Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Timothy Sandifer. He's the vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute. And today we're discussing his new book, The Permission Society, how the ruling class turns our freedom into privileges and what we can do about it. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Tim. Thanks. It's great to be back. What's the Permission Society? The Permission Society is my term for a society in which the individual's freedom is seen as a privilege or a permission that is given to the citizen by the government as opposed to a free society where people are presumed to be free and it is the government that has to ask the people's permission. Now, that sounds like sort of your ordinary civics lesson from eighth grade about how we the people create the Constitution and all that. But while that's true, it's also important on a deeper level that the American Revolution, what made it different, what makes the Declaration of Independence different, is that it reversed the presumption of an earlier generation that freedom is given to us by the king. If you look at the wording of the Magna Carta, it starts out, I, King John, hereby give the following freedoms to my people, and then it lists all the freedoms that he's giving to the people, as opposed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that say the people have all their freedom and they are choosing to give the government its powers. That's a profound philosophical shift, and it's one that I'm afraid is being eroded over time. Is it being eroded because people have changed their philosophy of what rights are, or is it just being sort of nitpicked to death by the kind of various organizations and entities, bureaucracy that you talk about in the book? A little of both. I think it's being, I think it's being chipped away philosophically by the lawyers, judges, law professors, political science professors, political leaders on the upper end who have persuaded people to think of freedom as a privilege that the government gives to us. And on the lower end, it's being gradually whittled away by the fact that it's always easy for a bureaucrat to think of freedom as a permission and to narrow it down without even realizing sometimes that that's what they're doing. So like a building permit, California courts have repeatedly said that they regard the right to develop property as a privilege that the government gives to you in the form of a permit. But of course, if you own property, the whole purpose of owning property is so that you can develop it or do something with it. And so I don't think the judges who say those things realize that what they're doing is basically, in a philosophical sense, overturning the entire point of a system of rights, which is that the individual has the right to decide what to do unless he's going to harm some other person. Because it's just easier to regulate people if you regard freedom as a permission that you have to come to me, the bureaucrat, and persuade me to let you do this thing. Making it easier for regulation would be one possible response to this question. But is this a mostly a semantic difference or mostly a philosophical difference? Like why does this matter so much? Because if on the one hand we say, okay, you have rights and the government, when it acts, it's restricting your freedom, but we don't tend to care much about how much it restricts your freedom. Like we think it's okay that it restricts your freedom in all of these ways. And so the government is therefore big and meddlesome versus you have to ask permission and the government just says no a lot. And so therefore the government is big and meddlesome. The real world consequences of this, does this matter much outside of those of us who care about philosophical purity or first principles being thought about the correct way? Well, I'm not sure how to answer that because I think that the when we talk about the philosophical basis of the transformation of our society from one in which a person is basically free to act to one in which a person is basically not free to act unless the government gives them permission. That philosophical change explains the many different areas of our lives in which we're seeing this happen in practical reality. So I think when I wrote this book, it was inspired by some conversations with some friends about the old rule of prior restraint. Lawyers talk about prior restraint in the realm of free speech. It used to be that back in the 17th century that you had to get a government permit before you could publish a book or something like that. And the British were very proud of the fact that they abolished that rule and said no, there's freedom of speech in Great Britain, which means you can't be required to get the government's permission before you speak. Now, you could still be punished after you spoke. And so there's a good argument that that's not really all that free, but it was still an improvement. Well, we got to talking about this and it occurred to me that you can see a lot of our lives in terms of prior restraint. For example, medicine. You can't possess many medicines in this country, probably most medicines, without a prescription. And what is a prescription? A prescription is a permit. It's a government permit that allows you to possess a medicine. It's exactly like the prior restraint rule in freedom of speech. It says you're not allowed to possess a medicine unless you get the government's permission or even something like architecture. The government in many local communities has a rule called architectural design review where you're an architect, you design a house, you go to the government for a permit and the officials look at it and they say, well, we don't really like this. We prefer if it looked like an English tutor house instead. It's perfectly safe and everything. We just think it's ugly. Well, that's a form of prior restraint on free speech. Architecture is a form of speech. It's a form of artistic expression like sculpture. And nobody can look at a Frank Lloyd Wright house without seeing that it's a sculpture, you know? And so for the government to come in and say, well, we don't like the way this looks, we're going to impose this rule on you and prohibit you from instructing because we don't like it aesthetically. That's prior restraint on free speech. So I see it as looking at all these different areas of our lives where it might look like different problems. But actually, it all boils down to one problem, which is saying that freedom is a privilege that the government gives to us. But with permits and most people think that a lot of the permitting systems that we have, so you brought up building permits, for example, and maybe even architectural aesthetic permitting. But with building permits, some people, it sounds like you might be saying, we shouldn't have any of these things where we have to ask the government permission, but in, say, San Francisco or a town that is beset with earthquakes and the possibility of fire, like the permitting system helps make sure that buildings can withstand earthquakes and that they're not going to burn down. And especially when a fire in a city was probably the biggest concern you could have for a lot of human history. And so permitting helps figure out, you know, we're not going to have certain types of factories or coal burns, like right next to a bunch of woodhouses. This seems like a good idea. And yes, you're asking permission from the government, but doesn't that really help us out generally and for the public good? It's a very good point. And I try to make clear in the book that I'm not saying that permits are never a good idea. It's just that they're much more rarely a good idea than people seem to think. So a permit is a good idea if what you're doing is very dangerous and very likely to cause a severe injury to other people. And there's nothing you can do about it afterwards if that does happen. So for time out of memory, doctors have been required to get some sort of permit before they could practice medicine, because if you kill a patient, the patient can't see you afterward. Maybe his family can, but the patient is dead and there's nothing you can do about that. So it makes sense to require a person to prove their qualifications before they are working on the operating table. But when it comes to things like pollution, for instance, there's another system that we have that normally operates in that case. And that's the nuisance system. That's the system that says you're allowed to do this thing, but you run the risk that if you hurt somebody else in what you're doing, they can sue you or they can get an injunction from a court to stop you from doing that thing. And that's typically preferable over a permit system for a number of reasons. The most important one of which, in my mind, is that the permit system discourages innovation, experimentation, and new ideas. A nuisance system allows you to try some new idea, just knowing that if you hurt somebody, you're going to be liable to that person. That is typically preferable because it allows us to try out new things. When you talk about a building permit system in San Francisco or something, what that is supposed to do ideally is, it's supposed to be like just a pre-approval nuisance kind of thing. It's supposed to say, well, we're going to make sure that you're not going to commit any nuisances with this