So, the three words about that, we have students for Liberty, the international organization, for students mostly, and we are promoting ideas of Liberty, economics of freedom, field of study and all of that. So, thank you for your attention, that's all for me. Hopefully, it's a pleasure to be here today. And I will leave the words to Mr. Roth. Thank you. Thank you, I guess I'm supposed to introduce myself, I don't know, but I thought everybody knew who I was, but I guess not because he asked where I'm from, so obviously they don't know who I am. So, my name is Yaron Brooke, I'm the chairman of the board of the Einwand Institute. Hopefully, you've heard of Einwand, but if not, do we have books? Okay, we don't have books, but you can look her up online. And there's actually a program at the Einwand Institute where you can get some of her books for free, downloaded. So, if you, yeah, there's a book, somebody has a book, that's good. But you can download a book for free if you're a student. And we do have a student conference coming up in Athens that you can also apply for a scholarship. Oh, we've got two more additional people coming, or one person and one semi-person. And so, as I said, I run the Einwand, so I'm the chairman of the board of the Einwand Institute. I live in Puerto Rico, which is in the Caribbean islands, which has the amazing advantage that if you're an American citizen and if you structure your income in the right way, you basically pay no taxes. So, it's the one tax advantageous place that an American citizen can take advantage of other places. You're screwed if you're an American, you have to pay even in Monaco or places like that, Americans don't work. Puerto Rico, it works, so I live there, which is a huge benefit. Let's see, what else do you want to know about me before we talk about capitalism? Anything you want to know? How many of you know, or let me ask you, how many of you have read something by Einwand? All right, so about half of you. All right, let's do this. We're going to talk, we'll talk about the model case for capitalism, which is what we promised to talk about. But let's in the Q&A, somebody asked me about Einwand, who she was, what she was, and why she was important and why I think you should read her, because I want, when we leave, I want you guys to be excited, enthused about going and picking up one of Einwand's books and reading it. And what language do you have in Slovakia? Slovakian? Yeah. Her books, I think I translated into Slovakian, they are. Into Czech. Into Czech, okay. Maybe a lot of them. Okay. I thought there was a translation, local translations. Okay. So, in Czech, you're going to have to play second fiddle. I'm sure it's not the only time that you've had to tolerate Czech. All right. So, how many of you consider yourself libertarians? Free market, something.  You know, we've got one who isn't, okay? I got an eye on him. I'm kidding. So, the first thing to note about capitalism or free markets. And I'm going to use capitalism primarily to denote free markets. We'll get into maybe a more technical definition of what I mean by capitalism later. But just for now, let's just assume capitalism equals free markets. And one thing we know, one thing there is a ton of evidence for any one of us who has researched it, done, studied a little bit, studied history, studied economics. There's one thing we absolutely know, and that is that free markets work. In the sense of creating wealth, you know, providing prosperity, raising people's standard of living, bringing people out of poverty, the reality is that markets work.  All you have to do is look a little bit at history. Look at what happens in countries that are not capitalist or not free market oriented and move just a little bit in the direction of free markets, right? Because we know there's no country in the world that's a pure free market. But if a country just moves in the direction of free market, what happens? Incas goes up, wealth goes up, productivity goes up, people make more money. I mean, from a material wealth perspective, we know that capitalism generates results.  And you know what happened when you got rid of communism and you haven't exactly got capitalism over here. We don't have capitalism in America, but it's freer than it was. And as a consequence, you're wealthier. You know, the economy's doing better, you produce more, there's innovation. Again, material perspective, everything is better off. And this is not unique to communism or to this part of the world or to Europe. This is true of China. China goes from a completely Maoist where everything is dictated and everything is controlled and everything is centrally planned to a little bit of freedom in parts of China and what happens? Those parts that are left a little bit free explode in terms of wealth, creativity, dynamism, everything. So we know that if we provide people with freedom, if we liberate economies, which means getting rid of government control, getting rid of central planners, then what happens, wealth is created and the standard of living goes up. And this is true no matter where in the world you try it and we've tried all kinds of things, all kinds of systems of authoritarianism and all kinds of systems of a little bit of freedom here and there. And it always works when you clamp down, when you restrict, when you centrally plan, when you control, you fall off a cliff, things get worse and when you liberate, things get better. And the more you liberate, the more freedom you allow, the richer people are, the more prosperous people are. And again, it doesn't matter where in the world. My favorite example is Hong Kong. Not a good example anymore, used to be, pre-2020 when China basically took it over and who knows where it's going to go in the future. But Hong Kong was one of the most amazing places on planet Earth.  But if you haven't, you might never experience it again because things have changed so much. But it used to be the most dynamic, exciting place with filled with energy.  Yet it's got more skyscrapers than New York City. Seven and a half million people live on the rock, seven and a half million people live in one little place. And the per capita GDP, so level of wealth, same as the United States. And they did it all in 70 years. They went from a fishing village to one of the most dynamic cities I plan to do it. What did the government do? Almost nothing. Almost nothing. Protected property rights, contract law, stable currency, and lived economy, left it on no welfare state, no socialist healthcare, no central planning, no dictates on the economy, and the thing just took off. So the bottom line, and I'm going to spend a lot of time on this because you guys are all free market guys. So you know this, guys and gals, so you know this, right? In America, particularly in Texas where I spent a few years, guys denotes everybody. So you know, I have to remember that I'm not in Texas anymore. So free markets work. And we understand why they work. That is, we know the economics of it. We know the incentive structure of it. We understand how economics work and why free markets actually produce the results. We've all read Hayek and Mises and Friedman and whoever else you read, right? We've read the economists. We know the process by which markets operate and why they work the way they work. Free market economists have won Nobel prizes in economics. They've got it in a lot of universities. They've done well. There are a lot of them. It's not just a few people here and there. A lot of universities in the West have free market economists. We get it. So we have a combination of capitalism works. We understand why it works because economically at least. And yet, in spite of all this, the real question we have to ask ourselves is why are we failing? Why hasn't the world embraced free markets? Why is generally the world moving away from them? Even in a place like Slovakia where for a period you were moving away from communism towards free markets. That stopped, I assume, and your sliding may be backwards. And if not here, I know other places where they're sliding backwards. Almost everywhere in the world, free markets don't have a great reputation. Almost everywhere in the world, people abandon free markets, abandon capitalism, particularly young people. I mean, if we were running right now a session on why capitalism is immoral, there would be a lot more people here. A lot more people here.  