I believe that yesterday was the first time in the history of this podcast where we've been doing home run picks where we had a double, double dong where both the home run picks of the day wound up going yard twice. Nolan Gorman and Shohei Otani both going deep twice last night and does put some pressure on today. But the good thing is we can kind of run it back with a lot of the same guys because Shohei Otani is pitching tonight. Nolan Gorman's Cardinals in a good spot for stacking. So we can kind of just get the band back together and try to replicate that matchup, that magic from last night. So let's see if we can do it one more time. Here's tonight in MLB DFS. Welcome on into the solo shop. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and NumberFire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Here to break down Wednesday night's nine game main slate with lock set for 7 0 5 p.m. Eastern for today. There is one rain note for tonight. That is in Baltimore for the Nationals and the Orioles. How much it impacts the game depends on when the rain gets there. Something to check back on later for sure. I'm a bit worried because I do wanna be getting some batters in this game. We'll see how things shake out there because might not have that choice. Also it is 95 degrees in Atlanta for the Giants in the Braves. So I downgrade pitchers there and I'm saying pitchers intentionally because there are two guys there and Carlos Rodan and Charlie Morton who are pretty good would downgrade them might still have to target one of those guys out of necessity. We'll talk about that in just a second. But first a quick reminder to make sure you are subscribed to the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast because our PGA DFS podcast for the Travelers Championship is already posted getting you set for some PGA DFS this weekend at TPC out at the Travelers Championship. And that is with myself and branding a duel of breaking down this week's feel pretty top heavy but a lot of fun names in the field we're breaking that down over on the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. So check that out wherever you get your podcasts and if you like what you hear leave us a rating and review as well. As always a reminder sports fans there is no better time than today to sign up for Fanduel Fantasy for users who have yet to make a deposit on Fanduel Fantasy. You can deposit today to receive two free entries. All you have to do is deposit a minimum of $10 into your Fanduel DFS account and you will be instantly rewarded with two free vouchers. This is a limited time offer so be sure to deposit now and play for free. Head to Fanduel.com or download the Fanduel Fantasy app today eligibility restrictions apply go to Fanduel.com or download the Fanduel app for more details. Pitching preview for this Wednesday main slate Carlos Radon as mentioned is the highest salary pitcher on Fanduel checking in at $10,500 Shohio Tani is 10,000 flats Sonny Gray still ramping back up off the IL-97 Carrick Scoobal facing the Red Sox 96 Charlie Morton in that Weather Game 92 Jordan Montgomery against Rays 91 we have George Kirby, Tristan Mackenzie Paul Blackbird and Eric Lauer as the others at $8,000 or higher. It feels like a lot of times this year Shohio Tani has been on absolutely loaded slates. He's always going up against stiff competition on the same slate. That's not as true for tonight and it opens a door for him to be the clear top option and to carry over the good vibes from last night into today's slate as well. Ohtani is facing the Royals which is not a great matchup. It's not bad, not great. But just a, the reason it's not great is it's a 20% strikeout rate for them versus righties this year. But there was just not super threatening 94 WRC plus which gives Ohtani a solid floor. Then he provides the ceiling himself. There has been lots of inconsistency with Ohtani as a pitcher, but the overall body of work is still very, very nice. He has a 2.84 skill interactive ERA a 31% strikeout rate. Bad at ball beta is decent at least. So, and he's also not walking a lot of guys. Even with the Royals low strikeout rates I do have Ohtani projected for 7.2 strikeouts tonight. That is the most on the slate by 0.68 strikeouts, which is a pretty substantial gap. Ohtani is at home. He's in a non-threatening matchup. I see no reason not to be hiding him here. So Ohtani not dealing with as much competition for tonight is the clear SP1 for tonight's slate. And I would treat him as such both for cash games and for tournaments. The second slot tonight is a lot more wide open after Ohtani. The other guys available are either in count spots or on tight pitch counts. The one guy who doesn't have either of those restrictions is George Kirby. And I'm going to put him second behind Ohtani for tonight. He's facing the A's in Oakland. It is cooler there than it was last night where we saw some home runs in the Mariners. 70 degree temperatures, 15 degrees cooler than it was last night. Closer to what it usually is in Oakland. Obviously it's a good matchup too. The A's have a 79 WRC plus against righties in their current active roster. They don't walk a whole lot in minimal power. Not that walks are a concern for Kirby to begin with because he has a 3% walk rate across his past five starts. That's a sample where he has been leaning more on his curveball and he threw it a season high 26% of the time in his most recent start. It's not a big with pitch for Kirby but it does generate ground balls. And that's a good thing for him because he had been struggling with hard contact before this stretch. That's less of an issue now. He's led up a 36% heart hit rate across his past five starts. And that stretch is actually a stretch that started with the game against the A's. We had nine strikeouts in that game, eight the game after that. And that second game was on the road similar to tonight. They have not seen him since then so I'm not too worried about familiarity here. So it's not the world's best slate for pitching. I'm fine taking a shot on George Kirby here and ranking him number two behind Shohei Otani and feeling pretty good about that with Kirby being valued here at $800. The third slot's pretty tough. The board is open because Kirby is valued at $800 but I'm not big into most of the other studs. I think Tara Scoobles' consideration against the Red Sox but very difficult spot there. I'm gonna rank Charlie Morton next but I just know, I think it's worth noting that doing so makes me very, very nervous and the conviction level here is pretty low. It's the reason that I'm concerned as the park primarily. Again, it's super hot in Atlanta for today which is great for offense and we saw the effects of that last night. So there is no safety here but there is upside. Morton has been upping his strikeout juice recently. He has had eight, 12 and nine strikeouts as past three starts. Granted all three of those were very good matchups but not everybody can get to eight strikeouts even in good spots. Morton can, he's shown that recently. I haven't seen any big changes in his approach so I'm still counting the earliest his numbers where he wasn't getting as many strikeouts but he looped those in his strikeout rate is 25%. Importantly, for tonight it's 28% against lefties because he'll see a lot of those here. The giants are not an ideal target for a righty and we saw that with Spencer Strider last night. Well, like a lot and they punched him around. They've got a 21% strikeout right against righties. They draw a lot of walks. I just don't have a lot of other options for tonight. I have Rodan projected for six strikeouts for tonight. I've got Tarek Scoobl around six and that's where Morton is too. So Morton for me actually ranks fourth in terms of strikeouts behind Otani, Kirby and then Tarek Scoobl but Scoobl gets the Red Sox on the road. I'd rather go Morton there. So overall pretty shaky landscape other than Otani and Kirby for me, I would not be shocked if I skew more towards single entry first night and just stick to those two guys, shift my contest type preferences. I prefer single entry in general but I think it's more of a single entry type night building around those two pitchers, identifying stacks you like and having a tighter core than you may usually have. Speaking of stacks, let's go there now. We talked about Otani as a pitcher earlier on. So let's go back and again, run it back with our what worked for us last night. Yesterday I said that I was okay stacking the Cardinals against the righty but would rather stack them against the lefty and we saw them do well last night but I think they're an even better spot here. I think they need to be the number one stack for tonight. The Cardinals are facing Eric Lauer who got off to an amazing start this year but his old issues were lurking there the entire time and the big thing was the hard contact. That was a big issue that was lurking and the first seven starts this year, the ERA for Lauer was 2.16, very good number. But he's letting up a 42% hard hit rates with a 46% fly ball rate. Those are super dangerous numbers. It just didn't matter a whole lot because of how many strikeouts he was getting but toward the end of that stretch, Lauer let up three home runs in the start against the Marlins and I'm guessing it was his cutter that got hammered there because his next start out, he cut back on the uses