 Hello, I'm Chris Kelton, and this is the first live Q&A for the Historical Controversies podcast. Welcome to everybody that is watching live, and of course, for those of you who cannot join us at the moment, this will be on YouTube and on Facebook later for you to watch. But let's dive right into this thing. The first question we have comes from a listener, Todd. He says, I'm curious as to your motivations for covering the Civil War and the history leading up to it. Are you drawing parallels to our current political situation? Do you think that another split and war is coming? Is this simply an attempt to provide a comprehensive and balanced history of the period, or perhaps a cautionary tale? The why is actually a lot less dramatic than you might have hoped. I am in the early stages of a PhD in history, and my area of specialty will be on 19th century United States history. So a lot of the decision to cover the Civil War is a way of economizing on effort. I have to do a lot of Civil War reading anyway. My dissertation will be on the Civil War. So this is easier for me than things that I will not have to study so heavily. But of course, the Civil War is also a very, very popular topic among libertarians. I think there are a lot of liberal, a lot of excuse me, lessons that can be drawn from it. And there's a lot of this history that even people who think that they've read everything that there is to read on this, there's always something new to be told. So there's a lot of reasons that I decided to do it. But a lot of it is just, it's easier for me to do something that I'm already reading a lot on. As far as the, are you drawing parallels to our current political situation? It's a question that I've actually been asked about this quite a bit by people that just I meet in person. And the answer is no, mostly because I don't like topical politics. I don't pay attention to the news or anything of that nature. Mark Twain once said, if you don't read the news, you'll be uninformed. If you read the news, you'll be misinformed. And I decided a few years back that I would rather be uninformed than misinformed. So I do get a little bit of what's going on because you can't really avoid it unless you live under a rock. But I'm not a big fan of topical politics. I always joke that I'm not really interested in politics until the politicians have been dead for at least 50 years. So I don't know of another civil war is coming. I'm always a little fidgety when people try to use lessons from history to make predictions about the future. There's nothing really wrong with it. But that's not, of course, what history is. And so, you know, they always say history repeats itself. And that's true in the sense that there are similarities in different areas of history, but of course, there are differences as well. What I will say is this, if you look at the history of the 19th century, our current political situation, regardless of how little I try to pay attention to it, is is far less divisive, far less hostile than it was in the 19th century. We're talking about a period in 1856, right? When a guy was beaten into a coma on the floor of the Senate by another congressman, for God's sake, like our politicians are getting along far too well today. Democrats and Republicans get along far too well for my tastes anymore. So as as divisive as as things seem right now, especially after the Trump election, I still don't think it holds a candle to the 19th century. Now, I do know that there's some talk about like California being split up into states. I hope we see some stuff like that, whether that kind of action, whether modern secession would lead to war, I have no idea. And I'm not immodest enough to try to hazard a guess on that. It's more just, I think the Civil War is an interesting topic. And a lot of people agree with me, so we're going to spend some time on that. From Nathan, your episode on the formation of the Confederate government was quite interesting, and I would like to do further reading on this topic. My question is then, firstly, what sources did you use for your research on that particular episode? And secondly, where would I be able to find the records of the debates and proposals for the temporary and permanent Confederate constitutions? The first part of your question is easy to answer. I used a book called A Government of Our Own. The Making of the Confederacy was published in 1994 by William C. Davis. It's a wonderful, incredibly well researched book. I actually feel bad sometimes when I only use a single book for an episode. Because I try to make sure I read and draw from different secondary sources because you have competing narratives. But for a topic like this, there's not a whole lot of alternative histories to pull from. So there really is just this. And for a lot of episodes, in fact, there's just one book that just really is the comprehensive work on that topic. And that would be William C. Davis's book, A Government of Our Own. It's a bit of a dismal read. It's a lot of political debate. I skipped through a lot of the boring stuff in the episode. So there's a lot in there that I didn't talk about. So if you are interested in it, it's, of course, still worth picking up and reading. But if you flip to the back of it, I wanted to bring it into the studio with me actually so I could show this, but I'm in the middle of of moving across the country so all my books are packed up, so I don't have it. But if you flip to the back of it and you look at the notes, you'll find that there are no clean records of the constitutional debates. And I suspect I don't know this. I don't know who Nathan is, but I suspect that the second part of that question is referring to the actual United States constitutional debates in which you do have left behind some very clean and comprehensive records. This would be Max Farron's records of the