 She can tell this wasn't my title, wasn't my choice, you know, free trade, immigration, and robots, oh my, I mean if it had been my title, it would have been free trade, immigration, and robots, oy vey, no, I mean generally this is Keith's title, he comes up with great titles, not mine, you know, my title is always boring like morality of capitalism, that's the best I can do. So free trade, immigration, robots, what's the common denominator in the culture in which we live in today? All three over the last year, two years, I have noticed, are perceived as threats, threats to people's jobs, threats to the American way of life. All three are perceived as destroyers of jobs, American jobs, our jobs are being attacked by immigrants, by trade, by robots. So let's go over all three, right? I mean it's kind of obvious that these are real threats. There's a certain number of jobs in the economy, and people are coming across the border legally or illegally, for manual, very simple jobs, those are very sophisticated jobs in Silicon Valley, and for every person who comes across and gets a job, obviously they're under pricing an American who already has the job and they're taking the job from him. The world, there are only so many jobs in the world after all, I mean, you laugh, but this is the argument, there are only so many jobs in the world, and every time we let somebody in, somebody is going to lose their job, or a more sophisticated interpretation of this, and you hear this a lot, they're going to compete with this American, and therefore, and since they're coming from a foreign country, and since they're probably coming from a poorer country, they're willing in order to come to the United States to work for less, they're going to drive wages down. So immigration is both a job destroyer and a cause for the lowering of a standard of living, the lowering of our American wages, and we can laugh at this, but there's an element of truth here, and we'll get to that, right? This is not a completely nutty idea, not a completely nutty idea, so that's immigration. It's kind of simple, very perceptual, very obvious, we can see what's going on. Trade is very similar, look. If somebody can do the job in China for less money than you can, maybe they're less productive, but they're a lot cheaper, and if companies figure out that the transportation costs, as we know in container ships today, the transportation costs are close to zero, it's amazing the revolution in transportation that has happened over the last 20, 30 years with these massive container ships, you can transport stuff from China to the United States at a very low cost, and if they're willing to do it cheaper, then they're taking our jobs. And for every job created in China, and God, there are 1.4 billion people over there, we lose a job in manufacturing or in computers, in programming, I mean there are millions of programmers in China, and most Silicon Valley companies have vast facilities in China with programmers and engineers. And maybe job they have, obviously we lose. And again, yeah I mean we can laugh at that, and yeah we can understand the bigger picture, but there's a certain truth there, there's a certain element of reality, there's competition, there's 1.4 billion Chinese that have woke it up, and they want a life, and they want a job, and they want to increase their standard of living, and some people argue, and some people try to convince us, and many Americans now believe that it's at their expense. And again, kind of a zero-sum mentality, but there's a certain truth there. And of course, robots, God, right? I mean think about it, we're just at the cusp of a revolution, and already 90 percent of all the manufacturing jobs in the United States, that you know we have about half the manufacturing jobs we had at our peak in 1979, most of those jobs, 90 percent of those jobs that went away, went away because of technology. Because of robots, primitive robots, simple robots, unsophisticated robots, just imagine when they get smart, and not just smart, but mobile. I mean one of the biggest problems with robots when you read about this is to get them to move. It turns out that our ability to move the way we move, the ability of animals to move is an incredibly sophisticated problem to solve, but you know we're getting better at it, and robots one day will be able to move, if not as well as us, close, close enough to take our jobs and all kind of jobs, and there's no end now to the kind of jobs that potentially could be taken. Anywhere from manufacturing jobs, simple jobs, where you're stamping the same thing over and over again, and that's kind of being taken away, to far more sophisticated jobs, and not just manual labor jobs. You know we did, you heard from Boz, I think, about this event we do in Israel, the best startup in Israel, Atlas Shrugged Award for best startup in Israel. And this year, the win of that award was a company called Zebra Medical Imaging Technologies, something like that, right, and what does this company do? Well they've got an AI, an artificial intelligence machine learning system that basically analyzes mammograms, and is far better than any radiologist in identifying breast cancer. Radiologists out there, and I know there are a bunch of you here, they're going to take your jobs, they're going to take your jobs, and again, one to threat, and what we've seen over the last year or two is all of this kind of bubbling up, and this is not a right-wing thing, and this is not a left-wing thing, because you see it across the board. You see it in the anti-immigration debate, you see it in the anti-trade debate, a debate I never thought we'd actually have, but we are having it turns out, and you're seeing it in the panic about robots, and it's panic. You're seeing it even in Silicon Valley, you're seeing it on the left and right in immigration, across the entire political spectrum. People are coming to take our jobs, robots are coming to take our jobs, and what should we do? Well we should be afraid, and we should build walls, and we should restrict trade, and we haven't quite reached a point