 Welcome back to the Kill Bigger radio show. We're bringing high-quality big thinking business content to Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, YouTube, and Pocketcasts. We are building things that matter. We are building things that last, and we are killing bigger. I am your host, Kyle Keegan. Thank you for joining us today. I just can't thank you guys enough. I love my listeners. I love where we've come and where we've gone with this already. I've still been wanting to spend a lot of time on capitalism because I think it's paramount to running good business. I think being an entrepreneur, you need to know what capitalism is and what capitalism isn't, and it gets demonized a lot. That's bullshit, and we're here to kind of dispel some of that. I've got a great guest for you today. I'm absolutely thrilled to have him on the show. He's the chairman of the board at the Einrand Institute, the co-author of the best-selling books, Free Market Revolution, and Equal is Unfair. He is the host of his own radio show, the Iran Brook show. Please welcome Iran Brook. Thanks for having me on, Kyle. It's good to be here. I just so appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is going to be absolutely epic. Thank you so much, Iran. Let's start out with the big question. What do you mean by equal is unfair? Well, that the idea of equality of outcome is unfair. If I produce more, I should have more. If you're lazy and you don't want to work, you should have less. If you're brilliant and you're an amazing entrepreneur and you create a world-changing product or service, you should be a billionaire. And we should celebrate our billionaires. So the idea of equality of outcome or economic equality, any kind of economic equality, is a travesty, an injustice. It is wrong. It is unfair. It is immoral. And think about what you'd have to do in order to create that kind of equality. The only way to do it is to take from those who produce and to give to those who haven't produced. And I like to give a basketball example of this. So I think basketball inequality is unfair. I'd love to be able to get on a basketball with LeBron James and score a basket. Just a basket. I'm not even asking for pure equality. I just won't want it. Yeah, it's unfair that you can't go on there and go toe-to-toe with him, huh? Okay, not just toe-to-toe. I won't score a basket. You've never seen me play. But I can guarantee you. You've probably seen LeBron James play. I mean, he is amazing. He's the best basketball player in the world. And I won't score a basket. So how do we get me to score a basket? How do we get me to have a chance? How do we create more equality of basketball? Well, you can't improve my skills. Not much. Too old, too slow, wrong genes. It's just not going to work. Too short, everything. So the only way to do it is to find a way to harm LeBron. And the worse I am, the more you're going to have to harm him to get us to be equal. So really, for me to play with him on any kind of equal footing, we'd have to break his legs, maybe an arm, right? And then I could get a basket. That's true in every realm of life, that if you want economic or, you know, playground equality, you have to break somebody's legs. And in economics, we call breaking legs, we call it taxes. But it's the same thing. There's no difference between taxing somebody at a high rate and breaking legs, right? Because what am I doing? I'm stealing his money. What is money? Money is your time, your effort, your energy, your work. It's you. So that's why I think equality is unfair. The only way, only realm in life in which equality is justified is political equality. Coding to our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. Well, what did they mean by that? They meant that we all have equal rights. We all are free, equally free. Protected by the same laws. Protected by the same laws from the same abuse and when we face the laws, we're treated equally. That's it. Beyond that, go out and do whatever you can and the results are always going to be unequal. So what do you think about the affirmative action laws or things like that that might be unequally applied laws? So I think the violation of the Constitution, I think the unconstitutional, they go against the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. I understand why we put them in place because Jim Crow laws were the opposite. They didn't treat us equally. Jim Crow and the racist laws that existed before the 1960s were laws that discriminated against blacks, that the government, not individuals, the government discriminated against blacks. And what they should have done in the civil rights movement is said, government cannot discriminate anymore. Period. And people are just feed it equally by the law, but they shouldn't have gone beyond that. Affirmative action actually creates discrimination and therefore should be unconstitutional and is morally wrong and is not equality before the law and is anti the spirit of this country. But I understand where it came from. I understand what they were trying to do. They viewed us at a corrective measure for the racism that existed before and was institutionalized before. I just think by doing it, they actually perpetuated racism. They made things long worse and in a sense I'd say we're paying the consequences today. Yeah, absolutely. So onto the next question, would you agree that capitalism and profit motive is the driving force of human advancement? Not only, right? So I certainly think capital is so the profit motive is one of the driving forces of human advancement, but certainly curiosity, scientific science. I think the reason generally our ability to reason, to think, to discover, and the motivation, the fact that there's some among us who are super curious and super smart and can figure stuff out. So maybe a profit in an emotional sense, not just a monetary sense. So I certainly think self-interest. And your interest in pursuing your passions, pursuing your values both in the economic sphere and in non-economic sphere will drive humanity forward. Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb because he cared one Iota about me or about anybody around him. Thomas Edison was a curious guy and he wanted for his own satisfaction and for his own well-being and for his own profit ultimately to invent the light bulb. And he wanted to beat everybody else because he was competitive, but it was about Thomas Jefferson. So I think certainly self-interest. And I think capitalism, what capitalism is, is the system that allows for progress. It's the system that rewards progress. It's the system that leaves people free to invent, pursue the profit motive. Incentivizes it. What's that? Incentivizes it. Incentivizes it. More important than that, it creates the rule of law. It creates the freedom. If you think about where profit comes from, where innovation comes from, where science comes from. It comes from the human mind. And what the human mind needs in order to create, build, make, invent, discover is freedom. If you put a gun to my head, I don't think anymore. I just do what you tell me to do. Right. Force reduces thinking. Therefore, force reduces innovation, reduce. This is why nobody innovated in the Soviet Union. Nobody innovated really in Nazi Germany, with a few exceptions of people who were trained before. And even then, they were way behind on almost everything behind the West because we were free and they were not. So in every level, when you put force on people, you crush the mind. What capitalism does, capitalism is the system of freedom. Capitalism is the system that says force is not allowed. You can't use compulsion on people. You can't, there are no authorities. You want to start a company that does whatever, goes to Mars, you know, go for it. And if you fail, you fail. If you succeed, great. Capitalism is the system that leaves you free to go and try stuff, to use your mind, to pursue values, to innovate, to experiment, to hire people, to fire people, to change mid-course, to live on the basis of your judgment, not on the basis of other people's judgment. Right. So you said, you know, capitalism is a system of no force. And this brings into question a couple of things that I see. And you see constantly people arguing in favor of higher and higher minimum wage laws. You see people always, you know, coming up with some sort of government control mechanisms, government force mechanism in order to control the economy out of some notion of a benefit to society. You know, what do you think about that? Well, first, none of that is capitalism. And indeed, I don't believe we live in a capitalist country today. I don't think I'm married. No, I don't either. It has elements of capitalism. We have a little bit of freedom. They allow us to do a little bit of freedom. But there's a ton of force in American society today. There's very, you know, in the 19th century, maybe in the last half of the 19th century post-Civil War, we approached capitalism. We got close to being a truly capitalist country. But since 1913, 14, we've been downhill, and we've been the socialist part of economies been growing, and the capitalist part of the shrinking to the point where today it's barely in existence. So minimum wage laws, regulations, controls, tariffs, barriers of trade, you know, President of the United States calling up a CEO telling him we can put a plant and we can't. Yeah, there you go. Again, all of that is anti-capitalist. It's anti-American, and it's anti the principle of freedom. It's all bringing force in. And it's destructive and it's the reason why economy has grown so slowly for the last 20, 30, 40 years, in particular, since the financial crisis, we've had 2% growth, even under Trump. So, you know, we don't have capitalism anymore. And the consequence is slower economic growth, slower dynamism, very little innovation, very little big ideas. And think about the changes, I don't know, from 1880 to 1920, you know, the invention of really the expansion of railroads, the invention of the automobile, the invention of electricity, you know, real expansive sewage systems all over the place. In every dimension of life, life during that period, those 40 years just leapfrogged everything else that existed before that. Take today and go back 40 years to 1980. Yeah, the big innovation is the internet. But that's it in terms of big innovations. And automobiles are the same automobiles we drove in the 1980s were flying planes that are actually slower. The 787 today is slower than the old 737 727s are planes are slower. Concorde, I thought that was a crying shame that we just gave up on supersonic jet travel because a couple of airplanes crashed. Well, it