constitutional convention, which were actually from James Madison's notes. And they also have the publication of the ratification debates, at least to those that have survived, which not all of them did, but some did and they've been published and you can buy them on Amazon. And if you look at books like Brian McClanahan's Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution and you look back at his notes, he's, of course, pulling from multiple sources. He's a good historian, but James Madison and Max Farron made it so easy from him because so much of his notes are just Max Farron's records of the debate from James Madison's notes and the collection. I forget who collected the ratification debates, but those two sources are almost all of his notes and you don't have anything that clean when it comes to the Confederate Constitution. So the notes for William Davis was just a lot of personal letters where politicians who are part of the debate were writing to other people about what they were talking about. So this is I mostly say this because William Davis did an incredible job in compiling all of these letters and sifting through them and reconstructing this debate. It was not an easy task. I suspect he's pulling from archives in Alabama, archives in Georgia, archives in all kinds of different places to construct this history. And I think he did a wonderful job. He's a great historian. Garrett asks, I had never heard of the 19th century filibusters before you talked about them in the podcast. Were there any other filibustering expeditions aside from just Cuba and Nicaragua? The answer is yes, but they weren't very interesting. So there were some others that took place down in New Mexico. I think I might have mentioned those briefly. There were some that actually tried to invade parts of Canada in, I think, 1830s, 1812s. I don't remember the details of these. There's one historian. I think his name is Robert May, who's written a few books on filibusters. I have a bibliographical essay on the historical controversies page at Mises.org where I list all of these books that talk about them, but they weren't anything as juicy as the filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. But I'm glad that somebody asked this question because I do also want to mention that for those of you who may not have listened to those episodes, the filibustering episodes are really interesting. Since we started this podcast a year ago, I was supposed to mention this in the introduction, by the way, this week marks the one year anniversary of the podcast. The 53rd episode will air on Wednesday. But since I've started this, I have done no other episodes that I've gotten as many comments and as many compliments on as the episodes on the filibuster in Nicaragua. And for those who did not listen to that episode, the filibuster in the 19th century did not refer to a congressman standing on the floor of the Senate and talking for 13 hours, which would be a really, really boring topic. It actually referred to private military expeditions in other countries to try to conquer them and institute American-style governments of some sort, whatever that that may mean to the person conducting the filibuster. And in the 19th century, there were two really famous ones that took place in the 1850s, one led by Narciso Lopez in Cuba and one led by William Walker in the country of Nicaragua. And I did a six-part series on the Nicaragua episodes. And on the metrics for episode downloads, these are my least listened to episodes. People skip over them, yet they are also the most complimented ones. I get so many people that call them out specifically to tell me, oh, I've never heard of this. This is amazing. So this is kind of a self-plug to go back for those of you who skipped those episodes. You want to listen to those filibuster in Nicaragua episodes. It's just good TV. There's no real libertarian lessons in them or anything of that nature, but it's just an entertaining story of how Cornelius Vanderbilt helped overthrow William Walker when he established himself as president of Nicaragua. It's really fascinating stuff. So there were some other episodes in Canada and Mexico and some other places, but they were really uneventful and they're not really worth reading about. But if you want to go see my bibliographical essay and you can find the sources for them from Joseph, my understanding is that most historians today believe that slavery would not have died out on its own if the South had won the war or had been allowed to peacefully secede. What is your take on that question? That's a very, very common question, especially when we're talking as many of us here do about the justness of waging the civil war. And of course, even Thomas de Lorenzo himself and the real Lincoln says that if Lincoln had waged the war for slavery, you would have a much more compelling defense of the war. But the fact of the matter was, as I've pointed out in the podcast, Lincoln was not waging the war to free slaves, at least not in the first half of the war. He was doing it to retain the union and he was willing to protect slavery if that would retain the union. As it turned out, it would not. These compromise proposals wouldn't work. But Lincoln did attempt to institute them as a means of bringing the slave states back into the union. So it's a very common question. It's like, well, if they had been allowed to secede peacefully or if the Confederacy had won the war, would we still have slavery? How long would have it taken to died out? And most historians do believe that it would not have died out on its own very easily. And this comes from some old history made most famous by two guys named Stanley Ingerman and Robert Fogel. And they published a two volume book called Time on the Cross. The second volume is just their data on this. This is also pretty much the founding of the