 Good. Well, welcome everyone. Good evening. Thanks for being with us tonight. This is our second campus on campus event since COVID. So we're very happy to be back in the swing of that. I'm Glenn Moots and I'm a professor here at Northwood University and I direct something called the Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise and we're a co-sponsor tonight's program along with Young Americans for Liberty and Bob will tell you more about that. There's a table of their materials back there and also we have folks from Turning Point USA joining us today, which we're very happy about. And we have two events next week that I want to let you know about next week. Lisa McClain, representative of the House of Representatives from State of Michigan, down near McComb. She's going to be speaking next week, Wednesday in Sloan, right, the big auditorium over in Sloan at 5.30. And then the following day, 7 o'clock in here is Jonah Nordberg who's from free to choose media and also is a fellow with the Cato Institute. And representative McClain will be speaking on free enterprise. And then Jonah Nordberg's title is corporate welfare. Where's the outrage? So that'll be Thursday. So if you're not getting enough outrage in your life, I don't think it'll be outrage or anything. I think it'll be very good. You'll enjoy it. So those two events next week. So with that, I will turn it over to Bob who will introduce our speaker. Please welcome Bob to the podium. Well, thanks for coming, everyone. I'm excited. Very excited to have you're on campus with us today. I was going to give a great talk on inequality and the importance of that. Before we get into the speaker though, I'd like to talk a little bit about Young Americans for Liberty. We're a non-partisan political activist organization. And what that means is we get on college campuses. We gather up student leaders that love liberty, love freedom, and we attack policies like bad free speech policies and vaccine mandates of public universities. So huge stuff that we fight against. We're actually suing Oakland University right now and Grand Valley State, which are going to be huge wins for us. We just got our 77th victory for free speech over 1.4 million students have been freed from restricted speech laws on college campuses, which is awesome. So good stuff there. If you're interested in joining our Americans for Liberty, learn a little bit more about it. We've got some materials in the back. Fill out one of those questionnaires. You can figure out where you stand in the political spectrum and allows me to get in contact with you later on. Without further ado, I'm very excited to have Yaron on campus with us today. He's going to give a great talk. We'll have some question and answer at the end. So without further ado, let's bring on Yaron Brooke. Thank you. Come on. Thanks everybody. It's great to be here. It's great to be giving a talk to three-dimensional people and not having to do this over Zoom, which is being the standard practice over the last couple of years. And then of course, it's this is the first school I've spoken to where the students live and are all wearing masks. So it's nice to see you smiling. I'm sure during the talk, you'll be frowning. But at least I'll be able to see what emotions are crossing your face because I think people underestimate the extent to which this is a form of communication, right? Facial expressions and what we do with our faces. And when we put a mask on, that's gone. Sad. So inequality is a big deal. It's a big deal everywhere. I'd say over the last 10 years, the issue of inequality has maybe become one of the, if not the top, it kind of varies. Not the top, one of the biggest issues, social issues that people are debating, discussing. You see it across the board. Almost everything that goes wrong in the world ultimately seems to get blamed on some form of inequality. So let's talk about what inequality is, how people talk about it. There are really two kind of ways in which they describe inequality. Inequality of income. So how much you earn on a regular basis, on a monthly basis, on an hourly basis, on a yearly basis. And inequality of wealth. How much you've accumulated in terms of wealth, right? Because you could have like, I don't know, some CEOs in Silicon Valley, I don't know what Elon Musk's salary is. He probably doesn't make a lot of money on a monthly basis. But he's the richest guy in the world because he has a lot of wealth because it's all in his stock. And the stock of Tesla only goes up, it seems. And he's made a lot of money, even though he's, I think he lives in a trailer. The stories about Elon Musk are a little ambiguous. But so both of those are measures of equality. So it's this gap. So inequality is the idea. Some people make a lot of money. Some people make a little. Some people own a lot, have a lot of wealth. Some people have a little bit of wealth. And the gap between those who own a lot and those who own a little, that is what we call inequality. And the bigger that gap, the bigger the inequality, the smaller that gap, the smaller the inequality. And this is, we're told, a massive issue. This is an indication of, we're told, of massive economic problems. The economy doesn't grow enough because of inequality. We're told that there is, right now, I mean, the whole idea of critical race theory is based on the idea that we've got two groups here and you look at them, you look at these groups and one group on average has higher wealth than the other. And that's a problem, right? Because there's inequality and inequality is a problem. And therefore we have to solve that problem. We have to first find a cause for that problem. And the cause with CRT is assumed some kind of systemic racism. And it's systemic because we can't point to any particular act of racism. And the evidence of systemic racism is the inequality that has resulted. Inequality is being blamed for climate change. Inequality is being blamed for terrorism in the Middle East. Inequality now over the last 10 years has been blamed for almost every social phenomena you can imagine. And I'm not going to cover all of them, but if there's any you guys that are interested in and want me to comment on afterwards, that's what a Q&A is for. So just ask me and we can talk about it. So let's talk about this gap. Why is this gap a problem? What is this assumption behind the idea that this gap is unfair, right? So people say it's just not fair that we all have different outcomes. That we all have different levels of wealth and different levels of income. But what determines income? What determines wealth? And what determines our perception of fairness? So one of the analogies people use to the idea of inequality is the idea of a pie, right? A pie or a pizza, right? So there's a pizza out there. Some people have a big slice of it, and some people have a little slice of it. That's not fair because it's a pizza and we should all have the same slice, right? You bring a pizza and you're sitting around with friends and the assumption is everybody's going to get the same. So is income and wealth like a pizza that we just divvy up? What's wrong with that analogy? Just yell it out if you have an idea. What's wrong with that? What's that? It ignores where the pizza comes from. Where does the pizza come from? It comes from a bakery, right? But there's wealth. And wealth is a pie and we're now concerned with who gets what slice of this pie will get to where it comes from in a second. But there are two big problems with this. One is the pizza's never going to grow. The pizza's a static quantity. You get it on a table. There it is. You eat it. It's gone. Wealth is not static. Consuming it in an economy doesn't make it just go away. What happens to an economic pie? What happens to an economic pie? A drink? In the normal times, what happens to it? People in Michigan were a little bit more. Don't be so shy. Yell something out. Yeah, it grows. The economy grows. Wealth grows. I mean, in normal times, COVID had shrunk. That was unusual. But usually, the pie is constantly growing. It's not a fixed pie. And the fact that it grows, how does it grow? What actually drives economic growth? What makes it possible for this pie to grow? Production. Who produces? I mean, some people produce. Everybody who works produces something. But do people produce at the same rate, the same quantity? Am I as productive as Steve Jobs was? No. As good as I am at doing this, you'll judge that afterwards, right? As good as I am doing this, even if I do a campus a day every year for the rest of my life, I will actually communicate with a tiny fraction of the people who are impacted by Apple. Just the iPhone, never mind everything else. Steve Jobs changed the world. He impacted the lives of billions, billions with a B, people. He provided them with something that they wanted, desired. He added to their life. He provided a value to them. I hope I'm providing a value to you today. But since I'm providing it to a relatively small audience, and I don't know how big the value