 This is the 74th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, also known as Part 4, My Conversation with TK Coleman about race in America. This week we're talking about race and politics. I learned about a decade ago that if you want to understand how the world works, you must understand economics. Economics is more fundamental than politics, and once you grasp the basics, it will irrevocably change your political philosophy. TK Coleman understands economics, and as such, it affects his politics and it's directly related to our conversation about race in America. The vast majority of the conversations on race in this country are about the extent of racism as a problem. Is it everywhere and a terrible thing, or is it nowhere and not a problem at all? People will argue till they're blue in the face about the extent of racism. But what TK suggests, I think rightfully so, is this is probably not the best use of our focus because of the following reason. Regardless of the extent of racism, there is one economic and political solution that we should all agree on. If you see racism everywhere, you can agree with TK's political solution. If you think racism is nowhere, you can agree with TK's political solution. So how about we talk about this politics and economics issue rather than a racism issue? I couldn't agree more with him. TK is the education director at Praxis, and if you want to read some of his work online and learn more about him, go to tkcolman.com. So that's enough introduction. Let's go right into our conversation about race and politics. This kind of reminds me of discussions with people about political philosophy. Whenever someone talks to an anarchist or a volunteer or a libertarian, they like to pose these really difficult scenarios and say, how would you fix that? How would you fix that? How would you fix that? And you can literally run through a hundred of those scenarios and totally dominate them. You can do this. The market can do it this way. The market can do that way. And then if they just find one thing that makes you think for 20 seconds, one thing that makes you say, actually, I'm not sure how the market could handle that. That's an interesting question. You lose. It's accepted as proof that this doesn't work. Capitalism is evil, blah, blah, blah. And see, this is why we not only need government for that, but for all of the other things too that you just showed that the market could resolve. And I think sometimes it's important to step back and say, hey, look, let's just admit that that's a tough issue for all of us to deal with, regardless of our worldview, right? World views can't save us from reality. There are certain things like death. There are certain things like getting a fatal disease. There are certain things that are difficult parts of life. And no matter what worldview we adopt, whether it's a metaphysical one or a naturalist one, whether it's a religious or a secular worldview, whether it's a liberal or conservative worldview, we're going to have a hard time figuring out what to do when we face certain dilemmas. But it is very important that we come to some kind of agreement on what we should not do, what we should not do about that. And I think what we should not do about that is compromise our stance on the importance of individual rights, merely because there are people out there who assign us powerful labels that have great consequence, simply because they are unfair. I think we should not run to the government to get them to pass yet another law to protect us from the experience of people being mean to us or people using negative language and talking about us. That doesn't make the issue any easier to deal with. But even if we can't come up with a good answer, I'm confident that if we run to the government to solve our problems, they're going to come up with a worse answer than anything we can fart out. I agree. And I think that's where individualism is so important, not just politically, but also, I would say metaphysically, or what you think the units of society are. If you think of them as groups, that can lead to all kinds of bad political problems because then you get pleas for government to protect this group against that group, which ends up hurting this group, which ends up hurting that group and things kind of spiral out of control. And if you're an individualist, you can have a kind of universal set of rights or a universal structure of government which only sees people as individuals and not based on the socioeconomic or racial group that they come from. But I do want to focus on another aspect of the race and culture and individualism conversation. I'm going to try to minimize the amount of times I can do this, but can I just inject one more thought? I just want to give the flipside to this problem of many white men being genuinely threatened by being labeled racist because of the social price they have to pay. This can cost them their careers. And I want to honor that as a real fear. And I don't claim to have the answers for how to cope with that and how to deal with that. But I do want to give the flipside for the sake of full context and say, there really are, whether you buy their reports or not, a lot of minorities in this country who genuinely feel that they are victims of racism, and I mean at a level that truly violates their individual rights. I don't just mean at a level of, hey, a white lady clutched her purse when I stepped into the elevator and my poor little feelings were hurt. No, no, no. It's not a violation of my individual rights. There are many black people who feel like they're victims of racism, whether individual rights are being violated, and every time they think about talking about it, they realize that they're going to be greeted with skepticism or anger and they decide to shut up because they want to get along. There are a lot of black people out there, and I've spoken to many who confess these sorts of things privately who they do understand that even though lots of people talk about the race card, that there are consequences for playing the race card as well, and that there are a lot of people in this country who don't want to hear about that. They don't want to hear about that. They do not accept as a fact that racism is a real or a large problem in our country and they believe that the bigger problem is not racism, but rather the belief in the existence of racism. So there are people on all sides of this discussion who are scared to either say how they really feel or who are scared to defend themselves against false accusation because they believe that it will cost them their career. This is not merely a problem for white males. That's a great point, and let's talk about it. So let's talk about those cases and where I suspect where they're most common. We're talking about real violations of individual rights. I know that because the word racism gets thrown around so frequently, a lot of people do have the disposition to dismiss all claims of racism as if they are the person clutching their purse. It's like, okay, you want to call that racism? What does that affect you? It's not really that big a deal. Yeah, it's not perfect, but have thicker skin. They want to dismiss all claims of racism as being as if that's the case. I know, and I know you have personal experience with this, that that's not all the cases of racism, at least in America, that there really is genuine injustice that is fundamentally caused based on a difference of skin color and my suspicion not being black, but from the outside, my suspicion is most of these violations most likely come from the justice system. I would say from the police, from the court system, and from the disproportionate effect of certain laws on ethnic minorities. So do you think that that is the case when you have the experience of racism and when you're talking with your friends who have also experienced racism, is that also where you find that the true violations of rights are coming not necessarily from the snobby white woman who crosses the street when you're coming, but from the police that are kicking down your door or the police that are enforcing laws in a literally unjust way? So I say yes, but with the understanding that I don't believe that that is a popular view or that that is sufficiently understood, because when people call out real instances of racism, there is often a cry for a political solution. And that cry for a political solution is often done in ignorance of how politics is the problem to begin with. So I recently read an article where Von Katesh Rao kind of criticized this sort of libertarian anarchist idea of let the market handle it as a sort of lazy passive approach to problem solving. And I think there's another side to that coin that gets overlooked. Saying let the market handle it doesn't mean everyone stopped talking about it. It's saying don't go do something outside of the market that's going to make it 10 times worse. But let's actually invest a lot of time, energy, creativity and money into solving it, but let's do it through the way of creativity, not the way of coercion that is politics. So it's interesting because I think people often speak of think of racism as if it's something that's capable of asserting power in any context. But I think it's useful to recognize that even when people are racist, they don't express that behavior unless they are in a context where they believe they can get away with it, even if they're wrong. So just to give you an extreme but obvious example, you're