 Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Yumi, for that. Thank you all for coming. America is a special country. It's different than pretty much any other place in the world. And it's special and unique in its founding. It's the only country, first country, maybe the only country, that was founded not on the basis of geography, not on the basis of ethnic group, not on the basis of historical accident, but on the basis of an idea. The American Revolution was guided by a set of specific ideas, of an ideal of what kind of country the founders wanted to create. And the idea is a moral idea. It's an idea about what kind of life is appropriate for individuals to live. America is the only country ever to be founded on a moral idea. Now what is that moral idea? What is the core, the foundation of the American founding? Well, it's in the Declaration of Independence and the American Declaration of Independence. It's the idea of individual rights. The idea that every individual, every individual has a right. What does a right mean? What do rights mean? I don't know what the word in Japanese for rights is. I can't pronounce that. A right is a freedom. The freedom to act, the right to life, which is the fundamental right, is the freedom to act on behalf of your own life, to pursue the values you believe are necessary for your own life, for your own success as an individual. Rights say you are free to act on your own behalf, but what is freedom? Freedom is a great, one of those words that everybody agrees with, right? If I go in front of any group of people on planet Earth, no matter what they believe in, you ask them, are you for freedom? Everybody's for freedom because everybody defines it differently. What is freedom at its core? Freedom means politically the absence of coercion, the absence of authority, the absence of telling somebody, telling you what you can and cannot do, and having the power to enforce that on you. It's the absence of force. So again, rights is your ability to act freely in the absence without any coercion or authority or control in pursuit of the values you need in order to survive and to thrive. America has founded as a country to create a society in which individuals are free to pursue their life free of coercion, where the government's job, the government's only job in its original conception, is to protect you. It's to protect your freedom, to protect your freedom from crooks and criminals and fraudsters and people who would take your stuff, to protect your freedom from maybe foreign invaders or terrorists or people who would hurt you from the outside, and to arbitrate disputes between us, having a legal system. But other than that, the original conception or the original principle is it leaves you alone to live your life based on your judgment, based on your reason, based on your values, based on your ideas. And as long as you don't hurt somebody else, as long as you don't violate the rights of somebody else by using force against them, by using coercion against them, the job of the government is to leave you alone, to leave you alone. Now, that was a unique vision, grounded on two fundamental ideas. Now, when does America come into existence? 1776. What is that period in human history called? The period of the 18th century. What do we call that period in history? The age of what? Yeah, the age of reason or the age of enlightenment. This is a period in which two ideas, two fundamental ideas that are at the core of the founding of America are, in a sense, rediscovered and brought to the forefront. The first is in the name, the age of reason. The idea that human beings, that what makes us human and that the source of all knowledge is reason is an idea that is rediscovered during the 18th century, during this period. Where did, where did truth come from? Where did knowledge come from, supposedly, before we rediscovered reason? Where did people think truth and knowledge came from? Well, ancient books, revelation, talking to the spirits, talking to God. But it came through revelation, not through use of your mind, not through use of your senses, not through use of logic to discover truth out there. But truth was revealed, usually, to a group of experts, call them the Pope or the religious leaders of the period, and then conveyed to the people. But most people, most people had no knowledge of how to live, had no knowledge of what was good for them, had no knowledge of the world out there other than what they were told. Because we were told that the only way to know the truth is through revelation. If you've studied a little bit of philosophy, then this might sound familiar from Plato. Plato's idea is that there's a world of forms in another dimension. That's where truth resides. This world is just shadows. We don't really know what's going on in this world. And we need philosopher kings to commune with that other world to learn the truth and to tell us. We are too ignorant. We lack knowledge in order to be able to live our own lives. We need the guidance of experts to tell us how to live our lives. The Enlightenment rejects all of that. It says no. Every single individual has the capacity to reason. And as a consequence of that, every individual has the knowledge to live his own life. All of us are capable of discovering the truth. We don't need philosopher kings. In order to tell us what the truth is. The age of reason is the rediscovery of this faculty that we all have and we all use and have always used. But now identified it as something that is the only mechanism to discover truth and reality. Our ability to be rational, our ability to reason. And who has this capacity to reason? Well, everybody does. Individuals do. There's no collective reason. There's no collective consciousness. Just like we can't eat for each other, we can't think for each other. That is the age of