 It is great to welcome to the program today, Yaron Brooke and Rob Larson. Yaron has joined us before and is chairman of the Ein Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brooke show on YouTube. Rob also a returning guest, Rob Larson is economics professor and author of Bit Tirents and Capitalism Versus Freedom. And indeed today we will be talking about liberty and freedom, relevant always, but particularly right now. What is the system of freedom and liberty? Is it capitalism or is it socialism? And to get us started, let's go to Rob, Rob, give us give us a sense of your perspective on which system is the system of freedom and maybe a little bit about why. Yeah. Thanks, David. So it's great to be talking about freedom here today. And I think it's always good to start just to think about the value of freedom, of course, to each of us. So I always tell people the value of freedom is whatever it is. You like to do with your time and your limited human lifespan, you know. So whether you're individually into playing the guitar or Pokemon collecting or Star Trek themed cosplay events, whatever it might be, that's the value of freedom to you. So what can we say about it? Well there's a number of traditions here in different views. One thing the philosophers have done historically is to sort of take the idea of freedom or liberty and divide it into sort of two separate domains, broadly speaking. So one version of that would be negative freedom, which we usually refer to as meaning an individual being free from outside coercion by some sort of institution or outside power. So when you're free to choose your career and no one dictates to you what you have to do with your life, we call that negative freedom or your freedom from outside coercion, we sometimes say. Alternatively, figures like Isaiah Berlin and some others have found use in elaborating on a concept of positive freedom or positive liberty or rights where we look at more what you're free to do and how much you're able to enjoy or take advantage of opportunities that are available to you. So are you free to do something like consume health care that the economy produces or something like that? And of course there's divergent views about that. I'm sure you're wrong. We'll want to address that too. But the sort of traditional picture is when we look at economic systems, if we look at, for example, capitalism system broadly characterized by markets and private ownership of most property. The traditional view is that capitalism provides that negative freedom because you're free to choose what products you want to consume or your career and so on and no one dictates that to you. And on the other hand, it doesn't provide positive freedom. Of course, capitalism doesn't come with a right to or freedom to consume health care or housing or something like that. But in my books and my work, I'll kind of give away the big message. So trigger warning, parents' caution, spoiler alert. I argue that modern capitalism doesn't really provide either of these forms of freedom. We agree on the positive freedom part. But that negative freedom, I would suggest, gets impinged pretty frequently by the level of concentration that big firms have in some markets and the strong concentration of wealth that we see historically into what amounts to a sort of upper class within capitalism. And you could argue that their major decisions that change our lives and, in some cases, control markets could be a violation of our negative freedom from outside powers acting upon us. Now, of course, the alternative system could be a form of socialism. And again, we try to be specific when we talk about this stuff as much as we can. So socialism traditionally is worker control of the means of production in some form. So you go to work, and you and your coworkers have access to the information that management today has about the conditions the firm is facing. And you work together with your coworkers to decide what will happen, and you send representatives to meet with the other industries that you articulate with, and you manage production with our big economic units of today, which we need to efficiently produce the goods and services we all rely on. We can manage that any more as it were democratic workplace-based fashion rather than having large firms and powerful individuals being charged with it. And again, there's a lot to say about this. And many people will suggest that socialism means government control over every part of your life. But one thing I like to turn to is if we look at the idea of totalitarianism and thought control, things that people naturally fear from authoritarian institutions, the definitive English language writer on those subjects is George Orwell. And George Orwell famously wrote The Road to Weekend Period and some other places that capitalism makes freedom impossible, as he put it, and the only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of socialism, justice and liberty. So there's some different ways to chop up the subject. So Iran, we've heard from Rob a couple of things. We've heard him first address why he does not believe that capitalism is a system of freedom and liberty. But we've also heard him assert that at least in some forms, socialism can be that system. So let me turn it over to you so you can kind of introduce us to your perspective. Sure. So obviously, I disagree with almost everything Rob said, at least as introduction of freedom, kind of positioned it, I think, properly, historically. Freedom is, and we can think of this as, what did immigrants in the 19th century coming to America think when they were coming to the land of the free, when they were motivated by freedom? What immigrants today coming to the US and immigrants still come to the US think when they come here that they're going, you know, they want more freedom. What does that mean to them? And I think overwhelmingly what that means to them is that they get to choose their path in life, that they may get to make decisions about career, about, you know, about consumption, about where to live, how to live. It is the freedom to pursue your values that or the ability to pursue your values, free of coercion, free of authority, free of violence, free of somebody dictating to you what you can and cannot do. So it's both positive and negative, right? It is the freedom from coercion. It is the absence of coercion that makes it possible for you to go out and pursue your values. And by definition is the system of freedom from coercion. Capitalism in my mind, capitalism is that system in which the government does one thing and one thing only. It frees us from coercion. It does not coerce and it does not allow us to coerce each other to use force against one another. It catches the crooks and the criminals and the robbers and the thieves and so on and puts them away. And as a consequence, it really is the only system in human history that is allowed for real freedom, the freedom of individuals to pursue their own life, free of the fear of being coerced, you know, I mean, there's obviously always some criminals in a society so fear isn't zero, but free, but confident that there is an entity that is protecting them. And that is the government and that's the only role in my view of the government. Whereas socialism is the exact opposite. From the end is the system of coercion. And my guess is of the three of us, I'm the only one who's actually lived in a socialist country, a socialist country that actually had the labor union was the largest employer in the country. So it wasn't the state. It was the labor union. And it was the actually it owned the means of production. They owned all of that and I can tell you, it sucked the technical terms. It was poor. It was inefficient. It was unproductive. It did very, very badly economically. I mean, and you're on not to interrupt, but for people who don't know and maybe Rob doesn't know, can you say where that was and what the circumstances were? I was born and raised in Israel and Israel was was basically founded as a socialist country by committed socialist. And until I'd say the early 1980s, the largest employer in the country and the largest owner of the means of production was the labor union, the labor union, Israel that this change in Israel's become quite a bit richer as it has become quite a bit more capitalist, not anywhere close to the way I would like it. But you know, I'll give you an example. I mean, under capitalism, if you want to be a socialist, nobody's going to stop you because they're not going to cross you. They're not going to place barriers on you. If you want to go and start a communal farm, a communal factory, a workers entity, anything like