 Who watches the Intellectual Watchman? When it comes to historians, especially those purporting to tell the truth about the founding of America, the Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan, and the godfather of Austrian economics Ludwig von Mises, it's Phil Magnus of the American Institute for Economic Research. Magnus has a PhD from George Mason University's School of Public Policy, and he's written or co-written books on what he calls the moral mess of higher education on Abraham Lincoln's plan for black resettlement after emancipation and on the 1619 project. He's emerged as that project's most dogged critic, finding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning series developed by MacArthur Genius Grant winner Nicole Hanna-Jones was quietly revised at the New York Times website after several prominent historians pointed out major errors in its analysis. She goes on CNN and someone asked her a question about this line and she says, I never said that. I never made that claim. But of course we know that 1776 was the founding of this country. The project does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country. I've started thinking, I've seen her make that claim 20 or 30 times, and I think it was in the original text. I'm gonna go back to the website, and it's no longer there. Magnus has also been a leading critic of Duke historian Nancy McLean, whose National Book Award-winning Democracy in Chains attempted to brand the school choice movement as motivated by racism. This whole set of ideas has been twined really since the beginning of our country, these notions of extreme economic liberty with racial subjugation. She said, I'm not going to even bother consulting anyone that works in the public choice you can in tradition. And her excuse, she said, this isn't an interview. She says, I don't wanna tip them off that I've discovered their dirty laundry or something. And he's a critic of Hans Hermann Hoppe, a professor emeritus at UNLV and a distinguished senior fellow at the Mises Institute, who is increasingly influential within the Libertarian Party. Hoppe has tried to invent this kind of carved out counter-narrative while still claiming to be a representative of Mises that says we can use this proper Tarian concept of the nation-state to exclude undesired groups, exclude immigrants from crossing the borders. And it's been complete inversion of Mises's thought, and yet he's doing it under the mantle of saying, well, I'm the heir of Rothbard who's the heir of Mises. Magnus also wrote an article for Reason that's inspired an ongoing plagiarism investigation at Princeton University of Kevin Cruz, a high-profile, very online professor of history. This is a guy that would tweet one or 200 times a day as a live stream of American politics. And then as soon as the word got out about plagiarism, he's dropped off the face of the earth. Reason caught up with Magnus at Freedom Fest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, to talk about intellectual accountability in academia, journalism, and the libertarian movement. Phil Magnus, thanks for talking to Reason. Thanks, Rob. You recently wrote a piece for Reason where you documented that Kevin Cruz, presidential historian who's at Princeton University, you know, seems to be guilty of plagiarism. You know, part of that it's a gotcha just because plagiarism is a bad thing, but because Cruz himself had called out various people for exactly the same thing. Can you recap the argument against Kevin Cruz for us? Yeah, so this actually started almost two years ago. I was asked to review his book, One Nation Under God, which came out in the late 2010s. And it's a purported history of religiosity in 20th century America. And he has this thesis that says that basically it's New Deal opponents connected to libertarians in the mid 20th century unite with the business audiences to force Christianity upon the public and the religious right. And this is like when, you know, in God we trust started showing up and, you know, certain additions to the Pledge of Allegiance. Yeah, so it's basically, he makes our Leonard Reed, ends up at Jerry Falwell, is basically his thesis. And I'm reading this book, and in addition to critiquing the academic side of it, I start noticing some of the passages. And one stood out in particular was this obscure quote by Abraham Lincoln. And I was like, I had seen that before because I've done a lot of work on Lincoln's presidency. And it just kind of nagged on my mind. And I started digging into some of his sources. And then I found he had taken it from a partially cited article in the New York Times. But there were real strong textual similarities like almost identical sentences and maybe one or two words changed. Wait a minute, this looks a little, it's lazy to say the worst, but it's plagiarism probably. So that made me very suspicious of his other works. And then he pops up again, cruises an author for the 1619 project. And I had been working on some of the response to that. And I was several months after I had made the discovery on the Lincoln quote, I searched his source, which comes from another book he wrote, White Flight in 2005, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. So I'm checking the footnotes, seeing where this comes from. And I pulled the dissertation to compare it to something that looks suspicious in the book. And right there on like page 10 of the dissertation is basically an entire paragraph that was lifted from another work without any attribution. Did the same thing where he moved a few quotes around and that really set off the red flag. So that was the discovery. So, and what, you know, what was his response? Well, I contacted him when I was getting ready to run the piece and asked us, do you have any comment on this? And I think his quote was he inartfully paraphrased. So it was kind of a dodgy language, trying to minimize it. But then after that, he went completely radio silent. This is a guy that would tweet one or 200 times a day as a live stream of American politics. And then as soon as the word got out about plagiarism, he's dropped off the face of the earth. What has happened? Do you know, is there, you know, has, you know, his faculty colleagues at Princeton or like how, how do plagiarism cases typically get adjudicated within the academy? Well, every university has a standard and it's mostly to deal with students that majorize in the classroom. And Princeton has a very strict one at that. They say at some points, even quoting or borrowing phrases as short as three or four words without quotation marks are inappropriate. And he did much more than that. The problem is when you're dealing with a kind of a celebrity faculty, an A-lister that's a regular on MSNBC, 1619 Project Author, there's some political cachet there. So getting their attention on it proved very difficult. So I first alerted the university after the earliest discoveries, I think that was December, 2021 and heard nothing for six months. And it really actually took the story breaking until other people started calling Princeton and saying, hey, do you have a comment on this? And then they finally dig into their email and found that I had contacted them months ago, reach out and ever since then I've been cooperating with them and trying to give them all the documentation that I found. So there's some sort of a proceeding that's going on right now. Why does plagiarism matter? You know, I think it's one of the areas, there's two reasons. First, it is intellectual theft. It's borrowing someone else's work without properly crediting it. So that cuts to the core of academic research. You know, you cite your sources and you also properly credit people for the work that they performed. But it's also, I think one of the quote unquote crimes in academia that is still taken seriously, still given a very rigorous penalty irrespective of the politics. So it's something that I think all sides agree on is proper to police for. And again, this is credibility before your students in the classroom. If you want to tell your students not to cheat, you also have to make sure your own work doesn't do that. And of course, I mean, broadly, I mean, this is a very kind of abstract and high-minded thing. It's part of the Enlightenment project, right? That we all share our sources, our kind of our data set, whether it's quotes or actual data, because it's not only for personal grandisement, but it's also that way people can check to make sure the math is correct, right? That you're making sense, et cetera. Yeah. You have made among the many things that you do, you have a kind of sub career in calling people out for either plagiarism or analytical mistakes. You know, a couple of years ago when Nancy McClain wrote a book accusing James Buchanan, in particular, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, of