This is the Reason Interview, where we go deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, policymakers,

who are making the world more libertarian, or at least a little more interesting.

I'm Eric Bame, filling in for Nick Gillespie.

This week, our guest is Lauren Hall, a political science professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology,

and the author of The Radical Moderates Guide to Life on Substack,

where she encourages readers to reject binary thinking and keep politics out of their lives

as much as possible. Lauren's work focuses on tribalism and political polarization,

examining, studying, and researching where it comes from, why it's so powerful,

and how we can fight back

against it. She has become increasingly alarmed by the populist impulses that are central

to American politics on both the right and the left, and by how the political elites are using

those trends to make the lesser of two evils feel like the only choice voters truly have.

In our conversation, Hall explained what it means to be a radical moderate and why that could

be the solution to America's broken political compass.

She also discussed the diverse and unusual influences that have shaped her approach to

political philosophy and what she wasn't prepared for from this second Trump administration.

And now the Reason interview with Lauren Hall.

Lauren Hall, thanks for talking to Reason.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

So you are a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology,

but you also write a substack, which is how I first learned about you

and came to appreciate your work and your thinking.

...