 Hey everyone, welcome to Triple V, a show dedicated towards advancing the message of a free society. I'm your host, Mike Shanklin. Today, I'm joined with a real special guest, his name is Stefan Kinsella. Stefan, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Glad to be here, Michael. Glad to have you on the show. Stefan, for those who don't know, a lot of you do obviously in the libertarian community, but he is an attorney in Houston specializing in intellectual property law, which is usually what we talk about when he's on the show. He's the founder and executive editor of the libertarian papers, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, C4SIF, and has published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics. So obviously, having you on the show here, we're going to be discussing a variety of different options with libertarian theory, mostly legislation and law and liberty. Obviously we have to hit on rights theory and intellectual properties, obviously, through. I do want to talk somewhat about corporations, see if we can pull some leftists over who might actually stick through this interview if they can still make a bunch of freedom, guys. But it's obviously good to have you on the show. What you've been up to recently? Oh, a lot of vacations over the summer and trying to do some writing as well. So glad to get back on the swing of things with the start of the school year. Yeah. Yeah. How many kids you got? Just one, but that's a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah, I do. And it is a lot of work. It's good stuff. For those who might not have seen the previous interviews, you can actually, I'll put both of them up here, click on these links. And obviously for the recorded show after, I can't do this live, but you'll have annotation links so you can go directly to our old interviews. But I want to start off, Michael Goodpaster, he actually comments a lot on my channel. He wanted me to ask you, or at least he had the comment, I'd like to hear more details about argumentation ethics. Obviously, it's something that's at the root of a lot of Hoppean discussion, but a lot of libertarians, even some anarcho-capitalists, let alone the Menarchist breed, just don't seem to understand what argumentation ethics is. I figured this would be the perfect time to discuss it. Yeah, it's a good time to talk about it. So let me give some background on it. First of all, a lot of the discussion is highly technical, and I don't think we can go into a lot of it here. But I would say, first of all, a lot of libertarians and anarchists don't have a theory of rights at all. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but if you ask them why they believe in rights or liberty, they just say, I don't know, because I do, right? Or because it's the right thing to do. And then when someone like Hoppe comes along and has an argument for it, they don't quite get it, or they criticize aspects of it. I'm not sure if we're there. I just got a phone call. Sorry, we're here. Are you fine? Yeah, I'm here. Okay, sorry. So I would say people that criticize argumentation ethics because they don't understand it or because they disagree with it, if they have a better theory of rights, I'd like to hear it, right? So sometimes they have no theory of rights. Sometimes they're consequentialist or utilitarian. Sometimes they're natural law or natural rights types. Hans-Hermann Hoppe basically says that here's how we can justify rights. Well, first of all, he recognizes problems with conventional justifications for rights, which is the, let me just point two problems with regular justifications for rights. One is the problem of what David Hume, the famous philosopher, calls attention to, which is the is-ought gap or dichotomy, which is the idea that you cannot justify an ought or a norm or a moral proposition or view from just factual statements because there's always a gap. Like when you go from facts to norms, you're always justifying, you're always introducing a norm, okay? So you're going from one realm of statements to another realm of statements. So there's always like a logical problem there. And Hoppe relies upon that, that criticism. The other is in natural law arguments, they always rely upon a definition of rights that assumes a certain human nature, but human nature is fairly vague and amorphous and diffuse. So Hoppe tries another approach, which is to rely upon something that everyone can't escape from based upon our human nature of being rational agents and trying to justify arguments based upon, or justify propositions based upon arguments. So what he says is that if there are certain norms or values presupposed in making any argument whatsoever, then you could never contradict those in an attempt to justify a norm. So the entire libertarian project in his view is recognizing that the very activity of civilized discourse that is sitting down with another person to try to figure out what is it that we should do, what is it that is justified, okay? Presupposes certain norms that you could never justify. So his basic argument is that socialism, which is the emphasis of libertarianism, always is a contradictory or self-contradictory argument because you're sitting down in an argument with other people trying to rationally justify something and you're sort of presupposing a civilized plane of discourse that we have a certain level playing field that I'm not going to attack you if you don't agree with me, I'm respecting your domain, your right to have a discussion with me. All that presupposes certain sort of property rights in each other's body and resources that we need to carry on the argumentation. But if I'm trying to say that socialism is justified, it contradicts that presupposition. So what he's saying is that ultimately any argument in favor of socialism is self-contradictory and I agree with his argument. Yeah, so do I, absolutely. I have seen responses such as Bob Murphy's and I think Murphy's hitting on some edges here and I think Murphy makes some good points. But I want to hear your rebuttal to what Robert Murphy has stated in response to him. Like, where did Bob Murphy take issue with what Hoppe had written? I've actually read over it, but I want to hear what you have to say. Imagine there's people out here who have not read any of this, so if you could kind of break down where we're coming from, what's going on here and then explain, I mean I really want to dig deeper into this so we can have a better understanding of what this whole discourse was about, because I can understand where Murphy's coming from when he says stuff such as, what was the last part? I guess like a slave, they don't have to own themselves to make the argument. I think what Murphy's saying is not everything that Hoppe's saying is accurate. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't really know at this point. I want you to kind of break this whole discourse down. Well, let's back up for a second. There was an article in anti-state.com published by Gene Callahan and Bob Murphy and Bob Murphy's a friend of mine. Gene Callahan and Bob are friends and Gene at the time was an Austrian and Libertarian. At the current time I have no idea what Gene Callahan is. He's all over the map. Gene has an article from those days where he attacks Hans Hoppe for his immigration views by mocking him by setting up some kind of Irish immigrant example and lately Gene is now taking that case himself. I think Gene is no longer a Libertarian. I don't know if he's an Austrian or ever was an Austrian to be honest. So you have to read that in light of that. Gene and Bob had an article attacking Hoppe's views on rights and his argumentation ethics. So my first question as a Libertarian is, well, do we have a Libertarian criticizing us or do we have someone else? At the time it was two Libertarians criticizing a fellow Libertarian and first you would say, well, what is their theory of rights and are they criticizing someone else for being defective in light of it? They never make clear what their theory is and they don't really agree on a theory of rights, especially not anymore. Bob is now a Christian. I have no idea what Bob's theory of rights is. I don't think he has a theory of rights. So basically he just probably is like most Libertarians and he happens to favor certain values like most human beings do, peace, prosperity, people getting along with each other. Now Bob Murphy is exceptionally intelligent and honest and consistent so he sees that if you want to achieve these basic values, you need to have a free market and he ultimately sees that you need to have ultimate