property ahead of time. And a lot of the time, that's sensible. The problem is it's always easy to go the next step and say, well, we're not going to grant this permit because, you know, we just don't like the way your building looks or because, you know, some wise government planner 100 miles away has an idea of what this neighborhood should look like 10 years from now or those sorts of things. It's a very tempting invitation to centralized planning. And as we know from the work of Friedrich Hayek and others, central planning fails because bureaucrats don't know what the public really needs. They're influenced by lobbyists and rent seekers who want to control the system for their own benefit. And again, it hinders innovation and experimentation. So you talk to someone who thinks of themselves as a Marxist and you raise problems with communism, say. One of the bad arguments that they'll give in the defense of communism is, look, it's a good system in theory, but, you know, it's just the people who uphold, the people who instantiate it, the people who practice it, screw it up. But that doesn't mean we should throw the idea out. Homer Simpson himself says this in an episode of The Simpsons. In theory, communism works. Yes. In theory. So is this a similar thing where the problem with the permission society is not the permission society per se? Like if the people who are giving permission were all wise and all knowing and thought about things the way that they ought to and were maximizing the correct things, then the permission society would be fine. The problem is just that we flawed human beings are bad at giving permission in the correct ways. Well, I mean, that brings to mind the famous line from the Federalist that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. I don't think of it in terms of being flawed or perfect or anything. I just think the nature of human beings is such and the nature of information and knowledge is such that nobody can possibly know the amount, the information necessary to predict the future. So I have a chapter in the book where I talk about a case that I litigated in Kentucky challenging the licensing laws that regulate moving companies. And one of the rules in Kentucky was you were not allowed to start a moving company in the state unless you persuaded the government that it would be convenient for the public in the future to have an additional moving company. And in the depositions in the case, I asked the government's expert witness. I said, how exactly do you calculate what would be convenient for the public 10 years or 20 years from now? And his answer was, we have no objective criteria. Well, of course they don't because nobody can possibly know what would be convenient for the public 10 years from now or 20 years from now. So it's not a matter of that human beings are flawed. It's just that it's not possible to know the future and it's also not possible to prevent the lobbying and jockeying for favors from the government and things that springs up whenever the government is in the position of redistributing wealth. I'm reminded of, Isabel Patterson was once said, you know, to say that socialism is a great idea, but human beings just aren't good enough to practice it is like saying that sawed us as the perfect diet for human beings.  Earlier in the book, early on in the book, you discussed something called the propiska, which I had not heard of before, which is a Soviet entity that really gives an idea of how far the permission society could go. So what was the propiska? Propiska is a Russian term that means it's a permit system. It's a permit that you are required to have in order to possess a job, to live in an area, to obtain government housing and all these sorts of things.  And these existed under the czar. They were abolished briefly after the Soviet Revolution and reintroduced them again. And they, of course, became extremely valuable. There's an old saying among Russians, sometimes attributed to Dostoevsky, that a human being is composed of three things, a body, a soul, and a passport. And the reason is because without this paperwork, you know, you would be unable to obtain employment. And of course, it was a crime to be unemployed and you could then be shipped off to the Gulag. So I refer in the book to a very powerful passage in the novel Life and Fate, which is a novel written by a Soviet writer. It was named as a Vasily Grossman, which is one of these epic Russian novels kind of based on war and peace set during World War II. And there's a passage in it in which one of the characters is desperately trying to get the permit that will allow her to legally live in her apartment building. And she's illegally living in it while she's trying to get this permit. And finally at last, she goes through all of the hassle of bureaucratic paperwork and waiting in lines to get her application filed, and it is refused. And then a few days later, a man who kind of is interested in her, that she's not interested in, he has some political influence and he gets her the propuska.  And I think it's a beautiful and chilling representation of how when the government's in the position of giving you the permissions you need to live your life, that gives them a lot of leverage over you and that gives bureaucrats who have political influence a lot of leverage over you. Well, that is a great point that I think a lot of people miss about the kind of little despotisms that individual bureaucrats can have. And it's not just that you need to have, you know, as Aaron asked, is this just a question of like, can we have good enough people and have a good permitting system? But you need a lot of good people because at every little step of the way, the guy who decides if you're allowed to build your house or alter your land or get a job or whatever, can have an incredible amount of power over you and that can become very dehumanizing and corrupting in its own way. Oh, absolutely. In fact, it's even worse for that reason. It's even worse to the moral and good people than it is to the bad people who are willing to lie and cheat and steal to get their way. There's a passage in a pamphlet by the poet John Milton where he says, Good men alone love liberty. The rest desire not liberty but license, which has no greater scope than under tyrants. What he means by that is the bad flourish under bad rule because they live in that environment. They're able to gain the system and use political influence and pull to get what they want because the good people, they have these scruples. I doubt that there's a single person in the United States who has not at some point or other lied or hedged or done something like that to get a government permit of some sort. I can think of an example from my own parents. When I was a child, my parents wanted to get me into a better school in Pasadena, California. So they said on the paperwork that I was living at the address that was actually my grandparents' house in order to get me into that house. So that's sort of into that school. So that's the sort of thing that permit systems tend to encourage is misrepresentation or hedging a little bit to get what you want. And over time, that can corrupt the good person. And the book goes through, I think we can get some of the actual chapters here because you have chapters on speech and property and earning a living and things like this with the prior restraints of speech, which you mentioned previously. That was one of the big aims of the First Amendment of getting rid of prior restraints. But it seems that we still have some prior restraints on speech just in suddenly different forms. What kind of prior restraints exist today? We do. And actually, that was one of the most interesting things to me in writing the book was learning about some of these things that I had not known about previously. Many people may not know that when the motion picture was first invented, the Supreme Court declared that it was not protected by the First Amendment at all. Movies were simply not a form of speech, as the Supreme Court said in the 1910s. And that wasn't changed until the 1940s and 50s when the Supreme Court finally said, okay, yeah, movies are a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. Well, by that time, over those decades, what had happened was that states and local governments had imposed these permit rules that didn't allow you to display a movie at a theater unless you had a permit from a local censorship board. They were called censorship boards. Nobody was embarrassed about it at the time. And if movies are protected speech, then the rule against prior restraints should have meant that all of those permit rules were immediately unconstitutional. But of course, the court didn't do that. What it did was it said, yeah, movies are speech, but this rule against prior restraint, we're going to water it down and change it into a sort of wishy-washy test so that these permit requirements can stay on the books. Now, for the most part, they've gone away. But what that meant was that other kinds of prior restraint, particularly FCC licensing for radio and television stations, remained on the books, which meant that for several more decades, the government could control the speech that went on in television and radio stations. There's other kinds of prior restraints on speech too. One that is really shocking is the increasing restriction on speech when it comes to political campaigning. The