You are in the Zoom meeting now. There are one participants in the meeting. This meeting is being recorded. No, I'm good. You're all right. Okay. I'm trying to figure out how to also join up for it. Why don't you join us in the Zoom here and present that window up there? Just because we did that, then the audio goes through your computer and everyone has it in your computer, which is fine. Turn it up loud enough. Are we okay? Yeah, but also the video. So last time we had six people. Yeah, we'll put a video up there. I mean, if you want to be inside the video, then yeah, we don't get that camera. Yeah. But how do you have to hang out? You can actually get a remote video input by a hangout. I guess we can wait two minutes to see if other people come. I think we can probably get started. I don't, I don't have any. Agenda that I can think of. So I was just going to see if anyone had anything that they wanted to discuss. Yeah. Well, probably not, not worth forcing it if no one has anything. I guess we could wait another one or two minutes to see if anyone pops on, but I'm, I'm guessing not. Maybe we can have a meta conversation about how to actually create these agendas and like how to line stuff up. I mean, it's just very stuff on the agenda. Do we want to try to line up? Because sort of like interesting kind of things going on. Yeah, I mean, I think most of the time people use these calls for, you know, for people in the in the general community to hop on and and ask questions. So I guess part of it is maybe that we haven't done enough to actually publicize that these meetings take place. So I guess I could, because we can send reminders, you know, a couple of days before with the agenda doc to see if people want want to add something. I mean, it does seem in general, like most people are comfortable with the with the mailing list and with and with PRs and with get off and stuff like that, which is honestly better for me too.  But but you know, I'm also totally happy to answer them. Yeah, one thing that I actually sort of realized they would be useful would be to have a more public notion of what we tagged things for, you know, the next release. And that's, I think that's that's you do pretty conscientiously. But I feel that it's unclear to some people when certain features will arrive in between. So I think we put the API but not actually in front of SDS being the example. No, yeah, I mean, it's I I agree. I think that would be great. It's not super clear to me how to build a roadmap when Yeah, I mean it like that's that's that's the problem with this type of work, you know, it's I can I do try to pretty aggressively go through and prune what's what's in the next milestone, at least with what I think people are working on. But I mean, given that, at least for me, you know, I mean, I do control some resources here, but but they're only a fraction of what is what is applied. And then, you know, I don't have any control over what anyone else works on. So it's it's it's it's really hard to come up. I feel like with the roadmap that's that that's accurate. I think that people have committed to building certain things in certain timeframes, and some may be possible like, you know, as well as well I'll do SDS but not today but I'll make sure that happens it for the end of Q one or something like that. That would feel that like on an issue by Asian Beats is like if someone is like, oh, I really need SDS, then they generally ask. Yeah, the other the other problem to is and this is just my personal experience is I don't feel that in general and this is not an on by problem. This is an industry problem that people are very good at estimating of when things will actually arrive. So I mean, saying that something is going to happen in Q one, in my opinion, is almost meaningless. So it's I mean, like it might happen, but it also might. Let me give you an example where this has been useful to me. For example, looking at Basil, they made clear that on that 1.0. Before they come up, they're going to have C++ code coverage. I think that is unless they slip off badly on that and that do you something to notice? I'm not going to expect any time soon, but I should expect you by time we hit that sort of. You know, like SDS today, you could say, well, maybe let me arrive and avoid 5.0. You know, the only the only pushback that I would give to that and this is my personal opinion so you can take it with a with a grain of salt is. I feel that they're basically two types of open source. There's corporate driven open source and then there's basically community driven open source. And even though on boy has a ton of money being thrown into it, I would actually put it in the community driven open source model like there's not a corporate backer. Basil is corporate open source and and in the sense that it's being driven by by Google primarily. And there's plenty of other examples like that. So the only the only the only reason that I bring that up is that I feel like in corporate open source, like versions have much more meaning. Like people are saying, you know, it's like we're going to have a 1.0 and then it's going to do this and it's going to be a product or something like that. And I don't know, I just don't I just don't feel that we're that we're in that situation. That's that's like, oh, I'm in doing this. No, so I'm I'm not really pushing back in the sense that like I think having a roadmap is great part of the problem. And this is something that I that I struggle with is GitHub is not great for road mapping. Right. I mean, it's like you have it.  But it's it's it's very hard to have a clear thing of what's going on. You know, if there is the best you can do, I mean, I'm trying to think like Istio has a roadmap. I believe they have a clear idea of what's going to go into the next version. I think Istio is corporate open source. So I mean, I just like it's Istio has program managers, Istio has like product managers, right? I mean, I just like we don't have those resources. So I'm not saying that this is not a good idea. Like we can have a doc and I would be more than happy to have a place where, you know, maybe it's Google Doc, maybe it's a spreadsheet. We can talk about what makes sense. And for high level features, we can drag and drop them into, you know, different releases depending on, you know, if we assume that releases are are every three months. And the people find that interesting. That's totally fine. Like that sounds great to me. I'm just worried that people are going to look at that. And then it's not going to get implemented. And then people are going to be like, what, well, you said it was on the roadmap. So I don't know. It just it just feels like it feels like it might it feel like it's useful, but it also might come back to bite us. That's all. Fair enough. Well, I mean, but but like I'm I'm for it. I mean, do you think that a doc or spreadsheet would be useful? Like, is that something that we should try?  We were a lot of things have gone into the API's and then being tagged, not implemented high grades or draft status. And it's unclear really when they're actually going to happen. And that that's I mean, in terms of the actual docs that people see, we do a good job of hiding that stuff, which isn't really, you know, firmly. How much of that is stuff that we didn't just add? I mean, we could publish our track talents. I thought most of the things we added beyond existing on the API were each thing that. Yeah, I mean, there's we've in in the beginning of the proto's, I think it was a little, I don't want to say out of control, but people were just adding things that we might one day want to implement. I think we've actually done a pretty good job at this point of either telling people, like, you can add it when you're going to implement it so don't don't want it. And we've got not implemented high tag now so actually is a lot more clear what when things are not implemented. There are, I, as far as I know, and I could be wrong, there's nothing in the public docs now that is not hidden. That is not implemented. And, you know, if that's the case, I would I would love to know so that we can hide it. So I, you know, I tend to agree that like we could, but but here's the problem is that, you know, if we go and we make a spreadsheet like let's say let's say we do a spreadsheet that that seems like the most cheap way of doing a roadmap. And let's say that we arbitrarily say that releases are every three months, we could go to the not implemented high things and say, you know, it's going to get implemented in version 1.x. But then when no one does that, then we have to go through and like, like, okay, now it's in 1.x plus one. Yeah, I think it was a simple fitting is that is a schedule for the next release or is this going to happen some time in the indeterminate future. Okay. Right now with the isn't issue tagging. Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah, so, so, okay, I mean, one, one way of doing it might be that might be scalable is how about this. This, this sounds like potentially a good idea. What if when someone adds something to proto and they put a not implemented hide in. What if we make them put a GitHub issue ID in there. So, so, so basically everything that is not implemented must have an issue that's tracking it so that when we're looking through the proto is they can just see like it's either in a milestone it's not in a milestone it's marked help wanted. I think that's a good compromise that that sounds like a good idea. And then we could actually search the proto's for, for GitHub issues, and like see if anything got you know forgot to get updated or forgot to get documented. I'm pushing back on adding things to be. Yeah, unless they are being implemented. Yes. Yes. So, so do we think that maybe that that might be a good idea to make people add a GitHub issue to the not implemented docs. Yep. Okay. So, initial we actually use both spreadsheets and GitHub issues. And we noticed that documents and spreadsheets tend to be quickly out of date. So what we've done lately is for roadmap, big roadmap items we open an issue and we market as epic. So this is a Zen Hub thing you mark an issue and as an epic and then you can add multiple sub issues to it or subtasks. Sometimes we use the milestone or releases and we just move the, the milestone when the, when the particular feature was not being implemented in the current release we were just like tag it to the nebulous feature or something. And the advantage is that we had people like sort of thumbs up on certain issues to see I really want this feature or commenting or adding use cases. So there is a benefit in having this in GitHub. How do you like Zen Hub? Is that, is that working out for you? Is that something that we should look into? I don't, we, it actually asked for your GitHub ID and I don't know if password it can read your GitHub history, but we've been using it. So it's a bit tricky. I don't want to recommend it in particular. Okay. But what I do want to recommend is having like tracking the features in GitHub so people can comment and add to them. Sometimes it's, they are hard to find in a spreadsheet, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's my, that's my feeling also, which is why I've pushed back before on like spreadsheets or docs. So I think we can be better about going through and doing milestones and historically, you know, that's just something that I've done because I'm kind of OCD and I like things to be organized. So that's something that, you know, we can spread around more if other passionate OCD people like to keep things clean. If that is you, you can talk to me and put up that work. Okay. But I guess I do like the idea. So maybe we should put it in the data plane API style guide that basically when you mark something not implemented, it must have an associated issue. Does For about 10 minutes of hacking on Proto doc, you could also enforce that as the syntax there. I guess that's true. Actually, we could just make it also have a have a URL. Yeah. Well, you had the idea. So not it. I'll do it too much. Okay, cool. Yeah, that that sounds great. I mean, I think I think there's a there's a made a conversation here kind of about about releases. And I get asked this quite a bit by people. So historically for envoy, you know, most people I think that are running on boy are kind of stereotypical larger internet companies that tend to be used to doing continuous deployment roughly. So people are mostly running master. A lot of people are not comfortable with that.  