freedom and property rights respected consistently, which rules out government, which is to my mind the ultimate case for libertarianism. If you value certain things, peace, prosperity, freedom, cooperation, and if you have some modicum of consistency and logic and economic literacy, then you're going to realize that libertarian principles are the only ones that could possibly be justified. That is basically the Hopi and Case and that's why I think people like Bob Murphy and other people who have no explicit argument for liberty are libertarians. Go ahead. Well, I remember one time he made this analogy as to trying to put a libertarian origin of rights next to grabbing the ring of what was a ward off or whatever that little creature is. It's always in the, what is it, the Hobbit or, I don't really watch those videos, but you know what I'm talking about, the ring and my precious and all that stuff. But he tried to compare placing these axioms or at least rooting rights into this attempt to try to grab onto this ring that nobody should have, like nobody should have an origin of rights. I guess the opinion that came from me when I read over the article, it just sounded like, well there is no origin from rights from their perspective. Do you agree with that? I actually think that's probably correct. I'm not aware, I don't remember his comments in writing on that analogy, but before I go further let me say, so Bob Murphy and Callahan wrote an article in anti-state.com, a criticizing Hoppe's approach to argumentation ethics, and remember this was when Callahan was allegedly a libertarian and was Bob Murphy's co-author. I wrote a rebuttal to that which they did not reply to at all. And then a couple of years later when Roderick Long was temporarily the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Callahan and Murphy republished their article there with very few changes that I could tell, and they still did not even address my response to theirs. So on my website, stephanicancell.com, you can find a link to my response to their original article and their original article, and a long thread about that which goes into tons of detail about it. So to my knowledge, they've never responded to it, and I don't think they ever will because Callahan is no longer a pretend libertarian, and Murphy still doesn't claim to have any grounds for libertarianism that I'm aware of. I mean, look, you can think of this in any number of ways. I mean, Kurt Gertl, the famous mathematician who argued that any system of logic or any self-contained logical system is incomplete because it could never justify its own axioms, right, by its own principles, and David Hume, who argued that the is-ought gap is real, that is, you could never justify an ought from an is statement, have a certain point, I believe, and that is, you can never logically bridge the gap between purely factual statements to getting to some kind of normative or evaluative or moral statements. I don't think that's a big problem. A lot of people think it's a problem, so they either ignore the problem or they try to sweep it under the rug or act like it's not a problem. I don't think it's a problem because I think human beings in society do have values. Ayn Rand recognizes this, Mises recognizes this, that when you perform an action, you necessarily have certain values. Ayn Rand thought that when you live as a human being, when you choose to live instead of dying, you're demonstrating that you value life as a human as opposed to not living, and that has certain normative or moral implications. I don't disagree with that, but that's compatible with Hoppe's view that there is a Humean is-ought gap, but what Rand and what Mises would say, I think, if you force them into it, is that there's a certain action you take, you choose to take because of your personal decision to adopt certain values that has certain moral implications. If you take that one step further, as Hoppe does, and you recognize what about the subsidiary or the specific action of argumentation, that is, engaging in civilized discussion or discourse with a fellow human being, trying to figure out what is right or wrong, what we should do, what rules we should follow, or what we should have in society, when you have people engaging on that plane of discourse, they're necessarily agreeing upon certain basic rules of interaction, like we don't hit each other while we're talking, right? Things like that. And if you just take those basic rules, then you have to realize that you could never have an argument justifying the opposite. Now, what you were referring to earlier was Murphy and other critics of Hoppe's argument have pointed out that, well, you can have slavery. So does that mean, does the existence of slavery, that is, a master having a discussion with his slave, does that prove that Hoppe's argument is wrong? And I would say it doesn't prove it at all, because all it proves is that the master is being inconsistent, right? Argumentation ethics is about norms, that is prescriptions. So we have to justify, we have to distinguish in our minds between prescription and description, that is between what we say people should do and what the way the world is. There's a distinction between the law of gravity and the law of men, right? You cannot violate the law of gravity, but you can violate the law of right and wrong. You can choose, because of free will, to violate other people's rights, that if someone chooses to murder or rob someone, it doesn't prove that robbery or murder is wrong. It's right. It only proves that it's a prescriptive thing. It's a normative thing. It's a rule that can be violated, but that should not be. So the fact that you have a slave owner arguing with a slave does not prove that slavery is justified. Now, it is the case that in some cases, you could find slavery is justified in a particular circumstance. So let's say, you know, you with your family are attacked by a band of marauders and you kill most of them except for one or two and you have to kidnap the others or subdue them and tie them down until the authorities get there or until you figure out what to do with them. So for a temporary period of time, you are treating this person as a means. You're subduing their body, right? This invader, this aggressor, you're treating them like they're a slave and like you own their body. And in fact, I would argue under libertarian ethics that you do own their body, at least in that respect. In other words, you have the right to subdue them and to kidnap them and to jail them and to incapacitate them to protect yourself because they are the aggressor and you're defending yourself, okay? So the very fact that you are using someone else's body as a means or using force against someone's body doesn't mean that you're being inconsistent. So let's say that I have a discussion with one of my attackers that I have now captive and I want to discuss libertarian ethics with them and my argument is that everyone has the right to their bodies. Now, am I being inconsistent when I have that argument with them? Well, no, because Hoppe's argument is that you can only make an argument that is universalizable, that is you have a good basis for making a distinction between people. If you and I, like right now in this discussion, if we were face to face and if I am trying to argue that I have the right to enslave you, that is to pick up a knife and attack you if you don't listen to me, I have to have a reason for that assertion. If I don't have a reason for it, I'm not making an argument at all and we're not really engaging in discourse. That's what's called a merely particularizable claim. If I want to make a claim that I can hope to persuade you or others to listen to, I have to come up with a reason for it. And the reason has to be grounded in something other than the mere claim, well, I'm Stefan Kinsella, you're Michael Shanklin and I'm me and you're not me and therefore I have the right to be your master. Because you could say the same thing. You could say, well, I'm Michael Shanklin and you're Kinsella and I have the right to be your master and then we're just fighting again. If we're on a civilized discourse playing field and we're trying to come up with a rational basis for our moral claims, you have to resort to objective reasons that could be potentially listened to by anyone. And so that's the reason why all these claims have to be universalizable. So if I just for no reason say, well, I have the right to hit you but you don't have the right to hit me because I'm me and you're you, that is not a reason at all. That's the failure to give a reason. It's the