 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is John Papole. He's the director of Freedom on Trial, the new movie from Libertarianism.org. He's the founder, CEO, and executive creative director of Emergent Order, an Austin-based creative agency and film production company. Welcome to Free Thoughts, John. Thanks for having me, guys. It's a real honor. So I want to get into these new movies from Libertarianism.org, Freedom on Trial, I mean, let's start by giving our audience a bit of your background. How'd you get into filmmaking? So if I step back before really getting into being interested in video, I've always had a sort of argumentative bent. So I've been getting into political debates with friends and family for probably longer than I had an interest explicitly in filmmaking and video and editing and the craft of film and video. But when, in a way, when I think about it, some of my earliest video projects had a political bent. My co-founder Josh Meyers and I, who's also been my best friend since fifth grade, actually made a political satire in high school for the little internal closed circuit TV system in our little Catholic high school. So you could say we sort of got started at this intersection of trying to do creative video and also have a kind of political or philosophical bent. I went to film school, coming out of high school and coming out of film school, that interest in philosophy and politics really took a back seat and I got a job entry level at MTV, actually in the animation department, the folks that did Beavis and Butthead and Daria and Celebrity Deathmatch. And then over the course of 12 years worked up through the MTV networks of the collection of networks that are owned by Viacom. So I worked at MTV. I worked at Nickelodeon, which is also where I met my wife, Lisa, who's the other co-founder of Emerging Order with me and Josh. And then moved to Spike TV and at Spike, I ended up for the last, I was there for seven years and the last several of them as a creative, one of two creative directors. And so as a creative director at Spike, I was responsible. I would direct some spots, some commercial spots and some longer form sort of marketing interstitials and pieces like that. But then I also oversaw the overall communications and marketing for about half of the network's content, their launches, the show launches. I was responsible for the campaigns for a show called Deadliest Warrior and A Thousand Ways to Die, both, and a lot of other sort of stuff at Spike as well as like the big awards shows. So that was my, I started off in film school and ended up professionally working at this intersection of, you could say film and commerce in the form of advertising and marketing. So, sort of stuff in those years, MTV and Nickelodeon and Spike, what sort of sort of the most interesting things that you worked on at that time, for example in MTV, did anything that listeners might be familiar with? So I think when I was at MTV we were, I graduated in 99, started working in MTV, began working in the series development department for animation. And when the dot-com boom hit, that entire department was eliminated. One of the largest layoffs in like MTV networks past 20 years. And I actually lost my job and then was, after several months, found a new position at Nickelodeon. So I was a victim of the credit cycle, even though I wasn't yet super engaged in the boom and bust the way I would be later, from a philosophical, you know, causal standpoint. At Nickelodeon I worked on, again in the promos department, so perhaps my most famous project was, I was given my first chance to edit a movie trailer. And it was for an animated TV, a TV movie special for a show called Rocket Power. And the movie, so it's like this, it's the show for, you know, there might be members of your audience who watched it growing up, but especially if they're millennials. But the show was this group of kids who lived in Hawaii and were like sort of skate kids without too much of a hard edge to them. And the movie was essentially terrible. But the approach I decided to take was, OK, if I'm going to cut a movie trailer, I want to do one of those big, awesome movie trailers with a guy that says, you know, and so I actually, so I watched every movie trailer I could, I could, I could find on the Apple trailer site, which is still a great place to find them. But at the time, it was probably one of the only places to like aggregate movie trailers. And then basically ripped off all of the best tropes I could. And then I wrote this script tracking against that, treating the movie like the most epic thing you will ever see. And then actually got the the famous Don LaFontaine, who is the guy that made famously in a world where one man must fight. One team must be put to the challenge. That's that sounds that sounds incredible. That is exactly what I'm going to watch when we're done recording here. And so and, you know, in a way, it was like my first professional success in that I had wrote the script and then I edited the piece myself on my laptop, which at the time was right at this transition point as the industry was starting to transition from these big extensive, expensive edit rooms, running on the avid system to off the shelf max, running Final Cut Pro. And so that combination