 Race in America is one of the most taboo subjects that you can talk about. Tensions are running high, and they seem to be getting worse by the month. What is desperately needed is a reasonable, respectful, and rational conversation between two people of different races about this subject. That's the topic of the 40th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hey guys, I've got an important show for you today. The topic is one of those difficult ones, race in America. Even though I'm currently outside the states, I still read news about what's going on back in the US, and it seems like race relations by the week are getting worse. I have a very deep-seated conviction that one way to solve most problems in life, but especially this problem, is by having clear and respectful and deep and honest communication between people. This is true for the difficult subject of race, but it's also true for other difficult subjects about religion, and ethics, and other areas in philosophy, and even in people's personal relationships with their significant others. I think honest conversation has the potential to solve a great number of issues. That's why I'm stoked to have T.K. Coleman back on the show, who I asked to come on for a solid two hours to talk about this subject of race in America, and we ended up talking for two hours and 45 minutes and just scratched the surface. So this episode is gonna be broken up into two parts. This is gonna be part one, and then mid-week this week, I'm gonna do things a little bit differently, I'll release the second part of this interview on Thursday. My guest T.K. Coleman is the Education Director at Praxis, and you'll recognize him from episode 27 when we talked about intellectual optimism. Before we dive into the interview, I wanna share on a lighthearted note what a crazy week it has been. So as you guys know, I've released my first book on philosophy called Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge, and it's a short book about logic. It's an introduction to epistemology, it's an explanation for why there are no logical contradictions. I'm very proud of it, I've been really working and thinking about the ideas for nearly a decade at this point, and it was about time that I wrote a book on the subject. Well, in a nutshell, there were some people inside academia who are very skeptical of the idea that you can do any philosophy outside of academia and that you can write worthwhile, self-published books on the subject of philosophy. And so there was a quarreling back and forth on my Facebook page in the middle of the week by some academics that I know who are very insistent that good philosophy really's gotta be done within the halls of academia. There was one particular philosopher, his name is Jason Brennan, who came onto my Facebook wall to let everybody know that in his professional valuation, it was most likely that I, Steve Patterson, am a quote self-delusional crackpot, my book is not worth his time, and in fact, I would have to pay him $1,000 in order for him to read my book. And naturally, I just ignored it and thought it was very much arrogant, but I get that all the time from several people who are in academia. But he was very insistent and he said, oh, but if you pay me $1,000 to read your book, I'll write a review about it and I'll try to get it published in an academic journal. And I continued to ignore this request, but then I got some wise counsel from my wife and from some other people who said, hey, Steve, this is a great opportunity. Why don't you take him up on it? Come up with a thousand bucks, have him read it, and have him write a proper review and see if he can get it published in a journal. And I made some calculations and I thought, you know what, I think this is a good idea. So midweek, I started a Kickstarter project. It was called Help Fund Jason Brennan's Review of Crackpot Philosophy. This was on Indiegogo. And in a matter of four days, I raised $1,000 to go towards this project. So I was planning on telling you guys about it and saying, hey, if you want to donate, check out this Indiegogo campaign. But you can still do that, but that $1,000 mark has already been met. There was enough people that either wanted to see Jason Brennan smash me in a review or there was enough people who wanted him to give the book a fair shot where we made it happen. So I've already contacted him and it's in place. It was a very, very eventful few days. I was also invited to do an interview on The Tom Wood Show about a similar topic of self-publishing that went very well. So it's been a dramatic and exciting week. Thanks everybody for sticking with me and special shout out to all of my patrons out there who I know you guys don't agree with me on everything, but I appreciate that you've been consistent supporters of the show. You value the project and you're willing to pitch in, even if it's just a dollar whenever one of these episodes is released, you're willing to put some money behind a project that you guys believe in. And I really appreciate it. So with that exciting story said, let's go back to the serious stuff and talk about race in America with my good friend T.K. Coleman. T.K. Coleman, thank you so much for coming on Patterson in Pursuit. Oh man, I'm glad to be here. I had a lot of fun last time and I'm ready for round two. So you're my first repeat guest and the first guest that I know going into this, this is gonna be a two-part series because we have so much to talk about. That's interesting because the topic we're going to discuss is one we have never actually had a conversation with. So that's quite a charitable assumption. It's fair enough. So the topic that we're gonna be discussing is race, race relations, racism, culture, individualism, a little bit of politics. And right now, at least in the States, what I think the entire country needs is a bit of rational, honest conversation between two people that can articulate themselves fairly clearly and have a mutual respect for one another that are of different races. I think we have an opportunity here to create a huge amount of value for people that want this kind of respectful conversation. I would agree, man. I'm excited about it. This is a conversation that for many people equals tension and discomfort. And I would even freely admit that for much of my life that has been true for me. And I'm just at a place in my life where I take complete ownership of my views on whatever I believe. And I also believe I have some things to say about this topic that are often left out of the discussion or at the very least are under-emphasized. I know that's true of you as well. So I'm excited, man. I'm excited about the opportunity to dive in and hopefully not only people I've never met, but maybe some family, some friends can hear this interview and perhaps glean some value from it. I think they will. And I'm imagining too, in addition to the value we're gonna create, we're also probably gonna, in the process, piss a lot of people off, which is probably a good sign as well. Absolutely. All right, so before we dive into it, I figured since you and I both have a bias towards analytic philosophy and precise definitions, why don't we start off with just a basic explanation of what we mean by our words? So when we talk about race, when we talk about racism, we talk about even politics, we talk about culture, we talk about individualism, all of these things require not super precise definitions, but an explanation of what we mean. So why don't we start just with the most basic? When we say the word race, I'm not looking for a biological explanation, I'm not looking for a metaphysical explanation, I'm looking for you. What do you mean by the term race? And I imagine you and I are both going to mean roughly the same thing. Sure, so this is interesting because, I guess you could say in the spirit of philosophy, I'm already ready to debate because I don't think this is the right starting point. If we're going to have a discussion about the problem of race, I actually think we should discuss what we mean by problem and exactly what is the problem because there are some things that are not a problem in relation to this topic and some things are, but we can start with race and perhaps come back to that. But I think there's one thing I could mean by this topic if I'm trying to come up with the most sophisticated, airtight, invulnerable to counter examples definition of race, but I think the most interesting topic comes from thinking about race in terms of how people actually use the word when they speak of racism being a problem in America. So I think the man on the street, so to speak, doesn't have any sophisticated in-depth biological explanations and so forth and typically doesn't subscribe to any theories about it being a social construct and so forth. So I would just say the everyday use of the word, race as