Dallas Buyers Club

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0:00:03.5 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres. In the wake of a worldwide pandemic, today, we take a look back at another. Dallas Buyers Club, the 2013 historical drama, featuring Oscar-​winning performances by Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey, is a raw and intimate portrayal of mortality in the face of bureaucracy and greed. But how did a group of normal people operating out of an office in a motel room stand up to the FDA and save lives? That’s what we’re getting into today. Joining me today are Brooklyn-​based activist and writer for the Center for a Stateless Society, Kelly Wright.

0:00:43.2 Kelly Wright: Hello.

0:00:44.0 Landry Ayres: And Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Jeff Singer.

0:00:47.3 Jeff Singer: Hello.

0:00:48.8 Landry Ayres: This movie is a really great movie. I think we can all agree. It is very well-​made. It is telling a compelling story with really, really great performances, and I think it has a pretty universal message that anyone can appreciate and latch onto. But I think a lot of people in libertarian circles really, really found this movie compelling for very specific reasons. This is kind of a leading question, I will say; is this a libertarian movie and why or why not?

0:01:26.7 Jeff Singer: I certainly think it is. When I saw the movie when it just came out, it just resonated with me so much. I was emotionally gripped by it. And I’m also a medical doctor, so I was questioning some of the science put forth in the movie ’cause I fear that AZT is still used, is used today as part of a combination treatment for HIV, and I didn’t think it was being conveyed clearly to the viewer that AZT actually isn’t the bad guy, but I sort of discarded that because what was more important to me was the message that was resonating with me, which is that people have the right to self-​medicate and to seek ways to save their lives. And here, you have government bureaucrats basically denying them that right. And that’s basically the big takeaway that I got from it.

0:02:25.4 Kelly Wright: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s definitely got libertarian themes throughout. I would say that initially, it reminded me of Ghostbusters, where the antagonist is the EPA.

[laughter]

0:02:38.1 Landry Ayres: Yes, exactly.

0:02:38.5 Kelly Wright: And in this case, it’s the FDA, and I get a kick out of any kind of movie where the antagonist in the film is a government bureaucrat, and so that’s… It really is kind of similar, again, to Ghostbusters. It feels kind of just a story of a small business trying to comply with regulations to the best that they can.

0:03:00.0 Jeff Singer: Yeah. Except this was more life and death, and [chuckle] it was more real. We knew that it’s based on a true story, and we knew these people were fighting for their lives, for their survival, whereas Ghostbusters, we knew going into it, that it was a fantasy, but yeah, I agree with you. There was a lot of…

0:03:17.9 Landry Ayres: Wait, what?

0:03:18.6 Jeff Singer: There was this… Yeah, really…

[laughter]

0:03:20.7 Landry Ayres: What?

0:03:22.2 Jeff Singer: Yeah. But I agree with you, it was a similar… I enjoyed those aspects of Ghostbusters as well.

0:03:27.8 Landry Ayres: I bring it up because I think it’s kind of tough to say because I wouldn’t call the movie libertarian in its intent, but it has values that resonate with those people, and I think it is a great example of the values that libertarians hold, helping to actually save lives and make the world better in a very, very tough and uncertain time in our world, that that really, really happened and that more people should know about. But it’s interesting because I think, as Jeff was saying, this is based on the story of very real people. Ron Woodroof was a real person. Several of the other characters, I think Jennifer Garner’s character and Jared Leto’s character, Rayon, they’re composite characters, but a lot of the people are based on actual people that lived during this crisis. The Dallas Buyers Club did actually happen.

0:04:33.1 Landry Ayres: It was very similar to things that were going on in New York and several other places across the country, but from what you can read about them, and especially in hindsight, a lot of people will tell you that these groups were not motivated by notions of a principle or an abstract notion of individual liberty, of the right of a person with their sort of bodily autonomy and their personal sense of self-​control that they are able to do to their body what they want and how to treat this life or death, at the time, condition in the way that they would like. It was much more about that mortality and dealing with the symptoms. Ron Woodroof even says at one point, “Once you’ve got the virus, you’re married to it. I’m more concerned about my symptoms and survival.” And Ron specifically, as a character, the way he’s portrayed in the film, is much more motivated or at least inspired by profit, and he can make money off of this.