And so far, mostly because we just don't have resources and at lift, we don't care at Google. I doubt you care. I mean, it's like most most larger companies don't care. We all tend to run master. There hasn't been resources for, you know, like maintaining dot releases and like doing doing those types of releases. So there's a larger long term question as to whether, you know, we need to do kind of more official release cadences where we do like release candidates. And then, you know, if a bug is of sufficient badness, we would do a dot release or something like that. And it's not that we couldn't do that today. It's just that, you know, that just requires yet more resources, which we don't have. So I'm just curious if anyone has any thoughts on that or, you know, if that's something that we want to think about in the future. Well, whether the distributions like various folks from like red hats and other distributions involved with the onboard community may make this kind of thing. Can we take that best practices and drive this. Yeah, I mean, I think we could. Well, I think so I think there's two things I think the best practices are pretty well known. It's more of a resourcing problem, just in the sense that, you know, I think we can build a policy like we could actually go through and we can do release candidate drops for some period of time and ask people to test and then we can do dot releases if there's bugs found, but File an open issue for this. And again, let the community debate it. Yeah, yeah, no, I think there isn't. I think there is an issue actually for doing for doing like dot releases and stuff like that. But I can I can look and track it. So I just want to throw it out there. I don't think it's something that we have to decide right now but that that is a that is a thing I've heard is that people are not necessarily comfortable running master and they want more official releases. But that's just not something that I personally have resources for. I think that over this year, just with the increasing usage. I wouldn't be surprised if Envoy starts getting a separate from Istio Envoy starts getting packaged by the by the distro vendors. And that might be a forcing function just in the sense that, you know, if it's being provided as part of Fedora, or a bunty or something like that, you know, they will likely force the the the versioning thing. There is significant amount of work in supporting multiple versions, especially when it comes to test infrastructure and all the rest. So, even in Istio, we have like a monthly release now we switch for a quarterly release to a monthly, but we do not plan to support all the intermediate versions, right, because if it keeps like forking and diverging, there is a there is a toll on the team. So we're going to support mostly like the latest or the two previous released versions, not everything. Right. And this also like it becomes an issue with who's using the version right and how critical is the bug that needs to be double committed in a particular version. So it's a whole machinery that becomes necessary when you move from using the master to having like supporting different versions. Don't take it lightly. It's just, you know, an advice. Yeah, I mean, you're, you're kind of listing out why why I don't want to do versions at all. But but yeah, it's something that I think we'll just have to track. And it might be that if people want, want versions, someone from the community might have to actually step up and basically do that work. We added a security policy not that long ago, right, which describes what would happen if you found the serious, you know, blowing on boy, and it does describe going back and doing things. Yeah, I mean, I guess the difference is that, you know, like when we when we ship 1.5, we found that there is a but so this is actually a great example. We found that there was a few bugs in terms of we weren't, you know, we weren't parsing the the proto schema correctly or there was a few cases of configs that basically weren't being cashed. And I think in historical kind of software practices, someone that was doing a shrink wrap software would have done a 1.5.1 basically with those couple of fixes and and we didn't because we don't have the resources to do that.  But, you know, and kind of like a random bug where you can just say, well, it's been fixed and faster. Is it also reasonable again if we end up with a couple big users who really won't release branches to ask them to contribute resources to do this. Yes. Yeah, I think that's I think that's totally reasonable. And I think that's in general the stance that I've taken so far, which is, you know, we, we are community driven, like in as much as I would love to provide everything, you know, that people want we're not running a business. So it's like can't really justify that. So I think if people want these things, I think someone's going to have to step up. And as was said before, doing doing release management, like if you look at what, you know, gRPC and what like protobuf does just as an example of like cutting our C's and like those kinds of things. It's a very non non trivial cost. So we would need someone to step up like an actual release manager to to go and do that. Cool. Anyone have anything else. Alright, so I think the concrete actions are going to be so we'll we'll do something in data plan API where features are not implemented will force people to put in a GitHub issue for tracking. I think that's great. I will set up some type of calendar reminder so that maybe like the Friday before the community meeting, we send out a reminder email and ask people to reply back with things that they might want to put on on the agenda, just so that we make sure that people are, you know, if there's things that people want to talk about to kind of remind them about it. Sorry, what's that? Once we have a maintainer rotation. Let's make that part of the maintainer rotation. Yes, of course. Yeah. And that's something that we can talk about offline. So hold on. I see Chris and chat. Chris is saying that we can ask people to do presentation with demos. So yeah, I agree. I think that would be fantastic. So maybe seeing if people in the community want to want to give a little talks or demo would be great. Or maybe even if they have something that they would like to hear talked about and then we can find someone who can figure out, you know, short demo presentation or whatever. Sure. Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, I think there are some topics that are that that generally confuse people. So maybe if we can get a list of of those are you know that's that's actually that's another possible thing is we could go through and actually make a list of kind of the most frequently asked questions or something like that.  Cool. All right. Well, have a great day everyone. Bye.


Going on everybody guys Sean and Kyle here relating sports cars and we're ripping the four boxes of bowman giraffe These are all gonna be for Jeffrey H. Got two choice and two jumbos. Go good luck. Mr. Jeffrey. Keep some heat going man I know we've hit some good cars for you so far See if we can keep it going my man. Good luck box one Yeah, guys, not a long queue if anybody does want to get in order going probably like 20 minutes or so at the Moment got this one and then two Star Wars boxes to do so not too much on the queue if anybody wants to get a Personal going like rich said we do have bowman draft or bowman Chrome University football breakers the light on sale all the way down to 14999 those were like 280 at one point almost or 275 something like that There's a Hans Monterey at a 499 light blue First high P So a refractor of Campbell and refractor Brady house Three touchdowns for the border Pretty good Golf just Iowa animal last thing. Yeah, he was slinging So did a Jermere Gibbs to he was moving around. There's a nice draft prospects chase Davis to 250 numbered Chase there First Kendall George and young keel Fernandez It's like Jeremy took us up on a full case of bowman breakers the light. Thank you, Jeremy Let's go rip a case of bowman a you breakers the light got you Jeremy and Then George took a couple of HDA choice. Nice. It'll work. Let's go Say bowman glass Jacob Wilson First AJ Ewing and James Wood Say a purple Spencer Jones to 250 for the Yankees Fractor first Cooper Engel. Oh Which pretty auto do you have Jace? I don't remember a party auto paper paper light blue furs of Mike Bovee And I'll be why Langford for the Rangers Strafkart Sullivan first Coleman Picard first I That's probably needs it really is I'm having There's an auto. It's gonna be Jake DeLeo first bowman base out of their Marlins Jake DeLeo Jake Gonzalez Kate Cooler and Andrew Lindsey It's a gradient of a Lucas Gordon first for the White Sox Charlie Soto drafts Ty Floyd and Samuel Bassio Workies and stars nice nice Do like the rookies and stars Nice yellow to 75 we got a chase Davis nice one there Cardinals top prospects on the yellow got Langford first Bradfield and Brando, my yeah Steve Brandon Brando First Andrew Pickney and smart Johnson. Oh, did you very nice Jace? That's always nice. Otto's me Justin Reimer base out of their Red Sox Spencer Jones, there's a first winnaker and Davis and De Los Santos Cole Emerson, there's a light blue Jackson holiday and lunar glow of Christian opera First right louder and coupé Chiefs first but paths today. Oh boy. Oh Boy, I could see the freaking bats Tommy Troy She's have been interesting. There's a Quinn McDaniel on the first blue wave to one fit For the Giants, no way type heat first and I'll meet him All righty, Mr. Jeffrey. There's one jumbo down One more jumbo in two choice Mr. Jeffrey I'm on super Some mood ring that one's gonna be a Tommy Troy for the d-back smooth ring Fractal first of Kerrig and camcoyer Hope it's happy goes off. Yeah, I'm sure some people are hoping that for sure some zappy believers So purple Carson Rock-a-Fort to 250 first Cephas and Roderick Arias and in Miami It's a gradient Ludwig Espinosa to 199 light blue first Tanner Hall Noble Meyer Cam Fisher and Gutierrez. He's stopped Brandon Jackson by the night for Sam No, he's gonna get right on like Mitchell and Noble Meyer nice one there the Marlins first drop it 10th overall. There's a Jacob Wilson, Jaworski, and Dettmer I don't know my Heather didn't hear Bowman glass type heat first bowmeister and Carlos Jorge white Langford base It's an Aqua shimmer to one 125 gonna be Carlos Jorge another Reds Number Jackson holiday