Welcome back to the Agora cafe for more coffee and philosophy and economics and law and history and other cool stuff because I'm talking to David Friedman, which is why I have things that they're behind me. I think that here is the, the location of the, the open air parliament in Iceland during the free Commonwealth period or the free state period or the free not quite a state period, which is roughly from 930 to 1262. Although, after the system collapse it sort of continued in the way after anyway it's not a story. The I first heard about the people Icelandic system from David Friedman. Back in the early 80s, he came to Harvard to give a talk. I missed the talk, but I was in a libertarian club, and I was, I was there in the same room with someone else who was listening to the audio and transcribing and he was either transcribing a lecture or transcribing an interview. I don't remember which is very similar. And so David was telling me stories about medieval Iceland and how this is working. I wasn't an anarchist yet then, but my interest was peaked. And I think my first met him was in like 2002 or so. When I Jared Diamond had come out with this article about the Icelandic legal system that was as often with diamond wrong headed. And so, and I had written an article on Icelandic system recently and and David of course had written lots of them. And so we were both invited out. So pretty cool for me to be on the same panel on something that I actually learned from a more, more expert person. Then eventually I actually got a chance to get to get to this place. A few years ago, I forget exactly the year, but I was I was invited to European Students for Liberty talk in Iceland and although many aspects of the visit went badly, because the first I was sick and I could barely hobble around in the morning, although it got better as the day progressed and the airplane, the airline had lost my luggage. And so I had to wear the same pretty clothes. Day after day. But everything else was delightful. The people who were hosting it were great. And the conference was great and the various venues we went to went to for talks and for meals and so forth were great. And also they took me on the Golden Circle tour, which is sort of a standard touristy thing, but very worthwhile. And so it's good to see the original geyser after which all the geysers are named. It doesn't mean it's the first geyser that ever existed, but it's etymologically the first geyser. And we're to see Gullfoss, the the big waterfall, and they got to see think that layer which is where the which is historically of interest, because that's where the as I said that's where the open air not quite a state parliament met during the Middle Ages and also it's a geological address because it's where two tectonic plates come together. And this is, you know, that's one of the other one now. I'll show you a little bit. You can see the scale of it by seeing those people in the background there. Anyway, so all that's by way of introduction of David Friedman will be talking about Iceland. Other things. And so without further ado, this has been a bit more ado than the usual. Actually really more do than usual because the I had all kinds of technical problems with this particular video and I thought that I'd lost all the video and just had the audio and it's a long story. But anyway, fix now. And here we go. Is that thing that were it is chosen in honor of this interview. Hey, a very, very long time ago I was visiting Iceland and my hosts arranged for me to have a tour of thing that were accompanied by a retired professor who basically knew everything there was to be known about that he was a fellow enthusiast. And it was a lot of fun it was raining a little bit. And we sort of wandered around discussing where we thought things had happened and stuff of that sort. As you may know, it's still the thing that were is a crack between Europe and America. That is to say there's a European plate and American plate, and it's one of the cracks between them. And one result is that the land has been gradually changing. So I told them they ought to put it back the way they found it. But it was also interesting because I've seen this last one. I spend a couple of weeks at a big SCA camping event called the Pensac war. And it's about the same scale as the all thing. I think a little bit bigger than the all thing we're about 10,000 people and I'm guessing the all thing was more like a few thousand. It's still a sort of a neat comparison, because the all thing is two weeks as I remember, and it's a whole bunch of people coming from all over and camping out. And that's what Pensac is just with modern, modern, rather than a 10th century or 11th century created stuff. What did you create Pensac or the Pensac war more nearly than anyone else that is it wasn't really a one person thing but I think I was the chief moving, moving actor in that there's sort of a standard story which is mostly false but but it is the case that I had the idea of having such a war and arranged for it to happen, but then various other people were involved in actually making it happen. So brave our audience who is wondering what what war you're fermenting I should explain the session with the Society for the creative anachronism which is a historical reenactment group and yes, David is not actually starting actual wars as far as I know. Not currently know. No, this one. This would have been about 50 years ago. We're around the 50th Pensac and the, the SCA was divided at the time into I think three kingdoms, West, East and Middle, and I arranged to have a war between the East Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, which consisted of a bunch of people in the armor that they had made using weapons that were made out of her tan not steel under a set of rules for combat fighting each other doing doing medieval foot combat as a sport essentially and they're still doing it. And nowadays they probably have battles with 1000 people aside something on that scale, but the first Pensac was more like 30 people aside. Anyway, I should probably introduce you. I don't know if I've entered in may just race but that's no that's okay. But so, for any bewildered viewers, this is David Friedman David D Friedman because there are many David Friedman's. So putting the D and helps to narrow their possible range of reference. He's an emeritus professor of law at Santa Clara University. You got his PhD in physics, not economics, not law but physics from University of Chicago. Among his books are I think this is all this is a complete list of his books is the machinery of freedom guide to a radical capitalism which is now in its third edition and was a book was a major influence on me and in my journey to free market legal systems very different from ours, which covers a variety of different historical legal systems everything from ancient Athens to medieval Iceland to the, to the plains Indians to Jewish law and Islamic law and various things. Also, I won't summarize each book, but there's also hidden order the economics of everyday life. Laws order, what economics has to do with law and why it matters. Future imperfect technology and freedom in an uncertain world. Price theory and intermediate text. And miscellany miscellany or miscellany, depending on which pronunciation you prefer, which is connected with society for creative and mechanism it's a compendium of medieval information. Maybe we'll hear a little bit more about that, plus there are three novels, Harold salamander and brothers. And I think that that's there's lots of articles and stuff too. Actually the miscellany is jointly written by myself and my wife okay and we also have a cookbook which is really extracts from the miscellany which is called how to milk and almond stuff and egg and armor a turnip a thousand years of recipes because one of our medieval hobbies is cooking from very old cookbooks. And I'll have links to where you can find all of those either either online versions whether or such or to buy what you can do that in the description so people can hunt all that down. In case anyone's watching this who's like completely clueless I suppose I should also mention that you're the the son of Milton and Rose Friedman and since you know I suppose there's someone on the planet who doesn't know that but anyway so if you say a little bit about you know about your journey how you you know how you got interested in physics how you found your way from physics to economics and then you got into free market anarchism medieval Iceland creative anachronism and it's a long story but to begin with at the point when I was looking for a field to major in in college and then go on to graduate work in I did not like the idea of spending my life being identified mainly as my father's son and since by that time my father was actually quite famous even in the outside world as well as in the economics profession physics seemed like an interesting subject sort of very fundamental subject so I decided to do that instead I actually got an undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics joint major and then went on to get a doctorate in physics I did several years as a postdoc at Columbia during that time somebody from the population council and I'm not sure how he got I should say that I was writing I think at some point I think starting as an undergraduate