not going to see someone dress up in the white sheets, KKK style, and go walking through West Side of Detroit at two in the morning. That's not happening, right? No matter what they believe, they are at least smart enough to know that you don't go around expressing those beliefs in that context. Wherever people express those beliefs, they do it in a context and in a manner where they believe they can be at least somewhat insulated from the kinds of consequences that we know exist in the world. Racism is not an uncontested force. It may not be as contested as we would like, but it is certainly not an uncontested force. Let's just be clear about the fact that there are a lot of people in this country who do not like racism and they speak out against it, they fight against it. And this problem that you talk about of many white males being defensive about being labeled racist is based on the fact that there are a lot of people who have shown, we've got the ability to create some problems for you if we think that you're racist, right? Good point. So racism is not an uncontested thing. Why is that an important observation to make? I think it's important because when you look at all of the contexts where racism seems to have the most power, it's primarily in contexts where the agents of racism are artificially insulated from the natural sorts of consequences that we see everywhere else. So, for instance, when you take a look at complaints about police brutality and race, I think it's important to notice where the complaints are not happening. Do you notice that there really aren't a lot of black people complaining about the brutality that's happening to young black men when they walk through white neighborhoods? You notice we don't hear anything about violence against black men in Beverly Hills. We don't hear about violence against black men in Old Brook, Illinois because these are contexts where if someone, if some civilian is violent against a black man, that black man is probably confident enough to defend himself, right? The market is going to handle that, right? The only place where we're even having the debate, and this is something you can acknowledge independently of which side of the debate you take. The only place you're having a debate is in a context where the people that are being accused of racist behavior are people that are not subject to the same market forces that everyone else is. So, it is not the case that racism only happens when we're dealing with non-market forces, but rather when racism happens in the marketplace, it tends to get dealt with. The voices that complain against it tend to be heard. So, one example of this, you look at with the Academy Awards, I believe for the second year in a row, just before this last one, for the second year in a row, there were no black nominations. I believe that's the case. And so, the popular Twitter hashtag at that time was Oscar So White. Now, there's at least one thing that you can always expect when people complain about anything pertaining to race. There's going to be a divide, right? Some people are going to get mad that race is being brought up and some people are going to stick to their guns and they're going to say race is a problem here. But because we're not dealing with government, we're dealing with private institution, we're dealing with the marketplace. As I pointed out in one of our, you know, first two episodes, it doesn't really matter if your customers are being rational or not. If you want them, you have to find out a way to satisfy them. So, the incentive structure in the entrepreneurial world is just very different. The incentive structure of the marketplace is just very different. So, what did the Academy do? I'm not interested in knowing if you think this is a great solution, but I just want to point this out. The Academy, within a matter of months, even though lots of people were upset, right? The Academy issued a statement saying that they are now going to make sure that their panel is more diverse because it was mostly older white men. They're going to make sure their panel is more diverse and they laid out a plan for how they're going to do this in the future. Now, maybe audiences will be satisfied by that or they won't be, but this is the nature of the market. The market rarely gets it right the first time. I mean, even the first iteration of the iPhone isn't going to be great. It's a test. Let's see if we get it right. We look at the feedback we get from our customers and we keep improving as we go along. But this is just how the market works. That doesn't mean the market does everything well, but it usually does everything better than what governments can do. So, I agree with you. If you look at the examples of racism that have genuine power, they are examples where prejudice is combined with some kind of monopoly on violence that makes the accused artificially insulated from natural consequences. Another interesting thing too is this is a very nuanced point that a lot of people equate with saying racism is not a problem and I'm not saying that. But even where race is a problem, race is not the problem. And what I mean by that is let's say you have a cop, for instance, since you brought up that example. Let's say you have a cop who is racist, owns the fact, and is going to go out there and harass black people just for the fact that they're black. Let's just say you had that and there's nothing ambiguous about it. The problem is not that he has that belief because you can have that belief and you don't have any power to inconvenience me. You don't have any power to oppress me. You go ahead and try walking into a black neighborhood and harassing black men and see what happens. They're not scared of you. So, even if race is a problem, it's not the problem because there may be lots of people with that view but with no power to have an artificial advantage in case there's any kind of interaction. The problem is here you have an entity who no matter what happens in his interaction with someone else will automatically get the benefit of a doubt who is not subject to any kind of trial or prosecution in the same way. Not playing by the same rules. And most importantly is not part of the market in a way where competition can keep him honest. They still have the monopoly on the provision of security. And there is a degree to which it would be illegal to provide the same service they provide. Sure, there are some forms of private security but we don't have a privatized security market in that way. So, that tends to be more of the problem and I think wherever you see racism truly victimizing people, that's it. But once you realize that the problem isn't race, even when race is part of it, the problem is really the monopoly on the violence. Which is why I think free market solutions are always better than status solutions. So, even when I agree with people that, yes, that was a racialized incident. I don't think the solution is saying hooray over this politician. I don't think the solution is begging this politician to get involved in doing something about it. Yes. And when you think about it, just as a pure market service. So, if the police protection that you're being provided is inferior for whatever reason, and there's abuses, like instead of protecting people, the police are abusing people, who are you going to call? The police? It's like if your house is burning down and the fire department is not putting it out, who are you going to call? The fire department? It is because it's a monopoly, there's not the competition. There's not an opportunity to get anybody else involved in the circumstance. So, if you think about it, I know, I had a conversation, well, I should say, I had two conversations while I was in New Hampshire, where this idea came up. One was with Patrick Byrne, when he was talking about the minimum wage, and how the minimum wage literally reduces the cost of discrimination. So, if you're an employer that has racist dispositions, you now, the cost of discriminating shrinks because you're going to be paying entry-level people the same amount. You can discriminate based on other metrics instead of wage. You can discriminate based on skin color, which I thought was an interesting point. But it also came up when I was talking with Lynn Ulbricht, who is the mother of Ross Ulbricht in the justice system now. Ross is a white guy, but the amount of corruption in the legal judicial system is insane. It's totally insane. And so, this came up in a very real way, and it's really sad to hear the story. Who do you call? Who does Lynn Ulbricht call when her son is trapped in a legal system, in a judicial system, that does not care about Ross? Doesn't care about justice? Doesn't care about the truth? The prosecutors? The judges? He's already wrapped up by them. He's already in jail. There's nothing you can do about it. So, I feel like that's the same circumstance that people in minority communities are facing, where if the police themselves, the legal system themselves are doing the injustice, you don't have another option. There's no systemized structure where you can redress those grievances. And here's why I think the issue is more fundamental than race. Sometimes, this is tough for me to say because I never want to sound like the people who are like, stop talking about race, stop talking about race. Because I think that too is a power game. I don't feel the need to assert myself over anyone by telling them what they can and cannot talk about. You talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about. And if I care, I'll listen and dialogue with you. If I don't care, I'll ignore you. But I'm perfectly fine at being in a world where lots of people talk about things that I don't care about. So I don't want to sound like people who say that. However, I do think sometimes talking about race can actually give people too easy of an out. Because when I say you are racist, I'm making an ontological claim, or better yet, a psychological claim. I'm talking about your invisible intentions. I'm talking about your state of being. I'm talking about what you were feeling deep down in your soul, or what you were thinking about as you did something. And that only matters to me if it leads to a violation of my individual rights. And if it leads to a violation of my individual rights, I don't care about the substance of your soul. I care about what you did. If you put your hand on my body, if you take my wallet, if you try to break in my home, I don't care if you were thinking about Spongebob or black people. Get your hands off my body, get your hands off my property, right? And if I can focus on the violation of individual rights, then we can have a conversation about that. And it's really not that debatable. On the other hand, if I say you did that because you were racist, if I'm right, that's even worse. Because if I'm right, I just gave you this huge window of opportunity to talk to me about the fact that you have a black friend in Kentucky, that you're a big fan of LeBron James. Now you're going to make all these dumb arguments that I can't refute about how dare you. I've donated this amount of money to the NAACP and I have a black best friend and a black dog. And you know what, man? I don't even care about that. Because if you've got a gun in my back, I don't care if you love black people. I care about the fact that you're violating my individual rights. And I'm not going to give you the easy way out. I'm going to take you to task over something that is concrete. So now, how does it apply to what we're talking about? I think honesty is not merely the product of intentions, but it's also the product of incentives. And whenever you bring up something like race when it comes to the justice system, you give people the opportunity to start debating intentions. Well, how dare you say that judge is racist against black people? My father was a judge for 20 years and that's like attacking my father or all of my dad's friends or cops. How dare you say that? And you're never going to win that debate. And show me someone who has won that debate. I'm open-minded. I just don't see a lot of progress being achieved in that debate. But what I want to talk about is the incentive structure. Because I agree with Milton Friedman, who says the solution is not to try to get a good man who can run the system, but it's to create a system that incentivizes even the bad person to do the right thing. So, you know, I don't want good cops because I know that you can't always have good cops, just like you can't always have good people in any demographic. I don't want good cops. I don't want good servers at my restaurant. I don't want good bankers. I want good systems that swiftly punish people who do the wrong thing and good systems that reward people for doing the right thing. You know, because in the free market, again, the guy that's making my coffee, I don't know if he likes black people or not. I don't know if he likes me or not. He might hate me. He might hate my kind. That's okay. Make my fucking coffee. Right? Show me some respect. Show me some respect while you do it. And I show you the same respect. I'm not going to speak down to you. You don't speak down to me. If we run into each other on the street and you want to take it to that level, that's cool. That's your right. But I'm your customer in this space and we're operating within an incentive structure to where I'm going to be real with you. You're going to be real with me, just like when I get into my Uber driver, my Uber ride. I don't know if you like me or not, but we're both going to be respectful in this context. That's what I want. And I think that's what the conversation has to be. So when you talk about the justice system, these problems aren't because we need to find a more honest judge here or a more honest group of cops here. The problem is that in spite of the very best of intentions, you can only be so good at what you do in the absence of competition. No human being is so amazing and so angelic that they have the power to be the best at what they do without any competition. So you would say then in terms of practical communication, this is perhaps the road that we can talk about because it seems like to talk about structures, to talk about crafting a system in which there is the universal application of justice is going to cut across every demographic. It seems like if you can find a way to talk about genuine structural indifferences, that everybody can agree to because there's monopoly so that these problems aren't corrected. I have a hard time believing that people are going to look at me, I've got white skin, but how can you possibly disagree with those ideas? Likely, you've got black skin. How can anybody, I guess unless they literally don't like you because of your skin color, how can people listen to claims about structural problems, structural injustices that we can identify and agree on? How can they object to that? How can they say, oh, I'm not going to listen to this. He's just making it up. It seems like that's a very practical route to take to talk about something that addresses what most people I think would consider genuine racism, at least in this country. Yeah, but let me tell you why I think it's practical. I think it's practical because it cuts to the core of the real problem, right? The problem is not prejudice. The problem is the power to oppress people on the basis of prejudice. There are lots of people in this world who are prejudice, but they don't have any power. I'm not worried about those people. There are lots of people who are prejudice. They have power and they're not artificially insulated from the consequences of the market. Not worried about those people either. People that own big businesses and are really wealthy, hey, these people are powerful and in some ways maybe they're more powerful than us, but we have the right to exercise our voice. We have the right to influence people, to patron other businesses, right? And even people who are wealthy know what it's like to have the ground beneath them shaken. But I'm concerned about power in the absence of the accountability of competition. So I think this is a practical way because it cuts to the core of the real problem. I'm not advocating this strategy because it's merely less offensive or because it's more politically correct. Or because I think we don't want to step on the toes of white people or black people or we don't want to annoy conservatives or liberals. It's not about that. It's about saying we actually want to get to the bottom of it. We want truth, right? And even when prejudice is a problem, prejudice is not the problem unless there's power there. In fact, one of the reasons why I think so many people have a hard time accepting the power of discrimination is because the only form of discrimination they are familiar with is the kind that's backed by the state, right? Discrimination can be a very beautiful and powerful thing. In fact, if there were no laws whatsoever against discrimination, I truly believe that the cost of being racist would escalate and it would almost become unbearable. And that's really difficult for people to believe because when people think discrimination, what do they think of? They think of Jim Crow laws, right? They think of agents of the state being able to lock me up from drinking from a white water fountain. But that's not what market discrimination looks like. That's what being artificially insulated from the consequences of the market looks like. That's what statism looks like. So let's paint that picture. We're talking about the free society. So I think you've identified the problem. Let's try to see what that, yeah. You get a free one, T.G. Okay. I just want to say, I also think this is why it's very difficult for people to talk about racism honestly across political lines. We discussed this a little bit in the first one or two episodes, but people so associate the solution to problems of racism with more government involvement that belief in any racialized incidents is equated with advocating for more government, which is why go ahead and conduct an experiment and see if I'm not wrong. I dare you to talk publicly about race and point out anything that you think is a racial incident and someone's going to accuse you of being a leftist or a liberal. Guarantee it. Because they're assuming that, A, if you admit this, then you've conceded the liberal position for, you know, growing the welfare state or whatever it may be. And so what happens is many people on the conservative side have boxed themselves into a position where they are incentivized to either utterly deny or at least have a hyper sense of skepticism about the occurring of racialized incidents, right? Because even many of them have assumed that by making the concession that, yeah, that was a racialized incident that they have advocated for whatever the liberal solution is. So another advantage of this is you actually remove politics from the discussion and say, hey, look, nothing's at