 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell and I'm Kevill Brown. Joining us today is Will von Lair. He is the CEO of Students for Liberty. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thank you so much for having me. Can we start by telling us what is Students for Liberty? First of all, I would like to say thank you to the Cato Institute not only for hosting me, but also Students for Liberty was incubated in your very halls here. So we are now ten years old, but we got started off here in your offices. So you provided a lot of support initially and now we are a 3.9 million dollar organization. To answer your question, Students for Liberty is a worldwide active organization that focuses on empowering the next generation of leaders of liberty. What does that mean? So we are really reaching out to students here in the United States and across the world who are interested in classical liberal libertarian thoughts, the thinking that the Cato Institute embraces as well. And once we identify these people, we're going to train them more in like how to do advocacy, how to be a good libertarian, but also how to reach out to others and organize events. So just last year alone, we had 98 conferences all around the world with 20,000 attendees. And we do this again over the 3.9 million dollar budget and we are now active on all inhabited continents. But we started here in the United States and the main focus is still on the United States because we are here in the land of the free and we're working very hard to continue to make in there. You're relatively new to the CEO position, right? That's right. It's only been six months and it has been a wild ride, but I enjoy it very much so far. How did you get involved in SFL then and then get to where you are? Yeah. So we incorporated here in the United States in 2008. In 2011, Students for Liberty went for the first time abroad. So it was an experiment and that started off in Europe. And I was one of the people who applied for the executive board position because everything what we do is basically volunteer led. All of the 98 conferences I was talking about are organized, are operated and led by our volunteers. And so I applied for the position and I got into it. And then suddenly I found myself in the room with Alexander McCabe and the founder of the organization and incredible students from all around Europe who had so much more knowledge than I had, who knew so many different movements in different countries in Europe. And I felt a little bit intimidated when I was there at the Institute for Economic Affairs. And on the one hand, there was sitting Hayek at the table. On the other hand, it was Ayn Rand. And these people were talking about things that I didn't really know about. But I quickly learned that the organization trusts young people and trusted me. And so I became very active. I waste over 50,000 euros to start the first training program in Europe and organize conferences with several hundred attendees and later became the chairperson. What do you view as some of the biggest challenges that you face on campuses, both in the United States and around the world? So the answer would differ, of course, depending on the country we are talking about. So we currently we have a leader with the name Jan in imprisoned in Venezuela because he stood up for the ideas of liberty and continued so as an alumni of our alumnus of our programs. So they face like much harsher condition we do here in the United States. But if you're talking about the U.S., I mean, you know very well about the free speech issue on campus. You have been working on that as well. So that is certainly an issue. And we are reaching out to both the left and the right to to really address that and form coalitions and talk about the importance of these ideas. Besides that, I think the current generation is really ready. They are sick of the left right dichotomy about butting heads of the Republicans with the Democrats. And our message really resonates with them because we are not going on campus and trying to yell at them. We're trying to understand where they're coming from. And then once we understood where they're coming from, trying to tell them, OK, maybe we have like similar goals. We all want to live like in a prosperous, more just, more equal society. But we have different means. Let's talk about that instead of just being in their face. And I think especially in the United States, people are ready for that message. How hard is it to communicate this message or to get a sizeable group of students for liberty on a college campus now? I mean, it's been quite a while since I've been in college. And when I was there, I was in a very leftist college in Boulder, Colorado. But it seemed I mean, I never got a sense that like the university itself was mobilized against these ideas. It was it felt pretty welcoming and open. Has that has that changed? Is it you talk about the free speech on campus issues, which we hear a lot of anecdotes about, but it's hard from not being on a college campus to see how really pervasive that is, how much that's become of a culture among young people. Is there a strong like anti-liberty culture that you have to push back against? Sometimes we do experience that. So students of ours basically nearly got fined because they were handing out the Constitution, the very version that the K2 Institute produces. So we were handing that out on campus, our students, and they got really a lot of trouble into that because it was not like people were offended by Roger Pallon's intro. It wasn't the Constitution itself that was the problem. No, I think it was just like doing this because I said, this is not like a dedicated zone where you can do that. Please stop refining from doing this. So I mean, many universities are publicly institutions. So the amendments should also apply to these places. So this is of course deeply upsetting, but it doesn't happen too often. And of course, sometimes when you have like controversial topics, so we, for instance, had like a single issue campaign once on free market environmentalism. So they talked about how the free market actually benefits the environment and how it has become much better. And your human progress center here also has a lot of very informative data on that. And the speaker was there and suddenly there was like a bunch of very hardcore leftist groups who were shouting down the speakers. And we had the student leaders then had to call the police. Similarly, we also faced this from the right. Like in Serbia, we had an event about like decriminalization of drugs and suddenly like right-wing groups came in there like neo-Nazi. So we're spitting at our students, which was like outrageous. But in both cases, our students remain calm and just like try to get like this situation in control and try not like to escalate it further. And we sometimes have to face that. But generally, these are the exceptions. Normally, as long as we talk to people in a friendly manner and also try to reach out to the left and the right on the campus beforehand, when we have an event that works very well. How much overlap is there between students for liberty and overt political activism? That is to say going out and