1 Million YouTube Subscribers!
As Reason's video channel celebrates a milestone, take a walk down memory lane.
A few days ago, Reason’s channel at YouTube passed 1 million subscribers, which is worth celebrating.
Since launching in October 2007, our 4,212 boldly and unapologetically libertarian documentaries, interviews, parodies, and video op-eds have generated 346,113,346 views (as of this writing). As YouTube tallies it, we’ve generated 25.4 million hours (!) of “watch time.” When I became the first editor in chief of Reason TV at the start of it all, nobody could imagine racking up numbers like that. We literally had zero views and no subscribers!
Reason’s video platform started out as the brainchild of TV legend Drew Carey and Reason Foundation President David Nott. Drew argued that our print journalism and policy work were persuasive, but video offered the opportunity to reach the heart as well as the head, especially as a whole new medium of online video was being born. We took advantage of what current Reason TV Executive Editor Jim Epstein calls “video’s Gutenberg Moment,” or the massive and continuing drops in the cost of camera and editing gear. At the same time, the rise of YouTube (and the internet more generally) made it possible to bring thousands of videos to millions of people all over the world.
Our first big hit came when Drew hosted a video for us about medical marijuana back when dispensaries in California were still getting raided by the feds and state police. Right as the video came out, Drew was named the new host of The Price is Right and used the publicity to call attention to how military vets and pain suffered because of the drug war. That took real guts.
If you liked that, also check out “Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey,” our first long-form series that drew critical raves—and a trip for Drew and me to address the not-always pleasant Cleveland City Council.
Over the past 17 (!) years, our videos have won a bunch of awards, helped drag Obamacare’s individual mandate before the Supreme Court, and reached untold young people as they are still forming their political and philosophical worldviews (fully 60.3 percent of our audience at YouTube is under 35). Will the future of politics be shaped by Millennials and Zoomers scarred by 2017’s “People Will Die!”, a musical send-up of nanny state excesses that has over 2 million views? Doubtful, but I hope so. For decades, I’ve chronicled the Boomer urge to “child-proof the world,” which more or less succeeded in producing what Jon Haidt and others call “the anxious generation,” so it would be nice to be part of a return to sanity.
“Reason TV is how I became a full on Reason subscriber back in the late 2000s,” responded one commenter when I announced our million-subscriber milestone on Twitter. That sort of response is gratifying, especially in a crazy election season like the one we’re currently in, where optimistic libertarian ideas about “Free Minds and Free Markets” (Reason’s motto) struggle for attention in a full-on freakout by conservative and progressive populists.
If you’re looking for something more politically heterodox than MSNBC or Fox News, you will enjoy scrolling through our YouTube channel. It’s impossible for me to pick my ultimate favorites from our massive online library, but let me suggest some of our best work as a starting point.
“Capitalism vs. Socialism,” a Soho Forum debate, is our most-watched video of all time (nearly 7 million views), and for good reason. A rollicking and forceful argument between economists Richard D. Wolff and Gene Epstein (moderated by yours truly), this is more like watching Ali and Frazier’s “Thrilla in Manila” than a faculty lounge disagreement. One of our best filmmakers is Zach Weissmueller, who started at Reason as an intern in the early 2010s and has since become a master of documentary, interview, and every other form imaginable. He cohosts our weekly show Just Asking Questions. Check him out asking college students if they support free speech in this 2015 mega-hit:
It’s impossible to fully capture the range of videos we’ve produced over the years. If you’ve thought about something—even for a second, like the old “dramatic chipmunk” meme of yore—we’ve got a couple or more videos on it.
I miss the vaguely manic energy of those early days, when we really had little-to-no idea of what we were doing and were willing to try out just about anything. Here’s an episode of the Reason.tv Talk Show, which was hosted by me and a pre-The Fifth Column Michael C. Moynihan. All told, we did about 16 episodes in 2009 and this one features Tucker Carlson and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy. My favorite bit might be the fake ad break at 10.37, where attentive listeners will hear Matt Welch belting out some high notes. (And yes, the inspiration for the set was the Seinfeld episode where Kramer finds the old Merv Griffin Show set.)
