I often think to myself, if I deleted all my social medias, deleted my Twitch and had to start over from the ground, could I do it again? Let's talk about streaming. I'm excited to start this series because I know it's something I've gotten very good at and something I can help you guys get better at and that's streaming, helping build your stream, helping become a better streamer because it is a booming business right now and I know a lot of you guys have a dream to essentially play video games for a living. So these are the first five initial tips I can give you. If you have any individual questions, any other concerns, any other thoughts as far as streaming is concerned, make sure you put that in the comments below and make sure you like the video. This series is going to be something that takes this YouTube channel to the next level and going to help all you guys become better streamers. So let's get into the first five initial tips. The first tip to being a streamer is pretty much a basic human quality and that's humility. He plays video games, millions of people play video games and tens of thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands of people are streaming video games on some platform in the world. So for anybody to take time out to watch you play video games, the gratitude you have to always have whether you have one person watching you or a thousand people or 10,000 people watching you, the gratitude you always have to show has to stay the same and I feel like that's just a social skill and it's something that I mean, I don't know if you can build on that, but it's always an important thing for me and always treat that one person that comes in your chat, that one person that's watching you play video games, treat them like they're super special, man.  Now this is not only a streaming thing. This is a social, this is a social quality, it's a social skill if you're out at the bar, if you're at some high school reunion, wherever you are, use people's name. It makes them feel happy, it makes them feel welcomed, it makes them feel appreciated. So the biggest way I can tell you guys to show this humility while you're streaming is call your viewers by their name. I think it really makes them feel at home, makes them feel welcomed and it will take your viewers in your chat to have a better experience and that will ultimately make your experience better. Alright boys, number two, building a brand. Now it's kind of overwhelming when you hear that, you don't have to be Nike, you don't have to be Apple, you don't have to be Tesla. Sometimes that's what you think of when you hear brands. It's more about your identity on the internet. And there's two things you can do to make that more viable. And the first one everybody should agree with, that's brand unity. For me, I want to make sure you have the same name or at least a similar name on every social media platform because there's so many people that come to my Twitch chat and say, you know, I messaged you on Instagram, why didn't you answer me? Why don't you follow me back on Twitter? Well, if you're Dark Knight 14 on Twitch and then you're Mike Smith on Twitter, how am I supposed to know that's the same person? So I would go about making sure all your social medias are the same name, at least similar. I don't have the same name on every social media. I would love dub dot w on every social media, but Instagram is dub underscore dot so on and so forth. There's a little variations, but it's the same identity. And you got to carry that throughout all your social medias. And that that's super important. Now the second one, I believe this is my philosophy. This is my, my thoughts. Now you can agree or this may be somebody else would disagree, but I feel like your face, your voice, who you are is, is super important. And it's ultimately what's going to make you successful as a streamer. Nobody's going to watch you because of your gameplay. Be honest, I don't know, no matter how good you think you are, nobody's really going to watch you because of your gameplay. It could be a start, you're good. It could be something that boosts you up, but you're not going to make it a job by just your gameplay. It's just super hard, super rough.  So I've always felt like your face has to be the forefront.   Face cams, so on and so forth, because that's what makes you identifiable. It makes you relatable to the people watching you. It makes you feel like another human. It goes back to that welcoming feeling. Kind of like the first one I talked about, humility, calling people by their names, having your face, the forefront of your brand, I think is super important. And that's why I would always make yourself your profile picture on Twitch, on Twitter, everything like that, man. You have to be different from everybody else. No one else has your face. Nobody else has your personality.  So that's why I always think your face should be the cornerstone of the brands you're building. Number three, this is probably the most important thing. It's a big realization that everybody should have streaming. Streaming is a job. It is not playing video games for eight hours. You have to use every single social media platform to get your content out there. If you sit on Twitch for eight hours with eight viewers, you have not built your Twitch at all.  You might have got some more followers, but did you build your stream more? I've always equated the stream to kind of a lake, right? Your stream is your lake. How can we get some tributary little ponds, creeks and rivers going into this lake, right? And your other social media platforms are those tributaries, are those rivers and creeks going into your stream. They will build your stream up, whether it be Twitter content, whether it be Instagram stories, whether it be TikTok, whether it be YouTube, which is probably the most important one. You have to put your content on those other platforms to funnel the water into your lake. That's pretty much what I've always equated to. If you sit on a boat in your lake and stream for 12 hours, it's really not that beneficial if you're sitting there with five or six subs. In fact, me, who's going to get, you know, 1500 to 2000 people watching me play Madden when the game drops, it's almost not beneficial for me to stream for eight to 12 hours. So if you're out there with, you know, 10 viewers, 20 viewers, something like that, it's definitely not beneficial for you. Use those other social media platforms to funnel people's eyes to your stream, to your content. Those are your biggest tools. Those are your biggest rivers and tributaries into your lake that is your stream, man. And that's when you realize, okay, um, playing video games for eight hours, sitting on the video game all day, even though I'm making money is not as beneficial as sitting down and putting some work into my content and really pushing it out on every platform I can to attract more viewers. And that's something I realized. I get paid a career's worth of money to play video games, but video games still stop me from reaching my potential. Playing video games still kind of hampers me from being the best I can be. And that's something you realize the further you get down. Of course you're excited to get paid, you know, to sit on Twitch and play video games, but you could be benefiting yourself better by putting out more content on other platforms. So make sure you're utilizing other platforms.  I'm going to work on my content, want to work on my gaming career. I would venture if you put in two solid hours of streaming and you've got to schedule down and let people know. I'm going to 6pm to 8pm every night. The other six hours, I'm going to make a YouTube video. I'm going to edit my videos and find some highlights from last night's stream. I'm going to work.  I'm going to spend some time in some other streams, getting to know viewers, getting to know other streamers. I'm going to spend time moving my brand and getting my brand on other platforms would be more beneficial than you sitting on Twitch for eight hours playing video games. And it's a hard realization. It's one that I'm still making now and I have to improve on. So most definitely you do as well. And that's number three, man. Use all these platforms available to you. All right, boys. Number four, this is something I see people kind of make an excuse to why they're not streaming or what they're waiting on equipment. Equipment is super overwhelming. It is super confusing for regular people. I was a guy that just liked to play Madden. I didn't know a microphone from a mouse. I didn't know a capture card from a video card.  