on the pitch a lot and it was getting whacked so I get it but cutting back on the cutter hasn't helped. His strikeout rate in that time with fewer cutters is 16%. He has a 5.09 skill interactive ERA that batted ball data has not gotten better either and that's even while facing some pretty bad teams. He faced the Nationals twice in the Reds once in that time. We've seen Lauer let up three home runs in consecutive games. He let up eight earned runs in one of those games so he's struggling right now. It's possible that Lauer gets things back on track if he can get more strikeouts again but I wouldn't count on it here because the Cardinals obliterate lefties 133 WRC plus a 44% fly ball rate and 18% strikeout rate. To me, even with Lauer having some good skills and some good strikeout juice, I think the Cardinals are the top stack of the night. Within this Cardinals stack Dylan Carlson is a switch hitter but I think we need to view him in a much more positive light against lefties. Since the start of last year, Carlson has a 200 ISO against lefties versus 156 against righties. Strikes out a bit less against lefties too. I'm fine with Carlson against righties but I think he's a better option against lefties. We'll see if Paul Goldschmidt can play here. Something key to back issue that kept him out last night. Obviously if Goldschmidt can't go, you downgrade the stack a bit but between Carlson, Aranado, Juan Yepes, other guys like that, I think that there's still enough here to feel good about this Cardinals stack whether Goldschmidt plays or not. Just feel a bit less good about it if he doesn't go. The Orioles could be playing in bad weather so check back on them later but if they're able to play, I would be high on them for stacking for tonight. They're facing Patrick Corbin who just keeps on struggling. That's even with his velocity being up. We've seen Corbin throwing harder in his past seven starts than he was earlier on this year and we've seen Corbin's velocity fluctuate in the past and at times when it's gone down, he's lagged and when it's gone up, he's improved but that hasn't been the case this year with the Velo going up. In those seven games with more zip, he has a 7.05 VRA. That's even with only two of the nine runs that scored against him last week being counted as Earth. If you count seven of those as being unearned which they were, his ERA is still 7.05. He has a 4.38 skill interactive VRA with a 15% strikeout rate letting up a ton of hard contact and we've seen him let up multiple home runs in four out of seven games during this stretch. The Orioles are not a juggernaut of an offense but they're not awful. They got a 99 WRC plus against lefties, a 41% fly ball rate. That can work in the right matchups and I think this is one of those. So check back on the timing of that weather. I think they should start this game. I just question if they'll play the full thing. So check back on the weather, make sure they're gonna play, make sure they'll play most of that game. If they do, I would say to get in on the Orioles in this spot. We do wanna be highest in the righties here but I would still use Cedric Mullins. He has a 44% fly ball rate against lefties this year with a 25% strikeout rate. He also does have four steals. So he will run even with a lefty on the mound. I'd prefer Mullins against a righty but he's a super high upside guy. We could see reduced roster rates with it being lefty on lefty and Mullins good enough to have upside even when he's facing a lefty. So Mullins to me is a guy you don't gloss over even when the Orioles are facing a lefty and we are prioritizing the righties. Our third stack is a riskier one. That's the twins against Tristan McKenzie and it's risky because McKenzie is a good pitcher but it's viable because it lets up a lot of home runs. And I think to me that balance pushes us towards the twins here. The most relevant sample on McKenzie is his past eight starts. He's been throwing more sliders in that time and it is the typical trade-off of sliders where he gets a lot of whiffs but lets up a lot of hard contact. Opponents have a 517 slugging percentage against that pitch according to Baseball Simone's but his whiff rate is 32%. So I get it, I understand going more sliders but there is some risk involved. In this time McKenzie has a 4.37 skill interactive ERA. His strikeout rate is 22% and he's had good results with a 2.72 ERA but a lot of that is thanks to plus matchups. He's faced Colorado, Oakland, Baltimore and Detroit in his past four starts. He faced Oakland in the first start of this run too. If we look at Colorado, Oakland, Detroit those are all bottom four teams in the league and WRC plus against Wright. Baltimore is 19th whereas the twins who will face Knight are third. They did face McKenzie back on May 15th and he did last seven innings there but twins had a couple of home runs off him they're now healthier than they were back on May 15th. We've seen McKenzie let up multiple home runs the Tigers, the Orioles and the A's recently too. So it's very risky to stack against a guy with this kind of profile who is actually like a good real world pitcher but I'm still willing to do it here in order to get that dinger upside but it's just for turning. So the twins will be on my list assuming we're talking just for tournaments for tonight. When we're stacking the twins we can be pretty even between righties and lefties. McKenzie almost dead even splits against both. I do like Trevor Larnack a lot at $2,200. He has a 2,15 ISO this year against righties. Good bat at ball numbers. Alex Kiriloff is also a lefty. He was smoking the ball down in triple A kind of forces his way back up in the majors. He's had a lot of hard contact in three starts he came back up too. So Kiriloff, Larnack used them to get up to the Buxton's, the Correa's guys like that within this twin stack but overall the twins I think a risky but good option for this slate. Thanks to watch here. Yesterday I said I would be on O'Neill Cruz a one off and I'm there again today. He's facing Keegan Thompson who had a great start against Atlanta last time out but the longer sample says we can use guys against him especially when they're fun guys who was still a sour of $2,700 it was up was minimum last night but you know, that's still fine. So O'Neill Cruz on the menu once again for tonight. If you want the O'Neill Cruz special tonight the minimum salary guy who's in play for one off I check out the angels. They're facing Daniel Lynch and I'm not sure if I really want to stack here because we can't use O'Tonnie in stacks. The, you know, Jared Walsh kind of gets scrubbed out it's Brandon Marsh against the lefty that's tough but Lynch lets up a lot of hard contact, a lot of fly balls. So Mike Trout's awesome. I like Max Stasi and Taylor Warden. The O'Neill Cruz play of the night is David McKinnon hitting for a ton of power on AAA before he got promoted could that in the middle of the order given how power deprived these guys are against lefties. I think that if you want a minimum salary guy who can move the needle a lot, I would say McKinnon is there but also Lornaak and Kearoloff, pretty low salary as well. Finally, if you want one more full stack in case the Orioles do get scrubbed out I would check out the Cubs. They're facing Jared Ikoff who was nothing the best year in AAA and seems like he's coming up out of necessity for the most part. The Cubs not an elite offense. So I don't want to go here, but I will at times just because the Orioles reign game may force me to do so the twins not a safe stack. So I do want to diversify and not be fully in on them but the Cubs would be the next stack on my list. Okay, let's get to the Dinger calls for today. And again, a lot of pressure here to try to duplicate the double-double-dong from last night. The boring one, I will go Nolan Aronato. If Goldschmidt were to play in a new year fully healthy I'd go Goldie over Aronato but Aronato like a 57 or so percent fly ball against lefties is so far this year. So, you know, big bummer we have to settle for Nolan Aronato here. The fun one I will go Lornaak was between him and Kearoloff but Lornaak has more of the like Homer friendly profile. Kearoloff is I think the better hitter but Lornaak has the Homer friendly profile. So I will go Nolan Aronato and Trevor Lornaak as our homerun calls for tonight. That is all that we have here for today on the Soul Shot overall pretty fun slate. I do think again, like I said, led itself more so for a single entry than multi entry just because there aren't a ton of plays I like but the ones I do like I like a lot. I think that makes it a fun option for today. Once again, do not forget to subscribe to the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed wherever you get your podcast. We of course run up a podcast Spotify Stitcher, Google podcast, you name it, you can find us there and while you're there, like what you hear leave us a rating and review as well. If you've got questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S you can also follow the FanDuel Podcast Network at FanDuel Podcast. Big thank you to everyone for tuning in for today. Good luck to you with your MLB DFS lineup starts tonight. Let's see if no one are not on Trevor Larnack and let us have some fun once again tonight. This has been the solo shot right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network.


Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. My name is Asha Bay, and I'm from the Office of Alumni Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Our office provides grant opportunities and other resources for exchange program alumni. Thank you for tuning in and welcome to our first episode of Mentor Talks, live from Washington, D.C. Mentor Talks is a new series designed exclusively for exchange program alumni. This is your opportunity to talk directly with leaders and mentors who excel in their fields. Like our guest today, Zoe Dean Smith. Zoe joins us from Vital Voices, a non-profit, non-governmental organization that invests in fearless women leaders with daring vision and partners with them to make that vision a reality. Zoe has over 36 years of experience in the for-profit, non-profit, corporate, and social enterprise sectors. Very impressive. Thank you. You're welcome. She manages a team of nine people and leads efforts on economic empowerment and entrepreneurship. Zoe has been instrumental in shaping the Fortune U.S. Department of State Women's Mentoring Partnership Program. She's also a mentor for the Mandela Washington Fellowship Program. So, what would you like to ask Zoe about her experience, her advice for entrepreneurs just starting out or wanting to expand? Her role as a mentor? This time is for you. Welcome Zoe and thank you for joining us. Thank you. Now that we've given you all a brief introduction about Zoe and the work she does, let's jump right into our questions. Zoe, can you tell us about two pivotal moments in the course of your career journey that brought you to where you are today? Absolutely. Thank you. So, in the years of 1995 to 98, I was in my third career step and I was working with a microfinance institute in Swaziland. And I was also doing a bunch of amateur theater and I produced the Rocky Horror Show, which is a musical show. And we had a big cast and a big stage crew and it was amazing. The Microfinance Institute went into liquidation and I was headhunted to run an industrial catering company, which I hated. So, I resigned because I felt like I was out of my depth in that job. I wasn't really sure what I was doing so it was a good time to move out. I joined into Jenny Thorn, who had been one of the lead players in the Rocky Horror Show. And she said to me, why don't you bring those organizational skills and come and help me run my handcraft business? And I thought, cool, what an amazing thing. So, I joined her and we made beautiful products like these placemats that you can see. And I worked with her for and with the organization for about seven years. And in that time met Vital Voices at a conference in Ghana in 2005. When I sort of came to the end of my, reached my glass ceiling within that business, we launched the foundation for the Gone Rural Women Artisans. From there I moved into working with the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation doing a similar kind of work. And then the funding for all of that came to an end doing consultancy work. And Elise Nelson from Vital Voices, our CEO, called me up one day and said, we want you to think about moving to Washington D.C. and working with women entrepreneurs and leading our entrepreneurship programs. So actually that's the chain from the Rocky Horror Show all the way through handcraft to landing up in D.C. So whoever would have thought theater would bring me into this world. And the second one was in 2003 we were invited to an event at the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Swaziland. It was Ambassador McGee and we were talking about the impact on HIV AIDS on the handcraft industry in Swaziland and trying to find solutions. And we heard about the World Bank Development Marketplace Competition. And so one of our colleagues at the embassy said, why don't you apply for this grant? And so we applied for a $10,000 grant to do HIV workshops with the women in Gone Rural and their communities. And so we did that and it was really an incredible opportunity to showcase what we were doing as a social enterprise. I went to Johannesburg to showcase what we were doing and we met the International Finance Corporation. They loved the social enterprise and then started investing in us, building our capacity. They gave us a working capital loan, a grant and that was the beginning of that relationship. I then met Elise through the IFC and the whole thing sort of unfolded into growing my relationship with vital voices, becoming a consultant with them and then getting really, really involved in the work that I do now. So again it was, I think the lesson that I learned there, the pivotal moment there was going to events where you're not sure what the outcome is going to be and having that unexpected apply for the competition, meet the IFC, meet vital voices and the story continues. Right, so one step led to another. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So thank you for sharing all that with us. We have limited time so let's get to some questions from our viewers. Jalen Serrano from Costa Rica on Facebook asks, how can we bring media attention to social entrepreneurship? That is a really, really great question and I think one of the biggest things is with social entrepreneurship you are solving some of the world's greatest problems and the best way to get people to buy is to tell the stories. So to tell stories with dignity show the impact of the work that you're doing and if the media doesn't have a lot of time available, reach out to them. Invite them to come into a story on your business, your enterprise and if they can't do that, do it for them. Give them all the content so that they can get it out there. So for me the most powerful thing would be storytelling. Great. And storytelling with dignity, not about, oh I feel so sorry for these people but look at how transformational that business or that enterprise is. Right, sharing the impact. Okay, thank you. Michael Bay writes, he is presenting this Facebook Live Talk to his class. Hi everyone. They have lots of questions. I'm not sure if we're able to get to all of them but one of his questions is how can an entrepreneur find and work with a mentor even virtually if there is no one in their network? So there are a lot of answers to that question. I think the first thing is when I think about mentorship is to think about who's within my circle and if I know of people that I don't actually personally know myself, do I know somebody else that knows that person that I would like to have some time with? That is one way. There are also a number of virtual mentorship programs available. So I think doing a Google search is an easy way to find that and of course there are fabulous mentorship programs like the Mandela Washington Fellowship. But I think the other really important thing is to be very clear about what it is that you want from a mentor. You've got to be very respectful of their time and what is it that you want to get out of that? It shouldn't be like a therapy session. I'm looking for an answer to this particular challenge and then asking for their time and spelling it out saying maybe can we meet for a coffee for an hour for the next three months and sort of having some guidelines around how you're going to conduct that relationship. Great advice. Thank you. Okay, we have another one from Twitter from Hussein Ula from Pakistan. The most difficult thing is to quit a job and become an entrepreneur. What are some things that can motivate people to do this? That is also another really good question.  So the first question I would ask myself is what is the problem that I'm solving? Have you got something that people are going to want to buy, support, whether it's a product or a service? It's got to be innovative. It's got to be something different from what everybody else is doing. So I think if it was me, I would want to take a pragmatic approach of like what is that solution and how am I going to make it happen? And perhaps even start putting that into place before you quit that other job because it is risky sort of leaving one job and starting an enterprise. Yes, that's true. Okay, we have another one from Egypt. He asks, hello Zoe, great talk. What's your advice for someone who wants to open her business, open her own business, but doesn't know where to start? I think this would go back to the question that we just had is like, first of all you've got to know what that business is. You know, what is the gap that you're filling? And as I was thinking about these questions in preparation for this, I was thinking about the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, the UN SDGs, because I think there are a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs around the world to be solving problems around climate, around access to water, you know, many things that need so much more help. So for me, if I was thinking about that, I would find where's that niche? Where's that space in my country or in my community where I'm going to do something different? And then again, develop the strategy. What is it you want to achieve and how are you going to do it? What's the timeline? Where are the resources, human resources, financial resources, all of that stuff? It's quite a process. It is, yes. Okay, we have another one from Twitter from Owen O'Coco. How can one balance working in the private sector while serving the community? And Owen cites policy, advocacy and youth empowerment as two examples of community service. That's an interesting question, the balancing the two. I think that so many people actually already do that. They do a lot of community service in their sort of outside of work time. I think in order to bring it into the workplace, a strategy I might take would be to bring to the attention of my workforce or my leaders, my bosses, the work that is needed to be done in the community and see how one can engage perhaps as a corporate social responsibility activity or something like that. That would probably be the way I'd go about that. Cool, okay. Okay, we have another one from Izyaka Dunion from Bamako Mali. She asked on Facebook, how do I overcome feelings of fear to become a successful entrepreneur? Fear is a big one for so many entrepreneurs. I think that if you are already an entrepreneur, congratulations to you. There is always fear in place. Again, I think you've got to think about what it is that you're wanting to achieve and have a clear plan on what that looks like, what is it you want to achieve, what's the timeline, etc. And I would also encourage you to dream big. So what's that next step that's slightly out of your comfort zone and maybe you don't start it now, but you know that in a year or two you've got the skills, the experience that you need for that big piece. So it would be about managing the fear and loving it into a powerful space of like how am I going to feel when I'm at that point where I consider myself to be successful and how do I get there? Who are the people that I need around me? What do I need to make it happen? Right, cool. Okay, Michael Bay on Facebook asks, what are the essential steps for starting a business? There are so many. This goes back to a couple of the ones we've already talked about. I think the first thing is like what is that business? What is the solution that you're solving? And then there's all the legal aspects of it. So you've got to have bank accounts and legal frameworks, etc. for that business. But I think the most interesting thing is to start with that little back of the envelope idea and sort of build it out into something. I think it's different for many businesses. You might be in one business and see a new channel that you could go to within that one. But I think the whole challenge in the entrepreneurship sector is competition. So what is it that you're doing differently from everyone else? I want to quickly go back to the fear question for a moment and just share if any of you who are joining us and watching us have never read the beautiful piece written by Marianne Williamson called Our Deepest Fear. Read it. It is super, super powerful. It's very short. Nelson Mandela quoted it in his inauguration speech when he became president of South Africa. I've got it everywhere. On my fridge door, in my office, everywhere it is very powerful. And it inspires you every day? Yes, it does. Okay, can you talk about the benefits of investing in women entrepreneurs? There is so much benefit in investing in women entrepreneurs. I think one of the things that I think about is with so many women entrepreneurs is that they're not just thinking about themselves. They're thinking about their family and their broader community. And so they have a very holistic approach to how they run their business, how they manage staff, et cetera. So for me, I think the long-term results of working with women entrepreneurs speaks for itself in terms of just creating good, long-sustainable, thoughtful business practice. Okay, cool. Thank you. All right, we have another question. What are some of the biggest challenges women typically face in starting or running a business? And what is your advice to overcome these challenges? So I've never started a business myself. So I can talk about running a business. And I think that one of the biggest challenges that a lot of entrepreneurs and business people face is financial sustainability. And so for me, one of the key things is that even, you know, you might be the CEO or working in your organization.  Even if you hate accounting and you pay somebody else to do that, understand your financials, grow to love them so that you can see where the business is and where you want to take it. So that would be one of the biggest things, I think. And then also be thinking about, apart from just surviving right now, in today and keeping all those plates juggling in the air, where do you want to go and what do you need to get you there? You know, who are the people you need to empower in your organization? Another thing that I feel very strongly about is succession planning in businesses, you know. If you've got people who are really successful at the top of their business, what's their next career step? You know, are they going to start a new section of that business? Are they going to go into something else? Are they empowering the people that are working with them to be stronger and bring more value to the business? There are many things, but that financial piece for me is important and the planning. Yes. Okay, here's another question. What are some steps I can take to create a business climate that supports women? Well, I think one of the ones that we talk about a lot in terms of great climate for women is thinking about enabling environments. And that includes things like childcare. You know, if you're employing a large number of women, are you thinking about how to make it easy for them to come to work every day if they're also moms and everything else that they're doing in their lives? So childcare, working towards equal pay, fair pay, those are the two biggest ones I can think of. Just to make that environment productive and happy for everyone, that they actually want to be there, they're happy to go to work, they're not stressing about who's taking care of everything else that's going on at home. So the more I think that organizations can do that, the better. And also then giving women a voice in their businesses so that they feel that they're respected and recognize a part of the organization. Yes, that's great advice. Okay, another question. How can I take the lessons learned during my exchange program and continue collaborating with mentors when I return home? That's an interesting question. I think that varies from mentor to mentor. You know, some mentors are super, super, super busy and you are lucky to get the time that you've got with them. And others have more time available. So in the case of collaborating with them, the first thing I would do is have a discussion with them about do they have the time available to continue working with you. And then again, you have to outline what it is you want to be working on so that they can see, here's the beginning point, here's the end point, and they can figure out whether they are the best person to be collaborating with you on that. It may be they are, maybe they can think of somebody else that could be a better person for that fit. Okay, it looks like we're running out of time. Zoe, in one minute or less, if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, what would it be? It would be the whole thing around having a strategic, developing a strategic plan of what you want to achieve, understand your financials, make sure that you're taking care of your human resources, the people that you work with, they're critically, critically important. So just thinking big picture and thinking about all the moving pieces and what is it that you... So think about them all because if you're strong in one area and weak in five other areas, you're not going to survive. So who are the people and what are the things you have to have in place for it all to be very holistic and successful? Okay, great. Thank you. So thank you very much, Zoe. And a big thank you to you, our online viewers, for participating today. You can learn more about Vital Voices on their website at vitalvoices.org. And be sure to keep your calendar open for our next mentor talks in August when we chat with Anar Simpson, Global Ambassador for Technovation. We'll broadcast live from Los Angeles, California where Anar will talk about the power of women and networking. Before we go, I want to give a shout out to our exchange alumni in Accra, Ghana who are gathered for a seminar focusing on strengthening business and trade for women entrepreneurs in Africa. Way to go, exchange alumni. Interested in learning more about more opportunities for exchange alumni? Visit our website at alumni.state.gov and join us on social media, on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for watching and see you all in August for our next mentor talks.


