Good afternoon. My name is Jeremy Kinner. I am the organizer of the meet-up group called Objectivists and Fans of I-RAN in Seoul, Korea. At our meetings, we study and discuss I-RAN's philosophy of objectivism.  Waikili Mulk and Partners is one of the largest intellectual property firms in Korea. They have been servicing clients all over the world since 1985. Again, thank you very much. This brings me to my special guest, Dr. Huron Rook. He is the executive chairman of the I-RAN Institute. Rook can be heard weekly on the Huron Rook Show at Blot Talk Radio. I enjoy listening to the Huron Rook Show podcast on Stitcher, but it's also available on iTunes. Dr. Rook is a frequent guest on national and radio and television programs, and he is an internationally sought-after speaker and debater. He and his co-author, Don Watkins, wrote two books called Free Market Revolution, How I-RAN's Ideas Can End Big Government, and Equal is Unfair, America's Miscited Fight Against Income and Equality. Dr. Rook was born and raised in Israel. He served as first sergeant in the Israeli military intelligence and earned a degree in civil engineering. In 1987, he moved to the United States where he received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. He became an American citizen in 2003. For seven years, he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University. And in 1998, he co-founded BH Equity Research, a private equity and hedge fund manager of which he is managing director and chairman. Please give him a warm welcome, Dr. Huron Rook. Thank you, Jeremy, and thank you, Mr. Lee, for allowing us to use this facility and for being here. This is kind of a wonderful surprise for me because I didn't really expect to be giving a talk in Korea beyond my participation at the conference next week. So thank you, Jeremy, for organizing this. I really appreciate that. So, equal is unfair. Over the last few years, inequality has become this big, enormous issue, really globally. I don't remember hearing anything about inequality before the financial crisis. And even in the few years after the financial crisis, there was nothing. And then it kind of exploded onto the scene over the last, let's say, five years or so. And really has become such a big issue that almost every problem in society is now blamed in one way or another on inequality, whether it's slow economic growth in Western economies or whether it's terrorism in the Middle East, or whether it's poverty is now explained in terms of inequality. Every ill it seems that our societies suffer from seems to be now blamed on this phenomena of inequality. And what is inequality? What do we mean when we say inequality? Well, what's conventionally meant by it is basically the gap in income or wealth or both between poor people and wealthy people. So the idea is that this gap, this difference in income or in wealth has causal explanatory power over all these other problems that exist in society. And if only we could shrink this gap, economies would go faster, terrorism would be reduced, maybe even the globe would get a little cooler. That was a joke, but almost every problem it seems would go away if only we could. Now, of course, it's true that from the perspective of the global warming crowd, it would get a little cooler because what's the only way to reduce the gap? What is really the only solution presented in reducing the gap? It's actually to eliminate the people at the top or to bring them down. To redistribute their wealth, to take from those who have and to give to those who don't. There was a very well-known book, and I assume it came out in Korea because it's out in every language in the world, and the author is treated as if he's some kind of VIP. A book called Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. I don't know if you've heard of this book, but it was a bestseller on Amazon. It was hailed as the most important book in economics in the last 20 years by almost every economist out there. He'll get a Nobel Prize in economics for the book, I'm pretty sure. And the book documents or purports the document, the increasing inequality that is happening in countries like the United States and much of Western Europe. He has data for the last 200 years, and this is considered one of the great feats of data collection ever in the book. And he says, you know, this is a real problem, and it needs to be addressed. And the solution to the problem of inequality is simple. 80% marginal income tax rates at the top, so top tax rate for anybody owning, I think it's over 150,000 euro or over about $200,000, 80% of your income is taken, which is actually pretty good because I don't know if you, the presidential campaign in France, the election that happened a couple of weeks ago, there were all these 12 candidates, and there were four leading candidates, right? And one of the leading candidates was a socialist or a former communist, a really communist, right? And he got almost 20% of the vote. And his proposal was, if you own anything over 150,000 euro, you get a marginal tax rate of 100%. So all your money gets taken away from you above 150,000 euro. And he was serious, and he got almost 20% of the vote in France, right? I almost wished that the presidential election right now was between him and Le Pen, because then the French would really get what they deserve. Either a fascist or a communist, it would be perfect. And the French deserve it. Now, not only did he suggest an 80% marginal income tax rate at the top, but he also suggested a 10% wealth tax. So every year, the government would assess your net worth and take 10%. So just to maintain your net worth from year to year, you would have to make on your capital investment more than 10%, or you'd have to make 10% exactly to just to maintain yourself. In an environment of 0% interest rates, that would be really, really hard. So basically what Piketty is suggesting is that we take 10% of the wealth and we basically destroy the wealth of a whole group of people who have it. The argument is, according to Piketty, that unless we do these things, all the wealth over time will accumulate in the hands of a very, very few people and impoverish all the rest of us. All the rest of us will become poorer and the very, very wealthy will become richer to the extent that at some point they would literally own 100% of all the wealth in the world. And he has this little formula that says that if the return on capital R is greater than G, which is the growth in the economy, then all the wealth goes to those who have capital, which is true if R is greater than G forever. Now, there is no, just to be clear, there is no economic theory ever presented that suggests that R will be greater than G forever. It actually contradicts many laws of economics. It doesn't prevent Piketty from arguing that that's the case without presenting any evidence or any argument. Other than there's one other thinker in history who suggested exactly the same thing who said all the wealth would accumulate in the hands of a few and nobody else would have it and that was the inevitable consequence of capitalism. Who is that? Karl Marx who wrote Capital, his book was called Capital in the 19th Century. This one's called Capital in the 21st Century. Well, I like to call Piketty's book Das Kapital in the 21st Century just to make it clear what he's writing, but he's basically updating Karl Marx. He didn't work under Karl Marx and there's zero evidence, zero reason why it would actually happen under Piketty. So these are serious proposals. This is not modular and again, some people in at least French politics have picked up on it and the serious people like Bernie Sanders in the United States who probably came this close to winning the presidency in the US who take this stuff seriously and seriously talk about 80% marginal income tax rates and 10% wealth taxes as viable as real things that could happen. So people are taking this stuff seriously. Again, you cannot open a copy of the New York Times newspaper without stories in it every single day about the evil of inequality and the damage that it is doing. Now, I want to be clear though that I don't disagree that there are real economic problems in the West in every economy in the world. There are poor people who remain poor and who find real barriers to advance. So there is a problem of what's called mobility, economic mobility. That's real. That's not pretend. So the real problems are poverty. And there's real problems of the middle class, maybe not growing as fast as one could imagine because economic growth in many Western countries is basically between 0% and 2%, very, very low. And there's a problem at the top in almost every modern economy. And the problem at the top is cronyism is when businessmen basically get involved in politics and where they influence the political process for their own well-being. They influence the political process in order to gain unowned benefits to themselves, use the legal system. Certainly you have that in Korea here. We have a lot of it in the United States, but every economy has this. So there are real problems in the economy. But this issue of inequality has nothing to do with any of those issues. Indeed, I argue in the book, and I'll argue a little bit here, that every one of the solutions presented for the so-called problem of inequality would make all of those issues worse, not better. All of those issues would be worse, not better. You'd have harder time for poor people. The economy would grow slower if it grows at all. And the people at the top, you would have more cronyism, not less cronyism. So in addition, there is no economic theory that connects this gap to any of these problems that exist in the economy. So there's no economic theory. There's no social theory. There's absolutely no justification for what they are doing out there making this issue of inequality such a big issue. So why do people buy it? What is it about this inequality argument that's appealing? And I think it has to do with the number of fallacies that people hold. Let's talk a little bit about these fallacies. So what's the first fallacy? Well, the idea is this, and people always use this image, right? We have a big pie, and the pie is the economy. And now the issue is how do we divide this pie up?  Because when dad brings a pizza home and we put the pizza, then it's wrong for some of the kids to get a bigger piece. And there's a lot of fighting about that because implicitly the assumption is that if dad brings a pizza home we're going to get equal shares. We're all going to get an equal piece. So we have this image of an economy as a pie, and we're all going to get a piece of that pie, and it should be equal. And people, I think, relate to that. Oh, yeah, I want an equal piece of the pie. What's the problem with that? Yeah, so the obvious problem is the pie is finite. It's just a pie. But the fact is the economy grows, wealth is created, so the pie is constantly growing. So it's not a limited amount that needs to be divvied up, but an potentially unlimited amount. And indeed it is those often who get the bigger piece of the pie who are the ones responsible for making the pie grow. And if you took part of that pie from them, if you made them have a smaller piece, the pie would grow slower. Why is that? Why is it that the people who get the bigger pie? Why is it that the wealthy are more responsible for economic growth than the poor? What do the wealthy do with their money? They save it, they invest it, right? So they use their money to create economic activity. But most people would say, well, wait a minute, that we have been taught that what really creates economic activity is what? Consumption. And who consumes more? Rich people or poor people as a percentage of their income? Poor people. Poor people consume 100% of their income. Rich people have money left over. They consume actually very little of their income and they save and invest most of their income. So the Keynesians would say, we want to shift the pie towards the poor people because they'll consume more and consumption is what drives the economy. So what's the problem with that? It's not true, yes. That is usually a bad problem to have. It's just not true that consumption drives the economy. It's just not true that consumption drives the economy. And it's mathematically, so people say the US economy is 70% consumption. That mathematically is impossible. So think about it. How do you consume? Where do you get the money to consume? What's that? By taking from other people, right? No, but where do you really get the money to consume? Yeah, from your work. So you have to produce and you get paid for production and then you can use that money to consume. If you don't produce, put aside redistribution of wealth, then you can't consume. So production has to come first. You have to actually have a job at something, whether you're