Governing Ourselves: A Libertarian Atheist Podcast

This week we cover what brought Lisa to libertarianism: learning about US government's mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden.  He came out with a book in late 2019 and that's what we're reviewing today.

For our first libertarian movie of the year, we're covering one of Adam's favorites: "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", and how its messages of government spying and the digital world are especially relevant to us today.

We're starting off 2020 by reviewing an excellent book by the person who got Adam into libertarianism: Ron Paul.  He explains the history of the Federal Reserve, what it is and how it affects our economy, and he lays out several good cases for abolishing it.

For our final episode of the Christmas season and of 2019, we're covering the new Netflix original movie "Klaus", a family-friendly animated Santa Claus origin story.

The historical Jesus wasn't always thought of as divine, much less as God, but he came to be thought of as such after his death.  The book we're covering this Christmas month is by a historian and Biblical scholar who tells us the evidence that historians and scholars have discovered of how Jesus was seen during his ministry and how that view changed through the following few centuries.

This week we chat about our own Christmas traditions—how we used to celebrate Christmas when we were Christians and what's changed now that we're atheists.

This being the start of the Christmas season, we decided to tackle a movie that deals with Jesus... sort-of.  "Monty Python's Life of Brian" is a hilarious movie about an average guy who becomes seen by some as a messiah.  Considered one of the best comedy films of all time and it's on many atheists' must-watch lists, we had a great time watching it and reviewing it as well.

Many kids have to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school, and Adam did but Lisa did not.  So together we talk about this classic novel and the main reason why it's significant—for showing the true side of socialism during a time when the world didn't know gulags existed, much less what they were like.

Adam flies solo again this week as he reviews "Joker" (2019).  He also critiques the film critics who have given negative and "woke" critiques of recent Marvel films and of The Last Jedi.

Some folks might be wondering how libertarians are similar to the Right and the Left, and how we're different.  So here we give many examples of our similarities to both sides of the political spectrum, and two of the biggest ways we're different from both sides.  We also give the Right and the Left a score from 1-10 on how close we think they are to libertarianism.

This week we review the book "God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales" by Penn Jillette (of the magician duo Penn & Teller).  This is the book that made Adam realize he's probably an atheist, so we wanted to talk about the book and share what we think it has to offer other atheists.

This week's review is of a one-woman show found on YouTube, detailing her journey from being a believing Catholic to becoming an atheist.  We also chat a bit about how her experiences mirror our own as we left the LDS church, became atheists, and Adam's family's reactions to it.

Lisa flies solo this episode to talk about the General Conference for the LDS church.  She talks about the good, the bad, and some overall impressions she got of the Conference.  We also have the YouTube channel up and running with our first 6 episodes up so far, and she describes that a little bit, too.

Today we reviewed another classic movie, "Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", commonly known simply as "Dr. Strangelove".  While Adam and Lisa have very different opinions about this movie, we both recognize the relevance and significance of the film for its time as well as for today.

This week we cover one of Christopher Hitchens' books, called "god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything".  We wish we had more time to cover more of his book because there's a lot of good stuff in here, but we hope that what we're able to cover inspires you to read the book and decide for yourself: does religion poison everything?

This is our first movie review on the Atheist side of our podcast.  We're reviewing the classic movie "Inherit the Wind" (1960) which is based on the real-life "Scopes Monkey Trial", dealing with the issue of teaching evolution or the Biblical idea of the divine origin of humans in the science classroom.  We highlight some of the creationist arguments for humans' divine origin as shown in the film, as well as the skeptic's arguments for why the Bible shouldn't be taken literally.

We've been promising you "Basic Economics" for a while now, and we're finally delivering!  Adam read it, and together we're discussing what the book is about, from basic supply and demand concepts to current political topics like Universal Basic Income and free college for all.

For our first movie review, we discuss "The Lorax" (2012) and how plot holes turned this movie into anti-capitalist propaganda that shows entrepreneurs/capitalists as villains.  We also say goodbye to David Koch who died last week.

Last week, the host of the podcast "Bluntly Speaking" (formerly "The Terrible Conservative"), Tyler Bluntman, moderated a debate between two of the Libertarian Party's 2020 presidential candidates: Kim Ruff and Dan "Taxation is Theft" Behrman.  We analyze the answers that the candidates gave for Tyler's questions and we elaborate on our own points of view of the topics.

Today we finally cover Jordan Peterson's book "12 Rules for Life".  This episode is longer than our new goal of ~45-minute episodes, but both of us have watched many videos of his and so we wanted to cover some of those things as well as each of his twelve rules.