Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute where he holds the Clarence J. and Catherine P. Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He is the author of You Don t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty, as well as The Conscience of the Constitution and The Right to Liberty. In this episode, Tim talks about Star Trek: The Rise of the Starship Enterprise and why Star Trek is so important to American culture.
00:02:40.520Let me see if I can just try to guess how these two things are related. Is it that in a Star Trek episode, there's likely to be some philosophical issues around some decisions that they make, and hence you're marrying these two together? Is that the link?
00:02:56.180Yeah, sort of. So it was in my recent book, You Don't Own Me, I have a chapter in there about how you can trace the evolution of American liberalism through the history of Star Trek.
00:03:08.740And that was why I was invited to speak. But instead of talking about that topic, I decided to do a presentation on, as you say, philosophical issues around individualism and humanism as they were portrayed in Star Trek.
00:03:23.040You know, it sounds fun and lighthearted to talk about a science fiction show, but, you know, Star Trek is every bit as much a part of American culture as Huckleberry Finn or Bart Simpson, and it's a great opportunity to talk about really profound philosophical issues with, you know, examples that people are really familiar with.
00:03:42.920Well, I love that. Now, I'll mention two points that sort of serve as segues from what you just said. Number one, I've gone to many APA meetings, American Psychological Association meetings, which is really like a mammoth conference, the biggest psychology conference in the world.
00:03:59.660And they used to have, I don't know if they still have it, they used to have a track on psychology in film. So you're doing an analysis of films using a whole range of obviously psychological principles that professional psychologists will be talking about. So that's number one.
00:04:16.680But number two, from an even more personal perspective, my main area of research as an academic is in applying evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer and economic behavior in particular.
00:04:31.100Well, there is a field, Timothy, which you may be aware of, called literary Darwinian criticism, whereby you study literature via an evolutionary lens precisely because literature titillates us because it speaks to a few key universal themes that we could all understand.
00:04:53.520So it doesn't surprise me that by you looking at Star Trek, you're picking up all of these important threads.
00:05:01.100Yeah, and I think those are particularly themes that I think are amenable to Star Trek, or at least how the series originated.
00:05:09.360It was very much an attempt to apply rationality and humanism and this openness to new scientific discoveries in the post-World War II era to human life.
00:05:20.460So I think that that would be a profitable way of looking at the show.
00:05:23.780and I'm gonna come you know to this book in a second but since we're talking about sort of
00:05:29.180individual rights and you don't own me and economic freedom believe me I've had to deal
00:05:33.440with some of these issues as I now depart Canada and head off to the United States by the way
00:05:38.220in case you don't know discussing this book is uniquely apropos to me because I am now going
00:05:45.440to be housed at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at
00:05:51.720Ole Miss. So it really resonates with me. What do you think makes you or I resonate with these
00:06:03.000principles of individual dignity, individual freedom, whereas the great majority of my
00:06:09.860Canadian compatriots view that as terribly evil, terribly non-empathetic, to use the framework of
00:06:17.240my latest book, Suicidal Empathy, whereby why should Timothy own more money than another one
00:06:24.360of his neighbors? Shouldn't there be an empathetic overlord that comes in and equalizes income?
00:06:30.660What do you think makes us so susceptible to that individual selling point, whereas others
00:06:36.580cannot accept that that's the way to organize society? Well, of course, there's not one single
00:06:43.020answer to that question, but I would say that probably a big part of it is the propaganda
00:06:47.820that we are subjected to in childhood, the anti-individualistic propaganda that begins
00:06:55.460at a very early stage that tries to teach children that their lives are not their own
00:07:01.500and that to be good people, they ought to serve others and dedicate themselves to the
00:07:08.480team or the family or the nature or the nation or the the society or the race or things like that
00:07:15.680these and i think there's a very powerful element of this collectivistic uh propaganda in our
00:07:22.480culture america the united states i think we are fortunate in that i suspect that we have less of
00:07:27.520that than just about any other country in the world we have the cultural traditions of things
00:07:33.280like the the cowboy west in fact in my book you don't own me i start with the example of the
00:07:39.200cowboy as sort of this the the perfect symbol of american individualism as as consecrated by our
00:07:46.720culture that's a very healthy thing and it's a very rare thing and teaching our young people
00:07:53.840that their lives are their own and they have a right to pursue their own happiness even if that
00:08:01.600comes at the expense of the society or the culture or the family and so forth um that you know that's
00:08:08.980that is something that ought to be cherished the you know a good example of this actually one of
00:08:12.800the most subversive movies of all time so subversive that people are stunned when you tell
00:08:17.440them how subversive it that it is a verse of it all is moana the disney pixar film moana which
00:08:23.500starts out as this celebration of tradition and culture right moana is supposed to learn
00:08:30.180that her people stay on the island and so forth.
