Earlier this year, The Washington Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, announced that the opinions section of his paper would be "writing every day in support and defense of…personal liberties and free markets." Today's guest is the person Bezos hired to execute that mission.

He's Adam O'Neal, a 33-year-old Southern California native whose resume includes stints at The Economist, The Dispatch, The Wall Street Journal, Real Clear Politics, and covering the Vatican for Rome Reports. O'Neal tells Gillespie his goal is to build a nonpartisan editorial section rooted in core American values of free expression, free enterprise, and limited government. That means taking on MAGA and the Trump administration, insurgent Democratic Socialists, and censors and statists in both parties. "It's small L libertarian…classical liberal," says O'Neal of the section he's building. "It's non-partisan and free markets and personal liberties are the North Star."

O'Neal talks about the challenges in bringing a classical liberal sensibility to mostly left-of-center readers, how growing up in California informs his thinking, what he thinks of Pope Francis' and his American successor Pope Leo's attitudes toward capitalism, and why newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates.

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and journalists who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by challenging worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.

 

0:00—Introduction

1:39—Writing in defense of free markets and personal liberties

7:40—Government threats to free speech

14:01—The Washington Post's editorial decisions

18:59—The state of free markets in America

21:52—Is the opinion section becoming libertarian?

34:09—O'Neal's origin story

40:46—Pope Francis and capitalism

45:17—Experiences at The Dispatch and The Economist

52:59—The culture of The Washington Post's opinions team

55:38—Generational change in politics and culture

59:04—The Washington Post ends candidate endorsements

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Transcript

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

Nick Gillespie: Adam O'Neal of The Washington Post opinion section, thanks for talking to Reason.

Adam O'Neal: Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about free markets and personal liberties with Reason, which knows a little bit about those subjects, certainly.

Yeah, that's right. Our longtime tagline has been "Free Minds and Free Markets." So I guess I'll start there. All of us at Reason were excited earlier this year when Jeff Bezos announced on Twitter that the opinion section is going—and I'm quoting him here—he said, "We're going to be writing every day in support of personal liberties and free markets."

And then you got hired a couple months later to help execute that kind of defense. Let's start with personal liberties and free markets—maybe start with free markets. What does it mean to be writing every day in support of those things?

Right. There's the textbook definition of prices and wages being set by competition and not the government. That's a free market, right? We all know that. But within that system—and certainly the United States is very far from being a free-market economy, more so than Europe, maybe less so than some examples you could point to elsewhere in the world.

And when we're writing in defense of it, it's those prudential questions that come in—where we are on that scale. Because we're not going back to the pre-industrial economy, right? But at the same time, you think that—

I live in New York, so we'll see come January.

Yeah, I mean, certainly decline is a possibility. And it's often a choice that societies make. Maybe New York is doing that right now. I think we'll see how he governs, right? But what we're writing about every day and we're one as an editorial board writing about these prudential questions. Right?

I know you've written about abolishing the FCC [Federal Communications Commission]. I think that's an interesting question to explore. Or if it's: Does the current configuration of the federal government, these different departments, does make sense? Should air traffic control be privatized—moving that particular service in a free-market direction?

We're both staking out a position and developing a voice as an editorial board, as our staff writers, but also hosting that debate with people whose North Star is wanting to move toward a more free and open economy. But may have differences of opinion about how far you go in that direction one way or the other.

What about personal liberties? You've got a piece that went up a couple of days ago—and we're talking, just for people, because this may change—we're talking on November 6th, a couple of days after, 2 days, after Zohran Mamdani won the mayor race in New York City, etc.

But personal liberties—you recently had posted a piece by Leana Wen, who is a doctor, one of your contributors, who was saying like, "Hey, forget Tylenol. Pregnant women shouldn't be smoking weed when they're pregnant," right? Personal liberties, how do you define that? That's a big topic.

I think this is less of a textbook definition than I gave you on free markets, but it's doing what you want as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's personal liberties and their freedom. And the same way of thinking it applies of the United States—it's a quite free country.

I lived in Europe for five years, and there were certain freedoms I didn't have there. One of my parents grew up in an authoritarian country. We're certainly much more free. But you can't do anything you want anytime in the United States, and it's hosting those debates. Sometimes I'll agree with the contributor; sometimes I won't.

