 You mentioned Chile is a good example of economic growth, so it was. But they obviously, during the period of economic growth, had quite a repressive dictator called Pinochet in power. During part of it, yeah. So to what extent do you think the economic freedoms, which you described in Chile, can work without political freedoms? So it is a sad that it happened to be Pinochet who embraced this. Although, of course, Pinochet is one of the few dictators in history to actually hold an election about continuing. You're not continuing and turning everything over to the democratic thing. He should have been tried for the crimes that he committed. He killed thousands of people, and he's an evil man. But he wasn't like he believed in capitalism either. He was floundering after he took over, and the Chilean economy was plummeting, and it was doing no good. And there was a group of economists in Chile who were trained in Chicago by Milton Friedman. They were called the Chicago Boys. And he basically said, you guys try. I don't know what's going to work. Something has to work. And they took over the economy, and they basically privatized everything, and so on, and it led to success. The success continued after Pinochet was gone. So well after Pinochet, really, until about five, six years ago, Chile was on this constant path of continuous privatization and improvement and economic growth. So it didn't require Pinochet, because once he was gone, it continued. One wonders whether anybody would have embraced these ideas if they weren't, in a sense, forced. That's probably why they're going away now when they voted socialist, because it never really was something people believed in. So I think capitalism works when people believe in it. You have to have people believe. If you don't believe in capitalism, you won't get it. If you believe in a mixed economy, you're going to get a mixed economy. If you believe in socialism, you'll get socialism. We get the politicians we deserve. We get the politics we deserve. When we start voting real free market politicians into power, and we haven't in a very, very long time, then we'll get free markets. When we elect people who are marginally more free markets, we get upswings in the economy, which is not bad. But it doesn't last, because we don't really believe in it. So we elect the opposite the next election. So what has to happen is a fundamental intellectual shift in among the voters, among you, right? For this to be sustainable. If it's going to be sustainable. And I believe that to do it, you need this moral revolution. You need a change in that approach. The ethics approach, the morality approach, the epistemology in the sense of the efficacy of reason, which is in decline, right? The post-modernist today tell us, probably here at this university, that reality is what? Well, we don't know. Reality is unknowable. And reason is impotent. And all you have is your emotions. And because all you have is your emotions, you better cling to the closest group that looks a lot like you. And all we have are identity politics. That's what we've devolved into tribalism. What we used to have way back then. We seem to keep going back. So when we were poor and life sucked big time. But we keep wanting that somehow. Because tribalism is the word of the day, both on the right and on the left. The right and the left are both devolved into racism and tribalism. Scary stuff these days. Yeah. You speak a lot about human flourishing. And I think it's interesting that you use GDP as perhaps a measure of human flourishing or state prosperity. I wonder why you stood on, for more of like a socio-legal perspective, Martha Nussbaum, who looks or kind of argues that GDP emits actually capturing development of individuals. I think she goes as far as to point out the failings of GDP. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of GDP either. It's just the best that we have. It's a measure of wealth. It's not a measure of fortune. It's a measure of wealth. But I also added life expectancy. That's, you know, if you die 39, life's not that good. If you could die at 99, which a lot of people are doing these days, and I meet these 90 year olds and they're doing really well, right? Their mind is still there and they're physically active. It's pretty astounding, right? And if you add the fact that at least the beginning of this, you know, so unbelievable flourishing in the arts, right? Think about Beethoven. You know, I love the musical Beethoven. I don't know if you guys like him or not. Maybe the agent rap Beethoven is not that popular. But I think Dave Beethoven is one of the great artists of all of human history. Beethoven is the first musician of serious music to actually make a living from his music. He actually held concerts and sold tickets. It was capitalism, right? Beautiful capitalism. Mozart, remember, could only make money by doing what? By sucking up to the church and to the aristocrats. Beethoven didn't have to do that anymore. He could count in a middle class, a growing middle class, sell tickets to his concerts and people sat and listened to beautiful music for a long time. That was going to be possible by that. So it's not irrelevant that we have money to our flourishing. Remember that when we didn't have money, all we did, we couldn't read. We didn't know how to. Nobody had an education. We couldn't read because there was no light and during the day when there was light, we had to work. And if you didn't work, what happened to you? You died. There's no well-being. There was no agency that came in to save you. You died. So it's only this wealth that is made possible. That is made possible. Other measures of human flourishing. My kids, I told my kids, they're about your age. And I told my kids, follow your passion. Do what you love doing. Unfortunately, they followed my advice. One of them is a musician. And luckily, we live in a relatively wealthy culture in which musicians can make a living, barely. They scrape up, but he's making a living. The other one writes comedy in Hollywood. They pay zero until you make it into television and they start paying a lot. But zero, right? But he works on the side and he works here and there. And luckily, we live in a rich enough society in which