 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Tess Terrible, one of the producers of Free Thoughts podcast. We are recording our 200th episode today. Our guests are Aaron Powell and Trevor Burris, regular host of Free Thoughts podcast. We'll be discussing the history of the show and how Aaron and Trevor were first introduced to libertarianism. Aaron and Trevor, welcome to Free Thoughts. Thanks. That's kind of weird, isn't it? It's good to be here. Yeah. You got a confused look on your face for a second. It's like, wow. Exactly. This is my first time sitting in this room recording with you guys. And I guess my first question would be, could you guys give us a little bit of the history of how the podcast started? Sure. So there's a podcast. It's not very interesting. It's not terribly interesting. But we'll, we can bring it up a little bit. The people want to know. So Trevor and I are both fans of a podcast called Econ Talk. It's been around for quite a while. We had Russ Roberts on the host of it on Free Thoughts. Two years ago, maybe? Yeah. And had, I had always thought that that format, I enjoyed that format a lot and thought that the kinds of things that we talk about at libertarianism.org, so less of the day-to-day policy or current events and more ideas and history and theory behind policy would lend themselves well to that format. At the same time, I was listening to another terrific show called The Partially Examined Life, which is about a handful of guys who read philosophy and discuss it. And that was also an inspiration. So it was, it would be fun to do this. We have all the resources here to do it. It fits well with what libertarianism.org is up to. Let's try it. And so in the space of what? It went for like, it's like probably 48 hours behind saying, hey, let's do this to actually sitting down and recording the first now very bad first episode. Did you listen to the first episode? I've listened to bits of it again. And it's... I saw you on Twitter bad-mouthing it. It's not, it's not... It's not that good. It's not that good. Yeah. And we took it from there. Yeah. And I liked the idea, of course, and let me get into some of the other policy areas that I like, which is pretty much all policy areas except for monetary. Monetary is pretty much the one that I don't really enjoy reading as much. But because I do constitutional law here, and I spend a lot of my time, it's a very different job than Aaron's. It's nice to be able to get into other stuff. But I specifically wanted, and this is something Aaron and I wanted together, was to be able to, as he said, not like Caleb's podcast, the Kato Daily Podcast, where that's often about Section 238 of some sort of bill or some sort of specific policy area that's come up that day, but sort of more evergreen kind of things that we wanted to bring on people like Michael Cannon and not ask him, how does Obamacare work or not work, but to ask him, how do libertarians think about health care? And then to try to ask him all the questions that someone would want to ask a libertarian about health care that are the kind of obvious what about people dying in the streets kind of questions. So bringing on Kato Scholars, or our obvious resource, initial resource, bringing them on to really get into the ideas and the theories that inform the way they do policy. Well, I'd like to build off that on how you both think about sourcing and ideas for podcasts. Sourcing? You mean finding people to be on the podcast? Yes, finding people to be on the podcast, different topics that we explore all kind of depends upon. We pay attention to articles, books, people coming to Kato. Sometimes there's just someone's in town for either a Kato event or maybe another organization's event or something we maybe specifically want to do. Occasionally we'll do one that's thinking about current events, although sometimes that's difficult to really hit those at this right time. Earlier this year, we did one with Alex and our Aston immigration that seemed pretty relevant to the immigration debate. It's hard to hit the current events though, so much as with the books and the friends of ours who are in town. And we have a lot of friends in the libertarian world, so we can kind of reach out to them and say, hey, I want to come on. Yeah, I mean, I think Trevor probably is responsible for more of the guests than I am, the nature of his work. He's paying more attention to all of the people within the movement and all of the scholarship going on. For me, I just come across things. I'll read a book. I'll see a book review. I will read an interesting blog post. There'll be someone I'm following on Twitter who I think is cool and might have neat things to say or people I've met at conferences. And it's really just... I mean, I often think of free thoughts as the continuation of the way that I approached Professor Office Hours in my undergrad. So I was one of those kids in undergrad who went to Professor's Office Hours all the time because it was a lot of fun to just sit down and talk with these highly educated people about their field. And so for me, I'll come across things that are just