The Lou Perez Podcast

Former public defender and former NYC candidate Maud Maron joins Lou to talk about Nikole Hannah-Jones's confession about her daughter's education, what happened to the "tough New Yorker," drug dealers on her stoop, and why she's done with the Democratic Party. Maud is a New Yorker, a woman, an independent, and currently "independently unemployed." She ran against Alvin Bragg for Manhattan DA on t...

Bretigne Shaffer writes children's horror, superhero graphic novels, and dark comedy about COVID — and she self-publishes all of it, because no traditional publisher (or Netflix) will touch a story that's critical of the pandemic response. We talk about her Halloween story Elixir of Fear — a 19th-century patent-medicine salesman who's also a wizard, a "budgie flu," and a whole town swept up in a f...

David Zhang built a 1.4 million subscriber YouTube channel exposing the Chinese Communist Party — from his base in the US, where he can actually say what he thinks. Born in China, raised in Canada, now in New York, David breaks down how Beijing operates: surveillance, threats to family members back home, and a propaganda machine that's gotten scarily good at targeting Western audiences. We get int...

Aidan Grogan is a researcher at the Manhattan Institute. He went undercover at Socialism 2026 — the annual conference sponsored by Haymarket Books, held in Chicago over Labor Day weekend — and sat in on panels that weren't being livestreamed to see what they were saying behind closed doors. In some cases, they were saying considerably more radical things than what made it onto the stream. We talke...

Andrew Hartz is a psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute — a national directory of vetted, non-activist therapists, plus a peer-reviewed journal, conference, and podcast. He wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about political activism in mental health, got a grant to do something about it, and hasn't stopped since.   We talked about: what an activist therapist actually looks like...

Barry Maher spent 20 years as a corporate speaker and wrote six nonfiction books. Then he discovered he had a brain tumor the size of a baseball. He woke up from surgery with Lady Gaga playing on loop in his head and a complete, fully formed novel already there — vivid as a memory, not a dream. Two years later, that novel became The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon, published at age 76. He's...

Recorded live at FreedomFest 2026 in Las Vegas. Lou Perez sits down with two UFC Hall of Famers — Don Frye (The Predator) and Dan Severn (The Beast) — alongside host Eric Carroll of Dad Talk Today, to talk about the early days of MMA, the wild west of the original UFC, and what it took to compete when nobody knew the rules. Topics include: how Don and Dan each got into the Octagon in the mid-90s (...

Recorded live at FreedomFest 2026 in Las Vegas. Lou Perez moderates a panel on politics, comedy, and the death of late night TV. Panelists: comedian Boris Khaykin, comedian and podcaster Andrew Heaton, Georgetown law professor and author Randy Barnett, Consumer Choice Center head of media Stephen Kent, and comedian Peter Stewart. Topics include: why Colbert was losing $20 million a year and what t...

Jon Miltimore is back — writer, commentator, and one of the sharpest guys covering arts, culture, and politics on Substack. This is his second time on the show and we did not run out of things to talk about. Topics include: why California can't fight wildfires and why Native Americans had better land management practices; the World Cup finally breaking through in the US; what to actually expect at...

Liza Libes is a writer and literary critic at Pens and Poison. Her parents escaped the Soviet Union. She went to Columbia. She found that Columbia's English Department had replaced literature with Marxist theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. She's been pushing back ever since. We talked about: the teachers who made us both writers; reading Wallace Stevens's The Snowman — out loud, in...

Michael Angelo Zervos is a Guinness World Record holder — he visited all 195 UN-recognized countries in 499 days. Along the way he interviewed people in every country about the happiest moment of their life. That project became a book, published by Penguin Random House, out February 23rd.   We talked about: how the record works and what actually counts as "visiting" a country; a year and a half of...

Germania Rodriguez Poleo — journalist, writer, and Venezuelan exile — escaped her country at age 11 after the Chavez regime accused her mother of terrorism, tortured their bodyguard to death, shot at their car, and raided their home. She arrived in Miami as a refugee. Then she went to NYU and voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Her Reason magazine article "My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Vot...