essentially being a handmade or a hand master to white supremacy, you called her out on a bunch of analytical and fundamental errors. Now, it's a little bit different than plagiarism, right? Because there you're not saying she took other people's work and tried to pass it off on her own, but she fundamentally misunderstood what she was talking about. Yeah, misrepresenting sources. And I think some of that has come out to be pretty willful. It's you compare the original letters versus what she says in the book and she's giving a very heavy spin that omits certain words, cuts quotes in half, that sort of thing. Yeah. So I think it affirmed a political story she wanted to tell. And then it also turns out it's layered over with just basic unfamiliarity with the subject matter. So she commits error after error after error and they compound. Because even though she's a very highly regarded historian, very award-winning, all of that kind of stuff, this was new material and she just wasn't that facile with it. That's exactly it. And she went even further. She said, I'm not going to even bother consulting anyone that works in the public choice, Buchanan tradition and her excuse. She said, this isn't an interview. She says, I don't want to tip them off that I've discovered their dirty laundry or something. Yeah. And this reminded me when that came out, it was the way Michelle Malkin, who's not an intellectual, but wrote a book defending the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. And in her prologue or forward, she said, I'm not burdened with having been taught this in academia. So I have an advantage over people who actually know the subject because I haven't been indoctrinated. This is kind of like the inverse of that. It's a hubris that comes at it. She purports to understand externally because she has certain political priors and political training. And that's been the full extent of a response to me other than accused me of being some part of this vast conspiracy against her. So to talk about accountability there, and I guess also it's, you know, I think Hayek in the kind of revolution of science talks about scientism as a mechanical application of a system of belief on a subject matter without any interest in the particulars of it. And I mean, it seems like McLean is being very scientific. She doesn't need to know the details. She doesn't need to know context because she knows what she knows. But what has been, have there been any ramifications for Nancy McLean? And, you know, and I think your case, people like Michael Munger, her colleague at Duke, you know, have raised serious questions, you know, and engaged in argument. And one of the, you know, one thinks the goal of the Academy is to stage exactly these kinds of debates because like people are gonna come up with new theories, new understandings, new analysis, which really upsets the Apple Card. And it's fierce, but like, has that been happening with Nancy McLean? It's quite the contrary. She has gotten top book awards and she was a finalist for the National Book Prize. This comes out after the controversy is revealed. She is a keynote plenary speaker at the Organization of American Historians and all the major conferences is very much celebrated on the speaking circuit for the supposed discovery she made in her book. And the early reviews that came out of the media, and these are generally left of center, they were favorable to her. So one of the arguments have pointed out, I think she's tapped into, if you remember the old Stephen Colbert concept of truthiness. Yes. That's very much what's at play in the Academy right now. So it's like even if she's not actually accurate, broadly speaking, she is right. Yes, she's tapped into what they want to be right, independent of the facts. So another person who you have spent a lot of time over the past few years sparring with is Nicole Hannah-Jones in the 1619 project. You put together a book length response to that. You continue to chart, fascinatingly, not just again, like large analytic errors or historical errors and things like that, but the way that the New York Times is stealth editing the 1619 project. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to understand that they were doing that? Yeah, yeah. So when I first read the 1619 project, I was actually excited because they were working in a subject area that I know well, history of slavery is a very deep and nuanced topic that needs to be investigated. But then I see the political bias coming in, but I started out as a partial critic of it. Critiqued its economics, which were bad, but also gave it some credit and even defended it on a few points. But what started to emerge is as Nicole Hannah-Jones responded to some of the measured, level-headed criticisms, she was just being dismissive of them entirely. And here we're talking about, excuse me, incredibly establishment historians in the left liberal center of academia. Gordon Wood, exactly. James McPherson, these are people that Sean Malintz, who is famously a well-established Princeton center-left historian, and they came out with very measured criticisms and said, hey, you need to fix some of these factual errors and she responds, basically, oh, they're a bunch of white historians and I don't consider them preeminent, I don't consider them important. And that's when you start seeing the discussion around the 1619 project turns is really in those first few months after it's published. So the next thing is Nicole Hannah-Jones is nominated by the New York Times for a Pulitzer Prize. This was their preeminent offering in 2019 and they were definitely promoting her essay. So right around the time that the Pulitzer Committee is evaluating and making these judgments, what I come to discover after the fact, and I think it was the first person that really broke this out into the open, is that the newspaper itself had stealth edited this line that appeared on its website about 1619 being the true founding as opposed to 1776 and it had been very controversial from the moment the project launched. I mean, it was part of the selling part because it's kind of a breathtaking and interesting reframing of American history. It has to be really kind of controversial in order to be worth talking about. And there could be a provocative case being made for this, but she came under fire for it and right in the middle of Pulitzer season, this line suddenly disappears off of the New York Times' website. Six months later, the Trump administration is going after the 1619 project with its competitor 1776 project. And she goes on CNN and someone asked her a question about this line and she says, I never said that. I never made that claim. And I've started thinking, I've seen her make that claim 20 or 30 times and I think it was in the original text and it go back to the website and it's no longer there. So it was a journalistic misconduct case, I think. And now it's a little bit different because it's journalism versus academia, right? So it's not that journalism is less serious but it kind of plays by different roles. And part of her response was it seemed when she was being attacked by historians for being inaccurate, part of her response seemed to be like, I'm a journalist, don't hold me by those standards. But of course now she is an academic. Right. And I guess a larger question then and certainly she is, she fills the role of a public intellectual. As do you, I like to think that I do. I mean, so it's where you may not be following academic, the rules of academic disciplines and subcategories all the time but you're expected to be arguing in good faith and respond to serious criticism and things like that. Do you think Nicole Hannah-Jones, like Nancy McClain, like Kevin Cruz, although the jury's kind of out on him, is her unwillingness to really engage her critics is that symptomatic of a larger breakdown in public intellectual life in America? Very much so. And there's a common thread among all three of these figures, Cruz McClain and Nicole Hannah-Jones. They like to attack critics that are of the Newt Gingrich stripe. They like to attack the Trump administration. Cruz was infamous for picking Twitter fights with like bright-leaning soccer moms. And also in like Dinesh D'Souza who may have at some point been a public intellectual but has shut the bet on that. He's like mentally ill or intellectually unserious. But yeah, Cruz would like, he spent a lot of time engaging in pointing out how bad Dinesh D'Souza's history was. But they don't want to engage the serious academic critics. And this is a real shortcoming that comes in the Nicole Hannah-Jones' book version. She says, well, I'm responding to my critics and the critics she goes after are the Trump administration. That's not, let's go respond to the serious historians that have actually done