like, that is someone who I would really enjoy talking with for an hour and learning what they know about a topic. And so then just send them an email and invite them on. And one of the more gratifying things is just how many people say yes. Most people seem happy to come on free thoughts. Yeah, I've never had anyone outright just say no. Either it's just, oh, I don't have time until this happens or they just didn't respond to an email. So I guess that's one way of saying no if you're cold emailing someone. But I think more often it just sort of slips through their cracks because most people like to talk about their work and get it promoted. So do you all have a approach to the podcast interview? I think long-time listeners will probably be able to tell the approach that we both have to some extent. I think that feedback that I get from listeners, which I'm happy about because it's what I try to do, is I try to play devil's advocate a fair amount. I try to put myself, because we're libertarians, we're at the Cato Institute, a lot of the people we have on are libertarians. There are things that we disagree with our guests about frequently, but on the whole we're coming from similar places. And so I try very hard to put myself into the shoes of someone who thinks what they're hearing is crazy, thinks it's completely and obviously wrong, or thinks they have very strong objections, and then give voice to those to take the potential criticisms as seriously as possible. Yeah. And since I am not married and don't have three kids, I tend to do more reading of this stuff before Aaron. That's why he has many other things he's doing, but I often try to read, especially if there's a book episode. I've usually read the entire book for a given episode, and I kind of let Aaron do the devil's advocate thing. You'll see me do it. You'll hear me do it sometimes, but I often have an entire, haven't read the whole book, kind of an idea that I want to get through at least some of these ideas that the author has written about. And maybe the third section is the best, but you got to lay the groundwork, so you listeners can hear that I might be leading them a little bit more, leading them on for questions that I don't know the answer to, or I already know the answer to, I mean, and then letting Aaron jump in and push back. Yeah. I think my favorite comment I've seen on Twitter was that you were both classified as humble inquisitors. Oh, really? That's a good one. Humble inquisitors. So, we do have a variety of guests on the podcast, and I'm wondering, who do you enjoy interviewing the most? Is it authors, intellectuals? We've had a couple people from pop culture on discussing pop culture. I don't know if there's a category. I think policy scholars, and not just art. I mean, policy scholars is a general rule. Because often we talk for a living, and an author may not be terribly great at talking. They might be really good at writing, but not terribly good at talking. So, policy scholars tend to be really good guests. That's true, but as far as the, I, there have been certainly people in all of the categories who have been wonderful to talk to. I think what it, the kinds of guests that I like the most are ones who are, I mean, first easy to talk to. Of course, yes. There are a few episodes. Sometimes, you know, it's weird because to some extent, like, so you might just get the, that stereotype that Trevor mentioned of the writer who's good at writing, but not good at talking. But there's another version of that that has, that sometimes comes up, which is the person who has, who's really used to doing media, who's really used to doing television or short radio spots. And so you'll ask a question. And in free thoughts, we like to have, we want it to sound more like a conversation than a script. Because it is a conversation. Everyone should know that there's almost, there's very little editing that goes on in a free thoughts episode. But it's not, it's, we don't try to make it be like, ask a question, get an answer, ask a question, get an answer. But sometimes you'll get people who are so trained in, in media appearances that you ask a question and they give you like a perfectly encapsulated 30 second answer and then just stop. I remember Michael Tanner was really good at that. Because Michael Tanner is like so experienced that he just like has 30 second answer. Right. And so, so you have to, so those have been, those are sometimes more difficult because you have to say like, and like, but I also think, I mean, anyone who just is willing to really kind of not just explore the, their particular expertise, but to like question the assumptions behind it, to delve into it in more depth. Someone who likes, I like guess, who like to think about these things at kind of a more theoretical or abstract level because those are the kinds of conversations I particularly enjoy. But then we've had very concrete ones that are terrific too. We've had some ones that we tend to call practitioner ones where it's someone who's not in policy, someone who's not an academia, not an author, but is a business owner. Or like a practicing lawyer. Yeah, who