supporting candidates or opposing other candidates. Yeah. So we have a 501c3 organization. So we refined from taking any like policy stance or supporting any candidates. So we cannot do that and we don't do that. So I would say that we have a very heterogeneous set of students who are interested in academia and journalism, in becoming business people, but also in becoming politicians. So we certainly talk about that and we talk about that. This is one of the means of spreading the ideas of liberty. And in this country, Wampoa was very formative. And even internationally, Wampoa was very formative for many classical liberals or libertarians. And so many of our people go on into politics. So you might have seen how much impact had we in Brazil. So we not only talk about the Brazil, we also get a lot of stuff done. So you saw these massive, massive events on the streets where people were protesting and many of them were holding signs up like less Marx, more Mises in Portuguese, of course, and there was a whole classical liberal movement there. And many of these people now who we have trained as a part of our leadership are now like in state parliaments. Sure, they're not part of our organization anymore, but they are our alumni and they are still affecting change this way too. So we do not prevent that. And many of our people are going to do that. But we do not focus only on politicians like some other organizations. In Brazil, Kim Kanaguri is one of the people who figures prominently there. Fabio Osterman was another one and were largely instrumental in organizing those large protests that ended with Dilma Youssef being ousted from office. There are people here and I think there are even people in Brazil who count themselves as being among the libertarian ranks who were incredibly surprised at the robustness of the student movement in Brazil. Can you speak to that at all in terms of where that came from? Yeah. So Fabio is a friend of mine and Kim has also been working with us. So we were really in the forefront. We are not the only organization was working on Brazilian issues. So they have like a very robust landscape of think tanks, etc. But I think it was a combination of that we really had the right approach and it was just also the time they were sick of so many decades of cronyism and leftist populist policies there and they were just sick of it. And so we were there with the right people, with the right training and the right ideas. And so I think it was just the timing that also really were played into that. However, now it has been a year basically since many of these events happened. De Maruzeth was hosted more recently, but we still have like a huge demand for our programs. We just trained last year several hundreds of them that close to a thousand and that's that interest continues. So it's not like a fluke as far as I can tell. But if you can sustain that momentum, that is a good question. And we have to look into that and we are improving our programs constantly to be still being attractive to these students. What does this training look like? What do you do to help student advocates become better advocates for liberty? Yeah. So it really depends what we're talking about because we have like a leadership pipeline. So we invest more resources in the people who are the most active. But if you talk about the first step, one of the basic tenets of those is learning about our status as 5-1-3, what they can do, what they cannot do, about the history of the organization. But more interestingly, we're talking about persuasion. How we as classical liberal can get the ideas of liberty across in a better way, that we are not going to yell at other people, that we're trying to understand where they're coming from. Because you can see so much activism, if you want to call it that way. On Facebook, where people are just like writing angry comments all day, all night. And that is not very productive. So we have a different approach in the trying to make young people realize that this is not the best way of going about it, but they should be like friendly, kind and understanding. And I think that works much better because when I discovered the ideas of liberty, I was that was in the after the financial crisis, the Great Recession. And I became very passionate when I was reading Hayek and Mises and Rothbard and people like that. And I thought I found the truth and many young people feel that way. It's like an exciting world view. And then sometimes they become like so ingrained in this that they just see everything in black and white. And I certainly have, I think, pushed people away from the ideas. And it's the last thing that I want to do. So I've learned from my mistakes and we're trying to really push it forward. But we also talk about fundraising and project management, because everything that we do, the 98 conferences, our media to a large extent is driven by our volunteers. So they have to learn how to an event with several hundred people and they're learning really, really valuable skills doing that. And I can honestly say, without students for liberty, I would not have a fraction of the skills that I have today. I have to learn much more. I know I'm still young, but most parents tell their kids what they should be doing. Most universities tell kids what they should be doing. We believe in them that they can do great things and we see that every week. Just recently, one of our so-called local coordinators, one of our volunteers was on French national television quoting Frederick Pasteur and defending Uber. These are kids who are like 22 years, 23 years old. And he's not an outlier. We have thousands of days and they really have a huge impact for the ideas of liberty because we trust them and they come up with their own programs and ideas. I think it's actually just a hazard of being a young person where if you are aware of something that you believe to be the truth, you are perhaps a little more brusque with people than you ought to be. What would you tell young people who are interested in spreading the ideas of liberty to avoid engaging in that kind of turning people off? What to avoid is basically when you talk to someone, our natural inclination, inclination, not only for young people, but for everyone, is always to respond and give like counterarguments that somebody is talking and like everyone gives me like a very good argument right now why the minimum wage is the best thing ever. And like I'm already thinking about all the arguments I would have against that point. And one should try to observe one's mind and if you're doing that and try to overcome that. So just trying to listen first and understanding where the other party is coming from. And if you do that first, I think that's the most important step because then the other party, let's say you're talking to a left winger, realize that you actually listening to them, that you understand them. And there's this wonderful saying and I'm probably butchering that, but we should strive for that. We can articulate the ideas of the other side, right wing or left wing better than they ever could. We should be striving for that. And because that really means that we understand where they're coming from, that we understand the