Okay, hey, this is Stefan Kinsella, my podcast, Kinsella on Liberty, episode 260, I think it'll be. That's StefanKinsella.com slash KOL 260.  That's my point. Every now and then I'll talk to someone. And I'm talking right now to Nick Sarwark, the chairman of the Libertarian Party. Hello, Nick. Hello, Stefan. And you're driving in your car somewhere right now, right? I am. I'm in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, which is colder than normal. We've gotten some unseasonable weather, but we try not to complain too much, because soon enough it'll be like living on the surface of the sun. And are you ready for mayor there or something like that? Or do you do that a lot? Because I ran for mayor in the 2018 election and the way our municipal races work. It's kind of a jungle primary in the first round, and then the top two go into a runoff. And I did not make the runoff. So I'm done running for mayor for now. Gotcha. Well, you and I were talking yesterday. We met a few months ago in Houston in person, and I joined the Libertarian Party a few months ago. And so we were just kind of chatting on one of my provocative posts on Facebook about something. So we decided, let's just have a chat about this, because you're a lawyer too. I actually hadn't realized that, but when I heard you speaking in Houston, you kept saying some things that were extraordinarily sophisticated for a layman.  So you're a lawyer too, right? I am. I got my letter of mark from the Supreme Court of Colorado in 2008. Okay. Are you like me? You've gotten Libertarians who give you, they give you guff about having sworn an oath to the state bar and you're selling out and all that. Have you ever had that attack? I have had a little bit of that, and I was a deputy public defender for the state of Colorado for five years. So I've also gotten the, how can you work for the government line of attack? Right, even though you're defending people from being attacked by the government. Yeah, the way I look at it is I'm perfectly happy to dismantle the public defender's office as soon as we dismantle the DA's office. You know, but I'm not one for unilateral disarmament when it comes to criminal justice issues. Okay, so you're the chairman of the LP, is that correct? I am. Now, is that, that's not a full-time job because you obviously have another job too, I think, right? Yeah, it's a volunteer position. Oh, it is. It's not paying at all. I didn't realize that, okay. It is not. It, you know, there's some reimbursement for expenses that are associated with party business, but it's a labor of love. Well, how often, let me ask you this because I saw you in Houston and that's not a big, this is not, Houston is not the most important sort of city. So you must travel a good deal for libertarian party business. Yeah, it, over the last, it's been, gosh, five years now, being chair. I average probably about 12 to 14 trips a year to various things, state conventions, you know, going to state legislators and lobbying for bills or being deposed by the federal government. That was delightful. What was that about? We are suing the Federal Election Commission over some of their campaign finance restrictions. So the FEC says that if you die and leave money to the Libertarian National Committee in your will, which everyone should, that the National Committee cannot take from that estate more than the statutory annual maximum per year. Which is just an absurd regulation, even if you buy into campaign finance law and the need to avoid a corruption or the appearance of corruption. The idea that a dead person could somehow get a quid pro quo, you know, absent something we don't know about the afterlife doesn't seem like it makes sense. So they wanted to depose me as part of our challenge to their law. And we, I think that oral argument was in front of the DC circuit, maybe December. I want to say end of November, beginning of December. So hopefully we'll get an opinion on it soon. And hopefully they'll strike that down. Gotcha. Okay. And how long have you been LP chair? I was first elected at the National Convention in 2014 in Columbus, Ohio, and then reelected at the 2016 Convention in Orlando, and then re reelected at the 2018 Convention in New Orleans. So I'm okay. Now the first three term consecutive chair in Libertarian party history. Really, very nice. And how long just curious how long have you been into Libertarianism yourself as a young man? So I got involved. I my dad took me to Maricopa County meetings here in Phoenix when I was, you know, probably 1011 12 years old. And I read Bergman's Libertarianism in one lesson and it made sense to me even as a 12 year old. So I've always identified as a Libertarian. I'm actually coming up this weekend on my 20th year as a party member. Got it. February 24th, 1999. We need to come up with a prefix for Libertarians. If you identify as a Libertarian, so we need a prefix like G or instead of he or Ms. or Mr. maybe maybe maybe maybe Liz or David. Yeah, yeah, I've been accused of being a reptilian. So let's not go that that direction. But we'll work into it. I think. Yeah, go ahead. Don't go ahead. I just say just for people listening that are curious.  I will deny that I'm a reptilian. I am. Yeah, but of course that's what you would say, right? Exactly. So did you practice law or did you practice law actually as a career or what's your legal sort of background? Yeah, so I practiced for five years as a deputy public defender in Colorado. I think I got up to about 36 trials to a jury. Everything from, you know, relatively low level misdemeanors up to a couple of first degree murder cases. And one argument in front of the Colorado Supreme Court in which unfortunately the justices got it wrong. As they are sometimes want to do. So I did that from 09 up through 2014. And then I moved back to Phoenix to take over the, you know, kind of succeed my father in the family business, which I had been avoiding to kind of go my own way and, you know, have some accomplishments and other fields. I was actually in computer science for 13 years before going to law school to got it. So let me ask you this, would you say that I guess you're very familiar then with all the different wings and types of libertarians because I've always been a libertarian small L. I've only been a libertarian party member recently, of course aware of the LP for a long time. But so I guess you're very aware of all the different factions and the different, you know, the menarchist versus the anarchist, the Austrian versus the others, the Paleo versus the others. And I assume you're familiar with all that. I am, I am painfully familiar with pretty much every stripe and variety of libertarian you can have. Right. And do you have a self-identified, are you, what kind of libertarian would you say you are consequentialist, solitarian, randian, pragmatic, libertarian, anarchist, menarchist, what? Usually I go with just libertarian. My personal beliefs tend towards anarchy. I like to think of it as kind of they, they go asymptotically towards anarchy but may never quite touch. Yeah. I don't, I don't go objectivist. No offense to the objectivists, although Rand did hate the libertarian party with a deep and abiding passion. Well, she hated libertarians, libertarians in general actually, right? She hated a lot of people. Rand had no, no lack of hatred. You know, one of the things that she hated the most was when people pointed out how much of her work was derivative because she was very convinced that she had original thoughts about everything. And she's sort of like the opposite of Newton. You know how Newton used to say that he only got to where he was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Rand would be the sort of person that would deny that giants existed. Yeah, except for Aristotle. She would say she stood on the shoulder of Aristotle maybe. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much the entire philosophical thing from Aristotle to Rand was an empty desert according to her. Yeah.   He's a favor of wall. They say, we're building wall. So now my, my, my joke with my son and I is like, Hey, what do you want for dessert? He'll just say wall. So I think for, for I ran Aristotle is like wall. It's like, who do you depend on Aristotle? Just one thing, you know, but, you know, a little tangent there. My mind's a little crazy. And so why would you say you're not a Randian? Is it because you didn't come in that way? You haven't read her? You don't like her? Are you or Ron Paulian or what? So I've read a lot of, of Rand. I've actually read, I want to say most everything. There's probably some esoterica that I haven't read, but I mean everything from Anthem through, you know, the fountain head and Atlas shrug. I actually did a philosophy paper on Atlas shrugged back in undergrad.  I try to come by it honestly, you know, by doing a deep dive into it and realizing that that doesn't work for me. And really it's Rand's view of interpersonal human relationships. That's kind of the breaking point for me. You know, the elevation of her personal aesthetic preferences vis-a-vis human relationships and her conceptualization of altruism, which is a little bit too sophisticated for me anyway. It just, it doesn't work for me. My experience is different from that. And I don't try and cue the beliefs that don't work in the real world, which is not to say I'm entirely consequentialist, but you know, I want to see how stuff works. It's kind of like to just jump a different tangent. People ask all the time, why doesn't the party do more to support ranked choice voting? Why aren't you guys trumpeting this as the one thing that is going to be the silver bullet that's going to make the libertarian party more viable? And we do support it and we have supported initiatives and given money for campaigns and things like that. But personally, I want to see a few elections held with ranked choice voting in places like Maine and see what empirically bears out as far as who wins and who loses. Because a lot of this stuff is still strictly theoretical. And you know, maybe it's my time as a, you know, doing litigation and dealing with people's lives. I like to see how things work in the real world, you know, kind of outside of the ivory tower. Right. I was just speaking at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum a couple of weeks ago, and there was a big booth by these guys who were voting the ranked choice voting. Maybe you can explain what that is. From what I can tell, it's basically a political analog of when you have corporate voting for board of directors, you know, the way you vote, that you can stack your votes a certain way. I mean, my cynical thought is that if it would work to make more libertarians be elected, then that's one reason the state political machine would not allow it to happen. So if it's accessible, it wouldn't work. Yeah, so it ranked choice... Yeah, and that's probably a little more cynical than I would go. But ranked choice voting, it's a voting system in which you get to send more of a signal than you send in our first pass-the-post system. Because the first pass-the-post, you have to pick one of the candidates and that's your vote. And that's it. So in ranked choice voting, you get to say, if there's four people running for mayor of Phoenix, for example, you can pick up to four in whatever order you like them. So you could put Sarwark first if you're a hardcore libertarian, but then you could decide that, you know, in absence of a libertarian, you would prefer a progressive Democrat. And so then you would put Kate Gallego next.  