self-employed, whether you work for somebody, to get the money to be able to consume. So at the very least, 50% of the economy has to be production where you make the money so that you consume where you consume the money. It doesn't work. But not only that, when you consume stuff, what are you consuming? Stuff that has already been produced. So what drives an economy is production, the creation of goods and services. The work that people do. Now, yes, you can't produce unless somebody's willing to consume it and yes, once you produce stuff, you then go and consume. So they're not opposites. They're not in conflict with one another, but the primary in economics is production, not consumption. What drives an economy is saving and investment. And one of the reasons Asian economies have done so well over the last 40, 50 years is because Asian cultures are saving cultures. One of the reasons economic growth is so low in the United States and one of the reasons we borrow so heavily from China and Japan and elsewhere else is because we are consuming, we consume which drives, actually, ultimately drives economic growth down. You need the saving. Now we produce the saving from surplus from other countries. So the investment still happens. But you have to produce in order to consume, so production is primary. So it is the saving and investments of wealthy people that cause economic growth long-term. Without saving an investment there is no economic growth. And this is economics 101. This isn't difficult stuff, right? It's also easy to get people to consume or you have to just give them some money. Much more difficult to get them to actually save and invest and do it wisely. So yeah, so fallacy number one is this pious finite and it's not because it's actually growing and that the growth is made possible because of the surplus that the wealthy have. But even that is a massive distortion of what's actually going on. What's the real fundamental problem with the pie? Yeah, there is no pie.  We each bake our own pies through the work and production that we do. And some of us bake little pies and some of us bake big pies. But there is no collective pie.  It isn't there. We actually did this. I did an episode of this TV show with Stu. It's on the blaze. He interviews you while driving a car and there are cameras all over the car. And he always takes you to fast food joints. We went to McDonald's and we bought a bunch of pies and then we started mushing them on camera. So there is no collective pie. Each individual makes his own pie. Each individual works and produces and creates. And the fact is some people create massive pies. That's their pie. It's not society's pie. It's not the government's pie. Nobody has a right to anybody else's pie. That's the fundamental. It's this whole idea in economics about social wealth or we have a certain amount of wealth in Korea. No, you don't. There is no Korean wealth. There is no Korean economy in that sense. We like to aggregate in economics and that's fine if we're just doing economic measurements. So we say the size of the economy is X. But that really is not meaningful. What's meaningful is what is the size of your bank account wealth. And to the extent that you create your own wealth, it's yours. It's not society's. We have to get away from this collectivistic view of economics. So if each one of us makes our own pie and we understand that the pie I make is mine then you don't get to redistribute my pie. It's mine. Now why do some people make big pies? How do you make a big pie? Or in other words, how do you become a billionaire? This is my secret for success. How do you become a billionaire? What does it take to make a billion dollars? In a free market. In a free market. What's that? Yeah, you have to make a lot of people's lives better. Why? Because when you sell something, right? Famous iPhone. When I buy this iPhone for $300, how much is it worth to me? More than $300. That's why I'm willing to give it up, right? The $300 bucks and get this. Indeed, much more in the case of an iPhone. Much, much more. So to make a billion dollars is to sell a product like an iPhone to millions or billions of people at a price higher than what it costs you to produce. And if you can do that over and over again to lots of different people, you will make a billion dollars, right? Now, have you made those people's lives better? Yes, because they got the money and got something with more in return. My life is better for having given up the $300 and gotten the iPhone. Now notice what happened to inequality when I bought the iPhone. What happens to inequality when I buy the iPhone? It gets bigger because I gave up $300. So Piketty, an economist, looks at my bank account and sees my bank balance shrink. So I got poorer by $300, but he doesn't measure the value of the iPhone. He can't because he's an economist. He can just do money. He can just do stuff with dollar signs behind it. So the iPhone is not there. If I buy art, he doesn't measure the value of the art. Any asset I buy is not measured unless it's a financial asset where there's a dollar sign next to it. So when you buy anything, you become poorer according to Piketty, and the other party becomes richer and inequality is grown. But that's ridiculous because my life is much better for having bought the iPhone for $300 than it was before I bought the iPhone for $300. So my position in life is improved. So how can in the book we use the example of... You guys read Harry Potter? J.K. Rollins? Harry Potter?  How awful is that? I mean, it's terrible because she became a billionaire because of me. I have two boys. So every time a book, Harry Potter book came out, I had to buy two copies because they wanted to read them at the same time. And then I bought the audio tapes because I wanted to listen to it. Every book, we did a road trip. So I could listen to it and we all listened to it. Because they read it, they started reading it midnight when the book came out. And then I would do the road trip and listen to it. And then, of course, she had to go to the movies. So I was like, I figure I spent on Harry Potter what? $1,000? $2,000 at least? So here I am, I became $2,000 poorer, and she became a billionaire. It's unfair, right? But was my life worse or better for having given up the $2,000 to get Harry Potter? Much better.  It's spiritual fuel. It's entertaining. It's great. It's wonderful. So my life is better. Her life is better. And life's not about money. Life's about what? What about success and happiness and flourishing as a human being? It's not about money. So yeah, she got richer. I got poorer. But I got more fun. I don't know. I think I benefited more than she did. How do we even measure those things? We can't. And this is why the whole inequality is so silly. So people who make big pies can only make big pies, can only make a lot of money by making our lives better, by selling us a book that we enjoy reading, by selling us a computer that we find really productive, by selling us whatever it is that they sell us. We wouldn't buy it unless we believed that our life was going to improve as a consequence. So why would we want to penalize people who make big pies? We want to celebrate people who make big pies. We want to celebrate when they make a lot of money. So the big fallacy here is collectivism, is this whole view of viewing everything as a social pie, as everything is social, everything is collective. And you know, President Obama, probably one of his most famous speeches, articulated kind of the argument that they make to justify their collectivism. And it's a famous speech that he made that we call the, you didn't build that speech, right? And here again the idea is that if you are baking this big pie, you don't get to be responsible for the benefits of that big pie. Because you had a great teacher when you were in great school that made you who you are. You probably have good genes from your parents, and you probably had a good upbringing and a good education. This is called the argument from luck, which is very prevalent out there. It was really articulated by John Wall's famous American philosopher, who died about ten years ago. And the idea here is you're not responsible for the pie you bake because of all these other factors, external factors. But does that really make any sense, right? I mean, lots of kids have good teachers. I can't remember a single one of my teachers, so I obviously didn't have any. But I'm sure some of you had some great teachers. Anybody have a great teacher that really influenced your life? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that if you ever make a lot of money, you should go find a teacher. Thank them.  Cool. But it's not like you owe them, right? They did their job and you benefited from that. That's great. But that was their job. They did it good. That's wonderful. And the fact is that a lot of kids were exposed to that teacher and she impacted the lives of only a few. And those of you who were impacted should take personal responsibility for the fact that you were open to being impacted. Now, is it true the genes play a role in how successful we are? Sure. But that's reality. That's reality. Some of us are born with, I guess, good genes and some of us were born with what some would consider bad genes. And that's just nature. But I know lots of people born with good genes are screwed up. And I know lots of people who were born with bad genes who somehow succeed anyway. Same with parents. Same with whether you're born rich or poor. I know a lot of rich kids who've screwed up their lives completely. And I know a lot of poor kids who've done amazingly well in life. Say, yes, we're all different. We're all born with different capabilities, with different environments, with different teachers. But it's what you do with what you have that matters. And yet, these other people want to give all the credit to other stuff. Why do they want to give all the credit to the other? Because that's how they can justify taking it away from you. That's how they can justify socializing it and collectivizing it. If you didn't build it, it's not yours and I can take it. So they create a whole framework, psychological and philosophical framework in order to justify taking stuff from you by saying you didn't build that. And that's becoming a very common approach. Even people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett believe that they didn't build it. Or at least they argue that. I don't know if they believe it or not. But Warren Buffett says all the time, I was born with the right genes to the right parents at the right time. It's all luck. But really, if you think about it, is it? Can it be? Don't we know that some people work harder than other people? Some people really engage their minds and other people don't. Some people really are involved in what they do and some people are not.  Yeah, environment has an influence. Yes, our genes have an influence. But probably the number one influence in your life is the choices you are making every single day. That's what really determines your life. So the argument about inequality is very much comes from a philosophical foundation of determinism and collectivism. And it's there basically ultimately to knock down those who are able and successful. And it posits. It posits as an ideal. Some world with equality. Some world of equal outcome. Now, I've never met an inequality critic, somebody who was against inequality, who actually argues that the outcome should be equality. Because they know what that looks like. It's very, very ugly to get to pure equality. But almost all of them believe that equality is an ideal. Yeah, human beings are not good enough to attain it, but it's an ideal. It's like a platonic ideal. It's out there and what we need to do is strive as close to possible to get there. I always ask them how high, you know, what level of inequality will be okay? So today, there's too much inequality. So I tell you, we shrink it by 20%. Is that good enough? 30%, 50%, 80%? How much? And nobody will ever say a number. Nobody will ever say, this is how much we should shrink it. They refuse. They always say, well, you know, we'll know when we get there. But we don't. Because the fact is that, you know, some Bernie Sanders and people like that always say, look at Scandinavia. Scandinavia has a lot of equality.  