where we should start restricting technology, but I'm just waiting for a politician to suggest that, and you know what? I think a bunch of people would vote for that. Now this is America. This is not the attitude that one would expect in America. You know, we're in Pittsburgh, one of the great cities of the Industrial Revolution in America, a city that saw its population grow tenfold in 60 years. Why? Because tons of immigrants came into Pittsburgh and stole jobs. It's a city that saw its population grow tenfold, why? Because it embraced technology, new technologies. It's a city that grew tenfold because it embraced the idea of win-win trade, right? The American spirit has always been a spirit of risk-taking, of facing the future boldly, of being exciting about the prospects of the future. And yet, we live in a world today where so many people are afraid, are scared, and while politicians encourage that, while intellectuals encourage that. They encourage fear, skepticism, pessimism, helplessness with regard to the future. And something new, well, something not new, but something that I think is solidifying more and more in the America we live in today. This notion of collectivism, our jobs, American jobs, what is that? I mean, I have a job. I hope you guys have a job. But they know our jobs. They know American jobs. But for decades now, Americans retort in our schools, at our universities, by our politicians, and by our welfare state that continues to reinforce the message. You can't take care of yourself. You need help. You're not alone. You're not, the individual doesn't count. What counts is the group, and the group is there to help you and assist you and provide for you. Don't worry. Don't say for retirement. Don't say for retirement, please, because we've got to taking care of. Don't think long-term. We've got to taking care of. Don't think about healthcare, because we're going to take care of it. We haven't quite got there, but we're going to. Don't think for yourself. Don't plan for yourself. We, the government, the intellectuals, the people in power, are going to take care of you. And at some point, that just continues, that continuous reinforcement, that continuous buildup has ground that American spirit down. I was reading Iron Man's Don't Let Go a few days ago, which he wrote in 1971, where she talked about the American sense of life, the sense of life of independence, of don't tread on me, of I can do it, and I can make it happen. And she talks there about, you know, it's going to take many generations for this to go away. There's such a strong sense of life. And here we are sitting in 2017, two generations already passed. I don't know how many generations she believed it would take to grind down. But it seems at least that it's being ground down. It's depressing. And I'm sorry, it's the last talk in the last day of the conference, but it's depressing. The world out there, when we look at what's going on, the political world is depressing. When we look at what Americans, at least a significant number of Americans, I don't know if it's a majority yet, but a significant number of Americans, what they want, what they vote for, what they get excited about, whether it's Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, it's depressing. It's a collectivistic vision of helplessness, a collectivistic vision of fear, fear for the future, fear for themselves, fear for America. And this is where the country is. This is being realistic. This is where we've come to. Now, their pockets, where things are different. And we saw examples of this this afternoon here on stage. Think of Blake Scholes, think of Keith Schacht, not helpless, optimistic, positive, willing to go, innovative, excited, not fearful at all about the future. And you see that spirit in places like Silicon Valley. You see that spirit in the kind of people who are building robots, who want to build robots, who believe in the future, who believe in what's possible in the future. And that's the spirit I think we, as I think the only real philosophical representatives of what America is about, need to stand for. It's what we need to give voice to, what we need to give a philosophy to. Because I don't believe the American sense of life can come back by itself. I don't believe the American sense of life can be brought back by conservatives or liberals or anybody in the middle. It's a remnant of the founding. It's the remnant of the spirit of that founding. It's lasted 250 years, but it needs new blood or it needs new ideas. It needs to be refreshed philosophically. We are the people who need to refresh it philosophically. It's Inran, it's objectivism that needs to refresh this American sense of life with a proper philosophy. So what does that look like with regards to immigration, trade, and robots? Well, I want to go back to the first lecture we had this week, to Ankar Ghatia's lecture on the love of ability, about productiveness. What is productiveness? What is this love of ability? It really is about taking the individuals your life seriously, taking it seriously in terms of achieving your values, your life, your happiness, your success. It's looking and seeing ability and achievement as pro your life, as beneficial to your values. How does this relate to these questions of losing jobs and the risks and the threats that immigrants trade or robots must pose? How should we relate to these questions? And look, I know I'm going to get questions about immigration and you can ask about all the different aspects of immigration and so on. I'm focusing here on one aspect, on this aspect which relates to job, to work, to productiveness, to your careers. Then multiple dimensions here. Now I said there was an element of truth in the fear that people have. Yeah, there are really smart people out there in the world. And if they come here, they'll compete for some of your jobs. Isn't that great? Isn't that cool that you get to compete with the best in the world? Isn't it cool? Isn't it something you should think about? You should consider whatever your job is. Isn't taking your career seriously? Isn't taking your