 Okay. Hey, we're recording. Let me just do a brief intro. So this is sort of part of my informal Libertarian Answer Man series. So people ask me questions that I usually offer to help sometimes in on a phone call because it's quicker than email. And if I do it, I want to record it so other people can listen so I don't duplicate effort all the time. Anyway, so Shia, is that Shae? Yeah, Shae asked me a question. So I thought we would just talk about it here. I vaguely recall what it was about something about how contracts of sale can be valid for value if you don't own it something like that. So this will be KOL something I don't remember which episode it will be but so tell us a little bit about yourself so who are you where you're from. Sure. Yeah. So I'm a fellow Louisianian actually like yourself. I work in mental health. I'm a therapist in private practice actually by profession before I went to grad school for mental health and psychology though I did my undergrad in like international studies and politics and things at LSU. You're alma mater, as I see your hat. In the poly side department or what department? Well, it was the interdisciplinary international studies major that they created. Well, I was there at least 10 years ago so they must have created that 15 or 20 years ago so you know it was aspects of political science, anthropology, like kind of all of the social sciences, but just was that guy, was that guy Ellis Sandals there then the guy that's a big Vogelin nut? Yeah, Vogelin was like a big deal there I don't think I took a class with that guy, but I know that Vogelin's long gone but it was Ellis Sandals was sort of his, his, his, his sort of follower and I think there. I think he wrote a book about him and then one of my law professors Robert Pascal, while he wasn't my professor but he was a friend who was a law professor. He was a huge Vogelin nut too. I didn't know that specific guy that you mentioned the guy who was kind of like a student of Vogelin I don't think I took a class with him but. I think it was like the head of the poly side apartment or something Ellis Sandals, but that might be in the old, maybe that may be from years ago. He may very well have been there like I said it was like an interdisciplinary interdisciplinary program I did so I was taking classes and a lot of different subjects and I took some political science classes but I wasn't in that department so it's kind of hopping around a lot. But yeah I picked up on like the Vogelin thing because I remember even in like the bookstore they had like a whole bunch of vogelin stuff and they're kind of trying to. Yeah, he's got like a he's got like a 3040 volume set of the collected works I've got three or four of them I've read some of them. What do you think of him I've never really actually got into got into his work. I think he's kind of compatible with what's our stuff but he's murky like Hayek or like, you know, Heidegger or something I mean he's he talks about Gnosticism uses all these weird made up terms. Yeah, I'd never got much out of him that I read the new science of politics closely and I got some nuggets out of it but I can't remember them so he's not a systematic thinker in the in the system that I'm interested in anyway but maybe someday I'll get back to it but. Do you live in Louisiana now still. Yeah, I live around Lafayette, I kind of moved around and live in some different places and ended up back over here. And yeah, so I'm doing tele therapy like for all my work now in this post COVID time, you know, well I got a good friend Anthony Anthony Sammer off who's here in Houston for a few weeks he's a he does tele therapy to. Yeah, I just saw him last night he was telling me all about it and he lives around the world and just does his work from wherever he is like Thailand or Costa Rica or Mexico. Or here or whatever. Right, right. Yeah, it is pretty cool, although it does bring up depending on the field you're in issues of like regulation and licensing between states and things like that. That's a whole another topic right there. Well, not everyone's life with that. Yeah, not everyone's licensed. Yeah, yeah, I know. And again that's a whole another topic, not too far off from issues of intellectual property and things, you know, obviously the same issue but still within the domain. Are you a libertarian Austrian and all that or what's your, what's your sort of ideological background. I would say I kind of lean libertarian, I wouldn't consider myself a full blown like Austrian devotee, although I've kind of dabbled in it more in the last couple years than anything else and more than I ever had that makes sense. I would say I was pretty standard like sort of left leaning kind of person just in my undergrad years a lot of the stuff actually that I got at LSU was your run of the mill kind of Marxist socialist stuff about yeah how like global capitalism was like you know is so and you know I had to read the Communist manifesto for one of my anthropology classes and all that kind of thing right so I'm always surprised I'm always surprised that people, these conservatives and libertarians who hate college, usually because they can afford it so they have to bash it. They bash all the elite schools in the Northeast like they're lefty and that you should send your kid to LSU like are some some Southern public state school. Right. And I'm like, what makes you think they're not lefty to they're all they're all hit by it I think pretty much. Yeah