wasn't because of crash. It was because of noise. It was because of environmental regulations. That's why you couldn't play the Concorde. They wouldn't let it land anyway because of the noise that it made. And then think about railroads. Any high speed railroads in the United States, they call a cellar a high speed railroad. Talk about a joke. You know, the railroad between Washington DC and Boston, which barely moves. I've been on high speed railroad in Europe and in China and in Japan and they go 300 miles an hour. That's high speed rail. What we have is a joke. There's been no innovation in any of those fields in the United States in decades and decades. And that's because the bigger the government is more regulation, more control, more force, the less innovation, the less growth you actually get. Yeah, I saw a quote from actually Ron Paul recently and he said that the US government is the biggest government in the history of the world and we shouldn't be happy about that. Ron Paul exaggerates. Unfortunately, Ron Paul comes from a tradition of libertarians who seem to hate American government more than any government in the world. The Soviet Union was a much bigger government by every measure, maybe not in dollars, but by measure of their control over the economy. The Chinese government today is a bigger government. Indeed, the government of Germany today is a bigger government. That's really what we should be talking about. Yeah, it's meaningless what he was talking about because he's trying to paint the US government in the worst light. I mean, I'm sympathetic to painting the American government today in a bad light, but let's not exaggerate. The world is filled with governments that are far, far worse than ours, as bad as ours is. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Would you agree that the standard of living is a better indicator of aggregate growth of wealth as a nation than any form of monetary measurement? Absolutely. I mean, the best example of that is the fact that if you look at monetary measures, the standard of living has grown very, excuse me, very little in the last 20 years. But how do you measure this? How do you measure the iPhone? Right. Yeah. It cost me a thousand bucks. But what's its value to me? Its value to me is it does things that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would have cost me tens of millions of dollars to replicate. Think about that. Yes. If you could replicate it, right, this is a computer more powerful than the computers that send man to the moon. This is a media device more powerful than any music player, movie player, you know, reader that we have ever had in human history, telecommunication device, video conferencing. I can do anywhere in the world that the marginal cost of zero. It's an amazing tool and we can't measure that with dollars and cents. So it's all about standard of living quality of life and indeed in a healthy economy. Look at computing power. A computer today costs about the same as it cost 20 years ago, like a laptop. But it does about it's about what, 10,000 more powerful. Yeah. So in a sense, the price of computers is declined. Right. Because unit of power, it's gone down dramatically. So we can't capture that in GDP. You can't capture that in any measure of economic growth. You can't capture the value of innovation and what economists sometimes call consumer surplus. The benefit that consumers are getting from the massive innovation is being created. There's no way to capture that in dollar terms. Right. And one of the examples that I've always talked about is. People from like 50 years ago who had maybe one car per household. They'd go on like one great vacation every, you know, 10 years they'd save up for something like that. You know, they very much pinch pennies and, you know, living a very small home and things like that. And things have changed a lot. And while some people may say, well, the growth of wages hasn't really happened. I would disagree because, you know, every household, you know, husband and wife in America, they all have two cars. I mean, I got it. Now we're standing some outliers. They fly a lot. Think about the price of an airline ticket. Air travel. We all plane about airlines all the time. But the fact is that cost of flying has gone down dramatically. We fly about all over the world. We take vacations all over the place. People's standard of living is much higher today than it was 20 years ago in terms of these intangible things that it's hard for us. And your money is buying more today. Yes. It's buying more. I mean, we haven't had deflation either. There's just more out there to buy. Yeah. I mean, think about what we're doing right now. I mean, video conferencing could have done that. Yeah, it could have done that with the quality and the quality of the videos like 4K. And that would have been unimaginable 10 years from now. And yet, how much is this costing us? How much did you pay for Skype? How much are we paying for this conversation? Literally zero. Zero. You remember? Absolutely nothing. I'm not too young, but I remember that I would think twice about calling a friend in a different state because of long distance phone call. Never mind my parents who live in Israel, that would cost me a fortune. I call them once every three months, not because I didn't want to speak to