Now, now I'm kind of tech savvy, equipment savvy, of course, but it took me four or five years of being in this field to really get to where I'm at now. And we're going to do tons of videos about equipment, what you need to use as far as camera, microphone, capture cards, computers, everything. We will do it. But I want to make sure in this intro to tell you guys, don't let that be the reason why you're not streaming. And also, say you don't have a computer, you can put work on on social media with your identity, with your brand that you built, you can put work on. You can reply to people's tweets. You can hop in people's chat on Twitch. You can spend time talking to other people. I would tell you, even if you don't have equipment, you can go and reply to gut foxes tweet about Madden. You can go reply to Nick Marks tweet and about call duty. You can go to reply to somebody that replied to somebody replied and you know what? Hey, maybe you made a met a new friend on social media. Now this guy will tune into your stream and you can do all that from your phone. You don't need equipment to do that. You can build your brand. You can build those rivers to your lake without equipment right away, man. And another thing I want you guys to understand, you don't just snap your fingers and have a streaming setup. You know, I don't do I didn't just wake up and say, boom, I have a $10,000 streaming setup. Let's go. I'm ready. Day one. That's not how it works. You build this stuff over time this year. You know, I might get a new camera. Oh, this month I might get a new microphone. You know, I might get new overlays. I might get something looking good on my stream. In fact, I want to show you guys what my stream looked like throughout the years. Now the bottom right is where I'm at now with this camera, this overlay, these lights, this background, but you can take a look at my other years, the other years of Madden from Madden 17 in the top left, where I think I was on a laptop camera I had. I will tell you, I started streaming on a 60 inch plasma TV and it was through Xbox one. And my chat was literally embedded in the screen of the plasma TV. I streamed from the console. That's how I started streaming in Madden 16. And I believe I would probably get up to 20 to 30 viewers streaming directly from the console. So equipment should never hold you back and you build it up throughout the years. It is not something you have to buy all at once. Don't think a stream set up is going to cost you $5,000. Maybe when it's all said and done, but you got to get little things at a time. You're not going to get it all at once. And this is something I'm obviously want to do tons more videos about as far as equipment is concerned, helping your streaming setup get better, but don't let it be the reason you're not putting work in to build your brand and build your stream right now. Number five, the last tip in the most important one that has helped me become a better streamer and really elevated my performance, elevated my mood, elevated my overall entertainment value, everything about it. This has helped me the most in my streaming career because I'll be honest. This field, it is a constant comparable field where you're always looking at somebody else, how am I doing compared to them? Can I do better than them? Oh, such and such a streaming right now. This is going to hurt me. I'm not going to get as many viewers if they're streaming. I don't want to compete with them.   And it's a constant thing that weighs on you while you're streaming. And it really kind of depresses you. It doesn't allow you to have fun. It's something you're always thinking about. You're always counting viewers. You're always counting money. And this is what I did. And this is something that has helped me immensely. It cannot be it cannot be counted. It cannot be imagined how much this has helped me. But this is what I look at when I'm streaming. This is my Twitch dashboard. As you see right here, I see my followers. I see my subs on the right side. My chat is over here on the left side.  Make sure your stream is operating well, your subscribers, sub points. And what's not up there is viewers. I removed viewers from my dashboard. When I am streaming, I have no idea how many people are watching me. I don't know if it's a thousand people. I don't know if there's 10 people. And this has allowed me to just focus on the people that are actually in my chat and not the ones that are somewhere else. It has helped me not compare myself to other people. It has helped me focus on giving that humility we talked about earlier to the people that are currently in my chat. So that is the number one thing that I decided to do, probably going into Mad 19 and really elevated and really allowed me to focus on my performance as a streamer, as a gamer, and not get into that comparable field where I'm like, I haven't been getting as many viewers the last couple hours. Maybe I should get off and it hasn't made me depressed. It hasn't made me compare myself to other people. And on top of that, I don't care who else is streaming. I don't. When I first started, you know, man, if problems on, maybe I shouldn't stream. Maybe I should try to work my way around his schedule because he's the biggest man streamer. Same with gut fox, man, these guys are going to take all the views if I'm on. If you're going to allow other people to dictate when you work, you won't be successful. Period. So just go ahead and go after it. Keep a schedule. Stay committed, man. And I removed the viewer count. If you want to do that, I would suggest doing it because it removed all of that all of that stress of how many viewers I'm getting. And it really allowed me to focus on my performance and not compare myself to other people. I never know who else is on Twitch. I never know how many viewers I have. And that allows me to just give back that humility. Be appreciative of the ones that are in my chat and are watching me play video games because at the end of the day, when you step back from the streaming stuff, the fact somebody is watching you do anything is pretty cool.


I was perusing through the stats the other day, being a weirdo, seeing if there's anyone that leads the league in batter's interference. And I came across this clip, Corey Kluber, 2018, second to last game of the season against the Royals. You got Montesey on first base. You got Alex Gordon at the plate. You got Kluber on the mound last start of the season. They don't want him to steal. They go for the pickoff. Now here's where things get very interesting. Montesey is on the move. Gomes tries to throw him out. The ball goes a little pop-up flair shot. No one really knows what happened. Everyone's like, please show us the replay. How could that have been? Here we go. Nice pitch by Kluber. And now the bat is right in the middle and bam. He hits his thumb right on the bat and it instantly starts bleeding, which is crazy to me how instant it is. Looks like his nail went into his nail bed. He's just bleeding. I've lost two nails in my life. When I was younger, I pulled the garage door down by the crack in it because it didn't have a handle on it. And then it flattened in my finger and I lost my nail. I was so scary and it hurt. Gordon says, I didn't even get in the way because they're calling him out on batter's interference here. And he's like, how could that be batter's interference? I just swung the bat and then he hit my bat with his hand. Tell him to watch his hand. But the ump who looks like Rob Cordroy says, the bat is in your hand so it's still interference. You see, you get it and Gordon's like, but I just swung. He's like, yeah, but you left your bat there after you swung. Yoast comes out to argue. He's trying to kind of confuse. He tries to ask Gordon like, what happened? He's like, I have no idea. I just swung. I don't know. Umpires get together, they figure it out and they're like, yeah, you know, he holds the bat, the bat. The bat is, the bat. The bat is over home plate and he swings interference so he's out. And then they all say, yeah, sorry man. That's kind of the ruling we're going with here. I've never seen that before. Kind of interesting. Montesy's like, all right, I'll go back to first play base. Not going to be here long. Roberto Perez comes in thinking his season's over and he's like, all right, I guess I'll catch you. Another Corey Kluber game. Thumbs up, here we go. There you go, a pitch out because they know he's going to try to steal. He gets sat on but he does get the base. Perez is like, really thought my season was just going to be nice and over. Then they move him to third. So now Corey Kluber has the runner on third with two outs. Can he escape this jam? Of course he can. He goes to his 2018 Corey Kluber. He was a horse back then. He was still really good. And he got a check swing on that swing, which I don't really know. They didn't show any replays though. And then he goes, hi heater. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Corey Kluber gets out of the jam. Jan Gomes ended his season on a really weird play. So did Alex Gordon. I wonder if he played the next game. God bless me.


Where did Cain get his wife's questions brought up often? And the truth is that Cain got his wife either from a sister of his or from a niece. We know that this is the case because there were no other people that were created. The Bible tells us one that Eve is the mother of all those that are living specifically that day as well. And we know that when God destroyed the earth, all the people that were destroyed, including before the flood, those that died, they died as a result of sin. And sin, according to Paul in Romans five, starting in verse 12 says that sin entered the world through Adam. So these people weren't judged because of, there were some other race or someone that lived somewhere else. No, everyone who was on the earth, so everyone that was ever created was born through Adam and Eve. And though we only know of three children that are named Cain, Abel and Seth, the Bible is clear that they had many other children. And so Cain either married his sister or his niece.