can just tell us about their job and what they do and how they've succeeded and then how policy issues, political issues factor into that. I'd like to do, I like episodes where I don't know much about what's going on. I kind of said I don't really do monetary policy. That is the biggest hole in my knowledge. A foreign policy, I don't do a lot of reading on my own time because I've convinced that either you should know a lot about foreign policy and have a very informed opinion or you probably should just refrain from having opinions if you don't have time to read all the foreign policy. So I really enjoy having on guests who are really teaching me. So I'm not asking leading questions. I'm actually asking, I have no idea what you're talking about, please tell me more. And so people like George Selgen, our colleague here, is always a great guest because I just really don't know much about what he's talking about. John Glaser, who was just a recent episode, is a similar type of thing. So those are really exciting for me because they're great learning opportunities outside from the prep I did for the podcast beforehand. So as you mentioned before, this is a more conversational podcast, more so than the other podcasts that are produced by the Kato Institute. I worked with Kila Brown on the Kato Daily podcast for a couple years. And now I have the privilege of working with both of you on this podcast. And I'd really like to know, although it is conversational, what's going through your head during the podcast? How are you hoping to lead the conversation one way or the other? Aaron's like smiling. Aaron's gonna be like, well, sometimes I'm like, what the heck is Trevor talking about? And sometimes I'm thinking, what the heck? Where is Aaron going with this? But Aaron's like, okay, what do I need to push back on? So Trevor and I come into an interview, into a discussion with a set of questions that we've written up. So we share a Google doc and we have the person's bio at the top and we have a bulleted list of questions, usually about a page, page and a half worth of questions that we've just typed up while reading the book or reading the policy paper or in our research. But they're kind of in an order in the sense that like we figured out what the opening question is and we frequently have figured out what the closing question's gonna be, but the ones in the middle are usually less prioritized. So you can't really lead your guests exactly where you want. But we have, so we have, we come in with an idea of like these are the kinds of questions we'd like to get answered. These are the kinds of topics we'd like to see addressed and maybe this is roughly the order we'd like to approach them in. But then both of us, I think, try to let it flow the way that it flows. And so if it goes off and if the conversation goes off in another direction, we let it and we'll only really return to the sheet. If there's a pause, if it feels like we've run out of steam on that particular line of questioning. And so I would say in a given episode, we usually get, we actually ask maybe half to two thirds of the stuff that's on the paper that we sat down with. And ask a bunch of things that aren't on the paper. Because of course, I mean a few things, it's different than just having a conversation in the sense that there are a few tasks that we have to be mindful of. One is clarifying jargon. So you have to be able to say, okay, is this something that everyone's going to know what they're talking about? And asking follow up questions to clarify more complex issues and things like that. Those are important ways to be thinking a little bit different than just having a conversation. But a lot of the people who are on our podcasts are friends of mine, especially Cata Staffers and a lot of the academics. And the conversation that we're having, although it's a little bit more obviously stylized and maybe formalized, it's not terribly different than the kind of thing we'd be talking about at a bar over the same type of thing. So it's one thing I really like about the show. Well, I guess that almost answers my follow up question, which is, do you ever get nervous before a podcast? I think a couple of guests, like back earlier on, we had people that we particularly revered on people like Richard Epstein, Matt Ridley. Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell was pretty nerve-wracking partially because it was over Skype. And it was, and we had been told that he could be harassable sometimes. And there were a bunch of rules on top of that. And Thomas Sowell is particularly important to the intellectual development of Aaron and I. So when big heroes of yours are coming in, you might get a little bit nervous. But I think I've gotten over that mostly. Yeah. I wouldn't say I get nervous. Sometimes, if it's a topic that I really don't feel that I know all that well. I mean, I've done the research, but still don't feel like I know all that well. It's a little bit more, there's a little bit more nerves. But it always turns out fine. Because I mean, if part of what we're trying to do with this show is help our listeners to