of being a creative, but also being a tech geek was something that was a big part of my career progress, like you could say. And to cap the story off, I guess, is that I remember talking to my mother, who was down at the Jersey Shore at the time, and she said, you know, I went over Aunt Rita's house and there was a sticky note on her television to watch the Rocket Power movie on February 14th. So that trailer and at the time, that really fairly poor TV movie I think got some of the highest, like one time ratings Nickelodeon achieved. And it was it was there wasn't a lot of and I think in a way like that is that approach of taking a kind of genre style and applying it in a new domain is something that's come to dominate a lot of what we've done in emerging order, including Freedom on Trial. You know, you see this sort of echo of, hey, here's this fun topic. How can we take like a big entertainment convention and overlay it in a surprising way? And it's been it's it's something that just, you know, the Keynes Hayek rap videos do that. The cronies did it. And I think Freedom on Trial is like the latest incarnation of this effort to sort of blend unlikely ideas with with style forms. So that's how you got into filmmaking. How did you get into libertarian filmmaking? Yeah, the the vast it's the the vast marketplace place of libertarian filmmakers, of course. How could you avoid? How could you not bump into it along the way? So I am. I've told this story a couple of times that when the when the Hayek versus Keynes rap videos that I created with Russ Roberts came out. But the short version is it was this intersection of the rise of social media, causing political debates, especially in the run up to the 2008 election, to become way more heated and way more present, even in a workplace that has nothing to do with politics. So the 2008 election, you know, Facebook starts to escape from just being something college kids use in 2006. And by 2007, you know, everyone in your office is suddenly on Facebook and starting to share their thoughts about the election without without any sort of social norms sort of established, not that not that many have been established since I think about it, but but just sort of unfiltered. And so that so pop, the political sort of dialogue was accelerating and being very pulled to the foreground at the same time that I was now older, married, had a mortgage who was concerned about interest rates and the financial crisis and the sort of breakdown of the of the mortgage market and everything was something that up until that point in my life, I probably just I don't think I had the the skin in the game to care about. And so that was sort of a broader context. And then in particular, Ron Paul's sort of singular voice pointing to what seemed like the only rational, plausible take on what was going on really was the invitation for me to take a look. I'd always sort of seen myself as a conservative Republican, essentially inherited from my family as a lot of people's politics are. And it was really through Ron Paul as well as essentially being you know, spending over a decade working in the diversity of views of New York City that in a sense moved me to the left into libertarianism to the point where I very much feel more like a left libertarian in a lot of respects. You know, my concerns that what animates my interest in libertarianism is a very humanistic belief in the in freedom as an empowering force for good, as opposed to a kind of religious adherence to the Constitution or a kind of traditionalist. Well, this is the American way. Like I really believe that freedom and the sort of classical liberal conception of it is is the true path to like human betterment. And and and so for me, that's what all gelled as I think I got more mature and and and circumstances, you know, raised awareness about what's happening in the world of politics and economics. Talk a little bit about that. The high Keynes rap battle videos. What was the the genesis of that? Was that your idea originally? And you contacted Russ or would you come up with it together? How did that end up happening? Odd idea. I just pitched it to someone immediately, especially at the time, because rap battles are are more common. I guess we have the epic rap battles of history and then, of course, Keynes Hayek. And so I feel like at the time, which what year did the first one come out? We released the first one fear the boom and bust in January of 2010. Right. I remember hearing. So that was I had been at Cato for six months or something. I think that and I remember hearing there's this high Keynes rap battle video and you got to watch it and preparing for it to be really bad because it sounds like the kind of thing that would be really bad. And then it totally wasn't. So econ talk. So as I said before we started, this podcast has actually entered the top of my list alongside of econ talk. But my first love will always be econ talk. OK, so it's ours too. So it's fine. And so I that I had this long bus commute, which was a big, which was essentially my schooling because I didn't take any formal economics as in my education. And so I was listening to econ talk as well as like planet money from NPR, which which was always exceptional and very classical liberal really, when you