¿Qué tal? Muy buenos días a todos y bienvenidos a un nuevo directo dentro de los cursos
de verano de la Universidad de las Espérides y hemos tenido otros directos dentro de este marco,
una entrevista a Martin Krause y también una mesa redonda con alumnos que participaron en la universidad
y hoy vamos a terminar, porque también la universidad, los cursos de verano terminan hoy,
con una entrevista a probablemente el profesor estrella invitado este año a la universidad,
el profesor de economía de la universidad George Mason, a quien ya tuvimos ocasión de entrevistar
en este canal a propósito de los problemas de la vivienda, pero hoy queríamos hacer una entrevista
más extensa sobre su pensamiento, su obra y sus propuestas. Me estoy refiriendo al economista
Brian Kaplan. ¿Qué tal Brian? Muy bien. La entrevista la vamos a hacer en inglés para facilitar la interacción
y también que Brian pueda expresarse con toda la profusión que desee.
Hello Brian, welcome to the channel. Fantastic to be here, Juan.
Well, I want to start this interview asking you about your ideas. What are your core ideas in economics
and in political philosophy? How would you define yourself?
I would say in economics, I think of myself as a behavioral economist, someone who tries to combine
psychology with economics to get a better understanding of what's going on. I know that behavioral economics,
people think of it as left-wing or interventionists and say, look, in practice, yes, but the idea of understanding
how human beings think and feel, it's not a political idea. It is just a deep insight and it's one where it is required
for progress. Of course, I'm also a free market economist, someone who thinks that markets are really underrated
and government is really overrated. Right now, I'm working on a new book called Unbeatable,
The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, where I really try to directly address why do I think that
free markets are so much better than most people believe, including most economists? Why is government
so much worse than most people believe, including most economists? And then in terms of political
philosophy or philosophy in general, I would say I put myself in the tradition of the Scottish
philosophers of common sense. Philosopher Michael Humer of the University of Colorado is the best
modern exponent of this. The main idea there is that all good philosophical arguments start with
premises that would make sense to a normal person that does not already agree with your conclusion.
If you need to say, here's how I prove my philosophy with some extremely controversial premises,
like here's how I, you know, the base of my philosophy is you should never aggress against another human
being no matter what. It's like, yeah, it's basically one that would only convince people
who totally agree with you. And it's also not a good way to get to truth. Like, well,
why that principle? So it's much better to start with very mundane, bland, simple principles
and that are not overstated, not like always, ever, but rather when like normally it is wrong to go and
murder another person and then see how far can we get from there. I think a lot of what Mike Humer
shows and the way this approach to philosophy shows is you can actually get very far by starting with
premises that are widely accepted, would not be one that only your best friends in the world would
agree with, and you can still get to some quite surprising conclusions. So that is where I see
myself philosophically.
Mm-hmm. But politically, would you describe yourself as an anarchist and anarchist?
Right. My answer to that is definitely anarcho-capitalists, but not the crazy kind.
Right. And what do you mean by not the crazy kind?
Yeah, crazy kind are the ones who think if you press a button, everything's going to be great today.
That's just not true. That's not true. Yes. Yes. That's not true. But rather, as I explain in my
recent debate on anarchism with Yaron Brook, what I say is that once people expect there to be
the free market provision of even the most basic government services, once it's accepted that this
is the normal way, then I say it will be stable. I'd say that anarchism would not work today in the
same sense that democracy would not have worked in 10th century Sweden. It's not that the idea is
unworkable. It's that if people are totally unfamiliar with the idea, then it's not going
to be something that will actually remain and be stable, even if you could get it, which would also
be crazy. In that debate, I actually do this thought experiment. Imagine you go to 10th century
Vikings in Sweden and explain democracy, and they would all laugh at you. They'd say,
like, you know, you know, but will stop the strongest a man from a just a killing and the guy who won
your stupid election. And it's like, so yeah, in a world where people think that way, it wouldn't
be stable. But in modern Sweden, on the other hand, if a losing political parties and why don't we just
to kill our enemies, people would then laugh at that. What the difference is that in general, with
governments, with government, with all sorts of social organizations, a very big determinant of
whether it will be stable is just whether people believe it will be stable. There are some systems
that are so bad that even if people believe in it, it doesn't work. Right. So socialism, like people
can believe it will work. It still doesn't work. But there are a lot of other ones where as long as
people accept this is how it's going to be, then that's enough for it to be stable. And that's what I
say about integral capitalism. And again, the crazy ones are those who say, it'll work right here,
right now. And like, yeah, no, it will not work right here, right now. If you abolish the government
right now, it would just be a civil war, and there'd be something worse that would happen.
So to restate in economic terms, you are saying that we don't only need formal institutions,
perfectly defined formal institutions, but informal institutions, the culture.
Right. All right. We just say, you know, expectations.
And expectations. Well, you could include them in informal expectations.
Yes. Yes. I mean, I like the word expectations more than just culture, because culture is very
vague. It could mean a lot of things. It's like, do we need to have Judeo-Christian culture together?
It's like, no, I don't think so. Like you would have lots of different religious backgrounds. It just
matters that people have a much more, this is the way things work. This is what's normal. And then I
think that the very radical libertarian dream is actually a practical possibility. But first, you got to
get people to understand what's going to happen and how it would work.
And how do you think we could we move from here to a more free society? Because obviously,
all the reforms does not necessarily lead us to a more free society if we don't have those
expectations towards the working of a free society. So how we should try to advance into a
free market. They're going to. Yeah. It's easy to make things a little better. Right. That's
the margin. Yes. At the margin. Like things improve all the time, Juan. So you have like a less
anti-market party gets in power or you just get the right person in charge of the right bureau who
doesn't really believe in it. In the United States, I think in the late 70s, there was an economist
named Albert Kahn. Albert Kahn got appointed to run the civil or not explored, which was airline
regulation. And he happened to believe in airline deregulation. And so it happened. It wasn't even
really that a lot of other people did. But the right person gets in charge. That matters. Of course,
just education matters. Podcasts matter. You matter, Juan. You are spreading these ideas to a very large
number of people in the Spanish speaking world. And I will say, like, I've become amazed at how
the libertarian the Spanish speaking world has been getting before Malay. With Malay, it's like, wow.
Yeah. Well, Malay is clearly the most clear expression of that movement.
Probably the only about anarcho-capitalist history to ever actually be the president or leader of a
country. Of course, we can also see you can do that. You still don't automatically get big changes.