is to you because you didn't pay for this, right? So you're getting it for free. You'll have to decide afterwards, right? But we know how much value Steve Jobs provided. How do we know that? Anybody here have an iPhone? Right? A lot of you, right? I mean, I have one famous for having one. How much you pay for your iPhone? Like a thousand bucks. This is a thousand dollars. That's a lot of money. Why didn't I pay a thousand dollars for that? Why did you pay a thousand dollars for that? What's that? Brand. Okay, so it's a value to you that it's an Apple, not something else. Okay? But why did you pay a thousand dollars for it? Usefulness, but still, why you pay a thousand? You know, why, you know, why didn't you pay? How much would you be willing to pay for this? Let me ask you a different question, a different way. Well, you're obviously willing to pay a thousand. We're not going to attach to you here how high you would go, right? But how much is this worth to you? For the brand, for the usefulness, we'll get to that in a minute. But how much is it worth for you? What's that? Yeah, more than a thousand. How do we know that it's more than a thousand? Econ 101, right? Because you gave up a thousand dollars for it. So you gave up one thing to get something else, which means you are better off having this than a thousand dollars. Otherwise, you wouldn't have done the trade. I mean, you wouldn't have gone to the store. It's not even that you're indifferent between the two things. You literally gave up a thousand dollars to have one of these. Because this is worth to you more than a thousand dollars. Maybe it's because of brand. Maybe it's because of usefulness. Maybe it's design. Who knows why? But for each one of you, we can say this is worth more than a thousand dollars. Now, who benefited here? Everybody. You benefited because you got something that was worth more than the cash in your pocket or in your bank. Apple benefited because profit margins on this are high. They make a lot of money when they sell you this. Now, I know for me, this thing is worth, I don't know, thousands and thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. You can't even put a number on it really because, you know, what's the value of being able to, from the other side of the planet, right, from the other side of the world on a business trip, being able to call up and read a bed night story to your kids? How do you put a number on that? Couldn't have done that in the past. Write video now. That was science fiction. Ten years ago was science fiction. Every piece of music ever written and produced is on here. I can access it. I can access movies and TV. This is a massive entertainment center. A phone. Nobody uses this as a phone, right? You do this. Nobody does that, right? It's a video telecommunication device. It's a GPS. I couldn't have found this university without, well, I could have, because I've done it in the past because I remember the days where GPS didn't exist. I'm surprised I'm alive, given the maps, right? You had to poke a hole in them to see through and figure out where you were going and getting lost. Now, you don't get lost. Nobody gets lost. And you could go on and on and on to assemble something like this 20 years ago would have cost you tens of millions of dollars, all the features that are in here. And it still wouldn't have gotten, and it wouldn't have been this small, and it wouldn't have been this beautiful, which relates to brands. So we all are better off because Steve Jobs produced this. And how much did he gain relative to what we gained? A tiny fraction. Somebody did an estimate. I don't believe these estimates, but I think this is overestimated. It's less than 2% of the value we got went to somebody like Steve Jobs. But I think that's way more than it really is. And it's changed. Whoops. It's changed our lives in ways that you guys don't know because, again, you lived with an iPhone from the beginning. And I'm not even talking just about iPhone. The existence of an iPhone created competition. So we have smartphones that are not iPhones. Not clear they would have come about, certainly not in the efficiency price point that they have, not for Steve Jobs. So he grew the pie. The pie actually got bigger. The pie was small. Steve Jobs came around with Apple and everybody at Apple produced the iPhone. We all bought it. And even though we got no, we got poorer by how much did we get poorer? $5,000 that we gave up. We really got richer because now we have an iPhone. But you see when economists measure inequality, they don't count your iPhone. They only count what's in your checking account. Saving account. They only count money. And what happened to money when you bought the iPhone? It went down. And Apple got richer. So inequality increased. But we're all better off. Nobody got worse off. The other example I love to use for that point is how many of you, well, I don't know, how many of you have read Harry Potter? Is it even allowed to talk about JK Rowland's anymore now that she's been canceled? Anybody read Harry Potter? This is generation? I don't know because it's like, you guys, she wrote these books a long time ago. So Harry Potter, right? Anybody like Harry Potter? Oh, yeah. I mean, I loved Harry Potter. Harry Potter was great. I read it because my kids were Harry Potter's age. So we got the book every year. Kind of as they grew up, Harry Potter grew up. And it was kind of cool to track that. In the beginning, I would read the book to them. But as they got older, they wanted to read them themselves. So we would have to go stand in line at midnight and get two copies. And they each get one. And they read it. And then I would listen to it on tape afterwards. With them, we take a road trip just to do Harry Potter. So three of us would get in a row in the car and just drive for hours just listening to the book. So I figured that I got significantly poorer because of Harry Potter. Probably spent at least 2000 bucks on Harry Potter. Like, do the math on the books. Back copies. Two copies every time. Audio tape. And then the movies, like, seven, eight, nine movies. I can't remember. Nine movies, I think. They weren't that good. But nine movies. And then Disney rides. I mean, Harry Potter was super expensive, right? And so my bank account shrunk by $2,000. And J.K. Wallace became a billionaire. I mean, what the hell? Talk about injustice and unfairness. I got poorer. She got a billionaire. That's not right. But of course, I don't resent the fact that she got a billionaire wine. She became a billionaire wine. I got memories with my kids. And I read these amazing books. So I got spiritual value far in excess of $2,000. Far in excess of $2,000. Again, you couldn't put a number to it. So if I ever met J.K. Wallace, I would say thank you, even though I'd given up $2,000 already. I'd still say thank you for making my life so much better. Yeah, inequality grew. J.K. Wallace caused inequality to increase. But she also, if you count spiritual values, increased the pie. She grew our world. She increased the amount of values that exist out there. And their potential to enjoy those values. The pies grow. They're not static quantities. But what these two examples also illustrate is that they grow because of particular types of activity. Creator, productive activity. That's what grows the pie. Activity engaged that individuals engage in. Because the other big myth about the pie is that it exists. There's no pie in economics. Why is there no pie? Right, when you go and you buy a pie, it's your pie. Or we all chip in. It's our pie. But there is no economic pie. There is no, in a sense, there is no such thing as GDP. There is no such thing as America's wealth or America's income. It's just a math thing. It's just what economists do because we like to talk about macroeconomics. We usually don't know what the hell we're talking about, but we like to talk about it. We add. We aggregate. But the fact is that all there is is your pie and my pie and your pie over there and each one of us has a pie. We all create. We all produce. We all be an income. We create wealth. And that's our pie. And yes, we can aggregate them all up and pretend there's one big pie that needs to be shared. But why? It's not yours. Actually, once I was on a TV show and we went and bought a bunch of pies to illustrate this, right? And then squish them together. And no, you don't do that. My pie is mine. You don't get my pie. You can ask for it. I might share some of it. But it's mine. And it's not really a pie because pies, when you consume them, what happens to them? They disappear. But what happens to wealth as an individual basis? You invest it. Even if you put it in the bank, you get a little interest on it. You might use some of it for consumption, but you invest it in particularly rich people. Most of what they do is invest. They can't consume it. They might buy rocket ships that go to Mars. But that's an investment. Investment that creates jobs and investment that produces a growing pie either doesn't exist. So each one of us