 Alright. Hey everyone. I'm just up here real quick to make some announcements about young conservatives of Texas. We're very excited to co-host Dr. Brooke here today. For those of you aren't familiar, young conservatives of Texas is a non-partisan conservative political student organization here at UT and actually at universities across Texas. We have about 10 chapters right now and have had chapters at almost every school at various points. We're engaged in the full spectrum of politics. We're engaged at the campus level, which you may be familiar with if you're a student here, but we're also very engaged at the state political level, which is one of our primary focuses. Occasionally we pay attention to what's happening in the swamp as well. But if you have any questions about our organization, feel free to come to me afterwards. Otherwise, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, just search Young Conservatives of Texas, specify UT chapter because that may take you to our state board page instead. And thank you very much for all the organizations, Horns for Liberty, Unray Institute, and UT SIPA for co-hosting this event. All right. Thank you, everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm Mason Thomas. I'm the president of Horns for Liberty, which is a brand new libertarian student organization. Me and a few friends started just last semester. So like he said, we're excited to have everyone out here. And a few things about Horns for Liberty. Standard libertarian organization, Austrian economics, all the good stuff. We talked about philosophy. I'm trying to blank here. We talked about philosophy, economics. We talked about literature and poetry, anything you can talk about. There's something for everyone because there's something for everyone in libertarianism. Our next meeting is February 4th at 5 p.m. If you want to know more about that, you can talk to me afterwards. We'll be talking about the location. Thank you for coming. Hello. Good evening. Can you hear me? Yeah? All right. Perfect. My name is Mario Villarreal. I'm the managing director of the Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics here at UT. And we are happy to co-sponsor this event with these great organizations. Thank you, guys, for working and being active as students. To those of you, this is the first event of the semester that we are co-sponsoring. You will receive an email with more events that we have for coming for this semester. So stay tuned for that. And I'm going to introduce our speaker today. Geron Brooke was born and raised in Israel. He has an impressive amount of academic and entrepreneurial accomplishments. But I'm going to start with the most important one. In 1987, he moved to the United States, but then he received that not his achievement. Well, moving to this country is an achievement, I guess. But that's not the one I want to highlight. I would say that he received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. So his home. Welcome home. Welcome home, Geron. For seven years, he was also an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University. He also confounded a private equity firm, BH Equity Research, where he is the founder and director. From 2000 to 2017, Dr. Brooke was the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He remained chairman of the board and his primary spokesperson and also serves on the board of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He's a member of the Association for Private Enterprise Education at the Montpoll around society. He's an accomplished book author. I'm not going to name all his work, but I will highlight his most recent book co-author with Don Watkins. The book is called In Pursuit of Wealth, The Moral Case for Finance, where they make the case that despite the conventional image of financiers as greedy and reckless, finance is a moral industry. Another book that I really enjoy reading by Brooks and Watkins is Equal is Unfair, America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, where they show that the real key to making America a freer, fairer, and more prosperous nation is to protect and celebrate the pursuit of success, not pull down the high fliers on the name of inequality. He was a columnist of Forbes.com and his articles have been featuring in several places, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor of Business Daily, and many other publications. I really recommend also that you take a look at his podcast, the Jaron Brooks Show. Jaron, thanks for being with us today. He's going to speak on internet and free speech. All right. Thank you. It's great to be back in Texas. We live in pretty amazing times. I mean, we each of us have in our pockets a supercomputer that is more powerful than the computers that flew man to the moon. And it costs us almost nothing. All of us have it. On that supercomputer that we have, my wonderful iPhone, we have the capacity to communicate with people on the other side of the planet at a marginal cost of, how much does it cost you to talk to anybody anywhere in the world at any time? How much does it cost? It's free. Zero. Zero cost. I remember AT&T long distance and calling foreign countries and getting these massive bills in the mail. We cannot communicate with anybody at any time. We can discuss politics. We can discuss business. We can, you know, FaceTime with our kids no matter where we are in the world. And we can access pretty much every piece of information produced by the human race in human history. The libertarian group is doing poetry, right? You can search poetry from any time and it's right here. You used to have to go, you know, they're building in the corner opposite Jesper. It's called the library. I don't know if you've been there. I assume your generation never goes in a library because it's here. Why go at the library? It's truly amazing. And we have the ability to create little communities. We can get our friends together on Facebook or Instagram or whatever you guys are using these days. It's hard for me to keep up with you and put our photos and fun stuff and, you know, we can also get into politics. We can get into whatever we want. Every one of us has become a publisher of whatever we feel like, whatever we want. Often that's a good thing. Sometimes it's not so good, but it's available. It's our choice. We have control of it. We can do pretty much what we want. I've been on Twitter most of the day up at 20,000 feet. Flying from, you know, where I live to here. I was on Twitter and Facebook and communicating with people and giving out a, you know, producing a message. They didn't like it for some reason, but giving my commentary on the events of the day. And it's amazing. It's amazing. I can get to thousands, tens of thousands of people. Some people out there have followings where they can get to millions of people instantaneously, anytime, anywhere, even in a plane, flying 30,000 feet above us. It's a truly amazing world, but it comes with risks. It comes with certain downsides, this ability. Sometimes we see posts on Facebook or Twitter or whatever that we don't like. It might be even hurtful. It might be unpleasant. It might create negative emotions. It might be challenging, provocative, ugly, stupid, you know, fill in the blank. There are a million different variations of the bad stuff one can be exposed to online. At any one of these platforms, at any one of these avenues that we go, we might do a Google search and not find the answer that we think we should find. Maybe it's on page three instead of on page one. We get frustrated. We're upset. And if you think about it, the companies who built all this, and think about it, somebody built this stuff. It's something we all forget. We take it for granted. There's Google, and there's Facebook, and there's Twitter, and there's a million other services on there. How did they get there? I mean, for your generation, they were just there pretty much when you were born. They just, Google just is. And it's easy to forget that somebody had to have an idea, an idea that was better than anybody else's idea. But then they had to implement that idea. Had to take massive risk, raise money. Other people had to believe in that idea. Hire some people, work day and night. And if you travel in their high-tech areas here in Austin, I don't know where they are anymore. They used to be out on 360. Now I think more of them are downtown. You see the lights on at 2, 3 in the morning because people are working. People are building. People are creating. Somebody built every single one of these companies. And