 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Gloria Alvarez. Hi, good evening, how are you? Good, I'm glad. It's such an honor to be here at FI and this amazing conference, and of course it's a huge responsibility to have the last week of tonight. Two weeks ago I was presenting a new book in UFM Madrid. UFM is the first university of Guatemala and the first in Latin America to open its doors in Spain. So give a clap for that. So I want to talk to you about the power of ideas and the power of course of freedom and storytelling. So I'll start. Who is a fan of Game of Thrones here? Raise your hand. Hi, so this is Tyrion Lannister in the last episode saying, what is what unites people? Is it gold? Is it flags? Is it armies? No. It's stories. The power of storytelling is something that unites humanity as nothing else. So inspired by Tyrion Lannister and also by this guy that you might know, I want to talk to you about the story and the powerful things about freedom, UFM and my personal experience defending liberty. So Steve Jobs talked a lot about connecting the dots. But you cannot connect the dots looking to the future. You connect the dots looking to the past of your life. What are the things that connect in order for you to find your destiny? So because of this, I want to talk to you about my personal story in UFM. First of all, I didn't choose UFM because it was the only libertarian university in the planet. I had no idea about this. I didn't even know who Mrs. was or who Hayek was. I chose this university because it was the only one in Guatemala who offered the career that I wanted to study, international affairs. And then I also decided to go for political science. So I graduated of both majors there. And I went to my parents and I said, this is what I want to study. And they were like, what are you going to work on? And I'm like, I have no idea. But I love all the contents of this career. So I was there. And of course, as you know, in UFM you start to have deep in courses about economic process. One, two, and three. It charts semester courses. Then you have Mrs. Philosophy, Hayek Philosophy, Public Choice, Law and Economics and all this amount of knowledge that I didn't know by this time that only in this university they teach you it. One of the beautiful things about UFM is that it unites everyone that fights for freedom. The monetarist, there is Auditorial Milton Friedman, the Austrian economics, the Ludwig von Mises Library, there's also the Bastiat Hallway and of course the Atlas Schrock Monument. So the power of Manuel Allao is that he made this environment where all the freedom fighters could unite in what they have in common, even though they're different disciplines, right? One of the first books that I had to read even before starting school was Animal Farm. And of course, when I read Animal Farm, it made a lot of sense. As some of you may know, my dad is Cuban and my grandparents, well, they ran away after the Communist Revolution and my other grandfather from my mom's side, he was Hungarian so he also fought the Soviets. So, you know, you gotta say that I have something in my DNA. I'm the best product that communism has come up with. Because without it, my family would have never ended up in Guatemala, right? So this made sense, but the fact that you know that communism is wrong doesn't immediately mean that you're all for free markets and limiting the government and taking it out of the economy. I still thought that the government had some role to do on it, right? And I remember that it wasn't economics what really convinced me about liberty. I remember that when I had my first courses in economics I used to joke with my professors and if some of you know Ricardo Castillo, Caio Castillo from Marroquín he gave me classes and one day I went to him and he still tells this anecdote until today and I went to him and I said, you know what, Caio? I know what I'm gonna do with my life. And he was like, oh really? What are you gonna do? And I'm gonna put a drugstore, a pharmacy. He's like, what? You're not even studying nursery, you're not studying medicine. Why are you gonna put a pharmacy? And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna put a drugstore and every time someone comes, you know, being sick or ill or with a pain or a preoccupation in life I'm gonna give them a little piece of paper. And he's like, what? A little piece of paper? And I'm like, yeah, that piece of paper is gonna say don't you worry the free market cures everything. And he's like, oh my God, you're such a cynic. And I'm like, but guys, for you it seems to be like that, right? Once we have free market, we're all gonna be free and everything is gonna be amazing and it didn't make sense to me, you know? I remember thinking about, Paris Hilton was in fashion at that time, I studied between 2003 and 2007 and I was like, how is it that if Paris Hilton purchases a $50,000 necklace in LA and if there's free market, eventually some kid in Guatemala is gonna get medicine, you know? It didn't make sense to me. Until I started studying more philosophy and it was because of Frederick Hayek and Bastiat when I read that being free is all about being responsible of the consequences of your acts. And actually this liberated me because I was in a moment of my life where everyone had something to say or what I should study, where should I work, what should I do. And in the moment that I read that being free is being responsible, it liberated me from everyone else's opinion. And he was like, yeah, sure, I'm gonna make my own decisions. That means that I will have my own burden but it also means that I don't have to be always paying attention to what everyone's plan it's towards me. Either it's a government, either it's a dictator or a majority or even another individual. So this is me