Teddy McGraw and Abner first hero why Chris Clark This show up Yeah, guys probably about like a half an hour or so on the queue nothing too long got a full case of Bowman breakers the light But that'll be pretty quick honestly, and then George has a couple of Bowman as well a couple of choice So yeah, probably like 30 30 minutes or so on the queue if anybody wants to get an order in Keep on ripping here. There's a refractor on it's gonna be Hunter Holland a 49 nut I'm there picture for the Reds Crawford Trey Morgan first and Michael O'Royle It's a Max Clark draft card first Brock Vredenburg Vredenburg all coming Gold base it is Daverson Gutierrez for the Mets nice one there on the true gold to 50 Mets prospects got a Max Clark prospects K. Scholl and Alfredo Dunham like blue paper to 499 This one's gonna be a cold young mariners Like blue Cole Emerson nice one there another mariners and Roman Anthony Jacob Gonzalez refractor Packed there for color. Yeah, I've done that with plenty of things just so when uh, so when I should have Max Clark first and Jackson bowmeister on the base first auto Lankford transformative another white Lankford refractor and strum wetter. Alrighty, Mr. Jeffy I'll do it for the two jumbos now. We got two choice for it Good luck. Good luck, sir. Come on now See some big color out of here Goal on top is Eric baton see on the gold for the brew crew Not bad there. Mr. Jeffrey. Um, that one is 49 out of 50 Tonsie on the go wave Bruis Got a first bowman Sean Sullivan Sean's boy with the tan line there first bowman for the Rockies Sean Sullivan And that's gonna be a K. Denton on the choice first to 150 Rockies someone pointed that out. Yes, I was like, yeah, we did notice that actually we have noticed that He does have quite the tan line going on Box tube choice last one here, Mr. Jeffery And a base auto cam Fisher. I want to be for the pirates or sorry the Astros Astros on the base auto And right behind it. We have Paul Skeens nice one there first pick in the draft that one's for the pirates Get that in a mag for you. There we go. Jeffrey Nice Skeens first pick in the draft the national champion also from LSU and the last one here is gonna be a base auto Blake Mitchell nice one there as well Skeens and Mitchell in the first pack first and the eighth overall pick We go mr. Jeffrey nice way to finish there on that last choice box Alrighty, alrighty, sir, that'll do it for you. We'll get that right out to my man as always. Thank you, Jeffrey


Welcome back to the Agora café for more coffee and philosophy. Today I'm pleased to have joining us my friend Sheldon Richmond. In fact I am wearing this t-shirt in honor of Sheldon. You can see this message. Sheldon is the one who introduced me to this quotation and if we get a chance we might talk about that guy later on. Sheldon has spent his career in the libertarian movement. He's known everyone from Carl Hess and Murray Rothbard to Thomas Oz and Dave Berry. He was formerly a newspaper reporter, director of research at the council for competitive economy, senior editor of the Institute for Humane Studies, which I think is actually where I met you in or around 1987, and a senior editor at the Cato Institute, which is likewise where I think I saw you again when Brian Cappell and I, I was running the program that I had previously been on the other end of at IHS and Brian Cappell and I came over to give you a visit. Senior editor of Inquiry Magazine, for a long time editor of The Freeman, also known as ideas on liberty depending on the year for the foundation for economic education, vice president at and editor of the Future Freedom Magazine for the Future Freedom Foundation. Currently, Sheldon is the executive editor at the Libertarian Institute, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a senior advisor at the Mollinari Institute, senior fellow and chair of trustees at the Center for a Stateless Society. In addition to hundreds of articles, he has authored the following books with the Future Freedom Foundation. He has three books separating the school and state how to liberate America's families, your money and that was in 1995, your money or your life, why we must abolish the income tax from 1999, and tethered citizens time to repeal the welfare state in 2001. And Sheldon is a fan of that term tethered, which also occurs on his website. With Griffin and Lash in 2016, he has America's counter revolution that constitutionally visited. Most recently with the Libertarian Institute, he has coming to Palestine from last year and we're social animals owe to each other from this year. He also has a couple of blogs, free association and the logical atheist and in the description, I'll have the links to both of those. But if you happen to be watching this in an embedded form, you'll feel like going out of the embed to see the link. It's Sheldon free association.blogspot.com and logical-atheist.blogspot.com. So in addition to his political interest, he has an economic interest, he has a wide variety of interests from Aristotle to atheism, from Gilbert Ryle to Gilbert and Sullivan. So let's just start by asking about your background, where you grew up, how you got interested in libertarianism and involved in the libertarian movement. Well, great to be with you. Thank you very much and thank you for the introduction. I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Well, that's Philadelphia. And that's the Philadelphia. There are a couple of Mississippi, at least in the United States, a couple of them. Yeah, there's a Paris. There's a Florence in Alabama, what can I say? There's Paris everywhere. Well, I always have Paris. I'm an early baby boomer. I was born in the during the at the end of the first year of Harry Truman's own presidential term, the one he won in 1948. Just made it into that year. It was born the day after Christmas, 1253 a.m. on Christmas day. So I thought that I experienced the Truman years. I wasn't much aware of things going on there. The first president I was aware of was Eisenhower. I just thought he was always the president and always would be the president and he's just kind of a fixture, which he was for a while. I brought up in a middle-class Jewish background, conservative Jewish, which is that sort of that today the wines are all blurred, but kind of that in between the area, between the Orthodox on one side and the reform. On the other side, it was an attempt to, they didn't like Orthodoxy, but they thought the reform had gone too far. You know, they took Hebrew out of the services and so they were trying to conserve something. So it's a real, in a way, muddled mixture of those two things. I went through the Philadelphia public schools, neighborhood schools, could walk to every school I ever attended. From there I went, where a lot of students from my high school, which was called Northeast High School, went because it was easy to get in being in state, was Temple University. I was sort of, I was a mediocre student. I think of myself as having sleepwalk through high school and I sort of remember it, but I don't think I had much impact on it and I don't think it had much impact on me. But when I, so I went to Temple and I did find a Temple. I enjoyed Temple. Unfortunately, I missed Walter Williams. I graduated in 71 and he didn't get there till 73, so I didn't know of him until later on. But I took a lot of philosophy, although I was a radio TV film major and I decided early on that I wanted to go into the print media, the newspaper business. I was totally enamored with H. L. Menken. I just thought his life that he described in various writings was so romantic. Although he probably scoffed at such a thing that I would think that. But that's what I wanted to do. And so I did that. So my first career, as you say, was as a newspaper reporter. I started with a small paper outside of Philadelphia called the Coatesville Record, Long Gone. Coatesville was a steel town and I did all kinds of things. It was a small paper, so you got to do everything. You covered the cops, you covered governments. And so I got, I was, I was already a libertarian, which I'll go back and talk about that in a second. But anyway, I got a really good education in observing the state. I also spent three years covering courts, criminal and civil courts and the DA's office and the public defender's office. It was a great education, especially as a libertarian. Now it didn't make me a libertarian. I was already a libertarian. I became, my political awareness began. I think this is true of a lot of libertarians who are about my age. I mean, people I know, I could name some names, but I guess I shouldn't. Not that it's embarrassing, but the Barry Goldwater campaign was the beginning of my awareness. And that's because I had an older brother. Unfortunately, I died in 1998, so it's been a long time. But he was ahead of me and was off to college, went to Albright College, a pretty good liberal arts school in Reading, Pennsylvania. And he was telling me about, he was really opening my eyes to politics. I hadn't thought anything about politics. Now, I was very interested in the American Revolution. I liked stories about liberty and the revolution. I remember Johnny Tremain, I, Disney had a series on TV about the Swamp Fox played by Leslie Nielsen, who went on to do comedic roles later on, of course, police squad and those things, airplane. Francis Marion, was that his name? Francis Marion. Yes, Francis. I always thought it was interesting that as a kid, I thought, huh, Francis Marion, that seems like a woman's name, but it's a guy and Leslie Nielsen, that seems like a woman's name, but he is a guy. So I love that series. I just liked the idea of liberty, just appealed to me, you know, automatically. And then I read, I think I read the book about the Swamp Fox, I remember, he was from South Carolina, it was kind of a guerrilla warrior. Yeah, I had a, I just, I had a collection of, I may still have it on vinyl, a collection of songs from the, from the revolution, and there's one about the Swamp Fox, but we are Marion's men. I don't know if I've ever heard that, but I did like that series, I don't know how long it was. Maybe I'll put it in the link. I never googled that to see, you know, how long that show ran. I never saw it before. I enjoyed it. And so I was kind of primed. So my brother was telling me about the, about the Goldwater campaign, and he was, he was not a libertarian, but you know, a mild conservative who was interested in Goldwater. He didn't like Johnson, you know, and he was maybe three years ahead of me, my brother. So I read the conscience of a conservative. The funny thing is I couldn't find a copy anywhere free Amazon, free internet. And the only place I could find one, finally, a paperback was in a, was it an American opinion bookshop, which was actually a wall at the back of a shoe repair, Joe's shoe repair. That's the name of it. I remember that very distinctly. The only, I don't know how I knew to go there. Somebody must have directed me. Anyway, I read that book. I wasn't thinking much about foreign policy in those days. I probably just would have been open to the idea that we had, you know, we have to be strong in order to get those right, you know, make sure the Russians don't take us over or anything. But what was, what was really appealing to me was what, what Goldwater was saying about liberty and limits on government and pro free enterprise that I found very appealing. And I guess I was talking to people in school about this and two guys who were twins, and I