that, you can do it. I think you'll fail. I think you'll be miserable. I think it's it's horrible, but you can do it right under socialism. I can't do what I'm doing right now. I love finance. I run a hedge fund kind of in addition, everything else that couldn't do it. Couldn't start it would be illegal to start it. I couldn't have an employer employee type of business to try to compete with the owner controlled businesses out there would actually go to jail. I guess if I if I competed with those, I think in socialism, socialism by definition, constricts and restrains opportunity. And therefore restrains and constricts individual choice and has no respect for what people produce. That is for private property. OK, so so far, the conversation has, I think, rightly focused mostly on the theoretical, although Iran did introduce this example of Israel, where where he was lived at an earlier point in his life. Maybe now to go back to Rob, you could tell us some of the ways today, examples today in 2020, where you find that capitalism actually restricts freedom and we could use that as a jumping off point to go back to Iran. Right on, for sure. So traditionally, when we look at that negative conception of freedom, we mentioned earlier in which Iran agreed with the idea there is we want to maximize people's realm of personal liberty by limiting how much other institutions can control you and dictate to you and push you around in some manner. I think that's fine. I think the issue here is not recognizing how common those things are in today's modern, large scale commercial capitalism, where we do kind of encounter this stuff pretty frequently. So an example that's relevant to my recent work on the tech industry and the bookbid tyrants, we look a lot at just some basic market economic phenomenon. You know, we make a huge variety of different goods and services in any economic system and the services and goods are different. So why would the markets be identical? And one thing we see in some markets is what we call network effects, especially in tech relevant markets today. So some folks may know network effects, applying certain markets where the value of a good increases as more people use it, which can seem kind of strange. But if you think like consider your telephone, right? If you're the first person with the telephone, great, call yourself, right? It's not very handy. As soon as some other people get on the phone line, now it has some value to you, because you can reach out and communicate with other parties. And so even today, when kids reach 14 or however old they are and their parents get them their first smartphone, that does slightly increase the value of the phone in your pocket, because that's one more party you might potentially be able to reach. And we call this a network effect where we have this strange sort of pattern because of the nature of that market. Well, the thing about network effects, they have a number of ramifications for how they shape markets. One pretty dramatic one is there's a need for technical standards. So if our phones all work in completely different ways, they won't be able to interface and we won't be able to communicate with one another. But this applies to any kind of good that's mediated through networks. So computer operating systems, applications, online search, they all have this network effect associated with them and in the book I go into a lot of detail about the different ways they come out. We tend to see is an unusually strong tendency, just as an example, for monopolization in markets where you end up with one extremely dominant firm because it attracts so many users that when people want to do computing, they look at the option that has the most users. So Facebook is the clearest case. What are you gonna join when you're a young person? A network that has none of your friends on it or the one that has almost all human beings on it. So relatively clear choice, just the nature of those incentives are such that early incumbents in these markets, and there's lots of little wrinkles and details, but the pattern is for the early incumbents of these markets to develop runaway leads and to become monopolists or maybe a sort of an oligopoly situation where you have a small number of extraordinarily large firms. So an example of that might be smartphone operating systems like Google's Android and Apple's iOS. What we tend to see is that what firms have these huge monopolistic market positions regardless of exactly how they acquire them. They have tremendous power over what happens in those markets and a lot of influence over us too. When I update my phone software, it's rare that I read the full entirety terms of service agreement that accompanies it because it's so damn long and it's filled with baffling technical legalese. You'll only understand some of it and we're all busy leading our lives. So we tend to accept those terms of service and also when our mind is, well, if I don't like Apple's terms of service, I could go over to an Android phone that the time it takes to move all of your data and all of your apps and all of your photos and some apps you're gonna have to buy again. These things create conditions and environments where firms have real power over other firms. So Apple uses its control over its app store that lets you choose the apps that your phone has on it. And they're very, I mean, up to a point, they're very open about the fact that they do curate it and they have a variety of criteria that decide whether you may present your app on that phone to these several tens of millions of users of that phone platform or not. And some of those criteria are secrets and some of them are openly stated. These are positions of real power or to Google again, since we mentioned Android, right? Google, its search function is a classic network effect. Google has individualized searches. Everyone knows my search for a term, my search results on Google won't be the same as yours. Well, Google now, I think it's hard to disagree that Google is arguably the most important company. You could argue that it governs the internet today. And when people are worried about a virus or interested in a political candidate or anything else, everyone turns to Google, including me, by the way, it's such a useful service because so many of us use it. It has extremely refined search algorithms because of all the data that our billions of searches have put into it over time. So there's that market aspect where I believe you can show that capitalism allows for real power in the marketplace. And just to say, I think the supply is on a more individual level too. If you're a figure, like just to take a clear case, like Mike Bloomberg is worth 60 odd billion dollars through his semi-monopolistic Bloomberg terminal business. With that, he can peel off one 64th of his worth. It's about a billion bucks and run for president. And yeah, that went down in flames, fine. But he was on every screen in America and every YouTube video. I think the manifestation of power in the marketplace is very clear looking at these facts. And that would, I think, represent real issues as far as our negative freedom and our ability to be free from external power in the marketplace. We agree the state is powerful. That's open and shut. So, Yaron, I'd love to hear you respond to that. I mean, the ways that Rob is describing corporations being able to acquire power, doesn't that in some sense restrict the power of those not in those privileged positions that Rob has described? Well, I don't think freedom has to do with power. Power is a tricky word, has negative connotations, and it's not clear exactly what it means. For example, I think it's really, really important to separate two forms of power. I think it's important to separate economic power from political power. I think they're very different. And one is clearly coercive, and the other is not. Economic power is fundamentally voluntary. It's fundamentally an issue of choice. Now, it is true. Your choices might be limited to having no phone, having an Apple phone, or having an Android phone, or maybe you could go to one of those old flip phones. They still exist. And by the way, I remember, I'm old enough, you guys might not be, to remember that somehow we survived in the world with flip phones without smartphones. So that's not an option that means death and destruction. It's actually an option that's available out there. So my interaction with any one of these firms that Rob's mentioned is a voluntary interaction. I can interact or not interact. Indeed, I sometimes use Bing for a search when I don't want necessarily Google. And they're actually encrypted searches now. There's search