failure to enter into discourse. But if I have a reason, like I say, well, the reason I have the right to keep you as a prisoner is because you attacked my family in the woods and I was reminding my own business, then I'm reverting to, I'm pointing to an objective difference between us. The objective difference is you committed aggression against me and I didn't commit aggression against you. So it is true in a sense that the bearer situation of a purported master having a discussion with a purported slave doesn't presuppose ownership rights of the slave in himself. What it presupposes is the prima facie rights of ownership of everyone. But it doesn't show that you can't come up with a reason. But what it means is that you have to have a reason. If you're going to treat someone as different than you, you have to have a reason. And the libertarian view, which we share, is that there is a good reason if the person being treated with force has committed force. This is where my estoppel argument, which branches out from Hapa's views, comes into play. If someone has committed force, has initiated the use of force, they really have no logical or persuasive grounds to come up with a whining objection to force being used against them. If they're going to run around the world using force against people without their consent, then if that happens to them, they really have no good objection to it. Which is exactly the reason why force that's retaliating against aggressors is justified. It's justified because they have no good grounds to object to it. So all these ideas of Hapa and sort of my estoppel approach, I think mirror the libertarian intuition of symmetry. The libertarian intuition is symmetrical because we always say, listen, we're not against force or violence, we're just against initiated force, which means that if someone initiates force against us, then retaliatory force, or at least defensive force, is justified. Almost no libertarian disagrees with that. So what they're saying is that force in response to force is okay. Force is not in response to force is not okay. So you see the symmetry there. And that is what is inherent in the Hapaian idea and this idea of estoppel that I'm talking about. Now, Murphy's objection and the objection of others that if you're a slave, that there's a possibility of slavery disproves this idea. I think it's just nonsense because it only proves that it's possible to violate rights and it's possible for people that are in a position of power to be inconsistent. But we already know that. All they're proving is that moral laws are not like causal laws. All they're proving is that prescriptive laws are not the same as descriptive laws. They're simply proving that it's possible to use free will to disregard a should statement. If someone tells you you shouldn't do this, it's possible to disregard that and to act in contravention to it. If someone tells you there's a law of gravity and they're correct, it's actually not possible to act in contravention to it. You can, but then you'll die, right? So they're just showing there's a difference between causal laws and teleological or normative laws. But we already know that, we admit that. So basically they're playing games, I think. They're playing games because they don't have an argument for rights. And I don't know, I think that they don't like other people coming up with arguments for rights because it highlights the fact that they don't have arguments for rights at all. And there's this sort of dislike for people that come up with hardcore. I mean, look, Nozick and others are like this with regard to people like Rothbard. Rothbard had a hardcore, solid, natural rights foundation for his arguments. Some people don't like that. They wanna have it loosey-goosey. They wanna have fuzziness. They wanna have slipperiness. They wanna have the ability to kind of not be so locked in with things. They don't like knockdown arguments. They don't like being hemmed in. Well, being a libertarian, to my mind, is taking a stand in favor of human liberty, human self-ownership, and the right to homestead. And if you don't like that, don't be a libertarian. Good stuff, man. That's really good. It's kind of ironic, too, or at least maybe hypocritical, I should say, for their position of saying that slavery debunks what Hoppe was saying. Or if anything, the inconsistencies only prove argumentation ethics, right? So the inconsistencies of the status or the infringer actually proves that argumentation ethics is right. Because if you argue in favor of those principles, it shows that they are inconsistent, even in action, let alone thought. So I don't know, that's just my two cents on that. No, I agree with you. I mean, look, imagine two situations. You have one situation where the slave owner is one like in early America 200 years ago. So you have a totally unjust situation and the slave owner is trying to justify his ownership of this African slave. Well, I think we would all agree that he can't come up with an argument that really justifies it. His only argument is that, well, you're a black from Africa and I'm a white from America, which we would agree is an inessential distinction, right? It doesn't justify treating him like a means. You're still rational humans. And if you have rights because of your human characteristics and so does he, because he has the same characteristics as you, except for his skin color. But your argument for your own rights doesn't depend upon your skin color. How could it? It's a ridiculous argument. So he would be inconsistent in arguing for his right to be your master. However, in the example I gave, if you have captured someone who's attacked you, so he's temporarily your slave. I mean, he's your captive, literally. Or let's take a starker example. You're going to actually kill someone who's attacking you in self-defense. You're gonna kill him in self-defense. When you do that, you're killing him over his objections. So you're treating him like a slave, or even worse than a slave, right? You're actually gonna kill his body. Do you have the right to do that? Well, I would say yes. And the reason is because the aggressor has consented by his actions to being treated like a means because he's treating everyone else like a means. He has no coherent objection to being treated like this. He has said to everyone, we're in a state of war against each other. I'm not going to respect your property rights. And so no one else has the moral obligation to treat him as if he has property rights. By contrast, among civilized people who live among each other in peace and harmony and who are trying to find civilized solutions to living with each other, who are trying to find rules that can let us live with each other and achieve peace and prosperity and harmony. Then just a modicum of economic literacy and a little bit of logical consistency will lead you to conclude that we should live and let live. Whoever gets a resource first gets it. Whoever has their body or controls it has the right to that body. And everyone should mind their own business and cooperate as they want to with mutual consent. I mean, these rules are not that complicated to come up with. And that is what most people actually do. You don't need a philosophy degree to figure this stuff out. Yeah, it doesn't always hurt though. If you get it from an anarcho-capitalist argumentation ethics university, which we had more of those anyway. Let's move on to the next question. Anything else you want to cover on that topic before we move on? That was about 30 minutes right there. No, that's fine. I would just, if someone wants to look into this, if they go to my website, stephencancella.com, I have one article called argumentation ethics, a concise guide, which has links to my stuff, Murphy and Callaghan's, and many other articles on this, trying to elaborate and discuss this topic. Okay, great stuff. Next question, yeah, I guess it's more of a question. Stephen Barangret, I hope I pronounced that correctly. He says, ask Stefan if more about what he considers to be an appropriate act of homesteading and what isn't an appropriate act of homesteading. Also, this issue is a bit old, but I'd like to hear cancels thoughts about granting easements to people in landlocked property in more detail. So let's start off with homesteading. Can you explain exactly how the libertarian views, homesteading, how homesteading works, and what makes property worse? It's actually a very good question. The reason it's a good question is because he's getting at something that libertarians sort of in the background think has been figured out, but really has