 Hello my friends and welcome to the 66th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, continuing the fantastic series of interviews that I've had over the past several weeks, this one with Dr. Patrick Byrne. We cover quite a lot of ground in this interview talking about the ethics of capitalism, ethics in general, the meaning of life, social justice, and whether or not he's a greedy capitalist pig. Patrick Byrne is most well known for being the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, but it turns out he's actually got his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. We were both attending a conference in New Hampshire where we met up and he was kind enough to agree to an interview. And as you'll hear, he really opened up about some of his deeper ideas and experiences that give him the values that he holds. He's also pretty well known for being a Bitcoin evangelist, so we have that in common. And he's definitely more on the free market in the spectrum than most people. But before we dive into the interview, I want to tell you about a new sponsor for the show. So ever since I had those conversations with Buddhist monks in Japan and in Thailand, I decided, alright, I gotta start trying this meditation thing out. So the past couple of months, my wife and I have been meditating pretty much every day and I am loving it so far. And I frequently get emails from you guys saying, hey, here's some tips about meditation. I listened to that episode. Here's some metaphysical insights I learned about Buddhism. So this is an area I am really excited about exploring in real time. And if you want to join me, I have a recommendation for you. It's an app called 10% Happier, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. The host of the app is Dan Harris, who takes a very rational approach to meditation. There's no woo-woo, there's no colored chakras or mysticism, which I and I'm sure many of you guys will really appreciate. So I've partnered with them, and they've agreed to give listeners of this show a free month's trial to see if it's something that you like. So don't take my word for it. Be as skeptical as I was, keep an open mind, and I think you'll find meditations pretty stinking awesome. So head over to stevedashpatterson.com slash meditate and sign up for a free month's trial. So I hope you enjoy my interview with Dr. Patrick Byrne, founder and CEO of overstocked.com. So first of all, I'm gonna thank you for sitting down and taking time out of your very busy schedule to talk to me. Steve, it's my honor that any of your listeners would want to hear what I have to say. You're an interesting person with an interesting background because you have a PhD in philosophy and you are a very successful businessman and entrepreneur in the world. But I want to pick your brain about some of your underlying philosophic ideas, in particular some of your ethical ideas. Because we live in a culture in the West, at least, where businessmen get kind of a bad rap. There's one community of people that romanticize businessmen, like, wow, they create so much value, they're doing so much for us. And then there's a large and growing amount of people, especially that come from the higher education system. And say, well, businessmen make their money by being greedy and selfish and by exploiting people. And they draw on some, let's say, flawed economic theories, maybe just support that. But a lot of their persuasive power comes from appeals to ethics. So that's what I wanna talk to you about. I wanna see whether or not you're actually a boogeyman that's out to exploit people. So we'll start with kind of a softball question, which is what is your basic response to the cliche that what makes a successful businessman is a mixture of greed and cold-heartedness to exploit customers and his employees? It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of business in the following way. We live in competitive markets. Labor markets are relatively competitive. The markets for consumer goods are highly competitive. You're selling an inferior product. Your customers don't stick with you. And if you're the kind of boss that is out of the Jetsons, remember Mr. Spacely Sprockets, the guy who's Jetson, that kind of guy, you're not gonna keep the bright people who can really add value. So it's what it is, though, it's a world where everything is done by consent. And the sense of, well, the employee is consenting to engage in this relationship where they're gonna have to take instructions through a certain chain of command. But it's not like the people imagine the military to be. A good company isn't a bunch of people shouting orders. It's people working together on teams. And if you go into the consumer market with an inferior product, the only people who get to sell to get away with providing inferior products at a high price to hurt people is the government. Now, that's the essence of every socialist product. Milton Friedman says every socialist products have generally at least two out of the following three characteristics. They're high in price, poor in quality, and they hurt the poor. Education, he said, is the trifecta. It does all, the public education system does all three. So the people get away with doing business that way that you're describing. Those are government people. Companies, you lose your employees and you lose your customer base. If you see them as a tool, as a resource from what you extract. Now, that might be true when you have competition in a marketplace. But do you think that there are limits to competition? So how would you respond to the argument that not everybody can compete? There are some people that are blessed with privilege, with capacity. There are some people who just really can't cut a living wage, let's say, in a competing market. And that's