listen to it, you know, because they are interested in actual facts after the election and with the bailouts and this massive stimulus program. I was really animated into a kind of activism. I wanted to try to get the message out that we're doing all the wrong things that were like repeating the same mistakes that got us into the mess. And my view from reading about Hayek and listening to Ron Paul and reading monetary mischief for Milton Friedman and listening to econ talk. And so I I decided actually with a lot of instigation from my wife, Lisa, who really said, you got to do something interesting with this interest, because, man, this economics that you're so excited about is the most boring thing in the world. And she's always she's always pushed me to try to think in a mainstream way because I can be as about as hardcore a libertarian geek as as one can find. And if you don't believe me, pick up the laissez-faire books edition of, you know, a tiger by the tail, because I wrote a forward for it, which which is like my faux attempt at being an intellectual. But but I reached out. I called called Russ Roberts because I thought, well, hey, if there's I if I just try to do something about the boom and bust on my own, who the hell is going to pay attention to me? I'm not an economist. I don't have any credibility in that domain. And I also want to check to make sure I'm even like getting some of this stuff right. And so I cold called Russ left this like winding message about I was a creative director at spike and got interested in monetary policy and wanted to make a video with him. And I was really excited about Hayek. And when Russ called me back, I swear this was more exciting than like than any celebrity shoot I had ever been on or directed. And I and I even got to shoot a shot for shot recreation of the original back to the future movie trailer with Michael J. Fox, and yet even including that, I think I was more excited to get a call back from Russ Roberts. But we were pretty excited when he came on on free thoughts, too. So we understand. Weird how he's hearing the voice come out of someone. I know he's he's just I really believe he is the best living economist today. And I say that because I think he has he embodies that classical liberal political economy that's richer than most economists who come up through this much more mathematically oriented, much more equilibrium minded school. I mean, he's just he's a he's a true economist. So so we started to have a dialogue and Russ is a very small sea conservative person when it comes to taking on projects. He's always very busy. A lot of people I realized I learned to approach him about things. And so it took about it took about nine months from the first phone call to the completion of Fear the Boomin bust. And we took many zigs and zags along the way. It didn't start off as a rap battle. We originally thought, well, maybe we'll do like a faux sitcom with Keynes and Hayek as like the odd couple. And then we thought, well, that's going to be really hard to pull off and it might not be very good. So why don't we do the the just the show open and make like a funny spooky show open to that show? And that'll be the video. And then and then Russ made it off hand a joke about doing a rap battle. And I immediately glommed onto it. But you know what? That's actually a great format for a back and forth and the cadence of rap. And I wasn't I wasn't much of a rap fan, which is the other ironic thing. So I had to basically have either of you seen the movie Hustle and Flow. No, I have if you say no, so in this in Hustle and Flow, there basically it's the story of a of a pimp who has rap talent and becomes like an up and coming rapper. But you watch it very tangibly happen. Like he just lays down these rhymes and he's got a buddy that's a music teacher and he takes the he takes his rhymes to his body. And he's like, well, you don't have a hook. He's like, well, what's a hook? It's like it's the refrain. It's it's what repeats and sort of pulls you in. And I literally had that exact same experience. I did a one crazy overnight pass on the on the first lyrics of Fear the Boom and Boss that probably got them about seventy five percent to eighty percent there and broad and actually did a recording of it. I brought it into some to spike and I used the instrumental version of this song Remember the Name, which had this simple strings, kind of classical rhythm as a base and played it for a buddy of mine that was also a musician and he listened to it like that's actually pretty that's not bad, but there's no hook. There's no refrain. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. The refrain. Well, how many of those do you need? He's like, oh, like about every 12 to 16 bars. I was like, oh, well, what's a bar? It's like, oh, I mean, I was really like it was like a child recreating something that's been well understood for for centuries. So oh, well, like every line is like a bar. And so like four bars is a measure and and so OK. So then I went back to the script and said, well, actually, the first four lines are a pretty good refrain. We've been going back and forth for a century. I want to steer markets. I want them set free. There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it. Blame low interest rates. Now it's the animal spirits. And so I took that copied it basically every four to six measures of lyric and then worked with it with Russ for like three, four months. And then we and Lisa found the actors that play Bill that Billy and Adam who play Keynes and Hayek. And because Russ is such a great public intellectual and such a welcoming personality, he had great relationships with PBS and NPR. And so that gave us some initial coverage to help us launch the project. So we actually had the folks at PBS News Hour film at one of our recording sessions and there was a before the release of the video. There was actually a story on NPR about the rise of Keynes. And I have to say that it was pretty neat because that story became not just the rise of Keynes, but the debate about Keynes versus Hayek, which it wouldn't have been had it not had they not engaged Russ and I about this project. So so like, in a way, we had already started to make an impact on getting Hayek's ideas out to more people, even before the video was released. And that taught me a lot about the way you can kind of work with media, you know, friends in the media that kind of help, you know, make an impact and balance out the story that's out there. No. And so, you know, it was released on like the end of January in 2010 and it was just so salient because, you know, we were right in the thick of this debate about stimulus and what grows the economy and and and how do you get out of what caused the Great Recession and, you know, what's why is the unemployment still, you know, so high and all of that stuff. So really, it was a very fertile time to sort of bring this kind of approach to the table. And it got him and we didn't have any media dollars behind it. Frankly, I don't think you could reproduce. It'd be very hard to if we were if we launched the same video today, I don't think it would have gotten the kind of traction without a lot, without a different amount of like support than what happened back in 2010. And then we had the then we did a sequel in 2011 fight of the century. So the sequel was was just sort of by popular demand or, I mean, I know there was a lot more attention, of course, paid after the first one. And then people just sort of wanted more. It seemed like I did. I know I did. So. So after the first one, I started it was really when I first started to genuinely become aware of the broader movement outside of, frankly, the Cato Institute and Econ Talk because I was listening. You know, Cato has always been a go to for me as far as finding finding, you know, great, a great source of ideas and and just raw material to try to understand what it means to be a classical liberal and what it means to, you know, have a free market operate and solve problems in a free market society. So I started to get approached by folks in the movement that were interested in doing trying to do more things like this. And it seemed like not people had, like you guys said, like people weren't expecting it. I don't think people thought it was possible to do something like that. So we, Russ and I were invited by the Economist magazine to their annual Buttonwood Gathering, which is this kind of highfalutin conference with like heads of state and central bankers and all kinds of crazy people. And so we wrote and this was about this was in the fall of 2010. And so at that point, the video had gotten over a million views, all like organically and been covered all over the rest of the media. And we decided, since that was such a big opportunity, we wrote lyrics as a kind of sequel follow on and had Billy and Adam perform these lyrics and they were an early version of Fight of the Century. And that video was actually on the econ stories YouTube channel, this the Buttonwood Gathering event. And so coming out of that, and it was very, I mean, it was like, you know, Central Bank, the head of the Central Bank of England at the time was there and all kinds of crazy people. So we we then had this raw material and Brian Hooks and the folks at the Mercatus Center had helped raise money to make another bigger, better version on the basis of that script. And so I wanted to just take everything to the next level. So we we brought in this awesome vocalist, Charlie Murphy, who happens to be Eddie Murphy's brother, but he's got this great voice and presence. And we made them the song more of a more of an exchange. So instead of in the first one, it's just Cain says his thing and then Hayek says his and the second one, it's much more of a battle where they're like, you know, parrying and sparring back and forth lyrically. And we took the production value way up and used had a much bigger crew with tons of extras in this period set in this boxing ring and and and it was, you know, and then it really kind of matched the trajectory as far as the media interest. Because, you know, I mean, tragically, one year later, the debate about the boom and bust was just as present in people's concerns as it was, you know, a year prior because of the depth of the Great Recession. And that and it's just a sort of button on that. That project, Fight of the Century, was the the sort of maiden voyage for me as an entrepreneur. We, Josh and I left Spike and the three of us with him and Lisa started Emergent Order and that was our first production