has our own pie. Now, do we all have the same size pie? Well, no, because we don't produce the same quantity. Some of us produce little pies. Some of us produce big pies. And life, I know this is shocking, but life is not about money and wealth. Some of us make choices to have smaller pies. Professors here, we have one representative, so I'm going to speak for him. Your professors here are smart people. They could have had a choice of careers. I bet you they could have picked a number of careers where they would have made a lot more money than they do as professors. They don't make a lot of money as professors. They're not going to have a huge pie. None of them are going to be Steve Jobs unless they've got a business on the site. Some of us choose to be teachers, high school teachers. You're never going to make a lot of money as a high school teacher. Why? Because as I said before, you're just not going to create enough value for enough people to become a high school teacher. And we know you're giving up a career that could make you a lot of money, choosing a career to make less money. Why? Why would anybody do such a stupid thing? Make less money. Why would you make less money? Yeah, because you love what you do. And life's not just about money. It's about loving what you do. Much more important than making the money. Although if you can combine it to, that's really cool. So people produce at different levels. People add value to other people, different quantities. So it's not surprise that there's inequality. We just don't produce at the same level. We don't have the same abilities. We don't have the same skills. You know, some people are smarter than other people. Some people are stronger than other people. Some people are more motivated than other people. Some people care about money more than other people. We're all different. Some people have different moral characters. Some people are lazy. Some people are hardworking. Some people are honest. Some people are dishonest. People who are dishonest generally make less money than people who are honest. A good free economy. So yeah, there's going to be inequality because if you look around the room, we're all different. We have different skills, talents, and all the rest of it. So we're going to produce different amounts. We're going to make different things. And the choice in life is not, ooh, what's my neighbor doing? Ooh, am I equal to somebody else? Decision in life should be, am I doing the best that I can with what I have? And first, political question is, are we giving people, are we leaving people free to do the best with what they have? Are they able to do the best with what they have? Are we creating restrictions? Are we creating barriers for them to not be able to do what they love doing, what they can do, what they're able to do? So those are the only real two questions. Am I doing the best that I can with what my skills are, what my talents are, what my passion is, what I'm voted to, and am I free? Free as I can. Am I free, free enough to do those things, able to pursue those passions, free of interventions and controls and limitations? So we're all different. Now, how do we make us the same? Because that's what people are advocating for. They're arguing that inequality needs to be tamed, needs to be reduced. Well, how do you reduce inequality? How do you reduce inequality? So I give you an example of inequality. So I am upset about basketball inequality. Like, I can't play basketball as well as LeBron James can. It's not even that I can't play basketball as well as LeBron James because, you know, you watch me play basketball, I'm not sure you'd recognize the game relative to how he plays, right? I couldn't score points on LeBron James if I train all day, all night for the next five years. I couldn't score a point on it. He's just better at it. He's devoted his life to it. This is his passion. He's got the skills. He's got the talent. He's got the physique. He's got everything going for him. I don't have any of that. And I want to get on a basketball court and I want to be able to score a point on LeBron James. This is basketball inequality. I'm sure most of you feel the same way. You all look like you're basketball, you know, not as good. Not as good. How do we make me and LeBron James? Not, we're never going to be equal, but how do we make them a little bit equal so I can score basketball, one basket, right? How would we do that? Yeah, you're not going to make me better. You make me marginally better, but not better enough. So what are you going to have to do? You're going to have to do what to LeBron? Yeah, you're going to make him worse. How are we going to make him worse? Chop his hands off. Great. Right. The morbid sense that people have, right? But he's right. I wouldn't cut the hands off, right? I was thinking more break his legs or something, but you know, but it's the same thing. How are you going to make me and LeBron equal? You have to cripple him in some way. You have to slow him down. You have to make it impossible for him to jump. You have to make it impossible for him to dribble. You have to make it impossible for him to shoot. That's the only way he's going to become equal to me. How are you going to make me and Steve Jobs equal? What's that? Yeah, you can make him dumb, but we're going to keep it simple right now. You can't really make him dumb, right? We'll talk about making people dumb in a minute. But so let's talk about equality. How are we going to make me and Steve Jobs equal? Well, take his stuff. Or just take his money and give half of it to me. You'll have half. I'll have half. We'll be equal. But how's that right? How's it right to take his stuff when I just, we talked about this. He owned it. He produced it. He made all of us better by doing it. He's not a crook. He's not a criminal. And yet we get to take his stuff. Why? Because we're jealous. Because we want half of it. Because we're not equal. Yeah, we're not equal. So, life. I mean, we're all horrified by the idea of breaking LeBron James' legs, as we should be. Why aren't we horrified by the idea of taking somebody's half of their income, half of their wealth, which we do regularly in this country now. We still live in California. Wait. My marginal tax rate was 54%. That's half of my income gone. Not including all the other taxes they load up on that, you know, sales taxes and all the rest. Why is that okay? What's the difference between money and breaking legs? I mean, if somebody offered me the trade, right, you could, you'd have to give up your money, half of your money every year, or we'd break your legs. I'm not sure which one I would take. Right? Breaking legs seems pretty attractive at that point. Fix the legs. My money's gone. Money's pretty important. I can invest it. I can grow it. I can start a business. I can leave it to my kids. I can do a lot of things with it. Yeah, legs, they'll heal. But we're horrified by one and not by that. Even though both acts of violence against me or against whoever has the money. And yet we're fine. Yeah, let's raise taxes and redistribute wealth and make us more equal, basically taking people's money. Why? And who gets to decide? And by what standard? Where's the justice in this? Particularly if you know that they have that money because they actually created value in the world. They actually made our life better. What do we get? What do we get to take it? People need it. It doesn't give you the right to take it. People claim they need it. So inequality now is used as an excuse to take from some, give to others, try to level the playing field. Playing field is never going to be level. Never going to be level because, as you said, Steve Jobs is just playing smarter than I am. No charismatic. I for design. All kinds of things I just don't have. He's different than me. We can't equate that. We can pretend to equate at the monetary level, but we can't equate the people in this room well different. But you know, there was a regime once that tried to do this. It was a group of young intellectuals who studied in Paris, true story, studied in Paris. And they learned from the best kind of philosophers, egalitarian philosophers of their time. And they learned that equality was the most important thing, that what we needed to achieve in the world is equality. Equal society, egalitarian equal society was the ideal. And they said, we're going to go back to our country, and we're going to implement this. And they did. They went back to the country, and they gained political power. And now they had to implement the strategy. How do you achieve equality in a culture? So first they observed that people lived in cities, and people lived in the countryside. And that was unequal because cities give you all kinds of advantages, network advantages, economic advantages. So people in the countryside tended to be a lot poorer. So how do you equate when you have people in the countryside and you have people in the cities? How do you make them equal? What can you do? Anybody here got an idea? How do you make people