life seriously about trying to be the best that you can be but realizing and taking into account what other people are doing? Isn't it fun to be working with the best at whatever you're doing? To be challenged by the best? To trade with the best? Isn't that what really taking life seriously is about? Don't we want to admire when people do great things and who cares what color skin they have, what sex they have, or what place they come from in the world, or what their stupid immigration status is? They're achieving something. They're building something. They're making something. Isn't that cool? Isn't that what we should be promoting, what we should be excited about? We want the best people around us to be living in our neighborhoods, to be built to be working in our companies, to be trading with us on a day-to-day basis, whether it's your gardener or whether it's the program of the latest, most complex AI system in the world. You want the best. You want to compete with the best. You want to take into account the fact that the best are coming here and take your career seriously. Figure it out. And if you think they're going to take your job, pick another one. Think about what Keith told us earlier about how he thinks about his career. Imagine if everybody thought about their career that way. And how many jobs he's had and how many times he's quit and shifted and changed and adapted. If everybody thought that way, what would, I mean, we would really take these things seriously. Yeah, immigrants are coming. There are people in China working and doing jobs. Isn't that great that we can trade with them and get cheap stuff so we have more money to spend on other stuff or to invest or to create or to build or to make things? Maybe we should go to China and build a plant there and take advantage of the fact that all these people want to have a life, want to make a living. The idea that we view trade or immigration or any of these things are zero sum, it's so strange, it's so alien and so unreal when you think about the real life benefits that exist. But yes, we have to take into account. And some of you might have jobs that are going to move to China. So take that into account and think about what you want to do in life. And if you need to change careers, change careers. That's what it means to take your life seriously. It's not just to sit around and wait and see if the Chinese show up or if the immigrant takes your job or of course if the robot takes your job. We should all be thinking career-wise whether we can be replaced by a robot because it's coming. You radiologists, it's coming. Okay, but that means I need to think about it. I need to figure out is there a field within radiology that is still gonna exist when the computers are doing all the stuff that could be interesting and fun? Or is there another field completely that it could still do that would be interesting and fun? And what would the world look like when all the manual jobs are done by computers and we can really think and focus on kind of the creation of reason, of the mind? Can we even imagine a world like that? Now I can tell you I can't. I'm not a science fiction writer, but I can tell you it sounds really beautiful even without being able to imagine it. Think of, well, I don't know that we can't think of, but you know, imagine the creativity, imagine the time we will all have, maybe to have two careers at once. Who knows? To have serious hobbies. I mean, after all, we've gone from having to work what, 16 hours days to maybe 10 hour days, to now eight hour days, and maybe with robots, we'll be able to work few hours and spend more time doing other things. Who knows? But it's beautiful. It's not something to be afraid of. It's something to be embraced and be excited about. That's what the American sense of life used to be like. That's what we need to help resurrect. We have to fight these trends. We have to present the positive vision. We have to present the positive ideas. So if you take Inren's ethics seriously, and in my view, Inren's ethics is the only thing that can help resurrect that American sense of life. That all these things, immigrants, trade, robots, must be embraced, must be celebrated. We need to fight the fear mongering. We need to fight the people who wanna build walls of all kinds. We need to embrace change and innovation and technology. And yeah, robots too, they're kinda cool. All in the name of positive values, in the name of egoism and what egoism really means, taking your life, taking your career seriously, thinking about what it is you wanna do. You go to Southern Ohio and yeah, there are a lot of jobs gone around here, a lot of steel jobs gone. And the population of Pittsburgh has shrunk by about half from its peak. Some people are sitting around waiting for the steel jobs to come back. Somebody promised that, by the way. President promised they were coming back. So sit and wait. And you can sit and you can wait, you can accept that welfare check and we can encourage them to wait. Oh, we can tell them to get in a car and drive to Texas or Arkansas or many other places, where there are plenty of jobs. One of the phenomenals right now in America is that there are many, many jobs that go unfilled, many jobs, skilled jobs. And I just read an article where there's this massive mismatch between the skills people have and the jobs that are available. So what's the solution to that? Get trained, take your life seriously and get trained in the skills where there are jobs. And somebody has to say that to people. Stop sitting in Southern Ohio and in Western Pennsylvania waiting for somebody to give you, go take it, go live. Now that's not to diminish the fact that there are problems in America. That the real challenges and issues, too much regulations, too many controls, too many people telling us we cannot do this and cannot do that, too high taxes, a role of government out of control. But it's interesting how we've shifted the focus from that in American culture, from attacking that, from challenging that, from fighting that, to fighting immigrants. Trade and robots. Now, I obviously