 Welcome back to the Agora café for more coffee and philosophy. Today I'm pleased to have joining us my friend Sheldon Richmond. In fact I am wearing this t-shirt in honor of Sheldon. You can see this message. Sheldon is the one who introduced me to this quotation and if we get a chance we might talk about that guy later on. Sheldon has spent his career in the libertarian movement. He's known everyone from Carl Hess and Murray Rothbard to Thomas Oz and Dave Berry. He was formerly a newspaper reporter, director of research at the council for competitive economy, senior editor of the Institute for Humane Studies, which I think is actually where I met you in or around 1987, and a senior editor at the Cato Institute, which is likewise where I think I saw you again when Brian Cappell and I, I was running the program that I had previously been on the other end of at IHS and Brian Cappell and I came over to give you a visit. Senior editor of Inquiry Magazine, for a long time editor of The Freeman, also known as ideas on liberty depending on the year for the foundation for economic education, vice president at and editor of the Future Freedom Magazine for the Future Freedom Foundation. Currently, Sheldon is the executive editor at the Libertarian Institute, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a senior advisor at the Mollinari Institute, senior fellow and chair of trustees at the Center for a Stateless Society. In addition to hundreds of articles, he has authored the following books with the Future Freedom Foundation. He has three books separating the school and state how to liberate America's families, your money and that was in 1995, your money or your life, why we must abolish the income tax from 1999, and tethered citizens time to repeal the welfare state in 2001. And Sheldon is a fan of that term tethered, which also occurs on his website. With Griffin and Lash in 2016, he has America's counter revolution that constitutionally visited. Most recently with the Libertarian Institute, he has coming to Palestine from last year and we're social animals owe to each other from this year. He also has a couple of blogs, free association and the logical atheist and in the description, I'll have the links to both of those. But if you happen to be watching this in an embedded form, you'll feel like going out of the embed to see the link. It's Sheldon free association.blogspot.com and logical-atheist.blogspot.com. So in addition to his political interest, he has an economic interest, he has a wide variety of interests from Aristotle to atheism, from Gilbert Ryle to Gilbert and Sullivan. So let's just start by asking about your background, where you grew up, how you got interested in libertarianism and involved in the libertarian movement. Well, great to be with you. Thank you very much and thank you for the introduction. I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Well, that's Philadelphia. And that's the Philadelphia. There are a couple of Mississippi, at least in the United States, a couple of them. Yeah, there's a Paris. There's a Florence in Alabama, what can I say? There's Paris everywhere. Well, I always have Paris. I'm an early baby boomer. I was born in the during the at the end of the first year of Harry Truman's own presidential term, the one he won in 1948. Just made it into that year. It was born the day after Christmas, 1253 a.m. on Christmas day. So I thought that I experienced the Truman years. I wasn't much aware of things going on there. The first president I was aware of was Eisenhower. I just thought he was always the president and always would be the president and he's just kind of a fixture, which he was for a while. I brought up in a middle-class Jewish background, conservative Jewish, which is that sort of that today the wines are all blurred, but kind of that in between the area, between the Orthodox on one side and the reform. On the other side, it was an attempt to, they didn't like Orthodoxy, but they thought the reform had gone too far. You know, they took Hebrew out of the services and so they were trying to conserve something. So it's a real, in a way, muddled mixture of those two things. I went through the Philadelphia public schools, neighborhood schools, could walk to every school I ever attended. From there I went, where a lot of students from my high school, which was called Northeast High School, went because it was easy to get in being in state, was Temple University. I was sort of, I was a mediocre student. I think of myself as having sleepwalk through high school and I sort of remember it, but I don't think I had much impact on it and I don't think it had much impact on me. But when I, so I went to Temple and I did find a Temple. I enjoyed Temple. Unfortunately, I missed Walter Williams. I graduated in 71 and he didn't get there till 73, so I didn't know of him until later on. But I took a lot of philosophy, although I was a radio TV film major and I decided early on that I wanted to go into the print media, the newspaper business. I was totally enamored with H. L. Menken. I just thought his life that he described in various writings was so romantic. Although he probably scoffed at such a thing that I would think that. But that's what I wanted to do. And so I did that. So my first career, as you say, was as a newspaper reporter. I started with a small paper outside of Philadelphia called the Coatesville Record, Long Gone. Coatesville was a steel town and I did all kinds of things. It was a small paper, so you got to do everything. You covered the cops, you covered governments. And so I got, I was, I was already a libertarian, which I'll go back and talk about that in a second. But anyway, I got a really good education in observing the state. I also spent three years covering courts, criminal and civil courts and the DA's office and the public defender's office. It was a great education, especially as a libertarian. Now it didn't make me a libertarian. I was already a libertarian. I became, my political awareness began. I think this is true of a lot of libertarians who are about my age. I mean, people I know, I could name some names, but I guess I shouldn't. Not that it's embarrassing, but the Barry Goldwater campaign was the beginning of my awareness. And that's because I had an older brother. Unfortunately, I died in 1998, so it's been a long time. But he was ahead of me and was off to college, went to Albright College, a pretty good liberal arts school in Reading, Pennsylvania. And he was telling me about, he was really opening my eyes to politics. I hadn't thought anything about politics. Now, I was very interested in the American Revolution. I liked stories about liberty and the revolution. I remember Johnny Tremain, I, Disney had a series on TV about the Swamp Fox played by Leslie Nielsen, who went on to do comedic roles later on, of course, police squad and those things, airplane. Francis Marion, was that his name? Francis Marion. Yes, Francis. I always thought it was interesting that as a kid, I thought, huh, Francis Marion, that seems like a woman's name, but it's a guy and Leslie Nielsen, that seems like a woman's name, but he is a guy. So I love that series. I just liked the idea of liberty, just appealed to me, you know, automatically. And then I read, I think I read the book about the Swamp Fox, I remember, he was from South Carolina, it was kind of a guerrilla warrior. Yeah, I had a, I just, I had a collection of, I may still have it on vinyl, a collection of songs from the, from the revolution, and there's one about the Swamp Fox, but we are Marion's men. I don't know if I've ever heard that, but I did like that series, I don't know how long it was. Maybe I'll put it in the link. I never googled that to see, you know, how long that show ran. I never saw it before. I enjoyed it. And so I was kind of primed. So my brother was telling me about the, about the Goldwater campaign, and he was, he was not a libertarian, but you know, a mild conservative who was interested in Goldwater. He didn't like Johnson, you know, and he was maybe three years ahead of me, my brother. So I read the conscience of a conservative. The funny thing is I couldn't find a copy anywhere free Amazon, free internet. And the only place I could find one, finally, a paperback was in a, was it an American opinion bookshop, which was actually a wall at the back of a shoe repair, Joe's shoe repair. That's the name of it. I remember that very distinctly. The only, I don't know how I knew to go there. Somebody must have directed me. Anyway, I read that book. I