But there's a spectrum, right? You could talk about Tylenol or drug usage, right? Or should heroin be legal? That's one question. Should you be able to smoke heroin on the street in front of a—

Yeah, or do direct-to-consumer advertising on television. And the FCC should be abolished. We could go down a whole lot of different mine shafts with all this kind of stuff. What are the personal liberties that you think matter most?

And I'm not asking you to kind of read Jeff Bezos' mind, but it's kind of amazing that the owner—since 2013—of one of the very most influential newspapers in America and the world said, "Hey, we're scrapping the old kind of general, you know, we are a newspaper that's going to talk about a lot of different stuff," and "We're going to focus—not exclusively—but we are going to focus mostly on personal liberties and free markets."

What are the personal liberties that you think are most under attack in the United States?

I think—well, so that's a different question. What's most important to me and what's most attacked? I'll start with what's important to me, which—I'm a bit biased here because I've spent my career in journalism—but freedom of speech is under attack, I think.

It certainly perpetuates from the dawn of the country. There've always been questions about how far you go with speech. But I'm always horrified when I see a politician—and I'll see them in the Republican or Democratic Party—it feels like it pops up: "Hate speech is not free speech." That's an easy one, guys. Yes, it is, right? We can dislike it, but that's free speech. And it's remarkably important.

As someone now in a position of power to welcome voices, give them a boost inside of a major newspaper, it's something I think a lot about, because you want a robust debate. You want an interesting debate. And you want to feel uncomfortable sometimes with positions that people are taking. And it's a matter of finding out where that works.

And I think—and I always go back to Europe because I lived there, right? They're a much darker place on free speech than we are. But we'll see flashes of European-style thinking on speech. And that's nothing compared to the Chinese Communist Party or what might be in a country like Iran.

But we should compare ourselves probably more to England, right—or the U.K.—which is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a year for tweets and things like that. And we had—I mean, I guess, let's sharpen this a little bit, talking about free speech—because we went through an era when Joe Biden was in the White House where, you know, we learned later that Biden administration officials were jawboning all kinds of social media platforms, who oftentimes—I don't want to say in their defense or in Biden's defense—but they were also asking for guidance from the White House: "Is this hate speech? Is this COVID wrong-thinking?"—things like that. And working in cahoots to clamp down on stuff.

A lot of—if not legal—actions against speech, then really pushing a social envelope—that is a bad phrase—but pushing people to ostracize anybody who dared think outside of a very narrow range.

Now we have people in office in the Trump administration—including Trump's FCC head, including Trump himself—saying certain late-night comedians, "who really nobody's watching, should be fired. They're no talent. The FCC should do something about that." Pam Bondi, the attorney general, actually recently, in recent memory said, "Hate speech is not protected speech," briefly—things like that.

Are we in a worse place with free speech under the current administration and climate of opinion than we were under Biden? Or is it just, you know, it just keeps getting worse?

I think we're in a spiral, and it's a bad one. I was talking to one of our editorial writers the other day, and he's telling me, "You know, we're definitely a democracy, but it's like we're becoming a democracy where you vote for which censors you want to be in charge." Pick your censor, and those will be the people who bully the big media companies into behaving a certain way, right?

Whether it's one of the streamers on COVID, right, as you said, or a comedian that a lot of people weren't paying a lot of attention to until he was being bullied by the government. And it's one of the things that concerns me.

I think about how we can get out of that spiral. And maybe that takes a politician with a forward-looking view who can kind of declare a truce. But I'm generally very optimistic about America in general, our ability to move on. When you read enough American history, we've been here before. That's certainly something that's happened. But we're clearly in one of those waves—or in one of those spirals; I don't want to mix up my metaphors—where we're escalating.

It's the censorship questions, but there's also lawfare, right? You don't want to end up in a position where you're a country like Pakistan or South Korea, where there's a very good chance you go to prison after you're done being in charge of the country—and the opposition comes in.

How we get out of that spiral is something that we're grappling with as a group of journalists working together to come up with a voice.

Yeah, do you feel like journalists are part of the problem? And, you know, I guess we always want to be part of the problem, because then at least maybe we won't have our jobs replaced as quickly. 