arguments and then and only then it is really useful to talk about our approach and our ideas because then the other side would listen more. And that goes back to things from Carnegie, how to influence and influence people, which is standard reading for us and training on emotional intelligence, which we're trying to incorporate more and more in our programs. How much do you encourage then the people in this leadership pipeline or the people you're working with and training to learn about the ideas of the other side? This is one of the things that I have noticed. So we have interns come through here and the work that I do with libertarianism.org, I spend these months, I'm talking to people who are new to libertarianism and there's often this attitude of, I've found the truth in Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and Bastiat and those guys knew what they were talking about and so why should I spend time really reading the people that I disagree with, that you get this a lot from kids who have gotten big into objectivism, that I've read Iran so I don't really need to read John Rawls or any of those anti-human philosophers. So is that something, is it how important you think it is to really learn those foundations of the beliefs that you may think are out to lunch? So it is absolutely crucial, but it really depends also on the preferences of the students. So we do not encourage all of our students to become like perfect academics. So if you are just there because you're part of the community and you happen to really like the ideas and you want to organize some social events where you gather with other people and talk about the ideas, that is totally fine, but the people who really want to get out there and want to talk with other people, I think they quickly learn that they need to do that because once you actually listen to someone else and do not stay only in your echo chamber of like libertarian groups and organizations, then you quickly learn that they also have sometimes very sophisticated ideas. So one of the first things that I did when I came here, free speech is not such an issue in Europe compared to the United States right now on campus at least. The first thing that I did, I was reading people from the Frankfurt School, like what kind of arguments they had. I was shocked to see that unfortunately the arguments are quite logically coherent. They're misguided and I think they have the wrong approach, but they're logical coherent and that's the only way how I could approach people on campus and try to engage with them because if you're just like in their face and just like say like, oh, you have to believe in the constitution and in free speech, it's not a value of theirs. And if you don't understand that from the get go, you will never be able to communicate to other people and we are filtering our people very selectively. We go for quality over quantity. I want people in our organization who have a good knowledge and understanding of the ideas, but who are also kind human beings because that's how you like form a community, which is also attractive to others because there's so many other groups out there which are very hostile and they work on an anti-left mentality or the left is working on an anti-right mentality and that's not how you're building budgets and that's not how you get more people excited about the idea which I truly believe have been changing the world and can make the world even better than it is today. In Europe and the United States there has been the rise of, at least in the United States, it's called the alt-right and in Europe it is populist nationalist parties in Spain, it's populist, communist party there. What do they have to offer in terms of a pitch for young people and how do you evaluate the values of libertarianism against that kind of argument that they make? Yeah, we see this threat coming up in many, many different countries. There's like Le Pen and France as well and the interesting thing is that this is always very, not very encouraging, right, because we're saying like, oh, we're talking about classical liberal ideas for so many years, why is it, why is so many people still excited about populism and it is true and what can you do? So even though that France has gone such a, like, let's talk about France for a second, has taken such a right turn, it is also true that it has seen and in France of all places like a strong classical liberal movement, one of the major German newspapers was just reporting about that, that young people really embrace these ideas. So I think the first thing is that we need, again, like the right people in place who are advocating for the ideas and then they stand up for like against this populism and people become sick of it. We see that with Trump, that people are like his approval is in the basement, right? And people are ready for like a new message and left and right dichotomy doesn't work so well. So I think it is always like also an opportunity, but how to do this specifically, I cannot give you one answer because we very much work with the Hayekian framework of decentralized knowledge and local knowledge. So we believe only that the leaders and France or in Brazil, that they have the right approach. And so we don't tell them what to do. We tell them what has worked in other countries and our 10 years of organizing stuff on campus all around the world, but we don't tell them how to approach it and how to engage with the public discourse in their specific country because we would otherwise also endanger them because if you use, for instance, to term free market or capitalism in like some of the African countries, that can get you in real trouble. And our students have been in trouble even though they have used like softer language. Where have been some of the strongest, we talked about Brazil, of course, that's an obvious example. But specifically in Europe, where have we seen some of the biggest growth of classical liberal libertarian ideas in Europe? The biggest growth of classical liberal ideas, it's in a bunch of countries and it's really striking. Like I've already alluded to France, but when we started on the board, actually, we had like seven people sitting around and planning the future, how we're going to do this organizing events. And we said, like, oh, we're not going to touch France because nobody is libertarian there whatsoever. And now it's like one of our strongholds there. Besides that, the Iberian peninsula, they have nearly every week, they have a massive event with hundreds of people talking about very intellectual topics. They have a very strong leadership team there. Georgia, the country is also very strong and I was blown away by that when I read a report. So each time when they organize something, they write like an after-action report and they wrote 15 pages and they had 500 people there for a one-day event. They have been on a campus tour before to tell other people about that. They have been on television before this, talking about the event. They had Subway there, Coca-Cola, all kinds of corporate sponsors there and they waste all their own money for this event. So we didn't have to pay like one dollar of the money that we are raising here in the United