finally graduating. As you can tell, I was really happy about it. And in the moment that I graduated I thought these ideas were amazing but yet they were quite utopian for Latin America and especially Guatemala. I thought that these ideas were not good enough for the reality that we were facing. So I said, I wanna go out in the world. And I started looking for scholarships online and I happened to be accepted at the Cato Institute, I did an internship there and what I liked about Cato is I saw how pragmatic they were. They were fighting the Democrats and the Republicans and doing public policy and I was like, hmm, this is interesting. This is a way of getting from the academia to the real world and do politics. So I thought that what I should do is go into the international aid world. I was going to fight them from within. I was going to work in the World Bank or the IMF or the UN or Oxfam or some of these huge NGOs and I was gonna introduce them to free market, right? So, yeah. I couldn't study where I wanted. I got in NYU and I wanted to study with the professor, William Easterly that some of you may know. He wrote The White Man's Burden and he worked in the World Bank for 15 years until he found out that it was a complete waste of time. But because I didn't have $50,000 and I didn't want to get in debt, I didn't have the money to go to NYU so I decided to go to Europe and I actually ended in a very Marxist university called Caillou-Lubin. So Marxist that this is the place where Catholic priests mixed Marxism with Christianity in something that was called the theology of liberation that basically was the excuse of the Catholic Church to become part of the Marxist guerrillas that we all had in Latin America. So imagine how Marxist that university was. And I decided to study a master's degree on anthropology, international development, and cultures. Sounds beautiful, right? So, when I started giving them papers about the need for free marketing in my country to liberate everyone for poverty, there were like, you neoliberalist, what is wrong with you? Capitalism is destroying the world. So, of course, I never graduated from there. My thesis was banned. Yeah. And at that point I was like, oh my God, you know what a terrible year that I just spent doing nothing. And then I went to Rome and I worked with Senegalese immigrants, actually. And I remember one conversation with a Senegalese guy who sold Chinese bags and purses and wallets. And he said to me, you know what's the most Hippocratic thing about the Europeans? Whenever Bono of U2 makes a concert about let's save Africa or Oxfam asks them for money or UNICEF, they're happy to give money to save Africa. But that money goes to my dictator. My dictator uses that money to implement chaos and violence in my country. So it's impossible for me to work there. So therefore I have to come to Europe. I do it in an illegal way. And the money that I earn here goes straight to my family through Western Union. It doesn't pass through the corrupt hands of the government. But what do they do to me, Gloria? They don't let me work. They yell at me at the street saying horrible things, racist things. They don't give me papers to work. So if the Europeans want to save Africa, cut the crap, at least stop the aid and let us work. And if they don't want us here, at least let the free market happen because the European Union does this not only with Africa but also with Latin America. It's impossible for us to work. So because of this, I ended up very frustrated. I had two bachelor degrees. I had two post-graduate degrees. A master's degree that I couldn't graduate from. All these studies, and I was like, my God, I don't want to work in a political party. I don't want to work in an NGO. What am I going to do? I'm a libertarian and I don't know how to, you know, contribute to the world. So I went back home. And because I didn't want to work in anything of what I studied, I went back to the radio. I used to be a radio DJ. That was my part-time job when I was studying in Francisco, Marroquín. And so I said, yeah, I want to go back to the radio. And this was my first radio show when I came back. And it was set to me. You know what, Gloria? You have all this knowledge. Why don't you use all the knowledge that you have and talk about it on the radio? And I was like, all right. The only thing is I have a very fucked up ideology. And he's like, why? Well, I'm a libertarian. And he's like, what's that? Because you have to understand by the year 2010 the only people talking about libertarianism wearing UFM. But most of the people out there, they don't know what libertarianism was. So I said to him, well, basically libertarians, I mean, the conservatives don't like us because we're all for individual liberties, you know, like gay rights and legalizing drugs. But also the left wing hates us because we're not socialists. And he's like, that sounds interesting. I want that on air. And I'm like, okay. So how do you start selling libertarian ideas to a young audience from 14 years old to 30 years old and their parents who are listening to you because they're driving their kids to school? So I started with what I knew and what I knew was scholarships. So I said to them, you know what, guys, the government is not interested in educating you. In fact, the dumber you are, the easier for them to buy for your boat. So if you want to educate yourself, you have two options. Either you take your education in your own hands and you use technology and internet because you are the first generation that has all the knowledge of humanity in the palm of your hand or you're going to stay ignorant and dumb waiting for a miracle until a politician comes and does something about education which, let's be honest, is not going to happen. Because of this, I became the crazy lady