 Okay, well, thank you so much, both of you, for making time. I know your schedule has been very busy, but you came highly recommended to me as I'm working on an idea for peace where really I just wanna get different perspectives and insights from economists around the world and their take on how some of our global systems have been impacted by COVID-19 and which ones they feel need to be disrupted and changed and discuss how, what is a way forward to doing that? I know there's a very big kind of lofty concept, so the angle for the peace might change. The more people I talk to, but you were my first economist that I'm speaking with. I normally write about the intersection of technology and social impact and global innovation, but I've just done a little research on you and objectivism and some of your perspectives on globalization. For the everyday person who does not know what objectivism is, would you explain that? Sure, so I mean, objectivism is really a philosophy, not an economic theory, and it's a philosophy that basically advocates for a morality of kind of rational, long-term self-interest of people pursuing their happiness and figuring out what is the best life to live and how to live it in a way that they're not being sacrificed to other people and other people don't sacrifice to them. In politics, and the primary way of doing that is by using your mind and following reason and by engaging with other people primarily in relationships of trade, of win-win relationships and taking responsibility over your own life primarily through producing, making the stuff that you can, making, taking responsibility over producing enough so that you can live and that basically means working and having a career and taking that really, really seriously. And then politically that implies, politically economically that implies a system that basically leaves us free to do exactly that, to live our lives, to pursue our happiness, to choose our own values, to follow a career, to produce, to create, to build. And that's a system of capitalism in which the government is limited really in its function to the protection of our rights, the protection of our freedoms, but otherwise leaves us alone and allows us to live our lives as we see fit. And so that's kind of on a very, very quick basis kind of the idea of objectivism. Is that something you think is possible with everything that's going on in the worlds right now with the crisis or do you think it was before or could be when there's a vaccine and when things calm down, whenever that may be? No, I think it's always possible and necessary now than ever. We need more now than ever guidance. Reason, I mean, a lot of what's happening in the world right now is panic, emotion, projection, it's speculation, it's, what we lack right now is data, knowledge, and we lack leaders who actually lead from the perspective from a thoughtful perspective. We have leaders that emote, we have leaders that provide us with two alternatives, we're all gonna die or we have to shut the entire world down and that's it, there's nothing in between, there's no more thoughtful approach. We have leaders who don't view the value of testing, obviously, because we're not testing, so data's not important to them. And we also, in terms of the population, we want a population that thinks about pursuing their own self-interest but thinks about that in the context of other human beings and in the context of long-term flourishing and pursuing happiness. And that means being responsible in terms of your behavior and what that looks like rather than on the one hand people who are, yeah, let's go to the beach, let's party, doesn't matter who cares about tomorrow, but on the other hand, no, no, this is, I'm so scared I'm gonna hunker down and live in my basement for the next two years until there's a vaccine. No, we need rational people focusing on true risk assessment and figuring out how to live even when there's a lot of uncertainty and we're not exactly sure what exactly is going on, but in a way that's responsible to our lives and responsible to the people around us. Yeah, I fully agree with that point. Are there any particular infrastructures or global systems that you've been keeping a very closer eye on than others in terms of things that, you know, I mean, none of our systems are really set up for equity or there's no such thing as being equitable really in some of the systems, right? So it's, you're like, well, maybe, but some of the problems that have existed in some of them are possibly more amplified or magnified right now. Are there any systems in particular where you would like to see changes made and are hoping that they could be made in light of anything going on, whether that's the financial system, education system or food system, political system, energy systems? Because I see so much happening in the world of business in the private sector and startups in terms of people wanting to create more equality, people wanting to have, you know, whether it's doing an unconscious bias program or building the pipeline more for equity or whatever it is and they do these programs, but it's really the underlying systems that I find problematic with the way that things are going. These businesses can have all the programs, you know, they can keep turning them out and doing great things, but if the systems are stuck, then what do we do? Well, we probably disagree in what the problems are. That is, I don't believe that there's a problem of inequality. I don't believe that equality should be a goal. I don't think equality is a good thing. I believe in freedom and freedom generates inequality. It just does. It always does under all conditions it does. When you take any group of people and you leave them free, you leave them alone to do their thing, you'll get an inequality and that's a beautiful thing. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we should celebrate inequality and not try to get rid of it. I think it's very dangerous and ultimately very violent to get rid of inequality. And I think the reason these systems don't work is because the only real way to get rid of inequality is through violence. I mean, how do you make me and LeBron James equal in basketball? You can't, but other than if you break his legs and break his arms or something like that, violence, right? How do you make me and Bill Gates equal in wealth? Well, you steal his money. Can you give it to me? But that's violence, that's stealing. There is no such thing as equality. We have to get rid of that. The only quality that means anything, the only quality that the founders of America implied when they wrote all men are created equal in declaration of independence, even though they didn't live up to that, but they implied it, is a political equality, equality of freedom, equality of rights, equality before the law when the law is focused on protecting our rights. So creating a level of playing field, not an economic sense, but in a political sense in the sense of we're all free to go out and pursue our lives, to try to build, to try to create, to try to make, and recognizing that we all start from different starting points. We all have different advantages and disadvantages. That's just reality. I can't change the genes I have. I can't change the parents I have. I can't change the wealth that my parents had and the opportunities they gave me or didn't give me. Given all that, I wanna maximize my opportunities. I actually wrote a book. It's behind me. I didn't put it. I didn't know we were gonna talk about it, but it's called Equal is Unfair and we talk about all this stuff and this is exactly what it's focused on. So when I look at the infrastructures in the world, I see what I try to maximize is not equality. I don't care about equality of outcome, equality of economic equality, or even equality of opportunity, which I think is a bogus concept. What I care about is maximizing opportunities for everybody, for the poor, for the middle class, for everybody should be maximize opportunities. And I know only one way to do that. And I think objectively in history, there's only been one way to do that. That is through freedom. I wanna liberate markets, liberate individuals. So when I look at the world, I look at where are the bottlenecks for liberty? Where are the bottlenecks for opportunity? And I see them all over the place. So it's hard for me to say what infrastructure would I like to be changed? Because I'd like to change almost all of them because I think all of them are constrained today, are limited, but given the coronavirus, given what the time we're living through, the one that is obvious that needs to be liberated is healthcare. I mean, healthcare is a mess. It's a disaster. And it's not surprising it's a mess of disaster. It's heavily, heavily, heavily controlled by government. If you look at the three areas where in the United States, you see prices go up and quality goes down. Three areas, healthcare, education, and housing. All areas completely controlled by government. All areas where government constrains the supply and regulates the demand and regulates every aspect of it. If you want to see prices drop and quality go up in healthcare, education, and housing, get the government out of the way. Liberate it just like Silicon Valley as little restraints on development of technology. And as the consequences prices go down and quality goes up. You need the same thing in healthcare. I would love to see, and I think the response to coronavirus is a great indication of that. Why couldn't we test early on? Because the FDA wouldn't allow testing. And the CDC decided that it was gonna design the best test in the world and the only test in the world. And central planning doesn't work. I mean, I always ask people, what would this look like as an iPhone, right? What would this look like if a government committee designed it? And everybody laughs. Well, why do we let a government committee design our healthcare system? Why do we let bureaucrats decide which tests are good and which tests are bad? Which drugs and which procedures are good and which bad? Don't we trust our doctors? Aren't our doctors smart? And can't they read the medical journals? And can't they figure this out? And couldn't the market have a replacement for the FDA? So I would love to see a true free market in healthcare. And imagine, why do we have so few hospital beds? Fewer than in the entire Western world. We have, why? Because in order to get a hospital, in order to expand your hospital, the number of beds in your hospital, if you own a hospital, so-called private, you have to submit to the state a statement of need. Why you need more hospital beds? And all your competitors get to write in to the state saying, well, you don't need additional hospital beds. They don't want the competition. And so you cannot expand the hospital capacity or ICU capacity or any capacity without getting the state approval. Indeed, one of the things that the state did, like in the middle of the crisis with state hospitals, okay, okay, for now you don't need to submit a certificate of need, go do whatever you need to go do. I mean, all of that is absurd. If you look at any other business, when demand goes up, what happens? First prices go up, second supply goes up and prices come down. Well, if suddenly you have a pandemic and hospitals know that they're gonna be flooded, what would they have done? They would have expanded supply. They would have figured out, they would have bought a hotel and turned it into a hospital. They would have