not a single one of these companies had to be successful. Every one of them faced massive competition from other companies that were doing either similar things or different things, but in the same space. Facebook had to, in a sense, compete with MySpace. Anybody here on MySpace? Anybody remember MySpace? Yeah, all the old people remember MySpace. MySpace was huge. Nobody could compete with MySpace, we were told. Every one of these companies was an idea that people, capitalists, believed in, that had to be built. People worked hard. Every one of these companies is a massive achievement. They've changed the world. And if you compare a Google search today to AltaVista or to AOL or to all the stuff we used to do in the old days, wow, what we have today is so cool. Why? Because people are creative, productive. They worked hard. They competed. They figured it out. They solved problems. And they created what we have today. So we always have to remember that there's a creation here in the background. There's an achievement here in the background. So we see stuff we don't like. And we're customers. We're customers. And the people in these companies also see stuff they don't like. And we've encountered over the last months, years, the phenomena of a lot of these companies making choices about what content we get to see. And they've taken a lot of content offline. They've said, you can't show it on our platform, right? Whether it's Alex Jones, who is kicked out of what? YouTube, Facebook. I don't think Twitter kicked him out. But Apple, pretty much everybody kicked him out. Now I happen to think he's a pretty shady, nasty character. So I didn't feel too bad about him. But somebody made a decision. We don't want Alex Jones. And some of you might have watched Alex Jones, whether for entertainment, I hope only for entertainment, never for facts, never for actual information. You might have been upset. Wait a minute. I was used to getting my dose of conspiracy theories every morning. And now it's gone. This is not fair. They have, on occasion, I think Twitter took down Jordan Peterson and then put him back up and then take it down and then put him back up. I think this happened at least twice. Right? And of course, the big one is YouTube. Think about YouTube. Wow. I mean, I do my show on YouTube. And I put video up there. And YouTube goes out and they have these sales people that go out and sell my show and they put advertising on my show and I get paid for that. Not a lot of money. It's kind of peanuts. But anyway, it pays for the tips to the valet. But I'm getting advertising on something I do with how much work do I put into that, getting that advertising? Zero? Nothing? I kind of click on a button called monetize. That's all the work that I do. But sometimes YouTube thinks we don't like what you said, Iran. We're not going to monetize you. There are few things that I say YouTube doesn't like. Anytime I talk about sex, they don't like it. Certain issues in politics, they don't like. But it always surprises me the stuff they don't like because it's not what I would have expected. But people like Prager, everybody here know Prager University? Prager University is being demonetized often. And they get real money from the ads because a lot of people watch their stuff. So they've been demonetized. Dave Rubin has often been demonetized. A lot of his shows. If you're a critic of Islam generally, anytime I go on and say anything negative about Islam, forget it. You don't get monetized. So certain issues that YouTube has decided, they will not monetize. And Prager, if you know the story, Prager is suing them now to try to get them to, I guess, to force them to monetize his content. They chose. They get to choose. They're platform. And this has created a real uproar, probably the most recent phenomena in terms of this. Is anybody familiar with Patreon? All right. Some of you might even be supporters of some shows on Patreon. Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson, you're on Bookshow. We all have Patreon pages. Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson don't have theirs anymore. Why did they take them off? Because Patreon has recently been taking people off. They've been saying, we don't want you on our platform. Patreon, for those who don't know, is a platform where you can monetarily support shows, creators, artists that you like. All they do is facilitate the transaction. You make a contribution. They charge it on a regular basis, and they mail the check to the creator, and they charge your credit card or your PayPal account on a regular basis. And they've said, you know, certain people we don't like, certain people we don't want on our platform. One of those was Sagan Avakad called Benjamin, who's a British guy. Again, critical of Islam and borderline on some issues, I would say, kind of pushes the envelope on a lot of issues. But he said the N-word in some interview on some other platform, on somebody else's podcast, and saying the N-word once on the entire Internet by this one individual got him kicked off of Patreon. And a lot of people have said, okay, that's enough is enough. This is, you know, you've gone too far. We're leaving your platform. So there's been a lot of this going on in the last few months. A lot of these platforms kicking people off, and a lot of people stepping back from the platforms because they're saying now, and particularly when it comes to money, right, it makes it more difficult because if I'm relying on an income, right, Jordan Peterson was a lot of money, right, a regular Patreon income, and they can, like that, just take you offline, which they can't. Then it's hard to plan for the future. If it's arbitrary like that, if you don't know what the criteria is going to be for them just dropping you. So a lot of people have said, we can't rely on this, we're gonna in, there's rumors now that, or not rumors, they've said that Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin are creating their own platform that, you know, who knows what's that gonna be like. They're gonna have to make choices too, right? So there's a big out quite, particularly among conservatives and some libertarians, that wait a minute, they're biased. These platforms are biased. They don't like conservatives. So they drop more conservatives than people from the left. Now they drop people from the left as well, but they drop clearly more people from the right than from the left. They're biased in these platforms and people upset and people that demand the action and they want to do something about it because it's not, it's not fair. I've got something to say and Facebook is not letting me say it. We become used to the fact that we can post anything, anytime, anywhere, and Facebook saying, Twitter saying, Patreon saying, no, some of you can't. We're not allowing this content. And I think a big part of the problem is, for those of us who create content, is we don't know what the standards are. Probably the biggest problem is if the standards were clear, maybe it would help, but we don't know when we're in violation of their codes and when we're not in violation of their codes. So it's a challenge for those of us who create content. But there's a huge uproar. You've heard it, those of you, somebody mentioned Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson's calling for the government to intervene, for the breakup of all these internet companies. We're seeing it from the left. The left wants to break up these internet companies because they're too big. I don't know if you heard Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, say there shouldn't be any billionaires. A society that has billionaires is by definition an immoral society. She said that I think yesterday. So all these billionaires, all these people in the internet companies, we want to break them up. We want to take their money. It's just not fair. It's just not right. But the issue on the right in the Republican Party is this issue of the biased against us. And because they're biased against us, we, the government, needs to do something. So let's talk about that, about what should be done. Is this a problem? Is there any justification for these companies to do what they're doing? And how do we deal with this whole thing? And it's not just like Facebook and Twitter de-platforming people. It's also the fact that when you do a Google search, when you do a Google search, the results seem biased. You can tell there's a certain attitude. Somebody did great innovators in history, the greatest innovators in history. And the top 