haven't given up hope, but I don't think you should give up hope. There's still a lot of fight in me and in you, I know, but it's gonna be a fight. And it's gonna be a fight against the whole attitude, the whole establishment, the swamp, we're the real drainers of the swamp. But I encourage you to go out there and engage. First, by taking your own life seriously, by taking the advice you got from Keith, by taking Blake Scholes as, wow, I mean, I don't know how many of you were in the boom presentation, but how inspiring is that, right? But every one of us can do that in our own lives at some level, in some capacity. That's what living is about, challenging ourselves, turning ourselves into the best human beings we can be. And then once you do that, once you've done that to you, then it's time to go out into the world and be advocates and talk to people and argue with people and convince people, exhibit that sense of life, exhibit the ideas, live the ideas, and if we all can live those ideas, if we all exhibit the ideas, if we don't give up to these pressures, then we have a chance of winning. Then we have a chance of convincing our neighbors, we have a chance of convincing the world out there to go back to that American spirit, that American way of life, that optimism, that independence, that view of an amazing future. An amazing future, that when you look at Silicon Valley, it's right in front of us. It's so exciting to think about where we could be. Just think about where we were 20 years ago, technologically, and extrapolate in terms of the tools we have today. We could be living double our lifestyles. And look at the Christ technology for gene splicing. I mean, that's massive in terms of what could be done. Think of robots and taking over all the drudgery that we have to do on a day-to-day basis. Think of all the smart technologies that are gonna be applied to medicine and to every other aspect of the life. Think of boom and going around the world in hours instead of days. Right, a little scary for me, but yeah. Yeah, the temptation to be traveling will be even greater, right? But there is a rosy future out there that technology I think makes real to all of us every day that should excite you, that should make you passionate rather than fearful and depressed. There's something to fight for. And it's right there, it hasn't gone out, the lights have not gone out yet. Colorado's still going in spite of everything. They're great creative people making great things, producing great things, and if we can liberate them, I don't know what the future looks like, but it's really, really, really cool. And I want to live in that future. And I think all of you do too. Thank you. Thank you to you, Dr. Brooke. And thank you to everyone at AIRI, all the speakers, staff, everyone involved for just doing so much good work for us. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone here, because in essence, this here is our Mulligan's Valley. So thank you everyone for that. Now my question is, I was thinking as you were talking about the line in Galt's speech where the mindset is, it is therefore I want it, versus I want it, therefore it is. So can you comment on, how do you engage with that? How do you get people to shift from that latter perspective to the former perspective? I mean, first of all, I think it needs to be shown to them that there is an alternative perspective. And that there is a different way of looking at the world. And that it is the heart of what this country is and how it became what it is. And look, some people are hopeless, some people can't change. But I think that if they're shown that there's an alternative and look at the leadership we have today, I mean, political, intellectual and academic. I mean, our academics teachers were complete determinists and there's no hope for us and we're all psychologically screwed up anyway. And our political leadership reinforced the fears. They reinforced the idea that we're dependent on government, that we're dependent on other people, that we can't create a great life for ourselves, that the Chinese are out to get us, that these people are out to get us. And you have to break that. And I think the first step is just offering an alternative because I don't think people hear the alternative. There's no voice. There's no voice out there. I mean, I find myself in this bizarre situation where I'm defending Silicon Valley, right? I mean, why do I need to do that? It seems like it's self-evident. But even among objectivists, I know people, I know a lot of people in objectivism who think I'm nuts for defending Silicon Valley because they're lefties. As if politics is primary. As if your political orientation is the most important thing in life. These are the most productive, creative, reason-using people in the world. They're changing our lives to the better. Yeah, I mean, criticize their politics, but the fact that they're moral far outstrips, in my mind, the evaluation of them in terms of their productive lives, far outstrips their position in politics. And yeah, I'll argue with them about politics and I'll criticize that. But we need to go back to valuing productiveness, valuing ability, admiring and loving ability. Excellent, thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. This is Scholar from Delaware. How could I miss Scholar from Delaware? My question is on immigration. I would like you to reiterate, Dr. Brooke, why you say that it should be very easy to enter this country, but very difficult to become a citizen? So my view is, particularly in the world right now, is it should be very easy for the reasons that I think obvious. I have a right to invite anybody I want into coming to live in my home or to come and rent an apartment to or to come and rent a hotel room to or to work in my factory to work in my plant, right? And I think they have a right to better their lives. And I don't see where their right ends because they encounter a border, right? Their rights don't end there. So it should be easy for them to come and work and engage in productive activity. Now, I think that to become a citizen, it