they are. They definitely are. I mean, for, for at least one reason which is that a lot of the professors are, you know, have gotten their PhDs at those schools right so this one particular professor I just mentioned God is, I think his PhD at Oxford so in that case it's England but pretty much in the same fold and I will say though you know it varies by discipline right so I remember one that really stood out was I had an American history professor who was clearly kind of more towards the conservative type, and I think that fits more with some, again some disciplines maybe some historians, especially in an American history guy, although that can go the other way you can have you can have some really far left American history people. True. Yeah I had a really conservative one there John Colbertson. My computer. I always forget to turn everything on don't disturb. Yeah, and if I don't someone's gonna freaking call me. Move this one. Okay. I was in engineering so it wasn't corrupt. I don't know if it is now but it wasn't political at all even law school at LSU was was not that political except the politics embedded in the law the legal doctrines themselves but yeah. Do you think that do you think law professors, do you think law professors in general have a kind of political bias like just overall on average. I think so. But it's a pragmatic discipline so a lot of them are just pragmatic and, but I don't know how to compare I mean it's been 30 years since I've been so I don't know how they are now. Yeah. So how did you end up following my comments or whatever made you, if you're not really that into it are you just following libertarians to some degree or something or what. To some degree, just kind of read a lot online in the area you know just consuming a lot of the content out there on YouTube and elsewhere and again just always been very interested in political philosophy political theory. I started to get really heavily into issues around intellectual property recently, which I know will dive into today. And just trying to really kind of figure out the dynamics there there's some confusing issues and obviously that's something that you have really kind of made, you know, a specialization, you know, perhaps among other things that you've worked on. Okay, so tell me tell me what you're kind of tell me what your questions are and I'll be happy to try to field them. Okay, so first you, you know, I think you give a lot of really good arguments and rationale behind the anti IP position in general. And we can dive into that, if you'd like. But the point at which I kind of came to you and started to ask some questions was kind of assuming that that's the case. In other words, assuming that we're going to say that intellectual property is non starter that you can't have property and information. Then my, my question was, is it okay quote unquote I guess according to some libertarian principles or moral principles that we may agree on to sell information. So it was that kind of issue like right between selling and if you can't own it how can you sell it so one of the things you gave me and the information you shared with me is an article that literally goes directly to that issue which is where you make the point, quoting others who have talked about this issue where ownership and being able to sell something or they're not necessarily linked they're distinct right so you can. Yeah, you can just because you can sell something doesn't mean you own it and vice versa, and there's examples within that domain that you kind of flesh out and highlight to make that point. Well and it depends on what you mean so here's where precision and definitions is necessary because it depends on what you mean by sell. So if by sell you mean transfer the title to an owned resource then you can't sell an idea. But if you just mean something different, you can and I'll go into that and I think what most people mean is the second meaning, which is an economic or descriptive meaning. What they really just mean is they're explaining why you did something. When we when we look at human action and this means is, we always characterize every action as the person is aiming at some end goal. Some, so he has some purpose he's trying to achieve some end result. That's the end of his action, and he uses some means to achieve that. So, when we see him behaving. We assume he's acting because he's like us and acting and behaving or different behaving it's just his motions acting means we assume he has a mentality and a consciousness and he has an internal purpose. So we observe his behavior and we infer from that, knowing how we act, we make some inferences about the characterization of his action so if someone hands a dollar to someone for a newspaper. Because we've done that we assume he's not just in a sleepwalking or in a coma or a robot we assume he's doing it. And his purpose is to get the newspaper. Now it could be that he's playing some game where he's really trying to, to trick the guy or play a practical joke but you know we have to make assumptions. So we characterize people's actions by assuming what the purpose is. And when we do that we're just explaining what they're doing. So if I, if I hand you a dollar for a newspaper. We would say it seems like the reason the guy gave the dollar was to obtain the newspaper so the end of his action was to obtain the newspaper. Right, but the thing is not, not every end of an action is the acquisition of an ownable thing. In fact