States and also abroad. And so there's really like pockets of many pockets where we have like strong, strong leaders and also I would say Latin America and Guatemala. Of course, we all know about the University of Francisco Marroquín but our leaders are organizing frequently events with like 300 people there just talking also to high school students. So there are many different countries out there which are very strong. You mentioned Ron Paul earlier and he seemed to, it's a lot of my colleagues, a lot of my younger colleagues got involved in libertarianism because they got involved with Ron Paul's campaigns but he's kind of dropped away from that. Rand has always been an influence but what sorts of are a lot of your students, kids who grew up in libertarian homes and kind of it's just it's been in the water for them or what brought them into it in the first place. So if you talk about the United States specifically, it is still Ron Paul because we will still see the videos and are still excited about that but it is ebbing away and we have seen that because we have been growing a lot in the United States and once Ron Paul was gone, we saw that our growth was not as dramatically anymore. So that certainly has an effect if you have a public figure like that. Besides that, I think the network of institutions in this country is very strong. Like I've been an alumnus of IHS, of the Institute for Main Studies, of Mercators and many other organizations out there. So many people are quoting that they have been influenced by them and I mean you're working on this podcast and I'm sure many people will hear about libertarianism for the first time through your good work here and that is also an answer to that and I would say it's not very often that people really grow up in a libertarian household because we still are very much a minority even though growing but that is rarely the case. So we have an organization also on staff, both examples where people came from the very hardcore left where people were reading Marx Day in and Day out and then they discovered okay maybe it doesn't work and then they studied Mises and the Socialist Calculation Debate and saw suddenly like there is something else to this and learn more about that. For instance, we also had one leader in Venezuela again. His name is Oscar. I don't want to go into detail but he grew up in a very poor neighborhood in Venezuela, even for Venezuelan standards and he grew up very much committed to the ideas of Marxism. He was even teaching others until 2012 when he went to a conference that reorganized about private solutions to public problems and that was the first time that his worldview was challenged significantly. So he had to think a lot about that and he started studying more and he became part of our leadership. We trained him and now he is an Austrian economist. He's actually trained. He's now working at the only classical level think tank in Venezuela and spreading the ideas of liberty not only there but throughout whole Latin America. But we also have people who grew up in a very conservative household and then suddenly saw like a reason video or went to a conference of ours and then they see okay these are actually nice human beings who happen to believe in radical ideas about freedom and free markets and all of that stuff and so they come come from all variety of ways and also of course here it's often connected to an event and objectives in the United States not so much a board. One of the issues that so I was a campus coordinator for a young libertarians group now 20 years ago on a college campus and this was of course before well before students for liberty and the it was an extreme challenge to try to organize anything this is also when the Internet was fairly young so it was it made it that much more difficult but one of the challenges that you that I think you probably face even today is that you have cohorts of students they arrive on campus they may be very active for you and then they're gone and in terms of maintaining that kind of trajectory and maintaining that kind of momentum to expand and continue to spread the ideas of liberty what what does that pose any specific unique challenge. I mean this is the business that we're working in so leadership transitions is part that also also every student learns from us like each time you're building up a group or something we said like OK one year before you graduate you should think about like who's the next leader that you should like try to get in place and doing that so we really try to teach that to our students does it always happen now does it always succeed now but this is basically the the nature of the game that we are playing and so you also have to offset offset that with systematic outreach and you were alluding to and thank you for your services on the campus back in the day you are alluding to that it's sometimes hard to find like other people and so you have to do systematic outreach and nowadays with the internet that's much easier so we are using not only Facebook graph search because everybody's using that but we also doing this with in conjunction with sophisticated training how to use these tools in center structures how to incentivize the students to do this systematically and scripts which helps them to get like more names and reaching out to more people and write them to events and tell them about the resources that we can offer them because one thing that we do for instance this country is OK you're interested in free speech please make the case to us that you can organize an event on your campus tell us about that and then we send you resources and then they can can use that and we find these people systematically and they don't have to necessarily be a group which is just branded students for liberty so we also open for young Americans for liberty groups or social for sensible drug reform we are like a loose network as long as the people work towards the goal that we agree with a goal towards liberty then we are happy to help them is there much collaboration between SFL groups and then groups that are saying not libertarian at all but might agree on a specific issue I ask because there's it often seems like there's this the example I sometimes give is from back when the Snowden records came out and libertarians were kind of way out on in front on that one because we'd been you know talking about state surveillance for a while when other people weren't paying attention to it and we were some of the first to condemn it and so a lot of say Kato scholars were in the news when this was coming out and there was this pushback on the left of you know don't get tricked by these libertarians like it may look like they're your friends on these issues but really what they want to do is dismantle the welfare state or whatever else so is there is there a concerted effort to reach out on say single issues where there's agreement with groups that are not libertarian and is their problem getting them to work with to work together given the disagreement on the other issues it depends on the case by case basis I would say so we are one of the I think few organizations who can actually build interesting coalitions because we are what tend libertarian we