There's too much inequality in Scandinavia. So Swedes want more equality. And Danish want more equality. So there's always you want more. Because if you set up equality as an ideal, even if you acknowledge that you can't actually attain it, you will keep pushing to get to that ideal. So let's think about what that ideal entails. So if you look around this room or any room or any group of human beings, one of the things you notice is how different we all are. Really, really different. As we said, different genes, different backgrounds, different environments, different thinking, different way of approaching the world. We're all different. It's one of the things that makes life so cool, so good. I mean, imagine if everybody was the same, even if everybody was the same as me. That would be really, really, really boring, really boring. So we're all different. So why is it a surprise that if you take us all different and you leave us free, then we all produce different things. We all create different stuff. We all bake different pies, different flavor pies, different size pies. So in order to make us equal, given the fact that we're metaphysically unequal, what do you have to do? Well, you have to use violence on some in order to correct what nature has provided us, which is inequality. And there's no other way. There's no other way to get equality without violence. So 80% taxes, that's violence. 10% wealth tax, that's violence. Or communism or any regime that has ever attempted to bring about equality has had a result of violence. I mean, maybe the best example of this ever was in the 1970s, a group of intellectuals who had studied in France. We talked about existentialists. They studied under the existentialists, under the egalitarians in Paris, at the Sorbonne, under Camus and Sartre and Foucault and all these guys. And they went to the country of origin and they managed to gain political control. They said, okay, we're going to implement egalitarianism in our country. So we're going to establish equality. So there are people living in the city and people living in countryside. So what do you have to do in order to get people to be equal if some are living in the city and some are living in the countryside? That's not equal. Yeah, get everybody out of the cities. Literally, force everybody out of the cities into the countryside. But then you have a problem of feeding them because all these people are in the countryside and there's no food. And it turns out that when you leave people out there in the countryside with nothing, some of them are good at finding food and some of them are bad at fighting food. So again, there's inequality and some of them are smart and some of them are educated and some of them weigh glasses, which is a sign, I guess, of you can read and you're educated maybe. So what do you do? All these people are, they're unequal. How do you get them equal?       This is the killing fields of Cambodia and where they killed almost 40% of the population. They killed 2 million people out of 5 or 6 million. And this criteria was, if you were special in any regard, if you were unequal in any sense, you were a little bit better at something or other, you were shot. That's what inequality, that's what the whole striving towards equality really means. The only way to level us is by chopping down anybody who sticks out. And there's no end to that. If the Kamauja had been allowed to continue, they would have wiped out everybody pretty much. Of course, they were well educated and they wore glasses and they had plenty of food, but it never applies to the ruling class who's implementing the strategy. So the ideal of equality is what needs to be crushed, what needs to be destroyed. It's a bad ideal. The only idea of equality that makes any sense is the idea of political equality. The idea that we're all equal in our freedoms, we're all equal in our liberties, we're all equal in our rights.  We all have a right to be left free to pursue our own values, our national values that we need in order to thrive as human beings. That's the kind of equality that is real, that is meaningful. And what happens when you give that equality to people? You get massive inequality of wealth and massive inequality of income. Who cares? It makes no difference. So there is a problem of inequality, but it's inequality of rights and inequality of freedom. And there is an ideal of equality. And that ideal is equality, political equality, equality of rights and equality of liberty. And that's what we should be fighting for.  Thank you all. All right. Questions on anything? Yeah. Oh, thank you. He was eager. Yeah. That's how you win. What are your thoughts on why people focus on wealthy business people as opposed to wealthy... Like people don't get angry about wealthy actors or athletes who seem as dense as they can become managers. I heard Stossel's theory. What's Stossel's theory? His theory is that with athletes we can see what they do and we know we can't do it. I think he got that from me. I wouldn't be surprised if he got that from me. Yes, I think... Look, all of us have played basketball. We've all dribbled the ball and shot at a basket.  And we see LeBron James and we go, whoa, he can really do it. And we know how hard it is. And it's fun to watch him and we get entertained. So he gets $100 million. Who cares? Because we're being entertained. And we get what he does. And we get that what he does is hard because we tried it and we can't do it. And there are few actors that make a lot of money. Not a lot, right? Most actors make very little money. It's like the few superstars make a huge amount of money. And again, we're entertained by them. And we smile or we say it was sad or usually just depressed after going to one of their movies. Not because the movie is depressing. So the fact that they make a lot of money doesn't trouble us because we see the benefit we get.  He's a paper shuffler, right? And from at least 2,000 years, we'd be taught that finance guys are just crooks. It's just through all thieves. They just manipulate paper and they manipulate stuff and they make money from money. Even Aristotle thought that was bad. Because money was barren, he would say. Money doesn't create children, right? It can't multiply like seeds or animals. So money should be able to make more money. So he didn't understand, right? But we have this perception of how can a finance guy benefit my life? No, we actually, when we look at businessmen, we actually perceive it as zero. Some game, hey, I'm $300 poor because I bought an iPhone. Now, it's easy to explain the iPhone. And that's why people have some sympathy towards Apple and they kind of like Apple and Apple's okay, right? But it's those evil finance guys. Because finance is a higher level abstraction and it's more difficult to understand. So if you produce something concrete, you can hide behind that concrete product like the iPhone or Microsoft software or something and we all use it. But what do you do when you do finance? Or what do you do when you do IP law? How do you explain that? It's very abstract. Now, if you study economics or you study these things, you know that you can't have an iPhone without hedge funds, ultimately, right? So without a robust, free, dynamic financial industry, there is no production of real products. But that's a high level of abstraction that very few people ever reach and nobody talks about it, including the financiers. They never defend themselves. They have a culture since Jesus threw the money changes out of the temples, right? Of suspicion about money and about bankers and about finance. And there you have it. So the more abstract what you do is, the more difficult it is for people to get, the more they resent it. And then remember the intellectuals are constantly telling people. It's those guys over there. They're at fault. They did it. They screwed you, right? They're reinforced constantly by the intellectual class. And they're at the end of the day at fault. Because at least in America, in the old days, people didn't resent people with money. They didn't resent wealth. They only started resenting wealth when they were taught to resent wealth by the intellectuals. Other questions? I saw another hand. Yeah. Korea is right now the world's fastest aging society. And because it's the fastest. You're aging faster than Japan? It is faster than Japan. There are already more senior citizens than there are young people in Korea today. Yeah. And so because of this whole inequality topic that you brought up, one of the solutions that more and more people are bringing up is the basic income. Yeah. And what is the objectiveist solution to this sort of problem of the basic income? The basic income has a moral problem, of course. Yeah. But considering how unproductive these senior citizens are going to be as they grow older, what is the ideal solution in that case? But aren't the senior citizens already getting kind of a social security and so they're being taken care of? You don't need a basic... The issue of basic income doesn't seem to me as targeted at solving the problem of old age because they've already got commitments in America through social security and I know in Japan and here I think you have also the equivalent of social security. So they're getting a basic income already. But aren't they getting stuff from the government? They're just getting very little from the government? So the argument is should we increase that? It's not whether we need... Because in a sense the basic income solution is being presented to a different problem in my view. And the problem that the basic income is supposed to solve is, and this is why it's a hot deal in Silicon Valley these days. You know what basic income is? Which will be given to everybody in society, young, old, everybody, a minimal, you know, $12,000 a year.  No other welfare, no other redistribution of wealth, but you get everybody in society gets a minimal income from the government. Right? The reason that's being promoted in the United States at least, and I think globally by technology companies is because of this notion that soon robots are going to replace all the work and young people are going to be unemployed and therefore young people are going to need a basic income. So the idea is that this is a solution to this so-called problem of systemic unemployment that's just around the corner. By the way, it's been just around the corner since about 1796. Right? When the first, you know, machine started replacing human beings, just around the corner nobody would have a job. Just around the corner. It's just going to happen any day now. And every 10 years somebody comes up and says, no, no, no, but this time it's different. Which is what they're saying now in Silicon Valley. Give me a break. So that's, I think, the basic income. So what do you do about an older population? I mean, I don't think you do anything about it. So, you know, they're poor. You know, they're poor. I mean, that's reality. They should have saved. Right? They should have saved when they were working. But because the government has promised to take care of everybody, people don't save. So the whole idea of saving for retirement is out the window. Because why save for retirement? I'm going to get Medicare. I'm going to get Social Security. I'm going to get all these benefits from the government and people forget that the benefits are not that big. America's Social Security is very little. You can't live off of Social Security very well. Actually, you live on it very, very poorly. So unless you save, you're in deep trouble and you're going to see large rates of poverty among American old people once this baby boom generation retires because they haven't saved. Now, if you're in the upper middle class or if you're rich, you've saved. But everybody else hasn't saved. Because they've been told, since they were little, don't save. What's the point? You're getting Social Security. So, you know, the problem of a shrinking population is a problem of young people, not of old people. What are young people going to do? What's going to be taken away from them to be given to old people? This is a problem everywhere in the world. It's in Japan, here, and in the United States. And in Germany, I mean, people think German economy is in good shape. Just wait 10 years. German economy is in deep, deep trouble because Germany is again shrinking. Why do you think they want immigrants? Why do you think Germany opens their borders up for all these immigrants? Because they need young people. Because they don't have enough of their own. Maybe they're not bringing in the right immigrants. But they're smart enough to at least realize that they need young people. The Japanese have zero immigration. So they're in deep, deep trouble because they don't have any. They don't have kids. So they don't have a young generation that is going to pay Social Security for the older generation. I don't know what the immigration policy and career is. My guess is that it's pretty tight. That you don't allow immigrants. That's not a good, you know, situation now. Ultimately, the solution is to have more kids. But that I don't, you know, that's a more difficult problem to solve. And you have to ask the question. I think it's an important question because it's not just Korea and Japan. This is in Italy, Spain, Russia and Germany and much of kind of Central Europe, people don't have kids. Russia is shrinking almost as fast as Korea and Japan in terms of the size, right? And we really have to ask why? Why are people not having kids? Because I think it is a cultural indicator. I think it says something about a culture when you stop having children. Not any individual couple having children but as a culture suddenly this becoming a phenomena. You know, it makes economic growth more difficult and it makes funding social programs more difficult. But the social programs are unjust to begin with. Now we're just, we're going to make them even more unjust because you're going to put a greater and greater burden on a smaller and smaller population of young people who are actually working for the sake of funding older people. But the old people have no claim over the young people. So it's not like we need to secure them more income at the expense of young people. I mean, that's unjust. That doesn't make any, that's not fair. Right? So the solution is the solution is immigration in the short run. And long term, you know, the solution is to wind down the welfare programs, wind down and encourage people to save for retirement and take responsibility for their own lives. The other problem, so-called problem in quotes, right, is longevity. We're living to be very, very old. Right? You guys will live to be a hundred, many of you. So we have this artificial thing about retiring at 65. Why would you retire at 65?  