wasn't thinking much about foreign policy in those days. I probably just would have been open to the idea that we had, you know, we have to be strong in order to get those right, you know, make sure the Russians don't take us over or anything. But what was, what was really appealing to me was what, what Goldwater was saying about liberty and limits on government and pro free enterprise that I found very appealing. And I guess I was talking to people in school about this and two guys who were twins, and I remember their names. I haven't heard from them since, said something to me like, if you like that, and this is the way it starts, right? If you like that book, you really need to read Henry Hazel's economics. I said, okay, thanks. And then I'm sure I went out and got the book, but they might have said to me, send your name to the foundation for economic education, which I never heard of. Interestingly, like many years later, I'd become the editor. And that was the longest job I ever held, right? For the longest period of time, 15 years. Like 15 years, yeah. Everything else was like five years, three years. And they said to me, once your name was on the list, it'll be there forever, and it won't cost anything. So just send your name in. They'll start sending it as Freeman. That was true for a very long time. Yeah. In those days, it was little, yeah, Leonard Reed didn't believe in them knocking people off. Yeah. In any respect. I was in my school, my friend, you know, there was a friend in church who put our names on that list. And so we got, you know, we got the little Freyman's from Freyman's. Is that right? I understand, I guess, from, you know, from Fee. He also put us from Hillstale, which is less delightful, but you know. I kept seeing the letters Fee thinking, do I have to pay money? Is there a fee? It took me a second to figure out what that meant. No, this is still high school, by the way. So either they or somebody else said, well, if you like that, you know, there's this guy, Mises, you start hearing a name for Rothbard. And then someone said, you got to read Outlaw Shrug. And that's, that's going to be inevitable, at least in my, in my time, please. So I think I read the fountainhead first. And I really liked it. Now that wasn't very, there's not politics really in there. And, but then I went on Outlaw Shrug. And, and I started Temple. Yeah, I went to Temple and I met students of Objectivism, as we call ourselves back then, various orthodoxies, some more tolerant than others. But we ended up forming a group, no meantime, I had fallen in with a really rough crowd, namely the old society, sorry. This was when there was still a libertarian caucus of the half, we're talking now 1968-69. And I somehow met, these are names out of the past, Don Ernsberger, David Walter, and then there were a few others, they were based in Philadelphia. I think I met Don Ernsberger much later at the, I could be maybe around 2000, no, it wouldn't have been 2000. He was in, he had gone to DC later. Yeah, he later went to work for Don Ernsberger. The one that I went to, I think it was 96. He later went to work for Dana Rohrbacher, who I met in the era I'm now talking about. Okay, so I get in with this crowd, they had a little office in Philadelphia, so I'd go down there after school and hang out and I was reading, oh, Filthy Pierre's Libertarian. I used to get back, a little bit of things stapled together. Yeah, like a Mimeo. And you could guarantee and have an article published to send them the stencil. That's what you needed to do. I don't know who he was, Filthy Pierre. But I was reading people like Stephen Hallbrook, who I came to know later on, associated with the Independent Institute. And we were very, very serious. We went off to the Pocono Mountains like for weekend retreats and had training programs and how to speak. I mean, this is kind of, you know, this is kind of cult thing we were doing, right? How to give a decent speech and then we would speak and they would evaluate us. And it was just honing our skills. It was really very good. And, you know, very small budget. It wasn't a big thing. But we became the part of the Libertarian caucus of Yaff. So as part of that, in early 1969, I went to New York for, there was a regional conference, regional, you know, convention, I guess, of Yaff. And I think I was the member of Yaff too, later on, believe it or not. Well, I joined because, you know, in those days, I didn't, before I even knew the word Libertarian. And, you know, it seemed like the only game in the town. I wasn't a commie, right? I wasn't a state socialist and that. So that didn't appeal to me. So we went to New York, a bunch of us from, sorry, we're still, we're still the Libertarian caucus, I'm getting ahead. And to see a debate between Carl Hess and Jerome Tuchilli, who's the father of JV Tuchilli of Reason Magazine. He was a Libertarian, limited government guy. Hess was arguing for anarchism and they debated. Now I don't remember really the debate, and I couldn't tell you what people were saying. It's probably predictable stuff. I do remember hearing later though, that after the debate, Tuchilli went over to Hess and said, you win, I'm convinced. And later he wrote that book, what was the book he wrote? Radical Libertarianism, I forget it, although it had to work. Yeah, Radical Libertarianism. And the subtitles, I think it's a right-wing perspective, which is unfortunate. But yeah, but that's because- Well, later on Carl Hess wrote- Yes, but later on Carl Hess wrote capitalism for kids. And that was way late, way later. Words are like counters, fools use them as money and wise men use them as counters. He said it, I did. One thing I like about Bob is he really has a way with words, even if he doesn't always put them together into true sentences. But I like that line of his. So I didn't meet Carl Hess on that occasion. I watched him in the audience. But the significant thing for me from that day was that sitting in a back row were three people that were then pointed out to me who would become quite loom-large in my life after that. Walter Block, Mario Rizzo, and Murray Rothbard. And someone said that's Murray Rothbard back there. And I maybe knew the name by then. I don't know if I've read anything. I'd probably read it. That was Austrian mafia in the background. Some of the short, and they were tackling back there at what Tuchel, he was saying. Anyway, that was a big thing in my life, right? Big, big time. So later that year was the National Convention in St. Louis, the famous National Convention in St. Louis of Yath. And we fielded a list of board members that we hoped would get elected. We didn't challenge the guy running for president. It was kind of David McKay. I guess we felt we were going to beat him anyway and he wasn't so bad. So let's not do that. So we didn't try to find anybody. And so we went and I remember taking a Greyhound bus with a bunch of people from the Philadelphia area, 19 hours on the bus. And I was sitting next to, who was a friend of mine in those days, I was sitting next to Bob Bidnato, the name you know. On that bus ride, Bob Bidnato read his open letter to Ayn Rand where he made the case for anarchism, which later on... Are you saying you don't mean right, Kyle? No, no. I didn't meet Roy Childs yet. At that point he was and he wrote an open letter. I guess it was an open letter. Oh, because the only open letter I knew was Roy Childs one. I had no idea. I don't know where he published it. Bidnato was anarchist in these days. I didn't know he had this... Oh yes, exactly. And we were... In those days we were very good friends. In recent years, he's attacked me as a sympathizer of terrorism. So yeah, well I and my friends have been attacked likewise. He did acknowledge that Roy Childs had already written an open letter to Ayn Rand and his letter was, as I recall, was very much like Roy's letter. But he wanted to have his own letter and put it on the record with Ayn Rand and get canceled, I guess, in his subscription, which is what happened to Roy. Anyway, we get to St. Louis. Because the only person who put it online would be him and he would not do so. Yeah, I never, I never even look for it. I never even look for it. But we, so we get to St. Louis and it's terribly exciting. And I'll make a, you know, a long story less long. I did get to see Carl Haas. I met Daniel Rohrbacher who in those days was not a was not a button-down conservative but a hippie, hippie of the right, let's say. There's a libertarian... Oh, that's how David Friedman describes