00:08:35.140What she ends up doing is discovering that actually her tradition is liberation
00:08:39.820and the individual going out and pursuing her own destiny.
00:08:44.300And it's just marvelous the way that that's done so subtly.
00:08:47.980That's a message that we ought to celebrate and teach our kids much more
00:08:51.540in order to keep alive the spirit of individualism
00:08:53.840that I think lies at the heart of our institutions.
00:08:56.160Do you feel that there is a mechanism, to use sort of my parlance, right, I talk about people are parasitized, and then I administer to them a mind vaccine.
00:09:08.420Do you think that through not just, I mean, your writings, but all those who many, Hayek and von Mises and Ayn Rand, could you ever administer a mind vaccine of sort that the phoenix doesn't keep re-arising from the ashes?
00:09:28.860Or do you think it's an indelible feature of the architecture of the human mind that it is a battle that will go on forevermore because there's always a new generation of people that could fall prey to that collectivist mindset?
00:09:43.640Oh, yeah. Oh, it's definitely the latter. I think it's definitely a perpetual conflict, because what altruism teaches is it takes advantage of envy. And envy, I think, is built into our psychology for evolutionary psychological reasons. I think there is, to some degree, there is a survival value to it in a sort of selfish gene sense. And so it has persisted with us.
00:10:11.680But, of course, that doesn't mean that we give into it. I mean, you could take another example is lust, right? A man's lust for a beautiful woman that he sees walking down the street. There's an evolutionary psychological explanation for that, obviously.
00:10:24.560That doesn't mean that he can just attack her and drag her into a back alley.
00:10:28.920And the same is true of our spirit of envy.
00:10:31.420What's really tragic, especially in societies today, when it is so unnecessary, is that socialism takes advantage and plays on this sense of envy and transforms it in this pseudo-intellectual lingo into some sort of philosophy, when what it really is is just envy.
00:10:52.740and it transforms it in it gives it a facade of intellectual respectability that has controlled
00:10:59.880the destinies of a lot of societies even to this day and i would say i mean the reason why i think
00:11:05.640once the parasitic socialist ponzi scheme is set in place in a society you can really almost i hate
00:11:13.080to say that it's intractable but you could almost never eradicate it because the recipients of that0.78
00:11:18.840system so greatly outweigh the ones that you have to suck dry in order to support the system right
00:11:25.700there's there's yeah and not just that yeah it's not just that i've been thinking about this a lot
00:11:29.900just recently actually that if you think about things in game theory terms you know you you get
00:11:36.180into a situation when you're in a socialist society where there's a prisoner's dilemma problem
00:11:41.380that is really insoluble and and it's not the fault of the victims of that society that they
00:11:46.960can't break out of it because if they were to do so they'd be the first to be you know executed or
00:11:52.160exiled or whatever it might be and so it becomes necessary for people to hunker down and pursue
00:11:57.340their lives as best they can and you can't blame them for that they are in fact doing the best they
00:12:01.400can to pursue their own happiness in such situations but because they can't assemble
00:12:06.060to create a constitutional system to protect themselves they the victimhood just perpetuates
00:12:38.160and then the key stories covered in this book.
00:12:41.880Well, my book is, first of all, it's an attempt to go through the Declaration and explain line by line what the Founding Fathers were referring to.
00:12:49.500This is the document that the Americans issue that say, here's why we are splitting with Great Britain.
00:12:55.220And it explains, first of all, philosophical terms, the famous lines about all men are created equal with inalienable rights.
00:13:01.560And then in much more practical, pragmatic terms, exactly what the British government had been doing that started the whole fight to begin with.
00:13:10.360And it lists quite a lot of these grievances against Britain.
00:13:13.220So I go line by line through each of those, and I wanted to explain what each of them is referring to, as well as discussing the philosophical background.
00:13:20.520What is meant by all men are created equal?
00:13:22.860What do we mean when we say that we are endowed with natural rights and so forth?
00:13:26.800But in order to tell that story, you know, it would be bland to talk about that in just philosophical terms.
00:13:32.080So I wanted to dramatize it in a sort of narrative fashion.
00:13:35.440And so I tell it in the way that the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as they were working on writing the Declaration in 1776 and the background of that friendship.
00:13:47.680So, for example, most Americans probably are unfamiliar with the century of conflict that led to the American Revolution.
00:13:56.720You know, it didn't all start in the 1770s. In as early as the 1600s, the American colonists were having these disputes with Britain over who really controls the political system here. Americans had thought that they were ruled by the king as their executive branch, but then that their laws were made by their own local legislatures.