But I mean, there seem to be so many people in the media who are very quick to be like, "You've got to shut down this person's speech." "Like, of course, I won't be touched by it." Or, "Now that I'm in power, we're going to go after these people who kind of screwed with me later."

I mean, I was just talking with somebody the other day about journalism shield laws. And I can remember when these were a thing—I would talk to kind of student journalism groups, and I'd be like, you know, "If the government is going to say, ok, if you're an accredited journalist, then you get certain protections, that's a really bad thing." Because it means the government gets to say, "You're a journalist and you're protected. You're not a journalist," and somehow you get lesser rights. And I feel like we haven't gotten out of that yet. It seems very strange to me that more journalists are not just rock-solid in favor of massive First Amendment rights all over the place for everybody.

Right. And you get into a lot of gray areas and nuances when it comes to that. And I think that's also where it becomes very dangerous. There's a big controversy this week—I don't know when this airs.

It'll be like that was a million years ago. Like, "Oh, woolly mammoths were seen in Bethesda," or something, yeah.

Right. And I think you want to be very careful to not be policing the way that people think. Right? At the same time, you also need to recognize the way that William F. Buckley did when he was running National Review. "You know, we don't want lunatics in our movement." And National Review—it's a smaller magazine—but when he stood up to the John Birch Society, I think that's something that decades later… now, there's some debate about how far did he go in standing up to them?

That's right, yeah.

But the general concept of: it's ok to say when there's something that's clearly out of bounds that, "This is not what we're associated with." But it shouldn't be that you should go to prison, or you should be fined, or you should be banished from society. It should be: you can go write somewhere else, because this is our movement, and this is what we're trying to do. I think any publication—you have your sets of norms, your boundaries, and what you're advocating for. And that's a separate thing than government coercion.

What troubles me is when I see journalists who advocate for government coercion and this sort of thing. People who think…I think it just has to be short-term thinking of: "My team will always be in charge and will never lose power." And it's a nice thing—one of my favorite things about America is that power changes pretty frequently, actually. And sometimes the new team does some things I like, I don't like. But it's a comforting thought—instead of living in an authoritarian state or even a place like Japan, where the LDP is just sort of perpetually in power and different factions trade off.

So, if we can go to today's page, I think—and this is kind of just to get a sense of your sensibility, because you mentioned National Review and I appreciate you saying there are questions about how far did Bill Buckley go in really reaming out the John Birch Society. I'm with Matthew Dallek, who wrote a great book, a biography of the John Birch Society a couple of years ago, where he says, "you know, that's more Buckley's version of things than reality." But that's neither here nor there, because my point is National Review is a viewpoint magazine, or a viewpoint platform—same as Reason, same as The Nation.

We have thought about newspapers—with the possible exception of The Wall Street Journal—as kind of being bigger tents than that. Right? So like you are going to be supporting personal liberties or defending personal liberties and free markets every day, but you're not, you know, you're not a movement newsletter, right? So that has got to be challenging for you, right? To figure out what you're going to emphasize.

And I just want to point—like you have on today's page, there's a— which I just had up and now I can't find it. You have an editorial up, "Elizabeth Warren Knows Better," and this is where you're attacking—this is from the house editorial of The Washington Post. Where Elizabeth Warren is basically bitching and moaning that YouTube TV did not carry a game on Monday Night Football. Can you explain what your basic case there is, why she's wrong, and how do you decide that's something that we're going to weigh in on?

I'll start by saying the editorial page—the opinion section—I've been here for four months, and we've made tremendous progress, tremendous change. It's still a work in progress. We're still recruiting people. And that's not a caveat to explain what that editorial—I actually quite like the editorial that we ran.

So Disney and YouTube are in a dispute—YouTube TV—they're in a dispute. Disney would like more money to air ESPN on YouTube TV. YouTube TV does not want to pay that much. And so it's a question about—it's a business dispute between two corporations who are having a negotiation, and things have gotten tough. And so on Monday, when I turned on Monday Night Football to watch, as I usually do—as tens of millions of other Americans—I couldn't find it on my YouTube TV.