them, right? Stoner, sorry, what'd you say? A libertarian, I think that's how David Friedman describes them. Troubadour had his guitar sat under, we sat under the gateway, gateway of arch and listened to him play. Carl Haas may have a famous appearance and a famous for libertarians under the gateway of arch and gave gave a talk and he was, Carl Haas was always very relaxed. I later on became friends with him. And a guy named Bill Schumacher who burned his draft card in the convention hall was beaten up by some ex-marines who were Yefers. And our slate for the board got totally smashed. Meanwhile, Murray Rothbard had brought out a special edition of the Libertarian Forum that said, you know, listen, Yef, and it was really a message to the libertarians, get out of there. Don't try to elect people. And that, on that, that was the end of the Libertarian Caucus and the formation of the Society for Individual Liberty, SIL, which later joined up with the Libertarian International and became the International Society for Individual Liberty, with the unfortunate initials, ISIL. I guess now they're going to call themselves Liberty International, so they're... Yeah, I think I've seen... And so that was... At least they have more justice to be paid to their name than than David Kelly's outfit has. But yeah, I guess the similarity to ISIL is, but I was like, you know, he's an ISIL. It's the other one that should change the name. Actually, during World War II, there was an American soldier, his last name was Hitler, and people asked him, are you going to change the name? Hell no, I'm not the one bringing the space and the family. It's the guy in Germany. He's the one who should change the name. So, better than his family, eventually, did change the name to something other than Hitler. So, we went back, you know, back home to Philadelphia, started up our own independent organization, and they held some great conferences in those days, since 69 and 70. That's where I got to see David Friedman speak. I saw Eric Mack speak. These are people I'm seeing for the first time, T-Born McCann. And I met Mises in that context, even though he never got to speak, because of screw-up and scheduling, it was really a shame. It was 1970. He died in 1973. He was a little frail, but they burned him down with Margaret, his wife from New York on the train. But while he was sitting outside the hall waiting to give his talk, he started just talking about the dangers of inflation. And he had this big group of students around him sitting at his feet. And I was one of them, listening to him talk very, kind of softly, no microphone, about just the ravages that inflation can inflict on a society. My one and only contact with Mises, I saw and then finally met. It wasn't quite the way they intended. So, do you want to explain what happened? We sort of get to speak at the conference, even if... Yeah, right. Not the way you got intended. Actually, what happened was they had scheduled, over-scheduled, or had a problem. And he had to, he was waiting for David Friedman to finish his talk, but he was very upset that he had to wait for a Friedman. So that's, you know, it wasn't the best PR for SIL, unfortunately. But those were great conferences. They put him on a pen in a few different places in the University of Pennsylvania. And then, you know, I went back to Temple, finished my studies in an active libertarian group. I wrote a weekly column for the student paper about libertarianism. And yeah, I had great fun. I met Jerry Rubin. He wasn't too fond of seeing me, because I forget what I was saying to him, but I didn't have the impression Jerry Rubin was really a libertarian. He wasn't a car all over me, as far as I was concerned. And he was a great, great time. So from there, I went into the newspaper business, and I already kind of talked about that. I spent a little time at the Associated Press. Not very long. I didn't really like it there. And then I went on to the, after covering the courts for three years, went on to the larger paper, the Wilmington Delaware News Journal, where I covered the state legislature, city council, again, more education in the state up close, politicians up close. While I was covering school boards and town councils in Pennsylvania, I would be sitting next to the reporter from the competing paper. We were kind of the brand X little paper. He was the big paper in the county, Chester County, Pennsylvania. And he would sit, we'd sit in the back and he'd make all these sort of snide, very, very worthwhile, but snide sarcastic remarks about what he was seeing up there on the stage. You know, just to me, not out loud. And I'd laugh and I would make some literary points back, but he was never making any kind of affirmative statements, right? It was all, it was just mocking, which was, which was great. But that was Dave Barry. We became very good friends. The famous Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winner, once had a TV show based on him starring Harry Anderson. Yeah. Best selling author, including best selling novelist, at least one best selling novel. And so we became good friends and spent a lot of time together, but we'd argue about politics, always friendly. He was, I think, you know, he tended to be, you'd say, you know, slightly left of center. So he didn't like the conservatives, but mostly he was interested in humor and sarcasm. We then went our separate ways. I went to Delaware. He was not working for the paper anymore, but when I decided I didn't want to do any more reporting, I got tired of that straight jack. And I took reporting seriously, that the reporter should be detached from his story and try to fairly present whatever it is he's reporting on. I mean, I really did take that seriously. It seems not to be taken too seriously these days. And then I found that constraining. I wanted to get an advocacy. I knew there were libertarian groups starting up, right? Kato begins in 1977. Things are beginning to happen. I remember writing a letter to Mario Rizzo, who was in NYU, and there was some institute or something connected with NYU that he was interested in. And I guess I had just read something of his. So I wrote to him and just said, is there some way I can become involved? Well, I wasn't an academic. I didn't have a career, a degree beyond the bachelor of science or bachelor of work. I forget what I had now. It was radio, TV, film. You think it would be arts, but I actually think it was science. It's sort of on the intersection of the two. Yeah, right. So he wrote and suggested I write to the Kato Institute, which was very helpful later on. We became kind of friends. I mean, it's not somebody I see on a frequent basis. He's in New York, and I was never based in New York. And so I got tired of reporting, and I wasn't sure where to go from there. And so Dave Barry, who had left reporting and was teaching writing, effective writing, for a consulting firm that was set up seminars in companies, corporations, companies, allied chemical, Dupont, places like that. And he said, I must have been talking to him. He said, I would like to do that. So he put me through training real fast. And there was a textbook that the founder of this little consulting company had written, and I liked it. And so I did that for a year. I wasn't working side by side with Dave. We were in different places. But that was a very important year because I honed my editing skills. I really do attribute what I think is pretty fair ability at editing. To that year. Because there's nothing like, and I'll probably improve my writing too, but I mean, editing other people, these were technical people who did not have to write plain English. We're not illiterate people. These were chemists who had to communicate the sales people who were not chemists, what it is the product, what the product was, and they had a hard time doing it. So my job was to teach them how to do that. There was writing, editing workshops, it was very good. But then, as that year was coming to a close, I got a call saying, how would you like to come down to Washington and be director of research at the council for competitive economy? Which was intended to be, was one of the early Coke organizations, so I can say that name. I've used that for a little word. Kato had already started, so it wasn't the first of the Coke organizations. But the idea was to be, we're going to build a libertarian, really libertarian chamber of commerce. So I went down and spent the summer on just to try it out, see if I liked it and I did like it. And then in