engines that have encryption where you can really feel secure and private, and the beauty of the market is it's produced that. It's produced options. It's just most of us don't care that Google has that information and are willing to give it to them. So this issue of voluntary is really, really important. When somebody has large market power, but that power is economic power therefore voluntary power, that's great. I have no problem with that, and I don't think anybody should. The power that scares me is the power of the gun. The power that says you don't behave the way we want you to behave, you go to jail, or we take some of your money, or we penalize you physically, literally physically. That to me is coercion. That is authoritarianism. That is violence. That is what I want to extract from human society if we want to have civilization. Civilization to me is when we don't deal in violence. Civilization to me is in our interactions of voluntary interactions, where we choose to interact or not. And look, I agree completely with Rob with regard to the network effects. I think it's actually quite beautiful that we have a world in which these network effects have manifested. The first company where we really realized network effects was Microsoft, and of course, they're gonna try to break them up, try to use that political force, the violence, the coercion of authoritarianism. Why, by the way? Because they were offering a product for free. It was an internet browser. And indeed, all the examples that Rob gave, not all of them, but many of them, are stunning in that Facebook is free. Google is free. And if you want to restrict their ability to use the information, you know, putting aside when they cheat on that, but when you want to restrict the information, you can set the settings to restrict what kind of, your privacy setting to what they get. We all can make those kind of choices. So what the system has created, this system of big tech, is this amazing world where we got a lot of stuff for free, where we actually have unbelievable choices, and where we have something like Facebook, when before Facebook, there was nothing like Facebook, and because Rob is right, that you need the networking effect, yeah, some companies are gonna dominate those spaces. That's just the reality of it. I wanna say one other thing as we get into concrete examples as a general point. We don't live, in my view, I think objectively, in a capitalist world. We don't live in a socialist world either. The world in which we live is a mixed economy. We have elements of capitalism in it. We have some private property. We have some freedom as consumers, as workers, as producers, but we also are constrained. We have lots of regulations. We have lots of taxes, different types of taxes that incentivize us to do all kinds of things. We have cronyism where some big companies use the government in order to control a particular space. So I fear that I don't want this conversation to go, look, the world as today isn't working, and this is an example of capitalism when, let's be honest, it's not. I can argue that every problem that we have today is caused by regulations and government control and cronyism and all of that. And of course, I wouldn't argue that all the things that are going on today is socialism. I think it's government control, but not in the form necessarily of socialism. So when we talk about tech, tech has evolved in a relatively free environment, relatively free of regulation, but not completely free, relatively free of cronyism, but not anymore. As we know, these companies now are pretty crony and are pretty protective. And this is not an example of what happens when you have complete free markets, but to the extent that they've been free. Wow. I mean, anybody who's lived through the last 40, 50 years should be inspired by how wonderful the tech industry, you know, the world, the wonderful world, the tech industry has created for us relative to what it was like before we had it. Eventually I want to get broached specifically the topic of healthcare a little bit, but I'm curious, Rob, as you listen to Yaron say that the economic is not coercive, but the political power is, do you, do you even accept that notion or would you challenge that notion as a fundamental principle? Yeah, that's exactly, I think with the core of the issue is yes, I think it's great to address that. Right on, so earlier Yaron said that freedom and power aren't necessarily related. I just would want to clarify that a little bit and then I think we can delve productively into the rest of this. As far as this relationship, I tend to favor the conservative writings, you know, in my book on capitalism and freedom. I take a look at the most prominent right wing conservative or libertarian writers, you know, starting with the more popular ones like Milton Friedman and Hayek and then getting into the more somewhat obscure theoretical ones like Murray Rothbard and so on. And they're again, very broad, just kind of public messages. More power for the government imposes on your negative freedom. If the government gains some new way to control you that imposes on your negative freedom. So to me, just again, on a very broad level, of course, the connection between them is more power exercised on you means less freedom for you in that simple negative freedom way. So that's sort of the basic framework there. Now, you're on his main point was that economic power, unlike state power is voluntary. Okay, well, again, there's a lot of variety in markets and you can find a particular market that meets any kind of pattern. But I think broadly, it's sort of difficult to draw that distinction. So one example I like just to kind of get us going and this connects to healthcare, I suppose as well, I would be the EpiPen which some folks would be familiar with if you have someone in your family with a major allergy to bee stings or peanuts and so on. The EpiPen is this little plastic pen you can buy and it contains an epinephrine shot, you know, an adrenaline shot so that you don't have to break out an actual hospital needle when your little brother gets stung by a bee at recess. You don't have to stab him in the heart with an adrenaline needle like in Pulp Fiction. You can use this nice little plastic thing that's kid-friendly and delivers a specific dose. Well, the firm Mylon has had a monopoly on those consumer-ready one dose adrenaline injectables for some time. And one thing I got to point out here because this is healthcare and drug-related, you kind of think of patent rights in this case which of course are a major state policy that has a lot to do with the pharmaceutical industry and others. But the EpiPen's been out of patent for years. It's just extremely difficult to produce for a time there were only two firms making it, all like Apoli as we say. And one of them was having difficulties controlling the dosage and the sanitation which you have to have of course with an injectable product like that. And so they're off the market for the time while they retool. I mean, over this period, Mylon's raised the price of a two pack of these things to 600 bucks. Now, I mean, we can't control what things we have allergies and which we're born with, which we experienced. So if I'm a working mom who's struggling to pay the bills, I have to come up with 600 bucks every six months or so because these things have a limited shelf life, right? I would argue like that would be an example of a clear imposition of using economic power to limit the liberty in the sense that we're taking assets from people who are on the demand side of that. I think there are a lot of examples that are similar to that if less immediately extreme. So you Ron mentioned Microsoft again, which I think is a great case. It's very true. The state, the government, the US feds did attempt to break up Microsoft and actually secured a ruling to that effect. But then the Bush administration came in and they ended the Justice Department's pursuit of a divestiture breaking up Microsoft. And it's a trillion dollar company to this day. Well, it wasn't just because they were offering a free product, right? Microsoft has a fairly long and lurid record of crushing competitors. And I mean, actually I will say this. Take a look at the book. Mostly my sources on this are business journalists who are broadly speaking sympathetic with the value that Microsoft's created with its operating system. And again, the clear value of these networks that we're talking about. So Microsoft has a history where they'd see some new competitor that might threaten their windows operating system software for example, and they'd say, we're interested in maybe a partnership with