Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed a 2013 Justice Department policy that worked to keep federal law enforcement from going after recreational and medical marijuana users and producers in states that have legalized pot.

That's just stupid policy from any number of perspectives: A growing majority of Americans believe pot should be treated like wine and alcohol. States that have legalized have witnessed no negative social effects and teen pot use is even declining. President Trump campaigned on the promise that marijuana policy should be decided at the state level, a position fully consistent with federalism Sessions himself pretends to espouse. California and Nevada just started selling legal weed and Massachusetts is set to follow suit later in 2018. It's clear the war on pot is over and the prohibitionists have lost.

But if Sessions can't really stop legalization, says Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, he can slow it down and make it more painful and disruptive than it needs to be. In a fun, freewheeling conversation about pot, politics, and posturing, Sullum, the author of the groundbreaking Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, talks with Nick Gillespie about what red state (besides Alaska) will be the first to legalize pot, what should happen to people behind bars for crimes that are no longer crimes, and how cannabis culture will change in an America where people are fully free to smoke dope.

"Bitcoin is not competing with Visa or MasterCard. Bitcoin is competing with the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar," says Michael Goldstein, president of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and host of the Noded Bitcoin Podcast. His co-host and the institute's treasurer, Pierre Rochard, talk with Nick Gillespie about meteoric rise of bitcoin, how it can become a viable currency despite volatility, and how it may well spell doom for central banks and the gods of Keynesianism.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is a group devoted to promoting bitcoin and working through many of the theoretical and practical challenges for the world's best-known cryptocurrency. It's named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of a programmer or programmers who launched bitcoin in 2009, in what Nakamoto called "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system."

Bitcoin potentially offers at least two radical things to its users. First is a non-state-based currency, and second is a fully peer-to-peer accounting system in which every actor can verify all transactions virtually instantaneously. The program resides on the computers and servers of its users, decentralized in a manner straight out of a science fiction novel. Inspired by Milton Friedman's and other economists' theories of a noninflationary currency, there is a fixed number of bitcoin that will be mined out over time into computer space, thus limiting the ability of people to inflate or deflate its value, at least in theory. Having said that, bitcoin is in the news now because of its massive spike in cost. Once trading at pennies, it recently neared $20,000 per bitcoin.

Whatever its price, Goldstein and Rochard say that bitcoin is here to stay and that what call "hyper-bitcoinization" is already well underway.

Today's Reason Podcast, which features myself, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman, begins with a discussion about the dramatic protests in Iran: their significance, the context, the vast amount that we don't know, the bad Twitter takes, the America-centric focus, and what Washington should do specifically about what few existing policies directly affect the situation in Tehran and throughout the Islamic Republic.

We also argue about legal (but heavily regulated) weed in California and elsewhere; President Donald Trump's recent comments on North Korea, Pakistan, and DACA; and whether cheesy '80s movies about nuclear holocaust (think The Day After and Testament) are worth rewatching.

Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.

The Republican candidate has managed to capture just 37 percent of the under-30 vote in each of the last two presidential elections. What do you expect when you run candidates such as Mitt Romney and Donald Trump and go deep on issues such as gay marriage and drug prohibition, asks Lisa De Pasquale. Is Roy Moore really gonna pack in the kids?

The former organizer of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) and author of The Social Justice Warrior Handbook: A Practical Survival Guide for Snowflakes, Millennials, and Generation Z, De Pasquale has just published a novel, I Wish I Might, which features a 30-something conservative woman who runs a beauty-and-fashion website that's reminiscent of Goop and Teen Vogue. The increasingly libertarian-leaning D.C. resident thinks it's way past time for right-wingers to stop trying to police popular culture and instead start creating it.

"For me, politics has become more [about] entertainment," she says. "Being in D.C. almost 20 years now, it's not like I've seen a huge bunch of policy changes. Maybe what's left now is just entertainment." A Gen-Xer, she's also adamant that the older generation needs to get out of the way. "Anytime Fox News tweets something from The Five or from The Greg Gutfeld show, you can tell who the older commenters are because they'll say they just don't get Gutfeld or Kat Timpf," she says. "The problem is a lot of those older people are still the ones that are running for things, running organizations, and that sort of thing." Moore, the Alabama Republican who just lost a Senate election in the reddest state in the country, is not only fringe in his anti-sodomy views, she says, he's also been around forever.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with De Pasquale about I Wish I Might, "secret laughter" inside the conservative movement, and why she doesn't think Lena Dunham is a role model.