them, but because it was too expensive. Nobody thinks today about flipping their phone open and video conferencing with anybody anywhere in the world and it costs them exactly zero, which is unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, just it's incredible the amount of standard of living improvements that we've seen unbelievable. So my hypothesis here for your judgment is the middle class has never been richer. Oh, no question. No question about that. Middle class has never been richer. You know, my fear is not about that. My worry is, is the middle class still going to become rich from here on? I worry that we are setting ourselves up for long term stagnation. What makes a middle class poorer? It's not inequality, a capitalist brand of inequality. It's an oligarchy style government control that might do that, right? Absolutely. So it's more regulations, more controls, more taxes, more mismanagement of our money supply by the Federal Reserve, more mismanagement of our budget by a government. There's macroeconomic policy that shrinks the middle class or makes it harder for the middle class to grow. And I think we're heading into a period. The next 10 years are going to be very, very difficult, I think, for the middle class. I think all the innovation, even the relatively low levels of innovation that we're used to today are going to shrink even more so in the next 10 years because see what the government has done. I mean, somebody has to pay the three trillion dollars they've just approved in stimulus. Somebody's going to have to pay for the six trillion dollars that the Fed is using to buy our bonds left and right. Yes. That money, there's no free lunches and that money comes from future growth. That money comes from the ability to grow the economy in the future. So the profit motive to create is dwindling. It's eroding. Well, the profit motive is there. The problem is that the scope for its action is dwindling. So you can apply it to fewer things. More regulations, the less scope you have to go and innovate. The more regulations, more controls, the less places you can deploy your capital to make money. And I think we've already seen over the last 40 years, 50 years, a significant shrinkage in the places where we can innovate and grow our capital in the places where we can deploy our profit motive. And that's what's so destructive. And today we're going to spend so much of our money paying back debt and just working in order to pay back our debt. We're not going to have the time and the energy to focus on growth and innovation and production and things that actually, you know, it's entrepreneurs that create economic growth and you need lots of entrepreneurs. And it's difficult to have a lot of entrepreneurs when there's little capital and there's a little appetite for risk because of the kind of world we're creating. Sure. So does one man's wealth come at the expense of another? Absolutely not. I mean, wealth is not a zero sum game quite the contrary. Wealth is a value added perspective so that, you know, when I buy my iPhone from Apple, they make a profit. Apple's wealth has increased. I paid Apple $1,000 so technically I lost $1,000. My wealth is decreased by $1,000. But that's not really true, is it? I now have an iPhone, which is worth to me much more than $1,000, much more. So I'm better off and Apple's better off. So trade, which is the basis of the profit motive and is the basis of capitalism, voluntary trade, voluntary exchange, is win-win. The buyer wins and the seller wins. The seller profits, the buyer profits. And when you have those kind of transactions, monetary inequality might increase. But quality of life inequality does not. Right. So the buyer of an iPhone profits not in a monetary sense because a lot of people will mix words there. They're profiting in an emotional sense. They actually now have all these new skills. They have these new abilities. Absolutely. And it's also a monetary sense in the sense that I'm more productive now, right? So I choose my iPhone from my job. I become more productive. My wages go up. So I gain a profit, both monetarily hard to measure, but it's there. And spiritually, because now I can expand my horizons dramatically and do things far more efficiently for my own well-being. Nice. Yeah, I like that a lot. Now, we've had some pretty rough times in America with the coronavirus and all of the government shutdowns and things like that. Essential businesses, government-picking winners and losers. Have you seen some parallels between Atlas Shrugged and Modern Day America? Yeah, there's no question. I mean, Atlas Shrugged is prophetic, not because she knew the future, but she understood that if you didn't change the ideas of a culture, then those ideas had a logical consequence. And what we're seeing today is a logical consequence. Government in every aspect of our life. So we look for government for solutions in every aspect of our life. Government doesn't have solutions because government is good at only one thing, which is the deploying force. And the philosophy that made government grow also made government incompetent. So you get problems like corona and governments completely incompetent to deal with it. But it won't let the private sector deal with it because it controls and it likes that control. So the best example of this is testing where