 Lately, it seems like every animated movie ever made is getting a live-action remake. In fact, over the last 10 years, remakes account for 15% of Disney's new releases, and another 24% has been sequels. In spite of an incredible pool of talent, and what might as well be all the money in the world, the entertainment industry seems to be struggling to come up with original ideas. Not to be left behind, a little later this month, Netflix is releasing the much-anticipated live-action remake of Shinichiro Watanabe's beloved animated series Cowboy Bebop. I can't comment on the quality of the new version, although I would be lying if I didn't say I had a few concerns, but it does provide us with an excellent opportunity to look back at the original show from 1998. As many of you know, I'm not much of a fan of the genre, and yes, I am still going to call anime a genre, but as an aspiring jazz musician just about to start college for music when I first saw it, Cowboy Bebop will always be one of my all-time favorite series. It was and is outstanding. It features interesting and engaging characters, a fascinating body of actual and implied lore, and one of the best original soundtracks in existence, mostly written by the brilliant composer Yoko Kano and performed by her amazing band, The Seatbelts. What's more, Cowboy Bebop deals with some pretty heavy themes throughout the show, greed, vengeance, nihilism. But the one theme I found to be most prevalent and most interesting is the idea of bravely continuing your own journey to self-improvement even while dealing with the consequences of your past. Scrap in, folks, because we're about to slip into hyperspace and try to find the connection between personal responsibility, good decision making, and finding meaning in your own life on this episode of Out of Frame. The premise of Cowboy Bebop is pretty straightforward. In the not-too-distant future, which often seems a lot more like the really distant future, humans have invented jump gates, which cut down the time to travel to other planets. Instead of months, years, or even decades in a spaceship, it's now a matter of hours or days to skip across the galaxy. Tragically, this technology immediately became a necessity because of an accident that nearly destroyed Earth and made it almost entirely uninhabitable, and which compelled humans to terraform and colonize other planets and moons. In addition to dealing with interplanetary jurisdictional issues, most of the police departments in the solar system are overwhelmingly corrupt. As a result, the difficult job of apprehending criminals and gangsters is often handled by bounty hunters, or cowboys. This last bit is pretty interesting and not entirely far-fetched, and it's in this world that we're introduced to our main characters. We've got Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter and martial arts expert with a mysterious past, and his partner Jet Black, former inter-solar system police detective and current owner and captain of the spaceship Bebop. They're both pretty good at what they do, but between what often seems like very bad luck or just the result of their own compassion, they rarely seem to get paid and they're chronically broke. Both men have scars, literal and figurative, from their pasts, but they're doing their best to make the solar system a little bit better, one less insane madman or eco-terrorist at a time. They even take in the occasional stray in need of a home. It isn't always easy, and it doesn't always go to plan, but Jet and Spike are both trying to improve themselves and put distance between who they are now and who they were in the past. It's just that their past doesn't always stay where they put it. In spite of everything they've tried to do, both Spike and Jet keep running into ghosts. Spike's former life in the Red Dragon crime syndicate keeps returning to haunt him. His old rival, Vicious, is an omnipresent force of nature, constantly trying to kill Spike and just about everyone else throughout the series. Jet was never a criminal, but he does have to deal with the cost of misplaced trust in his former partner and with his own overly controlling behavior, which eventually drove his ex-girlfriend away. It's stuff like that that makes the show so engaging, deep, and painfully relatable. As Spike and Jet pick up other crew members, like Faye, Ayn, and Ed, it's clear that everyone has issues to deal with. But coming together as the kind of family they actually get to choose helps them all do their best to, well, do better. At least for a while. But I think the difficult and yet very important lesson to learn from all this is that if you want to avoid the kinds of pain that each of our main characters feel, you need to think about the consequences of your actions before you make major decisions. You need to decide how you want to live, knowing that there will be costs and benefits to every choice you make. Look, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes. You have, I have, everyone has. Even the people you most admire will eventually let you down in some way or another. As part of being human, I'm not going to tell you that it's a good thing necessarily, but it is inevitable. So yeah, we're all going to slip up and make some poor decisions over the course of our lives. Hopefully most of yours will be relatively minor. But sometimes even our smallest mistakes, accidents, and moral lapses can have catastrophic effects, the consequences of which can linger for a long time. Faye Valentine, for example, spent 54 years in cryogenic stasis after a space shuttle accident. Once she's revived, in addition to suffering from amnesia, she's also saddled with the burden of tremendous debt in order to pay back the cost of decades' worth of other people's resources and labor. And here's the part where I'm going to say something some of you aren't going to want to hear. It's easy to think that nobody should have to pay such a debt. But what happened to Faye wasn't the fault