 Okay everyone we're getting ready to start so if the folks in the lobby area can be a little more quiet and get started with this big side chat with a young worker. Again thank you all for coming out to Crypto Monday. This is an ongoing event hosted by Pedro Herrera, and we also have mixers every other Monday as well as speakers. So the next speaker will be two Mondays from now, not next Monday. But again we'll have a decent crowd every Monday and we'll meet new people in the crypto community. And we definitely don't want to miss these conversations that we're having because they're influential to our futures here in Puerto Rico. I know many of you live here now just like I do, and this looks to be a great series and a great way to meet new people. So I'm Alan Warwick, formerly of San Antonio, Texas. Now I'm Carolina in Puerto Rico and I've been here since September 2nd. I'm a former city councilman for the city of San Antonio, represented 1.7 million people for three years. And I'm very glad to be in Puerto Rico with the community here and building community here. We are so blessed to have Alan Warwick with us today and he is the chairman of the board of the Ironman Institute, and former executive director of the Ironman Institute, and also the founder of the Hedgehog. He has been speaking about the projectivism throughout the world and in the United States. And now in front of us this evening, Alan Warwick. Thanks. Okay, so we're going to have a short Q&A session between myself and Yaron, and then we're going to open up to questions from the audience. I'm sure if any of you have read or listened to Yaron's ideas or hear some ideas that are interesting this evening, I'm sure some questions will pop up. But most of us have read the thumbnail or at the shrug. How many of you have read at the shrug? A minority of us have. Is the movie count? They know at least who Ironman is, but many of us probably didn't know about the Ironman Institute before this evening. So you could tell us about the Institute and the work that you guys are doing around the world. So for those of you who might not know that much about Ironman, Ironman was a novelist and philosopher. He was probably the most prominent advocate of individualism and capitalism in the 20th century and had a massive following. The books were massive bestsellers. She wrote at the shrug, for example, in 1957. It still sells hundreds of thousands of copies. It's translated into almost every language on the planet. It sells actually more copies now outside the U.S. and in the U.S. So those of you who have not read at the shrug, I don't know what to say to you. Go home and read the book. It's a must-read. It's kind of a cultural standard. And my guess is in the crypto world, most people have read at the shrug. In the technology world, generally I'd say that Ironman and at the shrug were probably inspiration for most of the great entrepreneurs from the industry, from Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, to Larry Ellison, to, you know, Sam McNeely, Son Microsystems, and, of course, this generation. I'm sure that is the case as well. Although there's little about it, maybe completely correct reasons. Suddenly, the founder of Uber was a known fan of the Pumptman, another book that everybody should really read. So what made Grant Specialist, she actually presents a philosophy of individualism, of, you know, that is about living one's own life for oneself rationally, with a long-term perspective, making life the best that it can be, and making the most of it. And what we do at the Institute is we promote those ideas. We try to get more people to read the books. We try to get people engaged in the ideas from the more philosophical ideas, through the morality. And then, of course, we apply the philosophy to the events of the day. So to the politics and what's going on in the world. I would say it was the preeminent advocate for capitalism. Again, in the 20th century, nobody was more of an adamant advocate for capitalism, I think, than she was. And we try to continue that path, to try to argue full capitalism, and try to influence the world so that we get more freedom, more capitalism for individuals everywhere in the world. I spent a lot of time traveling around the world primarily, Europe, Eastern Europe, primarily, and Latin America, some Asia. Talking about these ideas is a massive market globally for these ideas. We're still a tiny minority in terms of those of us who really advocate for freedom and advocate for capitalism. But it's growing. And the idea is to try to make, try to change the world, try to really have an impact on the world out there. That's great. Are there any projects in Puerto Rico on the island that people could potentially work with or work on to get started? Yeah, none right now. I mean, there are some student groups in some of the universities here that affiliated with the Students for Liberty, affiliated with kind of a libertarian student group. But other than that, there really isn't anything going on in the island. And it's changed because I think the island, given the mess that it's in, and given the attractive tax benefits, is poised maybe be kind of a laboratory experiment for some of these ideas if we could gain influence within the island and actually have an impact. It's a disaster if we don't, because you can see, I mean this island is basically dominated by a socialist mentality and by a socialist political class, which dominates society. It's not just corruption and