Well, thank you so much everyone for joining us this evening. My name is Mitch Whites, and I'm one of the co-presidents of the Adam Smith Society here at Owen. And I'm so glad that this event could even happen given the extraordinary state of the world today. And for those of you who don't know what or don't know very much about the Adam Smith Society, it's a chapter-based network of MBA students and professionals who want to promote debate about the social, moral, and economic benefits of capitalism. And I think that, honestly, there's probably no better time to do that than at this period of time. And frankly, with Yaron Brooke, he's one of the best speakers I've ever heard on the topic, so I'm really looking forward to that too. But first, before we get into Yaron's talk, I just wanted to give you all a little bit more information. One, this meeting is being recorded, and it will be posted on Yaron's YouTube channel afterwards. So just so you all know that. And then two, Yaron wants to make this as interactive as possible. So if you have any question, or at times Yaron might be asking you a question, you can use the raised hand feature and you can then unmute yourself and ask your question. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, you can also just use the chat feature and send and type a question directly to Yaron if that works better for you. But with all of those housekeeping items out of the way, I'd now like to turn it over to my fellow Adam Smith Society Board member, Brad. Thanks, Mitch. Yeah, really, really wanted to get the chance to introduce Yaron. I don't think there's anyone outside of my parents who's influenced my thinking as much as he has. But yeah, Yaron is the host of the Yaron Brooke show and a renowned bestselling author and world class speaker. He travels extensively promoting Iran and her philosophy of objectivism along with the ideas of capitalism, political and economic freedom. Yaron was the executive director of the Iran Institute for 17 years until 2017. And he remains the chairman of the Board of ARI is its primary spokesperson. His most recent book is in pursuit of wealth, the moral case for finance. This book, along with all of Yaron's others, can be found on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. It explains why finances face so much criticism and why, despite the conventional image of financiers as greedy and reckless, finance is a moral industry. Yaron was born and raised in Israel and served in Israeli military intelligence. In 1987, he moved to the United States where he received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas. He became an American citizen in 2003. And with that, I'll turn it over to Yaron. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. Thanks, Mitch. Thanks for making this possible. I know it's not easy in the world in which we live right now. Let me, a couple of things, a couple more housekeeping things, I guess. One is, I would find it more interesting, I guess, and more like a live event. If you guys switched on your video, thank you, Sophia. So those of you who can and who have the video capabilities, that would be great. It's just more lively, I think, if I can see you and if you guys can see each other. I think that is a benefit. Second, what I'd like to do is if I ask a question during the presentation, then just yell out what you think the answer is. Now unmute yourself first because yelling into the void of a muted microphone is not going to do any good. So unmute and then yell out the answer. Don't bother to raise a hand. Use the raise hand feature in the Q&A when you want to ask a question. But for questions that I ask you and kind of pause for an answer, just figure out where the unmute button is quickly and so you can do that quick and then just yell the answer back and we'll do it that way. This is going to be a little different than my usual talks just because it's weird to talk to a screen. I'm slowly getting used to it because I'm doing more and more of my talks this way since obviously live events, we've been barred from having them. But hopefully this will work and hopefully it won't be too awkward and I'm not going to talk for too long because the other thing about video is it's easy for you to get distracted. If you're in an auditorium in front of me, you're less likely to start looking at your phones and doing five, 56 other different things. But in front of your computer, I can see what you're doing.   So I'm going to try to talk less and then open up for Q&A and do more of a Q&A and then we get to your questions and the thing on everybody's mind, of course, is what is going on in the world right now, how this relates maybe to free markets and capitalism, how would this be dealt with if we actually lived on the capitalism? So all of those topics would be great if you want to bring them up in the Q&A afterwards. So one of the things that I think is going to happen out of this coronavirus is the anti-capitalists in the world are definitely going to use this crisis to argue that we need bigger and bigger government. We don't want capitalism. We don't want limited government. All right. So one of the things about speaking about capitalism that is always somewhat bewildering for people like me is that I have to defend capitalism. I mean, if you look at the facts, if you look at history, if you look at economic theory, if you look at the world reality, the success of capitalism is just overwhelming and in my view, to a large extent, self-evident. To the extent that countries and societies adopt free markets, to the extent that they do that, to that extent, they are materially successful in terms of wealth creation, in terms of standard of living, in terms of quality of life, in terms of length of life. To the extent countries adopt free markets or elements of capitalism, to that extent they succeed. The more capitalist a country is, the more successful it is. You can plot this on a graph. You can do a correlation, a regression analysis. And you will find that economic freedom is a significant, the most significant predictor of wealth, longevity, quality of life, standard of living that there is. You travel around the world and you look at places that are poor versus places that are rich. And it's obvious that the places that are rich have free markets. They have at least some elements of capitalism and the places that are poor don't. Whether they're socialists, whether there's some other form of statism, they don't have the prerequisites of a free market of a capitalist system in which individuals, companies are left free to transact with one another. So it's bewildering that we constantly have to defend capitalism and not only that. But that in the world we live in today, socialism, particularly among young people, is far more sexy, far more popular than capitalism is. And yet, again, when you travel around the world or when you read a history book or when you study history, it is obvious that to the extent that a country adopts socialism, to any degree it adopts socialism, to that extent, to that degree, it will be poor. To that extent, to that degree, people will suffer. Quality of life will deteriorate. Standard of living will be destroyed. Well, the best example today in the world are places like Venezuela.  At night of the Korean Peninsula and South Korea, which is relatively speaking, has some elements of capitalism and free markets, is all lit up and bright at night because people have electricity and people are doing stuff at night and there's activity. And if you look at the northern part of the peninsula, it's dark because they don't have the energy to run electricity. They don't go out. They don't have the wealth to do anything at night. They sit at home in darkness. That is the fate of socialists everywhere around the world. So again, to the extent you're socialist, you're poor. To the extent you're capitalist, you tend to be rich. And with that wealth comes higher quality of life, high standard of living and all the good things and better healthcare and longevity and all those things come with it. And again, we can go country after country, period in history after period in history. It doesn't matter when, if you adopt a free market, you succeed. So the question is, why socialism is so popular? And why is it that in countries that were more capitalist in the past, we have turned our back in the United States, in Europe to the capitalist system and have been drifting away from free markets since then. And look, when I talk about capitalism, I don't consider America to the capitalist. I consider America having elements of capitalism and a lot of elements of statism. America, like most countries in the world, are mixed economies. A mixture of state intervention, state control, state regulation and some freedom. And some countries have more freedom and less state. And some countries have more state and less freedom. But almost every country in the world is mixed. Now North Korea is almost all state. There is no freedom at all. But almost every other country is some mixture. And my argument is the more you emphasize the capitalism, the better off you are. And indeed, in areas where we've approached what I consider 100% capitalism, which is a system of government in which the government has no involvement in the economy. We thrive the most. We succeed the most. We grow economically the most. You know, maybe the best example of that is Hong Kong over the last 70, 80 years. If you look back at Hong Kong, and I don't know how many of you have been to Hong Kong, but I always tell audiences, if you've never been to Hong Kong, you've got to go at least once. It's, and it's changing. So go soon, you know, after the virus and everything, but go soon, right? Because things are changing there. But Hong Kong used to be a fishing village. It used to be poor. There was nothing there. And then the British came and they basically all they did is, you know, protect property rights, contract law, bring the British legal system. Other than that, they left everything alone. No welfare state, no government healthcare, no government regulations, no controls. They had some controls, particularly in real estate. But other than that, just left everything alone.  