maybe as a graduate I'm not sure I was writing columns for the new guard which was the magazine of the young americans for freedom which was a conservative student organization and I was essentially the token libertarian on that magazine my column was called the radical and I eventually put together that and other things I'd written a new stuff to make my first book and I guess that would have been I think that book would have been at least written and probably published while I was a postdoc at Columbia but in any case somebody associated with the population council observed that everything being written about population was being written from a basically left of center point of view and thought it would be interesting to see how the issue looked from the standpoint of somebody who was pro-market I don't think he was himself particularly right of center or particularly libertarian I think he was just open minded guy who thought it would be interesting to see different views but he asked me to write a piece on population which ended up as a pamphlet from the population council and I wrote a piece called less a fair in population the least bad solution and part of what I tried to do in that the sort of the superman economist standpoint the argument for both population and climate change our arguments about externalities the question is when you have another child do you make the rest of the world better or worse off when you burn some some gasoline and put carbon dioxide in the air do you make the rest of the world better or worse off and that's a harder problem than people usually realize because most things like this have a lot of effects and some of them are good and some of them are bad and in the population case the orthodoxy at the time was that of course increased population was bad the only question was was it very bad or horrendously bad that you had within the range of respectable opinion though one edge one end of it you had air lick writing in the 1960s late 60s that in the 1970s there would be unstoppable mass famines with hundreds of millions of people dying was that the population bomb was that that book his book was the population bomb and it seemed to me that in order to really look at this you had to try to figure out what the net externalities were if you added up the positive and the negative effects so my article was an attempt to estimate the next net externalities for having one more child and I observed that they were in fact substantial positive as well as substantial negative ones and my conclusion was that I could not sign the sum I couldn't say whether on net it was actually better or worse now we now know that at least the predictions being made at the time we're on that in particular we know that from the time the population in fact from the end of World War II roughly to roughly the present per capita calorie consumption in poor countries is trended up not down which is the opposite of what airlock airlock was predicting obviously and extreme poverty is going to sharply down and population growth is not stopped it's it's it's stopped essentially in Europe but Europe isn't poor but in Africa it's continued along with an increase the people in Africa are still very poor but they're less poor than they were when airlock wrote not not more poor so in that case I think I was right the many many many years later you had a very similar situation with climate and so I got interested in that subject I posted on it on my blog which you can see from my web page if you go there thanks to both of them yeah and if you the the blog is set up so you can search for terms on it so if you do a search for warming or global warming or anthropogenic global warming or something like that you can find a bunch of different posts to one of the many things I've discussed on the blog and again my conclusion is that I can't sign the sum that if you actually think about it seriously there are substantial negative effects from climate change and there are also substantial positive effects and for example the one which almost the two things that are almost never discussed one of them is that warming results in more hot summers and fewer cold winters there is an old lancet article which tried to estimate mortality from heat and from cold on a global basis and their conclusion was that many more people I think almost 20 times as many people died from too much cold than from too much heat and that certainly suggests that while you will indeed have additional people dying because of hotter summers you will probably save more lives on the other end because of cooler winters and the other thing that most people don't take account of is that CO2 is an input to photosynthesis and that one effect of increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere is to increase crop yield and we have pretty good data on that because people with greenhouses not uncommonly pumps CO2 in in order to increase their yield and the what the evidence seems to show is that for most though not all food crops doubling the CO2 concentration increases yield by about 30 so that's a whopping big increase in the total world food supply but there are negative effects as well of course so so again my conclusion is that the current orthodoxy is not is not legitimately based the current orthodoxy is not in fact supported by the scientific evidence the belief that temperatures are trending up I think is supported by the evidence the belief that the main reason is increased CO2 duty human action is at least a very plausible explanation I think it's a complicated enough system I'm reluctant to say I'm sure it's right but the belief that we can confidently expect the results to be terrible I don't think is supported anyway let me go back to answering your question about my history uh so I was doing physics at at at Columbia and I concluded I was a better economist than a physicist uh and it happened that uh there was somebody at University of Pennsylvania Julius Margolis who was running a semi-independent center called the center for state and local government at the fell center it's the state and local government and he had seen something of mine I'm not sure what and he invited me to come as a postdoctoral fellow uh at at the fell center I did have a doctorate even though it wasn't in any relevant subject uh and spend a couple of years switching fields from physics to economics so I did that and while I was doing that I wrote my first economics journal article which was an article an economic theory of the size and shape of nations in which I offered an explanation of general features of the map of Europe from the fall of the roman empire to the present and I eventually got that article published in the journal political economy which is one of the top journals in economics world uh and then at some point I encountered Jim Buchanan and what my article was doing was using economics to make sense of what we usually think of as political phenomena namely national borders what Jim was doing of course along with Gordon Tulloch was inventing public choice theory so Jim invited me to come to vpi which is where he was to the public choice center as an assistant professor of economics I should say I spent a year as a lecturer at Panin between these two two things I spent two years as a at the fell center in the one year as a lecturer so then I went to vpi at the point when I went to vpi the other really interesting person there was Gordon Tulloch somebody who I still have very positive memories of unfortunately neither than is alive anymore and Gordon both what I did meet them both through ihs and and so on connections yes very different people uh Jim got a Nobel prize it should have been shared with Gordon but I think Gordon had offended a lot of people which I like to to say that knowing Gordon was very useful for me because he had my faults but even more extreme versions in fact I used to describe Gordon as the world's smartest 12 year old and but one of the things that Gordon used to say was that he had published more pages in economics journals than had been assigned in all of the economics course he had courses he had taken and my response to that was that I achieved that with my first page uh so so I then I was just a professor of economics at vpi I think though I am not sure that Jim deliberately arranged for me over a period of some years to teach a sense to the entire syllabus because teaching courses is a good way of learning them and so by teaching those things I learned stuff uh and I think at least one of my fairly important articles and ideas came out of teaching a course there and realizing that what I was telling my students wasn't really right and then correcting it but in any case I was vpi for a fair while and visited at UC Irvine and I guess at UCLA and eventually went to UCLA as an assistant professor for some years they did not offer me tenure my story there was I had a conversation with the then chairman of the department he said look you're a bright guy if you followed the journals and wrote articles on whatever is the current hot topic you could get the kind of Vita that would get you tenure at a place like UCLA and I said yeah I probably could if you were me would you do that and he said no uh and I think I think we were both right in my opinion that it's it is better all better to be doing the things I find