remember their names. I haven't heard from them since, said something to me like, if you like that, and this is the way it starts, right? If you like that book, you really need to read Henry Hazel's economics. I said, okay, thanks. And then I'm sure I went out and got the book, but they might have said to me, send your name to the foundation for economic education, which I never heard of. Interestingly, like many years later, I'd become the editor. And that was the longest job I ever held, right? For the longest period of time, 15 years. Like 15 years, yeah. Everything else was like five years, three years. And they said to me, once your name was on the list, it'll be there forever, and it won't cost anything. So just send your name in. They'll start sending it as Freeman. That was true for a very long time. Yeah. In those days, it was little, yeah, Leonard Reed didn't believe in them knocking people off. Yeah. In any respect. I was in my school, my friend, you know, there was a friend in church who put our names on that list. And so we got, you know, we got the little Freyman's from Freyman's. Is that right? I understand, I guess, from, you know, from Fee. He also put us from Hillstale, which is less delightful, but you know. I kept seeing the letters Fee thinking, do I have to pay money? Is there a fee? It took me a second to figure out what that meant. No, this is still high school, by the way. So either they or somebody else said, well, if you like that, you know, there's this guy, Mises, you start hearing a name for Rothbard. And then someone said, you got to read Outlaw Shrug. And that's, that's going to be inevitable, at least in my, in my time, please. So I think I read the fountainhead first. And I really liked it. Now that wasn't very, there's not politics really in there. And, but then I went on Outlaw Shrug. And, and I started Temple. Yeah, I went to Temple and I met students of Objectivism, as we call ourselves back then, various orthodoxies, some more tolerant than others. But we ended up forming a group, no meantime, I had fallen in with a really rough crowd, namely the old society, sorry. This was when there was still a libertarian caucus of the half, we're talking now 1968-69. And I somehow met, these are names out of the past, Don Ernsberger, David Walter, and then there were a few others, they were based in Philadelphia. I think I met Don Ernsberger much later at the, I could be maybe around 2000, no, it wouldn't have been 2000. He was in, he had gone to DC later. Yeah, he later went to work for Don Ernsberger. The one that I went to, I think it was 96. He later went to work for Dana Rohrbacher, who I met in the era I'm now talking about. Okay, so I get in with this crowd, they had a little office in Philadelphia, so I'd go down there after school and hang out and I was reading, oh, Filthy Pierre's Libertarian. I used to get back, a little bit of things stapled together. Yeah, like a Mimeo. And you could guarantee and have an article published to send them the stencil. That's what you needed to do. I don't know who he was, Filthy Pierre. But I was reading people like Stephen Hallbrook, who I came to know later on, associated with the Independent Institute. And we were very, very serious. We went off to the Pocono Mountains like for weekend retreats and had training programs and how to speak. I mean, this is kind of, you know, this is kind of cult thing we were doing, right?  And it was just honing our skills. It was really very good.  It wasn't a big thing. But we became the part of the Libertarian caucus of Yaff. So as part of that, in early 1969, I went to New York for, there was a regional conference, regional, you know, convention, I guess, of Yaff. And I think I was the member of Yaff too, later on, believe it or not. Well, I joined because, you know, in those days, I didn't, before I even knew the word Libertarian. And, you know, it seemed like the only game in the town. I wasn't a commie, right? I wasn't a state socialist and that. So that didn't appeal to me. So we went to New York, a bunch of us from, sorry, we're still, we're still the Libertarian caucus, I'm getting ahead. And to see a debate between Carl Hess and Jerome Tuchilli, who's the father of JV Tuchilli of Reason Magazine. He was a Libertarian, limited government guy. Hess was arguing for anarchism and they debated. Now I don't remember really the debate, and I couldn't tell you what people were saying. It's probably predictable stuff. I do remember hearing later though, that after the debate, Tuchilli went over to Hess and said, you win, I'm convinced. And later he wrote that book, what was the book he wrote? Radical Libertarianism, I forget it, although it had to work. Yeah, Radical Libertarianism. And the subtitles, I think it's a right-wing perspective, which is unfortunate. But yeah, but that's because- Well, later on Carl Hess wrote- Yes, but later on Carl Hess wrote capitalism for kids. And that was way late, way later. Words are like counters, fools use them as money and wise men use them as counters. He said it, I did. One thing I like about Bob is he really has a way with words, even if he doesn't always put them together into true sentences. But I like that line of his. So I didn't meet Carl Hess on that occasion. I watched him in the audience. But the significant thing for me from that day was that sitting in a back row were three people that were then pointed out to me who would become quite loom-large in my life after that. Walter Block, Mario Rizzo, and Murray Rothbard. And someone said that's Murray Rothbard back there. And I maybe knew the name by then. I don't know if I've read anything. I'd probably read it. That was Austrian mafia in the background. Some of the short, and they were tackling back there at what Tuchel, he was saying. Anyway, that was a big thing in my life, right? Big, big time. So later that year was the National Convention in St. Louis, the famous National Convention in St. Louis of Yath. And we fielded a list of board members that we hoped would get elected. We didn't challenge the guy running for president. It was kind of David McKay. I guess we felt we were going to beat him anyway and he wasn't so bad. So let's not do that. So we didn't try to find anybody.  And I was sitting next to, who was a friend of mine in those days, I was sitting next to Bob Bidnato, the name you know. On that bus ride, Bob Bidnato read his open letter to Ayn Rand where he made the case for anarchism, which later on... Are you saying you don't mean right, Kyle? No, no. I didn't meet Roy Childs yet. At that point he was and he wrote an open letter. I guess it was an open letter. Oh, because the only open letter I knew was Roy Childs one. I had no idea. I don't know where he published it. Bidnato was anarchist in these days. I didn't know he had this... Oh yes, exactly. And we were... In those days we were very good friends. In recent years, he's attacked me as a sympathizer of terrorism. So yeah, well I and my friends have been attacked likewise. He did acknowledge that Roy Childs had already written an open letter to Ayn Rand and his letter was, as I recall, was very much like Roy's letter. But he wanted to have his own letter and put it on the record with Ayn Rand and get canceled, I guess, in his subscription, which is what happened to Roy. Anyway, we get to St. Louis. Because the only person who put it online would be him and he would not do so. Yeah, I never, I never even look for it. I never even look for it. But we, so we get to St. Louis and it's terribly exciting. And I'll make a, you know, a long story less long. I did get to see Carl Haas. I met Daniel Rohrbacher who in those days was not a was not a button-down conservative but a hippie, hippie of the right, let's say. There's a libertarian... Oh, that's how David Friedman describes them, right? Stoner, sorry, what'd you say? A libertarian, I think that's how David Friedman describes them. Troubadour had his guitar sat under, we sat under the gateway, gateway of arch and listened to him play. Carl Haas may have a famous appearance and a famous for libertarians under the gateway of arch and gave gave a talk and he was, Carl Haas was always very relaxed. I later on became friends with him. And a guy named Bill Schumacher who burned his draft card in the convention hall was beaten up by some ex-marines who were Yefers. And our slate for the board got totally smashed. Meanwhile, Murray Rothbard had brought out a special edition of the Libertarian Forum that said, you know, listen, Yef, and it was really a message to the libertarians, get out of there. Don't try to elect people. And that, on that, that was the end of the Libertarian Caucus and the formation of the Society for Individual Liberty, SIL, which later joined up with the Libertarian International and became the International Society for Individual Liberty, with the unfortunate initials, ISIL. I guess now they're going to call themselves Liberty International, so they're... Yeah, I think I've seen... And so that was... At least they have more justice to be paid to their name than than David Kelly's outfit has. But yeah, I guess the similarity to ISIL is, but I was like, you know, he's an ISIL. It's the other one that should change the name. Actually, during World War II, there was an American soldier, his last name was Hitler, and people asked him, are you going to change the name? Hell no, I'm not the one bringing the space and the family. It's the guy in Germany. He's the one who should change the name. So, better than his family, eventually, did change the name to something other than Hitler. So, we went back, you know, back home to Philadelphia, started up our own independent organization, and they held some great conferences in those days, since 69 and 70. That's where I got to see David Friedman speak. I saw Eric Mack speak. These are people I'm seeing for the first time, T-Born McCann. And I met Mises in that context, even though he never got to speak, because of screw-up and scheduling, it was really a shame. It was 1970. He died in 1973. He was a little frail, but they burned him down with Margaret, his wife from New York on the train. But while he was sitting outside the hall waiting to give his talk, he started just talking about the dangers of inflation. And he had this big group of students around him sitting at his feet. And I was one of them, listening to him talk very, kind of softly, no microphone, about just the ravages that inflation can inflict on a society. My one and only contact with Mises, I saw and then finally met. It wasn't quite the way they intended. So, do you want to explain what happened? We sort of get to speak at the conference, even if... Yeah, right. Not the way you got intended. Actually, what happened was they had scheduled, over-scheduled, or had a problem. And he had to, he was waiting for David Friedman to finish his talk, but he was very upset that he had to wait for a Friedman. So that's, you know, it wasn't the best PR for SIL, unfortunately. But those were great conferences. They put him on a pen in a few different places in the University of Pennsylvania. And then, you know, I went back to Temple, finished my studies in an active libertarian group. I wrote a weekly column for the student paper about libertarianism. And yeah, I had great fun. I met Jerry Rubin. He wasn't too fond of seeing me, because I forget what I was saying to him, but I didn't have the impression Jerry Rubin was really a libertarian. He wasn't a car all over me, as far as I was concerned. And he was a