It has more skyscrapers than New York, than Manhattan. It has a GDP per capita, a measure of wealth that's higher than the United States. What it took us to generate in 250 years they have done in less than 70. It is truly an astounding place. Why? Because it's adopted these principles of freedom, of free markets, of leaving individuals free to make their own choices, to pursue their own dreams. My phone and my watch are buzzing the hell right now. And the reason they're buzzing is because the quasi-police state of Puerto Rico is reminding me that the curfew starts in exactly 30 minutes and that I can't leave the house and I can't drive anywhere and I can't step outside of my home starting at 30 minutes. So that was a little distracting. Sorry about that. And you can't turn it off unless you turn off the phone. It just blasts out there. So capitalism is a some amazing success story. You can look at the United States in the late 19th century, early 20th century. Look at growth rates. Look at the amount, number of immigrants we absorbed. Look at the industries we created. Look at the wealth we created. We became the richest, most powerful, both economically and militarily nation in the world because we were free, because we had as close as mankind has come to a truly capitalist economy. Yet over the last 100 years, we've been drifting away from that systematically. I don't care to a Republican administration, a Democratic administration, a mixed administration. The one thing that is a constant, every administration grows to all of government. Every administration shrinks the amount of freedom we have, shrinks the amount of economics freedom we have, and we have been drifting away from free markets, from capitalism for about 100 and, you know, seven years and certainly since 1913. And the question is why? If capitalism is such a great success as I've described it, if capitalism is all good as I argue, and I'm sure you'll have challenges to this in the Q&A, then why are we drifting away from it? I don't know of an economic argument against capitalism. I think the capitalist economists have won the economic arguments, all of them, and they won them 50 years ago, Hayek, Mises, Friedman, and there's a whole list of great free market economists that just are right and that the opponents are wrong, and it doesn't matter, the opponents of one in the public debate. Nobody believes capitalism is good economically. Nobody believes capitalism is sustainable. Nobody advocates for capitalism in politics or in our culture. And I think the reason for why that is is deeper than an economic argument. So what is that reason? So let me ask you this question. What are markets about? When we go into the marketplace, why are we going into marketplace? To do what? What's the purpose of markets? Real question. Anybody just yell it out? You have to yell, though, because I can't hear. To transact. So we're going to the marketplace in order to transact, right? But why are we transacting? What's the purpose of that transaction? To improve your overall outcomes, profitability, income. Yeah, to make your life better. So think about why does Steve Jobs make the iPhone? Why does anybody, any businessman make the stuff that they make? To make money is one reason, right? And often when I ask audiences that, somebody will say to make money and everybody will kind of giggle uncomfortably because to actually stand up and say to make money is, for the most part, people view it as a cause of embarrassment. It isn't something that you're proud of, right? So to make money, is it only about making money? Did Steve Jobs just wake up every morning and say, I'm going to make this because I want to make money? So also address the need or want in the market? Yeah, maybe, although I have to say one of the things about economics is that great businessmen don't address needs or wants. They create needs and wants, right? I didn't know I needed this until Steve Jobs taught me I needed this. Indeed, when cell phones first came out, I fought it. I didn't want cell phones. I didn't believe in cell phones. It seemed silly to me at a phone at home. I had a phone at work. What the hell do I need a phone for in between work and home, right? I learned very quickly that indeed my life depended on it and I couldn't survive without it. But the industry taught me that. By the way, one of the great things about good advertising and good marketing is that they teach you why this product is a value to you even before you know it's a value to you. But what? Okay, so he did this to make money, but what else? I mean, power, what's that? To acquire power to make power, make his life matter, right? Make his life matter, but I don't think it's like matter because of power. Suddenly to acquire wealth, maybe, but I think what makes his life matter is to do stuff he loved doing. Right to enjoy himself to create something in the world that reflected his vision, right? And then see it change the world out there. So Steve Jobs makes this because he wants to make money and he wants to create beautiful things because he values beautiful things. He wants to produce something of great value because it's a value to him to be productive. Steve Jobs makes the iPhone for whom? Every businessman makes what he makes for whom? For himself, for his own satisfaction, for his own pleasure, for his own wealth, for his own self-esteem. And then I remember when I bought my first iPhone, it was 2007, 2008. And I went to them all to buy my first iPhone and it was during the recession, right? Remember the 2008 financial crisis? And my thinking was, I'm going to buy my iPhone because I want to stimulate the US economy. I want to help my fellow man. I want to make sure that people don't lose their jobs. So I'm going to them all to buy an iPhone. That's why you guys go shopping, right?  You care about the salesman and you care about the economy and your economics professors taught you that consumption drives the economy and therefore you're going to consume because you want to make sure GDP goes up because you care about your fellow man. Now, I'm not going to ask how many of you actually shop for those reasons because I don't want to embarrass you and there's always one in the room who says yes. But no, why do you go shopping? Why do you go shopping?  Yeah, and why do you want it? Because it'll bring you satisfaction because you want it because it'll make your life better in some way. At least you hope that, right? Yeah, I mean, Roger says he shops locally for some of those reasons. I don't shop locally. I will never shop locally. I shop for the best price of highest quality and I don't care where it's produced. It might be local. It might not be local. But I shop for my satisfaction, for my values. Now, if it turns out that locally is a value to me, then I would shop locally because it's important to me. Now, I think shopping locally is bad for the locality and we can get into that in the Q&A. So I think the whole idea of shopping locally, shop, national, shop, Austin, shop, USA is bad for national, bad for Austin and bad for the USA. And we can get that to that in the Q&A. But market places are places in which we go to transact in an effort to make our lives better. The places we go to transact in order to make our lives as individuals better in pursuit of the values we have decided are good for us, both as producers and as consumers. And the beauty of the transaction is that they're win-win transactions. Nobody loses. So when I buy an iPhone for $1,000, why am I willing to pay $1,000 for the iPhone? What's the iPhone worth to me if I'm willing to pay $1,000 for it? Probably more. What's that? I think it's worth probably more. Yeah, so more, right? More than a thousand. And if you really think about it, and I'm not going to go through the whole exercise, but the iPhone is worth to me, I can't put a number on it. I mean, tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, we could go through an exercise of what this thing does. Just think to put down a list sometime on a piece of paper, all the things that this thing does. And then figure out what it would have cost you to replicate everything that this does. 15 years ago, how much it would have cost you to create a thing, however big that does what this does. 15 years ago. Now the answer to that is, you couldn't have done it. And if you could have, it would have cost you tens of millions of dollars. Yet, for $1,000, I can get unbelievable, you know, every piece of music ever written at a marginal cost of zero, every movie, books, a communication device that I could have only dreamt of 20 years ago in terms of video communication for anywhere in the world at a marginal cost of zero. They're like two people in this phone call or in this Zoom who probably remember long distance phone calls. Like when I moved to the United States in 1987, I never called my parents in Israel because it was so expensive. You just didn't do it today. I'll call anybody anywhere in the world without giving it one second of thought because the cost is exactly zero. When I zoomed with my entire extended family the other day, you know, nephews and cousins and siblings, and we were all live on Zoom and cost me nothing. So I pay for that more than 1000 Oscars is worth more than 1000 to me, and Apple makes a profit, and my life is better. It's both benefiting from the transaction. And indeed, why do you pay as much as you pay for bread at the grocery store because the bed is worth more to you than the three bucks you're paying for it. And it's worth less than the grocery store. That's why they're willing to sell it for three bucks. Every transaction you make, you win and the other party hopefully profits. And indeed, in a free market in a healthy productive market, that is true of all transactions they are win win transactions with both parties benefit from engaging in them. But the whole process, the whole essence of capitalism is about the pursuit of self interest.  And yet, since we've been very, very young, this big, what about parents taught us about self interest? Morally, what is our focus supposed to be on pursuing your self interest, maximizing values. What's that? Morally, others. Others. Morally, you're supposed to focus on other people. Indeed, to be good, to be moral, to be noble, to be virtuous means to be self less, not to be selfish, to be self less. It means to sacrifice for others. It means to give. It needs to share. That's what morality demands of us. It demands that we be altruistic altruism means other ism altru means other. So the whole focus of our morality morality we've all been raised on is other people. Don't think of yourself first, think of yourself last. That's a direct quote from my mother. She didn't really mean it. She wanted me to be successful and all that. But that's what morality means to her. That's what morality means to all of us. I mean, we think that the most virtuous thing we can do is to be self less, not to think about ourselves. Now we can't live that way. None of us wants to live that way.  If you wanted to be Mother Teresa, you wouldn't be on this call. You're off MBAs after all, right? But we all know deep down that to be truly virtuous, to be truly moral, to be truly good, we would be Mother Teresa. And that our pursuit of an MBA, particularly if you're in finance, is a moral weakness. And it's interesting because the more code we live with is not even, it's not even that it cares about other people, because it doesn't. Like Mother Teresa barely helped that many people. What does it actually care about? I'm just reading a question. Yeah, we can get to that. And if I don't get, Sean, if I don't get to the question, I'll address it in the Q&A. I mean, Mother Teresa didn't help that many people. She didn't change the world. She helped some, maybe a few thousand people in India from starving to death, right? But she is revered as a moral agent. Why? Because she was completely selfless. She didn't have fun. She didn't enjoy herself. She didn't profit from it. She didn't get any benefit. The only benefit we assume she got potentially, maybe, is in an afterlife. But in this life, she was miserable. She suffered. And that is what makes her a hero. That is what makes her a saint. Think about, let's take somebody like Bill Gates. Bill Gates starts Microsoft. He, what is Microsoft?  By the way, just a general question. How do you become a billionaire in a free market? Well, you're not, yeah, Roger. A ton of feedback. I can't hear anything. No, no. No working. Sorry. Somebody else? How do you become a billionaire? You create an industry, Roger says. Yeah, but it's not, I know, I know people who've created industries and haven't become billionaires. You know, they're all that ton of entrepreneurs, that ton of businesses, that ton of inventors, that tons of innovators who have done something but haven't become billionaires. What does it take to be one of those things and then to become a billionaire on top of that? Well, you have to create something that is a value to hundreds of millions of people. That is hundreds of millions of people want what you are producing. And they're willing to pay you how much? Well, more than it costs you to produce. So you have a profit. And why are they willing to pay you that much money for the thing that they're buying? Because it's worth more to them than the money they're giving up. So the only way to become a billionaire is to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, potentially billions of people. And if you do it over and over and over again, year after year, then you become a billionaire. Almost just simple math, right? Make a profit on a product you sell. And the reason people buy it is because it makes their life better.  