Basically, you've got the long run, one of education, changing people's minds, talking to people
and just improving the reputation and the social acceptance of libertarians. Honestly, a lot of
people's willingness to listen is just personality. So you have a great personalidad. So you're
wonderful, charismatic, con carisma. Not so much.
Right. And you can tell with your numbers. So you get people's attention. And a lot of it is with humor,
with just being someone that someone would want to go and eat tapas with. So that's a big part of it.
And I think a lot of the problem libertarians have is just a bad attitude.
There's an old saying in English that says, no one cares what you know until they know that you care.
Just making friends with people is very important. That's why whenever I get requests for publicity
from mainstream media, I know there's a lot of libertarians who say, no, those horrible status
jerks. They're like, look, they emailed me. They want to talk to me. I should at least give them a
chance. And try to be very friendly with them and to really actually talk to them. Don't assume that
the person who wants to talk to you is hostile. Maybe they are, but what good does it do to assume
they're hostile? And then yes, that often will translate into both eventually changing what
parties win, but also the people that wind up actually holding the chance to make government
policy better or worse. In the United States, there really are so few conservative PhDs that often
Republicans wind up hiring libertarian PhDs just because like, well, who else do we get?
Even Trump had to do it. Yes. Trump hired a lot of libertarians, usually for lower profile
things, but where they made a lot of difference. So if I remember the numbers correctly, regulation
really did grow at a slower rate under Trump than it did under any measured US president,
including Reagan. And that's not because Trump is actually very anti-regulation, but he's got
to give the job to somebody. And there's just a scarcity of people to do those jobs that will
work for someone like Trump. You have said that one way of pushing for free markets is to
change in changes in education. But not only changes in education. One of your books is
selfish reasons for having more kids. Selfish reasons to have more kids.
To have more kids. Correct. What's your perspective on this? Make us a summary because you think that
libertarians could grow if they start reproducing themselves and having children, but also it's
important to provide children with, well, not exactly I think your point or is a mixture, but
it's also important to providing them with good education, although you think that children will
grow up as they are designed to grow up. Right. Let's see. So do you want me to tell you the general
idea of the book or focus on this exact question? General idea and focus on this.
All right. So the general idea of the book is this. There's a lot of books that tell people to have more
kids, but almost all of my competition just says, sure, having kids is a terrible hold of burden.
You have to give up all the fun in your life, but do it anyway for the greater good. It's like,
all right, it doesn't seem like a very persuasive argument to me. And I don't notice many people
actually listening to that. I wanted to go and give a very different argument based upon the actual
evidence that we have on nature versus nurture. So let's back up. People have been arguing for thousands
of years about why children resemble their parents in so many ways, right? For things like physical
resemblance, almost everyone realizes it's just heredity. Your dad has a big nose. You have a big
nose. It wasn't like he's sitting there saying, now, son, make sure you grow a big nose when you're an
adult. There are many things where everybody realizes, okay, that's just caused by heredity.
But then there's a lot of other things, especially for psychological traits, for intellectual traits,
for social traits, where people are very strongly thinking, no, that's just due to your parents
telling you, okay, be smart, read books, right? Anyway, this debate went on for thousands of years,
and they made no progress because it's just people making stuff up. And then about 70 years ago,
many researchers said, well, look, the problem is that we're normally studying families where
they've got half their genes and they're raised together. So studying ordinary families,
these two different forces, logically distinct, nature versus nurture, are tied together. We
can't really figure it out using the regular data, but is there special data? And they realize there is.
So we have kids that are adopted. So there they share only the upbringing, but not the heredity. And
on the other hand, we have the opposite. We have most obviously separated twins, identical twins separate
at birth. That doesn't happen very often. But we also have two kinds of twins. We have identical twins,
which share all their genes, fraternal twins that share half their genes. And they can all be raised
in the same home. You can say, well, are the identical twins more similar than infernal twins?
Because you're all growing up in the same family, but one set of twins has an extra 50 percentage
points of genetic similarity. This is a method that has been used over the last 70 years to actually get
real answers to these questions of nature versus nurture. And the main answer is that nature is
much more important than nurture, especially in the long run, least in first world conditions.
Right. So those are all important qualifiers, but nature is much more important, especially long run,
at least in first world countries. Now, what does this have to do with the number of kids that you have?
This was actually the inspiration of the book is they look right now in most rich countries,
there's the main popular parenting philosophy is what in the United States we call helicopter parenting,
where you fly around your kid all the time. Are you doing okay? Are you doing okay? Read a book,
read a book, be nice, read a book, go Democrats. So this kind of stuff on all of it based on the theory,
a theory, not a fact that you must do this stuff to give your kid a good future.
What I say is that the science shows that helicopter parenting is based on error.
It is not true that you have to do all this stuff. And then this is what's important, right? If you
love doing all that stuff, fine, you're not doing harm. But what if, but most people, it is stressful,
it is a lot of work. What I say is you can get the same kids you would get anyway while reducing the
painful part of parenting a lot. And that's why the book is called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids,
basically saying that people are mistaken about the actual price of kids in terms of the lifestyle
sacrifice. I'll still say, look, there's still some sacrifice, of course, but I say it's just a lot
less the benefit. And then on the other hand, I think you would also get the benefits higher by
having more fun with your kids and doing things that you enjoy instead of things that feel like
suffering. So that is the whole point of the book. I think about it is what the science is a coupon
for kids. It's like kids, 30% off, right? And if you, if you say like, I hate kids, right, fine,
throw the coupon away. But for all the people who like the idea of kids, but just feel like the cost
is too high, this first of all says you can have a better time. But second of all, 30% off, maybe I
will have another kid right now. I have like, this book is written for a general audience. There's no
direct libertarian connection. But like you're saying, I am especially eager for libertarians to know
the facts and to appreciate the arguments because if Leo, first of all, yes, through genetics alone,
right? One of the things where we have good evidence that genetics matter is political views,
right? People say like, how could genetics affect politics? We've got good data showing they do. If
you're really confused and look, a lot of political views are related to personality, right? So there are
people who have a calm fact-based reality-based view of the world, and that tends to lead you to some
certain political views, such as free markets. That's somewhat connected story with Jonathan
Hyde, because there might be some connection. Yes. Yeah, sure, sure. There could be, could definitely
be a Hyde connection, right? And of course, there's other people where their personality, like they're
dreamers, you know, let's just go and share everything, right? And these personalities lead to
different political views. And here is the little result of my book, like if libertarian men would
just donate heavily to sperm banks, that would increase the libertarian share of the population
purely through hereditary methods. Maybe don't tell the people that your goal, because probably
the libertarian sperm wouldn't be that popular. But that remains. Who knows?