00:14:18.540and then here comes parliament and says no no we're in charge of everything we can tax and
00:14:22.740legislate and do all these things it's it would be as if the the legislature of california were
00:14:27.560to try to pass laws for florida and after a decade of of fighting over that the americans finally
00:14:33.060said fine we're done with it we are giving up our british citizenship our membership in the british
00:14:39.280system and we are laying our foundations on the principles of natural rights and then in the
00:14:44.700including chapters, I want to talk about the influence of the Declaration throughout the
00:14:49.540centuries and, you know, how it affected the Civil War and the Progressive Era and up to the present
00:14:54.520day. Yeah, just historical sort of oddities that I'm interested in. So forgive me if they sound
00:15:01.420too pedantic or not. So, you know, if you and I were working on a paper together, or maybe
00:15:06.140I'm sending you some changes to a contract, I would use track changes in Word document, right?
00:15:12.740So what was, do we have a record of the track changes as you went through the different
00:15:21.140drafts of the Declaration of Independence resulting in that?
00:15:41.580And the declaration went through two stages of editing. So it was it was the responsibility of the committee of five to write the first draft and then submit it to the Congress and then the Congress edited it. So it went through two stages of editing by the committee and then the Congress. And Jefferson did the initial draft and then he showed it to the other four members on this committee.
00:16:00.980Well, two of them, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, didn't really have much influence on it, from what we can tell.
00:16:07.020Franklin probably added a couple suggestions.
00:16:12.260But actually, there's surprisingly few influences from them on the final draft.
00:16:18.820And then it was submitted to the Congress.
00:16:20.400Now, from there, we do know the changes that were made because Jefferson wrote them all out.
00:16:25.400He got so upset at the changes that Congress made to the declaration that he wrote out several copies of his original version and then put lines in it to show what had been removed and changed and everything, and sent it to a bunch of friends with letters saying, don't you think my original version was better?
00:16:42.300And as a writer myself, I can very much sympathize with that.
00:16:45.740But we don't know exactly who proposed which particular change in most cases.
00:16:51.840How many signatories are there in the final version of the Declaration of Independence?
00:17:53.240Do you – can you understand what I mean and what are your thoughts on that?
00:17:57.780Yes, I've been to the Reagan Library many times, although I have not seen the particular exhibit that you're talking about so far.
00:18:04.620But I have seen, you know, we have Jefferson's personal draft where you can see the cut and
00:18:11.140paste, literal cut and paste, where he's snipped it out and glued it onto another piece of paper
00:18:14.780because he's in the business of editing it and all that. And it's impossible not to feel goosebumps
00:18:19.680when you see something like that. Yeah, absolutely. I totally understand what you're talking about.
00:18:24.640Do you, in light of the fact that you are obviously steeped in all of these sort of
00:18:29.780deontological foundational principles that that drive american exceptionalism do you look at the
00:18:35.940current state of the union and go oh boy what the hell we're doomed or are you okay yes
00:18:42.980every every five minutes or so i really should get off twitter i i i regrettably i share the
00:18:52.000same affliction as you do but go ahead i mean yes i think you know your pessimism
00:18:57.720Well, I don't know if it's fair to call it pessimism. I feel optimistic in the long run, but quite concerned about the short run. I often remind myself of the old saying that Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted every other option.
00:19:16.520uh and i i so in the in the long run in that sense i'm optimistic i think you know i'm often asked
00:19:22.540what what the founders would have thought if they could come to the present day and i think
00:19:25.920you know in some respects they would be odd and in some respects they'd be horrified i think
00:19:30.260jefferson for example would be horrified at the way that we accept things like regular taxation
00:19:36.140jefferson was of the view that the the what we ought to have is a society of more or less
00:19:41.940independent people who live by their own hard work and the government leaves them alone and
00:19:47.460that taxation should be kept to an absolute minimum and should not be regular the idea of an
00:19:52.860of every april 15th you have to write out a check is a very recent idea in human history and it was
00:19:58.720not something contemplated by the american founders when they imposed a tax the tax man
00:20:03.080literally showed up at your door and demanded a check and if you didn't have a check he would
00:20:07.340take your grandfather clock or your china and in some ways i think that's a healthier system because
00:20:12.940you see the tax being taken from you whereas with all of the elaborate ways we disguise our taxation
00:20:18.620with withholding and all these sorts of things americans really have no idea how much of their
00:20:23.580hard-earned wealth is being taken away to give to people who don't work so in uh in this book
00:20:29.500in my latest book in suicidal empathy chapter seven is titled as only god's ad can title chapters
00:20:35.980uh govern me harder daddy and in that chapter i get into parasitic taxation and i you know i start
00:20:42.780breaking it all down and i explain and i'm sure you know this and this applies both to the united
00:20:48.300states and canada i think united states might have been 1913 the first time that income tax
00:20:52.860was levied united in canada it's 1917 it's just going to be a one-time very small temporary thing
00:20:59.740that's really going to be taken from a very very few people and before you know it it's not going
00:21:04.460going to apply to anybody. Close your eyes, open your eyes. 120 plus years later, certainly in
00:21:10.440Canada, you're taking roughly 65% of my income. So when you talk about the title of your book,
00:21:16.760you don't own me. No, you do own me because from January 1st till end of August, I work as a full
00:21:24.080fledged slave for you with zero spoils of my labor. And only in September, you allow me to
00:21:31.960keep my money. Now, when I go on social media and I try to vent about this, the most disheartening
00:21:39.480thing, Timothy, is to see my fellow Canadians viciously attacking me for being the existential0.96
00:21:47.140asshole that I am because I'm actually complaining about the fact that two-thirds of my book royalties0.97
00:21:54.860are taken away from me. I know you're not a doctor, but I'm going to call you a doctor because0.98
00:21:59.200it looks like I'm sitting on the proverbial couch. Doctor, please help me here.