I mean, it doesn't make any sense. But we've artificially established it. In some countries in Europe, you retire 55 or 60. And then what do you do?   And then you work for a little while.  I mean that's not just. And if literally your kids and grandkids had to write the checks, they wouldn't let you retire. Right?  So the whole system has to blow up. The whole system is corrupt. The whole system is immoral. The whole welfare redistribution, social security system is completely immoral and it has to go away. And that's the only solution long term. To make it go away now. You can't just make it go away like that because you've got all these old people who are dependent on it. But you can start phasing it out so you don't perpetuate the problem forever. And you have to start encouraging young people to save. And what that'll do is in the short run it will actually lower the standard of living. Because not only will they have to pay for old people, but they'll also have to save. And then their consumption is going to have to go down. And that means a lower standard of living for young people for a while so that they can not only pay off all the obligations that have been made but also save enough money so they can retire one day. But we have to get rid of this notion of 65 as a retirement age. And a lot of these notions that were created really during the Great Depression. Why was Social Security in America established at 65? Anybody know? Yeah, because almost nobody lived to be 65. So it's pretty safe to promise stuff after you were 65. You were going to die before that. So everybody worked until 65 which is pretty much when you died anyway because life expectancy was around you know, low 60s. But now life expectancy is 85. So why isn't there a time in age adjusted? Maybe somewhat. Because once you give people goodies it's almost impossible to take them away. I don't see why. I mean Israel is not an ethically homogenous society and the problems that Israel faces have nothing to do with the fact that it's not homogeneous ethnically. I mean my wife and I are not the same ethnicity. We're the same 2000 years ago we come from the same Jewish mother but you know that's 2000 years ago. She's different color skin. She comes from a completely different culture. She eats different food than I do. I mean not anymore now we've kind of merged their ethnicities together. But there's no there's nothing you know America I mean to say America's ethnically homogenous in the 1960s is ridiculous. The Poles hated the Irish and the Irish hated the Italians. I mean Italians were scum. And they started mafia's and they had dark skin. Nobody liked that. Not to mention the Greeks. I mean what makes you white? I mean there's no whiteness. There's no such thing.    I mean with all due respect to Koreans if you look at your genome those of you are Koreans and you look at the Japanese genome and you look at the Chinese genome it's non-existent. But you think you think I wouldn't be Asian but it turns out that I am. No I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding.  They give you the diseases you're susceptible to but one of the things that they do is they tell you where your ancestors lived 800 years ago. So where the snippet of genes from your DNA was 800 years ago. Where does it originate from? And it turns out that on my father's side my genome originates from northern Siberia. Asia. And then I have more in common from that perspective with American Indians than I do with Europeans. That's my genes. So the whole whiteness thing is one utter nonsense. It's nonsense. Race is a social concept. It is. I agree with the left. What can I do? I don't believe races exist. We have different colors of skin but race is an insignificant irrelevant, silly idea that needs to be wiped off the face of the earth and I think will be because there's so much intermarriage. So what are our kids? So when my kids were born in Texas this nurse walks in she's black and she walks in with this she's filling out the birth certificate for my kid and you know the name and the thing address race. And I looked at her and I said what are we in Nazi Germany? What's it any business? I don't even know what the term means race. What race am I? I don't know what race I am. I'm northern European or whatever you know mostly but it turns out now that I'm actually northern Siberian. But what does it even mean? She says look I can't give you a birth certificate unless you give me a race.  Because my wife's mother was born in Morocco what does that make her? African? My wife's father was born in Palestine but his ancestors were born in Uzbekistan that makes him an Asian. So it makes my kid a quarter African a quarter Asian and a half northern European. What does that mean? What are my kids? What race are my kids? What race? Jewish? Jewish is not a race. Jewish is religion.  But the fact is that it used to be that there was a lot of racism in Israel. The European Jews looked down our nose at Moroccan Jews and it's non-European Jews and we discriminated against them. Clearly there was discrimination. Now that is disappearing partially because of intermarriage and partially because of the stupidity of it and people become rational over time in some cases. So there's even intermarriage between Muslims and Arabs and Jews but we're not different races. Are Jews and Arabs different races? It's the same race. We all come from the same, like if you go back to the Bible half of us come from one son of Jacob. Jacob was it? One is Ahab and one is Isaac and we're cousins. We're all the same. We call each other cousins. So what are the races? So let's open up the borders to all the people in the same race which means all the Muslims are part of us. So Israel is a special case in terms of open borders because Israel is surrounded by people who want to destroy it and the people inside Israel have to be committed to its defense. So it has to be people who clearly view the state of Israel as an idea but if we lived in an objectivist heaven, right, if everybody was a freedom loving individual rights person then absolutely Israel should have open borders. No, nobody crossing the border into the United States wants to slaughter Americans. There's a big difference between Israel and 90% of all countries in the world. But the difference is this that if 2 million Chinese came to Israel and I don't want to spend the whole time talking about this but if Israel had a policy of bringing it to the Chinese are not going to fight for Israel. Israel needs people who will need to fight for its existence and right now in the world right now. The only people willing to fight for Israel's existence are Jews and that's why it has that policy. But if the enemy disappeared, if there was no enemy to Israel then yeah bring in 2 million Chinese who cares? As long as Israel is a healthy country, a good country I don't care what color skin you have or what slanted eyes you have or whatever. What relevance does that have to individual human freedom? That's all I have to any of this stuff. And the Chinese, you know for those who believe in IQ studies have very similar IQs to Ashkenazi Jews so cool, we can all have high IQs.  I mean I don't believe in IQs racially categorized people based on IQs, I don't believe in using that as a criteria to let people in or out. The whole way of you know what you need is a free country and people should come in. Fine, die out. I mean that's the alternative. That's fine. I mean you have a shrinking economy with no immigration and have a lot of old poor people and a lot of young people who are being taxed to death because they have to support old people because you're not having enough kids so fine, I mean so be it. I mean that's the reality but the fact is that I would like to see a world in which people can and because I think it's great to travel any way you want and to live as long as you're not a threat to the people around you. Threat means a physical threat a violent threat. Israel can't have open borders because the people would come in would kill people. Mexicans don't kill people in America. Not at any they do but at much lower rates than Americans do so what's that? No, in terms of the percentage a proportion of a population they're much lower. Yeah absolutely. Yes but the fact again the statistics show and you know we could debate statistics all day long that most immigrants an overwhelming majority of immigrants including illegal immigrants into the United States do not consume more welfare than they actually pay into the system but you're right I mean let's do away with welfare I'm all for doing away with welfare and I'm not proposing tomorrow borders but what I'm proposing that every country in the world should think about and do is increase the number of immigrants into those countries certainly the United States needs immigrants and the way I would increase immigration is if you can find a job you should be allowed in give them five-year visas and renewable they don't have to become citizens you don't have to give them citizens give people five-year visas to come to work and every country should do that and Japan should do that because that's necessary for economic growth and it's necessary for economic prosperity but it's also a right people have a right to I have a right to employ whoever I want to employ and if I want to employ a bunch of Mexicans it's none of your business and if I want to employ a bunch of you know green head people it's none of your business a bunch of people IQ's below 90 it's none of your business as long as they're not a physical threat to you then it's none of your business who I employ so it's an issue of individual rights so do we tomorrow eliminate borders? no of course not but do we make it much easier for people to cross borders in order to work in order to be productive? absolutely and the whole world needs that and by the way Israel has a huge number of guest workers huge number of guest workers in Israel Filipinos and Thais and Indians and all kinds of people in Israel to work and they get work visas and they work because you know who used to do the work in Israel? Palestinians all the construction works all the construction jobs all the work at hospitals and places like that used to be done by Palestinians when they got radicalized and they got suicidal then Israel had to replace them and they replaced them with guest workers from other places so Israel's not a particularly closed border kind of place I've always said I prefer them to become citizens but the idea that these racial identities are meaningful or that they need to be preserved is I think ludicrous and irrational yeah yes yes so first we have to admit as you're saying that there are people who reach the top because of rigging the system so we have to first acknowledge that fact and then you have to ask the question what is the way in which you unrig the system how do you actually eliminate cronyism the only way to eliminate cronyism is to get rid of government control over the economy the more government control has over the economy the more the companies the entities, the individuals in the economy are going to try to influence the government and it's a game and once you set the game in motion it's going to continue forever and there's no way to stop it you can't take money out of politics you know there's always a path for money to flow into politics if so what you have to do is eliminate the power of politicians over the economy it's the only way