bought away, they would have done stuff to expand the supply. Same thing with masks, the same thing with ventilators, all these things, the thing that constrains their production is that we don't let the price system work. If you take toilet paper, which is an easy one, right? If you'd allowed supermarkets to basically raise the price of toilet paper when everybody wanted it, then people wouldn't have hoarded it because they couldn't afford to. They would have bought what they needed and they would have gone home. And then people who manufacture toilet paper would have looked and said, wow, there's a huge amount of need for toilet paper and gone into production and produced toilet paper. This is economics 101, right? But when you tell supermarkets, oh, that's price gouging and you can't raise the price, then of course what you get are shortages. Again, economics 101, every freshman learns this in college, but we don't apply it because, oh my God, you can't raise prices in the middle of the crisis. So what we need generally in every infrastructure is more freedom. I'll give you one other one. And certainly this is true of education and housing. But I'll give you another one. I am very concerned about globalization. I'm very concerned about global trade. I am a huge proponent of global trade. I think it is the right pro-freedom thing you should be able to buy from anywhere in the world or whatever price people are willing to offer. And it should be your decision who to buy from, not Trump or any president or any bureaucrat. I think we're entering a period where global trade is gonna shrink, where we're gonna see much more protectionism across the board, where we're gonna bring supposedly industries back. And that will guarantee a lower standard of living for Americans and for anybody else. Higher prices, lower standard of living and fewer jobs. Actually globalization creates more jobs than it destroys. Every economic study, every economic paper shows that when you bring things back home, you actually destroy jobs. So those are, I could go on and on for hours, but those are just some examples. Some examples. Yeah, well, I got to watch one of your videos. I think you were riffing a bit on China, talking about China and the situation there. I mean, I read a piece and I think it was foreign policy a couple of weeks ago about China and they were saying how China, it's been no secret that China is light years ahead of United States, anyway, than has been. And that this pandemic. What, what, what, what? What are they like years away from? What are they like years away from? I think the writer was referring to technology, AI, things like that. I don't think any of that is true. I don't think any of that is true. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the thing too with AI, that's the whole mother thing. I thought that I'd see a lot more things happening in AI and machine learning when it comes to the pandemic. I'm seeing some things being done, but I thought I'd see a lot more at this point. But the point the writer was making in the article was that now China is in a position it's like doing, being generous with other countries and the medical supplies and everything. And the US is just looking worse and worse and worse and China is looking better and better. What, I mean, do you see that? Do you, what is your take on China and globalization? I'd separate two issues here. One is the perception of a country globally and internationally. And look, Donald Trump has destroyed whatever positive, much of the positive perception of the United States globally and his attitude towards trade, his attitude to immigration and many of his other attitudes have created a lot of ill will in other countries and justifiably so. And China is trying to come in and fill the gap and pretend that they're the good guys and everybody's gonna be nice. And I think to some extent they succeed in that, but everybody knows what they're really trying to do. I don't think anybody's gonna be fooled and people are suspicious of China. So I think people have way too positive a view of China's economy and China's ability and China's strength and China's ability to flourish in the future. China has become more and more authoritarian over the last five years. This president Xi is a disaster for China. He will bring China down and he already has started to bring China down. The Chinese economy shrunk for the first time in 40 years but since 1978 I think 6.8% last quarter. China can't afford to shrink. China is a poor country. On a per capita GDP basis, China is way behind the United States, way, way, way behind the United States in terms of wealth. China's technology to a large extent is either copy or stolen from the US. Because of the lack of freedom, there is no great innovation going on in China. When you look at things like the stuff they're using for social, their social score, facial recognition, spying on people, that's Israeli technology, American technology. It's technology that they've taken and adapted but it's not homemade technology. To be successful economically and to be successful technologically, you need freedom. To the extent China allows their industries and their tech industry to be free, to that extent they succeed. And that's what happened from 1978 till about five years ago. It was massive liberalization and opening up freedom in China. About five years ago they started shutting down. I think that shutting down, shutting down the freedom, more controls, more central planning will make China less able to grow the economy. I think it'll make China more desperate and it'll make China poorer. And we will see what happens. I think a long-term there's real risk of civil war in China as people who are poor now not advancing into middle class because