Socialism is cool. The reality is that the anti-free market position among young people is much cooler, much sexier, much more people are much more passionate about. You get, you do a talk on Marx, fill the auditorium. Why? If our system works, and we understand why it works, you can explain it. We've got good economists who've been explaining it for decades. Why is every country in the world, including the United States, including the little bit of freedom they gave the Chinese, all slipping backwards, all moving away from us? And this is true everywhere in the world. I mean, there's some countries that are moving a little bit towards capitalism, but nobody's embracing it. Nobody's excited about it. And you don't see passion around capitalism the way you see passion around socialism. And this should be the most important question that students for liberty and other organizations ask themselves. What is it about capitalism that those people out there find so offensive, and that they vote time and time again, and they endorse and they propagate ideas that are anti-capitalist? What is it about capitalism that they find offensive, that they find bad, that they can't support? And at the end of the day, I think the answer is not that they don't understand particular economic ideas, because we've explained them and we're good at explaining them. You know, we've got Mom Friedman's videos up on YouTube, he's very good at explaining economic ideas, right? And you can explain to people a million times why minimum wage causes unemployment and it doesn't matter. One iota, they still vote for minimum wage. They'll find a couple of obscure studies where supposedly it shows that minimum wage, raising minimum wage doesn't matter. Or rent control, or any socialist policy, any central planning policy. The solution always to crisis, whatever the crisis is, is what? Print more money, more government, more controls, more of the things that got us into the crisis. They got us into the problem. So I don't think the answer is going to lie in economics. And I don't think the answer lies in politics. And I don't think the answer lies in we need to better understand history. We do, and we should learn more economics and all that, all that is important. But the reality is, none of that, none of that is what is actually preventing, was actually causing people to have such a resistance, such a negative view of the capitalist system. So the real question is, why are we failing? And we have to acknowledge we're failing. Students for Liberty, I've been around since students for Liberty were started, I've been watching. And the audiences have not grown. And we don't have bigger audiences. And we haven't taken over Slovakia, we haven't taken over the Czech Republic, we haven't taken over anywhere. The two seats are front here, but they're also back there, so whatever you guys want. Something happened there, I don't know what. He sent you away. So here's the problem with capitalism. Let me ask you a different way. What is capitalism fundamentally about? What are markets about? Why do we engage in markets? Why do we enter into marketplaces? What's the purpose of a marketplace? To provide, to provide for needs. I mean that's one direction, right? Because a marketplace is more than just me wanting stuff. So when Steve Jobs makes an iPhone, right? You've seen this, right? So when Steve Jobs makes an iPhone, why does he build the iPhone? Who's he doing this? What's the purpose of this? Why is he selling iPhones? What's that? Yeah, no, but people, nobody demands it, right? I was there, you guys weren't born yet probably. But I was there before there was an iPhone. And I didn't know I demanded an iPhone. I didn't demand an iPhone, didn't know an iPhone existed. And if you told me there was an iPhone, I would have said, yeah, I don't know if I wanted all that. I mean, I literally said that about cell phones. Like when cell phones came out, the first cell phones, you remember those flip phones or whatever. Oh, the big ones, they were big like this. And I was like, I don't want a phone. Like I have a phone at work. I have a phone at home. So when I need a phone, when I drive from home to work, what do I need a phone for? So I refused to buy a cell phone. And then my wife was driving, we lived in Northern California back then. And my wife was driving, had a long drive to San Francisco back home and she would come home sometimes late at night. She said, okay, we'll buy one phone for her at night when she drives back just in case, you know, we weren't demanding cell phones. We did them a favor and bought one. Of course, once you buy one and you discover this is cool.  So it's not because we demand it. I mean, this is one of the fallacies in economics. Demand doesn't drive supply. Indeed, it's supply that drives demand or the two sides of the same coin in a sense. But one thing, one of the main things entrepreneurs do is they teach us what we should demand. Steve Jobs comes out with this and he says, this is wonderful. You should want one. And we go, whoa, yeah, I want one. But not before he said it, not before he showed me, not before he taught me. All right, that was our side track. Why did Steve Jobs make this? To make a profit, certainly. These things had and still have very high profit margins. So Steve Jobs makes a lot of money. But is it only about the money? What is another reason Steve Jobs would want to make this? Yeah, but why does he care about technological progress? Technology of Congress is kind of an abstract thing. Why did Steve Jobs do it? It makes other people's lives better, but like Steve... Okay, maybe he wants a problem, he solves a problem. So why do you guys... I mean, I don't know how many of you work, but why do you guys go to work? Yeah, I mean, he loved doing this. Like, he wanted to create something beautiful. He wanted to create something in his image. He wanted to create something that was obviously useful because he wanted to make money and it's wanted to be requisites, right? But he loved designing great products.  Not everybody does, but Steve Jobs did. So Steve Jobs designed the iPhone for Steve Jobs because he loved it and because it was going to make him a lot of money. So he goes into the marketplace trying to make money and trying to perpetuate his love. And I remember going into the marketplace in... it was 2008 and buying my first iPhone and the US economy was... we're going into a recession, it was a great financial crisis and we're going to a recession and I studied my canes and I knew that if you want to get the economy going when you're going to a recession you have to stimulate, you have to consume. I went to buy the iPhone because I wanted to help the US economy grow. I wanted to help my fellow man, I wanted to make sure jobs were kept because I knew that's where you guys should go shopping. You go shopping in order to make sure people have jobs and why are you laughing? Isn't this good? Of course not, right? Why do we go shopping? To meet our... you said it earlier, to meet our needs, desires once. I wanted an iPhone. Why? Because I thought it would make me more productive and I thought it would be fun because I thought it would be cool because I thought I would benefit from it. So what are marketplaces? Marketplaces are places in which people come to pursue what? Exchange for the purpose of what? What's that? Fulfilling their needs. Simpler. What's a simpler term for that? To pursue their self-interest. They go into the marketplace to pursue what they think at that point in time is good for them. It's the marketplace and capitalism, a systems in which people engage in activities because they believe it's in their self-interest. We build stuff, we create stuff because we like to, because we want to, and because we profit from it. We consume stuff because we want to, we like to, because we believe we will profit, it will make us happier, it will make us better, it will make us cooler, it will make us look better, whatever it happens to be. We just like beautiful things, so we buy beautiful things.  And we exchange, and the beauty of exchanges, the beauty of trade is that we can exchange. I can give Apple a thousand dollars, get an iPhone, and who lost? Apple gained $500 because their profit margin is about 50%. How much did I gain? What's that? One iPhone. One iPhone, but how much did I gain from that iPhone? More than a thousand dollars. More than a thousand dollars, or euros or whatever it happened to be, right? More. We know that. How much more? I mean, I can tell you can't tell them, you don't know, right? Only I know how much I gained. That's one of the problems in economics, that what they call consumer surplus, you can't measure, right? But I can tell you, this thing is worth to me tens of thousands of dollars for a variety of reasons that have to do with everything I can do with this. Don't tell Apple. I don't want them to raise my price. So it's a win-win transaction, but the essential characteristic of it is that it's self-interested. Now, what did our mothers and preachers and philosophers teach us about self-interest? Good thing? Morally, from an ethical perspective, self-interest, a good thing or a bad thing? Bad. Bad?  You know, my mother was very Jewish. So my mother taught me, think about this first. Think of yourself last. Always other people. They're the most important thing. Sacrifice for other people. That's the standard. That's good morality. Now, she didn't mean it because she wanted me to do well, and to do well, I bet I have to think about myself. But that's what we say to everybody. Morality is about other people. It's about making their lives better. It's not about yourself. And indeed, another term for morality often is be selfless. Be selfless. And if you're selfless, that's virtue. That gets you into heaven. That's a positive view of life. Are you selfless in capitalism? Is anybody selfless in the marketplace? No. I don't say, okay, I feel like sacrificing today so I'll overpay. Our whole mentality, and we live these dual lives, I think, our whole mentality is, no, I want to get a good deal. I want to benefit myself. I want to be better off after I transact rather than worse off. But sacrifice, morality in our minds is, oh, I have to be worse off after I transact. It's not about me. It's about somebody else. And if I'm worse off, I've shown that I am moral. I am good. I mean, indeed, the secular advocates for this kind of morality, whether it's Augustine Comte, the French philosopher, or Kant, the German philosopher, would say that if you approach and act to help somebody else and you think to yourself, oh, I'm getting joy helping them. I get satisfaction. Not a moral act anymore. Because you brought yourself interest into it. To be really moral, they tell us, it has to be self-less. How does capitalism fit into that? It doesn't. It doesn't. The motivation of everybody in capitalism, even though other people are better off because of capitalism, we'll get to that in a minute, right?  