And then you'd be like, well, fallout spills, I'll go with the Republican, and you put Sanchez last.  So what it allows you to do, the advantage of it as a voting method, is it allows you to vote for exactly what you want and specify what you want if you don't get your first choice. It's very similar to, I used to work for the Association of American Medical Colleges, and they do a national match between medical students and residencies. You know, the students rank the places they want to go in an ordered list, and then the schools rank the resident applicants in an ordered list, and then the computers do a lot of the matching to find an ideal equilibrium based on those data points that have been fed into it. So there's a lot of potential in ranked choice voting. The real question that isn't answered for me is what does that do to the kind of candidates that run and the kind of candidates that win in a system like that where second place means something more than it did before? Right, and to me, it's not obvious that this system has anything to do with liberty or libertarianism per se. It's just another voting mechanism, and the only reason we would care is if it tended to result in more liberty and libertarians being elected. But if it did, that's one reason that the state wouldn't allow it to exist. They're happy to allow us to do things that don't cost them anything. Free speech, you know, protests don't cost them much, so they let us do it, and it makes us think that we have a safe vote. They let us vote, et cetera. I mean, I don't know. It doesn't sound like you have strong... You sound cynical. Yeah, I'm anti-state, but I don't see that... I'm skeptical of political methods to achieve liberty, but as I said, I just joined the LP last year. I think... I'll be honest, you know, I've always been skeptical of politics as the means of changing or achieving liberty, and I still am, but I decided to join because I figured, you know what, these are my people. These are also libertarians. They're trying their way. They're trying to change the LP, but...  I assume that you don't take your entire retirement portfolio and put it into one stock from one company. That's an assumption. You could be, you know, one of those people that does that, but most people believe in diversifying in order to avoid catastrophic risk. That's what... When people say, well, I don't want to vote for, you know, less than a perfect person or somebody I don't agree with 100% or I don't think voting counts or it helps or whatever, the way I look at it is it's the same as having, you know, a small amount of real estate for precious metals in your portfolio. You don't sink everything into it.  So I look at political participation as a thing that is worth doing and worth doing as best we can to try and get maximal votes and get as much as we can get through the political process, but it's not everything. You know, it's not the be all end all. And I think that that's a healthy balance. You know, it's the same as... A lot of people are skeptical of the courts and whether or not the courts can be beneficial, but I think that the work that the Institute for Justice does is still good even though they often get, you know, beaten pretty badly on rational basis review because it's a fundamentally rigged system. Even if you know the game is rigged, sometimes you play anyway just because, you know, there's honor in the struggle. You see, you're pretty good at sounding reasonable without sounding like a fanatic, so that's impressive, a good balance to achieve. That leads to what you and I were kind of squabbling about on Facebook with this Supreme Court case that just was handed down a couple of days ago. Was it TEMP or TEMP for something like that? It's Indiana versus TIMS, T-I-M-B-S. Yeah. Mr. TEMS was caught with some heroin, which in Indiana and federally is not okay with our government, even though it's totally okay with me. And as part of his plea deal, he pled guilty to something, I want to say he got probation sentence as one often does with a first-time drug offense, but they took his land rover to court under a civil asset forfeiture proceeding and proceeded to seize it. Now, this is a $42,000 land rover that he had bought with a life insurance settlement from his, I think his father passed away in an untimely manner. The maximum fine for heroin distribution or whatever level of offense that he had in Indiana was $10,000. So his lawyers said, look, you can't take a $42,000 car for something that has a maximum penalty of 10 grand that's excessively punitive and it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against excessive fines. And one of the lower-level courts agreed with that, and then the Indiana Supreme Court said, no, uh-uh, because the Eighth Amendment's never been incorporated against the state, so we can totally take a land rover for this or anything else. And I believe the Solicitor General for Indiana during oral argument was asked by one of the justices, you know, if there's a law against speeding and somebody goes five miles an hour over and you arrest them for it, can you seize the vehicle? And he's like, yes, but we wouldn't. Which is not a good answer at oral argument. That's how you get a nine-to-nothing unanimous decision written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg establishing that there's a fundamental right to be incorporated through the 14th Amendment. Due process clause was her preferred method that even a state government can't violate. And I think, you know, it's... I don't want to say it's that big of a case because it just prevents excessive forfeiture, but it doesn't really upend the structure of legalized highway robbery that is the civil asset forfeiture system, but it's like how do you eat an elephant, right? One bite at a time. And I would agree that, look, take income tax. I don't know about you, but I want zero income tax, but if I can reduce it by 3%, that's a win. It's not a perfect win, but it's a movement in the right direction. And I would agree that this, in slightly limiting the power of state governments, maybe not the federal government, but the state governments, slightly limiting their power to impose outrageous fines of the civil asset forfeiture type for statutory crimes. It's probably a slight win. It's not a big win. It's sort of like the first step back. And as a libertarian, I'm all in favor of taking a slight... First step back to get out. Yeah, I'm all in favor of a slight win. It's just that, number one, as a libertarian and as an anarchist, well, first of all, even as a regular libertarian, we're against drug law in the first place. So possession of heroin shouldn't be a crime in the first place. And so there's no victim. There's no actual damages. So the question of an excessive fine is, to us, it's irrelevant. There should be no fines in the first place. Right. And so, but fine, so that they limited it a little bit. But my big issue, and the one I think we disagreed on, is this issue of libertarian centralism or this idea that you mentioned earlier, selective incorporation. And just for people who are not familiar with this, let me just lay it out. And if you disagree, you can tell me. But basically, the 13 states form the federal government. I assume you agree with that, although some of the Jaffa types, and some of the Tim of the Sanderfer and Cato types don't agree with that. They think the federal government was like the original American government formed by the will of the people, even though it was ratified with only 11 states out of 13. And the final two didn't need to have ratified it. But the whole concept of a national government is irrational, I believe. I guess we have an enumerated powers government, which is unique in the world. It doesn't have general legislative power. It doesn't have the power to violate free speech rights or even to legislate on the issue of drugs. Right, there's no federal police power. At least by the letter of the Constitution, there's no federal police power. But the founders were afraid that they would get out of hand, put these Bill of Rights in as an extra limit on what they could do. So they said, just to be clear, Congress cannot pass a law limiting freedom of speech. Congress cannot regulate the rights of our arms. So these were like extra limitations on what the federal government could do, because the federal government had limited powers. But then after slavery, after the 14th Amendment, that was enacted to basically try to get the southern states in line and to try to remedy the aftermath of slavery and to abolish slavery. The 13th Amendment ended slavery. The 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The 14th Amendment had these three clauses in it, one of which is the due process clause, another is the privileges and immunities clause, and the other is the equal protection clause, which basically said you can't treat people differently based upon their race, right? Right. We all agree with that. Similarly, situated people have to be treated the same. Race, sex, you know, there's applications. You know, I love the 14th Amendment. I just, you know, to kind of put my cards on the table, I think there's an incredible power in the principles of equal protection that were not fleshed out enough in the original draft of the Constitution, if you will. And it settles some debates, well, settles their debates. For example, marriage equality. You know, there are libertarians who would posit that the government shouldn't be involved in people's interpersonal relationships, period. There shouldn't be any government marriage. And so the real, quote, real libertarian position is get government out of marriage, which is technically correct, which if you're a Futurama fan is the best kind of correct, but what it fails to deal with is the reality of the world in which we live, which is as long as government's giving out licenses for people to marry, it should treat people equally before the law. This idea of equal protection is that everybody is treated equally before the law. That's what the rule of law means.  