your firm. Let's share code. And as soon as Microsoft sees the code, they then say, actually we're planning on our own very similar software products. So we're not gonna work with you and be able to sort of crush firms in that way. Another example, since we mentioned Facebook, Facebook, the Wall Street Journalist covered this a couple of times. Very thoughtful business journalism for investors and executives who need good information to run their business empires. They mentioned Facebook has a whole department within the firm with a number of people working in it whose whole job is to watch for like emerging threats to Facebook and Instagram. And it's under social networking platforms and Wall Street Journal actually, I just have to refer to this because it makes me laugh. They said that they're on the lookout for any firm that could disrupt Facebook. And they say it without irony. So I'm not sure if they knew that that was kind of funny or not. But I think these are real examples of firms using their market dominance to take over another sector. And again, Microsoft was specifically in trouble for using its operating system monopoly to crush NetScape Navigator and promote its, yes, totally free to the consumer at point of purchase, its Internet Explorer browser. But it was after it used its market power to crush another industry that ran at a fall of the anti-trust act. But one other thing I'll just say quickly, where I think we can see the tech firms revealing sort of the issues of power that we see in the marketplace is power internal to the firm. Because when you're in a job, you typically don't have the power to tell your boss where to stick it even when he might need to hear that. And that's an issue, you know. The Me Too movement I think has really shown how much power a lot of executives are able to wield over individual members of their staff. And to the extent that workers don't feel they can just pack up and move to another town and start a new job speaks to the fact that there's some any elasticity in that market. People don't want to immediately upend their whole lives because of a scumbag boss who bullies them. And I mentioned this because tech, which I didn't expect, but just as I read through the record, what you find is that these tech CEOs have pretty impressive records of being bullying scumbags on the clock. From Jeff Bezos, who's kind of famous for, or Steve Jobs, of course, everyone knows he was a jerk. Well, people don't just quit their jobs and move on to a similar firm that doesn't have bullying. There's a small number of firms in these markets and they have a lot of pull. And you don't just want to piss off your big time famous celebrity CEO for bullying you in the workplace or screaming at you and doing what these guys do, which is mostly yelling in front of other people at their subordinates. You know, we all get in arguments sometimes, but if I am yelling at someone whom I can fire, power issues, I think arise and you can see the implications for freedom there. So you're on, feel free to take any element of that that you want. I think it would be interesting, the EpiPen thing. That seems like a status quo that limits the freedom of someone who is potentially depending on that EpiPen to keep, keep themselves or a loved one alive. How does, how is capitalism consistent with freedom in the EpiPen example? Well, first capitalism created the EpiPen. There would be no EpiPen if not for capitalism and indeed all these things we're complaining about are products of capitalism. They don't even come around. They don't become options for consumers and the whole idea of consumers and producers and having a job and having a boss. These are all conceptions of capitalism. So you don't get an EpiPen without capitalism to begin with. Now let's be real about this again, right? Medical, the healthcare industry and we can talk more about healthcare, I'm happy to. It's not exactly a free market. This is a market dominated by government, dominated by the FDA and indeed at least one competitor to the EpiPen was kicked out of the US. I think it was a French company by the FDA, not by consumers, not by markets, not by a private organization that said, but by the FDA and I don't know if there was justified in terms of the quality or not. I'm skeptical whenever the FDA says, maybe somebody with some cronyism influenced them to do something that they, who knows? The FDA is not exactly one of my most trusted organizations and I think the corona problem we have right now is a good illustration of how awful the FDA is and I think to a large extent always has been. Three competitors are coming to the forefront right now with regard to EpiPen. You've got stories in 2018 that three different companies have applied to the FDA to try to get, to try to compete with EpiPen because you're right, it's out of pattern, so these are generics. The problem of course is that it's very expensive to get approval from the FDA and to go through the whole process and to get everything done. Also, nobody actually pays and we all know this $600 for an EpiPen. That mother who's single mother who's trying to make a living does not pay $600 for an EpiPen. All these things are discounted. You can go to the pharmacy today and the pharmacist will tell you, hey, look up this website, you can find a coupon for the drug and it'll knock 90% off the price and you can show them to them. The whole drug pricing, medical pricing is such a disaster and a mess, has nothing zero to do with capitalism. Capitalism encourages price disclosure, encourages consumers to get involved, encourages competition between hospitals, between manufacturers, between drug companies. None of that exists because of the way government is regulated. I mean, to go into drug pricing right now with all the different elements, it is so convoluted and complex. No market economy would ever, ever produce what we have today. What we have today is this combination of, a little bit of private and all this government intervention, including the fact that government is the largest payer for healthcare. Over 60% of all dollars spent on healthcare in the United States are spent by the government, primarily Medicare and Medicaid, which I think, I'm a capitalist, I don't think should exist. Let me address this crushing competition. Sure, I wanna crush my competition. I want everybody, I'm gonna hedge fund, I want everybody to give me money not my competitors. The question is how do you do it? Now, if Microsoft crushed its competition through fraud, which is one of the examples you gave, then we have well-established mechanisms to deal with that and this should be dealt with and that's what capitalism should, that's what the government should focus on, is stopping fraud because fraud is clearly a violation of rights, clearly coercive. But if crushing competition means either buying your competitor, poor competitors, they got bought out and they all became billionaires. I mean, I really feel sorry for the Instagram or the WhatsApp founders, I mean, really miserable. Or it means that they offer a product in competition, remember Netscape? I mean, I remember Netscape because I downloaded Netscape and had to pay $70 and 70 bucks for a browser. We all today take browsers for granted, we don't pay for them. It was a Microsoft innovation to offer it free. Notice that today, I don't use Internet Explorer, I doubt either of you use Internet Explorer. I don't even use Safari that comes with my Mac. I use Chrome or I could use Firefox, the at least four good browsers out there are free and all competing markets. So what exactly did Microsoft do badly? It succeeded. Success means you defeated your competition. Success means you were better than competition in some dimension. Good for them, I'm a huge fan of people who succeed and I find it horrific, the idea that we penalize success. I actually consider in this context, I consider antitrust kind of the first blow against capitalism in the US. Now, the US wasn't that capitalist given that it had slavery, but post-slavery, the first real blow against capitalism is anti-trust laws. I think anti-trust laws are a horrific violation again, coercive actions again, individuals. And look, this idea that bosses yell at subordinates, sure bosses yell at subordinate husbands, yells at wives, wives yell at husbands. And people can walk away and people do. The tech industry is great example for this. I know a lot of my friends work in Silicon Valley, a lot of them. I know very few of them who've kept a job out of their own choice for more than a couple of years. They flip jobs all the time. And now I'm running a startup and I hire you. And I'm investing a lot of energy in training