 to make this interactive. I don't want to just stand here and talk to you. I'm interested in what questions you have as well. But let me kind of, I want to set a little bit of a context, a framework for what we're going to be talking about, particularly in the context of the book you just read, which I think really in many ways distorts. If you take it too seriously, distorts the way you look at business and the world, if that's your primary source of information. So let me ask you a question. If you take 250 years ago, not 250 years ago, for you guys might seem like a long time, but I've almost lived 250 years. No, you haven't. No, I haven't. True, but I've lived 50 over 50, so that's a lot, right? 250 years ago is a long time, but from the perspective of human history, you know, we've probably been around on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. So 250 is kind of a short time. How many people do you think were poor? I mean, really poor. 250 years ago. So what percentage of the population was barely had enough food to eat, had to work really, really, really hard all day long just to feed itself? Yeah. 69%. Yeah? 40%. Anybody else want to take a, we're raffling off something here, yeah? 98%. Love it. Absolutely right. 250 years ago, almost everybody, except for the kings, there are a few aristocrats, almost everybody was poor. And that was true all of human history. If you go back 10,000 years, and you measure per capita income, so how much income individuals had on average? Or how much wealth individuals had on average? For 10,000 years, it's basically being flat. There's basically been almost no change, right? People were poor 10,000 years ago, and they were almost just as poor 250 years ago. And then something happened and everybody became really, really, relatively speaking, rich. Because you might not think of yourself as rich. But 250 years ago, people didn't have running water. They didn't have electricity. And shockingly, there was no internet. No, yeah, even 10 years ago, there was no internet. Oh, wow. So just a little bit ago, there was almost nothing. So all of us today are relatively rich, I mean super rich, as compared to anybody 250 years ago, even 100 years ago. So what happened? How do we become so super rich? How do we go from all of history being down like this, flat like this, and then suddenly going up like that? Shh. So technology was upgraded, which created opportunity for more jobs. But why was technology upgraded suddenly, 250 years ago, and there was no real technology before that? What made it different? Because since then, right, since 250 years ago, we've gone like that, every year's been better. Things keep getting better, people keep getting, technology keeps getting better. What happened that made it different? Before it was always flat, and then suddenly it went like that, yep. So the government held it, and kept it secret, and didn't let anybody know. No, because, and this is important. Government doesn't create anything. Government doesn't build technology. Who builds technology? People do. And usually, individuals, the Thomas Jefferson work for the government? No. No? He worked for himself. He worked for himself. And he had investors, and he built a small business. It wasn't dependent on government. Most entrepreneurs, did they need government in order to help them to create their businesses? No, they didn't. What's that? No, they didn't. They didn't? I know. So you don't need government to start a business. You don't need government to create technology. Technology is something that individuals make, that individuals produce, that businesses create and produce. So what changed 250 years ago that made us rich? Yeah. Your friend, Frank, went to Harvard. Yeah. People started getting an education. So that's part of it, but the interesting thing is that people started getting an education after the success that already started. So education helped push them even further. But what's interesting is that a lot of the success already started before. So what do you think gets people from just okay? What's that? Getting an education, again, helps. It gets you from a certain place up. But even before education, something even more fundamental, because what do you need in order to get an education? Why did people a long, long time ago not get an education? They went to a lot of schools, so why weren't there a lot of schools? Because no one had money. Because no one had money. If you're poor, if the whole culture's poor, if the whole world is poor, nobody has time to go to school because they're working too hard. What did kids do before the 19th century, before they started going to school? What did they do? They worked. They worked in farms. They worked in, you know, and most of them, sadly, most of them died. So 50% of all kids died before they reached the age of 10. That's brutal. That's brutal, right? So getting richer, getting more technology, is good for us. It allows us to live longer. You know what their life expectancy was back then? 48. 48 was old. No, way old. Somebody knew, yeah. 33. 33, so close. It's 39. 