Welcome back to program analysis. This is part two of this lecture on call graph analysis, where we now will look into two algorithms to construct call graphs, which are relatively simple and also relatively efficient, and will give us a call graph that is more precise than the most naive approach that one might implement, but not as precise as some of the algorithms that we'll see later in this lecture. So in general, there are many, many different ways how you can construct a call graph in a static analysis. What we'll do in this lecture is to focus on five algorithms that are relatively popular for doing this, and we'll basically go through them by increasing complexity. Starting with these relatively simple ones called class hierarchy analysis and rapid type analysis here in this video. Then in the next video, we will look at variable type analysis and declared type analysis. Then in video number four, we look at the Spark framework, which is a generalization of all the approaches that we've seen before, and that combines call graph analysis with points to analysis. Don't get confused by all these abbreviations. They are hopefully there to make your life a little easier, but I'll try to use the full name for these algorithms whenever possible. So let's start with the most simple of these algorithms, which is the class hierarchy analysis algorithm. What it does can be summarized very briefly. It basically looks at all polymorphic call sites where some method M is called, and then checks the statically declared type T of the base object of this call. And then for every subclass of this type T that implements the method M, it'll add an edge to T.M. So basically it considers all the possible subtypes that the base object may have, and all the methods that may be called because the object may be one of these, maybe an instance of one of these subtypes. So let's look back at the example that we had seen earlier in this lecture in the first video. So in that example, we had this method called make collection that creates a collection and then returns it. And then on this return value, the code is calling the add method. And so now in the initial look at this example, we had assumed that aesthetic analysis is clever enough to find out that actually this call to add can only go to array list dot add or hash set dot add. But a more naive algorithm like the class hierarchy analysis algorithm that we're talking about here doesn't really know this because all it does is to look at the statically declared type of the base object, which is C in this example. And this type is collection. So it will look at all the implementations of the collection interface. And each of these implementations that provides an add method is a possible target for the call of C dot add. So for example, what it will see is that there is a class called entry set which is an implementation of collection. And this class provides an add method and therefore it'll have an edge to that method as well. Or for example, it will also see that there is a linked list class which also offers an add method. And because all we know is the statically declared type of the C variable, it'll also add an edge to that add method. And because there are many, many more subtypes and subclasses of collection, actually there will be many, many more of these edges in this example. Note also that the add methods are not just those that are in Java util but potentially also other add methods that are provided in custom classes if these custom classes also implement the collection interface because if the static analysis sees these classes based on what it knows about this core site, it will also assume that these custom classes may be called here. So summarizing the pros and cons of this approach, on the pro side, we see that it's a very simple approach. So it can be explained in pretty much a minute or two. Another advantage is that it's correct in the sense that all the edges that may happen while the program is executing are actually in the call graph. So the call graph is not missing anything. And it has very few requirements. So all you need is a class hierarchy which is relatively easy to get for most languages and you do not need any other analysis information. So it's also pretty easy to actually implement this kind of analysis. But then there's some obvious disadvantages and the biggest one here is that it's very imprecise analysis because as we have already seen with the simple example, there will be many edges in the call graph that actually will never get executed because these are actually calls that are not possible but based on the simple analysis approach, the analysis just doesn't know and therefore in order to be correct will include these edges. To address this imprecision of class hierarchy analysis, to some extent, there is a variant of it that is actually slightly more clever and this is called rapid type analysis. So the idea of rapid type analysis is that it's basically like class hierarchy analysis but it only takes those types into account that the program actually instantiates at least once. So if you think about this collection example, if the program is not ever using a linked list, then we know for sure that this object will not be a linked list and therefore we certainly do not have to have this edge in our call graph. So this is essentially the idea that rapid type analysis implements. So let's look at the example again. What we see here is that in this entire program and let's assume this one piece of code that we see here is the entire program, in this entire program only array list and hash set are ever instantiated. That means that without really knowing what exactly the type of C is here, we know for sure that because array lists and hash set are the only two subtypes of collection that are ever used in this program, we know for sure that the only two ad methods that may be called here are array list add and hash set dot add, which is then why this will be the two methods that are actually included here as possible targets of this call in the main method. But now let's assume that we have a small variant of this program where in addition to this, to the code that you've already seen, we now also have this pretty useless call of new linked list here at the end of the method. So it's just calling the constructor and it's not even assigning the return value to anything. But because rapid type analysis will now see that linked list is also instantiated at least once in this program, it will consider this as a possible subtype of collection that may be called at this C dot ad statement. And therefore it will actually add another node and edge to our graph to reflect exactly this possible call by having this additional node linked list dot add here and another edge that goes from the main method to that new node. So as you can see, it helps to reduce the call graph quite a bit, but it can also be easily fooled by types that are instantiated but actually cannot be called at a particular call set. So summarizing the pros and cons of this rapid type analysis algorithm, we'll see the following. So first of all, it's still pretty fast. So if you reason about the complexity of this algorithm, you'll see that it's in the order of the size of the program because it basically has to go through the program once in order to figure out which classes are instantiated, but it doesn't have to do any more sophisticated analysis. It's also guaranteed to be correct. So whenever it removes a potential call edge, then this is certainly an edge that cannot really happen. And at the same time, it's much more precise than the very simple class hierarchy analysis algorithm that we've seen before because many unnecessary nodes and edges can actually get proved. But as we've also seen, it's far from perfect and the biggest disadvantage is that it doesn't really reason about assignments so that as an example with this new linked list constructor call that we've seen, it doesn't really know that this constructor call will never end up in the variable C on which the add method is called. All right, so now you've seen two simple algorithms to construct call graphs, both of which are pretty fast and both of which have obvious disadvantages. And in the next video, we'll see how to actually construct a call graph while reasoning about assignments so that some of the disadvantages that we've seen with these two algorithms here are removed. Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.


Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today on what is our 250th episode of Free Thoughts is Adam Bates Policy Council at the International Refugee Assistance Project. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. Yeah, hi. What is the International Refugee Assistance Project? Sure. So it was originally founded in 2008 as the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project. It was five students at Yale Law School, including Becca Heller, who is our current director, just saw that there was a need. That was at the height of the Iraq War, saw that there was a need for legal services for people who are applying for refugee status to the United States. And the provision of direct legal services to this community basically just didn't exist at that time. So it was really her vision to create a law firm, essentially, and people who could leverage legal expertise to help refugees escape the situations there. And so I believe in about 2015, it was rebranded as the International Refugee Assistance Project and their mandate grew because they were representing refugees, not just from Iraq, but from all over the world. So yeah, that's what we do. We provide direct legal services to refugee applicants. We litigate. We also have a lot of pro bono chapters, so law firms who help us do our work. And we have about 29 or 30 law student chapters. So we outsource a lot of work to law students. So we actually do a lot more work than the number of people who actually work there would suggest. Does this, this is only people coming to America. I just assume your expertise is in American refugee law, but does it get involved with situations such as the Syrian refugees going over to Europe? We've primarily focused on the United States because that's where the expertise is. We have field offices in Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. Sometimes we will work with people. We have a Canadian law school, a Canadian law student chapter. So on occasion, we may help people navigate the Canadian process, but we usually would defer to Canadian lawyers on that. So yes, by and large, this is focused on helping refugee applicants get to the United States. But if the situation arises, we are trying to get them to any safe third country. How did you get involved? Yeah, that's an interesting story. So I was actually working at Cato. I started at IRAP in October of last year. So I've been there about nine months now. For the three years prior to that, I was doing criminal justice policy here at the Cato Institute. And so I mean, basically what happened was the the election happened, and then President Trump instituted the Muslim ban in his first week in office. I was just motivated by by what I saw going on in the airports, by what was happening. What I thought was on the basis of people's religion or their nationality or their ethnicity. So I just decided that I wanted to start working on refugee issues. So I knew that IRAP was responsible for a lot of that organization that people may remember from the airports where lawyers were showing up to Dulles and Reagan and trying to help get people off the planes because the the Muslim ban came down at like 420 on a Friday afternoon and it went into effect immediately. So there were people in the air who when they landed, the husband would be a U.S. citizen and his wife wouldn't be a citizen. So they were turning the wife around and sending her back to Syria or sending her back to Iran.  And I was just offended. I would say I found reservoirs of patriotism. I didn't know I had. And I thought that this this isn't this can't be what this country is about. This can't be something. And I just felt that as a libertarian, as a lawyer, as somebody with some background in Middle East studies in the Arabic language, I just felt that this was the this was the thing for me to do at that time during while that policy was ongoing. I thought I really want to help this this refugee issue. What does it take to be a refugee to the United States in a general sense? Well, so I mean, in the specific in the specific legal context, the legal test could be to be a refugee. So a refugee is a person typically there, of course, there are exceptions to this, but typically a refugee is somebody who is not in their country of residence. They're not in their home country. Their unwilling are unable to return to their home country because of a well founded fear of persecution based on race, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social group, something like that. So it's a I mean, it's a pretty objective test. But at the same time, you can see how that might apply to a lot of people. So I think currently there are roughly 20 million, according to UNHCR, which is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are about 20 million refugees in the world with about five million more Palestinians who are considered refugees. And so that's just people who meet that definition. There are also people who are asylum seekers. So those are people who have arrived in a country like the United States and claim that they can't be sent back to their country for largely the same reasons for well founded fear of persecution. And then there are what we call internally displaced people. These are people who are still in their home country, but they've had to leave where they were from for some reason, usually internal persecution. So those people do not count as refugees under the UN definition. So the group of people that we work with typically are people who are outside their home country. They're not they're looking for a safe third country and they can't go back to their home country. Does that persecution requirement then mean that someone who say is just there's a civil war going on and you happen to be caught in the middle of it? So you're not being targeted for any of the various criteria that you listed. But it simply is just it's too dangerous to remain there because you could get a bomb dropped on you at any time. And so you fled. They don't that doesn't count as a refugee. Well, there are as I mentioned that that was the general definition of refugee. There are also exceptions to this, but in US law, there are things called like temporary protected status, which you may have heard of, which are people who are in the United States. Something happens. Now, this something could be a broader a broader category than what I mentioned earlier. So it could be a natural disaster. It could be the Syrian civil war breaks out and you're in the United States and you are given a temporary protected status. Of course, the problem there, if you come in as a refugee after a year, you can apply to have an adjustment of status to a permanent resident. And then, you know, four years after that, you can apply to become a citizen. It's the same as if you had immigrated to the U.S. Temporary protected status is temporary and these people exist in this kind of limbo. The government has to reauthorize a redesign that their particular crisis or else they can be sent out of the country. And that's happened a couple of times under this administration where there are concerns about people who've been in the U.S. and they're they're under temporary protected status, but they're concerned about losing that status and potentially being being deported. So there are even for people who don't qualify technically as refugees, there are humanitarian parole and temporary protected status. There are ways for them to be kept in the country if the administration is amenable to those. Well, that was I think that story was the Hunter and the 40,000 Hunter and who had temporary protected status for 20 years or something. And then they just took it away, which seems to me to be vicious is the only real word I can think of. What I mean, I don't think they were causing any huge problems. I don't think there were a bunch of stories of Hunter and crime sprees. I might be wrong about that, but just to be like, no, you guys got to go home. I guess after 20 years to kind of show something about the way this administration thinks of people living in this country who aren't American citizens, I think so. I mean, I think the answer you would get is temporary is meant to be temporary. And it's this very like formulaic instead of considering the broader humanitarian picture or the broader philosophical issues at stake. You know, it's really drawing right down into the name itself and saying, well, temporary means temporary. They've been here 20 years, yet you're right. I'm not familiar with any big Hunter and crime spree.  So, yes, this is I think anybody who works in the space I work in would tell you that this is this is not a great time for refugee law in the U.S. or or in the world, really. So I like I like fighting tough battles. You know, that's part I think that's part of being a libertarian is finding these hard battles and and fighting them. But yes, this this is a very trying time for refugee rights and immigration rights more broadly. What does fighting those battles look like specifically for you? So what do you do in your day job with Iraq? Sure. So one of the things that Iraq really prides itself on. It's a very young organization, both in terms of how long it's existed and in terms of how old the people are who work there. So it's a lot of young lawyers who are who are energetic and interested and fired up about this issue. There are people are very interested in doing the various things that we do at Iraq. So we have a the the bulk of our work is our legal department. So those are people who are providing direct legal services to refugee applicants. They're helping them fill out the paperwork. They're helping them file appeals. They're walking them through the laborious process of of becoming a refugee. We also have a litigation department. And what litigation does basically is sue the government. So we sued over the Muslim ban. We lost in the Supreme Court. We still have. So the Muslim ban was actually bifurcated into the travel ban and then the refugee ban. We're still litigating the refugee aspect of the Muslim ban. But as everyone knows, the travel ban was resolved by the Supreme Court in favor of the administration. We're also suing about various other refugee issues. There was a program for unaccompanied children from Central America called the Central American Minors Program. Was this the thing that people were freaking out about in during the Obama administration when they were saying that the kids are coming north and everyone started freaking out about it? Right. And they I'm from Oklahoma. They had they were using an army base in Oklahoma to bus the kids there. And and yes, and this was yes, people probably remember during the Obama administration, the unaccompanied minor crisis at the border. But so a lot of these were kids who were fleeing drug violence in in Central America, which was, you know, coincidentally caused by our prohibitionary laws. But never leave that on the side there. Well, I mean, when you deal with refugee issues and when you talk to people about where where, if at all, the obligation to take in refugees comes from, I think that's a worthwhile point to make is that especially, I mean, you may think that we have a general obligation to provide sanctuary and refuge to people. But even if you don't, the situations where we can draw direct lines between U.S. government policies and the existence of the refugee crisis in the first place, you know, maybe we have a bit more of an obligation there. But so yes, this was a program to basically provide humanitarian parole, which is again, this is one of these kind of executive processes to to get people into the country. The Central American Minors Program was a way for those kids to be able to stay in the U.S. when President Trump got elected. He without a lot of fanfare, without telling anybody, just basically canceled that program without giving any kind of justification. Just we're not doing this anymore. So we're litigating that issue. We're litigating on behalf of there's a program called the Lautenberg program, which if people are around in the 80s and early 90s, they may remember the Lautenberg program was originally established to help Jews fleeing the Soviet Union. So a lot of our a lot of the history of U.S. refugee law is helping people fleeing communism, whether from Vietnam, whether from Russia, Cuba, for instance, we we've always had that sense that people living under communist government should be able