Reason Video

Remy brings back the banana industry with protective tariffs.

Written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Austin Bragg. Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.

For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke.

As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O'Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled "A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government," this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O'Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

O'Rourke's new book, None of My Business, explains "why he's not rich and neither are you." It's partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they've taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn't understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn't fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.

Nick Gillespie sat down with O'Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an "old white man" just isn't what it used to be (and why he's OK with that).

Edited by Ian Keyser.

"Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar used under a Creative Commons license.

People of many political persuasions have identified postmodernism as a major threat to civilization. The most notable recent attacks have come from Jordan Peterson and other members of the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web."

Reason Editor-at-Large Nick Gillespie has a problem with that. He sat down with Zach Weissmueller, video journalist for Reason TV, to discuss and defend postmodernism—a term he says has been widely mischaracterized by its most vociferous critics—from a libertarian perspective.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Lorenz Lo.

"Say It Again, I'm Listening," by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License

"Fluid Dreams," by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License

"Telling Me Yes," by Ryan Andersen is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Dave Rubin is a popular YouTube host who was once on the left. He worked for The Young Turks TV show.

But Rubin tells John Stossel how he gradually changed his mind and became a classical liberal. For that, Rubin lost friends and gets protested at college campuses.

While many leftists are so angry at Rubin that they will no longer talk to him, conservatives are eager to talk. Rubin says that surprised him because, "I'm pro-choice. Most of them are pro-life. I'm against the death penalty, most of them are for the death penalty."

Stossel had a similar experience. "When I went from left to libertarian, the right was willing to argue," he tells Rubin.

Rubin calls the atmosphere on many campuses an "Oppression Olympics," where students and faculty compete to be the biggest victim.

As a result, ideas that offend "victims" are often off limits for discussion.

But Rubin says he will not bow to political correctness. He'll keep discussing uncomfortable ideas: "I would rather live and stand for whatever I believe in than just bow forever."

Does defensive gun use stop crime? Would more gun control save lives? Those were the topics of a public debate recently hosted by the Soho Forum, featuring Gary Kleck, a criminologist from Florida State University, and Paul Helmke, the former president and CEO of the Brady Center/Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as well as the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Kleck argued that there are at least four times as many defensive gun uses by potential victims as there are by criminals, and that new gun controls would reduce the defensive uses far more than the criminal ones. Helmke questioned Kleck's take on the data.

The debate was held on September 13, 2018, at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.

Edited by Todd Krainin.

"Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.

Imagine growing up in Baghdad and seeing your brother and cousin killed by Al Qaeda and other sectarian forces. Imagine getting death threats from groups such as the Madhi Army, a religious militia that once controlled large parts of the U.S.–occupied Iraq.

That's some of what 27-year-old Faisal Saeed Al Mutar faced during his childhood. Born into a family that prized analytical thinking and independent thought, he wrote critically of Islam and lived a secular lifestyle, making him a target for radical groups. Mutar fled to the U.S. five years ago.

Here he heads Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of expression in authoritarian countries. I sat down with Mutar to talk about his life, his personal experience with radical Islam, and Ideas Beyond Borders' latest project: translating into Arabic the works of secular Enlightenment thinkers such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and distributing them to readers in North Africa and the Middle East.

Edited by Todd Krainin.

Joshua Browder is trying to upend the legal services industry. His company, DoNotPay, has built an AI-powered chatbot that interviews users about their legal problems in plain English and then uses their answers to complete and submit legal paperwork on their behalf.

Browder describes DoNotPay as "the world's first robot lawyer," and believes that the system he's building will one day be able to address the majority of legal issues.

Produced by Justin Monticello. Camera by Monticello and Zach Weissmueller. Music by Gunnar Olsen, Matt Harris, Geographer, Text Me Records & Bobby Renz, and Silent Partner.

Image credit: ID 126279773 © Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com

Joshua Browder photos; Credit: Jeenah Moon/picture alliance //Newscom

Soldiers on the battlefield "have to choose between various shades of wrong," says Paul Scharre, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security. "What does it say about about us as humans...if we offload the moral responsibility of those decisions to machines?"

A former Army ranger, Scharre is the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, a new book about what robots and artificial intelligence will mean for the future of warfare. He's worried about fighting machines that can act without any human input and behave in ways that are difficult to understand.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Scharre to discuss the current state of autonomous weaponry, the implications for the future of warfare, and the likelihood that these tools will end up in the hands of nonstate actors.

Edited by Lorenz Lo and Weissmueller. Camera by Mark McDaniel and Lo.

"Low Force" by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License

As lawsuits pile up against police departments for shooting family pets, a national police group is using a high-tech simulator to teach law officers how to read canine behavior.

Video edited and produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Music: "Cylinder Two" by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

There has been a staggering reduction in global poverty over the last four decades. In China, sustained rates of economic growth have lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty. Ethiopia, a country once synonymous with famine, has grown faster than China while nearly halving its poverty rate over the last 15 years. Across the planet, developing countries large and small, from India to Ghana, have seen astonishing successes in alleviating poverty, exceeding even the most optimistic economic forecasts.

How did this extraordinary shift happen? Do poor countries need more markets, or more government?

Two of the world's best-known development economists, Joseph Stiglitz and William Easterly, met on August 27, 2018, at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village to debate these questions. The event was sponsored by the Soho Forum, a monthly debate series partnered with Reason. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.

Produced by Todd Krainin.