mathematical method in economics. So for people that are interested in econometrics and its applicability to economic inquiry, well, in history, you have client metrics, which is functionally the same thing and its application to determining historical causality. And that was founded as part of this debate on the profitability of slavery. And what Fogel and Ingerman determined was that slavery was profitable. Well, of course, it was profitable. It's like saying water runs downhill. If it wasn't profitable, it would have already died out. The question is not whether or not it was profitable, though. The question should be, is it was it, excuse me, was it as profitable as alternative forms of labor would have been? And that's a much more open ended and difficult to answer question. And then you would also have the question of would it have been profitable without the government subsidizing or socializing the cost of owning slaves in the form of laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this socialized to the cost of slaves because it imposed the the cost on the north of capturing and returning slaves, even if you were an anti-slavery citizen in a northern free state. And this is one of the reasons why the Fugitive Slave Law was so controversial. I devoted several episodes to this in the second season. So you you do see the lowering of the cost of owning slavery and therefore the greater profitability of it. But of even greater note, I think to people that might be listening to this is something that you probably couldn't have come across unless you've been at the Mises Institute because it was just pulled out of the Rothbard archives by the Mises Institute's archivist, Barbara Pickard. And Mark Thornton has recently written up something about it that I don't think has been published yet, but he was generous enough to let me read it. And it was a letter to the editor that Rothbard wrote in regards to this original debate back in the 60s, right? So this thing has just been sitting in the archives for the 60s. And what Rothbard said on the question of the profitability of slavery was that slavery itself wasn't profitable. The agricultural system of the South was profitable, but it was profitable because of exogenous factors. And those factors would have been in place with or without slavery. So had slavery not been in place, the profitability of that agricultural system still would have developed around whatever form of labor system. And his reasoning on this, which is just basic economic reasoning that you can find him espousing in some of the later chapters of man economy and state, if I remember my man economy of state correctly. And I may not. So go back and double check me. But it's he's basically saying that the profitability of slavery is going to, in the long run, being absorbed by the original slave catcher or the slave trader. When they sell the slave, they are going to factor in the future rents from that slaves labor into the price of the slave. So in the short run, you may get some some profits by them underestimating the long run profits from labor productivity and new new slaves being born to that slave. But in the long run, this is all going to be determined in the selling price of a slave. So the slave itself would not have been profitable, but the slave based agricultural system was profitable because of other factors that still would have been in place with or without slavery. So this is all to say that, of course, without slavery, you still would have had a profitable agricultural based system. It was not dependent or I should say more modestly, it was not necessarily dependent on the slave labor because you still would have had economic development with or without that slave labor and that letter was never published, presumably, because it was a very counterfactual economic letter. A Rothbard was not making an historical argument. He did not side historical evidence in it. He was just making an argument that's typical to economic theory, which is very counterfactual and that's not going to be very readily accepted by most historians who are a little fidgety when it comes to counterfactual arguments. But of course, that's what you deal with in economics. So that's an interesting and original argument about the profitability of slavery. So my take on it is that if you really wanted to see slavery die out, you just needed to repeal the laws protecting and socializing the cost of slavery that have been in place since the colonial era. I mean, these go back centuries and slavery would have been less profitable right off the bat. And yes, it would have eventually died out because we already saw it territorially shrinking further and further south. And in border states, you even had slaves trading at like a 10 percent discount because of the risk of running away. So the cost of owning a slave was very different than the cost of paying a wage labor because you have all these other factors that go into it that we already, I think, saw the displacement of slave labor in a lot of areas. And I think that's one of the reasons why the South felt so threatened to buy it in the 1850s is because it was already on the demise. But of course, most historians today think that it's enough to say slavery was profitable, therefore it was going to last forever until it ended by a war or something of that nature. So I do disagree with them. From JJ seems to me that secret societies have a heavier hand in history than most historians are willing to admit or explore. America had a history of deep suspicion of secret societies. As you know, what are your own thoughts as a historian? If I may call you that, you may call me a historian. I am currently getting my PhD in history, as I mentioned earlier. But my master's degree and my bachelor's are in history. So I hope you can call me a historian. I'd like you to if you don't