And you were motivated by being better off. So it takes it out of morale. The real problem capitalism has is that it fundamentally goes against everything we have been taught about ethics, about morality. It's counter to morality. It's immoral. And that's what everybody believes. They all like to transact. They all like the standard of living going up. But what do they like more? Feeling like they're good people. Morality always in the long run, Trump's economics. And if people think a system is immoral, a system is wrong, they won't embrace it. Or they certainly won't embrace it fully. They'll embrace it a little bit to satisfy their desire for stuff. And they'll always feel like, yeah, we need a little bit of capitalism because we need to live, right? We need a little bit of capitalism because we want to have the good stuff. But not too much because it's immoral. And we can't have that. I mean, Adam Smith had a sense of this in The Wealth of Nations, and he also wrote a book called Moral Sentiments. And he writes, you know, the baker when he bakes the bread doesn't care about you, right? He doesn't know who you are. He's not baking the bread for the consumer. He doesn't know the consumer. Why is he baking the bread? Yeah, to make money, to make a living. He has to feed his family, feed himself. And hopefully, like Steve Jobs, he enjoys making bread. He has fun doing it, right? The grocery store that sells you the bread is not doing it for you. It's doing it because they need to make a living. And you, when you buy the bread, are not buying it for them. You're buying it for yourself. So Adam Smith understood that the economy is driven by self-interest. But he also writes that self-interest is, eh, it's not a virtue. It's not noble. It's not moral. It's not good. See, he says, but, he says, yes, for an individual to pursue his self-interest is not moral or good. But when you aggregate all the self-interested actions that people take in a society, the sum of it leads to a better society. So cool, it's good. In other words, if you add up vices, add up negatives, you get a positive. Now, it's true, negative plus negative is a... But nobody believes that. In the world, let's say if I'm bad and bad and bad and bad, somehow it all ends up, do I'm good? It just doesn't add up. It doesn't make any sense. But that's the best we have to defend capitalism. Can we get to that afterwards? So you're challenging the whole concept of capitalism. We'll get to that in a minute. We've got a great answer for sweatshops. You might have seen it online. So I'll try to replicate that because it was good. So that's step one. And again, we'll deal with the... Some people are not better off under capitalism in a minute. So capitalism is viewed by the culture as negative. Think of it this way. And it's not because of capitalism doesn't help people. So take a Bill Gates, and before COVID, so don't forget all the conspiracy theories about Bill Gates since COVID. Let's pretend they don't exist and pretend some of you don't believe them. And just focus in on Bill Gates, builds Microsoft. And he makes billions of dollars for himself. And in building Microsoft and making billions of dollars for himself, what impact did he have on the world? Unlike pretty much everybody in the world. What? Huge. Positive. Huge. Right? People... The mission statement for Microsoft in the early days was... Anybody know what it was? A computer on every desk. Beautiful mission statement. What did they achieve? A computer on every desk, pretty much. On the planet, not in a country. So they changed everybody's lives. Now how do we know they changed their lives for the better? Because people keep buying Microsoft products. They keep paying the money. And just like I paid for my iPhone and my life got better, we know that when people buy a product their life gets better, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Bill Gates made the world a better place for hundreds of millions of people, actually billions of people. Everybody on planet Earth has been touched by Bill Gates, almost everybody. Even if you're really, really poor in Africa and you don't have computers, but you get aid, charities, bringing food. But guess how the charities can be efficient and get their supply chain right and get you the food on time and at a low cost. How do they do that? Using computers, using all the logistics and using all the technology that people like Bill Gates made possible. So Bill Gates made the world a better place for billions of people. How much moral, moral, not economic, how much moral credit did he get for that? He was a moral hero? Are they naming streets after him and building statues? I would say not just not a lot, I would say he got some negative. People hated him, but they still do. People hated him, and they hated him because he was successful. And why did they hate him? He made the world a better place, so why did they hate him? What's his sin? What's the sin of every businessman? Because no businessman are liked. Well, they get rich, which means they are benefiting. Yes, everybody is benefiting from them, but they also benefit. They benefit from making the world a better place and therefore that's no good. But who's a saint? Who's a good guy from a moral perspective? Who would you consider like the the moral saint? What's that? Yeah, it has to be somebody who does good for no personal profit, but even better is if they do good and they suffer. They suffer. Suffering is cool. Suffering is noble. Suffering is worthwhile. So helping other people and suffering, that's beautiful. So Mother Teresa is the ideal like moral standard, right? She suffered. If you read her diary, you can find out.  I mean raised them from death to poverty. She had this belief, very Christian belief that you shouldn't help them go out of poverty because poverty was noble. Poverty was good. How many people did she help versus Bill Gates? Who helped more people? Literally who helped more people? Bill Gates by far. Not even close. Right? Not even close. Bill Gates is a villain. She's a hero. When did Bill Gates become a little bit of a hero? A little bit better. When he left Microsoft, God forbid you actually produce and build and create stuff. Employee people and change the world can do that. But you can give your money away, that's good. So when he turned to philanthropy and started giving his money to left Microsoft, went to philanthropy and started giving the money away, then he became a little bit better. Why is he only a little bit better? Why isn't he a saint yet? Why isn't he a Mother Teresa yet? The way to make Bill Gates a saint is you have to give up all his money, move into a tent and bleed a little bit for us. You've got to see some blood, right? Then we'll have boulevards, statues. Nobody would want to be Bill Gates, but we'd all say, whoa, that's noble. That's amazing. Wow. I mean, building Microsoft, eh, not so impressive, but giving it all away. Making the wealth, creating the wealth and wealth is created. I think you all know that. That wealth is created. That's... But giving that wealth away, that's noble, that's good, that's virtuous.   Because we live with this constant back and forth. On the one hand, to be good, to be noble, we need to sacrifice, but how many of you want to sacrifice? Most of you just want to live your lives. And you're constant torn between two conflicting ideas. I think it's true of our personal lives. I definitely think it's true of capitalism. Capitalism cannot be perceived as a good system. Cannot be embraced by the world as long as they view it as immoral. As long as they view it as nasty and bad, because it's self-interested. So I don't think we can win as long as we believe self-interest is immoral. So you have to ask the question, is self-interest immoral? What makes self-interest immoral? Where does that come from? And this, I think, is Iran's real contribution to the freedom movement, to the ideas that I think drive the free market.  She's an novelist.  I mean, she's not the only one Aristotle, if you go back and study Aristotle, Aristotle says the purpose of life is to flourish, to succeed, to be happy, eudaumnia in Greek, to pursue the virtues that you should pursue, to be moral means to pursue these virtues and it leads to success and flourishing. Iran basically says something similar, she disagrees about the virtues, the particulars, but the idea is why should I suffer for other people? Why should why should I engage with other people with a relationship that is when lose, way I lose? When the option is what? Win-win. And by the way, when lose almost always turns into lose-lose, right? In personal relationships, if one side is losing and one side is winning, it often will flip around because that's not sustainable. People don't like losing. So, Rand challenges this idea in morality, this idea that other people are the standard of morality. And instead, she offers a suggestion. She offers a philosophy, a morality that says no. Your life is the standard. Your happiness is the standard. Your success at living is the standard. And then the question is what kind of moral values and moral virtues should you embrace in order to be successful at living? What leads to success at living? Rather than the alternative, which is what leads to suffering? What leads to sacrifice? What leads to not achieving your values but other people's values? And by the way, the moral code that we have, what does it have against selfishness? What is the thing, when we think