The Atlas Society Presents - Objectively Speaking

Who holds the world’s most powerful human rights organizations accountable, and how did groups founded as civil society projects become political powerhouses shaping the UN and international policy toward Israel?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 325th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she is joined by Professor Gerald Steinberg, who has spent years investigating NGOs as the founder of NGO Monitor, a research institute that scrutinizes the funding, transparency, and agendas of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University, Steinberg examines how civil society was hijacked by political and ideological agendas, how NGOs gain accreditation and influence at the United Nations, and why reports from these organizations often go unverified.

Join Atlas Society Senior Scholar Richard Salsman, Ph.D., for the 324th episode of Objectively Speaking, in which he cuts through the confusing labels attached to capitalism, from "crony," "stakeholder," and "state capitalism."

The concept “capitalism” is bandied about these days without clear definition. As such, it’s frequently and arbitrarily hybridized, with examples including “crony capitalism,” “welfare capitalism,” “anarcho-capitalism,” laissez-faire capitalism,” “conscious capitalism,” “common-good capitalism,” “democratic capitalism,” “political capitalism,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “racial capitalism,” and even such brazen oxymorons as “state capitalism” and “totalitarian capitalism.” Rarely does anyone defend the ideal social system: constitutional capitalism. Dr. Salsman explains how the “varieties” approach generates a diverse menu of critiques of capitalism, why the system is undermined by the mass-equivocation permitted by a multiplicity of false precision, and suggests ways to combat it.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 323rd episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with author Rob Henderson to talk about his book "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class," where he vividly recounts growing up in foster care, enlisting in the US Air Force, attending elite universities, and pioneering the concept of “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.

Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, who publishes articles on his Substack, with other writings appearing in The Free Press, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

What happens when a party insider who raised millions of dollars for Biden and Harris decides to tell the truth about what she saw behind closed doors?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 323rd episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with Lindy Li to talk about her new book, "Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider's Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse," which rips back the curtain on a rotten system that rewards failure and punishes honesty.

As a member of the Democratic Party's National Finance Committee, Li raised millions of dollars for Biden and Harris and co-hosted some of the party's most significant fundraisers. In "Unburdened," she offers a first-person account of the machine she helped build and watched collapse, detailing what she describes as a deliberate cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline, a $45 million celebrity payoff scheme, and a donor fundraising system she compares to a multilevel marketing operation. She now works as a political strategist and commentator, co-hosting the podcast "Her Take."

As Social Security and Medicare barrel toward insolvency, what can the United States learn from how other countries have restructured their retirement systems—and does Washington have the political will to act?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 321st episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with Romina Boccia to talk about her co-authored book, Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes," which explains what is wrong with Social Security and how major retirement program reforms from Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden could work in the United States.

Romina Boccia is director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, where she focuses on federal spending, the budget process, the economic consequences of rising debt, and reforms to Social Security and Medicare. She is the principal author of the Debt Dispatch Substack, the leading fiscal policy newsletter read by members of Congress. Boccia previously served as director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, where she was the principal author of the Blueprint for Balance, the organization's flagship budget plan, which informed President Trump's first-term budget proposal.

What is actually wrong with data centers? What productive purpose do they serve? And is the campaign against data centers just old-fashioned NIMBYism?

Join Atlas Society Senior Fellow Robert Tracinski, a longtime commentator of how technophobia gets dressed up as public concern, sorts out legitimate complaints from the reflexive hostility to progress—and makes the case for what data centers actually make possible.

What happens when a company trades its brand for a cause—and can the same instinct for building things that work fix America's mental health crisis?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 320th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with returning guest Anson Frericks to talk about his new AI-enabled mental health startup, Radley Care, which he co-founded with a mission to empower adults living with serious mental illness to live amazing lives.

Returning for a second time on Objectively Speaking, Anson Frericks previously joined in 2025 to discuss his book "Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer," where he pulled back the curtain on how stakeholder capitalism, DEI, and ESG initiatives contributed to the collapse of an iconic brand—and what that means for the future of American business. Frericks is the former president of Anheuser-Busch's sales organization, where he spent over a decade before departing the company.

Could nuclear power solve our energy future, and could Mars become humanity's next frontier for civilization-building?

Join Atlas Society Senior Scholar Richard Salsman, Ph.D., for the 318th episode of Objectivley Speaking in which he sits down with returning guest Robert Zubrin to talk about his new books "The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future," which argues that nuclear power is essential to solving the climate crisis while preserving human freedom and prosperity, and "The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet," a vision for the settlements, industries, and societies that could take root on Mars.

Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer, founder of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics, and the architect of the Mars Direct exploration plan. He is best known as the author of the seminal book The Case for Mars, which helped shape modern thinking on human space exploration.

Learn more about The Mars Society's upcoming convention: https://convention.marssociety.org/

When lawsuits become weapons and law schools become factories for bad ideas, what happens to justice and the rule of law itself?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 317th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at Cato, 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.

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at Cato and is known for his writing on law, public policy, and regulation. He is the author of several books about the U.S. legal system, including "The Litigation Explosion," "The Rule of Lawyers," and "Schools for Misrule." His first book, "The Litigation Explosion," was one of the most widely discussed general-audience books on law of its time, leading the Washington Post to dub him “intellectual guru of tort reform.” He followed it with "The Rule of Lawyers," on mass litigation, and most recently "Schools for Misrule," which traces how the ideas taught in elite law schools in one generation often shape national policy in the next—from class-action lawsuits to court takeovers of school funding.

Why do most of us believe the world is getting worse when the data says otherwise, and who are the people actually responsible for the extraordinary progress we've made?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 316th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with author Alexander Hammond to discuss his book "Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World," which profiles the scientists, inventors, and thinkers whose innovations helped save billions of lives, changed public policy for the better, and lifted millions out of poverty—even though most of their names have been forgotten.

Hammond is the founder of the Initiative for African Trade and Prosperity, a free trade fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a senior fellow at African Liberty, with work focused on the history of economic growth and innovation, African development, and global well-being. He is the Deputy Editor for Humanprogress.org and policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 315th episode of Objectively speaking where she sits down with four-time returning guest Timothy Sandefur to talk about his latest book "Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence," which revisits the revolutionary year of 1776 through the minds of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two men whose words and ideas gave birth to modern liberty.

Returning for a fourth time on Objectively Speaking, Sandefur is no stranger to The Atlas Society, having joined us previously to discuss his books "Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man," "Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness," and "Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence," Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He is the author of ten books as well as more than 50 scholarly articles on a wide variety of legal subjects.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 314th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with Amity Shlaes, chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, to discuss her book "New Deal Rebels: An Anthology of Critics of the New Deal," which gathers the voices of economists, journalists, and businessmen who warned—in real time—that FDR's policies were deepening and extending the very crisis they claimed to solve.

Shlaes is one of America's foremost historians of the New Deal era. In addition to The Forgotten Man, a #1 New York Times bestseller also adapted as a graphic novel, she is the author of Coolidge, Great Society, and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It.

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 313th episode of Objectively Speaking as she sits down with returning guest Geoffrey Cain to talk about his new book “Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,” which draws on previously unpublished materials and new interviews to reveal the untold story of Steve Jobs's “lost decade”—the twelve years of failure, near-bankruptcy, and humiliation at NeXT that forged the discipline and vision behind his legendary return to Apple.

An award-winning investigative journalist, Cain is a returning guest to Objectively Speaking, having previously joined us to discuss “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.” A former correspondent at The Economist and regular commentator in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Foreign Policy, and a frequent guest on CNN, NPR, Fox News, and Bloomberg, Cain sits down with world leaders, tech founders, and dissidents at pivotal moments in history. His previous books also include “Samsung Rising,” longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year.

Join Atlas Society Senior Scholar Richard Salsman, Ph.D., for the 312th episode of Objectively Speaking as he unpacks the paradox at the heart of Greenspan's career: how a man shaped by Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and free markets came to spend two decades running the very institution designed to plan them.

What makes a true founder, and why does America keep needing them to break the cycle of stagnation?

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 306th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she sits down with returning guest Arther Herman to talk about his latest book, "Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump."

In "Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump," Arthur Herman argues that America has always been driven forward by a distinctive type of leader—the founder—who, through visionary risk-taking and a willingness to build from first principles, has repeatedly rescued the nation from stagnation.

Returning for a second time on Objectively Speaking, Herman previously joined to discuss his book "The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization." A senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, Herman is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist historian and biographer, authoring nine books, including the New York Times bestseller "How the Scots Invented the Modern World," "Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II," and "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder."

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 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 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.https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbnFPdGw1ZEp0THN5VVFQMjVwUzdSNFV3OFEwd3xBQ3Jtc0trcXhvVEh1blg0Y1FzRlpsZENiY0xGRFRZSzVGd1B0VHdmVkV4c2hlOHY3ZmJaUWw1Uy1jMmtwZXJIQ19USXB6aElvbXhYeWZhMnBWSnNicmpqOVRWd1hZcnlKSm9DLXRNLXpHN185dWVlQ3pGN2h1cw&q=https%3A%2F%2Famzn.to%2F4xkUThA&v=Rc9KCSDBZGI