colonialism, but it's unions that are very, very influential and it really is a leftist socialist mentality. And if that would change, and not just we benefited from some freedom because of Act 20 and Act 22, but Puerto Ricans actually benefited from some freedom, which would be nice, I think this island could be a pretty amazing place. Are you doing anything to work to make that happen as far as? I mean I'm not spending enough time on the island, that's very possible unfortunately. I'm open to suggestions, but I travel so much I end up spending six months in a day in Puerto Rico and probably about a hundred days in other countries around the world and the rest in the US. But I'm interested in finding ways in which we can have an influence on the island and have an influence on the politics. I think if we're going to spend here the next five to ten years, as I think some of us will, to gain the max out of these benefits, we have a strong self-interest in trying to fix the massive problems in the island. And while a lot of people think that fixing the problems in the island means writing a check or doing philanthropy or stuff like that, that's all useless, that's all a waste of time. It's never made anybody successful, it's never helped anybody in a significant way. I mean it helps an emergency, it helps somebody out of not living together, but at the end of the day if you want to really help this island, if you want to help the people in the island, if we want to raise the quality of our lives on this island, we need to have a real significant political impact on what happens here and we need to tilt this island in the direction of free markets, in the direction of capitalism, in the direction of respecting individual rights. It's bad enough that they're under American law, which is rights violating to a large degree, but they impose a whole other set of bureaucracy on top of that, which is destructive to Puerto Ricans and it's destructive to Puerto Ricans. It's going to be destructive to us, so I'm open to suggesting in terms of how we organize politically, but I think some political influence is going to be necessary if we want to live a successful life here and extend it. Many of us are here for Act 20 and Act 22, including yourself. What do you think about the potential changes with legislation that's working its way through the House here and it doesn't seem beneficial to the island, especially with the objective of this idea? Well, they claim it's not beneficial to the island, but that's just the social populism. I mean, it's massively beneficial to the island. You're bringing in a large number of well educated, highly capitalized individuals who have money, who are putting their money in Puerto Rican banks, at least some of their money, hopefully not too much. In Puerto Rican banks, you know, the Puerto Rican banks are not too big to fail. They can fail. I would not have more than $250,000 in any account. I mean, I would open, what I did is I opened an account at Bank of America. You can do it online. You don't have to have an American address. I'll accept a Puerto Rican address. Anything about 250 goes to the US. Bank of America will not fail, right? Because the socialists in Washington won't allow it because it's too big to fail. But the first bank has failed in the past and can't fail in the future. Puerto Rican banks are too small and nobody cares about what nobody's going to be able to mount. So your deposits in Puerto Rican banks are at risk. That's good to know. The other master wants to know. I don't think so. Is that well? Unless there's a big tsunami or something. Yeah, probably not. And the nice thing about natural disasters is, you get the federal government bailing you out because of natural disasters. There's a whole other category of socialists who, that's what they fund. So one way, you know, but I would be very cautious. But look, we put money in the bank accounts. We go to restaurants. We buy real estate. You know, some of them might build real estate. We hire Puerto Ricans, whether it's, you know, the simple stuff of cleaning a house or whether it's office jobs or whatever it is. We pay more educated Puerto Ricans to look at our hedge funds or whatever. Right? So, you know, Act 20 and Act 22 are fantastic. The real evil of Act 20 and Act 22 is that Puerto Ricans don't get the benefit. I mean, I understand that they're pissed off. I wouldn't be pissed off if I were paying 30%. And there was this one class of citizens only paying 4%. I mean, that's pathetic. So, I mean, I have suggested and I think the approach that should be taken is that we should advocate for lowering everybody's taxes. That is, what we should advocate is a Puerto Rican flat tax. It should be more than 10%. And it should be on everybody. And I for one, you know, you guys might disagree, but I for one would be willing to raise my taxes to achieve that because I think my quality of life would go up dramatically. Flat tax on all Puerto Ricans are 10%. But to do that, the Puerto Rican government is going to have to massively restructure itself. A third of all people employed on the island work for the Puerto Rican government. A third. So, I would fire 85% of those. Tomorrow if possible. And that's good for the Puerto Rican economy. It's good for them. I would invest heavily in only two things. Puerto Rico as a government has to invest really into only two things. More policemen and pay them more money so they don't take the jobs in Florida. I don't know if you know, but all the