work on this subject. So do you think that's new and is it growing or is that actually just the way that, kind of intellectual life ever was? I'm thinking of Richard Hofstadter in a book about anti-intellectualism in American life. Like he opens, which I guess came out in the late fifties or early sixties, but he came out, he opens with the whole thing about how he's not going to actually engage Bill Buckley in the national review because this is a book about intellectuals and anti-intellectualism. And like they're not worth engaging partly because they refute his thesis it seems. What was the luxury of picking your critics? So I mean, is this new or is this just really, the way things always work that people kind of get a free ride depending on who they are and what they're saying and where they're saying it. And then it's up to people like you to kind of pick at them until they either engage you or people get tired with their arguments and say, oh, here's an alternative reading that I find more persuasive. Right, right. So I think that current has always been there. It's very convenient to be able to attack a straw man on the other side. And if you have a caricature that's making that straw man for you, you can ignore the serious substantive versions. I think it's intensified pretty dramatically in the last couple of decades. And this has been, it's an empirical fact. The Academy has moved to the political far left pretty aggressively. And you see this in faculty surveys. It used to be kind of a plurality on the center left 45% of faculty lean that way and then you had smaller sections across the spectrum. Now we're in the 60 to 65% range and then in disciplines. How do you define being on the far left? Yeah, so they, using survey data here, this goes back to the Carnegie Commission in the early 60s. They pull faculty every couple of years and say, where do you fall on the simple left, right? I think it's a five point spectrum. And you see very clear dramatic growth on the left. And the interesting thing is it has not matched the general population. They ask the same survey Gallup does of general American voters. And they're pretty stable over time. The faculty has gotten out of line with that. And in many profound ways, I mean, maybe the last few years and not quite in this, but I mean, the country kind of moved right actually over the same time that the faculty moved on. What do you think explains that kind of Higuera to, you know, the flight on the academic, you know, in academia towards a further left-wing perspective? Well, most recently it's Trumpism and you're understandable criticisms to have it. But I think it's a deeper phenomenon that comes to the job crunch in academia. And what it's become is political ideology is now a rationing mechanism for a very, very scarce number of jobs in the humanities in particular. You know, we had overproduction of PhDs going back for decades, competing for a tiny number of jobs to just refill on the tenure cycle. And you need a sorting mechanism when you're having 200, 300 people applying for the same position. And if you have a faculty that's already leans one way, they're going to choose people who look and think and act the same way that they do. I have, you know, I hadn't thought about this in a while, but I was in grads guys from 88 to 93 taking classes. And then I remember the election of George H.W. Bush. You know, and it might be just because I was there, but that was a flash point. Nobody, you know, and I was doing literature and cultural studies, but nobody believed that George H.W. Bush would win because he was so obviously a puppet and not serious and not popular. And Reaganism was this kind of weird phenomenon that, you know, that was a bubble that had popped. And when Dukakis lost and lost resoundingly actually to H.W., that was a moment where people kind of lost their shit. And they remember people saying like, I don't feel comfortable in my own country. A lot of the arguments now that left wing academics talk about, you know, right wing kind of yokels that, you know, white, poor white Christian types are always talking about being a stranger in their own country. Academics were talking about that in the late 80s. And I suspect that that might have politicized people deeply. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the echo chamber. And what it testifies to is the problem that emerges when you have a faculty that all swings one way. Because there's no one internally on the faculty to challenge them anymore. Even though, say, conservative, libertarian, other types, even moderates were a minority of the professoriate. They were at least there to say, wait a minute, this book is going off the rails in some of its political arguments. Let's counterweight it in pure review. Do you give any stock to the argument, which one hears from time to time, that it's also that conservatives in particular, you know, are not particularly interested in the intellectual endeavors that they hate the academy. And actually, we see this certainly since Trump. But it goes back deeper, where people on the right have, you know, absolute, you know, hostility to higher education. And they dismiss anything in the humanities, philosophy, literature, history, you know, as a waste. Like the only thing that should be taught in higher ed is engineering or like high end versions of technical fields. Do you think that's a contributing factor? Well, I think it's a chicken and the egg situation because, yes, the one hand conservatives are not going into some of these academic fields. But the flip side of it is, where is there a doctoral program that is conducive to non-left leaning thought in the history profession and the philosophy profession in English? They're basically non-existent. You have a few peripheral things at Hillsdale College, for example. And that's basically it. What they've created is a very unwelcome environment in majoring in history for anyone that thinks outside of a very narrow slice of the political spectrum. And you see this in undergrad majors are abandoning it. History is perennially a popular topic in the general public. You look at the New York Times bestseller list at any given moment, there's something about American history. But history is like the bestselling genre for, Exactly. Yeah, forever. Exactly, but they're not academic history texts. Some of them are pop history, some of them are patriotic history and those all have their problems. But the interest in the subject matter is there. Why is that not translating into students majoring in these subjects? And I think a big part of it is they're being scared away by kind of the group thing, the echo chamber that exists in these disciplines. Talk a bit about your intellectual and academic pedigree. Where did you go to undergrad and grad school? What did you study? And how you seem to be very atypical, not only about what you write, but now, and I want to talk about this, you don't work within the academy. You work at AIER, the American Institute of Economic Research. For economic research, excuse me. And that's an interesting perch, but what's your intellectual story? Yeah, so I started as an undergrad interested in political science and economics, also a historical angle. Where did you go to? University of St. Thomas in Houston, a small liberal arts tradition. And I wrote a senior thesis on the economics of slavery. So I was interested in political history. Thought I was gonna dabble in grad school, so I went, I moved to the Washington, D.C. area to do a master's degree in public policy to George Mason. I thought I was gonna work in the policy sphere on free trade. So I did a brief stand on Capitol Hill, found that it was dominated by lawyers rather than the economists. So that was kind of off-putting, but at the same time I found graduate school allowed me to do interesting research on things that I cared about that were a bit removed from the political puzzle. So I continued at George Mason. Got a doctorate there in public policy with an economic history focus. Writing a 19th century tax policy. It sounds like a snooze, but it... I really liked it out there for a second, yeah. No, but I'm sure it's fascinating, actually. Yeah, it's other than slavery, it's the biggest debate of the entire 19th century, and it intersects with slavery in very perfect ways. So George Mason is one of those schools where certainly the economics department and the law school lean libertarian, I mean, they're not conservative by any stretch, was the public policy school like that as well? Yes, there was a, at least when I was there, we had, this was 2010, was when I finished. So I was there for most of the 2000s. And so my chair was a, he's retired now, but he's an Austrian economist, economic historian. Who was that? Jack Kai. And he kind of came up with that same generation