want to. That's OK as well. But as far as the secret society and I think in the subject of the email JJ put in parentheses, conspiracy theories. So I kind of want to tackle those as separate things because there are topics that I typically try to avoid just because you can't help but alienate people. If you try to argue in favor of anything that some people see as a conspiracy theory, then you're going to alienate the people that are just like hard evidence, standard narrative. We're going to believe that. And if you dismiss the conspiracy theories, then people are going to be like, oh, you're just brainwashed like the rest of them. So there's there's no way to really dive into this. But as far as like conspiracy theories and secret societies go, I will mention one conspiracy theory that is very historically interesting and actually relevant to the first season on the war on drugs. And that's the mafia when Harry Anselinger, the godfather of the war on drugs, was just making his bones as a federal agent. He had this crazy conspiracy theory that there were organized crime families called the mafia that were pulling the strings in the underworld. And everybody kind of laughed at him about this. But it turns out that was completely true. That was going on. He was right. And evidence came out that vindicated him. But that last part is what's key when you're looking into that stuff, at least key to me is evidence came out to vindicate him. So what separates a conspiracy theory like we think of like, you know, jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams kind of thing and a conspiracy theory that's an actual theory that of people getting together and designing something in government in secret. Like, of course, that kind of thing happens. But what separates the two in terms of serious theories and something that that people ridicule, ridicule is evidence. And that's really what I wait for. So there's a lot of this stuff that's neither provable nor disprovable. There's a lot of people theorizing about it. But there's not much good evidence. And a lot of times on these things, like the JFK assassination conspiracy theory, for instance, you do see people putting out evidence. But then somebody else will weigh in and that evidence really doesn't seem credible. And a lot of this would be things like, oh, you know, the bullet went through his head, but his head fell forward, even though the bullet went from behind. And then there's physicists that show you that, oh, that can actually happen. I don't know. I just don't I don't have the time or the energy to wait into those questions. So I usually just try to avoid them to be honest. As far as the secret societies, since you specified that, again, I think it was just in the subject line that you mentioned conspiracy theories. But as far as secret societies go, that answer kind of translates. You know, I remember when Bush was president, people talked about the skull and bones. I don't know. I don't know anything about this. That's the thing about secret societies is their secret. And so as an historian, I try to stick to what I actually have access to evidence for. And if I don't have access to evidence for them, I can't say that stuff's not going on. But until there's actual, like, concrete evidence that I can get my hands on, I try to just avoid it. I retain a healthy degree of skepticism, but I try to just avoid those topics not because they're not interesting or potentially important, but because I try to stick with what I can know with some degree of certainty. And that stuff's just very, very difficult. You alienate people. One side or another is always going to think that, you know, like you're you're talking about absurd stuff. And I just try to stick with with what I can, you know, if you call me on it, I can point you to documents and say, look, right here, this is very, very credible. And so that's that's what I usually try to stick with. From Brian, I, like Murray Rothbard, am very open and practice revisionism in my study of history. However, one of the main objections to this process by orthodox historians is that it leaves aside certain elements of history in favor of a particular ideology or to conform to current public opinion. Is this criticism unfounded or is there a legitimate danger to radically changing the narrative about historical events? I actually am very glad somebody sent this question. By the way, this is kind of cool. I'm not going to say Brian's last name, but Brian, my first year at Mises U, I met Brian very briefly. I don't even know if he remembers this, but I was roommates with his high school history teacher. So I remember that, Brian, if you remember that, that was my first Mises U years ago. So that's very, very cool. I am a fan of revisionist history. You know who else is a fan of revisionist history? All professional historians. And I actually wrote an article about this, I think, on the Mises Wire. I don't remember the title, but if you just go to Mises Wire, search my name, revisionist history or something like that, you're bound to find it. And I tell the story of a debate between the historian Eric Foner, who went to who's a professor at Columbia. He's like the greatest living expert on the reconstruction era. And he was on a debate in 1992 with Liz Cheney, and they were talking about the standards for history textbooks. And during the debate, Liz Cheney accused Eric Foner of being a revisionist historian. Of course, this is a pejorative. This is a very insulting thing to say in the minds of most people. Well, Eric Foner tells the story of a reporter calling him up the next day. And I don't know if the story is true or not. This is as Eric Foner tells it, but it's still a funny story and can help elucidate this topic. Then the some reporter from Newsweek, I think it was, calls him up and says, Doctor Foner, who was the first