stake politically. Okay, we can look at this situation for what it is and we don't have to worry about, you know, what this means in terms of more or less government. That's a separate issue. We can start with what the problem is. But because we're not starting fundamentally with prejudice, but we're starting with power, you know, we can have that conversation more efficiently. And I do think a similar error is on both ends of the divide here because you definitely have that from the conservatives that there's a kind of universal dismissal. But part of the reason for that is because there are many cases which get publicized about how terrible the race problem is in the country that turn out to be sometimes explicit hoaxes. I remember maybe half a year ago, maybe a little bit more, maybe a year ago, there was, I believe it was a, maybe a church in Mississippi that was like burned and vandalized and it said, you know, like blacks go home, you know, pro-Trump type things spray painted on the wall all over the media, which is a lot of conservatives that were skeptical. And this is another case of the brow beating of how racist white America is. And then after the fact it comes out, oh, by the way, this was fake. This was a hoax. And this was something like a Hillary supporter or whatever that was trying to make it, to create a problem to try to create a political solution. And that just adds, that just adds to the skepticism that people have because that was such a prominent case. And that's not infrequent and it's not just exclusive to race debates. This has also happened with gay debates and transgender debates. And remember, there was a circumstance of a woman claiming that somebody, I think, carved into her arm like screw fags or something like that and she was a lesbian. And it was this big thing that made the news story and then it came out later, she actually carved it into her own arm. So there are cases like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I want to say something like that. I don't think we as a society are as concerned about truth telling as we often purport to be. People lie and exaggerate all the time and we don't really care. If you walk past some guy bragging to people about how much money he makes, you don't know what the truth of that story is. You don't know if he's making that much money and you don't care. You have a life to live. You don't care if this guy's telling the truth. But there are moments when we care and there are reasons for why those moments are different. Why do we care so much about someone telling the truth if they write a slur on their arm? Because there was no specific person incriminating, right? And if you're not the type of person who would do that, you have nothing to worry about. Why is this a problem? This is a problem because the person who's creating that lie is doing so because of a political agenda. If we acknowledge that their story is true and we go along with what they're trying to do, then that's going to lead to an expansion of government power in a direction that we don't want. So it still comes down to the politicization of it. In fact, it's not even about race because many times the majority of the liberals that are making these claims themselves are white, straight white people. That's true. Yeah, and now that I think about those circumstances, that is pretty much universally the case that ultimately it boils down to there's some kind of political message. On one surface level of it, it's, oh, this is a demonstration of how bad things are for this minority group, that we live in a country where people who hate homosexuals will just strap them down and carve slurs into their arm. Therefore, we need additional protections from the government and such and such. And that seems to be universally what the, where are these things ahead? Right. It's like the gun rights debate, right? Listen to what sorts of incidents people are expressing concern about. It's not just violence. It's not just that people are concerned about violence because if they really were, then they would advocate against things that are more prominently used in acts of violence. But they highlight the ones that support their agenda to get rid of the kinds of weapons that they want to get rid of, right? So, you know, follow the money, follow the policy. You'll always see where, you know, what it's really about. I think that's right. I think that's correct. All right, man. We're directing us somewhere. Yeah. All right. So the last topic that I want to talk to you about, we got to make it more uncomfortable since you, we have so much common ground here. Let's try to find some things where we disagree. Or at least make it more uncomfortable. All right, let's do it. So let's paint the picture of the free society where you and I agree we want political structures where people are treated as individuals, where they have rights as individuals, and where when there's a violation of individual rights, it does not matter. The skin color of either party involved doesn't matter their intention. It matters what's done and then what is the justice that needs to be served based on that incident. And if it is wrong for any, if it is wrong for a random individual in that society to do something, it is also wrong for groups of individuals to do something, even if we call them politicians. Yes. All right. So we're talking about an anarchist society. Where does that idea go? Where that idea goes? But what does that look like concretely? Because a lot of people shy away from, from entertaining this possible society, because they say, oh, well, that would result in discrimination, not of a political form, but discrimination in a social sense. If there's no political consequences, that would mean the butcher could say, hey, no Chinese allowed. We don't want to live in a society where there's that kind of overt social discrimination. And they say, well, therefore we need, we need, we can't have that political structure. We need to have this other political structure. So are you saying that in the vision of the society that we're talking about, you would have a tolerance for that kind of explicit social discrimination for people to say, you know what, I don't like black people and they're not coming on my property. So it depends what you mean by tolerance. So if you mean I'm going to ignore what this guy says, not have an opinion, not try to use my power of influence to bring him down or whatever it may be, then no, I'm not going to be tolerant because I have my agendas and I have my opinions just like anything else. And I see things in the world that I consider myself to be at war against, and I will use whatever means are at my disposal to fight against those things, right? So I do believe in such a thing as evil. In fact, there are things that are not even like easy to argue for objectively evil. Like I think people ought to eat healthier. I think people ought to perhaps spend less time watching TV and more time getting excited about their own individual potential as they do about a TV show, right? I got agendas that I'm out there fighting for and I'm trying to use my gifts, my talents, my influence and my connections to promote my agenda. So I'm not going to behave neutral, neutral. So I don't advocate for a society in which we all just pretend like everything is equal. However, if by tolerant you mean I would advocate for a society in which force is not used against that person for having the opinions they have and choosing to disassociate with people based on those things. I would tolerate that. And here's why I think that would be a better kind of society. First of all, when we look at those types of things, we often fail to take into account the basic economic principle that people respond to incentives. And we assume that just because a butcher has a desire to run a business in which he doesn't serve black people as you say, that he is going to choose to do this without considering anything else besides his emotions at that time. And this takes us back to what I said before. People are very good even at a subconscious level at factoring in the cost and benefits associated with their behavior. And people prove over and over again that even when they really want to say something, like there are moments where people really want to punch you in the face or they really want to swear at you or they really want to give you a piece of their mind and they exercise a tremendous amount of self control because they don't want to get in trouble. And getting in trouble isn't always about the law. You know, sometimes getting in trouble means I don't want to get jumped by all these guys in the bar. It could mean I don't want to lose my customers who might look at me in a different way. It might mean I don't want to out myself publicly. I'm okay with this being a personal opinion, but I don't want the world seeing me this way. There are lots of ways to get in trouble and to be ostracized in society that have nothing to do with being punished in a court of law. So if some butcher says I'm going to open up a business and I don't want to serve black people and I'm going to put that on my side. I'm going to make it a part of my marketing. I only serve white people or whatever or no black folks allowed. There are a number of things that happen. Number one, that butcher just incentivizes someone else to set up a shop right next door or down the street and be like, hey, I'm the butcher. That's for everybody. And that butcher, by the way, might be racist