10 were like African-Americans on Google. And some pretty obscure inventors, as compared to, let's say, Thomas Edison. So it seems to be a politically correct bias, a social justice-motivated impact. You know the Southern Poverty Center? What are the Southern Poverty Center? Southern Poverty Center issues these lists of people that they view as racists. And it's basically what any, I get, social justice left would view as racist. Often these people, the people they list, are not racist at all. But they've just got people that the Southern Poverty Center likes. It looks like a lot of the social media companies are using their list to kind of decide who to be nice to and who not to be nice to. So it seems like these institutions of the left have enormous power over these Silicon Valley, I think they're all Silicon Valley, internet companies, or mostly Silicon Valley internet companies. What should be done? Well, let's first think, put ourselves in the shoes of these companies, right? Because I think nobody really does that. If you ran Facebook, if you ran Twitter, or any of these platforms, would you allow all content, no matter what it was, like people wanted to post pornography? No. ISIS wanted to post videos of people cutting people's heads, or just recruitment videos, to their cause. No matter who runs the platform, they have to be standards. They're going to be standards. A platform with no standards is not going to be successful. Platform with pornography. Parents are not going to allow their kids on it. A platform with ISIS. People are going to abandon it, partially because, you know, these people want to kill us and it's a little treasonous. They help them along. So, every platform has to have a standard. How do you create an algorithm to decide of the millions of websites out there, which one to put first, which one to put second, which one to put third when you do a Google search? I mean, part of that algorithm is going to depend on the values, on the ideas of the people writing the software. There's no other way to do it. You're going to have to evaluate these sources generally are more reliable than those sources, and I'm going to give them a bigger weight in the algorithm or whatever they do it, right? There's no way for AI or for the many programs out there to be completely 100% all the time objective and to go do fact checks on every single website that's out there. That's not their job. That's not what they do. So, they have to rank websites based on reliability, and what's going to determine whether they rank something reliable or not reliable? Well, certain preconditions, preconceived notions that they might have, certain biases or ideas that they might have or what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false, who's a reliable source and who's not a reliable source. So, even if you ran any one of us, ran Google, somebody would complain that there was bias in the search results, that it wasn't quite a line. And what should be the terms and conditions of posting material? How do you define them? How do you articulate them? Now, I think you could do a better job than a lot of these companies. But I also think one of the things that we forget is how difficult it is to figure out, okay, ISIS I don't want, I don't want pornography, where's the line? How about Hamas? How about just a Muslim who wants to preach his religion? He's not chopping off people's heads, but he wants to preach his religion. All right, maybe that's okay. When does it bleed into violence? All right, what about racists? What about the Klu Klux Klan? What about white identitarians? What I mean, there are a million different variations. There has to be a criteria, but it's not easy. Even for the best of us, I don't think it's easy to figure out what that criteria is going to be. I think one of the interesting things that's going to come out from this, I assume everybody knows who Dave Rubin is and Jordan Peterson, it's going to be really interesting to see what comes from their collaboration. In terms of what standards do they have? Because they've already said, we're going to have standards. We're not going to be able to post everything, but what are those standards going to be? So before we go bashing people, before we go, we're attacking them, before we try big political solutions and breaking them up and regulating them, whatever, but even just morally being offended by what they're doing, I think it's worthwhile taking a step back and just evaluating and thinking about how hard what they're trying to do actually is. It's not easy to figure out what you want on the platform, even if you're trying to be 100% objective and not be motivated by politics or philosophy or ideas and can we be not motivated? Well, that's the other thing. How can you be not motivated? Silicon Valley, I lived there for seven years, so it's an interesting place. Incredibly hardworking people, incredibly productive people, incredibly smart people. People who generally take ideas seriously. People who win at some very good universities, or if they didn't go to universities, the dropout phenomena, they read a lot. They're immersed in the culture in which we live. They're influenced by the books and by the ideas that are present in the culture. I think because they're smart, they take those ideas seriously. What is the culture? UT maybe is an exception, maybe I'm not even sure, but if you went to Princeton and Harvard and Stanford and Berkeley, what is the culture? What is the culture about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable to say? What are acceptable ideas and what are not acceptable ideas in the culture? What's dominated? These universities are dominated by one political view that dominated by philosophers, political scientists, academics on the left. And what's prevalent today is these ideas that are emotions, a primary. I don't know, do you have microaggressions at UT? Anybody allowed to microaggress in UT? No, no microaggressions in UT. All right, no trigger warnings? You're in the syllabus, you don't have trigger warnings? You had trigger warnings, yeah. Yeah, so the trigger warnings, his professor has trigger warnings. So even at UT, you have trigger warnings, you know what a trigger warning is. And in California, it's not required, but it's recommended that every professor when they issue the syllabus have warnings, right? In Huck Finn, they use the N-word. So I'm just preparing you because I know you're delicate and I know your generation can't handle it. You might read a word that you think is ugly and we just want to prepare you for it, right? In Oxford University in England, what happens in the U.S. is we come up with the craziest ideas and then we export them. I don't know, there's no import-export balance. I mean, we need a measure of the importation, exploitation of ideas. We import the deep philosophical ideas usually from Germany and then we export the BS, kind of the application of those ideas in the most superficial, stupid way possible to the rest of the world. And in Oxford, a couple of years ago, I was in a class and they told me that if you're in law school, right, law school and you're studying criminal law, if you're going to be emotionally upset by the class on rape, the law of rape, you don't have to attend. You can skip that one and you won't be tested on it. It won't hurt you. You just don't have to attend. You're going to be a criminal lawyer. You're going to be upset by a class on something truly upsetting but okay, get over it. Real life is pretty harsh, particularly if you're a criminal lawyer. But no, they can be excused. This is the whole microaggression, trigger warning, emotions of primary. So think about the fact that these companies are filled with people who've been trained at these universities, trained in these ideas and now they have to make decisions. People making decisions. This content's acceptable and this one's not. Well, how are they going to make those decisions based on what they've learned, based on what their professors taught them, based on what the intellectual culture that we live in says are good ideas versus bad ideas. Again, who's going to get the short? Who's going to be deep platformed? Who's going to be kicked out? Yeah, it's not surprising that it's more conservatives than it is liberals. They're not surprising that it's more on the right generally than it is on the left because they come from the left. To them, all the ideas of the left sane and insane are part of their world. The ideas of the right are far into them. The ideas of capitalism, of free markets are far into them. I'm not sure that's on the right anymore. I think that's in a different dimension. But the whole set of ideas that does not constitute what were taught today on the university campuses about what are they? 30 different genders? No, I think I'm behind the times. I think there's more or less. I don't know. But that's just normal. And if you go on YouTube and say, no, no, no, they're just two genders, oh my God, all hell breaks loose. And YouTube, the people who watch the videos, because when they demonetize you, because the machine demonetizes you, they pick up keywords, I think. And then you can ask for a manual review. And then the manual review sometimes will confirm the demonetization. