This is going to sound like an accusation, but that's because it's part of my biggest broad source of skepticism of him as a public intellectual. It seems like on a huge range of issues, from human nature, to free will, to X-risks, to animal rights, to land use, to immigration, to civil rights, Caplan holds the view most convenient to anarcho-capitalism that he can plausibly defend (and occasionally view I think are quite hard to plausibly defend). This doesn't indicate any specific view, again most of his views are at least plausible and I agree with many of them, but as a trend it's hard to ignore. Given this, I was wondering if you could ask for examples of views he holds that are most inconvenient for his politics, especially if there are reasonably plausible, more convenient alternatives that he nonetheless rejects on consideration. If not, or maybe in addition, I was wondering if he could comment on the general trend - for instance if he thinks that there is enough of a common element to all of these views that their combination is independently plausible without invoking bias.

He doesn't publish to journals much, right? How would he run a journal to maximise positive impact/ such that he would publish in it? 

I would be interested in hearing more from Caplan about "stable totalitarianism", but not if it's just going to be a retread of the abstract concept that stable totalitarianism seems bad, what if Stalin had lived forever, etc.  Some questions I'd be interested in:

• Is Caplan worried by any of the specific technologies that might make stable totalitarianism more likely?  Besides life-extension medical technology, we also have things like:
  • LLM-powered censorship
  • other AI-powered surveillance tech like facial recognition and gait tracking, or potential AI-powered advancements in lie detection or persuasion/propaganda
  • recent progress in literal mind-reading via MRI, and other neurotech
  • "social credit" systems, "central bank digital currencies", etc, that could be abused to surveil and control people's financial lives
     
• Does Caplan see more risk of stable totalitarianism arising from:
  • The existing dominant international alliance (USA + Europe + Japan + etc) kind of drifting more and more into a situation of global control and totalitarianism over time? (slowly implementing more things like CBDCs and pervasive censorship, perhaps spurred by the legitimate desire to control dangerous technologies like AI and biotech!)
  • Some individual powerful country (like China, or the USA after a very bad election) going totalitarian and then somehow extending that system to the rest of the world?
  • Some relatively small country, which doesn't currently have lots of military power or influence, just innovates a new type of government which is very oppressive but nonetheless economically outcompetes liberal democracy in the long run?  (It's my impression that this is kind of how fascism seemed in WW2, and communism in the early cold war... in the beginning, people were legitimately worried that these totalitarian systems might just be more productive ways of running an economy, even though they were antithetical to human freedom.  In the same way that modern China's government more capable and better-organized than a simple strongman dictatorship, is Caplan worried that it's possible to somehow bolt together prediction markets + social credit systems + corporate best practices, or whatever, and outcompete the democracies?)
     
• What does Caplan think we can do to make totalitarianism less likely?
  • Preventative bans / regulation of specifically worrying technologies?
  • Trying to deliberately develop OTHER technologies which make totalitarianism harder (like, idk, the internet or bitcoin or etc), or to develop technologies that make the privacy/security tradeoff of surveillance technologies less bad?
  • Trying to reform our existing, free societies to make them generally stronger, more prosperous, and more resilient against abuses?
  • Just maintaining CONSTANT VIGILANCE against bad political actors, and trying not to vote them into power?
  • Doing more EA-style research into the nature of stable totalitarianism, to map out the risks?

Have his views on AI changed at all in the last year. He didn't really think it was gonna be a top priority in the next 20 years. Does he still agree with that take (I can find the quote if you care).

The 2016 Caplan-Yudkowsky debate (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_my_respo.html)  fizzled out, with Bryan not answering Eliezers last question. I'd like to know his answer 

Caplan has a lot of kids, wrote a book about why it's a good idea to have kids, and puts a lot of special effort into parenting (ie, teaching his children advanced economics).  To some extent this has been talked about in previous podcasts, but it would be interesting to hear some more from him about the ups and downs of parenting, what his advice would be to prospective parents, etc.

Bryan has forcefully argued for Open Borders, on both moral/deontological and empirical/consequentialist groups. But presumably there is some state of the world that would make him view Open Borders as net unjustified. What does he think is the possible world closest to ours (or real country closest to the US/UK) for which Open Borders is unjustified?

I would be interested to hear Bryan Caplan's take on Georgism (Tyler Cowen for instance thinks it's a bad idea) -- in general Caplan is opposed to pigouvian taxation, despite its appealing efficiency on paper, because Caplan thinks that it's all too easy for government to start calling anything it doesn't like a "negative externality", thus eroding peoples' freedoms.  I can see where he's coming from.  But maybe land value taxes could be a good idea even if we don't jump all the way to "tax everything we can think of that strikes us as a negative externality"?  Georgism is an interesting case of something that's fully supported by economic theory, but also somewhat of a challenge to traditional libertarian ideas of inviolable property rights, so I would love to hear Caplan's libertarian perspective.

I'd be interested in hearing about why he believes in retributivism!

(he mentions being retributivist in this blogpost) 

I'd like to hear about open borders.

• Have his views changed since writing his book?
• Are there cases where he thinks the ideas are not (or less) applicable?
• Empirically, are there modern examples where something close to open borders was tried, and what were the results?