the United States completely screwed up the testing regime in the beginning in February when he could have kept us, saved probably 100,000 lives and kept this virus under control. Sure. The CDC couldn't design a test. The FDSC couldn't approve a test. We didn't rely, like Korea did, South Korea, relied completely on the private sector to design and produce and create tests. We had plenty of testing really, really early on and had no problems. We bungled the bureaucracy for weeks and weeks and weeks while we did no testing. And then when we did do testing, there weren't enough test kits because we, again, screwed it up. So our government... Or the tests sucked, you know, they had a bunch of botched tests too. Tests didn't work. And all because of the FDSC. So all because of the CDC and the FDSC, all because of government. Instead of relying on the private sector to develop tests and to develop treatments, the President of the United States had the audacity because we know he's got a medical degree and spent decades doing medical research. Had the audacity to tell us what an appropriate treatment is. Who the F cares what the President of the United States thinks what an appropriate treatment is for any disease. He's not an expert. He knows nothing. Zero, zilch. Yeah, even bringing the government into this discussion was interesting to me. I was like, as an American, I would like to just be afforded the freedom. And a lot of people argued with me and said, well, what do you think about putting ankle bracelets on people who have tested positive and all this stuff? And I'm like, no. I'm for that. Really? That's positive. You're a risk to your fellow man. And you could infect other people who could potentially die, particularly if they're old. Absolutely, you should be isolated for as long as you're infectious. Isolated at gunpoint? Yeah. I mean, we can't trust Americans to be free on their own to decide this for themselves. No, I don't. I don't trust a convicted rapist to go, I haven't convicted him yet to go out in the streets and not rape anybody. Then he's doing other stuff. That's different. Driva has to pay for the fact that he put other people at risk. Somebody has coronavirus. So let's rephrase it. We can do it this way. If you test positive, you're asked to be self-isolated at home. Sure. If you don't, then I put you in jail. Are you okay with that? No, not really. But the point is that if you're walking out in the street, you're putting other people in danger. They don't know you tested positive. If you wore a star that said, I tested positive, that would be fine because then people would isolate from you. But if you're positive, you constitute a risk for other people. It's like drunk driving. Drunk driving. Drunk drivers should be pulled off the street. Of course they should. And they should be stopped from driving as long as they're drunk. Once they're sober, go back. But as long as you're drunk. I guess where I'm hanging up here is like, okay, a guy gets drunk, shit ass drunk in his house, right? Does the government need to show up and make sure he doesn't drive? Is really kind of where I'm at. No, I don't think so. The point is that the difficulty with the virus is, and it all depends on the virus, right? Yeah, obviously if somebody's running around coughing on people, that's a completely different story. That's a bit of an assault. But you don't need to cough on somebody to actually infect them with the disease. All you have to do is talk to them. A lot of us, me included, spit when we talk. They might not be pleasant to talk. Well, I'm glad I'm on camera then. Well, we all spit when we talk. We like to pretend we don't. Just put a plate of glass in front of your mouth sometime and just talk normally. And you'll see it all messed up because we all do it. And so it's a fact that you pose a risk. Now, it's true that sometimes drunk drivers, we all know this. You can go out there and be a little intoxicated and not hurt anybody. You'll be fine. You'll drive from the bar all the way home and hurt nobody. But you know what? If a policeman stops you, tests you, discovers that you're really drunk and you pose a threat to other drivers, they pull you off the road. I think the same should be true of a virus. Now, it depends on how serious it is and how deadly it is. But let's assume it's deadly, right? Let's assume it's dangerous. If you're walking around with the virus, that's like you driving around drunk. I pull you off the street as soon as you're free of the virus, as long as you're free of intoxication, you can go back on the road. So it's to protect other people from being exposed to you. Sure. And I think that's really the only role of government, really. I agree. Is to protect my rights from other people violating my rights or my property or my liberties. Absolutely. But you being infected is a violation of my rights if you get closer than three feet them to me. Okay. I get what you're saying. I just don't think that people should lock me in my house. You know what? I'm going to be in my house until I do otherwise. I'm not hurting you. I'm not hurting you. You don't need to be. But you know, as well as I do, that there's a certain percentage of population and it's significant. It's not small. Who won't stay in their houses? Who will go after the boss? Who are irresponsible? Who are idiots? And