 I thank you Maria for organizing this. I am looking forward to the day where I don't have to look at a screen and lecture to a camera. You know, I don't know how many of you do public speaking, but this is not fun. It's much, much more fun to be live with all of you in person. So I'm hoping that Maria has some live events scheduled for us once the world returns to a semi-normal, hopefully, in the months to come. So I'm definitely looking forward to traveling across South America, Latin America, broadly, and giving talks in person. But now we're stuck with this. This is what we have. So we'll make the best of what we have. And indeed, in spite of the complaining and in spite of the fact that this is not ideal, the fact that we can do this is pretty amazing. The fact that all of you are sitting in whatever countries you are in. And I don't know the range and the scope of the countries, but I assume it's a wide variety of places around the world. I assume Nixon there is in Guatemala and I'm sure there are others here in Argentina and the United States and elsewhere. And it truly is amazing that we live in a world in which we can communicate so easily and so freely, that we live in a world in which we can communicate by video in this kind of format. At a cost to all of us, really, of zero. Zoom is something everybody now has. Few of us pay very much to use it. And yet it can take our voice and our image and allow for two-way communication. And in this case, multiple-way communication across the entire world. And it's truly stunning how amazing the world we live in is today. We live and granted things in parts of South America are not as good as they are in the United States and we'll get to that. But generally, we live in a world in which food is easily accessible. For the really last 200 years, or the last 100 and something is, this is the first time in human history, food has always been a struggle. There's always been food uncertainty. It's always been a challenge to find food and to make sure that you can feed yourself and feed your family. We live in a world today of abundance. The major problem, I just read somewhere that I think in the next couple of years, obesity will be a bigger problem in places like Africa than malnutrition. That there will be more obese children than children who have malnutrition. We live in a world of abundance of food and food that we can now access from all over the world. We can get, I live in Puerto Rico. We can get a steak from Argentina. We can get kiwis from New Zealand. We can get, indeed, most of the food we eat here in Puerto Rico is imported from somewhere or other around the world. You all know I always use my iPhone in these talks. I mean, think about how this device has changed all our lives and how much better it has made it. Some of us still remember having to change records and clean them on the phonograph in order to listen to music. At a click of a button, I now have access to every piece of music ever recorded, ever published, and is now made available to billions of people around the world at a marginal cost, basically of zero. And that's just one little minor feature of this thing. So it's pretty amazing. And one of the amazing things about this iPhone is that I read somewhere that I think it's 60-something countries contribute some material or some assembly or some feature of this phone. So we have these vast networks that manage to bring goods to the right place at the right time, manage to assemble the right kind of products at the right kind of price. And billions of people now have iPhones that are equivalent of them all over the world. We live longer, healthier lives than we ever had before. From a material sense, put aside COVID, put aside the last two years, which I know is hard, but put them aside, life has never been better materially on planet Earth. It's never been, again, healthier. It's never been easier. It's never been more comfortable. And it's never been easier and better to access the various values that we need. And yet, we also know that all of this is very fragile. We also know that our ability to prosper and to live at this kind of stand of living is not just something that happens automatically. And it is not something that is indeed inevitable. We can look around the world and we can see examples of people, countries, places backtracking and actually losing the ability to live at this high quality of life and standard of living. Whether it's an obvious example of Venezuela in Latin America, which used to be under per capita GDP, the wealthiest country in Latin America and today is the poorest, where they are back to the point of struggling to find food with the basic necessities of life, including things like electricity, are uncertain at best and where security and ultimately health and longevity are in decline and significantly in decline. Oh, whether it's countries that have stagnated dramatically, Argentina, who in the beginning part of the 20th century was on par with the United States in terms of standard of living and quality of life per capita GDP or however you wanna measure it. And since then stagnated and it got nowhere and today is significantly poorer in almost every aspect than the United States. We know that success and prosperity and the material goods that we all take for granted, it's very easy to watch them disappear. I mean, even right now, as we speak in the United States and much of the Western world and I'm sure in Latin America as well, there's a lot of talk about supply chain bottlenecks and the difficulty of getting goods to market and long trails of ships outside of ports that cannot arrive, a shortage in the United States of workers, a shortage all over the world of productive capacity to meet the increased demands that have occurred over the last few months really since the pandemic. And here you can see the disruptive effects that have happened because of the fragility of what we call today the mixed economy of government controls and government regulations. And so nothing as bad as what we've seen in Venezuela and in Argentina, but certainly ones that have hindered and prevented the kind of stuff that we take for granted that when we go to grocery store, stuff will just be on the shelf that we want to buy our electronics at Best Buy or wherever they're just there whenever we want them at a reasonable price. All of that has been now disrupted and we now see that it doesn't have to happen. It doesn't take much to throw everything out of balance and to prevent us from being able to access the goods and the values that we require in order to thrive and in order to live a good life. We saw this as a consequence now of COVID. You know, we have seen COVID generally challenge this standard of living challenge on longevity, challenge our health, challenge us in a wide variety of ways. I would argue, and you can ask me in the Q and A if you're interested, that we have failed miserably in dealing with COVID in protecting the lives or allowing individuals to protect their lives with COVID that we've done a