to find a home in the U.S. But so the Lautenberg program, since there aren't a lot of Jews fleeing the Soviet Union anymore, the bulk of that program now is helping people who are being persecuted in Iran. Get to the U.S. So mostly religious persecution, Christians, Zoroastrians. So the way that program works, because the U.S. doesn't have any official relationship with the government of Iran, people in the Lautenberg program apply and then they're they're approved to go to Austria and the Austrian government actually manages this program from Vienna up until the President Trump was elected. Once those Iranians got to Vienna and went through the rest of the the vetting and all that, the admission rate to the U.S. was something like ninety nine point nine percent. I mean, for all intents and purposes, once you were in Vienna, you were coming to the U.S. President Trump since President Trump was elected, that has dropped to about zero. And so you may have seen some articles from Reuters or somewhere else talking about dozens or hundreds of Iranians who are stranded in Austria. The Austrian government didn't promise to take these. You know, it was a temporary situation. So we're also litigating on behalf of of of those people, because the government is obligated by statute to inform them to the greatest extent, practicable why they were denied. And in every one of these cases, at least the cases that I'm familiar with, the response from the government was for discretionary reasons. Period. Now, how so how appealable is that? Is that kind of you kind of stuck after that? Well, so we actually got class action status recently. So we're representing the entire class because what will happen sometimes is if you're representing two or three people, the government may move those two or three people through. And then you've mooted you've mooted the case. You can't proceed to the issue because your clients are no longer. But so we've been granted class status. We won partial summary judgment on the issue of the government having to provide notice about at least a better explanation for why these people were denied. But in terms of of where that's going, I can't tell you. I our third department is our policy department, which is where I work. So I have a tangential relationship with our litigation wings and our legal departments, but the bulk of my work is in our policy department. So I have a handful of clients myself. Everyone, everyone, every lawyer who comes to work at IRAP will do some client work just so they understand the process. And that's been very valuable for me because I wasn't coming here from a position of refugee law. But so I have a handful of clients that I work with. I also manage our student policy chapters. So in so far as our our law school student groups are doing policy work, they're coordinating that with me. And then I do a lot of our DC work. So IRAP is based in New York. I am here in DC. I'm based here in DC and I do a lot of our policy work on the hill trying to persuade the administration, persuade Congress to to protect the refugee program that we have and expand it as if possible. But as we've discussed, this is a very tough time for that kind of policy work. So a lot of that work now is just trying to ensure the program that already exists can can keep going. Can you tell us a bit about those clients that you have? Like, what kinds of situations do they find themselves in? What specifically are you doing to help them? Well, I mean, so for confidentiality reasons, I and I will say that. Yeah, because and as I said about who these refugees are, it's not just, you know, the general lawyer confidentiality issue.  So it's it's really important not to get into too many specifics. But I mean, just by the fact that they're they're applying to be refugees. They've generally fled their home country for some reason. They have some well established threat to their life and they need a safe harbor in a third country. They're not safe where they are. So you can you can imagine you can imagine the kind of conditions that these people are living in. You can imagine the kind of things that must be going through their head. They've uprooted their entire lives. They're living in a foreign country from where they were born. They're trying to get to a country and then they're being faced with all the bureaucratic hurdles that go along with being a refugee. And now a US administration that is overtly hostile to the idea of refugees and by extension, the US administration by that hostility is kind of dragging the entire international refugee apparatus down with it. So I mean, in so far as I said, this is a bad time to be doing refugee policy. It's immeasurably worse time to be a refugee. And it just happens to be one of the worst refugee crises since since World War Two. As I said, there are roughly, including the Palestinians, there are roughly 24 to 25 million people who are in this position. And I mean, maybe one percent of them, according to the UN, are going to get resettled in a year. So that's I mean, it's a terrible situation. And that's so yeah, without getting into too many specifics about what our clients are dealing with that kind of set lays the groundwork. Where do they while they're waiting for their appeal? And because they present themselves with the border or they come in a flight and then they do they claim refugee status and then they have to go through the process of getting paperwork and and showing that they deserve refugee status. Is that kind of how it works? Or do they do it before they come into the border? So what you've just described are basically asylum asylum. So I mean, it's easy to get it's it's fun to think why these things are called different things, but I guess asylum has that old thing of like going running into a church and yelling asylum or something like that, right? So but I see it. So refugees there went to the embassy or something in Kabul or something and applied for refugee status. So that's so yeah, just to clarify, if they're in the United States and they say you can't send me out because of I fear then that person is an asylum seeker and we have a different process for asylum adjudication. So just because that's a common a common confusion. So our clients refugees are people who are physically located outside the United States. And the way this typically works, you can go to an embassy and and try to register as a refugee. The way it normally works is to present yourself to the UNHCR.  And then the UN goes through the process of trying to find a they prioritize all the people who have been designated as refugees. And then they try to find willing countries to accept these people. In the U.S. context, once the UNHCR has referred them to the U.S., then the U.S. Refugee Admission Program, U.S. RAP starts all over. They basically start with the information gathering, the interviews, the vetting, the security checks. The U.S. doesn't just take the UN's word for these things. So by the time by the time a refugee is referred from UNHCR to the U.S. and then is granted approval and arrives in the U.S., that person has been through immense vetting. They're the best box checkers and paperwork people in the world just because of how laborious this process is. And then if you're not one of the lucky few who is resettled or they can't find a country or you're inadmissible to the country, a lot of those people are in refugee camps or they're in those they're in those second countries where they're still trying to get out. And again, their lives are kind of on hold. They can't go home. They're not permanently settled. They're just there. What does it look like to present yourself to the UNHCR? Like, so let's say I'm in Syria. I'm a Syrian citizen. And I think that I am capable of claiming refugee status. Do I they're just like, is there some building that I walk over to? Do I have to hop on a flight and manage to fly somewhere? So I haven't seen this firsthand yet. Hopefully in the next year, I'll get, as I said, we have field offices in Jordan and Lebanon. So hopefully I'll get to go see this for myself in the next year. So I don't want to say anything, you know, out of line here. But generally the way this works is you flee. You have to leave the country that you're currently in. And obviously, if it's an active war zone, there are, you know, UNHCR and the U.S. government may not even be doing interviews in that country. But so you would normally leave to a second country. So so many the biggest countries in terms of currently housing refugees, not resettling because they're not there permanently. But Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, so Afghanistan and Syria are producing. I mean, as people know, are producing a lot of refugees. So those neighboring countries, Turkey, have millions of Syrians or Afghans living in those countries who just fled across the border. Yeah, who came across the border when the war broke out and there. And so at that point, that's where you would present yourself to the UN and you would say, I'm a refugee from Syria. I'm a refugee from Afghanistan. Here's and then that's where you would start with the information gathering and the the interview processes. So yeah, when we talk about resettlement to the U.S. or the U.S. being the largest resettlement country, which has been true for the entire history until this year, the U.S. Not only has the U.S. been the largest resettlement country until this year, the U.S. has always resettled more refugees than the rest of the world combined. 2017 was the first time that didn't happen. But so but so when that's resettlement countries, when we talk about countries that are housing these people, I think something like between 17 and 23 percent of the population of Lebanon right now are refugees. I mean, just massive, massive refugee movements to these countries. Isn't there a different problem with refugees than sort of quote unquote voluntary immigration, where I tell people all the time that the reason immigration works so well is because the person who leaves a country voluntarily, like the person leaving Iran, not as a refugee, but saying, I just want to live in the United States is not an average Iranian. I think that's the biggest mistake is, oh, well, he's just an average Iranian. No, he wants to leave Iran and uproot his life or her life and learn a new language. All these things that mean that they really care about moving. But if you're being pushed out of a country, then you're not getting the same caliber, let's sort of speak, of people as people who are voluntarily up in their lives. And so you could have a bunch of problematic people there who are refugees, but ultimately may not really, they would rather be back in their country that's a war torn mess and they don't really want to be in America. So they're not actually the people that I don't I want immigrants, but I'm not necessarily would prioritize people who don't want to be in America as the immigrants I would take. And that would seem to be a problem you would have with refugees. You mean the problem of having refugees end up in America who don't actually want to be here? They would rather they left a place because it was so inhospitable. And they said, OK, I'll go to America. So maybe they're less likely to assimilate because they didn't come here and raise certain values or that sort of thing. Sure. So I think I mean, that's a concern that people have. But I mean, I think these are empirical questions, right? And these are these are issues that would show up in the data in terms of in terms of crime, in terms of economic behavior. And I think we just don't see that. And I mean, Iraq is not really unlike when I worked at Cato. You know, we're not a research institution. We use a lot of outside research. And some of the research, a lot of the research that I use is research from the Cato Institute from Alex Nalresta and David Beer here at Cato. And I mean, I think they've done a phenomenal job of empirically showing the criminal data, the terrorism data, the security data that just shows that not only are these people not threats, not only are they not criminals, but they're they're more law abiding than the native born American citizen.  