the fall, I moved down there and joined the staff. We fought tariffs, we fought subsidies. The first big fight was against Liaya Coca's Chrysler bailout. They were trying to get from Jimmy Carter. We lost that one, of course. You got the bailout. But we placed Washington Post full-page ads saying no bailout. Everything big business liked we opposed. And it was a good, it was a fun few years. From there I went to Inquiry Magazine and the neck closed. So I don't know if it was me, everywhere I go, there's a problem. But Inquiry Magazine was a great magazine. It was used to be called like the best of the left and right because of the categories everybody thought of. So you had Murray Rothbard and Noam Chomsky regularly and that Hentoff writing regularly about the First Amendment. And it was great. You had new left historians. You actually said during one of his period, Chomsky will often alternate between disparaging and friendly remarks about libertarianism. In some ways, Libertarianism is awful and horrible. But in fairness, I really respect their commitment to rational argumentation. And for a long time, the only places I could get published were in some of their journals. It's probably one of those I had in mind. Yeah. And Inquiry is filled with names like that. Sidney Lenz, who was a Cold War revisionist, lots of people. And on the economic side, it was Rothbard and the unnerved Austrians, Jerry O'Driscoll, Rizzo probably. Ralph Reiko was book editor, the book editor. And he was very good at that. My old friend Ralph Reiko, great historian and very fine person. I think I met him this summer. I met you at IHS. Probably right. He spent a year at IHS once I got to IHS. And that was great because I got to spend time with him. A lot of time with him. From there, I went to, you know, I have the order right now. Inquiry finally closed, which is losing too much money. And it closed in 1994. I went to work for a thing that CC, the Council for Commitment Economy, had morphed into called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was no longer oriented just getting businessmen to join. But it was going to be like a grassroots thing. So I did a few years of that editing and writing papers just on public policy, honing my skills, I think. And then after a couple of years there, I was tired of that. And that's when IHS was moving from California to George Mason. And I was living in that area in the Fairfax County area in Virginia. And I wrote to John Blundell and said, who was president at the time, late John Blundell, are you hiring anybody on this end? And he said, well, I think so. And so I got hired as senior editor. I was there the day the moving band pulled in to the Mason, to the Tolwood House. Tolwood House, I have to call it written down. It's been, it's since been torn down alas, but it was great. Right. And it wasn't contiguous with the campus property. No, it was a long walk. I think, I think one of those long walks through the, you know, through the Virginia summer heat was when Ralph Raco said, no one told me we were going to be reenacting the baton death march. And I'm, my office was never in Tolwood House. Remember there was also a bunker, like a one story long, I remember there was another, I didn't, I didn't remember the building. We all went to talk, we were all the, the graduate fellows went to talk with you about our papers we were working on. Yeah. Remember, yeah, you were, Oh yeah, that's right. I got to do, I got to do some editing there. And there was a very important time for me. I mean, I hope people gained from talking to me. I mean, but I gained a whole lot from all the people that passed through that. The summer fellows, the postdoctoral fellows, I got to know, Emilio Pacheco spent from my first year there, and then Chandra, my first published paper, not counting a book review that I made earlier, but my first published paper on mill was that summer of, and I got to read, I got to read a lot of that kind of stuff from you folks and offer editorial suggestions. Now, I wasn't really, I wasn't offering substantive suggestions because I hadn't read, I'd read only a fraction of the stuff you guys have read, but I was learning from you guys all the time. And plus we'd have set, we'd have these little seminars, what did John Blundville call them, a brown bag seminar, so you bring your lunch, you know, to the library, which is kind of this big open room. I remember Catherine Balthas and then seeing that you corrected all her IFFs to IFs because you thought it was a mistake because she was a native French speaker. Wow. That's embarrassing. I hope I didn't do that. I don't remember that, but I think, well, you know, someone without a background in Adalanda philosophy yet and reading someone you know is not a native English speaker, it's not that surprising, you might think that the mistake is going on there. But that's one of the most important people I've seen in my life today. I was there for five years. And to me, that was one of the most fruitful periods just because of all the people I got to have some contact with. Plus we would bring in speakers, Peter Bauer, who I got to know, Thomas Sowell, who I didn't get to know, but I think he's probably a hard person to get to know. But anyway, he was there and he got to the ear and speak. Lots of other people. Plus I got to meet and talk to Gordon Tullock, who always had something to say about everything and knows at least something about everything new, something about everything. James Buchanan and then all the younger people, Don Boudreau, Pete Betke, Steve Horwitz, all those students, David Chitko, so many, I mean I could just go on and on, who were in the graduate program at Mason. It was just, I couldn't have asked for like a better time to be just dropped into IHS. I mean that was a great move on my part because I didn't know how great it was going to be. At this time, I was also writing just to throw this out. I was writing for a column from the Washington Times. I wasn't on the staff, but I was writing as an outsider, a weekly column on computer, personal computers and software as an end user, right? Not a technical column. I just wrote them one day and said, I see you don't have your column anymore. Would you be interested in having me do it? And so they let me do it for like $25 a column, but in a sense all the software I could eat. I could write to companies and say, I'm the columnist and every day was Christmas. UPS would have left stacks of boxes, sometimes hardware too. Anyway, I did that for six years until the industry was just out of my control. I couldn't keep up, so I finally did that. So what did I do after that? From there I went to Cato after IHS and spent five years at Cato. Was there when they made the transition from Waterston House, that house that once housed Jefferson's core library that became the core of the Library of Congress, and then to when Cato built its own building? Brian Kaplan and I visited you in that new building when it was very new. I remember sitting in your office and you were on the phone. You had to take a phone call from some donor and you were trying to explain what the ideology of Cato was and you say, well, it's market liberal. Sometimes you hear the word libertarian. So Brian and I were chuckling about that sort of soft peddling. You have a good memory. I don't remember that one either. I'm not denying it, but I don't remember. Yeah, it was this gleaming building at the glass front. It is a cool looking building. Now they've gone way beyond that. They have another building. I had a friend who I've been back there since. I had a student who was an intern there and so back in 2001, I got to visit the building when it was closed. So I got to meet, again, met lots of good people there. I was on very good terms with Bill Nascannon, who was very supportive of me when I came under fire for my writings about the Middle East back then. And also when I had this big piece in the Wall Street Journal about Reagan's horrible trade record and got attacked by Clayton Yider, who was his trade representative. And of course, Bill knew all these people, right? Because of his experience in the council of economic advisors and everything else, he came to my defense beautifully and said, what are you talking about? Reagan is the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover. And so I have fond memories of Bill. And just, yeah, just had a great time dealing with people day to day, the staff, but also people who are coming through. And always people coming through to speak. So