Now that aside, of course, also means that just by having more kids the normal way,
you are increasing the number of statistical libertarians. Like the data, it does not say
that every child born to libertarian is libertarian. It's not that strong. Just like not everyone born to
shy parents is shy, but there is a strong genetic effect. And so it is totally possible. In fact, you
should expect that if you have more kids that even if you don't do much work, they will actually tend
to be libertarian if you're a libertarian. And this is raising the libertarian share. Now, we would
have to do a lot of this to win. But it is a great long run strategy. So let's see. There's a group in
America called the Amish. Have you heard of them? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So sometimes people don't know
about strange American religious groups. So I think right now they're at like
two or 300,000 people, like 100 years ago, they were like 2000. So they multiply their numbers 100 fold
in like a century, right? Say these numbers are for memory. So rough ballpark. And it really does
mean that if like just by having a high birth rate for even five generations, you really can actually
greatly multiply your numbers. So it's not a way to get liberty in our lifetimes, but it's a way to get
liberty in 200 years if we would just become a highly fertile people, then that's true.
Now, one last point on this. There is a good question. So why is it that upbringing doesn't
matter very much? Right now, one so and this is just fact. This is what we see in the data.
One story is that people are just immune to parental pressure. That's possible. Another story is that
parents don't apply a nearly enough, right? If they just did a lot more. All right. Now,
this is one where we have some interesting evidence from the real world that sheds light on this. Like,
so for example, B is typical in the United States for students to do three years of Spanish in school.
Virtually zero Americans actually learn Spanish from those three years.
And yet, is it possible for an American to learn Spanish, especially if they start as a teenager?
Yeah, it's totally possible. So what's the difference between people that learn it and people don't?
Some of it's intelligence and so on. A lot of it, though, is the amount of effort. The amount of
effort people are putting in American high schools is hardly anything. And so they don't get much. If
they if they did 10 percent more, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough. They're like, if you really
wanted your kid to speak Spanish, you did 10 times with their own mouth. That's what it takes to work.
Mm hmm. Now for libertarians, what I would say is right. So if you really want your kids to be
libertarian, sir, you've got a good basis in genetics, but also don't just be to be something
that you mentioned three times in 20 years. I'd say like I know a lot of economists who kids whose
kids don't know economics. They're smart enough. But it's like, well, why is it important? Like,
what do you mean is that important? Every five year old should understand supply and demand.
And yes, that is how I've raised my kids. My kids understand supply and demand from a young age,
and they hear it over and over and over. So let's say, like, if the dosage is high enough
at a level that most people wouldn't want to do. But this is something else libertarians can do is
first. So you can't say do a high dosage for everything. There isn't enough. There aren't enough
resources, but very high dosage for the top priorities, the things that matter the most to you.
So appreciating liberty, understanding economics. That's what these are some of the things that really
matter to me. And these are things where I'm confident I have actually, genetics aside,
increased my kids just because I don't just tell them once or twice. I tell them a thousand times.
Your children understand very well economics and also speak Spanish better than more.
Yes. Yes. So I don't speak Spanish. But yeah, I know how people learn languages because I was not
taught the correct way. So yeah, when my sons were learning a language, I had them do it the right way.
And yeah, so you talk to them, right? Yeah, totally.
Yeah, totally, totally.
Yeah.
You also speak more or less Spanish, but your children, I think would appear Spanish for most
standards. How does this connect with your other book, The Case Against Education? Because
in some sense you are saying that if you want people to deeply understand some issue, even if they have
some genetic predisposition to it, you have to put a lot of effort in teaching and speaking and
interiorizing them. But at the same time, you say universities are mostly useless because they are just
a signaling way of providing what in Spanish we call titulitis. This is the hunger for our time.
Las estampas. Las estampas.
So how... Necesitamos muchas estampas.
...to differentiate from the other. Yeah. And to communicate to others.
What's your view on universities? Do you think they should be much restricted? They should be reformed
to be more useful? What do you think? Right. So the subtitle of The Case Against Education is
why the education system is a waste of time and money. So it's focusing on the actually existing
education systems that we know and do not like. I don't like them. You don't. So what can we say
about that? So one of the main things, the main policy prescription that I push in the book is
austerity, austeridad, like large cuts in education spending. In fact, I'd be amazed if we could cut
education spending by one dollar, by one euro, that would be amazing because people are so resistant to it.
The main argument I give, so after saying the existing system is terrible,
is then, so why not improve it rather than try to go and just cut the money? And my answer there is
cutting money is easy. Anyone can do it. Improving it is really hard. And we can just see in how long
the system has been terrible that improving it, either we don't know, or the system is just very
resistant to reasonable methods. My view actually there is, it's the second thing. The system is
corrupt. It's broken. They will not listen to reasonable ideas. Again, going back to foreign
language education in America, there is very good science on how you really teach foreign languages.
So, in college, I had German classes and those were taught very well. On the first day of the first
class of German one, the teacher says,
And like that means you cannot speak any English here. And it's like, well, how do I? Nein!
And that's where you sit there like, okay, I need to learn a few words just to be able to do it. That
is what works. That will actually do it. American K-12 education does the opposite of that. They
basically have some exercises, they sing a few songs, there's no standards, and they just waste
years not teaching it. Now, the question is, why does the system persist in teaching foreign languages
in this terrible way? The answer is that they don't actually want to succeed. They don't value
the acquisition of knowledge. They just want to go and have an activity to do together. And also,
like, they don't want to have to be the bad guy. You know, the teachers don't want to have to be
like that, you know, . They don't want to have to do that. They just want to say,
let's all sing a song together. Okay. So that's what they want to do. And what I often say is,
like, so if you go and meet teachers in America, guessing Spain is the same, but say, look,
they're very, they're generally very nice, but they're not logical. They're not rational. They're
not disciplined. They don't care about getting results, except for like some math teachers,
some science teachers. They're the good ones usually, right? And say, that's the problem is
that we have a system where it does, they do not actually care about acquiring, acquiring knowledge of
any kind, useful or useless, actually. It's just about having an activity to do together to fill the time.
You know, if you went and put me in charge of the curriculum, I do think I know a lot of ways to
improve it. You know, but a lot of it starts with, okay, maybe we could go and learn, teach
Americans foreign languages if we did 10 times the effort, but is it worth it? Is that actually a
sensible way to spend the time of American students in a world where English is so widely spoken? And I
would say, yeah, no, it is not. So instead I say that a well-structured curriculum would focus on
teaching people things that they actually will be, will be useful for them to know in real life.