0:05:44.0 Landry Ayres: Obviously, he’s a person who is in need of financial sort of gains and like we all are as people, but he has motives to pursue that. But a lot of people that worked in similar circles and wanted to move the drug approval process forward in a much faster, rapid manner, like the people that seized control of the FDA, act up a lot of these very, very prominent activists that did amazing work, were not motivated by these notions of individual liberty. How do you square that? And do you think it is disingenuous to make this film about individual liberty? Or do you think that it is even more important to pull out that theme when looking at this story rather than just making it about life and death?

0:06:41.5 Jeff Singer: I think a lot of… It’s in the eye of the beholder. Okay. So as a libertarian viewing the movie, I immediately picked up on the libertarian themes, and I’m immediately connecting the dots in my head, talking about, here, these people are being denied their right to self-​medicate by these government bureaucrats. I was hearing some things that didn’t fit with my libertarian sensibilities, like negative comments about making profit, these guys in Rolex watches as if success is a bad thing. And those things have… I just kind of went… I denied them. Okay. I shut them out of my mind because they came secondary to what was really resonating with me.

0:07:19.3 Jeff Singer: But I think at the important point that you’re alluding to, Landry, is that everybody’s viewing things through their own prism. Okay. So as a libertarian, I’m immediately picking up on all these things. But if I was a… If I wasn’t a libertarian, I hadn’t read a lot of the philosophy and economics that I’ve read over my life, I might not have even had a clue about that stuff. I might have just seen it strictly as a story of survival against these self-​callous bureaucrats who are captured by these profit-​driven pharmaceutical companies. So I could see how you could take it the other way. It all depends on where you’re coming from. So maybe that’s why it was such a successful movie, ’cause people who don’t have my worldview were also very moved by it.

0:08:09.7 Kelly Wright: Yeah. I think that… I think it’s a good point to say that it’s not implicitly or explicitly libertarian, in that there’s definitely gonna be a subjective interpretation from everyone’s vantage point. I would say from my libertarian perspective, the kind of the vilifying of the profit-​seeking could almost be reconciled. If you think of regulatory capture, like you just said, the FDA creating barriers to entry for certain pharmaceuticals or certain treatments benefited the incumbent industries. And that’s something that libertarians are pretty consistent in criticising, is that symbiotic relationship between the state and these regulatory agencies and the incumbent privileges that they confer. And then following along that, the Dallas Buyers Club is kind of like the free market responding to that. Like market pressures and market incentives emerging still, even in this kind of captured environment, regulatory captured environment.

0:09:08.2 Kelly Wright: And also this is tangentially related. If you ban or if you don’t allow certain things to come to market, you’re not gonna prevent people from taking those substances. You’re just gonna push them underground. You’re gonna push them into an area where there isn’t medical surveillance. I think that’s even a word that they used in the movie. It was like these people are getting treatment without medical surveillance, and that’s a product of the FDA’s dragging its feet. And so that was my libertarian perspective, was like, “Wow, look at how the government is creating this immense profit potential for the producer of AZT but keeping these people who need life-​saving medication, just kind of letting them go, like you can’t really do anything for them.”

0:09:49.9 Jeff Singer: Yeah. And also, that connects the dots, of course, the prohibition in general, right? When anything is prohibited, whether it’s an actual antiviral medication or a recreational drug, it makes people have to resort to other ways of getting it where there aren’t the opportunities to have medical input and the kind of things that you need. So, but what I’m saying is we picked up on that, Kelly, you and me and Landry, but I could understand how a person sitting next to me who hasn’t been exposed to any of those kind of concepts or ideas, they would have a totally… They’d also love the movie, but have a totally different take on it.

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0:10:36.6 Landry Ayres: Jeff, you brought up early on the inaccuracies with the treatment of AZT as a treatment for HIV and AIDS. And I was curious about that because the film itself sort of wants to, and touts the story, at least from Ron Woodruff’s perspective, about, it’s almost a do your own research kind of way of looking at things of the people who are behind the scenes are trying to pull the wool over your eyes and hide the true science from you. When in reality, it was such an early time in the epidemic that there was science out there, but there was still so, so much to learn and technology had not quite caught up to the place that it needed to be. So to use those kinds of methods of learning and gaining knowledge are probably not as helpful back then as it would be today. But… So AZT, as we talked about, was toxic in the high doses that it was administered in when it first was released and in trials, and it was toxic to the people that took it, but that was mostly because they were scared that too low of a dose would be ineffective.

