Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliette Sre, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www Adam Smith works.org.

Welcome back. Today on July 6th, 2023. I'm excited to welcome Jeremy Lott to the podcast. He's currently the managing editor of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but he's also written some Adam Smith comics for Adam Smith works. And he's written an impressively wide range of books from a novel about William F. Buckley Jr's Faith to children's books like this one called Growlilocks. You can buy it on Amazon, to comics like Movie Men. Today we're going to be talking about a hodgepodge of topics, but we're going to kind of touch on most of these things, at least I'm really excited and I hope you are too. Welcome to the podcast.

Jeremy Lott 

I'm excited to be here.

Juliette Sellgren

So before we get started, what is the most important thing people my age or my generation should know that we don't?

Jeremy Lott (1.20)

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. So I'm raising two kids. I have a daughter and a son. They're four and two. So I don't know about your generation. I know the one before that, sorry, that comes after the most important thing to me to impart to my children, and that is that if my wife and I were to die in a fiery accident and our finances were a wreck and our kids became orphans or something, and what's at the bare minimum would I want to impart to them? And I think that the three things that are important are a love of learning and confidence and moral restraint. So that's what I'm seeking to pass on,

Juliette Sellgren (2.05)

And I think that kind of, I mean, That's good advice for anyone. I guess it's more of a topic to be familiar with and to have a take on, but I think you could kind of boil that down to general advice for how anyone could and should live a good life. It's figure these three things out.

Jeremy Lott 

Yeah, I think so.

Juliette Sellgren (2.29)

Yeah. Okay. Let's start on a more personal note. You've created a lot of different types of work from what the topic is to the medium and in my eyes, that makes you a major generalist. Listeners, go check out my interview with David Epstein on this topic because I love a good generalist. I like to consider myself a generalist. So I guess my question is,

Jeremy Lott 

I think most good podcasters are generalists.

Juliette Sellgren 

Well, hopefully that makes me a good podcaster then. Did you always know that you wanted to explore different ways of creating things or did that kind of just happen along the way?

Jeremy Lott (3.09)

Yeah, I'm not a planner. My wife is, so it's good to balance that out. But yeah, I mean, I graduated college on accident for instance.

Juliette Sellgren 

What do you mean?

Jeremy Lott (3.28)

If don't do your own credit evaluations, kids, it's a bad idea. Yeah, no, I literally was down doing it. So yeah, this is a great example of how life happened. I was down in LA doing an internship at Reason that I would not have taken had I known I had graduated, because in my mind it was like, and I was wrong about this, but internships were things that you do while you're in college and then you get a job afterwards, words. And so Nick Gillespie, who was the editor reason at the time, had been bugging me to apply for this internship. And I did, and I got it and I went down to LA and then a couple of things that happened at college that were just sort of weird. And so I called up the registrar who was a friend of mine, and I said, Hey, Larry, could you do a credit eval because I think I screwed something up and I want to know exactly what I need to take when I come back. And you could have walked at my school if you were two classes short. And I thought I was four classes short. And he said, well, you should have walked after he did the eval. And he said, and we did a bad job of transferring you in. And so I am going to count this thing in this category and this thing and this category, and where do I send your diploma in courts?

So yeah, there's just a lot of my life that was either badly planned or not planned at all.

Juliette Sellgren 

But look where you are. Turns out, doesn't it? Or turns out well, I guess I forgot a key part of that sentence.

Jeremy Lott (5.12)

It happens. Yeah, I don't know. I just think that there's so much of life that we try to plan and that sometimes that's just not how life wants to go and just go with it.

Juliette Sellgren 

So then I guess, did you have an idea that you wanted to be creating things or?