Several years ago when we presented the Milton Friedman Prize for advancing liberty to Hernando de Soto for his work in spreading property rights around the world, one of my colleagues said to me then, I was looking at Milton Friedman and Hernando de Soto up on the podium and thinking they're both men of some advanced years and who is going to replace them. And the first thing I said to her was, well, you know, Milton is 30 years older than Hernando, so they're not the same generation. They are clearly two different generations of thinkers, activists, libertarians. And since Milton at that time was about 90 and Hernando about 60, that means the people who might be in the next generation would be 30 years old and we may not know which of today's 30-year-olds is likely to win a Milton Friedman Prize for advancing liberty someday. So we have to hope that there are always new generations coming along and one of the things we like to do here at Cato is find people from rising generations and so we're glad to have a young scholar here today. Mark may say he's not that young but certainly compared to Milton Friedman and Hernando de Soto. He is a young scholar from a new generation. Mark Pennington, our speaker today, is reader in public policy and political economy. Now I know to Americans the term reader isn't terribly familiar but it does actually mean professor or the equivalent of what would be a professor in America so it is an impressive position at the Queen Mary University of London. He took his PhD at the London School of Economics. His previous books include Liberating the Land, The Case for Private Land Use Planning and Planning and the Political Market, Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure. He's also the co-editor of Comparative Politics. His new book is Robust Political Economy, Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy and in this book he offers a comprehensive defense of classical liberalism against contemporary challenges. So in the sense of generational change he is responding to ideas that in some cases were advanced as critiques of the ideas of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The book sets out an analytical framework of robust political economy that explores the economic and political problems that arise from the phenomena of imperfect knowledge and imperfect incentives. And using that framework he defends the classical liberal focus on markets and the minimal state from the critiques presented by market failure economics and communitarian and egalitarian political theories. So please welcome Mark Pennington. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here. I'm a little bit paranoid actually about my age having turned 40 last year. So I leave it for you to decide whether or not that counts me as part of the younger generation, the older generation or the sort of sagging middle. I'm not quite sure where I fit in. It's very nice to be giving this talk in the Hayek Auditorium here at the Cato Institute because in many ways this book, Robust Political Economy, is inspired by many of Friedrich Hayek's ideas. At the beginning of the Constitution of Liberty Hayek sets himself the task of piecing together the fragments of what he describes as a broken tradition. That tradition at the time was classical liberalism and Hayek saw himself as trying to recreate that tradition. Now I should say at the outset that I don't consider myself to be in the league of Friedrich Hayek, but nonetheless my book is inspired by the same sort of a vision, an attempt to, in my own way, piece together the fragments of a broken tradition. Now you may say why would you want to do this? What is there to fix? Haven't classical liberals in the fields of economic and political theory over recent years offered convincing defences of their ideas against various challenges which have come their way? Now I think this is true. If you look at some of the economic arguments advanced in favour of markets, economists have come up with good defences against various market failure theories. If you look at political theorists, they've come up with good responses to the kind of arguments that are made by egalitarians and by communitarians. However, what I think has been lacking in the recent past has been some kind of unified theoretical framework which can bring together all of these criticisms and the classical liberal responses to these criticisms. We don't have a unified framework which can actually respond not only to the economic objections which have been raised against classical liberalism, but also to the political and ethical challenges which have been raised against the tradition as well. Now there are three challenges which I set out in the book that I think classical liberalism needs to respond to. They are the challenges from market failure economics, what I describe as the challenge of neoclassical economics, the challenge of communitarianism and finally the challenge of egalitarianism. So those are the three challenges that I think face classical liberalism and the unified framework which I think we can use to respond simultaneously to all of these challenges is the framework of robust political economy that I set out in this book. So what I'd like to do in this presentation is to sketch out what I mean by the term robust political economy and then go through some of the ways that I apply this concept in the book. Okay, so what is robust political economy? Well, something is robust if it's actually able to withstand various stresses and strains. In the context of political and economic institutions, we can define something as being robust or political institution or an economic institution as being robust if it's able to withstand the stresses and strains that are wrought by various human imperfections. Now there are two human imperfections that I focus on in the book. The first is the idea of limited human rationality. The idea that human beings are not fully rational agents. They are not omniscient beings. Whenever they make decisions, they do so in a context of considerable uncertainty. There is always imperfect information when they're making decisions. We need therefore to evaluate institutions in terms of how well they cope, how robust they are in the face of this inevitable human weakness. More specifically, if decision making takes place in a context of imperfect information, what kind of institutions facilitate learning over time and what kind of institutions minimize the consequences of what will be inevitable human mistakes or human errors. The second human imperfection that we have to take account of is the problem of what I describe as limited benevolence. The notion that people may, under certain circumstances, act out of self-interested motivations, that they may be opportunistic in certain circumstances. On this kind of a view, we need to evaluate institutions in terms of the incentives they provide to channel potentially opportunistic actors to behave in a way which actually increases the overall level of well-being in society that improves the public good, if you like. So those are the two human imperfections that robust institutions actually have to deal with. Now, in the first part of the book, I claim that challenges to classical liberalism, the various challenges to the classical liberal tradition, fail to meet the criteria of robustness. Their particular alternatives to the classical liberal ideal of a minimal state and open markets do not address how their own favored institutions will deal with the problem of limited rationality and the problem of limited benevolence. The classical liberal case for a minimal state framework with an open market economy based on the dispersed ownership of property is based on the claim that these institutions are more robust in the face of limited rationality and limited benevolence. A competitive context is the best context to deal with the fact that people are imperfectly informed. When we have lots of different decision makers making different sorts of decisions, we can facilitate a process of trial and error learning which minimizes the consequence of any particular errors. If you centralize decision making in one place and people make mistakes, then the consequences are much more far-reaching than if that decision making power is more dispersed. Likewise, a classical liberal framework which provides for exit enables people to escape from the depredations of potentially predatory actors. If people are acting opportunistically, the capacity to exit from relationships with these actors is what provides a disciplinary check on potentially self-interested behavior. Now what I claim is throughout the book that the challenges to classical liberalism, whether it's market failure economics or communitarian and egalitarian variants of political theory, lack an account of how their favored institutions can deal with these problems of limited rationality and limited benevolence. And I want to work through now in the rest of my presentation a few examples to illustrate this particular point which lies at the heart of this book. Okay, let's start off with market failure economics. Market failure economics or, for one of the better phrase, mainstream neoclassical economics, evaluates market institutions against the benchmark of full information equilibrium. Any departures from this full information equilibrium are described as market failures which is considered a right for some kind of corrective government action. Now, if we take the perspective of robust political economy and focus first of all on the idea of limited rationality, then this notion of perfection or full information in this particular context simply isn't a valid standard against which to evaluate either market institutions or any other institutions for that matter. The case for markets isn't that they are perfect institutions, the case for markets is based on the view that they are best placed to cope with the inevitability of imperfect information and limited rationality. So, for example, take the notion that neoclassical economists focus on of imperfect competition which is often considered to be ripe for some kind of corrective government action. If we're in a world of limited