terrible job of securing a quality of life and standard of living over the last couple of years. And in every case, we have done a terrible job because of horrific government policies, the same kind of government policies on a much smaller scale that led Venezuela to where it is today or that Argentina to its demise or its stagnation over the last 100 or so years. So if we look at all the things that throttle our success, the throttle progress, the throttle our attainment of values and achievements of the material necessities that we need in order to survive and to live which in some countries are relatively easy, in normal times become harder when times are not so normal like under COVID and in other parts of the world are not. And what is truly stunning, what is truly amazing is that once one looks at the kind of countries where it's relatively easy to attain one's values and to achieve success and go out there and actually attain the kind of values like an iPhone that one needs or the food or the healthcare or whatever it is that one requires in order to live and looks at the countries that don't have that, whether they had it in the past and have lost it or whether they've never developed it, one thing just jumps out and is obvious. And that is that the countries that don't have the material wealth, the material success are the countries that have throttled that have diminished freedom. They've diminished the capacity of individuals to pursue their own goals, to live their own lives based on their own values. It is stunning how obvious it is that it is freedom that makes all of this possible, all of the success that we've enjoyed as human beings over the last 250 years. Indeed, as I think most of you know, 250 years ago we were all poor 250 years ago, life expectancy in the West was 39, 250 years ago, even if you were the wealthiest person on planet Earth, life, the technical term as I think sucked. We have made so much progress over the last 250 years as Deirdre McCluskey calls it the great enrichment and the correlation between that and freedom is truly stunning. But I think one underappreciated aspect of freedom is to ask the question of who in particular has made and is making and makes on a daily basis all of the success, all of this prosperity, all of these gains possible. Are we all equally responsible for the progress that has been made over the last 250 years? And again, if one looks at who has exploited freedom to benefit mankind the most, it becomes obvious that it is the producers, the businessmen, the creators, the builders who have created the modern world through their hard work, through their effort, but most importantly through the use of their mind in solving our problems in terms of what is necessary for our survival, providing us the means to survive, to thrive, to grow, to prosper, to make our lives better from the great businessman in the 19th century who built America, who created the millions and millions and millions of jobs that provided income to millions of people, provided them with security and of course provided us with all the goods that again we take for granted, whether it was Rockefeller who made it possible for us to suddenly have cheap energy that we could use, that we could then use in order to improve our lives. First, to light our homes. People forget this and people don't appreciate the fact that just 200 years ago we lived in darkness when the sun set, so did light. The rich, the wealthy could maybe afford whale oil in order to light their homes. But 90 plus percent of us when the sun set had no light. If we burn a fire, it was dangerous, there was smoke, it was unhealthy. Most of us just slept at night. What Rockefeller did was by lowering the price of oil by refining it, by investing in science and technology in growing the business, by innovating, he lowered the price of just something simple that again we take so for granted today like lighting to such a low cost that everybody now could afford it. And suddenly the world was lit. Of course, Rockefeller ultimately was driven out of that business by electricity and today light is everywhere. I think one of the most dramatic photographs you'll ever see in terms of the benefits of freedom as compared to the suffering of authoritarian dictatorship, slavery-like conditions is that photograph that I'm sure all of you have seen of North and South Korea at night where South Korea is all lit up from electricity. And North Korea is completely dark. Nothing there, no light. They still live as all of us did 200 years ago in complete darkness. And often speakers use that example and say, look, South Korea is free, North Korea is not. That's explanation. And it is, but free to do what? Free to innovate, free to produce, free to create, free to compete, free to provide values, free to consume those values. But in order for us to consume those values, somebody has to produce them. And it is those great businessmen who electrified the world, who provided electricity to all of us. It is, again, going back to the Rockefeller example, our automobiles are not just here. They are the product of people like Rockefeller who provided gasoline at a very cheap price. The great innovators who put together an internal combustion engine and the great businessmen who put it all together into an automobile and created an entire industry that again, we kind of take for granted. It just is a product of freedom. No, it's a product of the great geniuses that freedom allows to express that genius by producing values for all of us. It is those businessmen in the 19th century who made the United States from a third-rate colony in 1776, that the British barely fought because they had bigger fish to fry. They were too busy fighting with the Spanish and fighting with the French, who were real empires that America wasn't that important. And within 130 years, the United States was the richest, most powerful nation in the world. That didn't just happen. It happened because people, individuals, went out there, built, created, innovated, produced. They made the modern world. They created the wealth and they created the products that all of us consume. They turned America into a powerhouse. And to some extent, that was happening in a place like Argentina in the 19th century. There were businessmen, there was innovation, there was production, there was entrepreneurship. And the big difference in the end between Argentina and the United States from 1914 on, if you will, is that to some extent, lower extent, it continued in the United States. Innovation continued, entrepreneurship continued, production continued, business creation continued. In Argentina, it was throttled. It was stopped through regulations, controls. Indeed, we are rich because the businessman is free to produce and create the goods for us. And of course, who is the businessman? It's potentially any one of us. We are free. So freedom leads to production, but it doesn't lead to production through thumb in avidable, mysterious way. It leads to production because some of us, some