39 was life expectancy, right? So I'd be dead, right? Stanita would be dead. You guys would be approaching middle age, right? You'd be approaching the middle, rather than just approaching the beginning. So is made possible by wealth, but what is it that made the wealth possible? What do human beings need in order to produce and create and build and make stuff? What do we need? What's the most important thing that we rely on in order to be successful as human beings? Yeah. Money? Money, but how do you get money, right? Something even before money, something that leads you to get money. Ideas. Ideas. You need ideas. What leads the success in life generally, and what leads the success in life in business, and what leads to the creation of wealth and creation of money is ideas. It's thinking. It's reason. It's human rationality. It's the ability to see reality, understand it, and come up with new ideas, right? And what do we need in order to be able to come up with new ideas? What's the most important thing if you wanna have revolutionary ideas, invent new things? What do you need from other people? Yeah. Well, resources are always there, right? There's always resources out there. There's the trees, there's oil in the ground. But what do you need? He's jumping up and down. Go ahead. What's that? Advice, which means other people thinking, even before you need advice. What do you need from other people? Sometimes you need help, true, but even, again, more fundamental than that, okay? Their money. Their money? Nobody has any money, right? You're right in the beginning. Nobody has money. Yeah, last one. Like, to take part of their idea, but like, to like, to like share ideas, and all this is true, but not the fundamental, yeah. So let me ask you a different question. If you have a great idea, stop you from actually pursuing it and doing it. A lot of money you have, but you can go and get help. You can try to raise it. But what could actually make it impossible for you to do it? Give a sure amount of work you have to do. Yeah, but a lot of times, you know, you can find people to help you do the work and so on. Yep. Someone taking your idea. Someone taking your idea, so you're close. You're close, right? Okay, last two, and then I'll tell you the answer. Yeah, the government, but what about the government could stop you? You need a plan. You need a plan, but the plan's not gonna stop you. The plan is the way to do it. What can actually stop you? So you have a great idea. Let's say for the first time in human history, you believe that the earth goes around the sun, not the sun around the earth, right? That was a revolutionary idea. Who stopped you? Authorities. People who don't want your idea. People who have guns. People, it could be the government. It could be in the case of Galileo. You know the story of Galileo? Yeah. Yeah, other than the Galileo Galileo, do you know the actual story? Uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he discovers that the earth goes around the sun, not the sun around the earth, so what happens to it? It was to criticize. What actually happens to it? He gets put in jail. He gets put in house arrest, right? Because the authorities don't wanna hear the new idea. They don't want other people to believe in the new idea. So they use force to constrain him, to put him away, to shutter him away. So if you want people to have ideas and you want them to be able to act on the ideas and you want them to start businesses and do new things and find money and create plans and employ people and get the help and build something, you need freedom. You need the ability not to have to get permission from the government or from authorities, from somebody who could put you in jail if they don't like your idea. And that's what happened 250 years ago. 250 years ago, for the first time in human history, we were told you can have ideas, you can print those ideas, you can write those ideas, you can go start businesses based on those ideas without any interference. Nobody is going to put you in jail because they don't like the ideas. Nobody can shoot you because they don't like your ideas. Before that, you had to get permission for everything you did from the king, from the pope, from somebody had to give you permission. 250 years ago, for the first time in human history, we were told no, no, you don't need permission. Go do it, right? Just do it and guess what happened? People went and did it. Suddenly they could have ideas, they could raise the money, they could go and find help, they could have a plan and they went and executed it. Before about 250 years ago, there was no, there was no businessman really, there was no business really on any kind of scale because if people needed ideas, it had ideas, they had to get too much permission, too much paperwork, too much bureaucracy. So they gave up on it. So freedom, the ability to go out there and be free, to pursue your own life, to pursue your own ideas, to pursue your own happiness, that's what changed and that's what made it possible suddenly for people to be successful and to build businesses and create stuff. And we went 250 years from being very poor to today where we live relatively speaking pretty amazing lives. What's life expectancy today for you guys? Well, into the 80s, right? If you're a girl, your life expectancy's probably 82, 84, 85, something like that. If you're a guy, it's a little less than that. We tend to die younger. But that's pretty amazing for people who used to be dead by 39 and with 50% of all children died. Our lives today are so much better because of one thing, because of freedom, because we were allowed to have all these ideas. Now, what are government regulations like described in the book do in terms of freedom? They restrain it. They shrink the amount of freedom you have. So now you have to get permission, not from a king, not from the pope, now you have to get permission from a bureaucrat, from government, from somebody up there. And as a consequence, what you're seeing in America today, what you've seen in