how do I know in advance? Who's who? And what's the big deal? I'm not isolated in prison. I'm asking you to stay at home for 14 days. And I want to track you to make sure that you don't violate staying at home for 14 days. So why would you not be willing to wear some kind of bracelet? Me? I would not want the tracking from the government. You're self-isolating for 14 days. It's kind of like that if you don't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about kind of aspect. And I'm not really a big fan of that. Existently by being infected with the virus. Yeah. I mean, obviously I would take precautions. But what did you say? A lot of people would not. I agree. It's also my choice to go out or not go out as well. Well, it's your choice to be tested or not as well. Unless there's a reason to think that you're infected, nobody should be able to force to test you. But I would want to be tested. And I would want to be quarantined if I tested positive. Oh, yeah. I believe in self-quarantine. I believe in if you're sick, don't get other people sick. Obviously this hurts people who are older than me. More so than it would likely hurt me. I'm of the opinion that I might have had this earlier in the year than I thought before we were all talking about this kind of thing. Get tested for that. Yeah. I would like to get tested for that as well because I, I hope I got it back then. But I got tested and it came back negative. And then you hear that the tests are inaccurate. They tend to arrow on the other side. So they tend to give you more false positives and false negatives. Okay. That's interesting. Next question here. We'll get back on track a little bit because Corona virus can kind of derail everything. But as quickly as this year is rolling by, Thanksgiving will be here before we know it. Let's say cousin Jarvis, the fake Patriot communist gets a few too many beers in him and starts saying CEOs get paid too much. What do you say next? Well, I basically say CEOs get paid as much as they're worth. And CEOs don't last very long. By the way, if you look at CEOs, they stay in their job for a relatively short period of time because some of them, the board discovers are getting paid too much and they fire them. So it's a lot of, there's turnover because it's hard to find great CEOs. It's hard to find CEOs worth the money. But CEO is a rare talent. It's rare to be able to be a good CEO. It's like LeBron James in basketball. Nobody says to LeBron James or he gets paid too much. First, why do you care? It's none of your business. It's Mark Cuban paying the salary. It's equivalent of Mark Cuban and his players, what they paid, not any of yours. Right. And so whoever the shareholders are, they should care how much the CEO is paid. So it's none of your business. But secondly, why don't you complain when LeBron James makes tens of millions of dollars and you complain when a brilliant CEO does? Is that because all you can see is somebody shooting baskets which can't appreciate the genius of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or the CEO of Microsoft right now? You know, it's a lack of appreciation of the human mind which drives these people. It's a double standard for sure. Well, it's a double standard between physical and intellectual. They appreciate the physical because they play basketball and they know how hard it is. But since they've never actually used their mind or used their mind too little, they don't have an appreciation what it takes to run a company and how few geniuses or brilliant people they are who can actually get that done. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Now, I'm seeing this more and more on both sides of the aisle. So you've got Democrats and Republicans that are both kind of taking on this socialist rhetoric, talking about corporate greed or CEOs get paid too much or the income inequality argument. What would you say to a listener of my show that might be intrigued by this socialist rhetoric that they might think, oh, well, that sounds interesting to me and I should be like that? What would you say to that type of person that's kind of dabbling? I'd say the thing to value is freedom. If you don't believe in freedom, socialism is great. If you believe in enslaving human beings, in telling them what they can and cannot do, in running their lives for them, in dictating what they shouldn't, shouldn't buy, how much they shouldn't, shouldn't make, how they shouldn't, shouldn't live their lives, socialism is great. I believe in freedom. I believe individual choice. I believe that individuals should be able to live their lives as they see fit as long as they don't violate other people's rights, as long as they don't harm other people. It's none of anybody's business. Socialism is force. It's harm. It's damaging. Sometimes you can't see it. Sometimes it sounds nice. Sometimes capitalism sounds harsh. But when you give up on that so-called harsh capitalism, you're giving up on freedom. Think of the thing you enjoy to do most. There is somebody out there in the world that would like to control that, to regulate that, to tell you whom you can do it with, how to do it, when to do it, and how much you should be paid or not paid to do it, right? Yes. Everything that you do this, somebody out there would like to socialize it, would like to place other people's interests