Of course, some of these things schools already try to do, but poorly like teaching,
reading, writing, mathematics, but the American education has very performance. So
about a third of American adults are at least close to illiterate. They know letters, but they can barely
read. They have trouble doing even basic math. A lot of the problem is, yeah, well, maybe that person
shouldn't have spent three years in Spanish. Maybe that person should have done three more years of
practicing basic reading, writing, and math. So yes, first of all, before wasting time on luxuries,
make sure people actually get very basic skills, which are vital in adult life. But then after that,
it's like, well, once people know that, let's go and teach them things that they actually
plausibly would use in the real world. So that's another way that I would change the system. And
then you'll finally, there's a small share of people that actually love learning and ideas.
People are curious. If you're, if you're listening to us out there, you know,
right? So you have a lot of curiosity. That's why you're listening. So for people like that,
then something more like a much improved version of traditional college makes sense.
It does not make sense for most people who have such low curiosity. And again, it's,
some of it is, well, if they had better teachers, but the reality is that even the best teachers
cannot, are just incapable of inspiring love of ideas. And most people, Steven Pinker,
famous Harvard professor, he's gotten many awards for being the most fascinating, fantastic lecturer.
And yet, you know, he writes that about half of his students don't even show up.
He's a fascinating mind, but he's not fascinating to his actual, to half of his actual students,
at least. So I think we just need to be honest and say, like, this stuff is just not very interesting
to the vast majority of people. And rather we should have one, a special system for the small minority
people that actually love ideas. And for everything, everyone else, stop wasting everyone's time,
stop pretending and prepare them for real life.
And what about the university system? Because in the American universities are top world universities.
Ha, ha, ha.
Supposedly, supposedly. What's your perspective on that?
Right. I'd say like anyone who believes this should just go and sit in some,
some random classes in the United States. The teaching is very poor. Teaching is very poor. A lot
of it is because the students don't care and it's hard to teach students. They don't care. But also on top of
that, the even outside of humanities and social sciences, like it's most of it is just what we
call going through the motions. You just go and you go through your notes. But in math and science,
most people, they would never learn from the coursework. They have to actually sit down with
the book and do the problems. So there's that. But then when you get to humanities and social sciences,
this is where I say they are so politically corrupted, so dogmatic, so fanatical. This wokeness really
is a religion. People in America often say, yes, well, humanities and social sciences in America,
it's basically like the American version of the madrasa, where you get theology. You get,
these are the sacred books. Yeah. So not so much Marx, which is actually would be better than what
they're teaching. Marx, at least, there's some effort to go. It's a bad, you know, bad arguments,
but there's like some arguments. They connect together. It isn't just the garbage that people
are getting of brainwashing. So now the area where American universities, if they do perform well,
is on research, which of course you can be a great researcher and actually be a bad teacher. And I'd say
the correlation is probably positive, but quite low. And again, like, so isn't it great? We have all this
research, like the research in STEM there, probably it actually does have at least a good amount of
value. Although even there tend to think, would it be better if a lot of the pure mathematicians were
working in industry instead? Yeah. I think a lot of what's going on in even STEM is something that is
basically a game, a hobby for people, and it drains off a lot of the best minds. Now, when you go over
to humanities and social sciences, I'll say most of it is just terrible. It is just theology. And you're
like, is it all? No. So economics is, of course, better. Still actually has been getting quite a bit
worse in recent years. But yes, economics is better. Even there, though, like most of it gets published in
economics. I think if you really were honest about it, you would say, like, this is not a very important
question and it will have no actual effects on the real world. There's always this official idea
that, oh, I go and I research these small policy questions. They might seem small, Juan,
but government's going to listen to me and then it will lead to billions of dollars of value.
So, you know, just one small change. All right. Yeah. There's just this one problem. The people doing
the research generally make zero effort to actually publicize the work or see if anybody knows it. They
just publish in a journal and they forget it. So, yeah, then what good does it actually do? A lot of what I
do in my books is I try to actually find lots of small pieces of research where the author didn't
do anything with it, didn't promote it. And I try to put it together in a package and then say,
once you see the big picture of education, then it becomes useful policy. Then we see that we need
austeridad. Then you see that we need vocational education. What is it? What is that? Educación vocacional.
Yes. So then we see that. But if you only read the thousand individual papers, you wouldn't get this
picture. And I try to go and take work that would have never done any good and then put it between
two covers so it can actually do some good. Of course, even when you try and usually people don't
listen to you, you fail. I mean, I had a friend who was saying, well, if you don't think government
will actually do what you say, why bother? And I'm like, if I can just increase the self-confidence
of people who are skeptical of spending more on education by a little bit, just to know, look,
there are some people that have serious arguments saying that education spending is not such a great
idea. If I can just get a few more votes in Congress saying we're not going to go and give more money to
this stuff, I will think that my work actually did yield a lot of value, although much less than if
people actually listen to me, where I think we've got trillions of dollars of savings sitting there.
Coming from the U.S., I have to ask you about another issue. I think you have not written any
book on it, but certainly you have written many, many pieces of articles, which is the healthcare
system. You are saying that in education, we need austerity. We need to many cuts in educational spending.
What's your perspective on healthcare? Because the U.S. is spending more than any other country in the
world and the results are not clearly superior in many cases. So is there a problem with the U.S.
health system? How should we fix it? Is better, for instance, the public healthcare that we have in
European countries? I think you love the Singapore system of healthcare, although in the last 10 years,
it has also gone through some reforms. What's your perspective on this?
Right. So the first thing, so let me talk directly to the camera here so everybody hears.
The most important thing for Europeans to understand about U.S. healthcare is we have an enormous amount
of government spending. U.S. government spends over a trillion dollars on healthcare every year.
It is not true that we have a free market system. It is not remotely close to true. Rather, we have a system
where we spend a crazy amount of money on a minority of people. So elderly people in the United States
get government-provided healthcare. The poor, depending upon certain conditions, get government-provided
healthcare. So we have an especially dysfunctional one. There are many countries that get universal care
for the same cost that the U.S. gets for covering maybe 20 or 30% of the population. So that's one. We say,
well, maybe the European system is better than the U.S. one. That's not as crazy as it sounds, once you understand
the facts. Although here's what I would say. If the U.S. moved to a European system, we would not do it like you do.
Instead, we would just go and spend a ton of money on everyone. What's wrong with the U.S. system?
All countries have this nonsensical idea of if it saves one life. So we should spend any amount of
money to save one life, which is a crazy idea. It sounds good. It's poetry. But if you really did
that, that would mean that you would have to spend all your money on one person and have nothing left
for anything else. Not only not for healthcare, you wouldn't have anything left for food, for
entertainment, for actually enjoying life. No human being wants to spend their own money that way.