as an independent company. So let's turn to Freedom on Trial, which came out. We are recording this on Wednesday and it came out on Monday of this week. And so we approached you, we being libertarianism.org approached you guys to do a cool video stuff for us. Terribly jealous of the other people who got to do cool video stuff with you. Well, first I tell us tell our listeners if they haven't watched already, would shame on them, but we'll put links in the show notes. What Freedom on Trial is and then how this idea came about. So when you guys approached us, we were very excited because obviously Cato really is the premier libertarian think tank and sort of institution. And so it was a really exciting opportunity for our team and for me personally. And also what was just so great is that you libertarianism.org is very much like a safe space to engage ideas without necessarily being tethered directly to the more tangible mechanics of particular public policy. So it's a chance to engage the audience with the fundamental ethical and economic and moral frameworks of classical liberalism and a free society both historically and today. And so that was a group that was like it's like we don't always get to be doing projects that are so fundamentally educational and idea driven, but that's what we exist to do. That's why I started this company with my friends and family. And so Freedom on Trial is very much in keeping with that tradition of the Keynes-Huyack rap videos and of the cronies, which was another project that we had done several years back, of taking a popular media form, in this case, a kind of serial courtroom, like a procedural courtroom drama, a law and order and using that as a device dramatically to engage freedom related subjects. So in this case, the setup of the story is that we have lawyers for liberty and underdog law partnership of William and Holly who try to take on underdog cases of people whose rights and freedoms have been constrained or trampled or underthread and defend them in the court of law and the court of public opinion. Sounds like the Institute for Justice. Yes, it's the dramatic telling of the Institute for Justice or the Pacific Legal Foundation. And so in this, what we really saw, again, like aspirationally as a pilot, was to take that they would take on this case of Philip Carvel, a small hardware store owner who has a young employee that he's paying below the minimum wage and is prosecuted for doing so. And who's and the case takes a dramatic turn when it when its frame and its scope is broadened by the prosecution to really be a discussion of inequality in the country as a whole. And so obviously, that's a very salient topic right now, but it's also very evergreen and it's also it's always convenient. Hell, they never want to index the minimum wage to inflation because that would prevent politicians from getting to. Reignited as a new issue every several years, that's obvious. But but so that's that's the basic story is that it's illegal drama, you know, with high personal stakes for the characters and along the way, we get to hear the flavor of the arguments that on both sides and again, in keeping with, I think, the ethics of you guys and your organization and of Libertarianism.org. And it was such a great collaboration because you really encouraged us to be to give both sides strong arguments and to let the let the debate that takes place be a full and balanced and robust debate. So even though our sort of heroes, if you will, are the classical liberal lawyers, we didn't hobble the arguments of the prosecution or the other side in any way. And that's that was something that was kind of ethos that began with the Keynes-Huyack rap videos for me personally. And I just think it's a great way to engage dialogue. How does that then impact what you're hoping viewers of Freedom on Trial will get out of it? Because if it had been so the one way to present it, which is how we opted not to, which would be would be to have the Libertarian side win, you know, we say, here's a set of bad arguments and we're going to knock them down and therefore liberty and that would be a clear goal. Our goal would be to show the audience that the arguments in favor of the minimum wage don't work. And well, I think we did a bit of that. This like you said, trying to give every side a chance to express their view as strongly as possible and take them seriously, it ends up leaving things. We won't give away the ending, but it ends up leaving things a bit more ambiguous. And so what were you hoping that an audience, someone who watches that who's not already, say, a committed Libertarian gets out of it if it's not that Libertarianism trounces statism? I think that one of the things I learned about politics broadly defined political economy debates over big ideas from being in Viacom and being someone who was politically not sort of in the mainstay of my peers on a lot of issues was that you get more bees with honey and you engage in much more rich dialogue with people when you don't immediately push their buttons and trigger their tribal impulses. Nobody wants to listen to you if they just think you're a jerk or if you're being too strident in your position and don't seem to even know or care about their concerns. And so, you know, I think with