[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLES FRIED: Contracts are everywhere--
not just some huge formal agreement between large corporations, where
one is going to buy the other, so on, although that's
what something like that looks like.
But, as a matter of fact, it's everywhere.
You go through them, I don't know how many times in the course of a day.
You go into a parking garage.
They give you a stub.
Now, that's a contract.
They're going to look after your car, more or less.
And you're going to pay them.
You walk in to your dry cleaners, and you drop off your suit.
And the person behind the desk gives you a receipt.
Well, that's important, because that's how they're
going to know which suit is yours.
But that receipt is also a contract.
And even if there wasn't a receipt, you're dropping it off there,
and coming back a couple of days later and picking up the suit.
Well, they expect to get paid, and you expect to pay them.
That's a contract.
You walk into a restaurant, you order the steak
and chips and everything else.
And then you get the check, and you pay it.
You can't just say, well, that's very nice.
Thank you very much for dinner.
See you tomorrow.
Understood between you was they're going to feed you
and you're going to pay them.
And so it goes.
But it gets even less formal than that.
I live in New England, and we have a lot of snow storms in the winter.
So what happens?
It snows, and a bunch of local kids come knock on your door and say,
sir, can we shovel out your driveway and your walkway and so on.
How much?
$20.
OK.
So they do it.
And then they knock on the door, and they have a contract with you.
You owe them $20.00.
They didn't do that as a favor.
Now it gets more complicated.
You're out of town, and it snows.
And while you're out of town, they come and they shovel out your driveway
and do all that.
And when you come back and they say $20, please-- well,
do you have a contract for that or not?
We'll find out later whether you do or not.
And what if it snows the way it did a couple of years ago-- 18 inches?
And they say, well, we had a lot of work to do, and they really did.
This time you owe us $30.
Do you owe them $30?
All that is something we're going to try to understand.
Now, you might ask, why do we have a MOOC on this?
Why am I asking you to join me for really quite a number of sessions
and quite a lot of work-- your work, my work on the subject of contracts?
One thing I'm going to tell you, I'm not going to turn you into lawyers.
I'm not going to teach you how to draft a contract or deal with a situation
where somebody sues you or claims.
That's not what I'm going to do.
What I'm going to do is for you to understand
what's going on as you go through your lives in a jungle,
or maybe not a jungle-- a forest.
It's not so unfriendly-- of contracts.
It's as if I were offering to teach you a course on the internal combustion
engine.
Now, this wouldn't be a course on how to fix your car when
it breaks down or doesn't break down, but to know
what's going on under the hood.
So if your service station then tells you it's the transmission
and that's going to cost you $1,500, you know what the transmission is
and you know whether it kind of makes sense for that to cost you $1,500.
In other words, what I'd like to do when you're through with
this is for you to understand this part of your environment.