great, great time. So from there, I went into the newspaper business, and I already kind of talked about that. I spent a little time at the Associated Press. Not very long. I didn't really like it there. And then I went on to the, after covering the courts for three years, went on to the larger paper, the Wilmington Delaware News Journal, where I covered the state legislature, city council, again, more education in the state up close, politicians up close. While I was covering school boards and town councils in Pennsylvania, I would be sitting next to the reporter from the competing paper. We were kind of the brand X little paper. He was the big paper in the county, Chester County, Pennsylvania. And he would sit, we'd sit in the back and he'd make all these sort of snide, very, very worthwhile, but snide sarcastic remarks about what he was seeing up there on the stage. You know, just to me, not out loud. And I'd laugh and I would make some literary points back, but he was never making any kind of affirmative statements, right? It was all, it was just mocking, which was, which was great. But that was Dave Barry. We became very good friends. The famous Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winner, once had a TV show based on him starring Harry Anderson. Yeah. Best selling author, including best selling novelist, at least one best selling novel. And so we became good friends and spent a lot of time together, but we'd argue about politics, always friendly. He was, I think, you know, he tended to be, you'd say, you know, slightly left of center. So he didn't like the conservatives, but mostly he was interested in humor and sarcasm. We then went our separate ways. I went to Delaware. He was not working for the paper anymore, but when I decided I didn't want to do any more reporting, I got tired of that straight jack. And I took reporting seriously, that the reporter should be detached from his story and try to fairly present whatever it is he's reporting on. I mean, I really did take that seriously. It seems not to be taken too seriously these days. And then I found that constraining. I wanted to get an advocacy. I knew there were libertarian groups starting up, right? Kato begins in 1977. Things are beginning to happen. I remember writing a letter to Mario Rizzo, who was in NYU, and there was some institute or something connected with NYU that he was interested in. And I guess I had just read something of his. So I wrote to him and just said, is there some way I can become involved? Well, I wasn't an academic. I didn't have a career, a degree beyond the bachelor of science or bachelor of work. I forget what I had now. It was radio, TV, film. You think it would be arts, but I actually think it was science. It's sort of on the intersection of the two. Yeah, right. So he wrote and suggested I write to the Kato Institute, which was very helpful later on. We became kind of friends. I mean, it's not somebody I see on a frequent basis. He's in New York, and I was never based in New York. And so I got tired of reporting, and I wasn't sure where to go from there. And so Dave Barry, who had left reporting and was teaching writing, effective writing, for a consulting firm that was set up seminars in companies, corporations, companies, allied chemical, Dupont, places like that. And he said, I must have been talking to him. He said, I would like to do that. So he put me through training real fast. And there was a textbook that the founder of this little consulting company had written, and I liked it. And so I did that for a year. I wasn't working side by side with Dave. We were in different places. But that was a very important year because I honed my editing skills. I really do attribute what I think is pretty fair ability at editing. To that year. Because there's nothing like, and I'll probably improve my writing too, but I mean, editing other people, these were technical people who did not have to write plain English. We're not illiterate people. These were chemists who had to communicate the sales people who were not chemists, what it is the product, what the product was, and they had a hard time doing it. So my job was to teach them how to do that. There was writing, editing workshops, it was very good. But then, as that year was coming to a close, I got a call saying, how would you like to come down to Washington and be director of research at the council for competitive economy? Which was intended to be, was one of the early Coke organizations, so I can say that name. I've used that for a little word. Kato had already started, so it wasn't the first of the Coke organizations. But the idea was to be, we're going to build a libertarian, really libertarian chamber of commerce. So I went down and spent the summer on just to try it out, see if I liked it and I did like it. And then in the fall, I moved down there and joined the staff. We fought tariffs, we fought subsidies. The first big fight was against Liaya Coca's Chrysler bailout. They were trying to get from Jimmy Carter. We lost that one, of course. You got the bailout. But we placed Washington Post full-page ads saying no bailout. Everything big business liked we opposed. And it was a good, it was a fun few years. From there I went to Inquiry Magazine and the neck closed. So I don't know if it was me, everywhere I go, there's a problem. But Inquiry Magazine was a great magazine. It was used to be called like the best of the left and right because of the categories everybody thought of. So you had Murray Rothbard and Noam Chomsky regularly and that Hentoff writing regularly about the First Amendment. And it was great. You had new left historians. You actually said during one of his period, Chomsky will often alternate between disparaging and friendly remarks about libertarianism. In some ways, Libertarianism is awful and horrible. But in fairness, I really respect their commitment to rational argumentation. And for a long time, the only places I could get published were in some of their journals. It's probably one of those I had in mind. Yeah. And Inquiry is filled with names like that. Sidney Lenz, who was a Cold War revisionist, lots of people. And on the economic side, it was Rothbard and the unnerved Austrians, Jerry O'Driscoll, Rizzo probably. Ralph Reiko was book editor, the book editor. And he was very good at that. My old friend Ralph Reiko, great historian and very fine person. I think I met him this summer. I met you at IHS. Probably right. He spent a year at IHS once I got to IHS. And that was great because I got to spend time with him. A lot of time with him. From there, I went to, you know, I have the order right now. Inquiry finally closed, which is losing too much money. And it closed in 1994. I went to work for a thing that CC, the Council for Commitment Economy, had morphed into called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was no longer oriented just getting businessmen to join. But it was going to be like a grassroots thing. So I did a few years of that editing and writing papers just on public policy, honing my skills, I think. And then after a couple of years there, I was tired of that. And that's when IHS was moving from California to George Mason. And I was living in that area in the Fairfax County area in Virginia. And I wrote to John Blundell and said, who was president at the time, late John Blundell, are you hiring anybody on this end? And he said, well, I think so. And so I got hired as senior editor. I was there the day the moving band pulled in to the Mason, to the Tolwood House. Tolwood House, I have to call it written down. It's been, it's since been torn down alas, but it was great. Right. And it wasn't contiguous with the campus property. No, it was a long walk. I think, I think one of those long walks through the, you know, through the Virginia summer heat was when Ralph Raco said, no one told me we were going to be reenacting the baton death march. And I'm, my office was never in Tolwood House. Remember there was also a bunker, like a one story long, I remember there was another, I didn't, I didn't remember the building. We all went to talk, we were all the, the graduate fellows went to talk with you about our papers we were working on. Yeah. Remember, yeah, you were, Oh yeah, that's right. I got to do, I got to do some editing there. And there was a very important time for me. I mean, I hope people gained from talking to me. I mean, but I gained a whole lot from all the people that passed through that. The summer fellows, the postdoctoral fellows, I got to know, Emilio Pacheco spent from my first year there, and then Chandra, my first published paper, not counting a book review that I made earlier, but my first published paper on mill was that summer of, and I got to read, I got to read a lot of that kind of stuff from you folks and offer editorial suggestions. Now, I wasn't really, I wasn't offering substantive suggestions because I hadn't read, I'd read only a fraction of the stuff you guys have read, but I was learning from you guys all the time.  I remember Catherine Balthas and then seeing that you corrected all her IFFs to IFs because you thought it was a mistake because she was a native French speaker. Wow. That's embarrassing. I hope I didn't do that. I don't remember that, but I think, well, you know, someone without a background in Adalanda philosophy yet and reading someone you know is not a native English speaker, it's not that surprising, you might think that the mistake is going on there. But that's one of the most important people I've seen in my life today. I was there for five years. And to me, that was one of the most fruitful periods just because of all the people I got to have some contact with. Plus we would bring in speakers, Peter Bauer, who I got to know, Thomas Sowell, who I didn't get to know, but I think he's probably a hard person to get to know. But anyway, he was there and he got to the ear and speak. Lots of other people. Plus I got to meet and talk to Gordon Tullock, who always had something to say about everything and knows at least something about everything new, something about everything. James Buchanan and then all the younger people, Don Boudreau, Pete Betke, Steve Horwitz, all those students, David Chitko, so many, I mean I could just go on and on, who were in the graduate program at Mason. It was just, I couldn't have asked for like a better time to be just dropped into IHS. I mean that was a great move on my part because I didn't know how great it was going to be. At this time, I was also writing just to throw this out. I was writing for a column from the Washington Times. I wasn't on the staff, but I was writing as an outsider, a weekly column on computer, personal computers and software as an end user, right? Not a technical column. I just wrote them one day and said, I see you don't have your column anymore. Would you be interested in having me do it? And so they let me do it for like $25 a column, but in a sense all the software I could eat. I could write to companies and say, I'm the columnist and every day was Christmas. UPS would have left stacks of boxes, sometimes hardware too. Anyway, I did that for six years until the industry was just out of my control. I couldn't keep up, so I finally did that. So what did I do after that? From there I went to Cato after IHS and spent five years at Cato. Was there when they made the transition from Waterston House, that house that once housed Jefferson's core library that became the core of the Library of Congress, and then to when Cato built its own