0:11:58.0 Landry Ayres: But then later on, they learned very… At a certain point, that AZT in a smaller dose and in combination with other antiretrovirals in this sort of three-​drug cocktail, was actually one of the best treatments for many, many years for HIV and led to the development of things like pre-​exposure prophylaxis and all these different things that were revolutionary and helped shift HIV from a death sentence diagnosis to a chronic condition and bringing about this sort of rhetoric, rhetorical shift to discussions of undetectability and things like that. Is there some responsibility that you think media has in representing science accurately? Because you could easily come away from this film and think AZT is toxic and it’s terrible, when up until a few years ago, it was used by a… Specifically, a lot of pregnant women in order to prevent passing HIV along to a child or something like that. So is there a responsibility there? And what does the misinterpretation of this data do for the film for you?

0:13:18.8 Jeff Singer: Yeah, actually, obviously they have a right to publish it and produce any kind of film they want to.

0:13:26.1 Landry Ayres: Right.

0:13:26.4 Jeff Singer: But I agree that if they want to be responsible, that was very scientifically inaccurate and it you could easily come away with the idea that AZT was this useless, toxic drug that they were trying on AIDS patients and not allowing them to use things that work. But in fact, as you know, AZT has been used through recent times in combination treatment for a treatment of HIV. And like you said, originally, they were having problems with it because they didn’t know what dose it was… They were going in uncharted waters. They didn’t know what was a safe dose, so most of the toxicity was dose-​related. And also what they discovered over time was that the reason they were getting relapses after a while was because the virus was developing sort of a resistance to the AZT. By the way, the… I know what this is, this is kind of related to today.

0:14:26.9 Jeff Singer: There are a lot of scientists who are concerned that overuse of the antivirals that have been recently developed for COVID, molnupiravir and Paxlovid, that if you just indiscriminately prescribe them like crazy, eventually you’re gonna develop mutations in the virus such that the antivirals don’t work. So, a lot of clinicians are saying, “I think I’m just gonna prescribe it only to people who I really have no doubt they’re very vulnerable. They need it. But just to shorten a person’s illness by one day, who’s gonna do fine either way, I don’t think I want to make that drug so ubiquitous to invite a mutation.” So that’s the kind of conversation now going on among clinicians. But… So it was the same kind of phenomenon that happened with the AZT. And that’s why they found it works better in combination, so that, as you know, this time, the virus has to mutate to be able to escape three different antiviral drugs instead of just one, so it makes it more, more difficult. But yeah, at the end of the movie, there’s this very brief mention that AZT is still an effective drug used today in lower doses.

0:15:40.7 Jeff Singer: There’s a very interesting backstory to this, Landry, that you actually alerted me to, and it’s a great article written by Peter Staley in… It’s actually taken out of his memoirs called Never Silent, came out in Vanity Fair in September, 2021, where apparently he was largely responsible from saving the movie from basically becoming a junk science propaganda film. Originally, they weren’t even gonna have that disclaimer at the end about AZT, and they were gonna… And one of the script writers actually totally bought into the AIDS denialist movement, that there were a lot of people who thought AIDS was not due to a virus, but it was due to using certain drugs that were popular in the gay community at the time and that it was strictly related to behaviours in the gay community. In fact, in the early 2000s, the president of South Africa, Mbeki, for about five years, banned antivirals against for HIV in the country. And I don’t know how many people died needlessly because of that, because he didn’t buy into the the viral ideology.

0:16:55.2 Landry Ayres: I think this is a great way to pivot to sort of larger discussions that the film brings up about the response to HIV and AIDS that came about, specifically blaming certain populations for the emergence of the virus. Obviously, it was originally known as GRID, gay-​related immune deficiency, and eventually the Centers for Disease Control labeled these four different groups as the sort of most at-​risk: Homosexuals, heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, and Haitians. And those rhetorical moves not only created such intense stigma, but created a desire for people to want to be able to see the people that were living with HIV so that they could distance themselves from it and create this kind of second class, such that somebody like William F Buckley Jr even floats the idea casually of tattooing people to mark their status, to prevent people from infecting others. And he later recants and says he’s just floating it, and then 20 years later brings it up and says that it’s not such a bad idea and he only retracted it because it was sort of out of fashion at the time. And I’m curious about what you think the libertarian response to something like that is. What do we as libertarians who want to give people the ability to live their lives as they see fit so much as… So much that it doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s right. How do we responsibly and carefully react to rhetoric like that?