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes they'll actually reverse it. I've had a lot of videos where it reversed it. But the person watching the video is going, yeah, yeah, no, that's offensive. That's really bad. You can't say that. My professor told me. So at the end of the day, it's not surprising that these companies do what they do. Because they're employees, a part of a culture where this is what we've trained them. Some ideas acceptable. Some are not. Some are beyond the pale. That's what they learned in universities. Remember the demonstrations at Berkeley when Ben Shapiro came to town? I mean, they were burning tires. They were pepper-strain people and they wouldn't let him speak. Or demonstrations when Jordan Peterson or even Dave Rubin, who's, wow, I mean, nicest guy in the world and not particularly radical other than for free speech, you know, here he is, he's being demonstrated against. That's the mentality on campuses. That mentality spills over, has to spill over. Once they graduate and go to work and bring those ideas with them, and now they're asked, what do you think? Should this be on the platform or shouldn't it be on the platform? So none of this is surprising. It's hard. And you're putting it into the hands of people who are being trained in a particular way. So then the question, okay, what do we do about it? So let's start with what people are proposing we do about it. I mean, the biggest proposal on the right is that we somehow regulate this. We get a bunch of bureaucrats, we love those guys, right? We get a bunch of bureaucrats and we assign them the role of deciding how a platform, what content a platform should put up and what it shouldn't put up. We let bureaucrats and politicians make decisions about who on the left and who on the right is okay and given that we have to have standards, who is not okay? Now, that should be enough to dissuade you from that idea, just saying it, just making it, but it's not. People excited about this. A long time ago in the United States, there used to be this idea that on television and on radio, you had to have equal representation. What was the name of the law? It just slipped my mind, the FANIS Act. And the idea was for every conservative view, you had to have a liberal view. What about the libertarian view? What about the socialist view? What about the communist view? Forget about that. Just for every liberal idea, you'd have to have a conservative idea and we'll evade all the other ideas. Very conventional, very middle of the road, supposedly very balanced. It was a disaster. And that went away in the Reagan administration in the 1980s. And what happened? Radio became dominated by what? By whom? By conservatives. By Rush Limbaugh originally. Glenn Beck. And a whole slew of Hannity and all these guys. They dominate. Imagine if there was a FANIS Act. And for every conservative voice on radio, you'd have to have a liberal voice on radio. And even if the whole radio stations, radio networks out there that have a mission of the religious right, there's a number of them, very Christian radio stations, they would be forced to have atheists on their show for the sake of what? Balance of ideas. Every TV station, Fox, would actually have to be fair and balanced. Wow, what a concept. Well, unfair and unbalanced by giving the left a voice there as if left and right make a balance. I consider both of them. Apox in both their houses. I don't see how that's balanced. I mean, it's absurd to even conceive of something like that and not take that to the Internet. Where all of us are posting constantly, all the time. How are you going to measure them? How are you going to penalize Facebook for having too much liberal content? Or penalize us, the actual people who post? How are you going to apply this? How are you going to actually work it out? What are the regulations going to be, the terms and conditions, you know, that thing that nobody reads and everybody signs that they're okay with? That's going to be written by legislators? Have you ever read laws that these idiots write in Washington D.C.? It's completely unintelligible. Try reading Dodd-Frank. I've tried. Try reading Dodd-Frank. I make any sense of Dodd-Frank. Now you want to apply that logic to the terms and conditions under which you're going to use the Internet? And everybody might be happy if you're conservative when they're conservatives in power. Let me know when that happens, by the way. And if you're a liberal, you might be really happy when they're liberals in power. But you're not going to be happy when the other party is in power and they're writing the particular regulations that dictate what's going to be. It always surprises me with libertarians. Always surprises me that, oh, we want to shrink government. We want to limit government. We want to reduce government, except here, right? Except in this one space, whatever the space happens to be. We want to give a lot of power to government over here, like have them control what Facebook and Twitter and these massive companies do online. Are you nuts? Do you know what kind of power that gives politicians? What power that gives government to control what we do and how we interact and what we post? It's a form of controlling all of us. It's statism on steroids. And that anybody on the right who still pretends to be pro-freedom or pro-free markets or pro-free property rights, I mean, we're all for deregulation. We want to deregulate this and deregulate it, except we want a new regulation of social media companies. That's an easy one to do. About ideas. We want to regulate ideas. And people are concerned about free speech. Well, what about the free speech of YouTube? To decide what speech to allow on their platform, what speech not to allow on their platform. That's what free speech is about. Movie theaters have to decide what movies they allow in the movie theater. What movies they don't. Some movie theaters don't want to show, I don't know, boring, meandering, sex-filled, French movies. Imagine creating a movie that's sex-filled and boring. That's an achievement, right? Only the French are good at. Sorry, I just watched a couple of French movies and it was so boring. But, you know, everybody has to make these kind of decisions. Private, you know, private institutions that have auditoriums like this have to decide who to allow up on stage and who not to allow up on stage. Many of them say, you know, we don't want racist on stage or we don't want ISIS on stage or we don't want... They have a list. And it's their property. They get to decide. And if you say, no, no, no, we're gonna force you to have this person on the list, whose freedom of speech are you protecting and whose freedom of speech are you violating? You're violating the owner's freedom of speech, his freedom to deny speech on his property. Because you cannot separate freedom of speech from property. Freedom of speech is not the right to be able to say whatever you want, any way you want, at whatever time you want, on anybody's property. It's that you have a right that the government, all freedom of speech means is the government cannot stop you from speaking on your property. It doesn't mean you have to write to come on my property and speak whatever you want on my property. And YouTube is not ours. YouTube is YouTube's. It's Google's. Facebook is owned by Facebook. It's a property right. They get to decide who gets to speak. It's their freedom of speech that manifests in who gets to speak. And we want to violate that. We want to throw all the ideas about property rights, about free markets, about free speech out the window, because we don't like who's being deplatformed and being platformed. That's where we are today, unfortunately, as solutions that the right presents to problems out there. But the left has another solution and some on the right as well. We're not