America over the last 20 years or so, 30, 40 years, is less innovation, less growth, less progress, and a lot of the people complaining about their not good jobs and all that, that's because we've limited freedom of businessmen to create and to build and to make stuff. So a few sectors we don't regulate heavily, what's the sector that's least regulated? What do you think we have the less regulations? What is the most innovation? Yeah, yeah, technology, right? So you don't need permission to make this. Government doesn't regulate the creation of these forms a lot, right? It regulates a little bit. And they create the networks. They regulate the networks. But that's why for this we get super, right, really advanced stuff because there's constant innovation because these guys still have freedom. But let's take, I don't know, an airplane. You guys have flown an airplane recently? Yeah. So if you've gone on an airplane today, it's basically the same airplane that your parents went on when they were kids. Very little changes. Imagine if you were using the same phone that your parents used when they were kids. You ever seen one of those with dials and a cable and it has to be attached to the wall and it's kind of big. There were no cell phones when your parents were kids, right, unless you have really, really young kids. So you take something like airplanes which is heavily regulated. You need permission from the government for everything. And you know that the airplanes today, the new ones, like the Boeing makes, are slower, actually slower than the airplanes they used to make 20 years ago. So actually technology is declining because it's so regulated, so controlled. Innovation is reduced. And as a consequence, a few jobs and let's go. Same thing with, for most part, with automobiles. The internal combustion engine in your car today is pretty much the same as the internal combustion engine was 50 years ago. Very little innovation has happened because it's so heavily regulated. It's so heavily controlled. When I was growing up, I thought that by now we'd have flying cars. We should have flying cars. I don't know how you do it. I wish I did. But we should have, right? Because I thought we would innovate and there would be new technologies and new stuff. And it hasn't happened because you need permission. You've got regulations. You've got bureaucrats that stand in the way of everything that you do. So it's true, like the book portrays, that there are businessmen out there who are going to be bad, right? They're bad businessmen. They're bad at everything, right? They're bad doctors. They're bad lawyers. They even don't tell anybody bad teachers. They are bad people out there in every profession. In every profession. You don't solve it by placing restrictions and controlling and regulating everybody. What you want to do is get rid of the bad guys. So if the bad guys cause people to die in a fire, put them in jail so that nobody will do that again. But what you lose by regulating everybody is the innovation and the creativity, the amazing stuff that business can create and the businessman has and does create on a regular basis. If you look at America, when we were a colony, you've all studied the War of Independence, right? In history, like the War of Independence, 1776. The Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War. America was pretty poor when we had a Revolutionary War. The British didn't care that much. That's why they were busy fighting the French and the Spanish. And they didn't really send massive amounts of troops to America. That's how Americans won. By 140 years later, America was the richest country in the world. The most powerful economy in the world. How did that happen? How do we become the richest country in the world? Technology improved, but why did it improve? That's right. We were free, so the government didn't restrict us. Who created the wealth? Where did the wealth come from? In the back. Businesses. So if you look at that period of 140 years, it is businesses that built the wealth and created the jobs. And when immigrants came from all over the world, why did they come? Why did they come? Some of them wanted religious freedom because they were persecuted at home and here they want. That got to do with the freedom part of it. What else? Why? Why is America such a great place to stay? When you landed in America, they gave you a check in a home, right? No. What did you get when you came here? What does that mean? Opportunity is BS, right? Sorry. You got nothing. You got nothing. What you got is freedom. And freedom is what is opportunity, right? And you got, mostly, you got a job. The immigrants came here and it was the largest immigration probably in human history in terms of the number of people who came versus the number of people who were already here. The last period of the 19th century, for about 23 years there, more people came to America than in the entire 250 years before that. How did they survive? They got jobs because business was so productive in America. We were creating so many jobs. We could afford to bring in millions and millions of immigrants. That's what freedom does. Did you want to say something? It looked like your hand was up. So during this period, because we had freedom, we allowed businesses to have ideas and go and execute on those ideas and build stuff and create stuff. They created lots and lots of jobs and people in Europe living in little villages in the middle of nowhere who were poor and often starving heard about this place called America. They didn't know anything. There's