ahead of yours. So even when you're confused, even when you think, oh, that kind of makes sense, step back and really think, what freedom am I giving up? Who's freedom am I giving up? Why am I embracing this idea? That's interesting. And you mentioned in there harsh capitalism. So I know that a lot of people, every villain in every movie now is some capitalist pulling the strings. That's what they'll call him, a capitalist behind the scenes, pulling the strings. And every single time, it's always some asshole doing some nefarious bullshit to make money. He's not actually engaged in a win-win value exchange. He's ripping people off. And everybody calls him the capitalist. I think that's bullshit. What do you think? Well, I mean, they have a certain vision, a businessman or businessman, as self-interested. And they've also learned from their philosopher or their preacher or wherever they learn their morals or their mother, wherever they learn their ethics. Self-interest is evil. Self-interest is bad. They've never learned that self-interest leads people to lie, steal, and cheat and be villainous and be nasty and be mean and be bad. They've never learned about self-interest meaning win-win relationships. They've learned that self-interest means deception and thievery. So when they see a businessman, they think, ooh, self-interest, profit motive, must mean he's a cook. Must mean, and if he's not a cook today, just wait. He'll be a cook tomorrow. What are the natural villains? Because what they do is inherently self-interested. But it's a misinterpretation of what self-interest means. Indeed, it's not in your self-interest a lie, steal, and cheat. Those are self-destructive behaviors. They make you less happy, less successful, less prosperous. If you want to be successful in life, if you want to be happy in life, you have to be honest, you have to produce, and you have to trade. Trade with other people. And you have to gain self-esteem. So if you lie, if you deceive, you're going to be a miserable human being. So, capitalism is the system of morality. It's a system of self-interest. It's a system of a new morality. Of a morality of self-interest. And people don't think of it that way. They think of it as just going out there and lying, cheating, and stealing. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to get the deal done. Right. And they say, capitalists will do whatever it takes to scorch-stirth policy. And I always say, in what way is lying, stealing, or cheating good for business? If I lie to my supplier, they're never going to deal with me again, and I'm never going to gain goods. If I lie to my employees, they're going to leave me and go work for somebody else. Lying, cheating, and stealing are anti-production, anti-capitalist, anti-morality, anti-happiness ideas. So, no. But it's natural for people to assume capitalists are villains. It's the instinctual response because they haven't rethought what they've been taught. Right. It's the almighty dollar, and that's always associated with some negative. On a serious note, Einran said the smallest minority on earth is the individual. I know this feels true for my wife and I, and I'm sure that there are a lot of others that feel similarly. As someone that's devoted your life's work to capitalism, individualism, objectivism, are you politically frustrated? And if so, how do you deal with your frustration and disappointment? I know it's a tough one. There has to be a stronger word than frustrated. I mean, frustrated doesn't really capture it, right? I am frustrated and furious and angry and mad and I don't know. I really truly believe the country is going to hell. I think we have politicians who are both stupid incompetent and have no idea of what this country is about. They don't know what America is. I mean, you can't make America great again unless you know what America is. And I'm not just talking about Trump. I'm not just talking about all of them. In the Republican Party, in the Democratic Party, they're all ignorant of the meaning of this country. They're ignorant of the founders of this country. They're ignorant of what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution actually represent. Have you heard a politician say the words limited government in like 10 years? No. Or individual rights or the bill of rights or rights and limited government. They don't talk about that. But even the Tea Party, you remember the Tea Party? You know, what was it? Don't tread on me and all this stuff. And then you'd see a sign saying, keep your hands off of my Medicare. How is Medicare limited government? Give me a break. You're for getting rid of Medicare. You're for privatizing. You're for doing something that would actually liberate capitalism and healthcare, not institutionalize socialism and healthcare. Because Medicare, by the way, for those of you who don't know, Medicare is socialized medicine Yes, that's what it is. So there is nobody in our Congress, maybe one or two exceptions, somebody like Justin Amash maybe comes to mind, but maybe one or two others. There's nobody there who understands what limited government is, what individual rights are, what the Constitution means, what the Declaration means. And they don't have the American spirit. They don't have the spirit of we can do anything, of freedom, of leave me alone, of get off my back. Let's