too, but he's just a smarter businessman. That might be a racist butcher too, but that racist butcher might be like, man, I'm going to get all of that black money, right? And so that person opens up a shop down the street or next door and says, hey, I'm the butcher for everybody. I don't discriminate against anybody. We exist for everybody in the world. Now, I remember I went to a church back when I lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I went to a church and across the street from that church, there was an adult bookstore. It was a huge adult bookstore. You couldn't miss it, man. And I noticed something interesting about this place. There were no doors. You couldn't see any doors. You literally never saw anyone go in or come out. Why do you think that is? Because there is a smart entrepreneur that made some secret entrance somewhere so that people could find a way into the bookstore without letting other people know that they were going in there. Because there's such a strong social stigma. You don't want to be seen going into that bookstore that the entrepreneur is thinking, okay, we're going to have some secretive way where you can get in and people not know that you're coming in. Now, that's very interesting because the customers who go into this store clearly believe in what they're doing or are okay with what they're doing enough to go into the bookstore. Why would they go through the trouble of walking through the back or going through some secret entrance when they live in a world where that's not illegal? Social pressure, man. There's no law stopping them from doing that. No violence against them. All social pressure. Now, here's the interesting thing about that. When it comes to an adult bookstore, the only other alternative to that would be an adult bookstore. On the other hand, if we're now talking about a grocery store or a bank and people have an alternative of going into a bank where every time you walk into that bank or to that butcher shop, you become stigmatized as, oh, you're the guy that promotes racism, or you can still be a racist if you want, and you can go into the butcher shop where nobody knows what your beliefs are about race. Which one of those is going to give you an easier time? Okay, so lots of people have beliefs that they're very comfortable with in private, but they just don't want the inconvenience and the trouble of having to make those beliefs a part of their public image. There is a real distinction between your public life and your private life, and we don't always feel comfortable owning every opinion that we have when we're in public. So you incentivize competition by doing that. If you're the owner of that butcher shop, you raise the social cost of people coming into your shop. In addition to that, you have a full demographic of people who say, oh, hell no. Like, I didn't care one way or another, but I'm definitely going to make myself an enemy of your shop. And because I hate you so much, I might protest, I may make jokes about you. You're going to be on every episode of Key & Pill as the racist butcher shop. You know, it's interesting, Steve, because a lot of people, when they talk about racism, they say things like, oh, racism still exists today. It's just gone into hiding. It's just gone underground. It's just not as obvious. And they use that observation as a basis for saying nothing has changed. No progress has been achieved. And while I agree that hidden racism is still a negative force and that we shouldn't equate hidden or invisible racism with no racism, that is a kind of progress that behooves us to analyze and understand. Why is it that people feel the need to keep their racism secret? Why is it that people only feel comfortable being racist in certain contexts? Why is it that when people are in other contexts, they lose their courage, they lose their boldness, they clean up their language, they're way more diplomatic? Even people that are spokespersons, right, for a point of view on their own private little podcast, they wouldn't talk that way on David Letterman. They wouldn't talk that way on Oprah. They wouldn't talk that way if they weren't around their clique or their tribe. They lose their courage real quick because they know they might be in physical danger. They know they're going to get hated on. They know they're going to attract a number of people that is going to make their life miserable. People that don't want to work with them. People that don't want to buy stuff from them. So I don't think you can factor in these kinds of things without considering the cost. In fact, the more people are allowed to be free, to be open about where they really stand, the more those of us who are against them can make them pay the price. Right now, we live in a world where you actually can hate certain demographics of people and you can still make tons of money off of them by keeping it a secret. I don't see any reason to believe that all those people are just going to all of a sudden forget about greed, forget about self-interest, forget about their desire to make a profit, and they're going to choose to be openly racist at their own expense. And if they do, they highly incentivize competition. And you know what? They're going to hurt their own pockets. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that what you want if you're against racism for the racist to not be able to hide and pretend that he or she is something other than what he is? Well, so does this only work then if you have a society that already has some kind of egalitarian cultural belief system? I mean, what if it's the case that the social cost of being a racist would go way down? So let's say there's little enclaves of stereotypically some place in the south, some city or geographic location in the U.S. south and Mississippi where there isn't the social pressure. Doesn't that system then need those laws? So we have that now, by the way. We have that now. This is funny because this reminds me of any time I'm in some conversation with people about markets, people say things like, well, I mean, if schooling were privatized, what about the people that live in poor neighborhoods? Wouldn't they have like an inferior quality or if policing were privatized? What if somebody lived in a neighborhood where it took an hour for the police to get there versus a rich neighborhood? Like, you do know you're talking about current reality, right? You do know this isn't a hypothetical thing. This is the world we now live in. And if you think that world is a problem, then good, we're on the same page, right? So here's the thing. We already live in a society where certain forms of behavior, certain attitudes are marginalized because they have higher social costs in the mainstream world. And people are required to go into certain kinds of pockets and spaces and communities in order to feel free living that way or expressing that way. And we live in that kind of country right here right now. So I think there's a kind of a deeper truth here, a deeper, more fundamental truth that if it's the case you're living in a culture where it truly is the dominant acceptable ideology is racism, then laws aren't going to help because the police aren't going to enforce the laws that way, the judicial system's not going to enforce the laws that way. So I think that's kind of like a similar thing happens in countries where you have child labor laws. There's a worry that, oh my gosh, if you don't have child labor laws, you have people working in factories. But the reality of the circumstance is just economically speaking, the child labor laws come after there's some measure of economic wealth where people can afford to have their kids not go to the factories and work. So if you're in already a socioeconomic setting in which kids are required to work in order to make ends meet, law ain't going to make any difference in the world whatsoever. In fact, it's probably going to push people more into poverty because kids aren't going to be able to bring home an additional paycheck. Studies were done in this, I think it was India. And I think India passed a law and then as soon, sure enough, a bunch of kids stopped working in the factories, but child prostitution spiked up because those kids needed a way to make income so that their ends could meet. So I feel like the same thing is going on here where if you're in that circumstance, the law really isn't going to protect you that much. Yeah, so here's an interesting thought experiment to do. Let's go back to the time of the Jim Crow laws. Let's go back to time when discrimination was a very status thing, not a market thing. Tell me, given that everybody agrees that society was hyper-racist back then, that society was at least more explicitly, overtly racist than it is today. People were comfortable saying these types of things. Why did we need laws? I think this is a good question to ask. Why do we need laws to make it illegal for black people to work in certain places, make certain wages, be hired by certain people, venture into certain places? Why would you need a law for that if everybody's on the same page about how we ought to behave? And I got an answer for you and it comes from what they said. And what they said is without these laws, then black people will out-compete us. Because the economic incentive was that, like in the South, black freed slaves were able to charge lower wages. They were being employed just through purely economic market dynamics. So people said, hey, we can't have that. Let's have