0:19:00.0 Jeff Singer: Well, I think the, the best way to approach it is to push back with the science that I think that that’s the best way. It’s interesting that the scriptwriters, they themselves were influenced by, obviously, by homophobia because Ron Woodruff, according to Peter Staley and his memoirs, was gay, but in the movie he’s portrayed as a heterosexual who was very promiscuous.

0:19:31.5 Jeff Singer: And he was being… Now, the part that’s realistic was that he was ostracized by all of his heterosexual friends when they discovered he had AIDS. And there’s a combination of, “Don’t come near me because I’m afraid I’m gonna catch what you have.” And there’s also a nice way to also segregate you because of you’re gay. It almost gives a homophobic individual a good excuse. It’s not like I’m homophobic, I just don’t wanna catch your disease, So stay away from me. So you don’t have… So you can disguise your homophobia that way by just saying you’re afraid that you’ll catch the person’s illness. But I think the best way to push back is to present the facts. If you talk just in terms of philosophical principles, my experience over my long lifetime has been that when I try to speak to people on basis of philosophical principles, it doesn’t resonate as well as when I just give them real life examples. Unfortunately, most people don’t think in terms of principles, so you gotta just give ‘em, I think, facts.

0:20:41.2 Kelly Wright: I do think that it’s something that we obviously need to keep in mind. I think we saw it again when COVID happened, where it was used as an opportunity to be anti-​Asian, and anti-​Asian hate crimes increased after COVID-19 came out. The President called it kung flu and a bunch of really vicious rhetoric like that. And I think we kind of need to just acknowledge that humans are really good at creating an us versus them dichotomy to kind of maybe put up in-​group status. And you need an out-​group to vilify. And I think HIV and the AIDS epidemic really played into that, and I think it’s pretty clear that homophobia was a part of the lacklustre response. It was like, “Oh, this just affects gay people and drug users.” Those are undesirables. It’s not really a pressing issue, and that definitely informed the government slow walking things.

0:21:43.4 Landry Ayres: Talking about what the government did or did not do really in retrospect makes me wonder. We talked about the more efficient way that market forces were able to step in and better serve people early on, and you mentioned that, Kelly. What are some of the ways that you think… And Jeff, obviously feel free to talk about this as well. I’m curious about the ways that market influences can better help serve a similar function, but not in the same role as something like the FDA. How do we ensure that people are ingesting things in a safe way and that the science is followed through, and that everyone is protected and living as healthily as they can while still maintaining the autonomy and liberty that we think is so crucial to the way that they live their lives? What are some of the ways that you can see that intersection sort of manifesting? ‘Cause I think that a lot of people struggle to see, without a middle man standing in there and saying, “Woo, I’m gonna be the referee here,” how that kind of thing is going to function. So try to sort of tease that out for me and explain how that could work.

0:23:04.8 Jeff Singer: Yeah, it’s interesting. About a year ago, Michael Cannon and I came out with a white paper at the Cato Institute called Drug Reformation. And when we get into all of that, most people are unaware that there was a world before the FDA. In fact, the FDA was, as we know it now, came into its full form in 1938 and until 1951, you didn’t need a prescription in order to get a drug, unless the manufacturer decided they only wanted it sold to people based on prescriptions. And even as late as the 1960s, the FDA often relied on third parties to do the evaluations on the drugs for them. So prior to the FDA, there were independent organizations. The American Medical Association and The Council on Chemistry that would review all drugs. In fact, if any pharmaceutical manufacturer wanted to be able to advertise in its journals and therefore get access to physicians, they had to agree to be evaluated and rated by this council which served the function that the FDA does now. But there were other competing organizations.

0:24:11.1 Jeff Singer: And when you think about it, once the FDA approves a drug these days, as soon as it’s approved for whatever it’s approved for, legally, a prescriber can use it for anything they want to. And that’s called off-​label use, and about 20% of the time, drugs are used off-​label. So even now, 20% of the time, we’re not getting permission from the FDA as prescribers to use a drug a certain way. And there are independent third party compendia that basically rate and list what they consider to be appropriate, acceptable off-​label uses of drugs based upon the research. And so then we doctors who prescribe or patients who seek medication, they rely on that literature. People are unaware of that. So there is a world without one monopoly government gatekeeper. Something just happened in the news this week as we record this. The Canadian version of the FDA, Health Canada, just approved this drug called Albrioza for the treatment of Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS. It slows its progress down.