Meghan Murphy is a writer, podcaster, and one of the original people to get canceled on Twitter — permanently banned in 2018 for tweeting "men aren't women, though" and referring to a man who wanted to get his testicles waxed as "him." She's been writing and podcasting independently ever since, and she now lives in Mexico. We talked about: the tweet that got her banned and the Yaniv waxing lawsuit...

Meghan Murphy is a writer, podcaster, and one of the original people to get canceled on Twitter — permanently banned in 2018 for tweeting "men aren't women, though" and referring to a man who wanted to get his testicles waxed as "him." She's been writing and podcasting independently ever since, and she now lives in Mexico. We talked about: the tweet that got her banned and the Yaniv waxing lawsuit...

Aaron Brown is a quantitative analyst, risk manager, and author of the new book Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth from a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation. https://amzn.to/4frmg3n He's also about to debate gun control at the Soho Forum in August — and his preparation for that debate is a pretty good preview of what's in the book. Topics include: why out of 28,000 gun control studies, the RA...

Rambo Van Halen is a pseudonym. He's a Hollywood producer — the real kind, the below-the-line kind, the guy making sure the steel gets to the factory — who worked in the industry for decades, walked away in 2019, and wrote a book about it. The book is called Hollywood Samizdat: Notes from Below the Line. It's published by Passage Press. Lou read it. He dog-eared it. They talked for an hour. Topics...

Kira Shishkin is the CEO and founder of Informed.now — a news-by-SMS service that sends you one text per day covering what actually changed the world in the last 24 hours. No ads. No bias. No storytelling. Just primary sources, direct quotes, and a link so you can read the original sources yourself. Kira grew up in Ukraine, came of age in Israel, and built this company after watching both countrie...

Salih Hudayar is the Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. He was born in East Turkistan, fled to the United States as a political refugee at age 7, and has spent his life working to bring international attention to what the US government and over a dozen Western parliaments have formally recognized as a genocide. We covered: how China invaded and oc...

I sat down with Victor Varnado — comedian, founder of Supreme Robot, and the man behind the Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship. Victor is also King Super Nuts. That's not a joke. Well, it is. But it's also real. Victor built disability gaming software that could let paralyzed, blind, and deaf players enjoy video games without any extra hardware. He got a National Science Foundation grant to develo...

I sat down with Jason Gagne, fitness trainer and creator of the 90-day beginner program Good 2 Go Body. Jason has been training people for over 20 years and specializes in beginners — the people who've been told they're not in good enough shape to start working out. Check out Jason's 90-day program: https://good2go.podia.com/?coupon=LOU  (Every sign-up puts a few bucks in my pocket. Thank you. 🙏)...

Lou Perez sits down with investigative journalist and TV producer Rob Rosen, whose debut book Crimes of Omission: Distorted Justice, The Media's War on Truth is available for pre-order now. Rob produced A Reasonable Doubt on HBO Max, which led to nine wrongful conviction releases, and spent years at KCBS covering the OJ Simpson trial alongside Harvey Levin. TOPICS INCLUDE: How newsroom monoculture...

Lou Perez sits down with Stu Smith, investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, who has spent months infiltrating DSA meetings, Zoom calls, and internal channels to find out what the Democratic Socialists of America are actually up to. TOPICS INCLUDE: What most people get wrong about the DSA The DSA's internal "right wing" — people who just believe in elections The Red Rabbits: DSA's new arm...

Lou Perez is joined by Harris Sockel, lead editor at Pirate Wires — the tech media company that covers Silicon Valley without hating it. They cover a lot of ground in this one. TOPICS INCLUDE: - What Pirate Wires is and why it started on Substack during the pandemic - Why AI doom coverage is dishonest (and why the doomers won't go full prepper) - Lou's experience using Claude AI for press kits, pr...

New York City is heading in the wrong direction — and Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute is here to explain exactly why. In this episode, Lou and Rafael break down the real story behind the Washington Square Park snowball attack on NYPD officers, the media's deliberate misframing of the Gracie Mansion IED attack, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's dangerous blind spots on public safety, and why the cit...

German historian and author Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is currently under criminal investigation in Berlin for retweeting a meme comparing Putin to Hitler. He's one of the world's leading experts on Hitler and National Socialism — and the tweet was a historical warning about dictators who say "just this much, then I'll stop." He faces up to three years in prison. Lou and Rainer dig into Germany's Sectio...