00:22:04.680Well, you know, as we said before, I think that people find ways of rationalizing their sense of
00:22:12.040envy and taxation and supposedly helping the poor with this tax money is the number one go-to.
00:22:21.260It's sort of like their teddy bear, intellectually speaking. Well, what about the poor? Even though
00:22:26.100So history proves that the poor can be taken care of and typically are better taken care of by private undertakings than by the state, which, you know, when the welfare state was established in the United States, the theory was, oh, well, we haven't cured poverty with private enterprise.
00:22:42.180And surprise, we haven't cured poverty after a century of the welfare state either, have we?
00:22:46.960Instead, we have an entire category of bureaucrats who make their money by taking cash out of your pocket, throwing a quarter of it into their pocket, and then handing the other 75 cents to some third party.
00:23:00.820Jefferson's reaction to this would have been clear.
00:23:02.660he said in his first inaugural address the sum of good government is one which shall restrain men
00:23:07.440from injuring one another and shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of
00:23:12.600industry and improvement and not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned wow i mean
00:23:19.380i'm guessing that's a direct quote yes yeah yeah okay so what explains that all these guys seem to
00:23:26.100be such men of literature and so such polymaths right because all of those guys when i ever read
00:23:32.980their stuff and i'm hardly a scholar on any of them but enough to know how they wrote and how
00:23:37.400they express themselves they seem to have been cut of a different cloth than most of men today
00:23:43.920now obviously part of that is exactly why they are exceptional but is it something in the water
00:23:49.560or the educational system that led all these guys to be able to on the one hand quote epictetus
00:23:56.060and then hit you with whatever and can we ever return to that or has has that train left the
00:24:01.960station well there's a couple different answers to that for one thing um it's sort of a self-selection
00:24:07.740uh bias in that we don't remember the founding fathers who were less ingenious and so that
00:24:14.680creates the illusion that the ones we that they're all ingenious because those are the ones we remember
00:24:18.740secondly though they lived during the enlightenment and this was a time when intellectual leaders were
00:24:24.280very much into the idea of applying reason to, well, not just human affairs, but obviously
00:27:57.880Our goal instead is to try and reach those college kids or whoever who have the potential in them to be the next generation of great writers and thinkers and inventors and scientists and so forth.
00:28:11.700And so don't worry yourself too much about the fact that this looks like a small movement at present.
00:28:17.180The goal is to get to the right people, not to get to everybody.
00:28:19.960But I do think that we are seeing this movement.
00:28:22.420As for why it's located largely in the South, I think part of that is because there's just, historically speaking, Americans living in the South tend to be much more wedded to tradition, and the American tradition tends to be the American founding fathers.
00:28:37.480Now, there are good sides and bad sides to that. Some of those traditions, I think, in order to celebrate the American founding, I think there are some people out there who tend to overlook or blind themselves to the negative things about the American revolutionary experience. But the fact that people are even talking about it in a serious way is a good thing. And I hope there are all sorts of new organizations, like you're speaking of, that spread up all across the country.