you and getting you up to speed on this product. And six months later, you leave because somebody else offers you a better price. Great, good for you is my attitude. But let's not make this as if it's, I can understand in some relationships there's clearly a disadvantage, certainly some blue collar jobs and everything, but in high tech workers have a huge negotiating power. They easily moved away. And look, I'm not gonna excuse anybody who abuses their position for sexual favors or anything like that. I think it's horrific. I think it should be denounced and when it spills into things like rape, they should go to jail and we should throw away the keys, right? So I'm a huge supporter of Me Too in that sense. But you can leave. And it's again, and you can let the world know that this guy's a creep and a bad guy. Would I wanna work for Steve Jobs and be yelled at once a day? Absolutely. I would pay. I would literally pay to be able to go back in time and work for Steve Jobs and having me yell at me once in a while. You know what? No, not sexually abuse me granted, but yell at me, right? So work for a genius like that who we should be so thankful that Jeff Bezos and the Steve Jobses of the world exist because every single day and particularly now under house arrest basically. How could I exist without Jeff Bezos, without Amazon, without efficiency, the productivity, the price points that they provide? How would I exist without all this wonderful tech that we have? We take for granted the Skype that Microsoft owns. Yes, they bought it from a startup. All of this amazing stuff that I'm not gonna argue, it's 100% capitalist but the tech industry is closest to capitalist of any other industry. It's the freest of any other industry and look at the amazing world in which we live in the 21st century and to use this technology to denounce what made it possible to me is a little ridiculous. These giants made it, it doesn't excuse horrible behavior but I don't know that yelling at somebody once in a while and really being principled and think about beautiful the iPhone is would that have been created if the boss had been, well, we can compromise and maybe settle and maybe do this. No, Steve Jobs had one vision and he made that vision real in the world and thank you Steve Jobs for sticking your principles, not compromising and making all of our lives. And I thank you for all of us, maybe not you but everybody else for making all of our lives so much better. Our lives are dramatically improved because of these great geniuses. And I think, and let me end on this, I mean, this is what has happened in the tech world which is not being regulated. If we had taken that model, the model by the way that existed at the turn of the century in America and applied it to automobiles and applied it to energy and applied it to healthcare and maybe even to education. Wow, imagine the progress, the innovation, the success, the economic growth rate, the prosperity that we would be living under today. I think our healthcare system is horrific. The only healthcare systems worse than it are ones that are socialized like in Israel where my father is a physician in socialized healthcare and I would take American healthcare system any day over that. But what it could be if it was free, what our educational system could be if it was not monopolized real monopoly because it's by a gun, by the state. Imagine what all these industries, I mean, we would have the flying cars that we all imagined when we were young. If only we got the curse of power of governments out of the way and let, you know, let entrepreneurs create and produce and make and innovate. So Rob, I'm glad for you to respond to that but I also think it would be useful now that we've you've issued some critiques of capitalism and Iran has provided some defenses. It would be interesting to hear from you how socialism would deal with these problems to really ascertain whether these are maybe issues. So for example, antitrust, you could have a company that is organized in a socialist manner that is or is not prevented from monopolistic behavior based on government regulation. So I think it would be interesting to hear you address a little bit about how the system you favor would deal with some of the issues you've pointed out or whether they are more issues of government regulation or something else. Right on, yeah. Well, yeah, so first to look at the innovation issue which Iran rightfully brings up, which I think is great, clearly completely right, you know, the tech industry has utterly transformed our social landscape in many ways for the better but we all like recognize that, you know, we give those famous photos of, you know, Popa Ratzinger, Colonel Ratzinger visiting the United States and a few years later, visiting again in the first picture is everyone just cheering in the second picture, it's everyone holding up a phone for a picture. So transforming the society with these amazingly useful new technologies is an open and shut case. And the first page of my book, I specifically say, let me say I use these companies products all the time. As Iran was saying, you know, who would deny that they rely on these products constantly, especially as he said under quarantine, we rely on them more now than ever, I would actually argue. So I think that's all very true but to argue that the innovation, that the technology itself comes from the industry is a matter of the factual record and the record is the opposite of what is usually stated here. So we can look at this from the most foundational level. I think most folks are aware that the early days of the fundamental research into what became the internet were managed through various parts of the state sector, you know, so the original name for what became the internet was DARPA net because it was in the first instance developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, which is the Pentagon's research arm along with the big tech relevant universities, gradually developing this internet work technology, but also the technology and the smartphones themselves from the GPS, which is largely a military innovation to the smartphone display itself, which amazingly was actually originally developed at that CERN Particle Lab in Europe, if you look into the, again, relatively well-established history of the record of these innovations and how they happened and even the tech platforms themselves. I mean, remember Google's original web address was not google.com, it was google.stanford.edu because when you're developing a new technology and anyone who is a science background will be familiar with this, when you're doing scientific or technological research, there's no guarantee you're gonna get anywhere with your particular line of research and certainly no guarantee that it's gonna make your firm or you money anytime soon. So historically, if we look at a lot of the history of innovation, it's certainly in tech, which is the case I know about the best. What you see is largely public sector research, I think just reflecting the nature of the fact that science, it's uncertain whether you'll ever make any money. So if we look at figures like Bezos or Steve Jobs we mentioned earlier and refer to these figures as geniuses, I really think it's difficult to substantiate that on the record. I mean, Steve Jobs in particular is famous for the terrible design decisions that he made while working at Apple from the Lisa computer all the way to later Max. It was he who wanted to close the system off so that third party app developers couldn't make their own apps, which is every industry history that I've seen says that's why Windows is so dominant. It's not because people love Windows so much clearly. It's because of Mac was a closed platform and you see it because he made the same mistake again in the mobile era when for a very long time he refused to allow any new apps being developed by third party firms other than specific ones like Alphabet for its Google apps and so on, eventually lessening that with the Apple storage they still control. So I think the history of innovation there, it's difficult to support the claim that that comes primarily from the private sector. And it could be argued that that's because of the current arrangement we have in the economy today which as you're on set is a mixed economy. I think that's fine. But to say that Microsoft's succeeded and we're punishing it for success, it has network effects in that market. Network effects like economies of scale and others, these things give firm strong reasons to get big and to absorb competitors and take over markets and get big. And then you have the market weight to crush your competitors, which I