 So how does we how does Bill Gates become a good guy? He leaves Microsoft and starts a foundation Well, that's good because he's not making money anymore Now he's a good guy because he's giving it all away because giving your money away. That's good making it creating it Changing the world. Yeah, we don't really like that. I mean think about how perverse that is. How many people is he gonna help? By giving his money away I mean maybe tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands not billions He's not gonna change the world philanthropy has never in any way changed the world Anyway, but now we perceive it was a good guy not a saint. Why is he not a saint? It's that smile problem He seems to be having fun He's enjoying giving his money away. He takes it as a challenge and he's doing it kind of thoughtfully if you will And he invests and he lives in a big house and he flies to Africa on a private jet Saints don't fly private jets So what would it take for Bill Gates to be a saint? He'd have to stop smiling which means you'd have to give up his house if we could move into a tent That would be good. And at the end of the day, he has to show us a little bit of blood Then we'd say none of us would want to be Bill Gates, right? But we'd say yes now he's ready for sainthood like none of us want to be Mother Teresa, but in our minds We still think Mother Teresa. Oh Saint that's good morally. She sacrificed for the sake of other people Right. She was miserable. Yes. That's good Well, she was just read her diary and you'll see how miserable she was But that's the essence of virtue. That's what we've been taught By religion by philosophy by our mothers who learn it from philosophy and religion For 2,000 years We have been taught that suffering is virtue if you're doing it for other people if you're doing it for greater cause in yourself That being selfless is the essence of morality and any tinge any tinge of self-interest is bad Augustine Comte the French philosopher of the 19th century you coined the term altruism Said that if you help somebody else and we're helping him you you say I'm gonna feel good by helping this person You know, it's gonna make me feel good because I'm helping them. It doesn't count It doesn't count as more moral Because you have to help another person for the hundred percent sake of the other person Now, let me postulate that that is a morality that is inconsistent with capitalism inconsistent with markets inconsistent with liberty inconsistent with freedom Everybody knows Everybody knows that markets and capitalism about self-interest It's about making money and having fun In a sense enjoying oneself fulfilling oneself doing something meaningful with one's life It's about the values you choose for you Everybody knows this So nobody nobody wants capitalism. It's ugly It's immoral It's offensive. It's a bunch of selfish people going around doing their own thing for themselves That's immoral. That's the essence of immorality Indeed this morality of sacrifice this morality of other people other ism of self-lessness is a hundred percent consistent with which political economic system What's that? feudalism or socialism Socialism or communism right sacrifice you want sacrifice Communism is the best at that Like 200 million people were sacrificed with communism Right, they're good at sacrifice socialism is just as good sacrifice babies in Venezuela every day For the greater good for the cause for the grandeur of the Poletarian one day, you know That's That's the morality that drives us towards socialism. It's about sharing It's about being nice. It's about caring about other people It's about giving not expecting anything in return. It's this is these are all wonderful words that are really Consistent with socialism so the end of the day People are not driven by economic ideas the end of the day people are not Driven by their pocketbook by what I make them money People are driven by what will make them feel good about themselves and that is morality. That is ethics people are driven by the ethical code and This is why every time we achieve some freedom. I asked off I asked one of the architects of Chilean You know that the capitalism in Chile. I asked him why is this turning around? Why is it going the other way? And he said because the people who've been successful now feel guilty Why do you feel guilty? Where does guilt come from? It comes from living one kind of life But believing you should be Mother Teresa and Getting to the age of 50 or 60 or 70 and looking back on your life and say yeah, I've made a lot of money I've said my kids to college. I've done all these things, but you know what I Didn't live a mother Teresa life like that's what my mother taught me That's what the preacher said in church That's what my philosophers taught me in class that that is real virtue. So what have I done? So let me vote to raise my taxes. Let me vote to redistribute my wealth Let me vote to reduce my guilt And it's exactly what they do which people vote to raise their taxes all the time Rich people vote for the welfare state rich people vote to have themselves regulated because that's the other part of That's the other part of Of self-interest right? What do we think when we say selfish? That person's selfish. He's self-interested What have they taught us to think? He's a lying cheating stealing SOB. You know what SOB means ask somebody later He's a really bad person. He behaves badly. We've associated the word of self-interest with bad behavior So what's a businessman? A businessman is somebody who pursues his self-interest. So he must be a crook We just hadn't caught him yet. We will my mother told me every millionaire in the world is a crook She believed that because that's what her morality dictates. He's self-interested. Therefore, he's a crook So I don't have a lot of time. So let me let me let me Position it this way. We're faced in the world in which we live in today with two options Morally, ethically, philosophers teach us two options You can live for the sake of others. You can be selfless You can sacrifice and that is nobility and goodness and everything else That's altruism if you will or you can be selfish Which means a lying stealing, you know, horrible human being Nobody wants to be that Iron rand is part of Iron rand genius is to take those kind of distinctions and say wait a minute Are those the only two options? That can't be right and she does this in every almost every field she takes, you know a kind of a One perspective and then that perspective and she says neither want to write here's the right one And she says wait a minute. Why can't I be? Self-interested Pursue my life Without Exploiting other people without being a mad mean person and indeed she says If you actually figure out what drives self-interest what self-interest actually means What your interest is as a human being then exploiting other people lying stealing and cheating is actually self-destructive Not self-interested it actually hurts you and harms you and if you want examples ask me in the Q&A Right, but just think about somebody who's a systemic liar. What happens to them? They get caught nobody wants have anything to do with them and they live a miserable pathetic life Think about crooks. Yeah, they get the money But they live in constant fear being caught and ultimately they go to jail or even if they don't get it to go to jail They never really enjoy