to make that kind of change and my favorite story is Microsoft, some of you might have heard this I've told them many times in the mid 1990s Microsoft spent it was the biggest company in the world the most productive, creative, fastest growing company in the world and it was spending zero dollars on lobbying in Washington nothing and they were brought in front of the Senate an iron hatch a senator from Utah still in the Senate today, Republican yelled at them and he said you guys have to stop spending money in Washington you have to build a building in Washington you have to hire lawyers you have to have a lobby in other words you guys have to bribe me and Microsoft literally in the meeting they said look you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone we're not interested we're not going to spend a dime in Washington we're busy we're changing the world and literally they were changing the world leave us alone so what happened a few months later knocking the door they decided to break you up what was the crime Microsoft had committed giving away a browser for free in the days when we old enough to remember had to pay 70 dollars to get Netscape and they were giving Internet Explorer for free bundled in there the bundled was the key word so what did Microsoft learn from that and by the way that lawsuit took 10 years add another 10 years of resolution Microsoft was destroyed it's never been the same company and Bill Gates left and a big part of why Bill Gates left is because of the government involvement in running Microsoft so what did they learn from it lobby, lobby like crazy so they spent tens of millions of dollars today a year they've got a beautiful building about equal distance from the White House right glass building gorgeous, I've spoken in that building and look at Google Google from day one from day one was giving our money to politicians Apple didn't learn too well so the antitrust division has gone after Apple right Google nobody's ever gone after Google they went after them in Europe but in America they're untouched even though they have what 90-70% of the search on the internet and advertising on the internet and nobody goes after them how did that happen because they bribe the right people and they give a lot of money to Republicans and a lot of money to Democrats so they dish it out to everybody so they've got it, they figured it out so the way to stop it is to get the government out of business government should not be in the business of business so then there'll be no motivation if you don't regulate they won't be cronyism and that's why it's so hard because how do we get the government out and until we do it won't change and you can government here in Korea is very involved in the world of business business is very well involved in the world of government and that's true in every country around the world because of that no, because automation creates jobs it doesn't destroy them automation has never destroyed jobs in history it always creates more jobs than it destroys so you know now look, there's no, there's nothing in reality that says that the population has to increase all the time I mean the population can be stable or even decreasing that's fine and you can still have a rising standard of living with that but you can't run that and a welfare state because the welfare state the whole point of the welfare state is on those who produce to give to those who don't as the population gets older those who don't increase their numbers and those who produce shrink that's why you need immigrants so in a in a free world it's not clear the population of the world would increase I think it would because I think there's value in having babies and I think it's a sign of a culture's unhealth when they don't have babies they're fundamentally problematic in Korea and Japan and Italy and in a lot of these countries that is preventing people from having babies and once you think about that and I think that's interesting I don't have the answer but there's something unhealthy about that culturally it's a sign of decay so but you know maybe all we want is one child and therefore the population of the world will shrink it doesn't matter if we're now redistributing wealth so as long as you redistribute wealth you need young people whether you get them through both or whether you get them through immigration you need them the robots don't solve the problem because the robots create jobs I mean think about the jobs that exist today that didn't exist 50 years ago that I none of you could have imagined would exist I don't know if any of you can think of any well yeah I mean entertainment's massive social media games gaming computer games hundreds of thousands of people work in the gaming industry designing and writing code marketing and creating games and playing games professionally even more bizarre right but go outside of that think about things that why has the entertainment industry grown so much we have more free time we're wealthier so we can afford to pay for entertainment which we couldn't 50 years ago certainly not 100 years ago but it's not just that think about how many restaurants there are today and how many fancy restaurants there are today there's a whole culture now of celebrity chefs you know you have celebrity chefs in Seoul couldn't get a reservation I tried both restaurants I mean it's true one completely ignored me and the other one said they only open up a month in advance you literally have to be on speed dial when they open up the reservation to try to get a reservation and I couldn't do it so I didn't get in they don't know who I am that is guaranteed but yeah I have a list of this list of 50 best restaurants in the world and then the same publication puts out the list of the 50 best restaurants in Asia and the two restaurants here in Seoul on that list and I tried to get a reservation to both of them and couldn't get in so I mean who would have thought I would have never thought 10 years ago that I would care about getting into a top 50 it shows how rich I am in a sense and how how our pleasures have evolved 20 years ago I wouldn't have appreciated a really good restaurant but we now have the time and the wealth to be able to learn to appreciate what really really good food tastes like and the whole ambiance it's not just the food have you seen how they plate these things the aesthetic of it I mean 200 years ago we were barely eating right now we can enjoy the pleasure of just the look of the food right and we only locally source the food and you know the chefs go out into the wild and pick berries very special berries I mean the whole thing is ridiculous if I think about it right and yet I pay hundreds of dollars to go and eat at places like this and love it so that's a profession that didn't exist and it would exist much more of it in the future and who knows it's probably 50 years from now that we can't even imagine we would enjoy so the number of professions the amount of entertainment so if robots arrive we'll only work 30 hours a week or maybe only 20 hours a week so imagine how much leisure time we will have to do all the other things that we want to do and there have to be people I'm allowing us to do all that leisure activity and that's where partially all the jobs will be so it's impossible to predict but robots don't destroy jobs they create them just like every other technology has in human history there's never been a case where technology is actually on net destroy jobs keeps you going what's your own personal motivation for getting out here to come to talk to you well I mean it was like that especially you can't get into a restaurant yeah I know it's tough there's a restaurant in London that I've been trying to get in for 3 years and I can't get in it's ridiculous and I go to London a lot so I love these ideas I think they're incredibly powerful incredibly powerful for the individual for making your life as individuals better and they're incredibly empowering and of course culturally and society-wide I think they're world-changing and they have the potential and they have a huge impact on the world I'm a teacher at heart what I love is to teach and educate and so I love being able to engage with people with ideas and get them to change their lives as a consequence so improve their lives even a little bit that's what makes my day that's you know so and I am blown over by the fact that objectivism in Rand has become a global phenomena you know 10 years ago again one of these things 10 years ago I couldn't have imagined couldn't have imagined it just 10 years ago that I'd been in Korea talking about I in Rand or I just came back from Albania and Montenegro and Macedonia Albania is like 70% Muslim and here I am speaking about I in Rand and these people are telling me yeah, I in Rand changed my life you know the first president of Albania coming out of communism the guy who fought communists and established you know was the first president out of communism right told me that the two people inspired him most to do what he did was Ronald Reagan and I in Rand in Albania you know that's like I couldn't have imagined that but it turns out that there's a lot of that that happened under communism she was incredibly influential much more influential than any of us imagined now that kind of the history is coming out but I find inspiring and fun and you know I'm motivated by trying to change the world even though I realize that I won't that the change will happen well after I'm gone I still love the fact that there's progress and we're moving in that direction and we're impacting people and lives are changing and I have kids so once you have kids your horizon changes because your horizon gets lengthened and you're part of the fun of having kids you suddenly have to think even longer term than just your own life so I mean I'm motivated by and I love the ideas and I love the exchange no no it's really high in the 20s in the late 19th century and then the early in the 20s by the 30s it's starting to shrink your thoughts as to how that was driven by you know free economies or rich economies or oh it's very simple why inequality declines right and Piketty says it in the book great depression whose wealth gets destroyed in the great depression people who have it the stock market went down 95% and the capital in the stock market it plummeted in terms of wealth so the top got eviscerated right and what happened right after the great depression a world war if you blow up stuff inequality goes down so inequality went down because we basically destroyed a huge amount of wealth through depression and through a war now it was maintained at low level through massive redistributions of wealth which then drove a lot of countries in western europe bankrupt which then had they had to liberalize the economy so free markets create inequality late 19th century large inequality because there was freedom freedom creates inequality that's why inequality is a good thing not a bad thing because it's a sign of freedom what destroys inequality what brings about equality is anything that increases poverty war is great if you don't want inequality world war two flattened the inequality of his curve dramatically and Krugman is known as saying yeah what we need is a war war is a good they create economic activity he thinks right and they flatten the inequality then have a world war I mean imagine what would happen if North Korea started bombarding South Korea inequality in South Korea would go down because the poor would still be poor they'd still be here but the rich would lose a lot of wealth so inequality, genetic coefficients would improve so war is good for genetic coefficients that's why the whole debate about inequality is so sick in my view because the only way to reduce inequality is to do violence wars, depressions and you know communism theft, 80% marginal income tax rates wealth taxes it has to be violence that reduces freedom encourages and people tell me you know I'll be at this conference I'm actually giving you a talk on inequality at this conference there will be people that are libertarians who will be there who will say capitalism reduces inequality and that's just not true and my answer to that is who cares I don't care about inequality one way or the other inequality is irrelevant what I care about is freedom and freedom might increase inequality or might reduce inequality but what I know freedom does is if you take the people at the bottom their lives improve maybe not at the very bottom because some people their lives won't improve but most people's lives will improve some will improve very fast some will improve very slow but everybody's lives so if you go back 200 years if you go back 300 years how many people were poor? 95% relative poverty 95% to 96% of humanity was earning less than $3 a day now imagine life at $3 a day I'm talking about today's dollars so