gonna regulate them. We're gonna let the market regulate them. How are we gonna do that? We're gonna break them up. We're gonna break them up. They're too big. We want 55 different Facebooks, not one. And then we have different standards on each one of them. And we'll see and we'll have competition. And the people who get deplatformed on this standard will be able to go to that stand, to that platform, and there'll be lots of platforms. And this will be really cool. This is the left solution. Let's use antitrust. They're too big anyway and they'd like to throw in Amazon and everybody else into the pool. Once we're breaking up companies, let's go for it. That's our fun. Why just limit it to social media? What do you think would happen if you did that? First of all, we already have it, like there's Facebook and there's Instagram and there's Twitter and there's like lots of them. But what would happen if you physically forced them to break up completely? Well in the beginning, we'd all go to the little social media thing that we liked. So we'd have these little eco chambers, which we have anyway, but now they'd be magnified even bigger. So you'd have the conservative Facebook and the leftist Facebook and the libertarian Facebook and their wacky Facebook and all these other things. But of course, part of the reason I post stuff on Facebook on Twitter is not just to reach people who already agree with me, that's kind of boring, but to reach a broader audience. And there's no way for me to reach a broader audience if everybody's equal to it. So somebody would start a neutral platform. And guess what would happen very quickly is my guess, right? All these other platforms got a business because they were too small and they'd be one platform. The reason we have one big Facebook is because that's what makes sense market-wise. And yeah, you could keep them from merging. You could have the FCC making big decisions about mergers of Facebook platform. I mean, the whole thing is absurd. Why? Because what's sad that these private organizations have made decisions we don't like. Tough. They're private people. Believe me, there's about 7.5 billion people on planet Earth that make decisions I don't like every single day. None of my business. Not some of it is my business. Still doesn't help me, right? It's not my job. It's not our job to tell other people how to run their business and how to run their property and how to run their business. I do not think we can look to government for solutions for any of this. So what are the solutions? I don't think there's an easy one. I don't think there's an easy one. I think it's the same problem that those of us who believe in free markets, those of us who believe in capitalism, those of us who have certain views that are maybe not part of the intellectual mainstream of America today face. It's just in one more place. What do we do about the fact that by some surveys, 90% of all professors at American universities, at least in humanities, are way left of center? That troubles me more than what happens on Facebook, because in my view that dictates what happens in Facebook. So if I'm really worried about the tilt to the left in American culture, then you have to start where the tilt started. You have to start where the tilt is most significant. And that's at the universities. That's where you should be worried about. And how do you change that? It's kick him all out and how do you do that? And who are you going to replace them with? Where are all the conservative rights, whatever professors who didn't get those jobs? Maybe it's people oriented towards the left to go into academia and they dominate. Where are all the libertarians who could replace those jobs? They're not there. They don't exist. The free market advocates, there's like a handful of us in the big picture. We couldn't fill those jobs. So you can come up with grandiose plans, but the fact is that if you want to change the culture and Facebook and Twitter and all these platforms are just one part of that culture, it's hard work. It means we're going to have to convince people. It means we're going to have to do the work to argue our ideas, to convince people of the justice of what we say. We're going to have to convince people that they are wrong, that there's a better view of the world. We're going to have to go out there and do the heavy lifting of intellectual battle, of intellectual confrontation. And we have to win. We have to have good ideas in order to win. We have to write the right ideas in order to win. There are no shortcuts. And suddenly we can't look for government to provide us with a shortcut. Maybe some of us need to become entrepreneurs and create the next Facebook and do a better job than Facebook does. I mean, I would love to see all these platforms, all I would like. My solution would be, and if I were advocating to those organizations, the solution would be simple. All I want is a clear statement of what you'll have on your platform, what you won't have on a platform. The FCC has seven words you can't say on the radio. There's seven. And if you say any one of those words, you get fined. And if you say enough of them, often enough, you get kicked off the radio. Or like, what's his name, Stern? Howard Stern got kicked off because he'd say it every show pretty much, right? But there were seven words. So, you know, you don't say I did radio training once at a university in Southern California. And they literally have a whole hour and a half class on the seven words you're not allowed to say. All right. I'm fine. I don't have to say those seven words. I can manage without them. I don't think the government should impose them, but Facebook could say, hear the things you're not allowed to say. Hear the things we don't like. Hear the things that if you say, or you post, or you depict, we deplatform you. And it would be nice if they had an appeals process, right? We could actually go and say, hey, look, I didn't really say that word. You misunderstood because I have a funny accent. I don't know, something like that, right? Or whatever it happens to be, but there's no appeal process today. You get an email saying we don't like you anymore. You're deplatformed. You said this and this and that's it. There's nobody to talk to. There's nobody to ask questions. There's nobody to challenge. So just basic objective business stuff is what I think these platforms could be, would provide us. And it would make life a lot easier because then I'd know, okay, if I'm going to Facebook, which Facebook owns, they get to set the terms and conditions. These are the terms and conditions. And if I don't want them, I don't go to Facebook. Easy. And then competition can arise by saying, here's a different set of standards. And if you like my standards more, come to me. And now we can have a real discussion. Now, they don't have to do this. That's the beauty of their property, right? But it would be nice if they did it. It would be helpful if they didn't. If we were going to lobby for something, if we're going to argue for something, if we're going to try to have some influence with them, that's what I think would be ideal. Hopefully. And then if we don't like what they do, then we should start competition. Everybody complains that Silicon Valley is so leftist. Then okay, a bunch of right wing people start your own companies and go compete. Right? I don't know if that's better or worse. I'm not sure these days. But, you know, they made the money. They built the companies. They created the stuff. It's theirs. We didn't, or you didn't, or somebody didn't, right? I didn't. So it's on mine. If I wanted a better Facebook, I should have gone and built it myself. So at the end of the day, the certain things we can ask from these companies, the certain things we can even demand from these companies, and the certain circumstances in which we can leave these companies. But I think a lot of them all I rage about a lot of it, some of it's justified, some of it's exaggerated, and most of it abandons the context of the achievement that these companies have created. It's an amazing world, as I started with. It's an amazing world. The products that they have provided us have made our lives better, richer, amazing. We might have quibbles. We might have complaints. We might not like certain aspects of it. They built it. They created it. It's theirs. It's not ours. We can use it. We cannot use it. Our choice. But we have no right. If we value liberty, if we value freedom, we have no right to demand and to use force and to use coercion on them to make them change. What we need, if we want to change the culture, is to change the culture. And that's the hard work of convincing people that our ideas are right, whatever ideas happen to be. No shortcuts. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to have time for some questions. Just three basic rules of engagement. Please wait until you get the microphone. So we're broadcasting this. So please wait until you get the microphone. Then state your name and affiliation if possible. And most importantly, praise your comment in the form of a question. No, seriously. You could ask a question that would be fantastic. So there you can call the shots if you want. This ends up, please. We can broaden it to other issues if you feel like it. I'm always game. Thank you, Dr. Brook. My question for you is kind of the market situation we find ourselves in when it comes to not only social media, but publishing platforms in general. And this is a distinction that Senator Ted Cruz has brought up is that in the United States, publishers have certain rights and platforms have certain rights. And the market tends to favor platforms significantly more, but platforms are now acting like publishers. Do you think that distinction matters legally, morally? What are your thoughts on that? I had a iota of respect for Senator Ted Cruz until he made that comment. I mean, that's insane. Think of what a publisher does. So I've written books, right? So you submit a manuscript into a publisher and they get lots of these. And then they say yes to some and they say no to others. And then the ones they say yes to, they then edit and they mark it and they physically publish, right? They print them and they put them up on digital platforms and they do all this work around your piece of product. A newspaper, highest staff, by the way, the publishers have editors, they have copy editors, they have everything, right? A newspaper, highest journalist to go out there into the field and write stories for the newspaper. And if you want to write an op-ed, you have to submit it and they say no to most of them and they publish a few of them and again they'll edit them and they have an editorial point of view, clearly an editorial point of view. But what does Facebook do? You post whatever you want on Facebook. Nobody edits it. Nobody reviews it. Nobody screens it for the most part, right? 99.9% of your content just goes up. And then once in a while they say, this is offensive to us. We don't want it. Now you might not like the 0.1% that they think is offensive. You might think, no, no, no, no, you're being biased or it doesn't matter. They're not publishing. They're not hiring you to write for them. They're not editing your content. They're just saying this certain, let's say it was just porn that they didn't want. Would we say they were publisher because they're screening out porn? Okay, but you say it's political issues. Okay, so what about ISIS and what about the KKK and what about, is there, none of that constitutes publishing. It constitutes standards and those standards might be standards, again, you might not like and we might not agree with, but the standards for what they view as acceptable content, but there's nothing in that process that is similar to the intensity and the scrutiny and the work that is done by a publisher and I'll give you what will happen if you do away with the distinction. Why is the distinction important? Stinction is important because if a publisher publishes a book and if the book liable somebody or if a book says something about somebody that's false and that person sues, they will sue the publisher and the author and the publisher is liable because they screened it, they edited it, and they fact-checked it hopefully and now they are liable for that. Imagine if you applied that standard to Twitter where people are swearing each other, calling people's names, making up stories about one another, lying about each other all the time. Now anybody could sue anybody and Twitter would be liable. Forget it, then it's done. There is no, right? Or imagine a Facebook every time you put up a story, every time you put up a story from any source, you are held liable for whether that story is false or true, whether it liable somebody or not and Facebook is as well. I mean that would be insane to do that, right? The person who's responsible for the liable is the person who wrote the article and the publication, the fact-checked it and approved it and put it out there. Not the people who share it and that to me is not a hard distinction to make between a real publisher and a platform that allows people to put up. But even a platform has to have standards. It can't just allow everything on there. Those standards don't make it a publisher. I really couldn't believe, because Ted Cruz is not an idiot. I couldn't believe when he asked that question. Regarding the universities as a wellspring of radical illiberal ideologies, Jordan Peterson, Jason Haleide Poe University is called for defunding disciplines, specifically identity studies, sociology for being a wellspring of postmodernism. Do you agree with that as a solution? Well, who's going to defund them? I've for many, many, many years, when I speak to business groups, I say, if you want to help America, the one best thing you can do to help America is stop giving your alma mater money. Because you're giving money to the institutions that are teaching that you're a bad guy. By being a capitalist, by being a businessman, you're bad. So, stop doing it in your own self-defense. Stop funding your enemy. So, I'm all for defunding them in that sense. Now, again, do we want politics? Do we want politicians to decide which departments acceptable and which departments are not acceptable? Now, I would like, in my fantasies, I would like government to get out of funding education completely. I would like UT to become a private university. It's rich enough. It's got all those oil wells in east Texas. I don't want government to be involved in funding because that's the danger that some politician says, that economics department way too capitalist. Cut them off. And I'm sure it's happened. I wouldn't be at all surprised that it's happened. So, private people? Absolutely. I mean, if you're an alma mater and they want money, send it to the engineering school or to the sciences or to the medical school. But don't give the money to the humanities or even to the business school because business schools are anti-business. Business schools are anti-business, including the one at UT. I was there. And I know the professors. Some of them are good. Some of them are not in a sense of pro-business. They teach, you know, they teach bad stuff. So, if I had the money, I don't give to my alma mater because of this because I want to control. If I'm going to give the money, I want to make sure that it's going to promote values, I believe it. And if every businessman did that, every businessman did that. I think there was a story a long time ago, and it's not that long ago, probably in the last 10 years, at Duke University, Duke in North Carolina. The student newspaper published this interview with a philosophy professor who was asked why are most of the professors at the universities left? Why is Duke so dominantly left? I guess the newspaper went into the voting records and discovered that everybody's a registered Republican. This is in the south, right, in North Carolina. 