think is something that does raise freedom concerns. So get into your other question though, how would socialist economies manage these kinds of issues? Well, to me, the idea of socialism, like we said is worker control of production. Very few socialists today want hyper authoritarian government control where state approval is required for every decision. But it's when we're looking at big capital, no one's saying that the state or the local community or workers should be able to tell you what clothes to wear and what smartphone you can have. But if you own an oil refinery or a soybean plantation or the telecom wires that bring the internet to big regions of the country, that's not just your personal stuff anymore. I think you can argue strongly that you do cross a line with major property to where you have power. You have power over the society, power over specific parts of the economy. The goal, as I see it with socialism would be to have a real free socialist society where we're spared the power plays of powerful corporations as we would want to be from authoritarian state influence too. And this would mean worker control. It might mean lowered productivity because now the workforce is involved in these decision-making processes that normally management reserves to itself. But I think that that's a price that would be reasonable if we consider the fact that it would again, preserve our negative freedom by no longer making us the play things of the corporate world, but also we would have some of that positive freedom. I think it can be argued that once a society reaches a stage where it could provide healthcare to all of its citizens, where it's materially capable of providing housing to all of its citizens, but we don't because they're poor for maybe their own reasons or maybe because daddy was poor or their mom was a methodic. So the kids born addicted to math, like which is a thing sadly, which of course occurs. I think there's a strong argument to be made that a free socialism could improve that negative freedom and give us some of that positive freedom to benefit from the many, many important goods and services that we're producing today. I think there's an argument there. So what do you think, Iran? I mean, it sounds like that's an opportunity as Rob lays it out to increase the amount of freedom if we were to reorganize society in the direction that he's suggesting. Well, if I can, can I address the innovation bit? Sure, sure. Let me quickly do that. I won't spend a lot of time on it, but yes, no question. All the examples that Rob gave are true. The government did develop these things as a basic science. And indeed, anytime a government enters any space, it crowds out private capital. It's a well-known phenomena, the crowding out phenomena, and it does that in basic science. But the fact is that for 150 years, government did almost really zero investment in basic science. During the 19th century, government invested zero in any scientific endeavor, engineering endeavor, really until the new deal. And really until really after World War II when they really started investing. Science flourished during that period. Innovation arguably was even higher, significantly higher than it is today. Automobiles, trains, electricity, all these things happened on airplanes on a scale that today regulators wouldn't allow any of those to happen because one of the reasons we have innovation at tech and not in the physical spaces, techs, electrons, and we haven't yet figured out how to regulate electrons, but we can figure out how to regulate the physical world pretty well and we've stopped all innovation in the physical world. It's really one of the tragic occurrences of the 20th and 21st century is that there's almost no innovation in the physical world. So yes, all of those, Stanford is a private university, but all the university system in a capitalist society would be private. It's not like under capitalism that no universities and researchers wouldn't be doing science and all this thing wouldn't be happening. That is absurd. It would happen. It would happen in my view more efficiently. And of course, there's the issue of usefulness. Government produces in these labs and these laboratories produce all kinds of stuff. And but to turn it into something that's actually useful that's actually something that we all use and consume and you need the people, you need the Steve Jobs's of the world. You need the Jeff Bezos of the world. I'll put that aside a lot to say just on that topic. There's a huge amount, but you know, let's remember these guys in the 19th century that really major steps forward. We're not all government funded. Socialism. So the only way you can, you are claiming to be able to help bring some choices to people who maybe have fewer choices or some opportunities to people is by using coercion on other people. So there's no way, you know, socialism is a zero sum game. It is whatever you are providing to some, you are taking from others. Whether you're taking through course of taxation or taxation is course of you using a gun, whether you're taking by breaking up companies literally physically going in and saying what you created is not yours. And if you don't want to use Microsoft example, because yes, some of their technology will light on something government did. We can use a big company in the 19th century or 20th century that had no colonialism, no government funding and you're breaking them up. By what right do you have to come into my house and say your house is too big, we want to break it up into two houses? No, it's my house, I built it, I made it, I paid for it, I paid my employees for it. I have not free written on anybody in order to get this and who are you to decide what's too big? How do we decide what this government entity is going to be that decides to be? So what you get is some kind of authoritarianism in disguised in democratic terms, where the majority oppresses the minority, which is exactly our form of governing the United States in its origins was supposed to protect the minority from exactly that with all its flaws. That was at least its goal. You create a system in which if I want to compete with your socialist enterprise as a capitalist enterprise, you abandon it, you cannot allow it and if I get too successful, you will break me up. Your world and the socialist world, and again, I've lived in it, I know what it looks like, I've experienced it, I've been in socialized healthcare, it's a world of violence, it's a world of force, it's a world of authoritarianism, it's a world of no innovation. I take Israel, Israel's a great example of this because it was a socialist country. The founders were former communists who became, who rejected communism and were socialist in its founding and in the late 70s and early 80s, it shifted direction and it's nowhere near capitalist, it's much more of a mixed economy now from socialism. It wasn't socialist in the communist sense, but it was social democracy, it was a social democracy and it was poor and as soon as I left and it shifted to become more free, it's boomed, it's boomed, everybody in Israel is better off today. The innovation, the progress, the prosperity, the building, the growth is just stunning and the same, arguably, we don't have time to get into this example, the same, by the way, happened in Sweden, Sweden's a great example of this. Sweden, which was one of the freest countries in the world, one of the most capitalist countries in the world, then became socialist, which made it poor, then as abandoned socialism in the last 20, since 1994, and is now doing well again. I wish that America embraced many of the policies that Sweden has because they're far more capitalist than what the United States has. Socialism crushes the human spirit because it does not allow for individuals to be free, to pursue their values, their chosen values, to produce, to innovate, to dream, to create. You don't get that in any socialist country, even in healthcare, in spite of all the problems we have in the United States, 70 plus percent of all medical innovations happen here because we still have a little bit of freedom, not much, a little bit. In Europe, there's very little innovation because there's no freedom, they're all government employees. Rob, feel free to go directly back with your response to that critique of the system that you're proposing. Yeah, I think these questions get right to the heart of the issue. So you're all mentioned, by what right do you break up someone's firm that they have built up? Yeah. There's an authoritarian aspect there and so on. That was a very reasonable question here. But to me, the line, what's too successful, why should