00:29:06.160you know on a personal level when i so last year i was being i was fortunate enough to be
00:29:11.720courted by several universities that were trying to convince me to join them and when i started
00:29:17.040the process with old miss i mean they would have been maybe last on my list if only because i
00:29:21.660didn't know much about them and then i went and visited there and when i came back my wife said
00:29:25.760so how did it go and i said you know i think maybe we should be moving to oxford mississippi
00:29:30.480she's like what oh it's a beautiful place i i oxford the university mississippi campus is one
00:29:35.320of my favorites it's just gorgeous exactly and so but i was going to actually link it to an
00:29:40.460evolutionary principle and so one of the things that i loved in mississippi very very quickly
00:29:45.720is that when the mississippians took you in as theirs so once i said okay all right guys i'm
00:29:52.580coming to mississippi i was no longer a lebanese jew that has resided in canada i was a mississippian
00:29:59.760and therefore i can pick up the phone and speak to really really high-ranked people who would pay
00:30:05.180attention and then get the ball rolling to make you feel welcome. And that, now the evolutionary
00:30:10.580principle there is that in societies that mimic what's called the environment of evolutionary
00:30:16.100adaptiveness, which is a smaller group of people, right? Like most of us were born in villages
00:30:20.940where exactly we're going to die. So our word is our honor. If I renege, if I shake the hand
00:30:26.900of Timothy and say, I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and then I cheat you out, there's only going to be
00:30:30.860one chance that I'm going to cheat you out because there's going to be no repeat interaction.
00:30:34.080everybody knows i'm a scammer i'm dead and so i felt a sense of hospitality in oxford mississippi
00:30:41.580that made me then decide in one of the addresses i was giving there it was actually in jackson
00:30:46.580mississippi i said i hereby declare all of you honorary lebanese because the lebanese are very0.98
00:30:53.640very much reputed for their over the top generosity you come to our house we're going to kill you by0.97
00:30:59.140food right because otherwise that would be a death i would be happy to endure well i absolutely love0.87
00:31:05.540lebanese food i will invite you uh to old miss i don't want to miss it's a date okay good and then0.93
00:31:12.420you and then we we shall kill you through at least a seven pound gain of lebanese food so i think for
00:31:18.760me i felt very very comfortable right away because it spoke to sort of what i'm used to0.99
00:31:24.220Now, interestingly, when I would then speak to someone, either an American or a Canadian, say, oh, we're moving to Mississippi, the idiotic stereotypes that would come out, like, are you sure you're, I mean, don't, you don't, there's no chance that they would lynch you like the kid.0.96
00:31:41.560But I mean, these were not guys who were being facetious.0.97
00:31:45.280They genuinely thought there was an imminent threat that if it got out that we were Jewish, our days were numbered in Oxford.1.00
00:31:54.620How do we fix such stupidity, Timothy?1.00
00:31:57.440Well, I mean, well, first of all, it has to be said it is true.1.00
00:32:01.620There are still people out there who are discriminatory in that way.
00:32:05.320And there are still, you know, nasty sides to all of our societies.
00:32:10.600But, first of all, at risk of distracting us even further from the American Revolution, I must say that your very first assignment, if you're going to Mississippi, is to read the works of one of my very favorite writers, Florence King.
00:32:31.320Her great masterpiece is called Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.
00:32:35.140It's a memoir that she published. She was herself an Ole Miss student, and she wrote a number of other great books.
00:32:41.080The one that you particularly should pay attention to is called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, which is her sociological analysis of the New South.
00:32:49.340She was a humor writer. She wrote for National Review. She used to write the back page of National Review every week.
00:32:54.740And she was, in my opinion, until her recent death, the finest nonfiction writer in America.
00:33:01.540Just a master of prose and a model to follow.
00:33:07.760So, yes, definitely pick up the works of Florence King.
00:33:11.020But the bottom line answer to your question is nothing cures these things except time and forgetfulness.
00:33:16.420and you know people they have these stereotypes that in some cases were earned through pretty
00:33:22.780nasty things that that happened in the past and they have a hard time believing that things could
00:33:27.160change and the only way to to get past that is to show them that things have changed i'm reminded
00:33:32.880of a line in cyrano de bergerac when uh christian asks the the captain of the guard how do we how
00:33:40.440do we uh deal with discrimination against people like me and he says show them your courage right
00:33:46.200beautiful uh you've written is it nine books or ten books how many books uh this one is my 10th
00:33:51.760this is your 10th okay then let me put it up again people go out get it protect uh
00:33:55.520proclaiming i said protecting sorry proclaiming liberty my apologies you were too polite to
00:34:00.300correct me thank you for that uh proclaiming liberty walk us through your writing process
00:34:06.100and i ask this uh because there are many people i know for a fact who listen to the show who watch
00:34:12.300the show who are aspiring authors who say, you know, how do I go about opening that laptop and
00:34:17.260starting? Walk us through your process. Well, how do you go about opening laptop? I will give you
00:34:23.560the answer that my ninth grade English teacher, Mr. McCafferty gave. He used to say, the words
00:34:28.780are in the pen. When you open the pen and put the pen on the paper, the words will come out.