of those who worked to keep her alive. They could just as easily have let her die in the frozen vastness of space. It's not always fair, especially when we're talking about accidents and dumb luck, but okay, life isn't fair. More importantly, dumb luck can just as easily benefit people as harm them, and nobody tries to escape the consequences of a random windfall like winning the lottery or stumbling into a great relationship. So I'm less interested in talking about the role of luck here and much more interested in talking about the results of our personal choices. So keep that in mind going forward. In any case, Faye's debt is what it is. No matter what any of us might wish were true, both accidents and poor choices can be a huge setback to our goals. They can wreck our finances, impact our mental health, damage our relationships, and of course, cause physical injury to ourselves and others. A lot of people hope they can delay some of those problems by putting off dealing with them or even running away from them altogether. But eventually, the bill comes to you always. Now for a lot of people, accepting this harsh reality is frustrating. I get it. It's not fun to have to pay the price for choices we already regret. But here's the twist. All things considered, as costly and uncomfortable as all those consequences might be, they're valuable and necessary. You shouldn't want to live in a world without them. It's a good thing when people know that there's a cost to getting things wrong and meaningful benefits to getting them right. This knowledge is an important incentive that should factor into our decision making. Having to ask yourself questions like, can I afford for this action to blow up in my face? Or how much do I stand to gain if this goes well, makes you much more careful about the things you say and do. And if you fail to think about these things as you go through life, you might end up like Spike, Jett, and Faye, filled with regrets. Where are you going? Why are you going? You told me once to forget the past because it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike. Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. So I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture. Oof. Not that you'd know it from how a lot of our societies have been acting in the last couple years, but we're all individuals. And we all have our own unique levels of risk tolerance. Consequences that are acceptable for one person will be a deal breaker for another. But as long as people are free to choose what's best for them and accept the consequences, good or bad, that's fine. If we want a world where people are consistently making more good choices than bad ones, what really matters is that individuals are accountable for their actions, legally, economically, and even socially. We get major problems when people are empowered to make decisions for themselves or on other people's behalf and yet don't have to bear the costs. When an individual person or even a conceptual entity comprised of lots of individual people, like a corporation or a government agency, stands to gain if things go right, but not lose if things go wrong, this creates what economists and political theorists call a moral hazard. Remember, one of the most basic lessons of economics is that everybody responds to incentives. So our incentives matter. Moral hazards create the risk that people will behave badly, potentially unethically, if they're shielded from the negative consequences of their actions. Think about it like this. In a zero gravity environment, people's bones and muscles start to atrophy. Sure, it's fun to be weightless, but over time, you lose the ability to support yourself. Abandoning the metaphor, you can see what happens when kids grow up throwing tantrums without any kind of parental guidance, or when students don't get accurate grades or critical feedback on their work. When there are no social or legal consequences to crime, you're going to get more assault, theft, and murder. We see that in action in almost every episode of Cowboy Peabop. Since the government and the police are so corrupt and people have gotten complacent with violence in their cities, crime seems to be rampant. And of course, we've all seen the difference between how people act online under the cover of anonymity versus how they behave around people who know who they are and whose approval actually matters. Unfortunately, these problems get a lot worse when you scale them up. We see this all the time whenever politicians and government officials get to make rules for millions of people, knowing that they'll never bear any of the costs or face the consequences of failure themselves. Political decision making is full of moral hazards. If you think I'm exaggerating, let's look at the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis and great recession back in 2007. The story you've probably heard is that unregulated investment banks made a bunch of enormous, overleveraged bets that would only pay off if the housing market continued to expand and prices kept going up. But little did they know that the mortgage industry's incredible success was really being fueled by low quality, subprime loans made to poor people who had been duped into believing that they should accept variable interest rate mortgages but who had predictably default when rates went up and they couldn't afford to pay. I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that you were told that this was a consequence of too little regulation as well, but that story isn't actually true. People who blame the supposed lack of regulation are not only factually wrong, they always seem to completely ignore the role that moral hazard and bad incentives played in creating problems for both the investment banks and the mortgage lenders. The reason their story gained traction, apart from the obvious fact that it played directly to the biases of people who work in government and media, is that to really understand what happened, most