the money. You know who enjoys money people who make it Not people who steal it So she says wait a minute. This is bogus this dichotomy this yes There's altruism which she considered evil. Yes, there's self-destructiveness Which is all these other things we talked about and then there's real self-interest and what is real self-interest? If you care about yourself as a human being, what is the thing that makes human life possible? What is it that makes us human? What is it that makes every value everything in this room possible? Reason you can't have clothes without reasons somebody had to figure out how to take cotton and turn it into Cloth, I have no idea how to do that and I guess there's nobody in this room has any idea how you do that I never mind how to skin an animal dry its pelt and then Somehow turn that into clothing some genius came up with that or agriculture or hunting or building weapons to hunt or any Any of the basic things or building a hut put me in the forest and tell me you got to build a hut I don't know how to build a hut I mean I really have to think about it We are unique animal We don't have the means by which to survive programmed into us We have to figure it out. We have to use our reason. We have to use our thoughts So iron says if you care about your own life If you want to be self-interested if you want to live the best life that you can live What is the number one value you must pursue? It's your mind You must use your reason You must figure out what is necessary for me in order to survive to thrive To succeed to be the best that I can be at living a life And she said living is not just about You know being living as an animal It's about living as a human being as a full-fledged human being With everything that is made possible because of our cognitive abilities It means using our mind to make our life Wonderful to flourish To experience life to the fullest Not to settle not to compromise not just to be like everybody else but to live our lives. You have one shot at this I'm not a buddhist And even if I would be worried about returning as a cockroach, right? So you've got one opportunity to live life as a human being Ironman says Jump on it embrace it live it And use your mind to do it and then she says Okay So we have to use our mind to figure out what was good for human beings Now the question is what are the values and what are the virtues that can make this possible? and to her Ethics morality is a science like Aristotle It's a science to determine the values and virtues that human beings must Embrace in order for them to survive and to thrive That's it. That's what ethics should be about but nobody does ethics like that Ethics teaches us today how to die and struggle and suffer not how to live and thrive and succeed Ethics should be what you teach in business school so that people go out and know how to make money Because making money is an ethical endeavor because it's about creating values in win-win transactions So What kind of society? The people who value their own life value their own reason want And this is kind of the bridge between no ethical system And a free society because you need that bridge But Before I do that, I just want to make it clear the ethics we live in today is 100 consistent with socialism And unless we challenge it, we will never have capitalism And a little bit of flotation we had with capitalism. Maybe in the 19th century. Maybe in hong kong doesn't last Because at some point some Bleeding heart altruists will say this is too selfish And these people are bad people. We have to control them. We have to regulate them because otherwise they'll lost their Light stealing cheap So if you think about reason, what is the enemy of human reason? What's the thing that makes reason impotent? Well fear can be overcome. This cannot be overcome Force a gun I put a gun to the back of your head forget about thinking Because all you care about at this point is what I have to say I tell you two plus two equals five and you have to live by that You can't build a bridge. You can't program a computer. You can't do anything You're shut down force coercion Shuts the human mind down. It's not an accident that the scientific revolution happened in parallel to More and more and more liberty in society Because if you are a scientist in a 15th century and you discovered something that contradicted the bible, what happened to you? If you yeah, you were burnt at the stake So luckily galileo came a little bit later and he was only put on the house arrest And then by the time newton comes around we've already accepted the idea that yeah, okay You can you can challenge the bible. We still don't quite believe you but we can challenge the bible We'll leave you alone. It's the ideas of liberty that make science possible and then post newton boom science explodes Because suddenly there's this freedom there's this liberty To challenge the status quo to challenge authority to to to to not be caused We mentioned producers aside from those people who give us intellectual products. What about the businessman? You've talked about capitalism. I'd like to know his role in this Well, the businessman also is as recent a product as the intellectual before the births of capitalism There were no professional businessman And there were no professional intellectuals both the mind and material production and trade Were enslaved and ruled by the various combinations of a tillers and which doctors which means By a powerful government by an absolutes type of government Whether it was the feudal Absolutism or the absolute monarchies of europe of the past and the sound spirit In any case the producers of material goods the traders and the producers of ideas the teachers philosophers The early scientists were men without official status without a profession and the total mercy Of the political rulers, which means that the mercy are ruled by force It is only Since the industrial revolution the births of a pre-society society of capitalism That there was a new class of men, which is the three producers of material goods the businessman the industries They of course Are The producers in a stick the sense of the word or should be but they are the greatest victims of today's society They're the ones who have been betrayed by Modern intellectuals and in this sense Both businessmen and intellectuals will commit suicide by destroying each other and the fall belongs to the intellectual The businessman is the man who has to use his mind To deal with reality study facts to produce material goods He is the man who serves as the transmission belt of the discoveries of science And carries the product of science to all levels of society. He is the one who takes the invention Of an theoretical scientist or of an inventor transforms them into useful product and Put putting them into mass production makes them available to all levels of society The businessman is the man who has achieved the enormous Historically miraculous rise in the standard of living of mankind during the 19th century He is the one who has lived up To the role of a producer to the role of a rational Creative man, but the intellectuals have never given him credit for it Have regarded him as if he were an Attila And being afraid of freedoms themselves have been looking from the start of the industrial revolution For some form of an Attila to protect them the intellectuals against the free market of ideas