which means to vote and to be engaged in the political process. And I think then the government has more commitments towards you than it has towards non-citizens. I think that needs to be more of an achievement and it requires a certain understanding. And even today we have this, a certain understanding of what the political system is that you're being embraced in. What is the political system that you're gonna be voting as part of? And even today we have this little immigration test that you go, now today it's stupid, right? Because you memorize like 10 questions, you just answer them. There's no understanding. It's all memorization. But it should be a test, it should be something that reflects understanding of the political system. Now, a lot of people today are concerned about the fact that when they come, everybody votes Democratic or whatever, and therefore they can really do harm to our economic system. I'm, again, I don't think that if they all voted Republican, it would be that much better because I don't view this as one party being good and one party being bad. I view them both as being bad. But okay, so I'll grant you that, let's say. And by granting that I'd say, okay, so let's even say they can come in and work and they can't vote and only the second generation could vote. I mean, voting is not that important, is my view. So don't make them citizens. But I'd prefer to see that flow of immigrants into the country and have them not vote than restrict the immigration in. Would you say, I think you agree with this, but I think if you're worried about citizenship and there are issues to be worried about it, it's not really an issue about immigration. It is, should there be criteria for citizenship, including, so does it, if you're born in this country, does that make you a citizen? Can you pass this test that Yaron's talking about? So the more fundamental issue is, and it is a real issue in political thought, I think, what should be the criteria for citizenship? It's not an immigration issue and it's not obvious because you just happen to be born in this country that you're a citizen. If you're taken seriously that you have a responsibility for establishing a proper kind of government and that there should be some kind of criteria for citizens. But on the issue of immigration, I wanna reiterate a point in Yaron's talk that I think is really important. And it's, I think it's, so we've been talking about motivation quite a bit at the conference. As Yaron said, there's a lot of complicated issues in regard to immigration, but I think part of what the dispute is about is what one's fundamental orientation should be. And my orientation, I'm pretty sure, I mean, it's all in Yaron's talk, it should be oriented towards human ability and what immigration, why we're so pro-immigration is we want the doors open to human ability and to all these people born in countries that are either politically, on dictatorships and tyrannies or just economically disasters who want to make something of their life and the primary should be, we should be open and eager for those people to come. And then it's an issue of details. Yes, there are threats in the world and so on. Versus what is primary is the threats and the fear and we're worried about all these things. And yes, there's an issue of human ability and so on. And yes, well, I ran into being able to do what she did if she wasn't able to. That is such a reversal of what I think the proper value orientation should be. And I think that's a crucial issue in regard to thinking about immigration. Yeah, Nick goes back to Anka's talk about the love of ability. You know, I see people in China, I see people in Mongolia, I see people everywhere. And they're incredibly good people and they're stuck in lousy systems. I want them here, I want them to be able to produce and create and be trading partners of mine rather than where they are. Thanks, Aaron, for the invigorating talk. I just wanted to ask, how do you think the opposition or resistance to artificial intelligence and robots sort of taking our jobs in the future will differ from the left versus the right? I feel like the right is more nationalistic, protectionist, like let's keep our manufacturing jobs, let's keep people working, whereas the left might be more swayed to like a universal basic income or some sort. Yeah, I mean, my view is there's not a lot of difference between the left and the right. I mean, at the extremes, there's a different orientation, but there's not a big difference between them. I mean, remember, people think the right is against immigration, but that's nonsense. I mean, if you look at Bush's 2007 plan to have comprehensive immigration reform, which is not a bad plan at the time, it was the left that opposed it because it was the unions that opposed it because the unions don't want immigrants. Bernie Sanders in a moment of truth when asked by, I think it was Mr. Klein, about his, Klein assumed that he wanted open borders. And but he said, no, absolutely not. That's a Koch brothers, they want that. No, he said, I don't believe in open borders. I mean, wages would go down and we'd lose lots of American jobs. And I don't want that, I'm anti-immigration. And he had to change that a little bit as the campaign went on, but that's his true feelings. So I think the left and the right share that perspective on immigration. I think they share it with regard to trade. I mean, fair trade, which Trump has picked on and a lot of people in the Republican Party have picked on is a leftist idea from long ago, the idea of fair trade. And now it's on the right. And I think you're seeing the robot stuff primarily on kind of the left, but I think it's quickly gonna migrate also to what we perceive as of the right today. And I think that is gonna be, I view the world as collectivism versus individualism versus right versus left. And I mean, Ankar's really taught me this, but looking at it that way, and you see that almost everybody's a collectivist. Yeah, the right and the left are just different shades. Our job's under threat by all these things. Now universal basic