00:34:34.080So the answer is just start writing. Most of the work is in the editing process anyway. Just start
00:34:38.540writing the stuff, and then eventually you'll have stone soup. But my writing style, for
00:34:44.840my early books, like I wrote a book on property, for example, and that was largely adapted
00:34:50.740from legal briefs that I wrote as an attorney, because that's my day job is I'm practicing
00:34:55.760lawyer defending individual liberty, private property rights, and economic freedom in courts
00:35:00.480across the country. And so I had written enough briefs on enough subjects that I could kind
00:35:04.560of massage them together into a book and so that explains some of them this book
00:35:09.540though this one I had to write from scratch and this one I had a one-year
00:35:14.400deadline so I had to kind of plunge into it and fortunately I have I'm so
00:35:18.840obsessed with the American founding with Thomas Jefferson and that history that I
00:35:22.800was able to just immediately start and so much is online so many research
00:35:27.240research resources are available online now that it's you can accomplish in a
00:35:33.320year what would have taken you a decade in a previous generation so uh in the end then the
00:35:39.620bottom line answer is obsession yes you have to be obsessed with the topic it might drive you and
00:35:46.740your friends and your family a little crazy but you have to make it a nine to five job you sit
00:35:52.280down in front of that keyboard and you write and you do your research and you do not just tinker
00:35:56.740with it now and then a little bit when you feel like it and you don't you god forbid do you wait
00:36:01.200for inspiration. Inspiration and the reverse writer's block are myths that are promulgated
00:36:09.440by non-writers. No real writer experiences either to any significant degree, because to really write
00:36:15.280just means to be obsessed with getting the sentences right and saying what you want to say.
00:36:19.960I love the fact that you said the word obsessed, because that perfectly describes
00:36:24.540uh the mindset that i'm in when i'm working on a book project it it's a need that is akin to
00:36:31.640needing to go to the bathroom or i'm thirsty and i have to drink or i'm hungry and i have to eat
00:36:37.540i just need to express myself so i wake up and it's i'm autopilot get me to the coffee shop so
00:36:43.800i could start writing and then i almost feel like a sense of relief i just wrote 600 words okay i
00:36:49.680could take a break now and get on the treadmill do you and once you discover this about yourself
00:36:53.800you can manipulate yourself by forcing yourself to become obsessed with something so i recently
00:36:59.480have taken up the project of trying to revive my dormant high school french after 30 years
00:37:05.960you know i took it in high school and i've forgotten it you know for for three decades
00:37:09.640and my wife signed us up for this app called duolingo where you you we work on your foreign
00:37:14.120language skills so what i've done is i'm trying to force myself to be obsessed with it so i'm
00:37:18.840getting i'm trying forcing myself to read books in french and watch tv shows in french and listen
00:37:23.240to podcasts in French and do it all as thoroughly as I possibly can, because once that snowball
00:37:29.880starts rolling, then eventually it'll start feeding on itself in my mind.
00:37:34.120So you have to start finding ways to make yourself obsessed with things in order to
00:37:50.780Ah, je pense que mon accent est très pauvre et je peux que tu ne comprendes moi si j'essaie, mais peut-être à quelle heure, je ne sais pas, le temps pour finir le podcast.
00:38:13.320well you're very kind let me let me uh for even playing along let me just uh some or translate
00:38:20.460what you just said uh i think that my accent is very poor and i'm not sure how much time we have
00:38:27.280for us to to do this uh if i could just do one small correction forget yes please the the t in
00:38:34.420it's accent not accent so the t is silent but otherwise uh but i was trying to do my liaison
00:38:43.720with the t and the a at the end uh i see okay now i can't remember what i said
00:38:49.340but that's okay i mean listen the fact that you've got the self-assuredness to even
00:38:54.320try it listen i speak fluent french and when i'm asked to go on french shows i hesitate
00:39:00.240because academic life has been in English.
00:39:04.160So I don't know how to say epistemological empathy.
00:39:23.820I never could have imagined that this was the story.
00:39:28.440Well, I wouldn't say threw me for a loop, but I was very – I did learn a ton writing this book.
00:39:34.640And I had known some of the outlines of the story but not a lot of the detail about some things.
00:39:40.520For example, the American Revolution started out as a fight between the colonists and parliament.
00:39:47.220It was not between the colonists and the king.
00:39:49.380And the legal theory – now, as a lawyer, as a constitutional lawyer, I was interested in the legal and constitutional theories behind the revolution.
00:39:56.340And it was really this constitutional fight over Parliament's authority in the colonies, and it was really only in 1776 that the Americans gave up asking the king to protect them against Parliament and decided that he was never going to do that and that the only open route for them was to declare independence.
00:40:17.340And I also found a lot of aspects of the Declaration that I had read many, many times that I'd found new insights into.
00:40:26.820For example, at the end of the Declaration, it says these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.