that's kind of a story until I ended up at FI, although I never was based in at FI. It was always a telecomuter. Don Boudreau became president of FI in 1998, I think it was seven or eight. And he tells me that the first, and I knew him really well from my days at Mason, he told me, first thing he did was decide that he wanted me to be the editor. And so I said, well, do I need to move up there? And he said, no, that's fine. But I went out frequently. Yeah, that was the great improvement in the Freeman. Because the Freeman had taken a kind of a creepy social conservative turn before your arrival there. I remember, you know, stuff about how natural, how natural and appropriate it is to feel hostility toward gaze and so forth. Yeah. Well, you know, there were some of the shorter, short-term editors, you know, there was never really a successor to Paul Perot who was an editor probably for 35 years, sometimes uncredited in the beginning. I don't think his name was one. And then when Leonard Reed died, you know, Leonard had no designated successor. So it kind of was in chaos. And people actually proposed that maybe Fisha just closed at this point. Reed's gone. It was so much of a personal thing. People were devoted to Leonard Reed, right? Donors and others. But no, it carried on. And it was very chaotic. And it was in very bad financial straits. But so Don took the job. He decided he had left Mason to get a law degree at Clemson because he wanted to do law and economics. And then I think it was at Clemson when he got the offer. And he decided he wanted to leave academia. And he thought running fee would be fun. He wanted a purpose from which to speak and write. That's really what he loves doing. And he just thought this would be great. And he thought of me right away. And we easily came to terms. And he was not interested in the social conservatism, the stuff you were just referring to. He's a hardcore libertarian. And he loves Bastiat and free trade. And was essentially an anarchist. I mean, he talked about it in print. I mean, he did a column of just asking questions, all of which the direction of which were quite clear where he was going. So that was a great time. It was one of the best people I ever worked for. But then I went through a whole bunch of presidents. There was a lot of turnover after Don decided to go back to school. I think he went back to Clemson to teach. Or maybe he'd go to Mason at that point. I forget. And so I was there. You were in attendance when, you know, I think when I made it out to fee back when they were located in Irvington and Hudson for a conference I spoke at. And I remember you were there again. Yes. That was probably the best in my years there. That was the best summer of conferences. We did a lot of these student seminars. We would do five or six a summer. It was quite an elaborate program for fee. That summer we had an executive director brother named Lee Curry. And he was so encouraging to the people. Yeah. Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lee was the guy that organized it with some of my help. I don't know if you know Jeffrey Lee. Yeah. I miss two teachers. I forget where he teaches. I remember. He was over in Virginia. But he had been there as a, I don't know, first an intern and then some staff member. And when Lee Curry came along as the executive director, he was a very nice guy and very supportive of me. I mean the most supportive president for me since Don Boudreau. There were a few in between there who I got nothing out of. No help from. And so I won't say any more about that. But Lee was all, he appreciated the magazine. He liked me. He liked Jeffrey. And he gave Jeffrey free hand to set up a series of seminars. And I was there to give advice and to suggest speakers. But he did the work. And we had you. I guess that's the first time. Was that the one on only feet seminar you ever spoke at? I'm trying to remember whether I was, whether I went out there once or twice. And I can't remember. I think my time, that would have been the only time. But I think there's a little part of me that thinks twice, but mostly I think it was just once because you know, because I took the, you know, I took the train up from Manhattan because I wanted to just spend one day in Manhattan or at least half a day in Manhattan. I remember that, you know, between checking out of my hotel and getting on the train for free, I ran through the Metropolitan Museum of Art for like 90 and 90 minute gulf, which was inadequate, but it was all I had. And I found a place that would store my luggage, which was nice. But anyway, but yeah, that was, that was, that was a lovely, because that was, again, like Tallwood House, it was a lovely house with, yeah, and really, really cool letters on the wall. I remember there was a letter on the wall from, from Leon Trotsky to Henry Haslitz. Yeah, that's right. I can't remember what the subject to the letter was, but it was just, it was a cool thing. Yeah, I don't remember now either. I read it many times. But I might have been the one who recommended you to Jeffrey, although he might have thought of it on his own, but the Brian Kaplan was there that summer. And I forget who else. It was an all star cast. It was just magnificent. I had such a good time, plenty of economists of course, Ben Powell might have been there. Ed Stringer, I think was there. I don't know if Jeffrey Hummel was there. That's possible. Anyway, yeah, also it was the best after a while. It was the most, Kersner was probably there because Kersner was a regular at those things. Kersner was always very close to the foundation. I'd been on the board for a while. And I got to know Israel Kersner very much. The only time I remember, my very first time at IHS is the only time I can definitely remember encountering Kersner. If I go back in, you know, when I was in the Liberty Society, what week long thing in 86, I'm not sure I've encountered Kersner since then, but I'm not sure I haven't either. My memory is not as copious as it used to be. Well, those seminars were great, too. I mean, I met lots of great people there because George Smith was one of the regulars. Yeah, my first living society had Linda Ligio, George Smith, Randy Barnett, Don LaVoy, Israel Kersner. Oh, yeah. I knew Don. I forget who else. It was a I knew Don Well. Brain freeze. In fact, when my first child was born, Jennifer, in 1983, Don and Mary, Don unfortunately died way too young. Great, great guy and great thinker, very important person with a loss. He and Mary offered just a few weeks in. I think they hadn't had their first kid yet. I think this was part of the reason they asked to do this. They offered to babysit for an evening, just so my wife and I could go out within the first time out since having the baby. I mean, she was a very young baby. And of course, we knew them and had no hesitation about that. And I think they also wanted to see what it would be like for us to be alone with an infant until we want to have a baby. And I think it would probably run on someone else's kid. Yeah. Yeah. And everything, everything was fine. I mean, my baby was, I think her first reward was hermeneutics. At least it sounded like that. I can't swear that's what it was. But there were Gothammer, I think she was saying Gothammer, something like that. Gothammer, Gaga, they sounded very similar. Maybe. I probably over-interpreting, Gaga. And Lady Gaga. It was a musical request, actually. We hadn't heard of Lady Gaga yet, so I couldn't assume it was that. So, yeah, I mean, what can I say? I had the privilege and honor of meeting some of these people and getting to spend time with. Thomas Sass is another one. I got to know him very well. I started, I published him at the Freeman. I brought him on as a columnist, which lots of people didn't understand. I was once asked, why are we publishing a column about psychology? Now, at the time, the president was very big on promoting the idea of character. You may know who I'm talking about. But it didn't occur to me to say at the time, and I should have, you know, it's really not about psychology. It's about self-responsibility. And as I recall, self-responsibility is a big part of character, which is what Tom was about, right? Self-responsibility and not blaming. But also, you know, another illness he was about was about, you know, not blocking people up for dubious reasons, and that seemed like. Well, that too, which he, of course, wrote about. And he was a, he was a wonderful guy, extremely charming old world type, you know, born in Hungary, came over