We want to go and do trade-offs. Like, yeah, I can be healthier, but I also want to go and
eat or eat at a restaurant occasionally. Of course, even with your own health, it's like
you could keep perfect body weight, but then you'd have to give up a lot of enjoyment. And almost no one
decides it's better to be perfectly healthy and enjoy no food. Instead, people do trade-offs.
But anyway, so the U.S. is especially crazy about if it saves one life, where if government
is paying for the health care, then they hate to say no for any treatment, no matter how expensive,
no matter how experimental, no matter how rarely it works. So this is a big part is that the U.S.
So U.S. generally has smaller government than Europe, but when we do have government,
we have especially stupid governments, right? You can also see this in things like the U.S. spends,
I think, six times as much to drill a subway tunnel as in Europe, right? So there's always government
waste, but the U.S. government is especially crummy. And I say, look, Americans should always
assume that any time that we hand power to the U.S. government, it will continue to be the U.S.
government. It won't just be a government which is bad by itself. It will be an especially incompetent,
corrupt, and just mushy, you know, so mush-headed, weak-minded kind of government. My general view
about health care, though, is yes, we totally should have austerity. We should have large cuts.
And so why? So we have a very big part of this. So this is something that I learned from my colleague,
Robin Hanson. I just did not believe him at first, but I've read more, which is that the actual effect of
all of health care in general on human health is overrated. So lifestyle, diet, exercise,
these things are much more important for health than medicine, right? I think this is one like,
how do you know? Well, there's so there are, there's a lot of different kinds of evidence.
Some kinds of evidence just consist in, let's compare areas that have higher or lower spending.
So you can see, I think it's Costa Rica has the same life expectancy as the United States,
despite spending a tiny fraction of what the US spends on health care. You can also see, of course,
within the United States, there's people who have equal access to government health care and yet very
large differences in life expectancy. But most impressive, there are actually some experiments
that have been done where people are given different levels of subsidy for their health care.
And we can see that the more subsidies you have, the more health care people use. But it is very hard
to see any difference in health of the people that get higher subsidies. So what I say here is that
people just greatly overestimate the effect of medicine on health, which means that if someone
says, look, I don't believe in government in general, but for something as absolutely important,
as life or death as this, we need to make an exception. And there you might say, no, I disagree.
But I'll just say like, fine, you can be right. But this is not such a case. This is not actually life
or death. And again, as to why this is going on, probably some of it is just that,
I mean, like it's like your lifestyle is much more important for your health than
getting treatments after the fact after you've ruined your body. So that's probably part of it.
Another part is actually medical mistakes. Like anytime you go to the doctor, you are risking
them going and making you worse than you were before. You know, blogger, scholar, Alexander goes
over some of these studies of medical mistakes, where he says these numbers are overstated, still even
fairly low, fairly low estimates of numbers of number and severity medical mistakes. It's shockingly high.
Just think about going to the doctor and he didn't wash his hands after treating someone
with a contagious disease, and then you are infected. So that's probably another story is
there probably are treatments that do that do work, but they're getting balanced out by these
other treatments. And it's just very hard to give only the good without the bad.
So there is that. Like in terms of going and improving healthcare, yes. So I think an actual
free market system would be better. A lot of it just because we're spending so much money and getting
so little value on it. But do you think that in a free market system, people would spend less?
Because if healthcare is a luxury, although maybe not with good reasons, but if it is,
maybe we should or we would be spending more, the more rich we are.
Right. So what I would say is I know there's some smart people who say that somehow
have the government spending a trillion dollars on healthcare reduces total spending.
I just think this argument is completely crazy.
Right. If I gave it to you as a mathematical economic problem, you could go and show some
very special conditions. But the general fact that when government spends a pile of money on
something and gives it for free, that increases consumption. I think that is just beyond all doubt.
This is true for any, like there are actual experiments with charging people for healthcare.
And it is shocking how high the elasticity of demand is. Very small charges lead people to reduce
the amount of medical care they get. If you believe that medical care was like magic and it's getting
the years to your life and all this is terrible. But given the actual evidence that it is not magic
and the gains are actually quite modest, then it is a great idea to charge people more so that they
actually wind up consuming less in the way of valuable resources. The idea that's, you know,
it's very common in the US to say we have the best medical care in the world. Right. And I'd say
definitely the most expensive. Right. I would say like for very certain rare conditions that like
then probably US actually does give you the best care. Right. I would say not for experimental
treatments, which often kill you because they're experimental and they don't have a lot of practice.
Human beings are bad at doing things for the first time. Human beings screw up. You have to have
a lot of practice. So, yeah. So my dear friend, Robin Hanson says the smartest thing is to go to the
most advanced centers of medicine and ask for a basic product. Right. Don't get the most advanced
heart surgery. Get basic heart surgery from the best place where they really do have a lot of
practice and it's something new. It's not where they're still using you as a guinea pig. Yeah.
So my view is that we should have great cuts in government spending, which I am almost sure would
greatly reduce total medical spending. And so I think there's a lot of gains there because so much of it
is not very useful. And then I think it also does get people thinking seriously about what is this
actually worth doing and also gets the supply side thinking, how can we go and make treatments more
affordable? How can we go and focus on delivering more value? It is striking that America, there are
some treatments that aren't covered by the US government or by private insurance. Americans go to
places like Mexico and by all accounts get fantastic care, which is much cheaper.
One of my favorite reforms for the US government is how about you go and tell people they can get
their Medicare treatments taken care of in Mexico and you give them some share of the savings.
Right. It's like, no, that'd be terrible. Like, do you have, like, what's the evidence that
Mexican treatment is even worse? You don't know that we need to be sure. Are you sure in America?