00:40:35.360Why is that phrase ought to be in there?
00:40:37.880That sounds kind of odd to a modern lawyer.
00:40:41.000We don't usually use terms like that nowadays.
00:40:42.960And the answer is that in 1766, Parliament passed a law called the Declaratory Act, in which Parliament claimed that it had authority to legislate for the colonists in all cases whatsoever.
00:40:55.460And the language it used, it said, Parliament has and of right ought to have the power to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.
00:41:02.780So the Americans are turning that phrase around and sort of slapping Parliament in the face with its own language.
00:41:08.680And I thought that was really interesting.
00:41:10.360And it's an aspect of the Declaration that I don't think anybody else has written about before.
00:41:14.260So there were a number of little things like that that jumped out at me that were new.
00:41:18.940Mostly what I really wanted to do was to say things that I had been storing away for many years as a student of the Declaration.
00:41:28.300And, you know, you read this book and they have this mistake in it.
00:41:31.220You read that book and it's got that mistake in it.
00:41:33.040And finally I had the opportunity to set the accounts straight.
00:41:38.680after all this time nice i often ask people uh both in formal settings but even just kind of
00:41:45.840hanging around with friends if you had 10 historical uh figures that you could invite to
00:41:51.060your ultimate uh party who would they be now i could ask you that or maybe we can adapt it
00:41:56.800slightly out of all of the founding fathers you have one individual that you could go for
00:42:03.280tete-a-tete one-on-one with who would you choose and why oh easy it's easy to answer that question
00:42:09.460be thomas jefferson i've been i've been obsessed with thomas jefferson since i was in ninth grade
00:42:13.040and it's kind of a funny story so we you know i we didn't have a lot of money when i was growing up
00:42:17.920and so we would go to these if we found something in the newspaper where there was something going
00:42:22.320on that was interesting that was free we would go to it and we found out that there that thomas
00:42:25.940jefferson was going to be giving a speech in a town near where we lived uh it was actually a guy
00:42:31.200named clay jenkinson who does a show where he dresses up like thomas jefferson and he
00:42:35.440gives a speech and he answers questions from the audience and we went and by the time the show was
00:42:40.100over i was i was deeply in love and i've never i've never been out of love with jefferson i think
00:42:44.340he's an endlessly fascinating creature and um so i would definitely want him there whether or not
00:42:49.940we would speak french is an is another question i i rather suspect that my french is only slightly
00:42:57.920worse than his he was was he ambassador to french he was he was and and he actually um i joke about
00:43:05.960his french not being great his his teacher was scottish and so he is said to have spoken french
00:43:11.300with a scottish accent um fortunately one of the podcasts that i listen to coffee break french uh
00:43:17.760the narrator is himself scottish so i am hoping to have the same lousy scottish accent to my french
00:43:24.380that Jefferson had. But here's an interesting tidbit. So late in life, when he was in retirement,
00:43:28.960Jefferson translated a book by a French author named Destoute de Tracy. It's a book on economics,
00:43:35.880and it's basically a defense of Adam Smith. And Jefferson thought it was important enough
00:43:41.360that he translated it into English for the American audience. And, you know, Jefferson
00:43:46.420does not get enough credit as a defender of economic freedom and laissez-faire. He really
00:43:52.560was a very strong advocate of laissez-faire. And people today say, well, you know, he hated cities
00:43:57.860and factories, so he wasn't really a capitalist. On the contrary, Jefferson was very much a defender
00:44:02.460of economic liberty, to the point where he would take it upon himself to translate this entire
00:44:06.820book on economics. I think that's a really interesting note to his life that is overlooked
00:44:13.320a lot of the time. Again, that speaks to an earlier point I mentioned when I said, what was it in the
00:44:17.920water that made these guys so special you could again can you imagine now a typical politician
00:44:23.740having sort of the intellectual chops to say hey in my free time i'd like to translate this french
00:44:30.640economist's work never right i am i am reminded of the british politician who once said that0.97
00:44:36.320american politicians are so dumb they have to have ghostwriters for their own memoirs0.66
00:44:40.640well i know i know of a few gavin newsome who uh that that story might fit well uh what are some1.00
00:44:50.440things that you hope to accomplish i mean do you already have a vision i mean i know that
00:44:55.020right now this just came out i think actually this one came out one week last month yeah may
00:45:00.3205th mine came out may 12th uh do you already have sort of a planned out trajectory here are the next
00:45:06.680three stories that I'd like to tell in these books? Or do these kind of come up in your mind
00:45:11.260organically? How does that process go? Well, so first of all, I should say it's bad luck to talk
00:45:16.040about a book until it's done. But this is going back to what we were just talking about. One of
00:45:21.720my French projects is I've been working lately on translating the poetry of Edmond Rostand,