revisionist historian and Foner allegedly replies? Oh, well, that was Herodotus. Of course, Herodotus, for those who don't know, was the first real historian usually noted by people. He was an ancient Greek. He just wrote the histories. But he established the discipline of history in the minds of a lot of people today, centuries, centuries ago, right? And of course, the Newsweek reporter, as Foner tells the story, responds, do you have his phone number? Of course, it's very amusing. It's possibly not true. It's possible that he just made this up because it was funny, but it's still an important way to illustrate the topic of revisionist history. All real history is going to revise something. It may not be significant. It may not be controversial. But if it's not revising something, what's it contributing to the literature? All right. When you're when you're conducting history, you're not just showing that you know a lot about something. It's not just pedagogical. There's there's a place for that. There's a place for textbooks and teachers, of course. But contributing to the scholarship requires you to actually go and revise, refute or expand on the existing literature. And all of that is going to constitute a revision in some sense. So any real history is revisionist history. And this hasn't been very controversial among professional historians. The epithet of revisionist historian is usually one slung by people who are not actual historians, and that's not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with being a layperson, an intelligent layperson studying history. I think everybody should be that person. But there is a difference in the way that we view it after you've gone through, like, methods classes. And the first thing I was taught in the very first methods class I had by a non-libertarian standard progressive left professional historian, somebody with whom I disagree a great deal. She said, all history is revisionism. So this isn't like a libertarian take on things or a Rothbardian take. This is just the way that history is conducted. So I encourage you, Brian, to continue revising history. The question should not be whether the history is a revision. The question going kind of back to the previous question on secret societies and conspiracy theories. The question is whether you can support your arguments and support your revisions with, you know, documentary evidence. And that's really the burden of proof that's on the historian. Revisions are good, but they need to be supportable revisions for them to have validity. Of course, you can get accepted having false revisions of history. Some of you may be familiar with the controversy around the Duke historian Nancy McClain, who wrote a history about James Buchanan. And she's basically arguing that all libertarians are racist segregationists. And this is because of James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, something for public choice economic theories. And he liked a lot of Austrian economists. I don't know much about James Buchanan myself, but then you have somebody like Phil Magnus, who's gone through her book in detail and just said, look, you're wrong on this point. You skipped this archives. You misrepresented this. And she just gets all this stuff wrong. And it's not so much that she was offering a revisionist theory. It's just that she's getting stuff wrong constantly in her book. She's misciting sources. She's ignoring sources that are relevant to her argument. And this is really bad history, but it's not bad because it's a revision. It's bad because it's dishonest, right? So that really should be the burden of proof for an historian or the burden of being like a valid historian is just your honesty, not whether or not you're revising a quote unquote standard narrative from Will. He says, I love history and I love the podcast, but where does all this fit into Austrian economics or libertarianism? The first season on the war on drugs obviously has libertarian elements all through it, but a lot of the more recent episodes don't have much to do with economics or liberty. I'm just curious how all of this fits together. And that's a good question, I think, because when I first started the podcast, I was really trying to tie this into Austrian economics or libertarianism, because I felt like I needed to for the audience. And I kind of evolved out of that for better or worse, partly just because there's only so much you can do trying to make a libertarian or an economic lesson about everything. You know, you try to weave that stuff in where it belongs, but there's a lot of really interesting history that you can't derive. I mentioned the filibuster and Nicaragua episodes. They don't really have these libertarian or economic lessons. And then they're just really, really interesting. And I think that's OK. And a lot of people like that and that seems to be well received. So that's kind of what I'm continuing with after the first season, especially as I go into the Civil War. You know, I'm talking about battlefield stories and things of this nature that don't always tie into the stuff that's necessarily interesting to a Mises Institute audience. But I think they're just interesting in general. And I hope that that's enough because if I'm just sticking with, of course, what has to do with libertarianism or Austrian economics, I'm going to run out of material as soon as I finish Robert Higgs books or, you know, the topics that he or people like Ralph Raiko have written about, because there's a lot of good stuff there, but it's been done. And I do want to offer something something new. And I think that this is the way I can do it. And it's also about offering the historical context. But more importantly, I think would be Mises's theory and history. My favorite book to talk about. It's my my favorite book by Mises for one thing. And it's also