individuals choose to use their mind, apply their mind to solve the problems that all of us face, the problem of human survival, the problem of human success by building, creating, producing and making stuff and making it available for all of us to consume. It is businessmen who carry the world forward, who produce the goods, the services that make our life, make their lives of 8 billion people possible. It is businessmen in every country to the extent that they are free to do so in every country to the extent that they're allowed, every country to the extent that it is creating, that there is wealth being created. It is businessmen who take the science of the day who identify needs and human potentials and reshape reality, reshape the world using that scientific knowledge in order to fulfill some need that we don't even know that we have, some improvement, some improvement in our lives that we don't even imagine can be created. I never could have imagined an iPhone until I actually saw one, until Steve Jobs taught me that this is what would make my life better. Indeed, that this is what I needed. He saw it. He saw what we all needed that is part of his genius and then he must have the resources, the talents, the skills, the science, the technology, the innovation in order to turn that vision that he had in solving this problem that we didn't even know we had solving that problem by using all that and by producing something like the iPhone. When we cripple the businessmen, when we cripple businessmen, business in general, when we throttle them, when we constrain them, when we limit them, ultimately what we're doing is limiting ourselves, crippling ourselves, destroying ourselves. We are limiting our options of the future. We're constraining what will be possible for us in the future, not only in terms of what we can consume, but also in terms of the wealth that we will have as individuals and in terms of the jobs that we can pursue, the opportunities that we can pursue in the future, including the business opportunities that we might not have because we have constrained the opportunities of others. So progress, success requires innovation requires production and requires business. And ultimately it all requires freedom. Now, what is the importance of freedom? Why is freedom so important? Why is freedom so important for economic success? What is it about freedom that is so crucial? Why is it that businessmen can't rise up in North Korea? Why is it that no wealth is created really in the Soviet Union or in Venezuela today? Why is it that freedom is so necessary for human progress, for human success? What is it about human beings that makes freedom so essential for progress? Now here, freedom, I mean freedom here, is the ability to act, to pursue one's values, free of coercion, free of force, free of authority, the ability to act on one's own's judgment, free of other people telling us that we cannot do it, not just telling us, but enforcing them using coercion, using force, using their power against us. Why is this freedom so essential to human progress? Why is there such a correlation between freedom and wealth creation? I mean, nobody really expected it. And to this day, to this day, nobody really accepts it out there in the world. The fact is that we're constantly barraged by ideas from central planners of various forms. If only we could regulate this, if only we could nationalize that, if only we'd have a bigger plan, a better plan, a more organized plan, top down, we could be richer, we could be better. I mean, every economic proposal made by any politician anywhere in the world today is about somehow tinkering with our freedoms, limiting, constraining our freedoms in some regard. And they always sell it as the so make it better. The so make us, you know, the so make us richer. I mean, I've never seen a politician say, look, I know that government policy makes you poor, that, you know, all these regulations, all these controls, all these limitations of freedom actually make you poorer. That's okay. These regulations are more important than whether you're poor or not, we're good with it. It's always explained in terms of, no, we're making things better. We're actually gonna make you richer through these controls and these limitations and these regulations. Most people don't see the relationship between freedom and wealth creation, between freedom and innovation. Indeed, most people have a conception that in order to create wealth, one must plan. Indeed, in the United States, we've got a left and right on the political spectrum today acknowledged that we need some kind of national plan in order to secure America's wealth and make it a prosperous country. We need central planning of one form or another. Nobody challenges the idea, for example, I don't know, a central bank dictating how much money we should have, what interest rates should be, who cannot, cannot exchange that money. Nobody challenges that. The assumption is that we need a central bank because that's what makes us wealthier. So this idea of linking freedom with wealth creation, while it seems obvious when you just look out there in the world and compare countries based on their wealth and based on their freedom, it seems obvious that there is a relationship, almost nobody understands why. What is it about freedom that makes us wealthier? And to understand this, I think this is where Ayn Rand provides us with insight that really no other thinker has ever provided us. Because what Rand understands is that the way in which human beings survive and suddenly from there, the way in which human beings thrive are successful at living is not by means of physical force, is not by means of physical labor, is not by means of muscle. From the most primitive tribe to the most advanced nation or the most advanced societies today in the world, no society, human society survives through muscle alone. We do not have the capacity to run down animals, to bite into them, to catch them with our hands. We devise weapons, we devise tools, we devise traps, we devise hunting strategies, and then we devise agriculture, and then we automate agriculture, and then we devise everything, lights and electricity, all the way up to devising an iPhone and beyond. All of that is a product of the human mind. What allows for human beings to survive and thrive and be successful is reason, it's thinking, it's using our minds, and our mind cannot be constrained. Our mind requires being able to look out into the world, identify reality. It is about being able to integrate the facts that one observes out there, integrate them into new ideas, new concepts, and then imagine what is possible, and then go out into the physical world and change the physical world to make what is possible or we imagined a reality. No other being, the way we're aware of it at least, can do that. Suddenly nobody, no other being on planet Earth can do that. It's what makes human beings human beings. It's our conceptual ability, our ability to abstract, our ability to integrate all these facts out there in the