So the only way to become a billionaire is to change the world is to make the world a better place. It's to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of billions of people. And indeed, if you look at Microsoft, the world is completely different. The very fact that we're doing what we're doing right now would not be possible without a Microsoft. That it's standardized computing at some point. The fact that there are people out there all over the world benefiting from computers. Benefiting from what computers provide. Benefiting from the increased productivity that computers have created. Benefiting from the fact that computers had made even the distribution of food aid to the poorest of the poor in the most distant parts of the planet possible and cheaper and easier. Even they are benefiting from the existence of Microsoft. So to me, Bill Gates, when he was at Microsoft, did more to improve the fate of humanity than a million Mother Teresa's. And yet, how much moral, ethical credit do we give Bill Gates for founding Microsoft and becoming the richest man in the world? Zero? Negative? We hate him. He's so rich.  And why do we hate him? Why, why, why don't we love him? Why don't we just say, look, the guy changed the world? You know, he's a hero. Why don't we name boulevards after him, built statues for him? What did he do that is so sinful that we're not venerating him as a businessman? Morally. We like him as an entrepreneur, but morally. Well, what he did do is he made a profit. He benefited from it. He became the richest man in the world. And that's a sin. So even though he did good for other people, the fact that he enjoyed it, had fun doing it, made a lot of money. That wipes out any benefit he made, he created to mankind. When does Bill Gates become okay morally? When does he become a good guy?  No, that's no good. You have to leave Microsoft and go where? Start a foundation. Start giving it all away. Then you're a good guy. Creating the wealth and giving it away. That we like. Now, he's not a saint yet. Right? Why is he not a saint yet? Why are we not building statues naming boulevards after him? What's the problem that Bill Gates still has? He's still rich. He's still rich. To be a saint, and I haven't talked to the Pope, so I can't give a T this, but my guess is to be a saint, you'd have to give all his money away. You'd have to move into a tent. And if you could just bleed a little bit for us, show us some suffering. Then we think he was a moral ethical hero. None of us would want to be him, just like none of us wants to be Mother Teresa. But we think he was a moral hero.  They're usually in the process of dying a brutal death, right? Sacrificing themselves for some higher cause. That's the essence of morality that we live by. And my argument is that that morality is incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism is about flourishing. It's about happiness. It's about pursuit of values. It's about self-interest. On morality, it's about giving stuff up. It's about being selfless. It's about sacrificing. It's not about trading. Capitalism is about trading. What's the difference between a sacrifice and a trade? In a trade, I give something up and I expect to get what in return. Something of greater value to me. In a sacrifice, I give something up and I expect to get what in return. Nothing or something of less value. Then how come a sacrifice is better than a trade? To me, a trade is like a million times. Like a trade is win-win. A sacrifice is win-lose. So why don't we trade? Why isn't that virtue? Yet sacrifice is virtue. Win-lose is virtue. Losing is a good thing in life. Why? So we live with an ethic that basically says losing is the greatest virtue in life. Sacrificing is the greatest virtue. Thinking of others, not of yourself. Pursuing profit. Pursuing your own interest. Pursuing your love. Pursuing your values. A model at best, a model at worst.  But I know when I took it, when I got my MBA, it didn't teach me ethics. Basically the rule, the only principle I got from the business ethics class was, look, you know, we kind of shouldn't be making money, but we kind of have to make money because that's the only way we can help people. So we should make just enough money so we can help people and we should give it all the way otherwise. And by the way, we can't really have a moral principle around that. So just don't do anything that would embarrass you if it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. That was the moral principle from business ethics. You know, don't embarrass yourself. Not a great principle by which to guide your life or your business. So in my view, capitalism is hated. Capitalism is distrusted, not because it doesn't work. Not because it doesn't create wealth. Not because it doesn't create a high standard of living. Not because it doesn't work. But because it's all based on our ethical system. It just is not right. It's not noble. It's not just. And this is why the left wins all the time. Because for the left, the left is motivated by morality, which is to their credit. And they're motivated by justice, which again is to their credit. They have a wrong conception in my view of morality and justice, but they're motivated by ethics. And the side that defends capitalism has nothing to say about morality or ethics. Except for Ayn Rand. And this is Ayn Rand's real big contribution to the debate about capitalism. Ayn Rand asks a simple question. Why should you live for others? Why should the purpose of morality be other people? Why is their happiness more important than yours? Why is their values more important than yours? Why shouldn't you live for yourself? Properly understood self. Why is the profit more than bad? Why is building, creating, making, not the virtue? Yeah, giving away is okay. But why is giving away where we get all our moral credit from? And she challenges the morality of altruism. And she proposes an alternate. A morality of egoism. A morality of self interest. A moral code that asked the question, if I truly cared about my own life, or I wanted to live and I want to be happy and I want to be successful. How do I do it? Because morality is supposed to give you the principles by which to live. The principles on which to guide your life, to choose between right and wrong. Good and evil. So what should those principles be? She asks. Well, what is the most important thing for human life?  What is the thing that makes us human? And don't say thumbs. Our minds. Our minds. What makes us human is our capacity to reason. Our rational faculty. Everything that we have from the food on our table to the zoom that we're using. To the roof above our heads is a product of somebody's mind. Somebody's ideas. Somebody's imagination. Somebody's thoughts. Discoveries. All human values are products of thinking. If you really care about yourself. What you venerate above all your greatest value is your mind. And your greatest virtue is exercising that mind. Being rational, living a rational life. And of course, it's not just about thinking, because to survive, you can't sit in a room and just think, what do you have to do?  And you have to create, get, produce the food. The products, the roof, the things that you need in order to live and in order to survive and in order to thrive. So you have to be productive. You have to go out there and make the stuff necessary for your own existence. So fine land. The two most important virtues. A rationality and productiveness. The idea that it's your moral responsibility to take care of your own. Well being and to produce values is the only way you can really trade with other people value for value. So for land capitalism is a moral system. Because it is the only system that leaves us free to think for ourselves. Act on those thoughts. And engage with one another, not as thieves, not as exploiters, not as slave owners and slaves, but as traders. As people who exchange values in win-win relationships. So for all morality is not about sacrifice, it's about trade. It's not about losing. It's about creating as many win-win relationships as you can in your life. It's not about giving and not about sharing. Morality is about creating, building, making. For Ryan's philosophy, which he called objectivism, for objectivism.  Yeah, he wants to give it away, fine. But that's not what makes him a good guy. What makes him a good guy is that he changed the world. That he took care of himself. He used his mind, he used his energy, he created values. He didn't force them on anybody. He traded with people. He made his own life better by making the lives of other people around him better. He took care of himself, his family, and by extension, all of us. That's what makes him a hero. That's what makes him a good guy, a morally good guy. And indeed, businessmen generally are the greatest benefactors the world has ever seen. Nobody has benefited mankind more than businessmen. Nobody is responsible for the extension of human life, for the quality of human life more than businessmen. And yet, they're the villains of every story, of every TV movie, of every TV show. Because why? Well, because they're self-interested. Because they're out there doing their own thing, using their own minds, using their own effort in pursuit of their own values, and they they make money at it. They are self-interested. So if we care about capitalism, and more importantly, we care about the results that capitalism produces, then we need a shift in our moral attitudes, in our ethical attitudes. We need to reject the morality of sacrifice, and altruism, and a focus on other. And we need instead to embrace the morality of self, but not self as an exploiter, not self as a lying, cheating, stealing SOB, but self as a rational, productive human being. Somebody who takes responsibility for his own life, works, produces, creates, builds, and then trades at whatever level you can do it. Very few of us can be bogaters. Very few of us. And life is not about money. It's about doing what you love. It's about pursuing your values. Money is just one reflection in one particular area of life, of those values. But many of us choose not to be rich, like people like me who are teachers. No teacher is rich from teaching, right? We do it because we love it. So it's a morality that's about the pursuit of your own happiness. And at the end of the day, that is what it is something that the founders of this country understood deep down with all the contradictions and the problems with the founding of America. I think the greatest thing about it is there was founded on this idea that we'll all have an inalienable right. We all have inalienable freedoms to pursue what? Well, to pursue our lives. To pursue our happiness. And it is the American Declaration of Independence that ultimately makes capitalism possible because capitalism is the system in which we're left free to pursue our happiness. And what Rand provides us is a morality that says, pursuing your happiness is good. It's small. It's the essence of morality. It's the purpose of morality. What other purpose could there be to life? Other than to live well, to live the best life that you can live. You only get one shot at it. Matters of all, make something of it. So what we need today is not an economic revolution, not a political revolution, but what