a flaw of having the competitive system. Well, first of all, all of this goes for competitive capitalism, competitive free market capitalism. We do live in a world, and Milton Friedman used to always point that out, that he used the phrase over and over, competitive capitalism, to distinguish it from crony capitalism, which where a lot of those rules go out the window. So that's how those rules describe how companies interact in the marketplace and what's best is a generally free market. There are kinds of markets that fail. The left loves to run around and try to claim of any market. They've never seen the market. They can't claim there's some defect in. They never look at government failures. There are kinds of ways markets can fail. If, for example, there are externalities, external goods or bads that people external to a transaction that benefit from or harm by. And in those kinds of goods, there is a role for government. Pollution being a good example. I make a plastic doll and sell it to you, but I'm also creating this pollution that harms the environment. In that case, I think those kinds of externalities, there's a role for government. Do you think an area of potential market failure here is in, let's say, having a social safety net? That if there are some people that can't cut it, would you say we do need some kind of taxation system to provide for those people? Yes, and that is, although sometimes that's classified as a market failure. I don't see that as a market failure is the right way to describe that. Market failures come in where you say that no matter what your value judgment is, you can see that there is a defect in the market. It doesn't allocate things like they would if the market were perfect. When you get talking about a social safety net, it's not necessarily due to the value judgment that it comes in, that we say the outcome of the market doesn't provide the safety net. So we as a side are going to step in and do it. And to that, I have no philosophical objection. One could say, well, before we did it through this method that Bismarck really pioneered and pressured of a government-run social safety net, it was done through voluntary institutions. And it's an empirical question to me, which performed that function better. I'm sure someone has done some research on that, which has been more efficient. There are certainly objections to, there's a lot of ways we can document how inefficient the government mechanism is. The last I looked at it was in detail, which was about 20 years ago, the poverty gap ratio in the United States, for example, was about 0.6. What that means is it would take redistributing to get every family in America up to the poverty line would have taken a 6-tenths of 1% of GDP. And which doesn't sound like much, but then you look into the government programs to fight poverty, and depending on what you counted, there was somewhere between 3% and 6% of GDP goes to these programs. So in other words, for every dollar of poverty, we're spending five to $10 on government programs to address poverty. Theoretically, I should see no poverty around me. And the fact that I do, so anyway, so in my philosophically opposed your social safety net, no, I think there's a much smarter way to construct it than the way that the United States has. And that's a combination of a flat tax coupled to a very significant, a negative tax. Milton Friedman proposed that in the early 60s is what really became, was the basis for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is the most successful anti-poverty program in history. I actually, I'm exploring this new movement from the left for a, what do they call it, universal basic income. Believe it or not, Milton Friedman and some others were there. The only guy I know today who's been arguing for that on the right is a fellow named Charles Murray. And he's said, as Milton Friedman said, that if what you do is you have a, if you have a flat tax on a percentage basis, like everybody pays a 20%, but everybody gets to start with, we're gonna give you $10,000. And you eliminate all the other social safety net. And now that's $10,000 per person. So it does a whole, it creates a much better set of incentives. For one thing, it creates an incentive for family to stay together because two people, 32 people can get together and you could live on 20,000 if you had to, it wouldn't be a great life, but you could. And so it creates an incentive for families to stay together. It diminishes, well, it eliminates any handicap for poor people on going to work. Every dollar they make, they would then be keeping 80 cents of. And it's a, it would be a much better system. The way our social safety net got devised over from the 1960s really created this large government bureaucracy which then starts responding to different interests and its own interest ends up being the expansion of poverty because then it gets to be more bigger and more powerful. And there's no evidence it's really, so I don't have any philosophical objection to it. I would construct it on different principles. And odd is, it's so odd to me. So I haven't seen that idea really in the discourse. There wasn't that there for 50 years and I know of. Charles Murray revised it a few years ago and then he got his shouted down and beaten up or his hose gets beaten up in Middlebury. So it's never gonna get out. But I see the far left is or the hard left is now proposing that. And actually, if you're gonna do the social safety net, that's the way to do it. So underlying that even one step below the idea of a social safety net is an idea of human equality, political equality. I wanna pick your brain about that. So what is your philosophy around human equality? When you think social safety net would be justified because we don't want some people that lack the capacity