selfish and we think self-interested in whatever language you want, right? What is the image that common morality presents to us? Who is selfish and self-interested? What's that? What kind of behavior do selfish people engage in? Yeah. So they're lying, stealing, cheating. They'll do anything to get their way. That's the image that we have of somebody who's self-interested. Rand says, really, is it really in yourself interest to lie? Is it in your self-interest to cheat or to steal? Not just, not only because most cheaters and most stealers and most liars get caught and that creates all kinds of problems when you get caught, but also what it does to you as a human being. It's destructive. So her argument is, no, lying, cheating, is stealing. That's not selfish. We're presented with this alternative. You can either be a victim of sacrifice, or you can be a lying, cheating, stealing, horrible person. Those are two ideals. Pick. And Rand says, wait a minute, there's a third alternative. And that is to be truly self-interested, to figure out what's truly in my interest and engage with other people, not as a thief or as a liar or as a faker, but to engage with other people in win-win trade relationships. This idea of trade is the essential way in which we deal with one another. And justice, people treating one another based on what they deserve. And in the economic sphere, what you deserve is what you produce. So a moral code focused on individuals achieving their happiness, making their lives the best that it can be. Not succumbing to the needs of others, but succumbing to your own needs, and real desires. And if you're concerned about your own happiness, even more fundamentally, if you're concerned about survival as a human being, just surviving, what's the most important thing you should cultivate? What is it that we human beings need to do in order to survive? We need self-discipline but self-discipline to do what? What's the fundamental activity we need to do in order to survive out there in nature in the world? We need a work, but work needs to be guided by something. This is the difference between human beings and animals. Animals also need a work in a sense, right? Cooperation is Yuval Harari's explanation. I don't know if you've heard Yuval Harari. But cooperation, yeah, it's helpful. But you need to do something before you cooperate. You need a... What makes us human? Everybody needs to eat. All animals need to eat. Who should think? Yeah, I mean, you got to think. You got to use your mind. I mean, animals are born with the algorithm built in to know exactly what to do in any circumstance. They've got AI right there, right? It's all pre-programmed. You know, it's probably not as cute as chat GP... But it's... It's all there. So cheetah doesn't have to think. It knows that's food. I'm chasing it. I'm fast. I'll catch it. I'll eat it. Done. Right? There's no consideration. There are no choices. Human beings don't have that. I drop you into the middle of the Amazon. You don't know what to do. You have no clue what to do. If you rely on your genes, you'll die very quickly. But you can't survive. We're unbelievably good at survival. How do we survive? By thinking. Figuring stuff out. So I'm in the Amazon. Okay. What is poisonous? What is not? What is edible? What is not? How do I get water? You know, if water is just lying there, still dangerous might have bacteria in it. I need to get it from its flowing. Maybe I should build a bow and arrow. How do you build a bow and arrow? I don't know how to build a bow and arrow. Let me figure it out. Everything we do.  Every value we have received. Just look at this building. Any building. Any street. Any car. Are they products of what? Before we cooperate, we have to think. And before we communicate, we have to have something to communicate about. Again, we are not deterministic machines. We have to engage the thought process. I'm sure you all know people who don't think. I know lots of people. I would argue maybe a majority of people, they just follow. They do what other people think and they follow. They mimic. They, you know, they copy. But to really achieve anything, you have to think. You have to figure it out. You have to use your reason. You have to use your mind. You have to use your rationality. And that takes a lot of, that takes evidence. You have to accumulate the evidence. You have to accumulate the fact. You have to integrate them. You have to come to an understanding and then you go out into reality and you change it. To fit your needs. Animals don't do that. Animals accept reality as it is and if it's against them, they're screwed.  What's that? We think and adapt. We invent air conditioning. Because it's a little warm. Right? I mean, when we emigrated from Africa to northern Europe and suddenly it was cold, it wasn't like whoops, we all died. Right? We figured out how to get fur. We figured out how to build homes. We figured out how to use fire to heat ourselves. We figured it out as individuals. We figured it out. We created agriculture. Hunting requires cooperation. It requires traps. It requires weapons. It requires tools. None of that exists in nature. All of that human beings had to create using their reason, their mind. So, if you care about your own self-interest, if you want to live a great life what should you do? Think. Figure out what leads to a great life. Figure out how you can make your life the best that it can be. What value should you pursue to have a great life? So, to be self-interested is to be a thinker. To be self-interested is to be rational.  It deals with non-facts. Anti-facts. And yet rationality requires fact. It requires evidence. Alluding the mechanism.   So, for Rand morality is about being self-interested which means being a thinker, being rational having reason, working for a living in other words producing. One of the reasons she argues stealing is bad for you is that we get much of our self-esteem in life, our self-confidence and therefore our happiness from the knowledge that we can take care of ourselves which means we can put food on the table. We can produce the things that are necessary for us to survive. When you steal, what are you admitting to yourself if to nobody else? You're unable to produce. You need other people to produce from them. Well, you are just an animal that uses physical force to get his stuff, get other people's stuff and that destroys your self-esteem. So, in spite of what they show in the movies bad guys are not happy.  Do you know Bernie Madoff who Bernie Madoff was? Bernie Madoff ran the biggest pyramid scheme ever in America.   How devastating that is to your psychology. But he said when he went to jail he said, I'm happier in jail than I was before I was caught. And then he says, why? He says, because I couldn't look anybody in the face because I was constantly lying. I couldn't sleep at night because I was worried about being caught.   So being a crook is not it's horrible. The only profession in the world where lying is profitable is what? Politics. Absolutely, politics. And have you ever made a happy politician? I have not.  And the more authoritarian they are the more miserable they are. Have you ever looked at Bill Clinton? I don't know if you know who Bill Clinton is. He just looks pathetic. He looks awful. Biden. I mean all of them. Horrible. These great pictures of Putin actually during Christmas he wouldn't have Christmas with other like the ceremony at the church he wouldn't do with other people like the Orthodox Christian Orthodox Christmas and you see him in the corner of this church in his droopy face and he looks like the most depressed he looks like a you want to pet him because he looks so miserable he looks like a puppy that's just sad.  Actually I have a YouTube channel and on YouTube I showed video of this because there was video out there and it, wow, he looked like the most depressed person on the planet at that point. And it is because that's what happens you know if you live that kind of life there are consequences. Reality is what it is. Human beings need certain principles in order to achieve happiness and when you negate them you achieve the opposite. So what capitalism needs is a moral defense. A moral defense based on self-interest. What capitalism needs is a change in our culture where self-interest is regarded as a virtue not a vice.  Why do we redistribute wealth? Because they need it and it's okay to sacrifice for their need. So we sacrifice you for their need because you wouldn't do it if we didn't take the money from you. And of course it always begins with the small very very needy people. They really need your help. They're really struggling. But then once that's established and we take your money and we give it to them now there's another group that's just a little bit less needy than the previous group it still has needs. I mean today in America if you don't have an iPhone an air conditioning, an automobile and you know a home to live in because you're needy and somebody needs to sacrifice for you that's what morality demands.  