rationality, of imperfect knowledge, then knowledge of what should be produced and how it should be produced isn't going to be evenly distributed. It's going to be unevenly distributed. Some firms are going to judge the market better than others. Some firms are going to make more profits than others. Other firms are going to make losses. It's precisely through these imperfections or inequalities that a learning process is set in motion so that people can learn over time to copy the more successful firms and to avoid the business models that are adopted by the less successful firms. Any market which is based on imperfect information, unevenly distributed knowledge, is going to look imperfect when judged against a standard of perfection. The question is what is the alternative to this imperfection? Is it a world where regulators somehow magically are supposed to know what the ideal market structure is? If we're in a world of limited rationality, there's no reason to suppose that government regulators that are in a monopolistic position are in a position to know what the ideal market structure is. Now you may say that this kind of analysis is somewhat old hat. That there are new market failure theorists such as, for example, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz who are well aware that government is likely to fail in the way that markets fail. When push comes to shove, however, if you actually look at what writers such as Stiglitz do, they always hold markets against a different standard to public policy interventions or to government regulators. Stiglitz is fond of saying that the price system because of its various imperfections is too coarse a decision making instrument to enable people to make effective decisions. What he lacks is an account of why government regulators should be assumed to be in a position to correct for these market imperfections. Now if I may, I'd like to quote from a little piece of scripture to illustrate this particular point. This is what Stiglitz says. Now bear in mind he believes that he's arguing that government can improve on the results of an imperfect market. This is what he says. A full corrective policy would entail taxes and subsidies on virtually all commodities based on estimated demand and supply elasticities for all commodities and all cross elasticities. This is the key phrase. The practical information required to implement the corrective taxation is well beyond that available at the present time. Supposedly though, given all of this, we're supposed to trust still that government regulators are going to be improving on the market outcome. Stiglitz doesn't give any justification for this assumption whatsoever. He fails, in my view, to meet the standards of a robust political economy. Now there are other examples where Stiglitz commits the same sort of error in terms of incentives. Stiglitz is fond of pointing out various instances where there is asymmetric information in markets, where there are problems of high transaction costs or principal agent problems which lead to various market failures. What he doesn't do though is explain again how a public policy alternative can somehow be immune from the very same deficiencies. It's very interesting if you look at the way he completely misrepresents the work of Ronald Coase in this context. Anybody who knows anything about Coase will know that his whole work is focused on the problem of transaction costs. This is Stiglitz, and again, I'm going to quote from some scripture, speaking about Ronald Coase. Coase went wrong in assuming that there are no transaction costs and information costs. But the central contention of this book, and the book he's referring to here is his book with a socialism, is that information costs are pervasive. Assuming a way information costs in an analysis of economic behavior and organization is like leaving Hamlet out of the play. Now that's Stiglitz describing what he thinks is Ronald Coase's view. This is actually what Ronald Coase says about the matter. The reason why economists went wrong was that their theoretical system did not take into account a factor that is essential if one wishes to analyze the effect of a change in the law on the allocation of resources. This missing factor is the existence of transaction costs. The whole of Coase's analysis, or case for the market economy, is based on the recognition that yes, there are principal agent problems within markets, which lead to so-called market failures, but that we always have to compare these to the alternative. Anybody who knows anything about public choice theory, and the way it analyzes the way that governmental structures actually operate, would know that controlling a government is the mother of all principal agent problems. There's no incentives in most contexts for voters to try to inform themselves about what politicians are doing, because the chance that any one individual voter can affect the result of an election is infinitesimally small. The case of private enterprises, precisely that, principal agent problems are more pervasive in the public sector than in the private sector alternative. Conclusion? Stiglitz's approach does not meet the standards required by a robust political economy. Okay, that's the market failure economics out of the way. I want to apply the same type of analysis now to look at the challenges which are derived from communitarian political theory and egalitarian political theory. Let's take communitarianism first. There are many different claims that communitarians make. There's only one that I want to focus on for the purposes of this very brief talk. Communitarians challenge classical liberalism on the grounds that we shouldn't evaluate institutions on their capacity to respond to or to satisfy given individual preferences. On a communitarian view, we should evaluate institutions in terms of whether or not they have the capacity to challenge the preferences that individuals have. What they're getting at here is the notion that liberalism lacks any account of how we can elevate people's preferences. How we can encourage people or educate them to have a more informed or enlightened set of preferences to the ones that they currently happen to have. Now, this is a particular concern if you believe that the existing set of individual preferences are based on various prejudices which can exclude various sections of the population.  On a communitarian view, democracy is better placed than the market to challenge irrational or prejudiced preferences that people may have. Precisely because it's based on majority rule. On a communitarian view, people's preferences should have to be justified to the majority before they can be put into practice. And this majoritarian check will provide the context within which bad preferences can be weeded out and that we can have an overall elevation in the quality of the preferences that individual actors happen to have. Now, this kind of view, if we think about it in terms of robust political economy, I argue in the book, is based on a hopelessly romanticized view of how any democratic or majoritarian process can actually operate. It's based on a complete failure to understand how most people learn in most situations in life. The most important form of learning in society, especially if you take Hayek's ideas seriously, isn't the kind of learning that takes place when we argue with one another in a public forum and come to a majority decision about which particular view is best. The most important form of learning takes place from seeing what other people do in their lives and learning from the experiences of other people. Now, in order for that learning to take place, it's absolutely imperative that the widest possible number of experiences or experiments in living, if you like, can actually take place. Majoritarianism, by its very nature, squelches the process of experimentation. The way we get value change in most fields of life is by entrepreneurs, whether in the economic domain or in the moral domain, breaking from the majority position and doing something different. Then, gradually, through a process of incremental change, the majority view changes. Hayek puts this very well when he states that it is only by allowing the minority to act in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better. A system of private property rights which allows people to carry out experiments in living is much more likely to challenge existing prejudices and preferences than is any socialist or collectivist alternative. Now, it's not only in terms of this knowledge problem or the problem of limited rationality that the communitarian view fails. It also fails in failing to take into account adequately notions of incentives. Now, I draw in the book here, in this context, on Brian Kaplan's work. Kaplan makes the point very persuasively, following people like Brennan and Lemasky in the past, that the institutions of democracy do not actually provide people with adequate incentives to challenge the preferences that they have. Why? Because if you try to revise your preference in a majoritarian context, it actually makes no difference to the final outcome that you personally will experience. That is going to be determined by whether everybody else challenges their preferences. In a market context, you can profit personally by challenging the prejudices that you may have. If you're an employer who's got racist or sexist prejudices, you can profit by breaking from those prejudices and therefore expanding your market. But nobody in a democratic arena can actually profit personally from challenging their own views when they can't change the outcome until they've persuaded everybody else to expect some kind of a change in the law. So again, in this case, the communitarian view fails to meet the requirements of a robust political economy. It doesn't have an account of incentives to challenge people's preferences in a majoritarian context. Finally, let me move on to the egalitarian challenge and see what robust political economy has to say about this view. Now, there are a number of egalitarian thinkers that I address in the book. And again, I don't have time to discuss all of these, so I'm going to focus on just one