police here are leaving. So, we're in trouble because the climate is going to increase. The police are getting much better salaries in Florida than they are in Puerto Rico. So, they're basically leaving and packing up for Florida. And we're going to have fewer and fewer police, which is a real problem for all of us who live here. So, they should pay more to the police and hire more police. And they should, you know, until we get to the point where we can privatize the roads, which I think should be, you know, I don't think that's that difficult in a world of GPS. They should at least fix the roads. But other than that, the Puerto Rican government doesn't have to do anything. Everything else can be privatized. Everything else can be, you know, left to the private sector to do. Just shrink them by 85%. Lower taxes by, you know, it's a 10% flat tax across the board. No exceptions. Nothing, no deductions, no anything. But also tax everything a 10%. Lower the sales tax, what is it? 11%. Lower that to zero. So, a 10% flat tax income tax or corporate tax, make corporate tax, you don't put it because it's the largest. Second largest, highest in corporate tax in the world. It's like 49%. We pay 4%. On Act 20 companies, they're buying 49%. I mean, it's insanity. No country can survive with corporate tax at 49%. Lower that to 10%. Everything flat across the board, 10%. Privatize everything. And, you know, I would bring in a couple of full generation nuclear power plants that would provide electricity for this island forever at a relatively low cost. And, you know, these are power plants that can sustain a hurricane, sustain a earthquake. These are amazing technologies. And, you know, and then, you know, my theory is once we do all this an island becomes rich and, you know, everybody's making a lot of money. And it's incredibly successful. Then we succeed. Because look at that. We're the hell ones that live on American regulations. Then we succeed. But then, well, we have to be rich for us. You don't succeed before you're rich, right? So how long do you think that that would take? I mean, you said five to ten years back. Oh, I would give him four rains. It would take five years to get this island back, you know, on track to get it rich. So it would take ten to twenty years where this island is rich, rich, like Hong Kong, rich, like things like that. It would take probably ten, twenty to thirty years to become that rich. But it could be safe tomorrow. You have to be as high as the police. And decriminalized drugs, imagine Puerto Rico. Implicitly it can't because the federal government is involved. But you could decriminalize drugs implicitly by just telling the police to stop enforcing them. And let the FBI bother you about it as it enters the United States. Why would we be getting shot up over here over something that is all being consumed in the U.S.? Which is what all of Latin America should be doing. All decriminalized drugs. And stop the bloodbath in their own countries and let them enter into some of their country. It's our demand for the drugs that is fueling all these murders all over Latin America. So speaking of the U.S., midterm elections are happening tomorrow. And we have a number of things that are going to impact the States. Is there anything that's going to spill over to impact Puerto Rico? No, I mean it doesn't matter who wins. They're not going to do it with the Jones Act, which could help us a lot if they did it with the Jones Act. So affirmative, stupid, you know, government regulation. There was maybe good during World War II which would have been abolished in 1945. And it's still there in order to sustain an American shipping industry, which is an American-eater shipping industry. We talk about tribalism in spades. Farmers do shipping better than we do. Farmers do the shipping. So it increases the cost of Puerto Rico dramatically. One of the reasons things are so expensive is because of the Jones Act. So nobody's going to do away with that. No, I mean Donald Trump's still going to be president. That doesn't affect us that much over here. What else? I don't know what difference... I don't know generally what big difference is going to happen during this election. So the Democrats take the House, which will probably happen. The Republicans keep the Senate, which will probably happen. The Democrats will make life rough for Donald Trump. I can't think of a nice person it could happen to. You know, I don't think anything dramatically changes in the U.S. all here. It's not like the Republicans having the House and the Senate and the presidency have done much. They couldn't repeal Obamacare. They haven't done anything. They've increased fluid spending. They haven't, from a legislative perspective, haven't reduced regulation in a significant way. So it's as if the Democrats control the House already. It's not like the Republicans did anything. I mean, the Republicans are in a competent ruling party. They're quite good in the opposition. You know, they repealed Obamacare when they won the opposition. They cut government spending when they won the opposition because it didn't go through, because Obama wouldn't sign it. They did all these... They actually suggest that turning Medicaid into a voucher system, which I think is the only solution for Medicaid. I would like to phase it out, which gives you a mechanism to phase it out. They did all these exciting things, and as soon as they got the power to actually put it into play, they backed away from everything. Increased