radio who talked to you about scholarships and the show went up in ratings. And you know what I found out? That freedom of expression is directly upwards with the amount of rating that you can give. As long as you can have a rating, anything goes. So one of the things that I was coming to understand was the power of technology. And I don't know if you have watched this YouTube video. It's called iSmartphone. And it grabs the same principles of iPencil of Lyonna Reed to explain that no one in this planet knows how to make a smartphone but how powerful a smartphone is. Because of my job in the radio, I then work in a bank doing their social media. So I learned about the power of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. And then I worked in a cellphone company, the biggest cellphone company of Guatemala. And I understood that this is the teacher of the future. That in order to liberate the minds that have been captured by Marxism in all the schools, not only state schools, but now private schools where the rich kids go, now it's cool to be socialist and like Bernie Sanders. We have this Marxist mentality both ways oppressing the amount of young people who think for themselves. So I said, I think the solution is here. And I started doing activism in my country. I was protesting in the streets because this is also useful and important. In order for libertarianism to be successful, we gotta get out there. We have to be, you know, we say in Spanish, library mouse, but also a bar mouse. Whatever you learn in the library, you have to take it outside to the bars, to the parties, to the streets, to the protest. Otherwise, we're not gonna be successful. So because of my activism, I got invited to a parliament in Spain. By this moment, they only know me in Guatemala. I'm the crazy libertarian girl in the radio talking about scholarships and how the government should be limited. But then they invite me to Spain and I give a speech. And I didn't know that this speech was being recorded. And they put it on YouTube. And because of this speech, that I have it here, yeah, which, you know, basically I said what was already making sense in my mind. Let's dismantle populism through technology. Let's use our cell phones and let's start, you know, putting away all the lies that Hugo Chavez, Lula da Silva, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales, and all these dictators that we have in Latin America are trying to say to the world. And guess what? Apparently, this idea that for me is like, you know, common sense resonated with everyone. In three days, the video got one million views. And I started getting calls from Argentina, Miami, Venezuela, Colombia. Oh my God, what you said, it makes sense. And I'm like, really? The libertarian, crazy ideas that for decades have been relegated to radical and extremists are now something that people want to hear. You know, it's like finally in the market of ideas, the demand and the offer are meeting for people who defend freedom. And from this moment on, I had two choices. Either I go down my bed and hide and expect for the YouTube video just to pass out of fashion until the next big thing comes up. Or I take this opportunity like Steve Jobs said and start connecting the dots. And I decided to do the second. And since this moment on, I started working all over Latin America. I had given more than 1,000 conferences. I have given support and knowledge to young students, to people in politics trying to tell them that libertarian ideas do make sense. Because of this, I got an invitation to go to Venezuela, right? The zombie apocalypse of the 21st century. And my father was so mad at me. He was like, what the hell are you going to do with Venezuela? They're going to kill you. Imagine my father, he has the Cuban mentality of the dictatorship, right? So I was like that. If I don't go to Venezuela, I don't have moral grounds to talk about how horrible this regime is. Because what about if everything that they have told us is a lie? What if actually Venezuela is in the case? But it's not the same talking with socialist, cool, young students from Berkeley who love Bernie Sanders when they have never gotten to Venezuela when you have been there, right? So for me, entering Venezuela was pretty much when Luke Skywalker was entering the Death Star, I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know what to expect. And it was horrible. It was like watching Rome after it was invaded by the barbaric peoples. Everything destroyed. People dying in the street. Scarcity all over the place. Everything that my Cuban grandparents told me about communism. Seeing it in the first flesh and then real for me for the first time. I got in so much trouble. I filmed a supermarket expropriated, nationalized with nothing. No goods, no food whatsoever. The KGB of Venezuela, de Sevín, followed me everywhere. It was really disappointed to get into meetings with the opposition which actually is also socialist. I mean when you tell them that the only way of getting Venezuela out of this mess is privatizing the oil and legalizing drugs and there is illegal drugs, money and the oil in the hands of the dictatorship this is not going to end. It's really sad when you see that there are Venezuelans dying every day and no one in the opposition has the balls to defend capitalism, private property and free market. It's really terrible. And the only woman doing that is Maria Corina Machado. And unfortunately she doesn't get the press that she should get because she is defending the right ideas. So I'm going to go back to this conference of the opposition of Venezuela that actually don't agree with free market. So since that moment and speaking about Star Wars because this is another thing that I do a lot I take movies and I try to take out of movies the important