I would say that's only a tiny subset of all actions. So every action has some end goal, some something you're trying to achieve, which just means you're trying to change the future universe from the way it would otherwise be. So in a sense, every action is the action of a mini God, we're like little creators trying to create a new universe. That is we're trying to create a universe in the future that would be different than the one that would, that would occur if we didn't intervene, and we intervene by causally affecting it by employing causally efficacious means. Sometimes you want to obtain the possession of something so for example, Crusoe on his island, there's no such thing as ownership or rights because there's no other people and rights and ownership or social relationships. So he just wants to possess so if he wants a fish because he's hungry. He imagines a future where he's going to be hungry or hungrier than he is. And that, that idea fills him with what it's Mises call it. He got a word not dissatisfaction but I'll think of it in a second it's a classic word Mises uses like it's a psychological motivation to act when you imagine something and oh it makes you uneasy. So because you're uneasy about the future that you envision that's coming, you want to intervene and try to change it. So you want to possess a fish so you can feed yourself so you go about you know getting a net or getting a spear, or something like that, and catching the fish that's your means right does that make sense so far. Yes, it does. In that case you wanted to possess a fish. In another case you might want to relax at the end of the day's work. This is Crusoe again by himself and you just you might want to just climb up on the on the hill and see the sunset. So, you use your legs, and maybe you use your shoes as your means and you climb up the hill and you rest and you see the sunset. In both cases you achieve a profit, a psychic profit, because you achieve what you wanted to achieve and you've made the world better than it would have been from your subjective point of view. In one case the object of your action was to to possess an object that you can use in the other case it was to just experience something that you wanted to experience like seeing the sunset. Okay. That makes sense. Yes. When we come to other people you have economic exchange now I'm not talking legal exchange is economic exchange just means you're you're trading something that you have for something else that you prefer. And just like in the fish or the sunset example sometimes the goal of your action is an experience or a state of affairs. Sometimes it's the acquisition of an object that you can possess and use and control right so I might give you an apple for your orange because the goal of my action is to acquire the possession of an orange, right. Or I might give you an apple to get you to smile at me. In both cases, I'm, I'm giving the app, the, the apple, or the orange to induce you to do something. Okay, in one case is to induce you to give me something that you control. And the other case is to give for you to do something perform an action that I want you to perform. Okay, right. Now, when we come to a more sophisticated society where there's not just people who trade but there's also legal norms that arise that protect the rights in these things, because if I possess an apple or an orange. It's always at risk of being stolen from me by other people. Right so people are a benefit because we can trade with them but they're also a risk, because they're they have free will and they might choose to use my scarce, my scarce resources that I have possession of. So property rights arise to give total just a second. It's telling my nanny to go. Okay, so property rights arise to give you extra security in the possession of something by giving you a legal right to it that's what ownership is ownership is the legal right to control a resource so it's distinct from possession is the capacity or ability to use it or control it, which Robinson Crusoe has, and which we have in society, but we have ownership, in addition to that to give us even more security of using it and that allows us to, you can do longer range plans with it, so you have longer range production processes which makes us richer. And you know, makes everyone better off. It allows us to trade and cooperate peacefully, instead of having fights with each other which is also inefficient and unpleasant. In that context, an exchange has a legal meaning to so it means that in a simple example of a contemporaneous exchange of two owned objects like I own my apple, you own your orange because I keep switching my objects but you get the idea. Yeah, because we have property rules that are widely respected in society where people respect these property assignments. Because I picked the apple and you picked your orange so we each own them. And so we can exchange them economically that like an economically just means it's the explanation of why we did it. Right, it's just a characterization of the means and the ends that we employ, but legally, the titles transfer as well. So I give you the, which one do I have the apple or the orange. Let's pick one. I've got the orange. I think that I think that's how you started with the alright, I've got my orange and I transfer the title of it to you in exchange for you. When I say in exchange for legally that means I make it conditional upon you doing something so I hand you possession of