being distinctions in a combination of skin, color and culture or distinctions that are usually perceived to be easily identifiable based on those things, the difference between being a white man and a black man that that's a part of our race. Yeah, I completely agree with you and I think the simpler, the easier. I think skin color is probably in terms of the way that people use race, it's probably 85%. There are some other different external biological features that people are talking about when they're talking about race and obviously they're talking about there's cultural concepts that are associated with race, but I think it's really that simple. It's to a large degree what people look like and how people are perceived by other people based on those external characteristics. I would agree with that. I accept that definition 100%. Okay, so let's work then then how about we go to what you, let's work on the next word. Let's work on problem. Yes, so my understanding of problem is influenced by my understanding of economics. We know that in economics, value is something that is deemed to be subjective. What makes the price of a concert ticket for a Justin Bieber performance worth what it is? Well, it has nothing to do with the properties inherent in the ticket itself or the concert venue or the experience itself. It's based on how much satisfaction the person buying the ticket deems they will get from the experience. So value is subjective because value is essentially that which is perceived to satisfy a desire and desires vary from person to person. So if value is subjective because it's that which is perceived to satisfy a desire then that would also mean by extension that problems are subjective because problems are that which is perceived to be to interfere with the satisfaction of desire. You can't intelligently speak of a problem unless there's some kind of goal that this problem is functioning as an obstacle for. This to me is very important because it characterizes C.S. Lewis's idea of the particularity of pain that even though there's an objective element to every problem, there are circumstantial conditions whose existence can be scientifically validated and so forth. What makes the problem the problem is the way we process and perceive that. This is why you can have two people who have identical circumstances but for one of them, it's an amazing opportunity. It's a gift from God. And for the other person, it's a really crappy experience. You can have two children who grow up in the same home. One of them says, I remember mom being abusive and the other saying, I remember mom just being amazing to the both of us, right? So we experience reality differently. This makes problems subjective. That's a pretty common sense observation but it actually has some significant ramifications for discussions on the problem of race. The first is that in any discussion on race, we often speak as if it is easier than it is to pontificate on how easy or how difficult other people have it based on their demographic. Whether we're talking about concepts like white privilege or discrimination against people of color, we often have very strong opinions about how easy you do have it or how easy you should have it based on a pretty imprecise understanding of how the difficulty of problems ought to be measured. A second problem is we typically use the subjective nature of problems as a way to automatically invalidate or dismiss people's opinions. This can happen in a couple of ways. You can have some people say, well, because you haven't had this experience that I've had, you have no right to have an opinion on it. This is something that I could do to you, right? As a black man, you don't know what it's like, Steve. You don't know what it's like to be a black man or to experience life as I do. So I'm going to automatically dismiss your opinion. You can't talk about this topic. And then the reverse could also happen where maybe I describe an experience as racialized and you dismiss that experience because it's not consistent with how things seem to come together in your reality. In any discussion on race, all of these problems occur and they stem from an imprecise understanding of the subjective nature of problems. We have a easier time than we should have saying that one person has it hard or one person has it easy and we have an easier time than we should have in validating other people's opinions based on it being subjective. So I think as a foundation for the discussion, I think that understanding should be in the background because conflict resolution always involves the effort to learn from one another in spite of the irreducibly particular nature of our problems. And if I don't have the right to an opinion or you don't have the right to an opinion because I haven't experienced what you experienced or you don't experience what I experienced, then we can't learn from each other and we rob ourselves of the opportunity to do philosophy which is substantiate our views with reason. Yes, I completely agree with that. But I want to have you maybe explain that just a little bit further because I think that is true but what that idea often gets turned into the idea that there is no objective circumstance to evaluate, that it is all, we're only talking about people's subjective experience. So if some particular event was motivated by racial hatred or if it was not motivated by racial hatred, that still has that objective component. And if one party feels like it wasn't and one party feels like it was, I don't think it means obviously we have to, first of all, we have to respect that that is their experience of the circumstance but that doesn't mean that there isn't still some kind of objective answer to the question of whether or not it was racially motivated, right? Sure, absolutely. So let's say some guy punches you in the face. That part is objective. We may have a debate about why he punched you in the face but the fact that he punched you in the face that happened and maybe for you, you think it's racially motivated, maybe I'm a little skeptical about that. Well, there's certainly an objective component and there is an objectively correct answer to this question of was it racially motivated? But what's one of the number one problems that keeps us from getting to the objective truth? Well, if you say it was racially motivated, I might feel the need to invalidate that description because perhaps I've never experienced that, right? That's not consistent with my subjective experience or maybe you're wrong and maybe I actually have a pretty good argument as to why it's best explained by something else and perhaps you use the subjective nature of your problem to invalidate my opinion by saying, yeah, but TK, you can't tell me anything about being a white man who's hated for being white so you can't have an opinion on it. So it's not that these questions don't have objective answers, but a lack of precision in our understanding about the subjective nature of problems becomes the very thing that makes it impossible for us to have intelligent discussions that lead to answers. Yes, that's so true and it makes me also think of just people's personal relationships. So for example, you're married, I'm married and if you don't give the benefit of the doubt to your spouse and you don't have that fundamental trust that the other person is communicating to you some honest experience that they had, even if the interpretation of the experience was not correct, then it's just a recipe for conflict. You can never resolve the issue and tell you say, look, both of us might be wrong about the actual thing that happened, but we have to be willing to say, I trust and respect that you're communicating to the best you can the truth from your perspective. I think that's a good analogy because I often say that the perception of a problem is a problem and we often find ourselves debating the existence of problems when it's actually quite meaningless and ineffective to do so. If my wife comes home from work and she says she has a bad day and I ask her why and then she says, well, someone said such and such to her and I respond to that by saying, well, that's not a problem. That's not a problem. I'm misunderstanding something very fundamental about the nature of problems, right? And that is the perception of a problem is a problem. Now, there is a sense in which that analogy is also not a very good one for talking about race because we're presupposing something when we use the marriage example. We're presupposing that we're all in a context where we're incentivized to resolve conflict with the other party. Whereas when real world disagreements come up, we are often incentivized to say, well, you know what? We don't see eye to eye, but I have no reason why I wanna get along with you or create a life with you, screw you. And that too is an option. And