rules about regulations and restrictions on donating to political campaigns are so strict and so complicated and confusing now that even lawyers often can't understand them. And in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court pointed out that you basically have to hire a lawyer and go to the FEC and ask them if it's legal for you to do such and such in your campaign. Well, that's basically a prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment. And yet every year we get more and more restrictions on who can support political candidates and how, which of course only benefits the incumbents because they've already got all the free press that they need, whereas true citizen politicians who are doing it because they believe in it, they need that money. They need to get money to buy television ads. And a lot of the time, they can't get those resources that they need because of these complicated restrictions. Let me push back on both of these examples because I can see counter arguments against both the FCC and campaign finance as being the kind of prior restraint that we would be concerned about or even really prior restraint in the first place. And so the first one, if you're arguing, like of course we need licenses to do broadcast television, broadcast radio, not because the government wants to control what we say, but simply because there's only so much spectrum. And if we don't give people licenses or in some way control this, there's going to be, it's going to be impossible to listen to the radio or watch TV because it's going to be so overrun with alternative stations jamming each other in a sense. So this isn't really prior restraint so much as like if you want to use this communal resource, we have to make sure there's enough of it for you to use without making it terrible for everyone else. And then on the campaign finance, the counter argument there is it's a non-starter because what you're talking about here is not actually speech. What you're talking about is donations and how people can spend their money and money's not speech. And we routinely will limit people's rights if the way that they exercise them is not itself a right. So like I can't, I have a right to enter and leave my own home, but I can't choose to do that in a way that involves me, say driving over your lawn to get there. So we simply say like, look, you can use your property rights, but you can't. That doesn't mean you can do it in these certain ways. And us saying I can't drive over Trevor's lawn to get to my house is not really violating your property right. Okay, so with regard to the FCC regulations, I think the permit requirement for broadcasters is a great example of how a permit system that might look at first as a benign way of resolving a problem with about limited resources can gradually turn into censorship. What happened was that these licensing requirements were imposed for the reason that you say, but then because about the same time, lawyers and judges and law professors were saying, you know, freedom of speech is really a privilege that the government gives to people and not a fundamental right. It exists in order to foster democracy and public debate. Because they said that the regulator said, oh, okay, well, then it's better to foster public debate by among other things requiring equal time. So the equal time rule said, if you allow a person to express an opinion in one area, you have to allow the opposition to come in and express their opinion in another area. And if a radio station owner didn't want to allow a person he disagreed with to take up his airtime to broadcast his views that the owner found objectionable, he had no right to say no. And that was a form of compelled speech. People were being forced to subsidize speech that they disagreed with as a result. With regard, so that shows how a permit system that was intended in a benign content neutral way, it wasn't intended at first as censorship, very quickly became a form of censorship and regulation of the content of speech for just that reason. With regard to the election thing and money being speech, I think the last part you said is a form of question begging because what you're saying is, yeah, you can exercise your right, but just not in a way that violates another person's rights. Of course, I agree with that. The very concept of rights, I think, inherently includes that idea. But if you exercise your right in a way that doesn't harm somebody else's right, I think that just brings us back to where we started with, which is the government shouldn't be in a position of stopping you. Now, the whole contributing to campaigns and is that speech thing is kind of outside the scope of my book. But I think it's a distorted debate because really it's a property right. Your right to donate money to support a campaign that you agree with really ought to fall into the category of private property rights. It's just that the courts have done such a terrible job of undermining private property security and restricting people's right to use their property that instead were forced to make this argument in the realm of free speech. And I do think it's a form of free speech. I mean, if you say money isn't speech, then that means that a person who pays to publish his opinions in a pamphlet and hand them out that he has no right to do that or that a person has no right to buy or sell a book or to publish a newspaper and print advertisements in the newspaper to subsidize the newspaper. And money is so inherently connected to speech that it essentially is speech. But again, I don't really get too much into that subject in the book. Discussing the FCC licensing, which the license system actually says that you're granted permission to broadcast in the public interest convenience and necessity, which is a very example of one of these great broad terms that they can use to force you to do things like the Fairness Doctrine, as you mentioned. But that brings up the question of this sort of right not to speak and do not have to carry the broadcast of someone you disagree with or with a great story you tell in the book to not have to say the Pledge of Allegiance. That's an interesting little sort of Supreme Court saga. Can you walk us through that? It is. And I think the reason that it's so important is because it's one of these areas where the difference between freedom as a right and freedom as a permission really makes a difference in the outcome. If you believe that freedom of speech exists as a privilege that the government gives to you in order to foster democratic decision-making and deliberation, which is the prevailing view in the law schools today is a championed among others by Cass Sunstein. If you believe that, then there's really no realm for the right not to speak. What right does a citizen have not to participate in the democratic system then? If freedom of speech exists in order to encourage democratic decision-making and public debate, shouldn't you basically force people to participate in public debate? And of course, every few years you hear people saying, well, we should force people to vote and things like that. And this comes down, on the other hand, if you believe that freedom of speech is a basic individual right and that it exists because a person owns himself and his opinions and has the right to express his own views as he wants to, then you cherish the individual's right not to be forced to express an opinion or participate in public debate. And this really made a difference in the Pledge of Allegiance cases, Gobitis and Barnett. In the Gobitis case in 1940, the Supreme Court said it was constitutional for the government to force children to pledge allegiance to the flag against their will. And of course, there are many people and particularly Jehovah's Witnesses who object to being forced to pledge allegiance to the flag. They regard it as a veneration of the flag that conflicts with their religious beliefs. And so Jehovah's Witness children were being thrown out of school and Jehovah's Witnesses were being even jailed and punished and persecuted and beaten up by their peers in the schools for refusing to pledge allegiance. And only three years later, the Supreme Court reversed that decision in the Barnett case and upheld the construct down, rather, the laws that forced children to pledge allegiance to the flag. And it's a stirring opinion by Justice Robert Jackson, one of the best of the Supreme Court justices who went on to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremberg. And he has a stirring passage in the opinion where he says that the whole point of the Bill of Rights was to remove our freedoms from the vicissitudes of political opinion and to say that no matter what we might vote on, our rights to freedom of speech and private property, he includes private property, cannot be subjected to majority vote. They're off the table as far as politics is concerned. I just as an aside here, I'm always struck like the pledge of allegiance. There's these things that government does that our theory of government, and it's embodied in our founding documents, is this social contract model that government is a contract that we got together and we imbued this thing with power in order to get certain things out of it and we entered into an agreement and it has an agreement with us. And I'm always struck by how many little instances there are of the government saying, no, this isn't