The Reason Roundtable

Why does a well-aged glass of smokey whiskey taste so good? It's all about the chemistry of sitting in a barrel for decades. "The polymer structures make the wood slowly fall apart," says Bryan Davis, a pioneering distiller who learned the science of liquor production by watching MIT classes on YouTube. "They shed all of these precursor chemicals that turn into different stuff that tastes really good." This time-consuming process is the reason distillers have to charge five figures for a top-shelf bottle.

Not anymore. Davis, cofounder of the Los Angeles–based Lost Spirits Distillery, has figured out a way to compress a 20-year aging process into about six days.

Reason editors assess Rudy Giuliani's media tour, make bets about Iran policy, and gently suggest that some economic policies in Seattle may be suboptimal.

"Government made a big mistake with the dietary guidelines," says Nina Teicholz, author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. "Given the track record that they have so far, you can really make a plausible argument that they've done more harm than good."

Reason's Alexis Garcia sat down with Teicholz to discuss how decades of faulty nutrition science can be traced back to the flawed research of a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys.

Do customers need to be told that coffee might give them cancer? According to the state of California, they do.

Thanks to Prop 65, enacted in 1986, businesses are required to post a warning about the presence of any substance known by the state's environmental hazard office to "cause cancer or reproductive toxicity."

The list is updated yearly and now contains more than 800 substances.

A recent ruling from a Los Angeles judge orders major coffee chains such as Starbucks and Peet's to post explicit warnings that chemicals in coffee might cause cancer.

Acrylamide is a byproduct of roasting coffee beans and appears on California's list because studies show that lab rats are more likely to develop cancer when administered extremely high doses of the chemical.

A human being would need to drink approximately 16,000 cups of instant coffee, or 35,000 cups of regular coffee, a day for life to reach the lowest levels of acrylamide that increased cancer risk in mice.

The World Health Organization has said that there's "inadequate evidence" that coffee drinking increases cancer risk.

We stationed ourselves near a coffee shop in Los Angeles and asked people how far they think labeling should go.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello.

Reason editors rate the White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump's nuclear politics, the optics of political summits, and the resuscitation of Zora Neale Hurston.

On April 16, 2018, two free market economists debated a topic that has long divided libertarians. Fractional reserve banking refers to banks' standard practice of keeping only a portion of their depositors' money on hand and loaning out the rest. In The Mystery of Banking (1983), the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard called fractional reserve banking "a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts." Other libertarian economists, such as Larry White and Steve Horowitz, have argued that the practice is perfectly defensible.

At The Soho Forum, a debate series in New York City that is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, Robert Murphy debated George Selgin over the following resolution: "Fractional Reserve banking poses a threat to the stability of market economies."

Would you eat a hamburger or a chicken nugget made of meat grown in a laboratory?

Joshua Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of JUST, is betting that you will. The San Francisco-based company has been producing and selling non-animal versions of food, like mayonnaise, since 2013, and it's raised more than $310 million in venture capital.

Tetrick and his team have created products like Just Mayo by identifying plant-based alternatives to common animal products, like eggs, using a combination of lab experiments and machine-learning.

JUST is one of a handful of tech companies working to disrupt the meat production industry.

While many of its competitors are pursuing better plant-based meat substitutes, JUST is pushing ahead with so-called "clean meat," or lab-grown animal tissue that requires no farming, no feeding of livestock, and no slaughterhouses. Only a single sample from a single animal that's duplicated endlessly.

JUST and companies like it are poised to disrupt the livestock industry. So established players are turning to the government to help protect their turf.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning.

During a rally in New Hampshire last month, President Trump promised that the federal government would "spend a lot of money" on a new anti-drug campaign that would scare kids "from ending up like the people in the commercials."

We'll make them "very, very bad commercials," Trump told the crowd. "We'll make them pretty unsavory situations."

Yet research on the effectiveness of past anti-drug campaigns, including a 2014 meta-analysis of 19 studies, concluded that these efforts had little to no effect on use of illicit substances. A 2008 study published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at the effectiveness of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which ran from 1998 and 2004 and cost $1 billion. It found that the program may have had the opposite of its intended impact, actually encouraging drug use.

Isn't it time to just say no?

Written, produced, and shot by Meredith and Austin Bragg. Edited by Meredith Bragg.

Reason editors share notes on the end of the political war against marijuana, plus the latest on Trump/Russia and the "undocumented" Andrew Cuomo.

A special all-female edition of the Reason Podcast