But how to compare that against a person who is fleeing a war torn country and they're fleeing for their lives and they're worried about their family safety. What does that person think when they get to somewhere where finally for the first for a lot of these people for the first time in years and years, they're safe and they have a home and they have a life and they have a job. So if we take for granted like Netflix and chill tonight, it's fine. So I think that too would be a very powerful, a very powerful force in people being happy with with the situation they're in. And I think if that weren't the case, then we would see it in the data. We would we would see that there was a problem here and we just don't. But along those lines, you mentioned there, what, 25 million people? So you said currently in the world, in the world, seeking refugee status or seeking to be relocated. We can't just let them all in. I mean, we can't we couldn't just say, OK, all 25 million can come here because it's even if they're not even if they're not higher crime rate than the average American, that still is that's an awful lot of people. So how do we how many is enough and how do we decide which of those 25 million it makes sense to take on? So I again, I feel like that's an empirical question. And there probably is some science out there about the number of people that are given landmass and resources and all of that. But I would say the issue here is that the the numbers we're actually working with are such an infinitesimal part of that. That I mean, that's really just an academic discussion, you know, over the since the so the Refugee Act of 1980 basically created our legal the legal framework that we use in the US for refugees today that authorizes the president every year to make a determination of how many refugees are basically a refugee cap for what the president anticipates will be taking in refugees over the course of that. So it's 2018 over the 38 years of this program. The the average refugee cap has been about 95,000. Whatever that that higher number is, whether it's 25 million, whether it's whatever that number is, it's higher than it's higher than 95,000. So that's our historical average. When President Trump made his first determination in 2017, he set a 45,000 refugee cap, which is the lowest cap in the history since in that 38 years. And I checked right before I came over here in terms of actual. So that's the cap. That's I mean, it's generally treated as as a target. That's usually what we would anticipate the number is going to be. But right now, we're almost to the end of the fiscal year. We have resettled something like 16,200 refugees. So we're not even on pace to hit half of that historically low cap. So it's it's almost I don't want to say it's funny, but to think about having a situation where we're talking about how many refugees would it take before we were we just can't take any more refugees. We're so far away from that. So, yeah, I don't know what the answer to that question is, but it's a lot more certainly the United States has the capacity to absorb a lot more people. And I know, again, to refer to your colleague Alex Nowresta, he's done great work, for instance, on the Merrill Boat Lift in Cuba. When you did have these huge numbers of people showing up in a very short time frame, and it turns out it's not that bad. The economic benefits are in fact positive. Or just fracking in North Dakota or maybe just suddenly 10,000 people came into town and into a thousand person town. I mean, this is fracking. This is a big this is a big country. It's a very big, sparsely populated country. So again, I'm not an expert in population dynamics, but I don't think that's a concern that people really need to be worried about. I'd like to ask you about your history, even before Cato, because there's a Facebook post that you wrote on 9-11 three or four years ago that described what you were doing on 9-11 and sort of the path you went through to get here. And I've often shared it with people. I think it's a great story of how you, you know, eventually you couldn't even stand on the sidelines anymore. And so far as Cato standing on the sidelines and what doesn't really get your hands dirty with helping real people out in that sense. So what is that kind of path in the least in the abridged sense? OK, so so, yeah, first, I should say this is obviously me speaking and not and not I wrap here, but my own. But so, yeah, I grew up in Oklahoma. I grew up in I was born in Texas, I have to say, genetically a Texan. I grew up in Oklahoma.   So, I mean, after 9-11 happened, you know, my perception of the world at that point was the United States is good and right. I was an exceptionalist. The United States is good and right and a beacon on the hill. And we were minding our own business.  So that really set me on the path. That's when I got really interested in learning Arabic. That's when I got interested in doing Middle East studies. I mean, at that time, the idea would have been to go work for the government and fight the bad guys, but it was really through that process and through learning about the history of the US government's behavior in the world through meeting Muslims for the first time and actually talking to people who knew so much more about these issues. And it was really learning about the US history in Afghanistan. So I not to date myself, but I graduated high school. It was 2003. So that was right in the Iraq War had just started and we'd been in Afghanistan. So that's the that's the backdrop of when I'm learning this stuff. And it was really when I learned about the history of the US and Afghanistan and then actually interned at the Cato Institute doing foreign policy that that that kind of fell apart for me. So that was the point where I decided that I yeah, I really bought into libertarianism and this idea of universal rights, universal individual rights and that I mean, basically the fundamental libertarian preset that people are people and the equality under law as a universal idea so that a person born in Juarez and a person born a mile away in El Paso have the same rights. They have the same rights from the same source and they need to be respected or a person in a Democratic Republic of Congo that needs that is is fleeing a war. So so yeah, that's that's what led me to Cato in the first place. That's what created my interest in civil liberties. And then as I said earlier, when the Muslim ban happened, that's what really kind of set me off to think this is not this is in so far as I think America exists as an aspiration and we have these these liberal ideas of what America should be. It was just offensive to me. And that's where I just thought that I don't want to be writing policy papers not to not to present company, you know, but that I wanted to get out and help people. And I thought I had the skill set to actually to actually do that and work in the field and represent clients. And so and that's why I'm here. So yeah, I it was a long path and a circuitous route to this. So would like 18 year old Adam call call you a liberal like liberal Wimp who doesn't properly appreciate America's exceptionalism. Yes. And if I'm glad that Facebook didn't exist when I was 16 or 15 or 16 years old. But I mean, that's I mean, that's that's part of of growing up and getting out of your, you know, your town in Oklahoma and meeting new people. And and yeah, so I I'm more worried about what 32 year old Adam thinks about what 18 year old Adam thought. But yeah, that's that's that's how I ended up here. So for your years at Cato, you did criminal justice. Are there similarities? I mean, a lot of the work you do in criminal justice is you were concerned about the way that this this government apparatus can use its power directed against the powerless and underprivileged. Frequently and the way that government and grinds down these people who don't have a way out from under its boot. So are there did the work there help you or their similarities or parallels now moving into the way that the state interfaces with these these refugees were themselves like pretty powerless people. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I do I do think there are similarities and I find myself calling on a lot of my experience doing criminal justice policy and my and my study of that. I mean, I think all of the things that we point out and that I worked on when I was here in the all the the institutional issues in the criminal justice system about access to justice, access to counsel due process rights, things like that. This refugee community, our refugee system is what happens when those even those things, even when those imperfect institutions just simply don't exist. I mean, these people generally, they don't get to see a judge. They're not entitled to counsel when they when they do their interviews. They're not entitled to counsel at all, if unless they can find unless they can find they can afford counsel or they have somebody like I wrap who represents them for free. And on top of that, these are people who like to to a person are fleeing.  There, you know, their their entire experience is is uncertain. They're they they they're not secure in terms of their personal security in terms of their personal safety. They can't go home. I mean, these are people who are among the world's most vulnerable people. And behind them, you know, they have a raid. The forces of authoritarianism or religious extremism.  So I think in terms of, you know, being a libertarian and being concerned about individual liberty, there's no there's no fight that's more worth fighting to me than that. In terms of what libertarians say we care about and the issues that we want to protect people from, people who are in a refugee situation are are right at the heart of that.  Most of us only have to deal with one crappy government, but you have one at your back and one in front of you sitting in the middle of it. Right. And you're, you know, you're interacting with the United Nations, which is this gigantic, sprawling apparatus. You're in a third, you're in a second country and you're dealing with that government. You're trying to, you know, present yourself to a third government in terms of protecting people from from government. That's about as much as you can get. Yes. So you giving your Oklahoma, I have a lot of experience with Oklahoma. My parents are from there, giving your Oklahoma background and sort of Oklahoma Republican, I imagine you could speak, at least speak fluent Oklahoma Republican to some extent, you know, at least a bit. What is changed in the Republican attitude, do you think over the last few years toward people like refugees and immigrants? Yeah, I mean, it has it's it's I rarely feel that I'm shocked by anything anymore, but it is it's pretty shocking just in terms of as I think I alluded to earlier, for the longest time in the so I mean, most of our refugee law came into being after World War Two. That was the big, you know, idea that we need internationally. We need some way to deal with with these kinds of things. But from the end of the of World War Two, so during the Cold War, the overwhelming majority of refugees who came to the U.S. were fleeing communism. Now, there are some politics involved in that, you know, the U.S. would look the U.S. didn't look as kindly on refugee applications from friendly governments. There's a little politics there, but I mean, for the most part, it was generally understood in America, you know, left, right, whatever, that we had an obligation and that it was a good thing. It was a net benefit to the United States in addition to being a net benefit to the refugees for people not to be living under those kind of regimes, for those regimes not to be able to benefit from the resources and productivity of those people. And that you can you can see that in the Republican Party for decades. You can go back and watch Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush basically have this fight over who's more supportive of immigrants. So I think to see it now, where we've basically just abandoned the idea that that a that we have an obligation to people who are who are suffering under authoritarianism or whatever they're suffering under, but also that we've we've essentially lot or at least a lot of people who used to advocate this as a strategic issue have somehow, you know, forgotten that argument that we don't want people living under ISIS. We don't want Christians being persecuted in Iran. We don't want people living under these situations. So not not only can we deprive these these authoritarian regimes of their resources, but we gain a resource ourselves in the productivity of these people. And I mean, and the data is very clear on