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Reason Video episodes

  • Margaret Hoover Talks About Life on the Firing Line
    Few TV shows—especially few political shows—can compare to Firing Line, the talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In its original incarnation, it ran for 33 years and over 1,500 episodes and featured guests ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ronald Reagan to Jack Kerouac to Milton Friedman to Mother Teresa.
    The show went off the air in 1999, but now it's back on PBS with Margaret Hoover in the host chair.
    Born in 1977, Hoover is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, a former contributor to Fox News and CNN, and the author of 2011's American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party.
    Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia.
    11 min
  • Travel Shows Were Boring as Fuck. Then Came Anthony Bourdain.
    Once upon a time, travel shows were stodgy as fuck. Television tourism was populated with pleasant, proper people who strolled the Champs-Élysées or the beaches of Rio to show you how to do pleasant, proper, prepackaged things. Early travel shows regarded the locals as curiosities. Interactions with the host were either staged or kept at a respectable distance, while finding a good cruise and shopping for bargains were paramount. Until the 1990s, travel shows were mostly about watching a trusted host sniffing his way through fine wineries, meandering through Baroque Period museums, lounging around four-star hotels, and indulging in the sensual pleasures of eating familiar fare with the right fork at the right restaurant, and always with the right kind of people.
    Then came Anthony Bourdain. He began every show with a parental advisory warning and was 10 times snarkier than all the other hosts put together. His punk nonchalance stuck out like a middle finger to every travel show that went before him. He savaged rival chefs by name and held in righteous contempt every culinary fad and pompous ideology that stood in the way of pure food enjoyment.
    10 min
  • Remy: Violent Video Games
    In prison for life, Remy looks back on his violent past and contemplates where it all went wrong who's to blame.
    Written and Performed by Remy
    Shot and Edited by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg
    Mastering by Ben Karlstrom
    Music tracks by Grind Time Production Squad
    2 min
  • Has the U.S. Constitution Lost Its Meaning? A Debate
    Should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning of its text?
    On June 11, 2018, two leading constitutional legal scholars, Georgetown's Randy Barnett and Cornell's Michael Dorf, debated "originalism," which seeks to protect against arbitrary and personal interpretations by jurists, while making the law stable, predictable, and consistent in its application.
    The debate was hosted by Reason and the Soho Forum, which runs Oxford-style debates, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains more ground is victorious. The resolution was: "The U.S. Constitution should be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning communicated to the public by the words of the text."
    Dorf won the debate by changing the minds of 20 percent of the attendees.
    1 hr 32 min
  • Stossel: Jordan Peterson vs. 'Social Justice Warriors'
    Many leftists hate Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.
    As an example, Peterson cites studies that find, in wealthy countries that focus most on equality, like Sweden, even fewer women major in science and math. Instead they pick fields that deal with people, like teaching, and men tend more toward technical fields.
    Peterson says this shows that when men and women have the most freedom to decide what they do, they pick fields that line up with their natural biological interests.
    That idea infuriates leftists. "It should infuriate them," Peterson tells Stossel. "Because I'm going right at the heart of the radical leftist doctrine."
    That doctrine is social justice, the idea that all groups should have equal outcomes; that there should be just as many female CEOs, scientists, and computer programmers, because men and women are essentially the same. If outcomes differ, it must be sexism.
    Peterson says that the focus on group equality is a spinoff of Marxism. That after Marxism failed spectacularly in the economic realm, Marxists applied their way of thinking to issues like the difference between men and women.
    Peterson calls for the opposite of Marxism–a focus on the individual.
    8 min
  • Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers
    Eric Lundgren, an e-waste entrepreneur who built the first electronic hybrid recycling center in the U.S., will begin a 15-month prison sentence this month after a six-year legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice.
    In 2012, Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement for copying and selling CDs for restoring the Windows operating system on broken PCs—CDs that Microsoft gives away for free.
    So why did Lundgren's crime result in a jail sentence? The answer cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own. Repair advocates say that in their quest to protect their intellectual property, manufacturers are trampling on our First Amendment rights.
    Produced by Paul Detrick and Alexis Garcia. Narration by Garcia. Cameras by Detrick, Garcia, and Jim Epstein.
    13 min
  • Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build a Foxconn Plant
    Powerful forces—including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, and President Donald Trump—have aligned, to turn more than 1,000 acres of Wisconsin farmland and family homes into an LCD screen manufacturing facility.
    Reason visited the village of Mt. Pleasant to speak with homeowners facing the threat of eminent domain, and the local government officials responsible for acquiring the land on behalf of Foxconn, which is receiving $4.5 billion in subsidies and tax breaks. The project was sold to the public with a promise of 13,000 jobs and billions in additional tax revenue.
    Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Justin Monticello and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Meredith Bragg.
    14 min
  • 'The Libertarian Party Is the Right Answer, as Broken as It Is:' Larry Sharpe
    The New York governor's race this fall has garnered outsized national attention partly because a well-known actress is mounting a left-wing challenge to the two-term Democratic incumbent, who just happens to be the son of a past governor, a one-time Kennedy family in-law, and a cabinet secretary during the Bill Clinton administration.
    Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda on the long-running show Sex and the City, is an unrepentant progressive who has been attacking Andrew Cuomo hard from the left.But there's another candidate running for governor who's worth a longer look than either Nixon or Cuomo. Libertarian Party candidate Larry Sharpe is a New York City native, former Marine, and an entrepreneur who came within 32 votes of being Gary Johnson's vice-presidential candidate for the 2016 election. When Reason asked his rival Bill Weld how the LP could become more successful, Weld replied, "You want to get out more candidates like Larry Sharpe."
    Introductory segment produced by Austin Bragg. Edited by Ian Keyser.
    'Covert Affair' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
    26 min
  • Expect Fully Legal Weed Within 5 Years, Says Former Top Pharma Lobbyist and Congressman Billy Tauzin
    With medical and recreational marijuana legalization spreading across the country, Reason attended the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition in New York City to get a sense of where things are headed with commercialized weed and weed-related products.
    But by far the most vision-inducing part of the conference was keynote speaker Billy Tauzin. He's a former conservative congressman from Louisiana, who went on to head up PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's massive lobbying group. Now he works for LenitivLabs, a medical cannabis company founded by TV host, multiple sclerosis sufferer, and longtime legalization advocate Montel Williams. Tauzin himself survived a life-threatening bout with cancer, and now says he wishes he could have smoked weed to ease his pain.
    7 min
  • Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Cult of Silicon Valley
    Established in 2003, Theranos promised to save people from pain and disease through early detection and lead the way into an era of cheaper, more consumer-driven health care. Holmes' big idea was to replace traditional venous blood draws in a doctor's office, hospital, or lab with simple finger pricks. One day, she said, patients would be able to do the tests at home and upload the results for their doctors.
    Holmes stacked her board of directors with heavyweights such as former and future cabinet members George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and Gen. James Mattis. She held fundraisers for Hillary Clinton and cadged hundreds of millions of dollars from investors such as the Walmart heirs, Rupert Murdoch, and Betsy DeVos. For a time, her company was worth more than Spotify or Uber.
    Today, Theranos is on the verge of liquidation and its backers have seen their investments wiped out. Holmes may face charges.
    32 min

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