actually a contract. Praise me, praise me. Yeah, like so pledging allegiance is not the kind of thing you do in a contractual agreement. Well, think of it this way. I mean, what if instead of pledging allegiance, the children were presented with a copy of the social contract and asked to sign it? That would be interesting. I wonder how long that social, this is like the Constitution, we just say you have to sign the Constitution every time. Well, that could be a little different. They first get Lysander Spooner and then they get to... Yeah, the Pledge of Allegiance case has actually opened up a fascinating philosophical can of worms really because on top of that point, which is a very good one, what about the Supreme Court's decision in the Smith case where it says, Smith versus Employment Division, where it says that a generally applicable law that conflicts with a person's religious beliefs that person can still be forced to abide by the law and it makes logical sense. Justice Scalia writes this opinion, he says, look, we can't have like a heckler's veto over the laws just because a person objects for religious reasons to what the law requires them to do. If the law says take off your hats, then that means everybody has to take off their hats including people who wear yarmulkes or turbans unless the government gives them a special exemption. Okay, that makes sense. But then what do you do about the Pledge of Allegiance cases? That would mean that Barnett would basically have to be overruled or the Yoder case where the Amish schoolchildren were exempted from higher levels of education because of their religious beliefs. Justice Scalia gives a pretty, I think, unsatisfying answer to that in the Smith opinion. He says, well, yeah, but those cases involved hybrid rights that were both religion and free speech and so those are different. I don't buy that argument. Fortunately, that's not a paradox that I had to resolve for purposes of the book. You also write about different sort of professional speech-licensing situations such as tour guides, psychologists, interior designers and talk about how there's a class of professionals who are having to get permission in order to speak about these issues. Yeah, there are businesses that consist entirely of speech and psychology is a really good example of this. Psychology is different from psychiatry. Psychiatry people are prescribing medicines in addition to other things but a psychologist is only engaging in talk, in speech, or communication of some sort. So doesn't psychology fall entirely under the First Amendment's protection for speech? In my opinion, there's just no justification for requiring a psychologist to have a license at all. There's no difference fundamentally between what a psychologist does and what I do when I go to talk to a friend about my personal problems or when I go to talk to a pastor about my personal problems and the states recognize this and so they fill their laws, the psychology-licensing laws with all sorts of exceptions that don't make any sense. Like, for instance, it's legal for a lawyer to practice psychology without a license in California. Wait, wait, wait. A licensed lawyer to practice psychology but a person, a psychologist, needs to get a different license if they're not a lawyer. Exactly right. Even though I can guarantee you none of us California lawyers have ever received any kind of psychological training in our law school and some of us could have used it probably. So I don't think that there's any justification for requiring a license for businesses that engage entirely in speech but the Supreme Court and it's very strange because the court has never actually ruled on this issue at all ever except in some very oblique ways in two opinions that are not binding anyway and disagree with each other. But anyway, the court has struggled a little bit with this because there are businesses where you're advising a client like you're taking a person under your wing and giving them one-on-one advice in a sort of private, confidential, professional relationship like a stockbroker who's advising you on your investments. So if the government can regulate stockbrokers can't it regulate the advice a stockbroker gives? That seems logical. And so what has happened is that courts have kind of put together this doctrine called professional speech where the government sometimes has even broader authority to regulate what a professional says than what a non-professional says. Now I say sometimes because there are actually there's a couple cases that go the opposite way and say that speech by professionals is more protected than other kinds of speech. This is a totally chaotic realm of law where there is almost no precedent to begin with and the precedent that does exist conflicts with itself so badly that it doesn't make any sense at all and I think it should just be abolished. I don't think that there is any basis for the government to regulate speech when or regulate a profession when that profession consists entirely of free speech. Well it seems that there might be scared about the implications of giving because lawyers do a lot of speaking and no one no reasonable person I put reasonable and square quotes there wants to abolish legal licensing and say that anyone can practice law because that's a form of speech and so they worry about striking out something like a tour guide licensing system because they want to be able to separate out the free speech element with the just straight professional elements to protect the people from Cicester lawyers for example. Yeah that's exactly what's going on and it's a fool's errand it cannot be done. Speech and rights cannot be divided up this way. Rights do not come in discrete little packets that can be separated out from each other in neat categories. Rights are connected in a very fundamental way because really when you get down to it rights are just a way of categorizing a person's liberty. Liberty means your freedom to do what you want as long as you harm no other person and so that includes the liberty to speak which we call the right to free speech and the liberty to buy and sell things which we call economic liberty. So if I buy and sell a book or a newspaper or tickets to hear a political speaker give a speech is that speech or is it economics? You know we can try and divide those things but they don't actually separate out and so that's the problem that you run into there. You're absolutely right. Now the best argument I've heard for lawyer licensing is that lawyers do things other than speech. For example we have the power to issue subpoenas to people that compel them to attend a deposition and bring papers with them and things like that and so the government can regulate that. Okay fine take that away and I don't think that there's any justification in free speech terms for requiring a lawyer to get a license before you can practice. I wanted to get back. And again we recognize that fact by the fact that we allow people to represent themselves in court. True true. I want to get back to some of the best stories you have in the book and you mentioned it briefly when you're discussing moving company I believe with the certificates of need which are really quite astounding if people haven't heard of what certificates of need are and how blatantly just protectionist they're protecting existing businesses from competition. Yes absolutely these certificates of need or certificates of public convenience and necessity laws as they're called they were invented in the late 19th century to regulate railroads but they today regulate a wide variety of industries everything from moving companies and taxi companies to hospitals. In many states it's illegal to open a hospital or even buy new medical equipment unless you get permission from the existing hospitals. That's the way these laws work and the idea if you can even call it an idea behind these laws is that there are some industries where competition is a bad thing and so therefore it's good for the government to restrict entry into those businesses. It's I think fundamentally absurd and even the economists who have suggested this theory have admitted that there are no actual markets where this is actually the case but nevertheless that's the law in most states and most major metropolitan areas. I believe about half of the states. What kind of things moving companies was a weird one but in hospitals what other things have certificates of need? Well it depends on how you define it so the term certificate of public convenience and necessity it applies to public utilities so gas pipelines and things like that they have to get certificates of public convenience and necessity. Certificates of need that's a term that's often used in the hospital context but it's the same thing it says that you have to you have to file an application and then existing companies are allowed to object to you getting a license and when that happens you have to go to the government and prove to them that there's a public need or public convenience or whatever that will be served by your new company. We at the Goldwater Institute actually are challenging the constitutionality of a certificate of need law in Georgia where the state has a provision in its constitution that prohibits monopolies and yet the state makes it illegal to compete against a hospital unless you get permission from the hospitals you're competing against. Other