understand the particular topic or set of ideas, then going into it, not knowing stuff just gives lots of opportunity to ask. Stupid questions. Ask the stupid questions that are exactly the stupid questions that everyone else is hoping someone will ask. Myself included. What about you? Are you ever sitting there going, I really wish they would ask this question and then do we usually? Sometimes. Sometimes I have guests that you bring in that I'm doing my best not to fangirl over. Are there times when like you're listening to us and you're like, oh man, they blew it? Yes, but I'm not going to mention that. We'll have to ask you off air. Yes. But that leads me to, we talk to a lot of intellectuals, a lot of scholars on this show. And then we have a few guests that have very unique personal experiences. Can you talk to me a little bit about what it's like talking to those people? Yeah, so we've had people like Sean Hoplitt and Bernie Carrick or two that we've had on who talk a lot about their own lives. Sean is the most recent one. Both spent time in prison. Both spent time in prison. I think the episode we did with Dr. Ryan Dew-Hoffel is somewhat related to that, his own personal experiences of being a direct primary care physician. Or when we had our episode about Guantanamo Bay with the next Guantanamo Bay Guard. And I really, really like doing those episodes. I think that they're popular. I think that they're very valuable. I would like to do more of them. It's hard to find guests of the sort where I'd like to put on human interest stories of someone who had, I don't know, gotten wrapped up in the EPA over some sort of long period of time with some sort of Kafka-esque story of declaring wetlands and the not and something like that. But a lot of people who are put in those situations are not guaranteed to be great talkers and people who can get into the kind of ideas that we like to get into on free thoughts. But definitely some of my favorite episodes are the personal experience ones because you're hearing a fascinating story from someone who's done something incredible and lived a fascinating life. And how do you feel about talking about your own opinions on certain areas of public policy? Clearly our guests can be very present to express our own opinions. I wonder if they wonder what our opinions are though. I mean, I don't know. I guess that's a good, if we have, we have an episode where we just talk. Hit us up on Twitter and let us know. We have episodes on, you know, there are just either you being a guest or me being a guest or, and so. But I'm sure sometimes they wonder what our opinion is of. Maybe they don't. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I certainly, I think we both express our opinions a fair amount. Neither one of us would be in the careers we are in if we weren't the kind of people who really like telling other people our own opinions. But at the same time, I think it's really important like one of the bad ways that people discuss politics is to go into it assuming that, you know, my opinions are correct and I know everything about this or that the person that I disagree with, I'm disagreeing with them because they simply don't know as much as I do or they have, you know, impure motivations or whatever. And so to not listen and to just trample their expression with your own expression of your opinions. And so I don't think that we, you know, we don't try to cover up our opinions or tone them down or whatever, but it's more just we're here as kind of representatives for our audience. That's our first job. And so what we want to get is just a full and complete and fair picture of what our guest has to say and we're less interested in particularly advancing our own views on the subject. I guess that the answer to this question would be more interesting if we had more people on who we disagreed with fundamentally, which is not a product of not trying. It's more about in your U.S. tests, like how do we get these guests on? Like I said, I know a lot of libertarians. I know a lot of people in the libertarian world that they can email them and say, hey, I really like your book. And of course, there's a theme to this podcast. But I think Aaron and I both agree that we would love to have more people on who disagree with libertarianism. And then the question of so we had Jennifer Lawless on, we've had Elizabeth Anderson on, and I think we're going to have Elizabeth on again. And, you know, even if someone isn't totally libertarian, we might be just talking about something that we agree upon. But if we had, it's one thing I would love to grow the podcast in such a way to bring on people who disagree with us. So if you disagree with us in your academic or some sort of person as a thing, you know, send us a tweet and maybe we can have you on. Tell us why we're wrong. Yes. So this being our 200th episode and us having the opportunity to talk about this, who would you like to see on the podcast in the future if you had a wish list? There's so many more guests that we could get on. I think one of my goals has been people who are kind of celebritarians, well, not