building? Brian Kaplan and I visited you in that new building when it was very new. I remember sitting in your office and you were on the phone. You had to take a phone call from some donor and you were trying to explain what the ideology of Cato was and you say, well, it's market liberal. Sometimes you hear the word libertarian. So Brian and I were chuckling about that sort of soft peddling. You have a good memory. I don't remember that one either. I'm not denying it, but I don't remember. Yeah, it was this gleaming building at the glass front. It is a cool looking building. Now they've gone way beyond that. They have another building. I had a friend who I've been back there since. I had a student who was an intern there and so back in 2001, I got to visit the building when it was closed. So I got to meet, again, met lots of good people there. I was on very good terms with Bill Nascannon, who was very supportive of me when I came under fire for my writings about the Middle East back then. And also when I had this big piece in the Wall Street Journal about Reagan's horrible trade record and got attacked by Clayton Yider, who was his trade representative. And of course, Bill knew all these people, right? Because of his experience in the council of economic advisors and everything else, he came to my defense beautifully and said, what are you talking about? Reagan is the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover. And so I have fond memories of Bill. And just, yeah, just had a great time dealing with people day to day, the staff, but also people who are coming through. And always people coming through to speak. So that's kind of a story until I ended up at FI, although I never was based in at FI. It was always a telecomuter. Don Boudreau became president of FI in 1998, I think it was seven or eight. And he tells me that the first, and I knew him really well from my days at Mason, he told me, first thing he did was decide that he wanted me to be the editor. And so I said, well, do I need to move up there? And he said, no, that's fine. But I went out frequently. Yeah, that was the great improvement in the Freeman. Because the Freeman had taken a kind of a creepy social conservative turn before your arrival there. I remember, you know, stuff about how natural, how natural and appropriate it is to feel hostility toward gaze and so forth. Yeah. Well, you know, there were some of the shorter, short-term editors, you know, there was never really a successor to Paul Perot who was an editor probably for 35 years, sometimes uncredited in the beginning. I don't think his name was one. And then when Leonard Reed died, you know, Leonard had no designated successor. So it kind of was in chaos. And people actually proposed that maybe Fisha just closed at this point. Reed's gone. It was so much of a personal thing. People were devoted to Leonard Reed, right? Donors and others. But no, it carried on. And it was very chaotic. And it was in very bad financial straits. But so Don took the job. He decided he had left Mason to get a law degree at Clemson because he wanted to do law and economics. And then I think it was at Clemson when he got the offer. And he decided he wanted to leave academia. And he thought running fee would be fun. He wanted a purpose from which to speak and write. That's really what he loves doing. And he just thought this would be great. And he thought of me right away. And we easily came to terms. And he was not interested in the social conservatism, the stuff you were just referring to. He's a hardcore libertarian. And he loves Bastiat and free trade. And was essentially an anarchist. I mean, he talked about it in print. I mean, he did a column of just asking questions, all of which the direction of which were quite clear where he was going. So that was a great time. It was one of the best people I ever worked for. But then I went through a whole bunch of presidents. There was a lot of turnover after Don decided to go back to school. I think he went back to Clemson to teach. Or maybe he'd go to Mason at that point. I forget. And so I was there. You were in attendance when, you know, I think when I made it out to fee back when they were located in Irvington and Hudson for a conference I spoke at. And I remember you were there again. Yes. That was probably the best in my years there. That was the best summer of conferences. We did a lot of these student seminars. We would do five or six a summer. It was quite an elaborate program for fee. That summer we had an executive director brother named Lee Curry. And he was so encouraging to the people. Yeah. Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lee was the guy that organized it with some of my help. I don't know if you know Jeffrey Lee. Yeah. I miss two teachers. I forget where he teaches. I remember. He was over in Virginia. But he had been there as a, I don't know, first an intern and then some staff member. And when Lee Curry came along as the executive director, he was a very nice guy and very supportive of me. I mean the most supportive president for me since Don Boudreau. There were a few in between there who I got nothing out of. No help from. And so I won't say any more about that. But Lee was all, he appreciated the magazine. He liked me. He liked Jeffrey. And he gave Jeffrey free hand to set up a series of seminars. And I was there to give advice and to suggest speakers. But he did the work.  I guess that's the first time. Was that the one on only feet seminar you ever spoke at? I'm trying to remember whether I was, whether I went out there once or twice. And I can't remember. I think my time, that would have been the only time. But I think there's a little part of me that thinks twice, but mostly I think it was just once because you know, because I took the, you know, I took the train up from Manhattan because I wanted to just spend one day in Manhattan or at least half a day in Manhattan. I remember that, you know, between checking out of my hotel and getting on the train for free, I ran through the Metropolitan Museum of Art for like 90 and 90 minute gulf, which was inadequate, but it was all I had. And I found a place that would store my luggage, which was nice. But anyway, but yeah, that was, that was, that was a lovely, because that was, again, like Tallwood House, it was a lovely house with, yeah, and really, really cool letters on the wall. I remember there was a letter on the wall from, from Leon Trotsky to Henry Haslitz. Yeah, that's right. I can't remember what the subject to the letter was, but it was just, it was a cool thing. Yeah, I don't remember now either. I read it many times. But I might have been the one who recommended you to Jeffrey, although he might have thought of it on his own, but the Brian Kaplan was there that summer. And I forget who else. It was an all star cast. It was just magnificent. I had such a good time, plenty of economists of course, Ben Powell might have been there. Ed Stringer, I think was there. I don't know if Jeffrey Hummel was there. That's possible. Anyway, yeah, also it was the best after a while. It was the most, Kersner was probably there because Kersner was a regular at those things. Kersner was always very close to the foundation. I'd been on the board for a while. And I got to know Israel Kersner very much. The only time I remember, my very first time at IHS is the only time I can definitely remember encountering Kersner. If I go back in, you know, when I was in the Liberty Society, what week long thing in 86, I'm not sure I've encountered Kersner since then, but I'm not sure I haven't either. My memory is not as copious as it used to be. Well, those seminars were great, too. I mean, I met lots of great people there because George Smith was one of the regulars. Yeah, my first living society had Linda Ligio, George Smith, Randy Barnett, Don LaVoy, Israel Kersner. Oh, yeah. I knew Don. I forget who else. It was a I knew Don Well. Brain freeze. In fact, when my first child was born, Jennifer, in 1983, Don and Mary, Don unfortunately died way too young. Great, great guy and great thinker, very important person with a loss. He and Mary offered just a few weeks in. I think they hadn't had their first kid yet. I think this was part of the reason they asked to do this. They offered to babysit for an evening, just so my wife and I could go out within the first time out since having the baby. I mean, she was a very young baby. And of course, we knew them and had no hesitation about that. And I think they also wanted to see what it would be like for us to be alone with an infant until we want to have a baby. And I think it would probably run on someone else's kid. Yeah. Yeah. And everything, everything was fine. I mean, my baby was, I think her first reward was hermeneutics. At least it sounded like that. I can't swear that's what it was. But there were Gothammer, I think she was saying Gothammer, something like that. Gothammer, Gaga, they sounded very similar. Maybe. I probably over-interpreting, Gaga. And Lady Gaga. It was a musical request, actually. We hadn't heard of Lady Gaga yet, so I couldn't assume it was that. So, yeah, I mean, what can I say? I had the privilege and honor of meeting some of these people and getting to spend time with. Thomas Sass is another one. I got to know him very well. I started, I published him at the Freeman. I brought him on as a columnist, which lots of people didn't understand. I was once asked, why are we publishing a column about psychology? Now, at the time, the president was very big on promoting the idea of character. You may know who I'm talking about. But it didn't occur to me to say at the time, and I should have, you know, it's really not about psychology. It's about self-responsibility. And as I recall, self-responsibility is a big part of character, which is what Tom was about, right? Self-responsibility and not blaming.  Well, that too, which he, of course, wrote about. And he was a, he was a wonderful guy, extremely charming old world type, you know, born in Hungary, came over in 1918. I'm sorry, when he was, sorry, 19, he was born in 26, 20, came over age 18. By the way, I have a video of an interview I did with him, which people can find on my YouTube channel. The one that has politics in the name, because I have another YouTube channel about pipe smoking, which reminds me, you know. Oh, yes, yes. So, you're very tall for this pipe. My wizard pipe, my Gandalf pipe, which is quite nice. I don't have anything in it at the moment. And only tobacco touches this, this pipe. One of my earlier videos, I actually, I know, I actually did it with a coffee mug. I didn't have any coffee in it. But I, but I confessed. I can, you know, I want to live at the amount of deception in doing these things. I confessed that I was doing it without, and I did one of these videos with coffee that I mean, heated up from the, the night before, which is very sinful, but it reminded me of my old colleague, William Davis, who used to, who would leave his coffee in the fridge and then at the office on Friday, and then on, on Monday morning, he'd, you know, heat it up in the microwave and he says, this is just as good as espresso. And we don't look at it with horror. Anyway, I can't say, I can't say too much about Tom. I think he's the most, maybe the most underrated libertarian, 20th century libertarian. I think a lot of people don't even bother to read him if they know about him because they think, well, that's just some esoteric area, psychiatry. You know, I'm not interested in that. They don't seem to realize all the violations of liberty that occur in the name of psychiatry, mental health, and the therapeutic state, as he calls it, is extremely important. He was, you know, he had been a crusader for getting rid of the drug war from very early on, and he was constantly condemning the psychiatric profession for listing homosexuality in its Bible of diseases. I mean, he wrote about that often and wrote aphorisms about it and pieces about it. And then finally they quoted it off the list in the 70s. That's how they decided what's a disease and what's not a disease. I don't think they do that on the pure medical side when they take a vote of hands. Is this a disease or not? I used to sign one of his books, I forget which one, back on A.C.T. for medical ethics. It was probably one of the most liked. His books are great. I recommend, don't pick up almost anything. I mean, his magnum opus is, I think, is considered a insanity. Oh, what's this up? I don't know. Well, I'll look it up. It'll be in the... It's like analysis of an idea or something like that.  