someone get their firm broken up? It's, I think, reasonable to talk about drawing a line where it gets to where you're an extremely powerful entity. To me, again, the relationship between power and freedom is really relevant here. Once a firm reaches a certain level of concentration where it has 80% market share, 90% market share, we can debate exactly where the line is, like we do on any other legal subject. We end up settling on some sort of threshold that we designate. So to me, that sort of technical aspect can be argued about. But to me, the real line is at what point does some firm end up having so much control over a market segment, over its employees, over some important technology? That's the issue that brings up the question of why should they, at some point, be imposed upon by their workers who go on a sit-down strike and socialize the firm or something like that. So I think that's at least something to consider there. I mean, to me, the closest metaphor for this would be when you think about something like a warlord. So in Libya right now, since the US intervention under great secretary Clinton's leadership, it's completely collapsed into heinous civil anarchy and there's outright slavery there again, which is about as bad as it gets for the record of an intervention when it goes back to slavery. Well, that's a do-over, I guess. We take a look there. One of the things that people want the most in societies like Libya or others that are just torn by fundamental civil strife, as bad as we have it in quarantine now, it does get much worse in the world, of course. Well, there, when societies try to move out of that kind of thing, like say Somalia 20 years ago, trying to get past a period of civil war and warlord action, one of the basic goals is to disarm the warlords. We're taking away property from you that you have illegitimately. It's something that lets you control other people. Maybe you paid for all those nice automatic firearms. I'm very sorry. But this gives you too much power over people. And I think this is a scenario that we see very frequently in the marketplace. And just generally, it's not about considering people's stuff sank or sank. It's once you have the ability to control the livelihoods of millions of people that we could legitimately consider some kind of action. And yes, perhaps it's antitrust, which you're on is right. That really was the first step we took away from pure, or the pure laissez-faire capitalism of the gilded age, which post-slavery, I agree. That's sort of the era of fully free markets that we want today. But it's an era of huge fortunes of large monopolies in many industries, extreme chronic economic instability. I mean, only what we're going through right now can match what they saw in the 1890s. So you could look into that history if you want. But I think those are some of the issues that come up. And it's very reasonable to explore these subjects. But again, to me, I like to just take the conservative writers like Friedman and Hayek at their word. We don't want power in our society deciding what happens. And once you reach a point where a market has a tiny handful of firms with very limited competition amongst them and you have internally very strict hierarchies in the workplace where your boss can scream at you. And even if they're a genius, I still think you shouldn't abuse your workforce. We could debate that part. That might be a personal preference issue. But I think that sort of speaks to these fundamental issues. So we're going to go back to you in a second, Iran. We're starting to get to the end of our time. And I want to bring up something that is, it's really not trivial. And living in a mixed economy, it's very easy to say, okay, Iran wants to pull us more in this direction whereas Rob wants to pull us more in this other direction. But consider the incompatibility of, on the, let's take the word violence that you guys have applied to these terms. Iran has asserted, if I understand him correctly, that the violence is the government coming in and doing the regulating. Whereas Rob has asserted, if I understand him correctly, that the violence is done by those that go unregulated when they accumulate too much power. This is not a trivial distinction. And I wonder how, I mean, the once you understand that we're very far apart here, Iran, aren't we? I think we are, but I think the viewers should really think about where Rob went with his last comments because I think it's very revealing. We all know what violence is. Give me a break. The warlords in Libya, that kind of violence, is not the same as a boss firing his employee. There is a real, real difference, a category difference. These are two different categories. Me pointing an M16 at you with, I mean, reasonable belief that I would pull the trigger. And me saying, get out of my office, you're fired, I'm not the same category. We can maybe say that firing somebody is not good, is not nice, it's not pleasant, it's not a lot of things. It's not violence, guys. So I agree completely regarding the Libya example. The one thing we should do is eliminate violence for society. And I believe government has a huge role in regulating firearms because firearms are things of violence. And the one thing government must do is regulate violence. In other words, eliminate violence from society. Its only job, in my view, is to do that and arbitrate disputes so that they don't get violent. So my view is, the thing that is the real danger for civilization, the thing that threatens freedom, the things that threaten my ability to pursue my life in pursuit of my values is violence in all its forms, but violence, right? Where I get something from you, not by negotiating with you, not through some kind of mutual agreement, a contract, something like that, but by pulling out a gun or by lying to you, by committing fraud. Fraud is a form of violence, firing somebody is not. There is a clear distinction. So, you know, breaking up a company, that's violence. And we can argue about where the line is where authoritarian starts. But authoritarianism starts once you cross that line. I don't want authoritarianism. I don't wanna cross that line. I don't believe anybody should be broken up ever. I don't have any problem with market-derived economic power. I think indeed, because of the network effect, exactly for the reason you started out with, it is essential to have big companies. Because the only way we as consumers can benefit from network effect is if we allow them to get to size. I think economies of scale are often, not always, often beautiful things, because they allow producers to make products cheaper and cheaper and cheaper so that we can benefit more and it raises our standard of living. You know, Rockefeller is a very good example of that. So, you know, violence, absolutely, we need to negate that from society, but let's be honest about what violence actually means. Firing somebody is no worse in my view than somebody leaving a job. So, if I'm gonna restrict it in being able to fire an employee, is he gonna be restricted in leaving? No, because those restrictions are violations of my freedom. They are the violence. The restriction is the violence. Not me saying to somebody, you can't be on my property or somebody saying, I don't wanna work for you anymore. I'm leaving, I'm going away. And in the tech industry, we know that happens all the time. So, I'm for freedom. Freedom to voluntarily associate and the freedom to voluntarily unassociate and under conditions that are determined as well as possible in advance. That's a beauty of contracts. Contracts are beautiful things. And yes, they've been distorted. We don't read those disclosures because let's again, a legal system is nuts. We've gone away away from respecting private property and all the laws and the dictates that require disclosures. I mean, I like to have contracts with people I do business with that are one pages and they're in English. And if the lawyers touch them, then they're gonna be. So, all I want is true freedom, which means true voluntary association, voluntary relationship. And again, if you wanna start your social company over here, run by the union, run by the... I have no objection to that. I love ESOPs where employees get shares or let employees vote the managers. Let that company compete with the company that doesn't have that. That's the beauty of capitalism. We can try different models and see what works. Go ahead, Rob. Yeah, I mean, so feel free to take on directly whether this issue of what constitutes violence is really the intractable disagreement or any other element there. Right on, yeah. So there's a lot of meaty stuff in here. And of course, we have limited