in this context of robust political economy, and that's John Rawls. People who are influenced by Rawls's thinking are concerned about what kind of institutions manifest a notion of impartiality. So Rawlsians are concerned about having social rules which seem to be impartial, rules which anybody could actually be willing to accept. Now, there are various theoretical devices, of course, which Rawls derives to try to get people to think about what impartiality would actually require. The most famous of these is the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Behind the veil of ignorance, people are supposed to know nothing about their own particular place in society. Their economic status, their social status, they're supposed to know nothing about where they're going to be in a particular pecking order. The purpose of that veil of ignorance is to try to make them reason impartially, to choose rules that everyone, irrespective of their social standing, would actually be willing to accept. The only information that people are allowed to have behind the veil of ignorance is what Rawls describes as basic facts of social theory, so facts to do with the way economic systems or what have you actually operate. Now, for Rawls, the impartial rule that will emerge from behind this veil of ignorance type experiment is the difference principle. The rule that inequality should only be accepted in society if they operate in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst off. That's the distributional rule that Rawls claims will come from this particular thought experiment. Now, there are many people who've challenged Rawls' conclusions here. John Hassanyi famously argued that actually from behind the veil of ignorance, people wouldn't choose the difference principle. They'd opt for something like maximizing average utility. Many people have argued that the veil of ignorance smuggles in notions of extreme risk aversion into the account. It's only extremely risk averse people who would actually choose a rule of maximizing the position of the worst off, as opposed to say maximizing the average level of well-being in society. These are common kind of rejoinders which have been raised against the Rawls' view. But from the perspective of robust political economy, there's a much more fundamental objection which can be raised against Rawls' reasoning. If one of the basic facts of social theory that we have to take into account in devising impartial rules is a recognition that human beings are not omniscient beings, that they are not perfectly rational actors, that they're operating in a context of highly limited rationality, then it is utterly implausible to suggest that people would ever opt into a once and for all set of distributional practices. On impartial grounds we can argue that people would choose to be an environment which enables them to learn about the effects of different distributional principles. It would allow for competition between different distributional rules so that through an evolutionary mechanism we can discover which type of distributional rules people actually prefer. The Rawls' view assumes that people have the rationality to decide what an ideal set of distributional principles is. But if we take into account that people are limited in their rationality, this has got to be abandoned. We need to facilitate learning in these particular contexts. Learning is ruled out in the Rawls' model because behind the veil of ignorance people are assumed to be choosing rules for a closed society. Now there's a justification that Rawlsians give for making this assumption which is kind of an attempt to deal with the problem of imperfect incentives. The argument is that you assume that people are choosing rules for a closed society because you want to imagine a situation where the rules are being devised almost by your worst enemy. What kind of rules would you choose if it was your worst enemy who was actually deciding these rules? If people are self-interested, as Rawls recognizes they might be, then allowing an exit option, he claims, is unsatisfactory because opportunistic actors may try to bargain for an unfair advantage against other people who are operating behind the veil. His way of dealing with the problem of opportunism is to specify the requirements of this veil of ignorance as taking place in a closed society. Now this has always been a rather odd move if you think about it. If you take seriously the notion that incentives matter, which was one of these key factors in a robust political economy, then surely when we're devising institutional principles, thinking about what might happen if our worst enemies are going to be in charge, then we'd actually allow an exit option for people because that's the best protection that people can have in situations where they may be ripped off by opportunistic agents. So on both of these counts, in terms of failing to take into account the notion of limited rationality and failing to take into account the problem of limited benevolence, the Rawlsian perspective, I argue in the book, fails to meet the tests of a robust political economy. Okay, now in this presentation quite deliberately, I focused on the abstract theoretical arguments that I raise in the first part of the book, which addresses these various challenges to classical liberalism. In the second part of the book, I try to apply the lessons learned from responding to these challenges in three empirical contexts. One of them is the context of poverty relief and the supply of public services, the issues that the welfare state is normally thought to be best placed to deal with. A second set of issues I deal with are concerns to do with international development and the third set of policy issues I deal with are concerns about environmental protection. So I apply the robust political economy framework to derive specific classical liberal approaches to these particular problems in the second part of the book. I'm not going to go into any more detail about those now because I don't have time to do so. And besides, I'd actually like you to buy the book and to read about those solutions. So I hope I've given you enough of a flavor of what this book is about and the kind of ideas it uses to challenge the enemies of classical liberalism and I hope on that basis that you might be interested enough to think about buying the book. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. Mark, I'll let you stay up there and call on questioners and when you're called on, please wait for a microphone to come and Mark, don't overlook the young man in the front row with the worldwide questions. Questions? Yeah, there's a gentleman up there. Good afternoon. I've wondered if you illustrated any or been tempted to illustrate any of your concepts and some of them seem that they could be graphical. Sorry, I'm not quite clear. Can you just explain that again? I didn't quite understand what you mean by that. In organizational management it often helps to have a flow chart and understanding of the juxtaposition between various aspects. So is there a way you could explain this graphically to someone? Probably not because drawing has never been my strong point. That's really the only answer that I can give to be quite honest. When you've got a new generation of... No, I'm not. The new generations all do graphics. Yes, the gentleman at the front. I was wondering about your position on the sort of deontological consequentialist debate that occurs whether you fall completely on the consequentialist side or if you think that it's now time to resuscitate these ideas via consequentialism. Well, it should be obvious, I think, listening to the kind of framework that I'm using, that I'm coming from a broadly consequentialist perspective in terms of defending classical liberalism. However, I think even people who want to come from a rights-based or so-called deontological view have got much to learn from this kind of a perspective. What this perspective is basically saying is that before we can come to absolutist conclusions about what is right and wrong in a moral sense, we have to take into account the constraints that characterize all human action. And in my view, the most important of these constraints is the idea of limited rationality. The problem of limited benevolence is another one, but I think in many ways that that is a secondary issue. The problem of limited rationality is fundamental to any sort of framework. So what I'd want to say is that before we're in a position to specify and pin down in the way rights theorists want to do a stripped-down set of rights that people should have, that kind of an account has to take into account this notion of limited rationality. Many rights-based theories, I don't believe, actually do that. They think you can derive logically some pristine set of rules which are meant to reflect those rights. That kind of an approach is something that I'm not particularly sympathetic to. Yeah, the gentleman in the front. Hi, Martin Hutchinson. My colleague Kevin Dowd and I wrote a book last year, Alchemists of Lost, which looked at what went wrong on Wall Street in 2008. And in particular, the sort of troubling failures of classical economics in the areas of risk management is one thing, and also insider information. If you have these computers which are sort of two microseconds from the stock exchange, they're getting trading information before anybody else, and that looks like insider trading to me. I wonder what conclusions you've come to in thinking about the Wall Street or global financial crash and what the implications were. Well, it's interesting. I'm very glad you raised this question because I flew over here last Tuesday and on the plane I was actually reading your book. I didn't read all of it, but I got a good way through. I think you can certainly make the case that in the financial services sector there are very severe principal agent problems. And my understanding from reading your book was very much that those are reinforced by things like deposit insurance and by rather more radically suggesting but by limited liability sorts of rules as well. Now, I certainly think using this sort of a framework that you can make a case for getting rid of deposit insurance. On the grounds precisely that you are wrecking the incentive structure that many actors face. Whether you could actually be as radical or I would want to be as radical as to say you should abandon limited liability as well, I'm not quite so sure. I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that we should try to limit move further in that direction by making people more liable for the actions that they're taking. But how far you push that I think is open to debate.  