And the senator from Massachusetts, what she argued was, "The problem is the companies have gotten too big and they can keep nice things from you because the companies are so big and they're very mean." And I don't think that's an unfair interpretation of the tweet.

We saw this—and we covered the bigger stories: the election results, different foreign policy issues. You can see the mixed ones in the editorials. But we think that when people who should know better, and this is a former law professor and adviser to corporations before she had her pitchfork-populist turn, also a contributor to something, I like to bring this up all the time—a contributor to something called the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, where she offered up her grandmother's variation on some kind of Native American dish. 

Right? I think she was 1/64th. Right?

Yeah, the troubling part about it was—so it's, you know, you want to beat up on corporations, that's fine. Free speech, go for it, senator. But then she said, "And Donald Trump is letting them." And I'm old enough to remember when Senator Warren was very concerned—maybe I'm sure she was—let me rephrase. I'm old enough to remember when a lot of Democrats, and I think principled Republicans, were worried that Donald Trump was getting too involved in television decisions and saying who should be on air and who shouldn't.

And so we just wanted to step out and inform our readers quickly—I just think it was 300, 350 words—and say, "Look, this is a business dispute. The last thing you need is government getting involved in it." And there's a never-ending supply of senators, congressmen, congresswomen, governors who make economically illiterate statements that might stir some populist passion. I don't like the word populist—I shouldn't say populist—because I don't know what populist means. But stir some passion in voters and fire up their base.

And I think that one value we can do—and it's not the core product by any means—but one way we can add value is by pointing it out, explaining what's really happening, and suggesting that maybe there's something else going on here. And our readers can be—

And you point out in the editorial that Disney, among other things, owns Hulu, which is a direct competitor of YouTube. And like nobody in contemporary America is suffering from a lack of stuff to watch, right?

Do you think that we—so that's one way that the government is kind of getting in people's business where it just doesn't need to be. It doesn't make any sense, almost from any perspective. How will you guys—and I think I know the answer to this, because I've already seen it on the editorial page, both from columnists or opinion guest writers or things—when Donald Trump starts to say, "OK, the American government needs to own a piece of corporations either as a condition of them getting a merger, or of them exporting things to China, or bringing things into the country with a special exemption." Do you see this all as like, if we're in a bad space, a bad time for free speech generally, we're also in a really bad time for free markets, it seems?

Absolutely. I think one tricky part of all of this is that no party's hands are clean when it comes to this. Now, traditionally the Democrats were the party that could kind of use state power, push the limits. And Republicans were supposed to be the grown-up party that said, "No, we'll be a little more prudent." One is the party of free stuff. One is the party of growth and opportunity. That's sort of the myth that a lot of Republicans tell themselves.

And I think there are many times in history where it was actually true. Donald Trump, who is a very talented politician and also not a very ideological person—as we all know—there are certain things he's really felt strongly about for a long time, like tariffs, but not a deeply ideological person. I think when he talked—I think it was about the Intel stake—he was asked about it. And he said, "Yeah, of course I'm going to try to get what I can get." That's how he sees these things.

I won't predict what he's thinking, but the end result of that is, ok, maybe you're able to do that now. And I don't know what benefit the U.S. gets from having a piece of Intel. Certainly it's a problem for Intel in the long run, even if there's some help or preferential treatment now.

But again, eventually Democrats will be in power again. And a lot of Republicans who are cheering this on are not going to be thrilled with what Democrats do when they take stakes in companies or which companies they're bullying. And that's just a bit of prudence that we're trying to share with our audience. And when they see this, they might think, "Oh, it's interesting," or "Things are changing. Let's not be free market fundamentalists." But there are really good long-run reasons why you want to avoid getting into this business when you're the government.

Do you see that broad kind of province or edict to support personal liberties and free markets—I mean, is it ultimately the bounds of what you're talking about is a kind of basic classical liberalism or libertarianism?

You know, and I'm thinking of other things that are coming up today where you're starting to see Republicans talk about, "Oh yeah, it would be great to get rid of the filibuster," because we wanna end this government shutdown on our terms—as if earlier this week they didn't get at least a little bit of a wake-up call to say, "Hey, you may not even be in control of Congress this time next year."