I'm doing this for your own good I'm raising your taxes it's for your own good you'll feel better about yourself. And they always couch it like to say remember in California they raised the state income tax on top of the federal income tax state income tax. So if you were making I think it was more than a million dollars they raised it from 10% to 30% and they said look rich people we're doing this for the kids right your money is going to go keep schools open if we don't raise your taxes the schools will be closed so we're doing it for the kids guess how the millionaires voted they voted for it they voted for raise their own taxes if you look at the richest areas the counties in the United States vote to raise their own taxes almost always because it reduces the amount of guilt they feel because what happens when you have a moral ideal over here and you don't live up to it you feel guilty government says look we've got a great scheme to reduce your guilt we'll take your money we'll take care of the needy people you don't have to worry about it anymore you regulate businesses like why don't we trust businesses like I don't know in the Czech Republic but in America if you walk into an elevator you know elevators up and down and there's a little thing there's a little thing on the wall and it says a government inspector inspector this elevator don't worry it won't fall I mean it's not what it says but that's the implication a government inspector doesn't inspect every elevator in order to operate why because if the government didn't inspect the elevators elevators will start falling constantly and killing everybody because the best way to make money is by killing your customer if we didn't have food inspectors McDonald's would poison us all tomorrow that's the implication and why do people believe that and people do believe it by the way there was a brief period of time in Georgia Georgia the country where they abolished food inspection the government didn't have food inspectors and nobody died surprise, surprise businesses want to make money and the way to make money is to keep your customers alive so they can come back and buy stuff from you so why don't we think businesses are going to poison their customers and we don't even think it we feel it because they're selfish they're self-interested and we know that self-interested people lie, steal and cheat and kill and don't care about anybody except themselves in this narrow, silly kind of way so we have a regulatory state and we have an office state because of our ethics if we want to get rid of them we're going to have to change our ethics so the reason we're not making progress I believe is because we're talking about the wrong thing yes we need to educate people about economics yes we need to educate people about history yes we need to educate people about all the benefits capitalism provides for a material sense but we also need to challenge their moral beliefs we need to question where they're coming from morally and we have to change the moral the morality that the culture holds and unless we do that we lose and we lose all the time and you see that it's not going to grow until we're willing to stand up and say no your morality is screwed up and it's going to take a long time that's the other thing you have to recognize you change people's views on economics much easier than you can change people's views on morality it's really really hard you're going up against 2,000 years of religion you're going up against the biggest philosophers ever every one of them with the exception of the Greeks was kind of a pro sacrifice so it takes time but the reality is that if people believe that their self-interest is a good thing and they believe that the way to achieve their self-interest is through long-term thinking, rational behavior then do they want the government telling them what they shouldn't shouldn't do if I'm self-interested if I want to live my life what I want is to pursue my values based on my terms to achieve my happiness nobody gets to tell me what to do you can encourage me you can argue with me that's what self-interest means self-interest means I want to try my ideas, my values I want to do what I want to do I don't want mother governments sitting on my shoulder saying don't drink that drink too much sugar I mean if I come to conclusion there's too much sugar I won't drink it but it's not their job to tell me what to do and what not to do it's my responsibility to take care of myself and I can do it I have the tools to do it, I have the ability to do it I'm trying to do it, but out of my life a culture of people pursuing their own self-interest rationally and explicitly, knowingly is the culture that has to accept capitalism because it's the only system consistent with that morality what else is there they have to accept freedom because nobody wants to be unfree if they care about their own life the only reason we want to be unfree is because we don't care about our own life so what we need if we want to change the dynamics of the world is a moral revolution a moral revolution that rejects conventional morality and replaces it with a morality of self-interest and as far as I know the only philosophy that presents such a morality is Ayn Rand so read Ayn Rand and let's get the word out there, thank you alright, questions you had a question, yes let's start with one I've got another mic let's do this I think this is live streaming we'll get really sophisticated here talk into that and the next person who gets the mic will talk ok so my initial question was about the sweatshops and the planet as a whole because I agree with that in a small community yes Baker wants to bake the best bread he doesn't want to make money but for you to be happy he wants to bake you good bread and then you'll be happy and you buy from him more but in the economy we are living right now somebody is paying that extra price the children making this shirt we're paying the price of me buying it cheaply and being happy about it and maybe a river that is poisoned because of the colors that were ok so let's take the sweatshop and we can do the river afterwards ok so there's some kid in Indonesia Malaysia somewhere that is working in a plant making some ridiculously low amount of money by your standards and he's making your t-shirt why is he there why is he making the t-shirt let's assume it's not slave labor we're all opposed to slave labor we're all opposed to use physical force to keep people there why did he choose or his parents chose to send him to work at this factory that makes your t-shirt because what's his alternatives the alternative is starving and remember before capitalism how many kids made it to age 10 what percentage of children made it to age 10 let's say before 1800 anybody know what the statistic is less than half most children died before they made it to age 10 so one possibility is by the way what did children do before the industrial revolution and before capitalism what did children do they worked in the field much harder jobs by the way much more dangerous jobs so the reason they're in the factory is because the alternatives are much much worse the reason they're in the factory is because if they don't work their parents don't have enough money to feed them so they have to contribute to the family budget so that there is money to give them food what's really really interesting and there's a really good book on this about sweatshops just about sweatshops a whole book is that every single country that reaches a certain GDP per capita a certain amount of income per capita child labor disappears why? because as soon as the parents stop making enough money where they can feed the child without the child working they take him out of the factory and send him to school so again you know I would encourage you to buy more t-shirts from that factory because you want more children working there so that they don't die and they don't have to work in the fields where they're paid even less so that ultimately as they become more productive their parents who have other jobs will make even more money and will pull the kids out but it's more than that those children who work in the factory let's say at age 10, 12, 14 you know we'd rather they be in school but that's not really an option here but they're learning a skill they're learning to be on time they're getting a wage they're learning to do a job many of them are going to become more and more productive and many of them are going to be much more successful than their parents were because now they've learned a skill from very early on and they've grown with that skill so in my view sweatshops have created massive opportunities again I'm excluding slave labor to the machine, it doesn't count but assuming they're doing it out of at least their parents fee will see we should see we does not understand slavery it's like the PC police it's not just the national security agency listening in it's also the woke so we have it's not only that this child other options are worse than this and you're doing him you're actually adding value to his life by employing him now again these ultimately as societies get richer children stop working and by the way countries always pass laws banning child labor a few months after there's pretty much no child labor left or when there's a very very small amount of child labor they don't do it before because the parents would get upset and children might die of starvation they do it after and then they get the credit if you look at western history child labor laws always pass after child labor is gone but if you talk to your socialist or status friends out there they'll all tell you oh no government saved the children no capitalism saved the children share economic status of children self-interest saved the children the self-interest of the parents they want them in school okay and isn't it my self-interest to have the cheapest t-shirt available yeah buy him as many as you can isn't that and the children have more opportunities as a consequence of that yeah isn't that keeping our no because the kids are there not because the owner of the factory want to keep them there the kids are there because it's their best opportunity that they