Jeremy Lott (5.38)

My brain, I feel like I'm just kind of like a normal guy inside of this really big crazy brain that I've never quite understand. That's always creating, that's always doing things, and I'm just alone for the ride. I've gotten better as the years have gone on at steering it in certain directions and that's helped in creating different things. For years, I couldn't do fiction or anything like that because I was awful at dialogue and there's just something that my brain that just wasn't processing that well. And finally I was writing a comic book and one of the guys swore and I went to change that like, well, that's not how I would swear. And then I said, wait a minute. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait. Don't do that because this character is actually talking in a way that you view as distinct from you. And it was just this watershed breakthrough moment. And I realized that, hey, I can do fiction now. And that was, I want to say that was, I'm turning 45 this year. That was maybe my late thirties if not my early forties.

Juliette Sellgren (6.55)

So one of the big questions of 19th century Russian literature, probably wherever there's art, but this is what I've studied, is the question, why art? What drives us to create art and why should we do it? There are generally two sides of this debate. One of them is art is utilitarian. You have to serve a greater purpose. You have to know why you're creating and why you're called to create a thing and what values you want to impose upon it versus art for art's sake. And if it has values and morals embedded in it, then so be it. But that's not why I did it necessarily. So why did you do that?

Jeremy Lott (7.36)

I think there might, let's get the right word, might be the Socratic position where he goes to the poets and whatnot and he says, you obviously have inspiration from the gods. That's his thing. And he goes, explain this to me. And they can't. He's like, artists cannot explain these things. Yeah, I don't know if I look, I don't think it's either or. I think it's both. And I think that sometimes art, it depends on what the art form is and how you're doing it. I mean, write, some of the things I write are kids books. Mine are not very message heavy kids books, but a lot of ones that are successful are, that's fine. I'm knocking that. That's just not, I create. Now that doesn't mean ideas don't go into my kids' books. Growlilocks was sort of kind of me. I've always hated golden mean arguments. And of course, Goldilocks was creator of the frame that we used for golden mean arguments, and so I just flipped it and have a bear coming into a human household and they're trying to do the whole just right thing and the bears. That's insane. So that doesn't mean that ideas don't get into my books, it's, I'm not trying to use it usually to drive a larger moral point.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah, that's also, you just played into one of my biggest irrational fears because I've been pronouncing it growly locks, which I guess doesn't make sense because it's a bear. So Growlilocks makes a lot more sense

Jeremy Lott 

The way it's spelled. I absolutely can see how you would pronounce it growly.

Juliette Sellgren (9.23)

I was trying to type it and I was like, how on earth what? I don't know, but it makes a lot of sense now. It just didn't at the time. I guess you in part of answered this question, but do you have a goal overall with just creating things or does your goal with respect to projects go more on a project by project basis?

Jeremy Lott 

Okay. I mean there are sort of overall benchmarks you want hit right with the kids' books. I want to, how familiar are you with there sort of the self publishing movements right now in books?

Juliette Sellgren 

Not that If you want to elaborate, that would be cool.

Jeremy Lott (10.16)

It's a Facebook group, but it's sort of a moniker or I dunno, that's not the right word at this point, called 20 books to 50 K and was the head of this group was just mathematically saying, I write books on the regular. I dump them on Amazon about once a month and this is how many books I sell on the average per book, per month, per year, et cetera. This is the bump that I get whenever I publish a new book. And he just mathematically worked it out. He said, if I want to make $50,000 a year on average, I need to publish about 20 books and I need, there were a couple other specs, it needs to be right to market, so right to, you're not reinventing a genre or something. And fast publishing, which is close to monthly, if you can pull that off. And I'm not saying I'm doing the books just for money, but it was an intriguing concept to me and I started writing some kids' books and I got some people that I knew from the comic book world to illustrate them for me and we're going to publish a lot of them. And the financial aspect of it obviously is a thing that matters, but I'm also enjoying the heck out of writing them.

Juliette Sellgren 

That's awesome. What has been your favorite thing that you've created, and do you think that that has been the most effective or successful, if you don't mind my asking and why?