Or I saw one of the senators from Alabama—Senator Football from Alabama—talking about why it's great that we're about to go, apparently, gonna go in to teach Nigeria how to defend its people and things like that, In a way that this was the exact opposite of what Donald Trump was running on for a second term. I mean, are you essentially—is the opinion section essentially becoming broadly classical liberal or libertarian?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say, right, small-l libertarian, or a classical liberal, right? There's all kinds of nomenclature that you can use. I'd say fundamentally, it's a nonpartisan project. And that's something that's new. That's sort of our very clear attitude.

When I'm facilitating conversations with the editorial board, or if I'm meeting with the op-ed editors and we're thinking through stories, it's never about which party will be advantaged or which one we prefer in general. Right? So that's the baseline: it's nonpartisan. And free markets and personal liberties are the North Star.

So there may be ways that we agree with libertarians. It's funny—I covered the Libertarian Party convention last year, when I was still at The Economist, and I love Libertarian Party activists. I remember there was this table with buttons that you can steal—or not steal. So you could pick up—

…you could liberate. 

And there were just like different libertarian slogans. It was like, "Sell the Grand Canyon," "Legalize buying AR-15s from vending machines." It was just the most libertarian stuff possible.

So yeah, you know, I'm probably not that far. Like, I think the federal government probably has some role to play in preservation—things like the national parks. I'm not pure libertarian in the way that some of my friends I made at—

Some of the people on this interview may be, yes.

Yeah, so I would shy away from that particular label, but there are plenty of times where I'll agree a lot more with the libertarians than I do with the Republicans. I say "I," you know, but also institutionally in our room, it's a wide range. And I think of myself as facilitating a conversation and getting us to the best answers institutionally—and also the most interesting debate.

But yeah, classical liberal—I think that's a huge tent, by the way, under classical liberalism.

Oh, absolutely. And you know, it's interesting. In my experience over the years—and particularly over the past three or four years—the ranks of classical liberal people, which basically means people who believe in, you know, kind of most personal liberties and mostly free markets, that's starting to get filled up from a lot of people who would have, maybe a decade ago, would have considered themselves liberal or progressive.

And then, particularly after the reaction in America to October 7, a lot of free speech–kind of liberals started moving toward the center. Which they are not social conservatives; they're very libertarian—and all small-ls and things like that. So I think you're on to something with the idea that being classically liberal, or small very, very small-l libertarian, contains multitudes in a way that it didn't really 15 years ago.

How is the audience responding to this? 

I've read over the past couple of years there were various reports claiming that The Washington Post, between 2020 and the end of 2023, lost half of its readership. It went from 100 million unique visitors online in a given month or given day to 50. Part of that was seen across the news industry broadly—just that when Trump was kicked out of office after 2020, it's like ok nobody was interested in reading about politics anymore.

But I also—supposedly, and this was in The Washington Post—when The Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate—and obviously by that, meaning that it was expected to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024—it lost 250,000 subscribers.

I know part of what you have to do is build a new section that is pointed in this particular direction, but also you have to win over a new readership or win over the existing one. How are people responding to the changes since you've been at the helm of the opinion section?

We still have quite a lot of readers and subscribers. I'll say, I've worked at smaller places, and it's a robust audience. And you know, when you write something in The Post, someone notices it.

That said, it needs to get bigger. And the audience now is overwhelmingly left-leaning. Everybody knows that as the data is available.

And that's for the whole paper, not…

Yeah the entire paper. Probably the opinion section. I don't have the breakdowns in front of me. And we value those subscribers. A lot of them have been loyal subscribers for decades.

And we're not trying to push them away and make this a MAGA project where they'll be deeply offended by everything we write. At the same time, I don't think it's a great business model to have one sort of mono—it's not entirely monolithic—but one very similar audience. And so we're trying to continue to serve our existing subscribers, who we value, while also looking at people—I don't know, like my dad—who frankly never would have subscribed to The Washington Post, who just wouldn't have trusted it, and say, "Look, we're doing things different at the opinion section. There's going to be a lot of stuff you disagree with, but you ought to find it interesting. We'll challenge you and educate you. And there may be things that you find that you're agreeing with that you wouldn't have seen before. Or you might've seen here or there, but not as frequently."

