 Right now. Hello everyone. I would like to thank you for joining us this evening with Yaron Brooke. My name is Angelina and I'm an LC for SFL Italia. However, I do sometimes work with SFL Serbia and tonight I will be speaking with Yaron Brooke about the infamous pandemic that is currently happening and strike the world and of course China's role in it. So Yaron Brooke, actually let's introduce you. Actually, how about you introduce yourself a bit to our non-SFL community since I see a lot of mix here and tell us a bit about yourself and the work you do. Sure. So I was the CEO of the Iron Man Institute for many years, 17 years I ran the Iron Man Institute. I am now the chairman of the board of the Institute. I have my own YouTube channel, Yaron Brooke Show. It's also a podcast. You can get it on any podcasting app. I do probably three, four shows a week. On top of that, since I don't know 20 for 22 years now, I've been involved in a hedge fund. So I'm in the financial business in the past. I've been a university professor. I've been a student for many years. That's almost a profession for some of us. I've been an engineer in a previous life, it seems. And originally I'm from Israel and served in the Israeli army. So I have covered the gamut of lots of stuff. I've done a lot of things in life. But my passion, our ideas, my passion, Ayn Rand's ideas, Ayn Rand changed my life. When I was 16, she converted me from a altruistic, collectivistic socialist to an egoistic, individualistic capitalist. And I've been trying to spread those ideas ever since, since age 16. So I'm a passionate defender of her philosophy. And I love working with ESFL. I think I spoke at the last regional conference you had in Italy. And I've been to Serbia a number of times to give talks, both to ESFL and other groups in Serbia, and of course, all over other places in Europe. And hope to be able to continue to do that once ESFL conferences start up again, once this pandemic, once this pandemic is gone. So right now I'm scheduled to be in Paris in October. So hopefully for the ESFL regional conference in Paris, let's really, really hope, I won't say pray, but let's hope that that actually happens. And we get to see each other in person rather than through this Zoom thing, which is wonderful and fantastic. But as you said, I think all of us have some Zoom fatigue. There's definitely Zoom fatigue that is hidden. Yes, so that is who I am, at least a portion of my life. Amazing. A little recommendation to everyone who doesn't know you're on Brook is pay attention to his podcast. Ever since they've joined ESFL and the celebrity movement, I've been following you're on Brook and you truly are an inspiration to many of us. And might start you make you start think differently about liberty and freedom. If you're ready, let's start with the questions, right? You're on, why don't you set the stage a little bit? I kind of find it useful to begin with a little bit of a scene setter. Where is China right now in terms of to what extent has it returned to normal? And to what extent is the country still very much defined by the COVID-19? So I think China is probably returned to normal more than most countries. Generally, Asia has done much better during this crisis in terms of returning to normal than in Europe and the United States. Now it happened in Asia earlier, but also put aside China, countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore have dealt with this crisis much better than the Europeans or the Americans have dealt with it. And now South Americans are dealing with it. Unfortunately, none of our countries learned from the exceptional management of this crisis by the South Koreans in the Taiwanese and Hong Kong, Singapore, who all did this very effectively and efficiently. And they're back to pretty much normal. I'd say South Korea, certain things are closed because once in a while there's a spike and they close some clubs because that's where the spike happens or in the same happens. But even Japan now has returned to normal pretty much. In all of these countries, they continues to be voluntary social distancing. And in all of these countries, what's interesting and maybe one of the aspects that have led to their better performance, in all of these countries people wear masks anyway. If you go to Japan or even China on a regular day, no pandemic, some people are wearing masks in the street. If you've got a little bit of snivels, if you feel like you might have a cold or flu, the polite thing to do in Asian cultures, it appears, is to wear a mask, not to infect other people. And that probably helped them a lot. In terms of China itself, China, of course, shut down, probably had the most rigid shut down policies of any country, particularly in Wuhan and Hubei province and Wuhan, the city. And as a consequence, they got control over this virus within a couple of months. And they actually just tested, I mean only the Chinese can do this. They literally tested every single person in Wuhan, a city of 8 million people. They did it in 10 days, they tested 8 million people. And what they discovered is pretty amazing. They discovered that only 200 people have the virus and that those 200 people are all asymptomatic. And as a consequence of that, I think Wuhan is pretty much open. Other parts of China have pretty much opened. Again, I don't think it's completely open. I think there's voluntary social distancing and, of course, in China, there's always the government looking over your shoulder and monitoring what you're doing. But generally, I think in general sense, China seems to have gotten past this with relatively few deaths and relatively few cases. Maybe we don't believe the numbers, but even if we don't believe the numbers, it's still better on a per capita basis than probably Italy and the United States and some other countries. If you look at industrial production, it's up, so the economy is returning, consumption is way down, the economy shrunk by 6.9 percent in the first quarter will probably shrink again in the second quarter. The government just announced that they are doing away with GDP targets, which they've always had or had since the early 1980s, which means that they can't meet the targets or why have targets when they can't meet them, which means the economy is still struggling. But I think overall, they are further along in returning to normal than in almost any country in the West. The only countries better than China in that respect are the other Asian countries. I mean, South Korea, Japan, again, just eliminated its emergency status. Taiwan has been back to normal for a while now. I mean, Taiwan never even had travel bans. I mean, people were still coming in from China for a while, and they did phenomenally well because of their capacity to test and to trace. And Hong Kong is tragic for other reasons, but Hong Kong did very, very well and has returned to much of normalcy post-pandemic. So the problems, they are more China than the other pandemic. Right. But in your opinion, what led to this shift from this catastrophe, from this pandemic craze that happened in the world to this normality, especially in China, there's a lot of debate on very high restrictions authoritarian regimes and everything. Was that that led to this normalization or people changing sense and having responsibility to each other and to themselves in this? I think two things led to it. Look, authoritarianism works in a restricted, limited sense. Right. If I wanted to eliminate all rape in the United States, then I could, I could authoritatively restrict the male population in the U.S. to have a curfew on men. They can't leave the house unaccompanied by a female, let's say, who knows them or by a policeman or something. Oh, let's just say they can't leave the house. They have to stay home and rape will go down. So in the narrow sense, authoritarianism works. It's a disaster. It's horrible, but you can force people to behave. Now, lots of other bad things happen as a consequence. Right. If you limited male population to staying home, you're violating their