do not hide that we want to have the objectivist within our leadership but also people who believe in minimal government or no government and so we are very heterogeneous there but we also try to build bridges to both the left and right as I've said and we do that so we are one of the few organizations where you can find just last year the conference you can find the NIA the National Rifle Association but you also can find the ACLU the American Civil Liberties Union so as an organization level we really try to do that and do it more and very often they really thank us for being there so recently we were in the protest for the travel bands and we were there and saying of course of course you need like some checks and balances in the system but you should not just ban refugees because this is a nation of refugees and of course there's also self-interest because like I have a visa as well and I'm living here and people thanked us very often that was the majority of responses were very positive thank you for being here thank you for standing up for that but also some guy took like one of the books we had there which was called the morality of capitalism said like is this for free and we said yes and he took it and ripped it apart and threw it away but that was that was like one guy but mostly people were reacting very nicely and it works well but it really depends on the group and this is this is on the organization level what groups do individually it really differs some people have like really an interest of having like concealed carry on campus or something and they're working more with the right but just at the University of Maryland we had several events now with like hundreds of students where you have a variety of groups there and the coalition is built by our leader Ethan Pritchard his name he's reaching out to them and he's saying like we have all of these different groups there from the left and the right we want to talk about free speech you will be missing out when you're not there and then they're showing up and talk about one another and often it's the very first contact libertarianism often can say there's the economic side of it and there's the social side the social liberty side of it our students do you notice that students are more or less interested in one versus the other do they seem to be care more about the social angle and less about the economic or the other way around so one thought is that generally the younger generation is more socially liberal than the older generation that's just not even in libertarian circles it's just like statistically true for all different circles and we also see that but I would say that some people of course are interested in one issue they were the other but most of the people are still coming from the economic angle to the ideas and when we recruit people we really want to make sure that they have a firm understanding of the ideas so we test also that like what is your favorite thinker or like what is the book that influenced you the most that we're getting at that and economics is really the most important and I would say like it's the backbone also like I studied political economy and I have to defend my dissertation next month and so I believe this is really something that every student should understand but of course some people are like more interested in marriage equality and some people are more in gun rights but I really want to facilitate and continue to foster an environment where libertarians from both sides from the left and the right can feel themselves as part of a community because it is perfectly valid to be libertarian but hold deeply conservative values it's perfectly fine as long as you don't want to have the state or the government impose your preference over others and it's a very reasonable preference and not everyone wants to party and smoke pot and I don't consume drugs I don't even drink alcohol or that much and I think it's totally fine to be that and we want to have a welcoming environment there and we see this quite frequently that also younger conservative like people with conservative values also join our leadership. Do we know much about how young people in the United States members of Students for Liberty how they voted in 2016 of course we had two of the most despised candidates in at least recent American history and how they broke down. I don't have any firm data on that but when I talk to our students it seems that most people were voting for Gary Johnson. Sure. Like the libertarian alternative that they were basically appalled by both alternatives and yeah really didn't see that coming and now we are living in a post-election world with Donald Trump in the office and it's certainly an interesting challenge because it's quite easy for a libertarian organization and libertarian students to stand up against Obama and criticize him and we will continue to do the same thing with Donald Trump in office. We had a vent here with like 90 people in our office here in Washington during the inauguration week and the message that I sent to people over there is that it really doesn't depend on the personalities. We have to stand for liberty. It's principles over expediency and Hayek taught us that and we really have to adhere to that. So we still try to reach out to the left and the right and we will say that if Donald Trump is doing something that is beneficial for the economy or something that is very good for liberty we will say yes that's good and if he is wrong on something then we should criticize him. I raise that specific question because I know several libertarians who describe themselves as libertarians who were ardent supporters of Donald Trump and I've struggled to understand exactly why. I mean I talked to many people and for me as a European it was first impossible to understand but now I think I understand it much more and I don't claim that I have a full picture first of all but it seems to me that many people latch on on like one specific issue for instance the Supreme Court and then they say okay Donald Trump would be so much better than Hillary so it's always in comparison to Hillary and people are very skeptical if she would have done anything good and people were very afraid of her being in charge and so they latch on to this one issue and then say yeah he would be much better on that and say like Trump is my guy and then maybe take it too far that they only look at this one issue but on like embrace him and all of his policies. That's what I see very often when I talk to people at least. Trump's election appears to be a catastrophe in so many ways but it's nice to try to pry out some silver linings in it. Do you think that there's a chance that the left, the young people who were really excited by Obama and a lot of them, I mean there seemed to be an inexplicable excitement among many for Hillary that didn't seem to have anything to do with her at all. Her actual policy. There was some like platonic ideal of Hillary that they were fans of instead but it made it harder sometimes to argue against the state to just make our public choice arguments or our moral arguments because there was this exciting well-spoken dashing guy in the White House who everyone loved. So do you think