enlightenment identifies the idea that individuals must think for themselves. If truth is something to be discovered by the individual human mind, then individuals must think. And that every individual has that capacity to think. And therefore the unit of importance politically and ethically is the individual. Think about that declaration of independence. It says we each have a right to life. Whose life? Our own. We each have a right to liberty. Liberty means to think whatever you want to think. People can't force ideas on you. There should not be authorities when it comes to ideas who can enforce the truth. You must discover the truth. And you have a right to pursue happiness, your happiness as an individual. So there are two ideas that come out of the enlightenment. A reason as man's means of knowledge and individualism that is moral individualism. The sanctity of the individual and of his moral purpose is to pursue his happiness. And that's reflected in this document that founds this new country. Note that if individuals have the capacity of reason and therefore they can discover the truth, and through science they can know the physical world. There's no accident that the enlightenment is happening just after it overlaps with another age, the age of science, the discovery of science. Newton, Isaac Newton is the same period as John Locke was just a little before. They overlap, right? It's not an accident because suddenly we're discovering that we can explain the physical world using our senses and some math, and it's not that hard. Something that for thousands of years we had no clue how it worked. For thousands of years again we relied on revelation to explain. Now, with some formulas and some experiments, look, this is how the world works. So suddenly individuals said to themselves, well, wait a minute. If I can use my own mind to discover the truth out there about the physical world, why can't I choose my own profession, my own career? Because what was your career before the late 18th century, 19th century? What career did you pursue? Who decided that? You typically pursued the career that your father pursued. You were part of a guild. You couldn't just do what you wanted to do. You couldn't go off and, you know, decide what kind of life you would live. It was decided for you. Society, whether it was government or the tribe or the religion, decided for you what you could do and not do. Did you marry whoever you fell in love with? No. Marriage is almost all arranged. You married who you were told to marry. Some of the people woke up and said, wait a minute. I want to be able to pursue. If I have my own capacity to think, I should be able to pursue whatever profession I want. I should be able to marry whoever I want. And I should be able to choose my own political leader. If my life is mine, if I have the capacity to take care of myself, then why does somebody else decide who is going to rule over me? So the American Revolution is a true revolution. It changes the world. It asserts that we're all equal for the first time, right? There are no aristocrats, there are no people who are better than others. Now they were inconsistent because there was slavery at the time and they perpetuated the slavery. But the idea that we're all equal is what ultimately made it possible to free the slaves. We're all equal in our political rights. We all have individual rights. Those rights should be protected by government and otherwise leave us alone. So this is a revolution that happens at the end of the 19th century and really captures or determines the spirit that is America going forward. A spirit of individualism, people taking care of themselves, thinking for themselves, pursuing their own lives independently, limited government and freedom. The freedom to live, the freedom to act, the freedom to think, which at the core of what American ideals were. And what is the result of this revolution in thinking? A revolution that started in America and then spread across the world. If you look at simple measures like income per capita, if you look at income per capita in human history, for 100,000 years it was pretty much flat. We made on average somewhere between, I don't know, $2 to $3 a day for all of human history. I mean if you look at a graph, it goes like this. It's basically flat. In Europe, there were periods when it went up a little bit, I don't know, during Greece and Rome, and then it would go down during the Dark Ages, and then it went up a little bit during the Renaissance. But it was, you couldn't even, you can't even see the variation, it's so small. And then suddenly, suddenly, at the end of the 18th century, at about the time of America's founding, income per capita goes like that. I mean you have to jump to get to the, to how high it gets, because you can't even capture it in dollar terms, because how do you measure the benefit of having running water, having electricity, having computers. You can't capture it in, in monetary terms, because there was, it's not that the, you know, there was nothing comparable before. Think about being the richest person in the world, the richest person in the world 150 years ago. Are you better off being poor today, or being the richest person in the world 150 years ago? Who lives better? Somebody poor today has running water, sewage, electricity, access to the internet. Most poor people have smartphones, access to transportation. 