world, then come up with ideas, how to create something new and go out there and do it. But you see the human mind in order to act in this way, in order to be able to make these integrations, and then in order to be able to go out there and guide us in changing our environment to fit our needs, requires freedom. When you constrain our vision, when you tell us you cannot look over there, you cannot question the dogma. You limit what we can integrate. You limit what we can imagine. And of course, once you limit our minds, you're going to limit our actions as well. So whether it is the church, or whether it is other forms of authority that constrain our ability to think about the world because they constrain what facts we're allowed to consider, what experiments we're allowed to run, what thoughts we're allowed to have, and then constrain what actions we can take based on those thoughts. Then when you do that, what you're ultimately constraining is our ability to change the world, to make it better, to innovate, to produce. Every single innovation, every single product that has been produced in human history is a product of the human mind. And it's a product of a human mind that thought outside what people call outside the box, a little differently, integrated things, saw things, imagined things, was willing to create things that nobody else had been willing to do. Nobody else saw an iPhone. Nobody else could put it all together. And we usually, in history, in unfree societies, when somebody innovated, or somebody created something new, we often burned them at the stake. We often killed them because they were challenging the dogma. They were challenging the status quo. And therefore, there's no doubt in my mind that we could be hundreds of years more advanced today if we had not both the innovators, the producers, the unusual thinkers at the stake hundreds of years ago and allowed for progress to continue. But that has been human history. Freedom. The freedom to think is a rare phenomena. It may be existed for a while in Greece and it existed to some extent in some parts of the world since the Enlightenment. And it is that freedom to think, to come up with new ideas and then to apply those ideas in reality and test them out. It is that freedom, intellectual freedom, if you will, that has made the world rich, that has made the last 200 years possible. It has made all the wealth that we have around us possible. And it is the thinkers, the people who imagine what we can't imagine, who project the reality, something new, something exciting, something different, something more cheaper, better, revolutionary. It is those people who drag us forward, who move us forward. It is no accident that the industrial revolution happens when it happens. Industrial revolution starts somewhere in the late 18th century. It happens at a time where suddenly the mind's a man of freedom, freed from the dogma of many religions, but freed from the dogma of state control. Suddenly people can think new thoughts and they don't only think new thoughts in philosophy or they don't just sit around contemplating new ideas. They don't just think new thoughts in science. But what happens in the late 18th century, early 19th century is people suddenly now apply those new thoughts to the problem of human survival. They suddenly apply these new thoughts too, how to make life better, how to make life more comfortable, how to make us all richer. And those are the businessmen who reshape our world, who build a world in their own image and from whom we all benefit because we all trade with them, whether we trade with them as employees, as consumers, as investors, or as all of them, most of us, trade with them in all capacities. And yet, sadly, tragically, they are in our culture today portrayed as the villains, whether it is in our movies, in our novels, by politicians, in almost every aspect of our culture. Businessmen, the producers, the creators, the people who really carry this world in their shoulders and move civilization forward are the villains. The villains for being rich, the villains because we have a culture that has no concept of where all the material wealth that they enjoy comes from. They are the villains because the power lusters need a villain they always have and they exploit the envy of the people. And as a consequence of the fact that we make them out villains, the consequence of the fact that we, as a world still believes that somehow planning, top-down planning produces wealth, forced coercion, dogma produces wealth, we still haven't learned the lesson of the importance of reason and the importance of freedom to reason. We still have no knowledge of these ideas. As a consequence, we regulate, we control, we limit the scope of imagination. We require businessmen to get approval for everything, to grovel, to ask for permission. Just right now, the thing that's making me angry is the Pfizer has a pill that guarantees basically that if you get COVID, you will not land up in hospital or die. It's 90% efficacious in terms of patients who would otherwise go to hospital. 90% of those patients are not now going to hospital. So the the the danger of COVID becomes trivial and minor and not significant. And it's so good, this pill, that the FDA, who they have to ask permission from in order to distribute because we live in a world of permission. The FDA has said it's immoral for Pfizer to continue their trials because it's wrong for them to give a placebo because the pill is so good. How can you give somebody a placebo? Just give them the pill. And yet, FDA has not approved that for all of us. We don't get to use it. Pfizer does not get to distribute it. It is sitting on tens of millions of doses, just sitting there. People are getting sick. People are going to hospital. People, they're dying. And the FDA is twiddling their thumbs, waiting for what? I don't know. More data, more of this, more of that. Contemplation, you know, word from God. I don't know. So at some point, they will approve this pill. I'm sure they will at some point. But how many people are dying right now, unnecessarily because they're taking their time? It's that kind of permission that businessmen encounter all of the time. And it is limiting our growth and our progress and our success. So if we're going to fight for something, what we should be fighting for is the liberation of business. The liberation of the businessmen from state control, from state dogma, from state approval. It's not a matter of, you know, getting better regulations, getting less regulations. It's a matter of getting rid of regulations. It's a matter of separating state from business, getting the state out of the business of business, out of our lives. So businessmen can go back to creating, building, making without asking for permission, training with us, without getting the approval of the authorities, whatever alphabet agency they belong to. So the one thing we should be fighting for is to get the state out of the business of business. I know these days it's popular to attack business even