spending, their regulations all the same. They've done nothing. They've cut taxes, which is the only thing what Republicans are doing for it. And they didn't cut taxes on individuals that much, but that's our way of Puerto Rico. They cut taxes that much when we were stating the oaths. So, one of the things that Jim will touch on again is education. A number of schools have closed in Puerto Rico. Graduates who cut and maybe have been objective of this idea that they potentially work here on the island. What are those, and how can we start in Puerto Rico? The only thing that can help save education anyway, certainly in Puerto Rico, is to get the government's hands off of it. Government can't do education. Government only does one thing. There's only one thing government does. Well, and that is anything that has to do with the government. It's to protect us from invaders and to protect us from criminals. That is it. Anything else the government tries to do? Well, that's a government, right? Of course, it's coercion. They're good at coercion. So, when you think government, and this George Washington said this in his inaugural address, I think the second one, that's the essential characteristic of government, is forced inclusion. I don't want forced inclusion in schools. I don't want that mentality in the schools. So, the only moral, ethical, and logical thing to do with education is to privatize it all over 100%. But you have to do it smart, because you can't tomorrow say, we're not doing education, we're getting out of it, and nothing, you know, it would be a disaster. So, what you have to do is, the first step is something called education saving incomes. This was legislation passed in the United States. It passed the House of Senate, and the governor signed it, and the teaching union sued, and it's in the courts now, so who knows what will happen. But this is the idea of education saving income. I don't know how much the governor would trial that education. But let's say it's $5,000 a year. I'd be surprised if it was a lot more than that. But let's say it's $5,000 a year on per child and education. What the government would do is, they would give you, or give parents, every parent in Puerto Rico, $5,000 in a special bank income, education saving income. And that account, you could only use for education. But you get to choose what education. You could send your kids to a private school. You can home school. You can do something on the Internet. Whatever it is, you can fund from that account. The government has no say in the kind of education you provide, and you're responsible as a parent for your child's education, and you get to spend it. Now, what would happen? Entrepreneurs would enter, and start schools, because they'd be a massive market school, but it wouldn't be just demand. It wouldn't be a demand with money. People would have money that the government has given them, $5,000. So entrepreneurs would enter, and the professionals would try to enjoy the cost of school down, and the quality up. Isn't that what happens in every field where you allow competition, and you allow innovation, and you allow entrepreneurship? Prices go down, quality goes up. You can find this video on YouTube. It's a video where he's talking about education before he went back to Apple, so during his next days, right? And he talks about the fact that education is one of the only products where you don't have advertising. Like, how much time do most parents spend on choosing shoes at a shoe store? More than they spend on choosing with schools to send their kids to. We've got all our priorities upside down. Think about all the advertising in the marketing that business is spent to try to attract your attention. Imagine if schools did that. Hey, our city schools are higher than anybody else. We train kids to be great artists. We train kids to be what, whatever. Imagine hundreds of little schools that are advertising and trying to get your attention, trying to get your money, and trying to get your kids. Quality would go up dramatically. The cost would go down dramatically. Now, the beauty of the important thing about these education-saving products is that anything you save and you can wall into the next year, and you can keep, you know, you keep the money. And if you save money at the end of high school, you get a wall that ain't your college fund. And if your kid doesn't go to college, you can withdraw their money. Let's assume you have to pay taxes on it. You can all the rest is tax-free. You can withdraw money tax-free. Now, I think that we're working also in the states of the United States. We can probably work smooth and easy over there because, you know, it's going to be difficult to get out of the news in Puerto Rico. But I think it's doable. And it's, and in my world, I would phase it out, right? So in 20 years, the government would put zero in your banking on, because, again, we're going to be rich in 20 years. All those people are going to be rich in 20 years. They're in education at that point. And now the key is that everybody gets it. It's not means-tested. Everybody gets it. Everybody who has kids gets $5,000 into their account and they can use it. So there's no incentive not to work so you don't get the money. Everybody gets it. It's like, anyway. So that would be my solution to education. It's got to be frightened. The only way you'll ever improve education is by privatizing it. The government will never. So with that, it sounds like a great system. It sounds like