been fuzzy all these years. And this is how political theory works, or philosophical developments work. They get cleared up, or they evolve over time. And I've been thinking about this for 20, 25, maybe 30 years now, and my thinking has evolved on it. And at first I thought, like a lot of libertarians do now, and I would say like there's a right to self-ownership. I mean, in literally those words, self-ownership, and that everything flows from that. Now, some libertarians think that self-ownership flows from God, or God's decrees, some think it flows from common sense, some think it flows from practical consequentialist realities, some think it flows from natural law, the nature of the universe, but they sort of take, as their starting point, this natural idea of self-ownership, and they think that property rights flow from that. So they think of property rights, of which homesteading would be a type or an aspect, and they think of it as a subset of self-ownership. The more I thought about this, I think there's some metaphorical and conceptual confusion in some of this. I think the best way to think about what the essence of our libertarian project is, our libertarian idea is, is that we are a community of people that deeply and passionately desire and favor freedom, justice, where justice sort of is an inchoate idea of the right treatment of every person, what everyone is due. That is, you have to justify certain actions that would hurt other people. We all want not only ourselves to have happy lives, but our fellow men. Maybe, look, maybe we're Randians and we value ourselves more than others, that's fine. But we still value our fellow men, we value living with our fellow men. So we want everyone to prosper. We want there to be conditions of prosperity and flourishing and cooperation and peace. And so because of that, and because we understand a little bit of economics, what we're in favor of are rules that allocate, that specify who is the person who gets to use this scarce material rivalrous resource in the world. Because if we lived in a world that didn't have scarce resources, we wouldn't have this problem. If we were all magical fairies, then we could just have what we wanted with a blink of an eye. Zeitgeist, man, don't know. The sluaraffin land, or the land of milk and honey, we wouldn't have the problem. But we live in a world where we have scarce resources where only one person can use this resource at a time or at all, like your body or other things. And what I've come to believe is that the unifying principle of libertarianism is not homesteading. Homesteading is a secondary principle. The unifying principle is we want to find some objective rule that assigns ownership of every scarce resource to a user so that everyone can accept it as fair and so that we can all get along with each other and go about our lives. And we can have our own lives as individuals, but we can also cooperate with each other and avoid violating each other's property rights. And that rule for libertarians is that we have to find some objective link between the person claiming the right to use the resource exclusively and the resource. And the libertarian view is that there are two specific cases to be looked at. One is for human bodies, and one is for everything else. That is things that the human body or the human acting through a body uses. So the homesteading principle applies to those second things. But your body itself can never be homesteaded because homesteading requires a homesteading agent or actor. It requires a human being with a body. So you can never homestead your body because that makes no sense. You would have to have a body to act in the first place so you couldn't homestead your body. Could you technically argue that parents homestead through production, the child, or that another person might, maybe a person who's adoption, who's going to be adopting a child? Is that considered homesteading of a child? Yeah, so I actually talk about this issue in my article of how we come to own ourselves, which is on my website. So I was grappling with that idea because the more this idea occurred to me, I was thinking, well, so technically, that means that parents own their children because or think of a mother. The mother owns her body, right? And the particles inside her body gradually coalesce into a fetus and then into an infant, right? So technically, she would own that fetus or that baby. She's the property owner of that baby because it came from her body, just like you own the calves that your cow produces or the apples that fall from your apple tree. It's the same idea. It's called civil fruits in the civil law. That means that this is the idea of use of fruct, use of fructus and abuses. The property rights mean the right to use, the right to the fruits and the right to abuse or destroy or get rid of property. That's what property rights consist of. And fructus or fruits means things that are produced from your property, which would include, as I said, actually literally fruits of trees or interests from property, which is called civil fruits or calves from cows. Or if you want to extend it, it could include the babies from a woman's body. So my was thinking was, well, we have two choices to make here. By this theory, either the mother owns the infant and the child, which means she is literally a slave owner, or the child at some point becomes a self-owner. If the latter, then it's not because of contract exactly. It's not because of a gift. And it's not because of homesteading, because you can homestead something until you're a self-owner in the first place. My view, and what I think is the libertarian view, is that the child, ineluctably, becomes a self-owner because he has a better claim to his body's resources. Because the child has a direct link to his body. That is, he's the direct controller of his body. If I choose to raise my arm, I choose to raise my arm, not my mother. And that gives me a better claim over my body. So in a sense, the right to own your body is not because of homesteading. It's because of the direct link between the agent or the personality or whatever you consider the person to be. Whether you're religious or not religious, it's not really an issue. But just the legal person that we consider to be the owner of this physical resource called the body. And no, I don't regard them as the same, even though I'm not religious. I don't regard them as the same any more than I regard the brain and the mind to be the same, conceptually. They're linked, and one may be dependent on the other, and I think it is, but they're not the same conceptually. Homesteading is the idea that, well, how do we... So libertarianism says, how do we decide who owns a human body? And I think what we say is prima facie, the person who is the body or who inhabits the body or who controls the body or who is linked with the body, however you want to put it, is the presumptive owner. Now, that is the feasible. That means if you commit a crime, right, then that presumption can be defeated, like in the enslavement case of the criminal that I gave earlier. But the presumption is that the person who inhabits or controls the body is its owner, but that's not a homesteading argument. The homesteading argument is, what about every other resource in the world? Land, trees, canoes, minerals that are extracted from the earth, et cetera. So then the question is, who owns these things? And I think there is where the homesteading argument of John Locke comes in. And his argument was the first person who uses the resource and transforms it in a visible way with his labor becomes the owner. And I think that's compatible with the same rationale that undergirds the self-ownership idea. It's that the first person who uses a resource and sets up objective, publicly visible borders becomes the owner because he establishes by doing that an objective link that other people can see. And when he does that, he establishes a link that he can point to in any subsequent dispute over the resource. So let's say a second person comes along and says, well, I claim the right to this land. Well, his claim has to be based upon something, otherwise it's not a claim based upon reason. It's not a claim at all. He's got to point to some link. So if he says, well, I have this land because I made a verbal decree. Well, that's not a good argument because any number of people could do that and it wouldn't serve to avoid conflict because a million people could claim the land by verbal decree. So it has to be something objective, some action he took that establishes a link. So he has to say, basically, I'm using the