in the countryside and the cities? Yeah, you empty the cities. You empty the cities. So literally, they literally forced everybody out of their homes and marched them into the countryside. So well over a million people were marched out of the city into the countryside. Now you've got a problem. You have to feed them. And it turns out that some people are better at like foraging for food than other people. It turns out that some people are just smarter than other people and find ways to find food that other people don't. So what do you do? How do you make them equal? People are good foragers and the people are not good foragers. How do you make them equal? Some people know how to farm. Some people don't know how to farm. Some people know how to read books. Some people don't know how to read books. This is a population where not everybody was literate. What do you do? How do you establish equality when you have millions of people who are just not equal? They're just different. What's that? Well, they were the intellectuals. That's the problem. They were the leaders of the intellectuals. No, because that wouldn't have equality because then you'd have the slave owned and the slave and that's not equal. So no, you can't do slavery. That's not a solution. What's that? You can train everybody to do things. You can raise people up. But that takes a long time. And even then, again, some people are smart. Some people are not. Some people can train. Some people are not. And right now, you've got people who are going out there and they're getting more food than other people are. And they just have more ability. You collect it all, redistribute it, and you have to keep doing that. And it's still true that some people can read and some people can't. Some people are smart. Some people are not so smart. Some people are educated. Some are not educated. I mean, this is a big dilemma for these guys, right? So they came up with the ultimate solution, which is you basically shoot everybody who's above the rest. So if you're a good father to you, you were shot. If you wore glasses, the assumption was you could read. So you were shot. If you had a high school degree, you were shot. They killed 40%, 40% of their own people in the name of equality. 40%. This is the killing fields of Cambodia. Look it up. Paul Pot and the Khmer Rouge. And this is like I was alive when this happened. I know I'm pretty old, but I was alive when it happened. So it's not ancient history. It's just history. This was in the 1970s. 40%. Five million people, two million were shot. They're mass graves, evidence of all in the name of what? Equality of outcome. Now there is an important sense in which equality is valid. Indeed, the only sense in which equality is valid because this type of equality, quality of outcome is absurd. It's nutty. It's immoral. It leads to genocides like we saw in Cambodia. So what's the one sense in which we should be all equal? The one sense that the founders in the Declaration of Dependence, they declare all men are created equal. They didn't live up to that, of course. They failed on that score right off the bat. But what did they mean when they said all men are created equal? Did they mean equality of opportunity like, I don't know, did you all have the same opportunities in life? Yes or not? And then where you came from depends on your parents, depending on how much they invested in you. It depends on a lot of things. We don't have equality of opportunity. The conservatives fail because they assume that equality of opportunity is a comeback to equality of outcome. But opportunity is an outcome. I spent a lot of energy, time, effort, money to try to give my kids as much opportunity as they could get. They're not going to be equal opportunity with other kids. Parents didn't invest that amount of time and effort and money in that. But there is still a sense in which equality is a legitimate concept. What is it? In what sense should we be, are we all equal? Full ability, yeah, there's a sense in which that's right. You kind of are any kind of aren't because people will come back and say you're born to different parents. That's a tool, right? And they're going to impact you and given that the parents are different, you're going to be different. Yeah, equality of freedom. Oh, I'd say equality of rights. We're all equal in our rights, in our liberties, in our freedoms. Nobody is a slave. Nobody is a master. Shouldn't be. Equality is not about outcome. It's about the way the state other people treat us. The state treats us from a legal perspective. It's equality before the law. But more basic than equality before the law, because what the law is based on should be based on, it's not, but should be based on its rights. It's equality of rights. Each one of us is born with a right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. A right, an inalienable right. Inalienable means what? What is an inalienable? Nobody can take it away. Not a majority. Nobody. You have that right by your very nature as a human being. The right to live your life. And what do rights mean? Because those are banted around. It's a pretty liberal use of the term right. What do rights mean? At least the way they were originally thought of, John Locke, that influenced. It's not a veto on something else. Rights are freedoms of action. They recognize the fact that you are free. Free to act on behalf of your own life. Free to pursue your values, using your mind, your reason. Rights of freedoms. Freedoms of action. Not freedoms to stuff. Not access to stuff. You don't have a right to my stuff. You don't have a right to other people's things. But you have a right to be left alone. You have a right to use your mind, liberty. You have a right to pursue your values, pursuit of happiness. And we're all equal in those rights. Every one of us has those rights to live their lives based on what they have. In pursuit of what they choose to pursue. Free of coercion, free of force, free of authority. Nobody has a right to tell you how to live, to force you, to live a particular way. Nobody has a right to enslave you. Nobody has a right to control you, to dictate to you. You are free. And that's, and free in the sense, not again, freedom is kind of a word that everybody, nobody's against freedom, right? But what I mean by freedom is freedom to live. Freedom free of coercion. Freedom is the absence of coercion, the absence of force, the absence of authority. You get to make your choices. You get to live your life by your standard for your own benefit. Nobody gets undermined or undercut that by using force. That's the only kind of equality that means anything. There is no such thing as equality of outcome. We're all different, metaphysically different. Can't change that. You can kill 40% of Cambodians and the 60% left are not equal. They're different. But in a free society, nobody kills anybody. At least not unless they're a criminal. Because everybody has the right to their own life, to be an individual, to be different, to pursue the values that they want, to become a teacher, or to become a hedge fund manager, or to become a CEO of a tech company, or to become a basketball star, or to become anything. Whatever you choose, whatever you're able, right? It's not just about choice. It's about ability. Whatever you're able, whatever you choose, that is yours. So the whole inequality debate is, it assumes that equality is good. But I'm saying no. Quality of outcome is bad. It's morally wrong. It's anti-life and anti-reality. But only quality of the matters is this equality of freedom, equality of rights. That's what we really should be fighting for. And that's what really matters. Now, there's a lot of specific issues we can get into, and we can talk about specifics in terms of equality or inequality. And I'd love to have that conversation. So I'm happy to take any questions you guys have. Thank you. You've got a mic. So just raise your hand. I'll walk around with the mic. If you have any questions for your on. Right over to you. I'll start if you don't mind. Someone argued that the relationship between business owners and work, same relationship between slaves and masters, how would you respond to that? I'd respond with God. I mean, slavery is such an evil institution. And it's so horrific in all of human history. It is imposition of the use of force of one human being over another human being. It's degrading. It's unjust and immoral and evil in every regard. There's no voluntary consent. Slaves were whipped, beaten, murdered with no consequences because they weren't considered human beings. And it is popular right now on the Marxist and the leftists who were influenced by the Marxist to think of the employer-employee relationship as a slave-like relationship. I mean, that's bizarre. First of all, it's a relationship that's voluntary. You get to choose. And there is no one employer in the world for you. You can choose. You can also get in a car and go to another state and move around. Nobody is restricting you. You couldn't choose your slave owner. So there