interesting which are much more likely to actually be original things that make a contribution than to be the fifth best author on whatever is the current hot hot topic but uh in any case but uh it what then happened uh was that the I had my first marriage it ended uh roughly a little after I moved to vpi and I met a woman there who I'm now married to uh who was a graduate student in geology Betty and it took me a long time to persuade her of the virtual long-term contracts uh I was the first she was a graduate student I was the first man she had ever dated she had simply taken it for granted that that whole part of life just wasn't wasn't part of her life so to speak uh but eventually at the point when I was at UCLA and she by that time had graduated vpi and was working for shell in New Orleans uh and we kept I mean I'd proposed to her multiple times and when I had week off I'd visit her and in New Orleans and so forth and eventually we were talking on the phone she said I have an idea why don't we get married and I have forever regretted that I was not quick enough to say that's a great idea why didn't it occur to me but in any case once that was settled I needed a position in New Orleans and I got Tulane to hire me for their business school as professor of economics so I drove across the country from Los Angeles to New Orleans and spent several years at Tulane as a professor there and while I was there there was an exchange of articles by several people Chicago uh George Stigler and Gary Becker wrote an article I think on the payment of enforcers or some title like that in which they argued that the present system for rewarding law enforcers is not really incentive compatible from an economic standpoint and the way I put their article their argument not the way they put it is I'm a cop you're a criminal and I've got the goods on you and getting convicted will result in a punishment that's the equivalent to you of a hundred thousand dollar fine convicting you will get me a gold star on my report card and that'll raise my lifetime income by ten thousand dollars and we know according to dragnet what happens I take the evidence to the da and he arrest he has you arrested but economists know that markets exist to move resources to their highest valued use and the evidence showing you're guilty is worth a hundred thousand dollars to you and ten thousand dollars to me so that suggests that what will actually happen is you'll pay me something between ten thousand a hundred thousand dollars and I'll burn the evidence and that means you need a second layer of cops watching the first layer of cops in order to keep that from happening and what becker and Stigler said was look you could solve that problem in a simple and elegant way by saying that instead of paying the policeman a salary he gets the fines that the criminals he catches pay and now the only bribe all takes a hundred thousand dollar bribe and that's fine that will save the trouble of a trial and still get you your punishment uh and uh Richard Posner and Bill Landis who were the law and econ people at Chicago law school wrote an article responding to that pointing out a number of problems uh pointing out some issues that Becker and Stigler hadn't thought about and also pointing out that once you solve those issues what they were really doing was reinventing tort law because after all the tort law the victim or his lawyer sues the punishment is the damage payment it's received by the plaintiff and so forth and so I got interested in that uh I had and and and it occurred to me that I knew of a real world society a real world legal system which had looked an awful lot like the hypothetical one that Becker and Stigler were talking about one in which in effect tort law swallowed criminal law in which uh the victim of an offense uh in effect sued the the perpetrator and that was saga period Iceland and I ended up writing two articles in response to this exchange between Becker and Stigler and one of them was an article trying to work out how the saga period Icelandic system had worked and to analyze its workings and the other was a theoretical article showing that a particular part of the landis and posionist critique was wrong more precisely that something that they were claiming was impossible in the Becker Stigler thing could in fact be done by simply tweaking the detailed rules of of how their system worked uh and both the way how did you how did you become interested in medieval Iceland in the first place how did you that might be connected with sca I'm not sure I got the sca came into existence around the time I started being a graduate school at Chicago and it originated in the bay area of california and about maybe three years four years after it got started uh I heard about it it sounded like fun and some of my friends at Chicago knew heard about it and we just started decided to start a midwestern branch of it so that got me into doing medieval things for fun things like finding a medieval cookbook and actually trying to cook the dishes which is quite a lot of fun and I've been doing it for about 50 years now uh and various other things and so that's probably though not certainly why I why I read the Icelandic sagas but the Icelandic sagas that's where we get the word saga from and the sagas are basically historical novels and histories that well there are two clusters of them but the the family sagas are describing events from about the early 10th century into the early 11th century I guess or a little fire that there's another set which are describing the final break up breakdown period a couple hundred years early yeah uh and the the sterling sagas uh and the sagas but the sagas are describing a all of them are describing a legal system in which there was a court system and there was a legal code and there was no government enforcement there was the way I like I like to refer to that as the semi-stateless society because there was a legislature uh but the enforcement of the laws was entirely by private action which turned out to be very interesting system but in any case uh so I wrote the two articles and they both got published in Chicago in journals coming out of Chicago and the people of the law school Landis and Posner basically invited me to come visit uh as a faculty fellow for a year to argue with them at closer range so to speak and I did that at that point uh Betty was not really enjoying being a geologist for for Shell as she put it at the time as I remember that she didn't like going to work a couple of hours before she woke up uh and and that was the point when the oil industry was in something of a slump and so Shell was buying out its employees basically offering a fixed amount to give up their future employment so she quit Shell uh I visited uh Chicago they then offered to give me another couple of years Tulane was not willing to give me another couple of years of leave so I quit Tulane and ended up spending I guess about nine years as a faculty fellow uh at University of Chicago Law School I visited Cornell for a year during that but most of it was at University of Chicago Law School and that was a mostly research position although I did a little bit of teaching as well both a little bit of teaching for the business school I think one course for the college and then I think a couple of courses for the law school but but mostly I was really free in that standpoint eventually it became clear that Landis and Posner were not going to persuade their colleagues that the law school needed another economist as a tenured professor which is what Landis is really an economist not a lawyer Posner is really a is really a legal scholar not an economist even though he's famous for his role in doing economics analysis of law uh and at that point somehow I got on to Santa Clara University I think partly because there was a professor in the economics department called Larry Yonakone who was a Becker student who did interesting stuff on economics of religion and he was a professor there but somehow or rather however it was uh the law school at Santa Clara University wanted somebody doing economic analysis of law which was sort of a moderately hot subfield at that point so they hired me to do that and I then spent about 20 years 21 years as a law professor at Santa Clara I was a half I ended up as a half-time full professor which is a very nice job if you can get it it was enough income for my purposes it meant that I had one semester on one semester off which gave me lots of time to do things it made sense from their standpoint because since I wasn't trained as a lawyer most of the courses that they taught I wasn't confident to teach and you know maybe with enough investment of time and effort I might have been able to learn enough to teach one of the basic courses but it didn't seem to make a lot of sense so instead I taught law and econ and then I invented various other courses that I thought would be fun and one of those other courses one one that I called legal issues of the 21st century and that ended up as the book future imperfect I should say several of my books have been written by teaching a course for a number of years accumulating lecture notes turning those eventually into a book and I like to say that my trick for getting myself to finish a book is to announce that the book I'm currently working on will be the textbook next