the minimum wage so that they're not going to be out-competing us on what they're charging for labor. So what my fundamental beliefs is that you always find out the most interesting things about a society by taking a close look at what they conspire against. Because people don't conspire against things unless they feel threatened by the potential of those things. We don't conspire against ants because we feel completely confident that we can ignore them and get everything we want out of life. If an ant ever gets in our way or creates a problem, we can just step on it or walk around it or whatever we do. We only conspire against something or someone if we feel like that has the ability to destroy us. Which is why I think it's very interesting to take a look at the fact that all communist regimes, what do they conspire against? Cigarettes, blue jeans, pop music and stuff like that, they're telling you something about the power of markets. They're not threatened by political meetups as much as they're threatened by people experiencing the goodness of the market for themselves. Because they know it's really hard to indoctrinate people with those sorts of views when they know, when they directly experience the beauty of the market. In a similar way, why is it that the racist of the society conspired against voluntary interaction, conspired against a free market where people can work for what they want to work for, people can hire whoever they want, why is it that they felt the need? I mean, if these races didn't want anything to do with each other and racial prejudice by itself was powerful enough, why did interracial marriage need to be illegal? Because it's hard to stop somebody from doing something. Apparently, apparently forces are being attracted to each other and as much as we hate it, as much as we don't like it, people aren't being racist enough at their own expense. That tells you something about the market. People don't have an infinite ability to discriminate at their own expense. At some point, it becomes expensive. At some point, it costs them a lot. One example of this, and people get annoyed at observations like this because they equate it with saying black people are only good at sports. But I think this is a useful thing to look at because it's an example where, at least historically, black people have significantly outperformed their white counterparts. Let's take a look at the NBA. Donald Sterling was recently ousted, like in the past year or two, from being the owner of the Clippers and there was pretty much this consensus among the media that this guy was racist. What's interesting about that fact is that most of the players on his basketball team were black. Now, I'm not using that as an argument to say that he wasn't racist. Let's just go ahead and assume that he was. Now you tell me, why would a racist white man have black players on his team? What is it that he understands about business that makes him do that? Then if you had an all-white team, there's not enough white players that are of the caliber, so you just lose money, you'd fail. Hey man, the world may one day change, but there's no white counterpart to LeBron James, no white counterpart to Chris Paul, to DeAndre Jordan. That's going to be a boring team, that's going to be a team that doesn't sell tickets, and even if this guy is racist, he cares more about his pocketbooks than making a point. He cares more about his well-being. He's not going to be racist in every area of his life, just those areas where he might believe that he can get away with it, just in those areas where it's not too expensive. And what that at least tells you is that people are self-conscious or self-interested enough to consider their well-being and the things they do. Now, some people may say, alright, TK, I think that's still a little naive because we have examples today where even with all of those factors being present, people actually do seem to be racist at their own expense. They actually will hire an inferior white employee because they don't want to be around black folks or whatever it may be. And I would say in the instances where you can point this out, where someone appears to be racist at their own expense, those are areas where they're actually incentivized to engage in irrational behavior because they're artificially insulated from free market forces. We don't live in a free market today. When most people criticize capitalism, what they mean is corporatism or crony capitalism. What they mean is having a bunch of big businesses that are in debt with government and are able to do all sorts of things they would never get away with in a voluntary society. But they're able to do those things and still not suffer consequences because you as a customer don't have any power. The government will bail them out either way. And yeah, you do have the ability to get away with that stuff. But that's very different from the kind of society we're talking about. That's a great point. And so I do want to conclude this conversation by talking more about what that society looks like. And I think the truth of the matter, and tell me if you think this is wrong, the truth of the matter is that if you had voluntary association, you're necessarily going to have voluntary disassociation. And that's okay. So if it's the case, for example, that with me, with my beliefs about the individuals who cut in line. I'm going to say, voluntarily, I would voluntarily choose not, I wouldn't say, I feel strongly enough that I wouldn't associate with line cutters. But I would take a stand and say in my community, the people I want to associate with, I want to make a stand against this cultural practice. I think that would emerge. I think you'd see it all over the place. You'd see that with cuisine. You'd see that with how, if people show up to late to work. You'd see that across the board, people are going to say, we're going to go for this cultural attitude, that cultural attitude. I would say, that's okay. That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. Those people can still be, participate in the same political structure. Those people can still learn from one another. But I think people shy away from that because they have this idea that if there's any discrimination like that, voluntary disassociation, that's a bad thing. It's necessarily everywhere and always a bad thing. If there's any judgment about the traits of an individual or the traits that we don't want to see in our communities. So do you think that that is part of what the picture of the free society is, is voluntary association and voluntary disassociation and that's okay? I don't think voluntary association means anything without voluntary disassociation. If you're not free to disassociate, then you're not really free to associate. We're just playing games at that point. I'm not freely choosing to associate with you unless I'm also freely choosing to ignore all the people that I could be associating with at this time. So you got to have voluntary disassociation and the people who have a problem with it have in some sense a very good reason to be frightened by this possibility because at least in this country when you look at the history of that kind of disassociation, it's always framed in a way that makes people's protest rather powerless. Because it's always enforced by state monopoly on violence. So we didn't have that during the Jim Crow era. So when it was illegal for interracial couples to get married or when it was illegal for a black person to go into a shoe store, it's not as easy as me saying, Hey people, don't shop here. I'm going to stand outside and protest this place. I could actually get arrested for that. I'm not on an equal playing field as that business. They actually have a position of power because this kind of discrimination is backed by coercion. So when people think of that, it makes sense that they're scared of this. But I absolutely agree that voluntary disassociation is where the power is. It makes consumers far more powerful because all too often people think about the reality of business as if the people with the product have all the power. But you don't have the ability to ignore consumers and still gain value from that product. At some point you want to move it. It's kind of like those hypothetical monopoly scenarios where people say things like, All right, let's say I have control of all the gas, then I'll raise it to $50 a gallon. People fail to understand a pretty basic fact like, dude, just because you can raise the price to $50 a gallon doesn't mean people can afford it. And you don't benefit from just having a bunch of gas. Like you only benefit if people buy that gas and you're going to go broke really quickly if you just have a bunch of gas that you can't move. So at some point you have to come down and charge at a level where the people are willing and able to buy. And unlike today, if you're in a society where you're not artificially protected by all sorts of things, by all sorts of anti-consumer laws, disguising themselves as consumer friendly laws, then we don't have that same kind of problem. But yeah, I agree on the disassociation. Well, let's push it to the extreme. Let's say there's a circumstance. I know what this is the case, but let's say there's an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. And the people there are very racially distinct, and they have some beginnings of an ear in the middle of their head or something. They're definitely racially distinct, and they're culturally