to get high wages, let's say in a competitive marketplace, we still want them to have some safety in their lives, some comfort in their lives. That presupposes that, hey, humans are valuable in the first place, there's some kind of peership among humans. So what is your justification for that? Why do you think, why do you not have, let's say that actually cold hearted approach, which is to say, if you can't cut it, you can't cut it. And if you starve, then that's your own problem. Well, at this point, one of the reasons is we have created a reliance interest. We basically have said for 80 years now that we're gonna take care of old people, sick people and poor people. Oh, well, not in that order, but old people, poor people and then the sick people, we've sort of gotten around to saying more recently. So you've created a generation which understand, which they have what you've made a promise to them and it's that they have organized their life around that promise that the rest of society has made. So for no other reason, now that that promise has been made, been made, you have to keep it. If only even if theoretically society doesn't want a social safety net and decides that, you still have to create some path off it. You couldn't just end it overnight. Now, but more deeply, if we didn't have one, if we didn't have a social safety net and we were considering implementing one, someone could make all the arguments of why we should and this is how, and I would say this, I would be structured in the way I just proposed in the last answer. But I guess I would ask the question, are we sure that by implementing this, if this is really how we all feel that we want a social safety net, that's fine, but what makes us think that the government is the best way to organize that? Is it the case that voluntarily supported social safety nets would be more effective? And again, that's an empirical question that we'd have to look at history to answer. And then if I'd say, but ultimately, I'm philosophically attuned to, yeah, we have to take care, even if we had not made the promise, I would like us to make the promise as a society that we can afford to take care of old people, sick people, and poor people. Okay, this is a question that probably nobody asks, but I wanna ask, because I'm curious, and I don't have a great answer myself. Why do you have even that fundamental respect in valuation for other humans? So a lot of people, when you get down to this level, like why care about the well-being of the old, poor, and the sick, they will justify those beliefs based on religion. Sometimes they have a kind of humanist philosophy that the humans are intrinsically valuable. Sometimes it's just utilitarian, or maybe they say it benefits me the most. So what are your kind of philosophic justifications for valuing human life? Great question. The, you can certainly get there on a utilitarian basis that it just on a consequentialist basis. Utilitarian, the greatest utility for the greatest number by that it is crippling to have to go through life with fear, and the people who have to live with fear, I mean, old people, sick people, and poor people, by moving $1,000 from me to one of them, you know, the utility by which my life is diminished is a tiny fraction of the utility by which they gain. And so the sum of utility goes way up. So just purely on a consequentialist basis. I am a humanist, Spinoza and Spinoza's ethics, and I'll probably talk about that today. It's a great question, you know, part of the ethics is you're seeing the God and everybody, you're seeing that and everybody, and that demands a certain kind and amount of respect, that just that in itself. I suppose if I came at it from a psychological basis, I was raised a very strict Catholic. I was actually an altar boy until I was 14. And I gave all that up when I was about 16 or 17 when they whole sex thing became an issue and they're either gonna be a hypocrite or I was kinda, so I wasn't gonna do that, so I left. But being a Catholic is a bit like being a Marine. You're never a former Marine, you're never really a former Catholic, I suppose. My view of the world is heavily informed by that upbringing, although I went on to Zen and other things, Buddhism and Zen. And that's, so my sense of our obligations to other people in the world comes from that upbringing. And then I guess also, I had a, if I had one moment of insight in my life, so you know I was sick for a long time, you know what I mean? So yeah, so I'd cancer a few times. I remember I was really struggling and I remember a specific night in October, 1985, I was trying to, sat up through the night, trying to think what is worth going through this for. And I came up with three reasons. And one was what could make, you get to this point where you're wondering why I even care. And I just, I came up with three reasons to care. And one of them was that the meaning, if there's any meaning of life, it can be found in service, serving other people. Which is actually how entrepreneurs, we view ourselves. It's so funny that we see this whole mass of people who think that we're the evil, the whole essence of an entrepreneur is you're looking at, you're looking for opportunities where people are not being served. Potatoes are selling for $5 a pound on this side of town and $2 a pound on that side of town. Well, if we go over and we buy here and bring them and say we can close that gap, you feel like you're filling things in, you're serving, you're finding ways to serve people that are not being served. So anyway, service in my view, finding some way to serve other people is actually where you find value in life. Now you said there were two other ones, that was one of them. Service, do you mind sharing the other two? Sure. Great love affair. Third was being very, very good in art, especially