year and then I've got to get each chapter finished by the week when that chapter is when I've got to provide that chapter to the students and I've done that for several books now so that produced one of my books and then later I got into a later let me go back a step the part which in some sense is more relevant to libertarians I had done the Icelandic article and it was really interesting it was a lot of fun I learned interesting things from it some years later I got interested in the legal system of 18th century England and 18th century England as you may know was a legal system which on paper was our legal system the only thing is there were no police or public prosecutors so it was a criminal system where it was enforced by the state but prosecuted privately so if somebody stole your horse it was up to you or somebody you hired to find out who did it to bring in the evidence to get him convicted and and that was I originally got interested in it because the 18th century criminal code is known as the bloody code because essentially all all all serious crimes are capital and there was an article by Gary Becker in the law and econ literature which raised the question of why it didn't always pay to in effect charge the maximum punishment and just lower probability of catching people to get the amount of deterrence you wanted that's an oversimplification of the article I think I think Gary's answer to the question was wrong in my opinion but but it was an interesting question and I thought a high 18th century England bloody code that's an example turned out it wasn't true that if you actually looked at the evidence it turned out that even though on paper all serious offenses I think the only real exception is manslaughter were capital in practice of people charged with one of those capital offenses something like one in eight got hanged and of those convicted maybe one in three or so got hanged at least from the sample we don't have complete evidence but people have gone through particular bodies of court records counting counting what happened and that there were the system was designed so even though on paper everything was capital there were outs in particular even first you could be convicted of a lesser included offense blackstone uses the term pious perjury for a jury which knowing that stealing more than 40 shillings is a capital offense convict somebody of stealing 30 goods were 39 shillings even though the goods included more than 40 shillings and money and that's pious perjury they they wanted him punished but not not hanged furthermore if you were convicted in one of these crimes you could then get pardoned and you could get pardoned either you could get pardoned because the judge thought you're innocent that's probably a fairly uncommon case but you would get pardoned and sent home you could get pardoned on condition of agreeing to enlist in the army or navy if there was a war on and you could get pardoned in on condition of agreeing to be transported to the new world for 20 years of indentured servitude that's transportation pre-Australia this was to north america and so all of those meant that it wasn't really such as bloody a code as it was supposed to be but the interesting thing i discovered was the fact that it was all privately privately prosecuted so i ended up doing an article on that and trying to understand how it worked and the the obvious puzzle there is why does anybody bother because our tort law is privately prosecuted but our tort law if you win the case you collect the damage value you get you get a reward for doing it that's right english 18th century criminal law you win the case they hang the guy or they transport him or they pardon him or whatever so that so there was the very interesting puzzle of why people did it and i think i had a number of different answers for why they did it and that got me into a bunch of again to meet quite interesting questions so i'd written that article and then i've been lazy for 10 years or something i hadn't done anything in the story and it occurred to me at now at a point when i was an scu that i learned a lot and had a lot of fun writing those two articles i needed a way of getting myself to do more of that sort of work so i announced that the next year i was teaching a seminar on legal systems very different from ours this is what we economists call a commitment strategy a way of making myself do something i went to the law school library and i said what do you have in terms of books that describe legal systems different than ours and they provided me with one of these rolling bookcases i think three shells full of books that they found me and i went through and i ended up with quite a lot of interesting legal systems and i taught that seminar every other year for i suppose 10 years or so and accumulated lots of stuff i believe in exploiting my students just as they exploit me that is to say they write interesting articles from which i learned stuff and hopefully i teach the things for which they learn stuff and then i turned that into the book legal systems very different from ours and i should say two of the chapters of my other people uh peter leeson had written a very interesting book on pirates i was a referee for that book well i was a referee for one or both of the articles and i think for the book but i'm not sure and one of the reasons i say well to do that was that students of mine had written on the subject so i'd already read papers not nearly as thorough as the job that peter did but so it was already familiar to me uh so i got him to write a chapter on the legal system of 18th century pirates which turned out to be quite interesting and then david scarbeck had written a book about criminal gangs uh prison gangs not criminal gangs in general prison gangs and it's a fascinating book uh he never quite says that prison gangs are a good thing but he clearly thinks they are he has evidence that when this prison gang system developed the deaths in prison felt felt quite sharply and that was a basically a private legal system developing under a very unfavorable environment and nonetheless functioning so that was quite interesting so i got each of them to do one chapter for my book and the other whatever 20 chapters or so i did and those chapters that book is consists of what i think of as uh system chapters which describes some legal system and then what i think of is thread chapters which describes some issue that runs through multiple legal systems and that was a lot of fun too so that's really the latest thing along that those lines the latest nonfiction that i've i've written i'm currently working on another book or books i i decided i'd run out of ideas but it occurred to me that my i had 15 years of blog posts which were ideas i had at various point or another in fact my blog is called ideas and so i went through all of them and sorted them by category by topic uh and the idea is to then produce a book or books i think the total of blog posts is probably the equivalent of four or five books but there's some repetition among posts that's part about doing that yeah yeah and my blog post not with yours yeah of course uh and so i'm that's the project i'm currently the writing project i'm currently involved in uh and if you look on my web page and follow the relevant link i've got the first two and three quarters sections up that is i've got the section on libertarianism up drafts these the doubtless will get edited further uh i've got the much shorter section on religion up and i've got most of the section on education up that's what i'm working on at the moment and i should say the reason i'm working on that one at the moment the main reason is that i was asked to give a talk and in about another week and a half from now at oxford over the internet of course on education and it occurred to me i had thoughts on education but i'd never actually given a talk on it so i decided that if i did that section of the book that would remind me of all of the thoughts and start putting them in a somewhat organized form and i can hopefully turn that into a new talk because i i in general have sort of my doubts about why how useful it is to give the same talk the fifth time when several of the previous ones are already webbed on youtube uh and so it's more interesting if i can say something new which i can hope the occasion only do so anyway so that that's what i'm up to now and in addition to that i have as as you mentioned i've written three novels uh theoretically i'm working on a fourth but i haven't gotten very far on that project at this point the the first one was commercially published by bane and they marketed it as a fantasy but it isn't really a fantasy what it really is historical novel with invented history and invented geography uh but the there are no there's no magic there there are no elves or dwarves the technology and the geography i think it falls within a very broad conception of fantasy i think is maybe the the the technologies and social institutions are all real although i'm mixing different things i've got it the the antagonist force as it were is an empire which has got mixed features of sort of uh roman Byzantine and Abyssin uh because it's a polygynous uh ruling polygynous ruling class uh and various other things and my protagonist society is very loosely based on sanga period iceland but it's not on an