is this voluntary relationship, which is really, really important that your employer cannot kill you. Your employer cannot whip you. They will go to jail. It's illegal. So there's nothing about this. You can resign. You can quit your job right now. We're living through what is being called by the press the great resignation. I don't know if you know this, but August, so the largest number of Americans resigned from their job, quit their job, since this was trapped. So it's not that long. So since 2000, the year 2000, the most people resigned in one month and people are calling this the great resignation. People are leaving their job because they don't want it. They don't think they'd be paid enough. They're going on strike. Imagine slaves striking. They'd be killed. So it is a travesty to call it that. And it's the opposite. Employee-employee relationships are virtuous relationships. Not only are they, not only in their voluntary, but their win-win relationship. Why do you go to work for Employee X? You get paid. And how much are you getting paid? If Employee Y offers you more, I mean there's a combined package, right? There's a good chance you would go there. So you're staying here because she's paying you the best that you can get. She's paying you enough to justify you going to work for him, not doing something else with your life. You decide a business. You go back to school. You could go work for somebody else. But you choose Employee X because you're better off by being employed by Employee X. To reality, you're better off. And now is he sacrificing in order to employ you? Is he losing from the proposition? Well, he's making money off of you. You know, when you go get a job, let's say get a job for $50,000 a year, how much are you, how much are you worth to the employer? More than $50,000. They're making a profit off of you. And how much is your time worth to you to be free of this employer? Less than $50,000. That's why you willing to give up your time to go work for him at $50,000. Who lost? Nobody. It's win-win. And if you think about it, think about the birth of capitalism, the beginning of capitalism. What were all of us doing before there was capitalism? What were our ancestors for the most part doing? They're mostly farming. Most of them are subsistence farming. Subsistence farming means you grow the food that you eat. There's no excess. You work all day while there's light, hard physical labor. Night, you go home, you eat, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, you go to work all day, and you're feeding. Everybody's barely eating. No obesity problem in those days, because there was barely any food. What's life expectancy before capitalism? 39. I'm long dead. You guys are middle age. 39. How many kids make it to age 10? 50%. Half the kids die before their age 10, either childbirth or later. Many, many women, I can't remember the exact number, but a high percentage of women don't make it out of childbirth. They die in childbirth. That's life before capitalism. What do children do if they survive? What do they do on the farm? They don't just sit around all day. They don't go to school. School is a minor phenomenon. Nobody went to school. They worked. So here comes capitalism in the cities, and they suddenly are offering people jobs, employees, and they're paying them. And it turns out that everybody leaves the farm and goes to city. You're seeing that right now in China over the last 40 years in China. Hundreds of millions of people left the farms and went to the cities to do what? To become employees, not slaves, employees. And why did they do that? Why did they choose to become employees rather than farm their part of land? Because it paid better, a lot better. As little money as they made in these so-called sweatshops or in these factories, they made so much more that they could live and send money home, because their kids usually stayed behind in the farm or their parents stayed behind in the farm. One child policy that China had, the one child got to support two parents. That's how we came out of that poverty. That's how we got the life extension we have. That's the life span we have. That's how we have the relative health that we have is coming through that process and working through it. And why the wages rise? Why are people not making the same today as they did 200 years ago? Why are they making more? Much more. Because they're more productive. Because they can create more. And they can create more because of machines and because of capital and because of knowledge. That makes us more productive. And as we become more productive, we're more valuable. As we're more valuable, we get paid more. As productivity goes up, wages go up. So no, it's not just that it's not that. It's the opposite. This is a healthy, good institution that has raised the employee-employee relationship, that has raised the quality of life for almost everybody in the planet. Hi, Ron. Thanks for your talk. And I loved the fact that you were tying in spiritual values with money. And on that topic, the whole idea when you were talking about Steve Jobs and JK Rowling grew their pie. I think each and every one of us here in this auditorium can grow our own pie with our creativity and effort and thought. But I wanted to ask you, this is my thought. I'm thinking that as a person who is receiving welfare from the government, for instance, what does that do to a person's spirit? In other words, if earning money is going to a job, increasing your potential, learning new skills, being proud of yourself, and then actually getting money for it, that actually grows your pie and increases your spiritual values, how does the welfare state, does it devalue a person's spirit or sense of self? Yeah. I think it does. I think it has to. We are an animal that has to produce. And much of our self-esteem, our notion of self-worth, our notion of being successful at living, is our ability to go out and take care of our own material needs and take care of our family's material needs. And even if we're poor, even if we don't have a lot, the idea that we can take care of our own, that we can take care of ourselves, we can take care of our family is a source of pride. It's a source of joy. And it's hard, but it gives us self-esteem. It gives us a sense of achievement in life. But when somebody comes around and says, don't do that. Don't. Here's a check. Don't worry. We're just going to fund you. Don't need a job. We're going to take care of you. I think it, I think it's very tempting. So, you know, people do it, particularly in economic times when they're seemingly no jobs. And it can be quite addictive. Don't have to go to work anymore. You're now receiving goodies. But you're losing something. You're losing that sense of accomplishment, that sense of pride, that sense of achievement. Indeed, the opposite has happened. You're being told implicitly by the government that you're worthless, that you can't make it by yourself, that you need the government to take care of you. And you become kind of a ward of the state. And I think it's very damaging to the pride and self-esteem and the ability to achieve happiness of people. And I think the welfare state broadly does that to people. And I think it makes poverty worse, not better. It'll help individuals. Some kids will come out of it, right? But there's too much of it. It builds up a culture of entitlement and a culture that is, that is, denying the achievement and the success that comes from taking care of self from a material perspective. So I think the welfare state is incredibly damaging spiritually to the recipients. And of course, it involves taking from some people, in order to give to others. Questions. A few provocative things. Come on, people. So I'll ask another. I don't know if it's a question, but I was thinking, as you were thinking about ways to equalize, I thought, if you wanted to be Steve Jobs, you could also use a time machine. That would be helpful, right? It would be very helpful to have a time machine, although even if I had a time machine, I couldn't. I don't think I could do it. I mean, you probably couldn't sustain it. But I would invest in Apple and I would make a lot of money by investing in Apple. But I don't know that I could do, even with the knowledge today of what he did, do what he did. I brushed. Do you know the stories Steve Jobs, when he raised his money for Apple for the first time? He was a hippie. He had long hair. He didn't believe in showering. True story. He did not believe in showering. He thought having showers was unhealthy. So he stunk. And he didn't, he didn't wash his clothes. So he would go to meetings with venture capitalists, try to raise money, and they would like sit over there. You know, the guy was, and it's just amazing and a testament to his ability to convince, even under those circumstances and ability to convince people that he managed to raise money to start Apple and build a business. This is not the typical kind of guy that you would think to invest money in and who would become, you know, one