So I'd probably like to move in your direction but perhaps not quite as far as you suggest in that book, at least not in the immediate term. Gentleman here on the front. We have a question from online here. It says, can we argue for a classical liberal interpretation of Rawls' difference principle by itself? I think you can. I think you can. I think there are problems though in terms for Rawlsians if they believe that the difference principle implies support for the welfare state. Now I've been saying in my talk that if you take the notion of limited rationality seriously, people wouldn't actually pick any one distributive rule. This is actually a conclusion which isn't only made by myself and Marty Asen in his recent book, The Idea of Justice, comes up with pretty much the same sort of an idea. However, let's imagine just for the sake of argument that people do agree or would agree on choosing the difference principle. The question then is how do we achieve the difference principle? Now again, if you take into account the notion of limited rationality, then the knowledge of how we actually maximize the position of the worst off isn't going to be something that's available to some central organization. We're only going to be able to discover whether or not we're fulfilling the requirements of the difference principle if we allow some kind of evolutionary learning process to take place. If we allow the discovery of who should give what to whom in order to actually achieve this particular principle. Now I would want to say on the grounds of robust political economy, and this is a point that I make in the book, that this actually implies the case for a classical liberal alternative, that people should be able to decide for themselves how much money they give to the poor, whether they give money to the poor, whether they think actually the best way to help the poor is to invest in an enterprise which could employ poor section of the population, whether they think that it's better to spend time with the poor rather than actually giving them resources. These are all things that we don't necessarily know the answers to in advance. Most people who support a welfare state, and I'm including Rawls himself in this as he did, assume that somehow answers to how you actually achieve this principle can be given to the administrative arm of government. There's no more reason to believe that politicians are in a position to know how to achieve the difference principle than they are to engage in any kind of efficient form of industrial planning. So you can make a strong classical liberal case for saying that the best way to achieve the difference principle is to allow people to spend their own money, whether investing in enterprises or in giving to the poor in different sorts of competing ways. Notice that we do have people back in this back part of the auditorium. My eyes are kind of being stripped by the lights. There's a gentleman in the front row the back of the auditorium. The front row? The front row actually here. He's wearing a red shirt, I think. Stanley Kober with the Kato Institute and also London School of Economics. Did you look at the Soviet experience and for example in the market economy because when the Cold War was ending, I was struck by some of the leading Soviet officials admitting that the command economy didn't work and one of my papers here, I cited Alexander Yakovlev to that effect that you just have too much wasteful investment which gets back to your market failure and I was wondering if you looked at that to inform your discussion. Certainly, I mean I don't look at it in great detail. When I look at the market value economics arguments I take it for granted that most actually mainstream neoclassical market failure economists as I described them such as Stiglitz would recognize that the Soviet system was a disaster and they look at, they would look at the evidence to support that particular contention. So I don't go beyond that in looking at the Soviet experience. What I'm concerned to address more are people who are trying to make arguments on comparative institutions grounds which is what Stiglitz does for the mixed economy model because the kind of argument you get now is that nobody's actually seriously proposing even in the context of the recent financial crash nobody's seriously proposing socialism thank heavens perhaps unless you're Michael Moore as a serious alternative to capitalism. People are claiming however that the recent crash demonstrates the case for a mixed economy model where you've got some degree of market competition but also you've got heavy amounts of government regulation to cope with so-called information asymmetries principal agent problems and various other market failures. Those are the arguments that I'm really sort of going for in this book because I think that's where the debate has actually moved on to. Thankfully, we don't really need to take Michael Moore that seriously. There's another guy on the back half of the... Oh, too far back. Yeah, there we go. The name is Kevin Dool from the George Washington University. I really appreciated your mention of Rawls but I did think that your discussion of the discussion principle or the difference principle was lacking reference to another principle that he brings up in his book which is the rights principle. In fact, in the book he writes that the rights principle actually precedes the difference principle. That's correct. On the lines of one of the last questions regarding a classical liberal interpretation of Rawls it is in fact the case that Rawlsians most often misinterpret Rawls' own ideas by largely excluding the rights principle and not bringing up the point that the rights principle precedes the difference principle then why is it necessary to create a counter position to the Rawlsian argument if the Rawlsian argument is just being misinterpreted? No, that's a fair point to make. What I would be questioning though even in terms of the notion of liberty perhaps and maybe this is a bit more controversial is the kind of notion of liberty perhaps that Rawlsians and actually for that matter some libertarians actually have. I mean you get into issues where will people necessarily in these situations choose liberty? Some people may not choose liberty some people from behind some kind of veil of ignorance or whatever you might want to say could choose socialism they could choose authoritarianism. What I'm trying to suggest is that in those situations where you take seriously the notion of limited rationality it's not clear what people should actually choose so I'm trying to justify people sort of know you can probably see this from a mile away I'm trying to justify a kind of Nozickian metayutopia as what should really emerge from behind this genuine veil of ignorance experiment and in that context you have to recognize that many people may not choose liberty you could say at some level that liberty is the meta-organizing principle in the sense that there are different visions that compete with one another but within that you have to recognize that people may choose to live in authoritarian societies. When we get to the international development chapter in the book I think this is very relevant because I run a very strongly non-interventionist line in the context that we shouldn't be trying to promote a particular model of private enterprise or the market economy in developing countries because there are different traditions that people are actually immersed in and it's inappropriate on evolutionary grounds to go into other places telling them what particular economic models they should actually be following. Gentleman here and then the lady over there. Hi I'm Mike Dial from Truman State University early in your presentation you I guess illustrated the fallacy of comparing markets to the perfect competition model would you further support as a defense of those imperfect models the imperfect markets that those imperfections might be like an adaption to those uncertain circumstances and will provide greater benefits in time. Oh absolutely I mean if you're making the point that at any point in time most consumers when they make purchasing decisions in markets in a sense settle for what's available it may be that a particular producer is offering you a product which on most dimensions is superior to the competition but which isn't superior in all dimensions. In those situations you don't have perfect exit because you're not indifferent to the options that are actually out there but what is the alternative? I can't think of any alternative in those situations where consumers are always going to have to satisfy themselves with imperfect products but my argument is that these imperfections are going to be more tolerable in a context where there is a plurality of options which facilitates some level of innovation change and learning than in an alternative scenario where you've got one decision making body regulating from the centre there's no evidence at all or theoretical reason to suppose that central regulators are in a position to learn in some kind of evolutionary process because there are no competitor models out there. Regulation operates by squelching competition that's the very purpose of regulation. The lady at the back is that the one I should... Sorry My name is Lee Yang I just wonder if you try to justify all irrational behaviour to include all kind of unlawful or criminal act or to justify the freedom and privatisation of social services or social program benefits I try to think unlawful of law or crime or official mechanism that should be corrected that should not be just kind of part of the irrational behaviour just irrational it's not