That's funny. In the beginning, I kept waiting for my book covers to show up. It didn't occur to me. Wait a second. That's added later. Yeah. It will be added later. So, please, if I have... If I leave the viewers one message, read some Thomas Sass. He's very important. I did an article in the Journal of Vine Rain Studies called Sass and Rand. And it's about a book that Sass wrote called Faith and Freedom, which is about libertarian people. And he does a chapter... He has a chapter on Rand and a chapter on Brandon, which are, I think, eye-opening chapters, very important. And he has a very important chapter about Deirdre McCloskey based on Deirdre's own book, Passing, about, you know, becoming a transgender woman and extremely interesting. They're both, you know, both psychologists. And I haven't read what he has to say about Brandon, but I've been interested to see that. Yeah. Well, look at that article. I read it recently. It's been a while since I wrote that. I came out in like 2006 or something about that. And so it was a very long time. And something maybe I think to read it.  And he's got lots of interesting things. He has a more favorable but not totally favorable view of Rand than he has of Brandon. Anyway, so that's what happened. And then everything with fee changed. I don't need to go into the glory details. And I spent some time a year working with the Future Freedom Foundation editing. Went from FEE and FFF, just working your way through the phone book, it sounds like. Well, I just had to have a note to what a phone book is. I just had to erase the two bottom lines on the ease. Yeah. It was easy. I saw my shirts. I could easily change my shirts with some paint. By the way, it was a privilege to publish you with the Freeman. I don't know if that was the first time you were in the Freeman, but you wrote some very good pieces for me on Nozick. And I got you to kind of rewrite your point about equality. What was it, the unknown, the other unknown ideal, I think? And so you contributed, I don't know, three, four pieces for me. I don't know if you ever wrote for FFF or not. But that was fun for doing that for a year. But then that ended. They couldn't raise the money. And so that was on my own for a bit. Stretching away, getting some help from a friend of mine in California. I spent a year and a half in San Diego. At that time, I was seeing you at Liberty Fun, right? Because we had the few things we had. And also at Appie. Two things at that San Diego. What was that, Imperial Hotel or something in San Diego? Was it the... Is that the one? Yeah, La Jolla. Just sort of north of San Diego. My mother lived in the 1930s as a child. Yeah, you told me. I remember you told me. Also, you know, also we used to come out to the Association for Private Ed and Prize Education when it was in Las Vegas. I think that's when you were still working for Fee and they were giving you the travel funds to get out there. Oh yeah, those were the only times I went to Appie. That was a few times. And those were great. That was great fun, too. Yeah, you used to take us out to Fee's Dime. I'd be on your panel. Right. And you would set up panels. I guess you would set them up and I was on there. And I gave a couple... I debated... Yeah, people like Gary Darkay and Charles Johnson and so on. How did you get interested in left libertarianism? Well, this is part of my Freeman legacy, which maybe makes some people cringe, because actually there's one person, kind of prominent in the movement, I won't name him, who twice tried to get me fired because I brought Kevin Carson to the Freeman. I started reading... Well, I was already reading you and we were in communication. And I think you made me aware that there was actually this thing left libertarianism. I don't think I was fully aware of it, maybe not really aware of it at all. Now, I had... I was certainly aware of Rothbard and his new left days. And I knew Roy Childs, who had written about the real history of big business in opposition to Rand, who said it was America's persecuted majority. So I already had some of this background. It wasn't totally foreign, but I was now hearing it extended in ways I hadn't experienced and finding it very, very interesting. And it seemed consistent with the things I believe. So you, I remember email from you, I'd asked you, who should I read then in this? And you... And this is where I first... I'm sure the first time I saw the name, Kevin Carson. I know you've had one as a guest. And then Charles Johnson and you might have mentioned Gary. I met... Later met Gary at a... Yeah, Gary came from... My older brother later. Yeah, I met him at Freedom Festa, one of those things was in Vegas, but I already knew him, but we met face-to-face. Yeah, I know he used to go out there, not to attend the sessions, but just to hang out with other people who are going there. You go to the crowd, not to talk to the crowd, but to talk to individuals and draw them away from the crowd. Freedom Festa. Yeah, because there was a very big open book exhibition room. And it was, yeah, it was a lot of fun just hanging out there. I usually did more of that than anything else. So I started reading these people you recommended. Probably one of the earliest things I did was get my hands on studies and it wasn't mutuals, political economy. And devoured that. And around that time, you were bringing out that edition of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which was a look at that book, an examination of that book, pro and con. There was some pretty vicious stuff about the book in there.  George Reesman. I really invited George Reesman to do that, is because Reesman had also... Well, as you know, Reesman had also been doing work on how some aspects of the classical conception of cost and value could be salvaged and reconciled with cost. He was a Ricardian. He was an Austrian Ricardian. Yeah, and Carson was doing something similar. And so I thought, well, maybe there'd be some addressing. I was so wrong. Yes, you were. You told me that back then. You told me that back then. And yeah, yeah, you can't ever predict. So I thought it was extremely interesting stuff. And I learned a lot about history, including, you know, Marx's take on a lot of history, not so much the theory of economics or the... Yeah, Marx is a lot better than... Historical episodes, like the closing up of the commons and denying people customary rights that enjoyed for a long, long time. And so I learned a huge amount. And so I had him write... I invited him to write for the Freeman. And he wrote something about the history of transportation subsidies and how it distorts the economy. And what's his line, the subsidy of history? I think that article was... I think that title was what he used in maybe the first article he wrote. And also, he also did a piece about taking Hayekian concerns about knowledge problems and central planning and applying them to the hierarchical corporation. Exactly.  Not all the experience of course reaction. And that's the idea that if libertarians are complaining about all the regulation and intervention by the state, including a lot of privilege by the state, why then on the following day, when a leftist is criticizing something a corporation is doing, do a lot of libertarians then say, hey, wait a second, if it wasn't serving consumers, they wouldn't be doing it or competition will drive it out if it's not good. Wait a second, what were you saying yesterday about all the interventions and the privileges and the excluding of competition? And it's a failure to think, you know, the two sides of your brain thinking about the same thing at the same time.  And they say no, no, look at all this, it was an intervention. But then, you know, the Marxists will forget all that. And this really goes back to Marx himself to some extent. They'll suddenly forget all that and say, no, it's the, you know, it's the market that creates all this hierarchy and oppression and so forth. So the Volga libertarian and the Volga Marxists have a certain have a certain kinship, although neither would be happy to recognize it. Well, there were some people who were not happy to see Kevin's article. I don't think they knew his name, but they read the piece. And somebody wrote to, you know, above my pay grade and said, this is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a left wing journal. Well, that blew over. But then we started a little writing competition, not when when Beth Hoffman, the long time managing editor died, a donor and a board member, wanted to put money into create a Beth Hoffman Prize. So we decided to make it okay, the best article from the previous year. So it was already published. It wasn't a way of writing competition. And I picked like the five finalists. It wasn't blind, of course. These were published articles. I picked five finalists, and I submitted it to a to a three hardcore Austrian economists. No one's gonna complain about. They picked Kevin Carson's article on the on the transportation. So he wins that article that competition and the same guy that had written like the year earlier writes again to complain. It's bad enough. They published the article. Now the guy wins an award for it. Well, these were these were not left libertarians. And certainly wouldn't call them left libertarians who were on that jury panel who picked Carson's article. And they knew the name was on there. So they would have known who it was to, but they just thought it was the best of the articles out of the five I nominated. And I tried to be very fair about what I thought were the best or it was me saying it, but still. So that was an adventurous time. And since then, since the FFF came to an end, and I spent a year and a half in San Diego living cheaply and deciding what to do. Scott Horton called me up and said, let's form an institute and we'll break. Let's, let's start a group. Let's start an organization. And it became the Libertarian Institute. Interesting that no one has that name yet. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. And so my TGI, you know, I've been writing this weekly column TGIF, the goals, freedom, which began in 2006 at the Freeman, first, first online. And then it would a version of it would end up in the magazine. And then I carried it over. It always followed me. And when they didn't have a real job, it was on my own free association blog. And then when I joined FFF, it was there. And then it's at the Libertarian Institute, although I don't write it weekly. It's much more occasional now. So that's my, that's my biography. All right, let's, let's talk a little bit about your, your three most recent books. So starting with America's Ponder Revolution, The Constitution Revisited, which I think may be the context in which I discovered this quote. Yes, I found that. I don't remember why I found it. I don't remember a lot. I don't remember a lot about Abraham Bishop. I think it was from Connecticut. He might have been Congress. You know, I really didn't know much about him. And I didn't try to, you know, do some research to find out a little bit about him. It turns out he was he was one of the few founders who when the Haitian Revolution broke out was, was expressing sympathy for the black slave rebels, as opposed to, you know, clutching pearls about the, the fate of the slave owners property. So he was, he was a better Jeffersonian than Jefferson. And he was pretty good. He had some stuff on on the separation of church and state. He had some anti-imperialist stuff. He was not terrific, but better than average for his time on, on gender equality. He was a defender of, of, of education for women and so forth. So it was, you know, as the founders go, he seems to be one of the, one of the cooler ones. Well, I found that, you know, either in a book by Gordon Wood, who was, you know, who was a great historian of the revolutionary period, the constitutional period, or one of the writers about the anti-federalists. I really don't remember now. There weren't footnotes in that book. So I can't check it. I guess I probably have notes somewhere, private notes. But when I saw that, you know, Trump was, was getting his campaign together. He might have even announced by then, that was in 2015, the day now, right? And when I saw that, I mean, I don't know if people got a chance to see the quote. I don't know if you held it up long enough. Well, I, well, what it says is about the nation makes greatness. Its poll star can never be free. Abraham Bush 1800. I was blown out of my chair because Trump was in the air, who's make America great again. You could imagine my, let's talk about serendipity. I couldn't have made up a better quotation. It was just fantastic. So, as I said, the, you know, the, the progressive left is not exactly free from the cult of national greatness either. So you should take the quote as well. And the neocons were all about national greatness. War was a path to national greatness. It gave people a sense of purpose. Well, it was a great quote from great in some sense quote from Herbert Crowley, the defending, you know, American warfare saying America needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure. I've got a better moral, you know, why not withdrawing from all that crap? That would be a serious moral adventure. I'd be done for that adventure. Exactly. So that book, that book was written over many years, actually. I mean, I didn't sit down and say, I'm going to write a book for the Freeman. I began to, I don't know why I initially got interested in this. I really don't remember. I started writing essays, TGIFs. It began as the TGIF columns, which I then maybe probably expanded and put in the magazine about the constitution. I wish I could remember what triggered this because I had been an anarchist for since 1969. So it wasn't like news to me that there was a problem with the constitution. Yeah. Although there are a lot of the garden anarchists who still have a kind of, yeah, who still keep invoking the constitution more often than you would expect. But I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't on even that kind of constitutionalist. I just wasn't. And so, but it's something, for some reason, I started that column in 2006, something I read got me interested in this. And I just started reading Merle Jensen, a great historian of the period of the Articles of Confederation. And then, you know, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, maybe something about the Articles of Confederation really kicked this off. And I read something and said, wow, they don't have, they didn't have the power to tax or regulate trade. Of course, Rockford's book on this is finally out now, although I have to read it. The minimal volume of Conceived in Liberty, which for a long time was, it was either an unreadable handwriting or inaudible tapes. And now they finally, they think they finally accepted it. And I think the notes, I think the editor actually had to do a lot of reconstructing, right? Jeff Hummel thinks that's a very good book. He had a review and reason magazine. He likes that. I look forward to reading that when I get a chance. Well, anyway, however it got my interest got going. I just was reading stuff. I think I was reading about the Articles of Confederation and began writing about that. Those might have been the earliest ones. They really don't remember about how this is amazing. Here's a quote, government, more like a quasi government, really. It had no power to tax and it had no power to regulate trade. It had to go hat in hand of the states. The states would say the checks in the mail, get out of here sometimes. And I just thought that was an extremely interesting chapter in American history, which doesn't get much, much attention. It's kind of what actually used to be in the Middle Ages, where the kings had to ask the municipalities and jurisdictions for tax contributions, which they might or might not end up popping up. That drew me into the move toward a constitution, which was to quote, fix, right? Fix these flaws, namely the lack of taxation power and the lack of other things, including power to regulate trade. That had to be fixed. It was a big problem, right? Because what kind of government, what kind of self-respecting government lacks those two powers? So that drew me to the Constitutional Convention, and so I started reading stuff. Jensen talked about both. And Jensen has a great line, which I quote, where he says, the men that wrote the Constitution were very different from the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence. And that really flicked on the light, and I just kept reading from there. And started doing these essays, which, when I look back, I'm a little amazed that here I am, the editor of the Freeman. And I'm writing the subversive, you know, the Freeman was never really a edgy, radical magazine, or fee was not edgy and radical, right? But here I'm writing, I'm questioning the Constitution, not just once, a series of articles. And I remember one of the presidents of the Nameless said to me, I see you're writing a lot about the Constitution. I said, yeah, yeah. He said, you know, every people really does need its folklore, its fairy tales. And luckily, that wasn't an order to stop, cease and desist, because I didn't, I didn't cease and desist, and nothing happened to me. So I guess, I guess it wasn't meant that way. Eventually, in 2015, when I was in California and didn't have an actual job, I think it was Gary Chardier who came to me and said, why don't you just put all that stuff together in a book? Funny never occurred to me. I didn't think it was all that weighty, although looking back on it, I guess it's pretty good. Well, you can tell his contribution both from the choice of publisher and from the font choices on the cover. For those familiar with both of those sort of screen Gary. We published it under, yeah, that publishing house. And I'll never forget when I had a PDF of it, or maybe when I had the actual book in my hand, I said, this is amazing, because I actually have a book on the Constitution. And so I feel, I feel proud of that book. I mean, I think it's a good sell book. And I, and you inspired at least one of the chapters in the area, one of the late, I think the last chapter is called The Constitution of Anarchy, because I, I learned a lot from an essay you wrote, you'll remember the title, I don't, about how any society has probably or something like that. Yeah, any society has a Constitution. I mean, there was a, I had a blog, a series of blog posts when I was debating Robert Benonato, the sort of long list lines, but also, yes, I had a chapter in the anthology that I did with Timur McCann on, and that's exactly right. And I had read that and mine, mine, I mean, it's not a rip off because your name is all through that chapter. And I quote it quite a bit. But I was such an important point. I'm glad I was able to kind of lift Hayekian title, right? He's got the Constitution of Liberty. I just thought this is as we call the Constitution of Anarchy. And because it's so counter-intuitive, Hekron Anarchist Society of a Constitutional, any society, class society has a Constitution, a set of, a set of rules, tacit, sometimes tacit, sometimes not tacit, that constitute that society, the regularity, the customs, the etiquette, all those things, all those things that the competition is a form of checks and balances. And so Anarchy has more competition than a monopolistic system. So of course, a monopolistic system that has division of powers like the US division of powers between the three branches of the federal government in the States, that has more competition than like a solid unified monolithic authoritarian state does. And the more competition that has, the better it works in checks and balances. And Anarchy is free entry into the job of checks and balances, but if it's harder for the checkers and balancers to end up sort of polluting because anyone can down. It's a brilliant paper. I thank you for it because it inspired my chapter, which then made, I think, the perfect closing chapter to my book on the Constitution. I was so happy when it occurred to me, okay, that's not about the US Constitution, but that belongs in this book. So I'm proud of that book. It was like, you know, 20 years in the marketing. It's an excellent book. 15 years. Boo! Which actually means this in Turkish. I think Uzbek also saw those ghosts. They've just been saying this, this, this all the time. Anyway, I'm interrupting here because my full interview with Sheldon ends up running for nearly two and a half hours, which is both a heavy burden on my viewers and a heavy burden on my bandwidth when I try to upload it. So I'm going to be snipping this this interview in half and this seems like a good place to snip a natural. It's roughly halfway through and it's a, it's almost exactly halfway through, really. And just, you know, sort of a natural transition from one, talking about one topic to the next. And so I'm going to load the first half of this, this interview this week and I will load the second half next week, although I don't know when you're seeing this. You might be, you might be binge-watching at some point in the future when they're both up. If you're binge-watching all my episodes at the time when, when they're all up, maybe all of them are up in the sense of all ever and that I'm dead and you're just watching what's left. Let's look at dark turn. Anyway, so, well, I'll start it off with ghosts. So what do you expect? Boo again, this, this, this. Anyway, so, you know, if you're watching this, you know, right after I upload it, then you will have to wait eagerly for a week or so for part two, which is going to be very interesting as well. And in the meantime, like, share, subscribe.   But as mentioned, it's something you might just feel like doing. If you suddenly find yourself with loads of extra money in your hands, you don't know what to do with them. And in the meantime, farewell until next time.