it, and I give you ownership conditional upon you doing something else which is you giving yours to me. And that's a contract. That's what contract is. Contract is the owner transferring the title to it, the legal ownership of it to someone else. So in those kind of exchanges, there are legal exchanges. So there's a two way transfer of title. My orange now is owned by you and your apple is now owned by me and it's the same time the possession usually transfers to it doesn't have to be that could be distinct. You and I can make a contract where like you're in one town and I'm in another town and we can be on the phone and we can make a deal. So I say okay hereby sell my apple to you and you sell your I sell my orange to you sell your apple to me. So when the deal was done, the ownership has been transferred but now we're each in possession of each other's property. So now we have to go find each other and make the physical exchange. Okay, so there could be a moment of time where ownership and possession are not the same thing, which is the same thing for example if you loan someone something like if you bar if you rent a car from Hertz or Avis. You have the ability to use the car temporarily and for certain limited uses. Yeah, but they still own it and you have to give it back at the end of the of the of the lease term right. Yeah, that makes sense I was actually about to ask you is that equivalent to say like a landlord and a tenant, just in a home. Yes, it is. Or if or if you invite some people over for dinner so they they have permission to use your house because you're the owner. You can think of that as a contract and that's called license that's what license means license just means permission everyone calls talks about like a software license but license just means permission and permission presupposes you're the owner because if you're not the owner of the resource that the that the licensee or the permit T is using then they wouldn't need your permission they only need your permission because you're the owner. Okay, so contract and license and permission and invitations all and consent all that are secondary principles that that rest upon the more fundamental principle of property property means and property in a sense rests upon possession. So possession is the is the physical act property is the legal right. I'm sorry possession is the is the is the actual capacity to control and possess and user resource to employ it and property is the legal right to protects that and then contract would be the exercise by the owner of the property resource he owns to either deny permission or grant permission or license to other people or to transfer it all together in the terms of a not a temporary loan like a car or a lease. But, but an outright transfer like the apple and orange case right yeah, yeah, and it can be it can be unconditional or it can be conditional. It can only be unconditional if it's simultaneous and contemporaneous and that is right now, because if it's if it's done in the future it's always conditional, because the future's uncertain. So even if I say. So usually it's conditional upon some other action, unless it's a donation or a gift. So, if I give you the apple, I'm giving it to you on condition that you give me the orange or sorry by first, if I give you the orange is conditioned upon you giving me a real apple that's not rotten not a plastic apple. And not withholding the apple right, so there's a condition there, I could give it to you unconditionally I could say I hereby give you an orange in 10 minutes, just as a gift. Now that's a contract and it's enforceable, but it's still conditional because the orange might not exist in 10 minutes something might happen in between now and then. So, every future contract is always conditional. Which is why it's not fraudulent if you fail to fulfill a future contract it's just it's brief is maybe what you call breach but it's not necessarily fraudulent. It's fraudulent if you're lying at the time you make the deal, like you pretend like you have an apple but it's really a fake apple. Right, or something but if you fail to deliver on a contract in the future that's never fraud people confuse that one too. Okay, so if you don't if you don't pay back debts in the future. That's not fraud. It's not theft either is simply. And if you if you if you understand contracts, not according to the standard conventional legal sense and the economic sense prevalent today which is that contracts give rise to legally enforceable or binding obligations. So, if I promise to give you an orange in 10 minutes and then I fail to do so. I mean let's say I'm going to drive. I promise to do it I'm going to drive by the store and buy it and give it to you. But I go to the store and they're out of oranges, so I can't fulfill the law right now would view that as a breach of contract. And when there's a breach that means I owe you consequential damages. Okay, so I still owe you some money. So Rothbard and I would look at it is a contracts are only what I described earlier, they're the exercise of the power to consent or exclude others, or to transfer ownership by the owner. So all contracts are really just transfers of title to things that you own. So, but if I'm transferring title now to a future orange that's uncertain and necessarily conditional on the orange existing. So if it doesn't exist when I'm supposed to transfer to you. There's nothing to steal. So it can be theft with orange just doesn't