rights, you're eliminating the ability to be happy, you're eliminating the ability to work, you're eliminating their ability to produce and to live really. But rape will go down. Murder will go down. Crime will go down. So to some extent, the authoritarian measures in China worked. It's not justified what they did. I think it's horrific what they did. But they did work in eliminating this virus, basically putting their entire population of several cities in jail, the equivalent of jail, putting them in house arrest, actually reduce the ability of the virus to spread, actually basically made the virus go away to a vast number of people. And then, so that is, that is part of what happened and that is part of what succeeded in China. Other countries, again, like South Korea and Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore, managed to get rid of the virus without authoritarian measures. They did it by simply testing, tracking, tracing, finding people with the virus and isolating them. And by doing that, they stopped the exponential spread of it, and they managed it early, they controlled it, and they stopped. China took the authoritarian route, but to the extent that it stopped the virus, it succeeded. Now, so did Europe. But Europe can't be as authoritarian as China, right? So Europe did half measures, and we'll see how well it worked or didn't work. Europe, with the exception of Sweden, did that. But so China's seen a reduction in the amount of virus for those reasons. It's not to justify eliminating freedom is wrong, even if it has so-called positive consequences in one particular realm. For example, in virus or reduction in crime or whatever it happens to be. But it did do that. Second, I do think there are certain social norms in Asia that are different than Europeans and let's say, Italians hug and kiss all the time. Asians don't. You know, if you go to Japan and you want to shake somebody's hands, they don't shake your hand, they bow. So there's no touching, particularly of strangers, in Japanese culture. And you bow from a distance because you don't want to knock your head, so it has to be a distance. So the six feet away anyway, right? And there's less transmission. They wear, as I said, they wear masks anyway. So for them to wear masks now is normal. They're not cultures in which multi-generations live in one household. Again, like Italy, where sometimes the grandkids, the parents and the grandparents all live in the same house. In Japan, people live separately. Families are not as close and as not as touchy and as not as, you know, again, mixed up. The United States is somewhere in between. And I think Northern Europe is somewhere in between. And maybe that's why Southern Europe got hit harder is because of the more social, the more touchy interaction and the more, and the kind of households people lived in. So Asia is naturally, culturally, is more adept at controlling viruses because there's less interaction, intimate interaction between people in, you know, in public settings. So I think that plays a role as well. All right, thank you. Moving on. To what extent has Xi Jinping emerged stronger or weaker domestically as a result of these, what, now three and a half months of his leadership of the country during the crisis? And how will this affect the political scene post-pandemic wise? So I very much hoped that he would emerge from this weaker. In the beginning, when we first got to reports out of Wuhan, if you remember the first doctor who let kind of the world know that there were problems, he was brought in front of the police, he had a sign, a statement saying, no, no, no, I didn't mean it. And ultimately got the virus and died from it. I thought that that and just the social media in China and everything that was going on in Wuhan, I thought that would weaken Xi and that would be a good thing. I think Xi has been generally broadly a disaster for China and a disaster for Hong Kong and a disaster for the world. You know, up until she came to power, I thought China was heading in a good positive direction. I thought generally there was more liberty, more, more freeing up, more openness, more freedom of speech. I would go there and give speeches regularly. There were free market think tanks in China that would invite speakers in. I would go to Chinese universities and speak in front of students and get a great reception and a lot of students would come. And when she came to power, you could immediately see that start to shrink, the scope of freedom, the scope of freedom of speech, the people's fear rose and the scope shrunk. And people became much, much more afraid. And last time I was in China, literally I was banned from going to the university. We had to do an event at a hotel. Professors from the university were banned from attending my event. The think tank that had invited me repeatedly to come to Beijing, thugs showed up on their door and started beating people up and trying to shut them down. Last year, officially, the think tank had to shut down completely because the Chinese government wouldn't tolerate them. I know that some of the scholars I've worked with have landed up in jail and in and out of jail in recent years. It's just being truly horrific and freedom in China has shrunk and been limited and being constrained and China's gotten worse and worse and worse and worse. And it got much worse this week with what they announced about Hong Kong, which we can talk about if you want. She is truly horrific. And I hoped, let's say in March, I was hopeful, that he would come out of this weaker, that the Communist Party would view him as a threat to their survival. They are basically focused on survival. The Communist Party is not communist. It's focused on surviving. It's an authoritarian political party that just wants to survive as an authoritarian political party. They want to be able to run China and they don't want anybody to threaten that. I thought they would try to kick him out and replace him maybe with somebody better. But it seems like he is a shrewd political operative. He has not only managed to survive, but it seems looking at this last week, where China has asserted itself more on the world stage. It's standing up to the United States of America and it's going after Hong Kong. It seems that he is stronger. And I think that is a threat, not only to China, but a bit of threat to the whole world to some extent. What you're going to see is a China that is willing to confront the United States. What you'll see is a China that is going to get more aggressive with Taiwan. They already basically have eliminated the sovereignty of Hong Kong with the new security laws that they passed us last week that basically place Hong Kong under the judiciary control of China for all national security purposes. But in China, as we know, everything is a national security issue. So they're going to restrict freedom in Hong Kong significantly. They're going to go after Taiwan. Their long-term goal ultimately is to take over Taiwan. They've never been shy about saying that. I think as soon as they see weakness in the United States and weakness among the Taiwanese, I don't think would even hesitate to launch a military operation to take Taiwan, which would really put the world at risk in terms of the fear of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and China. I think China is going to get more aggressive. And one other aspect of that is I think the Chinese economy is in real trouble. I think the Chinese economy coming out of this crisis is going to be weaker. It's going to struggle. It's going to shrink. One thing we know or should know as advocates of freedom and one of the observations that I think Ayn Rand made that is really, really important. But of course, people of Von Mises and to some extent Hayek also made, that is that it is that freedom is what produces wealth. Freedom is what produces innovation. Freedom is required for continued economic growth, innovation and progress. China succeeded from 1978 until now because it allowed vast sectors in its economy to be free. They basically