all of our projects, we try to do this, we try to and it's not just a matter sort of strategic positioning, although I think it does that too. But to disarm people of their prejudices in the body of the project, to have the I think like, you know, for us, like having it be very highly produced is part of that signaling of making something inviting to watch. But then I think having and you can't avoid the fact that these are deeply contentious subjects and that there are well intentioned people on both sides. And I think if you if you just set up the opposition, in this case, people who believe that government not only should have the right to interfere with the agreements of too consenting adult parties, but that it will make them better off or it will make society as a whole better off. You know, nobody's nobody's twirling their mustache as a villain, thinking that for the most part. I mean, maybe, you know, a handful of narrow interests are doing so this sort of like the bootleggers of the crowd. But most people want to make the world a better place. And so I think you have to I think it's important to embed that understanding in the in your storytelling. And I think as a filmmaker and as a as a storyteller, you have richer, more dramatic characters when they're not just white hats and black hats. I think white hats and black hats is boring. I think the character complexity is a huge part of what makes a dramatic story be dramatic and be surprising. And you know, you don't want, you know, if you know what the ending is going to be right before you start, are you even going to watch to the end? Like that's that's it's just it's I think it's both philosophically and morally a good way to go. And I think it's dramatically a good way to go. Was this a different kind of project than Emergent Order had done in the past? Did you was this something new to you guys and how you had to go about doing it? Well, we had done one scripted dramatic web series prior to this that I think was sort of a good prototype in a way, which was the Love Gove series that we that we created for the independent Institute. And so we had already managed, I think, to successfully tell a character driven story that had a didactic framework to it without it being, you know, you know, one commenter said, this is not cringe worthy, which which which in one hand feels like faint praise. But I think when you're trying to actually like unpack these kind of ideas, that's actually great praise from my perspective. Because it's like you said, you know, the pitch of these things, your first impulse is, oh, that's not going to be very good. Right. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. That's like that's the real fascinating, I guess, challenge that you're engaged with. And it's what we thought about when we were discussing the different concepts for for the movies was was what would not be cringe worthy. And it's kind of odd because there's a lot of tropes out there. Like Captain Planet, which is being turned into a live action. Well, I think Leonardo Capri wants to turn it into a live action. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. But Captain Planet is is I mean, absolutely unbelievably ridiculous. But people don't really perceive it as I mean, I think people perceive as ridiculous as the 90s cartoon and it's a little bit pompous, but not because the evil corporations are trying to kill the environment and there's a superhero saving it. And if we tried to make a I don't know, Captain Capitalism or Captain Free Markets or something like that, I mean, I guess we could do it if we parodied Captain Planet. You should put that one in your in your idea bank of Captain Free Markets that parodies Captain Planet. But it would be very quinger there is or if we tried to make a movie where the government and because businessmen are often the real big snidely whiplashes who are always twirling their mustaches. And that doesn't make people cringe, but we it seems that we have a cringe deficit in terms of trying to convey libertarian ideas without sounding too preachy and not having people just cringe at what we're saying. Yeah, and just to piggyback on that, I mean, you notice this in not just in the more didactic filmmaking that, you know, we're engaged in as the Cato Institute and Libertarianism.org who have a message we want to promote, but also in just general say Hollywood filmmaking. It always it seems like the left is able to get away with producing more ideological stuff than libertarians or conservatives are that when, you know, you can watch you can watch a Hollywood movie that has an extremely leftist message and simply enjoy it as a movie. But when it's a libertarian or conservative message that cringe worthiness often comes out and is often, you know, it's a justified response on your part like the film simply is more cringe worthy. And so why is that? Why why does the left seem better at making non cringe words the political stuff than we are? It's a great question. It's something I've thought about a lot. I think that well first, and I, you know, just before things get a get away if we don't come back to it, you know, we you know our team had put together as you know like five or six different unique ideas that were all intended to be something that you could