we need today is a moral revolution. All right. Thank you. That's my kind of thing. I'll take questions from you. I could start with this one that's here on the chat, but feel free to unmute yourself or raise a hand or just ask a question. So one is, could you extrapolate on the misconception of greed? Some of the Milton Friedman argued often, how can we overcome these misconceptions? I mean, greed is just a form of expressing your self-interest and it can be in a healthy way or it can be unhealthy. Greed can definitely be unhealthy. The problem is our perception of self-interest. As long as we have a negative perception of self-interest, then greed is what is greed? Greed is a single-minded pursuit of filling the blank. Usually it's money, but there are periods in life where it's not that bad if you're an investment banker to have a single-minded pursuit of money. As long as you're not cheating, lying, stealing in order to do it, but working 70, 80 hours a day in order to, you know, which is what you'll be expected to work if you go to Goldman Sachs after you get your MBA. And your single-mindedly pursuit on that, and then people will call you greedy, but what's bad about that? But if greed is then that pursuit of money is then an excuse to lying, cheating and stealing and cutting corners and doing, then it's wrong, but it's not the greed that it's wrong, it's what you did with it. It's the actions that you took. So greed in and of itself is just a single-minded pursuit. Greed used to be applied to food. So people, you know, people, if they said you're greedy, it meant that you ate too much, right? You were single-mindedly focused on eating rather than on, I guess, other stuff. It's neutral, I think. But the thing that people really find offensive is the self-interest. Even if you don't lie, steal or cheat, they're coming after you. Because it's the fact that you're pursuing your self-interest that's offensive. Okay, another question on the chat. You qualified objectivism, for example, by excluding slavery and focused on trading. But you also said you buy the least expensive product and don't care, consider where they come from. How do you square those values for products produced in ways known to be exploitative? Often in third world countries with no market restrictions, would providers, the moral bumpers in these situations, who provides them all bumpers in these situations? Well, you do. So let me clarify what I meant by that. If I thought that a particular product was made with slave labor, I wouldn't buy it. Not only that, I encourage everybody not to buy it. I don't think it is my self-interest ever to promote and to endorse and to support slavery or what you could loosely call exploitation. But I consider exploitation when people are forced to work in a place that they don't choose to do. They are tied to the machines and they are whipped if they misbehave. Now, there are certain countries in which that happens. And if I know that is happening, I would certainly not buy their products. But the idea that because children work in a factory in Southeast Asia, they're being exploited, I think is wrong and really misguided. In every country's development, there is a phase in which children must work. I know this is not pleasant to hear. I know nobody wants to think about it, but it's an actual fact. When countries are poor, what do children do? They do one of two things. They either die or they work. Those are the only two choices they have. And usually the work that they do is in the farm. Hard labor from dust to dawn. It is for starvation wages because they're basically growing the food that they will eat. And their parents have to have them work because if they don't work, they can't feed them. When a company like, let's say Nike, just because Nike was in the news a long time ago for having going in and creating what are called sweatshops in places and employing children. When a company like Nike comes into a community like that and offers these children wages that are higher than the value they're creating on the farm, they can now go work in a factory, make a little bit more money than they did in the farm, and their parents can be a little bit more well off than they were before, and they can eat better, and they are learning a skill. Over time, as more companies move into a country like this, the parents become more productive, start earning more money, and at some point the parents earn enough money to do what? To take the kid out of the factory and put him in school because no parent or very, very few parents want their kids to be in a sweatshop. And indeed, you can track this country after country after country. As the country as individuals in the country get richer, because capital is flowing in industry is flowing in, as these countries become richer, fewer and fewer kids working in in so called sweatshops. And when they hit a particular level, a particular level of income, children disappear from the workplace. Once children disappear from the workplace, the government usually passes a law that bans child labor. Now that happened in England in the 19th century, it happened in the United States in the early 20th century. Once children are no longer in the labor force, government will ban them, will ban child labor. But you cannot go from a poor country to becoming, let's say, a middle class country without going through a phase which is not pleasant. Nobody's happy about it, but it's a reality where people are working for very low wages and where some children are working as well. When we deny them the ability to work, we deny them the ability to become richer. We deny them the ability to grow their economy. We deny them the ability to keep their children alive. We are being cruel to them. We're not helping them. We're not being good to them. So when I buy a product from Indonesia produced in a sweatshop, I actually embrace the fact that I'm helping some family make more money than they ever had before. And if you think about China and put aside that some Chinese products indeed are made by the equivalent of slave labor because they have political prisoners producing stuff and building stuff. And it's just China, some parts of China are just horrific, but mostly China has factories that have people working at wages that we consider ridiculous. But they are working there because for them, these wages are amazing. Indeed, when the mother or father come in from the countryside and work at one of these factories, they are making enough money for themselves to live. And then they are sending money back to the countryside where typically a grandparent is taking care of the kids while they are in the city working. And over time, their wages rise because they become more productive. And ultimately, they'll bring the kids to the city to live with them. And they're slowly rising. And if you look at China over the last 30 to 40 years, if you look at Indonesia, if you look at Thailand, if you look at even Vietnam, but certainly if you look at Taiwan and South Korea and Hong Kong and Singapore. You look at countries that 50 years ago were dirt poor, poorer than anybody in the United States, poorer than you can imagine unless you visited really, really, really poor countries. And yet today they have vast middle classes. Not to say there are no poor people still in those countries, but over a billion people have been brought out of poverty, extreme poverty in the last 30 years. Just a question. Curious. How many people do you think today live in extreme poverty? What the United Nations calls extreme poverty, which is under, I think it's $3 a day. What percentage of the world population lives in extreme poverty today? Less than one. Eight percent. How many? Less than one. What else? I'm thinking like seven or eight percent. You guys are better educated than most audiences. So 8%, 8%. 30 years ago, almost over 30% of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Over the last 30 years, billions of people over a billion people have come out of extreme poverty. Now, you think that was the best news ever. Nobody cares. Nobody even knows it. And why are we celebrating in the streets? And why are they out of extreme poverty? Because of capitalism, because factories have opened up in their neighborhoods, because people have moved to where the factories are because of so-called sweatshops, because of production and creation and building and making and producing, not because of foreign aid, not because of socialism. Socialism is not raised one person out of poverty in the entire history of the world. It's all because countries like South Korea and Taiwan, you know, South Korea 50 years ago was poorer than North Korea after the Korean War, the end of the Korean War. South Korea was poorer than North Korea. Today it's a gazillion times richer, all because they embraced a little bit principles of free markets. So I don't buy the whole narrative of exploitation. I am happy to buy stuff from foreign countries because I know it makes them richer. Indeed, the next wave of so-called exploitation, the next wave of sweatshops is going to be in Africa. And I hope that happens. And I think it will be a sign that Africa is becoming richer because you will be seeing production move from Asia to Africa as Asia becomes richer and becomes more of a service economy, like our economy, and production, real, you know, manual labor will move to Africa. And that'll be the best thing ever for Africa if it develops the property rights and the capitalist things that are necessary, you will have law, you know, to facilitate it, and you'll see a spike in wealth in Africa. You're already seeing it in place like Rwanda, Botswana, you know, Namibia, where they've adopted some semblance of capitalism. Those are the fastest growing economies today in the world. And they have sweatshops because that's part of the process. That's part of coming out of poverty. There's no shortcuts. There's no shortcuts. Iran, do we have time for one more question? Oh, wow. Time flew by. I've got three. Can we do three? Absolutely. If you have time. You guys, you guys feel free to leave if you want to, but I'm willing to stay. Okay, can you share your opinion of how COVID will impact capitalism and the view of capitalism in the US? Good question. I did a whole episode of my podcast yesterday about this. And basically, it's one of the most depressing shows I've ever done. I think COVID is very, very bad for capitalism. I think all the lessons learned from COVID are bad for freedom. So what are people learning from COVID? They're learning that we need socialized medicine. We need the government control medicine. We can't trust markets. We need a big powerful government to isolate us and, you know, make sure we don't all get sick. We need government to make massive investments in, you know, vaccines. So I think COVID, for many people, is viewed as, see, we need more government, not less. Now, I would argue that the failure that we, in my view, the failure of what we're seeing around the COVID response is a failure of big government, not a failure of capitalism. I think that with less government, with less responsibilities for government, with government not involved in healthcare, with government not involved in insurance, with government not involved in all these things, we would have survived and done much better with COVID than we're doing right now. If, you know, government has screwed this up from the beginning in ways that private companies would never have done.   