Whether or not it's a good idea to go sign up to do that, that's a personal judgment question, but you shouldn't block that way in a discriminatory fashion. So anyway, sorry, got on my 14th amendment book box. Well, no, and that's what we're going to talk about. And I appreciate your motivations, and I actually agree with a lot of what you said. I totally disagree with you on the military issue. On the marriage issue, I actually agree with you, but for maybe a slightly different set of reasons. On the military issue, that's not a civil right. Military people are not doing good by and large. You don't have a right to a job in the military. And the military has special functions and requirements, and the whole thing seems like a mess to import transgender and marriage equality and gay issues into that. I don't see how that has anything to do with liberty. As for the marriage issue though, in a way, this is like the immigration issue. You could say that in a perfect world we can have free immigration, but given that we have welfare and public property and anti-discrimination laws, you just can't have open borders and welfare. You've got to choose one or the other. So some libertarians argue that way. I'm not saying I agree with one or the other. But for marriage equality, what you're saying is the way I would look at it is if the government is going to monopolize the field of contract enforcement, then they have to enforce contracts that people settle on. I would just look at the matrimonial regime as we call it in civil law property and the continental law. The matrimonial regime is a contractual incident of a personal relationship. It's really none of the government's business what people call their relationship. If you call it marriage, a partnership, it's really not up to the government. But they need to recognize the contractual aspects of it. If the government itself says that we will only recognize these legal aspects, if we call it a marriage, well then they have to call it a marriage because they're the ones that are insisted on this. If the government had early on said you can call it a marriage or a domestic partnership and we'll recognize that we don't care what you do privately, then there would have been no, it would have deflated the balloon of the gay rights movement because they would have nothing to complain about as long as their domestic partnerships are being recognized on the same level legally. So I would just favor of the Lawrence Results, by the way. Right, well this is where it gets to, and this is kind of the difference between the theoretical and the real politic or the man in the arena kind of stuff because what you're getting into is kind of game theory and negotiation where you had in this country prior to Obergefell, you had different levels of privileges available to people who were in certain kinds of relationships that were privileged by the state. So if you were in a relationship that is called a marriage between a man and a woman, you get favorable tax treatment, you got to visit your loved one in the hospital without having to go through a bunch of forms, you didn't have to develop other contracts, you were in a legally predictable situation because you had a large body of case law about what was and wasn't allowed in marriage. And what happened was the people who were privileged under that system didn't want to extend those privileges to people of the same sex. And so they started their negotiating position with you can't have this period. Then they sort of, some of them backed off and went to the whole, like you can have a civil union but you can't call it marriage, very similar to race relations in the whole let's do separate but equal for a while. And it wasn't good enough. And then they lost in court. And when they had sort of gone too far and lost, that's when you got a lot of people kind of sour grapes. The government shouldn't be involved in marriage at all and we should just get government out of all marriage relationships in the same way that post Brown v. Board, you had Southern states that were trying to dismantle their entire public education systems rather than integrate. You know, it's like we've lost. So now we're going to take our ball and go home. Correct. And I think that's right. Yeah.   Yeah. If you try and take too much, you will lose. Right. And I think I agree with you on everything you said here. And you could argue that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment doesn't... I actually have arguments that it doesn't apply to the states for two reasons. Number one, the 14th Amendment was... Well, it's un-libertarian, and it's unjustified, and it was never ratified properly because the final state that ratified it was coerced and they withdrew their ratification consent and the Congress ignored it. So you could argue, technically, legally, the 14th Amendment was never ratified, but you could argue that about a couple of other amendments, too. And at a certain point, laws become defective to the law. So I actually think the 14th Amendment was not constitutionally ratified, so it's actually not the law of the land. Right. And even then, I think it does an outlaw succession, which is the ultimate out. So a state that doesn't agree with the decision of the Supreme Court saying they have to do X, Y, and Z, they can just leave. But everyone says the Supreme Court settled that. But... Well, that's where I like to draw these distinctions because I've had these arguments that if you spend enough time in libertarian circles, you end up talking to some citizen people and tax protectors about how the 16th Amendment doesn't apply. And I try and stay out of those debates by accepting that, hey, maybe you're right on some sort of hyper-technical or historical accuracy point that there's some law in the drafting or Texas really never came back into the union or whatever. But I'm going to live my life based on what does this mean to me? And if I don't pay my federal income tax, they're going to lean on my property and they're going to take it. So the philosophical arguments are interesting but only to a point. And that's kind of, philosophically, I do believe in the right of succession as the very same kind of self-determination that led to the founding of the country in the first place in the Declaration. However, comma, practically speaking, that is settled. We had a war, a lot of people died, and I think the right side won. Other people disagree with me on that. But it is what it is, and we are where we're at. Well, so I would... In a lot of ways, I would agree with that. I think we should have a pragmatic view. We should recognize the law for what it is, not for what we want it to be and distinguish between them. I wouldn't equate the arguments of the sovereign citizen people and the common law court nut types. I wouldn't equate that. And the income tax processors, by the way, they're all basically crazy. I wouldn't equate them to the people that have a sound legal argument for the way the 14th Amendment ought to be interpreted. And I'll tell you why, because, as I said, I would agree that the Equal Protection Clause seems to be a pretty broad application to the states, and you could use that to argue for the marriage, for the gay marriage case. Although, honestly, if you just think back and you say, do you think that the framers and the public at the time of the 14th Amendment, 1867, or whenever it was ratified, would they have agreed that this Equal Protection Language meant that homosexuals could be married in states? I think that that could be... Absolutely they wouldn't. It doesn't fall under original public meaning. No, so it doesn't fall there. That argument, as I say, it's about three-fifths correct. Our little constitutional scholars will catch that reference. So you could argue the Equal Protection Clause did justify the gay marriage case, but the other, the substantive rights, like in the recent Civil Asset Fourth Survey, when you say that the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Third Amendment, and the Eighth Amendment apply to the states, what you're saying is that there are substantive rights that are incorporated by the 14th Amendment and applied to the states. And according to the traditional interpretation, what happened was in the late 1800s, the Slaughterhouse cases, a challenge of New Orleans Slaughterhouse Monopoly thing, and the Supreme Court said that's not part of privileges and immunities, and so they struck it down. They refused to strike it down. And later on, of course, the government got more power and the central government got more powerful, and they started using the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment instead. So what they said was the Due Process Clause, which is presumptively procedural, has substantive rights as well, and they incorporate the Fundamental Rights in the Bill of Rights, something like that. And over time, they selectively incorporated some of them. And today, or this week, they incorporated yet another one. They've done like 90% of the Bill of Rights, and there's a couple little things left, like trial by jury for civil cases, and things like that, which has not yet been incorporated against the state. And finally... Third Amendment. Yeah, so finally, they've done the eighth, the excessive fines part. That's what this recent case was, right? Right, and the thing is, again, this comes back to the kind of real politics of going too far. My poodles are crazy. All right, they're done now. No problem. So it's the whole real politic of going too far. So you had a post-reconstruction Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse cases that said, yeah, you know, when we passed this Fourteenth Amendment, it was supposed to make it so that the Southern states could not continue to oppress African-Americans in the way that they did prior to losing the Civil War. But it doesn't really mean what it says, and the privileges and immunities don't really mean anything. I mean, if you read Slaughterhouse, they're basically eviscerated that clause. I agree with you. That's what they did. I agree with you. And what happens when you do that is that's how you end up with the due process clause getting elevated, because you're going to pick up another piece of the amendment that was initiated and use it. And it's funny because there are things that are different about the clauses. You know, one of the things that struck me about the Tim's case is you have Gorsuch and I cannot remember the other one. Oh, it was Thomas. Thomas and Gorsuch. Which other justice? Thomas and Gorsuch. Gorsuch and Thomas wanted to use privileges and immunities. Yes. I don't like privileges and immunities because privileges and immunities references citizens. Yes. Whereas due process references persons. And much like the whole immigration debate, I come to my libertarianism from a basic individualist belief in the goodness or the dignity of all human beings regardless of where they are from, where they live, what side of the border they were born on. I believe in individual rights full stop. Yes. So when we use constitutional provisions that elevate citizens of the country over persons who are here in the country? Yes. So you're saying you're not an American, you're a libertarian first. You're basically a libertarian first, not an American. Correct. I believe that fundamentally libertarianism is, if not anti-nationalist, at least or orthogonal to nation state. Yes, it's humanist. Yes, it's universal. I agree. I totally agree. And that's why due process is better than privileges and immunities. I do too, but the process is a process. I mean, the word process means it's a procedure. And what they try to do is they try to incorporate substance into process. And like Thomas and Kathy, he's one of the greatest constitutional scholars that I admire. He argues that actually makes sense, but honestly in the end I think it doesn't. Process means giving someone a process, a fair trial, a public hearing, make sure there's no retroactive laws. Make sure the laws are publicized as they know they're violating. But basically it just means as long as the government does it by the right procedure, they can still kill you. And it conscripts you and take your property and put you in jail. Right. Well, it's like the argument over the death penalty versus life without parole.  