land or I am trying to use the land or this resource. But the first person was doing that already before him. And so the second person is a latecomer, as Hoppe would call it. So the only way he could say his claim is better is to argue that latecomers' claims are better than earlier users' claims. But if that's true, then he doesn't have a property right in it because a third guy could come along and take it from him. So it's almost like Mises' regression theorem for money where he shows how, if you trace the current value of money back, back, it has to finally resolve in some earlier state where there was some commodity that had a non-monetary value that finally became money. Industrial use, you're right. Exactly, industrial or jewelry or ornamental or something like that. So that's how I would talk about homesteading. Homesteading, to me, is one of the two branches of the property allocation scheme adopted by people that want to avoid conflict and adopt rules that permit people to use scarce resources in our real world to let us live together in peace and harmony and prosperity. All right, good stuff. Let's move on to very good answers. You're doing great today. Like you ever have a bad day here. Anyway, let's move on. What was it? Stephen also asked about easements for people that are landlocked in landlocked property, which I guess to me seems a little silly because in a free society, I think most people would have already written into contract. Easements written or these easements written up into their contracts, but maybe you could go in a little bit more detail. Yeah, so, and I've actually written on this before and I can send you a link and maybe you can put it in the show notes for the show. I've had some sort of interchange with Roderick Long and other people about this. And I pointed to the way the civil law and other legal systems have dealt with similar situations. First of all, I don't think there's anything really special about land, which is one reason I object to the georgist crankish claims of single use tax and all this kind of stuff. And the earth is not special either. I mean, we may be living in the universe some day and maybe not on planets. Spherical objects are nothing special. They're just a type of natural resource, scarce resource. Human bodies are one type of scarce resource, so are other things. So the living area on the earth is just one current type of scarce resource that is usable. Underground caverns could be usable. Floating islands or undersea things could be usable. Things in the air could be usable. You could have three dimensions. You could have people living in space. So, you know, the surface area of the earth is not something that's unique. It's just one type of scarce resource. And like other types of scarce resources, we have a practical rule of allocation of who gets to own it based upon earlier, earlier use of the thing by setting up property borders or boundaries around it. So that's my first comment. My second comment is that as libertarians, we shouldn't be, as a lawyer, I feel a little bit funny saying this, but we shouldn't be too obsessed with legal distinctions. In terms of fundamentals, as Rothbard pointed out, all rights are property rights. That's important to recognize. It's impossible to have a property right, sorry, a right that is not a property right, and every right has to be a property right. And the reason is because, as Hoppe points out, the very basis and purpose of property rights is to solve disputes over things that can be disputed over, which is what economists call rivalrous goods or scarce resources. Things that you can have rivalry or rivals over, fights over. So everything that's going to have a property right over it is going to be something that people could fight over or have a conflict over. So these are things that are scarce in the world. So every property right you can imagine is some type of allocation of the exclusive right to use something that could be fought over. So we have to think of easements as a type of property right. Now the traditional view is to think of property rights over land as a bundle of rights that can be separated out. I think as libertarians we don't need to be that specific. We can simply say that if I own a piece of property like a piece of land, I have the right as a property owner to get rid of that right either partially or completely, temporarily or permanently by contract, that's what contracts are. So let's say I own a car. I can abandon the car, that means I get rid of my ownership of the car. I can destroy the car if I wanted to, or I could give the car to you let's say as a gift in which case I'm transferring ownership to it. Or I could sell it to you in which case I'm transferring ownership to you in exchange for you giving me some of your gold or your money, right? Or I can lease the car to you which means I give you the right to use it for a period of time for certain uses. Or I could loan it to you as a friend for free again for a limited time. So there's these different things you can do with property. So an easement is just a type of, it's like a loan. So like let's say I have a piece of land and you have, you're a neighbor of mine and I'm getting to the circle thing. So let's say you need to get to a road that's on one side of my land and you, instead of driving a far distance around all of our land and neighbors you wanna cut across a corner of my land on a regular basis. Well you might approach me and say, listen I'd like to drive across your land on a regular basis, would you let me do that? Well I might give you that right to be a neighbor, maybe an exchange or something else or just to be friendly or maybe I'll sell it to you. But I can do that, I can grant you an easement which is a partial property right. So from that moment on, technically you and I should be viewed as co-owners of my tract of land. Co-owners as defined by our mutual contract. With respect to the rest of the world, we're co-owners and with respect to you and I we have a contract that specifies who gets to use the land in what ways and on what day and for how long. So an easement is just your partial property right in this land and my ownership is my property right in the land. So I own 99% of the land, you own 1% of the land let's say, you own the right to cross this corner specified on this plat or this map on every day for certain non-commercial uses or whatever we specify. So that's what an easement would be. Now, let's think about what would happen if you get encircled by people and you just can't get out. I mean I just, actually in the civil law it actually doesn't give you the right to an easement automatically over people's property if you're voluntarily encircled, if you let it happen. And if you think of the earth as a sphere, you could draw little rings around it, a small ring or a big ring around the equator or little rings and let's say we have a small ring about enclosing a two acre field or a hundred acre field, let's say. So there are a million, a hundred people living inside this hundred acre field and everyone else lives outside of it and someone owns this doughnut shaped or disc shaped circle of land around them. Well, the people on the inside of the circle are no different logically than the people on the outside. I mean, you could say the people on the outside are trapped from going on the inside of the circle and vice versa. So do they have the right to cross over this circle of land? I don't think so. I don't think it's any different because let's say that the circle of land is owned by a thousand people. There's a thousand different tracks that make up the circle. Well, if you have the right to get out of the circle by crossing the circle, who's land do you have the right to cross? Are random one of the owners? All of them? Doesn't make any sense. I think this is nothing different than regular negotiation, regular interaction between people. And plus it's such an implausible example. This almost never happens. This is almost like these examples of, well, what if one person buys up the entire earth? Or what if there's a monopoly that controls all the mail commerce in North America? That's called the United States Postal Service. I'm just joking. Yeah, exactly. But that didn't happen by voluntary trade and agreement. So I would say it's a non-problem, but if it happens, well, there is the only libertarian solution is voluntary negotiation and property rights agreement as with any other type of interaction between people or the need to use other people's resources to travel places. Yeah, interesting. I want you to talk about the difference. If