I suppose that's one of the things that makes this topic a little bit more complex because if it were that easy, we could just say to everyone, hey, this is like a marriage. We all need to get along, but we actually don't. We don't all need to get along and we don't all want that. So within the context, the way that I think I will put this, your conceptualizing of problems is it's only a problem within a means-ins framework. What are you, there are no problems unless you have some kind of goals or in state that you envision. And the natural first question, now that I think we've got kind of the preface out of the way is what is the perceived in-state? And I think this already is where people have different in-states that they envision and then it causes all this miscommunication and anger. So in my mind, the ideal in-state for how people of different racial groups could interact with one another, I would say it's radically individualist. I would say I am having this conversation with you, TK, and you have a particular genetic makeup. And in my in-state, I would think, well, that's nice. You're great, you're taller or shorter than I am. You have a different skin color, that's great. Other people also have different genetic makeups. I don't really care. It doesn't affect my conception of who you are as a person. That's my in-state. Now, if that's my in-state, it becomes very clear what kind of behaviors are problems, what kind of behavior is unacceptable for reaching that in-state. So do you share the same ideal in-state and do you think if not, why not? So I'm not sure I quite understand. I'm hearing you as saying that the goal is for each of us to be individuals who live as we please and the end game of a society with great race relations is for people to respect one another's individual rights and just not let color get in the way. It's not even so much about respecting rights. I think that would be a political solution to say, look, we're all gonna have equal rights. I'm saying it is more personal than that, where like you and I consider us friends and maybe this is my own naivete or whatever it is, but the fact that you're black, the fact that I'm white is an irrelevant fact, just like the size of your feet and the size of my feet, that I want to see a way, that is the in-state I see of that deep mutual respect in getting past irrelevant differences, which I think skin color is an irrelevant difference. That's what I'm saying is the kind of in-state that I think a lot of people would flourish in that kind of a society where race, as we mean it, is largely irrelevant. You know what, man? I actually don't know if I can agree with that kind of ideal. Definitely if we're talking about things like rights and respect, but why not? Why couldn't someone make race, even if they're being arbitrary, an issue, as long as rights are respected? So in the realm of dating, for instance, people have aesthetic preferences that are quite arbitrary in terms of being attracted to people of certain hair colors or being attracted to people of certain body types and there's a wide amount of variety here and we certainly don't encourage people in that space to regard physical appearance as irrelevant or not having anything to do with the judgments they make about who they talk to, who they flirt with, who they pursue. Why do we need it to be any different when it comes to skin color? I mean, can't people say a person with this skin color for whatever crazy reason makes me feel more attracted to them or more inclined to like them as long as that's all expressed in the way that isn't violating anyone else's rights? I just don't wanna aim for a goal that's too high, that's too fluffy and that's too dependent on a sort of kumbaya kind of world. Well, I agree that that would be a perfectly satisfactory political instate. I think we're in agreement about that. Like if somebody wants to be discriminatory for some completely random reason, as long as they're not infringing on the rights of other people, I think politically speaking, okay, you should be able to be free to be as racist as you please as long as you're not harming anybody else. But I'm not talking about merely being free to be racist. I'm saying, because that kind of implies that I'm being free to hate you or think badly of you, but what about just being free to make that an issue in ways that perhaps might be morally ambiguous or morally neutral? So could you give me an example of where somebody could make a reasonable argument to say this other individual has a different genetic makeup? And for that reason, I'm gonna have some kind of, I'm not going to want to associate with them. I'm going to, if for example I had some, if I were to write down criteria of being one of Steve's friends, right? And I would have put on there the size of one's feet. I would say, yeah, you should be able to be free to make that list. But I don't think that's a, I think that's not respectable. I don't respect if somebody has that valuation that it's literally the size of my feet and I've got some pretty big feet. I have an issue with that. I have kind of an ethical, moral issue because I think it says something about how you think of other people in humanity, that you're picking some characteristic and it just causes an unnecessary division that doesn't need to be there. Okay, so I would agree that if you ask people to make a list, it is a rare individual indeed who will write on the list in order to be my friend, they must be this color. I imagine some people out there would probably do that, but let's at least agree that it's a rare individual who would do that. But in terms of the snap judgments we make, in terms of the unconscious decisions that we make, there seems to be a large body of evidence to support the notion that we often do choose friends and allies based on all sorts of things that are not essential to a person's character, like we make snap judgments without even knowing we're making them about people who have beards and people who don't. We make snap judgments based on the way people who are really tall seem to strike us versus people who are really short. No one's going to write, I only want to date people that are really tall or I only want to be friends with symmetrical faces or friends who don't, I only want to buy products from people who don't have beards, but these things actually do affect us. So why would we need a society in which those factors are not at play? Why would it not merely be sufficient to say that's fine, but problems only enter when we violate rights on the basis of such observations? So there's a difference between the snap judgments and rational decision making. So I am in complete agreement that people make all kinds of snap judgments for maybe silly reasons, maybe experiences, isolated experiences they had in their past that gear them towards some kind of instinctual response to somebody, let's say, if a woman has been beaten by her boyfriend and then she sees somebody else on the street that vaguely looks like her boyfriend, she might have an instinctual reaction to that. I'm not saying there's any issue with that. I think it is what it is. What I'm saying is my in-state, the society that I would like to see would recognize our snap judgments as not being the basis for friendship and would say that we can overcome snap judgments, that I want to live in a society that when my ideal society where biological happenstance and arbitrary genetic characteristics might affect our immediate subconscious selves, but can very easily be recognized as largely irrelevant. So do you believe that all snap judgments are expressions of people just not being aware of the horrible logic underlying their choice? You don't think any snap judgments just are all about biological propensities or perfectly innocent aesthetic tastes? I think there's a mix. So a recent book I read on this topic was Thinking Fast and Slow, where Daniel Kahneman talks about system one and system two. I think the system one is kind of this underlying brain connections. And part of those brain connections are you could say just neurological. Some of them you could call them like subconscious beliefs. And I think that also makes up those kind of snap judgments. But I don't see a reason why we shouldn't say, look, we can master that. We can overcome that. Where I could say, if I had some traumatic experience in my life or let's say how to give me another example, some people have really, really terrible parents. Like let's say their mother beat them and was awful and just absolutely miserable. They had to scarred them, they had a scarring childhood. And those people, I think there's a strong connection between, let's say like radical misogynists, men who just absolutely hate women. And those individuals who had those parents, who had really, really bad mothers. Now on one level, I could say, I