companies like liquor stores car dealerships have things that are very similar to certificates of need they call them by different names but they essentially say you're not allowed to open a car dealership within a certain radius of another car dealership and so they're just ways of dividing up the market to serve the politically powerful because the existing companies don't want to actually compete economically. We are recording this this is our first episode of Free Thoughts that we have recorded that Trevor and I have recorded since Trump was elected because we got quite far ahead in recording episodes so this will come out quite a bit after the election but we're all still kind of processing it and I am curious how this notion of the permission society and it being wrong from the perspective of the basic principles of liberalism that this country was founded on and that you argue for that you've dedicated your career to seeking to advance what where those principles of liberalism exist in the emerging narrative that seems to have come out of Trump's success and the way that we talk about it in the like so what I mean is maybe the argument that look the government exists to protect our rights we have these rights that it's you know everyone should be able to live how they want to as long as they don't actually hurt the people around them is just not the way that America wants to think about its society anymore that the government does not exist to do that but instead the government exists to protect an American way of life to make sure that Americans live the way that Americans are supposed to live that America is this this nation that has an identity and protecting that identity is what matters and so the government isn't violating your rights but is doing precisely what it exists to do when it say like let's say that it goes after the New York time for being critical of Trump and his supporters because the New York Times is undermining the American way of life or it restricts immigration in these really profound ways because we as an American community have a right to keep out people who think different from us or have a different religion that these restrictions on speech are just simply like look it's not that you have a freedom of speech that's just completely wrongheaded what you actually have is you get to participate in this thing called America and if you do it the right way great and if you don't we get to punish you or kick you out that maybe it's just that that this whole project of enlightenment liberalism is wrongheaded and the country has simply embraced a more robust nationalist communitarianism and that's what we ought to be advancing and that that's what the permission society does and we should just kind of bite the bullet and accept the will of the American people well I there certainly are people who believe that a lot of people who believe that both on the left and the right I hesitate to draw large conclusions about the direction of the nation as a whole from Trump's election keeping in mind that the vast majority of people voted either against Trump or held their nose very strongly when voting for him so I don't think that we should take you know be in too much despair about the future of the enlightenment project as a result of Trump's ascendancy you know there are certainly some people who mistakenly supported Trump because they thought they were defending the enlightenment legacy and so although they may have made a mistake tactically their strategic mindset was to defend the the principles we agree with that doesn't mean he's any less dangerous of course he he's tremendously dangerous to both now and the legacy that he leaves behind in the form of his supporters but no I don't think that we need to despair about that I think the reason for that problem is that you know if we take your average person who doesn't know a lot about political philosophy or political theory or things like that they've got much more important things to do with their lives living their lives would be number one so they hear the term leave us alone and they agree with it and they attract and that attracts them so you and I when we say leave us alone we mean leave individuals alone to maximize their own lives and in freedom but a lot of people hear that in terms of leave my neighborhood alone to impose its own restrictions as a community on how we live our lives and that kind of ambiguity infects the libertarian and conservative world very strongly you find a lot of libertarians and conservatives sort of have this reflexive appreciation for local control or they often use the term states rights and things like that even though what they really mean by that is their right to oppress their neighbors without interference from the federal government which you and I would strongly disagree with so that's the reason why I think when you boil it down why you really have this problem this attraction toward what you and I would call proto fascism from a realm that ought to in all sense and likelihood should go in the direction of freedom instead people get drawn to these movements that are more nationalistic and and communitarian because of this ambiguity about what leave us alone really means and I see it as a major importance for for people in our community to clear up that misunderstanding and say local is not always good and freedom for me also means freedom for the other guy I think Eric's question we're tying it into the Trump election is that this book is relevant in another way too because as you as you subtitle the book how the ruling class turns our freedoms into privileges the idea that the the system is rigged the sort of this part of the narrative that a lot of people feel like that you know there's a sort of elite cabal who are in different ways succeeding in that normal people can't succeed in a in a sort of typical American fashion anymore and there's people who get ahead because they get permission and that's and I think that that is true and something that your book touches on in a timely fashion we now have I think the the statistic is one in three jobs require a license and you know it might just seem like well you know maybe all these jobs need to have public safety element to them but if you're a poor person who needs to spend a thousand dollars to get a job and you can't get that job then you you need to get permission to get this job then you start to think wow the system is really rigged against me in a variety of ways oh yeah and I think that that that that's a that's becomes a bad sort of cancer on a society when when exactly when you have a thousand different ways you have to ask permission and the people who get permission are on average more connected and wealthier yeah I I I swear when I was watching these uh these Trump rallies in this past fall I kept thinking of Oscar Wilde's Sonnet to Liberty when he with when he which he ends with the line God knows I am with them in some things because the that attitude that resentment toward political elites is right it's that's well founded and it's and that the political elitism is fostered by a system that rewards political influence instead of actual work and skill and uh and unfortunately what the people chose to support is just more of that and and in fact twice as bad but they're they are right that our system is gradually dividing into the haves and the have nots or the can gets and cannot gets and that is a result of the government's increasing influence over our economic and personal lives I I all I can say is that that the solution to that is not more government it is more individual freedom yeah and there's and there's another factor too which I've been uh doing some some work on and some some media appearances dealing with how Trump will can what he can do in the presidency especially as a businessman and how he can get some of these businesses for example what he's saying he's going to make a good deal with these businesses to make them keep jobs in America or something well the it's already going on exactly but the power that he actually has that he can you know put the thumb screws on these companies a lot of it has to do with permitting and different types of things that you write in your but he can give them a a land use permit or he can he can say I'm going to free up that your employment or I'm going to stop a lawsuit from the EEOC or he can do a variety of things that come back to the massive amount of government and and permitting quote unquote permission kind of system that that he controls and and the reverse is also true isn't it remarkable that the permit for him to construct them on the property in Argentina was approved very swiftly after he was elected president when and when after there had been such a long delay beforehand you know it's a way of influencing him as well and you know the social consequences of this I think are something that the libertarian world has failed to emphasize as much as as it ought to we tend to focus so much on the on wealth on a creation on free markets on the political and economic consequences of policies but when we talk about the social consequences of creating a society in which those with influence succeed and those without influence fail regardless of their hard work and skills that typically breaks down along racial lines it typically breaks down along family lines it worsens the divide between the haves and have nots in our society and