have and competition for labor is going to drive their wages up not down the more productive they become their wages will go up the reality is that as a state of living in the world goes up your t-shirt will get more expensive but you don't have any control over that that just is what it is and by the way sweatshops might be in Indonesia right now but where's the next place the sweatshops are going to be Africa and that's a beautiful thing for Africa because it'll mean Africa's on the way to rising economically when you start having factories there when you have children not working in the fields anymore working in factories their productivity just went up in that sense they're producing more and as their parents become richer they will be go to school and Africa will become relatively richer that's the path every single country goes to and if you're going to ask about the polluted rivers in Indonesia it's exactly the same thing you've got a pollute to become rich no shortcuts in England in the 19th century during the industrial revolution they burnt huge quantities of coal and if you'd said at the time stop you're polluting literally people were getting sick it's not potent sick real sick they were breathing the coal in they were getting black lung or whatever horrible things if you'd stopped it because of that and said no we can't have pollution you would have killed the industrial revolution and killed all of the progress we've had over the last 200 years China in order to get to become middle class they go from you know what percentage of the Chinese population was $2 a day or less in when Mao Zedong died 1976 I think that was like 90-70% it was one of the poorest places on planet Earth today hundreds of millions of people are middle class or above I mean you go to Shanghai you go to some of these cities now they're still poor people but the percentage in extreme poverty is less than 10% well less than 10% how did that happen? it happened by producing stuff as cheaply as they could on a massive scale did that involve pollution? absolutely couldn't see the sun in Beijing now that they're rich what are they doing? exporting pollution elsewhere to Africa no now they're cleaning it up they're cleaning it up at home and when Africa this is also the whole point about fossil fuels which we'll get to in a minute now they're cleaning China up and yes the pollution will go to Africa because Africa will need to industrialize as Africa industrialized it won't be able to put those fancy filters on it won't be able to have lots of cleaning processing plants because they're expensive they won't have the capital to do it so in order to get rich you have to go through a period of child labor you have to go through a period of dirt, filth, pollution and on the other side when you're rich you clean it up and yes some people are going to be hurt by it but the alternative is not to industrialize and if you don't industrialize you stay poor and people suffer much more if they stay poor so pollution is a cost of progress progress is not zero cost it's a cost of progress you want progress you can have to pollute for a while there's no way to take the clean technology we have today and give it to Africans say run with it because they can't afford to use it and this is the problem with alternative energy and fossil fuels we all think we all imagine Africa will happen with with windmills and solar panels they can't you can't make enough of them they're not reliable enough and the reality is that they're too expensive it's much cheaper to build a little power plant with natural gas or with oil and they need to be cheap because they're poor and they can't compete unless they're cheaper than everybody else so if you deny fossil fuels from Africa you deny them the ability to develop and progress we the rich we can afford you know you Slovakians can put out lots of solar panels all over the place you won't get any electricity because the sun never shines here but you'll feel good about yourselves because you tried I mean I go to Germany and I see these massive fields of solar panels and I go these people live here they know there's no sunshine in Germany I mean it's insanity I understand California I live in Puerto Rico we have sunshine every day but Germany England you're not going to get solar panels so anyway so the point is that's how progress happens and then no shortcuts it's more about Anne Rand and her work so where would you suggest to begin with reading and learning about so I would say to some extent it depends on you so if you like fiction and I hope everybody likes fiction because fiction is amazing, there are stories then I would start with The Fountainhead which is a fictional book but it is an expression of her morality so about an architect and his struggles to build the kind of buildings that he believes in the kind of art, the kind of architecture that he is committed to and the struggles he has in building those and his relation with other people and it's very much about this morality of self-interest versus morality focused on other people if you're more interested in kind of the big, still interested in stories of time, politics state of the world, what's going on in the world I would recommend Atlas Shrugged bigger book, thicker book thicker story which really deals with the state of the world and what makes the world run and what happens when when you want to stop the world from money so it's a fascinating book and philosophy is more developed in that book if you're interested in non-fiction if you don't like fiction, if you don't like stories like Atlas Shrugged it's like what we say is that we live it now so it has become a documentary of some sort yes, so Atlas Shrugged a lot of people you know, but we you know, Iron Man heard that in the 1970s in America people were saying that it's happening right now during the great financial crisis in 2008, 2009 it was happening right now right now it's happening right now it seems to always be happening right now what's really amazing for me and a lot of us who've been studying Iron Man for a long time is how resilient our world is that in spite of all the bad things we still keep going somehow if you're interested in non-fiction then a few books I'd recommend of essays, all her non-fiction books or most of her non-fiction books are books of essays so I'd recommend Capitalism Not Known Ideal where she talks about her views of capitalism and the other one is the virtue of selfishness which is what we talked about a little bit today but where she developed, there it is there's the virtue of selfishness and where she talks about a morality of self-interest what is a morality of self-interest how do you live the best life that you can live what morality is structured around that so I would definitely look into that and he's got a copy of the book there so you can take a look at that other questions I'm currently reading Atlas Shrugged and there is a nice example of Francesco cheating with the San Sebastian Minds and I'm just curious in this case he increased the value of his company by decreasing the value of others because they were cheated on San Sebastian Mind and I think isn't it the reason that a lot of the merit of society thinks that the capitalism is immoral that part of the people are creating are trying to fulfill their self-interest not by creating a value but by cheating of others and decreasing their value so I'm not going to answer the question as it refers to Francesco because I don't want to spoil the novel for you so you're going to discover why he did what he did and what the reason is for it and he's not the bad guy he's the good guy so you'll see why he does what he does and how it all turns out but I'm not going to tell you because that is the big spoiler there's a huge spoiler but yes I do think that there are businessmen like Bernie Madoff and other businessmen Bernie Madoff is the guy with the pyramid scheme who do cheat their customers I think they suffer for it but that definitely gives a bad reputation to businessmen but the interesting thing is people have the bad businessmen have the bad reputation even before they cheat and when they cheat what happens is what happens inside their head is yeah I knew it that's what they are they're all like that I remember in 2002 now you guys are too young to know any of this and it's also in America in the 1990s and early 2000s there were a lot of cases of fraud in America so Enron and a few other companies all what's that WorldCom and Enron WorldCom and there were a few others all by the way in heavily regulated industries Telecom and electricity Enron all committed fraud and there were like four or five of them they were big and it was big in the news and Bill O'Reilly I don't know if you know who Bill O'Reilly is but Bill O'Reilly used to be the biggest guy on Fox he used to be bigger than Tech of Carlson is today but he was bigger than Tech of Carlson is today and he had me on a show because he said all CEOs all businessmen are crooks we should fire all of them and I went on the show and said some of them are crooks we should fire the ones that are crooks but you can't accuse people of being bad people without any evidence you don't know I mean it's ridiculous what about the CEO of your company somebody runs Fox they employ you you wouldn't have a job without the business people who create the business opportunities for it he didn't like it he got really mad and got very angry but that's the instinct people have because it comes from that view of self-interest equals lying, cheating, stealing so if one of you does it one businessman does it and you go yeah they