00:45:27.600the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. He published three volumes of lyric poetry that has never
00:45:34.280been translated into English before. And so as part of my practice, I've been working on that,
00:45:40.240and I'm trying to put together a manuscript of that, and I might go ahead with that. But otherwise,
00:45:45.020as far as my legal and historical writing, no, I don't have any specific plans at present. I have
00:45:49.780some vague ideas, but the problem is writing about the Declaration of Independence is very hard,
00:45:55.520because how many books are there on the Declaration? I mean, there's tons, and coming up
00:46:00.000something new to say can be very challenging and if i were to write about the the constitution of
00:46:04.960the united states for instance which is the obvious next step i would want to find something
00:46:09.040new and original in my approach i also have been working on a number of pieces on state constitutions
00:46:17.760which is a fascinating subject because very few scholars have done the historical research about
00:46:23.680the origins of provisions of state constitutions and especially the arizona constitution where i
00:46:29.120live. Ours is a very recent one. It was written in 1910. And it has a lot of really unusual and
00:46:35.640interesting aspects to it. So I've been writing a series of scholarly articles about that. And
00:46:40.900maybe someday that might make a book. I don't really know. How much if one were to look at all
00:46:46.74050 state constitutions to conduct a content analysis of how much overlap in their foundational
00:46:55.320content there is versus to your point unique things that are found in the arizona constitution
00:47:00.060what would i mean i i know you you've you've probably not done that exact analysis but just
00:47:04.340off the top of your head is it mostly the same stuff with slight little changes yeah yeah it is
00:47:10.160because we're it's not only is it 50 state constitutions but a lot of them have had numerous
00:47:15.180constitutions over the years and they borrow stuff from their previous iterations and then
00:47:19.700they overlap and copy from each other and so it's a it's a very rich history of a lot of borrowing
00:47:25.460To take one example, I wrote an article recently about the eminent domain provisions of the Arizona Constitution,
00:47:32.700which was it was borrowed from Washington, Missouri, New York, Ohio.
00:47:38.960And and those were developed over the many years and so forth.
00:47:42.980And so it's a very rich history there.
00:47:46.680And, you know, they in between 1865 and 1900, almost every state in the Union wrote a new constitution.
00:47:53.860so that amounts to a revolution and yet it's a revolution that most historians overlook we tend
00:48:00.060to think of just having had one revolution but in that sense you know our state governments are
00:48:05.080where most of the power still resides and you're talking about a lot of change over the over time
00:48:10.220so there is a lot of overlap but there's also a lot of really interesting development and a lot
00:48:14.840of new ideas that have been incorporated in there as we face new challenges to take one example the
00:48:20.180Arizona Constitution contains the private affairs clause, which says government may not intrude into
00:48:25.980your private affairs. Well, there's a number of reasons why that was written. One of them was to
00:48:32.040try and hold off the movement for the income tax. You're just talking about taxes. One of the
00:48:36.920concerns about the income tax when that idea was being floated was that it would require you to
00:48:41.520submit a report to the government every year about where your money comes from and what you spend it
00:48:45.300on and that that violates your right to privacy and a lot of people were outraged by that and so
00:48:50.460the arizona and washington constitutions include this provision promising that the government will
00:48:54.580never do that oh well do you ever foresee could there be a cataclysmic movement a cataclysmic
00:49:04.240agent of change that comes along i'm not gonna i dare not say it returns us to 1913 pre-income tax
00:49:12.220But that really alters the way people view the inherent features of what constitutes fair taxation.
00:49:19.960Or once we've reached where we are, it's path dependent never to go back in the other direction.
00:49:26.080Oh, you've offered me a false alternative because I do think it's possible for us to fix these problems, but not through a cataclysmic response.
00:49:35.460It has to be a slow progressional change.
00:49:38.900Because a cataclysmic change, like the American Revolution, the reason why we celebrate the American Revolution is because it's so rare for things to work out as well as that did.
00:49:47.560And a cataclysmic change is usually very, very bad.
00:49:51.000Much more often, the Saturn of revolution devours its own children as with the French Revolution.
00:49:58.280But yes, actually there are a number of states that are currently working on plans to eliminate the income tax and to try and adopt a much more rational tax system.
00:50:09.760Arizona a few years ago adopted a flat tax in the state.
00:50:13.880So we are working on trying to solve these problems, but they have to be solved slowly.
00:50:20.020And to go back to your very first question, ultimately, the only real solution is to cure
00:50:26.200ourselves of the altruistic, collectivistic notion that it is your obligation as a citizen
00:50:32.640to labor for the benefit of other people and to instead embrace the individualistic idea that
00:50:38.620you have the right to pursue your own happiness in peace and safety.