people would have had to know a lot about the history of regulatory and monetary policy starting more than a decade earlier. For example, the reason that mortgage lenders had so much money tied up in what we now call subprime loans was because the government told them to. Back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration decided that home ownership was a keystone of the American dream. They had studies showing that people who owned their own homes had more wealth, they lived in better conditions, they had more family stability, and of course they had a major asset in the home itself. Home ownership was seen as a path out of poverty, but it was also out of reach for a substantial percentage of the population. So in the late 90s, the federal government passed several pieces of legislation pushing banks to lower their lending standards. Of course, both the politicians and the banks knew that these kinds of loans were very risky. So to make up for it, the government promised to cover the debts if and when they went bad through government-sponsored enterprises like the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. It worked exactly like you'd expect. Banks that weren't making loans to low-income people before were now incentivized to lend out more money, giving a lot of financially unstable people the ability to buy homes for the first time ever. That seemed like a big win for low-income buyers, and it was obviously hugely beneficial to the mortgage banks, the investment banks, and the real estate business. But keep in mind that the only reason lenders were willing to do this is because they knew that although they would profit no matter what, their potential losses would be paid by taxpayers. And at this point, another question you should be asking is, how did the mortgage lenders get all that money to lend out to begin with? I can tell you, it certainly didn't come from any increase in personal savings rates. So in order to understand how this was even possible, we need to skip ahead a couple years and talk about how money gets created. Moral hazard plays a role here, too. It's now the beginning of 2002, and in the wake of the dot-com bubble and the various economic problems created by 9-11, the Bush administration was facing a recession. Predictably, a lot of politicians and perennial supporters of bigger government demanded a massive explosion in spending as the cure. In his August 2002 column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman argued, to fight this recession, the Fed needs more than a snapback. It needs soaring household spending to offset more abundant business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of PIMCO put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Yes, he actually wrote that. And well, that's exactly what happened. Oops. In spite of significant opposition from other, I would argue, better economists, Congress and the Bush administration decided to increase spending in order to combat the recession, bail out the banks and airlines, and pay for the newly minted global war on terror. Of course, to do all that, they needed money. And to get it, the Bush administration looked to our central bank, the Federal Reserve, for help. You see, the Federal Reserve basically has three tools for increasing the amount of money in circulation, all of which can be used to raise funds for the government or stimulate the economy. First, they can reduce interest rates, thus encouraging consumers to borrow and spend more money. Second, they can reduce reserve requirements, which allows member banks to loan out more money without needing to simultaneously increase the amount of cash they actually keep on hand in the form of bank deposits. And third, the Federal Reserve Bank can buy government-issued securities or bonds directly, which gives the government and other banks more money in exchange for, essentially, IOUs. Of course, all these actions have a cost, including reducing the value of our money through inflation. But between October of 2000 and February of 2004, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan reduced the interest rate from 6.5% down to less than 1%, strongly encouraging borrowers to take out loans. So that's what they did. From 2000 to 2007, the US saw the largest explosion in household debt since the Great Depression. It literally doubled over a seven-year period. And with banks only needing to retain 10% of their assets in reserve and the Fed adding billions to the bank's balance sheets, there was a ton of money to go around. This massive expansion of the money supply also enabled big banks to borrow billions of dollars, loan out more money than they actually had on hand and make big bets on increasingly risky investments, such as mortgage-back securities and, eventually, credit default swaps. And they did all this correctly assuming that taxpayers would pick up the tab if anything really bad happened. We ended up with a perfect storm of bad incentives created by government policy. By 2004, some economists were already warning about the impending collapse of the housing market. But the government dismissed the idea as absurd. In fact, they kept saying that everything was perfectly fine right up until everything fell apart. So let's recap. Politicians intentionally pushed banks to lend to low-income, subprime borrowers. To do this, they promised to bail those banks out if those borrowers couldn't pay back their loans. Moral hazard. The government then made it easier for Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers to make riskier, high-leverage investments. Moral hazard. Then the Federal Reserve dramatically expanded the money supply, flooding cash into the financial system, making it possible for both the mortgage lenders and the investment banks to sink billions of dollars into increasingly bad loans. Moral hazard. See where I'm going with this? Once the whole house of cards came crashing down, the government did what it's consistently done since