Hello everyone. Welcome to this interview of the Lotus Cetus. I'm very pleased to be interviewing

today, Ryan McMacon from the Mesa's Institute and he is the chief editor of the Institute.

Ryan, thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed today.

It's great to be with you today. Awesome. So I'm a classical liberal and a very historically conscious one.

And I think it's good to talk to another person who identifies broadly within that camp.

So I would like to ask you to set, to set some order in the conceptual chaos, because

right now, especially in culture wars and in social media, there are people who use terms

like liberalism, classical liberalism, modern liberalism, progressism, minarchism, they constantly use these terms.

Conservatism is another term.

I don't think that they know what they mean, or at least I think that they're using frequently

these terms in a way that is conceptually untied to their historical meaning.

So I would like to ask you to tell me how you understand these notions and how do you

understand the history of the movement?

Well, when I talk, when I use these terms, I'm generally drawing upon a historian that

we value a lot at the Mises Institute

where I am, and that's a historian named Ralph Raco. And I recently edited a book by him,

which was essentially a history of political thought. And so he uses, he uses, in fact,

a similar term to you, right, about conceptual chaos, right?

Because if we're going to take a historical view of these sorts of terms,

we have to use terms that don't change very much over time.

Otherwise, it makes no sense.

If we're trying to apply the term conservative today

...