island in the ocean uh and the his allies one of his allies is i suppose based on maybe early norm in england or something a little bit close to that so so i got to use my medievalist stuff as an input to that uh it didn't do very well um i'm still pretty happy with it i think it's a book worth reading but it was not very successful so bane wasn't interested in publishing another and i had an idea for a sequel which i started but it never finished but i had another idea for an entirely different book and i was discussing those two ideas with verner vincen who was a science fiction writer and a libertarian and a friend of mine and he persuaded me that the new idea was more interesting and that turned into salamander and salamander none of my fiction is really libertarian fiction in any very strong sense it's affected by my being a libertarian it's affected by being an economist but it's basically storytelling not not preaching uh and salamander the idea i was starting out with was a magical equivalent of the central planning fallacy that the central planning fallacy is this very persuasive intuition which says look there's all that stuff out there all those people materials if only some sensible person had control of it think of the wonderful things he could do and there are basically three things wrong with the central planning fallacy the first thing is forgetting that all that stuff's already being used by people for their own purposes so if you want to divert it to your purposes you've got to stop what they're doing second one is assuming that the problem of figuring out what to do is an easy problem of not appreciating just how complicated a real world economy is and the third mistake is assuming that it will be controlled by good guys that once you've got these mechanisms people won't use them for their own purposes so i decided that it would be interesting to do a magical equivalent of that mistake and in the society that i described magic is very weak that a fire mage is more like a match than a blow torch uh the ski the training of mages is largely consists of learning how to create large effects with small causes which is also useful for other people uh a mage at the one college of magic in the in the nation the way this is all set comes up with a spell that will let one mage pull in the magical power of many many other mages and funnel it through himself to do things and he's a well-intentioned person and he from his standpoint he just thinks that you know you could stop a plague you could do all sorts of good things if you only had this power there's we've had this frustration for hundreds of years that mages can't do very much and he there is a student at the college a woman who was extraordinarily talented uh i should say the mage who's come up with this is obviously sort of a roughly genius level theoretician he's probably well there's one other the theoretician i should say my my whole setting is about 50 years after what i think of is the magical equivalent of newton that is to say that magic has been a craft for hundreds of years and about 50 years ago someone finally began to figure out how it worked and uh he's still the newton figure is still alive at this point that he's an old man but aside from him my male protagonist who's one of my two protagonists really is probably the top theorist in the in the in the kingdom uh and but he has a student woman who is at his at his intellectual level and in fact to it rapidly becomes clear comes to the college already knowing more about magic than most of the professors but not more than he does and so he invites her to help with his project to develop this spell for pulling magic in and she refuses and his reaction is you know you've lived a sheltered life you don't realize what dangers there are out there that when you do something about one eventually discovers that his parents died in a in a in a plague epidemic so there's a reason why he feels the way he does and her response is uh oh yes i understand my mother is a healer i have seen men with gaping wounds that she has closed and when you have taken her power to end a plague or build a monument on whose hands are the blood of those she cannot heal so that's one of my three points we never actually in the story get the it's too complicated do get what to do that that just doesn't come through but that's one point and then as it turns out only one of his colleagues is trying to assist him with this project and it turns out eventually that colleague has his own objectives which are not nearly as benevolent as as the male protagonist's objectives uh so that it's i like the story it's an interesting story one of the lessons that i learned writing my first novel is that uh no author uh can remember how i put it uh but basically that you can't control your characters that once you've written the characters uh they're going to do if it's going to be a good story they've got to do what those people would do not what you've planned them for doing so when i originally planned the book my female protagonist didn't even what was that was a possible i wasn't sure she was going to exist she wasn't going to be a protagonist she was going to be a secondary character she was going to be the daughter of my male protagonist and the person who ended up was my male protagonist was going to be the antagonist well meaning but doing something bad and it didn't turn out that way uh and in particular my male protagonist was a well meaning and very highly intelligent person and once somebody pointed out the problem that he was doing he changed sides uh and started trying to suppress the invention that he been in the process of trying to make so by the time the book was finished uh first my antagonist the steep to be my antagonist my original male protagonist to be who was the father of the female protagonist had become a secondary character going important secondary character and i had developed two love stories neither of which was intended in my original plot uh so the whole thing went in very in in in in in very different ways uh than i intended and that was quite a lot of fun so i was happy with that i then wrote a sequel to that which involves some of the same people a couple of years later and some other people and that's brothers and and i'm reasonably happy with that and my plan was to then write a third book which started before well before the first one ended after the second one uh so and i have ideas for that but i haven't yet gotten them worked out to a fashion to a form good enough so that i'm willing to start writing and that may or may not ever happen now the other thing i've been doing in the last few years is producing audiobooks so at this point all of my non-fiction except for price theory exists as an audiobook read by me uh price theory i decided just had too many graphs and such to do yeah it's hard to know what to do with diagrams if you're if you're reading something a lot yes well i had some of that problem with hidden order and even with the laws order but much less of one uh and uh the of the fiction uh harold exists read by me somebody else uh offered to uh do an audiobook of salamander in exchange for half of the revenue which i was delighted to have happened because i wasn't planning to do it because it had sold very well and he's now done that so you can get that uh my guess is that if that's more successful than i expected he may be willing to do brothers but my guess is that he won't so brothers probably will never be an audiobook unless i get unless i decide to do it but for the fun of it because in general my my nonfiction has been fairly successful my fiction has not been very successful i enjoy writing it some people clearly enjoy reading it from reading comments on amazon and such but there are quite a lot of fiction writers who are better than i am uh quite a lot better at people i enjoy reading and you know i in fact one one one result of having written novels is saying isn't that neat i could never do that about various features of the way other people are writing their stories uh so you know i wish more people would read my fiction but i can't say i'm terribly surprised that that it isn't enormous as successful but i think that for certain people i think that for people who are in some ways like me it probably is worth reading that it's it is different one of the comments that some of the people reviewing it on amazon made in different versions was that everybody is too rational and and that's true that even the villains at least the important villain is is is a very cold-blooded very careful very rational person uh and so are the but but i end up sort of discussing implicitly discussing issues relevant to libertarians that one of the issues that comes up in salamander really is the question do the ends justify the means and i think the answer is maybe that if you have sufficiently valuable ends you may be willing to use means that you normally wouldn't approve of and i make that pretty explicit uh because you have a character who essentially says yes i agree that doing x is bad but i won't promise to never do x because there are circumstances in which the alternatives are worse uh and he's a prominent secondary character and he's an antagonist but not a villain so i basically my first antagonist stopped being an antagonist so i introduced another antagonist but he