You're not sure. So you are advocating for cuts in education and in healthcare,
probably also in other areas. But do you think voters will support that kind of policy or they are
biased? And this is connected to one of your other books, maybe the most famous book, I don't know,
but one of the most famous you've written, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Do you think that we are
biased towards more expenditure by government? Right. Yeah. So this is really an idea I'm
exploring, especially in my new book that I'm writing, Unbeatable, The Brutally Honest Case
for Free Markets. The main theme of the book. Markets do the good things that sound bad. Governments
do the bad things that sound good. So let's spend lots of money on healthcare, for everyone,
education. That sounds wonderful. It's something where most people just, they hear that poem and they
love the idea. And it's very hard to talk them out of it, especially with a good argument. So in the
case against education, I actually barely talked about political bias in education, which I think
is not the fundamental problem. I think there actually is now finally hope for cuts in spending
for higher education, but not because of anything that I said in my book, just because of Hamas,
because of Hamas and related things like that. So people who just love education want to go and
rain money down on education. But then they say like, oh my God, these professors at American
universities, they're terrible human beings. They're sharing Hamas. That's disgusting. I hate those
people. Let's go and cut their spending. And I'm like, okay. So yeah, they are terrible. But even if
they were, even if they hated Hamas, they're still going and wasting people's time failing to teach
foreign languages. That's the fundamental point. But yes, the American higher education in just the
last couple of years has, it has not actually changed very much, but the word finally got out
about the incredible, overwhelming woke bias of American universities, the administration,
humanities departments, social science departments. And it's gotten to the level where now there's
actually a large share of Americans who are disgusted with American universities and who might
finally for the first time support taking $1 away from them. I don't think it's going to be a lot,
but it's like, we're going to go and reduce your spending by 3% until you stop going and waving
the moss flags. All right. That is where we are for education, for healthcare. I don't like, I think we
are still nowhere near to there. People generally, people still believe that this is like magic and it's
just, you know, and it's just so evil to go and ask questions like, well, like how much does this treatment cost?
And what exactly is the gain to the patient? We're still not there yet. It would really have
to be that we have a bunch of demonstrations of doctors and nurses waving the moss flags around
before people start saying, oh, even there, I don't think it would work because it's like,
well, they're waving the moss flags, but I still want to go and get my cancer treated.
Yeah. It's like, yeah. Like, how about you just stop smoking? This is one of the things like,
like during COVID as Yale said, well, yeah, we weren't as bad as Spain, but still there's endless
propaganda, wear masks, six feet apart, no propaganda about lose weight. And is it because
someone did a study and found that the elasticity of weight loss with respect to propaganda is low,
or is the elasticity of staying six feet apart from people as high? It's like, no, it's just like,
well, we'll just go and tell people the things we feel comfortable telling them.
And on the other hand, the things that are very well supported, like high risk lifestyles,
greatly increase the mortality of COVID. Like, well, that's a personal choice. Why isn't a personal
choice if I hang with my friends and I'm thin? Like, why is that not a personal choice? No, no,
no. That's like, yeah. Like is highly arbitrary based upon, you only want to tell people the things
where you feel like you can do it comfortably and the harsh truths about what could actually
be done about it. Well, if other people aren't saying it, I don't want to say it.
And also, how is this connected with immigration? I mean, you are an open border guy, but would
immigrants import towards a country values, ideas that are against the reduction in government spending
or not? What's the evidence on this? Right. Ah, great question. What's the evidence?
So could the answer is, of course they could. What is the actual evidence? This is one where I've had
many people claim that immigrants don't, you know, that they're socialists and they favor huge
government and everybody knows this. But like when you actually go and read the pieces, like, right,
so where are the citations? What's the data? So I actually have gone to the data. So the general
social survey is one of the best surveys that we have of long run American political opinion.
We know about the nativity of the respondents. So I actually went through the data myself.
And here's what I said. So first of all, there are the most of the differences that critics of
immigration believe were immigrants being more statist. Most of that actually is true. It's true
that people who are foreign born in the US are by most measures more statist than native born Americans.
And then people say, oh, see, so give me a minute. Calm down. But the magnitude is small.
The magnitude is small. Right. It is not that Americans are libertarians and Mexicans are Stalinists.
We're talking about differences of a few percentiles. So you say, well, but like even that's somewhat
concerning. I agree. It's somewhat concerning. But then a few other things. First of all,
we're not talking about a very minor imposition on human liberty. When you say that you can't come
to the United States, it is a major harm to go and say that you have to go and stay in the country
where you're born. Right. And remember, say, well, like, well, it's our country. Like, it's not your
country. It is the country of the of the property owner. So of the employer, the landlord, like the
stores, the merchants, these are all the all of these people's rights are violated when you say that
someone that wants to come can't come and work for them or rent from them or shop with them.
There's no idea. This is our country and we can decide. That's socialism. That is social. It's our
country. We as a society decide. But yeah, no, that is, you know, go to, you know, why don't you go to
Venezuela if you think that? So I'll rather, you know, the focus should be on, you know, first of all,
of course, the rights of natives that want to trade. And then also, like, like if someone from
another country, they want to go and work for an American employer, what business does anyone else
saying, you know, like, and it's bad. So, you know, some is most obvious, like someone in Haiti,
they could go and move to Miami, shine shoes, it would be a life or death difference for them.
Yeah. And US law says no. Now, in terms of this political harm, like I said, I don't just discount it.
I face facts. So like when I was writing Open Borders, by the way, my editor actually said,
well, like you should take out some of this. It undermines your argument. I said, it's true.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not here to only say things that make me make my argument look good. I'm here
to go and give a fair summary of all the evidence and then tell people what the best way to think
about it is. I'm not going to just go and suppress evidence that is difficult. I'm going to actually
face it and address it. So the other thing is besides there being only a marginal difference
in opinion between natives and immigrants, on top of that, we have low voter participation for
immigrants. So that's another reason why it's not as bad as it seems. And then finally, there's a lot
of evidence of high assimilation. The fact that your parents came from Mussolini's Italy and maybe
were fascist does not mean that their kids growing up in the United States are going to be fascists.
It is just not true that people's parents go and pass on these strange views from another country.
You say, well, what about all the heredity? I remember I was talking about the political
effects of heredity. It's important to remember this is within the context of growing up in a
certain society. So yeah, how could political views be hereditary when monarchism was very popular
300 years ago and hardly anybody does? Is it that the monarchists had no children and the anti-monarchists
did? No. Rather, what's going on is that we are looking at how explaining political views
within a society. Obviously, if you move someone to a radically different kind of society,
then the very things that they're even discussing as possible do change.
Yeah. So if you were to go and, you know, if you wanted to make your kid into a monarchist,
you've got to go and like get a time machine, go back and time 300 years, and then maybe you could
do it that way. But within modern American society, convincing your kid to be a monarchist,
even if you were, would be very hard. Yeah. But the profile of immigrants that the
U.S. is receiving is not the same that Europe is receiving. Yes.
In what sense can we translate your teaching towards the case of Europe?
Right. So here's what I would say. The main thing that I do in Open Borders is start off with
the harsh truth that trapping someone in the country of their birth, especially when that country is
really bad, as many are, is a very severe harm to inflict on someone. Right. It's the kind of thing
that at minimum you should say and say, oh, my God, to say that like a person born in Haiti can never
leave those horrible conditions. Look, it's something where it's like, oh, gee, like this is not just
something this is not something that anyone should do lightly. And then secondly, like to remember,
there are obvious and enormous gains from almost all immigration just come from moving someone's
labor from a place where productivity is low to where its productivity is high. And when a Haitian
moves to the United States, the standard for their production to multiply by about a factor of 15.