that there's an opportunity with Trump to reach out to particularly people on the left who might have been opposed to or very skeptical of libertarianism but suddenly are maybe a little more willing to listen to our arguments about how you shouldn't invest a ton of power in these people? Yeah, that's certainly the argument that many of our students are making. So I hope that we can reach out more to them because after the election the left imploded on campus and they could not or in general and they couldn't really deal with the new reality and we can say we told you so but I don't think that argument alone will be very effective. So we need to show them why the libertarian body of thought is in general much better in order to address some of the issues that they care about and so libertarians have become much better and much more diverse in what they're talking about. It's not only about economics even though I think it's very important that we understand all of that and that we talk about these thinkers but it's also about minority rights and about what is happening to black communities and what their concerns are and that we are taking these things seriously and that we engage with them and talk about that more. And I see many libertarian organizations doing this more and more and we also do that and I think that is the right approach. So I hope that we will be successful at it but we have to wait some more time in order to see if the left is coming in huge ways into the libertarian movement. I certainly would like that. On that diversity the libertarian movement has long had a reputation for being a bunch of white dudes. I guess what are the demographic breakdowns look like for student groups now? So I'm very happy to report that at least on the female male division we are like much better. So very often at our events we have like 40% women there. And I think it's also due because you address like many more topics and because we try to really have like a community which is not based on like anti-something but like post something and being like more open to discussions about all kinds of different ideas. I think that certainly helps but I think it's still mostly white people. And I've noticed this when I came specifically to this country and I found myself doing like a training and there were like 250 libertarians in there and also like conservative people and there were four black people. And only one of them was African American. The other people were from one from the Bermudas and the other two from Africa. And I was talking to them like for an hour or so and was trying to figure out why. And I realized that I didn't understand the some of the issues that they are facing and what they care about. Similarly I went to like a donor event and there was only one black donor. There are not many people around them. I also talked with him for an hour to try to understand like why he thinks that the black community is not hearing this message or is not attracted to this message. And at the end of the conversation I also asked him like how many people like how many white people like have asked you this question. And I'm not special by any way but he said like you're the only one. And we're talking always about how do we get more women in the movement? But apparently this question we don't raise enough. So thank you for raising it and how we can change it. So we are right now working on actually a proposal which I wanna have like a staffer just focused on historical black colleges and universities and trying to engage with these communities more and bringing the libertarian message there and trying to get them more into our leadership because it's just very natural. Even if you let's say you have like a black person and you have red mises and hayek and rand and you're like super excited about that. And then you see like a group of 100 people only white people talking about their ideas. Would you go there? You don't know if you're allowed in that club, right? And it's just like very natural. And so we would really try to make an effort in order to bridge that more and try to speak that community more. But we at first have to understand like how do they see capitalism? Why did they see it negatively? Why do they believe more in the government if that's really the place and all of these sorts of things. Have you come to any conclusions about that? I mean, I've only had a couple of conversations. So I'm still very ignorant and I still have to learn much more. And I wanna be very clear on that. But from what I've heard is that capitalism is very much connected as a system to slavery. That's part of it. It is also to believe that federalism is very good for black communities because they believe that Jim Quo got like the federal government stepped in and got rid of Jim Quo. They don't know that like most politicians back in that day, back in the day were really a bunch against that and that even like the president had like close to like a nervous breakdown because he didn't wanna pass that law. And so it's basically the trust in the federal government to step in and to improve the situation. I think that is like another piece of the puzzle because they see the states as problems because police is state. But they think that the federal government might be able to help. But capitalism in itself is very much connected to colonialism and to slavery. And so we have to address that. We have to learn more about that. We have to learn more about the thinker that are behind these arguments and then address it head on and try to reach out more. But it's not that uncommon for young people to believe that kicking a debate or kicking a decision-making power from the local level to a higher level of government is going to result in some sort of more responsible decision. Fortunately, it's the opposite. So libertarians really embrace decentralization and more power on the ground. And that might be like another argument that they see or if he would give more power to the local cops or something then they would be even more tyrannical. But also research from Eleanor Ostrom has shown that that is not very true because if you have more local police in the community who comes from the community, there's so much more interactions between them and it's much more peaceful than if you had the state governing everything and as people you don't know is policing your area and interacting with your crowd in a wrong way. So if I'm one of those people who's being questioned and someone's telling, so what is this libertarianism thing? Are there arguments that you see or ways of presenting it that you see young libertarians, people new to libertarianism make that you think are particularly ineffective, that you wish they'd stop and then ones that you think, you wish they'd make more of that sort of either argument or description of libertarianism or just way of presenting it. That goes back to the whole persuasion thing and what is like the best arguments. And so one part is that you first have to understand what the other party really cares about because if you just come up with your best arguments independent of what the other person cares about, then that will not be very effective. That's one part. The other part