totally get and can understand why somebody with those traumatic experiences would have such a visceral idea about how terrible women are. I see it in terms of explaining their behavior, explaining their belief system okay. But I also want to say, look, that experience is not reflective of women in general and you can overcome that. Even if it's hard, you shouldn't take that experience that has shaped your system one, shaped that underlying subconscious brain and into holding beliefs about a whole group of people that are actually very reasonable and respectable human beings. Yeah, so I think you're talking about the side of the mix you acknowledged that I would completely agree with. If you find yourself behaving, perhaps violently or disrespectfully or holding yourself back from the options and opportunities that you could have in life or depriving yourself of health, happiness, fulfillment, sanity, or whatever it is you need because you have bought into irrational stereotypes based on limited experiences and so forth, certainly a society would be better in some sense if individuals effectively overcame that. That just strikes me as becoming more rational, that that's just a part of being a more rational person. But there's more to snap judgments than that. There also is at a fundamental level, there are aesthetic preferences, there are biological propensities and if you leave people alone, even people that are healthy and sane and don't have any malicious thoughts towards other people from different demographics, you will see patterns begin to emerge in everything from physical and psychological traits of who people date, who people become friends with, who people hire, and so forth. And I'm not so sure if we should strive to make that something other than what it is because I don't think the absence of that is where the problem truly lies. I think when we're talking about race though, there's definitely something to be said. I like the analogy to aesthetic preference like in a dating market. That makes sense that a lot of people, it's just something literally innate. I mean, if you're attracted to some particular race, there's not, usually it's not some conscious choice. You don't go out and try to overcome that or whatever, it just kind of is what it is. But I don't think that's the case when we're talking about friendships, when we're talking about respect, when we're talking about how we view other people. I think that to say that just because in semi-laboratory settings, which you can't really get with human beings, that you see a natural self-discrimination based on racial lines, I don't think that that justifies that type of behavior. I don't even think that necessarily means it's rational because I think, and again, maybe this is my naivete, I suspect based on my personal experiences that if individuals want to be hyper-rational and try to genuinely see the world the way that it is, I don't think racial discrimination and racial bias is the most rational conclusion. So I think there's truth to say that to see human beings fundamentally as all one type of thing just with some different external shades of color, I think that is actually the most rational perspective. And so anything that makes something that is non-fundamental, like race, turning it into something fundamental, I think that's just an error. I guess I agree with that, but then here's why I take issue with you not pivoting this conversation on the rights issue because I would say that that kind of world is a natural world, that the real world in the sense of a voluntary society, in the sense of what nature provides, in the sense of a free world, in the sense of not a world where people believe in the legitimate right of one entity to rule over another, people are naturally incentivized, I believe, towards that view that the real world can be very harsh towards racism. But the reason why, the reason why we have the kinds of problems that we call race issues in our country is precisely because we don't live in that world. So I guess I don't see how we can discuss this in a way that isn't intimately connected to rights. I guess it comes down to my belief that the only reason you're talking about that as a problem or the only reason that that problem exists is precisely because of the state itself. So let me ask you, let me use that example and put it back at you. So you and I- So really quickly, Steve, before you do that. Yeah, yeah. There's a passage, in fact, I'm sure you've read this Milton Friedman's essay Why Government is the Problem in the final passage, the final passage of that book, I mean, or the essay, he closes it out by saying, the great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are. It does not care what their religion is. It only cares whether they can produce something that other people want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another. So I don't think there's something you need to do in order to have that kind of world you're talking about, but there is something very important that you need to not do. And once we have a discussion about what you need to not do, we're talking about rights. Okay, but so you and I share, I think very similar ideas about the ideal political end state. And you said it there, where we don't acknowledge the legitimacy of one entity to govern the lives of everybody in society. However, I could say that the world is incorrect. They have bad beliefs. They desire to be governed. The world is harsh in the sense that people desperately want government. But just because people want government, and it's a very natural thing to want government, to want that kind of protection, and I agree that people naturally are, they want that strong government. That doesn't mean that our ideal end state shouldn't be talked about, shouldn't be, we shouldn't persuade people and say, look, if you can overcome your bias for wanting government, you can overcome that deep down biological desire. Like, yeah, let's have somebody else take care of all those things that are dangerous out there. Protect me from the world. Then why not be able to overcome your biases socially? You can overcome them politically in your political theory. Why not in your social theory and how you view other human beings? So I think overcoming one's bias towards belief and authority, political authority, I think that that's a morally good thing to do. And there is evidence that that would change one's actions, that that would change significantly alter how people treat one another, whether or not they initiate violence. But I think, I guess the trouble I'm having with what you're saying is, I make a strong distinction between innocence and integrity. I define innocence as, we can say the absence of evil intent, right? We can say you are innocent when you have not been contaminated or corrupted. You haven't been exposed to evil. An innocent person doesn't even know how to do you wrong. It's like a child, right? I mean, well, children know how to do some wrong, but there are certain levels of evil that a child just can't take it to because they don't have the knowledge of how to be evil in that way. Integrity is when you have the knowledge and ability to be evil and you sometimes experience the temptation to behave in ways that are evil, but you make the choice not to because of a higher level of understanding. And I think integrity is the kind of society we wanna have. We wanna have a society where people are people of integrity, not necessarily a society of people who are innocent. And in order to have a world of integrity, that means you have to have a world where we can be real about the fact that people have all sorts of things going on in their hearts that are sometimes contradictory, that we have contradictory thoughts occurring in the same brain. We've got contradictory feelings pulling us in different directions. And sometimes we want to cheat. Sometimes we want to steal. Sometimes we want to lie. Sometimes we want to be jerks to people for reasons that are purely arbitrary and not rational. But the mere presence of those things in the human heart, the mere thought about these things is not what makes a person a person of integrity. It's the decision to act in accordance with a certain ethical standard that makes you a person of integrity. So I'm not sure if a good world is a world where people have overcome their ability to feel these arbitrary impulses to hate me or do bad things to me. In the August Wilson play, Fences, and now there's a movie starring Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, there's a scene in the film where the father's this harsh man who he's just not a touchy-feely kind of guy. And in one scene, his son says, do you like me? And the father says, like you. And he begins to ask him a series of questions. He's like, is there food on the table every day? And the son's like, yes. Do