distinct. So let's say that everybody that comes from that particular island has certain cultural traits that you find unpleasant. So we can come up with many examples. Let's say they don't respect private property rights, so they're much more likely to steal. So in this society that you're talking about, you're okay with the idea that everybody who comes from this island, individuals based on their behavior or based on the employee's judgment of what their potential behavior will be, even if they're discriminated against, you're okay with that. Even if it's on the basis of race, because somebody has said, hey, I don't want to hire people from this island because I feel like I'm going to have my stuff stolen from them. You're still okay with that. So I think we have to be careful with our language here, and this is a common misstep that's made. You know, anytime someone advocates a position that says, I am against the use of political coercion as a means of motivating people to behave in ways that I think are good, we take that to mean, you know, anything goes in my world, I'm okay with whatever people do. You know, just because I say I don't think the government ought to make laws against the consumption of fast food doesn't mean I'm okay with unlimited, you know, consumption of fast food. I might be the guy that's most against that, right? It just means I'm against promoting it in a way that's based on coercion. So let's come away from it for a minute, and let's talk about it within the context of something that might be a little easier. Let's talk about the lady we discussed earlier, who's on the elevator by herself, right? And I step on the elevator, and she clutches her purse, and let's say I hear her whisper to herself, oh my God, black man, right? And she clutches her purse, and so she's afraid. All right, I don't want a society in which that lady goes to jail for having that reaction. Now let's keep it in context. We're not talking about her accusing me of a crime and having her word taken over my word. That's a different kind of thing. But let's say all she's done is something like, you know, get afraid of me because I'm black, and let's even allow me to be offended. I want the kind of world where I'm free to decide if I want to be offended or not, okay? I want a world in which she can have that opinion and where her right to dislike me for any reason, however arbitrary, is not overcome by violence, right? That's the kind of world I want. However, that's a political thing. At a philosophical level, I'm not okay with the fact of somebody being afraid when I step on an elevator. I want to contribute to a world in which I can step on elevators, and me and the person who's on that elevator together can have a good time conversing or laughing. And I'm all about using my gifts, my talents, and my abilities and my connections to promote that kind of world. Even if in this particular instance, I'm not going to be able to do it. Like that experience will be a reminder for me. All right, I still got work to do in promoting the kind of worldview that I promote. So it's similar to what you do with philosophy. You have moments in life where people exhibit irrational behavior and it frustrates the hell out of you. And you know that in that moment, you can't do anything about it. And you certainly don't want to pass a law that says people go to jail for logical fallacies. But you use those moments as motivation to say, all right, this just reinforces my conviction of why I need to promote and popularize philosophy. Why I need to get the word out there to people outside of academia? Why I need to make philosophy more accessible to the average person? So I think you deal with it in a similar way. You don't have to stop fighting ideological wars and cultural wars just because you're against the use of political coercion as a means of getting people to do the right thing. I don't want people to be forced to go to church. Doesn't mean I can't try to inspire and influence people to go to church. I don't want the law to be used to force people to go to the gym. Doesn't mean I can't get all in your face and be an annoying, preachy friend. It was like, Steve, you got to hit the gym, man. It's good for you. I can do that all I want. That's a great example. And one of the things that really does get under my skin, philosophically speaking, is what I call irrationalism. There are logical contradictions that exist in the world really bothers me and I have a very strong desire to live in a culture and a community where people do not accept the existence of logical contradictions for reasons that they understand. I want that. That is an explicit goal and I would not like to be in a culture in which people are more tolerant and okay with the existence of logical contradictions. However, as passionate as I am about that particular idea, in no way do I want to make it illegal or live in a society where it's literally illegal to have this ignorant belief that ruins people's worldviews. This is the point that you've made a few times very eloquently that there's a difference between political structure and social structure. We can agree on political structure, a tolerant political structure that allows people to be free to have ideas and beliefs and actions that we totally disagree with. This is one of the things I was just talking to my friend about this yesterday. This is one of the beautiful things I think that is in the libertarian philosophy. In this case, this is the most extreme or most logically consistent view of libertarian philosophy, the stateless society or the voluntary society, is that it's so big tent. It's bigger tent than any other political theory because it tolerates behaviors that we find acceptable, it tolerates friendship and niceness and honesty and equality, but it also tolerates politically intolerance. That's what people on the left, they don't have. They're not as tolerant of genuine intolerance. As long as you're intolerance or your ignorance about the law of identity or whatever it is, as long as it doesn't infringe on my rights, you should be free to hold the beliefs that you want to hold. You should be free to act the way that you want to act, to associate with those you want to associate, not associate with those you don't want to associate with, and yet you and I can still be in the same political structure. I think that is beautiful to me. Yeah, so I just wanted to pick at one thing because you emphasize people on the left, and I never set myself up as a defender of the left. I'm a defender of liberty. But as far as I'm concerned, you got puppets to my left, puppets to my right, to my left, status to my right, authoritarianism on both sides. And when I look out at the world, I don't see a world filled with a bunch of tolerant people, except for those on the left. As far as I'm concerned, tolerance erodes on both sides. It just depends on what subject you choose to talk about. Let's have a conversation about what you get to do with your own body when it comes to drugs. And I don't think we're going to see a whole lot of tolerance from the right, right? And that's not me defending or picking on either side, but I think we live in a highly authoritarian society where the most fundamental disagreement between people is not authority, but rather whose side gets to have the control over what everyone else does. I just want to keep that clear. So I don't feel like, oh, we're almost there, but it's just this half over here. No, I don't think it's that simple. I think we've got authoritarians all around us. That's a great point. It's definitely true. And I think the reason I bring that up is because the left likes to use the rhetoric of tolerance. I don't usually hear that word as much coming from people on the right, but the left is so big on tolerance, they don't see this whole gigantic glaring area where libertarians, I think, are much more tolerant politically than those on the left. You're right to bring up, you have any conversation with somebody that's like a hardcore neo-conservative, I would say, about drug policy and man, they, I actually, okay, two second story and then we'll wrap it up. Years ago, I was having an argument with a conservative. It was at a like a philosophy camp. I guess you could call it a worldview camp. And the gentleman was arguing for prohibition, for drug prohibition. And through a line of reasoning, I would say, well, if you agree with these arguments, then you have to also support alcohol prohibition. You also have to support tobacco prohibition. And he agreed. I thought, ah, case and point. Okay, I made my point where I could make good libertarian point. And then he said, you don't see me disagreeing. Like, I do support alcohol prohibition and tobacco prohibition and overeating prohibition and drug prohibition, actively said that. So that would be an example of the authoritarians that you're talking about saying, yeah, it's okay to have government intervene in these areas, which I think is just completely repulsive. Yeah, you know, you know, tolerance is so funny. You know, it always amused me like I go to college campuses and everyone's talking about tolerance, like, let's be tolerant. And, and they're tolerant of everything, except for that Christian guy with the sign that says senators are going to help. They're not tolerant of that guy. And it's like, hey, if you want to preach tolerance, you got to be tolerant of them as well. We all have we all have areas of tolerance that are not quite as comfortable for us. But