it used to be that 90% of the people on the planet earned less than $3 a day how many people today on the planet earn less than $3 a day 8% it's gone down over the last 30 years it went from 30% to 8% almost 2 billion people came out of poverty over the last 30 years which nobody talks about so global inequality is actually shrunk while inequality in the United States has increased global inequality shrunk because the poor have gotten richer okay so $3 a day everybody's poor so there's no there's no inequality and then what happens then you get capitalism and you get this everybody gets richer some people get richer faster than others so suddenly you've got a gap but everybody's richer how can we complain about that that's like something to celebrate because people focus on what they want to focus on what will present the best case that they have or the argument that they want to make it's not about reality and truth I mean Piketty in the book admits that global inequality's gone down it's not worried about he doesn't care about poor people I mean the myth is that he even says in the book he says all these taxes that I want to inflict it's not going to help poor people that I have these taxes because it's not enough wealth to redistribute all the poor people to make them wealthier it's going to knock down the rich inequality will shrink that's what he cares about so they're motivated by resentment of success and by envy and by hatred they're not motivated by the love of poor people they don't care one Piketty's like an older aristocratic family from fans he's got a good academic job now he makes $100,000 a speech he's like you know Paul Krugman once gave a speech about inequality the evil of inequality and he charged $250,000 for this speech I mean that's not a joke that's reality these people don't care he didn't give that $250,000 a charity immediately it's like Bernie Sanders has three houses it doesn't matter and you can say they're hypocrites but it doesn't matter because they don't really care about the poor if they really cared about the poor they'd be full plastic fake apples obviously objectivists have a different definition of what a state is than what a party is and so objectivists will always advocate for the existence of the state and you said that people who advocate for more equality don't have a definition of what is a fair tax rate so what would be the objectivist definition of what a fair tax rate would be well the definition of a fair tax for an objectivist would be a voluntary tax would be a non-coercive tax so one is government revenues raised through fee for services on some services and the other would be where people wrote checks voluntarily and there would be social austerity austerity no it's not austerity ostracize ostracism social ostracism against those who maybe didn't pay their taxes an objectivist state would be so government would be so small right so you could in the 19th century the federal government in the United States spent about 3% of GDP I mean that's what federal government spending was and total government spending across all government was I think less than 5% you know how much federal government spends today about 20 and total spending across everything is somewhere in the mid 30s right so imagine if we shrunk back to the size of government in the 19th century you would shrink government about 80 to 90% right so it would be nothing to pay tax to raise revenues for government that small if I had to pay only 10% to 20% of what I pay today now I live in California so I pay a lot more than that I mean my margin of income tax rate is 55% a little less because I get to deduct my state taxes but basically 55% right and that doesn't include state taxes I mean consumption taxes and everything else sales taxes right yeah I'm paying because I live in California and because I made good money last year I'm paying more than Canadians I pay as much as Scandinavians do I mean it's ridiculous this is the America's so-called land of the free home of the brief home of the whims so if I only had to pay 5% happily for the police and the military and a judicial system that runs well I would even pay 10% because I'm getting something in return it's real so I'm happy to pay I probably overpay and some other people would underpay and some people would free ride cares but imagine if taxes were flat 10% and this is the other thing Ayn Rand said she said look we've got such a long way to go until we get there who cares let's agree that we have to shrink government spending and we have to shrink taxes when we get to the point where the government is only doing what it actually is supposed to do we can figure out how to pay for it it'll be easy because it'll be so small and we'll believe in it because why do I resent paying taxes so much today because A it's cost and B I don't see the money I drive on shitty roads so it's not like they're investing in infrastructure what am I getting for it my military is massive and they don't know how to use it the police force is corrupt the judicial system is becoming more and more corrupt every day what am I getting for my money nothing negative value so certainly 55% I should see something for it that's a lot of money so if I actually got value I wouldn't care and the only thing I could get value from the government is in those areas where the government is uniquely is the only entity qualified to do something which is in the area of force so I'm not an anarchist for those well I mean there's no shortcuts I mean it's about advocating for the ideas I don't think you can just advocate for economics I don't think you can just advocate for politics you have to change the culture you have to change people's orientation and this is part of my whole BS my view that it's all BS about culture cultures suck all of them do I want to change them all and ultimately what I want is an objectiveist culture not Korean culture, not an American culture I want an individualistic culture and if it's global cool and I don't care what ratio I don't care what anything you are if you hold an individual perspective on life I'm your buddy right and I want you you know that's what I want there's no alternative and I think morality is the most important thing so ultimately it's all about ethics you know so if you want to really change the world you have to convince people to be egoists and not to be altruists you have to convince people to be individualists and not collectivists and they will always be collectivists as long as they're altruists so to destroy collectivism you have to advocate for egoism and unless we can convince the world to be rational egoists the world will always be statist and that's the history of the world the only errors where people have an understanding of egoism those are the only errors where people are free grease and the enlightenment those are the errors in which people chose an individualistic morality and those are the errors where humanity is flourished and the manifestation of the enlightenment is the 19th century and early 20th century where people are mostly individualistic in their lives but we've lost that and we're becoming more and more collectivists although there's still remnants of this so one of the beautiful things that happens when I travel all over the world is you can ask any audience in pretty much any country in the world today China, Russia, any place you ask them who does your life belong to and almost all of them say to me that's amazing like 300 years ago you asked people who does your life belong to they'll say the church the community whatever but now they all know their life belongs to them now they don't understand the full implication of that and what responsibility that places on them and what that has to do with morality but the world is more individualistic today as a global phenomena than ever in history and that's because western civilization, western culture has invaded the entire world and everybody in the world is ultimately receptive to it it's just a matter of education and it's our job I think to do that education so okay your life belongs to you what does that mean what does that imply for morality, what does that imply for politics but that's the starting point ethics it's about living your life to the fullest about making your life the best life it can be and who could be against that you tell people you should make them you should live life they're the best of your ability you should flourish, you should be happy everybody goes yeah I want to do that absolutely you should take it to North Korea I know people who actually do the balloons they put Iron Man stuff and Hayek and Mises and they put it up in balloons and send it over to North Korea so all kinds of ways in which this stuff is being smuggled into North Korea all the time I think the Human Rights Foundation does some excellent work in North Korea they take flash drives into Cuba with all of Iron Man's writings and other pro-liberty writings and they get them into Cuba a lot of people are doing that kind of work of getting good ideas into these places but we live in an amazing place where there are only three or four countries in the entire world that are like North Korea it used to be that half the world was like that just not that long ago before the Berlin Wall came down so we've come a long way but now we live we all live in these mixed economies which are kind of gray dying, getting older and that's where we have to fight now it's not that we're fighting communism like in North Korea we're fighting just the grayness of people not committing to anything it's not even that they're really altruists it's not that they're anything really they're a mixture they're a mixed economy of the spirit they're a mixed economy of everything mixed philosophy, mixed morality mixed politics, mixed economics and that's an improvement of everything being black but it's we've got a way to go so if you really want one issue to really nail it's the ethics because look even with the gods in the inequality thing altruism inculcates envy because if you're not I'm an altruist it means living for the sake of other people that is the purpose of your life is other people's well-being your moral responsibility in life is to serve other people that's what altruism means is defined by Augustine Comte who came up with the term he invented the term he was a French philosopher so if you're an altruist and you're poor it's like goddammit you're supposed to live for me and you have money I hate you and if I'm rich and an altruist I'm going I should be helping these people I don't really want to but I should be helping these people so I feel guilty so I vote to have the government tax me more so that I get to help the people to reduce my guilt so altruism is what creates all the mess that we're in and that's what needs to be fought and I don't think it's that hard to fight it we just need to get out there because most people don't want to be altruistic but they don't know any other way to think because that's all they've been taught and actually Asian countries in this sense I think Asia is far better than the west because Asia doesn't have it doesn't have Christianity and there's nothing there's no worse form of altruism than the Christian form of altruism I know I know most of Asia now in Korea you've got a problem I mean think about think about what it means to grow up to live your entire life with Jesus staring down from you from across having suffered the worst kind of death possible to mankind nail to a cross it's a slow painful horrific torturous death for sins he did not commit sins you committed talk about sacrifice right and this is the image of morality the image of morality the essence of morality is suffering and pain and for the sake of other people I don't know have you ever seen a picture of a saint of a Christian saint with a smile on his face because the whole point of sainthood is suffering you can't be a saint if you had fun in life Mother Teresa would have never been sainted if she actually enjoyed the work she did she hated the work she did that's why she was a saint it's the fact if you read her diaries you know how much she hated what she did she hated the people she hated the work she doubted God she was a suffering pathetic the more suffering the better that's the essence of Christianity not the way people live it but the essence of it is always there in the image of Christ on a nail to a cross and that's why every church it's everywhere right it's everywhere that image to remind you how pathetic you are the fact that in most of Asia you don't have to deal with that as your moral symbol there's a massive advantage that Asia has over Europe and particularly the United States now Europe has become secularized but it's kept a cost it's dropped God but kept Jesus America still holds it's kept God but it's a problem the biggest problem we face in