Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. I am your host, Rafael

Manglal, and I am so happy to be joined by my wonderful colleague Tal Forkang, who is a legal

policy fellow here at the Manhattan Institute,

someone whose work I've been following since he was in college,

although we've already had this conversation on the podcast.

Welcome back to the show, sir.

Thanks. It's always great to be talking to you.

So I don't know if you know,

but we've been doing a kind of new series on the podcast called Who We Are,

where we're kind of taking deeper dives into some of the core policy issues that Manhattan Institute scholars and city journal contributors are kind of steeped in.

And I was really excited about doing that series. I'm really excited about having you on to talk about

your work, which I think is very, very interesting and

different from almost anything anyone does here. And so I want to get into that in a little bit.

But first, I just want to start with like, tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you

end up at the Manhattan Institute? This is kind of a weird gig as someone who's been doing it

for over a decade. And I'm always interested

to just know, like, was your path here circuitous? Were you just always a policy wonk?

Like, what happened? Well, it's weird in the best way, this job that we get to do.

Yeah. And this wonderful institution that employs us. I still, I pinch myself every day that I get, I get paid to do the work that I do. Um, and we'll talk a little bit about the substance. I'm sure some of our critics have the same question. Yes, that's true. And some conspiracy theories, by the way. Uh, don't read the comments. That's the, that's the moral. Never do. Never do. I was interested in political theory when I was in college and I tried to connect the big ideas of political theory to the debates that my classmates and friends and I would have in class more frequently around the lunch table about the policy issues around us.

And connecting big ideas to mundane policy disagreements was always something I enjoyed doing,

always asking the question, why, why are we arguing about this thing?

I'm trying to

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