Who else but Reason would rhapsodize on the “tiny house” phenomenon to call attention to ridiculous zoning and planning rules that jack up the cost of full-size homes? (The subject of the piece, Jay Austin, became more libertarian after seeing it; his tragic ending is a reminder that the world can be a harsh and terrible place.) When the FBI was saying that Juggalos were a criminal organization, we created a beautifully shot documentary about the phenomenon and followed the band’s leaders, Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, to the halls of Congress as they made a powerful plea for free speech. Like the ICP, I see miracles every day and have no idea how magnets fucking work.
Jim Epstein’s series “Cypherpunks Write Code” rediscovered the crazy online libertarians in the ‘80s and ‘90s whose work ultimately led to the creation of Bitcoin, the world’s first truly durable stateless currency. We exposed the government’s war on cameras, the job-killing impact of $15 minimum wages, and the five cities that got f*cked by the Olympics.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time doing interviews with everyone from John Cleese on wokeness and comedy to Camille Paglia on the demise of critical thinking to Edward Snowden on who he was voting for in the 2016 election (really). “The individual is more powerful today than they ever have been in the past,” he told me via Skype. “And this is why you see governments that feel threatened by an individual like Julian Assange, who's trapped in an embassy. Because despite the fact that they can control the physical location of someone, the power of the reliable sort of old, bad tools of political repression, are increasingly losing their weight.” This is heady stuff to me, especially given my early days as an editor at teen and music mags. Back in the ‘80s, I mostly interviewed pint-sized luminaries like Coreys Haim and Feldman, or rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne and Slash (more on that here).
And of course there’s Reason’s comedy stuff. Do you know the work of Remy, who started collaborating with us back in 2011? His first video, “Why They Fought,” might still be my all-time favorite of his. He collaborates with the Bragg Brothers, Austin and Meredith, whose genius is evident in everything they touch.
Their Great Moments in Unintended Consequences is our most popular series, and for good reason (government overreach is easier to take—and fight—when it’s exposed via comedy). Their “libertarian editions” of popular shows and movies such as Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars, done in collaboration with Andrew Heaton (who also hosted the great Mostly Weekly for us which was scripted and filmed by my fiancee Sarah Rose Siskind) are still pulling in new views.
These days, we create a lot of “shorts,” the minute-long videos that YouTube is prioritizing to compete with TikTok and Instagram. It’s incredible how much libertarian info and worldview you can pack into 60 seconds (check out this short on why Seattle has a statue of Lenin and this one on Oakland, California’s terrible gun buyback program). And as more people listen to podcasts on YouTube, we also post videos of all our shows there, including The Reason Roundtable, The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie, The Soho Forum Debates, Just Asking Questions, and our newest offering, Free Media with Senior Editor Robby Soave.
Ever since Reason first launched as a monthly magazine in 1968, we’ve been proud to generate stories, essays, exposés, and op-eds that flesh out what a libertarian world can look like, why it’s worth fighting for, and how to make it real. Expanding into video back in 2007 helped us supercharge those efforts by reaching vastly more people, especially young people looking for wisdom, insight, and hope.
And most of the time, we’ve been having fun doing it. I appreciate your indulging me and will leave you with this old video we did in 2010(*), parodying a famous series of ads to talk about arcane labor classifications and the battle between UPS and FedEx. This one did well for us and got nominated for a National Magazine Award back when those things mattered. The most amazing thing to me about it is how we (Meredith Bragg, really) managed to mimic high-end production values on a zero budget. The wonders of green screens and smart people. [*: The YT video got reuploaded in 2013 due to a stupid rights issue.]
If you have a particular favorite video from our library, please let me know in the comments.
Onward to 2 million subscribers!
Congratulations. More content than I can hope to consume, and grateful for it.