Who has an incentive? What's that? Businesses. Businesses? Which, which in particular? Like business that loses money, the sicker you are. Alliance. But business is directly, it's not secondary effect, it's a direct effect. Insurance companies? Insurance companies. Imagine if insurance companies were told, you know, the government's only job during a virus in my view, a pandemic in my view, is to quarantine people who have it. The only job of government is to protect individual rights, and the only way rights are violated is when you who are infected interact with me who are not. The government's job is to figure out you're infected and to isolate you. That's the responsibility. So who has an incentive to minimize infections, to minimize days in hospital, if nobody else is going, is going to do this? Who has an incentive to plan, to have enough ventilators at hospitals, to have enough doctors, to have enough beds, to have enough equipment? Insurance companies and the hospitals themselves. So we live in a world where we have no real free markets, not in insurance and not in health care. So if we had, first of all, I think, you know, for example, the first thing would have happened is we would have had millions of tests available, because we wouldn't have had to go through the FDA and the CDC and all these organizations that screwed this up thoroughly from the beginning, and didn't provide enough testing equipment.  So everybody wants to test and you want to test as many people as possible, so you can find the people who have it and quarantine them quickly. And if you do that, this crisis becomes much less of a crisis. All you have to do is look at South Korea and how they dealt with this. They dealt with this so much better, so much more efficiently, so much more productively than we have, because we rely for everything on the federal government. And on state governments. And the only solution they can come up with is shut everything down.   Okay, shut everything down. We'll use force. We'll use coercion. We'll use the hammer. You know, I think COVID is going to make is going to be viewed as see markets couldn't handle it when the truth is the exact opposite. The truth is that the only reason we're coming out of it, going to come out of it ultimately is that companies are creating private companies are creating massive numbers of testing equipment. The companies are creating treatments companies are creating vaccines.  The private sector stepping up in ways that the government is only in my view screwing up. So, I'm going to use some of these others you can go on and on and COVID and if you're interested in COVID. A lot of my podcast from the last month or two have been on COVID. I've done many of them and you can find my podcast on my YouTube channel on any podcasting app just put my name in and you'll find it. Could you share your thoughts about the leveling playing field to me the issue with capitalism is not everyone is in a position to be able to play in the first place. This is under capitalism real capitalism 99.99% of the people on a position to play. They're not in an equal position to play, but they're in a position to play. Equality is a false God. There is no such thing as equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Equality is equality, political equality, equality of rights. In other words, the freedom to make the most of your life. That's it. And it's absolutely true that if you're born in a poor neighborhood in national, you're going to have few opportunities that if you're born in a rich neighborhood in national, that's life. And it's immoral to penalize me for having more opportunities. What is moral is to provide the most opportunities for everybody. That is to maximize opportunities to provide that poor kid, the most opportunities possible for him to make the best life he can for himself. That sort of morality necessitates and that to me is exactly what capitalism does by freeing people up to think to produce to create to build to trade. You're creating more jobs, more wealth, more opportunities than any other system known to man. And therefore you're maximizing the opportunity of everybody in the system to do well in life. You're not guaranteeing it. You're not equating it you can equate it. I always give this example. How do you equate my opportunity to play basketball with LeBron James's I mean play if we did one on one if we won one on one against each other. How do you make me and LeBron James be able to play on the same court have the opportunity. How do you give me the opportunity score point and LeBron James. Like you haven't seen me play basketball, but I can guarantee you. I'm not scoring even one point every single shot I make is going to be blocked. If I ever get possession of the ball. How do you equate the opportunities between us. Anybody have enough of a scheming mind to figure out how we equate the opportunities for basketball between me because I'm really upset about inequality in basketball. I don't have the same opportunities LeBron James had he was born with better genes and he's worked much harder than I have. So what I still want to pay basketball like he has to help with how much he's worked. Your parents worked really really hard some of you worked really really hard to give you lots of opportunities. And now what we should do is you should penalize you for that for all your parents hard work. So the only way to make me and LeBron James equal in basketball is usually somebody says in the audience by breaking his legs. Why? How does LeBron James deserve breaking his legs just because I can't play basketball. So it's true that a lot of people don't have great opportunities. And you might even say it's sad that they don't have better opportunities. But that doesn't give you anybody the right to break LeBron James' legs or to break Bill Gates' legs or to break anybody's legs. In other words to use force on other people to reduce their opportunities and not to enhance somebody else's. So life is unequal in its opportunities and in its outcome and you should celebrate that because that is a good thing. We're all different. This is the kind of you know meme if you want if you want it in a meme form right inequality. Economic inequality is a feature of freedom not a bug.  There's no way that that doesn't happen. We have different skills different talents different abilities different moral characters different everything different interests. We're going to produce different amounts. And it doesn't matter. The fact that we come from different backgrounds. Yeah that plays into it. All right. Let's see with the recent announcement of the end of Bernie's campaign. It was written that he appealed to younger voters who came of age after 911 and subsequent war, the recession crippling school debt. And now covert example of healthcare limitations and our current system to them capitalism failed and socialism has become more attractive. How can we convince others who were pushed who were personally failed by capitalism or a sacrifice required of having capital of society that capitalism isn't bad image only by bad actors. It's not bad actors. It's nothing to do with capitalism. 911 was not caused by capitalism. I think that's pretty obvious. But importantly, the financial crisis wasn't caused by capitalism. The financial car crisis was caused by government regulation government intervention government distortion and perversion of markets. And I can't prove that to you here in five minutes. I have an eight hour I think it's eight hours course on the financial crisis, where I go into nitty gritty financial detail on how everything that went wrong in the financial crisis is the fault of some government regulations some government control some government that is true of the great depression that is true of the great inflation of the 1970s. All these economic crises were caused by government. And it's not hard to see once you dig in into the details. So I encourage you it's on YouTube it's for free. Just put your Ron Brook financial crisis and you'll get now that you're sitting at home with nothing to do. You can watch eight or listen to eight hours of me talking about the financial crisis, but nobody out there has been betrayed by campers. They've been betrayed by the mixed economy. They've been betrayed by government. They've been betrayed by socialization of the health care system. They've been, you know, we have socialized medicine in America. You know, it's not popular to say this but America 70% of health care socialized. Right Medicare and Medicaid, a socialized medicine for poor people and people who are over 65. And that's most of health care. But if you're over 65 you've got Singapore universal healthcare. It already exists. This is why Democrats want Medicare for all, because they want socialism for all. They have socialism only for people over 65. That's not capitalism. That's socialism. It's socialism for some. And I would argue that all the problems that exist in our health care system, all the problems that exist in our health care system are consequence of Medicare, Medicaid and state and federal regulation of our insurance companies in our hospitals. And of course the FDA is regulation over pharmaceutical industry. It's all regulations and controls. And again, to the extent that we are free, we are successful to the extent that we're regulated controlled, we fail. So all these people were not, were not failed by crooks exploiters or cheaters. They were failed by, by politicians, by regulators, by presidents. You know, the biggest criminals of the financial crisis are Dodd, Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank. And their punishment was that they got a bill called Dodd-Frank named after them that basically ups the regulation even beyond what it was before 2008. But remember that the housing, mortgage and banking industries are the most regulated businesses in America and they failed. That should raise some, you know, question marks. Why are the most regulated businesses the ones that failed? Maybe it's the regulations that are the problem. Anyway, so I think the whole narrative, the whole way we teach economic history, the whole way we tell stories about economics, the whole way we tell the story of the Great Depression, the whole way we tell the story of the Great Recession, the whole way we tell the story of American business is fundamentally false. It's one big lie. And I know I sound like a crazy radical, but I'm a radical. I'm not crazy. I'm actually telling you the truth. And, you know, I'll give you one simple illustration of this. In 1776, the United States was a third-rate colony. It was a third-rate colony. The British barely fought us. They were much, they were busy with the real powers like the French and the Spanish. We were poor. By 1914, the United States was the richest country basically in the world, most powerful militarily and economically. How did that happen? How did that happen? How did we get so rich? We had natural resources that countries that have more than us. Not because of socialism, we had none. Not because of big government. Government was tiny, like 80% smaller than it is today. What, what did it... Well, in my view, it was businessman. It was Carnegie and Mellon and Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. They built this country. They created the wealth. They built the industries. How do we call them? How do we, when we teach them in high schools, what are they called? Robber Barons. Robber Barons. Now, I can't think of a greater injustice. These people made this country. Nobody contributed more to America than Rockefeller. And yet he's considered a villain. By making oil cheap, he completely changed this country for the better. Much more than the impact Bill Gates had. Same with J.P. Morgan. Same with Carnegie.  