Right. And a lot of this is actually shared with the world. You go and you're working as a farmer
in a primitive farm. You barely grow anything. You come to the United States, get a job on a farm.
You are producing a lot more food. There are enormous gains to the world of just moving that
labor from places where the value is low to places where the value is high. And then finally, right.
So we've got this basic human rights issue, which is serious. We have this big economic gain. And then
the question is, all the complaints that people have against the immigrants, where do they go? So how severe
are those? Are they so big that it makes sense to say, yeah, despite the whole, that it's a horrible
thing to do, despite the gains, these harms are even greater. And then finally, is it true that
there's no cheaper, more humane way to handle the problems? And the most obvious one, the difference
between the US and Europe is your welfare state is generally bigger and also just less restrictive.
So US does a much better job of getting immigrants working than Europe does. But again,
it's still, it's something more like maybe like 15, 20 percentage points of labor force participation.
It's not that European immigrants have 0% labor force participation. Or even if you go and find,
so recent immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, a year after they have gotten their legal
work permission, even there, like maybe that's like 25, but of course it goes up over time.
So, you know, these, but anyway, so it is a marginal difference, not night and day,
bigger marginal difference. And then the question is, all right, so is the right conclusion to draw,
don't let them come or change the welfare state? Now, many people say, look, the welfare state's
just unchangeable. It's like the welfare state changes all the time. Actually, the rules do get
changed. I don't know of any country where you can immediately get full benefits, like as soon as you
arrive in the country, like, you know, the United States, if you are a tourist and you get in an
accident, they will give you emergency care without proof you can pay. So if like you get your truck,
your leg gets run over by a truck, they don't go and say, right. But on the other hand, if you say,
like, I'm dying of cancer, I hear this is the best treatment in the world. It's like, well,
you have to go back to your own country. Well, your own country doesn't even, doesn't even have a
single actual oncologist, but too bad. All right. So there are already limits. And what I've been
telling critics of immigration for years is why don't you take all of your effort at getting a
massive policy change in general immigration policy, which is very hard in the US. And why don't you go
and focus it down like a laser on reducing eligibility of immigrants for welfare benefits.
And this would be my advice for you, for Europe to try and focus on that. Why just join this general
thing of punish everyone, including people that are going to work, including people that have done
that have done nothing wrong. It's like, well, that's unrealistic. So it's realistic to think
you're going to get a total change in the European immigration policy, but it's unrealistic to think
that you could go and say that it takes five more years to be eligible for benefits. I think it's
actually a lot more realistic to get that. So anyway, in the book, I go over a lot of the other
complaints. I always try to go and be honest and say, look, these complaints are not completely wrong,
but always stay calm. Always think about numbers. It's like, is it true that foreigners have a higher
probability committing terrorism than natives? It is. It is definitely in the United States,
almost certainly in Europe as well. But then say, all right, how big of a problem is terrorism?
Actually, as a percentage of all murders, what actually is terrorism? It's a very low percentage.
Right. So in my book, I actually use the saying of being more likely to be struck by lightning than
to be killed by terrorists. Right. And this is the kind of thing that reasonable people do.
Now, if you just say, look, yeah, but people aren't actually reasonable. They're crazy. Like,
yeah, I know. I know. That's why I do what I do. I'm trying to make people less crazy,
trying to get people to calm down. At minimum, I would hope that people who care about human
liberty will be more receptive to this idea of not getting really passionate about politics,
not just becoming a fanatic, but just saying, all right, look, OK, first of all, I'm listening to
what other people say. I'm going to acknowledge the validity of their complaints as far as the facts
warrant. And then I'm going to go and put in perspective and say, yes, it's true that foreigners
commit a disproportionate share of terrorism. But it is a very tiny problem. And the fact
that it that it really upsets us is not a reason to treat it as the most important thing in the
world because it is not a very important thing. Well, in Spain, we have also other type of crime
or criminality that is being committed by immigrants. And this is a rising problem. But
but of course, there are other ways of it's actually rising or it's just the media coverage is rising.
No, no, it's rising. Yes. It's standard in the US that you look, you got crime statistics and you
got media coverage. No, no, no. In this case, there are types of crimes,
for instance, violations that are rising and mainly due to foreign immigrants. But again,
there are many ways of. Yes. Like the obvious thing is harsher punishments for people who are
actually criminals, right? Not to go and punish everyone, including the vast majority of people
who have never done anything. In terms of the actual numbers, here is what I've seen in the data.
In the United States, immigrants have lower crime rates than natives. In Europe, they have higher crime
rates than natives. And you say, well, is it because we let in worse immigrants? Like a lot of it is just
this. Americans have very high crime rates. Europeans have very native born. Europeans have very low crime
rates. And immigrants are in the middle. In the middle, yeah. Right? Which is,
on the one hand, you say, well, like they are worse than a reasonable point. But also,
the reason why they are so much worse than you is that your rates are very low.
So if you go to a country like Japan, where the natives have committed almost no crime at all,
say, well, you're saying like, tourists have 10 times the murder rate of Japanese per day in the
country. It's like, but it's 10 times something that's almost zero. This is not a good reason to go and
start trying to cut back tourism to Japan. Usually, especially when a probability is low,
you want to say like, what is the absolute probability? Not just like one in a trillion
is a thousand times as bad as one in a quadrillion. But if it's one in a quadrillion or one in a trillion,
those are still so low that probably you should just calm down and say, life is too short to worry
about this problem. Okay. And one last question, Brian.
Wow. I feel like we just got started.
No, no. We are more or less. It's one hour of interview, which I think it's a good time. But
what would you say are your main contributions to economics? And what fields do you plan to
research in the future? You have said one, but I want to hear more.
All right. So my first book, The Myth of Rational Voter, that's about public choice,
the economics of politics. And I see my main contribution there as saying, actually,
the main problem with democracy is that due to very weak incentives, people are highly irrational
in politics, much more so than in markets. In markets, normal people at least do things like,
well, the price may seem lower, but the price per kilo is actually higher. And so actually,
I should make this other purchase. I eavesdrop on people in grocery stores and hear people who do not
sound like they are math majors, make very thoughtful arguments about products. On the other hand,
almost everyone's political arguments, even people agree with me. I just like,
these arguments are terrible. They're just so unreasonable, so unfair, so emotional.