shouldn't have to be quite a nice guy even though he was an antagonist so i then had to bring in a villain as well i know like you know i used to do a series of comic books uh i started when i was as it was a long series i started i was i was 13 and my second year of uh of teaching after i got out of grad school i was still continuing it i just i never had time to go back to it but i had characters who constantly wanted to change sides and so on started getting redeemed and heroes started getting corrupted and it wasn't what i had planned they just that's what they wanted to do yes that's right that that's right my line was no plot survives contact with the characters to take off on napoleon's uh no battle plan survives contact with the enemies uh which i think is that napoleon what was that napoleon i thought i i could be wrong i remembered as being napoleon but it's certainly possible with somebody else of course and there's also mike tyson's version of it everyone's got a plan until they get hit in the face hadn't heard that yes yeah uh well you know good lines tend to get attributed to church to learn to napoleon or do a few other famous people uh often falsely oh is that me mason fc on the uh says uh you know many uh you know in the words of abraham lincoln many quotations on the internet are inaccurate correct yeah right uh huh it's true the you know i at one point found on the internet a lengthy quotation from me which was actually rothbard the one of the nice things about the internet is that you can do searches so i pretty routinely do a search for references to my name check down them quickly uh many of them are other people have the same name of course uh it was particularly funny when when trump appointed as ambassador to israel somebody named david freedman and your photo ended up in one of some of the now one of the sources had my photo presumably because it was easy to find online because i've been active online for a long time i got an invitation to an event to an embassy event in washington dc uh by email i think and i think i ended up uh explaining to the man from david freedman uh but for that matter the reason my web page is david d freedman.com is that another david freedman grab david freedman.com a few months before i tried to grab it uh but but anyway but i i i have a search string which i've developed which has got various relevant things and so uh i can spot people who are uh either saying something relevant to me that i find interesting or i'm misquoting me or things of that sort and i've done that a number of times these uh i get there's one line in machinery which is routinely misquoted where the original i think is that the direct use of force is so bad a solution to the problem of limited resources that is used only by small children and great governments uh and there's a abbreviated version of that which i often see i should say that's also a steal the the original line is i think it's by a philosopher i think and it's about the game of uh what's it called basically two kids driving cars straight at each other and the question is who's gonna chicken check it the game of chicken and it's a description the comment is that this is a game played by juvenile juvenile degenerates and great statesmen and that was where i was stealing my things for the i like to say that when you're young you're afraid people will steal your ideas and when you're old you're afraid they won't and so i don't feel particularly bad about stealing other people's ideas and lines and such the people backing up a little bit so how did you become a uh a free market anarchist as opposed to just a general free marketer of the normal variety yes well when i think as of i don't know 15 or 16 just before i went to college uh my i was a classical liberal and my view was that laissez faire was the right way of running the economy but that you needed a framework that it functioned within which had to be provided from the outside and i sort of thought i could prove that although i didn't have actually a formal theorem worked out it seemed sort of intuitively obvious and then i read hind lines novel the moon is a harsh mistress and it gave what seemed to me to be an internally consistent account of a society where the legal system was endogenous where there was no government and nonetheless there were legal rules that got enforced and it was not very much like my society but a theorem is defeated by a single counter example so if if hind line was right that you could have such a society then it couldn't be true that such an arrangement was impossible and that suggested the interesting question of what would a what would a version in my society a society a system which did not have a government but did have private property and law enforcement and such looked like and that's basically what machinery or freedom came out of what part three of machinery came out of so that was my model of an aqua capitalism and i think i refined it a number of ways and refined the analysis of it in the third edition which has another hundred pages second edition has some additional stuff but not as much but one thing i concluded from the research that led to my legal systems book is that in my first in machinery i was really reinventing what's the standard term anyway was reinventing something that already existed because there were historical societies which had law and law enforcement without government and to some extent iceland was one although there was a single legal code the northern Somali would be another example and there are a variety of other examples which i discussed in the book i've got a chapter in that one of my thread chapters is called feud law and looks at how decentralized legal systems decentralized privately enforced legal systems work yeah one interesting thing about that is that you know there are a whole bunch of things that we think of if you live in a you know in a um in a legal system like ours there are whole bunch of things you think of just going together a legal system necessarily involves all these things that provided by the state in the same way and then you look at you know historical examples you talk about and well here's a system that didn't have this bit here's a system that had they didn't have something kind of like this bit but it didn't have these other two bits and here's one we're gonna any of those bits although it had you know something kind of like this other bit um and one of the more striking ones is that a whole lot of people assume that money has to be provided by government and there just is no reason there might there are arguments for and arguments against but we certainly know lots of cases of private money and there's no particular logical reason I mean there is a reason why there are there are reasons why national defense makes sense for governments and there are reasons why it makes some sense to combine police courts prisons in in in one bundle as it were but it's hard to see I mean money just happens to be something that many modern that that modern governments do but can be done in lots of other ways as well there are lots of nowadays when people debate things like you know Hobbes versus Locke and government and so forth and how much order is needed how much government is needed for various kinds of social order you know people writing what this nowadays all sort of picture something like our society with a very extensive police system yes but in the days of Hobbes and Locke there really wasn't much of a police system in our sense of the word I mean they had institutions that play similar roles but the kind of English police formally originate about 1830 with with Robert and you've got some sort of experimental things trending in that direction by the end of the 18th century I believe the English have police in Ireland if I'm not mistaken and of course the French have police at that time but in England proper you really don't have a police force in our sense until well into the 19th century yeah so when Hobbes says the government is needed to keep to maintain social order you know he's not really talking about police force it's not always clear what he what exactly is talking about and then of course also but notice notice that even in 18th century England the enforcement of the verdict is by the state mm-hmm so that he that his his all-powerful ruler can be making the laws enforcing the laws but letting private people do that part of the job that involves catching the criminals approving they've done it yeah and then of course you look at things like um ancient Athens or um the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire had something more more like a modern police system but the Roman Republic didn't have that much of one and ancient Athens didn't have that much of one I mean had you know they had a bunch of publicly owned slaves that performed some police duties but it was mostly self-help um and I when people read these you know when people read these disputes about you know like in Plato about uh you know the extent to which uh social order Plato's dialogue the Crito where it's all about how social order depends on government again and so forth but again he's living in a society where that you know what that looks like is very different from what our students picture when they read that and they're picturing you know police keeping order well you