150 years ago, the richest person in the world had none of those things. None of those things. So the consequence of this revolution was a massive increase. Innovation, technology, and quality and standard of living. Unthinkable how much richer we are today than what we were before the American Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution, before the late 18th century. And it's not just money. What was life expectancy in most of the world in 1776 or 1800? What was life expectancy in 1800? How long on average did people live? It was under 40. In the best places, it was 39. Some places, it was under 30. Most of you would be middle aged, I'd be dead already. Life was short. It was brutish. It was unpleasant. What did we do? We woke up in the morning when the sun rose. We went and worked all day in the field. We went back home when the sun set, had dinner, and did what? Read a book. Most people couldn't read. 90 plus percent of the people couldn't read. And there was no light. You couldn't keep a fire going inside the hut because it was, you know, polluted the air. So you want to sleep? So the world ended when it was dark. So life expectancy today in Japan is well over 80. That's up from 39 in 1800. By every dimension you can think of that's measurable. Life in every country that has adopted elements of this freedom, elements of this philosophy articulated in the founding of America, has dramatically improved. Dramatically improved. Now, what is the manifestation of these ideas politically and economically? Well, if the rule of government is just to protect you, then for the first time in human history, how did we get all this wealth? Well, suddenly people came up with ideas. They didn't have to ask anybody for permission to publish those ideas. They didn't have to get access, permission from anybody to use those ideas to build a business. Remember, you know what happened to Galileo? When he had an idea, like the idea was what? That the earth goes around the sun, not the sun around the earth. He got into trouble because the authorities didn't accept this idea. So imagine he wanted to start a business based on that idea. No, no, no, you can't do that. You haven't got permission. But even for hundreds of years later, if you wanted to start a business based on a new idea yet get permission from the king, or from the government, or from the tribal leader, or from the witch doctor, from the pope, somebody always had to give you permission to live, permission to build, invest, create. For the first time in history, no permission was needed. You had an idea, you went and executed. You might fail, and then it was up to you. Nobody would bail you out, or you might succeed. And suddenly you got people innovating, inventing, creating, building. Business for the first time came into existence. There was no such thing as business. There's no such thing as a corporation until really the beginnings of the 19th century, where people started taking in capital, investing in ideas, building things, selling them on a market. The whole idea of consumption really didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution. Because before that we were just subsistence farmers. We grew the stuff that we ate. We didn't have access to go out and buy stuff in stores, supermarkets, malls. All this is a phenomena of this modern society that was being created. What do we call that system where you don't act based on permission, you just go out there and create and build and produce and make? Well, that's really capitalism. That's free markets. And that's what the American system, that's what this idea of individualism and the idea of the efficacy of human reason brought into existence. They brought into existence a system of capitalism, a system of free markets that has made us all relatively speaking fantastically wealthy. They've improved our quality of life and standard of living dramatically. That was the vision, I think, that started America. And that was the vision that lasted in America for about a hundred years. But what does this idea rest on? Again, it rests on two things, reason and individualism. Individualism means that your life is yours. And that your moral purpose in life is to pursue your happiness, your well-being. But both of these ideas go counter to much of contemporary philosophy. Much of the ideas of philosophers over the last 200 years contradict both reason and the idea that what you should do with your life is pursue your own happiness. What are we typically told that a moral, ethical person should do? Pursue your own happiness? Be an egoist? Try to make your life the best life that it can be? Is that what your mother taught you? I don't know about Japan. But my mother never taught me that. My mother taught me that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for others. Always think of other people first, of society first. If you grew up in a nationalist kind of environment as I did, the country, the tribe, society, the group, you are not that important. You as an individual should always sacrifice for the group and for everybody else. So there is a tension between the individualism that America was founded on and this collectivistic vision of the importance of the group above the individual, of the importance of other people above the individual. The idea that you must sacrifice to others that what's noble, what's good, what's virtuous, what's right, is sacrifice. It's the denial of your own values and what's good for you. So right from the beginning there is a tension between these ideas and even reason. Is reason unequivocally right? Is the idea that truth is really discovered by the individual using his mind? Well that is challenged philosophically. Whether it's by religion that says, oh no, no, you don't know the truth. Truth is up there. Or by philosophers who say, no, no, no, we don't see actual reality. Our minds distort what's real. We don't know what's real. We don't know what's actually out there. Kant, Hegel, they didn't think that we had the capacity to actually learn about reality. They didn't believe in logic. Hegel tells us that contradictions are part of the world. And what is logic? Logic is the science of figuring out that there are no contradictions. It's the science of undoing contradictions because the fact is