income is again a complicated issue, which I did a whole show on it and I have a teeny bit of sympathy towards it, only because it would get rid of all the bureaucracy of the welfare state, which is kind of enticing, but it also is sanctioning the whole idea of welfare and redistribution of wealth. And to view that as the solution to robots is such an upside down. Think how wealthy we will be when the robots take over. That you won't need basic income because every job will be, you know, we'll be making lots of money. Thank you. The universal basic income has been picked up by both the left and the right. Yeah, Charles Maui is promoting that on the right and you've got the left promoting it as well. Do you think that politics is the area that we should focus on to get objectivist ideas into the culture or are there other areas that would be more effective? I don't think there's one area to focus on. Objectivism is a philosophy. It has a worldview, it has a tremendous amount to say on all kinds of different subjects. And in terms of both your interest, your advocacy, your communication with people, communicate in the areas that people are interested in that you have interactions with people. It's what we're trying to convey is a whole set of ideas and that there are people who are interested in politics and that's an avenue into a whole different worldview. There are people definitely interested in ethics. There's people interested in learning to think better. And if you just, like I often ask people how they got interested in objectivism and I'm sure many of you have asked each other at the conference. There's so many different avenues into it. It's almost you don't hear the same story twice. And we're talking about 500 people. So there's so many things to focus on. What we have is a philosophy. And in certain ways, if you think there's one way to get into this, so you're not really understanding what we have a philosophy in. It's about a whole different worldview. And that's what we're trying to convey and communicate. Yeah, and in that sense, I think the one area where we don't talk enough about and should be talking about more about because it is part of the philosophy in a real way, which I don't think most people appreciate, is the aesthetics. We almost never talk about aesthetics. We don't really deal much with the romantic manifesto. But if it is a philosophy, that is a big avenue and it could be a very powerful way into the culture. So I agree with Ankar, it's everything. But what I said before is too many people judge other people only based on one of those, right? They have a bad politics. Therefore, that wipes everything out. We take politics too seriously in that sense. That's my only thing about politics. Not that we shouldn't be talking about politics. No, we shouldn't do it. But don't make that your only way in which you evaluate other people. It's a part of how you evaluate people. And usually when they're about politics, it's just a bad ethics. But it's not enough. It's not what people are. It's not what life is. Hello, Dr. Brooke. Dr. Gata. So there are a number of people in the free trade debate and the immigration debate that would, I think, normally consider themselves to be free traders. But an argument they have is that if another country puts tariffs on our goods, that the proper response of our government should be to put tariffs on their goods. So I was wondering what your interpretation of that argument would be. I mean, I would send them to read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This is a problem resolved 240 years ago at the economics level. We'll get to the moral level in a second. At the economics level, there's no debate. There's just no debate. I mean, it's not a single, there's not a single worthwhile economist in the world who believes that from an purely economic, I mean, Pina Navarro, who is the Trump trade guy, is a hack. He's not an economist. I've met him, he found an area which nobody, he found something that he could own because no other economist would own, which is, he's anti-trade. No other economist in the world is anti-trade. Paul Krugman, another hack. One is Nobel Prize for an essay on free trade. So even Paul Krugman gets it, right? So on an economic level, it just doesn't work out. I'm not gonna give you the whole economic argument here, but it just doesn't make any sense. But on a moral level, so I don't know, let's take Germany, because Germany is the latest hotspot for unfair trade, we're told, right? We import more cars than they import. Maybe it's because they make BMWs, Audi's and Mercedes-Benz's. And that's a problem, according to President Trump. No, we need to have a balance of trade, not just globally, but with every country separately, which is just bizarre. But I mean, if Germany raises tariffs and penalizes its citizens by raising their taxes, our response should be to penalize our citizens by raising our taxes. I mean, how can that, so Germany's initiating force on their citizens and our response should be to initiate force on our citizens. How can it be right to violate the rights of Americans? In the name of what? So this is a rights issue, this is not some theoretical, and it's a moral issue. How can you tell me, I wanna buy this thing from this Chinese guy, how can you tell me it's wrong because his government is penalizing him that I can't buy it something from him? There's no, remember, and this is a point I've made in many of my radio shows and many times, countries don't trade, people do. You trade with some Chinese company and some Chinese guy when you buy a Chinese product. It's your choice and his choice and it's a win-win relationship between the two of you if it's voluntary, right? Assuming he's not a slave and you're not being forced to buy it. The fact that he's being screwed by his government is sad, you know, and I wish he wasn't. And at a motivational level, it's very revealing that at tariffs and at tariff war and there've been tariff wars in history and they're not pretty, nobody benefits, everybody loses. And this is part of what Greg earlier in the day was