is that I think we have to be careful with moral arguments. I think we both have to make the moral case as well as the utilitarian case or like why freedom is important and freedom of the word index and all that stuff. But with the morality, we should be careful and I think that is the mistake that I've made and what I see many young people are doing that they just think, okay, whatever the government does is evil. Therefore, if you advocate for policy acts, you are evil. And that is like, it's a sledgehammer approach where there's no way out for the other party to really engage in the conversation. Like where do we go from there? And I mean, we should make the moral argument and we should point out that the government and all their policies will finally end up in some sort of violence against people. And we should try to make that case but we should be careful in leading people to that because it's such a radical different view that they have never heard that one should have a gradual approach starting with what the other person cares about first. That would be my general advice. So I shouldn't just shout taxationist theft at people? Maybe not, no. Or just loudly call them a statist? Yeah. Does that... It seems to work okay. You're thinking don't do that? No, no, maybe not. And that's also why we try to brand us differently. So we have slogans for instance that says like T-shirts and people love it, it says peace, love, liberty. That's what it's about, right? Stop bombing people. It's about respecting other people, love them like your neighbor. Because like libertarianism is the only ideology which really trusts people because if you talk to both the left and the right, if it really goes down to something, why they wanna impose their worldview is because they think that people are stupid because they think they cannot govern themselves. We believe that people can actually do that. And the other slogan is don't treat on anyone. It's not only about me, me, me, me. It's not about like this isolated individualism but it's about don't treat on anyone. It's also about other people. And that is something that we also have to go against on campus because most people when they hear libertarianism, it's things like we are just like radical individualists who just wanna fight for ourselves and just build like the empire and screw everyone else. But no, we understand the value of community. We understand that complex social problems have to be addressed by complex institutions which are built of many, many people. We know that we have social needs. As much as we have the need for food, we have the need for acceptance of others. And once you understand that and like learn a little bit about evolution of psychology, then you know that this is not true for libertarians and we have to also make the case for that. That seems like it presents a particularly good opportunity for libertarians in the coming four to eight years where you have a broadly right wing for lack of a better term anti-immigrant, anti-trade, push and on the other side, sort of a would be totalitarian anti-speech, anti-fascism is what a lot of these groups call themselves who seem every bit as scary as the other side. I think what we can really do differently is that we should stress more the positive aspects of our ideology because we get all teary eyed if we read eye pencil, right? But why? Because we marvel at the market and that's the word that Hayek used in his essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society. The price system is a marvel. If we can get this excitement to other people, like look at a supermarket and think about the thousand of thousand of people behind that, how is it possible that this most boring item, like the tomato soup is still interesting, is still there, is I can eat that and I don't die? Like how is it even possible? Think about it. Like this sort of excitement and the positivity of the ideology, also talking about not only that we have erased poverty from, I think absolute poverty was in 1990 around 37%. Now it is at like since 2015, less than 10%. Like also explaining what this means. Like just think about all these data points, all these individuals who used to work like themselves to death and only lived until 40 years old. Now they have a family, they have more options. Whole countries like China and India, suddenly they can get like much better education, much better healthcare. Have these countries still problems? Sure, I'll be in a perfect society? No, is the world perfect? No, but look at all of these positive developments and say like, this is why I believe classical liberalism and libertarian ideas are so important and excite other people for that. I think that is a message that people should hear more and that's independent of who is in charge because there's so much negativity out there. The left is hating the right, the country is really divided and we see this in this country, many other countries as well. And if we had like a positive message, which is like more uniting and not only complaining about all the things that are going wrong, I think that really resonates with people. So this week as we record this, you guys have got, this weekend you've got a pretty cool event going on here in DC, why don't you tell us about that? Yeah, that is our 10th year anniversary of the International Students for Liberty Conference. So over 1,000 people have registered and then tons of partner organization in the Kato Institute is one of our main sponsors of course coming there. So we expect like 1,500 people who are celebrating with us, Liberty. It's an event where people talk about all kinds of topics from our foreign policy about drug reform, to prison reform and all kinds of other things. And we have great speakers there when Paul is going to be there, Steve Forbes is going to be there, Amir Nasa is going to be there, who is a refugee actually, who is in Canada right now who cannot travel to us because of the travel ban, which is very unfortunate. He's going to speak there about his topic about how Liberty can actually help to argue against some radical forms of Islam which he experienced when he grew up in the country of Sudan. And so there's a variety of speakers there and also it's not only for students because last year alone, there were 50% of the attendees were non-students. So it's really like a movement event and people interested in the ideas old and young. There is a conspiracy theory that I've heard from multiple sources about students for liberty. And it goes something like this, you hold your annual international conference around Valentine's Day and we're recording this on Valentine's Day, also the birthday of Frederick Douglass. And the idea is that you're trying to actively make more libertarians by holding it this close to Valentine's Day. I see. I guess like the people who are coming up with the conspiracy theories are smarter than we are but it's actually a good idea. So that we are going to grow as a movement more just by, okay, I see where you're going with that. I don't think that is really conscious that we made that decision, but it cannot definitely harm. And we know that for instance, Alexander McOwen found his wife through the organization and we