it fosters what you and I would regard as vices instead of virtues that is a willingness to invest one's time in political influence instead of hard work which is not something that our society used to venerate we we have always been a society ideally that that respects hard work and perseverance and inventiveness and we are gradually I fear going to become a country that resents those things and instead respects the gangster strong man mentality that we are already seeing in our culture I mean look at how many television shows already feature the sort of prurient fascination with these tough man figures who come in and impose their will by force instead of the democratic attitudes of cooperation and deliberation and persuasion and things like that I think our culture is primed for the strong man to take over if he really pushes it and that's the real fear I don't think Trump is that strong man but I think that he he benefits a lot from that that attitude on part of the people if you've enjoyed listening to free thoughts this past year I encourage you to check out Libertarianism.org's Facebook page where you can vote on your favorite episode of 2016 free thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Cheryl, the mortgage advisor advice I appreciate most was to make back weekly payments rather than monthly. It adds so much more to the principal every year. Hopefully, Donna Polaris, how are you doing? With these friends that we have, they're only taking down eight dollars per month off the principal. Eight FN dollars per month off the principal right now. Eight dollars from a $2,800 payment. And then they also have taxes. They also have repairs. They also have all the stuff expenses that comes with the house. And they bought if house prices drop, like I asked, I asked this friend, I said, listen, so are you on the water on the house for a night? She goes, no, no, no. She says, we're the same. If we sell right now, we don't lose anything, right? Again, if they can sell. I said, well, what if it keeps on going? And she goes, I don't know. I go, well, you could just walk away because during the 2008 financial scam, one thing that happened was, for example, people had bought homes, let's say for a million dollars, right? Back then, the average was lower, right? But let's make it a million, make it even, right? So they had bought homes for a million dollars. Let's say they could put, they had to put 10% down. A lot of people didn't. Let's say some people barely even put 5% down, right? But let's say a good person making a good investment decision has saved up so many put 10% down, right? So a million dollar house they bought, they put $100,000 down, right? So they got a they got a loan mortgage for $900,000, right? Price of the house is a million. If a price of the house goes up to 1.5 or 1.1 million, then hey, great, they made 100,000 less all the fees, so they break even still, right? If you buy home for a million, sell it for a million, you're losing money, by the way, right? Because there's transaction fees and stuff like this, right? So house, they bought a house for a million, put $100,000 down, they got a $900,000 mortgage. House has plummeted some places by more than 50%. So now the house that they bought is worth $500,000. That means, that means they lost half a million dollars, right? They still have $100,000 equity in the house, but dropped $500,000 So what happened 2008 after 2008? Smart people didn't pay mortgage for a while, right? They banked the money, didn't put it in the bank where they owed the mortgage, right? They took the money and put it somewhere safe, right? So they didn't pay for a while, right? And banks were like, it takes a while to evict people, right? So they built up a nice little nest egg and then they got evicted, right? So they had to leave the house.  The house is now worth half a million dollars. And then the bank has to get rid of this house. The banks can't hold on to all this property that is worth so much because it takes maintenance, it takes this, it takes this. It's not really an asset if the value, if you're not selling it, and if the value keeps on going on, and it's more of a liability, like a car is not an asset according to banks, it's a liability because it has payments you have to make, expenses, gas, maintenance and all this shit, right? So the banks are looking to sell this property. So all these people that walked away from the house, right? They had nest egg on the side under a different name, family name and stuff, they come back and buy the house for half a million dollars. So they had $900,000 mortgage on a house they walked away from. The house is now worth half a million dollars. So they rebuy the same house or something equivalent to it, so they just saved themselves half a million dollars or $400,000, right? I expect that to happen. However, one thing that occurred since that time, they made it harder for people, so first of all, walk away from property, sometimes that debt goes with you, like in Spain, you buy a house, you get into mortgage, that debt goes with you forever. A lot of people in Spain after 2000, they scam, they killed themselves because they were carrying debt forever now, they're screwed, right? So I think they changed the laws in Canada and the United States where it's not as easy to walk away from property, okay? But we'll see how that plays out. This is all just a scam anyway, so we'll see how far they take the scam, right?


HAHAHAHAHAHA This episode doesn't matter in fact life doesn't matter because I bought something That's more important than anything going on in this world right now Motherfucking chanterro because he won't be seen in the season.  Why does he need this big box? Come on, come on, bro. You can't breathe. Come on. Look at that Beautiful bird. How can you not include him in season three? I don't even want to finish the season I might drop it like I dropped most of the shows I watch on my channel. God, bro It has like that new car smell, but it's like a new bird smell instead. Anyways, let's get to the video Do you see the name of this episode a sword from over 300 years ago reminds me of that attack on Titan episode From from my year a hundred years ago in the future whatever it's called man We're gonna get a flashback. This is a flashback episode. We're gonna see the sword get the basement key I can't wait.  I can't believe it. Don't take that sword Don't take that sword man Actually, wait wait take that sword take it God knows with what powers you're gonna gain from that Maybe it'll stop him from getting hurt every episode. Oh god It's gonna be like Thor's hammer Only time to roll can pull it out.  This sword's been through Vinland saga the rumbling everything.   How long were we gone for? How do you grow? Listen man, listen, I don't care what anybody says. I will state It's every single episode reaction for this season. This is the best opening so far What about Lisa? I love Lisa. Okay. I love her. I love her like she's my own, okay? But no no, this is it.  What's happening this episode? What's the nakedness this season man?   Oh, no, that's like an anime thing. Okay I was about to say man. Was there a jewelry shop on Whale Island?  Oh my god I've never seen a main character be thrown around more than Tanjiro. I swear to God What are you doing? I've seen Tanjiro use more faces this episode than the whole series No, no, we don't need an explanation Why miss the hockey sack a ghost Tanjiro you give me one more face. I swear to God. I'm gonna bully you Quick everyone make them go limp again.   All right, that's enough for an episode Or two Oh My god, we get to see them two together.    Look at him. He looks like he ate himself Rice crackers. It's called only Geary motherfucker.   What's next tenkins arm? Rengoku's body and his backpack Look, look at our those are toys.  He's braiding her hair. Find a man that braids your hair.   You saw his sausage before you ate a sausage with him I'm surprised you can do it, man.  Who is this? Oh, what's about to happen to him?  He's not falling down the steps.  It's like they just recorded a vase on the ground Here we go. They you foldable vase. They didn't know normal vase All right, this is gonna be disgusting season This is the demon slayer I know Here we go That's the same shot from the opening Oh my god, he's already there man.  It's over.  Oh my god. We're ready in the middle, man. This show goes by so fast Here we go. Keep it nighttime, man.  I can't wait. I haven't been failing.  Is he about to join them? Oh, he's not going to tandoor Oh god, oh no, the main one of the main characters in a dark room like this. Here we go. Now we're about to see him in action Damn, look at the movement on him Brother brother brother What am I? Yo Why can't we see a little like a flashback cloud of his brother? Yo, I saw something I wanted to say and finally a character that we all could relate with and I agree This guy Must have got tag team beaten by his parents like not just beaten by his dad But his mom too and they took turns should be him in the face That's the kind of attitude he has right now, man. He was whipped with a belt Why the mom held him held his arms together in the back, bro. This is some tag team Damage right here. Look look at those eyes.    