left them alone. There's a wonderful book called How China Became Capitalist. I don't believe China became capitalist, but the book, that's the title of the book. How China Became Capitalist by a Nobel Prize-winning economics by the name of, his name has just slipped my mind, it'll come back. But anyway, if you look at how China became capitalist on Amazon, you will find it. And it describes how China in early days left after 78, left certain regions and certain industries alone, laissez-faire, and that's where China grew and thrived and succeeded. Places where they didn't leave alone, places where they engaged in central planning, places that were dominated by state-owned corporations, did badly, did not succeed, did not grow, did not create the wealth. So to the extent that Xi is limiting freedom, is increasing central planning, is increasing control of business, increasing control of financial institutions, increasing control of the economy, to that extent China will stop growing at the high rates that it has grown in the past. It will not be innovative. So if in the past there has been some technological innovation coming out of China, that will shrink. And to the extent that China is going to be isolated more and more from the world, whether it's because Trump raises tariffs, which I'm against, but if Trump raises tariffs, and even the European Union is starting to talk about raising tariffs to China and isolating itself more and more. If those things happen, then I think, again, China is going to find it more and more difficult to be successful, more and more difficult to grow economically. Now what happens when countries don't do well economically, authoritarian countries? Well, they try to divert their people's attention away from the pain. They try to create threats overseas. We see this with every fascist regime. If things are not going well at home, then you find an enemy over there. And in this case, the enemy could be Japan, the enemy could be Taiwan, the enemy could be the United States of America. But China will try to divert attention from its struggles, from its pain, from its problems economically, by picking on outside forces. And that could become very dangerous. And again, ultimately, the goal is Taiwan. And as everybody kind of pushes their buttons about Taiwan, and at the same time, nobody's really willing to defend Taiwan, right? I mean, Trump is a hero, right? He's flexing his muscles because he left a World Health Organization yesterday. If he really wanted to make a statement, he would open an embassy in Taiwan. But I don't know how much of you know, but the United States does not have an embassy in Taiwan, because the United States does not officially recognize Taiwan as a country, as a nation. And it has an embassy in China. So it has an embassy in an authoritarian dictatorial barbaric state. But it does not have an embassy in a relatively free country like Taiwan. So if you really wanted a flex muscle and convinced the world you were serious about defending freedom and about standing up for freedom, you'd actually open an embassy in Taiwan. But America is a cowardly country, Europe, even more so. And we all grovel before the will, the whims of the Chinese. And I very much think that what we are learning from China is that authoritarianism works, and that America and Europe are adopting more and more of Chinese authoritarian methodology. So in that sense, I think I had a, I think I did one of my podcasts and the title was, We're All China Now. And then there's a sense in which we're all adopting Chinese authoritarianism to some extent or another. To that extent, they are winning. And those of us who believe in freedom are losing. So I wanted to add a question. And we've seen China sending aid and its experts, medical resources to numerous of countries, and which one of them is the United States, and applying a sort of soft power on them. Can you comment a bit on that? And what was the main purpose of it? Who has? Does China benefit from this? And who benefits from this? Well, it's, it's, it's aimed at not so much in the United States, but it's primarily aimed at other countries in the world, whether it's South America, Africa, other Asian countries. And it's basically a PR campaign to say, look, America is weak. Europe is weak. We are the rising power. We are the country you need to reckon with. You know, we are the power you need to pay attention to. And these people are not going to defend you. If you want, if you want a future, you better pay attention to us, the Chinese. So I think it's basically a PR campaign for the rest of the world to pay attention to who China is, and, and to try to be on China's side, if you will. I mean, even the Soviet Union did this in the, in the old Cold War days. If there was a hurricane somewhere, even the Soviet Union that was poor and had nothing would send doctors and aides and pretend that they were strong and mighty and could help countries. Cuba, you know, expanded its influence in places like South America by doing that. So they would send doctors. And then the doctors would become, you know, military aides and suddenly they would have their tentacles into the, into the country. They're doing that in Mexico today. They did that in Venezuela. So the countries, authoritarian countries like to do this. They like to pretend that they are the friend of third world countries of countries that are struggling and that they can be their beneficiary. And it's basically a big PR campaign. And the fact is that Donald Trump is so obnoxious and Donald Trump is so disliked around the world that that creates an opportunity for China to step in and say, yeah, yeah, those Americans, they're terrible. They, you know, they hate you guys. We love you. We, you know, we want you and to try to increase their influence in the world as a consequence. And I think to some extent they're succeeding because of the weakness of the West because of the weakness of America. All right. But I would like to mention this because this story doesn't go away. And which is a possibility that the virus didn't emerge in the vet markets of Wuhan, but emerge in a laboratory in Wuhan. There is a lot of misinformation here being spread out to China. Controlling is always the information outflow. And my question is what was W H O's role here and how much are they in fault? What do you see as the consequences internally and internationally? If that is that story is proven to be true? So first, my guess is that nobody really knows where the virus initiated and how it started exactly. I think people are still investigating. Maybe the Chinese knows and they know and they're not saying, but my expectation is that they, you know, people just don't know that it's complicated and they don't know. I guess there is a possibility. There's some weak evidence, but it's very weak that this started in a lab, not that the virus was manufactured, not that the virus was tinkered with. There's strong evidence that that is not the case. Biologists that have looked at the virus can verify that this is a naturally occurring virus that was not changed. This is not biological warfare. But there is a possibility that the Chinese was studying this virus in one of their labs and that the virus escaped, that the virus infected one of the lab technicians and then the technician went home and that's how it spread. Again, very weak evidence for that. It's still much more likely that this virus came from the wet markets. Now people say, but people don't, there were no bats in the wet markets. Yes, but it's not clear that we got the virus directly from bats. We might have gotten it through an intermediary animal. That is bats infect another animal and then you eat this other animal and you get the virus. That was always the hypothesis about this. I don't think we know, and I'm not sure when we will know. It's probably going to be a while before we figure out exactly what happened and before the scientists allowed into China to actually investigate. Now in terms of the, it does the two things. One is China withholding