And one thing I've noticed that's been very encouraging, when I break down the data, is that a lot of stories are doing particularly well with non-subscribers. There are people who were kind of looking past The Post in the past and now are giving it another look.

And this is a long process, right? It takes years. You're going to have to write editorials hundreds of times on different subjects where people start to realize, "Oh, this is interesting. This is something I'd actually pay for."

So we're not taking anything for granted—whether it's the people we need to win over or the people we want to keep and remain happy subscribers. And it's a tough balancing act. Where do you fit in? And some folks simply will see stuff that we're publishing now that I think is interesting and engaging, and they'll disagree with me, and they wanna leave.

But I think overwhelmingly, by having this big tent, hosting this robust debate, we're building a stronger audience. And some of the early returns—things I'm seeing in the data—leave me very optimistic. In the long run, that's a good move for us. I think for the country, for society, it's helpful to have an opinion section like this—but also for the business.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because basically, there's The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. If we were talking 20 years ago, you might throw in the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune, but newspapers as places that everybody gathers are fading.

And in a way, you've got The Wall Street Journal is conservative—it's good for free markets—and they've been strongly critical of Trump. The New York Times editorial page has its token conservatives, occasional libertarians, but it's reliably liberal.

Do you think The Washington Post will kind of square that difference? You've been critical of Trump. If you look at the page today—and again it's November 6 as we're talking—there's a lot of criticism of MAGA. The leading piece is by Jeff Flake, the former senator who got chased out of office. I interviewed him only a couple of weeks ago; I was visiting his Institute of Politics at Arizona State. He got chased out of office by Donald Trump.

Do you think you will be the kind of libertarian place—and again, not in a doctrinaire way—that will, not split the difference between The Times and The Journal, but will offer up real, hardcore defense of personal liberties and free markets?

You could pick the precise language, but I do see an opportunity there. And we should separate out the philosophical and then also just a regional and sort of cultural space.

So philosophically, I think we can be genuinely nonpartisan. I think both The Times and The Journal do good—like you said, they'll run a mixture of voices—but I think we can really own that space in a way no one else does.

But at the same time, I'm not looking to just try to steal market share from other papers. I think that there are a lot of people in America—some of my colleagues joke, there's one example I always go to, I don't know where it came to me—I say "a dentist in Tucson." It's kind of a particular individual. I have some family in Tucson—they're not dentists—but you know—

And you've got to be careful, because a dentist from Arizona is Paul Gosar, the congressman who was MAGA before MAGA. I don't think you're ever going to win him over.

Does he represent Tucson though? 

I don't know if it's Tucson. It's somewhere close around, but…

Ok, well, a variety of professions, a variety of places that aren't on the coast. Folks who wouldn't necessarily be subscribing to a big newspaper. And part of that is just writing in plain language. When we write—let's call it lifestyle content, or more or less focused on politics or policy—but the other offerings that you can have in an opinion section, things that appeal to them, that they don't just think, "That's really weird," or "What is that?"

Reaching folks like that, who either are kind of turned off by news or maybe get some news from Instagram here or there, and finding ways to meet people where they are. I think that's our bigger opportunity. Rather than thinking, "Oh, where do we sort of triangulate ourselves between the other similar institutions?" "Where can we go that they're not going as aggressively as we are? And how can we serve that audience?" I think that's a big part of it.

And the nonpartisanship and the sort of general American values of, "Hey, leave me alone. I like free enterprise." A normal person doesn't wake up and say, "I support free enterprise," but they have that instinct of like, "No, I'd like to start a business and be left to my own devices."

Appealing to that kind of American instinct and that American tradition. That I think is a huge opportunity for us. And that's one place where we're looking and where we're pushing hard.

You know, that's a good segue. I like to talk to people about where they're from and how they kind of came to their beliefs. So I think that's a natural segue.

So you're from Pomona, California—famously smoggy Pomona. Or it used to be. Nothing is smoggy really in the way it used to be because of progress and whatnot. But you're from Pomona? What was it like growing up in Pomona, and how does being from California—which, you know, until Texas started eating its lunch, was the definition of the American dream… You went to U.C. Irvine as well, a great university in the premier state university system in America. The U.C. system was part of the postwar American dream that California represented. How does where you're from inform who you are today?