messages about the individual freedom the self-esteem the importance of fighting for ideas so I have done radio shows about how Star Wars is actually a story that starts with the blockade of free market in between the planets and that's where it all starts when they start to block free market. Since then I've been doing the battle of ideas all over Latin America. How do you measure the impact? Well you can never know exactly what I do know is that for the first time in my life I see that current ideas are making an impact and more voices are coming up in Argentina people like Antonela Martí in Spain, people like Maria Blanco Juan Ramon Rayo, Diego Sanchez de la Cruz in Chile, Axel Kaiser in Brazil, Instituto Mises I mean finally in the market of ideas and especially in the internet which is not controlled by the government and is not controlled by the conservative school in the internet which is the freest of all the countries libertarian ideas are the ones who are always winning. The demand for these ideas is what young people are looking for. Why is this so crucial? Because bad ideas lead to bad realities and good ideas lead to good realities. Bad ideas socialism in Latin America state mercantilism and conservatism in the sense of sexism, racism, classism, not teaching evolution in the schools for young girls to know how to manage their body biologically and responsibly these have an impact and the worst of all these impacts of course is the Venezuelan case more than 4 million Venezuelans have fled and ran away from the consequences of bad ideas implementing bad realities 4 million Venezuelans and counting plus the thousands and thousands that have gotten killed so we've also done a job of explaining to people how we got here I published this book called the populist deceit with a philosopher and lawyer Axel Kaiser from Chile of course there are all the guys there starting with Fidel Castro because one of the things that Latin Americans do not understand is that this is a strategy that has been in place since the 1960s when Castro comes to Cuba he starts implementing a copycat of what he did and that's why we had Marxist guerrillas in Guatemala El Salvador Nicaragua, Peru and of course the most famous of them all in Colombia the FARC because they're not only a Marxist guerrilla they're also a drug cartel so in this book we try to explain Latin Americans this is how we got here and this is how we get out of here but I also published this book How to Talk to a Socialist because in my travelings in Latin America I saw that the Marxist mentality has poisoned all the minds of the young people because socialism offers you quick solutions to hard problems there's poverty so let's just give away the wealth so what I try to do in this book is I get the image of the coolest politician young guy that we have which is Ernesto Che Guevara who was a sociopath a homophobic and a killer and I don't believe that my region can have peace or prosperity when the young guy by excellence that everyone applauds is Che Guevara it's really sad when you see an LGTB protest or parade and they use Che Guevara when the guy killed a lot of homosexuals when he was in Cuba and he hated them and he was not only homophobic he was also racist but in this path I also found that our enemy for freedom is not only socialism it's also estate mercantilism it's also conservatism but not conservatism in the Anglo-Saxon way where you try to conserve free market no, conservatism where you try to conserve sexism, classism racism privileges from the government to your business which has created oligarchs super-rich oligarchs in Latin America that most of the people despise and this is why they vote for socialism to have revenge so then I wrote this book How to Talk to a Conservative right? because this discussion has been going for decades in the Anglo-Saxon world but not in Latin America in Latin America, sadly there's still not like a good straight division in between being conservative and being a libertarian and in order to do public policy sometimes we need to talk about things that conservatives just want to ignore on drugs it's a complete failure all the ways you see it but they don't want to talk about it so if you want to do politics in a very libertarian way either we step out of both of these collectivist extremes or we're not going to be successful so I launched this book like three weeks ago and of course in the cover I go for Margarete Thatcher and I go for Margarete Thatcher and I put like this cool sunglasses because I think the woman was pretty libertarian by her standards she ruled in the 80s she decriminalized homosexuality which was a crime in England and that's why Alan Turin decided to kill himself because he was put in this program of let's cure the gay away but she also decriminalized abortion so by those standards she was very libertarian for her age I don't know any conservative right wing women right now in 2019 in my region that would dare to do that but also because she said that at the end the ones who betrayed her were not the socialist were the conservatives of her own party which every time that she wanted to push for more free market the conservatives were like no no no we're gonna lose allies on the other side and she was like I'm not here to have friends I'm here to do the right thing and I also get inspired in this book by Hayek's why I'm not a conservative and also by Anne Rand's conservatism an obituary which she has in her book capitalism the unknown ideal and basically what I'm trying to do here is to say guys liberty is one it's economic liberty it's individual liberty that doesn't mean that we are pushing for subsidies no we're just pushing for free market to have the options for people so from this point on I have not only work in Latin America I have had the opportunity