information and the WHO. There was no question the Chinese withheld significant amount of information from the beginning of this virus on. And one of my shows, I did a whole timeline of what happened from the end of December through pretty much every week in January, what was known, who knew what and how much information was held. And it's clear that certain local authorities in Wuhan knew that there was a virus, a coronavirus that it was transmitted from human to human and they were denying it. They were saying, yes, there's a virus, but there's no evidence of human to human transmission. And that was a lie. This doctor that I mentioned earlier was already writing about the fact that there was human to human transmission in early January. He was forced to retract the statements and again died ultimately from the virus itself from human to human transmission, by the way. Other people who early on kind of went public with human to human transmission disappeared and have never been seen, right? So who knows what the Chinese authorities did with them. And then there's just a pattern I'd say from probably late December, early January, until the end of January of denying, denying, denying, denying, denying. Now, it's hard to tell how much of this was bureaucratic mindlessness, incompetence, stupidity, right bureaucrats. If you study public choice theory, this is a free market theory of economics. Public choice theory applies certain economic principles to the way bureaucrats think and function. One of the, one of the things they teach you there is that when a crisis happens, the first instinct of a bureaucrat is to deny it, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. Then when everybody knows so they can't deny it anymore, then they say, oh, we didn't know. And then they overreact. And that's exactly what happened. And then what's happened in the US and what happened in China. So they denied it and denied it and denied it. Most at the local level, we don't know to what extent that was true of the national government, the government out of Beijing. But at some point, even they had to know what was going on and they continued to deny it. We don't know how much of this was intentional, how much was it again, bureaucratic, just incompetence. But we know that they were irresponsible in that sense and probably caused a real delay in the ability of Western and other countries to plan. Now know that the Taiwanese didn't believe the Chinese denials. The Taiwanese who had gotten reports from doctors on the ground that this was at human to human transmission started preparing for the virus in early to mid-January. And as a consequence, we're way ahead of anybody else in the world. And that's why they've done so well. And it's no accident, by the way, that the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist. So they knew exactly what the science was and they knew how to deal with it and they did all the right things. And it's pretty amazing reading about what Taiwan did. But a lot of it has to do with the fact that they did not believe the Chinese because they know that the Chinese government lies. It's shocking that the rest of the world doesn't know that. Now, what about the WHO? The WHO has personnel in China. And the reason they have personnel in China is because many of these viruses, many influences, start in China. And the WHO, which is responsible for infectious diseases, has to have people in China. Those people were clearly lied to, but they accepted the lie. They didn't act like the Taiwanese did. And all the way until late January, the WHO was basically accepting whatever they were told from the Chinese. And well into February, and I can't remember the exact dates, the WHO was denying person-to-person transmission pretty late. And then denying that this was a pandemic and only calling it a pandemic pretty late in the game. So the WHO is no question is at fault here for delaying and not giving the proper advice for being too believing of the Chinese, for relying too much on the Chinese for information and not having enough independent voices. To some extent, you can understand it because they didn't have people in Wuhan. So they had to accept what the Chinese were telling them. But on the other hand, there were independent reports coming out of China already in mid to early January that this was much worse. And the WHO could have taken those people seriously. They didn't want to offend the Chinese. So WHO should be condemned. Now, I'm not a great believer in multinational institutions that accept everybody as a member. I truly believe there's a fundamental difference between countries that are basically free and countries that are unfree. And I don't think basically free countries should be in multinational organizations with countries that are unfree. Now, maybe when it comes to infectious diseases, we should make an exception because we need to know what's happening in China. But then the WHO should have a very narrow assignment. That assignment should be just dealing with infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the WHO is a public health organization, which has much broader mandate. And I think as such as a corrupt organization and a bad organization and a statist organization, I'd like to see the WHO reformed and that it become just an infectious disease organization basically run by a council of representative from places like the CDC, infectious disease organizations from countries around the world and not have its own bureaucracy, which it does today. So WHO bears some responsibility here. China bears a lot of responsibility here. China misinformed. It lied and it silenced its own people. It acted like every dictator in history acts. Right. Well, good thing that you mentioned, authoritarian China. And I would like to continue if there was an index of measuring the depth or intensity of authoritarianism in China over the last three and a half months, to what extent would that index have moved? Like what has China to put it bluntly, has an authoritarian China become more authoritarian China in the course of this? And if so, is that likely to endure? Will that become, in your sense, will that become the new normal? I think so. So I think I think sites say from 1978 until about three, four years ago, with the exception of a period of our Tiananmen Square, China was moving generally in the direction of more freedom and more liberty, particularly in the economic realm, but also in the political realm and the realm of free speech, say in social freedoms. And then it started declining in terms of freedom about four years ago. And that has accelerated it more and more with Xi. And then I think the pandemic has given them an excuse to accelerate it even further. So I think today China is a lot less free than it was four months ago. I think Xi has consolidated his power. I think you can expect it to become much more of a police state than it has been in the past. I think part of the lesson learned is that they need more control over the population. They need to be able to shut cities down faster and more effectively. I think this whole social scores that they have now, they can embrace that even more fully. So I think in the short term, China has become more authoritarian. And as a consequence, as I said earlier, I think it's going to become less rich. I think it's going to become, economy is going to suffer. It's going to, they're going to be real conflict within China. And I think that is the hope. The hope is that ultimately China has something like a civil war. That is that there's another gentleman's square that young Chinese students are willing to go onto the streets and protest their government and basically launch the equivalent of revolution and force the Chinese authorities to get rid of Xi and to again go on a path of greater liberalization. The Chinese haven't done that since gentlemen's square. I ask the Chinese, why regular Chinese, why don't you care about political freedom? And their attitude has been, as long as we get richer every year, voting is overrated. We're not that crazy