in reality there are no contradictions. Something is what it is. But philosophers kept telling us, no, and today we have post-modern philosophy that tells us that reality doesn't even exist necessarily. And we certainly don't know what it is. And we all, our realities are all different based on, I don't know, based on our race or based on our genes or based on our something. But there is no one reality. There is no one truth. Everybody has their own truth. That's kind of subjectivism, relativism. There's two co-ideas of the Enlightenment. Almost immediately come under attack philosophically, ideologically, from everybody from the philosophical profession. And you see the erosion in the confidence in those ideas throughout the West and certainly in America. And as a consequence of that, when we start doubting the ability of the individual to discover the truth, when we start doubting that the individual's purpose should be their own happiness and we should give them the freedom to do that. Well, what do we replace that with? With a government that wants to tell us what's good for us and what isn't good for us. A government that wants to control how we behave and how we don't behave. What's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. We now start re-establishing authority over individual's lives. That's exactly what you see in America starting in the late 19th century. You see government bureaucrats, government officials, government politicians. More and more starting to intervene in markets. More and more starting to intervene in how individuals are living their lives. And that only accelerates through the 20th century. So while America was founded on this ideal of freedom and this ideal of liberty and ideal of individual rights, today that ideal is still a large extent lost. Today America is not that different than any other country in the world. The government regulates and controls and taxes and tells us what we can and cannot do and how we should live to a very large extent. And does, seemingly, that trend only seems to increase over time. All a consequence in my view of an attack by philosophers, by thinkers, by intellectuals on the ideas of the Enlightenment, on rejection of the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment that happened starting in the early 19th century and goes on through today. If you can't advocate for reason and individualism, you can't advocate for individual freedom, you can't really advocate for capitalism. Now this is where I think Ayn Rand is so important and the crucial role Rand plays. Because Rand in the 20th century is really the only philosopher, thinker, who is trying to defend these ideas of the Enlightenment. She, again, brings forward this idea of reason being our only means of knowledge. Reason being our means of survival, the individual's means of survival and thriving. And she not just resurrects that idea. I think she provides a powerful philosophical foundation for the idea of human reason. She actually has a whole theory of how reason works, how human, our ability to conceptualize, to form concepts, to understand the world. She has a whole theory about how that happens and how that works, which is revolutionary. And in terms of individualism, she is the first philosopher since probably Aristotle and Greece to actually say, no, the purpose in life is not to sacrifice. Your purpose in life is not to live for other people. Your purpose in life is not to live for the group, to live for the nation, to live for the state, to live for whatever, fill in the blank. Because she asks the question, why? Why should you live for other people? Why are the lives of other people more important than yours? Isn't your life the most important thing for you? And if it's the most important thing for you, then why not live for yourself? So she develops a whole theory of egoism, a whole theory of the morality of egoism. She doesn't just say pursue your happiness. She provides a philosophical, ethical context for that and a philosophical, ethical guide to pursuing your happiness. So the kind of virtues and the kind of values that you must hold as an individual in order to attain your happiness. So for the first time, I believe in human history, we actually have a full-fledged philosophy grounded philosophically that defends these two ideas that the Enlightenment brought forward, the ideas of reason and individualism. And as a consequence of her view of reason and individualism, she said, what is the only political system that leaves individuals free to pursue their own happiness that doesn't intervene, that extracts corrosion from their lives and leaves them free to live? So the only moral system, according to Ayn Rand, the only ethical system in which individuals should live, political system, is capitalism. Because capitalism is the only system that leaves you free. And again, not the capitalism that we have today, which isn't really capitalism. What we have today is a mixture, right? We have some freedom, we have a lot of controls. And it's the interaction between this freedom and controls that kind of determines the economic world in which we live, the political world in which we live. Now, she said, what has to happen is a complete separation of economics from politics. The government has no role in telling us how to live our lives. Socially and economically. So she was very critical of Democrats in the United States, if we go to American politics, because Democrats wanted to intervene in our business lives, in the economy, regulate, control, nationalize maybe. So the left was bad because it wanted to intervene in our business lives, in our economic lives. But she was very critical of the right. Because the right, historically, wanted to intervene in our personal lives. It wanted to tell us who we could sleep with, who we could marry. It wanted to intervene