exist. Right, the orange in my possession. So the orange in my ownership has to exist for me to transfer to you. But if I don't have it, then I can't steal it. So, yes, that clears up the that clears up the debtors prison issue. Now what would happen is, what would happen is you'd have an ancillary, an ancillary title transfer which would be that I owe you money. I owe you monetary damages, equal to the value of the orange. As soon as I come into it into possession of it or something like that or ownership of it. So you would have you couldn't get out of a debt by just being bankrupt on the day you owe it. The debt would accrue with interest or something like that because that's what most people would agree to. Right, but that would still be just a title transfer to an owned thing, and a future thing that's uncertain. So you may never get paid back because the guy never make, he may be dead before the contract happens, you know, before the transfer happens. So in any case, we call that an exchange because it is it's it's it's both an economic exchange. In other words, both parties did something for a certain reason to obtain something they want. And that the end of that happened to be the possession and ownership of an owned thing. And that's legally called an exchange to. But if I pay you to induce you to do something else like to perform an action, which some people might call labor but labor is just a subset of action because action is leisure and labor it's like two types of action right so let's just say action. So I pay you money, or I agree to pay you money in the future or I pay it to you now either way. And I do that to induce you to do something. Now that's the economic description of it. Okay. So it's an exchange because I am, I am trading my possession and ownership of my property, my orange, in order to get something that I want, which is for you to perform an action. And you're engaging in this action which is labor to you it's just a disutility. Yes, otherwise you would do it without me inducing you to do it, right, you're doing that to get ownership and possession of the orange. So that's the explanation of our actions so economically it's an exchange. And by analogy we call that a sale or an exchange in the law, but it's really not. We're basically fitting into the same category because it looks the same, but it's really a one way transfer of title instead of a two way, because what happens is I'm giving you ownership of my orange, and you're performing an action. So, there's only one title that's been transferred that's the ownership of my apple because you don't own your actions your actions are just you own your body and that gives you the ability to do something or to refuse to do something. So, I know that, and you know that so I know that I have to induce you to get off your ass and do what I want you to do. Right. So, we call it a sale of labor because that's a way to describe the economic side of it. And it leads to confusion because then people start saying something like well in a normal, in a normal exchange of two objects like an orange and an apple. We call it an exchange or we call it a sale like you're selling your apple to me for my orange I'm selling my orange to you for your apple. It does imply a title transfer to it implies that we each own those things. So then when we use loose language and we say well if I, if I pay you my orange to get you to labor for me, we can call it you sold your labor and I sold my orange. And then people naturally assume well, if you sell something you must own it. Right, but you can see you don't you don't own it actually. Right, right. Does that all make sense. It does you said earlier that one thing that stood out was labor. First of all labor is just a subset of action. Yeah, leisure and labor is how economics sub sub divides it. And then it's not like it's not like consumption goods and production goods. We don't want production goods for themselves we want them because they help us get consumption goods which we consume and we enjoy. So leisure is labor is more like the consumption more like a production good and leisure is more like consumption good leisure something you do for its own sake. So for the enjoyment of living labor something you do that you have to do that somewhat unpleasant in order to be able to have leisure at some points or to survive or to get something you want. Right. And another thing to hear that I think is important is how you, you highlighted how to a to obtain ownership of something is only also a subset of human action, you can also do things in order to say, obtain or have an experience. You aren't gaining ownership and anything by seeing the sunset, but you, you know, use means to the end in your actions to maybe see a sunset. So, or if I if I pay someone to fly me somewhere. Right, right, right. I'm paying them the flight I don't own the flight. I mean, it just gets me to where I want to go or if I pay someone to take me skydiving. At the end of it, I have some memories as a photographs, but I didn't I didn't buy an object. I just paid them to. So, I'd say the general way to look at it is every action aims at an end and in state of affairs, which really means a different universe. And one subset of that universe is that I am in possession of an object, or an ownership of an object, but that's only one subset of the sets of ends that we pursue. And lots of ends are not catalytic or commercial. They're just things you do on your own