about voting. I think once they stop getting richer every year, maybe their political freedoms will become more at the forefront and they become more valuable and more important to them. And I think China is going to enter here into a period of real economic struggle and real economic problems, which might spur many of its middle class and maybe working class, lower class people to rise up against the Communist Party and demand change. And I think that is that, you know, the Chinese might try to crush that. We will see it's harder to do today in a social media world with a live stream to everything, but it's possible they could shut down the internet and try to crush the protesters. But hopefully that'll lead to more openness and more freedom. Hard to tell. Hopefully. And to conclude before we start taking the questions from the audience, how would you comment the vaccine story? So we've seen many countries, Israelis, the US, China, trying to make a vaccine. And how feasible is that actually? Where does the budget for this come from? And who will have access to this? What does this vaccine, how does this vaccine differ from the rest of the vaccine that we regularly take? And how do we come to this? I don't think it's going to be that different. So I don't buy into any of the kind of vaccine conspiracy theories. I think a vaccine is possible, but it's hard. Vaccine production and creation is very, very difficult. It's not easy at all. There are a lot of companies trying. There's a lot of money going into trying to create these vaccines. Some of that money is venture capital money. Some of that money is publicly public company money. So money that companies have raised in the public markets. And a big chunk of that money is government money. I know that the US government has given a number of companies billions of dollars to try to help develop vaccine and guarantee that it gets a supply when the vaccine becomes available. I think in Israel, there are two or three different companies, mostly some of them funded by the Israeli government, some of them funded by venture capital, by private markets. I think in Europe, in the UK, certainly, there are a number of vaccine companies. And then China has a active vaccine program and trying to make vaccines. I think the challenge primarily is the scientific challenge. We've never had a vaccine for coronavirus. Coronavirus is a very difficult to vaccinate against. But there's never been this kind of global effort to try to create a vaccine. We've tried to create vaccines against AIDS. And we've never had a vaccine against AIDS in spite of decades of effort, which is interesting. There's a treatment for HIV, but there's no vaccine Ebola. There's maybe now a vaccine for Ebola. But it took like five years or six years to develop it. So it takes a long time. Now, because there's such an effort going on, maybe they can cut the timeline to 12 to 18 months, maybe sooner than that, maybe by the end of the year. And then who is going to get it is really going to depend on who develops the vaccine, who funded the development, and who can rank ramp up production of the vaccine. One of the things, one of the confusing things about, you know, there are a lot of conspiracy theories going around now about Bill Gates. One of the things Bill Gates is doing is he is building factories that once a vaccine is discovered, will be able to manufacture large quantities of the vaccine. So he is backing companies that are building these factories, not that he's building them, so that whoever, whoever develops a vaccine, they would license the vaccine from that company and produce the vaccine in large quantities. And I think you're going to see that all over the world. I think you're going to see pharmaceutical companies creating manufacturing lines to produce the vaccine. So whoever discovers it first is going to then license the vaccine to a bunch of manufacturing companies so that we can spread the vaccination around the world. So I think a lot of people will have access to the vaccine. I think this will be a massive effort. I hope countries don't mandate that people take the vaccine because there's absolutely no reason to mandate it. But I hope the vaccine is safe. I mean, one of the risks in rushing the development of vaccine is that we don't take all the precautions that are necessary to produce something that's safe. So I hope we do it safely and then we can mass produce it and then people get, you know, if China is the first country to develop a vaccine, will they license it, right? Particularly if they're in the middle of a trade war with the United States or middle of something else with the United States. All hard to tell. If the United States develops a vaccine, will Donald Trump block the licensing of that vaccine to China? Who knows? It's Donald Trump. So you have no idea what he's going to do. So the geopolitical struggles around this are going to continue. But I do believe that once a vaccine is discovered, it will be available globally and fairly quickly. It's the discovery that is slow and difficult. Thank you, Rioron, for this and let me stay in that context. I'm doing an interview. What am I doing the interview? I think next week weekend. Yes, on a week from today on Saturday, the 6th with Matt Ridley. I don't know how familiar you guys are with Matt Ridley, but he is a British intellectual who wrote the book The Rational Optimist. He's a real free market. He might not be quite as free market as some of us would like, but he's on that side of the spectrum, definitely. And he just wrote a book about innovation. And he is kind of a science writer. And some of the questions I'm going to be asking him about vaccine development, treatment development, where we are, what he thinks, how fast he thinks we can ramp it up. He's actually an expert in that field, so he would know a lot more about it than I do. All right. Well, thank you. Now we know. And now we can start with the Q&A session. We already have some questions previously written down, so I'm going to read them to you. Anybody of the people who wrote it, you can tune in. So here the question is from Nicos. Why after decades of relative liberalization has China decided to go back to more authoritarianism in the last five, six years? Will Iran still be comfortable giving talks in China today? So I think the reason is that I think the Chinese Communist Party figured out that if they continued on the current path, they would ultimately lose power. That the current path was definitely leading them to granting more power to the people, granting more power to markets, granting more power to people advocating for ultimately political liberalization. And I think they got scared. And in getting scared, what they did was they appointed a man to lead the party who has a definitely a authoritarian viewpoint about this. And he, I think, surprised many people, and I know people in China who told me they were shocked by this. He surprised them in how authoritarian he was and in how quickly he consolidated power and how cleverly and efficiently he did it. I mean, he basically launched an anti-corruption campaign who can be against anti-corruption. Everybody is anti-corruption. And he used that to basically get rid of all his enemies, who were probably corrupt. So it wasn't a reach, but who were his enemies as well. And solidified his control. And I think now it's hard, once you do that, it's hard to go backwards because authoritarians don't like, can admit that they're wrong. And if they start liberalizing again, again, they get into the problem of, well, now are people going to demand more freedom? And we can't afford that. So I think, look, countries don't, countries don't stand still. I don't think individuals stand still. I don't think there's such a thing in life standing still. You're either moving forward or you're moving backwards. In individual human life, you're either living or you're dying. And this is again, for my man's philosophy, every decision you make is either moving you towards a better life or towards a worse life. There's no