must all be like this it comes from the bias we already have but yes it makes it more difficult but is there any way how to motivate people to fulfill their self-interest by creating a value and not cheating because cheating is often easier two ways one, teach them that cheating is not in their self-interest at all ever and two, put the bastards in jail that is have clear laws for fraud catch them, put them in jail make them penalize them so you think in advance I don't want to go to jail so you don't cheat, right so one is a positive don't cheat because there are better things to do for your own self-interest and then one is a negative don't cheat because you'll go to jail if you do if I may have a yeah let me get you the mic if I may have a point or a discussion, that's something I won't make a difference I agree with everything that you have said yet I do have a so when you were talking about the cant the philosophy can't think to track me that was yes there are certain that from all that you have to do stuff selfless stuff for happiness in it to be moral but I think the underlying principle of why the socialist is much more respectful than us unfortunately that's how I view it is that they have made the better they are called so for example they are not saying like the guy is happy their claim is not necessarily because people are not always happy with the jobs that they have they say that if we promote non-consumers we can do stuff to be happy and help other people as well and the same goes for the I think it was sweatshops as well but I forgot my point there it's fine so what the socialist say about sweatshops is well we're rich we should just pay the kids not to be in the sweatshop we should just take all our wealth and give it to their parents and make sure they don't go into the sweatshops but of course if you do that your wealth won't last for very long you can do that for a year you can do that for two years you can't do it for all the kids some kids will suffer they'll become an employee of a company you get alienated from the means of production you get alienated from your life and this is suffering and today they call it wage slavery wage slavery but again what this does is first of all it takes agency away from you and then he says you don't know what's good for you you're forced into this job no you're not you can go back to the farm you can do a million other different things so I'm saying figure out what's truly in your self interest and if this job is the best that you can do then go for it then it's not exploitation and it's not alienation it's the best option you have for you so they deny the idea of individual agency model agency we are constantly and manipulated and that we are determined and therefore exploited by other people that we don't determine our own fate so that's one thing they do very well which undermines but again I think that that works on people because we haven't taught them to live for themselves they have this morality back there these principles of living which they don't really want to do so they're torn and then somebody comes to them and says yeah and they're exploiting you and they're taking advantage of you and that fits right into this whole idea of I'm living this conflict and then the other thing what was the other thing that I want to say about the socialist and the labor is fundamentally what Marx is doing is he's rejecting model agency of the individual but he's also rejecting the human mind so Marx explicitly rejects reason we're all determined we're determined by a class we're determined by genes in other words we're determined by social circumstances we're not in control of our own self-interest so if you're born to a worker you are a worker and therefore and others will just exploit you in order to get their way and again there's this negative image of self-interest it's a capitalist self-interest to exploit you so he's leveraging I think he's leveraging Christianity he's leveraging the whole idea of sacrifice he's also everything's predetermined predestined history is predestined predetermined there's no choice there's no agency there's nothing so I think what Marx does and what the socialists do is they exploit our current understanding of morality and of deeper philosophy of epistemology of whether we have free will or not and they exploit that for their agenda and what we do is we don't have a positive case to argue against that's the challenge we don't have something to inspire people we don't say no, you're not being exploited just take the job, make the most of it live learn, grow, become better make your life into something you are responsible for your own life you are your own agent you have agency, you have free will libertarians unfortunately because it's such a big tent and they don't offend anybody's philosophy under the tent they don't reject the idea of altruism they don't reject the idea of predetermination they don't reject the ideas of self-sacrifice which are so embedded for example in Christianity because they want to keep the big tent but I think that unless we challenge those philosophical ideas that Marx builds on Marx comes after Hegel and Kant and Marx builds on Hegel and Kant it's not just he doesn't come out of no way he comes from a particular intellectual tradition and we have to challenge that intellectual tradition otherwise we can't be successful ideas, particularly deep philosophical ideas are what ultimately shape our culture it's not economics and politics we are doing a just as you have said at the beginning we are doing a terrible job at the the philosophical part and I agree with everything and I think that everything that they are saying but they're good at it but they're very good at it they always come and the unique part of people for example LGBTIQ then you have environmentalism they are aggressive but we as the right-wingers or libertarians don't necessarily notice for example LGBTQ and again I'm pro-LGBTQ I don't catch your life do whatever you want with it that's the whole point but the way they do it is do you know this concept of intersectionality it's an academic concept that's in America but it's spread now all over Europe certainly in the UK it's the idea that we rank people based on how a press they are so if you're you know black and I don't know homosexual and trans and I don't know you abuse this then you are the best everybody in a sense should sacrifice to you because you're the most oppressed and intersectionality basically in a sense gives you a rating based on color of your skin, your gender how oppressed you are the term privilege everybody talks about privilege I hate that term but how privileged you are and how oppressed you are and there's a parent and the whole idea is the whole idea is those who are privileged must sacrifice to those who are oppressed so it's not about economics anymore it's not about class sacrifice to the poor now it's about all these other dimensions of oppression sexuality sex and color skin but it's all built on a foundation of we should sacrifice it's all built on the foundation of I can't help myself other people need to sacrifice for me and your life doesn't belong to you because if somebody is oppressed over there you need to help them that's your moral duty is to help them not to take care of yourself but to help them so the whole intersectionality is this idea of altruism, otherism on steroids because it's taken a different they be very creative when the economic stuff like classes don't really exist anymore who's working class when AI is going to come about robots take jobs we're all going to be doing stuff that is not traditional working class jobs classes have kind of become unsexy so they're looking for other places in which they create similar hierarchies of sacrifice the environment is exactly the same thing I don't know that these poor animals poor little worms and insects and what you're doing is harming them so you as a human being should sacrifice to them to slow economic growth we should slow the nice buildings we want to build so that the worm can have a good life and it's okay to sacrifice that's more of the moral thing is to sacrifice for quote nature so they're constantly looking because God is gone at least for much of the West God is gone so we're not sacrificing God anymore that was religion the only purpose in life is to sacrifice to him or now you're not supposed to say God is a him to him who right there's the church of England just announced that they are considering the gender reference to God because you know anyways the sacrifice to God is gone so Mark said sacrifice to Polyterian the LGBTQ sacrifice to whoever is oppressed and now it's sacrificed to nature human beings should sacrifice to nature stop progress stop building stop creating because everything we do and this is true everything we do impacts nature because this is the difference between human beings and animals we got this earlier right animals if change if nature changes what happens to animal it dies we change nature like we chop down trees and build huts we blow up mountains and build highways we we redirect rivers to water agriculture we create reservoirs to get water the way in which human beings survive the means by which we survive is to change our environment to tell us not to change the environment is to say human beings die because there's no other way for human beings to survive other than to change their environment so again this is all about sacrifices it's all about your interest have to be subservient to fill in the blank we'll have a sexy new thing for you to sacrifice for tomorrow and the opposition to that