hey, I want to go back to the specifics of this example you gave like this, this race of people who are clearly a minority and they come from this island somewhere. And, and you put it on me and I get that we're doing a philosophical exercise here, but you put it on me to come up with the way of showing how these people can be all right. And in a voluntary society. And I want to do what I did with you earlier by sharing the pressure. I want all worldviews to fill the pressure of this because let's assume that the voluntary approach doesn't work. Let's assume let's assume that a more authoritarian status approach works. My question to you is, what do you think politics is going to do for these people when they are a very small group, they have no majority power, their voice is very small, and most people in society are against them. Do you think a democratic society is going to be kind to those people? Where do you think those people are going to end up? What kind of representation are they going to have? Here's my guess. Here's my guess how somebody would try to answer that. I think they would say something like, therefore, we need some enlightened compassionate individuals in the democratic system, or maybe in a more aristocratic system, I'm not sure, to protect the minorities because the mob, the majority won't. So they would say, I think from talking with them, they'd say, you need that group of powerful, wealthy, enlightened individuals to protect the less well off. You know, this is interesting. I'm going to make an assumption here, but I'm assuming that the kind of people that you're speaking for here who would say that are the same kind of people who believe that we as a nation have chosen someone to run the country that they don't is enlightened, right? So I think that's an interesting thing. But my question would be, and who gets to choose these enlightened people that will lead us? Does that race that you're talking about, do they get extra votes because they're minorities or something? Or the same as everybody else, who gets to choose? And whose beliefs will be reflected by that choice? I think the only consistent answer to try to piece something together is to say the enlightened choose. So it can't be a democratic process. It has to be themselves, the academics, the philosophers. Those people have to kind of choose themselves as the leaders to make these kind of decisions. That's the only way I can see this trying to be coherent. Yeah. And I think we're already moving in a direction that is number one, very, very different from the kind of society that we're in. And it takes us in the opposite direction of where a lot of those same people who would bring up this scenario want us to go in. But I bring that up because I want to make a contrast between how politics works and how the market works. In the market, you don't need to be the majority in order to serve a demographic of people in a way that creates win-wins for both people, right? You know, the thing about these kind of hypothetical scenarios is, first of all, we always assume something that we've never, ever, ever, ever come anywhere close to experiencing or observing in human history, which is a scenario in which millions of people are somehow unified in their hatred of this really, really small group. But there have always been civil wars. There have always been disagreements among majorities, right? You have never had a demographic that agrees on everything. In fact, we talked about earlier how the political wars between liberals and conservatives, these are mostly white liberals that are battling out the white conservatives. It's not like all white people are united on the race issue and it's white versus black in this country. It's not the case at all. If it were really the case, if the only people who cared about racism against black folks were black folks, we wouldn't really have a debate. That voice would be squashed, right? But the reason that we have a debate is because for whatever reason you want to tell yourself, there are a lot of white people in this country who feel tied to this issue and there's a lot of opposition. So there's always going to be that kind of opposition, but markets offer you opportunities to create, to serve, and to create wealth for people in ways that don't require that majority vote and in ways in which nobody's artificially protected from competition. So it's not an easy scenario. I can't say I can sit up here and tell you how a truly free society would solve every problem that you come up with. It takes a lot of thought. These issues are very difficult. But at the same time, I think it's important to contextualize it by saying these are difficult questions for us all to answer and we certainly don't live in a society right now where we have answered them with the system that so many people are fighting for. That's right. And all of the cases, in fact, where you do have the minorities in some kind of a democratic circumstance and they're being oppressed, which a lot of people would say is a bad thing, it's because of the structures of government. I mean, a problem in every single one of these circumstances is the government, the structures in place. So to say in this hypothetical scenario, oh, in this one case, the government is necessary to protect the minorities, I think is highly dubious. Oh, yeah. So so in that example you gave, you know, what if at least those minorities would have the advantage of being able to say, hey, you know what, we don't trust you guys. And we know that you don't believe anything we say, you know that no matter what we say, you're going to look at us as not having evidence for what we say, but we don't trust you guys, and we want to make sure we police ourselves. Exactly. We don't want to give you our money to drive through our communities and make sure we're okay and not violating, you know, other people's individual rights. Just stay away and we'll hire our own, we'll build our own. At least they have that opportunity. Exactly. Well, well, TK, I appreciate your time. This is, before we spoke, I said, oh yeah, maybe an hour and hour and a half. And then I correct myself. I shouldn't make any claims about how long these conversations are going to go on because they're so great. I really appreciate this. This has been, this has been really fantastic. Oh man, we didn't get uncomfortable. We've got to find something uncomfortable. That's true. Well, hey, I'll tell you what, man, if you're open to it, maybe what we do, because I find out with this topic, it's funny, there are always people that leave comments like, oh, you guys should have talked about this. Yeah. Or, oh, you should have talked about it from this angle or what have you. Or, oh, you know, I don't know about that claim. Maybe we can take a look at some of the questions that come in, some of the objections and comments that are made. And maybe we can do a session where we break those down and we respond to them, whether we agree or disagree about something. And we can tackle, we can tackle something. I don't expect everybody to agree or disagree with everything that we have to say, but it might be cool to come back and, you know, give ourselves a chance to comment on those things and give comments a chance to see how we weigh on it. I love the idea. Let's definitely do it. And that means listeners right now, make sure you leave a comment in the comment section, because TK is going to be coming back on the show at some point in the future. And we're going to try to field your questions. Okay, but if you leave a comment, I mean, don't look, I'm not going to tell you not to do it because you're going to do it. So go ahead and do it if you want, but a comment like, hey, you're stupid, or this is a waste of time. Right. So if you can do that, and I'll have a good laugh over it and I'll probably click like on it, but I'm not going to be commenting on those because it just has no, there's no propositional content. So give a comment other than, hey, Steve, you should have got me on the show. I'm the dude. I mean, just actually say something that we can respond to or ask something that we can give an intelligent thought about. Thank you. Good clarification. We probably will not read all of the comments. If previous episodes and videos and articles are any metrics, I think some of them will be will not bring to the table. But all right, thanks, TK. Like I said, this has been great. And I'm looking forward to our next conversation about this. Looking forward to it as well, man. All right, that was my conversation with TK Coleman. I hope you guys enjoyed it and found it valuable. Every time that I've talked to TK, I think we've gone at least a half an hour more than we were planning. In this case, this was like two hours more than we had originally envisioned. There's just so much to talk about that unfortunately doesn't get talked about in the mainstream. And so it just kind of snowballs on itself. We have number five planned. In fact, I think this is going to be a crescendo. We've had the four episodes that are leading to the conversation we're going to have about racism and color blindness. I'm not sure when that's going to be released, but whenever it is, it's going to be an excellent episode. So that's all from me this week. Don't forget to subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube. If you want to patronize the show, head over to patreon.com. You can chip in just a couple of bucks whenever a show like this is released. All right, take care.