you see a difference, or I hear a lot of anarcho-socialists and communists basically point out the difference between personal possessions and private property. I'm sure you've heard these people talk about personal property is different than private property. I want you to kind of address that issue in concern. Maybe you can tell me what you've heard because I don't know if I know that it syncs with any personal property and private possessions. Okay, I guess it's neat. I mean, Marxians, I understand, have this distinction. Like, they'll say that they have a system where the state or the collective owns the means of production and the land, but everyone still has the right to their shirts and their mattresses and things like that. So they allow some kind of limited market in consumer goods, but I'm not aware of any even semi-libertarian leftist that are that extreme. So maybe you can elaborate on the distinction. Well, that's pretty much it. I think it's bunk too because it's all subjective-based. I mean, who says what I'm producing today is a business or maybe it's just for me to have to sell it to somebody else and becomes a business? How many more do I have to sell before it becomes a means of production? I mean, what is means of production? Who are the workers in this workers' paradise, right? It's all subjectivity. And to me, I just think it's completely bunk and I think you kind of just highlighted the fact that private property, it's based, doesn't have this double standard. So you know exactly where the law and property is at all times with private property, whereas when you try to go off and do personal property world and make it sound like you have these, like two different types of property, it just muddles real property rights, if anything. Well, yeah, it's like the libertarian, this thicker argument that whether libertarians have a good reason to be against authority and all this kind of stuff the left libertarians talk about. Look, we libertarians don't claim that we're only libertarians, we've never claimed that. We're human beings, we're acting in the world and those of us that are libertarians value liberty but we of course value other things as well. There's nothing mysterious about this, there's nothing revolutionary about this recognition of thickerism. Similarly, in economics and particular Austrian economics, I mean, Hoppe has some good comments about this and I think it's a theory of socialism, capitalism, or maybe in economics and ethics of private property, he has two fundamental books on Austrian theory. He explains, and so do other Austrians, that you're right that all values are subjective, which also means that the way a good should be treated as a good or classified as a good or what type of good it should be regarded as is partially subjective. So if you as a user regard a good as a capital good or as a commercial good, then it is for your subjective use. If it's a consumption good, then it is for your use. But there's nothing objective or intrinsic in the physical qualities of that scarce resource that makes it a capital good or not. So all these theories that try to distinguish or classify things that human beings as actors use in their lives as either commercial on the one hand or non-commercial on the other because they wanna tax one and not the other or whatever, they're completely arbitrary, unjustified, and unscientific and not really grounded in the nature of things. And not only because of that, but because nothing is 100% one or the other. Everything is a mix of everything else. Like when we think of people as entrepreneurs, we're isolating one aspect of their action, but there's no such thing as an entrepreneur that's a pure entrepreneur. There's no such thing as a consumer that's a pure consumer. Every human being as an actor, in every action you take, there's an entrepreneurial aspect to the action because you're forecasting the future and you're hoping for a profit, even if it's psychic profit, even if it's five seconds in the future. There's an entrepreneurial aspect to that, right? In every action you take, there's a consumptive aspect, your consumer as well, and your producer. Now, we can isolate the aspects of action to analyze them as economists or as social theorists, but that doesn't mean that these things exist on their own in a vacuum. And the same thing with goods. When you have a good, like let's say you have your home. If you live in a house on a piece of land, is that a consumer good or a producer good? Well, it's both, right? Because you enjoy living in it, so it's a consumer good and you're not actually making a monetary profit on it in every case. You probably have depreciation, et cetera, and you pay interest on the mortgage, but you need a place to live to sustain yourself so that you can go to work every morning. So it's a consumer, so it's a capital good. Now these distinctions matter to economists for analysis purposes, but they would never matter in terms of classification purposes except for someone who wants to tax you based upon how they classify you, right? So the government comes up with these arbitrary classifications of things because that's how they identify what they want to tax and regulate. But, and I can give you another blog post I've written where I identify about 30 or 40 or 50 completely arbitrary ways the government just tries to classify things like is it an assault rifle or not? I don't know, I guess if I wanna assault someone, it's an assault rifle, you know what I mean? So it depends upon the subjective purpose or use of the person, which means it's not an objective characteristic of the object itself. So I would sort of reject the whole idea that you can classify objectively a scarce resource as being commercial or not. Now, if you wanna distinguish land from non-land, I think there are legal reasons to do that. In the civil law it's called immovable versus movable or in the common law it's called real property versus personal property. But that's just a convenient way of treating things that have different characteristics for human action in the law. It doesn't mean that they should be treated differently on a fairness basis. Any more than a woman or a black person should be treated differently under the law than a male or a white person. Property should be equal under the law in a sense just like people should be equal under the law. Osiris redeemed, it's a person's screen name on Facebook. They stated, property as I understand it is granted to the owner when said owner employs his or her own resources to obtain it without the use of force, of course. How does this apply to intellectual property? I think accordingly, the above definition that intellectual property is therefore property except that it is usually non-tangible. But I believe something is usually overlooked when defining property in general and that is the will of the owner. So for example, if I create a piece of music using my own resources, I have to have the right to specify when going into a consumer producer contract the conditions by which said consumer goes about using the potential property before a transaction of resource occurs between consumer and producer. What's your opinion? Well, okay, so the second part of his comment is a little bit question begging that it relies upon establishing something by his first part, which is a question. So a couple of comments. First of all, we have to recognize that a question is not an argument. So he has a question, which is fine. People are entitled to ask questions, but it doesn't establish anything. People think that when they make a question that is based upon certain presupposed mainstream assumptions that if you don't have an answer right away, that the presupposition behind their question is justified. That's not true. Second of all, he's using the word property in a vague way, which leads to equivocation. Maybe not intentional, but it does. Property, if you use it vaguely like he did, property originally meant a characteristic of something. Like you are a person, you're Michael Shanklin, you're an acting human moving in the world. You're associated with the body. Some people, a materialist would say you are your body, a Christian religious person would say that you're a soul inhabiting your body, but you're still bound up somehow with this identifiable scarce resource called your body. No one denies that. And when you mix your labor and you start using these things in the world, which Mises would call scarce means of action, you use a net that you've crafted to catch fish. The net is an extension of yourself. So you could say it's a property of