I thought music. If you could be a great musician. I met one, I met, anyway, anyway, we had this talk once and he was talking about what he was, you know, plans he had for life, like maybe outside of music. And I was like, man, you gotta be kidding. You have, you know, since 3000 years, you have the ultimate job and any man's eyes for 3000 years, you know, being a rock star or being home or being the, you know, that's the ultimate, that's the coolest job there is. And not just cool, I mean, if you could do, now I'm totally musically incompetent and so not able to contribute there. And so ultimately that's where, that's how I organize my life. This, that's fascinating. I know, so my own experience, I didn't have to deal with bad health like that, but I had, I was raised Christian evangelical and then kind of fell away from that, not because of a scandal, just because I didn't find the ideas as rationally persuasive as I wanted. I found the methodology of faith to be flawed. So I was like, okay, I gotta do this rationalist thing to sort and figure out what the truth is. And then about six years ago, I had a profound love experience. The woman who's now my wife, I thought, okay. That's okay. Thank you. This is it. This is, this is the val, this is the orientation that orients my, this is the value which orients all of my other values. And I didn't know it at the time. It was kind of like a discovering something that might have already been there that I didn't know was there. So it's interesting that you say that it was an experience that you had, kind of an insight. I wonder, most people don't like to talk about that because it's kind of, you know, it's not a little mystical, it's not a little weird. But I wonder how many people share those type of experiences and don't want to talk about it. These incredibly profound experiences, they say, oh, I had the bottom of the barrel. I was thinking these things. It's like, well, that's a really big deal. I feel like everybody should know about that. You know, that happens. And you make the mental note and keep the mental note. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so I want to ask you just a couple more questions. When you are viewing the world this way and you think that the valuation of human life, you might be able to discover through service, I might say through love, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap there. There are a large and growing amount of people who think that to view the world through an entrepreneur's lens is to miss the value of social justice. That's the term they throw around, social justice, which is a mixture of political equality, economic equality. Do you find the arguments for social justice to be compelling? Do you find that that resonates with your own desire for service and maybe human equality? Or do you think that fundamentally maybe there's no there, there behind social justice movement? Not only, well, do I think there's no there, there. I'm reminded of Asad Noom Chomsky asked once if he believed in God and he said, well, you tell me exactly what that question means and I'll tell you if I believe in him. And you can't really say exactly what social justice, what God did. And you can't say exactly what social justice is. And in fact, I think it's a very fuzzy, warm and fuzzy, gloppy, extraordinarily pernicious term that I wish it never had entered. There was an Italian in the 19th century and an Italian priest or something who started speaking these terms. And it's certainly from Rawls in, from John Rawls' foreords that concept that is expanded and maybe taken over the discourse it seems to me in academia. I know that people really think it's strange just to say, do I believe in social justice you define what social justice is. It's a meaningless, gooey concept. I know what legal justice is. I know what ratificatory justice is. I, you know, there's all kinds of justices I understand. It seems to me a fallacy, a product of the fallacy of composition. A fallacy of composition is a logical fallacy. If I have a bicycle and you have a bicycle and that fellow over there has a bicycle and that woman does and everybody in our group has a bicycle, that doesn't mean that there is some social bicycle. Just because every member of a group has a property doesn't mean that the group has the property. So justice to me is a word that defines relations between individual, between people. If you put a, and in that sense it's inherently social, just talking. If you put a person in a spacecraft and shot him out past Pluto somehow and he's drifting off, he's got no radio, he has no obligations, he's completely divorced from humankind forever. There's no way he's ever gonna return. Can anything he do in that situation be considered just or unjust? I don't think he can. And what that means is it's because justice is intrinsically a social relationship. So justice does govern us in all these ways but where's this idea that above and beyond my duties to you and your duties to him and that there's this, that there's this social. So it's not societal justice. Society, it's just a vague, gloppy term. What I think it is, I can't distinguish between the old 1980s style Christian right who were saying, who were explicitly arguing to legislate morality. Their private morality should become the public law. I think that it's just, when I hear people talk that way to me they're just taking their gooey intuitions about how they wish the world war and saying we wanna legislate into law. They just wanna impose their private intuitions of morality on others through law and they have a different name for it. If you are... But I don't wanna be clear. I don't object to the ends of those people. I think that the way those ends can be achieved are through economics and through an economic or utilitarian