the 1940s, bailed everybody out with taxpayer money without fixing any of the structural problems. Politicians learn nothing. Bankers learn nothing. The Federal Reserve learn nothing. Most people in positions of power kept their jobs and went on to make even more bad decisions that continue to affect people today. Meanwhile, we all paid the price. Unfortunately, this is far from the only example of politicians creating terrible incentives that have had severe consequences for everyone else. It's inevitable when they're never held personally accountable when they're wrong. If people never suffer negative consequences for their actions, there's a much greater chance that their behavior will not take risk or costs into account. We've seen this play out in a ton of disturbing ways since last year. I've talked about all that a lot on this series already, so I won't go back over it now, but we would have been much, much better off if all the people in power had to actually pay for the costs they impose on others. This is one of those things about life and growing up that is kind of unpleasant. But the more you think through the role incentives and meaningful feedback play in the quality of our decisions, the more you come to realize how important being accountable for your actions actually is. The fact that we must all own our decisions is what gives meaning to everything we do in life. It's also what provides dramatic stakes to a story like Cowboy Bebop. I'm not going to spoil the series for people who haven't seen it, but everyone in Cowboy Bebop, the clients, the criminals, and the bounty hunters themselves have to deal with the consequences of their choices. And that's a big part of what makes the series so good. Our protagonists get hurt, hurt others, and routinely wish they'd done things differently. But they each own their mistakes, deal with the consequences, and as painful as that is, it's way better than the alternative. Spike and Jet are definitely trying to be better at their profession, better friends to each other and better as human beings. And struggling with the consequences of their actions is what causes them to do better. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to avoid suffering and discomfort. Humans have achieved and created some remarkable things because we wanted life to be a little bit easier. The trouble comes with trying to avoid discomfort at all costs. They say humans are social animals. They can't live alone, but you can live pretty well by yourself. I tell you, instead of feeling alone in a group, it's better to have real solitude all by yourself. You were just afraid they'd abandon you, so you abandoned them. You distanced yourself from the whole thing. Faye is constantly running away from the causes of her suffering. She shops and gambles and drinks to distract herself from her problems. The bebop is the closest she's come to having a long-term home. And even it is a spaceship always on the move. She doesn't improve her life because she doesn't take responsibility for the things she should. And she is the unhappiest person on the show. Maybe Spike and Jet aren't the most well-balanced of people or the best with relationships, but they are trying to climb out of their own personal holes instead of digging them deeper. Jet finds peace trimming bonsais. Spike trains in martial arts every day. It's not surprising that each of them has taken up practices that involve a high degree of self-discipline and control. Humans were meant to work and sweat to earn a living. Those that try to get rich quick or live at the expense of others all get divine retribution somewhere along the line. That's the lesson. Unfortunately, we quickly forget the lessons we've learned and then we have to learn them all over again. Despite the chaos of life and the consequences of our inevitable failures, we humans have a remarkable tendency to want to do better today than we did yesterday. We learn, we grow, we improve, or we try to anyway. The world is a complex place. There's not a lot about it that's in our control. What we can control, though, is ourselves, our immediate environment and how we respond to the knowledge that we've made a mistake. Do we acknowledge our errors, accept the consequences, and try to do better next time, like Spike and Jet? Or do we run and avoid and continue to do the exact same things as before, like Fei? There comes a point when you really need to ask yourself, what kind of life do you actually want? Do you want to live in a consequence-free zero-gravity world, slowly losing your ability to stand on your own? Or will you accept responsibility for your life and the consequences of your decisions, good and bad, finding meaning in the process? That choice will always be yours. It's really important to understand that whenever we sever the connection between choices and consequences, people tend to make really poor decisions. And I'd love to start a conversation about that in the comments. And if you want to participate in even more discussion, join us on Discord. Also, check out our weekly Behind the Scenes podcast, where we discuss movies, TV books, and other content we usually don't get into on this series. And for those of you who support the show on Patreon or SubscribeStar, we do special bonus content where we answer Q&A. Supporters also get a private channel on Discord, Free Swag, and access to other cool stuff. So if you love what we do, please consider a monthly contribution. And speaking of our supporters, I want to give a special shout-out to our associate producers, to Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor, and Vega Starlight. Thank you. Lastly, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Ring that bell icon. And if you really want to make sure you see everything we publish and get even more exclusive content, join the weekly Out of Frame email list. And as always, don't forget to find us on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. I'll see you next time.