you have clothes on your back? And the son's like, yes. And do you have this? And the son says, yes. And he says, why do you think that is? And the son says, because you like me? And then the dad laughs. And he says, like you. He says, son, I do these things because it's the right thing to do. Like I don't always feel these warm, fuzzy feelings towards you. I'm not always charmed by you. I don't always like you, but I'm a man. And there are certain principles that I live by as a man. And then he tells his son, so instead of going around the world worrying about whether or not people like you, what you need to worry about is that people do right by you. And I think the best kind of world is a world where we do right by one another in a particular way, even if we dislike each other. If we all liked each other and we didn't have the temptation to be arbitrarily mean, then to me, that's not integrity. That's just innocence. That's just a world of people who don't experience temptation. I don't particularly think that's a better world. But it's not that this world is one where we all like each other. It wouldn't be like that because that would be completely unrealistic. I'm saying whether or not somebody likes you has little to do with the size of your feet. That's what I'm saying is the ideal in-state where it's not, we all sing glumia and get along. It's that my own judgments of who I think you are as a person, I'm not going to include what I consider to be arbitrary characteristic. Okay, so have you ever been in a situation where you or someone you cared about felt tempted to do something that they believed was morally wrong and they couldn't offer a logical justification for it? They said something like, I know this is unfair of me. I know I don't have a logical reason to be mad, but it just makes me so upset and I just want to punch them in the face or I just want to do this bad thing that I shouldn't do. Can you identify with that? Are you saying can I identify with it as in have I experienced it personally or am I aware of other people experiencing that? Let's do both. I like to know about you personally. I've definitely experienced that with other people and specifically the example you give, the punching, that's a great example because I have a background in martial arts and I enjoy literal fighting. I enjoy punching and being punched in the dojo. So, yes, that is absolutely a natural drive is to say I don't like you. There's some part of me that like to sock you in the face. Absolutely. And how about since you used the example of marriage, I don't know if you could identify with this, but I'm sure a lot of men out there can. Maybe you've been in a situation before where you're having some sort of disagreement or dispute with your wife and you know there's a point in the conversation if you just let go of your desire to have the last word problem solved. But there's just this lack of self-control. There's just this little part of you that just wants to take a dig. You know it's not necessary. You know it's not even good. You know it's not a matter of expressing principles you believe in, but it's just this part of you. Part of you that maybe Christian theology would describe it as the carnal side of you, right? And you just do it anyway. And maybe a friend of yours says, come on man, why did you say that, Steve? Why did you do that? And you're like, ah, man, I don't know. I don't know what got into me yet. It was stupid. It was stupid, okay? Does this not happen? Of course, yes, definitely. So what makes integrity integrity is not the absence of arbitrary and irrational impulses. It's not the absence of things like, I don't know why, but there's something about your beard that just annoys me, right? To me, that has nothing to do with integrity. What has everything to do with integrity is what I choose to do with that. I know that I probably shouldn't be annoyed by the fact that you have a beard, yet I can be real with myself about the fact that I do feel annoyed. And even though it's irrational and I can't understand it and get to the bottom of it, I'm still gonna do right by you. Yes, but you're still not accepting. So it's not, it's one thing to say that everybody has these, the carnal side. I totally grant that. It's another thing to say, and we just have to adjust to it. And we have to suck it up and say, this is the way that it's, this is the way that humans are, how do we kind of structure a political system around that fact? What I'm saying is- So I'm not saying we have to adjust to it. I think we're both saying that has to be overcome. But when you say that has to be overcome, I think you're talking about altering our internal state in a way that makes us not feel that way. And for me, I think it's overcome through action and the ability to overcome vice through action is the very thing that makes integrity possible. So that's an excellent way of putting it. And this is something that I really can't wait to hear your thoughts on because this comes up a lot in racial discussions. There's a popular idea that that carnality, that racism, that you make subconscious racism is so deep as to be inescapable. We can recognize it, we can trumpet, we can overcome it. But it's just part of human life. Now, in speaking, in honesty, my parents did an extraordinarily good job in this respect where deep down, even if there's any subconsciousness feeling going on whatsoever, it is so small as to be virtually irrelevant and it is so easily overcome where I'm assuming this is because of my experiences and my upbringing and the sheltering and the successful sheltering that my parents did, even though on my dad's side, my grandfather was very much racist explicitly. And he came from that time where that was the default. But in a generation, in me, that really, honestly, isn't really there or to the extent it's there, it's irrelevant. Now, I know from talking with a lot of my friends who grew up in this generation, the generation I'm a part of, at least my white friends where we can have conversations that we're comfortable, not gonna be judged about, a lot of people feel this way where there's an accusation that a lot of people lobby that say you are racist, you can't get over, you're inescapably racist. That does not jive with my experience. I honestly don't feel that way. I really think that the way that I see the world and what human beings are, race is practically very relevant in people's lives. The current system, the real world we live in now. But in reality, it really is largely irrelevant. So does that not jive with your experience? Do you think that I'm pulling your leg here when I say something like that? That subconscious part of me that doesn't really care about your race really doesn't care about your race? Well, it's kind of funny because, I mean, don't most people believe that about themselves? I don't know. I ask because I'm confused by this because I hear all the time that apparently this racism is so deep-seated as to be inescapable. Yeah, so, okay. So I think there are a couple of things going on here. One is, I think part of the problem is that we put the vice of racism on a pedestal and that makes it extremely difficult for us to make judgments that would be quite easy if we were talking about literally anything else. So for instance, notice how we don't have discussions and heated debates about topics like is jealousy a problem in America? You know it is, right? We can all be honest about that, but none of us feel like we have anything to lose by admitting that there doesn't seem to be much at stake. If I say, I think jealousy has a problem. Jealousy is a problem in the world. We need to do something about jealousy. I'm not really gonna lose any friends, make any political enemies or anything like that. But if I say race is a problem or race is not a problem, oh man, just no matter which side I come down on, I'm gonna create a lot of enemies and piss a lot of people off. So we put race on a pedestal and it makes it difficult for us to make simple judgments. Here are a couple of examples of this from the media recently. So, and I'll give an example from like the liberal side and the conservative side because I believe it just happens, period. I'm not with the camp who treat these sorts of things as if it's something that only left us do. I just think, you know, human beings do it. So for instance, if you take the recent incident of the four black people who recorded the video of them torturing the white person and they were saying racial slurs in the video, okay? So, and yet there were people on the left defending saying, well, it's not about race. We don't know if it's about race. And what was interesting about that is that the very perpetrators of the crime were saying it's about race. And yet as outsiders watching it, we couldn't even agree with the criminal about the criminal's own