Jeremy Lott (12.01)

Favorite thing? No, it's a thing that I just did as an article, but I'm going to turn it into a kid's book. So we will see, this was a long time ago. This was close to 20 years ago, I was writing my first book called In Defense of Hypocrisy, and I would write that at the bar side of a bar and restaurant in Linden, Washington. And it wasn't that frequented, but there were guests that would pop in and out that knew what I was doing. And then there were some out of town people. And I ended up getting into an argument with this girl over the town's dry laws, which I didn't like, but we're not that hard to get around. It was dry on Sunday and I didn't realize, I didn't know who she was with. It was her grandfather. And so then he comes in, he wasn't confronting me at the table, but he was wanting to size me up.

And when he learned that I was a writer of books and stories and whatnot, he sits down and tells me his life story very clearly. I think he was a very old man, and I don't know if he was terminal or something, but my sense is he wanted this story to be told. And so I paid very close attention to the details that I could keep in my head. And then went and wrote it all down very quickly afterwards. And I didn't get his full name. His name was Jack something. And so the title of the piece was, You Don't Know Jack, and it was just his life story. And I published that in the American Spectator, which is one of the places that I've worked. And at some point I'm going to take that story and just have somebody give art to it and turn it into a kid's book as well.

Juliette Sellgren 

That's awesome. Did you have a computer at the time?

Jeremy Lott 

Wish I had a computer. I don't believe I actually had it on me. I think in that case I made a beeline. Normally I would, but for some reason I didn't that day. And so I was like, check please. And I went home and I just typed as fast as I possibly could because I wanted to keep the details fresh.

Juliette Sellgren

Yeah, I got to go check that out, listeners, go check it out. That sounds so cool. Let's turn to your work with Adam Smith, because that's kind of how we got in touch in the first place. I'm not saying that I don't read children's books regularly, except I don't really, I've been checking them out though. That's a long ways away from me though

I'm pretty far from being a parent, so we'll see. But at the open market blog with c e I, there's a series on Smith which highlights his most influential ideas because as we all know, hopefully it's almost Smith's 300th birthday or this summer is his 300th birthday.

Jeremy Lott 

We don't really know when he was born, so we sort of approximate it.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah, I know there are some mass pilgrimages to his grave in Scotland. It's a whole thing. We love celebrating Smith. So I guess along this vein, what do you think Smith's most influential idea has been?

Jeremy Lott (15.40)

He opened up with a division of labor. That's how he opens up the, so his most influential economic idea is that he opens up the wealth of nations. It's an extended argument about the division of labor and how important that is. And I don't think that was entirely unique to him, but he punched it so hard and so long that he made the point and it really had an effect on policy in a lot of different areas. My colleague Ryan Young argued that the reason though that Smith was successful as someone who we care about is because what underlied all of his observations was this idea of empathy. That economics isn't just a study of numbers, it's a study of how humans work together and how they can do it better. And that if he hadn't been a very close observer, observer of human nature and he would not have been able to produce that result.

Juliette Sellgren 

What do you think one of Smith's most underrated or overlooked ideas is? If there's one that comes to mind?

Jeremy Lott (17.02)

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's underrated, but I mean just the story of the name of your podcast where he talks about how science is an antidote to a lot of it's the great antidote to superstition, but these days it's also an antidote to a lot of other things. I don't think that's actually that. I think you've done a good job to make that more well known, but I think that that's not a thing that he had been known for before you started punching it,

Juliette Sellgren 

And you just made a comic about that. Very one. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about the comics? There's a lot of Adam Smith content and there are a lot of scholars, but not a ton of comics. And so you made these with slash four, Adam Smith works and they're pretty impressive. I have been enjoying them, especially the one that relates to my podcast. I guess. What led you to write these and why did you pick the parts that you did?