somebody can perform comedy three times a week or whatever and still survive. Like there were very few comedians back then. I called Jester to a few musicians here and there. I mean, wealth makes possible the ability to pursue one's passion. The ability to do things that in a poor culture you cannot do in North Korea, they're not a lot of entertainers, unless they're paid by the government. Even in, I don't know, in Laos or in Burma, they're not a lot of people who do that. Because there's customers. Nobody has the money to pay them in order to do it. So I believe that by any real measure of human flourishing, and I don't think Nassbaum has a real measure of human flourishing. I think she's flungy. But by any real measure of human flourishing, we are so much better off post-capitalism, during capitalism than we were before. And any compatible to a socialist state, one would have, right? So by every measure that I can think of, at least, willing to accept other measures. And GDP is not a good measure. And the primary reason GDP is not a good measure is because GDP counts government consumption as if it's production. So the GDP goes up during war, which is ridiculous, because war is when you destroy stuff, and you bomb stuff, and you knock down buildings. It's not exactly pro-economy. It's not exactly wealth enhancing. But GDP goes up, why? Because the government is spending money on tanks, and on bombs, and on fighter airplanes, and all that stuff, which are not productive. They don't enhance human well-being. But overall, if you take the scope of history, GDP is correlated with wealth. It's not accurate, but it's correlated. Yes? You mentioned that during the same period, your state has been growing more and more. Do you think that that might be why people view capitalism as such? Because the state is basically the main propaganda tool in our society. Yeah. The state is basically in competition with capitalism. Yes. So I think that's right. I think a big part of why people are still so sympathetic to socialism is because the state controls education, more important than anything else. It controls education. It controls how you think. It controls the history you learn. It controls the economics you learn, and you learn the lousy economics. Economics 101 at every university I've ever been at, maybe the exception of two or three in the world, is just garbage. You learn the perfect competition model, anybody taking that? That's all of that. The monopoly, all of that is garbage. It's just not economics. It's just bullshit. And it shouldn't be an economics textbook. But that's what you study, because that's what the powers want you to study. It's not that that's because of conspiracy. It's just that it reinforces one of our 10 years, a great reinforcing mechanism for people not to innovate and not to create new things, because they challenged the existing order, and the existing order is the one that grants you 10 years. Thank you. In several of your novels, you've made the point that leadership in any culture, not only in art, but in literature, morality, politics, and economics, that this sort of leadership must be provided by what you call the professional intellectuals. I wonder if you could tell me just what you mean by the term professional intellectuals. Who are they for example? The professional intellectuals are, in effect, the field agents of the army whose head or commanding chief is the philosopher. The philosopher. The man who defines the basic fundamental ideas of a culture is the man who determines history. And professional intellectuals are all those whose professions deal with the humanities, the studies of men as against the physical sciences. The professional intellectuals in all their various professions carry to the rest of the culture, to the rest of society, the philosophical premises, the ideas which have been defined by the philosopher. Therefore, they are the transmission belts. They are the ones who determine the goals, the values, and the direction of a culture. Is this true in any culture? Would it be true no matter where you found them? It is truly a civilized culture, but historically, you must remember this. The new intellectual, or rather the intellectual, is a very recent phenomenon. There were no such phenomenon as a professional intellectual prior to the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism. Prior to that, man could not make a living, could not make a profession of intellectual work. The mind, the intellect, reason, had no value in those earlier cultures. It is only since the birth of capitalism in our pre-society that man, for the first time in history, acquired the chance to make a living by means of dealing with ideas. Reason became a practical issue for the first time. And the height of it was the 19th century. Today, this is the value which we are losing, and it is the intellectuals who are betraying. You think, then, that America's intellectual leadership has collapsed? Yes, collapsed and abdicated. How have the intellectuals failed to do the things that they ought to do? How have they not lived up to their responsibility? By betraying the very premise that made their existence possible, by denying the intellect. For decades now, the intellectuals have been progressively preaching and abdicating the ideas that the intellect is impotent, that man can know nothing for certain, that reason is unreliable, and in effect, man has no power to know the facts of reality. This amounts to men who proclaiming themselves intellectual spend their time denying the validity of the intellect. That is a form of committing suicide. And today, when you see the rise of such openly mystical, anti-intellectual philosophies as Zen Buddhism or existentialism, doctrines which cannot really properly be called philosophies, this is the admission of intellectual bankruptcy on the part of those who accept it. If in a group of men, such a theory as Zen Buddhism, which is a doctrine originating about the fifth century BC, if that becomes the latest word of the mind, it isn't I who have condemned them. They have condemned themselves by their own actions. They have given up. They have declared their intellectual bankruptcy and have gone back to the mysticism of the dark ages.