expressed reasons for doing, you know, what they're doing. An opposite example, if you look at the, I believe it was Dillon Roof, right? Was that the? Yeah, and Charleston. Yeah, the shootings in Charleston. Here's a guy goes into a church and he did not successfully kill everyone. There were eyewitnesses there. And the report of the eyewitnesses was that he said some racialized stuff. And he made it clear that he had certain fillings about black people. And this is why he was doing that, okay? Immediately you see the political punnets, you know, Sean Hannity was on the air talking about it. Well, this is more of an attack on Christianity than about race. So here we have yet another example of the actual guy committing a crime is telling us what it's about for him. And yet we place our opinion as outsiders above his when he knows best why he's doing what he's doing. And it wasn't until it was later acknowledged, but it was a little bit later. And Ben Carson was one of the ones to really step forward on this issue and say, look, we gotta acknowledge that it was about race because it's only by being honest about these problems that we can move past them and get the healing. So I think one of the things that complicates discussions on race is we feel there is so much more at stake about acknowledging elements of racism in our own hearts or in the hearts of others that we deny things that we would never deny if the topic were any different because we're afraid what the liberals might do with that concession or what the conservatives might do with that concession. And we have a very difficult time separating common sense observations about human experience from the perceived political implications of those experiences, you know? Go ahead. Okay, so when you talk about this, you know, the subconscious racism and can people purify themselves of these things? I think I really believe this is only a discussion because we put racism on a pedestal. We don't have this discussion about anything else, even though everything you just shared with me is also true of everything else. Like we have all sorts of things going on in our hearts. You name your vice, name your vice. What's a vice to you? Jealousy, is that a vice to you? You wanna pick from the seven deadly sins? You wanna go with the lust? Name your vice. It is in the human heart. Everybody thinks about it from time to time. Everybody feels tempted to move in that direction from time to time, but we only have this discussion when it comes to race. And for me, I don't care what you feel. I don't care what you're thinking to yourself in private. I care what you do. You know, it's sort of like an imperfect analogy is when I go to a restaurant and my server is serving me, I don't know if that person hates me. I don't know if they like me, but what I care is what they do. And as someone who has been a server in multiple restaurants and who has worked with servers in multiple restaurants, I can assure everybody who's listening, you have probably had several servers who hated you, who probably wanted to smash a pie in your face. But those people behaved with integrity, not because they were naive, not because they were innocent, not because they didn't know how to be evil, not because they lacked a vocabulary for how to express bigotry, but because they did right by you. And I think that's what matters, you know? If some guy tells me that, you know, he's felt tempted before to cheat on his wife or if some woman tells me she's felt tempted before to cheat on her husband, let's go back to the movie Fences. I'm sorry that I'm high off this film because I just watched it. But there's a scene in the movie where the husband expresses to his wife how he did wrong by her. And she begins to get upset and she says to him, she says, you don't think that in the 18 years we've been together, I never wonder what it would be like to be with someone else. You don't think I've ever been pulled in a direction that would have led me to be unfaithful? No, but I've stood by you because I made my choice, because I honored my principles. To me, I don't think she would have been a better woman if she said something like, oh, well, I've never thought about being with another man. I just don't accept that premise that it's somehow better for a human being to have never thought about those things or never felt those things. I think what matters is what you do. And in fact, I think this very attitude is what contributes to a dangerous assumption that you are a person of integrity merely because you have the capacity to be outraged by certain things. In fact, a lot of people let themselves off the hook because they get mad at this, they get mad at that. And they think that they're a great person that they have some sort of moral high ground because they know how to get angry at what's going on in the world. I don't care if you get angry at the right things. I care what you do when you get out of bed in the morning. There are a lot of people out there who are outraged over injustice and they aren't doing anything. Sorry, you're not a person of integrity. You're just angry at the stuff that you ought to be angry at. And yes, perhaps that does have some value. I'd rather you be angry at things you should be angry at than to perhaps feel neutral. But I'll take the guy who hates me but does right by me any day over the guy who says he loves me and doesn't do right by me. This is, that was excellent. Three things. I'm gonna try to remember them all. Okay. So, you say that it doesn't matter what you think really, it matters what you do. And I totally respect that. But. That's an imprecise. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I'm sorry, let me let you finish. I do care. I care what you do, certainly. And it's certainly when we're talking about politics I care what you do, majorly. But as a fellow human, I do care what you think about me. And I do care if that your evaluation of my skin color and my foot size puts up a barrier between us. I do have that care. Now, it's a luxurious care to have in the sense that if we've reached a point, if we could reach the point of, you know, political equality and have the correct governance system, that would already be just miles and miles ahead of where we are now. But I'm talking about that ideal. You know, what is the in state we're going to? Is there a higher form of human interaction than just- All right, can you give me an example of this? What this looks like? I mean, you used you and I and our friendship as an example. Let's say that in my mind I occasionally have racist thoughts about you. That's not actually true. But let's say in my mind, I occasionally have that. Or let's say right now I'm thinking, ha, ha, ha. Steve thinks he has no subconscious racism. Ah, such a typical white male privileged thing to say. Like, why would that matter to you apart from how it might affect the way I behave towards you? It would matter because, well, first of all, I think it would matter more for you than for me. So if the goal is for people to have a rational worldview and view the world as rationally as they can, I am totally fine with any kind of politically incorrect opinions that one has as long as they're true. Totally fine with that. What I'm saying is I think it's inaccurate. I think you would be making a bad judgment call. You had a bad method of reasoning or that thought. And I wouldn't, the other part of this is people's reaction to the racism. I'm not saying it's not there. Obviously it's definitely there. But you're right to say it gets put on such a platform as to be, you know, just people are obsessively focused on it all the time on both ends, on both ends of the debate. So if you were to have those thoughts, I would think, well, that's kind of ignorant, TK. You're making, you're judging, you have some kind of judgment about me. If that, for some arbitrary characteristic, and I don't really respect that, I'm glad that you can respect me. I'm glad that we can be friends. But if you were to think that, I think, well, that's, you know, you need to think a little bit more about the importance of some of those genetic characteristics for who I am as a human being. So that's what I would think. And if somebody, so let me give you an example. And I was taking a college class once with a lady who described herself as a radical feminist historian. And we were talking about the Civil War. And in the class, there was, you know, they split the class in half and we were supposed to like play sides for you are gonna act like you're on the Union side, you're gonna act like you're on the Confederate side to try to get in the minds of the different groups. So I was on the Confederate side, which naturally is easy pickings for people that are or on the other side. And the conversation exploded very quickly into it. And it kept going after the end of the class