Jeremy Lott (18.09)

So it was most of the bits that the excerpts were offered to me, Christie Lynn Horpedahl, she is the matriarch behind Adam Smith works, I believe. And a friend of mine who used to work together at the Cato Institute, many, many, many, many moons ago. And she saw that I'd done some comic book work and she wanted to do some Adam Smith comics to commemorate the 300th. And so she got ahold of me and we worked out what we were going to do. And it was that she would come up with the excerpts, I could veto if I didn't like something, but I think I said yes to at least almost all of it. And then I would write a script based on it, and then she would okay that. And then I would take the script two comic book artists that I knew and get them to turn it into a one page comic for AdamSmithWorks. And so we did 10 of those. And the ones that I think worked out the best, well, it was a mix. I liked some of the Paula Richie's. She did a Slice of Life thing, which was basically a modern day version of Adam Smith's mom tucking you into bed. They'd just been to the market. And he's like, well, why was everyone so nice to me? And she says, well, you're cute. That's part of it. But they also wanted my business and how self-interest plays in that.

But the ones that I also like, Doug Curtis did the most of these comics, and the ones where we could do a riff on something celebrity were those were my favorite. And so what we did here with science being the great antidote is we took the famous scene in Monty Python's quest for the Holy Grail where there's the whole, she's a witch, so they're doing this, but it's a different set of things they're accusing her of. And so then the night just goes through and he is like, when you put Mentos in Coke, it fizzes big deal or whatever. And so he proves by science that she's not a witch. And then of course, we had to end with the famous sign off, well, what about the fact that she turned me into a newt, right? And he says, well, you don't look like a newt to me. And he goes, I got better.

Juliette Sellgren (20.46)

Go check it out, listeners. Yeah, I've really been enjoying them. It's fabulous. Plus comics have always kind of intrigued me as a medium, right? First there's this, which I guess I'm asking you about now, is the relationship between the writer and the illustrator. There are two people, but how does that relationship work? What is the dynamic and how does it shape the final product?

Jeremy Lott (21.17)

Yeah, I mean, any writer of comic books worth his salt needs to, and this almost should go without saying, but sometimes it needs to be said, realize that comics is a visual medium, that yes, words are important, but they absolutely, or if they're just standing on their own, they're going to fall flat. There was a famous comic book writer named Chuck Dixon who I was talking about sort of the pros and comic books and how it's not very good typically. And he countered by sending me a page that had no words on it. And I'm like, he goes, I don't understand. And he said, A writer wrote that. A writer said, here are the things that need to happen on this page. That page wouldn't have come into existence without a writer, even though there are no words on that page. And that was an interesting and humbling moment for me. But the idea is use the visual as much as you possibly can. And the other thing is that it really, collaborations vary. You can do it differently. In this case, we had full but not ridiculously detailed scripts. So all the three artists could put a little bit of themselves into the pages, and I think that's very important as well.

Juliette Sellgren 

So then I guess, what is your process? How do you pick what works best as a word versus when to lean on the visual? Lean into the visual maybe?

Jeremy Lott (22.57)

Yeah. Oh boy. I think we're almost at the Socrates. And where does your inspiration come from thing? Yeah, I mean, part of it is you do it a bit and you make mistakes. You do things that are too wordy. Well, one of the things I will say is that, so I do, when I'm doing a full 20 page comic book, I do a script. I send it to the artist, and any questions are answered along the way. If they're answered, the artist then will send it back to me, usually without the art, without the dialogue or anything else. And almost every time I then revise my script downward. I shorten everything. I make it less, not a lot less, but a little bit less just because I want to make more room for their art. And so I think that gets a little bit at your question, but I don't think it's a fully answerable one.