know not really or just or just barely only a little bit um you know yeah so that's that certainly was part of the fun for me of getting some feel that is people when I talk about the legal systems book the question I tend to get is what's the best legal system and my answer is I don't know that there is one you know what works is going to depend a lot on the features of the society that one of the points I make in the especially in the third edition of machinery though I say some of it in the first is that there are some environments where my system won't work or it'll break down for one reason or another uh and what I'm really trying to do is to understand a bunch of different ways people have solved the problems that a legal system solves maybe learn some things from their experience or what are problems you might have if you change things in one way or another and I have a few suggestions for things from other legal systems that we could borrow that might be might be profitable might be useful to borrow I there's one respect in which I use the Icelandic institutions to argue that the modern American law is a mere thousand years behind the cutting edge of legal technology line of ponder but but generally the idea is not really what's best but what can we learn from looking at lots and lots of different different attempts and I guess in a sense my part of my starting assumption is that people in other societies are not stupid that that we want to that they're all adults that they're probably about as smart as the people who made our legal system and therefore you should take all of them seriously whether that's imperial china which is probably really the long well it's the longest lasting state legal system I know of because with occasional interruptions it lasted for about 2000 years Jewish law you could argue lasted even longer than that though maybe about the same late the time it's sort of hard to know how much pre you know more than a few hundred bc exactly what was going on but each of these systems there's you know part of what I try to do in the book and it's to some extent misleading maybe is to explain things I say why do they have this rule and I'm doing it as the economist so I'm saying well I'm gonna assume that that it serves the function I'm assuming that it's not just random mistakes and probably I'm wrong in some of those but it's at least an interesting exercise to try to say why does it make sense to do it this way instead of that way that looks crazy what that upon reflection you can discover that it you know there's a reason it would make sense doesn't necessarily follow that that's why they did it but at least that comes a live hypothesis it's not just the the you know the explanation they're just crazy is not the only it is not the only option on offer and of course any legal system that we know that I know about enough about to really cover lasted for a substantial length of time which is again some evidence that it wasn't completely crazy and also you don't see people criticizing uh these um these examples like Iceland and so forth by saying well look it eventually collapsed and and my response is always yeah but most of most of these ones lasted longer than ours has yeah no the way I usually put it is that the Icelandic system the settlement starts in 870 ad roughly maybe a little before there's now some archaeological evidence the basic system is is worked out in 930 ad and the collapse well it finally it finally collapses in the 1260s but that's that's the end of about 50 or 60 years of increasing violence so figure that from the time it's set up 930 1030 1130 you've got about 250 years roughly in which it functions and it then starts breaking down and I don't think it's collapse in terms of people killed per capita is as bad as the US civil war which happened after all less than a century after our system was set up yeah so in that sense it did a good deal better than our system done on that by that measure at least and most others the as I am even China the legal system it's it's pretty clear that the legal system of the final dynasty largely goes back at least a thousand years and parts of it probably nearly 2000 years but but the but the Chinese system of course keeps getting interrupted you've got a dynasty then you've got a breakdown of the dynasty and a period of collapse and then a new dynasty comes up and so forth so yeah of course the occasional conquests as well but yeah yeah well sometimes yes that is you have well I guess both the Manchu and the Mongol are dynasties were established by conquest but I think that probably only happens my impression is that that happens at a point when they went when the existing system is not a very good shape but I don't really know enough of the details it seems plausible anyway and of course there's also a lot of two-way influence there and the the groups that end up conquering China end up adopting at least as much from the conquered population as as vice versa yeah no more probably that is I would have said that the the Manchu by the end of the final dynasty are much more Chinese than they are Manchu the same thing with the Mongols with the with the Celts and Germans and so forth who end up eventually defeating the Roman Empire yeah the west which is you know by the end they look they look more you know they look more Roman than the Romans of Barbarian although the Roman you know the you know the Romans start wearing pants as I and so on so they you know there's mutual influence but but after all Gaul is originally Celtic yeah and then you get the Frank it's it's eventually conquered by German speakers and French as a dialect of Latin I mean that's a particularly striking case and the Germans is not the case that you Germany but of course the the Romans never conquered very much of Germania so not for lack of trying well they misplaced some legions well it's hard to keep track of all those legions yeah right because we're backing up again so how did you get involved interested in the society to create a mechanism it sounded like fun and it turned out to be a place where there was a a function for various things I like to do I like poetry know a lot of poetry write poetry and this was a place where I could actually write a poem to other people interested in hearing me recite I thought of myself going through high school is very unathletic I did do judo for a while independently and was not bad at it not terribly good at it but I eventually concluded that what was going on was not that I was less athletic than other kids but the things that we were doing in gym like baseball and football and such were things they did for fun quite a lot I never did them except in gym so of course I was incompetent at them so with SCA there was in effect a new sport that was new to all of us namely fighting with medieval weapons turned out I was good at it the so now it's also true the fact that in the early years they weren't that many people doing it meant that you could be one of the best people even if you know you're only in the top five percent or something which is probably about where I was but the SCA kingdom is ruled by a king elected by combat there's a in in all kingdoms except the west there are two crown tournaments a year and the winner becomes king for six months I've been king four times I certainly didn't accomplish anything similar on any other activity so that was fun and then the cooking turned out to be interesting I find that you know research for the fun of the research more recently one of the points I make actually in the in one of the chapters that I'm writing on education is that the kind of teaching I really like to do is the kind of teaching where the students are not there to get a degree and the example I start with is that SCU has an adult education program the only reason for somebody to take those courses if they think it'll be interesting course to take they're not getting any kind of a degree I've taught my legal systems course a short version of my legal systems course twice for that and it's a lot of fun but also every summer except last summer I attend the pensive war to weak camping event of about 10,000 medieval hobbyists medieval and renaissance hobbyists basically and I teach classes there I teach a class on how to tell a period story in a way that makes it feel like a period person telling a story to a period audience rather than a modern person doing it I teach a class on how to make hardened leather armor I teach a class sometimes on Islamic law and my SCA persona is a North African of about 1100 so I'm teaching it as if I were a believer in this legal system describing it to a bunch of foreigners so to speak and I teach sometimes a class on early Islamic history concerning Muhammad and the well-guided caliphs I think is the title I use for that as the first four caliphs and every evening of the second week I run a bardic circle with my encampment and the idea of that bardic circle is not true of most SCA things is trying to actually create the illusion that we're really medieval people so everything is done what people sometimes refer to as first person interpretation or as in persona as the usual SCA term where when you're inside the boundary of our encampment you are not talking about modern things you're not talking about medieval things from a modern point of view you're doing your