Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 309th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with returning guest Gad Saad to discuss his book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, and its blistering critique of maladaptively irrational altruism that has gripped our culture. Building on themes from his earlier work on the spread of destructive ideas, Saad argues that a miscalibrated sense of empathy is driving many of today’s most dangerous cultural and policy failures.

A Lebanese-Canadian Professor of Marketing, Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. Gad Saad previously joined The Atlas Society to discuss his book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which examines how certain destructive ideas have managed to take hold in places like academia and popular culture.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 310th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with returning guest Doug Casey to talk about his latest co-authored book, "The Preparation: How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous," which lays out a four-year, sixteen-cycle alternative to a college path that now averages $140,000 and too often delivers ideology, debt, and obsolete credentials.

What if you could trade four stagnant years in lecture halls for four years of adventure, emerging as a debt-free EMT, pilot, welder, web/app builder, rancher, and entrepreneur all in one?

A previous guest on Objectively Speaking, Doug Casey returns to discuss The Preparation: How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous, his new book co-authored with entrepreneur Matt Smith and Matt's twenty-year-old son Maxim, the program's "beta tester." Written across three generations, it lays out a four-year, sixteen-cycle alternative to a college path that now averages $140,000 and too often delivers ideology, debt, and obsolete credentials. Built on a foundation of Stoic and Renaissance thinking, The Preparation is a roadmap for forging the kind of person who can protect, build, heal, sell, and lead—a modern-day Renaissance Man ready for a world being upended by AI and economic turmoil.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 308th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she is joined by returning guest Batya Ungar-Sargon for a conversation about her latest book, "The Jews and the Left," which examines how one of the most consequential alliances in American political life—between Jews and the progressive movement—has come undone, and what its unraveling reveals about antisemitism on the left.

Returning for a second time on Objectively Speaking, Batya previously joined to discuss her books, "Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women" and "Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy." Host of "Batya!" on NewsNation, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has written for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, and the New York Review of Books Daily.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 307th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with the Chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, Sara Albrecht, to talk about the organization's recent legal victory over the Trump Administration’s tariffs before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Can the President unilaterally impose sweeping taxes on Americans without Congress's approval—and what does it take to stop him when he tries?

In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court answered with a resounding "no," issuing a landmark 6-3 ruling in Trump v. V.O.S. Selections that struck down the Trump Administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs and reaffirmed that the power to tax belongs to Congress, not the executive.

Sara Albrecht is Chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, the nonprofit, public-interest law firm that brought V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump and prevailed at every level of the federal judiciary, from the U.S. Court of International Trade to the Supreme Court. Beyond her work at Liberty Justice Center, Sara serves on the boards of the Illinois Policy Institute, Empower Illinois, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Unify America, and the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 306th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with by New York Times #1 bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz to discuss the real-world rise of political violence, radicalization, and what he calls the "horseshoe of nihilism": the point where the far left and far right bend toward each other and meet in a shared rejection of meaning, a "No Lives Matter" zone.

What's driving the "horseshoe of nihilism," and why are so many people being pulled toward it? Fresh off his standout appearance at The Atlas Society's Galt's Gulch 2026 student conference, Hurwitz unpacks how monetized algorithms select for users most vulnerable to radicalization, why so many people, especially young men, feel unmoored from reality, and how much responsibility each of us bears for where our attention goes. The author of 27 thrillers, including the bestselling “Orphan X” series and upcoming novella “The Delivery”, Hurwitz has been published in 33 languages and currently serves as Co-President of International Thriller Writers. Beyond fiction, he's written screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks, published poetry, and is an award-winning documentary producer.

What is tort law actually for and when does it stop protecting individual rights and start undermining them?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 305th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with the lead author of the American Tort Reform Foundation's annual Judicial Hellholes report, Lauren Sheets Jarrell, as part of our mini-series on tort reform to discuss the relationship between civil litigation, accountability, and the proper role of law in a free society.

In addition to authoring the flagship report that identifies the jurisdictions where civil courts most fail to deliver balanced justice, Jarrell directs ATRA's amicus program, advancing sound legal principles in state and federal courts across the country. Her work focuses on lawsuit abuse, no-injury class actions, and the structural reforms needed to restore the courtroom to its proper purpose: protecting individual rights and holding genuine wrongdoers to account.

Who are “We the People”? Are we a collective body whose majority will is sovereign, or are we individuals whose inalienable rights government exists to secure?

In Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, Randy Barnett argues that America’s founding charter was designed not as a license for democratic majorities, but as a bulwark protecting the rights of each individual against the encroachments of government—and that the long drift toward a “Democratic Constitution” has eroded the very liberties the Founders enshrined. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution; he argued Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court and was a lead architect of the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius.

As part of this episode, Barnett will also draw on his new true-crime memoir, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, recounting the murder cases and moral dilemmas he confronted as a young prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, as well as his biography A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, which traces his decades-long fight to restore the Constitution’s original meaning.

Join Atlas Society Senior Scholars Stephen Hicks and Richard Salsman for the 303rd episode of Objectively Speaking, where the duo discuss whether today's "post-liberal" New Right is genuinely charting new philosophical territory, or simply repackaging the same critiques of reason, individualism, and capitalism that have long animated the postmodern left. Drawing on recent work by figures like James Orr and Roger Scruton, Hicks and Salsman examine what the New Right actually believes, where it converges with the postmodernism it claims to oppose, and whether both movements ultimately share a pre-modern rejection of Enlightenment values.