celebritarians, that's libertarians or celebrities. I mean, celebrities who are actually libertarians. So I would love to get, you know, maybe libertarian sympathy. So people like Mike Rowe and Adam Corolla would be super fun to have on. I would love to have on someone like Clarence Thomas. That would be a great episode. You know, I'd like to have more representatives on. People like Justin Amash would be good. Thomas Massey, Rand Paul, people like that. Yeah. I mean, on my side, like my wish list of guests, I mean, there's not like a ton. If you think of the question as like, who are the, you know, the kind of dream guests it would be hard to get on. Our experience has been that it's most of the people we ask are willing to come on. And as the show grows, they're more willing to come on. So I don't, that list isn't all that big. But for me, it's more like the people I really would like to talk with. Because again, if I'm thinking of this as like, who would I like to talk with for an hour? It's, you know, there's a list of particularly philosophers who I have learned a ton from and have really gotten a lot out of their books and would like to discuss with them. And so it's more of those, for me, it's more of those academics. I think that another one that Pochmed is on the academic side is James C. Scott, I think would be who's written a bunch of important books about anarchy in the state. He is a new one out called Against the Grain, but he wrote Seeing Like a State and the Art of Not Being Governed. He's someone I would really like to bring on. I've tried to email him a few times and probably just sort of went, went away or went to his spam folder or whatever. But yeah, there's a lot, there's definitely a lot of academics who would be nice to have on, but I would like to have, I would like to have someone on like George Ackerloff, who won the Nobel Prize and is married to Janet Yellen, mostly because I think he's, his last book is quite insane. And so I'd like to really grill him on that book. But I don't see getting many Nobel laureates on here as of yet, especially if they're not friendly to libertarians, I guess would be a better way of putting it. Over 200 episodes, 200 interviews, what have you learned about libertarianism that... I think one thing that I've learned or at least developed is a, is a greater sense of the breadth of libertarianism and the breadth of the ways that liberty and politics interact that, you know, you come in like as a certain, I came into libertarianism in a very specific way through a specific kind of set of ideas. Like I came in through economics and philosophy and approached it in, you know, this academic way. And I think a lot of the people in the movement come in either through political activism or through academic pursuits. They have this kind of abstract way of thinking about liberty or this very electoral way. But the seeing the ways that such a variety of people are part of this, the ways that they experience political liberty or experience the lack of political liberty. So the, you know, the kind of personal story episodes that we've talked about, but also the practitioners and also some of the people working in the trenches in areas of policy that I hadn't been paying as much attention to or hadn't had as much exposure to. Some of our episodes with Peter Van Dorn on the specifics of regulations where it's these things that, you know, if someone sat down and told you they were going to, I mean, to tell you about telecom regulation in the 1980s, that sounds dreadfully dull. But when you start hearing all the details of it, it's, I mean, these are crazy stories with, you know, heroes and villains and good pacing when Peter's telling it. And so I think that for me is like just seeing how much more variety there is in the study and practice of liberty than I think I had coming into it four years ago. And I guess that going off of that, one thing that I learned and this is a little bit silly to say, but I'm trying to the right way of saying this, but that especially for our colleagues here at Cato have been guests who most of them at this point have, I think. Our colleagues are really, really smart. And it's sort of funny for me to say that because I have been a huge fan of Cato for decades. And I have, especially before I started here, I pretty much, everyone at Cato was a rock star to me because I was consuming all the podcasts and all the events. And so someone like Mark Calabria, who recently has left Cato, but as it became a good friend of mine, you know, you know, he's really smart. You've heard about and talk about all the time and you've heard him on TV and you've seen his writings. But then you get him in the chair and you start, you're able to kind of grill him so to speak. And you realize how deep his knowledge is on the areas like the episode we did with him on housing and the policies around housing. And some things where I initially think I was like, oh, I bet he doesn't know the answer to this question. Of course, they do know the answer to that question. It goes without saying that Peter Van Doren is particularly good at that and is definitely one of