Rothbard called it the most under read of Mises's four major treatises. Right. So Mises had four major works. This would be theory, money and credit, socialism, human action and theory and history. And theory and history is the least read and least understood work, according to Murray Rothbard's preface to the book. If you read it, it's a fantastic book. And what Mises says, and he says this in human action, but he elaborates on this a lot in theory and history. And then later in the ultimate foundations of economic science is Mises says there are two sciences of human action, praxeology on the one hand. And that's the one most people are familiar with that the pure a priori logical deductive method of deriving the laws of human action, the universal immutable laws. And this would include the laws of economics. And on the other hand, the second science of human action is history. And history is not a priori science. Mises says that it's a it's an empirical science, but you are able to employ tools such as praxeology that can help inform your interpretation. But you also have to employ documentary evidence as well as all other knowledge of the natural sciences. For instance, you want to talk about history, it does help to understand basic laws of physics and things like that. It seems pedantic and obvious to say, but it's an important element in understanding how we would employ praxeology and then combine this with empirical evidence to come up with interpretations on history that are accurate. And what Mises said was economic history is no more important than any other strand of history. What you should be looking at is history that incorporates all of these different strands, religious history, military history, cultural history. All of this stuff is important in informing us about the motivations of historical actors and therefore the causes of historical change. Because contrary to Marx and Mises, of course, spent a lot of time talking about Marx's terrible theory of history in that, contrary to Marx, is human action is not determined by economic factors or it's not determined by anything, at least not entirely. It's influenced by the environment around you. And that includes all of these different things that we subsume into various strands of history, like cultural history and religious history and economic history. But it's influenced by all of them simultaneously. Humans don't exist in a vacuum, but humans also have free will or Mises actually says more modestly that we should just assume that they do because we can understand human action better with that assumption. And therefore, when we're understanding human change, we have to acknowledge this idea of free will and the way that that has an effect on the choices that people make, right? So all ideas have some level of originality and historical change can only take place because human beings are making choices based on original and unique ideas as individuals. And Mises thought that history as such was a very important science, probably as important as economics, economics was his specialty, but he devoted an entire treatise to the theory of history or theory and history. And he thought that that was a very important aspect of the sciences of human action. And it's my belief that a lot of what people misunderstand about praxeology, where they try to fit it into this empirical economic paradigm that you have in like mainstream economics. I think part of that is because they're ignoring the history element where that stuff actually does have valid application. Mises said praxeology was pure a priori, but there is an empirical science of human action and that's history. And then there's a lot of, of course, substrands to that as well, like psychology and things like that, depending on how you interpret that. But, you know, he talks about this in the first hundred or so pages of human action, but then theory and history and ultimate foundations are where you look for that. So I don't think that to be a Mises Institute type thing, it has to necessarily be Austrian economics or libertarianism because history was something that Mises devoted a lot of time and energy and thought to. And so just by doing history as such, we are following the tradition of Mises and Rothbard, who wrote a great deal of history. And I think he is the best, you know, modern. He offers the best modern display of Mises's method of historical inquiry, which Mises called thymology and all of his many, many historical works. Let me read real quick, see if there's some questions in the comments. Looks like one person asked, will you be using referring to any of the books on Lincoln by Thomas D. Lorenzo? I've read them more than once, or I've read the real Lincoln more than once, I should say. The answer is probably no, just because two reasons. One, historical, or I'm sorry, Thomas D. Lorenzo's historical writings use primarily secondary sources. I'm already using secondary sources, so it's easier for me just to go to the sources he used. And then I can form my own opinions. I don't agree with Thomas D. Lorenzo on everything. I do want a lot of things, obviously, the very fact that I'm doing this for the Mises Institute tells that, but I do have some disagreements with Thomas D. Lorenzo. So if he's using secondary sources, I can just bypass him entirely as the middleman and go to the secondary sources that he's pulling from. And many of the people that I cite are ones that he cites in his books. James McPherson's Battlecry of Freedom, Jeffrey Roger Hummel's emancipating slaves and slaving free men. I'd rather just go straight to them. And then they're citing primary sources that I can go to. And the other reason is D. Lorenzo's work is not chronological. It's topical and I'm following a chronology. So books that are organized in that way, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not very