And yet we call them Robber Barons. That's the kind of history we've been talking. Nobody teaches the 19th century. Nobody teaches the greatness of capitalism and the greatness of businessman. Because we're taught by people who are being trained by the left. By people who are anti-capitalism, whether left or right, because the right today is just as anti-capitalist as the left. So I don't want to be, I don't want you to think I'm just anti-left when I'm equally anti pretty much everybody. Why do you think so many people oftentimes highly educated or drawn to socialism despite its historical dark past? Because it's the only system they can consider that is moral because it's consistent with their altruistic ethics. And the more educated you are, the more you try to live up to your ethical standards at least in your mind. You don't do it in your life, but in your mind you want to pretend to be virtuous. And the way to be virtuous is to advocate for socialism. Because socialism is consistent with the morality of sacrifice, the morality of altruism. And to promote capitalism means you're selfish SOB. And morally they can't retain that. So it goes back to my whole point of my talk. It's all about ethics. I like that LeBron James mentioned Kurt von der Root wrote a short story named Harrison Bergeron. That's a great story that gives an impactful view of how government tries to equate all people. Yeah, that's a brilliant story and it's not science fiction. Sometime you'll invite me back to give a talk on inequality and I'll tell you, I'll give you the example of the real case where government tries to equate everybody and what comes of that. And real story happened in the last century, not that long ago. Okay, how can you talk about shop local idea that was mentioned? Can you talk about shop local idea that was mentioned earlier? I mean, if somebody is producing something locally and it's a poor quality or higher price, then why are you rewarding them over somebody that might be in a neighboring state? But who is producing at a higher quality and lower price? Who are you helping and who are you hurting him? You're helping the less productive, the less innovative, the less efficient, and you're hurting progress. You're hurting people who are moving us forward, which means become more efficient, which means higher quality at the lower price. So you're hurting our economy, you're hurting the best for the sake of mediocrity, the fact that the mediocrity happens to live next door to you. But the fact is that that hurts everybody that lowers all of our standard of living. Money doesn't, money doesn't stay local. The whole idea of local is economically bizarre to me, right?  And how rich do you think we would be if we did that? We'd be really, really, really poor. We'd be like Africa today is or like we were all, excuse me, we were all 300 years ago. We'd be really, really poor. The whole reason why we are rich today is because we live in a division of labor society in which we are free to produce and buy from the most efficient, most cost effective, most highest quality producer. No matter where they live in the world, never mind in our community. The more we bring things back to our community or even to the US of A, the poorer we will be. There is nothing more valuable today than free trade. And I don't care what the Chinese subsidize or don't subsidize, we should have free trade. We should have zero tariffs. That raises our standard of living. Because what it does is it gives us the benefit of the division of labor across 8 billion people instead of only across 350 million people. And if you only buy local, you're only benefiting from the division of labor in your little community, half a million people in national, I don't know how big national is. I mean, you can buy an iPhone because iPhones are not produced in national. Now you do, but there's no value to buying local. You're not helping anybody. Indeed, you're hurting people. You're hurting the best producers out there. You're hurting the people who are investing the most in being productive. So buying, I always say buy America is un-American. Buying local is un-local, whatever the hell that means. Buying local is anti-progress. It's anti-prosperity. You want to buy from the best, and the best might be local. Like if you're buying organic vegetables, yeah, you got to buy them local because by the time they come in from somewhere else, it's taken too long and they're not quite as fresh if you value organic vegetables. But it doesn't apply to almost anything else. And if this business goes out of business, your local business, what will happen? That capital that's in that business gets deployed to better users. Right now, the reason it went out of the business is because it can't produce a value. It can't trade in win-win relationships. So that value, including the labor, the people who worked in it, will get deployed elsewhere in the economy. Some higher value activities. So Bank of C is not a bad thing. Shutting down businesses is not a bad thing. It's a way for labor and capital to be redeployed to more efficient users. All right, quickly. I said there were three questions. Now there are 55. But to give an alternative view, I did not like the LeBron James mention. He provides entertainment that society has placed a high value on. Those who inherited wealth did not work like LeBron to provide value to society. And they don't have to provide any value to reap awards. I just like, I think it's like apples and oranges. Nobody raised the issue of inheritance. So that wasn't a comparison. The fact is that almost everybody on the list of richest people in America today, possibly with the exception of the Waltons, didn't inherit their money. They created it. And they created it by making all of us better off. And to me, it is bizarre to think that LeBron James earned his money, but Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos didn't. I mean, LeBron James certainly earned his money. I value what LeBron James does. Good for him. And by the way, the only reason LeBron James earned so much money is because of globalization. Because the NBA has watched all over the world and he has such a huge market. And it's the same reason why some of our billionaires are so rich. It's because they sell across the entire world. They don't have a market just of 350 million. They have a market of 8 billion. Now, inherited wealth, it's not that I'm offended by taking the money away from somebody who didn't make it. What offends me about people who resent inherited wealth? Let's say I make a lot of money. It's my money.  And I decide to burn it all. Literally make a pile of all the money and burn it. Or invest it in certain stocks that are equivalent to burning it.  Whose business is it? Why isn't any of your business, if I decide to do that? Why is it state's business? Why is it anybody's business? Instead of burning it, I decide to give it to my kids. None of your business. My kids might not deserve it. I don't know. But that's my decision, not yours. None of your business, what I do with my money. With my property. It's being taxed already. You're going to double tax it because you don't like my kids. What if they're really, really nice and really, really productive? Who are you to decide how much my kids should get? Isn't it my decision just like it would be my decision to burn it all? So I think the whole idea of a wealth tax, the whole idea of penalizing inheritance. What you're penalizing is the creator of the wealth. You're penalizing LeBron James. LeBron James entertained us all. He's got a pile of money. Now he wants to decide what to do with that money. Why is it anybody's business, whether he gives it to his kids, or donates it to charity, or invests it in a business, or burns it all? None of your business.  That wasn't the point. There was no issue of inherited money then. But I have no problem with inherited money. It's none of my business. Perhaps a key driver is their answers to success was that their children and grandchildren could benefit. Yeah. I mean, I work really, really hard to provide as many opportunities as I can for my kids. I'm sure you will and do if you have kids. Who are you to tell me to stop? No, your kids should have the same opportunities. What about times like today where we need ventilators, but some critical parts can only be made on scale aboard? Why is that a problem? As far as I know, if there's a manufacturer in Mexico and Brazil or even in China that can make ventilator parts, if you pay them, they'll produce probably faster, cheaper and more efficiently than a U.S. company can. So I want fast and cheap. So right now, as we are shutting down production because we're isolating ourselves, China is ramping up production because it's over COVID. Great. Now is when the time we want to import a bunch of stuff from China because they're on the uptake. Right now, the western Europe and the United States are shutting down because of COVID. COVID hasn't affected Latin America quite as much.  There's no isolation going on in Mexico. Great. International supply chains are working beautifully. There's no problem of international supply chains. There's no case that I know of where China has said, you're offering us gazillion dollars for ventilators. You know what?  We're not giving it to you. It just doesn't happen. It's not happening. It's not happening in Mexico. It's not happening in Canada. On the contrary, they happy. I mean, New York just got over the weekend, a thousand ventilators from whom? From a Chinese company because China wants to make money because the Chinese company, not China, wants to make money and they sold New York ventilators. Isn't that cool? Couldn't we be celebrating that? Globalization is wonderful, fantastic, phenomenal, the best thing in the world, even in or even more so in the midst of a pandemic. All right. I think I'm done. That was all the questions. All right. Thanks, everybody. This was fun. I hope you enjoyed it. And look forward to doing, you know, maybe visiting you one day, doing it in person. Well, thank you so much, Iran. I know that applause is hard to do over Zoom when everybody's muted, but I know everybody's applauding and thank you so much again for making the time to do this. My pleasure. And remember, guys, my goal here is primarily not to convince you, but primarily to make you think. So I probably said a lot of things that you went, whoa, nobody ever says that. That's crazy. That's good. I hope I did that because it should create some cognitive dissonance, get you thinking in a particular different way. Hopefully ultimately you'll come to agree with me. But if you started out disagreeing with me at the end of today, you completely agree with everything I said. Something's wrong with you. So at the end of the day, you need to do the thinking and hopefully all I can provide is that stimulation to think a little differently about the conventional wisdom that we get day in, day out from our professors, from our teachers and from the media and from the world out there. And for anybody else who is interested in some of the books that Iran's published as well as his podcast, you can find his books on Amazon, including his newest book. There's one of them. He was unfair. That's the one that has all the inequality stuff. It has the good example of what happens when you actually establish an equal society or how you do it. Okay, perfect. So there you go. You can find that on Amazon. And then you run you said if we want to look at your podcast, just go to YouTube and search for your on my name on Google and it's a little scary what comes up a lot. You can follow me on Twitter on Facebook and LinkedIn and on and of course on YouTube, you can subscribe to my channel and you'll you'll get I do I don't know three full podcasts a week. And of course on iTunes you can subscribe to chat the podcast audio only on iTunes. Perfect. Well, thank you.  Absolutely stay healthy guys. Thank you.