approach to the problem. Okay, well that's the question that I wanna ask about. One of the outcomes that they're talking about is income inequality. One of the things that they think is inherently unjust is for some human to have gobs and gobs of money and other humans not even if let's say they're above poverty line. Is there some, do you agree with the notion that income or economic inequality itself is an injustice? That there's some level at which you can reach at which if you have more it's a bad thing. Well, there is a point at which it is bad or I think the US has reached that point. The problem with the people who generally call attention to that is they, you know, the left is generally correct about the problems invariably wrong about the solutions. And in particular, they do not understand how the problems they're address are so often caused by government. Government is the big creator of economic inequality. So, you know, the answer may not be more government. And there are ways in which the government acts that has been very pernicious in this regard, especially the minorities has a long history of that. You know, the whole minimum wage is a mechanism to get to hurt black people. The minimum wage was introduced it was the Davis Bacon 1931 black people were starting to emigrate from the South to compete with unions in the North and unions got this federal way law passed that said any federal work has to be done basically by unions or and then the unions shunted out the black people and it's a way same thing happening in Canada with the Chinese. It's a way minimum wage laws have been and always are a way to disfavor the class with less advantage. It has nothing to do with and the people who believe it does. God bless them don't have anything. I mean, but it just always tells me when I'm talking to somebody who doesn't understand economics. Can I walk through this quickly for you? Certainly. Suppose you're talking to, suppose there's a racist and he's got a and he's hiring for a relatively low skilled job. And in the absence of there being minimum wage laws and let's say he's not just race he will practice, he will discriminate on that basis. Let's say he can hire a white person for $6 an hour. Now there's hardly anyone so racist that at no price they would hire the black person. Suppose so let's say at some price that guy is gonna hire a black person instead. Let's say at $4 an hour. He'd rather pay $4 an hour for the black person. That means that man is willing to pay up to $2 an hour to be racist, to discriminate. Now when you raise the minimum wage if you put in a minimum wage now at let's say $8 or $15. He can hire the white guy for $15 or the black guy for $15. How much does it cost him to discriminate? It costs him zero. Well when you drop the price of something people buy a lot more of it. It's why when you make the price of say polluting zero people pollute more. When you drop the price from $2 an hour to zero they'll consume a lot more of it. And so that is absolutely, you know that's not some theory that's you go back into the history look at how so the minimum wage got passed and sort of the late the federal minimum wage in the late 1930s. It didn't have after Davis Bacon, it didn't and it was passed that congressmen were explicitly saying well this is to protect white jobs from the competition from these black people. Didn't have much of a bite because when it was kept it was not much of a bite through World War II after World War II we had a big dope bout of inflation in the U.S. And in 1949 or oh and I should mention black labor force participation was actually higher than whites in up by 1930 blacks had higher labor force participation than whites lower unemployment. They're coming into the mainstream. This stuff gets passed 1950. They jacked the minimum wage up because inflation had come in. They jacked the minimum wage up from that at that point black unemployment shot up to twice white and it has been at twice white ever since it's always twice white whatever white unemployment is, black unemployment doubles that. That's purely a reflection. That's money being shifted from poor black people to wealthier white families. And by the way very little of the minimum wage benefit actually goes to the bottom of 20% and people on average spend, when they get a minimum wage job you don't spend many weeks. How many weeks do you spend a minimum wage job? I think an average is about six weeks before they're out of it. So what you're doing is you're not only cutting off the run for the bottom of the ladder. You're making it costless for white people to discriminate. So it's a horrible idea and the people who want to take it to $15 are just, so that to me is sort of the, a very good example of social justice thinking that you can, they think that you can just legislate an outcome. They don't understand like medical things. You can't just, we have so many interlocking systems. It's so complicated. You can't take this reductionist approach to it. Oh, we're gonna help poor people by getting a $15 an hour minimum wage. I think that's a very well put. And I always like to say that before we start talking about how the world should work, we have to understand how the world does work which is why economics is so utterly important because exactly, I've never heard it put that way that the minimum wage reduces the cost of discrimination. That's the whole purpose. That's the whole purpose. Okay, so this is a two part question. The first one, I think I know your answer and then I wanna ask the second one. You said that in it, let's say that in a more market system you would have less income inequality. Is that right? Yes. Okay, let's say that you had the market system and you still had great income inequality. You had the few people that, the Mark Zuckerbergs that