the favorite guests for both of us. And his depth of knowledge, it blows people away inside the building and it's great to get him on the show so he can sort of share it outside of these walls. What policy areas have you developed an interest in since working on this podcast? Well, for me that's a weird question to ask. I haven't answered that to some extent, but I'm kind of omnivorous when it comes to policy areas. So there weren't many that I wasn't interested in. Some of them became more interesting to me because of the guests that we've had on. If I wasn't doing constitutional law and criminal justice work here, I would probably be doing something in health care policy or education policy and episodes that we've done on health care policy, whether with Peter Suderman or Michael Cannon or on education policy with Neil Mulusky, for example, get into the deep history of what's actually going on in the history of, say, public schooling or in the history of the American medical system. So those episodes are particularly they piqued my interest even more to learn more about those. But I also bring it up again as monetary policy has become more interesting to me because of talking to George Selgen both actually on free thoughts and just personally when we go have lunch or something. The way he talks about money, the episode we did with him on the gold standard was very illuminating. The episode we did with him on just how money evolved in the United States. So all those have made me more interested in learning about those areas. I am not as omnivorous as Trevor when it comes to policy. I tend to stay more focused on my areas of philosophy and moral issues of politics. But although, like Trevor, I had a pretty wide exposure coming in not because I had been just reading tons of policy for my day job, but because prior to starting libertarianism.org, my first job at Cato was as the staff writer. The staff writer's chief job is to write this bimonthly magazine called Cato Policy Report that is effectively the newsletter about what Cato has been up to over the last two months. And that includes summaries of most of Cato's output, which meant that in the years before I started libertarianism.org, I would attend every single Cato event, every single Hill briefing. I read every book and every paper we published. And so if you do that for two years, it's going to get a pretty solid overview of public policy. But that said, I think the area that my interest has most been sparked and that I've followed up the most on is the stuff that comes from the conversations that we've had with our colleagues, Julian Sanchez and Patrick Eddington about digital privacy, about surveillance, about the ways that policy and law interact with the online world. I was somewhat interested in that stuff, I knew about it, but the conversations with them, it's really fascinating stuff. And I think that's the area I've most followed up on in my own than reading and independent study. With the current political climate and increased media attention on libertarianism, how do you think perceptions of libertarianism have changed throughout the year? I think there's two ways that they have. We're probably thinking the same two ways. I'll let you know after you're done answering your question. So one is libertarianism I think is a scapegoat for what's wrong with the country. It was libertarians that gave us Trump, whether because some of them may have voted for Trump or because they didn't vote for Clinton or because they voted for Gary Johnson. They're a convenient, my political side lost or my political side isn't accomplishing what they wanted to or I can't get legislation through because those libertarianish Republicans in the Freedom Caucus are mucking up the works or whatever. I think that they're kind of political outsiders who can be blamed often without much cause for the dysfunction of everyone else. At the same time, I believe that there's a willingness to, if not take us more seriously than to at least pay attention to our ideas or co-opt our ideas because people, suddenly we have people who weren't really worried about what the federal government was up to under Obama because Obama was a nice guy who seemed like a cool dude who wouldn't do anything wrong and had everyone's best interests in heart. So we didn't have to worry about the wars that he was starting or the surveillance programs that he was overseeing or the press freedoms that he was curtailing because he was one of us. But with Trump, I think a much larger portion of the population is suddenly sympathetic to the kinds of critiques of state power that we libertarians have been making for decades. So you see people pushing back against surveillance. You see people questioning war in a way that they weren't a couple of years ago. You see the rise of movements against police misconduct, police brutality. And I think those are encouraging signs. And if they're not, I think a lot of these people, they aren't saying, oh, these libertarians have some good ideas. I'm listening to them and now I'm acting upon them. It's more just libertarianism is kind of in the air more