among so-called free market advocates. And yes, there are cronies out there that deserve our disdain. Cronies manipulate government in their favor. But we should always remember the source of cronyism. The source of cronyism is the government, is the power that government wields. The source of cronyism is the fact that the government can crush any businessman at any time, anywhere, because of the power they have over our economic lives. Yes, we should condemn the truly crony business person. But we must also recognize that the source of that cronyism, the reason that crony businessmen exists is because of the power we have granted governments. And that is what a primary focus should be on fighting them. But there's a second thing we should be fighting for. And that is we should be fighting for, in a sense, the virtue of businessmen. We should be encouraging them to be proud, to acknowledge their own value, to fight for their own freedom. There is no more noble a profession today on planet Earth than to take what reality provides us, to use knowledge to reshape it, to turn it into something that enhances human life. There is no more noble a profession today on planet Earth than to be a businessman. In spite of all the attempts of governments all over the world, to crush them, to stomp on them, to regulate them, to control them, they still work hard. Whatever, within the scope of what is allowed, they use their minds, they improve our lives. We should be thankful. They should be proud. And we should imagine, imagine a world in which we are all free, really free. Imagine living in a permissionless world where we don't have to ask permission to produce or to consume, to create, to build, to make. However rich we think we are today, however successful we are today, however long and healthy lives we live today. In a world like that, we would be so much richer, healthier, and really, most importantly, happier. Thank you all. And I think we've got time for questions. Thank you so much, Jerome. Can you hear me well? I can. I can. Hi, Ricardo. That was a very insightful talk and I have a couple of questions to ask you as a follow-up. But then me make a short announcement to the audience. Un recordatory para la audiencia de que si quieren hacer preguntas, sea en español o en inglés, la pueden hacer en la sección de preguntas y respuestas que encuentran abajo en la pantalla de Zoom. Okay. So, Jerome, I have a couple of questions. One of the interesting things you mentioned is that today it's common for people, and I would argue especially for young people, to take this progress, this wealth for granted. Yes. Ignoring the long historical and intellectual development that created the conditions for this to be even possible or conceivable. My question is, do you think altruism, by claiming that we are our brother's keepers by duty, is somehow responsible for this indifference, if not on gratefulness for the wealth we enjoy today? Yes, and I think a variety of different dimensions. I don't think it's even in just one way. Altruism is vicious. It's a vicious ideology that really is throughout our culture, it's throughout our world, and it has impact on almost everything that we do. But you think about this idea of taking stuff for granted and taking the wealth that we have for granted. I mean, how can that be altruistic? Well, again, in a number of different dimensions. Let's just take one. The very fact that the people who produce the wealth don't take credit for it, because that would be selfish. That would be self-interested. That would be boastful and prideful. And we know those all sins. So businessmen will often say, oh, no, no big deal. I didn't do anything really special. Anybody could have done this. And everybody says, oh, he's so humble. Isn't that amazing? And that humility filters into the culture and say, well, OK. Even he admits he didn't do anything. What's so special? Stuff just happens. It's just here. The iPhone just sprung out of nowhere. Luckily, Steve Jobs was not particularly humble, which is an advantage. So part of it is that the producers don't take the credit. And of course, nobody gives them the credit. Because again, altruism doesn't allow you to give the credit. Because then you're recognizing that somebody acting in their own self-interest, the profit motive, the enjoyment of producing and creating, has actually made the world a better place when altruism teaches us that really, in order to make the world a better place, in order to help your fellow man, in order to be your brother's creeper, you have to sacrifice. Sacrifice is the essential. I mean, it's shocking. Because if altruism really cared about other people, if altruism says you should care about other people, you should care about their happiness, their success, their prosperity. If altruism really cared about other people, if that really was the famous, then wouldn't Bill Gates be a saint and Steve Jobs be a saint? I mean, Rockefeller, Carnegie, all these bad guys, because they've helped more people than anybody in Planet Earth, not on their charity, but in their business. Isn't the way you make money by improving the lives of your customers, by improving the lives of the people you trade with, your employees, your suppliers, your customers, everybody? So somebody like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have improved the lives of billions of people on the planet, and yet they get zero moral credit, and the reason they get zero moral credit is because they didn't suffer doing it. They didn't show pain. They enjoyed it. They made money off of it. So the whole conception of altruism is not about helping other people, it's about suffering in the process. So we have no way to appreciate what they've done because altruism tells us they're happy, they're successful, therefore they must be bad. It's hard for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle, is the religious aversion of it in a secular term, whether it's Kant or whether it's Kant, the French philosopher, saying that if you kind of meet a happy person, be suspicious because happiness in a sense requires self-interest and self-interest we know is evil and wrong, and therefore don't trust happy people and then don't trust businessmen. So yes, I think altruism has a lot for us. The world just is because we can't give credit to anybody because if we did, it would have moral implications for us. It would actually suggest that these people deserves a good guys or have improved the world and that would throw our form of altruism into total confusion. And I'm sure there are other ways in which altruism affects this as well. Thank you. So I have another question. This is kind of a question for contrast to really get your view. So there is a growing, I would claim it's a positive movement which is progressive studies who are intellectuals who are devoting their time to studying precisely this kind of development, why the world is so rich. And they recognize the value of ideas, the value of freedom of thought. But I think their emphasis sometimes is quite