static. There's no staying in place. Everything you do either makes your life better, that is living or makes your life worse, that is dying. And countries are the same. China can either move towards more authoritarianism or towards more freedom. It's rejected the idea of moving towards more freedom, and therefore it's going to move towards more authoritarianism. And that means it's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It's going to be very hard for it to move backwards without big changes in the leadership in China. Now, the second part of the question was, would I speak in China today? That's a tough question because I love the Chinese people and I have great admiration for many of the people in China who are fighting for freedom and fighting for liberty and who are risking their lives in doing that and who are willing to stand up to these authoritarians. And if they invited me and they actually thought we could pull off an event that did not, was not risking my life or not risking, maybe the worst that could happen is the Chinese authorities would kick me out. But if I could get in and inspire people to fight for liberty and nobody censored what I said and I could go in and speak to people who are living this, fighting this. And actually, if there is a revolution one day, we'll be on the front lines of those days. If I can play a little tiny role in inspiring them to do more, then I would go in. I wouldn't go to vacation in China today. So I used to vacation in China, used to go and travel around and see, and I'm glad I did because I saw a lot of China, because I wouldn't want by doing that to sanction and support the Chinese regime. But if I could go just to give a talk to undermine the authorities, and maybe just saying that right now publicly is going to ban me from China for life, but if I could go in just to undermine the authorities and support those who are fighting against it, how could I, and granted, not risk my life, how could I say no? I mean, isn't that what we do is all about? It's about fighting for freedom. And I don't, I'm not, you know, people accuse me of being a globalist because I believe in freedom. I don't care where it is. You know, I'd like Americans to be free because I live in America. But if some other country became freer than America, I move there. So I'm for freedom for anybody, everybody, wherever they happen to live. I don't think the borders are what make a difference. So, you know, that's right. To me, it's so important to engage with Europeans. It's so important to engage with Asians and so important to engage with people all over the world, because I think freedom can arise anywhere. And I want to, I want to be able to support it. I want to be able to help fuel it and help light that fuse. So if I could do it in China, I would do it in China. All right. The next question is from Erin. How well positioned is China to put the yuan on gold? And is this an incredibly powerful threat to the US dollar and the USG's dependence on reserve status as I fear? I mean, that would be amazing if any country put their currency in gold, particularly a big country and a significant country. But there's no way China's ever going to do that. Because China's an authoritarian country. And one of the things that authoritarians want control over more than anything else is the currency. Because they know that by having control over the currency, they control the people, they control the economy, they control, you know, the economic lives of everybody. And if they went to a gold standard, then they would lose that control. A gold standard basically amounts to the idea that the market determines the quantity of money and the rate of interest, not central bankers, not authoritarians, not governments, not politicians, not treasury secretaries, but the market. Now, that is a massive step towards liberty and freedom. No way is China going to take that step. It would mean that it is giving up control over the most valuable tool they have to control the marketplace. It's just not going to happen. It's a nice libertarian fantasy, but it ain't happening. Now, could they do it? Sure. Anybody could do it. You'd have to do it smartly. You'd have to think about how to actually transition. I don't think it's an issue of reserves. It really is just an issue of commitment and some economic thinking about how to do, how to actually activate the process. But they won't do it because it means giving up massive amounts of control. Right. The next question comes from Dennis. Dennis, wow, you've sent quite a few questions. Let's see if we can cram them all in one. Although we don't support Trump as such, is it completely okay to ignore Trump's concerns and WHO's inoc action, misinformation, and siding with the Chinese authoritarian regime? That would be the first one. And the second one, one at a time. No, I mean, I don't think we should ignore the WHO what they've done. I said this, I think the WHO should be restructured and redone, but it is hypocritical of Trump or any American to withdraw from the WHO and stay in the UN, to withdraw from the WHO and not recognize Taiwan. But yeah, I would support the United States withdrawing from the WHO and trying to establish a truly international infectious disease agency that was committed to fighting infectious diseases and providing real information. I mean, there's no question that the WHO should and must pay for the fact that they were not, that they told the Chinese line too much. Now, I don't think they provided misinformation. I don't think they lied. I just think they waited the information they got from the Chinese government more than they waited the information they got from other actors, from independent researchers and from Taiwanese doctors. And that is amounted to misinformation, but it's not like they lied purposefully. It's, I think they, I mean, I'll just say this, it's rich of the Trump administration to talk about misinformation because Trump throughout February was saying, eh, this is just a flu. Nobody's going to die of this. We've got 15 cases. Tomorrow it will be gone. I mean, there were direct quotes from Trump, where he's dismissing this completely and on top of that. During the whole of February, no infrastructure was built to do testing in the United States. No infrastructure was built to trace anybody. No preparation was done to prepare the hospitals. No preparation was done to provide PPE to doctors. No preparation was done to order masks and to get masks and ventilators and everything else needed ramped up. The Trump administration was so pathetic and provided misinformation, lied about this crisis. And he was told by advisors, this is a serious issue. We need to prepare. And he did nothing. He's got blood on his hands. The fact that the United States was not prepared caused the deaths of thousands of people. So for Trump to complain about misinformation is ludicrous and ridiculous. Yes, the WHO misinformed. So did Trump. So if you're going to accuse the WHO, you should be equally as passionate in your accusations against Trump. If you look at the Trump administration timeline of action, it is a timeline that is pathetic. And it is a timeline that undermined the ability of the United States to be prepared to actually handle the pandemic. And so you got to blame everybody. You can't play favorites. If you're going to blame the WHO on China, you got to blame Trump as well. Thank you. Dennis will continue with your second question. It says, Errol, what do you say? How effective were socialist emergency measures like nationalism in the hospitals like they did in Spain or surgical production of price fixing of masks, medical equipment, et cetera, the rest? Well, it was terrible. It was terrible. We saw vast shortages. Whenever you fix prices, what happens? We know this when economic 101. You get shortages. You don't get oversupply. You get shortages. On the other hand, if they would allow prices to go up and if people would have bought them at the higher prices, what would have happened to manufacturers? They would have gone into overdrive