and then it eventually got into racial discussions, as you can imagine, it was very heated. And at the end, the professor who was still there, we were talking, I think we were talking about the government system and, you know, like welfare payments, redistributing welfare payments based on race. And I was saying, look, I view that itself as some kind of factual racism that you have somebody who are born with these particular genetic characteristics, they're going to get taxed and their money is gonna be taken to give to another group of people with different genetic characteristics. That to me strikes me as racist. And she kind of agreed to that. And I said, so does that mean I was essentially like, oops, I'm just born into the wrong skin color. I have to suck it up. And she said, yes. This is a lady at my school telling me that, well, that kind of racism, well, that's okay. That we're going to, we just have to accept it and it's in the political structure. And, you know, that's the way it is. And oops, you were born with the wrong characteristics. And so I can have that judgment about you. That is totally, for me, it's just infuriating because now maybe again, maybe this is my own naivete. I do have this perspective of thinking that these racial characteristics are not really relevant. And so for one, for somebody to make an evaluation based, a personal evaluation of me based on those racial characteristics, things kind of silly on their end. But then obviously, as I'm sure you and I in agreement to couple that with government is just maddening. So, I'll give you- But I guess my problem with this example, though, is ultimately what disturbed you was someone's behavior, someone's choice to act in a specific way. I mean- But that's part of it. That is definitely part of it. But the other part of it is I, as a human, want people to have a conception of me and a perception of me based on who I am as an individual, not based on the size of my feet or my skin color or how tall I am. I desire that. I wanna be in a community of individuals who when they're evaluating somebody else, they look at the important parts, which is personality, character, intelligence, integrity, those kind of things. So, and if we're gonna live in a big society, yes, it is true to say the line ends at politics where like if we're talking about a society of 100 million people, yeah, ultimately I really don't care if some distant people don't like me because of how tall I am. I really genuinely don't care. However, if we're talking about a community in which we wanna live, I do definitely desire that in-state of being in a group of human beings who are mature enough to recognize what differences are important and what differences are not important. So I think we have to make a distinction though between I guess maybe I'll call them instincts, impulses, idiosyncrasies versus ideas. I agree with you that a world in which people have ideas that are logically consistent and evidentially supported is a better world. And there are certainly instances in which people do things based on propositions they accept as true. When people take certain actions, they believe that doing so will achieve a certain result or if someone goes to church it's because they accept as a true proposition, God exists or whatever it may be. Certainly that accounts for a lot but there are also things people feel inclined to do. There are things that go on in people's hearts and minds that they would not dare try to logically defend. And yet these factors have a great influence on what people choose to do and what people choose not to do. That sometimes people can dislike you and yet at a philosophical level, no, they can know that their sensation of dislike has nothing to do with there being actual evidence that you are untrustworthy or that you are a bad person. And yet we still have to deal with impulses, instincts and idiosyncrasies within ourselves even when we know it doesn't provide evidence that something is true. So I think maybe what do you think about analyzing this based on different scales of people? So I think we're probably gonna be in agreement for large scales of people that what you're saying is true. We just have to acknowledge just as the way that the world is and let's structure a system where people's instinctual biases aren't going to be coupled with force of law. I think we're in agreement there. But at that level, that macro level, I think we're almost exactly on the same page but I'm saying I don't just wanna live in a macro society. I wanna live in a micro society. I want a group of people to live around, to be my friends, maybe family members. I want that small group of people who recognize just based on rational analysis that certain traits are irrelevant to what we are as mutual human beings. Well, for you, for example, I want you as you and I are friends. I don't want you to have a bad feelings about me based on I've got a big nose, right? I do have a big nose, it's true, it runs in the family. But if you have a negative experience towards that, I don't like that, that makes me feel bad. I wanna say TK, don't judge me for that. Work through those feelings. Look, let's hang out more so you can see just how cool I am. And we're really gonna like each other. I think we're really gonna like each other based on what we actually are, which is human beings with different traits. And if for some reason- But what if I do have a bad feeling about your nose and we do hang out and we do have those great conversations, you know? Then I think it's petty and I think it's something that can be overcome. And here's the thing, here's the huge other part of the equation. I completely respect 100% somebody who has, okay, who's introspected and can say that and say, you know what? Like, let me give you some examples. I am a auditory learner. My auditory person, I have been my whole life and I've had a problem, I've had a bias against people with loud laughter. It's like a legit bias. It's one of those kind of non-rational things, but it's true, right? Why would I care about that? Well, it just so happens that my wife has very loud laughter. And so I have had extended experience with a trait that I thought that I didn't like. And at this point, after that experience, I have overcome that bias and now I think her laughter is like birds singing. Now obviously I'm not saying like, okay, everybody just needs to be married to one another. And I'm trying to say that those biases that we have, which can be true, we can identify them unabashedly. I respect being able to identify them, but I think they can, through experience, honestly, be overcome. And that is, that's my own internal experience. And what you said earlier, I think this, talking specifically about this topic does cause a lot of controversy because I think they're genuinely, I do think there are two camps here. I think there's a large camp that thinks deep down that those feelings are unavoidable and not able to be overcome. And I totally respect that. I understand that line of reasoning. But I'm telling you, TK, I genuinely believe based on my experiences, based on my own internal introspection, at least this generation, maybe like millennials or something, maybe it's cause the internet, maybe it's cause the experience is, I don't know. But I'll be damned if there aren't a lot of people out there that either have overcome their biases or they're so minor as to be irrelevant. What do you think about that? Man, I really like you, but I hate this idea. Let me tell you why. Okay. It poses two problems for me. Number one, I'll meet you halfway and I'll say I'm open-minded to the idea that this can be overcome in any one. I mean, I'm open to the possibility. I'm not gonna dogmatically reject that forthright. However, even if it can be overcome, and I think this is illustrated by the examples you gave, the way we overcome it is by leading with action. We overcome it by leading with action. We don't overcome it by sitting around navel gazing or going to racial harmony seminars and meditating away our feelings of disgust towards one another. We overcome it by challenging ourselves to live in accordance with moral principles. And I know that we haven't had a debate about how that should be defined, but by living in accordance with rational principles, in spite of how we sometimes feel, in spite of what we sometimes feel, tempt it to do. I believe that is where character began. Even if it's true that we can overcome these biases, that we can restructure subjective experience in the way that you're talking about, we do that through action. Action is the cause. Secondly, this is my other problem with that, is when you emphasize the value of changing the way you think, changing the way you feel, you are talking about something that a lot of people are skeptical of, and you're talking about something that I think