changing the world in America at least is religion I think it's a bigger problem than the left either one it's kind of easy to talk on maybe higher level and we understand a lot of the concepts you're talking about what about if you're talking to somebody who very brand new to these ideas and you want to get across for example the issue of altruism and why that is not the right word to you have like a go to move you've got a short time no because I think you have to acknowledge the context and you have to what is the context in which this is coming up there's no there's no speech that you can you know I mean I wish right in Atlas Shrugged is so amazing right because gold can walk into an executive's office give him a two hour speech and the guy completely convinced and walks out with him if I could do that we'd change the world given how many miles I do and how many people I meet you know that's it we'd be done now I'm no John Galt one and two it takes more than a speech so you have to find the right context for the person you have to find the right way of approaching them but if you want my go to lines I mean watch my videos because particularly the Q&As because those are the kind of questions I get constantly right and most of the audiences I talk to are not familiar with Iron Man they're not familiar with the ideas so I just did a tour of British schools high school high schools the top British schools in England right there the eat I don't know if you're familiar with eaten and Harrow and all these like Harry Potter Foo Foo like Foo Foo schools they all look you go to the school and it looks like Harry Potter I mean at old buildings and these mess halls and they're boarding schools and most of them are all boy or girl boarding schools and quite really interesting but these are the smartest kids in England right but they've never heard of Iron Man and so if you watch some of the videos from those you'll get a sense of how I approach it but it depends on what the question is and what the context that it's coming up in there's no I wish there was I wish there was just three arguments and that would do but on that hand I don't wish there was because if there was it would mean that people don't have free will and it's very deterministic so you know we have the reality we have you just got to deal with it well that he's wrong I mean Ben Shapiro's the smartest of them of the whole bunch and he's Jewish he's not Christian he was a Yomica but what you do a Christian values exactly right the one that says that if God tells you to kill your own son you should do it right Abraham I don't know how much you know the Bible but like God tells Abraham go kill your son and says okay off I go right no questioning no rebellion and this is why he's this is why he's a hero right why is he a hero because he didn't doubt he just God told him to kill his son what kind of God is that what values does that teach you you know what value it teaches you obedience now obedience doesn't lead to freedom obedience doesn't lead to the the American revolution obedience doesn't lead to the enlightenment right okay take another one Moses comes down from the mountain right and a bunch of Jews are worshiping a golden calf they're disobeyed orders so he doesn't calmly lay the tablets down and go over to them and say look I believe in religious freedom go do your thing you go over there and we'll do our thing no he drops the 10 command because he's so frigging furious right and they shatter and he picks up a sword with his brother Aaron and they slaughter 30,000 people in one day and God rewards them because this was a good thing okay where's religious freedom tolerance of different points of view there's none of that in the Old Testament now granted the New Testament is softer so the Christian because it's a religion of of weakness right you know Judaism is a religion of transition and Islam is a religion of strength Christianity is a religion of weakness so yeah turn the other cheek if any Christian does that love that neighbor like yourself because Christianity is a minority religion in a Roman Empire that is crushing them and destroying them so they have to get along but it's not for any theological reason it's a political reality so they create a religion that's politically feasible for them to exist under and when they get power that's what the Christians do once they get political power they have Augustine rewrite the story of turn the other cheek so now they can slaughter people and they go off and they start conquering the world you know there's no difference so there's no due to Christian values that are consistent with freedom now yes I don't know you got a personal relationship with God some of them say and what else you know that shall not murder every single religion in all of human history has a commandment that shall not murder nothing unique about Judeo-Christian tradition I'm sure in Korea's tradition there's somewhere law that's against murdering so it's where does it come from yes it happened the western civilization developed in Europe you know why because Greece is in Europe they lucked out so western civilization is Greek it's not Christian it's Aristotle it's Plato I forget the name of the sculptors Pericles was the politician anyway it's those guys they created western civilization and they were pagans and when did western civilization wake up at the renaissance of what what was it a renaissance of of Greece and what's the enlightenment the enlightenment is the application of Greek ideas to science and to politics and to everything right so there's no forget about I mean I'm not saying there's no value in the Judeo-Christian tradition there's some value religion is a primitive form of philosophy and people need it there is a value to it but to attribute the success of the west to that is absurd and if you read The Founding Fathers in the Federalist Society in the Federalist Papers they're debating political issues how often did they cite the Old Testament or the New Testament almost never who did they cite constantly Montesquieu Montesquieu a French philosopher I think he was an atheist they cite Locke they cite philosophers not religious leaders they don't cite the Pope right so it's mind-boggling to me but it's only you know America is obsessed with religion my biggest disappointment with America when I came there I came in 1987 and I couldn't believe how obsessed everybody was with religion even the objectivist, the atheist objectivist constantly were talking about religion to me like I became an atheist I think at the age 6 or 7 religion was over and it wasn't like I didn't go to synagogue and we didn't have our fight and I prayed as I did all that but it was like religion was gone I went through the motions I did all the motion things but I never thought about it twice and yet Americans constantly think about religion and they can't but it really is they believe like Jordan Peterson does that you cannot have morality without religion and I think they latch onto the religion because they want to be good people so that's my more benevolent view I wonder maybe that's why there's almost no talk or no even acknowledgement of is-ought issue and if you deny that if you deny how she arrived at that and how she built past that then again you now have your monopoly on where did morality come from but if you acknowledge that then you lose your monopoly yeah but yes so a big part of that is that but it's also that secular people don't want to accept is-ought who particular derivation of is-ought partially because of the way she does philosophy which is very different than the way conventional philosophy is done and they just don't want to acknowledge it and they can't get their head around it they can't sign no philosophy we just don't get it they just reject it not because they're religious to them which is very frustrating because I think her solution to the is-ought problem you know the is-ought problem is how do you get an ought from an is how do you get a you should from it is right and she solves it elegantly I think but people don't recognize it which is could you go over any detail on that it's different from conventional philosophy so I think you're talking about method yeah I mean I mean you know this is beyond my pay grade well because I'm not a philosopher and I've never really taken a philosophy class so I'm not an expert on other philosophers maybe I'm an expert on I ran but I'm certainly not an expert but if you read I mean partially if you pick up a book by Kant you can't even read the thing it's unintelligible without massive amounts of effort when you read I ran it's intelligible it flows I mean that's partially the fact that she speaks and her logic is reality based so it's not academic in the sense of detached from reality I find it very hard to read philosophy because it's mostly detached from reality what I love about ran is how attached it is to the real world how much it makes sense common sense people say right but it's common sense because of that connection to reality but take the Izard dichotomy so suppose the Hume the philosopher Hume said you can't derive an odd from an is so the world is we can absorb that but that says nothing about what I should do and most philosophers have said yeah absolutely you can't do that now I think the Greeks would have found that weird because they would have said well how do we get shoulds if not from izzards I think because the Greeks were very attached to reality some reality even Plato would have said okay maybe you can't derive it from this reality but there's another reality in where the should is real so you know what it is right the world of forms where goodness and justice actually live and reside so you can you can see them directly but the idea that what art is you know is subjective is whatever you feel like would have been weird for the Greeks and in Christianity just played owners right so it's instead of a world of forms it's God but the art comes from somewhere else from revelation and Rand is the first one to say well first one to really articulate a case that it's is now Sam Harris does something similar he tries to derive an odd from it is and is generally in the right direction he just he doesn't have the sophistication iron man does so it's not that hard to see you look at the objectives ethics yeah yeah that's where she does it right I was looking for the page where that was mentioned yeah it's mentioned it's fairly early on where she does she does it she basically I mean you have to understand what art what art is yes I was going to say that and stop myself but yes what art is that is what does it refer to if art refers to human life then then what you are do is a direct consequence of what human life is and what human life acquires so it becomes a scientific question what the odds are just science what leads to human flourishing and how you get that human life is the art is a whole discussion in the objectives ethics about what value is and that only human life gives value any meaning and therefore and you know you face this fundamental choice between existence and not existence life or death once you choose life then the odds are obvious consequences of izzes because what does human life require because reason and all these things right and but that's izz that's an izz that now becomes an art so once you buy into her life or death what a value is and only the individual's life makes value meaningful once you buy into that then izz art gap is simple what is the object of it the object of is it to give you guidance on how to live how to live a good life so what is the object of any philosophy the object of any philosophy is the truth is to discover the truth about life and about reality but Ayn Rand talked about her philosophy the purpose of her philosophy is to provide us guidance on how to live life on this earth to the best of our ability okay so it's different in this sense subjective says that there is no firm reality and that whatever you want is the good Rand rejects that and she says no there is a firm reality and your nature is firm that is human beings have a particular nature and therefore what is good for you is not whatever you want what is good for you must be discovered scientifically objectively, rationally and it's objective so there are there are certain things that are good for all human beings who so concept is phenomenon several okay German philosopher but he is Jewish but he is one of the most respectful Jewish like that his concept is phenomenon is what appears it is it just include both of them objective so Rand rejects that that's a very Kantian approach Rand says no reality is what it is this table is here it has certain characteristics that are independent of us it is okay reality is what it is and then we as individuals have the tools to identify it to see it to identify the material it's made of to