that out of the 1970s that picked up the mantle from Hayek and Mises to continue work in Austrian economics. But I had a very mixed committee that included people on both the right and the left and everywhere in between, worked with some Austrian economists, some real traditional trade economists, traditional political scientists, traditional historians. What happened at George Mason? I mean, it's an interesting school because it's a state-supported university. It was kind of a commuter school through the 70s and 80s. They had a president who was kind of an empire builder and really jacked up the academic standing of the school, partly by realizing in places like NYU and Chapman University where they, these are schools that were not particularly academically forward. And then somebody realized we're in a great location. We can basically hire anybody we want. We can get the best faculty in the world and they do it. But what were the conditions that led George Mason to becoming more interested in kind of heterodox thinking? And particularly in the law school and the economics department and public policy, things like Austrian economics and libertarian thinking. Yeah, it's entrepreneurship. And then they basically did an academic version of the money ball strategy. They looked around and saw people that were undervalued at their other institutions because maybe they were the wrong political stride or the wrong methodological approach. And they started recruiting. So Karen Vaughn and Henry Manny are the two major figures that really, their department chairs are in Manny's case head of the law school. And they look around and say, okay, well, who are these faculty that are heavy hitters in their intellectual output, but they're kind of at backwaters or they're at a teaching institution and we can pull them in here. And you know, we're up and coming, we're not tier one or one research university yet, but we bring them in and we're gonna start being heavy hitters. And that's where they found James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. They were kind of disgruntled faculty that had been through University of Virginia and then Virginia Tech and never really were able to set up a home or they were chased off by hostile administrators. What is the, you know, what's the role also of outside money because, you know, the Charles Koch was a major benefactor of George Mason, you know, our various subgroups there. How did that play in? And does that, you know, this is one of the critiques that gets leveled at places like George Mason. Well, you know what, the faculty has bought and paid for and they're ideologues that get imported in, you know, and it becomes kind of, you know, it's a laughable argument when you talk about somebody like James Buchanan or Gordon Tullock or Vernon Smith, who was, you know, at University of Arizona, then George Mason and it's now a Chapman, but, you know, dogs, even Nobel Prize-winning economists, but, you know, is there a concern with that or how do you safeguard universities, you know, getting money from people who have an ideology and an agenda without compromising intellectual integrity? Absolutely. I think there's an asymmetry of complaints that occur in this department because, you know, money coming from causes that are more politically aligned with the academy is everywhere. Right. I know it's a trope to say Soros money or Tom's day or money. Or Ford Foundation or something like that, right? And there are, I mean, for every one Koch Foundation, there are a dozen foundations that are overtly progressive and are putting money into overtly progressive political programs. So the counterweights here, I mean, there's no comparison even that they're on the same level. Just in the amount of funding or influence, yeah. And the people that object to Koch funding at George Mason, you know, you look at their own departments and you find that they took tens of millions of dollars from one of these other foundations on the progressive side and they had no concern whatsoever about that. So if they applied their own rules to themselves, they would be excluded from public intellectual life because they have discredited themselves with left-wing dark money. The other thing to consider here, look at the academic output, look at the citations in the top journals that some of these scholars are hitting. And people like James Buchanan, here's a guy that published on a regular basis in the American Economic Review, major groundbreaking articles that get five or 10,000 citations that change the direction of the field. You can't tell me that that person is not doing it on their own merit. Right. Why didn't you go into a traditional or conventional academic career? I taught in higher ed for about a decade. I went through mostly teaching institutions. Where did you teach? So I taught at American University in DC, George Mason, and then Berry College in Georgia. And I had a great time at all three, although I always found that the teaching emphasis was about the only route that I could go to get a job by having the ideas that I had. It didn't matter about the scholarly output. I mean, I'm someone that I don't want to my own horn, in a sense, but... You're prolific. Yeah, prolific, hit decent journals of Oxford University press, doing work that gets noticed and cited, but it's often from a perspective that's not as valued in the academy. And what that means, and I think this is true of anyone that falls outside of kind of a very narrow progressive echo chamber, you have to hit far above your weight to even get a teaching position, whereas someone with fewer publications, less of a scholarly impact than yourself, gets an easy job at Princeton, with full research support, with access to tons of money. This was the thing when the McLean controversy was going on. She's claiming there's this massive conspiracy against her. She's a tenured prof at Duke University, making easily high six-figure salaries. And she's claiming that I was this person that was the hired gun to take down her book. I was making maybe what, 70K on a three, four teaching load at a small liberal arts college and funding my research out of pocket. You know, I had a weekend off, I drove over to Charlottesville, Virginia, paid my own gasoline, paid the hotel out of pocket, just to check the sources and do the archival work, whereas she is operating on these massive grants that are coming through her university. So there's a real asymmetry there. Is there something odd about libertarians or outliers? You know, they're on some level and not completely, but oftentimes they're kept out of elite institutions, but then they also seem to desperately want to join a club. And it's kind of like a Groucho Marx line. They definitely, you know, they want, you know, they spend all of their time railing against Harvard and Yale and Princeton, but they desperately want to be validated. Absolutely, absolutely. Is that, it's just a performative contradiction? I think that's just the nature of academics as they shoot for the prestige journals, they shoot for the prestige departments. And you know, at the end of the day, if you are a professor in the Harvard Polyside Department or Economics Department, you have the best grad students, you have TAs for every single class, you have tens of thousands of dollars and research money that's available to you, things that someone teaching at a small institution simply does not have. Yeah, so it's materially, it's a better place. Absolutely, it's a more comfortable life. And yet these are, I guess, you know, these are particularly, not somebody like Milton Friedman, he's one of the great examples or exceptions. Yeah, but then, you know, people like Hayek and Mises clearly were, you know, didn't get the university positions that they might have deserved at a certain rate, maybe Hayek later in his life. But when you joined AER, then, you know, how, I guess, what's the difference between doing the work that you do at a think tank which has an ideology and is not, you know, it's not an academic institution, what's the difference between working in a place like that and in academia? I think that probably the biggest thing other than the lack of the teaching obligation, because that is a draw on your time, is the intellectual freedom to pursue research in areas that, you know, would have been fun or intellectually enticing or even valuable for me in the academy, but they simply would not get me into certain journals that would not be rewarded. Or even if I do hit a top journal, and I did on several pieces that I wrote, it's not seen as the same as someone who hits the same journal telling a different political story. Right. So, I mean, how do you, and I guess, you know, how do you make sure though that, you know, you don't drift off into a libertarian echo chamber, or a right-wing