compete. Not let's rig the system to make it favorable to my constituency so that they have an advantage. No, real competition. Let's level in a sense the legal playing field. Let's get rid of cronyism. Let's get rid of government intervention and economy. There's no politician representing that. So I'm super frustrated. The way I deal with it is I have a podcast and a YouTube channel where I yell. I get angry. I yell and scream. I've noticed. Yeah, and tell people what I really think. And that's how I deal with it because there is I can't run for president, unfortunately. I wasn't born in the United States and nobody would vote for me anyway because I'm such a radical. Yeah, I'd get like 25 votes, maybe 25,000 votes, but that's it, right? But it's so disheartening. I'm an immigrant to this country. I immigrated to this country. And even in the 30-something years that I've been in the U.S., it's gotten so much worse. Freedom is in decline. Intelligence of the people at the top, I came here, Ronald Reagan was still president, right? What a difference. I mean, he didn't do that much, but he had a spirit to him. He could give a speech. He could talk about limited government. He could talk about rights. He could talk about what this country should be like. Nobody on the political map today talks that way. Now, it never mind does anything about it. So it's very, very, very frustrating. I don't know what you do about it. Lately, I've come to the conclusion that we need a new political movement. We need to dump Democrats and dump Republicans. We need to be as radical as I am. But just the third party that kind of represents a sane, limited government perspective doesn't have to be all the way like I am. Just some sanity. We want to shrink government. We believe in balance, budgets, paying what we can afford, spending less. Think about how markets can solve problems instead of how government can solve problems. Reducing involvement in the world, the fact that the United States needs to defend itself out there in the world. Just having the right approach to some of these issues and being open to reason and argument and discussion and debate. The other thing that's happening today is we're so tribalized. We have our own tribe and we can't even talk to one another. We can't discuss, we can't debate. So we really need to call it a center because I don't think it should be in the center. It should be removed from left and right. It should be a pro-American, pro-founding father's, pro-principal defense of individual rights movement that has an appropriate sense of what the world of government is and that starts liberating the American people to live out their potential, which I think is immense. We're being held down. And it's sad. It is sad. You, in particular, I guess you were frustrated enough that you decided to make the jump and go down to Puerto Rico, didn't you? I did. I got to the point a few years ago, two and a half years ago, where I said I don't want Washington and D.C. or Sacramento living in California to get a dime of my money. You're paying the enemy. I think they're all, I mean, you're funding the enemy. They're all incompetent. Puerto Rico is a beautiful place. Nice people. Weather is gorgeous. The food is amazing. And if you have the right profession and if you open a business here and you do it right, you pay very little taxes here. So life's good. So you like it. It helps deal with a little bit of that frustration then. Yes. You know, I still, the problem is I'm still, it's still part of the United States. I'm still, which is nice because I don't want to leave the U.S. But I love the United States. It is a true passion of mine and it's still incredibly frustrating and depressing to see what is going on in America and the fact that we in November have to choose between Biden and Trump or is particularly depressing and but it is what it is. So my role and to some extent I believe your role is to go out and try to you know present people with an alternative. Present people with an alternative vision for what this mighty country should be, could be and maybe over the time start a new political movement that gets rid of these you know truly drains the swamp. I like the term drain the swamp. I just don't believe the changing swamp animals from one type to another. Just changing swamp animals. Actually, I mean that's all they've done, right? You got different swamp animals but it's still swamp. What you need to do is truly drain the swamp. Get rid of all those swamp animals, you know, and grow some eucalyptus trees and really turn it into a garden and that requires major changes to our government major changes to the way we think about the world and unfortunately there's less than a handful of people in Washington today that have that kind of perspective. Well, I may see you down there in Puerto Rico so the wife and I are giving it a good look. We want to go down there as soon as we can have a nice trip so to take a look. People to come, particularly if they have the right set of ideas you know and maybe we could do a silent takeover there of the island and turn it into a capitalist heaven. It would be great. All the movers and shakers head down there and we'll have a paradise right? Absolutely. It would be fantastic. You're Han Brooke. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Pleasure.