Okay, ready Christmas. Happy New Year. Happy Holidays This is the favorite time of year for Santa for so many reasons one of them I get to stop here on my travels to Mountain View Dodge and Olds, Alberta and see all the wonderful specials They have on they have trucks. They have vans. They have SUVs and they have One of these these are actually the reindeer's favorite vehicles Rudolph and his pals They love the Cherokees. They are zipping all over the North Pole in these things They got sport editions and North editions trail Hawks They set up a snow mode. They're ripping around playing all the reindeer games. They're having a blast. I Want to invite you to come in and check them out. See a good friend of mine here Dean. He's got lots of other friends They can also help you Come and see him. He's gonna give you a great deal on it See what we're talking about great deals great vehicle the Jeep Cherokee Different models to suit different budgets Santa knows we all have a budget Santa has one Mrs. Claus She has me on a very tight treat budget I Have to work hard at this. Sometimes I sneak a few extra snacks past Mrs. Claus Come on in the Mountain View Dodge, you're gonna love it see Dean give them a call check their website out They're at<PHONE_NUMBER> D even has a special number. You can call them at or send them a text<PHONE_NUMBER> and tell them Santa said Give me a call See you later


We are here live at Jeju Oak Top in Busan, South Korea South Carolina. Oh, right. Did I do it right? No, we're in South Carolina. Oh, we're in Korea Dude, are these steps big boy?  Is this place a buffet because I mean we're going all these calories off first Wow I'm trying to be a gentleman Is it working What's your name Benjamin nice to meet you Benjamin. I'm Austin. That's Matt. That's S fan. Hello. I'm a gladiator.  She booked a whole year manager You own the rest Okay, okay, where's Joe forward? Yeah, where's Joe? For where's Joe? What is what is this right here? Okay good. Just you can't think that I'm not a specific name of there, but is it is it like your plans? Okay. Do you guys have tea? We got a live Give me one second. Let me check it. Yeah, I don't even like I don't even know what he is Oh You give me your favorite drink I like to have that Wait, let me get did you go to California No, I'll live in what I just live in like Eastern part Eastern part of California. No, East Carolina, North Carolina You work you were mr. Bees, you know mr. Bees. Yeah, let's cut let's cut to the chase. Do you know Mr. Bees? Mr.  No, no, do you know Moxie?  Yeah, she's hammered You know emmy she can't stay off the bottle that right now. It's true you can't grind Chat you guys want to see my my backpack? Meow is that sick? I would get with Austin. Let's discuss the cheese. Okay.  I don't know what's taken away from him.  What we're like us hugging. Yeah, like we're dating. Oh, yeah We're definitely not co-workers. We're definitely just Yes, so what we're eating today is called Korean barbecue. It's different than American barbecue allegedly Yeah, so Nick came to this restaurant earlier Nick and seer and Milena are in Korea and we couldn't make it Not you but we decided to come here because we thought their content was really good so Here we are force it is gonna be joining us soon, dude. I'm I'm overwhelmingly uncomfortable I don't think Korea is made for places like me and S4 too big Yeah, yeah true the same Nick has best OTK content actually true Nick. Yeah, he doesn't one day before yeah He steals our content before we do your Korean barbecue before we do it. My idea rate doesn't offer me Oh chat. We're going to North Korea on Tuesday. Yeah She's driving. Oh, that's the content I needed we need velvet Driving a Jeep on a very rocky road on the She checked with Korea You need to be careful those shorts. I'm just yeah, no, I don't Okay, we'll just Are you sure? Yes, I got rid of the underwear that I'm sure so how are we going to North Korea? With that camera anything Can you connect the phone to the backpack? Yeah, I want to go to the DMZ I want to go see the line. Can we go there like right on the line where you can see on the other side like North Korean guard Oh, yes, this is my favorite. Is it is it fruity for me? Yeah, it's free for us. It's not free Oh, I told you I'm not all this restaurant. No, no, it's okay. Yeah, it's okay He's paying. Okay. I got no, no, no, no, no. He's the boss, right? He's the boss. I'm not paying for this. No way. So this is like Mandarin cocktail. Okay, and the old Mandarin is from Jeju Island. Oh, wow Yeah, yeah, really. Yeah. No, it's an island. You've been there. No, not yet You have to go to you and me.  We're friends. We're going to How's cool slick about this? I don't know Yeah, oh, I can't I can't drink because I'm on medicine. Oh, really? Yeah I'll have this can you give me a bottle? This is a game tool. Yeah, with two glasses I Don't argue my chapter about a week straight. Well, what they said the chaser's on a real thing like what's a chaser dude? What yeah? They're like it doesn't mean that they're like they didn't know that chaser meant something That's because you chase the drink down. Yeah So be chaser. Is this a beef? No, that's the Chaser it's it's well because the chat is all kids. No, listen. No, I'm allowed. We have the same chat That's me. Oh, it's just me. It's look so it's it's my chat is 30 year olds that act like the 13 Mrs. Chad is 13 year olds that act like the 30. It's my average is 26 I have never gotten a stream sniper who's 15. Yeah, the Was I was one time? No, do you remember PAX East the weekend that we got banned? Do you remember how funny I was? Right the S10 those people are 21 now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Perfect. Thank you The weekend that we got banned. It was so funny. Everybody that came up to miss was like 16 everybody Everybody that came up to me I got like swarmed up at like the party with like the beer party for the old people You're so cool. Oh man. It was so good. We went to a beer party, bro Oh All right, I was reminiscing Oh Rules are meant to be broken Thank you right here Oh I need that hey chat by the way, do you guys have a twitch prime? And you haven't used it anywhere yet if you guys want to use it here I would very much appreciate that because this trip has been very expensive and I Pay for all the tech and I bought a bunch of new stuff just for the trip and I discovered new technologies Just so we could do these IRL streams if it wasn't for S-Fan, we wouldn't be able to go live You really think any of us prepared anything absolutely not S-Fan has been staying up hours and hours even when he had his thumb broken He was in the hospital Getting x-rays and we were calling him for tech support on the back. That's actually true. Literally I was I was I was talking to the doctor and I with and with with one broken hand I was talking to the doctor and then with my other working I had to talk my hands because language barrier and with the other hand I was I was hacker man's setting up the stream to make sure miss could could stream and stay live. So please It's free With twitch prime Some of you may have it and you don't even know take your mouse right now do it with me take your mouse And just hit the subscribe button. You may have a free twitch prime. You didn't even know you have it Just see what happens. Okay, S-Fan. I'm about to take the first bite. Okay ready. Let's do this. Is this okay? Yeah Okay, then anything else. No Here we go I love it. Wow is incredible right incredible Wow, and I don't like pork. Oh really? No That's really good Okay, we got pork like you can do my life No, it's okay. I got a fork to They want to they want us to shout them out. Oh, yeah 100% we are here live at Jeju oak top in Busan, South Korea, South Carolina. Oh, right? We're in South Carolina. We're in Korea That is like salsa with like green onions What are these? What are those? That is pork belly Really, it has three layers me flashback. Oh, this probably isn't the right way Like this. I'm just kind of Yeah, I just kind of like I just kind of improvised. I mean at the end of the day, it's however you get in your mouth Yeah, that's right. Which I mean something else Okay, I always set myself up for Cheers Okay, can I just say something?   I don't put alcohol on it like no drink tastes good without no drink Alcohol makes everything taste worse in my opinion. None of it They would have been better as juice I just think alcohol tastes maybe my drug of choice Chopsticks are getting better What do you think of me even cider like Wait, who's paying for this Let me get it's your stream your mind You're our boss. Yeah, translate it for him. So we understand. Oh Walk around the club Korean soup Say what is this? No, I'm not gonna say But like no soup no like it's a cold noodle. Okay. Have you ever tried it? Yeah, yeah whole thing. Okay cold noodle. This is egg. Yeah a little spicy though Oh It hurts your teeth Because it's cold How is it? It's good. Try this with Um, that's ice because it's cool little yeah, but it's too cold What's wrong with my teeth, I think maybe old Do you guys have any heat problems?   Oh five head Is that good miss? Yeah, that's good Next time we go on a triple spring for you. Yeah, I'm totally down. You always carry the camera My meat Can you just so passive he just kind of stands around and does whatever and giggles Is there clams in there no, I'll eat it in a second Eddie It's terrible Oh The soup did taste good. It's a traditional Korean like soybean soup.  I didn't like this yesterday Hey, I don't like it today for shock dude chat shot up with the baby rage.   Come on. Here we go a little bit a little bit more Oh, it's like a tease. Come on. Good. Put some more into it miss. Oh, come on. What's up, miss? That is so look like there's a guy right down there working and he's hearing this Put some more into it grab grab my It's getting there do tougher tougher tougher.  Okay, I'll be a good friend I got it. You're not a good massage. Yeah, I'm doing right now.  This is always is normal for crevage They make too much the other side dishes and stuff. Yeah, but chubby when you stayed at my house for months Remember I paid for all your food. I wouldn't have asked. Wait. Why are you kids saying you stayed at her? She stayed at my house Did you stay at my house? No, she stayed at my house 10 years ago Interested in my house for a while. No, she's at my house. That's what she said at both of our houses when then one Why are you so defensive about this?  Sorry. I was RPA.  Wait Platonically turn the camera. Okay, tonically My balls in the middle of the gym yesterday came out.    No, no No, since my boy.   I just feel awkward Isn't it weird that you saw us in Texas and then now you're here. We were a spin.  I sniped you guys today. Yeah on the train. Yeah Oh, yeah, that's true. We took a train to Busan and S-Fan wouldn't shut up on the train and tell him to be quiet That was funny. Wait, you know what? Dude, there was a oh Thank you for visiting. You should have you should open up a hachumar in America and I'll work there every Sunday It was one of the most confident people like business Today ass Man The manager Bro, what are you writing in Arabic? That's right fun. This is what I'm about to see.  My hand is broken. Okay Yeah, I'm ready to wrap it up I'm ready. I'm ready for whatever you guys want to do put the camera on me.  I think I actually saved I was gonna wrap it up, but she says this is good for she liked playing the first good for sure Thank you He's wearing one extension. We're gonna keep it going where you're going then