0:25:20.2 Jeff Singer: The US FDA still hasn’t decided if there’s enough information, if they have enough data on its efficacy to give it the green light. But Canadians are gonna start to be able to get it right away. And Americans, of course, can legally go to Canada, buy it and come back across the border as long as they’re doing it as an individual. So another kinda intermediate step reform other than just getting rid of the FDA and allowing third parties to fill the role is to allow Americans to be able to purchase products approved by the FDA equivalence of most countries in Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel. You could come up with a list of countries that are pretty advanced in science, so that way I can, as a consumer, I can go, I could say, “I know this drug isn’t approved by the US FDA, but it’s approved by Health Canada. And I wanna take it for my ALS. Right now, I can’t take it for my ALS, and I don’t have time.” So it’s the same kind of situation as the AIDS patients, you know?

0:26:28.4 Kelly Wright: Yeah. I just wanna echo all that. And I’m definitely not a medical doctor or an expert in drug approval.

[laughter]

0:26:35.1 Kelly Wright: But I am an advocate of informed consent model access to care. And that’s honestly what the Dallas Buyers Club was. It was like an agorist, counter-​economics, informed consent model for drugs to treat HIV and AIDS. And I think that that would… Even though at the end of the movie, the FDA kind of won and they were legislated out of existence or regulated out of existence, they still, the Dallas Buyers Club still saved lives. And they still like… Like that in and of itself, they saved lives, that’s direct action. They took their own action, unplanned, like not a central planner, just diffuse individuals engaging in voluntary interactions. Like this is just stuff that we as libertarians should eat up. And even though they were regulated out of existence at the end of the film, they still improved a lot of people’s lives, and they kind of moved the needle in favor of an informed consent, sort of a carve out area for people to have an informed consent access, understanding the risks that are involved, and I think that that’s just an unqualified good thing that resulted.

0:27:43.6 Jeff Singer: Yeah. All of these… Buyers Clubs actually pushed the FDA regulatory regime to get more relaxed, more liberal, approve drugs more quickly. Of course, at the end of the day, we still have this one monopoly gatekeeper. Another thing that ought to be added about them, one of the reasons the Dallas Buyers Club and other Buyers Clubs saved lives… And again, this wasn’t made clear in the movie and again could mislead people, but one of the things that they were handing out at the Buyers Clubs was DDC, and DDC is sort of like a beta version of AZT, and that’s why it worked. So that wasn’t, again, that wasn’t in any way conveyed to the viewers of the film. So it… And if you read the backstory that Peter Staley so eloquently puts forth in the Vanity Fair article in September 2021, it originally was gonna be basically an AIDS denialist propaganda film until he was actually asked to play a small role in it and got to look at the script. And then when he looked at the script, he said, “Oh my goodness, this is all wrong.” And he fortunately had a very… The director of the film wanted to do the right thing, so he was able to convince the director to get a rewrite.

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0:29:13.1 Landry Ayres: Jeff, you brought up ALS specifically when talking about Healthcare Canada, which reminded me and sort of is in reference to something I said earlier. I was working on a story a couple of years ago now at this point, specifically about the Right-​To-​Try Movement, sort of gaining traction and the amazing sort of work that they’ve done in allowing people with rare diseases and terminal illnesses to access drugs that have not yet received FDA approval, if they have exhausted all of their other treatment options. And it was a really, really great bipartisan supported bill that luckily was able to get signed into law on a federal level after several state laws passed that mirrored it. And actually ALS activists were the people that I was talking to because there are so few treatments for that condition that they are highly, highly motivated in order to find ways that they can treat themselves. And they specifically cited ACT UP, a similar… Peter Staley, one of the members of ACT UP, as an inspiration for the type of sort of direct action that they were trying to emulate. And they tried to basically redo the Seize Control of the FDA protest, albeit it happened on a much smaller scale.

0:30:43.4 Landry Ayres: But when I asked them if they wanted to comment about their involvement, they were some of the people who basically said the aims of the organization at our time were not based on a desire for individual liberty, but because they basically were dealing with life and death, and as such, it was so interesting. The last sentence or so of the email they sent to me was that, “ACT UP has always wanted a better, more responsive government, not less government.” Which I think gets at, hints at a little bit, the sort of anarchist, minarchist divide that goes on in libertarianism a little bit, but I think it goes a little bit further than that even. I think more libertarians would fall on the less government side rather than a more responsive government. So how do you work with people, I think specifically, who are so averse to market responses because of rhetoric about corporations and profit-​seeking and that type of thing? And I always come to this question specifically because the Citizens United case, sort of the talking point that corporations are now people, and they have the same rights as us, people cringe at that and they think it’s terrible and things like that, specifically on the left generally.