to manufacture more and more and more masks, more and more and more ventilators, more and more and more tests. The fact that the government kept the prices of all these things led to massive shortages of all these things. So socialism, this crisis is one more illustration of the utter incompetence and disaster of socialism. Look at how poorly the Italian, Spanish, French hospital systems did. And now the NHS in the UK, which is a disaster. Look how many people are dying. Look how much shortage of equipment they have, how much shortages of everything they have. And these are centrally planned socialist systems. Now to the extent the US did badly, it's only to that extent that they were centrally planned, that they were controlled. Again, the Trump administration, by dismissing this and by not doing, you know, putting together the necessary infrastructure to handle the crisis. The state government, by limiting the number of hospital beds in hospitals, and then the general laws that prohibit gouging, price gouging, which restricted the ability of prices to go up during the crisis, limited the supply of these goods. A free market, a capitalist laissez-faire free market would have handled this crisis a thousand times better than the way it was handled by any government out there. And to conclude, it's Dennis's question. From an antitrust competition, law point of view, is it really okay to allow free flow of investment funds from Chinese companies, especially state-owned controlled ones? And should we be concerned that they don't support free market trade policies in any matter? Yeah, we should be concerned about a lot of things. I mean, concern, the question is what do you do about those concerns? So no, I have no problem in Chinese companies buying American companies or buying anybody's companies. As long as there's no national security issue, and I do think they should be evaluated on a national security basis. But as long as there's no national security, that is you're selling them technologies that are used in Kuzma cells or something like that, then why if a Chinese company buys a cement company in the United States, why is that harmful and who is the harm? They're probably going to overpay for the companies. The American walks away with a load of cash and then goes and invest somewhere else in the US economy. It is only accretive and beneficial to the US economy to have Chinese companies, including state-owned Chinese companies buying stuff in the US. Is it problematic that China doesn't support free trade? Yes, it's problematic for the Chinese people because the Chinese people are screwed by the fact that they have to pay taxes on the goods that they import and the goods that they buy from other countries. It's also bad for Chinese companies in the sense that Chinese companies are not exposed to real competition and therefore don't have the benefits of capitalism, of creative destruction, of competition. They would actually spur them to become better, more productive, more efficient, and better on the world markets. Freedom is good to the extent that China limits freedom within China. That's bad for the Chinese. Does it affect the rest of the world that China limits trade? Yes, at the margin, but it affects the Chinese much more. You can't solve that problem by adopting their policies. The solution that Trump and many others advocate for, not to deal with China, is to make America like China. Oh, Chinese have tariffs on goods, so we should do the same thing. Oh, Chinese don't allow American financial institutions to come into China. Oh, we shouldn't allow Chinese financial institutions into the United States. Oh, the Chinese jail political dissidents. Oh, maybe we should jail political dissidents. Where does it end? I mean, I repeat, I think the world is becoming like China. I think all the people saying, oh, China's bad. We shouldn't trade with them. We should have tariffs. All are making the world like China instead of fighting China. You want to fight China? Unilaterally lower tariffs to zero and become rich. You want to fight China? Invite China to invest in any company they want other than national security issues. Invite, so prove, you want to fight China? Prove that capitalism is a better system. Show the world that America in Europe are a beacon, a shining city on a hill, a beacon of freedom, a beacon of liberty. In America, we don't force people into isolation. In America, we don't use Chinese methods against people's livelihood. In America, we don't tax consumers if they happen to want to buy a product for Mexico or China. In America, we believe in freedom and liberty. Then you would actually present a model different than the Chinese model. You would show that it is superior to the Chinese model. And therefore, you would maybe marshal support for freedom and liberty around the world. Instead, Europe and the United States are becoming more and more and more like China. I mean, we have a president in the United States who doesn't like to be criticized by the media. Just like she, he doesn't have the political tools yet to shut them down. But if you just saw his executive order about Twitter, he wants and is seeking the political tools to shut them down just like she. So unfortunately, the sad thing in the world today is that while China is becoming more and more... Could you try again? Whoops. Get that. Could you try again? That is Siri thinking I'm talking to. I'm not talking to you, Siri. Go away. Instead of... So China's becoming more and more authoritarian. At the same time, America, Europe and the rest of the world are also becoming more and more authoritarian. There's a race towards more authoritarianism. And that is what is really scary. The European Union is becoming more authoritarian and more... wants to dictate the way people live their lives. And Washington is becoming more and more authoritarian. So I don't see how antitrust laws are related to this issue. I don't believe in antitrust laws. I think there should be no antitrust law. Inran called antitrust laws the most non-objective evil laws in the books of the United States of America. If you believe in capitalism, you believe in capitalism. Antitrust laws are the essence of statism, status control on the beginning of authoritarianism in America. Seeing that we have a lot of new questions coming up in a little time, let's just answer the last three. And we have one on Facebook. So from Tarshul, it says some nations like India also medically aided other nations. Do they want to make benefits from it and pretend themselves strong nations? Well, that's part of it. Part of it is they want to look altruistic. They want to look like they care. And because they get moral credit for that, not only within their own countries. So part of it is within their own country, people think, oh, this is a good government. They care about the world, but also in other countries. So it's part of this effort to be altruistic and appear in other countries as being caring and also more powerful. That is a country that can help other countries. It's powerful. And there's certainly a competition between India and China. China is richer right now, but India will pass China in terms of number of people. That is, India will become the largest country by population soon in the world. And India has ambitions to be richer than China. And India is the largest democracy in the world. And India wants to exert a certain influence out there in the world. And yes, I think all these supposedly altruistic actions are attempts by these governments to influence and project strength and wealth. I hope that answers that. And we have another one from Erin. Are you aware of Britain's offer of residency slash citizenship to 3 million Hong Kong people? So I haven't yet read the details of this, but I will. To the extent that that's true, I think it's wonderful. I wonder why it's only 3 million and not 7 million. It seems a little discriminatory there. There are 7.5 million people who live in Hong Kong. Why not offer them all British citizenship? I think that would be even more generous