different. And I have an example in mind, the example I have in mind is the self-styled rational optimist, Matt Ridley, who claims that the, or who puts the emphasis not in ideas per se in the individual conception of an idea, but what he calls ideas having sex. That network of cooperation that allows you to create an iPhone. And you mentioned that how an iPhone involves a network of goods, of minds who come together into one product. So do you agree with this view or do you think your view gets something more fundamental that I run, recognize, how do you see this argument? So first I'd say that I'm very encouraged by the progress movement. I think they do good work. I think it's important work to do. I think that understanding progress in all its details and explicitly is a good thing and making observations about the environmental, political factors that are involved in bringing about progress is really, really, really crucial. But I think that two real problems with most of the progress movements and that is the agnosticism when it comes to morality and to some extent their agnosticism when it comes to epistemology. I mean, mad readily, as you said, believes to some extent that progress just happens. Yes, you need to be free. You need some level of freedom. You need to have certain things there. But then the individual doesn't really matter. Individual thought or individual ideas or individual don't really matter. It will just happen. If you don't have the idea, I'll have the idea, somebody else will have the idea. If there's no Steve Jobs, we'll still get an iPhone. It might take a year longer. It might not. And I think that it's a wrong way of looking at the world. First, I think it's false, right? Suddenly, for most of us, it's true that we're in a sense when it comes to production, maybe interchangeable. Few of us make contributions that truly nobody else could have made. But some do. I mean, is the world just gonna be exactly the same if there's no Isaac Newton? Is the world gonna be the same if there's no Aristotle? Would the world be the same as those own Iron Rand? I mean, maybe one day the ideas would be discovered anyway, right? But how long? A thousand years, a hundred years? Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to think it. And at various levels of genius, those people are unique. And the more brilliant they are, the more extraordinary they are, the more original thinkers they are, the more unique they are. But ideas don't have sex. People with ideas exchange them and interact with one another, not through sex, through speaking and writing and debating and arguing and writing primarily, right? They allow those ideas to develop into new ideas, to build one idea on top of the other. But that requires people to do it. And there's no accident that if you limit ability of people to write and speak freely, ideas stop having sex, right? Not because ideas can't do it, because ideas never, ideas are not independent of the human beings facilitating them. So to divorce progress innovation, creativity from individuals is a massive mistake, I think. And I think Ridley makes that. And it's an epistemological mistake. Somebody has to do the thinking. And here's the, so here's the problem, the two problems that, you know, that's Matt Ridley's particular, but I'd say broader speaking. I don't think there's a real appreciation for human reason. And for the principle of human reason. And for principles more broadly. There's much too much of a empiricist attitude towards progress studies where, look, we've got five cases in which this happened. We've got seven cases in which this happened. You know, both these situations seem like they're pro-progress. And, but we can't really draw too many broad abstractions from those. We need 20 cases in order to draw, you know, and then the abstraction can't be, you know, we can have certainty everything has to be probabilistic and Bayesian and whatever. You know, they're very careful in terms of, and they don't, I think, have a proper view of how to get to principles and the principles that define progress and allow progress and what progress requires. And in that sense, they're lacking a proper foundation of epistemology. But then I think they also seem, and this is where I think Deirdre Makasky is a little different, but I think she hasn't had enough of an impact on progress studies. They don't seem to have an understanding of the role of morality, views of morality on progress, right? And here I think Deirdre gets it wrong. She understands the importance, but then she gets it wrong, right? And this is again, I know it both contributes to this epistemological idea of how to think in principles and how to apply principles, the importance of reason, that being a principle, the importance of freedom to reason, and that's what really leads to progress. And yes, it's important to understand in what ways that happens and all the stuff that this study is all valuable, but it's gotta be framed by this principle. But then the second thing is, if you have the morality of altruism, then you're opening up the door to what government does. When you have the morality of altruism, you're opening up the door to a business for not having the kind of self-esteem they should have, not having the pride in what they do that they should have, not being able to defend themselves in the way that they do. I think many of them retiring earlier than they probably would otherwise, not understanding the benefits of what they're doing and focusing too much of their effort on charity when they should be really working because the charity is not that important and not that big of a different big deal and they don't really like it. They do it out of a sense of duty and they should, there's so many ways in which we would have more progress if we had a culture of egoism, a culture of self-interest. And I think progress studies purposefully is agnostic when it comes to morality and it's mainly utilitarian, but I'd say most people, most economists, most free market economists and most I think in the progress movement to the extent that I know are utilitarian, the most happiness the most people and as we know, utilitarianism is a very, very dangerous ideology, dangerous philosophy and it opens up to all kinds of things including state control and state limitations and so the role of morality and the role of epistemology is what we need to bring in to the study of progress for it to really have a long-term impact on the world. Thank you so much. I can say I have used my privileges as a moderator very well. Excellent. A lot of food for thought. We have a few questions that have been submitted. One is from Jesus, who's writing from Venezuela who's being enjoying the conferences by the problems with the energy and internet. And he asked, how can one fight for liberty and against the excessive social control, especially after the pandemic, effectively when you are in a totalitarian dictatorship such as Venezuela's? You can't. When you're in a totalitarian dictatorship it is almost impossible