create this product that just makes, it's like a trillion dollars. Let's take the crazy extreme. Do you think that's a problem? In the market system with the strong concentration of wealth, do you still think that is an injustice in itself? Well, I don't think it's, I don't think you can look at that. If you say that's an injustice, then you have to be willing to define, well, there's some line, there's some ratio beyond which it is unjust. And if you tell me there is some ratio, call it X beyond which that is, that becomes unjust. I'm gonna say, okay, then assume a distribution for a moment of 99% of X. Assume that were the distribution. And then Mark Zuckerberg says, it's the old, do you know the Wilt Chamberlain example? This is what's- My audience vote, but yes I do. The Nozick, Nozick in, he says, anyone who believes in a pattern theory of distributive justice has to be willing to specify some pattern which is just but anything outside that is unjust. Okay, assume that pattern, I'm gonna say Wilt Chamberlain says, I don't feel like playing basketball anymore, but I'll come out, I'll play a game if everybody on the way in drops a dollar into a bucket and I'll do it. And 40,000 people show up and drop a dollar into the bucket, he plays the game and he's got $40,000 more that puts him over that line. If you now say that's unjust, then you're saying that the voluntary actions of those 40,000 people should be overridden by your theory of what a just distribution is. So no, I don't think you can say that distribution in itself is unjust. However, this is all in philosophy, all in theory. In our real world, we live in a world of crony capitalism and when you have such huge concentrations of private power, it doesn't just operate in a vacuum, it gets to exert political force and that's really where it becomes problematic. I think too, in those examples, what strikes me as more just is the method for the accumulation of wealth rather than the wealth itself. I mean, if somebody comes up with a product, let's say that cures cancer and in the process of curing cancer forever, they make a trillion dollars. Who in their right mind is gonna say, oh, that is itself unjust? Right. Hey, I'm not gonna take it with them. You know, what's he gonna do with it? What, Warren Buffett made a great point to me once, hate to drop names, you know, Buffett was kind of this duck truncle to me in life before he was ever the famous Warren Buffett. He was this fellow who I happened to meet when I was a kid and we took this great shine and developed a great friendship. He's really my rabbi and he pointed out to me once, you know, it isn't the accumulation of the wealth. It's if and how they're spending it. I could, I, Buffett, could afford to pay a thousand painters to sit every day and pay a portrait of myself if I so inclined and if I did that, I'm putting this call on society's resources and that is taking it from other people and so a system that taxes that consumption, it has a lot of charm. But simply, you know, the accumulation of the wealth, the wealth isn't sitting under his mattress. That wealth is, that's capital, that is building jobs and factories and moving civilization forward. I think that, you know, you want as much of that as possible but then when people go to use to consume, you know, tax on that side. And I think that that's the right answer. It isn't the distribution because if Mark Zuckerberg has a trillion dollars, what that means is that his stock has gone up so much because everybody's finding this thing he invented so valuable. And what's supposed to happen in a competitive world is that that attracts competitors and they come in and compete and, you know, in the long run, all that sort of washes out. What in fact happens is the guy with the trillion dollars, you know, calls his pet senators in Washington and gets laws written that prevent his competitors doing anything. Exactly. Tom Sol has a great line where he, I forget which book it was, but he says, and then what? That's his phrase to ask people, especially on the left, when they're talking about economics, okay, and then what? So Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated a trillion dollars while he can buy a lot of stuff and then what happens when he's got a trillion dollars in the real world in the market system that employs people? That's the R&D investment capital that goes for trying to do things like curing cancer and taking on these other projects. So accumulation of wealth, I don't think by itself is something we have to worry about. Thomas Sol is my first, second, and third choice for president and his book, he has a book called A Conflict of Visions. Have you read that yet? Yes. That is, that was my Saul on the road to Damascus moment when I read that book because out of all these swirling thoughts from all camps, I had not found the right theoretical framework and he got it exactly right. And his writing is brilliant. He's a scholar-scholar. He is. Well, on that note, I really appreciate the conversation. This has been fantastic. Steve Patterson, best of luck in your travels. Thank you. All right, that was my interview with Dr. Patrick Byrne. I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope you appreciated him opening up a little bit. Opening up is a two-edged sword because it allows for a deeper connection with people and audience that you're speaking with, but it also opens up an avenue for criticism and even mockery sometimes when you're talking about personal experiences and your own individual values. There's, of course, quite a lot more to say on these topics. I actually found myself disagreeing with several parts of what Dr. Byrne was talking about and I can't wait to analyze them for you in a future breakdown episode. So that's all for me today. Have a great rest of your week.