the economy's not growing very fast. They go out into the streets and what happens in a world of where everything is streamed when you have another Tiananmen Square? I mean, the Chinese are terrified of this. The Chinese authorities, the Communist Party is terrified of this. So I think China's in trouble. I think their troubles are internal. Their troubles are economic. Their troubles are social. Their troubles are how do they control their own population? And the way they handled this pandemic was a disaster. They penalized the people who actually were providing information. I mean, there was a courageous doctor who provided information early on and he lined it up dying from COVID-19. So, and the Chinese hid this and distorted the facts and their population knows this. So I think China's in trouble. I don't think other countries buy their benevolence. I think other countries are skeptical about it. And I think people have seen through their authoritarianism and the consequence of them in a sense repressing information. And so people are gonna be, I think they're gonna have a hard time with regard to trade. I think a lot of people are gonna hesitate to trade with them, particularly in the developed world. People are gonna hesitate to give them new technologies or to sell them new technologies. We're already seeing the backlash against 5G from the Chinese companies and even the UK shifting to different technologies so that the Chinese don't get a foothold in the UK. So I think China's in trouble. I think it would be a mistake to view China as benefiting from what's going on in the world right now. China needs a robust Europe, a robust United States and Europe and the US that want to trade with it. And so I think as globalization declines, which I think is what's gonna happen, I think global trade declines, China is a huge loser, the United States is issue. I mean, it's a lose-lose proposition. If trade is win-win, the essence of trade is win-win, the essence of tariffs and restrictions on trade is lose-lose. China loses, the US loses, the West loses. And there's no way out of this. The whole Belt and whatever Belt and Highway project that they have cannot succeed without massive trade. And there's no indication the world is heading towards massive openness and trade. Okay, we only have a couple of time or minutes so I just have two more questions. What is your take on the idea of universal basic income? There's been conversation around that, especially as of late for obvious reasons. What do you think about that? Are you for that and how would it even be possible? So I think there are proposals that are feasible in terms of UBI, so I don't think it's unfeasible. I don't think it's a crazy idea. There's a version of it that I'm sympathetic to and the only version I'm sympathetic to is a version where basically we will place all social programs with UBI. But that would mean all social programs, everything, all the welfare programs, but I would even throw in healthcare into that. I would do away with Medicare and Medicaid and so everybody gets a check and with that check they have to buy health insurance, they have to pay for their own food, do whatever they need to do. And they don't expect anything else from the government. And if we could as a consequence of UBI shut down the entire welfare state bureaucracy, get rid of all those employees and right now we have, I don't know, 500 different welfare programs, little minutiae food stamps and help for this and help for that and help for these people, help for those people. We got rid of all of that and just replaced it all with one check from the government every month. Then there's a huge increase in efficiency there, right? Because you get rid of a bureaucracy, you turn people who are not very productive into people who now go out and seek productive jobs and you actually create markets. So for example, if you gave old people a check and said you have to buy insurance with this, then you suddenly create a health insurance market for old people that replaces Medicaid, which I think is much more productive, much better for our healthcare system, much more efficient than Medicare, which is a one size fit all program that distorts the market in dramatic ways in really, really big ways. So that's the way in which I, it's the only way I think UBI can work, but philosophically I'm opposed to it even then, right? Because I'm opposed to redistribution of wealth. I'm opposed to taking from some people and giving to others. So I would propose UBI, let's say we said everybody gets 20,000 a year or 15,000 a year. And then I'd say, okay, but realize this, everywhere, every year, other than let's say for seniors, everybody else, we're gonna cut it by $1,000. So in 20 years, UBI is gonna be zero and there's no welfare state. So start planning, start saving, start organizing your life so that when the government stops helping you, you're in a position that you can afford to take care of yourself. So it's a way to, in my view, it's a way to transition as far as a welfare state that tries to control every aspect of our life today to a truly free society one day down the road. But as a transition, it's far superior to what we have now with this insanity of the bureaucracy of the kind of welfare state we have. Okay, my last question is about Puerto Rico. Well, I'd love to know what brought you here, but maybe we'll save that for another conversation because I know you've only got five, six minutes. So I'm working on a separate piece right now for Forbes about Producé and Uva to delivery services here. Producé delivers all fresh organic food from farmers, local farmers, and Uva is groceries and restaurants and they've expanded to pharmaceutical and essential needs. And as you can imagine, their subscriptions