Juliette Sellgren (24.02)

It's funny, actually, as you were saying that it hit me when I was in high school and professors would say, you have to write this essay analyzing one page, write me eight pages analyzing this one page of novel, of great book. And I would always roll my eyes a little bit. I was like, there is no way that the author put that much thought into it. I can't imagine someone writing a book and saying, well, someday someone's going to analyze this line by line. So I must write knowing that on every single line there should be some sort of little thing to pick up on. And then I kind of realized that the reason why we do analysis, and I guess the irony of me asking you to answer these questions with me being a consumer of your work and you being the creator of your work, is that this is, I analyze and readers and consumers of media analyze basically to understand what is implicitly known and the image that's in the author's head. Because the more you analyze it, the better you get the picture that they were thinking about when they translated it onto paper or movie or whatever. 

Jeremy Lott 

There's also, especially when you're dealing with something with a different era, there are things that the author says while not meaning to say them, right, because there's a lot of things that are just assumed, and the assumptions will tell you almost as much as what isn't said, or sorry, what isn't said can tell you as much as what is,

Juliette Sellgren (25.40)

Yeah, especially when I think about Smith, the fact that he talks a lot about sympathy and now sympathy. When we read Smith saying sympathy, it means more empathy than it means sympathy today. Even that distinction tells you a lot about, I don't know, the transformation of language, but also just the way that people talked and thought at that time. And there's a flavor. But it is funny because to ask you to answer these questions about the things you do when you might not consciously be aware of most of it, and even if you are, it's just that's my job. That's my job as a reader. I don't know. It's a little silly thing I realized. Let's talk about Movie Men. A little bird called the internet told me that you actually crowdfunded this project. So can you tell us a bit about how you did that, why you did that, and the project itself?

Jeremy Lott (26.48)

Well, how is the easiest? Well, okay, the how of funding, it was the easiest part, which is I know a lot of comic book people. I'm just very involved in that world. And so when I created a comic book, I just told a lot of 'em, Hey, I did this comic. And that basically got me within inches of the finish line right there, because I think we got a hundred backers or something like that. It wasn't a huge number, but it didn't have to be because crowdfunding, the way it works is you can buy in at different levels, and a lot of people threw in some significant money. And so it got us enough to fund the printing and whatnot of the book. But to back up the creation of movie men was, I used to be a complete movie nut. I mean, I would go to movies. I think I worked it out, so I average like 60 movies in the theater a year.

So there was a lot of observation that happens during, because you're not always just watching movies, you're watching the theater, you're watching the people. And so Regal had changed their uniforms, so they kind of looked like dorky X-Men costumes. And I was like, huh, that's weird. And I was like, wouldn't it be funny if they were really superheroes? And so I was just scratching my head about that. And then when you go to a movie, usually an usher with a glow on will come in at some point and check the exit to make sure that it's closed so that people aren't sneaking things or people in. And at one point it occurred to me they also were supposed to do a cursory look at the theater and make sure everything looks okay. And I said, well, wouldn't it be funny if one of 'em found a bomb while he did that? Right? And these things just finally melded together in my head. And I told the story of a bunch of kids that work in the theater, this kid he named Comb, he's one of the workers there, and he goes in to check the exit and he sees what he thinks is a bomb, and he yells Bomb. And then he gets trampled by people running over him to get out the theater.

And he wakes up just in time for it to explode, except that he's still standing there. The theater is still standing there, and he turns around and the dinosaur is missing from the screen. And so what it is, is a reality bomb has gone off and it managed to knock all the beds off the screens in the theater, and they're spread out all over town. And these kids are just like, well, what do we do? And they just sort of being kids, they just run into the problem and hope for the best. And they find out that there is the secondary effect of this, which is that when they go to confront these creatures, weapons from the movies appear in their hands and they're able to do battle with them and put them back in the screens. And so that's the sort of silly setup concept for Movie Men that I use to, yeah, so that's the first issue of movie men is that, and then the second issue, which will be released at some point is a crossover with another character that some other creators made called a sportman.