complicates the process of arriving at a solution. In fact, one of the reasons why things like forced integration has happened in the past, one of the reasons why you have agendas out there to try to get people to hang out with other people before they want to, before they're ready to do it, is precisely because you have people trying to create these contrived situations where everybody can just learn to love each other, learn to love each other. And I don't think that is the natural or most effective context for people learning to deal with each other's difficulties. And this is why I believe we have to bring rights and free markets back into the discussion, because I would argue that people best learn how to appreciate each other, respect each other, and do right by each other, not when we encourage them to deal with the impurity in their hearts, not when we encourage them to change the way they internally feel around people who are different from them, but when we create an environment where in order for people to satisfy their own self-interest, they have to do the kinds of challenging things that create character that develop virtue. And I believe placing too much emphasis on this discussion actually distracts from that. So I think maybe one of the areas that is causing the controversy, in fact, actually I think we might be more in agreement here when you said that, is I don't want to act like the solution to racism is just to love one another. I mean, okay, that is superficially true. But I'm not actually saying that the way racism is overcome or dealt with is by meditation or feeling really bad about one's thoughts about another racial group. I'm not saying that. And I think what I would say is just purely explanatorily part of the reason or even a huge part of the reason that people have racist beliefs is because of past experiences. So I don't fault anybody for having those feelings. I don't guilt anybody for having those feelings. Okay, like it is what it is. You have your beliefs for a reason. Okay, but what I'm saying is you can understand rationally that past experiences, which give you those beliefs are not representative. And don't just take my word for it. What I'm saying is don't overcome those biases with ethical, happy thoughts. Overcome them with rational, skeptical, empirical inquiry. There are lots and lots of people out there of every single race that are awesome, that are fantastic, that are respectable, that are intelligent, that are rational, that are loving, that are friendly. So I know people who are actually genuinely racists and they're not shy about even saying that they're racist. And I think largely the reason that that's so is because of experiences. So it's just a philosophic error, right? It's I've had these experiences, let me tell you about all of these experiences that I had with that racial group. And then I'm gonna make a judgment call about therefore people from that racial group act this way. That's a philosophic error. And I'm not gonna just explain it logically. And I think people can grasp that. What I'm saying is you have to keep an open mind. And what you're saying is true in the sense that the way you overcome that is through action. But the reason I think the way you overcome that is through action is because in reality those differences are minor. Racial differences are largely minor. And you'll find that black people, white people, Asians, Mexicans, everybody really has 90% in common when you think of it viewing it through the human lens. We're all humans, we have different goals, we have families, we have values. That is the much more powerful way of explaining human behavior than thinking that humans from different racial groups are different types of things. So on the one hand, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Well, I certainly agree with that last statement about the essence of what it means to be human and so forth. But I take issue when you describe someone who has formed these racist views based on experiences. I take issue with the notion of saying, well, it's just a philosophical problem. It's not, it would be just a philosophical problem if you had someone who, you know, didn't have any kinds of attitudes like this. And then they got into an argument with the philosopher who convinced them that maybe black people were inferior. And then they started talking all this stuff. Sure, if argument led them into it, perhaps argument can lead them out of it. But when you're talking about someone who had negative experiences, you're talking about someone who's reacting to what they engaged in the real world. And why did they have those experiences? Did they have those experiences because they had an open mind? You know, they had those experiences because they were engaging reality. And if you create contexts in which people are not artificially insulated from engaging reality, they will learn lessons a lot faster and a lot more effectively than you trying to argue them into something, out of something that they were never argued into in the first place. It's true, but I'm not, what I'm saying is I'm not claiming that the way you overcome racism is by argumentation. I'm not saying that. I'm still talking about the in-state. I'm still saying, you and I are in agreement about changing the political system would have a massive, massive benefit in terms of improving race relations and maybe getting towards this in-state. But I'm still saying, I think it's very helpful for people to have the end goal in mind is not one of, okay, we all have these biases. We just have to accept with them. You have to act virtuously. And even though you have these thoughts, but they're gonna be overcome, that's fine as that's as good as we can get. I think it's helpful to say, let's go there. Let's get to that state, yes. But then you can actually, there is a state beyond that. The state beyond that is to recognize things as they are in the world where race really isn't a factor. So is your disagreement that you think that in-state is impossible or do you think that it's, maybe it's possible, but it honestly just isn't even worth talking about? Because it's so far away. I think it's more of the latter. I think it's unnecessarily alienating. I mean, you've got people listening right now who simply do not believe that, right? And let's just say that you're correct on this issue. You're requiring them to believe something that really isn't necessary for what the real end goal is. So even in your end goal scenario, where we live in a world where people have effectively restructured their subjective experience to think in this right way and to feel in this right way, even then, that world is better because people behave differently. At least that's the presupposition that we behave towards one another in a different manner. And I'm saying we can get there, we can get there without requiring people to accept this theory. I guess I just don't see a lot of value in it. And look, I am far more cheesy than you and than any of my friends. Like when you say you're into philosophy, you mean Western analytic philosophy. And I'm into all that stuff too, but I also read the philosophers that people make fun of that aren't even acknowledged by philosophers by anybody. Like I read self-help, I like Wayne Dyer, I like Tony Robbins, I like a lot of that cheesy stuff. And I have big, big beliefs on what's possible for people to change internally. I believe we don't quite know the limits of what's possible there, but I think it's far more important rhetorically, pragmatically to place the emphasis on right action because even if we can change these things internally, we change them because of right action. But even if we can't, they don't prevent us from right action. All right, that's where the interview is going to end today. On Thursday, I'll release the second half of the interview. It's gonna be about an hour and a half long. You don't wanna miss it. It's rare that over the course of an interview, I change my mind anything significantly. Usually I'm already exposed to whatever ideas my guests are talking about. But TK's perspective on this really changed my mind in several areas, kind of on the spot. I had not really thought about things the way that he brought them up. That's very exciting and beneficial for me and I'm sure it is for everybody listening. So if you enjoyed this one, you are definitely gonna enjoy the next one on Thursday. So that's all I've got for you today. If you'd like to check out that Indiegogo that I mentioned earlier, you can find it on my website, steve-patterson.com and it's one of the first posts that's up there. If you wanna chip in a few bucks if you like the idea of the project, plus if you haven't gotten a copy of Squirrel One yet by chipping in, you can get a copy yourself. All right, that's all I have for you for now. Enjoy the rest of your day.