in 1918. I'm sorry, when he was, sorry, 19, he was born in 26, 20, came over age 18. By the way, I have a video of an interview I did with him, which people can find on my YouTube channel. The one that has politics in the name, because I have another YouTube channel about pipe smoking, which reminds me, you know. Oh, yes, yes. So, you're very tall for this pipe. My wizard pipe, my Gandalf pipe, which is quite nice. I don't have anything in it at the moment. And only tobacco touches this, this pipe. One of my earlier videos, I actually, I know, I actually did it with a coffee mug. I didn't have any coffee in it. But I, but I confessed. I can, you know, I want to live at the amount of deception in doing these things. I confessed that I was doing it without, and I did one of these videos with coffee that I mean, heated up from the, the night before, which is very sinful, but it reminded me of my old colleague, William Davis, who used to, who would leave his coffee in the fridge and then at the office on Friday, and then on, on Monday morning, he'd, you know, heat it up in the microwave and he says, this is just as good as espresso. And we don't look at it with horror. Anyway, I can't say, I can't say too much about Tom. I think he's the most, maybe the most underrated libertarian, 20th century libertarian. I think a lot of people don't even bother to read him if they know about him because they think, well, that's just some esoteric area, psychiatry. You know, I'm not interested in that. They don't seem to realize all the violations of liberty that occur in the name of psychiatry, mental health, and the therapeutic state, as he calls it, is extremely important. He was, you know, he had been a crusader for getting rid of the drug war from very early on, and he was constantly condemning the psychiatric profession for listing homosexuality in its Bible of diseases. I mean, he wrote about that often and wrote aphorisms about it and pieces about it. And then finally they quoted it off the list in the 70s. That's how they decided what's a disease and what's not a disease. I don't think they do that on the pure medical side when they take a vote of hands. Is this a disease or not? I used to sign one of his books, I forget which one, back on A.C.T. for medical ethics. It was probably one of the most liked. His books are great. I recommend, don't pick up almost anything. I mean, his magnum opus is, I think, is considered a insanity. Oh, what's this up? I don't know. Well, I'll look it up. It'll be in the... It's like analysis of an idea or something like that. I'll also have an image appearing, you know, being a ghostly wave in your head and mind. That's funny. In the beginning, I kept waiting for my book covers to show up. It didn't occur to me. Wait a second. That's added later. Yeah. It will be added later. So, please, if I have... If I leave the viewers one message, read some Thomas Sass. He's very important. I did an article in the Journal of Vine Rain Studies called Sass and Rand. And it's about a book that Sass wrote called Faith and Freedom, which is about libertarian people. And he does a chapter... He has a chapter on Rand and a chapter on Brandon, which are, I think, eye-opening chapters, very important. And he has a very important chapter about Deirdre McCloskey based on Deirdre's own book, Passing, about, you know, becoming a transgender woman and extremely interesting. They're both, you know, both psychologists. And I haven't read what he has to say about Brandon, but I've been interested to see that. Yeah. Well, look at that article. I read it recently. It's been a while since I wrote that. I came out in like 2006 or something about that. And so it was a very long time. And something maybe I think to read it. And, you know, it's mainly Tom talking, although I do extend it in a few places. And he's got lots of interesting things. He has a more favorable but not totally favorable view of Rand than he has of Brandon. Anyway, so that's what happened. And then everything with fee changed. I don't need to go into the glory details. And I spent some time a year working with the Future Freedom Foundation editing. Went from FEE and FFF, just working your way through the phone book, it sounds like. Well, I just had to have a note to what a phone book is. I just had to erase the two bottom lines on the ease. Yeah. It was easy. I saw my shirts. I could easily change my shirts with some paint. By the way, it was a privilege to publish you with the Freeman. I don't know if that was the first time you were in the Freeman, but you wrote some very good pieces for me on Nozick. And I got you to kind of rewrite your point about equality. What was it, the unknown, the other unknown ideal, I think? And so you contributed, I don't know, three, four pieces for me. I don't know if you ever wrote for FFF or not. But that was fun for doing that for a year. But then that ended. They couldn't raise the money. And so that was on my own for a bit. Stretching away, getting some help from a friend of mine in California. I spent a year and a half in San Diego. At that time, I was seeing you at Liberty Fun, right? Because we had the few things we had. And also at Appie. Two things at that San Diego. What was that, Imperial Hotel or something in San Diego? Was it the... Is that the one? Yeah, La Jolla. Just sort of north of San Diego. My mother lived in the 1930s as a child. Yeah, you told me. I remember you told me. Also, you know, also we used to come out to the Association for Private Ed and Prize Education when it was in Las Vegas. I think that's when you were still working for Fee and they were giving you the travel funds to get out there. Oh yeah, those were the only times I went to Appie. That was a few times. And those were great. That was great fun, too. Yeah, you used to take us out to Fee's Dime. I'd be on your panel. Right. And you would set up panels. I guess you would set them up and I was on there. And I gave a couple... I debated... Yeah, people like Gary Darkay and Charles Johnson and so on. How did you get interested in left libertarianism? Well, this is part of my Freeman legacy, which maybe makes some people cringe, because actually there's one person, kind of prominent in the movement, I won't name him, who twice tried to get me fired because I brought Kevin Carson to the Freeman. I started reading... Well, I was already reading you and we were in communication. And I think you made me aware that there was actually this thing left libertarianism. I don't think I was fully aware of it, maybe not really aware of it at all. Now, I had... I was certainly aware of Rothbard and his new left days. And I knew Roy Childs, who had written about the real history of big business in opposition to Rand, who said it was America's persecuted majority. So I already had some of this background. It wasn't totally foreign, but I was now hearing it extended in ways I hadn't experienced and finding it very, very interesting. And it seemed consistent with the things I believe. So you, I remember email from you, I'd asked you, who should I read then in this? And you... And this is where I first... I'm sure the first time I saw the name, Kevin Carson. I know you've had one as a guest. And then Charles Johnson and you might have mentioned Gary. I met... Later met Gary at a... Yeah, Gary came from... My older brother later. Yeah, I met him at Freedom Festa, one of those things was in Vegas, but I already knew him, but we met face-to-face. Yeah, I know he used to go out there, not to attend the sessions, but just to hang out with other people who are going there. You go to the crowd, not to talk to the crowd, but to talk to individuals and draw them away from the crowd. Freedom Festa. Yeah, because there was a very big open book exhibition room. And it was, yeah, it was a lot of fun just hanging out there. I usually did more of that than anything else. So I started reading these people you recommended. Probably one of the earliest things I did was get my hands on studies and it wasn't mutuals, political economy. And devoured that. And around that time, you were bringing out that edition of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which was a look at that book, an examination of that book, pro and con. There was some pretty vicious stuff about the book in there. Yeah, it was funny to think about... George Reesman. I really invited George Reesman to do that, is because Reesman had also... Well, as you know, Reesman had also been doing work on how some aspects of the classical conception of cost and value could