echo chamber, because part of the ideal version of academia is that people belong to discourse communities and within, you know, any particular field, economics, history, literature, there are experts, sub-experts in your field who really you're engaging and are keeping you honest. You know, and obviously we started this conversation by talking about places where people are not being kept honest, but how do you make sure that you don't just kind of, you know, go off a cliff into your own personal obsessions where you can avoid your critics or you can avoid people who have serious reservations about your project? Well, part of it's holding my own work to account. I mean, the easier route would be I could churn out hundreds of pages and send them to the Insano Journal of Libertarian Activism. I think I'm on their editorial advisory. They may have me as well doing their book reviews or something. But part of holding myself to account, I ask the question, I've got a piece that I think is good. Can I hit this in a mainstream journal? Can I get this on a mainstream press or send it to Newsweek or the Wall Street Journal as opposed to a national review? And I think there's value in both of these types of publications. But I try to ensure that at least some subset of my work is going before mainstream scholarly publications that directly engage it. Now, kind of a double-edged sword here is I often engage some of that literature as a critic. And there's room for that still in the journals, but it doesn't make you popular. I mean, I'm sure Nancy McLean and Kevin Cruz and all these guys, they probably have a voodoo doll where they stick pins in me every night. When you, you know, in journalism or in media more broadly, I think most people are certainly on the, you know, on the libertarian end of things really celebrate the decline of barriers to entry. You know, everybody can be a journalist now. And, you know, that means the volume vastly increases. You know, and the garbage does. But it also, you know, you're, you know, you're not judging a field by the amount of garbage. It's the, you know, the gems that you find inside that. And do you think in intellectual life, in public intellectual life, are we in a better place now than say 20 or 30 years ago because of the proliferation of groups, AIER goes back to what, like the 1930s. 1933. Yeah, so I mean, it's one of the very oldest kind of think tanks or, you know, simulations in American history. But, you know, there's a proliferation of these types of group. Are we better off for that? Or does that just, you know, mostly increase noise rather than signal? Yeah, again, it's a mixed bag. The fact that there are more outlets means that you can get arguments to the forefront of the discussion that otherwise would have been gatecapped held out. But I always go back to, there was an interview Milton Friedman did about 1995 in Reason Magazine. And the interviewer asked him, he said, well, don't you think it's great? We have all these institutions, they're proliferating, he says, well, I suppose that could be a good thing. And I'm paraphrasing him here. But I don't think we have the talent to fill them all. And I think we still have that issue. There are a lot more libertarians than there are libertarians working at the level of rigor that's necessary to bring that work into the public debate. Let's talk a little bit about when accountability works. And then I want to ask you about accountability on the libertarian end of things are conservative. You know, going back some years, Michael Belial was a historian at Emory. And he published a book that talked about how the idea that in colonial America and the early Republic gun ownership was widespread. And he seemed to have an airtight case, people like Edmund Morgan, you know, the Dean of Colonial American History was like, wow, this guy has revolutionized the field, et cetera. It turned out that he was a fraud. Like he made up his sources and then compounded it by every time people were like, well, let's see your data. And it was like, oh, you know, there's a waterline broke or my, you know, my computer. Yeah, I mean, it was like unbelievable. But he effectively got flushed out of the system. So, you know, accountability is still possible. Yeah. Right? Who are the people broadly, I guess on the right or who tend to agree with you with your critique of kind of left of center, you know, academia or intellectual work, who are the people that need to get flushed out of the system that you think are doing bad work? Yeah, yeah. Well, I do worry about, well, I guess there's two things here. Very few of them are in the academy anymore because the number of people on the right that hold professorships, I think it's like 10 to 12% of the academy now. And that's down from like 30% in 1980. So it's very few that are working in there, but you do have, you know, instances of people that venture far afield of their lanes. So one just, I'm just naming because I heard him on the radio the other day. So Victor Davis Hansen by all accounts is an outstanding classicist, someone who works in a very narrow research area. But he's also a political commentator on every subject under the sun. And he's affiliated with Hoover Institute. He used to write a lot for national review and a bunch of right-wing publications. Exactly. So I see someone like him that when he ventures outside of his expertise, I mean, it's no different than the commentary you get from Michelle Malkin or one of these Ann Coulter types of commentators that are basically writing red meat for the conservative base. And I think there's a danger there. Unfortunately, I think it does discredit some of his scholarly work because it's now associated with the guy that writes these bomb-throwing op-eds. Yeah. Hans Hermann Hoppe is one of your, he's, I was gonna say, he's one of your white whales. I mean, he's certainly into whiteness. That is certainly the case. Hoppe, you know, who taught for years at University of Nevada, Las Vegas was a protege, a colleague of Murray Rothbard and things like that. What's your beef with Hoppe and is he somebody who needs to be critiqued more forcefully within the broad libertarian world? Yeah, so Hoppe has strangely come to prominence as like this figure he's seen as the designated heir of Rothbard and as supposedly- Who had designated himself as the heir of Mises, right? Exactly. And you argue that they fundamentally misread Mises. That is absolutely the case. Okay, what's the basis of that? The clearest is the question of immigration. Mises is a good, solid 19th century classical liberal, especially on immigration. And he is vehement in his opposition to immigration restrictions. Does so on all the classical economic arguments. This is a theme that runs through his texts from the 1910s to basically when he dies. And Hoppe has tried to invent this kind of carved out counter narrative while still claiming to be a representative of Mises that says we can use this propertarian concept of the nation state to exclude undesired groups, exclude immigrants from crossing the borders. And it's a complete inversion of Mises's thought and yet he's doing it under the mantle of saying, well, I'm the heir of Rothbard who's the heir of Mises. So what I argue with Hoppe and my critiques of him is he's really importing two external traditions into Austrian economics and trying to pretend or claim that the roots of them are there all along. What are they? So the first is his background in training. It's methodological. He is a Habermasian critical theorist, but instead of Habermas is on the left, he takes that and gives it a right-wing spin. He takes group identities and conflicts between groups as his methodological basis for understanding society. And this is, again, Hayek, again I think in the kind of revolution of science talks a lot about methodological individualism. So that the individual is ultimately the proper unit of analysis in all kind of social and cultural analysis. But Hoppe is taking the groups. They could be ethnicities, they can be nationalities, different groups of people. So it's the same thing you see coming from the collectivist left, only he takes it in the right-ward direction to restrict immigration. And then the second external influence that he brings in, and you find this in his work, Democracy the God that Failed is his big treatise. It's actually some really ugly kind of racial eugenicist style thinkers, biological thinkers from the mid-20th century. So J. Philippe Rushton, who was this eugenics thinker, talked about like IQ means of... A Canadian academic. Yeah, yeah, there's another passage he cites. John Raspel, The Camp of the Saints, which is this dystopian novel about hordes of immigrants from the developing world, invading Europe. And he's importing this into his supposedly presented as an Austrian