repeat to tackle many different subjects from a classical liberal point of view. And it was actually Max Borders who's one of the you know members of my team and and you know really like a great you know philosopher and thinker in his own right that came up with the idea for freedom on trial and then we discussed well should it be freedom on trial or should it be government on trial? So there's a lot of the process of just arriving at the idea you know as you got to experience with us is this big broad exploration. And then the second half which is really like the 98 percent that matters in another in another sense is that well okay we've got the 2 percent inspiration how does that how does the perspiration how does the execution play out which is I think something that we've always tried our best as a company to do and I think that's that's the first part is I think that a lot of I think that there's a craftsmanship deficit for creatively on the um God I hate to say on the right but I guess I'll just say it like on the right. I don't know why that is I don't know if it's like like genetic that there tends to you know if you tend to be more creative and aesthetic that your your brain tends to be wired to be a little more collectivist I there's something there there's a like there's like a clear ideological delineation between creative fields versus more um systematic fields like engineering and construction and and other and other disciplines and as far as the way people's politics break down. But I think um one other like big picture is I think people in the political circles especially that you know on the sort of free market or right of center so to speak have this notion that Hollywood is sort of driven by ideology and I actually then don't think that's correct I think there's an ideological bias that's like like endogenous like I was just saying but Hollywood just wants to make money Hollywood's like randian capitalism on steroids it's it's very transactional if if uh I mean you don't have to look any further than the post passion of the Christ bout of of Christian TV shows and movies that were suddenly all the rage it's you know uh if it can find an audience um the business folks in in in Hollywood are going to make it and so that leaves us with this question of if it's not sort of a systematic bias at the business level it's an aesthetic bias and I actually think we have a real challenge on our hands because what is our story our story is the invisible hand our story is trying to show the unseen these are not easy things to point a camera at you know I mean a very I mean one of the things about there's a great there's a sort of um if if mises is human action is like a is like a is a canonical tone of classical liberalism it has a corollary in the in the storytelling world which is Robert Mickey's story and in that book I mean it basically is the human action of storytelling it says people's character is revealed through action it's revealed through the choices they make not the not what they say it's what they do and the problem we face is that dramatically a lot of our stories are often not of the individual motivations and intentions of a person but the actual like outcomes of systematic incentives that actually like as Milton Friedman would say guide even bad people to do good things for when you're trying to tell a character story people's individual motivations matter like you judge the character the goal is to have their personal character revealed like it's like why the word character both means a person but also their nature their moral frame like their moral nature and I think that's really hard when you're trying to when you're trying to say look yes this statement that we want to help poor people that are working live better well I can do that by passing this law that tells these greedy rich people of rate to pay them more that is that the intentions are there and so you can tell that story that mr smith goes to washington's story of the reformer that takes on capitol hill the you know the classic like probably the best example would be the movie dave where you got i was just gonna say dave yes this i love that movie but it is also just absolutely aggravating but yeah you wonder how you could tell that if it was a libertarian story well i made i made the crack i think trevor a while back that the reason i adore the the west wing tv show um which is not a popular opinion i think among my colleagues i do too but i had remarked to trevor that a libertarian west wing wouldn't work dramatically it would be boring as hell because it would just be a president sitting in the oval office saying well i'm gonna do anything about that yeah there's nothing that's beyond the scope of what i am capable of doing i don't have the knowledge or incentives to do it yeah it's like okay i would not make for an exciting 45 minutes of television yeah and then dave he the big thing is when he proposes i'm employing having the government give everyone a job and it's just absolutely infuriating but then you're like hey it's kind of you know endearing in its own way yeah and and and i think that's it's it's baked into character driven storytelling that we care about the character's motivation we care about a real live person and what they do and so we have to