be salvaged and reconciled with cost. He was a Ricardian. He was an Austrian Ricardian. Yeah, and Carson was doing something similar. And so I thought, well, maybe there'd be some addressing. I was so wrong. Yes, you were. You told me that back then. You told me that back then. And yeah, yeah, you can't ever predict. So I thought it was extremely interesting stuff. And I learned a lot about history, including, you know, Marx's take on a lot of history, not so much the theory of economics or the... Yeah, Marx is a lot better than... Historical episodes, like the closing up of the commons and denying people customary rights that enjoyed for a long, long time. And so I learned a huge amount. And so I had him write... I invited him to write for the Freeman. And he wrote something about the history of transportation subsidies and how it distorts the economy. And what's his line, the subsidy of history? I think that article was... I think that title was what he used in maybe the first article he wrote. And also, he also did a piece about taking Hayekian concerns about knowledge problems and central planning and applying them to the hierarchical corporation. Exactly. And making this very important point about vulgar libertarianism, which, you know, it's one of those things that once you hear it's actually somebody stated to you, it's like, of course, that doesn't sound so startling, except you didn't really think of it, you know, in the forefront of your mind, you didn't really... Not all the experience of course reaction. And that's the idea that if libertarians are complaining about all the regulation and intervention by the state, including a lot of privilege by the state, why then on the following day, when a leftist is criticizing something a corporation is doing, do a lot of libertarians then say, hey, wait a second, if it wasn't serving consumers, they wouldn't be doing it or competition will drive it out if it's not good. Wait a second, what were you saying yesterday about all the interventions and the privileges and the excluding of competition? And it's a failure to think, you know, the two sides of your brain thinking about the same thing at the same time. So Marxist in reverse, the Marxists will say, you know, all these evil things arise from free competition, you know, and then they give their historical story and somebody, you know, when the capitol, when the defender of capitalism says all this, you know, all this came about because the capitalists were thrifty and frugal and smart and so forth. And they say no, no, look at all this, it was an intervention. But then, you know, the Marxists will forget all that. And this really goes back to Marx himself to some extent. They'll suddenly forget all that and say, no, it's the, you know, it's the market that creates all this hierarchy and oppression and so forth. So the Volga libertarian and the Volga Marxists have a certain have a certain kinship, although neither would be happy to recognize it. Well, there were some people who were not happy to see Kevin's article. I don't think they knew his name, but they read the piece. And somebody wrote to, you know, above my pay grade and said, this is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a left wing journal. Well, that blew over. But then we started a little writing competition, not when when Beth Hoffman, the long time managing editor died, a donor and a board member, wanted to put money into create a Beth Hoffman Prize. So we decided to make it okay, the best article from the previous year. So it was already published. It wasn't a way of writing competition. And I picked like the five finalists. It wasn't blind, of course. These were published articles. I picked five finalists, and I submitted it to a to a three hardcore Austrian economists. No one's gonna complain about. They picked Kevin Carson's article on the on the transportation. So he wins that article that competition and the same guy that had written like the year earlier writes again to complain. It's bad enough. They published the article. Now the guy wins an award for it. Well, these were these were not left libertarians. And certainly wouldn't call them left libertarians who were on that jury panel who picked Carson's article. And they knew the name was on there. So they would have known who it was to, but they just thought it was the best of the articles out of the five I nominated. And I tried to be very fair about what I thought were the best or it was me saying it, but still. So that was an adventurous time. And since then, since the FFF came to an end, and I spent a year and a half in San Diego living cheaply and deciding what to do. Scott Horton called me up and said, let's form an institute and we'll break. Let's, let's start a group. Let's start an organization. And it became the Libertarian Institute. Interesting that no one has that name yet. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. And so my TGI, you know, I've been writing this weekly column TGIF, the goals, freedom, which began in 2006 at the Freeman, first, first online. And then it would a version of it would end up in the magazine. And then I carried it over. It always followed me. And when they didn't have a real job, it was on my own free association blog. And then when I joined FFF, it was there. And then it's at the Libertarian Institute, although I don't write it weekly. It's much more occasional now. So that's my, that's my biography. All right, let's, let's talk a little bit about your, your three most recent books. So starting with America's Ponder Revolution, The Constitution Revisited, which I think may be the context in which I discovered this quote. Yes, I found that. I don't remember why I found it. I don't remember a lot. I don't remember a lot about Abraham Bishop. I think it was from Connecticut. He might have been Congress. You know, I really didn't know much about him. And I didn't try to, you know, do some research to find out a little bit about him. It turns out he was he was one of the few founders who when the Haitian Revolution broke out was, was expressing sympathy for the black slave rebels, as opposed to, you know, clutching pearls about the, the fate of the slave owners property. So he was, he was a better Jeffersonian than Jefferson. And he was pretty good. He had some stuff on on the separation of church and state. He had some anti-imperialist stuff. He was not terrific, but better than average for his time on, on gender equality. He was a defender of, of, of education for women and so forth. So it was, you know, as the founders go, he seems to be one of the, one of the cooler ones. Well, I found that, you know, either in a book by Gordon Wood, who was, you know, who was a great historian of the revolutionary period, the constitutional period, or one of the writers about the anti-federalists. I really don't remember now. There weren't footnotes in that book. So I can't check it. I guess I probably have notes somewhere, private notes. But when I saw that, you know, Trump was, was getting his campaign together. He might have even announced by then, that was in 2015, the day now, right? And when I saw that, I mean, I don't know if people got a chance to see the quote. I don't know if you held it up long enough. Well, I, well, what it says is about the nation makes greatness. Its poll star can never be free. Abraham Bush 1800. I was blown out of my chair because Trump was in the air, who's make America great again. You could imagine my, let's talk about serendipity. I couldn't have made up a better quotation. It was just fantastic. So, as I said, the, you know, the, the progressive left is not exactly free from the cult of national greatness either. So you should take the quote as well. And the neocons were all about national greatness. War was a path to national greatness. It gave people a sense of purpose. Well, it was a great quote from great in some sense quote from Herbert Crowley, the defending, you know, American warfare saying America needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure. I've got a better moral, you know, why not withdrawing from all that crap? That would be a serious moral adventure. I'd be done for that adventure. Exactly. So that book, that book was written over many years, actually. I mean, I didn't sit down and say, I'm going to write a book for the Freeman. I began to, I don't know why I initially got interested in this. I really don't remember. I started writing essays, TGIFs. It began as the TGIF columns, which I then maybe probably expanded and put in the