However, I understand that if somebody gets thrown, if somebody gets condemned to execution, there are going to be lots of people who are going to look for potential ways to exonerate and places where the evidence might not have been right because, you know, death, quote, death is different. I believe it comes from the Supreme Court. But life without parole ain't that great. And what you do when you get an LWOP sentence, very few people look into those kind of exonerations because they figure, you know, at least we're not killing this guy. And so you get to these places where, you know, when you eviscerate privileges and immunities, you kind of, if our goal is to protect individual liberty and you've taken away a tool that you think legally makes more sense, you know, privileges and immunities makes more sense as a tool. If you take that tool away, it's like, you take my screwdriver and I have to unscrew something, I'll use a butter knife. It's probably not good for the butter knife. I'll probably slip a couple of times. But it's got to get unscrewed. It's the same thing when the southern states decided that they wanted to, even though they lost, they still wanted to take those rights away. That's where you get the 14th Amendment. That's where you get all those clauses because the state government had subplenary police power. Subject to the restrictions of the 10th, which is not that strong or the 9th, which, again, has not been used to the fullest potential. Well, the 10th of the 9th don't restrict the states. They restrict the federal government, but that's a different issue. Yeah, but when the states go too far a field in their violations of individual liberties, that's where you get the 14th Amendment from. That's where you get incorporation. It's you had a tool, you abused it, you don't get to use the tool anymore. And I'm okay with that. Yeah, I'm okay with it as a libertarian because in the end, I'm results-oriented too. I'm consequentialist in a sense. But you could say this, I mean, if the United States invades Iraq to change or even Iran right now to get rid of their laws against homosexuality, you could say that that's a good thing libertarily, but the means used to do it are completely dangerous to liberty too, right? But there's a big difference between an armed invasion and a constitutional amendment that was passed under the rubric that we have. Regardless of the ratification question. Well, hold on a second, but the 14th Amendment was passed after an armed invasion, so that was also an armed invasion, the Civil War. So you can't just say it's like this. I agree there's some differences. Armed invasion, illegal secession, tomato-tomato, right? Well, I don't think the secession was illegal. All the law caused that. Well, I don't think the southern states were any more libertarian or better than the north. In fact, they were worse in probably most ways. But they did have a right to secede under the Constitution just like they would have under the Articles of Confederation. In other words, there was just simply no there was no power granted to this federal government to stop it, which is why it's implicitly illegal. Well, yeah, and that's probably going to be way more than we're going to be able to resolve today. But the question of whether or not an institution or a government has the right to maintain its existence. Look, I'm just saying, I'm just saying... This is like basic Marbury stuff. Wait, are you saying that the federal government has... Silence. I'm sorry, I think we got... Are you saying the federal government has a right to maintain its existence, or you think that's part of their argument you could use? There's a solid indication to develop the Constitution. You've created a government from whole cloth, right? And so the government, such as it was, that there is an implication that maintain that institution is implied as a power. Yes, and I think that was a... I would call that a danger, right? And that's one reason I am opposed to the Constitution, personally, as a libertarian in the first place, because they didn't have known that was going to happen, right? Well, yeah. I mean, that's a basic human institution. I mean, that's the reason that we still have NATO, even though we don't have a Soviet block, is institutions maintain themselves. We probably still have the World Electrification Administration, or... Well, we just got rid of the Spanish-American war telephone tax, what, like three years ago? Well, and Germany just paid off the World War I debts in 2010. I mean, these... Right. There are inertia is a big thing in government. Which is one reason we should be loathe to create a new government, like the federal government, which the Constitution did. So I think the Constitution is completely unlibertarian. And when libertarians pass out the pocket Constitution, as if it's a libertarian pamphlet, I want to cringe.  Well, and that is... I mean, that's a place where I've gotten into arguments with more of your either constitutional conservatives or some of the paleos, you know, that have real good feelings for this idea of states' rights. And they're like, well, don't you support the Constitution? Don't you support the 10th Amendment? And my answer is yes, when it's beneficial to individual liberty. Yes. And no, when it's not beneficial to individual liberty. Yes. And as a libertarian... The tool that you use is orthogonal to the goal that you have. And as a libertarian, I agree. In fact, I wrote something 20 years ago, and I basically view the Constitution as instrumental. Like, we have to look at it like, if it's favorable towards liberty, okay, if not, not. But I do think there's a role for honesty in sound legal reasoning. So I think that we should not pretend like the due process clause or the privileges and immunities clause was supposed to implement some libertarian revolution. Look, if you as an advocate in court can push this argument for your client, go for it. But let's not pretend among ourselves that it really was meant to be libertarian. So I'm actually kind of intrigued that you... I thought you would be arguing like the Cato, Roger Pallon, Randy Barnett, these guys. I thought you'd be arguing that we should do what Thomas and Gorsuch argued and abandon the due process clause in favor of the P&I clause. No, I'm more persuaded by Sandifer if you come down to it and his arguments that the due process clause really is supposed to do stuff like that. But you do have a point. These constitutional provisions at the time that they're drafted at the time that they're ratified, the intent of the provision was to do the thing that they were trying to do. So you're immediately post civil war. The intent of the provision is to not let the southern states continue to treat African-Americans like slaves in all but name. That's the goal. The goal is like, don't get them lynched. Let them testify. Well, actually, if you read some of those debates, they were like, well, it doesn't even say that you let them vote necessarily. Well, that's why there was a very limited amount. Right. There is a limited amount of what they were intending to do. But the beauty of language is that you can then use that tool to do other things to a point. You stretch it as much as you can in the same way that free speech doesn't just cover a Gutenberg press. It covers the internet now. The freedom of the press covers bloggers, even though they don't work for an official news organization. I think that we should stretch the Constitution to the maximum liberty maximizing point that it will bear. But recognize that the best thing you can say about the Constitution Churchill said about democracy is it's a terrible system except for all the other ones. Our constitutional republic has some very, there are some flaws in the Constitution. There are some flaws in the application and checks and balances don't work as well as we would like them to work. But I would, Constitution, our limitations on governance are much stronger than, say, the Magna Carta limits the government of the United Kingdom. We have teeth in ours. They're sharp and small teeth, and they let a lot of things slip through. I know what you mean. Well, let me ask you this though. Santa First view is the Jaffa view. That's why I mentioned Jaffa earlier. That's the view that the American nation is basically a sovereign. They view the U.S. government as a government of plenary powers, however they have to manipulate it or manage this through the police clause or whatever, and that it was voted for by the mass of people in the U.S., not the states. I think that's totally ahistorical. I agree with Kirkpatrick and with Berger on this. I think that we had 13 states. In fact, we only had 11 states that ratified the original Constitution, right? So there was only 11 states when the Constitution became a force. There weren't 13. Well, the nature of representation in the colonial era was, I mean, the franchise was far less spread. Yes. You still had a lot of good old boy stuff. So the idea that that was a popular consent of the governed, it's a bit of a stretch. I mean, they didn't yell about it. Social contract theory of any stripe, whether it's this or the broader social contract theory, it's always a stretch, right? It's never really a contract. It's a shorthand for us to talk about things. It's the same way, one of my frustrations in Libertarian Land is you talk to anarcho-capitalists and they're convinced that private property is some sort of first principles thing, which is also a historical. It does not recognize that this arbitrary bundle of rights that we call property, whether it's real or chattel, developed over a long history of time, and it is arbitrary. If you just look at European inheritance law and its evolution over time, what you can and can't do with your property, alienability, things like that, these are legal structures that are created to privilege certain kinds of ownership over other kinds of ownership, and there are choices that are made in the system, and all systems are going to benefit some people more than others. And I think acknowledging that makes us better able to deal with suggestions that we move into different property regimes. For example, you know, that the current fat is towards moving towards socialism. It's easier to advocate against socialism if you acknowledge that our current system of private property, disintermediated and liability-controlled corporate structures and things like that, the system picks winners and losers. And if you don't acknowledge that the system picks winners and losers, then you aren't able to make a good defense for why this system is better than the other system. If you're trying to start from, you know, this system is just what springs at an issue from the state of man. Like, making arguments like that makes you look dumb, in my opinion. Well, you're very