of speaking at CPAC of working with John Stussell of being in the European Parliament they gave me the lifetime achievement award of Freddie Hayek and I'm like you're already giving me a lifetime achievement award I still have decades to live right but I'm very aware that I'm standing in the shoulder of giants of great giants that have come before us even before classical liberalism people who have fought for freedom and freedom is such a delicate torch that needs to be passed from generation to generation so I have no idea of the impact of my work and you will never have a real grasp of what the impact of your work can be maybe the impact of your work will have results in centuries to come Manuela Yao when he decided to make a university in Guatemala he said if I put a political party no one will vote for these ideas because no one knows them if I put a magazine no one will read it only the people who already agree with me and that's going to be preaching to the choir and so let's do a university and we start changing minds and thanks to that decision in the 70s right now in Guatemala we have a libertarian radio libertopolis radio and it's not only heard in Guatemala it's heard all over in Brazil they also have a libertarian party so you never know what the impact of your work can be in centuries to come and when we understand that freedom is what Ana Julia Cooper said the cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class it is the cause of humankind when we understand this we know that we're not working to win elections we're not working to free a country we're working to liberate people's minds in order for them to make their own decisions so where do we go from here we were talking last night with some people from Atlas Network and we were talking about how other sciences neuroscience astrophysics DNA genetics biology are coming up to the conclusion that in fact individuals we are wired to be free and I think that the next step for libertarianism is to get along with all these sciences and start teaching new generations that freedom goes beyond economics I don't know if you know this guy Jason Silva he's Venezuelan and he has worked with National Geographic he's done this show called Origins he has an excellent episode on the origins of money as one of the most important technologies that humanity has come up with he didn't got to this conclusion because he studied at UFM or because he's a libertarian it's because these are people who are studying evolution and science and humanity has come up with ways to collaborate pacifically and voluntarily Cosmos of Carl Sagan and now the new series of Neil deGrasse Tyson shows us that actually the cosmos works for freedom as well every time that humanity has freedom it prospers and every time we understand that we're responsible for the planet and the results also Harari with sapiens and Steven Pinker in this book and in the blank slate conclude that communism is terrible that every time that the individual is submitted to the will of the collective everything goes wrong Harari has in sapiens one section on money that looks like the speech of Francisco de Anconia and Atlas Shrugged yes I know sometimes these guys are fatalist I know sometimes these guys are taken by the left like their idols but in fact when we read them carefully we find clues where we can find things in common and they are great storytellers and this is why Tyrion Lannister said that stories are so powerful because if we can also communicate that freedom is something that evolutionary has made humanity better we have better chances at alluring to more people another excellent branch that we need to tap into is the environment market solutions for pollution we have to get away of the discussion either if the climate is changing or not changing who cares what are we going to do with the pollution that is evident the pollution that I have felt I live in Mexico City and we had an air crisis not so long ago I've seen plastic in the seas by tons and you know one of the things that we freedom fighters agrees that when reality shows us something we should not ignore it we should work to solve it so I think that we have another great opportunity at speaking about market solutions for pollution and also now there are people talking about the possibility of the death of the death the possibility that we're not going to die anymore the possibility that maybe in two centuries people are going to live forever and with genetic processes and you know reverting age people are going to live longer what are we going to do with that time what's going to be the right philosophy the right ethics to live forever and these are debates that I think libertarians have a lot to say about so I want to leave you with this quote that I used in the speech when they gave me the lifetime achievement award the importance of knowledge and ideas is the most important thing of all because knowledge and ideas is what shapes our reality since it's the only thing that no totalitarian dictator can take away from you nor expropriate and this was taught to me by my grandparents and my parents the only treasure the only wealth that no dictator can nationalize from you or expropriate or take away from you is what you have in your head so invest in your brain because if you have to start all over in a new country this is where you have all your wealth not in the material world it is the brain the most valuable of your properties the tool to solve problems the key to start over and create wealth and progress so if we're going to tackle the brain as the most important of all the wealth creation tools that we have we have to tackle the brain all of its branches psychology, art sports, genetics biology, nutrition, sexuality not only economics thank you very much and have a wonderful evening