helpful to me. So I think that because D. Lorenzo and I are pulling from a lot of the same influences, you're going to hear a lot of overlapping stuff. But as source material for the podcast, there's not much reason for me to to use his book. I have read it. I agree with a lot of it. I disagree with some of it. But but it's just not very useful for me for functional reasons. Let me see. One person asks, it seems like you focus on US history, but I love financial history. What about a podcast history of John Law? So the problem with that is just my own limitations. My focus on US history is, as I mentioned, I think very early on because that's what I'm getting my PhD in. It's economizing on effort. There are other things that I'd like to do outside of the US. But until I've gotten through all of the work with a PhD, it's probably not going to be practical. Financial history is very interesting to me as well, but it's not very interesting to a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons why you're like the history of money and banking. This kind of stuff, if you read Rothbard's book on that, there's some fascinating stuff about this like private central bank called the Suffolk Bank that I love to talk about. But it is hard to weave into a historical podcast of the style that I'm doing. And as far as the history of John Law, I just don't know it. I could learn it, but I'm probably not going to any time soon. This is one of the things when you tell people you're an historian, you know, I always joke, people say, oh, well, can you tell me about, you know, 11th century plowsharing? And, you know, of course, I'm limited. I know the history. I know, and that's what I'm going to talk about. This stuff I don't know, I'm happy to learn, but there's still that limitation. So I don't think that that I'll be doing that just because, one, it's hard to make financial history very interesting as a storytelling medium and two, what you specifically asked about with John, John Law. I just I'm not knowledgeable on it. And that would actually go for another question about Switzerland and Lichtenstein about being decentralized democracies. Same thing. I find that interesting. I just don't know European history. I'll tell you my last question that I got before the live Q&A was from Phil. And he asked, what do you plan to cover after the Civil War? And I think that'll relate to these questions here, which is that right afterwards, I'm going to do reconstruction, which is just a continuation of the story. And then after that, I don't exactly know because of exactly what I'm saying here on my limitations. I may just continue doing into the gilded age and progressive era and continue with US history. That's an easy, interesting topic that people in this country at least tend to not get super tired of. And hopefully I can bring new elements to it that even if you're familiar with it before, I hope I'm bringing you stuff that you've never heard from anybody else. That's my goal anyway. But if I do continue into US history, it'll it'll probably be for these pragmatic reasons that it's just what I'm going to have to be reading a ton of anyway. And as long as I'm reading it, I might as well incorporate it into the podcast and have a little bit less effort put into doing that. What I'd really like to do, though, I think the one that I keep going back to in my head when I'm thinking about other topic ideas that I'm not an expert on now, but I'd really like to become one if I am going to do a lot of ancillary reading is the history of the Soviet Union. I read a Martin Malleus book, The Soviet Tragedy, which is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it and it just kind of piqued my interest saying that there's a lot more that could be done here. People interested in Austrian economics, libertarian takes on history. The Soviet Union is an obvious topic. History of communism in general would be an obvious topic. A lot of the stuff around the smaller Cold War things, you know, in Indochina in Korea, this stuff is fascinating. I've read some books on it, some books on North Korea, especially at a great interest in that for a while. And I'd like to read more and this would be an excuse to read more. So eventually, I think I'd like to do that, but I don't know when that will be because, again, it'll have to be after the completion of my PhD and defense of my dissertation, which is going to be so U.S. centered that if I'm able to continue the podcast at all during that entire time, it's only going to be by keeping the podcast pretty U.S. centric as well. So for those of you that would like me to branch out into other areas of the world and other time periods, I feel I feel I'm with you. I think that stuff's interesting too, but it's just not going to be feasible for me in the foreseeable future, at least until I finished my PhD. OK, I think that's it. We will call it here. Thank you for those of you who submitted questions and those of you who tuned in live. I hope this went well. Being live was terrifying for me. I like I like recording and having people able to edit out all of my many, many mistakes, but this was fun. I hope we're able to do it again. If you are not already a listener of the podcast, please, as a personal favor to me, subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher. Please leave a positive review. This helps us get out when people search for historical topics. The number of and high degree of good reviews are part of what allows that to show up to the people that maybe aren't Mises Institute listeners that are just looking for an historical podcast. And those those good reviews really help us out. And you can also support the show at Mises.org slash support H.C. All of which all of those contributions will go to books. I can guarantee it. All right, I'll call it here and thank you for showing up. Goodbye.