yourself. You could also say it's a characteristic of yourself. You're extending your means of action into the world. So the word property really doesn't mean a thing. It means an aspect of your ability to control things in the world. Over time, the word property has come to be associated with the scarce resource that you acquired and have a property right in. If you wanna be precise and be careful and not be confused by the way these concepts are used, it'd be better to say, listen, here's me, I'm my body, I have property rights in my body, and I also have property rights in, or I have ownership of certain scarce resources, things that can be disputed over, like the net. So the only time the question comes up, who owns that thing is when the thing is a scarce resource that people can fight over. So when we identify the owner of a thing or property rights in a thing, we're always simply answering a question theoretically between two or more people disputing a thing. We're answering the question, who between A and B has the better claim to this scarce resource? You would never ask that question over an idea, for example, because they don't need each other's permission to use it. They can both use the same idea at the same time. The idea or the information or the knowledge is not the type of thing that's a scarce resource. It's not the type of thing that can be fought over. It's not the type of thing that's a scarce or rivalrous resource in the first place. It's not the type of thing that we even have a dispute over in the first place over who owns it because we don't need to assign an exclusive owner to it because it's use is not exclusive, because it's not a scarce thing. So what happens is you have people jumping from the original insight, the human-intuitive insight that if we wanna live together in peace and prosperity and cooperation, when we find things that only one person can use, the only way that thing can be used productively is by one person, so we have to find out who has the better claim to use it. That's it, right? But what happens is we start using the word property to refer to that thing. And then we start thinking, well, the reason he has a better property right in that property or that thing is because he was the first one to use it. And then over time, as the capitalist economy advances, we start seeing more and more people make their resources that they own more valuable because they use their labor to transform them into more valuable things, like the Ford factory where they're turning metal and plastic and rubber into cars, right? They're turning these things that are worth one thing into another rearrangement that's worth far more. So we start thinking of production as the basis of wealth, which it is. And then we start thinking of production as the basis of property rights, which it's not because if you think about it, Henry Ford and his factory had to own the resources to transform them into finished cars, right? So people get confused, so they start thinking that it's a rule of thumb that the reason people have the right to own things is because they produce them, which is a false assumption. And then they think, well, this applies to things in general, right, like ideas. So the mistake here is thinking that anything that you can name or call a thing or that's valuable to some people or that can help you in your life is a type of thing that can be owned. Now, if you have to find an owner to a thing, then you're gonna try to find the closest connection to the thing. And I will admit that if a poem or a novel or an invention or a design is an ownable thing, then who's the better person to own it than the person who came up with the idea? I guess you could say humanity owns it because in most cases, every idea is based upon the ideas of other people. So in most cases, the so-called creator maybe contributes 1% of the value of it and 99% comes from the ideas he's building himself upon. I guess, so I guess you could have a dispute over who owns these non-scarce resources called ideas or patterns or recipes or information. It's either the creator or its humanity as a whole, I don't know. But the way to avoid that whole question is to recognize that these things are not ownable things in the first place. The question of assigning property rights arises only for things that we need property rights for. And the purpose of property rights is to solve disputes. Disputes are only possible for scarce resources. That's what they are. So I guess my answer is the false assumption here is assuming that things in general can be owned, they can't. Only scarce resources can be owned. And the way to think about this is imagine if you assign ownership by some kind of legal system to some non-scarce resource, like the design of an iPad or the pattern of the Harry Potter novel. Well, the only way to enforce that is to use physical force. That's why the word enforce is used. So you're gonna go to a court somewhere, ask them to award you as the quote owner of this idea, but what do you really want? Ownership of the idea and being recognized as the only other idea doesn't get you anything. What you really want is a physically forceful coercive order against someone else or their body or their physical resources. So for example, if you sue someone for copyright infringement, what you really want is the government to come in and take a million dollars of their money from them and give it to you, right? Or you want the government to coerce them to not use their body in certain ways or to not use their printing press in certain ways. So you're basically making an ownership claim against their material resources, their money, their body, their printing press, their capital equipment. So that shows that all disputes are always necessarily against physical resources. They always involve an implicit claim of physical material force. So these people that claim that materiality or physicality or scarceness is not a requirement for property rights, well, they should stop using physical force and stop trying to get other people's physical resources. If someone wants to come against me for violating their copyrights and they just get a judgment from a court saying, we hereby declare that you're a bad guy in the ghostly realm of intellectual ideas, hey, have at it, I don't care. You can go around and criticize me all you want because that's really all it would be, criticism. And you're free to criticize people in a free market, but they don't want that. They want to use physical force, usually of the state, against people's already owned resources, which shows that the only property rights that can ever exist is in material resources. Very interesting. I have somebody who believes that even intellectual property is supposed to be like the real property. So maybe I could get you guys, I don't know if you know Chris LaRue. I'm sure you know Chris. I don't remember his name, but that sounds like a comment of, that like Galambos would make. Galambos was this interesting character in the 70s, a California guy. And he thought that, and like Ayn Rand, by the way, they sort of believe that intellectual property is the basis of all property rights. And I think this is about as bass-acquards of views you can have. At least most modern advocates of IP recognize that it's sort of a deviation from property rights, but it's one we have to have to accomplish certain goals. Some kind of incentive system or something like that, a social tool. But they recognize that it's sort of an exception from regular property rights, but we have to have it. But these guys put it at the forefront of property rights. And I think their entire conception of the purpose and nature of property rights is completely misconceived and confused. It has to be based upon the existence of scarcity and the possibility of conflict. And the very purpose and heart and nature of property rights is to solve these disputes, to let us get along with each other in a world of scarce resources. And when you try to apply it to non-scarce resources, you end up undercutting rights in scarce resources, just like when you grant positive rights or positive welfare rights, you undercut and undermine people's natural negative rights, just like when you inflate the money supply, you reduce the value of existing money. These are all the same type of phenomena. Now, great answer. Rob Duffy wants me to ask you, who do you admire? Well, I admire people that mind their own business and have a job, people that find a way to make it in this difficult world. I admire pretty much all libertarians, even the ones I disagree with. I admire everyone