have skyrocketed the last month because everybody needs these things. And so we're looking at, obviously Puerto Rico relies on imports very, very, very heavily. We're looking at is it possible? What would it take for Puerto Rico to be less reliant on imports and can we someday have a more self-sufficient island? Look, Puerto Rico is a basket case. It's an economic basket case. I gave a talk, I've been on the island for two months, two years and three months. So I came January 1st, 2018. And three months later in March, I gave a talk in Puerto Rico on how Puerto Rico could become the Hong Kong of the Caribbean. Because why not, right? It's a beautiful island. It's got friendly people. It's got talented people. They do fine when they move to the US. It's just here, they seem to screw everything up. It's a beautiful beaches, should be a tourist haven, but it should be a producing haven. There should be skyscrapers everywhere. I mean, there should be a financial and hub on the Caribbean and what's stopping it? Well, to do that, you have to look at why Hong Kong is Hong Kong. And basically, Hong Kong is Hong Kong because it's free. So if you take the number of people who work for the government in Puerto Rico versus Hong Kong, in Puerto Rico, a third of all people employed work for the government. In Hong Kong, 5%. So the first thing I would do is fire, you know, 90% of government employees in Puerto Rico. Because there are, one of the things that you realize as an economist is people who work for the government, most of them, they're not all of them, but 80 to 90% of them are actually destroying wealth. That's their job. It's to destroy wealth. It's getting the way of producers. It's getting the way of developers. It's getting in the way of wealth creation. So, you know, I gave an example. Why can't Puerto Rico become the first state in the US to do things like fire the DMV and make the issuance of a driver's license online? Why can't I sit in front of a computer screen, fill out a form, the computer can take a picture of me. All of that is emailed to some agency where they verify the information electronically. You could do that with blockchain. You could verify that all the information I gave is true and then they download my driver's license onto my iPhone. I mean, why do you need one person to work at the DMV if that can happen, right? You don't, everything could be electronic. So, technology today, but it could replace many government employees. And then what you need to do is free up developers to develop, free up, you know, I'm here because you're probably familiar with Act 20 and 22. So, I'm benefiting from Act 20 and 22. So, I have a very, very low tax rate. Why shouldn't Puerto Ricans have a low tax rate? Why should I pay less taxes than Puerto Ricans? Why doesn't Puerto Rico institute a flat 10% tax rate? Not just, do you know that Puerto Rico has the second highest corporate tax rate on the planet Earth? It's like almost, I think they lowered it recently a little bit, like the 30 something percent. Why doesn't Puerto Rico institute a flat 10% personal income tax rate and corporate tax rate? 10% across the board, all taxes are 10%. We've already have a high sales tax rate in Puerto Rico. And live within your means, then start cutting the bureaucracy, lay people off, get rid of, to open a business. I mean, I'm a business owner, I have two businesses in Puerto Rico. The amount of forms and little taxes I have to pay, little fees here and fees there, it's an immutability here. I hire an accountant to do all that. Another unproductive job of somebody who just works between me and the government to smooth things out. All of this should be easy and simple. You want to make it as business friendly as possible. The way Hong Kong does it is only 5% of the people employed on the island work for the government. And as a consequence, there are almost no regulations. There are almost no constraints. There is development. If you want to start a business, you can get a license in a day that business taxes are minimal and trivial and easy to pay. The forms are non-existent, so easy to fill out. That's what, and of course, you need to get rid of the corruption. I mean, you know the story here in Puerto Rico about the testing equipment. They basically hired a construction firm to go buy medical tests. And the construction firm happened to be owned by somebody who contributes a lot of money to the political party in the rules of Puerto Rico. So the corruption has to disappear, but the way you make corruption disappear is you shrink through all the government. If government can't hand out favors, people don't lobby it. So make it impossible for the Puerto Rican government to hand out favors by shrinking it, by reducing its power, by taking it out of the economy. The more government intervenes in the economy, the poorer we are. The more freedom we have, the richer we are. This is my case about China, by the way, what I argued about China. When China became really, really grew fast, it's when the government didn't intervene much in the economy. When China is now intervening heavily in its economy, the economy is gonna grow much slower, if at all. So Puerto Rican needs to adopt the same legal, the same kind of structures as every country that's ever become rich has adopted. And that is protect property rights and get out of the way. It's really, it's actually super simple. It's super shocking that nobody actually does it. You know, you've got Hong Kong, you've got Singapore, and that's about it. Nobody's actually practiced the mechanisms to get rich. It's easy. It's not that hard. It's politically hard, but actually, in reality, it's not that hard. All right. Wow. Well, thank you. Sure. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and...