in our bedrooms. For Rand, the state had no role intervening in our lives other than to protect us. That was the only role. So she rejected Democrats, and she rejected Republicans. There's a famous video, you can find it on YouTube, where she talks about the bankruptcy of conservatism. Why conservatism was completely bankrupt as an ideology. And her argument about conservatism is that conservators relied on the defense of capitalism on religion. She said, you can't defend capitalism on religion. If you're going to defend, we live in the 20th century, 21st century now. You have to defend it on reason, on the basis in a sense of science, not on the basis of mysticism. Conservatives always said that capitalism was good, why? What's the defense of capitalism? Because it helps other people. It's good for society. Adam Smith, the wealth of nations. Adam Smith says, in capitalism, everybody acts in their own self-interest. He says, the baker doesn't bake the bread for you. They bake the bread because they are trying to make a living for themselves. And they enjoy baking bread. And you are the beneficiary. So everybody in capitalism acts in their own self-interest, Adam Smith says. And he says, that's not morally good because self-interest is morally tainted. It's morally bad. We're supposed to sacrifice. We're supposed to help our fellow man. We're supposed to live for others. But he says, when you aggregate all the self-interested action, when you add it all up, society is better off. She said, if you add a vice to a vice to a vice to a vice to a vice, all these negatives, somehow you get a positive. Now, nobody buys that. Nobody thinks that's true. People want to do what's right. People want to be moral. Ayn Rand says, that is a terrible defense of capitalism. What you want to defend is the right, the moral right, not the political right, the moral right of the baker to bake a bread for himself. And again, her theory is that your life is yours morally and your purpose, moral purpose in life is to live your life, the best life that you can live. Not because it helps society, as the conservatives would argue, but because it helps you. And yes, by the way, it does help. Society is better off. We're richer, we live longer in the aggregate. But that's not the purpose. That's not the reason it's good. That's just a happy outcome. The reason is that it's good for the individual. So she provides this new solid foundation for individualism. She provides a new solid foundation for reason. And that's why I think that if we ever move back towards capitalism, if we ever move back towards free markets, it will probably be on the philosophical foundation of Ayn Rand. Now, she has been quite influential on many conservatives because conservatives have read her works. What inspires them more than anything is her political analysis and her economic analysis. Conservatives have failed, I think, to really absorb Ayn Rand's ideas and to influence them dramatically because they've ignored her more philosophical ideas. They don't want to accept them because, because her philosophical ideas reject religion, because her philosophical ideas reject the morality that they think is right, that the tradition tells us is right. She's too much of a revolutionary. She's too much of a, you know, of a disruptor for the conservatives to actually embrace. So you find today in American politics that a lot of people on the right, a lot of people say that they are inspired by Ayn Rand, but almost none of them have any kind of understanding of her actual ideas. In terms of her influence over the last few decades, her influence has been, I think, dramatic but superficial. So I don't think Ronald Reagan, for example, would have been elected president of the United States if not for Ayn Rand. She set the groundwork for the kind of rhetoric that Reagan had that was pro-capitalism. He didn't do necessarily very much, but the pro-capitalist rhetoric that he articulated. That was, that resonated with Americans because for 20 years earlier they had been hearing from Ayn Rand, to some extent from people like Milton Friedman, that capitalism was good, that capitalism was productive in Ayn Rand's term, that capitalism was moral, that it was the only moral system. I think many people who worked under the Reagan administration all the way up to today have been influenced by Rand in a variety of different ways and impacted kind of the political dialogue in America. But at its heart, at its core, nothing has really changed. We still live in a very mixed economy where the number of controls and regulations and interventions only grows and where the realm of freedom is shrinking. But as I said, I believe that to the extent that there is going to be a move towards more freedom, to the extent that there will be a revival of capitalism, it will be on the back of Ayn Rand's ideas. And just to add to what was said, not only is Ayn Rand being very influential in America, and a lot of people have read her books and have inspired individuals, but globally now, Ayn Rand is really becoming more and more influential in a force. So you've got translations of most of her works in almost every language in the world today. Her books sell more now in foreign languages than they do in English. So Russian, Eastern European languages, Indian languages, Asian languages, all of her books, almost every single one of her books are now in Chinese and mainland China. Vietnamese, in almost every language Ayn Rand is being read. I think her real influence is in our future. I think in 50 years she'll have had much more influence than she's had in the past 50 years. And hopefully, hopefully that'll be true in Japan as well. And we've got books here, but of course the books are also in Japanese and you can pick them up, I guess, on Amazon Japan. Yes. All right, thank you and I'll take questions.