have many of these cases. So there is love to be found in the ideas. And I think Valentine's Day, I think it's wonderful that we recorded on this day because we all have a love for liberty here in this building, especially at the Cato Institute and we should be more open about that. So maybe we can expect to see a tender for libertarians from you guys. I don't know. We do have quite a few entrepreneurs among our ranks and many people start businesses. So that might be one of those projects that maybe we see out of coming out of students for liberty soon, which is exciting. And just one more note. So people can go to www.isfLC.org and can check it out and hopefully register and I would love to see you there. And on the topic of alumni also it's very uplifting because it's like one part of our work is empowering students on campus to learn more and to become better leaders. But all of these people then follow their own career and that's really our theory of social change which is based on Hayek's intellectuals and socialism because we do not only need people on the hill who are affecting change because if the ideas in society didn't change then everything will be reverted just in the next period. We need journalists. We need people like you here in the think tank world. We need media folks. We need journalists. And we have now many, many success stories of people who have started businesses or we have founded over 18 non-profits right now in the United States and abroad who are now working with the Atlas Network and other organizations and affecting change that way as well. And that's really exciting to see because it's not only about the leaders today but also the leaders of the future and those we are trying to create. What do libertarians not study enough in school? Libertarians. Yes. What should libertarians be studying that they typically don't? Aaron made reference to understanding the arguments of your opponents but in terms of deeply understanding a body of thought what should they be studying? First I heard your question differently and I said like nobody is studying libertarianism in school and so they don't become libertarians in the first place. But I would say and this is close to my heart it's probably psychology and specifically political psychology. So I'm a fan of Jonathan Hight's work. He's also going to speak at our conference actually and his book The Righteous Mind is a fantastic read. I recommend it to your listeners very much because it and I'm sure he would be mad at me if I summarized it that way but he basically summarizes how smart human beings can really become very irrational when talking about politics. And this is something very deeply ingrained with us because the ideas that we have we identify with them. They are part of us. And if somebody is arguing against those ideas and undermines them which sometimes happens it is somewhat alike as a personal attack against us and that can lead all kinds of different responses that are inappropriate. That's one point. And it's also about emotional intelligence. Actually understanding how other people think trying to be empathetic, trying to really be open about what's going on because we are putting our students in very difficult situations where they speak in front of hundreds of people. This is nerve wracking. Maybe they think they are imposters. I certainly felt that I was very intimidated when I was around all these leaders like Alexander McCoban and others. And if we address that more and if we understand more of this thinking then we can become more productive ourselves, better leaders ourselves and can speak more effective to people who are not libertarians. So you're in your first six months as CEO of Students for Liberty and I'm sure you have big plans for the organization. So what do you see in the future of Students for Liberty and the libertarian student movement more generally? To answer your first question first, we are currently working through an extensive process of creating a vision document for the next five years. And it has been very productive and we involve volunteers and all kinds of staffers all around the world because we have 41 staff members. And it has been very fruitful. So three pillars we will focus on as an organization is the community aspect, being like reaching out to ever more people but also being like the kind and reasonable alternative even though with radical ideas alternative on campus. The second thing is like really improving our training because we have trained just last year or this year or so it's only in our fiscal year nine months in over 2,000 people. We wanna have more impact but we also wanna really be the go-to libertarian organization for young people so that they can learn more, become better leaders. So increasing our pipeline. So we now have for instance also like top 100 retreats where the top volunteers in the region for instance Europe or America then come all together and train one another and get trained from others for like three days in different leadership principles. And the third thing which I'm also very excited about is about incubate because many of our students come up with unique projects. We have people for instance in France, Ukraine and Vienna and some people working also in the United States who have started a startup incubator helping businesses get started working with big companies together but also teaching why a free society and a free market is necessary for that. That's not something we could have come up with but they were just pursuing that and were very able to pull it off. We also had like an event where there was a massive concert it was like 2,000 people, it was a festival but they also had speakers like Tom Palmer there. So having parts cultural stuff but also partly libertarian topics. So really focusing on these students who are doing unique things and helping them setting them up with a network giving them specific training. I think that would be also very interesting and so that they also have at some point like a top 50 we tweet where we're bringing all the best leaders like the people you mentioned like Fabio Osterman from Brazil talking to our American leaders talking to our European leaders and then they can really engage in high level knowledge sharing and really continue to change the world in the future. That's one part and the other part is that we see so many of our alumni now starting businesses and engaging in nonprofits and becoming academics and really continue to have a change for the ideas that we all embrace here in this room and that's just very wonderful to see. For libertarianism in general, I mean I'm very optimistic because I'm looking at our organization and I see so many good organizations like the Cato Institute for Main Studies doing tremendous work and I think it has a huge effect and libertarians as a group have been growing and I don't think that 10 years ago you could envision that we have a conference like this here in DC where 1500 people would show up. So I'm optimistic about that. Will this translate into change in the short term? I don't know. I'm more skeptical about the short one but very optimistic about in the long run. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org.