magazine about the constitution. I wish I could remember what triggered this because I had been an anarchist for since 1969. So it wasn't like news to me that there was a problem with the constitution. Yeah. Although there are a lot of the garden anarchists who still have a kind of, yeah, who still keep invoking the constitution more often than you would expect. But I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't on even that kind of constitutionalist. I just wasn't. And so, but it's something, for some reason, I started that column in 2006, something I read got me interested in this. And I just started reading Merle Jensen, a great historian of the period of the Articles of Confederation. And then, you know, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, maybe something about the Articles of Confederation really kicked this off. And I read something and said, wow, they don't have, they didn't have the power to tax or regulate trade. Of course, Rockford's book on this is finally out now, although I have to read it. The minimal volume of Conceived in Liberty, which for a long time was, it was either an unreadable handwriting or inaudible tapes. And now they finally, they think they finally accepted it. And I think the notes, I think the editor actually had to do a lot of reconstructing, right? Jeff Hummel thinks that's a very good book. He had a review and reason magazine. He likes that. I look forward to reading that when I get a chance. Well, anyway, however it got my interest got going. I just was reading stuff. I think I was reading about the Articles of Confederation and began writing about that. Those might have been the earliest ones. They really don't remember about how this is amazing. Here's a quote, government, more like a quasi government, really. It had no power to tax and it had no power to regulate trade. It had to go hat in hand of the states. The states would say the checks in the mail, get out of here sometimes. And I just thought that was an extremely interesting chapter in American history, which doesn't get much, much attention. It's kind of what actually used to be in the Middle Ages, where the kings had to ask the municipalities and jurisdictions for tax contributions, which they might or might not end up popping up. That drew me into the move toward a constitution, which was to quote, fix, right? Fix these flaws, namely the lack of taxation power and the lack of other things, including power to regulate trade. That had to be fixed. It was a big problem, right? Because what kind of government, what kind of self-respecting government lacks those two powers? So that drew me to the Constitutional Convention, and so I started reading stuff. Jensen talked about both. And Jensen has a great line, which I quote, where he says, the men that wrote the Constitution were very different from the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence. And that really flicked on the light, and I just kept reading from there. And started doing these essays, which, when I look back, I'm a little amazed that here I am, the editor of the Freeman. And I'm writing the subversive, you know, the Freeman was never really a edgy, radical magazine, or fee was not edgy and radical, right? But here I'm writing, I'm questioning the Constitution, not just once, a series of articles. And I remember one of the presidents of the Nameless said to me, I see you're writing a lot about the Constitution. I said, yeah, yeah. He said, you know, every people really does need its folklore, its fairy tales. And luckily, that wasn't an order to stop, cease and desist, because I didn't, I didn't cease and desist, and nothing happened to me. So I guess, I guess it wasn't meant that way. Eventually, in 2015, when I was in California and didn't have an actual job, I think it was Gary Chardier who came to me and said, why don't you just put all that stuff together in a book? Funny never occurred to me. I didn't think it was all that weighty, although looking back on it, I guess it's pretty good. Well, you can tell his contribution both from the choice of publisher and from the font choices on the cover. For those familiar with both of those sort of screen Gary. We published it under, yeah, that publishing house. And I'll never forget when I had a PDF of it, or maybe when I had the actual book in my hand, I said, this is amazing, because I actually have a book on the Constitution. And so I feel, I feel proud of that book. I mean, I think it's a good sell book. And I, and you inspired at least one of the chapters in the area, one of the late, I think the last chapter is called The Constitution of Anarchy, because I, I learned a lot from an essay you wrote, you'll remember the title, I don't, about how any society has probably or something like that. Yeah, any society has a Constitution. I mean, there was a, I had a blog, a series of blog posts when I was debating Robert Benonato, the sort of long list lines, but also, yes, I had a chapter in the anthology that I did with Timur McCann on, and that's exactly right. And I had read that and mine, mine, I mean, it's not a rip off because your name is all through that chapter. And I quote it quite a bit. But I was such an important point. I'm glad I was able to kind of lift Hayekian title, right? He's got the Constitution of Liberty. I just thought this is as we call the Constitution of Anarchy. And because it's so counter-intuitive, Hekron Anarchist Society of a Constitutional, any society, class society has a Constitution, a set of, a set of rules, tacit, sometimes tacit, sometimes not tacit, that constitute that society, the regularity, the customs, the etiquette, all those things, all those things that the competition is a form of checks and balances. And so Anarchy has more competition than a monopolistic system. So of course, a monopolistic system that has division of powers like the US division of powers between the three branches of the federal government in the States, that has more competition than like a solid unified monolithic authoritarian state does. And the more competition that has, the better it works in checks and balances. And Anarchy is free entry into the job of checks and balances, but if it's harder for the checkers and balancers to end up sort of polluting because anyone can down. It's a brilliant paper. I thank you for it because it inspired my chapter, which then made, I think, the perfect closing chapter to my book on the Constitution. I was so happy when it occurred to me, okay, that's not about the US Constitution, but that belongs in this book. So I'm proud of that book. It was like, you know, 20 years in the marketing. It's an excellent book. 15 years. Boo! Which actually means this in Turkish. I think Uzbek also saw those ghosts. They've just been saying this, this, this all the time. Anyway, I'm interrupting here because my full interview with Sheldon ends up running for nearly two and a half hours, which is both a heavy burden on my viewers and a heavy burden on my bandwidth when I try to upload it. So I'm going to be snipping this this interview in half and this seems like a good place to snip a natural. It's roughly halfway through and it's a, it's almost exactly halfway through, really. And just, you know, sort of a natural transition from one, talking about one topic to the next. And so I'm going to load the first half of this, this interview this week and I will load the second half next week, although I don't know when you're seeing this. You might be, you might be binge-watching at some point in the future when they're both up. If you're binge-watching all my episodes at the time when, when they're all up, maybe all of them are up in the sense of all ever and that I'm dead and you're just watching what's left. Let's look at dark turn. Anyway, so, well, I'll start it off with ghosts. So what do you expect? Boo again, this, this, this. Anyway, so, you know, if you're watching this, you know, right after I upload it, then you will have to wait eagerly for a week or so for part two, which is going to be very interesting as well. And in the meantime, like, share, subscribe. You know, you want to. And if you feel like supporting this channel on PayPal or Patreon, you know, I can't, you know, command that with quite a peremptory way, since, you know, that's not as costless as the other options. But as mentioned, it's something you might just feel like doing. If you suddenly find yourself with loads of extra money in your hands, you don't know what to do with them. And in the meantime, farewell until next time.