talking about, when you get and you really push on what are you trying to achieve and it's just stripping everybody of ability to trade and ability to work and ability to produce, that's what a real evil mentality looks like. And in all these debates, there's when you push them, there's some really evil and malevolent forces at work that need to be exposed. So this is a significant issue. It's not just an economic issue, it's moral and philosophical as well. Thank you. And let me just say, I think this issue is a big issue because again, this is not hard. I mean, immigration, there's some subtleties, there's some difficulties, you can see some complexity to it. Trade is not hard. And I wait the view on trade very heavily because it's about win-win relationships and you wanna break them and you wanna shatter them in the name of what? There's no positive value to be achieved, none. It's all, as Zonka said, it's all about destruction. And I know you know I'm pretty hostile to Trump and a big part of it is this position of trade. It's just so irrational, so incomprehensible, so anti-life and so anti the whole field of economics and morality and politics that it gets a big weighting in the way I view the world. Thank you for an invigorating discussion instilling optimism for the future in us. That's very fueling for the soul, so. My question's regarding universal basic income. I've heard advocates of it argue that when robots take over manual labor, the uneducated demographic of society who depend on manual labor will be unemployable. And I even have a friend who is, Lean's objectiveist loves Atlas Shrug, the fountain head, but he believes that the universal basic income should be instituted in the sense of throwing these guys a bone to naun to keep them out of our way while we do our things. Now, I see it as a failure of our education system. I see that as the root. Would you guys mind commenting on the involvement of the education system in this debate? I mean yeah, I mean it's a huge failure of educational system and the fact that we have an educational system run by a monopoly called the government, or government schools. It's not surprising. Yes, there are way too many people who are massively underemployed in the sense that they haven't been taught to use their minds. They haven't been taught to use their rational faculties to create value and to produce. But I also think it's just a lack of imagination. That is, I think the whole robot thing is just, I mean, if you sat 50 years ago and told people about the kind of computers we'd have today in iPhones and supercomputers, they'd say, well, what are people doing? So many jobs are being replaced. What are they doing? And they couldn't imagine the fact that, so they're half manufacturing jobs today. Less than 1% of Americans today work in agriculture versus 100 and something years ago where it was something like 80% of the population. What do they do? The manual people, the people who didn't get an education. What do they do? Well, I mean, they're more restaurants today than in all of human, you know, it's just unbelievable the number of restaurants. And not just any restaurant. Fancy restaurants, middle restaurants, fast food restaurants, whole gamut of restaurants. Every strip mall has a massage parlor and I didn't need a little legitimate ones, you know? I mean, we're so rich, we can take an hour off and get a massage. Nail salons. I mean, I don't get nail salons. They're everywhere. Like in Orange County, like every strip mall has a nail salon. I mean, how many nails are they in the, I mean. I mean. I mean, who would have imagined that lower middle class people, not just upper middle class, not just rich would go and get their nails done and pay people to, I don't know, to do whatever they do in a nail salon. Now, can I tell you what the jobs of 50 years are the manual labor jobs that are gonna exist if 50 years go for now? Oh, no, I can't. I don't have that kind of imagination and I don't believe in central planning. So I don't believe anybody really has that unless you're a science fiction writer. But this is the principle, I think. Human needs are infinite. I know, you know, I remember talking to my business partner years and years ago and saying, you know, when I get $100,000 a year, I'm done. I'll be so, you know, and then it was 150 and then, you know, and then, and the more money I make, the more stuff there is and the more fun there is and the more needs I have and the more, and I think we're all like that and it's great. It's wonderful that there's always some new toys, some new thing to do. And I can't imagine what I'm gonna spend my money on 20 years from now and today. And I'm, but I'm not worried. I think because human needs are so expansive. And I don't know, and Ancon and I have talked about this in the past, I don't know what the interaction between technology and human being is going to be. I don't know what it's gonna look like. I don't believe computers will become conscious, but I don't know what roles computers will have in us and I mean in us. So there's a lot of interesting things that you gotta find out. I think it's exciting. It's fun. And I think this pessimism is unfounded. And another aspect of the universal basic income and it goes back, look at it from the perspective of the right leaning people like Charles Murray. I think there's a real element of the conservative mentality. Now Charles Murray calls himself a libertarian, but if you read some of his work, there's a conservative bent to it I think. And of what Ayn Rand talked about, that they view man as depraved. Now I don't think that's true of Charles Murray, but that there's an element that they view him as metaphysically incompetent or can't survive. Or there's only some subcategory of people who can survive. I think that is a fundamentally mistaken view. And it leads to all kinds of destructive policy. So there's poverty in America, but relative to the rest of the world, there really isn't. If you've ever spent any time in the third world, I mean I have, Iran has. It's poverty on a level you cannot believe as an American and