So I say that you're focusing specifically on the problem of voter rationality and the fact that
democracy encourages people to be as intellectually irresponsible as they ever get. And that's, I say,
is the actual main problem of democracy. It's not special interests. It's not just ignorance. Oh,
I didn't know. It's people who say they do know, but who have never actually studied the subject.
So that's in this rational voter. Selfish reason for kids that is in the field of family economics,
economics of the family. And I would say they're just combining this research on twin adoption research
with actual practical advice on optimal family size. That is the main contribution. And by the way,
that book is the only one I've written that has actually noticeably improved the world because that
book, there are hundreds of people who tell me they've had additional kids because of it, which if you
use a standard economist value of life, like $10 million, that book created billions of dollars of value
for the world, not for me, but billions of dollars of value for the world. So that's the book that I
think has actually done the most good. Then I've got the case against education. So I definitely did
not invent the signaling model that was invented before, right around the time I was born, actually.
What that book does is it takes theory, the theory of signaling, which most of the people who work on
it, that's for them, it's all it is. It's just a theory. It's like a fun math game to play. And I say,
look, it's not just a theory. It is the true theory. It explains the facts. And I try to bring
together a lot of evidence, not just from economics, but from psychology, from sociology,
from the field called education, and say, this is actually the best way to understand what's going
on with education. And it does imply, especially austeridad. So like the idea that economics says,
oh, education is a good thing to spend money on, wrong. If you really think properly, then it's a
reason for drastic cuts in the spendings. It's so wasteful. Then my next book is Open Borders. So
this is the one where I try to take a lot of different arguments and evidence relevant to
immigration to make the case for radical deregulation, not just double high-skilled
immigration, but really let almost anyone take a job almost anywhere. I try to never be totally absolutist,
but just because you're not absolutist doesn't mean that you can't say almost always, right? It's like,
is it always wrong to go and kill another person? Almost always. There are certain very special cases
where it's different. But if you were to say, well, it's just dogmatic to be against killing
people like this, not dogmatic. That is a very good, almost always true principle. And if you think
the principle is violated, be very cautious. Juan de Marina had to say something about that.
Good, good. And then you said my most recent book is Build Baby Build, which is similar to Open Borders.
This is my book favoring radical housing deregulation. We already talked about this in
a mix of English and Spanish before. So this is also one of the most destructive things that government is
doing. We have the technology to make very large buildings, tall buildings cheaply so that almost
so that almost everyone can have a beautiful, cheap place in a great location. And yet government
is not allowing us to use this technology. And so people are suffering with some combination of
very high prices, small living space, undesirable locations. We've got the technology to make it
abundant. Right now, when you go to the supermarket, you probably don't think, oh, gee, there's all this
nice stuff. Too bad I can't afford it. It's like, it's like, no, no, I got it. Like the problem is I
eat too much. Like it's just this incredible abundance. There's great fruit, great vegetables,
great bread, great pasta, great meat. It's so wonderful. That's what markets give us in the field
of food because the regulation is real low. We could have something like that in housing and it's just
government that stopped us. In terms of what I'm working on now, so I got a few projects
projects. Actually, a lot of the way I work is if I get an idea, so I have a queue, a list of projects
and also a list of blog posts. And really, anytime I get an idea, I say, okay, stop what I'm doing.
And I go and I add it to the queue. And that means I just have more ideas than I would ever be able to
write. But that's a problem everyone should have, right? So I never actually say I have no idea what
to talk about. So the book I'm writing right now is called Unbeatable, The Brutally Honest Case for Free
Markets. Already told you about it, but again, I'll tell you the main theme. Markets do the good
things that sound bad. Things like saying, yeah, we're not going to go and give you a million dollars
of healthcare just because it has a one in a million chance of saving your life. Too bad. Sorry.
All right. Markets do the good things that sound bad. Governments do the bad things that sound good.
Like saying, oh my God, that horrible, greedy jerk. Let's give you all the taxpayer money you need for
every treatment, no matter how expensive it is and no matter how unlikely it is to work.
Then next to my queue, there's a book called Poverty, Who to Blame. This is one that I've
been talking about for some years, but I rearranged my queue. But anyway, so that's about a quarter
written. And when Unbeatable is done, then I'll probably come back to that one. Then I've got another
book next to my queue. After that, this book is called Pragmatic Pacifism. This morning I talked about
pacifism. So I know this is a view that people think of as totally unrealistic and naive. And this
is a book where I say, look, if we think about it in a very certain way, narrow it down a bit,
don't make the most extreme version. And actually it is a shockingly reasonable view. Namely,
we just build with, first of all, in war, even the good guys do terrible things to innocent people.
They really do. Because it's just too hard to fight a war without going and murdering innocent
people. So it's like, hmm, sounds pretty bad, but maybe it's unavoidable. It's like, well, maybe,
but here's the thing. You may say, well, we're killing these people, but it's all for the greater
good. Everything's going to work out. But will it, though? Do we know it's going to work out?
What is the actual track record of people who say wars are going to work out great? And I say, yeah,
actually, we got a lot of evidence that there's high uncertainty here. People who promise that
everything's going to be great are a very low reliability, which means that we should be much
more cautious in listening to them and be much more skeptical about the actual propriety of fighting
war. Thank you very much, Brian. All right. It's been a pleasure. All right. Great job. Thank you.
And by the way, Juan, so thank you for everything you're doing. When I look at your numbers on social
media, like, you know, madre de Dios, lo creo. Well, we have to keep fighting. Yeah. At least
in Spain and in Spanish world to push liberty a little bit more. Thank you very much. Thank you very
much. Muchas gracias. Y a todos vosotros. Hasta la vista, vaya con Dios. Todos.
A todos vosotros, a la audiencia, muchas gracias por acompañarnos en esta hora de entrevista. La verdad,
muy interesante y con muchos puntos y matices que nos ha ofrecido Brian Kaplan, invitado estrella en
la Universidad de las Espérides, en los cursos de la Universidad de las Espérides, que hoy,
justamente, terminan. Recordad que, además, la Universidad de las Espérides también está ahora
mismo ofreciendo sus cursos de grado y de posgrado que empiezan en el próximo mes de septiembre. Así que,
si queréis informaros sobre estos cursos dentro de esta universidad que reflexiona sobre las ideas de la
libertad dentro de sus programas de grado y de posgrado, pues podéis obtener más información
en el enlace que aparece en la caja de descripción del vídeo. Muchas gracias a todos y nos vemos en
un próximo directo ya fuera de los cursos de verano de la Universidad en el canal. ¡Hasta luego!