 and when I decided that I didn't want to just do grant work the rest of my career that I really missed being in an academic setting, Mercatus seemed to be a logical place for me to return. Hi, I'm Bobby Herzberg and I'm a distinguished senior fellow in the F.A. Hayek program in advanced studies in philosophy, politics and economics at the Mercatus Center George Mason University. I have always known about Mercatus I think from the beginning of Mercatus in part because I was trained in public choice theory and was in an early attendee public choice meetings back in the 80s and as a result as Mercatus was finding its new sort of existence I became aware of it through public choice. It was quite different in the way in which I reacted to it at the time. I was trained largely as a political scientist in political economy, game theory, public choice theory in the Rochester school and as a result my early interactions were with the more public choice analytic side and of course used Buchanan and Tulloch's calculus of consent in my dissertation work and so I had great admiration for their work so as they came on later in Mercatus's history I continued to sort of follow what they did and I'd always sort of been familiar with it then in probably the 90s I was sort of reintroduced to many of the people at Mercatus through Liberty Fund and just at a few different Liberty Fund conferences and as a result I started developing relationships and familiarity with the work and all the analysis in public choice and began to respect really the scholarship that was being done in a way that very few people in either political science or economics were doing this kind of work and so they became the sort of star on the hill as far as the disciplines went in terms of combining public choice and this tradition of Austrian economics and the work of Hayek and then to incorporate the Bloomington school that was sort of the trifecta for me it became really the one place in the nation in the world perhaps that most reflected my own interests in scholarship and so it became a sort of natural tradition I went to John Templeton Foundation from Utah State University as a faculty member and at John Templeton Foundation then I was the grant officer the program officer over the Mercatus grants for academic and student programs and so then I got familiar with all of the new programming they were doing with students and how they were bringing along an entirely new generation and when I decided that I didn't want to just do grant work the rest of my career that I really missed being in an academic setting Mercatus seemed to be a logical place for me to return to that academic setting and combine all of the things I liked about being at the John Templeton Foundation and being able to promote classical liberal thinking and libertarian thought with an academic scholarly perspective and so that's why I joined four years ago four and a half years ago now the Mercatus Center is a distinguished senior fellow