time. Folks watching this should dig into our books. We've written a little bit about this. The printed word is how you get really into the meat of it. I'm sure everyone would agree with that here. So getting back to what you're on said though about the mixed economy, I think something he said there is extremely accurate, which is once you have like partially regulated markets and very large powerful firms, it just becomes like the outcome of that is a system that's just the outcome of a tug of war between, in my view, opposing powerful centers of authority. And the outcome of it is completely right. It's a God for sake and mess. That's impossible to argue with. So I think that's very reasonable. But as you said, the real issue here is, you know, what is violence? What is coercion? And the state case, again, I think everyone agrees on that. If you don't pay your taxes, you go to jail, the state can draft you. Like these are clear manifestations of state authority. No one that I know of would disagree with that. But I think it can be argued also that in a scenario where I control the arable land of elation or all of the fresh water, and I say, I'm not gonna give you any, and I let you starve. I think it can be argued that that's an instance, and if things like that are instances of economic coercion. I remember John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, which is a great tiny read. Everyone should take a look at it. It's mostly about negative freedom and how, you know, all the limited circumstances where the state can coerce you. And like your own said, it's mostly to prevent violence against other people, that's fine. But a careful reading I think shows that positive freedom appears in his conception of it. Remember when the, you know, you can see the page number in my book, but he says a man might as well be killed as excluded from the means of earning his bread. But perhaps I would suggest lending some support to the idea of positive freedom there. If you monopolize an economic resource, whether it's oil like Rockefeller or food and some other example, there is a way where you can exclude people from that and create a real coercive relationship, absent pulling out a gun or a knife. And then again, this is a thing that we can dig into a little bit. When I look at today's modern gigantic corporate empires, the huge amount of market share they have, the way they're able to dominate industries, the fascinating story, I mean, don't have time for it, where Google and Apple conspired illegally as it came out in court to fix the wages of many of their technology, you know, their software code writers and so on, with a number of other firms and eventually they did get caught. But they succeeded for a number of years with that. I think these instances go to show that economic power is a real thing, that coercion is very, very conceivable within the marketplace. I think that there's some relevance there. And finally, I think the last point is really important that Iran made, which is like economies of scale, network effects and so on. They show something that we would agree on, which is there is compelling economic reasons for big production, for big economic institutions. People, I would totally agree, fail to recognize the value of things like economies of scale. You produce at a huge volume of goods. You can push the cost down. And that tends to mean, you know, at times lower prices for consumers, more revenue and profitability for the firm. It depends on the broader market conditions there. Those things are extremely important. And to me, big economic institutions are the reason for this whole debate. If we were still in the 1600s and most of the economy is small scale feudal farming or local home handicraft industry, you know, there's not much economic power there apart from the Lord and the King themselves, you know, the state power that we don't recognize. Once you're looking at a world of gigantic data centers that hold all of our information on them or modern smartphone ship manufacturing plants, those things cost a billion bucks to put up. Now we're talking about a real economic installation. If I decide to close it down tomorrow, there go a huge amount of jobs and access to data. To me, that's where there is a line and you can see the realities of economic coercion, at least being a concern at that point. And that might help people think about this. So, your honor, we started with Rob. So I want to end with you and I would love for you to the example that Rob gives is an interesting one. And I'd be curious whether you would concede that it is a form of violence if through the accumulation of economic power, which you've said you do not feel is coercive. I obtain control of all of the water resources in a given area and I restrict the access to the surrounding population to water. Would that not be an economic form of power, an economic instance of power that is violent in a literal way? We need water to survive, right? So we need a science fiction example in order to get a capitalism we finally have to. I mean, no capitalist economy has ever produced that. Let's say you had all the water supply. You can't stop me from building a desalination plant on the coast and turning saltwater into regular water. You can't stop me from building a tank that collects rainwater and supplies my own supply of water. If it's on my land, you can't stop me from building a well into the ground. I mean, no, what restricts is when you restrict my action. What restricts? No, yes, you can, you buy the land, surround me and don't give me access through that land. I mean, I've heard them all, right? Sure, and in common law, way back in England under private property, it's understood that access is something that is allowed under private property. You can't surround somebody and not allow them access. You could argue that if you did somehow monopolize all the water in the world and my examples didn't count, you'd have to give some access, but I doubt that because A, the example is, I think sci-fi and ridiculous and B, I think that as long as people have a mind, as long as people are free to act on that mind, they will find ways to find water and to get around your monopolistic, so-called monopolistic behavior, as they always do. There's a little meme kind of thing going on on Facebook or whatever, showing the changes in tech company dominance over the last 20, 30 years and the shifts. I mean, do you remember when, oh, now the name slips to my mind, you know, anyway, you Yahoo during the, you know, there was a company before Yahoo dominated. It dominated everything. Nobody knew who Google was, Google was this couple of kids at Stanford doing something. I, you know, it changed very quickly and I wouldn't be surprised if we did this 10 years from now, Google wasn't a small company but there was somebody already challenging them and maybe taking over and the same with Amazon. You know, it's funny to freeze the world in place when they, particularly in the tech industry, where it's never been frozen, where things are moving constantly, even as we speak, there's some young entrepreneur because we still have some freedom in this company left. Not a lot, but still some, maybe not any right now, but maybe in a month or so, we'll have that freedom back. Some young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley dreaming up a way to crush Facebook or maybe to crush Amazon or to crush Microsoft. And you know what? They are venture capitalists salivating to give him capital to make it become real because the beauty of capitalism is it never stops. It never, it never, it's never static. It's always dynamic and when you free up economies, when you take away the regulations, when you leave people free, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful things happen and it's amazing the kind of life we have today because of capitalism, because we didn't go the socialist route that people 100 years ago couldn't even imagine. Gentlemen, we've said it all and in a way we've only just started the conversation but it has been a very, very interesting hour plus. It always feels weird to stop the conversation somewhere but at some point every good conversation must end. We've been speaking with Yaron Brooke, chairman of the Ein Rand Institute and host of the Yaron Brooke Show on YouTube and with Rob Larson, economics professor and author of Bit Tirents and Capitalism Versus Freedom. I've interviewed both of them extensively. You can find those interviews on my YouTube channel and website. Gentlemen, I really do appreciate your time today and we must do it again. Thank you. This was fun. We should do it again. This was great. I'm sure we will.