like, like, like love, you really can't pay a woman to love you you could pair to have sex with you but you can't pair to love you. Right. You can't really earn that in a certain different way. But you can even characterize that economically as an exchange, I guess. But then you start getting further and further field. Yep. Yeah. Okay, so you say that when information is sold. That amounts to a kind of a one way title contract. It's exactly it's exactly like the sale of an action or the sale of an action or labor because you're really asking someone to perform an action and that is to provide you with some data. Right. They're telling you something or they're giving you something. They're performing an action that transmits data to you that satisfies you or they're giving you. They're giving you some substrate or some medium that is in pattern in a certain way like they might hand you a book, or they may teach you how to how to speak German. Yeah, so they spend their time teaching you how to speak German, or they might tell you the secrets to quantum physics so they're giving you information that they took a long time to learn, so they're teaching you something. Right. But it's really just it's really just an action. You're trying to induce them to engage in an action. Right. Okay, so currently right now I'm actually and this is one of the reasons why I was wondering a lot about these topics is, I'm creating an online course. I'll be putting it out probably within the next couple weeks. So I think this is a good example for us to use and to see how some of these issues intertwine with it. Now, this is something I'm actually doing. It's not just hypothetical. And when I say course that might be misleading nowadays course online oftentimes means just like a prepackaged thing it doesn't necessarily mean course like I'm not going to be interacting with anyone who purchases this in a sense of I'm not going to be teaching them. I'm not going to be teaching them as you would one on one it's sort of all the information that I know on this topic I put it in audio and video and I'm going to I want to sell it online. Okay, now. If let me let me let me step back one second and say a couple things I just realized I might have to go at about 10 or 15 minutes. Okay, we're not done we can pick it up a second time. I think people always say can sell a how can you, how can you say that you don't the copyrights bad, because you sell books. And isn't that the others they think that you have to have a copyright to sell a book. Right. Of course you don't. It just means you can't stop other people from selling a similar book you can always sell a book you don't need copyright. Copyright is not permission to do something it's just a way to stop other people from doing something. Right. And you can also have contracts so so go ahead. Yeah, that makes sense. So, in the case of this course that I'm going to put online. And let's say that I agree with you about intellectual property so I don't demand any like IP or copyright on this course, which I probably won't do now I know, as an aside the law assumes copyright from my understanding you have a copyright well, you have a copyright in any original work that you fix in the tangible medium of expression so something that you write down or that you record. You don't have a copyright if you just talk to people because that's ephemeral disappears, right has to be fixed. Now if you made a recording of it, or if you hand out some notes people you have a copyright in that. Okay, this is not whether you copyright it or not you do have a copyright. And I wouldn't I also wouldn't say that all my theories mean that you should never enforce your copyright. That's a moral issue. Yeah. In today's I just say the laws and you shouldn't have that law the law shouldn't exist but how you, how you respond and operate within a legal system that's corrupt is a different issue. Right. Now let's assume there was no IP in the law. Yeah, and that's a better way. Yeah, and I just put this out there morally and economically I would hope that people don't copy it and give it away for free. But correct, I would only hope that on those grounds, I don't demand that there's a law that makes it illegal for them to do so. That's the. So, so, so, so I think what so like Tom Woods has that so and other people I like I pay extra money to get access to some of the things which they don't they don't provide to outsiders. Some of their users could easily copy it start pirating it. Right. You know the thing is, even if they do that they're going to look like assholes and third of all, a second of all, it's just not that useful to outsiders because they kind of want the package to experience right easily so it's still not going to be that. It's not going to hurt them that much but that is a risk of doing something where your, your business model depends upon something that's easily copyable. The way that what you want to do is have as the seller, or as the provider of a service, if trying to prevent the easy leaking of your proprietary information is important to your business model. You have to do it in a certain way that it's not easy for people to take it and put it on the internet. So one model is to pay wall right to make it a little bit more difficult but then the more you do that the more you annoy your customers who are actually paying you. Right. You could also have a contract with all those people where they all agree not to copy it. And if they