80% of the professors were registered Democrats. So, he asked the philosophy professor, why is this? And the philosophy said, basically quoting John Stuart Mill, conservatives are just stupid. He said this, right? Conservatives are stupid. So, they don't get PhDs. So, they're not professors. So, we're not going to hire them at Duke. We only hire the best professors. And since conservatives are stupid, we only hire liberals because they're the smart ones, right? Now, you would think. Now, who's the alma mater? Who is funding Duke University? It's a private university. Who's funding Duke? The alma mater. And who are the alma mater? They're business leaders all over the south. Now, one of them is a Democrat is my guess, right? Did they stop funding Duke because of that? There was an uproar. There were shouts. There were yells. People banged. The Board of Trustees came out with all kinds of statements. Alumni said, oh, we'll never give you money. And the next day, they gave them money. So, you know, yeah, I think it'd be good if there was an attempt at Dartmouth where the Board of Trustees run by alumni to change the policies of Dartmouth. And it was squashed by the faculty. And at the end of the day, the faculty win. So, if you want to defund them through the private sector, through alumni, through donors, absolutely go ahead and do it. I'm all for it. I think that's the only way universities will change. Well, there's another way universities will change, which is the other thing Jordan Peterson is doing. He's starting an online university. So, the real way, or I think he's starting a rank, he wants to rank universities, rank these departments. So, parents see what they're paying for. And then he also wants to start an online university. The real solution is competition. Ultimately, there will be something that changes this, you know, like Uber for universities that really changes the whole structure of the industry. Yeah, I mean, Jonathan and I, it's very good on this. There are a lot of people. I mean, one of the good things that's come out in the last few years is there's a whole group of people clustered, I'd say politically in the middle primarily. And Jonathan Hyde runs the heterodoxy academy. You can look it up online, which monitors kind of politically correct BS on campuses and monitors this kind of social justice stuff. And he said you have to choose between truth and social justice. You need to ask Jonathan Hyde what he considers truth. That's a whole other interesting question. But, you know, he's right. And there is a movement, you know, the intellectual doc web and people affiliated with that. There is a whole movement to try to correct us at the universities or at least try to offer an alternative. And a lot of you get a lot of stuff on YouTube that you don't get at universities, right? You watch Dave Rubin who does these amazing interviews with intellectuals that don't teach at UT. And you probably get more out of some of those interviews that you get some out of some of your classes because you get some of the top people. And this is what I mean by they're going to be disruptive technological forces to change our universities. This is before I send to the next question. Let me correct you in one thing. The university is not private. I, as a Duke alum, I can tell you that 50% of the funding is public. The donation you make, 30% of it is off taxes rebates that you're taking. And then the rest of it is coming from NSF. So it's a sense larger, right? Because they are there are cartel. We are a cartel funded by the government. In a sense, there's no private universities in America today because because all your student loans are funded by the by by government. So there is no such thing as a private university. There's no private real private education, unfortunately, in the US. But that's that's tragedy. Yeah. Well, this Hillsdale College of those I haven't heard of that one, but Hillsdale was famous for being the only real private one because they didn't take any government money. So it's good to know that there's a second one as well. Yeah. Thank you for your presentation today. I want going with a bit of a philosophical question. I want to know your personal opinion on the proper role of government, considering how the founders originally stated how proper role of government is to protect our liberties from within the country from threats within and without yet. You also say that we don't we shouldn't regulate these public squares on the internet to protect free speech. I just want to know your opinion on the proper role of government. I believe I'm I'm with the founders almost 100%. I just don't think they were quite radical enough. I mean, that's not fair. They for the time they were about as radical as you could be. I completely believe that the only role of government, only role of government is to protect our individual rights, to protect our right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. It is to be a policeman and a judge and a military to protect us from our liberties from from external invasion. But internally, that's it. Now, what that exactly means is is is, you know, is tricky, right? Because our conception of what rights means has changed dramatically from the lock in conception of the founding fathers to the conception of modern intellectuals today. Today have a right to everything. You have a right to food, you have a right to shelter, you have a right to education, you have a right to to Facebook. I don't think you have a right to Facebook. Rights mean rights as the founders understood them as I understand them as I understand understood them. Rights means freedom of action. You are free to act in pursuit of the values necessary for your survival. Free of what? What does freedom mean? Freedom is a very basic concept. What does freedom mean? What's the definition of freedom? What's that? Yeah, so it's freedom from coercion. Freedom means the absence of coercion. So the government's job is to protect us from people who would curse us. And the government cannot, is not allowed to, based on our Constitution and Bill of Rights, to curse us. It's supposed to stay out of it. So it's true that if Facebook pulled the gun on you and forced you to what? I don't know. What's that? To use Facebook or to have a particular or to state a particular opinion? Then the government's job is to protect you from Facebook's gun. But Facebook doesn't have a gun. Facebook, your engagement with Facebook is purely voluntary. And the government has no role in voluntary transactions. No role in voluntary interaction. You don't have to go to Facebook. You don't have to post on Facebook. Facebook doesn't have to accept you as a client. I mean, it stuns me that conservatives who do not, who believe that the baker has a right not to bake the cake for the gay couple, which I believe he does, he has a right not to bake the cake. I believe that. Conservatives claim they believe that. Yet they want to force Facebook to carry somebody they don't like for whatever reason they don't like it. Either people have a right on their own property, on their own platform, to deal with the people they want to deal with and not with the people they don't want to deal with. Or the baker has to bake the cake and we all have to interact with whoever the government decides we have to interact with. Either we're free or we're not free. Freedom means you get to decide who you engage with and who you don't engage with. There's no such thing as a public square. Certainly not if the public square is private. Right? My property is not a public square. Now unfortunately in America, we have public property. I think a violation of the principle under which this country was founded. I don't think there should be public property. It's a contradiction in terms. Property by definition is private. So public property is nobody's property. And our conception therefore of public property is you can go in the public square and say whatever you want to say. Now that's not even true. Try going and committing pornographic acts on the public square and they're going to shut you down. It's not the job of government to control what I do in my private space. Facebook is a private company. It's not a public square. I wish all public squares were privatized. I'd like to see all public squares privatized. I'd like to see the streets privatized. I'd like to see everything become private property. So that private owners get to decide what is done on their streets. So that there isn't this question of what does the state allow said on this particular place or not. The state should have no business in any of this. The state's job is to protect. Let me give an example of what I think America has failed with regard to free speech. If you publish a book I don't like and I threaten your life, should the government stop me? Yeah, I mean that's protecting free speech. You have a right to publish whatever book you want and the publisher has a right to put it out there. And if I threaten you, if I throw bricks in your windows, if I say I'm going to kill you, then I have violated your rights. Threat is the equivalent of violence. And yet when Solomon Rushdie, this is before you guys were born, I guess, 1989, published a book called Something Satan, Satanic Verses. And the Iranian regime put out a fatwa against him and the publishers, including the American publisher, and then bookstores in New York were attacked where they had displays of the book. The government did nothing. George Bush Sr. did nothing. When the Danish cartoons were published in Copenhagen, in Denmark, and there were riots everywhere, no American newspaper would publish the cartoons. One newspaper published the cartoons. Why wouldn't they publish