What's his name to kimo? Oh, that's go eyes. Is this dude high? The high hasura She's super odd You ain't the one to call people odd, bro. Actually, he's the most normal person I've seen in the show Maybe an anime Oh, we've met did you see your friend try to stab her in his chest? What The the fuckles is going on Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man.  What's this gonna be? Oh Right, he crawled and cried He didn't notice him until he saw him Yeah, baby Miss breathing.   We're done. We're done in the hot springs and titties But Bro, I could have voiced this guy. Why didn't you foldable contact me for the english dub version?   That guy has a horn on his head like nesco Yeah Too much like nesco too much like remember your age You'll go in the full demon form stop it.  He just killed that upper right demon. It's over.  Yeah Wait, is this the twins that people are talking about because that's all a picture of this guy I didn't know it was the same guy.   She's full demon.       Oh my god.   Oh my god.  I don't know why Oh It's a leaf head. I've never been hit with an attack that felt like that. I'm so glad it's not It's not that guy anymore and he's split into these demons Slash is only going to be split into many more demons.  Don't worry about me help. Ganya, bro. That's typical tondra.  She's worried with the horn on her head.  Best episode of the season so far, man. This is demon's joy joy All right, so they each have like a different personality trait you have the mad one the sad one the mad that's the good the happy one Then you're gonna have the big titty one watch watch that there's gonna be a big titty one I just know it for sure That's a quirk itself big titties There goes another episode with a cast on you motherfucker. I swear to god if I see any tape on him in the next episode I'm I'm switching main characters. I think we need a tanjiro numb counter. Like how many times have he been has he been numb? Yeah Here we go.  Do something. Where's big titty girl? All right, that's CG took me off for a second man.  Saving him is a low price already. Oh my god.  It's like a demented Nemo. Okay, wait, it's not terrible. It's It's so weird to describe it, man.  Don't let tanjiro come and save you do something yourself I love how he's fighting a fish kaiju right now. First we're fighting a doll. Now we're fighting a fish And a vase a fish with a vase on its back He's already having flashbacks and the main character look his speech works on him too It's the main character supporting speech. I saw that on twitter too. They were like it doesn't work on the mishash Or not man. He's already thinking about it. It works on everybody It's gonna work on muzon too. Look look look. It stopped them in the tracks Bro hear me out though. This fish is low key. Uh, yeah, I'm about to make some sushi with this motherfucker Yeah, that's that tanjiro inspiration right there. Uh-huh Yeah, man This is from the opening too. Oh my god, we gotta wait a week We gotta wait a week to see this motherfucker in action. No My god, they're like we've shown you enough of her I'm not saying the first two episodes were bad The first episode was like an introduction to the arc the second episode was a little meh I mean seeing yo chiro whatever his name is with with the sword and everything that was cool But I thought this episode was going to be more of like a backstory about the sword like why what is it a little maybe Um view into the past or something, but it was so different We we were introduced to these demons and this is demon slayer man Not saying the other two weren't the other two episodes But this was why I love demon slayer not just because of the action But let's face it take an action at a demon slayer It wouldn't be as amazing the story is great.  And this is what I love. This is what I love about it, bro. Honestly, and I love this new That guy with with spring off into six people, but I'm telling you there's going to be a big titty one out of them I'm just waiting miss hashiro have been different personalities. We have no, um, what's her name, bro? Mitsuri no Mitsuri titties in this episode.  Oh my god. Anyways guys, what you think of the episode? Let me know down below and I will see you all in the next video Bye


My fellow Americans, during the next 10 days at the White House, matters of central importance to our country's role in the world and to the peace and prosperity of all nations will be dealt with. This week I will meet President Mubarak of Egypt next week with King Hussein of Jordan. In both meetings, one item will dominate the agenda, peace between Israel and her neighbors. King Hussein has made clear his wish for a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict which has plagued the Middle East and the world for so long. He foresees a peace negotiated directly between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and is committed to begin those negotiations, if possible, by the end of the year. We're doing all we can to support the efforts to make this vision a reality. Egypt, President Mubarak's nation, has already proven that peace between the Israelis and Arabs is possible and now faces other problems, a troubled economy at home and danger on some of its borders. We're doing all we can to help Egypt meet these challenges because we know that a secure and prosperous Egypt is the cornerstone of peace and stability in that region. King Hussein, President Mubarak, and I will also discuss the war between Iran and Iraq. America and other nations have worked for years now to bring this war to an end, so far to no avail. Yet, if we cannot end the fighting, we and close friends like Egypt and Jordan can keep it from spreading. In particular, we're determined to preserve the free shipment of oil through the Persian Gulf. Next Friday, I'll meet the new Soviet foreign minister, Edward Shevarnatsi. He and I will discuss human rights, regional conflicts such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, bilateral issues such as trade between our two countries, and security matters, including our efforts to achieve genuine, verifiable reductions in nuclear arms. As Mr. Shevarnatsi and I meet, it will be six months since Mr. Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader, and this will give our meeting special significance. As you know, the Soviet Union frequently has been bent upon expansion. Indeed, since the 1970s, the Soviet Union has been engaged in a military buildup which far exceeds any rational definition of its defensive needs. These policies have inflicted bitter costs upon the Soviet peoples. Every week, Russian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan while their standard of living has suffered accordingly. Mr. Gorbachev can change this. He can set in train a policy of arms reductions and lasting peace. By shifting resources from armaments to people, he can enable his nation to enjoy far more economic growth. Given the nature of the Soviet system and its ideology, we must not raise false hopes. But during my meeting with Mr. Shevarnatsi, I will express the goodwill of the United States and search for signs of a Soviet willingness to engage in genuine give and take. Mr. Shevarnatsi and I will both have in mind the approaching meeting between myself and Mr. Gorbachev. Again, with regard to this meeting, we must not raise false hopes. The differences between communism and democracy are profound. There will inevitably be competition between us. But it's the central responsibility of the leaders of the United States and the USSR to ensure that this competition is peaceful. In these meetings, we will make clear to the Soviet leaders that we are determined to protect Western interests, but willing at the same time to do our part to improve American-Soviet relations. If there's comparable seriousness and flexibility in the Soviet part, cooperation between our two great nations will be enhanced. Already, many in our administration are toiling on preparations. On Friday, I will tell Mr. Shevarnatsi how genuinely we wish this meeting to bear fruit. Turning from foreign affairs to international trade, in recent weeks there has been sentiment growing in the Congress for some form of protectionism, legislation which would make it difficult or impossible for us to exchange whole categories of goods with our trading partners. On Monday, I'll address our absolute commitment to trade that is both free and fair. For now, let me simply state that the answer to our trade problems isn't anti-trade legislation. It's more economic growth worldwide. My friends, the dangers to world peace and prosperity are ever-present. But I believe that with your support, during the next 10 days, we'll be able to promote peace and advance the cause of free and fair international trade. In closing, I want to talk about the tragedy of the Mexican earthquake, which has brought a great outpouring of sympathy and offers of assistance from the American people. We greatly admire the bravery and resolve of the Mexican people to dedicate all their resources to overcome this calamitous event. A tragedy like this reminds us that the desire to be a good neighbor is basic to the American character and to our foreign policy. We have already provided some technical assistance, as requested by the Mexican government, and stand ready to help in every way, in the days and months ahead. To aid in that effort, Nancy will go to Mexico within the next few days to express the support of the American people for our courageous friends in Mexico and to explore how we can lend a hand in this ordeal. Until next week, thanks for listening. God bless you.


