Welcome to a bonus live debate episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast.

I am Matt Welch.

And what you're about to listen to is the first ever installment of an exciting new live debate series called Reason Verses, in which a couple of us, in this case, me and Nicholaspie, debate a single topic in front of a live audience against a couple of them.

Here that is Sarah Longwell

and Tim Miller of The Bullwork. This was held in Washington, D.C. at the beautiful Howard

Theater on December 18th. Peter Sutterman is your MC, and you're going to hear his dulcet tones

soon enough. Just a heads up first that the latter half of this debate, there's a visual

props segment for which you're going to have to use your imagination.

All right.

Hope you enjoy and stay tuned for more announcements about Reason versus.

Take it away.

I'm Peter Souterman.

I'm going to be your moderator tonight.

In full disclosure, I do work at Reason.

But I also appear on a podcast that has run through the bulwark, so I'll try to be

fair and not take sides. However, that might be a little bit complicated given our resolution,

which is you don't have to pick a side in politics. So if I'm not taking sides, am I actually

kind of taking sides? I think that's the sort of

thing that's going to come up in tonight's debate. Now, because this is a debate, there will be a winner,

and that winner will be decided by you, the audience. The way this is going to work is there are going

to be two votes. The first vote, you've either already voted or you should vote right now.

And then there's going to be another vote after the debate happens.

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