right by education we have to change that Okay well the type of framework that I identify has a rule for law and order what I'm concerned about in the book is identifying what the scope of formal legislation law and order if you like should actually be. Now on the grounds of the kind of argument that I offer in the book I think that should be a very limited set of functions the number of issues that we decide to deal with should be relatively limited it should be confined to the prevention of force, theft, fraud which are the basic things that any classical liberal or libertarian would be concerned about those are the things that absolutely we should be preventing. Now if you're asking me on the grounds of the argument presented in my book do I support the privatisation of social security actually yes I would support the privatisation of social security and many other privatisation measures I think can be justified in terms of the kind of arguments that I put forward in this book now obviously some people will not be happy to hear those kind of arguments but I would like to put forward a case to show why people who are concerned about these issues would actually get a better deal out of a genuinely free market model than they do under the existing alternatives. Any online questions? Maybe not. We've got a cue going. So this is in response to the follow-up question specifically addressing Buchanian public goods does RP allow for the provision of public goods through the state or collective and would such public provisions be limited to local governments via the table mechanism or would successful public good provisions be scaled up to federal provisioning? Okay this is a good question so in the book I certainly make the argument especially in the chapter on environmentalism that many environmental collective goods which it's normally assumed can only be provided by the state either at the federal level or at the local level can actually be supplied through various private mechanisms so I draw on a lot of Eleanor Ostrom's writings and people who focus on the idea of private proprietary communities gated communities if you like in the central gated communities as ways of actually addressing many of these problems. However there are some collective goods where I think there is no classical liberal solution not only at the local level but also at the federal level now the ultimate example of this that I discuss which is kind of like the worst case scenario for any classical liberal or libertarian is the issue of anthropogenic climate change now I'm willing to accept I am a skeptic if you like about some of the arguments which you put forward here but I'm willing to accept that there is such a thing as anthropogenic climate change and in the book I try to work through what is a robust political economy solution to this sort of problem. Now many people if they're serious about tackling climate change on the grounds that you need to solve the collective action or free rider problem if you push them would make the argument that the logic of their position is that they should support a global government because it's no use one individual country acting to try to tackle climate change you're going to have a free rider problem it's going to be in no individual country's interest to introduce the right policies unless they are forced at the global level to actually adopt some kind climate change strategy now there is no classical liberal solution to this problem you can't have a market solution because you cannot privatise excuse me the global atmosphere however I think the fact that this is the worst case scenario for classical liberalism also can expose some of the inattention to these robust political economy issues that is often characteristic of people who want to argue for more intervention to believe that a global state is actually going to deal with the problem of climate change you've got to make some pretty ludicrous assumptions you have to assume that the people in that state are effectively omniscient in terms of knowing how to manage the global climate that's point number one so you're failing to take into account this problem of limited rationality but also you're failing to take into account the problem of limited benevolence because the state which has got that kind of power you know and it would have to be able if people are breaking the terms of treaties it's going to have to invade other countries forcing them to actually abide by the terms of the relevant treaties or the relevant regulations a state that has got that kind of power can abuse its power and what chance of individual voters got of holding to account an authority at that level if voters in organisations existing international organisations such as the European Union for example are already being screwed effectively by politicians through various forms of corruption what hope is there that some kind of supranational authority isn't going to be even more subject to these kind of problems I think it's very significant I always use this example to illustrate the point that two years ago the United Nations appointed Zimbabwe to be chairing the sustainable development commission now if you're putting Robert Mugabe in charge of that what hope is there that this kind of you know a united super state at the sort of global level would actually be making sensible decisions I think on grounds of robust political economy you can make a case that although there is a market failure here which can't be resolved it may simply be better to do nothing about climate change and simply to adapt through more economic growth to whatever problems that climate change may bring about I think whether you make that call or whether you still think it's worth creating some kind of global structure ultimately depends on how severe you think the problem might be I'm not saying my view wouldn't change if somebody gave me evidence that the problem is really potentially cataclysmic then I might change my mind but at the moment I don't see any reason to go down that particular route Captain, right at the very back Hi, Michael Willey, Georgetown University I was wondering if in your book you address applying robust political theory to education Yes I do in the chapter on the welfare state I have quite an extensive discussion of the work of James Tooley which is demonstrating the case for private enterprise and education and I compare it to the alternatives both in a developed country context and in the developing world so I think you can make on the grounds of these kinds of arguments a strong case for the privatisation of education Yeah, why don't we take one more question after this one and then break Okay I always like to ask people from the classical liberal perspective about civil society Alexis de Tocqueville said that this was something especially unique about America and of course before the welfare state through voluntary action a lot of the needs of the most needy in society were in fact taken care of libertarians, I always like to make this argument and of course we know the state grew in power and as markets are deregulated and as taxes are lowered the market economy can heal but I'm wondering if you believe that civil society can heal if miraculously we were able to get significantly smaller government in this country do you think that civil society could heal itself or is pulling up that carpet as their only mold the short answer is yes, I do believe that so in chapter 4 of the book I look at a lot of the arguments written about social capital again discussing Elin Rostrom's work some of Putnam's work but I'm actually quite critical of Putnam on the grounds that he arrives at totally the wrong conclusion basically Putnam argues that because civil society is good voluntary organisation is good that it ought to be subsidised by the state now we have the same kind of debate I don't know whether any of you are familiar with what's going on in Britain at the moment but David Cameron the British Prime Minister has got this idea of the big society which I think is actually from a classical liberal perspective the idea of wanting more voluntary organisation not just the commercial market to supply goods and services is a very good thing the problem is the way that this is interpreted and by many people it is interpreted as meaning that the government should promote civil society through these groups resources now that argument is one that I challenge in the book on the grounds of robust political economy because the minute you start having the government funding these associations they lose many of their benevolent characteristics they become in effect rent seekers who are going to be looking for the state for more and more support and the voters who are going to be funding these associations instead of being able to hold them to account for their political contribution are going to be faced with a massive principal agent problem that the only way you can try to get rid of funding from these bodies once they have government funding is to vote in elections but we know how ineffective that is as a mechanism for actually withdrawing funding from failing organisations relative to a situation where you just look at an organisation yourself and think well no I don't like what it's doing I'm taking my money somewhere else I'm taking my government intervention and when the state actually tries to subsidise or promote something that would grow organically in a classical liberal environment and that's very much the argument I make in chapter 4 of the book Is that it? Should we have a break? Sure, thanks very much Mark