So, if you live in Texas and you're in the mood for a little bit of adult content right now, if you know what I mean, this is what happens when you try to go to one of the largest adult websites in the country. You're hit with this message that reads, Dear user, as you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you to access our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors while safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission. Providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online and in fact will put minors and your privacy at risk. And guess what? They're absolutely correct. But Texas is not the first state to do this. In fact, they're the seventh state to implement age verification requirements for adult websites. And each time a state has done this, Peehub has responded the same way by basically saying, we're not going to offer content in these states. NBC News reports, Texas is the latest in a string of states, including Montana, North Carolina, Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas, Mississippi and Virginia, where ILO, this is the parent company of Peehub, has restricted access to its porn sites in response to age verification laws. They add, and it's not just Pornhub. The entire portfolio of adult content platforms owned by Pornhub's parent company ILO, including Brasers, UPorn and Men.com have also removed access to their content in Texas. Now, before we talk about the efficacy of this law, I first want us to understand how it got to this point to where ILO, Peehub's parent company, decided to pull out of Texas altogether, pun non-intended, by the way. So last year, Texas' age verification law took effect and it was immediately challenged, expectedly so. And while it was being challenged, sites like Peehub weren't requiring driver's licenses because there was that injunction in place until November of last year, which is when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to vacate the injunction. So ILO, at that point, still wasn't complying with this law. And as a result, Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton decided to sue them. And he's now claiming that they owe Texas $10,000 for every single day they were in violation. And it's been 160 days. So that means that they're on the hook for $1.6 million. And Pornhub's response has been to just duck out entirely. So that's how we got to this point. But when it comes to the efficacy of these types of laws, I think that Pornhub is one of those things that falls under the category of this is the responsibility of the parents, right? Parents who don't want their kids to consume that kind of content. They've got to police that content. Police, what their kids are doing, pay better attention, implement parental controls. But rather than leaving it up to parents to police the activity of their own kids, states like Texas have taken it upon themselves to assume the role of nanny in an all out effort to stop minors from accessing porn. But the problem is that this isn't going to stop minors from accessing porn. Rather, it could push them towards more dangerous websites, more sketchy websites that don't actually follow the law and ask for age verification at all, which we'll get to in a moment. But it doesn't just fail to protect kids. It also punishes adults and unnecessarily puts their identities at risk. As Barry Collins of Forbes explains, these types of laws don't mandate how driver's licenses are supposed to be stored. And that information could instantly become a huge honeypot for cyber attackers who could use that type of a database to extort registered users, want your employer, your family, your neighbors to know that you've signed up for this porn site, pay us $200 or else. But that's just one hypothetical issue. Another problem with these types of laws is that they are very easy to get around. In fact, Variety reports that search inquiries for VPNs in Texas quadrupled after Pee Hub shut off access on March 14th. In other words, you can't keep porn from horny people. If there's a will, there's a way. Now VPNs are widely available and a minor could just as easily mask their IP address to access Pee as an adult could. So the law just isn't effective. It's useless and adults shouldn't be punished for consuming content. That's perfectly legal. But by now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should know how ineffective this law is because ironically in his victory speech on Twitter, he got a response that kind of demonstrates why this isn't going to be as effective as he thinks. So he wrote, Pornhub has now disabled its website in Texas. Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children. We recently secured a major victory against Pornhub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect in Texas. Companies cannot get away with showing porn to children if they don't want to comply.  Now, for those who don't know, there is no age verification requirements in Texas for Twitter. So it might ask you your age, but you don't have to input your driver's license to access Twitter in Texas. And Twitter doesn't just link you to pornographic websites.  And we know this because Texas lawmaker Ted Cruz accidentally liked porn while still logged into his public account back in 2017. I think it was incest porn, if I'm remembering correctly. But to make matters even funnier, other Texans who celebrated the end of Pee Hub in their state also learned that the war had not yet been won, even though they declared victory in this battle short term, because Steve Monticelli had even more examples in an article for the Daily Dot. He writes, Texas State Representative Nate Shatzlein, who has said he believes all pornography should be banned, also celebrated porn hub leaving Texas and received identically ironic responses. Boom. Proud to have fought all session to require online ID verification for pornography Shatzlein posted on X. Thank you, Ken Paxton, for defending our bill. We must end the sexualization of children. This is step one to taking down the predatory porn industry. Quote, pussy in bio, a bot wrote under Shatzlein's post. Texan right wing influencers, such as Sarah Fields, were put in a similar situation after reveling over the news that porn hub is no longer accessible in Texas without a VPN. Texas didn't ban porn hub. Fields wrote on X. We placed an age restriction on it. Porn hub wants your children so bad they got mad about it and left Texas link in bio. Another porn spam bot responded. Observers were highly amused by the porn bot spam on such posts. Puppy in bio one joked another pointed out that porn is readily available on X. Yeah. So I mean, this kind of feels like the porn equivalent of George W. Bush's mission accomplished speech with regard to the Iraq war because they thought they won. But they were reminded very quickly that you kind of didn't though. So what's the lesson here? The lesson is that this policy created under the pretense of protecting children from porn isn't actually going to protect children. It'll just needlessly punish adults and put their personal information at risk for doing something that they are illegally entitled to do. But I think that's the point, right? I don't think that this is about kids at all. I think they just want to ban porn for everyone. And I say this because they're admitting it. They're saying this is one step closer to our goal of completely banning porn, and it's because this gets them closer to the Christian theocracy that they've been yearning for for decades. So I mean, of course, they just want to ban for everyone. And it was never really about the kids. And whenever a politician says they want to protect kids, usually that's a sign that they don't want to protect kids. And they're using that as an excuse to cultivate sympathy for whatever they're trying to sell you.  Now, rather than finding ways to improve your life meaningfully in Texas, politicians there are just like continuing to go on this moral crusade against porn. Which do you think if you're in Texas and you vote for Republicans, this is going to meaningfully improve your life at all? And we all know that these politicians who are against porn, they consume it themselves. Like, are we kidding ourselves? Of course they consume porn. I'm sure that Ken Paxton whacked one out to porn before he wrote that tweet. So they are unserious and people need to know that.


The real activities hanging down the road past Apotiki, where one of the most revered rally roads in the world, is about to become home to more than 50 competition cars. The Motu was used extensively in the past by Rally New Zealand in the WRC. It is the road legends are made from. It twists its way along the hillside and valley that links the Bay of Plenty with Gisborne. 43 kilometres of this road is designated special stage today. A stretch of road with surfaces varying from loose metal to bedrock. Add in some tightening corners and some sheer drop-offs and you can see why this is a driver's road. The challenge favourites, Stokes and Strong, both show good form, covering the distance in 40 minutes.  Not bad for such difficult terrain, but Brent Taylor smashes more than a minute off their time in the hybrid Corolla. Reese Millen runs just outside the top 10 in his first pass over the mighty Motu. The RX-7 gracefully sliding around the hill country. The man with the most experience on this road is true to form. It was an absolute shocker for me. We got it off the road in a drain about a third of the way in and bent the steering quite badly and it whacked my elbow really bad and then just lost confidence in a lot of time and coming down the hill we lost a rear brake pipe. So just one to forget. But having said that, I've never had a good run in there. I don't know why I look forward to it because it's just a nightmare. It's a nightmare for Jeff Judd as well. The rally leader succumbing to the reputation of the special piece of gravel. Yuck. I hated it. I had no feel with the car and I was a real pussy through there. So yeah, not so good. It's a dream run though for the second fastest Shane Merland who's beginning to show his cards after a slow start to the 2012 event. That was great.