of the richest people in the world and one of the people who really changed, changed the world completely. So given how difficult it is, it would seem that it's easier to lift people up and empower them. If we want to have something that looks like equality, then to pull people down. But why do you think it is that so many people, especially people in power, or people that want power, would rather pull people down than help people come up? Well, I think it's, in many respects, easier to pull stuff down than to build it. Much easier, right? It's easier to knock down a brick tower than it is to build it. You know those kids who love building towers, and you know there's always a kid somewhere who just likes to come and knock them all down, and he gets his pleasure not from building but from knocking down. Those people become politicians. No, I mean, I think they do, but it's politicians or professors. But it's, it's much easier to knock down. But there's, they're also playing off of a populist sentiment. That is, we all, we all grow up with the idea that, you know, what should you do with your, what's the moral purpose of your life? What does it mean to be a good person? You thought they make a lot of money and be super successful in the business? No. What does it mean to be a good person, morally? Like, who's, who's a symbol of morality? Like, if you have to think, I want to think of an ideal moral person, a saint. Yeah, Mother Teresa is a great example. She literally is a saint, right? They made her a saint. So Mother Teresa is like our ideal of morality. Why? What makes Mother Teresa an ideal of morality? She helped other people. Did she just help other people? Because lots of people help other people. What did she, what did, how much did she offer the people? Well, we can debate that, but she, she, she, the story is she helped a lot of people, but she, what about herself? How did she live? Yeah, supermodestly, right? She was impoverished and she gave the sense she was sacrificing for the people. She was living for them. She was not important to herself. It was all about other people. How many people, and we think she's a saint because she was selfless. She cared about others. Now, what a businessman. The businessman sacrificed to help other people. They devote their life to, they live and publish lives with nothing, you know, to help other people. Steve Jobs through that, Bill Gates through that, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. No, what, what, what a bit, what, what do we know? What a businessman after? Money profits, not just money and profit, right? Bill Gates didn't just do it for the money and Steve Jobs, you watch Steve Jobs. It's not just about the money. What's it all about? I don't know about power. What's that? Yeah, productivity. Why, why did they care about being productive though? Yeah, it was fun. They, they love it. You, you watch Gates or Bezos or Elon Musk talk about their businesses. They love this stuff. For them, this is fun. But who are they doing it for? Who are they building these businesses for? Bezos. Bill Gates didn't get, Steve Jobs didn't get up every morning and say, oh, what society wants today? Steve Jobs got up every morning and said, I want to create something beautiful that I think is great. You know how many, how many focus groups Apple does when it, when it releases a product? You know, focus groups, you get people in, you test this idea, just that idea, you, they press buttons, whatever. I'm sure they teach us in marketing, right? Focus. How many focus groups does Steve Jobs do in his career? Exactly zero. He doesn't care what you thought. He was going to teach you what to think. He didn't, he wasn't interested in what you thought the shape of the iPhone was going to be. He was going to make it the way he thought would be beautiful and amazing. And he was convinced you would like, these guys did it for whom? For themselves. They love it because it makes them a lot of money because they produce a beautiful thing. If you've got militaries on one side, moral, self-last, and you've got these guys over here and they are what? Are they self-less? They're selfish. So Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, all these guys are selfish. They're doing it for themselves. And what do we know about morality? What's good and what's evil? Self-less is good. Selfish is evil. So of course these guys are bad guys. Now even though who helped more people? Mother Teresa or Steve Jobs? Not even close. Who helped more people? Who helped more people? Mother Teresa or Steve Jobs? Yeah, I was going to get to that. But yes, but let's put the torture aside for a second. Let's assume she helped them. Yeah, if you want to know more about Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens has a great book on her and there's a number of documentaries online about what a hellish woman she was and actually hated herself and she hated, you know, but partially she did it because she believed that the mix will inherit the earth and it was virtuous to be poor and suffering was a gift. So she helped them not die, stay alive and suffer. But this was part of her belief. But we view her as a saint. But take anybody like Mother Teresa without the bad connotations, right? Steve Jobs helped a gazillion people more. We ran the experiment before. Everybody who buys an iPhone is better off from buying an iPhone. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all these guys have helped billions of people. Billions. Helped. As I said, it would cost me millions of dollars to replicate what this does. It changed my life. Steve Jobs did that. So even though they helped more people, because their motivation is self-interested, they are considered bad guys and we love to hate them. So the question is maybe our morality is a little screwed up. Maybe we shouldn't be admiring the Mother Teresa of the world and resenting the business people of the world. Maybe it's the other way around. So I'd encourage you to read, I don't know how many of you've read Ayn Rand, but I'd encourage you to read Ayn Rand, because Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrug, the fountain ad, she has a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, not the selfishness of exploiting other people, taking advantage of other people, but the selfishness of pursuing your own life seriously, of making the most of your own life, of living life to the fullest, of trying to live the best life that you can for you, of producing and creating and building and trading win-win relationship, trading with other people. That's the real kind of, I think, conflict we have in the world and a challenge we have in the world. So why? Because we know that the businessman, the people at the top are greedy selfish SOBs and it's okay to pull them down because of that. And we don't treat them equally in terms of rights. They pay higher taxes. Third way to quality before the law, how come some people make more taxes than others? It's built into kind of our moral code to resent those who are successful and tear them down in favor of those who are less successful. Any other questions? Yeah, so the question is, do I think that somebody who is born with bad opportunities in a circumstance, family, social, whatever, that just limits their opportunities, makes life hard for them? Do they still have a moral responsibility to make their life the best that it can be? And the answer is yes. What's the alternative? You have one life, one. You're never going to have a second of it back. Every second the passes will never be recaptured. What's the purpose of all of this? If not to be successful at living, to live a good life, to live a meaningful life, to live the best life that you can live. And whatever your opportunities are, wherever you happen to be born, whatever you have, you have to make the best with what you have and try to achieve happiness, which in some circumstances is difficult. Some circumstances is easier, but always requires effort. Always is a challenge. Nothing is just provided out of thin air. When it is provided out of thin air, you should be suspicious of it. But life requires effort, right? Requires and glanted people. Nobody is born with the same opportunities. We're all unequal in opportunities. And for some people, it's going to be a struggle, more of a struggle than for other people. As they say, that's life. There's nothing you can do to change that. And when you try to change that, is when you make it more horrible for everybody. That's the model of the Cameroon story, is when you try to achieve equality, what you bring about is death and destruction. Yeah. Why are the majority of professors liberal in the US, liberal meaning left? I'd say because the left are more intellectual, the left are more philosophical, the left are more geared towards education. Which intellectuals is the right produced in the last 150 years? Okay, that's the quality of the intellectuals that they deserve to lose. All right, as much as I like Jordan. He's not that good. The left just dominates