So if you have casting networks in the US, you've probably have received a bunch of emails and seen a bunch of things about a new casting networks coming soon, coming in May, sometime in May. I don't know when exactly, but I noticed when I logged on to my SF casting and went to account and then link accounts, I was like, what? I didn't know this existed. And I did try to link my LA casting and SF casting accounts. It's not working yet, which makes sense because they haven't rolled it out, but there is some information here. And it does say if you're subscribed to unlimited premium on your talent accounts, all your links accounts will have access to casting billboard. So I'm not sure what that means. I think it just means you'll actually be able to pay one for both of them. But I went to Australia casting because Australia in the UK, I know, has the new version. I don't know if that's going to be the same that they're going to give us in the US, but a lot of companies do this where they do a pilot version, you know, in certain places and then eventually roll it out so that they can work out the kinks and change everything. So that's why I made an account through Australia casting. As you saw, you're able to put more than one location, which is really cool. So I just did the bare minimum. Their accounts are just under $8 a month, which is cool for them in the US. It's a little more expensive, but of course I did the free version to see what it's like. And this is the Australia casting profile, which looks so much nicer than the current one. This is one of the things that I, a few years ago when I did a video on casting networks, I said that their, you know, their website wasn't so great and I wasn't sure why they didn't just update it. I tried putting LA casting on here, but it wasn't working. So let's compare the two. Let's go on to SF casting. And then after that, let's go on to Australia casting so you guys can see the difference what we might be getting because it looks really good. Again, I have no idea if this is exactly what we're going to get in the US, but I know that we're going to get an upgrade. So I'm hoping it's something like this. Okay, so first this is SF casting SF and LA casting pretty much look the same. You know, a little bit old school, like everything is there. Everything is fine. The only thing I don't love currently is that you can't message directly. They have to email you first and then you can go back and forth through email, but you can't talk in the app, in the website, in the casting website. So hopefully that's something that we can do in the future with the new version. This is what it looks like to look at the casting calls, to look at your alerts. Of course, the link accounts is right there. And then this is what your profile looks like, which is mostly, you know, personal information and then your resume, which again, it just looks a little old school. It looks like it could use a little bit of a revamping. And then now let's go log on to the Australia casting, which I did create an account earlier for. And the homepage pretty much looks the same, just a different actor. This is what it looks like when you are looking at casting calls to submit to. This is a casting billboard and it has a filter on the top, which the other one also has a filter, but it's not nearly as detailed as this one. This one just looks cleaner. I mean, it just looks so much nicer. And hopefully it is able to filter things more accurately for whatever you are looking for. The profile looks a lot cleaner. I did the bare minimum so you can hardly even see, you know, things on my profile. But you get the idea that this one is quite a bit cleaner. It looks nicer. It looks more professional. I just really like how this one looks better. And hopefully this one will work better as well. Because currently I always have to contact, you know, casting networks, which they are really helpful when I do contact them, but usually I have to contact them for help to upload photos, videos, whatever. But here, working locations on the Australia one, you can put up to three places. I tried putting LA, it didn't work, but I did put primary location and then two additional locations. And that's what it allowed me to do for the Australia casting one. I don't know how many locations we'll be able to do in the US. And then here's the media bank. This is what I was talking about. So hopefully this will be a lot easier to upload and reorganize because currently in the casting networks, it's really hard to reorganize the headshots that you have, at least it is for me. I recently had to contact tech support in order for them to help me out with this, which they were able to fix pretty quickly. But I rather me be able to do it because I don't want to bother them every time I want to update my headshot or reorganize my headshots. And then the media bin, I did try to upload my reel. It was taking a while and I don't know if it's because they still have a cap on it. Honestly, the best way is to be able to put a link like Backstage does. I don't use Backstage anymore, but it would be nice to be able to do that because it's instant. Here are the alerts. I don't have any because, of course, I haven't submitted anything through Australia casting. And then if I did have anything, they would be here and hopefully we'll be able to chat back and forth through here. Then your submissions, which is really important. So you can see what things you have submitted to when you get a callback or something, you know what they're talking about.  And I thought it would be cool to show you what a casting network account looks like in case you don't have one. And then also what the new one might look like for us in the US. Managed talent. This one, I didn't really know what it was. I'm wondering if this is where you're going to add all of your profiles or is that only for managers? Not sure. But eventually you will have to link your account and you'll need to log in with your email and password versus what we do now, which is the username and password. I'm excited to see what the billing is like with this new casting networks, because if you're going to have both LA casting and SF casting in one place, hopefully they are reducing the price versus, you know, paying two full accounts because I can get pretty pricey. I think the last time I upgraded my LA casting premium account, it was around $250. So, you know, having LA casting SF casting, that's a little over $500. So hopefully the billing is a little bit more affordable because that's a lot of money, especially taking into consideration if you have casting frontier and Actors Access, Casted Talent, all of these different websites. It'd be nice to, you know, get a little bit of a break there. But we will see when this finally comes out through casting networks and I will definitely make an updated video once I have all of that information. I just thought it would be cool to look at the two casting networks and get a little bit of a glimpse of what might be coming for us in the US. But thank you so much for watching and at the end of every video I feature another channel. This is today's feature. If you would like to be featured on my next video, make sure you're subscribed, like this video and leave me a comment.