and better and more consistent with liberty and freedom. But I think it's wonderful. Can you think of more industrious, more hardworking, more pro-freedom people? Think about all the people who've been demonstrating in the streets for what? For over a year now in Hong Kong. Don't you want them in Europe? Don't you want them in the UK? Shouldn't we want them in the United States? Every three countries in the world right now should basically offer citizenship to every single citizen of Hong Kong. I mean, that would send a statement. Thanks everyone. I just thought of this idea. That would send a great statement. Imagine if the United States tomorrow said to combat what the Chinese are doing, we are going to offer citizenship to every citizen of Hong Kong. And if France did it, and Switzerland did it, and the UK did it, wow. I mean, that would send a message. It would send a message of support. It would send and it would also reflect real values because these people are, why wouldn't I want them in my community and in my country? So I think it's terrific. I only wish Britain would expand it beyond the three million. And to conclude this wonderful interview with the last question, which is from our SFO staff, Nathaly Chan, she asked us, you, is it fair to call China's industrial age as a time of freedom? They were mostly implementing state subsidized mercantilism. Wouldn't you agree that it is a good counter example to direct link between wealth and freedom as 20th century libertarians suggest? So no, I actually don't think most of what they did was mercantilist. They certainly had elements of mercantilism, but so does every country in the world. We all live in mixed economies. None of us live in laissez-faire capitalism. But there was a period in China where you definitely got the sense that it was freer economically than the United States. It was easier to open a business. They were less regulated. They were less controlled. It was the Wild West. You could do whatever you wanted to do pretty much. And again, I, you know, I've been in China many times and I've seen this with my own eyes, but if you wanted documented statistically and story-wise, I strongly recommend reading the book, How China Became Capitalist. And let me just give one example. China under Mao Zedong had a really hard time producing enough food to feed its own population. Indeed, during the 1960s, anywhere between 20 to 40 million Chinese died of starvation. And they were continuing to starve well into the 70s. And when Mao Zedong died in 78, this was still the case. And this is, it's a true story of a village. You can find this online. There's a village in China. And the village, the village basically was, they were dying. There was no, there was no food. They would literally send their children to beg in towns nearby so they could get enough money to be able to produce food, in order to buy food so they could eat themselves. What they were growing was not producing enough. And they got together at a town meeting. This is a true story. And they said, look, we can't go on like this. This isn't, you know, let's try something new. Let's try something we really haven't done since the 1930s. You over there, you pretend that that piece of land is yours. And anything you grow above and beyond what the Communist Party takes, you get to sell out there in the black market or whatever, and you get to keep the difference. And you own that piece and you own that piece. They basically created private property. Now it wasn't private property in the sense that any court will protect it because the courts wouldn't have protected it, but it was pseudo private property. Everybody behaved like they had their own piece of land and they cultivated it. The next year, production of agricultural products in that village went up sevenfold, times seven. They produced seven times more. They were suddenly one of the most productive villages in all of China. Now, the Communist Party then said, wait a minute, what happened in this village? This is amazing. We should send people to investigate and maybe we can get other villages to do the same thing. So they sent people to investigate because all this was secret, of course, and they interrogated the villagers and soon enough they discovered what the villagers had done. And the local authorities basically wanted to kill everybody. That was their solution. We can't let this out. We can't let people find out that they produced seven times as much because they instituted capitalist free private property. And then Chopin, to his credit, then Chopin was a monster, but he had some good spots, I guess, to his credit said, no, no, don't do that. We're no longer ideologically communist. If this works, this is amazing. We can solve a food problem. Instead of killing them, we're going to try this in another village and see if it works over there. And they went and they tried it in another village. And that village produced a lot more food as well. And then they said, okay, so it looks like this private property thing works for agriculture. Let's unleash it. Now, they never literally gave the farmers deeds on the land, real contracts, real property rights, but they allowed the farmers to act as if they had property rights. Now, that's closer to capitalism. That's not mercantilism. It's not exactly full-fledged, as they fare. They did the same thing in Guangzhou province. So, yeah, Guangzhou, in the province where Guangzhou is, Dongzhou, whatever the province there. And as a consequence, you got Dengzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan and a number of other cities. There was nothing there. And suddenly you have tens of millions of people, actually hundreds of millions of people migrating there because they basically said, whatever you do in this province, we're not going to interfere. You can build whatever you want. You can create whatever businesses you want. And I visited there. I visited that province a couple of times. And it's stunning. You've never seen so many skyscrapers in your life. You've never seen people working as hard as they do in that province or did when I visited and was the early 2000s. They were producing, creating, building, making because they were free. It is that freedom, which is what made China wealthy. It is the mercantilist investment in state-owned companies, central planning that has limited their ability to grow. If they had actually freed up the economy, if they'd actually created a capitalist institutions, they would have grown much faster. They would be today much richer. And they would be on the path to being the freest, wealthiest country in the world. They're not because the fact doesn't a per capita basis, per capita GDP basis. There's still dirt poor in China, certainly relative to the West, right? The capital GDP I think is $2,000 a year in Europe. It's $50,000, $60,000 in the United States, $60,000, $70,000. Not a purchasing power parity. China is closer, but it's still relative to America poor, right? But they could be much richer. And what's lacking is more capitalism, more freedom. So no, yeah, somebody, somebody's linked here. Ronald Coase is the author. Ronald Coase is an overpriced winning free market economist. And Ning Wang, the story is, Ronald Coase wrote this book when he was 101 years old. So I hope all of us can be writing books like this when we're 101 years old. He had a Chinese co-author. And it's a, it's not a particularly well-written book because it's very repetitive, but it is a brilliant book in terms of what it teaches us and what you can learn from it. So I encourage you. Mercantilism does not create wealth or create some wealth, but it's capped. What really creates wealth is freedom. Thank you, Yaron. Thank you. Oh, and there's an Italian translation of the, thank you Veronica. There's an Italian translation of Ronald Coase's book. So translate in many languages so you can, you can access it there. It's all on Amazon. Well, I would like to thank with this last question, we conclude our interview. I would like to thank everyone that joined us tonight and