searching for an answer. Among libertarians, I admire most strongly the radicals, you know, the Austro-Anarchists. I admire the activists, even though I'm kind of skeptical of activism. So I guess I admire anyone who's willing to respect others' rights and willing to seek the truth in trying to find an answer in this difficult world. No, great answer. Vigrin Sakharajic, I'm so sorry if I mispronounce that's a hard one. He says, money aside, if you were starting back out today, would you go into law? That's a difficult one. Probably, probably. I might go into a different field of law. I might go into something I think is more fun and more suitable and more productive than intellectual property law. Maybe more than gas law, or maybe international arbitration, which I've done some of and I enjoy. But yeah, I don't regret having gone into law. Trading is a field that's very lucrative. I mean, look, I'm not against making money and I think that doing something highly specialized in the real world that makes a lot of money is a good thing. So yeah, I'm glad I did it. I don't oppose it at all. And I'm glad I didn't join the dark side on too many things. I'm gonna switch over, my phone's bugging out, so I'm running out of juice, so I'm plugging in here. Sorry. So yeah, I think law is a worse field now than it was when I started 20 plus years ago. It's just because of the economy and because of the surfeit of lawyers. So I'm not saying I recommend it. I have some posts on my website recommendations or something like, no, it's like advice for anarcho capitalists looking to go to law school or something like that. I can send you a link to that too, Michael. Where I and some of my friends who are lawyers have cobbled together some advice to people because I get this question all the time, should I go to law school? And if I do, what should I major in? My advice is go to law school if you can afford it and if you think you can be near the top of your class and if you think you'll like it. Don't do it just for money unless you're extremely smart and have a goal in mind. And don't do it for libertarian reasons. If it complements your libertarian application later, fine. If it doesn't, fine. Get a career that makes a lot of money. I would say avoid something that's highly immoral like being a plaintiff's lawyer in IP or any trust cases or tax being a lawyer for the IRS, for example. But being a defense attorney for victims of the drug war or victims of the tax war, nothing wrong with that. Or being a corporate tax attorney, nothing wrong with that. Being a commercial lawyer, even being an IP lawyer, although it's tricky because you have to avoid the evil side and you might not enjoy it once you realize how pointless this whole legal field should be. Just like tax law or drug law. If you're defending someone for a drug crime, you're doing something good, but your job shouldn't exist, ideally, right? But I don't think that you should feel guilty if you're defending someone for a cocaine prosecution, even though in a free world, your job wouldn't exist. So yeah, I don't think it's a bad career if you're mentally suited for it. Yeah, great answer. I've had a couple of people ask me this about the Property and Freedom Society meeting. A guy named Jared Taylor was there. People, I think, are trying to say like this guy's somewhat racist. I don't know too much about Jared Taylor, but I know the Southern, you know what's going on here. What do you say to those? Yeah, I think I understood. I know what the question's going on, huh? Well, first of all, I actually don't know Jared Taylor and I don't know much about him. I haven't read that kind of stuff. I think the question is basically, I think the question is implicitly saying you're speaking at a meeting which has a racist at it. Well, I don't know what the question is. I mean, so is the question, are you racist? No, I don't think so. I guess I'd be called a racist by a lot of people because we live in a PC world and if you recognize some differences and you say certain things plainly, you'll be called a racist, but I personally don't care what those people think. I'm personally, I'm not a paleo-libertarian in the old sense. I don't think I'm a right or a conservative libertarian, to be honest. I've always been a cosmopolitan, pro-technology. I believe in evolution. I'm not religious. I believe there ought to be gay marriage and we should live and I'm an individualist and don't personally care too much about people's race or sexual preferences and all that kind of stuff. Now, I also am tolerant in the sense that I don't mind too much people that have different preferences. In fact, I think most of humanity has far different preferences than I do and is less tolerant than I am in that sense. So that's fine too. I just want people to be rational and individualist and respect liberty. Who people choose to associate with is their business. So I don't know what to respond to if there's not a clear question. I don't believe in guilt by association. I do believe there's nothing wrong with hearing people give talk and they're talking with people and hearing what they have to say. I am also very skeptical of judging people by the judgments of other people because I don't trust other people's judgments because they're so largely and often influenced by hearsay or by guilt by association or by modern PC standards. I mean, if someone just objects to a policy, anti-discrimination policy or if they're named on the Southern Public Law Center's website, then they'll be judged to be an anti-Semite or a racist or a bigot. To be honest, my assumption lately in the last few years has been that if someone is called a racist or a bigot, my assumption is they're probably not. I'm an individualist. I believe you should make your own mind up. So if someone accuses someone of something, I'm not gonna accept that. I'll make my own mind up. So I don't have an opinion on these things because I haven't looked into it because I really don't care too much. So I'm speaking at a meeting that he is speaking at. It wasn't my decision. I don't know much about it. I don't care. I'll listen to the guy. Maybe, maybe I won't. If it makes sense, fine. If not, fine. So I don't know what to say. I think you did, I think you did fine. That's good enough. I just wanted you to clarify that for everybody so we don't have those questions flying around anymore. All right, Stefan Mollin wants to ask everybody. I know you guys were talking about this earlier, but I already had it written down in my notes. How's the shoulder doing? Yeah, so I was in Whistler, Canada recently and I was mountain biking for the first time in my life and I locked up the front wheel like a noob and I flipped over and I separated my shoulder. So, you know, it's doing better. I'll be doing all right soon, so I'm healing. I'll be good as new in a few months, so I'm fine. I saw you move around the computer pretty well, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was three weeks ago, so it's amazing how quickly the body can heal from something that's extremely harsh and painful at first. Yeah, I'm sure it was. Last question tonight. James Weeks, the second, wants me to ask you, why don't you have a beard? My wife doesn't like them. Yeah, that's good enough right there. Neither does mine, but we have a compromise as long as I don't go. You know Pete Ayer? Yeah, I've seen his name, huh? Yeah, he has a beard out to here. She would leave me, yeah. Probably the only thing that'll get her to walk out the house, but anyway. All right, thank you so much for being here, Stefan. I'm gonna try and have you back home within the next couple months to give us. We're gonna always have plenty of questions for any time you come on here, but it's always good having you on the show. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it, thanks a lot, Michael. Yes, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you everyone for checking out Triple V. As you guys know, I will be here tomorrow. I have a couple of videos coming out, plus I have the radio show eight to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Tomorrow night, we have Rob Ventarius to log in with my four panelists. Also, I will have on Wednesday, George Donnelly from United Mutual, or from Mutual Shield Mutual, excuse me. So that'll be good. We're gonna be talking about Adam Cocache and see what we can do to hopefully help him out with some drain electrification. It might be too late, but we'll talk more about that on Wednesday. Thank you guys so much for checking out Triple V. I will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day, bye-bye.