do they owe you some penalty some fine, but, but the problem with that is, either the, either the fine is small or it's large. If it's small, it's not going to really just like if it's $10, one of your, one of your, one of your customers might just take it and put it on the internet and pay the $10 fine and now your information is public domain. So the only way to stop that is to have a very high fine, but who's going to pay you $35 for, you know, $10 for a book or $50 for a course, if they're signing up for a potential million dollars in liability. Right, right. So it just is not a business. So if you did that like if Amazon tried to try to make in a copyright free world if a book seller or an author or a publisher, or Amazon tried to make a customer agree to millions of dollars of potential damages. If they use or learn or copy this work too much, right, that they're paying $10 for, they're just going to say screw you, I'm going to go get a pirated copy. Right, right. So you're just as a practical matter. I don't think you can, you can really restrict your customers too much because these are the people that are actually paying you. Most people are pirating it. The few people that are actually willing to pay you and you're treating them like shit. I mean, you can't do it. Right. I just think it's with informational services, it's just unavoidable. Now, if you think about it, why do we hire professors and teachers to teach us? Everything they're teaching us is in textbooks. It's public domain basically, but you hire them because they have a skill at presenting information. So you're really usually paying them to perform a service. You know, like if I pay a juggler to juggle in front of me, I could go watch a video of someone juggling or I could learn to juggle but I want to pay to watch him do it. He's learned how to do it. He's going to entertain me. Right. So anyway, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't oppose either one pragmatic restrictions in the sense like you put some kind of difficult like fidgeting digitally and that kind of thing. Absolutely not. Tom Woods does that. I think is nothing immoral or unethical or wrong about it whatsoever. It's if you're doing it for a profit. Now if you're doing it for nonprofit like I do like writing libertarian stuff. The whole purpose is to spread the message so I think it's silly is silly to try to put it behind paywalls because you're not doing this for money anyway, you know, Right, right. But that would be a different goal. You're trying to get, you know, you're trying to distribute the message and, you know, gain, you know, like attention in that case. So free makes sense. But if you are trying to do it for profit to have these pragmatic constraints, it is still kind of odd to think that you can put some of these restrictions on it, even though you don't own it. But again, we can keep that distinct. It doesn't, you don't have to own it. But not, but not really so it's really exactly like you own your body so you have the ability to be lazy and not to do what I want you to do so because you own your body. You don't have to do what I want you to do so I have to induce you to do it. Even though you don't own those subsequent actions. You own your body. So subsequent actions. Action is what you do with your body, right? It's just a motion you perform. So if you say you own your actions or your labor, you're double counting because you're saying you own your body and you do what you do with it. But owning your body is what gives you the ability to do what you want to do with your body. You see what I mean? Yeah, it's like, it's like, you don't own your car and the ability to use it. I mean, owning your car is giving you the right to use it. I see what you mean. So you wouldn't. So again, you wouldn't oppose either one those pragmatic restrictions on it nor to some even a contract even a contract. I just I just think I just think practically economically it's probably not strategically wise because it can induce your potential buyers to essentially avoid that it's annoying or the risk is too high for them to take on and they're actually might induce them actually to go towards pirated or free information. Correct. So I think really it's better to rely upon reputational issues like you have a close knit community they don't want to they don't want to screw you over just like people give to Patreon now to support people that are producing. They don't want to ruin them. They don't want to ruin they like you they like that you're providing something they don't want to screw you over I mean generally now if you're you know if you're IBM and you're selling I mean if you're some big corporation and it's in personal there's millions of customers, you know you lose that personal touch and people you're going to have pirates then. Right, right. Well that was my intuition though and that kind of like reinforces that that a strategy essentially in this context would be to rely on reputation and essentially the good will of the potential buyers. Correct. I do have to go now I've got to take my kid to get a COVID shot which is going to annoy all my libertarian listeners but Yeah, we can pick it up later if there's more but I think that kind of covers most of it but once you think about it and talk to me later and let me know if there's more you want to talk about I'd be happy to do talk to you more. Okay great sounds good this was fun thanks for doing it. Thanks Shay. All right, bye.