no television. So they didn't see what America looked like. There was no telephone. They couldn't call up people in America and ask them what it was like. But they heard rumors that there was this place where they left you alone. You didn't get any favors, but they didn't force you to do anything like they were doing in Europe. In Europe, they were being persecuted and they were being controlled and there were no jobs and they were still poor. All you got in America was the opportunity to make a living for yourself. To get a job, to start a business, to take your own life and make something of it. And they got on boats, but think about this, right? They got on a boat and left their families knowing they would never see them again. Never see them again. Because how long did it take to get from Europe to the United States? Like a month, right? And then you got to New York and maybe you got on a wagon and you went west, which is another few months, right? And you're not going to make the trip back. You're not going to go like today, I go to Europe like three times a year. I go back and forth and back. It's easy because you get on a plane a few hours later, you're there. But in those days, when you left Europe, you were leaving forever. You would never see your family again. I mean, just think about that. And sometimes kids your age, right, would go with the parent and the rest of the family would stay in Europe and they would never see each other again. So what you had was this massive immigration into this country because this country offered freedom, it offered opportunity, but it didn't offer any goodies. Nobody was waiting there to give you a check when you arrived. Nobody, there was no guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed housing or guaranteed, there were no guarantees for a job. You had to find a job. It was up to you. So it was a very different period of time than what we have today, an era that we have today. But at the end of the day, this country was built by business, creating jobs, creating wealth, creating technologies, building on those technologies, and by immigrants who came and worked in those businesses and started creating businesses. Most of the big industrialists, most of the successful businessmen in America were not born in America. They were immigrants. Even today, if you look at Silicon Valley, of the Silicon Valley companies that are worth a billion dollars or more, how many of you think were started by immigrants? What percentage of, you know, Silicon Valley where they make this stuff, right? Technology. How many of these companies were started by immigrants? Who were successful ones? It's like 50%. Half of all Silicon Valley companies. So don't let anybody tell you that immigrants don't work, that they don't produce, that immigrants don't make stuff. Don't let anybody tell you that immigration is a bad thing. Because you wouldn't have. Google, Google started by immigrants. Steve Jobs' dad. You know where Steve Jobs' dad is from? Slovakia. Slovakia now. But where is Spam is in the news? Where is Spam is very in the news? Steve Jobs' father, who is an immigrant. Not Yemen. But right area of the world. Syria. Steve Jobs' father was from Syria. If you ban immigration from Syria, you might not get a Steve Jobs. Not everybody who comes from Syria is a terrorist. Not everybody who comes from Syria is a bad guy. Some are, and we should screen them and make sure they don't come in. We don't want bad guys in this country. But some of them land up having kids and a lot of the stuff that we use. Which is pretty cool. So when we have these broad brushes on immigrants and we paint them all the same, you got to be very careful. Because it's just not true. It's just not true. You know where the CEO of Microsoft is from? Microsoft, big company, right? Where was the CEO born? India. CEO of Google today was born outside the United States. Again, 50% of all the startups in Silicon Valley that are successful are foreigners are immigrants. Now I have to tell you, I'm biased. Why am I biased? Because I'm an immigrant. I wasn't born in the United States. I came here almost 30 years ago. I was born in Israel. Same thing as what? I was born in Israel came here 30 years ago. So this notion that we have that immigrants are somehow a problem. No, that's not the problem. If we have a problem in America today, in my view, it's that we're too controlled. Too regulated. Too much people telling us how to live and what to do and how to do it. Your life, whose responsibility is your life? I mean, assuming after you're 18, right now it's your parents. But whose responsibility is your life? Your life. Nobody else is going to take care of you. Nobody else really cares about you other than your parents. I mean, that's the reality. Nobody else really cares about you other than your parents. If you don't take care of yourself, if you don't work to make your life the best life that it can be, for you, nobody else will. And indeed, your primary responsibility in life, every human being's primary responsibility in life is to make your own life the best life that it can be. And this is what Ayn Rand, you saw that little segment about Ayn Rand. This is what Ayn Rand teaches in her books, which I strongly recommend you read. I think they're both fun and really, really interesting, so they get you really thinking. There's stories, right, Anthem. Anybody read Anthem? No. Why do you raise your hand and then say no? We The Living, Fountainhead and Alice Shrug. She wrote. And they're all amazing books that are really inspiring you. But