economics contribution. But there's a point in the book where he acknowledges that yes, Mises was a liberal on immigration, but he says something to the effect of, well, this is an antiquated way of thinking that was suitable for the 19th century, but not for today. And then he goes on to cite like Raspel and Rushton and these real cranky, basically racists on the right. And more recently, he's even started to pull upon Holocaust denier types. So he published an article a few years ago where it's got a quotation across the top, the quotations about how history is shaped by the person that's telling it and the author is David Irving, who's notorious anti-Semitic Holocaust denier. And even though the quote itself doesn't mention a name, you look up the source of the quote, it comes from a, it's a pro-Hitler biography, basically. Yeah. What do you attribute Hoppe's, a considerably growing influence within certain libertarian circles, wired libertarians gravitating towards that? Yeah, I think a couple of reasons there. One is he does offer an avenue for people that come with prior racial beliefs, including racist beliefs, to attach themselves onto libertarianism. And these are people that have been probably with good reason ostracized from other political camps. As no one wants the racial baggage that they may. Who are those people? Oh, this is where you get some of the alt-right types. Richard Spencer, for example, has appeared at several of Hoppe's conferences that he holds over. Although Spencer now has become kind of like a little progressive and has dating profiles where he seems to be open to dating anybody, kind of desperately. Right. He's given up the rate. I mean, I guess that filter, he needs more of an audience. Itinerant pseudo-intellectuals that are trying to find whoever will allow them to grift off of them for a reason. Do you think with somebody like Mises, do you consider Mises a primary influence on you? I do. Not the only, I come more explicitly from the public choice tradition, but I think Mises is deep in the intellectual background of that. And do you think, I mean, is Mises fundamentally an individualist? Absolutely. And how does that play out? Because it's, you know, within libertarianism and there's this tension. And you see it definitely in Hayek where he talks about, you know, okay, you need, you know, there are universal human rights and universal rationales and things like that. But then the local tradition and local knowledge and distributed knowledge and respect for the accumulated wisdom of tradition and customers is very important. Even as every once in a while, we need to be able, we need to be willing to burn it down because ultimately individuals should be free to do what they want. Can you talk a little bit about Mises individualism and how that should be, you know, foregrounded in our discussion of him in contemporary moments? Well, this is the core of his economic thesis. He comes straight out of the marginal revolution, which is built around the subjective theory of value. And the ultimate subjective unit is the individual, his personal preference. And if you are constructing an economic approach out of that, you have to reckon with the individual as your basic unit. But this explains- And those preferences, the subjective preferences that individuals have are fundamentally individual as opposed to group. Right. Or I mean, or ultimately the individual takes them on and expresses them. Even if you, you know, you grow up in a particular community, it might be Catholic, it might be Jewish, it might be, you know, Italian or Irish or whatever, but ultimately it's the individual doing all the calculation. That is absolutely, it allows also for the individual to change, to evolve, to discover, discover new knowledge and take it in new directions. So there was a, unfortunately, it's a very obscure episode, but Mises in 1926, he's a German-speaking academic at the University of Vienna. He happened to be traveling through Germany and he attended a lecture by Keynes at the University of Berlin. And this lecture becomes Keynes' famous essay, The End of Lausse Faire. And Mises actually writes a German language review of the lecture and it is damning that the gist of which is, first he sees Keynes going off in a collectivist direction by talking about groups rather than the individual. And second, as Keynes is talking about groups, he starts veering Keynes does into eugenic theory about shaping humanity in a scientific direction. And Mises is basically screaming at him in this essay. He says, look, you idiot, there are Nazis in the audience there that you are giving cover to, that you are fueling their ability to do these horrendous things like restrict immigration from Eastern Europe or to persecute people based on their group membership, not their individuals. So he is railing against this. And I think that cuts to the core of how Mises sees the political world. It's when politics veers into group identity is the unit that decisions are made and the resources are allocated and then eventually persecution follows against the out group. That's when you descend into tyranny. That's when you descend into Nazism or socialism. What is the role for nationalism in this world? Because and Mises obviously is somebody and Joseph Schumpeter is similar where they are kind of chased out of every polity or every jurisdiction that they lived in and half the time those places are collapsing or literally and figuratively disappearing as they're moving out of it or being forced out. But in an American context, there is a nation state and there is an American identity and sometimes we like to think that it's the universal identity. But how does Mises or how do you use Mises to kind of square like national identity or group identities that are freely chosen and individual identity? Yeah, yeah. Well, there is a liberal internationalism that's fundamental to Mises and you see this and he does, he gets chased out of Austria by the Nazis. He lands in Switzerland, which is thankfully kind of like a lifeboat for the German speaking world and he makes his way to the United States. But where the nation state I think comes into that is, I mean the nation state is an institutional curator of norms of systems of law and legal traditions. And you can go in a bit of a Hayekian tradition here. Hayek's point is not that the British Empire is the greatest thing ever. Hayek's point is that the British common law system has allowed enough slack to encounter the problem of information and knowledge but also enough stability that you can start seeing and discerning patterns of norms. And the point is not to say, hey, we're Ra Ra United States or Ra Ra Canada or whatever country you happen to be in. It's that those countries have institutional systems of government that seem to be at least upholding and protecting the stability of those notions of property rights and fair adjudication before the courts. Even when they fail, there at least is an ideal that we go back and point to and aspire to. And this is all very anti utopian ultimately, right? It's like it's meeting a bare minimum of like letting the discovery process and kind of self-actualization develop. Yeah, there's a Humean and the David Humean strain of let's compare stable rule of law, organically developed norms to people that come in and try to impose a utopian who's Hume's great villain in his history. It's Oliver Cromwell that's stepping in with this quasi religious top down state and what happens, hundreds of thousands of people are slaughtered. Well, now we are on the opposite sides of the barricade because I, but Cromwell also ended assisted. He does. I mean, the tragedy is he became as abusive as the system that he replaced, unfortunately. There's a very libertarian story to be told about that, right? We got a free born John Luebber. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Now he's the hero of all these stories. Exactly. And I think there's a point where in the 1650s he's an exile in a castle in Jersey or something and he writes a letter and he's looking out and seeing what Cromwell has become. He says, had I known this, I would take King Charles a thousand times over. Right, right. Which is a damning commentary on Cromwell. So speaking of Hayek and Mises, there was a moment towards the end of the 20th century when, I guess in the New Yorker, Robert Highbron or the popular economist who wrote, what was it, The Worldly Philosophers which was like this fantastic bestselling book that was an introduction to economics. Highbron was a kind of left of center, central planning is gonna be good type of economist. At the end of the 20th century, he said, Keynes was wrong and Hayek and Mises were right. And it was this moment where Hayek and Mises who had always been kind of on the edges of certainly academic life but also intellectual life, their legacy was rediscovered and now we're within the libertarian movement, we can test it but they're broadly influential. You are doing an interesting project about how Karl Marx went from kind of being nobody to becoming the mode of force in much of the 20th century. I mean, it was in a lot of ways, the ascendance of Hayek and Mises towards, or an embrace of their intellectual lineage, Marx's reputation. Talk about what you're doing with Marx and what can we learn from what you're doing about how the past is not a stable entity. It's something that we're recreating in the current moment to affect the present as well as the future. So the state of Marx right now, he's very much ascendant in intellectual life and there have been multiple metrics. He is consistently one of the top two or three most assigned authors in college courses. Nature magazine did an empirical study of Google citation counts and he comes up at the very top of the list of the most influential scholars. There's philosophers who have declared him the single most significant social scientist of the 20th century. He is ubiquitous across the humanities and social sciences as a presence with the exception of economics. Where he's seen as kind of this antiquated debunked. But we go back to Marx's life. He is fundamentally writing as an economist. Das Kapital is a critique of political economy. He presents himself as making his major contribution there. So the discipline that he set out to influence rejected him very early on. Part of it is he just happens to be at a moment in time when the labor theory of values being displaced by subjective or marginal value. And as a result he falls into obscurity that by the turn of the 20th century the economic journal runs a book review of a new edition of Das Kapital. And the author of it says, who should tilt at such a windmill? I'm saying Marx is Don Quixote. He's a nobody in our discipline. So I asked the question, how does Marx get from that and say circa 1900 a peripheral obsolete footnote in the history of economic thought to a little over a hundred years later this giant across multiple disciplines. And I did some investigation looking at Marx's citation counts in academic journals and books. And you find that they just kind of piddled along from his death till a very specific event in 1917 and they triple overnight. And then it's just off to the races since there. So what happened in 1917? It's the Bolshevik Revolution that proclaims a state built on Marxist principles after Lenin seizes control of a major world power. So the empirical study that I'm doing here is asking the counterfactual. It's myself and Michael McCovey is my co-author. And what we've done is we've collected over 200 authors from the 19th century that were contemporaries of Marx. And you can see where their citation counts matched Marx prior to 1917. And you find that he is not a top tier thinker. He's not up there with Adam Smith or John Locke or John Stuart Mill or even someone like Herbert Spencer is a giant of that era. And now kind of obscure. Marx comes in roughly at the level of Johannes Karl Robertus and Ferdinand LaSalle and some of these fairly obscure socialist thinkers by our own time that were his contemporaries. So I mean, it kind of makes sense if Lenin, Lenin is the hype band for Marx. And there's a successful revolution in that the Soviets take over and then they have a pretty good run. Why does the end of the Soviet Union not discredit Marx, if anything? And there was a moment actually, I think, in the 90s where I can remember again, I was in grad school in literary and cultural studies and people were like, okay, we gotta stop emphasizing Marx. And there was a boomlet in Hayek among left-wingers. They were like, we can learn a lot from Hayek in particular, but Marx is back baby. He's like top gun, right? That's exactly it. So what's going on with that? The Soviet Union falls apart and they find out that all the supposed economic prowess, the stuff that Paul Samuelson had been projecting, Soviet would overtake America. It's like painted over a rust on an old machinery. And I think the fall of the Soviet Union reveals that along with the atrocities that you start seeing. But there was a weird moment and I think it happened between the mid-90s, early 2000s where people that were of the left, that were ideologically or philosophically inclined to Marxism, dissociated Marx from the Soviet experiment. Even though the Soviet experiment had been the thing that elevated him, they said, oh well. He's in all the paintings. He's in all the, you know, it's never, you know. Exactly. And it's like this open question. They said, well, the Soviet Union is not true socialism. They deviated from Marx. Here's the other way. And I'm sitting here saying, wait a minute, you owe the fact that this guy is even on the intellectual map to the events of 1917 in the Soviet state dumping millions upon millions of dollars worth of resources into promoting him and his intellectual work. Do you feel like, and now, you know, that's let, you know, we're 20 years on from, you know, into the new century and everything like that. People talk about a crisis in global capitalism, you know, and clearly in the West and OECD countries, you know, there are, you know, a lot of people believe that the economy is not working and that a neoliberal or a liberal economy, et cetera, is not working. Do you agree with that critique? And if so, what are the ways to kind of engage that and either dismiss it or to actually engage it and come up with a new formulation of how something approaching liberal individualism and market capitalism can be reinvigorated. Yeah. Well, I think that goes down to the problem with the term neoliberal. What is an illiberal? And we find out, we look into the history of it. It's kind of a pejorative term that emerges for anything and everything that's slightly free market that I don't like by the people that use it. And it's a relatively recent ascendance of this notion of a neoliberal international order. You cannot find citations to this term prior to about 1990 in any significant way. But I mean, are we, you know, there's no question that the, you know, we live in a much more globalized world, not trade, you know, I mean, with minor exceptions and especially over the past couple of years, but trade became much easier, tariffs fell, mobility became increased. I mean, it seems like capitalism on a broad sense, one even China is doing capitalism. And now are we, you know, running into a problem with that because everybody in the United States, whether they're, you know, Trump or Joe Biden are complaining about capitalism. That's yeah. Capitalism itself has always been the concept that gets none of the credit for the things that it achieves and all of the blame for things that are often actually in positions on a laissez-faire or more free market order. So you see someone like Trump coming at it from the right or Bernie Sanders coming at it from the left, they're both trade protectionists. And they're saying trade has taken the jobs of the American factories and moved it abroad. And you find that critique is fundamentally wrong. Well, I think it's empirically wrong. They are not understanding the gains from trade that occur to an economy. It's the classic Bostia scene versus unseen. And we see this as a recurring pattern in history. In the 19th century, after Richard Cobden and John Bright successfully overturned the Corn Laws, they initiate a period of radical liberalization of the international economy, unprecedented to that point in world history. And it has significant economic effects that are beneficial, I think to humanity as a whole, but they also get blamed for recessionary events that occur in the late 19th century. They get blamed for rising inequality, for disrupting the old order. And it's often unfairly blamed because there's other things. So do you say, I mean, are the main problems with America now, it's that we need to educate people that things are not as bad as they think, or they're being told, or are things getting bad and we need to address that? I mean, it's a rhetorical strategy, but I think coming out from a libertarian and free market perspective, we're at a disadvantage. The other side is promising ponies and unicorns and wonderful things paid for by the state. They don't really execute on them very well. And often it goes quite the other direction, but they come back with more and more promises. It's the action biases. I will solve your problems if you elect me. And we're saying, no, just leave us alone. Don't do anything. Well, do you think, I mean, this may be an absurd question, but do you think the average American or the typical American is materially worse off now than they were 20 years ago or 40 years