eloquent. I think we agree on far more than some people would think. Let me give you a quick... I kept you longer than we talked about. Let me give you a quick lightning round of questions, okay? Sure. Okay, number one, should the Supreme Court overturn Roe vs. Wade, yes or no? In your opinion? Probably not. Okay, give me more. You won. Yeah, give me more. Why? It was a poorly written opinion as a lawyer, but there is a significant amount of what would now be detrimental reliance on that structure. Yeah, it's too ingrained. And the other thing is the right of privacy is kind of like the Equal Protection Clause. Like, you can do a lot of good libertarian stuff with that, so it's not a tool I would like to give up. But would you kind of agree as a common sense, decent normal person that aborting a eight-month-old fetus is a little bit morally disturbing? Yes, oh, so we're going to have to do this another time if you want to talk about abortion, because it gets deep. Yeah, it's not something I would do. You know, some of these things are kind of like, it's kind of like the war on drugs, is you can agree that drug abuse is a problem, but the regime that would be necessary to prohibit it is worse than the problem. No, and that's basically my opinion. And that's kind of where I come down on abortion. Yeah, that's my view too, but don't you agree that late-term abortion is a cancer murder in some cases? It can be, it can be. And you know, the question is how much surveillance and how much law enforcement do you want involved between a person and their doctor to catch those rare outlier cases that might cross that line? Well, I'm an anarchist, so my solution is to put the jurisdiction on the family. So it's just the jurisdiction is in the family. I view it as an anarchist. It has its own problems. Yeah, it's a way of punting, but it's my elegant solution. Yeah, you're punting down to a small group. Okay, so what would you think about the Supreme Court striking down drug laws with some cobbles-together argument based upon the 14th Amendment? Privacy rights, privileged immunities, due process, I don't know. What would you think about just saying that all drug laws are unconstitutional? And by the way, I think the best argument would be the 10th Amendment, but that's just my crazy view. But what do you think? Well, the best argument with the historical precedent of prohibition in Article 2, Section 8 is that it's just outside of the police power that was granted under our limited power. That's the best argument. You want to talk about clean legal hit. The problem is you have case law that upheld the original... I can't remember the act, but basically they upheld the drug laws, and so we don't get to go back there. But I'd be happy with striking it down on... I think privacy is actually one of your better avenues under sort of a Lawrence Griswold theory that what you put into your body in your home is really not the state's business period and that the state should not be able to get to the point where they can figure out that you're shooting up heroin. Right. Or you could argue 8th Amendment too, like it's excessive punishments. Like, what damage have they done? 8th is tough because once you allow them to criminalize something, again, it comes back to the weakness of due process. My fourth professor used to say, due process just means that you get whatever process is due, which, if you've ever practiced an admin law, is often very, very, very little. I agree, but we did win on the 8th Amendment this week, so let's not... Yeah? And actually, I think that the 8th Amendment could be used as an argument against copyright law because copyright fines are excessive given the, quote, unquote, damage is done. They're arbitrary. They're crazy. $25,000 per incident. It could be literally $3 billion. No, it's... It's very high. There's just... There's a strong presumption towards the legal fiction that Congress thought long and hard about this stuff in creating those penalties, which... No, I'm just saying that they... Not true. No, it's not true. So my final question was going to be, how do we get intellectual property abolition on the Libertarian Party platform? And I already have Karen Ann Harlow working on putting a version of that in the LP Colorado platform. We're talking today actually about that, so... That's a good start. If you can get it accepted in state party... For example, the Libertarian Party of Texas had a death penalty abolition flank for, I think, nearly a decade prior to the National Party adopting one. So getting it adopted at state party level is a good way to get people familiar with it. It's also... You get to hash out the arguments in lower stakes. To get it in a national platform, you need two-thirds of the delegates at convention from the entire country to agree that it is both important enough to put into the platform and you need agreement on the language that it's going to get broad acceptance. And I think we've talked about this kind of offline. I don't know if a hard abolition of intellectual property is going to get two-thirds. I think curtailing some of the excesses, you know, extensive copyright terms 76 years after the death of the author, I think that's the kind of stuff you can get broad support for.  You eat the elephant one bite at a time. The problem I have is that patent and copyright are federal laws and so I don't really know if states... I don't even know what a state platform would be because state platforms are about what the state law should be and they don't have IP law. Because it's been pre-empted by federal law, so... But I guess it would be... But they have federal representatives. They have congressmen and senators. We're going to nullify copyright law in our state or I don't know. Well, that's how we built this country was nullifying everyone else's copyright and patent. True, that's true. We didn't adopt the Barron Convention until the 1980s, actually. No, I mean, basically stealing IP from other countries was like how the... These are the sort of historical things I wish more people knew that our country was built on piracy. But again, these are shifting power dynamics. This is stuff like privilege theory and when we're making money off of intellectual property, then all of a sudden we've got making-mouses lobbyists having excessive copyright penalties and excessive copyright terms. When we're the young scrappy upstart, it's like patent? What patent? Not from the United States, sorry. Right now, China is where we were. And India is where we were vis-a-vis drugs and pharmaceutical patents. And so recognizing the dynamism of the intellectual property system, I think is the first step to having good conversations. It's one of the things that I've always appreciated about Larry Lessig is he looks at kind of the overall system. He's wrong a lot, but he looks at the dynamism of how the system works and you get better solutions when you actually understand the overall system, not just the piece you're tinkering with. I hear you. Well, I've kept you way longer than I said I would, so I appreciate your time and I enjoyed it. And did I send a bag of you? If so, I'll delete anything you want. No, not at all. Okay. Not at all, not at all. This was a really good conversation. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully it will go a long way to repairing relationships between the factions such as they are reparable. I think some of them aren't because they're fundamental, but some of them probably are. I'm not a monster. Time heals all wounds. Yeah, and dialogue helps. If you can sit down and talk to somebody, it definitely changes your ability to caricature them because you know that they're real people. I agree, I agree. All right, thanks for your time, Nick. Well, this was great. And good luck with the LLP, and I'm glad to be a member and keep doing what you're doing. Thank you so much. Talk to you later.


Hello everybody, Andrea Majeski here with Dental L Mobile Hygiene. So I saw a patient the other day who hadn't been in in about five years. So they had not had their teeth cleaned in five years, but it was because they said that they had a bad experience with their last appointment somewhere else where they were just in a lot of pain. So they did have their teeth cleaned, but just afterwards they were in a lot of pain. They said that just overall the appointment didn't go well. The office was behind he kind of felt that he didn't really get a lot of his questions answered. And he felt like he was just a number where he was, you know, in out. That's it. They didn't call him to, you know, see if he was doing OK after his cleaning appointment. You know, things like that. So he just said to me, you know, I felt like I was a number and he was actually referred to me by somebody else, which is excellent. So I love that. But as you guys can see here, so this is a good example of how your teeth will look after five years. Now, this could actually happen after a year, two years, you know, ten years, everybody's different. So what you see in the first picture here is plaque and charter, even stains. So you see that kind of like yellow brown, I guess, areas like on the bottom of the teeth here. And this is your lower teeth on the inside. So right at the right at the front, here's the lip and your tongue is the tongue is pushed up a little bit here. But this is plaque and charter. So this is not healthy because remember how how I said that plaque harbors a lot of bacteria. So plaque pretty much forms right away after eating and drinking anything. And then after 12 to 24 hours, plaque becomes hard. And then forms tartar forms calculus. So each of those two terms mean the same thing. And plaque or sorry, tartar and calculus, you cannot take off with your toothbrush.  So look at the after look how amazing that looks right amazing. Stain is not there. Plaque not there. The tartar, the calculus is not there. And this does not have to be sore.  It all it all depends on, you know, taking your time or, you know, me taking my time. Something like this may even take two appointments. It depends on the person, but taking our time and I and I also have a numbing agent that I can apply to sort of underneath the gums along here. So then that way it's not sore at all. And the numbing agent lasts 45 minutes to an hour at the most.  You can eat, drink anything. So it's perfect. But look how nice this looks before and after. So something like this took, you know, would take about two appointments. But that's it. Now that things are nice and clean. I'm thinking this person can come in maybe every four months or so because they tend to build up staying quite quickly. If you, you know, if you drink a lot of wine, coffee. If you smoke as well, I lost my train of thought there. If you smoke as well, then that can build up staying. So you might have to come in more often than every six months. But this person, I'd say every four months, at least until things are nice and healthy again.  So even if you haven't seen a dental hygienist in 10 years, that is okay. Come to see me. I am so happy to help and you will actually like having your teeth cleaned again. So let me know if you have any questions and thank you so much for watching.