her idea is this. We're always told by our parents, by our religious leaders, by our teachers that the most important thing to do in life is to take care of other people. That other people are the most important thing. Ayn Rand says, why? Isn't your life just as important as other people's lives? And to you, isn't your life more important? Shouldn't the primary focus of your life be to make your life the best that it can be? Now, that doesn't mean you don't help people. But you help people in the context of your own life. You don't sacrifice your values for somebody else. You don't make yourself worse off in a big way for somebody else unless you really love them. And then your life is better for helping them. You help your friends more than you help your enemies. Maybe you don't help your enemies at all. But that whole orientation of Ayn Rand's ideas is what is good for me? What is good for you? And how do we know what's good for us? What's the tool that we use in order to know what's good for us? How do we figure that out? A brain. A brain. We think. We use our minds. Just like before we said businessmen, innovation needs ideas. We need a brain. Every human activity relies on our ability to think. We don't have instincts like animals. We don't have genes. We don't know how to do things instinctually. We need to figure it out. Everything. And how many of you know exactly what's good for you and exactly what you should do all the time? Is it obvious what the right path is in life? No, it's hard. Being self-interested, really thinking about yourself in that video being selfish is hard work because it requires you to think about what's going to make my life the best life that it can be given my circumstances all the way into the future all the way until I'm 80, 90 you guys would probably live to be 100 years old, right? If technology, if we have enough freedom in technology, you guys should all live to be over 100. The technology is advancing that much that your generation should be the first generation that lives well into over 100. Which is pretty cool, right? You'll live a whole century, you'll see a lot of life. So you got to use your mind to think to figure out what's the best life that you're going to look. You're only on this planet one time. It's the only one shot at this. You might as well wake the most of it. You're not going to get a second chance. You're not going to lose in life. You can't go backwards. There's no time to travel. This is it. So Rand says, if this is it, make the most of it. Live a full, complete life. And to do that you've got to judge for yourself what is right and what is wrong, what is good for you and what is not good for you. Don't let other people dictate. Don't accept other people's authority over you. Now again, you're a kid so you have to. You should want to be independent. You should want to live your own life for your own self, making your own decisions about what's good for you. As long as they're reasoned decisions. As long as they're rational. As long as they form your mind. So let's take some examples. Is lying in your self-interest? So would I even say, yeah, you should go ahead and lie because you're self-interested and lying is good for you. Why not? Why is lying bad for you? Yeah, why is lying bad for you? Yeah, lying gets you in trouble all the time, right? Because people catch you. You can almost never get away with lies. They usually call your parents catch you, your friends catch you and you get into trouble. Which is not fun. What else? Why else is lying bad for you? Think about it. Think about it in the context of thinking is good for you. Thinking is what's life's about. Thinking is how you advance in life. What's lying relative to thinking? What do we deal with when we deal with lies? Yeah. Consequence is the bad consequence you talked about. But I'm talking about the fact that when we deal with lies, we deal with things that are not true. With untruth, right? What is thinking required? If you want to be good at thinking, what do you need? What are the elements here? What's that? You need a brain obviously, yes. But what does the brain need? Yeah. Facts. You need facts. To be a good thinker, what do you start with? facts. You start with what is true. Lying, untruth is the opposite of facts. So what lying does is it corrupts your brain, it corrupts your mind. If you see kids who are consistent, non-stop liars, they can't think properly. Because they start confusing facts with lies. You can't keep them straight. I'm at the age, I don't get there one day, a long, long time. I can't remember what I did last week. I really can't remember. I can't remember. I travel so much. I can't remember where I was last week. Never mind what I actually did last week. And I imagine if I lied about what I did last week. Now I have to remember two things. I have to remember what really happened and I have to remember the lie. But it's actually more than two things. I have to remember what I did for the lie and who I told the lie to. Why I told these people the truth and those people the lie. It's too complicated. It's just stupid. So lying is an incredibly destructive policy. It's not good for you. It's not good for me. If you're selfish, if you're self-interested, in the sense Ayn Rand means it, then lying makes no sense. Lying is just silly strategy. Yeah. Because it's easy. Say it again. Yeah, but it's not really thinking. They want to shortcut. And they want to get out of doing something. And they it feels bad, right? So, at the end of the day, when they get caught, the consequences are