Juliette Sellgren (30.18)

Interesting. That's a fun plot. Listeners, go check it out. There's so much stuff. There's so much content to supplementary, that's not really a word. You know what I mean? Listen to supplement to also consume after this because you produce so much. That's so awesome. That's so funny. Wow. I was wondering how on earth you could know that. I mean, I guess maybe you don't need to watch that many movies to know that the people who check the aisles and stuff also check the exits, but if you're seeing five movies a month, 60 a year, that cost a pretty penny. Did you try to use those exits to get in?

I w3as like, how did he know that?

Jeremy Lott 

I'll say that. I saved money by, I often didn't get concessions, so it was just a ticket price.

Juliette Sellgren 

So you sneak in a bag of lollipops. I had a friend who would sneak in a bag of 200 dumb dumbs every single time. It's great.

Jeremy Lott 

Yeah, no, I had friends that would sneak in alcohol and occasionally a can would get loose and roll down the aisle. That was fun.

Juliette Sellgren 

So children's books. How did you make the transition and why did you do that? How has the experience been?

Jeremy Lott (31.37)

I mean, a lot of it is, I have two young children now, and I'm reading all them these children's books, and I've always liked children's books, but I didn't read them as regularly for many years, obviously. And just their similarity to comic books, it occurred to me. And when that happened, I realized, Hey, I could rope in some comic book artists and do children's books. I don't see why not. And so then I sat down and started trying to think of ideas for children's books, and the Growlilocks idea came to me, which was, what if it was Goldilocks? But the Reverse, basically.

So the first series that I'm putting out, it's four books and it's Growly Locks and the three Humans that was released two months ago. It's the Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf. And that was released a week ago. And then about a month following, you're going to see the trouble with Golden Eggs and the Tortoise and the Dare, and they're all based on fables. It's called, the series is called Fantastic Fables that I just sort of twist in some way. And so you could look at that a little bit as using training wheels, using existing stories and just changing them rather than trying to create something from the ground up. But I've also got some other unique things in the works as well.

Juliette Sellgren 

And it's the bones you have to pick with Goldilocks and other things that already exist. I mean, it's a good way to get your frustrations out. You say, I don't know if that would work in real life.

Jeremy Lott (33.23)

Well, the three feral pigs and the vegan wolf, I have a father-in-law named Len, and he used to work on the farm, and he would always talk about how much he hated working with pigs and how just vicious these things are. And I think he got attacked a few times. They're

Juliette Sellgren 

Aggressive, aggressive pigs,

Jeremy Lott (33.43)

And they're even worse. So those are farm pigs. Those are ones that are not that aggressive really. But you look at wild pigs in nature and they're a lot worse. And so I was like, well, what if you just flipped the three little pigs and the big bad wolf? What if it's the wolf that's being pursued by the pigs? And so I told that story. So just things like that. Sometimes you can flip it easily or sometimes you take the existing story and add something, or you never just retell the same story. You always do something at least somewhat different.

Juliette Sellgren (34.25)

So okay, let's go back to Adam Smith a little bit because I think especially actually after this kind of context and conversation, this might flow better, but something that has been a common theme is the state of the world right now. I guess maybe that's always something that people care about, but it seems recently that a lot of people really think it's going downhill. And a lot of these people that I talk to are policy people. And so coming from you, your answer might be a little different or there might be a little nuanced different perspective coming from a more creative culture oriented side maybe. Well, so back to basically the open market blog and the stuff about Smith recently, there was one part that was about how Adam Smith has influenced America, and maybe I'm just feeling a little patriotic because it just was the 4th of July, but I like the sound of that. So I guess how much has Adam Smith influenced America? And on the darker note, are we losing sight of that? Is it as bad as people say?