this. So there was a report that actually was produced under the Trump administration, analyzing the economic impact of the refugee program on the U.S. economy from, I think, 2004 to 2015, I want to say, and it showed that the net the net economic impact of the refugee program was like plus 63 billion dollars or something. So there's no question that in terms of economics, this is a benefit. There's no question that in terms of the refugees themselves, this is a benefit. So, yeah, it is it is disappointing. And there has been a huge shift in the way people, especially on the right, but just in general, have have kind of shifted their attitude. When when people used to show up from Cuba, they just got to stay. We knew that people shouldn't be living under Castro. Somehow we've lost that. We don't have that same approach to people who are currently suffering under the Islamic State or any other authoritarian regime. So, yeah, it's interesting to see how that's how that's changed over the years. You think it's part of that, I guess, demographic shifts and kind of cultural anxiety that it's one thing to be accepting of people who are different from you when people who are like you are the dominant majority. And so those these new people exist always on the periphery. But as as we tip closer and closer, like, was it within the next decade or so? I think people when whites become the non-majority. I'm not sure when, but it will be. It's coming up coming up that that whites become more and more anxious about people who don't look like them, don't speak like them, have, you know, different belief systems, whatever else coming in. Well, I think so again, I would go back and almost chuckle at that in terms of relating that viewpoint or conception of society to the actual tiny numbers of people that we're talking about. Like, if another 25,000 refugees is going to make the difference, then... It's not a voting block. So, yeah, I'm not concerned. I don't know no concern about the refugee voting block, I think, would be very legitimate. I also think the more alienating and hostile we are, I mean, those are things that make it harder for people to assimilate. And this has become a problem in some places in Europe where, you know, they take asylum seekers, they take immigrants, they take refugees, but then they make it very difficult for them to work, they make it difficult for them to lead normal lives and assimilate. We don't, generally, we don't do that in this country. We make it pretty easy for people to assimilate. And it would be a shame for us to go the wrong direction there. I also think that argument has always been there, right? That argument about demographics was, I mean, even when the immigrants were majority white, when they were Irish or when they were Italians, they weren't considered white at the time. You know, we changed the definition of white after the fact. But there's always been that argument. I don't know if either of you have been to the Ellis Island Museum in New York. So, it's a great museum. And there's some subversive libertarian elements that I was surprised by. Like some rooms that were, you know, celebrating people who helped turn people's coats inside out so they wouldn't see the marks on them or translators who intentionally mistranslated so that people wouldn't be deported. But one of the rooms at the Ellis Island Museum is just a collection of basically nativist, anti-immigrant cartoons and statements and things from the Know Nothing Party over history. And I mean, just the most shocking thing in that room is that you know this. You've seen these arguments. You read them in the newspaper. You read them on Facebook. So, I mean, fundamentally, the anti-immigrant argument has not changed in 150 years. And I don't think that position is any more legitimate now than it was then. I think that argument has proven that it's not correct, that people don't have anything to worry about from these people. And insofar as we have data, I mean, the data backs up that presumption. What can individual, normal, so to speak, people, because you're clearly not normal, I don't know. What can individual people- People who aren't involved in policy or attorneys. Do to help refugees. So, unlike some countries like Canada, there really is no private sponsorship in the United States. So, I mean, a lot of this stuff is happening at the political and policy level where it can seem inaccessible to people. But, I mean, people always have the normal routes of contacting their legislators of, and especially because this is largely a federal issue. States don't have a lot to say. I mean, states can do things like provide in state tuition for refugees. They can make public statements and things like that. But in terms of what the law and the policy actually look like, so much of this is happening, not just not at the state level, but happening thousands of miles away and happening in the White House. It's tough. I mean, I think expressing support, I think getting legislators involved. I think, you know, supporting organizations that are doing this work are probably the best things people can do. After the Muslim ban came down and you saw all the lawyers and people show up at the airports, I mean, people got into the country who otherwise would not, I mean, people had their rights vindicated, who otherwise would not have. So, I do think there's a place for direct action, but I think for the normal person who's not gonna show up at Dulles at two in the morning, yeah, I think just being a public advocate for this, for America's obligation, for human rights, I think that's the best thing that people can do. Thanks for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Test Terrible. If you enjoy free thoughts, please rate and review us on iTunes. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


I'm Dr. Brad Tucker. I'm one of the astronomers here at Mount Stromlo Observatory, and we're going to go on a tour to see all of the amazing things there, including places where we build satellites that go into space, lasers that talk to the moon, giant meteorites, and a whole lot more. Mount Stromlo Observatory is the headquarters of the astronomy, astrophysics, and space groups here at ANU. Mount Stromlo started in 1911, two years before Canberra, and we've been carrying out observations on the mountain since essentially September of 1911. We've done everything from studying the sun to solar eruptions, stars that explode, black holes, finding new planets, and everything in between. So let's go on a journey together. So this is the site of the original workshops where we build telescopes, instruments, and satellites. Now this was destroyed in the Canberra bushfires, and our new facility we're going to go check out. But on the site of this location we have these three small telescopes, and we use these for school groups in the public to come up and do stargazing here from Mount Stromlo. So it's a great way of interacting with anyone to show them the beauty of space with their own eyes. There's nothing quite like seeing the rings of Saturn with your own eyes. So this is the site of the Absala telescope, built in the 50s with Absala Sweden, to monitor stars. We even monitor some of the first satellites like Sputnik. Now these two domes have been built post-bushfires, and we use these with the ACT education. These are actually research telescopes for high school students. Students who are wanting to do astronomy, to do some creative work can come here and use these facilities. So just only high school students in the region get to do cutting-edge science from Mount Stromlo. Just over my shoulder on the top of Mount Stromlo is the original telescope, the Audi telescope, the ruins which were built in 1911. But next to it represents our cutting-edge work, done with the private company electro-optic systems. This is a space junk tracking laser. We can find objects centimeters wide, thousands of kilometers above the earth. And this is an aid to catalog and help clean up space. And right now we're leading a project to help develop a laser that will actually remove this debris. By using a laser that can cause it to de-orbit it, we can have it burn up in the earth's atmosphere safely, cleaning up space with lasers here at Mount Stromlo. So we are standing next to the 50-inch Melbourne telescope. Originally built for the Melbourne Observatory, it was moved to Mount Stromlo in the 1950s. It did important things like trying to find what dark matter could be, and in the process actually found some of the first planets around other stars, we call exoplanets. It was also used by Brian Schmidt to study supernova, these big explosions, distantly off into space for his Nobel Prize-winning work in 2011. In 2003, this telescope was planned to be an automated facility to digitally map the skies. But the fires changed that plan, and now we have skymapper at Siding Spring Observatory creating the first digital map of the southern skies. So we're in the main part of Mount Stromlo Observatory with a number of buildings housing our academics, engineers, scientists, students, and support staff. There's over 180 people working on-site. We're in the Duffield Building, this is one of our main academic buildings at Mount Stromlo where lots of our students' offices are and other astronomers. When you come in you're actually greeted by this fancy doorstop which is actually a meteorite. This landed outside Alice Springs about 5,000 years ago, and this somewhat seemingly small rock weighs about 250 kilograms, mostly made up of iron and nickel. And this is one of the things that we also do at Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatory is tracking asteroids as they come near the earth and entering the earth. And eventually things like this are studied at the Research School of Earth Sciences here at ANU. So now we're headed to the Advanced Instrumentation Technology Center. We call this the AITC. This is where we build telescopes. We build cameras for telescopes, laser systems, satellites, in fact what we call the National Space Test Facility is inside here. This allows us to do our cutting edge work, building facilities, not just at Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatory, but all around the world and even beyond. So this is what we call the Integration Hall. This is where we assemble, test, and get ready telescopes, cameras for telescopes, and satellites. Down here is a space simulation chamber we call our extra large wombat where we test equipment to make sure it is ready for space. So we're going to go ahead down and take a closer look. So we are in the lab where we are building some of the cameras and telescopes that we're going to be using around the world. Down at the end we have an instrument called Veloce which is going to precisely measure the atmospheres of other planets from our telescope at Siding Spring. We have new systems called adaptive optics and this using lasers and mirrors that can change shape actually take out the effects of twinkling stars and this is all where it's actively being built and designed. So our extra large wombat here is a space simulator. This pumps out all of the air and creates a vacuum like you're in space. So if you were to go in there you actually need a space suit to survive. We also pump and change the temperature so we think of space as being cold but it can also be hot. As you're going around the earth you can go in front of the sun which is 100 degrees Celsius and then into the shadow which is minus 100 degrees Celsius. So when you build a satellite or camera that's going to go up there you need to make sure it's going to work and this is the largest facility of its kind in the entire southern hemisphere and we use it not just for our own work here but other groups around Australia and New Zealand. We also have in the back a new telescope that is just getting ready for use and this is going to be a laser optical communication station. We're going to start sending data to the moon via lasers. We also have new lasers under development in the box as well as a room that can actually test the quietness of a receiver. If you're to go in the Enocho chamber it is so quiet you can hear things like your heart beating because we need to know exactly how strong our satellite is going to be over its distance. So I hope you enjoyed this tour of Mount Stromlo and all our awesome facilities up here. Thanks for watching and make sure to come and visit us when you're in Canberra.