to fight. You're likely to, for real harm to come to you. Look at what happened to people like people who fought the Soviet dictatorship, the soldier-nitzins who landed, look at the millions who landed up in the gulags, who were killed, I would advise people in Venezuela to the extent that they can get out. First of all, life is too short to stay. And secondly, you will be a better fighter outside of Venezuela for Venezuela and freedom than you will be within Venezuela. So it's obvious to me, given what's happening in Venezuela over the last 10 years, that there is just not enough people like you, Jesus, in Venezuela want to be free. If they were, you would have had a revolution, Maduro would be in a grave somewhere, and you would have a very different country. But they're just not enough of you. And you could spend your time trying to convince people of the cause for liberty, but in the meantime, you have to live there. You have to be enslaved by the system that exists. And again, life is too short for that. And here is, I want to make an important point about, you don't owe the country of your birth anything. You don't owe the country of your birth anything. You owe your life everything. And I would advise people who live in these kind of countries to the extent that they can get out quickly, effectively, safely. If you want to continue fighting for that country, fight from outside, but in the meantime, live. Go to a country that is significantly free of the Venezuela, pretty much anywhere. Even in Latin, even countries in Latin America, almost all of them are free of the Venezuela. Go tell the story of Venezuela, try to prevent countries like Colombia, Peru, Chile, from becoming the next Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina. And use your time to fight for liberty in places where you can have a voice and you can have an impact. In Venezuela, sadly, it does not look like that can happen. So get out and fight from wherever you can. And the way to fight is to right speak, right speak, right speak, right speak. There's just no other way to do it. Thank you. Next question is from Susana. And she writes, the morality of altruism affects businessmen because it makes them feel guilty, evil, and that they are always trying to base social and environmental preparations because they think that their productive work is intrinsically bad. But, and this is a question, how does this morality of altruism affect us as consumers, workers, et cetera? What is the impact on our lives? So kind of a shift of perspective. Sure. I mean, it causes us to, one, to not appreciate the producers, to not appreciate the businessmen. So it hurts our lives in a sense as we talked about before. We take all the stuff that we have for granted. We don't have an appreciation of it. We don't have appreciation for what it took to produce it because how could you appreciate selfish people? How could you appreciate rich people? How can you appreciate people who have more than their quote fair share? So it hurts us that way. Of course, it also hurts us because the producers, because they feel guilty and so on, produce less. They're fewer producers because a lot of people don't go into production because, oh, that's a selfish activity. I don't want to become a businessman and be selfish. So we have less to consume. And then I think many of us as consumers feel guilty for all the stuff we do consume. I know a lot of people who buy all kinds of stuff and drive their car everywhere. And then they feel guilty for it. Oh, I'm destroying the planet. I'm making mortgage rate rich. I'm wasting my money. I could be giving it to the poor. So even consumers, to the extent that they consume for their own benefit, feel guilty for doing that. So they suffer as a consequence. So I don't think any of us are immune from the evil of altruism and from its impact on our lives. So remember that to be an egoist means to appreciate where your values come from. To be an egoist means to be just and that means to say thank you and show appreciation and internalize that sense of this person is important. This person has done good. And I think that's part of what builds your self-esteem, your ability to identify the good in people and to identify the good people. It makes you a more virtuous person and therefore ultimately it makes you a happier person. Great. Next question. I don't know if I'm getting it well but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Can too much integrity in a business lead to altruism? Too much integrity in a business lead to altruism? I guess... No, not if you understand integrity properly. Then the answer is no. Integrity is a commitment to life-affirming values. It's a commitment to do, to act on your abstract values but the values have to be life-affirming and you can't never do more than you know you always wanna do as much as you can of that, right? The only way of having too much integrity can become altruistic is if you misunderstand integrity to mean a duty. For example, don't lie. So I don't know, the rapist comes to the front door and says, where's your wife? I wanna rape her and you say, oh, she's in the back room, right? I mean, but that's not integrity and that's not honesty. That's stupidity and cowardness and lots of other things but it has nothing to do with the integrity. You don't have a duty to provide information of people who don't have a right to particular information. You don't have a duty to provide people who threaten you the truth. That's not integrity. Integrity is not to be truthful under all circumstances. It's only in pursuit of values. It's only when it's, you know, when you're not doing it under threat of physical force under threat of violence. Thank you. Next question is, I'm wondering why all politicians insist on central planification? When it affects, I would say this starts creativity. Why they insist on central planification? Well, they insist on centralization because that's power. That's where they get power, right? They have control of other people. They are motivated by control and by power and central planning allows them to tell other people what they can and cannot do and they get their kicks from that and they are power lusters and they justify it. They rationalize it by saying, I'm smarter than other people. I have better mathematical models than other people. The market fails. We hear a lot about market failure and we need some government bureaucratic I mean, to fix things and make them better and I can make them better and I have the best scientists, the best economists, the best this, but it's all a rationalization to justify the fundamental power lust and they want to control you. That is ultimately what is motivating them. They don't really believe that they're improving the world in any kind of meaningful sense. Not deep down, not really. All right, a couple more. So do you want to comment on the elections in Latin America where populism has been too infant, especially in Peru, Nicaragua, Chile and Honduras? Do you have any general views about that? Yes, I mean, I