than it was because the underlying nature of the environment has shifted. And so even if they're not willing to give us credit for being the ones who have been championing these ideas for decades while everyone else has been silent about them, it's at least good that they're suddenly kind of taking our side on these issues. Yeah. Basically, we had the same very similar two categories. I think that Trump presents good opportunities for libertarians of a certain sort to basically demonstrate that we aren't conservatives and demonstrate that we have a unique and interesting critique of government that is relevant, particularly in times like now, but it's actually always relevant. I also think that there's a lot of people out there who call themselves libertarians and I can't control who calls themselves libertarians. One reason we started this podcast and one of the things that Kato works towards and one of the things that Libertarianism.org works towards is a better, more robust view of what libertarianism is. And there are a lot of people out there who don't really have that and they might be Trump voters, for example. And I'm not saying it's impossible for a libertarian vote for Trump, but a lot of really, really fervent Trump supporters call themselves libertarians. A lot of alt-writers have called themselves libertarians and a lot of people who are very racist have called themselves libertarians. A lot of quote-unquote states writers have called themselves libertarians and that doesn't really help us too much. And those people are kind of on the ascendancy to some degree. I just wish they would use a different word to describe what they believe. On the other side, we have places like Kato and other libertarian organizations around Washington, D.C. who are, I think for some organizations, are finally getting separated from the conservative side that we have always been put on because I personally don't think of libertarianism as being on the right. I actually think, you know, I think if anything, obviously it's not a one-dimensional political spectrum, but I have more in common with people on the left than I do with people on the right. And what Trump has done is he, I think he has split conservatives in a way that that split has always been there, but now it's in the Oval Office and it's much more politically real. He's split conservatives between what I would call collectivist conservatives, which are the nationalist groups, the state as a family kind of view of conservatives, the people who want to ban drugs because it's bad for your soul, the people who want to ban foreigners because it's bad for American jobs and those things, and then what I would call classical liberal conservatives, the ones who are more repulsed by Trump, who have always found more affinity for libertarians, although they may not want to go to the things that scare them about libertarianism like our beliefs on immigration or beliefs on foreign policy. And that puts Cato, in particular, and libertarians at a pretty good spot to come in there and say, look at what we believe on immigration are these heated times about immigration that we've always believed on immigration. And then people say, wow, those libertarians, they're not conservatives. I always thought they were ultra-conservatives or arch-conservatives. That's what the New York Times sometimes likes to call us, that libertarians was just a version of conservatism that is more extreme than the sort of okay friendly conservatives down the block. And I think in the Trump era, more and more people realize that libertarianism is an entirely different way of looking at government. Besides acting as regular hosts of Free Thoughts podcasts, you both have other responsibilities and jobs outside of recording. Is listening to podcasts part of your daily lives? I think for me, more than Trevor, I listen to a fair number of podcasts. I listen to books on tapes more than podcasts, but you listen to a lot of podcasts. Yeah. Although with a few exceptions, most of the podcasts I listen to are not politics at all. I'm not related to it. They're not about philosophy. They're not about history. They're about other topics that interest me. They're palate cleansers. Is there a fountain pen podcast? Why isn't there? Why don't you start the fountain pen podcast? Oh, there are many, there are many fountain pen podcasts. I'm a big fan of fountain pens, by the way. But I do not listen to any of them because my interest within fountain pens, even so the very narrow field of interest within fountain pens, is then further narrowed for me to only certain aspects of it. And most of them are long discussions then of aspects of pen culture that I'm less willing to spend time listening to. Okay. So you're still weird. It's fine. You listen to other things like horror podcasts and story podcasts. Yeah, I really like a lot of the radio drama shows that are out there right now. The Black Tapes podcast is terrific. The only real political podcast I listen to is the Fifth Column, which is incredible and I love it, with Camille Foster and Matt Welsh and Michael Moynihan. But then it's a lot of tech