somehow find a way to tell freedom stories that are about individual people's character i mean that was what we tried to accomplish with freedom on trial by you know presenting the impact of these two people and framing it around that and and um and it's still very it's very very difficult i think there are there are some great movies that point towards um ways of doing this i think one of the best is is um a dallas buyers club agreed that was that was my next question actually which is what is your favorite libertarian movie but oh my favorite libertarian movie is real easy it's ghostbusters by a million miles it is the most libertarian movie ever made i don't know if it's just that like markets were there when the air in the 80s i mean i'm actually looking across my office right now at a framed lp of ghostbusters and the complete like 500 dollars worth of lego's set of the firehouse and the ecto one wow he's he's really not kidding i'm impressed you're willing to admit that on the air that's i mean that is that is interesting the i've heard the ghostbusters thing a lot and i agree with you um and it's interesting because i often say dr strange love is one of the great libertarian movies but that the both of those movies are incidentally about freedom and markets and entrepreneurship or in the case of dr strange love the complete and utter idiocy of people in the government which i which which i think is important and it it can be difficult to to go out and intentionally try to make an ideologically charged movie but if you incidentally tell a story of freedom then it might be a little bit more resonant and that's also true of dowell spires club i think it's this um you know there's these sort of dramatic structures of uh of of man versus man man versus this the nature man versus the system and i think that um there's a lot of great freedom storytelling to be told in the framework of man versus the system which is what dowell's buyers club is um and to some extent it's what ghost busters is it's you know the the bad guys are it's like it's hard to tell who's the bigger bad guy the epa regulator or the or the actual ghosts trying to destroy destroy new york city you know and he's like the classic adam smith man of system you know walter peck yes it is true he he that man has no dick is not that is not the question the famous line in the movie you know it is it is a great libertarian classic but again that's the interesting about the challenge of freedom on trial is it's obviously explicitly ideological to some degree but you also have to tell a story that's worth watching compelling characters yeah and i think so i think it's like you have to find ways of grounding of staying at the ground level at the level of of human action of people doing things and um and you have to let i think good storytelling and look look as a firm and as a storyteller we don't always get this right i mean you know but but we try to actually put story first on the basis that if you don't have a good story nobody's gonna walk through the door so no matter how nicely you've set up the room if they don't walk through the door it doesn't matter so the story has and i think that's you know so i think there's this class of didactic movies that are garbage and they they do span the spectrum there's probably because of the sheer volume differences there's probably as many horrible left-wing ideological screed movies as there are free market or right-wing ones and the free market ones stand out to the extent they're free market in fact at all because of the success to failure ratio on the right is way different but i mean you like take a movie like a lesium and you could argue about whether that whether it's really an analogy about immigration versus an analogy about economics and capitalism but in that movie is horrible and it's where is its ideology on its sleeve in a way that the prior film by that director district nine didn't do so where do we take freedom on trial from here do you have ideas for things you'd like to explore in future episodes well i think um if the world of support for the project you know comes to the table and is interested in in there being more stories like this i think what we tried to do with the with the series and in thinking of it as a pilot is set up a structure that's repeatable in that they can take on so many different kinds of stories i mean like you you guys mentioned um you know the the legal advocacy groups like like ij or plf and um and almost any story out of their docket is is something that i think could make for a compelling case i think it's it'd be interesting to take on the victims of the drug war and to really take on things that are less obviously on the political right like uh you know things that surround criminal justice or immigration for that matter i mean to take on this uh this some of the more populist issues that are um soul crushing as a libertarian in 2016 but but i think there's like there's a kind of endless supply of human stories where the the lawyers for liberty could make the case for more individual freedom and autonomy thank you for listening if you enjoyed today's show please take a moment to rate us on itunes free thoughts is produced by evan banks and mark mcdaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org