Good afternoon everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arbor with Stock Swoosh, and I'm here today to review Cree. Why? Because I'm excited. I'm getting excited. I love when I see something at night that I like for the morning. It keeps me motivated. It keeps me excited. It helps me wake up at 5 a.m. and go to the gym and come back and trade.  So I'm so happy. I be here today. Cree tomorrow. Can't wait. Now, what does this mean? It means this is a bearish gap. I have not rated it. I like to wait till the morning to see because, you know, you never know. This may not be open tomorrow morning. You'll be trading at this exact number. So I like to be very, very exact. So I'll wait till tomorrow morning and then we'll rate the gap. But you could rate it at night if you want to and then you could check it again. I'm gonna wait. Bottom line is, this is definitely gonna hold the gap down tomorrow, whatever time you rate it. It's actually looking very, very good here. Oh, that's just, oh, look at that. That was an invisible tick. You just saw that live. Look at that. You see, just went up and popped up where it was closed today. Oh, this is gonna be interesting. I wonder, this is, hmm, I have no idea where this is gonna be tomorrow morning. It can't be under 23. Look, it's gonna try to get under, it's gonna get under 23 right now as we're talking here. This is exciting, people. Cree is always a favorite. Here, it just broke 23. There you go, Cree. Live earnings tonight. Cree is gaping down. I'd like it in the morning. I don't know what a little rate, but this is a watch. So here you go. You can watch this tomorrow. I don't know if we can be aggressive on this or not because it depends on the price that it opens. It depends on where it opens, what the target's gonna be. All of this I teach in the class, but I'm giving everyone here a wonderful, fabulous Happy Halloween gift. Happy earning season. Happy Golden Gap class week gift. Cree is an amazing short tomorrow, unless it opens in reverse wishes. If it opens in reverse wishes, then we're not gonna do it. I don't think it's gonna happen, but, you know, you never know. I mean, we have to say, and the market was very, very strange and very, very weird here, falling into the clothes, but just came in to support. Oh my gosh, this market is so sloppy.  My goodness, I do gaps and I have nothing to do with the market. If you are needing the market to do something, anything to get any kind of trade lately, you're getting chopped to bits and pieces, you're losing. I've been so careful. I'm not doing that many trades, but I'm making money, so I can't complain. You gotta take it when you get it. You can't make these ones up. And here you go. It's Cree. So watch for tonight. Stock Swoosh Watch is Cree. Like it? Boom. Here you go. Happy birthday, everyone, and happy Halloween. Early. Do the Cree tomorrow as long as it doesn't reverse swoosh. I have no idea the resistance numbers of the targets unless you're in the trading room with me. And if you'd like a trial of the trading room, you can email me. I'll give you a trial for the rest of the week. If you wanna learn my method, it's this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. I'm doing the class and it's a great time to trade. I really think this year is gonna be weird because September was so slow that I have a feeling December is gonna be a good month. Like two years ago, December was a really good month, which is weird because it's a holidays. But I have a feeling November and December are gonna be strong months. Up until the last week of the year, I have a feeling it's gonna be very profitable for everything because the market's gonna fix itself and start to make sense again very soon. And we're gonna get the play on through and all these nice things like we like and like I normally get. Have a great night, everyone. Those of you who are in the room with me, I'll see you tomorrow morning. Email me at melissa at thestockswish.com if you'd like a trial of the trading room. And if you want to do the golden guy class and you want to learn my system that tells me this is a good pick, that Cree is a good short, not a long tomorrow, then email me at melissa at thestockswish.com. But beware of the reverse wishes. It's a good Halloween phrase there. Have a great night, everyone. I'll see you tomorrow.


This is Mises weekends with your host Jeff Deist All right, ladies and gentlemen welcome once again to Mises weekends. I know a lot of you already know our guest Connor Boyack Thanks for having me labor toss in Utah. How are you? Very well? Very excited to be here talking with you, Jeff Hey, you know, there's new total twins book out. That's what we're talking about before we get to that Can we mention that your organization was involved just a couple weeks ago in a medical marijuana initiative in the state of Utah? Please tell us about it. So Libertas has been around for about seven years now. I After I remember Ron Paul on the campaign would always say that, you know People would come up to him and say what should I do and what, you know And he would always say I have no idea like everyone has a different path and this ended up being my path And it's been fun, especially to talk to Dr. Paul recently and he's like Connor I'd never would have told you to go start a think tank and change these laws and stuff So we have a ton of fun. We're what's called the state-based think tank And so where a lot of times we focus on federal issues I feel like we can't have a very good impact a lot of times. It's very difficult to affect change there But at a state and local level, it's actually really easy. So being a very libertarian group We've changed about 30 plus laws in Utah a lot of significant stuff Search and seizure and civil forfeiture and privacy surveillance all sorts of stuff And most recently as you point out, we were behind the effort to legalize medical marijuana or cannabis in conservative Utah that no one thought we'd be able to get it done. So it's a ton of fun and Very heartening to see Conservatives especially come on board and maybe some of the Bible Belt states will be tipping from here to follow the same path Are you finding that just some very average people Mormons are sympathetic to the plight of people with cancer or nausea or pain? Yeah, yeah, I think I think generally speaking people are sympathetic the hard thing is kind of the reefer madness You know the the fear that if we do this teens will start increasing it and DUIs will increase So I think the sympathy is there I think a lot of people know especially with like epilepsy and cancer as you point out that everyone knows somebody Who could benefit the hard part is assuaging those fears especially for people who are inherently fearful And very prone to fear So I think the tricky thing for us was finding how to thread that needle and and have a conversation in our state in a Way that reassured them and helped them overcome those fears and then the sympathy kind of kicked in and we got the vote Yeah Well your side project of course is the tunnel to win series. You've got a brand new book out called Fate of the future. This is what number eight in the total nine number nine. Yeah, yeah now You base each book at least loosely Around an existing book. This one of course is based around Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the state It's a pretty harsh book for adults when they first read Anatomy of the status if they aren't sort of in tune with our way of thinking Talk about how and why you chose Murray's book So we have a long list of books that You know our readers have been suggesting and so our potential list is pretty long and anatomy of the state has Been on there for a little while that we've gotten Suggestions to do and and we got to remember I remember so much but it's important for your audience to understand that the libertarians are kind of our core faithful few who are familiar with these works and You know I've read the original books and want to pass those ideas on to their children or nieces or nephews However, I'd say easily 80% of our audience at this point are not libertarian They've never heard of Mises or Rothbard. They've never read Bastiat They just heard in a homeschool group that these books teach important values to kids or you know They heard from someone at church that You know, this was great for their kids. Hey, you should check it out So we find ourselves communicating with an entirely new audience who's not familiar with these original works and that makes our This book in particular that much harder, right? Because here we are communicating Rothbard It's one thing to have an intro libertarian debate about, you know Anarcho-capitalism anarchism all that but when you're presenting someone entirely new to these ideas The the basic tenants of the state and voluntarism and so forth It's a tall order and so we had to we try to tread pretty lightly This book ended up being a little bit stronger than past books because we feel the ideas are so compelling But it's it's tough for us to find a way to kind of thread that needle and say well Look we can we can be strong and appeal to the libertarians or we can be a little bit more gentle with these topics and broaden The funnel of people we're talking to and and lead people into our movement. That's the that's the one that we're trying to hit Connors, it's not like you pulled any punches in this book. I mean you're using words like coercion and predatory and violence words that Rothbard uses in anatomy the state and you're presenting them the kids What's what's the age group that the books are aimed at? So Intentionally, we're aiming at kids five to ten what we found over the years that a lot of teens The older siblings will read these books because even though they're a bit juvenile in terms of their presentation with all the colorful illustrations the ideas are engaging and this was never intentional, but it kind of spontaneously came about where easily a third of the parents were finding are kind of What's the word like deviously or Suddenly learning themselves. They don't want to admit that they are like learning from a kid's book But they find this joint learning opportunity where they're learning alongside their children so we position the books with simple stories and Fun, you know stories for the little kids. It's kind of like watching Simpsons or Shrek right where the little kids kind of it's slap happy humor and it's fun But the adults