podcasts, accidental tech podcast. Yeah, I still listen to Econ Talk on the regular, which has always been the podcast that I predominantly listen to and is still one of my go-to. Definitely one of the things that helped me most in just becoming an informed libertarian was listening to Econ Talk, especially as someone who essentially never took an economics class in my entire life. But going through whatever, I probably haven't listened to every Econ Talk, but let's say 350 episodes of Econ Talk is more than the hours you would spend in a doing a PhD in economics probably in class, or even a PhD, but at least a bachelor's. And so it's a great education for anyone who doesn't already listen to Econ Talk. Erin, I've been specifically asked to direct this question at you. How were you first introduced to libertarianism? Asked by who to direct it to me? Our other producer, Evan Banks. I hate to give him credit, but by Trevor... He doesn't want to say it, I know. It's hilarious. By my co-host, Trevor Burris. You're welcome, world. Yeah, so I was in undergraduate, getting my English degree in Boulder, Colorado, and I took a class in science fiction literature. And Trevor was in that class conspicuously. He was the guy who always had something to say about everything. And then... Real guilty as charged. And then I think it was after the final exam or something, I ended up at a diner with you and my friend Nicole, who's also in the class, and we chatted, and Trevor and I became friends. And that was when he started introducing me to these ideas. We would go a couple of few times a week to... There's a Barnes and Noble in Boulder, and we would go in the evening instead of doing homework. Not much homework and philosophy major English degree, I guess. I mean, I'm sure there was something I could have been doing. Probably. We would go to Barnes and Noble and we would... You could have been studying German. I could have been. Mr. I took German three times. Three times. Failed it twice. Yes. Passed it on the third time. But we just would have conversations, and Trevor recommended readings, and I was kind of... Of the left at that time, because of an English major, I was really into lit, crit, and postmodern philosophy, which has a certain political slant to it. Although it's much more interesting and nuanced and worthwhile than people who only know the term postmodernism and hurl it around as an epithet understand. So I encourage you, if you really hate postmodernism, to actually read some of it or at least read about it. But it was through those conversations and through reading and through various discussions that I came around. My perception is I'm the same. Aaron had blue hair and he was also green at one point. Red at another point. Maybe red at one point. I think purple at once. Just converse shoes and... Still have converse shoes. Yeah, you still have your converse shoes. But yeah, we started... In Mark's class that was the name of the professor, there were videos. There we would go as a class to watch movies like Cat People and Candy Man and... What else would we watch? Some other weird ones, Eraserhead or something. Maybe not Eraserhead, but we would have... Blade Runner. Blade Runner. We would have socials. Socials. And so that helped. The class socialized. And I should remember, I don't remember the first time we started talking. It might have been like our friend Nicole. I might have met her first, but Aaron and Nicole were hanging out before that. So yeah, there was a very, very long conversation that went on for about a year or so about the meaning of government and meaning of economics. Most of it, I would say, was more about economics. I was a very different libertarian at that time than I am now that... You were more socially conservative. I personally wasn't socially conservative, but a lot of my attitudes were more on the socially conservative, but I've never been religious or any of those things. But probably on more and some of those things I was not as a libertarian then. But mostly what we talked about were economics, things like what's wrong with minimum wage and what's wrong with these kind of things. And some of the books, I gave them more Thomas Sowell, which are great sort of entry drugs, so and then after that we took two more classes together. So we took three classes together, total and undergrad. We ran a website for a while and then we went to law school together. And then Aaron went to graduated a year before me in law school and then he got here and then I got here and the rest is history. Thank you for listening to our 200th episode of Free Thoughts. And a special thanks to our producer, Tess Terrible, for hosting. I also need to thank our other producer, Evan Banks, who's been with us from the very beginning. And also to Tess's predecessor, Mark McDaniel, who is now at Reason Magazine and manned the recording booth for a couple of years, making sure that we got everything down on tape the way it ought to be. Thank you to Trevor. Always a pleasure. I think we should do 200 more. We should do 200 more. And thank you to all of you for listening and we'll see you next week.