describe it and that's human reason and it's objective if we identify what's really in reality that's what being objective means it means identifying the reality identifying what's real not identifying what we feel like and it requires human consciousness to be objective because we have to see it we have to integrate the knowledge but it's of something real with a certain identity in the world out there it's not a phenomenon it's a real thing it's not based on physics it's not based on science philosophy can't be based on science it's not based on philosophy I mean I approach this you're thinking that this is a way to with Cartesian philosophy no I don't not at all I don't think so Cartesian philosophy actually is you know I am what is it I think therefore I am right that's the cult and she's against that right she's against that she says therefore I think but I don't think she's not a determinist she's not about physics it's about human consciousness so two things in reality out there there's the world external of consciousness and there's consciousness and the essence of consciousness is to observe the function of consciousness is to observe reality to observe the world out there the energy and almost the same same I mean it's later era it's later era I mean at the time maybe I'm wrong it's not effective without theory in the world in the era I don't I think it's dangerous to think about philosophy in physics terms there are two different things you had a question and well Jeremy's the boss not me well you were so pumped up on morality and metaphysics but about the voluntary financing and government if you might just give a quick one on why there could not be yet a market in retaliatory use of force and then maybe you can like ask a follow up if you don't like you want me to do a you want me to cover capitalism in spite of everything no I don't think it's a huge question I think it's a very simple issue I mean two things one you can't have a market in force the very nature of market requires there not to be force that's what makes a market a market forces out and therefore we have to negotiate everything is voluntary based on trade you can't therefore have a market in force the one thing that has to be done for a market to exist you can't internalize it into the marketplace it creates violence so all you get what is the standard by which we determine it's who has the biggest guns so anarchy always devolves into authoritarianism or just pure violence there's a reason why in our terminology anarchy means everybody shooting at everybody else because that's what it is that's what it literally is it doesn't work you can create mind games about it but it doesn't actually but there's a deeper issue and the deeper issue is a personal logical issue the anarchy capitalists don't believe in objective reality they don't believe in objective law they don't believe in objective truth so law for example is not something that is objective and set and done it's you have your laws I have my laws I have my police force backing my laws you have your police force backing your laws and now we negotiate right? but that's rejection of the absoluteness of a legal system and Einman says no you need an objective law you need a court system that arbitrates disputes based on that objective law and it's not who pays whom more whatever the legal system they want now you could have different legal systems in different geographic areas and in that sense they can compete but in a particular geographic area there's an objective standard by which what constitutes force and what doesn't constitute force is defined what's your view on the second amendment? I mean second amendment is a complex issue partially because the intention of the second amendment is clearly to allow the population to be armed so they can rebel against the government but in a world in which governments have big big big weapons including nukes it's pointless to say I have a right to have a little handgun because I'm going to rebel against the government it just doesn't make any sense you're not going to rebel against the government it's not the intention of most people who have guns to rebel and if you did you'd be slaughtered and you'd be crushed now I think you have a right to bear arms in a sense of self-defense so in the emergency where the police can't get to you in time you should be able to defend yourself and have the weapons necessary for that emergency in order to protect yourself okay but then what are those guns and how big can they be and all of that is I think an interesting legal question and I don't think objectivism has a clear answer on that I mean I have my opinions I know a lot of objectivists who disagree with me on it because I think it's something for legal scholars to really think about and analyze and come up with an answer I don't think you can have a tank it's okay to have a handgun AK-47 automatic, semi-automatic doesn't make a difference, who cares should you have it at all should you register with the government I think the government should have a registry of all the arms out there because I think it's part of its monopoly over the retaliatory use of force to keep track of weapons of force the only reason guns exist is to kill people to kill people to kill people for protection but it's to kill people so it's about violence the essence of guns is violence and therefore since the government is responsible for all things violent it should monitor who owns the guns now if you accept the Second Amendment as allowing you to hold guns in order to rebel against the government well of course you don't want the government to register the guns because the whole purpose of accumulating the guns is to fight them but I don't believe that anymore I don't believe it's viable in a modern society to rebel against the government using guns so um no I can't use it what does it mean to rebel against the American government it means to die it's not like the founding fathers it's not like 100 years ago you know there's no there's no there's no victory here what are you going to go up your AK-47 have you ever seen a tank do you know what a tank will do to you I mean never mind the nuke they have big big big weapons that the founding fathers couldn't imagine yeah only because the British government wouldn't wipe you out but they could have defeated you at any moment right and believe me as a former Israeli military intelligence guy they could have crushed you they didn't want to they decided not to crush you but they could have crushed you they would have had to kill a lot of you not just a few a lot but they could have taken they could have taken Belfast and flattened it and the IRA would have disappeared so yes in that sense you can rebel a revolution has armed revolt against your government and you know okay you know if you you think you can do it I'm open to that argument that's why I think it's a complex issue and I don't think it's that important because there's not going to be a revolution in America so who cares about the Second Amendment it works in America though because it's now falling under a dictatorship it's obviously not because we have guns zero and America will fall under a dictatorship in spite of all the arms because the fact is a lot of the people who've got a lot of guns are the ones who want dictatorship you think because you own guns you don't want a dictatorship quite the contrary they want to just go out and slaughter the leftist so they can establish their own dictatorship I mean there's no correspondence between people arming themselves and truly understanding and loving freedom so I don't you know I don't I mean I have a gun because I wanted to defend myself you know it's locked in a safe and I can't remember the combination and I've even got a concealed weapons permit so I could walk around the streets in California with my gun on my belt but I never have because I find the whole idea so frigging ridiculous and oppressive that I don't want to do it but I have the option I don't want that option because there are people out there who want to kill me but you look like you know you like me yeah that's good to say I didn't bring my weapon to Korea no no there are people out there who want to kill me I mean whether they're complete nutcases there's a guy who came knocking at the door I'll end with this guy who came knocking at the door at the end of the institute and they said why because the government had planted a chip in his brain and I'm here to take it out and he had a gun in his backpack it turned out so you know he obviously was mentally you know he landed up in a mental institution it was problematic but A there are people like that B there are a bunch of Muslims who don't like me and you know so there are a lot of people who I offend and so I want to be able to protect myself from the illusion that I am going to go and fight the American Special Forces again somebody who's been in the military I know what they can do but if you look at history it's never good that weapons are monopolized but the state doesn't matter you know people make up these stories about that all the guns were confiscated from the Jews in Germany and that's why they were saying bullshit it's a made up story it didn't happen anywhere anyway it's never been the case that authoritarianism have driven the power because the civilians didn't have their handguns particularly Jews the Jews of Europe were not going to fight and when they did decide to fight like in Warsaw they found guns in order to fight the fact that the Germans had taken their guns didn't stop them from rebelling in the rebellion of the Warsaw ghetto and the Germans if the German Jews had just had their weapons the Nazis would have spared them somehow is absurd maybe it would have cost the Nazis a little bit more to kill them all but it's doubtful that the German Jews would have ever used their weapons I mean they went to the concentration camps they just walked in like sheep like sheep I mean believe me these are my people I've studied their history nobody said if I had my gun I would be fighting I mean it took them years and years before they woke up to what the reality was they realized I even it was and then they found guns and they rebelled in a few isolated cases most of them never did of course there would be I mean you think people want to be free I don't I don't think people want to be free people wanted to be free why is it the 99.9% of human history we've been enslaved in one way or the other which goes back to the ideas of having an idea it's about ideas this is my disagreement with George W. Bush when he said all people yearn for freedom when he invaded Iraq or whatever but it's nonsense most people don't yearn for freedom most people want to be told what to do and they have to gain the right ideas in order to realize that that's wrong if they could live a much better life if only they could live it for themselves but that's an achievement freedom is a massive achievement it's an achievement at the individual level and it's certainly an achievement at the cultural level I mean how long has South Korea been free not for very long so most of the world is very very young to freedom because it's such a massive massive achievement an achievement that was made intellectually in Europe based on Greek ideas what's freedom is just it only depends on your ability to defend it yes but not with weapons it depends on your ability to defend it intellectually intellectually the Russians couldn't defend their freedom intellectually the communists were the smallest of minorities with no weapons and they took over a massive government and crushed them because there was no intellectual opposition to them the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia with tiny little minority with no weapons and they took over the country through ideas without a shot fired and most of these revolutions happened with no shots fired it's not about weapons it's not about guns Hitler didn't come to power by having an armed revolution he got people to vote for him and then the army initially was opposed to him so they all joined the Nazi party not because Hitler was powerful the Nazi party was a tiny little minority nobody cared about the Nazis they could have wiped them out within days revolutions don't happen because people with big guns show up and take over a country people with little guns and big ideas it's all all about ideas it's not about guns that's why I don't think it matters one way or the other whether the American people are armed or not if they have bad ideas, we'll get a dictatorship if they have good ideas, we'll remain free and guns don't matter one way or the other thank you doctor it was really a very lively conversation and a pleasure to have pleasure to meet you and again another thanks for Waipili for allowing us to use all of you guys for coming out I really appreciate it