think that what we're seeing what we're seeing all over the world because I don't think this is separate from the rise of populism in Europe and the rise of populism in the United States and the rise of populism really everywhere is that the pro-liberty side, the pro-freedom side is basically given up or basically given up on the idea that principles can win. The principle should be defended. And then we now have left the political landscape to a populist of all stripes. To people who believe that individuals don't matter, people who want power for power's sake, people who wanna control our lives whether from the right or from the left, but the idea of individual liberty, the idea of individual freedom, the idea of the individual mind, the idea of individual mind pursuing individual values, that is gone, that doesn't exist. So in Chile, you have a choice between a Catholic so-called market-free market authoritarian and between a Marxist authoritarian. In Peru, you now have a Marxist populist, whatever the hell that means, right? It's a soft Marxist, a Marxist who's gonna only do Marxist stuff that people like, I guess, or his cronies like. All over the world, you get populist of the left and populist of the right. Nobody committed to principle, really. Nobody committed to ideas. Ideas and principles generally are out. They're unfashionable, nobody believes in them. And it's not just advocates of liberty. I mean, the Marxists don't really believe in Marx anymore, right? And the ones who do are not the ones who are running for office, the Marxists are populist Marxists. They're gonna go after the rich, they're gonna redistribute well, but they're not gonna get power to the proletariat, God forbid, right? They're not gonna actually have the proletariat decide their fate. They're gonna decide the fate. They know what's good for the people. They'll figure it out. I think what we've seen is the death of ideas and the death of principles and the death of a commitment to ideas and principles. And now it's just emotionalism on both sides. And then it's a question of who's gonna attract emotionalism more. I mean, I'm glad to see that Chile hasn't gone full blast left, that it hasn't committed itself as it seemed like it was going to about a year ago to a completely Marxist leftist ideology. So I'm glad that there's been something to counterbalance that. I'm saddened by the fact that that is manifest in somebody who is as committed to religion and committed to tradition and committed to, I think, ultimately populist authoritarian values as the person who won, somebody who admires Pinochet. You know, Pinochet did some good things, but he was a nasty, horrible guy who killed and murdered thousands of people in the name of control and in the name of power. And the idea that the right now is Mrs. Pinochet, and once more Pinochet-like politicians is a complete bankruptcy of the right in Latin America and beyond. I mean, when the American right now worships Orban of Hungary, who has basically crushed free media in Hungary and has no free markets, has basically not made one single move towards more freedom economically, or they admire Poland for having conservative social values and imposing those from above, that, this is the real tragedy, I think that there was no representatives on the right who represent personal liberty and free markets anymore. We're seeing the complete abandonment of ideas and principles on, particularly on the right. I'm not sure they ever existed on the left. Thank you. Do you have time for a couple more? So maybe two short ones or one longer one, let's see. Well, here's a very short one. Would you say we're experiencing a neo-inquisition against the motor of the world? Would you again say, neo-inquisition? You know, I don't think we're quite there, right? The inquisition was pretty brutal. I don't think we're quite at the point where we're putting them on the rake and we're putting them in prison or we're experiencing a rise in authoritarianism on every side of the political map. We're certainly seeing a kind of a free speech inquisition in the sense that people are advocating for limits of speech, whether they just don't tolerate it and they become very sensitive or whether they're actually going to put it into play through legislation. But the inquisition was pretty brutal. We're not quite seeing that kind of brutality against businessmen yet. And remember, the antagonism towards businessmen is not new. In the 19th century, they were called robber barons. In the 1980s, a lot of businessmen went to jail for no justified reason because we hated businessmen, we still do. So this kind of is unfortunately a pattern of the last hundred and so years. It's a little worse right now, but it's not quite at the level of inquisition, at least not in the United States and in the West. All right. Well, I have, this is the, I wanted to ask you if you have any message to young people who are listening and who are joining this conference and especially those who are thinking about becoming businessmen, becoming entrepreneurs and the places where they are living now are not very happy about their dreams and desires. Do you have any last message for them? I mean, first I would say, life, as I said before, is too short not to try to get to the most free place you can find. And I immigrated to the United States because I believed when I did so in 1987 that it was the freest place that I could go to and I did whatever I could to get to the United States. It wasn't easy. It's even more difficult today than it was back then. So I understand the difficulties. But wherever you are, try to find the place that is the freest that is accessible to you. Don't place, this is controversial, don't place your family and your commitment to your country above your commitment to your own happiness and above yourself. You are the standard and try to find the best place in the world and then go for it. Pursue your dream, work hard, try to make out a reality, do what is necessary to fight for your own happiness, for your own success, for your own career, for your own vision of the world. Don't give in. Don't let others, to the extent that it's in your control, don't let them limit you. So the future entrepreneurs, you are the heroes, you are the good guys. Don't let anybody convince you otherwise, have pride in what you do and fight for your own happiness and never give up on the fight for your own happiness. That's what it's all about. We can talk about capitalism, liberty, freedom, all of that is great abstract notions that we should fight for. But at the end of the day, what it's all about, the bottom line is you're my, every one of our happiness and our ability to pursue our happiness. Thank you, Jerome. Thank you, Jerome, very much. Thank you, Ricardo, for being our moderator. It was a very inspiring talk. So again, I hope to have you here next year, to see you here, to be able to gather 500 people and let's move on. So thank you very much. Looking forward to it, looking forward to it. Bye, everybody. Thank you very much.