ago? I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, I've studied inequality statistics. What we'll say on Piketty and Seyes and these economists that work on it, they exaggerate their numbers. Some of it is probably intentional. I think the worst instances of it where they show these curves of inequality going up like that. Yeah, the Gatsby curve. Exactly, exactly. But then when younger people, and this is something that's very much part of millennial discourse and Gen Z discourse is that, yeah, they really are going to be the first generation to have a lower standard of living than their parents. I'm a late boomer. I was born in 63. I heard that all my life. It turned out to be radically false. But these guys, they really mean it. Is that just they're wrong and they're being sold a false narrative? Or is there something to that? So the one area where I think there is something to that, housing policy. Clear as day that the restriction of the housing supply through nimbyism, through basically what you see in San Francisco, where you cannot build anything anywhere, which is coming from a political preference of the boomer generation. The people that already have the houses and they don't want their view obstructed. That has thrown the housing market into shambles. But it's a misdiagnosis of what's going on here. This is a clear case of where government intervention into the free market has made things worse off. And has prevented the route to home ownership, the route to greater economic stability from being accessed to large swaths of the population because they're driven out of the market by restriction. Switch gear is a final kind of topic. You are putting together a book about COVID. What are COVID policy responses? What is the book about? And how should we be thinking about COVID? I don't know, I was gonna say now that it's in the rear view mirror. I don't know that that's true. I mean, yeah, it's like it's kind of both on the horizon always and in the rear view mirror. But what's going on with COVID policy? Yeah, so this was intended when we put it together through AIUR as an academic symposium analyzing what just happened and comparing it to past instances. It's kind of a postmortem of the past two years. And why did we basically fail at bringing this disease under control after two weeks to flatten the curve between two months became two years? Right. So the question I ask in my chapter and there's about a dozen different academics that take different angles of it. The question I ask in my chapter is about taking on the COVID response strategy. As a classic example of a failed attempt at central planning, the notion was that we had Fauci came out here with all these epidemiology models. They told us exactly what to do, what levers to pull, you lock down when case numbers hit this, you put a mask mandate when case numbers hit this and none of it worked. So it's assessing that question of what went wrong and what it comes down to, I think is a fundamentally Hayekian observation. There was a pretense of knowledge that the models had it right. There's a pretense of knowledge that the medicine behind this particular disease was well understood and all we had to do was execute on the plan. And at every stage they failed to account for something else or it turns out that the science was not as settled as it actually was. And then you start getting institutional factors. You get bureaucrats involved that are interested in boosting their own budget and their own power. So there's, I mean the public choice analysis. Exactly, exactly. But then in the United States we had a pretty decentralized, I mean on some levels it was super centralized. The FDA and the CDC asserted monopoly control over certain kinds of testing and vaccine rollout and all of that kind of stuff. But on another level, and this was partly, it's unclear if it was a strategy by Trump or just kind of a fuck up, but we had a pretty dispersed response. Different cities and different states did different things. That was not a good thing or it was, it's double edged sword again. I mean you look at someone like Bill de Blasio in New York City has stricter restrictions than anywhere in the area around them. So he is executing a central plan of his own only it's on a micro level. And there are certain state governors early in the pandemic. The one moment that sticks out to me is where I see this is really kind of going off the rails is the governor of Rhode Island set up police checkpoints on Interstate 95. And they were pulling and diverting people with the non Rhode Island license plates. And it lasted about a day. But I see this is like a petty tyranny. First off, it's unconstitutional, all sorts of problems with it. So yeah, in a decentralized federalist system, you have the good cases of people that either corrected course or never were inclined to a centrally planned route. But you also have the bad cases of people that persisted in maintaining regulations well beyond their known efficacy or well beyond their own failure. So it really does become a mixed bag. You see this in other countries. So Australia is notorious for certain states in Australia had draconian lockdowns that went on for months and months and months. Others are relatively open. And was it that there was no, like it didn't matter because pretty much the disease was gonna be the disease. Regardless of the policy response or was it that certain policies were much worse than others? So I definitely think it's certain policies were much worse than others, but they were put forth with a pretense of certainty. Lockdowns are the classic example and some of the best empirical work that's coming out, they show there's basically no difference on how the disease played out, whether you were heavily locked down or not locked down at all. We also know that before the pandemic, if you go read the WHO reports from 2019, they say don't do lockdowns. And they're basing that off of the Spanish flu outbreak when they couldn't even keep this off of military bases that went under complete lockdown in 1918. What spurred the actual move to a lockdown because it's really unprecedented. And that has kind of receded that question, but why did we lock down? March 16th, 2020. And that's the date that the Imperial College, Neal Ferguson model was published. And we're starting to see some of the evidence of this. In terms of its Fauci and Deborah Birx brought it to the forefront of the US COVID Task Force and they got all of the public health authorities, although Trump couldn't impose it himself, he could endorse it. And it was like he gave a letter to 50 governors saying run free with this and of those 50, like 42 of them take the opportunity. It happened simultaneously in the UK because that's when the model was projected. And for various reasons, the media hype that was around it, they elevated Ferguson's model above all others. And it turns out two years later, it was the worst performing of any of the models. Right, wow. What is the lesson going forward for this? Because COVID is kind of over, but we're gonna be dealing with it in various permutations for a long time. But the policy framework that gets in place, has this discredited that kind of like lockdown mentality or top down stuff or has it, or is this the use case of that? Like is this, are we gonna be seeing this more often or not? Yeah, I hope that it has fostered enough of a skepticism that the public response, if they try to lock down again, we'll say no way. And I think we've seen enough of the protests and resistance that's come against that. The public health authorities on the other hand, now they have a vested interest because they see, they discover how far they could get with this. There was an interview Ferguson from Imperial College did about a year into the pandemic and he's recounting his own thinking. He says, well, we saw China lock down, but we couldn't pull this off in a Western democracy. But then they start seeing signs that Italy was doing it. And he was like, aha, there's our opening. And he basically admits that that's what he seized upon. One thing I think on the policy level that we can actually pay attention to is a lot of the powers that were used to enact these were emergency measures that came in the wake of 9-11. Whenever one thought there was going to be a bioterrorism pandemic. And the Bush administration was really horrible about this. They said, let's pass all these laws that give governors or mayors or town councils the authority to supersede normal rule of law with a public health board. And I think it's time that we start thinking about scaling back those measures. Because what turned out, started as bioterrorism was the perfect excuse for a different type of medical emergency. All right, we're going to leave it there. Phil Magnus, thanks for talking to me. Absolutely, thanks for having me.