The Atlas Society Presents - Objectively Speaking

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.