best to do a sort of a joint fantasy improvisational theater you might think of it in which we're all medieval people we're not making a big point of it but you know a sort of a very casual sort of low-key version of that and that's fun so so it's just been it's been a place where I've been able to do things that I enjoy doing and meet interesting people I mean at this point I would say of the of probably the closest friend I've had who is now no longer alive unfortunately with somebody I met through the SCA as are several other people who are or were good friends so in that sense it's been interesting and part of part of the virtue of that sort of thing is you meet different people that most of the people I meet in that context are not university professors and so that's that's been interesting can you say a little bit about that book Harriet ox miscellaneous sure it's one large chunk of it is recipes about 300 recipes and in each of those you've got a recipe that was written down in a cookbook before sometime before 1600 because there are a couple of it there are a few recipes from a cookbook that's written in the 17th century but those are the exceptions and most medieval recipes do not include unnecessary details that just quantities temperatures or times it's a verbal description of how to make a dish so what you do is you use trial and error and whatever experience you've got as a cook to try to figure out how to make it you keep doing it to what's good now there are exceptions the muslim cookbooks are better than the european ones in particular one of our favorite sources and then the earliest source we've done much from which is a 10th century cookbook from the middle east quite often gives quantities by weight but that's the exception really not the rule so what we have in the miscellaneous for each recipe is the period in translation if it's not written in english and then a description of how we make it so our like a modern recipe so that's one large chunk of it uh another chunk at the end of it is my poetry not all of my poetry but the poetry I've written in the context of the sca so that I have two fairly long narrative poems about William Marshall who was a very prominent uh night english night very interesting character he was born the fourth son of a minor baron and before he died he was regent of england after john died uh and in between he was probably the top tournament night in western europe uh i like to say that he probably in terms of of medieval tournament fighting he probably regarded his contemporary richard the lionhearted as a talented amateur and that's probably a slight exception because richard was in some ways closer to being professional but it was reasonably clear that that william in tournament fighting william would have been a more important more important progressive person than richard but he's an interesting character in a bunch of ways he was I think seen at the time is sort of an ideal of what knights were supposed to be like uh and when when suddenly most people don't realize when king john died there was a french army commanded by the dolphin sitting in london then a french army had come over in support of the barons who were fighting against john uh john on his deathbed asks the people there to ask william to take over as regent and it looks like a pretty desperate situation uh the treasuries essentially empty john's son is I don't know nine or something he's a minor child and william william takes it takes takes over and within six months the french are back in france everything he's at peace it's all over he can go home to die he's an old man by this time uh but he leads his he leads a cavalry charge at I think in his 60s probably maybe maybe a little older we're not sure uh the one well one of the two major battles and that in that sequence of events certainly I've got two poems I don't have a poem covering that stuff that's the one that I've the third one which I've written the beginning of but it never managed to complete has to do with john's it starts with john's death but but I've got two of them which are about other incidents and part of part of what's interesting about william marshal is that we have an account of his life written shortly after his death basically commissioned by his sort of friends and relatives and as one prominent medieval historian has pointed out almost all of our sources for the middle ages are coming from the clergy they're the people who were writing stuff here you have a detailed lengthy source written from within the chivalric uh culture so to speak and that's very interesting but anyway there are two stories of things that uh from that source which I've made into poems but then there are a whole bunch of other poems on other things there are limericks giving advice to squires there are uh various poems stories some of which involve people actual sca people but you know fictional stories that they're embedded in and so forth in between there are a bunch of articles on how to do things on how to make hardened leather armor on how to make period furniture in particular transportable period furniture given the needs people are going to things like pennsy there are a bunch of articles which are in a sense sca philosophical articles about you know about things like the idea of staying in persona in favor of that so there's a bunch of different of different stuff there's an article some of my articles are written in persona there's an article on gemstones in which I'm trying to I do medieval jewelry is also one of the parts of the hobby that I do and the article on gemstones I think I have a comment about faceted stones that this is a that they flash and look in the light and please simple people but you know I don't think it's going to catch on and I might put it that way but something like that from that standpoint and in general sort of part of part of the fun of trying to do stuff in persona is trying to realize what it looks like if you don't know what the future is going to be like you don't even know the whole world is like you only know the things your character would like so that that's sort of as a my persona is north african 1100 by that time the reconquista is well on its way the Spanish are gradually pushing south but I don't know that from my standpoint it's true that the Franks up in the mountains made them nuisance to themselves but use of the Almoravid came in with an army and he drove them back where they belong and they're making nuisance to themselves we'll do it again that's sort of my my attitude attitude to it and so that's sort of fun trying to almost it's almost like writing a novel but not exactly but trying to to imagine what it would be like to be a different person in a different background so the last time I taught medieval philosophy I decided to do something new I hadn't done before which is I also included a module on courtly love not the you know not the fictional narrative but the you know some of the theoretical works yes not at the time because it's a it's a version of medieval philosophy it's very different from most of the new philosophy which is all about god and free will and universals and you know the standard stuff that one of the people writing on medieval technology is discussing the chimney and mantle fireplace that in the early middle ages what you have is basically a big hall with a fire down the middle trench fire and the smoke hopefully going out eventually and you then eventually replace that with what we think of as a standard fireplace system where there are multiple rooms each of which has a fireplace each one has a chimney and his law the line that I liked was the inventor of the man mantle and chimney fireplace did more for courtly love than all the troubadours when you're all living in one big room it's sort of hard to be quietly adulterous but maybe think of something but I thought it was only briefly I can't think what it was um we should probably start to wrap things up because it's limited to you know this is about the length of a video that I can that I can upload uh with my system without it without it taking forever I've got other things I ought to be doing today anyway so that's fine but this has been really fun uh it's good to see you good to see you I enjoyed it um and yeah we could always we could always revisit again some time if we uh some of the new things to talk about um so thanks oh and uh say hi to patry for me I know that you said you were going to be uh seeing supposed to be seeing patry for the first time in many many months tomorrow that that found we we we have been self-quarantining very tightly and they have been self-quarantining less tightly so we have not been associating nearly as commonly as we normally would but we're going to have them over and we'll socialize outside and I will get to see my granddaughter who is more than one I'm not sure if she's two yet or not but he was very cute she might be two by now and haven't seen her for many months it's the real reason I want them to come over actually but it'd be nice to see the rest of the family too definitely bye bye okay bye bye and that's my interview with uh David Raidman um if you like this kind of thing and you know if you stayed you know if you stayed through this long to the end then you must uh then you know like share subscribe all that good stuff and I'll see you next time