Put in the research, put in the work, so there is no surprises tomorrow. So the number comes out, it's received positively, you've got a lot of good-looking charts, right? Welcome to Access a Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey, guys. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Access a Trader.com nightly wrap-up show. Hope everybody is doing well. First time here, subscribe, like the channel, give us great support. Again, what we try to do is give you an incredibly unbiased opinion of what's going on, whether the market's going higher or lower or different. There is always a chance of an area of interest via technical analysis, and that's exactly what we provide. Going into tomorrow, right? Obviously, it's a big day. I'm going to wrap this little update a little sooner. Today, my son is a freshman, first high school basketball game today, so I'm very, very eager to get there. So let's take a quick history lesson, what happened the last three CPIs, right? And this is where when you're looking into the future, and tomorrow the future is at 8.30 in the morning, and this is where the CPI number will come out for December, and everybody thinks they're smarter than the market and trying to handicap what it is. Let's talk about the last three scenarios of what happened, right? Here is, and keep this in mind, all three scenarios had basically the same narrative, right, when the data came out on the CPI. Number one, inflation continues to be a problem. Number two, right? This is the same thing over and over again. Number two, we are trying to tame inflation, and we are ready to act, and oh, by the way, we might or might not start curving down or tapering some of the basis point hikes into the future. That's basically what it is, right? So nothing more, nothing less, the same thing. So here was September. September, with this news that came out, September, the Dow fell 1200 points. October, right? October, we initially gapped up on the news, right? Gapped up on the news, I think it was like 350 points on the Dow, went red, went down 500, rebounded very, very aggressively, right? Very, very aggressively to close higher. The next day, we pretty much gave everything back, and by the way, we started rallying, a lot of stuff going on here. This is the last one, right? This is the last one. So we had to sell off, then we had to gap up, sell off to get to the rally again, and here was the last one. The last one was November the 10th, the CPI came out, everything was guns blazing, everything went higher. We had a nice little retrace for three days. We went sideways, tested the bottom of the range, as you can see here very clearly, Powell came out, gave that epic Powell boost on that random Wednesday. We went up 4.5% in two hours on the queues, only to sell off to the bottom of the range here five days later. And then here we are, right? Here we are going into tomorrow's session. And I think when you go by, and especially on social media and stuff like that, you're going to see a lot of people preparing for this monster rally tomorrow, okay? If that was definitely 100% set in stone, man, sign me in. Mac's buying power on every single position, but we don't know that guys. And that's the whole point. We don't know that tomorrow is another trading day like everything else.  You guys are hearing for the last three, four days the importance of the CPI number, the importance the following day, Wednesday of the Fed statement, right? Of course, this is absolutely important. But keep this in mind, your trading career is not going to be made or broken based on these two days. And unfortunately, a lot of new traders, they're sensationalized, they're putting into their head that they're putting this on such a pedestal the next two days, that they're already so emotionally charged, and we're not even there yet.  What are you holding $800 million worth of positions? Why wouldn't you sleep tonight? Tomorrow is exactly the same as today. The only difference between tomorrow is we're going to experience violence. We know that, right? Whether the market is up a thousand, down a thousand, up 500, down 500, we don't know that. The only thing we do know it's going to be violent. And unlike a normal trading day when things are very organic, lethargic, very predictable, violence is, well, that's what it is. It's volatility. The market's going to go up, down, up, down, up, down. And this is not an area of concentration if you're a brand new trader, just getting your feet wet. You want to kind of run away from those days, right? Because again, you can't handle risk. You can't emotionally handle any position because every move is going to be wicked out. Unless you're trading really a longer time frame, especially on the intraday basis of 60-minute channels versus the smaller time frames, the one five and the 15, whatever the case may be, at least you have a sense of what the market could do and should do on the next candle because there's only six of them. The problem is tomorrow a lot of traders are going into going to sleep tonight and they can be waking up looking at futures at four o'clock in the morning. Don't know why, considering the number is coming out at 830. Take a deep breath. Guys, I'm telling you, take a deep breath. You're already psyching yourself out subconsciously before the day start. If you're a brand new trader, the last thing you should be doing is can't wait for the CPI number. Really? Really? You really can't wait for the CPI number? Okay. If you're an experienced trader, you know violence is unpredictable. You know it's anarchy, right? You know it's like the purge. The last thing you want to do is stick your feet into the fire until things calm down. I do believe whether the CPI is going to be received good, received bad, I do believe there's enough value on both sides of the market that we can be prepared and that's the only thing, right? I have no possible, any possible idea of what the CPI number is going to do, right? I take data, I trade off that data, I have ranges on both the upside to the downside and that's all that matters to me. The back and forth, speaking on both sides of the mouth, having an opinion, trying to sound intelligent, that's not my thing. I don't think that's anybody's thing, but everybody who wants to put you in this situation to believe that you are less intelligent than everybody else. Guys, nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, right? The most important part is go through your charts. If you trade technology, look at the technology names, right? You're going to see some really clean-looking shorts. You're going to see some pretty clean-looking longs, right? So let me give you an example. If the market rallies tomorrow, look how good Nvidia looks, right? Looks great. If the market gets killed tomorrow, look how crappy Tesla looks, right? And again, market was up 500 today, leading up to the CPI. Somebody didn't tell Tesla, right? And that's the whole point. And Tesla not only was it down today, it is literally, it's a stone throws away of taking down this macro channel. And if you saw the betting, right? If you saw the betting going to the CPI, they were embedding the 230, 240, 250 calls. They were betting the 165, 160, 155 puts on the weekly basis. So there's plenty of good value on both sides of the market. You just have to put your work in today. And whatever sides confirms, right? Whatever side confirms, that's the side you want to attack. And you want to attack it with extreme prejudice because you're going to be prepared for it. Like an example, look at Boeing, right? Look how good Boeing looks, right? That looks really, really good. Look at Chewy. Look how good Chewy looks, right? That looks really, really good. So regardless of what they say, right? CPI, PPI, ABCDEFG, nobody cares. As long as you are prepared for tomorrow's session, the market can blindside you.  Hey, the market's good. Nvidia looks great. The market's good. Microsoft looks great. The market's bad. Look at Meta. Couldn't rally the whole day, right?  It starts taking down this bottom channel here. It's going to go lower. Tesla, if it's the market's crap, it's going to go lower. Amazon looks pretty good, right? Amazon looks pretty good. But again, there's both sides of the market. Amazon is either going to take out this top of the range or this bottom of the range. Again, we're going to be prepared for both sides of the market, and that's the only thing you can do. Give yourself a punches chance with common sense, technical analysis, and acting like an adult because if you go into tomorrow's session, completely unprepared and just read the headline, you're going to be really, really in a dark place about 15 minutes later. Don't be sidetracked. Put in the research, put in the work, so there is no surprises tomorrow. The number comes out. It's received positively. You've got a lot of good-looking charts, right? The market comes out, perceives negative, and it's a carbon copy of September's CPI instead of last month, then you're going to have some pretty good value to the downside as well. If you look at the spies, again, let me give you guys a couple of ranges here. Spies to the upside starts building above 400, right? Starts building above 400. We're going to go higher. Spies start building below 393. We're going to go lower, right? Again, don't be fooled by the noise. Read the charts and know exactly your levels. Look at the Qs, right? Qs start getting above 86. Remember we talked about 86 last night, right, on the weekend video, right? 86 is the big number. Continues to be the big number. 86 to the upside. You can see here, it got rejected twice off the same number here, 285.64. Qs start building 286. We're going to start moving higher. But on the flip side, again, this is how we talked about last night in the video, Qs start getting below 278. Then we have a completely different conversation for tomorrow's video. So that's it, guys. Relax. Take a deep breath. Get off of social media tonight. You don't need to go on Twitter spaces with 25 guest hosts trying to handicap what they think is going to happen. Nobody knows. You can physically have, right? You can physically have the announcement right now in your hand. And you still don't know how the market's going to react. That's how volatile, that's how aggressive, and more important, that's how violent it's going to be. Guys, again, we don't like violence. We like boring, right? Boring, lethargic, predictable. Violence is chaotic, and somebody eventually will get hurt. And if you're not prepared of what about to happen into tomorrow, hopefully that won't be you. Guys, God bless. I'm going to a basketball game. Have a great night. I will see you all in the video tomorrow. And with God's help, we'll all be there together. Take care, everybody. Have a great