the intellectual fields. It has for 200 years. It has, you know, since really the Enlightenment, it's Hegel and Marx and that school of thought that has dominated intellectual life. Who has been for freedom who's been a dominant intellectual in our culture? They haven't been there. So the left dominates the intellectual field because the right has not produced the kind of thinkers that could dominate that field. For a while, the right, the right being the pro-freedom side, if you consider the right for freedom, maybe not anymore. But for a while, the free market side dominated economic, the best economists. We still to some extent do, right? Best economists in the world are all free market types. But economics is not a fundamental field. It's a derivative field. It has far less cultural impact than economists think. What has much more impact is philosophy and kind of the soft, the soft humanities, which, and they're the left dominates. You could argue that. You could argue that people with pro-freedom are just going to business to make money and they leave the intellectual stuff to the left. So by default, or by something, that's what's being produced. Yeah. Give him a star because he's like the first student who's asked a question. Yeah. What's the greatest threat? I'd say the greatest threat, I'd say the two, right? So one is an external threat. An external threat is that our opportunities are being limited. They're being limited by government. They're being limited by our fellow men, our fellow human beings. They're voting to restrain us and constrain us. And so it's becoming more and more difficult to start a business. It's becoming more and more difficult to hire people. It's becoming more and more difficult to trade. It's becoming more and more difficult. You're less and less free in the world in which we live. And it doesn't matter, Democrats or Republicans, it's not about politics because they're all about the same politics. It's about power. And it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat, you want power over other people. And that means restraining other people, constraining them and limiting them. So I would say that the biggest constraint we have is the fact that our politicians, our governments, local, state, federal are limiting the opportunities that we face and constraining them. And I'd say the biggest challenge we have internally is that we're not taught and we're not encouraged and we're not expected to be rational. There are major philosophical attacks on our capacities to think. So what does it take to achieve a successful life? It takes a lot of thinking. It takes a mind. It takes using your mind to solve problems. And the problems could be, what do I do with my life? That could be a problem, right? But it takes real thinking to solve problems. And to do real thinking you have to be one motivated, but you have to have a certain skill set. And I think you guys, unfortunately, many of you, your schools have not taught you to think, to use this tool. You're taught to emote, to express your emotions, although this group doesn't seem to be very good at it. And to have opinions about everything, whether you know anything about those things or not. But the skill set that is really crucial for human beings, the thing that makes us different than animals, the thing that makes us unique is that we think that we can use our mind. And that's something that you have to make an effort to do. And a lot of society out there discourages that. And a lot of educational institutions, primarily pre-colleagues, but even some in college discourage you from thinking. And that's what life is ultimately about. If I had to say, what is the way to prosperity and happiness and success in life? It's think, think, think. Solve problems. Solve the problems that you face in your life, in the world out there. You want to become a billionaire? Solve problems for billions of people. That's how you become successful in business. Solving other people's problems. And you do that on a large enough scale, you'll be incredibly successful. But it's, so those I think are the two, John. Okay, time for about one more question. We got two, we got one here. Why don't you grab him and then grab him? You got two here? Okay, so we got three. Unless you have to vacate the room. My question is, it's popular belief nowadays that price gouging is considered un-moral, but do you see it as a benefit for society? Price gouging. So let me just, let me just say something about the way I think about these, these issues. First, I don't know what benefit to society is. I don't know what that means. Who's society? Right? I know what a benefit to you is, I know what a benefit to me is, I might know what a benefit to some of these other people are as individuals. But we like to talk about the common good and the public interest in society and this group and that tribe, but they're all just groups of individuals and individuals who might not have the same interests. So there's a lot of confusion about what is good for society. Nobody knows and we can argue all day long. And what are you going to, you're going to, this is a problem in utilitarianism. How are you going to, how are you going to figure out what causes the most benefit to the most people? There's no way to literally know that because we don't have utility functions stamped on our forehead. So we don't know what's good or bad for each one of us to add up. But price strategy makes complete sense from an economic perspective and individualistic perspective. Think about what happened at the beginning of COVID. People were worried. So they went to the grocery store and they bought all the toilet paper available. That's the first thing funny. First thing people bought was toilet paper, not food, not water, toilet paper. Maybe I'm not sure exactly what that says about the world, but it isn't. So now the grocery store could have, imagine if the grocery store had started jacking up prices. Hey, demand is up. What do we do when demand for our product is up? We can increase price. Imagine if the grocery store had jacked up prices. What people who value toilet paper a little bit less would have said, I don't even know how much toilet paper costs. Life does a grocery shop. So my work bought a lot of toilet paper when COVID started. So maybe I should ask her about why. So let's say a big roll of thing costs five bucks, right? So it's five bucks, I'm buying everything in the store if I could. But if it goes up to 10 bucks, I'm only going to buy what I need right now. Now some people at 10 bucks will still buy more. Some people won't buy any. And what will that depend on? How much they value the toilet paper. So the toilet paper will go to the people who value it most. At the same time, prices have gone up for the toilet paper. And of course the grocery store wants more toilet paper because they can sell it now for 10 bucks. They already paid two bucks for it, right? So they go to the supply of toilet paper and they say, we want to buy a bunch more because we want to fill the store because we want to sell toilet paper 10 bucks. And of course the producer is observing the prices going up. So they're jacking up production and they're producing more. But the shelves never get empty because the price, supply means demand. The price adjusts upward and keeps supply on the shelves until more stuff arrives. And when more stuff arrives, prices start declining because of competitive pressures between stores. And you get to a new equilibrium. But here, everybody goes, they buy everything. The shelves are empty because the grocery store is not allowed to jack up prices. And you get a shortage. So the people who got there first to buy everything up at a cheap price benefit. Everybody else loses. I don't know how you do the social balance, but it just makes economic sense to allow prices to float upwards when it comes to a crisis. Same with gasoline in a hurricane, right? Who's going to buy the gasoline if you jack the prices up? The people for which the gasoline is most valuable. So they get the most benefit from it. They're willing to put up the most. But you don't run out of gasoline. No one is quickly. Because what happens this way? Keep it cheap. Everybody comes and gasoline runs out like that. And including people who are just topping off not because they're trying to escape or flooding home, but just they want to top off just in case of an emergency. But I'm not just going to top off in case something happens if gas prices just triple. So Galgie serves a crucial, fundamental, really, really valuable function. Really, really good. We got two questions here. You think you can get them in five minutes? You think you can get the two questions in five minutes? Yeah, you have to be out of five minutes? Yeah. I was researching before I came, and I was reading something on your Wikipedia page, and I wanted to know your opinion on it. You knew you were going to get at least one question. Brooks claims that when the U.S. goes to war, it should only be to protect the rights of its