Jeremy Lott (35.36)

There's a lot of threads you just dropped there. I know, sorry. Okay. Adam Smith's influence on America is undeniable. You look at our founders, Jefferson talked about how this is, and I'm paraphrasing, but this is one of the greatest works of political economy ever created Washington read it, quite a few. They read quite deeply and dismissed ideas, though they didn't always enact them immediately. This idea though, that honestly they were less influenced by free trade, though that mattered than they were about some of his other ideas about governance. And also Smith did, it helped that Smith counseled Britain when he could, that you should either let the colonies go or make them part of a union where they are co-equals with us basically. And so the founders appreciated that. So a lot of ideas on free markets in America compared to the rest of the world has typically had much freer markets over a longer period that comes from Smith. The ideas from trade that eventually predominated here, but not right away, came from Smith. There's a huge economics profession here. And I think that that wouldn't be the case if Smith hadn't very much influenced how economics, he made sure that economics was more of a social science. And I think that that has made economics more appealing to a lot of people over time as well.

Juliette Sellgren

I like that. Are we losing sight of that?

Jeremy Lott (37.30)

How bad is America? Yeah. Look, I think that when you're looking at decline, the thing that you need to worry about is there's a saying, and I don't know if it's true, but it might be true, which is that politics is downstream of culture. And what you're seeing in our, I don't mean from Hollywood. I'm seeing social media, there's this in the academy or whatever, it's a very censorious moment where you have creators who are often very afraid to create, to do the things that they think that they ought to be doing because they're worried they'll offend someone. And that's having a bad effect on just fewer good things are being created because of that. And I don't know, I couldn't quantify this, but I just about guarantee you fewer good things in the culture are going to mean fewer good things in our politics and our policies. So I don't think that one's as directly tied to Smith as the other, but I do think it's important.

Juliette Sellgren (38.47)

Yeah, I mean, I think Adam Smith might kind of tie in to more how do you get it back or how do we redirect in an orientation that we prefer? And maybe that's more, you have to look at the Theory of Moral Sentiments. How do we relate to one another? How do we empathize with one another and how do we find meaning and human connection? And I think that that is kind of Smith set us up and Smith can save us. I don't know if we entirely need to be saved, but Smith has a lot of answers. Well,

Jeremy Lott (39.23)

We could use some help. Let's just say that at the very least, we could use some help. And Adam Smith reading deeply into the writings of Adam Smith will cause you to be a more thoughtful, empathetic human being. And I read some of Smith before this, but I'm reading more now because I really think that there's a lot there and there's going to be a lot more coming for me in terms of Adam Smith comics.

Juliette Sellgren 

Awesome. I'm looking forward to that. You mentioned some of the other stuff you have coming up soon, but is there anything else we have to look for you from you in the future?

Jeremy Lott (40.07)

I mean, look, I'm going to be publishing about a book a month for the next year at least. It could go for much longer than that, and it's going to start out as kids books, but there'll be other things. I want to do a book called Tables and Leadership, for instance. And I dunno, I think though if you plan too far in advance in these things, you're going to miss some things. So maybe I'll also write a book called Against Planning.

Juliette Sellgren 

You're going to let life Happen a little bit.

Jeremy Lott 

A little bit.

Juliette Sellgren (40.39)

Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and listeners go and check out all of this content that Jeremy has produced. It is so awesome, and also just awe inspiring, the sheer breadth of content. You'll have something that you enjoy. I promise. I have one last question for you. Okay. What is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Jeremy Lott (41.11)

Okay, so there's the thing where if you got a time machine, what would you go back and do? And everyone says they'd kill Hitler or whatever. I'm not saying I wouldn't do that, but one of the things I would do is I would go back and I would slap the early version of me and say, mushrooms are awesome.

Juliette Sellgren 

Interesting. Elaborate.

Jeremy Lott (41.31)

Yeah. I used to hate taste of mushrooms because kids have texture issues sometimes, but I think I was just being a little punk. And mushrooms, sauteed Mushrooms are a very good thing to eat. They're

Juliette Sellgren 

Like vessels for flavor and it's like a vegetarian snail. I'm going to say it.

Jeremy Lott 

There you go. Okay, now it's out there.

Juliette Sellgren (42.01)

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.