they resonate with it as well. That's the angle that we're trying to achieve Well, I think they're fantastic and we shouldn't kid ourselves a lot of adults aren't familiar with Bastiat Don't know Rothbard Mises don't know Ron Paul necessarily much. So if they they learn of these things through their kids all the better Yeah, exactly when you have kids start asking their parents like why is taxation theft? That really makes the parents start to be like wait a minute. What? What do I need to think about and to be able to converse with my seven-year-old now? Well, I know I've struggled with this a little bit as a parent Is there an argument for allowing kids to keep their illusions for a while a lot of what the Tuttle Twins is about is demystifying the state and state action, but we've got Santa Claus We've got the Easter Bunny should we let kids believe in government for a while when they're little? Let me flip that question a little bit Jeff I really appreciate the question because it's something as a parent. I've thought a lot about as well I Wonder if it's more like helping reaffirm what children are taught ever since they're young Since kids are little we say don't hurt other people don't steal their stuff, you know respect boundaries be kind and In a way, I think our books are Reaffirming not only for those kids, but then the older kids and the adults that yeah Society teaches us all these exceptions to those rules, right? If it's the state It's okay, or if it's big groups of people you don't have to follow those rules if anything I feel like in a way we're reaffirming that those principles that almost universally we teach to our children are Enduring principles. They're not exceptional. They're not time limited age limited So in a way, I think rather than demystifying or talking to kids about these adult things I think we're saying hey kids these principles your parents are teaching you actually apply to the bigger world around you And here's how Well, I'm sure a lot of our listeners or parents or would-be parents someday So let's just talk a little bit about how we've done and my kids are a little older now But when they were younger they would come in with a question about politics or government And here's what I'd say I'd say look I have very strong opinions or feelings about this Here's what I think but as you get older as you develop as you become an adult You may have very different thoughts and opinions and that's okay It won't make me think any different of you or love you any less In other words, I'm trying not to be dogmatic because I don't want my kids to rebel against me by being a statist sure So how do you think about that? You know your presentation with young people in terms of dogmatism? So I this may be an awkward example, but it's the one that comes to mind Imagine a parent of young children wanting to have the birds and the bees conversation with their child They don't want that child learning about the birds and bees on the street, right or on the internet They won't have a sincere conversation in a safe environment and say like look This is what we think is right You're gonna hear a lot of competing ideas as you get older But like this these are our values and this is what we think is proper many parents struggle with that conversation and There are many many popular books that make it very easy to talk to your child about those ideas through a story That you jointly read together kind of introducing a third party into the conversation a little bit That's trusted and sometimes fun and so forth. That's how I feel. We're doing it here We're not propagandizing children so much as we're enabling parents to have Conversations about serious ideas to say look you're gonna learn a lot of competing ideas as you grow up in the world around you We think it's important to transmit these ideas to you and now we have a resource that's gonna help us have those Conversations just yesterday. We got a message from one of our readers who talked about how with his son He felt that our books helped his conversations with his son quote level up in the sense that Around the dinner table they can talk about some really engaging ideas because there's context for the child He can the dad can say hey, do you remember when you read about? the in the Tuttle Twins in the food truck fiasco about protectionism and how the government was trying to stop this business from succeeding Well, guess what our Airbnb is getting shut down by the city because the hotels are trying to come after us And they're using their connections in the city It makes more sense to the child because they have that story to fall back on and the parent can use that reference point Kind of as a foundation as they go on through the years now that we've been doing this for years We've accumulated all sorts of stories where the parents are able to kind of point back to the books as a way to have that Conversation with their children. I think that's the most valuable thing It's just the reference material for parents to be able to contextualize what's happening in the world around them in a way that benefits their children Well, and let's face it even if they're homeschooled in their younger years They're getting bombarded with the fantasy camp version of government is benign. I mean, this is balance needed balance Yeah, yeah for all the accusations of propaganda on our side where are those accusations? Yeah on the pro-state side like I Don't even know if we're balanced because we're like so small compared to the apparatus of propaganda that's conveying the other point of view So if anything, I think we need more of what what the Tuttle Twins is doing We we need competition and we need other people writing books for kids as well Well, I wonder if you have or if many of our listeners have actually looked at kids textbooks in public schools. They're horrible. I Actually, I'm glad you asked that I've been contemplating doing a video with my kids So if you go to our Tuttle Twins Facebook page at the top, you'll see a pinned post with my children Who are kind of our little kid actors for the books and the videos have accumulated millions of views and done really? Well, one of the videos I want to do is featuring some of the material I've actually gone on eBay and I bought some of these books you mentioned Jeff and I have Highlights and sticky notes one in particular I remember was talking all about how wonderful the government is because it solves problems and look at pollution and look at poor people and look at hungry people and the government is so great because it helps people and of Course that explaining is very simply at like a eight eight-year-old level But those messages start to resonate with kids and they stick there And if they're not if there's no competition if we're not in there kind of clarifying or contextualizing that It is propaganda because they're not explaining any alternative point of view But this is revolutionary what you're doing with these books. Do you get attacked for them? You know from time to time not that bad like I remember when our book on Atlas shrug came out But that that's probably the biggest attack we got I remember salon wrote an article attacking us. Oh, no Yeah, it was great for the attention right it helps sell a lot of books It's like whenever there's gun control measures or Democrats win an election that the gun stores sell out because everyone's so Worried it's good for business. So it's been good for business when we get attacked. We don't get attacked a lot I I think some of our books are positioned as kind of apolitical Take for example The eye pencil which we turned into the Tuttle Twins in the miraculous pencil talking all about spontaneous order and social harmony Cooperation that's a book where we've spread tens of thousands of copies of that book into schools directly into classrooms around the country and And there hasn't been really pushback because it's not perceived to be Political even though I mean as you and I might understand politics and economics. It's really kind of human interaction just in different spheres So we try and kind of outwardly position ourselves in a more appealing way and not say hey We're you know libertarian propaganda for kids We we marketed a bit more softly again to kind of broaden that audience a little bit and maybe for that reason We're not getting a ton of Pushback but frankly I would invite more pushback because we'd love to sell a few more copies of the book When I think I lied you have an Atlas shrugged book. You have an eye pencil book by Leonard Reed you have a book based on the law by Bastiat I think you have a Jekyll Island Fed book as well. Correct. We do. Yeah, we have a creature from Jekyll Island We have economics in one lesson. Okay, let's see the road to serfdom We have a dr. Kersener's book a competition and entrepreneurship That was our eighth book that came out a few months ago all about entrepreneurship And then I think we have a foreign policy of freedom by Ron Paul with the collection of his Speeches that was a very meaningful one for me because after the way I got into this movement I'm often I love this question right because we all kind of came in at different times and levels for me It was I was invited to a screening of Aaron Russo's Documentary called America freedom to fascism and I'm sitting in this little library room with people I don't know I just I can't remember how I heard about it and there was this guy that just made a lot of sense You know, who is this guy? And it was Ron Paul. That was my first experience learning about him I purchased this book a foreign policy of freedom, which was the collection of his Congressional speeches pertaining to foreign policy and non-interventionism and as I recall I think I took that like on my honeymoon as my reading material right when I was getting married because so, you know Awakening for me to you know embrace and understand this point of view that just clicked with me And so when we did that as a total twins book all about the non-aggression principle and it was very Fun to honor, you know, Dr. Paul who I credit with bringing me into this movement So we're having a ton of fun. We have many more books obviously that we can do Initially we had kind of planned to do eight to ten books, but at this point I think there's just so much demand for new material We're just going to keep it going well, let me just interject that Daniel McAdams and I edited Ron's speeches which became