people, and the government must do everything in its power to end the threat to its citizens as soon as possible by using overwhelming military force or the threat of force. If torturing enemy prisoner of wars and purposely targeting civilian population centers will end a war against American citizens, Brooks is for it. I was wondering your opinion on that and bringing it into inequality. You were using a lot of very broad terms, metaphors, and such like that. I wanted to know if your views and opinions change. If you were on the streets homeless, I'm just trying to get some empathy from you, and it's very, very difficult. I know. I didn't really expect it, but I wanted to ask. No, my opinion doesn't change if I'm on the street and I don't have anything. It's my responsibility to boost drive myself and get out of that. I can ask for help, but I have no right to take your stuff. I don't have any right to take your stuff. I came to this country as an immigrant to get an MBA because it was my only way to get into this country. I came with nothing or very little. I wouldn't say nothing, but I came with very little enough to pay my out of state tuition. But basically that was it with a wife. I had two kids when I was a graduate student. I got no money from the government, although they paid my in state tuition, so I guess I did in that sense. So it's not like I started out life with everything handed to me. I worked hard. I challenged. We used to write down every dollar that we spent, where we spent it, how we spent diapers was our largest expense for a couple of years. So it's not that everything was being handed to me, but I don't think any of that is relevant. The point is, no matter how bad, if I get cancer tomorrow and I lost all my money and everything just disappeared, right, does that give me a claim on you? No, you live your life. My friends, I will ask them, hopefully some of them will help me, but I can't force them, but people are not my friends. Where do I get the power to take your money and to take your time and to take your effort and to take your energy for my sake? Why? Because I'm suffering. My suffering doesn't give me a claim on your time. I would ask people, I would ask people for help if somebody came to me who was struggling. Here's the empathy you want. Somebody came to me and struggling and people have, I'm happy to help. Happy to help. What's that? I mean, look, the closer you are to me, the more like them to help, the further you are for me, the less like them to help. That doesn't mean I wouldn't help somebody who was far away from me, but the burden is higher there. I'm going to help the people. I'm self-interested. I care about my life. People are close to me are going to get my help, but that doesn't prevent me from not loving people, right? I do this not for the money. I do this because I mean, I get paid, but I don't do it for the money. I do it because I love educating people. I love changing people's minds. I love seeing that flash of light that comes in when somebody gets a point when they think, because I love human beings. So am I happy to help people? Sure. And if the government didn't take 51 percent of my income, I would love helping other people even more. But the idea that because I care about myself, I don't care about other people is bogus because other people are part of my life. And the idea that one, because I understand reality, understand the facts of reality, for example, how you win a war. So for example, I have a lot of empathy and I get tears in my eyes when I think about the soldiers, the American soldiers who died for absolutely no reason in stupid wars where the politicians never intended to win them because to win them, they would have had to do what I had said, right? That's the reality. We won World War II because we dropped bombs on University of Nagasaki and a million Americans or hundreds of thousands of American lives probably were saved. I have empathy for the families of the soldiers who died for no reason because we're not willing to fight a war problem. And it pisses me off to no end that our politicians pretend like they're trying to win wars when they're not and they sent kids to die for no reason. No, I'm not anti-war. No, let's be clear. Sometimes you need to go to war and when you need to go to war, you got to win, right? But if you want empathy, I'm empathetic to people where there's injustice, where there's real injustice. I'm against going to war to lose, which is every single war America has engaged in since World War II. It's gone to lose. Those are about the most immoral wars you can imagine because everybody dies and we don't benefit. Nobody benefits. I mean, the bad guys benefit. They serve. They're all bad guys. No. I appreciate that. Thank you. You should have asked a question in the beginning, not waited to the end. I was, I'm wondering about companies that have been implementing diversity goals as well as college campuses, like for example, the affirmative action and how that actually might be like making social inequalities worse or like, like your thoughts on those. So, you know, I think private companies should be allowed to do what they want. And certain companies think, and I think there's some value to this, that some diversity in the workplace makes sense for them. And for them, it is a criteria and how they define diversity and what they mean by diversity. And it's a cachery and employment. And I don't necessarily have a problem with that if it's done freely, voluntarily and in the service of the goal of the company, which is to do what? Make money. It's the maximum shareholder wealth. I know that's not popular anymore. Well, you know, social responsibility and so on. So if it's consistent with that goal, then absolutely. The problem is that it has become it has become something that is required, required by the state, required by government, affirmative action obviously is part of that, required now by investors who are not seeking the well-being of the business, they're seeking diversity for the sake of diversity. And that, I think, is wrong. Again, people should be free to make choices about who to employ and who not to employ, who to deal with and who not to deal with. It's a violation of their rights to engage in voluntary engagements with whoever they want to dictate to them, you know, these DEI requirements that are now popular. And think about what DEI means. I mean diversity, but the key is equity, right? What does equity mean? Now equity traditionally has meant, what does equity mean? Yeah, equity traditionally has meant fairness or justice. And justice historically means people getting people what they deserve, right, in a particular context. What does it mean today? What does equity mean today? What? Yeah, equal outcomes. It goes back to the whole topic of what we discussed. Equity means today equal outcomes. And equal outcomes are not a good thing. And if you start, I mean, it means you pay everybody the same. You don't pay everybody the same. People produce at different levels. You pay people based on how much they produce. Now, you know, if companies are doing bad stuff, if they're discriminating, if they're treating their workers badly, they won't do well. You know, I'll give you this example. And then I think we have to stop. Give you this example. There's an argument that women get paid less at law firms. Yes, I'm going to do the, people are outraged. Women get paid less at law firms than men do. So the same skill set, the same ability, and they'll come out of Harvard Law School, a woman and a man, and the woman will get paid less than the man for basically doing the same job, right? That's the story that was told. Now, let's assume that's true. Is there a way to make money off of that? How would you make money off of that fact? It's actually an episode of, what was that, Chicago lawyer, anyway, a TV show that took this on and said, how would you make money off of it? Yeah, hire an old woman. Start an old woman law firm. You don't pay them exactly as much as men, but you pay them a little bit less, but more than what the man are paying them. And you would have the best law firm in the place at the lower cost. How many old women law firms are there? Very few, maybe some small. Why? Because it has to be something else going on here. It can't just be that. So you have to always think about what are the economics of this? How does this actually work in reality? And it's not that women are not as good lawyers, or they couldn't start their own firm, or they couldn't be as successful as they could. So the fact that they're not doing this maybe suggests that this wage is supposedly gapped, maybe doesn't exist, or maybe there are other factors going on at the same time. But equity wipes that all out. We can't even think in terms of things like that. Markets are very good at getting rid of, when you really have markets, when you don't have government imposed restrictions, are very good at getting rid of bad act. Bad, not legally bad model. All right, thanks guys. Really appreciate it.