Historian and entrepreneur Thaddeus Russell has a bone to pick with American higher education. It's not simply that maverick opinions that stray from a liberal-progressive orthodoxy get squashed in classroom discussions and tenure decisions. Russell says the federal Department of Education effectively manages an accreditation system that controls the number and character of elite institutions by insisting that "serious" colleges and universities have dorms, dining halls, and a whole host of things completely unrelated to higher learning.

As the founder and proprietor of the online Renegade University, the fight is both personal and practical for Russell, whose 2010 book, A Renegade History of the United States, offers up one of the most original and provocative readings of the American experience. "People who operate on the fringes of society," says Russell, "who have operated against social norms...have opened spaces that were later occupied by the mainstream and established things that we now take for granted." In his telling, it's not august statesmen and high-minded citizens but the pushers, prostitutes, and outliers who have enabled the radical lifestyle, cultural, and political freedoms we take for granted.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Russell, who holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, talks about discovering the Austrian School of economics only long after he left the academy, why actual Marxists hate postmodernism and why libertarians should love it, the insidious nature of America's Protestant work ethic, and how the Democrats are reviving the Cold War.

"I got a lotta problems with you people; now, you're gonna hear about it!" So barked George* Costanza's dad Frank 20 years ago this week, in a classic episode of Seinfeld that introduced the country to Festivus, an alternative and heretofore private December holiday created by Daniel O'Keefe, the father of Seinfeld writer Dan O'Keefe. Now recognized as occurring on December 23, Festivus includes a simple aluminum pole, Feats of Strength (which involves wrestling the head of the household to the ground), and most famously, the Airing of Grievances.

It is that last activity which wraps up our special year-in-review Reason Podcast, featuring myself, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman. But SPOILER ALERT: My grievance, originally aimed in the general direction of sellout fiscal conservatives who have ballooned the federal deficit and debt once back in power, turns at the last minute toward Nerdpants Suderman (pictured), who beginning at the 50-minute mark of this podcast decides to direct his Festivus animus at the makers of The Last Jedi for reasons he could not elucidate without IMMEDIATELY SPOILING THE MOVIE FOR ME AND ANYONE LISTENING. His response to a man who A) does not review movies professionally, and B) has young children? "You basically missed the spoilers deadline." The monster.

The episode, however, focuses mostly on the big stories of 2017—the elephant in the room, the world's undercovered horrors and triumphs, the transformation of music-delivery systems, the last wheezing gasps of the 20th century, and (obviously) the aliens that will swallow us whole in 2018.

"Fifteen million able-bodied adults on government welfare would have a better chance at economic betterment if they were taken off welfare."

That was the proposition debated at the most recent Soho Forum debate, held on December 11 at New York's Subculture theater in the East Village. Sponsored by Reason and moderated by economist Gene Epstein, the Soho Forum is a monthly, Oxford-style debate series that explores issues of particular interest to libertarians.

At the December 11 event, the Foundation for Government Accountability's Tarren Bragdon defended the proposition while Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress opposed it. As an Oxford-style debate, the audience (including those watching via Reason's Facebook live stream) voted before and after the debate, with the winner being the person who moved more people to his or her side. It's a lively conversation that features audience questions toward the end.

The next Soho Forum takes place on January 16 and features the proposition that "selfishness is a virtue." Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, will defend selfishness and Gene Epstein will move from moderator to debater in opposing the resolution. Moderating the debate is Fox News' chief legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano. Tickets for the event are $18 ($10 for students) and must be purchased in advance. To buy tickets, go to https://thesohoforum.org

"The tree of hope has to be watered with the blood of young journalists," Katherine Mangu-Ward says on today's Reason Podcast.

Was Reason's editor in chief talking about entitlement reform? The new Star Wars movie? Paul Ryan? All of the above? You'll have to listen below to find out.

The episode, also featuring myself, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie, starts with an extended treatment about what's good in the GOP tax reform package likely to be signed into law this week, continues on with an extended generational clash about whether will he/won't-he-be-retiring Speaker Paul Ryan has ever been worth a tinker's dam when it comes to fiscal responsibility, and ends with a flurry of unfortunate Star Wars impersonations.

Warned, you have been.

With Republican tax reform almost a sure thing, the nation is poised to experience the most sweeping and significant changes to the tax code since the late 1980s. But are those changes—including lower corporate and individual rates, reductions in some longstanding deductions, and almost certainly trillions of dollars in new national debt—good from a libertarian perspective.

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the CATO Institute, likes most of what he sees on the corporate side of reform. But when it comes to individual tax policy, he tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, "It's basically reassembling deck chairs on a really messy and horribly complex system."

Edited by Ian Keyser. Music by _ghost, lisenced under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 US.