0:32:25.2 Landry Ayres: But we have to understand that corporations are made up of people. And people don’t generally like to oppose the idea of small businesses, because that’s the free exchange and voluntary exchange of goods and services. That’s the market at work, and it’s personable. And it’s people talking to one another, like Jeff was saying, like when you give examples of people working, most people begin to understand that. So where is the line that we reach, where a firm or something becomes big enough that we suddenly start to say, “Whoa, you’re making a profit, but it’s exploitative, it’s extraction.” And what can we do to help people understand that that is a much much more tenuous delineation than they might think of in their mind?

0:33:23.2 Jeff Singer: I heard two things there. I heard first the latter about the profit motive and corporations. But before that, you were talking about minimal government versus a good government. And I deal with both of those things as a think tank person. I mean that’s part of… You just described my everyday life. So particularly in my policy areas that I work in at the Cato Institute, for example, ending drug prohibition, the opioid overdose crisis, drug approval reform, those kind of things, I find that there are a lot of people who don’t share my philosophy, but may share some of my… At least my more immediate goals. And I work with them. I have to, in fact, that’s a benefit of working in these areas because you develop relationships with people who you might otherwise never have developed a relationship with because you consider yourselves on different teams.

0:34:21.3 Jeff Singer: And all of a sudden you find that, hey, you got a lot in common, you’re both nice people, you’re both motivated for the right reasons and the barriers break down, but still, what I end up doing in those situations is I just focus on the… I oftentimes understand that my allies may only travel a certain part of their way down the road with me, and then they’re gonna get off the highway. [laughter] And I’m gonna continue. But if they’re willing to help me get to the next exit, then I just take what I can get.

0:34:54.9 Jeff Singer: On a second thing, I think the emphasis is on, it’s usually never the “profit motive.” Profit motive is what drives progress. It’s important to point out to people. And it’s often these same people who I develop relationships with, and then we’re friends, and then we’re getting into conversations and then that kind of thing comes up about the greedy corporations. And what I try to do is shift their attention to the fact that it’s not the profit motive, it’s crony capitalism. It’s using the leverage of government power to advance your particular goals. And that is wrong. And that’s what happens when you have government. That’s what makes government so dangerous. I’m not an anarchist, but you have to be keenly aware that when you create just like, wasn’t it, George Washington that said, it’s fire? So you’re playing with fire. And so that’s what I end up doing. I was trying to shift the emphasis and lots of things, I must say some of the people I’ve… This is a personal experience. People I’ve worked with when I shifted to that, and I say, well, it’s really not the greed. It’s the fact that the government is giving them special favors. Sometimes you see lights go off behind their eyes, and they get it.

0:36:12.6 Kelly Wright: I would also… This might also be relevant to the conversation we were just having, but there’s a part early on in the movie when Ron is in Mexico. And he kind of has that comment about you have the new world order down here, and that kind of kicks off the trade. I’m gonna give you a bunch of cash, you’re gonna give me a bunch of pills, I’m gonna go back and start this thing. And that to me was just the perfect example of kind of what we think about as libertarians, as markets providing this pluralistic and multiracial, diverse. Maybe it’s not true that Ron in real life was a homophobe, in the film at least, you see the market aspect of this kind of cool, his homophobia down. And it brings all of a sudden, you have these different people from this homophobic rancher, electrician, living in a hotel with this trans woman, and they’re pulling their resources to get aids medications. And it kind of shows how, yeah, markets bring people together, people from different walks of life, they could come together peacefully and pursue mutually advantageous aims together. And that’s what I liked.

0:37:20.7 Jeff Singer: That’s an excellent point. And the profit in that case, that’s another advantage of the profit motive, right? Because it was a profit motive in this story that got Ron Woodruff to even wanna associate with somebody who repelled him initially. And then all of a sudden that association leads to an understanding and affection. And that’s the way markets are all the time, right? If we had, was it Bastiat who said, when goods cross borders, armies, don’t? That’s kind of an international extension of the same principle, right? Which is markets actually are the best way to arrive at peace and harmony among individuals so that’s an excellent point.

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0:38:06.9 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockepod. That’s pop the letter N, locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.