should be no we're not sacrificing why should we we want to live we love life we're going to do whatever it takes to live a successful life to help with you but we need to be able to articulate that in a philosophical way that challenges all of their problems any other questions please go one more I would like to ask in case of environmentalism let's say that the part of the people want to sacrifice the progress in to achieve like nature preservation and so on let's say that we don't want to do it but in long term point of view didn't destroy our society like there is a small possibility that the enormous increasing in progress in current situation can destroy the progress itself like from point of the global warming and so on so and decrease our happiness in three generations from now so what's your opinion about it well I think it's all wrong and it's framed wrong the problem is framed wrong if you can show me that there's a better way for me to live that is more contributing more to my happiness and my success as a human being then fine but for you to come and say three generations from now people will be less happy how do you know reality is and I use my 19th century example again imagine if in the middle of the industrial revolution people said you're using too much coal this coal is killing people you've got to stop now well it turns out three generations from now they were all doing great and thank god that nobody stopped them back then and let's hope that nobody stops us now because our grandkids there's another thing about it if we have progress how rich will three generations from now be super rich compared to us how rich are we than our great grandparents super rich can super rich deal with problems that you can't yeah well let them deal with the problems then since I don't know you're saying I don't know if you knew then fine maybe we can do something about it but if you don't know then let future generations deal with it because there'll be so much richer have so many more resources have better science and better technology they'll be able to deal with it so the best way how to focus on long term long term progress is to make myself rich to optimize and to increase the possibility of future generation to have a better scientific approach the best way to deal with the problems of the world is for everybody to get rich yeah it's a good argument thank you and it's not that hard because you can do this exercise at home if you want you can do it on your iPhone right now let's assume let's assume that if we had real free markets in Slovakia you could achieve I don't know 6% real economic growth a year for the next 40 years I think that's reasonable I don't think that's science fiction if you had real free markets not the idiocy we have today right 6% growth for 40 years now let's assume that wages approximately rise at the same rate as economic growth which is true economic growth increases productivity and wages rise with productivity so do 1.06 I don't know if you're opening up your calculator but do 1.06 to the power of 40 what's that somebody do 1.06 to the power of 40 yeah you can't do it in your head what is it okay 10.3 let's say it's 10.3 right so let's say what's a low wage today a year sorry an annual wage in Slovakia well let's do before taxes because so let's say 10.000 10.000 euros a month a year is like a poor person is what a poor person makes in Slovakia okay now multiply it by 10 now they're making 100.000 are you poor in Slovakia and 100.000 no so in 40 years there's not a single poor person in Slovakia fair to say because maybe somebody's making only 8.000 but now they're making 80.000 so there's no poor people left and that solves now there are poor people relatively speaking because some people will be even richer some people will make millions but the poorest person on an absolute basis now in real terms because we said real economic growth so we've adjusted for inflation they're making 100.000 real euro there's no poor people so the poverty the problem of poverty is gone and that's what's at stake so the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism are going to be the poor people they struggle to barely survive and they could be rich 100.000 euro you can do a lot of stuff with 100.000 euro that's what we don't explain to people is the social poverty is not the welfare state it's not charity it's not giving away it's not sacrifice, it's economic growth and the faster we grow that's what China discovered how did it go from 90% of their people in extreme poverty to now less than 10% economic growth they grow at 12% it happens much much faster than 40 years but and what leads to economic growth markets free markets get rid of the regulations, get rid of the taxation liberate it and you get this explosive economic growth and nobody's poor anymore and then again when people approach what do they do they like to clean up their environment they like to have nice parks they like to pay people to pick up the trash they like to make sure the air is clean because now they can afford to have clean air and clean rivers and clean all this and it doesn't cost them that much because they're rich so being rich solves a lot of problems in life people who tell you money doesn't buy you happiness are lying to you of course money buys you happiness not having money certainly makes happiness difficult now money doesn't give it to you happiness but it certainly is part of being happy sorry can I have one last question sure last year I was at Libertycon in Prague it was like a conference of Libertarians I've spoken at Libertycon many times but there was a guy which had a presentation in which he claimed that the Jesus was a capitalist at principle would you argue with him or would you agree with him I think this is why we lose it's because we try to make ridiculous arguments and we try we try not to be too controversial we try to be mainstream you know give up on Jesus I'm not saying to you, I'm saying generally the sermon on the mount is socialist the sermon on the mount is socialist it's about sacrifice it's the meek shall inherit the earth it's hard if a rich man to get into heaven then a camel to go through the eye of a needle you know yes you can find other statements but these statements also exist I mean the beauty of the Bible any religious text New Testament, Old Testament, Koran doesn't matter we don't want in it stop looking we have to stop looking for the past we have to stop looking at what is conventional because what is conventional is led to where we are today it's led to socialism and statism and the conventional mixed economy we need something radical and new and it's not radical to hold on to Jesus and not let him go it's time to let him go Jesus taught a bad morality Jesus morality is wrong, it's bad, it's no good because it tells you that life on this earth is not that important because it tells you that life on this earth is meant to you should sacrifice in religion generally God comes to Abraham and says take your kid and kill him do you know this story okay this is it yeah see I got a religion and he's shutting me down no free speech even in SFL I wanted to conclude with this very nice and radical hands point but also I'm my market and I'm head of the law University and I'm very happy that you all came we have some merch down there and also like with his year if you want to support us please take the merch if you have any I don't want to say this to me please take it so I can move it absolutely happy to come back thank you


It's quarter past seven, Saturday morning, November, end of November. It's getting cold, but it's not as cold as it could be. We're here near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. This is the Wendover Woods 50th Centurion event. First time since it's been done, lots of ascent, about 9,000 feet of ascent, five laps of 10 miles each. Hope to do it in about 12 hours. So we've done one lap of the Wendover Woods 50. We've climbed 600 metres of ascent, so multiply that by five, basically. We've done that first lap in two hours. It's just coming up to the end of the second loop. It's going to be about four hours and eight minutes for 20 miles. We're just about halfway through now. So four, five and a quarter hours, 25 miles. So I've just left the aid station after lap three. Here we go on lap four. I've got my cup of coffee. I'm just going to walk out the first half a kilometre or so. I'm feeling pretty tired, but we'll get to the end. We'll do another two laps of this, no problem. Right, so this is James. James is like a phenomenal runner, but we'll gloss over that and talk about Wendover Woods 50. I'm on lap. I'm just about to start my last lap in the dark. How's it all gone? First one? Very good. Happy about it? The conditions, all the runners I've saved so far. I've had about 12 come home. The winner is 7.39, which is pretty much bang on what we hoped expected, and a few drops. Many of you know Richard, my running partner. He's injured and he's lent me his jacket. James, why has Richard lent me his jacket? I presume it's so that you can pass kitchen. Listen, if you're going to do a centurion event, make sure you check that mandatory kit and get it right, because he will be on your back. Do that with a large sleeve. Cheers buddy. Finish.  I just missed the 12 hour target. It came in about 12 hours and 10 minutes or something like that. Five minutes. Thank you very much. Look, there's the medal. There we go. That is the hardest 50 miles I've ever done. It has to be said. Do you know what? I will have a cup of coffee now. Thank you. I'm ready for that. Just milk no sugar. Thank you very much guys.