a foreign policy of freedom and I remember that editing process very Viscerally it was not a fun book dead because it was literally his four speeches as transcribed by the house clerk with the ums and all that In it, so I'm close to that book, you know, I want to ask you there's a big nexus between these books and homeschooling generally Yeah, does ever shock you that we've been able to get away with homeschooling this long that it's not attacked more vigorously. I Actually interviewed for our podcast Society in the state pretty recently a couple who went to Sweden and Talking about their homeschooling fight. They went up to Sweden's highest court In Sweden a few years ago. They changed their country's law to say that You know with with very rare exceptions Nobody can homeschool and they almost never give out those exceptions anymore So this family was talking to me about the plight that they found themselves in people fleeing the country just because they Didn't want their children being fed into this state apparatus literally of a propaganda and Culturization and and it was actually very awakening because your question is very on my mind because of that conversation as a homeschooling father myself To realize how fortunate we are. I'm very critical of how many of our freedoms are being violated Taxes are high wars and everything else. But as a parent I actually would agree with kind of your question the sense that I'm amazed that we get away with this And I'm amazed that the state for all its strength and power Maybe it's that they feel like they're so big that they don't mind a little bit of competition because they know that they're still gonna win and You know, they have all the momentum and money and power and so forth. Maybe there's a little bit of that in play Nonetheless, I'm thankful for it because I know just a few decades ago in America The homeschooling laws were generally awful and it was kind of around the 80s that things improved And I see for my own children a night and day difference of how it would be for them in public school or how it was for me So, yeah, I'm glad we're getting away with it because we have a wonderful time and these books are Huge in the homeschooling committee because I think homeschooling families are always on the hunt for curriculum, right? They're always out there trying to find good material. It's not like there's an off-the-shelf solution for all homeschoolers I think homeschoolers are more independent minded by virtue of that decision that they've made and so all of that kind of clicks together Which works really well in our favor to? Introduce this material to to those types of families And if we're willing to take a long-term view of things homeschooling might be the most radical revolutionary Libertarian activist approach of all I mean it might be better than a million white papers or a million candidates in an election or a million third-party votes Yeah, I totally agree. It's that's how we perceive our project even if we're getting to kids who are in school We position this to those parents of public school kids to say look your kids aren't getting a balanced education Make sure in the home you're supplementing with these types of ideas, but but I agree It's very radical to be spreading anarcho capitalism to six-year-olds I mean you can't really call it anything else other than radical at the end of the day to be Introducing an entirely new generation. I always think about like who's yeah, who's the next Lou Rockwell? Who's the next Ron Paul? Who's the next Jeff dice for for that sake like or Connor boy? Who's out there that if we didn't reach out to them now at a young age? We wouldn't get them for like, you know 50 years before something else happened in their life How amazing is the world gonna be because we're planting all these seeds? Yeah, a lot of them aren't gonna grow But a lot of them are and I get very excited and working on this project Fantasizing in a way about a future in which we have all these people who better understand these ideas will never be a majority I don't think we're gonna have this reawakening of classical liberalism throughout society like the founding era necessarily But I think the critical mass is important of even of a minority and I think projects like this can help But it's interesting if you look at just about all the murderous or dictatorial regimes in human history they've all understood how important it is to get kids away from family influences and Toward thinking in terms of themselves as a cog in something bigger and that bigger thing is the state I agree. I there's a great quote I'm not gonna be able to repeat but the the gist of it is that the the family is the best line of defense between the individual and the state and Again, like I feel that as a dad I worry that a lot of parents like me are not equipped to talk about these ideas when we do little focus groups or try and Study our market a little bit and have these conversations We find that even the adults who've maybe read the law by Boston Let's use that as an example just because it's so popular They feel inadequate in being able to explain that to another adult and then when we say well, how would you talk about to your child? Just blank stares like how do you even distill that down? And so my my goal my quest in all of this project is to facilitate those conversations so that that line of defense between The individual in the state can actually be somewhat adequate, you know be be able to mount some sort of defense but if we I think a lot of parents don't even realize that we're in a battle for the hearts and minds of the rising generation that there are people out there who recognize that this is war quote unquote and For folks like us like how are you going to win a war that you don't even know is being waged? how are you gonna Prevail in a conflict that you don't even understand is happening all around you And so kind of my my sinister goal if I had one with this project is to Spread these ideas to so many families so that they're having these conversations Understanding this material, you know over the weeks and months I don't think it's just you sit down and read it and a light bulb clicks on but maybe something on the news happens four months later and and you know your 11 year old is like Hey, that's just like in this book and those connections are made and and it's gonna help them later in life I think it's immeasurable a lot of the stuff we're doing I think it takes a while to manifest itself, but but where that family should be that line of defense I feel like our movement if you want to call it that we wait for people to become adults, right? Like we like your organization mind Liberatus we're often talking to voters we're talking to adults who can read these big thick books and I I was working on The Tuttle Twins over the years I've come to the realization that we have a profound lack of investment in the rising generation We wait for public schools to propagandize and Plant all these biases that we have to then overcome or we hope that homeschoolers are gonna do okay on their own without equipping them with Resources to kind of help So my wish is that we as kind of a movement so-called Can recognize the importance of investing in the rising generation? I'm not here to say that Tuttle Twins is the or the only project. I think we need more effort And you know, I know Ron Paul's got his Ron Paul curriculum You know, I think the the earlier we can invest some of our resources and attention the better off will be in the future Well, I want to finish with this the first the book is dedicated to Lou Rockwell. Yeah, just tell us why You know Lou Rockwell's website was very helpful for me and learning once I kind of learned about Ron Paul I immediately found LRC and Reading all those essays was very very helpful for me That's how I found out about Rothbard and then of course learning about the Mises Institute And all the work that Lou has done to spread those ideas and so we wanted to honor him As an individual for me personally But also for the movement and doing such an effective job at spreading these ideas so that they they don't fade away into some library but that they're You know a reawakening of sorts and making sure that new generations are learning about Rothbard's work Well, and I don't want to conclude without mentioning the illustrations, which I think is fantastic Elijah Stanfield is sort of your partner in crime and drawing this I think they're every bit as important as the text. Oh Yeah, the stories would be one thing like if all I did were write some little stories, but you know when you have Entire illustrations that can visually convey the ideas that we're doing and talk about these concepts He makes these stories come alive in a way I never never would be able to he he does not get enough credit for these books He does such an amazing job and of all the complaints excuse me not complaints the the The applause that we get in the praise that we get it's it's like 80% easily for how amazing the illustrations are Well before we finish, how can people keep track of what you're doing? What Libertas is up to? So a tuttle twins calm is where you can find out about the books For those who don't have them and want to get we do like a combo pack where you can get the books and the workbooks And then if you want to learn a little bit about our work in Utah We do work with some partner organizations in other states as well Although we are just focused on Utah our website is Libertas Utah org or another handy website because a lot of your listeners are spread out throughout the country There's a group called the state policy network, which is SPN Org and that's where you can find groups like mine, but in the state wherever you're at so different kind of free market Libertarian conservative type groups who are trying to increase freedom in your state SPN org would be a great resource to check out Well Connor, thanks for your time. Congratulations on another book. You can find it ladies gentlemen in our bookstore at mises.org I think you can find them on Amazon as well Yep, and yeah, go buy them on the Mises bookstore We really appreciate what you're doing and we look forward to keeping an eye on you and your organization Thanks as always job. Thanks and ladies gentlemen. Have a great weekend Subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes you stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on mises.org and YouTube