Well, it's funny you mention smog, because my father—he actually wrote about this once for a newspaper—he was an air quality regulator.

Oh, wow.

And he's an engineer, and that's what he did for, I think, a little less than 30 years. He worked at the air quality regulator.

So being in Pomona would be like being an actor on Broadway, right? It's like where you want to be.

And my parents moved there to be closer to his work, actually. Yeah, indeed. And I'd say, one, we had a middle-class upbringing. My parents were engineers. And it was a nice, pleasant place to grow up in Southern California.

You weren't totally shielded from life in the way that I think maybe Irvine is, where you'd have—there was crime and violence in Pomona. You know, not unimaginable…

So my father, in his career working at a regulator, it kind of made me skeptical of state power pretty early on. And I think it also made him skeptical of state power. From a young age, he was kind of teaching me the ways of classical liberalism. I don't think he would call it that, but there was a lot of reading in our house.

We subscribed to The L.A. Times when it was a really significant, meaty print product that you'd get, and you could spend hours reading it. And we also had a lot of magazines in the house. It was just a lot of print products—reading. And also things like National Review, right? Things like The Wall Street Journal. I'm not sure if The Post came across our direction very much back then, just being on the West Coast. And The Post was a very different paper in the '90s than it was now and in recent years.

But certainly had some interaction with columnists, right? Like George Will—still writing for us. Real gem. But that was kind of the intellectual and cultural ferment that I grew up in.

Did you go to—were you part of any kind of student networks or anything as you were moving through Irvine?

Yeah. So in Irvine—I mean, I barely attended Irvine. I went to classes, I almost flunked out because I got a job at a radio station. And you can imagine how my engineer parents felt when I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to switch out of biology and do something else." And, "Don't worry, I'll go into this radio station to make, you know, eight bucks an hour, nine bucks"—whatever it was. I don't remember exactly.

But that was the start of my journalism career—it when I was 19. I worked at KFI AM 640—"More Stimulating Talk Radio." And actually, there's a Reason connection there because Lisa Kennedy—who we all of course just call Kennedy, she was at KFI at the time. We overlapped and I got to know her a little bit when I was just a fill-in producer on different talk shows at KFI.

Yeah, I did that. But as a student, I did policy debate. I was in this Junior State of America, which was part Model U.N., part student government, part debate society. And I got to meet a lot of really interesting students—some of whom I'm still friends with to this day.

And that really shaped a lot of the kind of debate. And I don't want, "intellectual" is too generous to describe, you know, 15 year old me—but the kind of mental exercises I was engaging in, that started early with activities like that.

You, early on, you worked at RealClearPolitics, which is an interesting site—it's coded right, and I think for some legitimate reasons, but it does fantastic work across the board. And you were the Vatican correspondent for Rome Reports. You had mentioned living in Europe. You did that for The Wall Street Journal as well, right?

Yeah.

But what was Rome Reports and what was it like covering the Vatican?

Right. Well, I was working at RealClear, and I really liked it. Carl Cannon was a great mentor and editor and boss. He gave me my first shot in D.C.

But I started—I don't know, "wanderlust," I don't really like that word—but I knew I wanted to go out and like see the world. And so I found Rome Reports, a job posting for them on journalismjobs.com. I'd never heard of it. It's actually a Spanish news agency. They use it in English, but it's run by Spaniards based in Rome.

And so I had the great experience of learning how to speak Spanish while I was living in Italy—which is just endlessly confusing. Because in the office we would speak Spanish, and then I'd go out and try to… they're different languages. People always say, "Oh, they're very similar." They're different languages.

But covering the Vatican was a real…it was a real blessing.

What year? What was the range of time?

Most of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. It was a one-year contract. So Francis was established—he came in in March '13. So at that point, I think I covered his second-year anniversary. He'd kind of gotten comfortable as a pope, people were getting to know who he was.

And look, I was not like interviewing the pope or, you know, deep in Vatican intrigue. I was—

Yeah, you weren't during the—

You weren't doing the Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, Skullduggery. Are you Catholic, and does that inform what you do or what you think?

Yeah, I'm a Catholic. It's not a huge part of what I talk about, but of course, I was raised Catholic, confirmed Catholic, and I still identify as such.