something that I would agree to. But what about the equality of opportunity? And I think there are not as many opportunities on that level maybe because of that 49% tax as far as entrepreneurship. But what would your idea be to maximize and increase the number of opportunities on this island for that recovery? So let's start by this. There is no such thing as equality of opportunity. This is a nutty concept. It's a socialist concept. There's no such thing, right? I work very, very hard so my kids would have a lot of opportunities. So what are you going to take them away from me? Are you going to destroy the opportunities that I created for my kids? All of us work really hard but I'll give you a great opportunity. There's no such thing as equality of opportunity is the same as equality of outcome. It means destroying the opportunities that some of them create. What I want to do is maximize opportunities. By the way, my book Equal is Unfaith is all about this topic. I want to maximize opportunities. I don't want to create equality. I want to maximize the opportunities for people to create their own wealth, their own achievements, their own life for themselves. And the question is how do you do that? Well you do that by freeing them up. By not taxing them, by not regulating by not controlling them, by not telling them how to live and what businesses they can open and how much they can pay their employees. I mean it's nutty how much of our life today is controlled by government regulations and government control. You know, one of the most disastrous laws out there is the minimum wage laws, which is how they're going to use the two bucks an hour. Which one? What's that? That's probably the worst one. So basically any employee can sue you if you don't track your time to their lightning, but they're automatically fined. And this is, you know, when you... So labor law is awful. Why isn't any of the business of the government how I transact with my employees? Why do I have to give everybody benefits? You know, there are a million things that when you grow a business and a business grows a little bit, you suddenly realize that the government is controlling it. So the way to maximize opportunities is to get the government off our backs to increase economic freedom to maximize opportunities for entrepreneurs to create as much wealth as possible and therefore to create as many jobs as possible. And the way to get people out of poverty is not by giving them a check. The way to get people out of poverty is by giving them a job and the way you give them a job is by encouraging businesses. Not encouraging, just leaving businesses alone to make money by creating jobs. The way to create jobs is to make money. The more money you make, the more jobs you can create. Yeah. They have a large element of funding when they can get into student loans. So they're collected to see what's happened to the cost of higher education. The situation has gone like that. And part of it in part of the system for our higher education systems is, you know, they're spending on something like, okay, they've got a great chain of facilities and all this stuff. I mean, we're known for our grad schools that our undergrad and high school are down. It's horrible relative to the rest of the world. So how do you guard against that? Let me ask you this. Imagine there was a government program and the government program said, no matter what an iPhone costs, we'll fund 80% of it. We'll give you a loan for 80% of it at below market rates. And you'll get 30, 40, 50 years, whatever, to pay it back. What would happen to prices of iPhones? It would go way up, right? Because I'm giving you a loan. I'm not even checking your credit worthiness. By the way, I won't check your credit worthiness. I'll just fund your iPhone. And I won't take the iPhone back from you if you default. You'll go back, but I won't take the iPhone from you because I can't take education. So you're setting up a system in the United States where the university can stay kind of private. But we will fund 80% of the tuition. Any kid who wants the tuition. And any price point that is available. And we won't check the kids' credit rating. And we don't care what degree you get. If you go and study, I don't know, anthropology or English or gender study, even that. And you can't get a job afterwards. We don't care because we're just lending you money. No bank would do this, right? So imagine if the government said tomorrow we're stopping to fund college education. Zero. It's gone. We're not lending anybody any money ever again. Or what happens to tuition? Go on. Or what happens to tuition? Crap. Tuition would come dramatically down. Universities would fire all the... You know where the tuition goes? Where does all this increase in money go? Because professors... You know they're making good living, but they're not like gazillionaires. And it's not like salaries and professors went like this. They didn't. So at least professors went out, but they didn't go anywhere near as much as tuition has gone up. So that's not where the money went. You think they'd hire more professors and the student-teacher ratio would shrink, right? Better education because it's more expensive. No. No more students put professors to go 50 years ago. That hasn't changed one bit. So where's the tuition gone? These are amazing. I mean they put extra kids to pay $80,000 a year to go to school. We are tax payers. Subsidizing them. $80,000. $80,000. $80,000. $80,000. $80,000. $80,000. $80,000.