if you've only inhabited parts of America. And the idea that what they need is universal basic income, not freedom and a philosophy that encourages them to make something of their own is such a monstrous view of those people and what is required. Yes, there's a very small minority. There's a very small minority who cannot take care of themselves, but most people can if given the chance, the freedom and an orientation to you can do this, which as Iran was talking, was the American spirit. And the universal basic income he has given up on that in terms of human nature. And it's on most, it's 99.9%, right? I mean it's almost everybody. I mean I know, and you see this, people with Down syndrome who have jobs, right? Who can do something. So there's almost no human beings on the planet who can't do something productive. And if you do something productive in a rich society which has robots, you're gonna be, because of the investment in capital, you're gonna be compensated so much more, right? So manual labor in America results in poor by American standards. Manual labor in China, you're barely surviving because of how rich American society is. So there's no one of the, there's no problem of poverty when you get real wealth, when you get the kind of society that we potentially can be. Thank you. Now the robotics question, I work for a manufacturing company and we just started automating using robots, manufacturing in China for the last year. And the senior management defends the economic and financial benefits of automation. But when you ask them what about that poor laborer who's not going to have a job, their answer is well it's safer, right? Because now you don't have to have some person sitting there inhaling paint fumes all day, you have a robot doing that. It feel like they need a better defense and is ARI gonna be doing anything to help defend robotics in the future? Yeah, I mean we're talking about, I think we're gonna talk a lot more about it and it's gonna become a big issue. And look, the safety issue is real. I mean, I think that's one of the great value of robots is, and this is about manual labor, manual labor thoughts, right? And as you get rid of that kind of manual labor and the dangerous manual labor with robots, if coal mines, you just send robots into the coal mine, I mean, that's great, that's a good thing. That enhances human farishing. It allows the people who used to go into the coal mine now to look for better, safer, more fulfilling careers. And I think that's what they end at the core, the moral question that people are going to have the opportunity now to find more flourishing, more fulfilling careers for themselves, if they take it seriously, if they take their lives seriously, if they take advantage of the opportunities. Great talk. I have a question that relates back to earlier talks about the people in power and free speech. Years ago, I ran considered gun rights a minor thing, but I'd like you to comment on the historical fact that generally, tyrants disarm civilian populations before imposing hard censorship. You know, gun rights. I always get in trouble with this one, even more than immigration, it turns out. I don't believe, I mean, personally, and you can challenge me in the history. I don't believe that that is a major factor with tyrants. I really don't. So people talk about the Nazis disarming the Jews. I don't know any Jews in Germany own guns, and if they did, they walked like sheep to the slaughter. Until late in the war, there were guns available to them, and when they finally got a spine, they fought. But for a long time, this wasn't about the Jews being disarmed by the Nazis. They, this was about, they were disarmed mentally, they were disarmed psychologically, they were disarmed philosophically. They couldn't believe it was happening, they couldn't believe the evil, and they walked into the gas chambers, I'm not saying willingly, but without any resistance. And only later did they form a resistance, and when they did form a resistance, guess what? They found weapons. They found the guns. And you know what? If we wanna start a revolution, and this is to a whole other, if we wanna start a revolution, I'm not gonna wait for the government to prove that I buy guns. Let me tell you, if we're gonna start a revolution, I'm gonna get us to break into military armories and steal the guns. I'm gonna go and steal the tank. If we're starting a revolution, I'm not starting a revolution, I don't believe it. But the idea that a government gets really, really bad, so bad that you want to start a revolution against it, but the Second Amendment is gonna protect you, of course they're gonna disarm you. And when our government gets really, really bad, they'll disarm us. But that is not relevant to the fundamental question of, what in a free society are your rights with regard to firearms? Which I think is a completely different question than the question of revolution. Because I don't think those firearms have to do with revolution. Again, when the revolution comes, we'll find weapons, we'll steal weapons, we'll get the weapons. And in the meantime, I'm just trying to protect my house. Yeah, let on call. Yeah, the idea of revolution, and that if our society's collapsing and we're at the point of rebellion against the government, the projection of that is that the rebels would be better than the government. I don't see any reason to think that. If anything, they will be worse. And if you think of what is happening, whether it's with the alt-right or it's with college kids and so on, and the idea is, oh yeah, if only they had more guns, that would be great. I mean, so it's a different thing to say, well, would you arm dissidents in Soviet Russia than of a free country that is on collapsing? It's so much more important to arm people with the right ideas than that, oh, what we need is guns. And if we collapse, it's because we fail at that. This is why the issue of free speech is 10,000 times more important than the Second Amendment. Absolutely. All right, so go out there and free speech. That's what we should be fighting for. Thanks, everybody.