the cartoons? They all said because we're afraid. And did the government, to George Bush, step forward and say, our job is to protect your freedom of speech. Our job is to make it possible for you to publish these cartoons without any fear. We're going to protect you. No. He said, you know, those cartoons, they probably shouldn't have been published. We don't want to offend religions. We shouldn't offend religion. George Bush. So our government has failed to protect free speech, whereas they're responsible against real physical threats. Facebook is not an issue of free speech. It's an issue of speech, but it's not an issue of free speech. It's not an issue of the government. It's not something the government is there to do. The government is there to protect my ability to speak on my property. You don't have a right to silence me. Right now, for the purpose of our purposes, this is the property of the student organizations and the center here at UT that set up this talk. And if people burst in, like I've had happen, if Antifa burst in and tried to stop this speech, which they've succeeded too many times in doing, then they would be violating our free speech rights, because they would be interrupting our private event with their... So I think we need to get out of the statist anti-founding fathers, anti-American principle notion of the public square. I think it's a bad conception. Yes, the federal government is currently shut down over the issue of border security, specifically, and of course the issue of immigration more generally. And first, I know you're an immigrant, so let me first say thank you so much for coming to America. I say thank you because I know I personally profit from productive immigrants such as yourself coming to America. I know I've profited from an immigrant who left Russia 90 some odd years ago. I mean, if I ran doesn't leave Russia 90 years ago, no fountainhead, no Atlas shrug. So my question is this, I mean, how did we get to the point today and on the political right today where, you know, the president looks at immigration and free trade as some kind of a favor we're doing to immigrants, you know, if we trade with China and Russia and, excuse me, China and Canada and Mexico, somehow that's a favor we're doing. If we allow more immigrants in the country, you know, that's a favor we're doing. It's not a win-win proposition. So on the right today in America, how did we get there? So the two issues in which I get harassed nonstop on Facebook, you know, they get the most posts, the most comments, the most everything, but they're all negative. It's immigration and trade. It's unbelievable how people flip out on these issues. So thank you for bringing those up now. So you guys can flip out. How did we get here? I mean, I think we got here because we, for the last 100 years, this country has moved away from the founding principles. This country has adopted a mixed economy, has adopted a mixture of the principles that founded this country, the idea of individualism, the idea that we treat individuals based on their individual character and collectivism, where we treat people as groups, as, you know, not as individual entities, but as what group do they belong to? And that mixture intellectually and then the mixture economically, the mixture of some free markets and a lot of state control, a lot of socialism, right? We're a massive mixed economy in the U.S. We have huge taxation, we have huge regulation. And what is that? Let's start with the economic issue. What does a mixed economy produce? A mixed economy means that the government is in a position to grant people favors. It gives different groups, different favors. Maybe unions were the first ones. Maybe if you produce solar energy, we give you a favor. Or maybe the senator from Texas demands special favors for all companies in Texas or whatever, right? And we've given government the power to give those favors. So what does that create? It creates a situation where we're all basically members of a group fighting for a pie, because what government does is zero sum. In the marketplace, the marketplace is not zero sum. In the marketplace, the pie is constantly growing. And each one of us owns the pie, so we each have an individual pie, right? And our individual pie is growing. And if somebody else's pie is growing faster than our pie, we don't care, because we know that if we work hard, our pie can grow as well. But once the government comes in and says, your pie is too big, and your pie is too big, and we're going to take some of your pie and we're going to give it to those people over there. And we can do this by redistributing wealth. We can do it through regulations. We can do it through subsidies. We can do it through all these different things. Then you people who have the so-called too-big pie group together to form a lobby, and those guys who are getting goodies form a lobby, and now you're fighting. And what a mixed economy does is it creates pressure groups. It creates thousands of different pressure groups. How many lobbying organizations were there in Washington, D.C. 150 years ago? Almost none. Maybe the railroads. Why? Because the government had no involvement in the economy. So there was no goodies to divvy up. There was no power play to make. There were no subsidies. There was no redistribution of wealth. So why go to Washington? It's a waste of time. Too busy running a business. How many groups today have lobbying organizations in Washington, D.C.? Thousands of them. And what that does is it inculcates in our minds a zero-sum mentality. If you're benefiting, I'm losing. Now, you also have a welfare state where you're taking from some people and people who are not working. For whatever reason, they're not working. Many of them could work and they're not working. Are getting money. Or maybe they're working. And they're not making enough a living wage. I don't know what a dying wage is like, but a living wage. So we subsidize their wages with welfare. And they're like 1,000 different welfare programs. I mean, unbelievable. At the federal level, at the state level, at the local level. And now again, wait a minute, I'm working hard. I'm, you know, and if I live in California, I'm paying like 50% of my income to taxes. And these people who are not working or not, or work or whatever, they're getting my money. That's not fair. Now throwing immigration into that. Wait a minute. That group of people who are getting stuff is going to grow. Because I look at those Mexicans coming across the border, they don't look like they're going to compete in Silicon Valley. They look like they're going to compete for the welfare checks. Now that's a little bit xenophobic, right? The fact that I can tell by looking at people where they're going to compete. But that's part of the attitude, right? And you hear that all the time. They're taking Americans' jobs. That's an un-American statement to make. Americans don't have jobs. You have a job, and you have a job, and you have a job, and you might not have a job. And you might be competing with people in Arkansas, and you might be competing with people in China. And if you don't do a good enough job, you're going to lose your job. And that's how America used to work. We used to compete, and we used to embrace competition, and we used to try to be the best that we could do it whatever we did, not sit there and complain because somebody else is doing a better job than we are, or producing a product cheaper than we are, or coming in from over the border and out competing us, right, for the job. But that whole zero-sum mentality which applies to trade, China has taken all of our jobs, which is just a bullface lie to begin with, right? 90% of all the jobs we're manufacturing lost over the last three decades. 90% of them were lost to automation, 10% to foreign competition. I don't think anybody would be up in arms about 10%. Particularly given that those 10% of people all went to other jobs, service jobs. You know what service jobs are? You know what's a service job? Everybody thinks McDonald's, flipping burgers. That's right. All Americans are flipping burgers. What's a service job? What's that? Postal worker? Postal worker is a service job. So all those manufacturing jobs that were lost, they're all postal workers and flipping hamburgers. What are Americans actually doing? Like writing code is a service job. It's not manufacturing. Like if you're in the gaming industry, like they're what, 300,000 programmers and games, that's a service job. Is that a bad thing that we stopped doing, I don't know, stupid mechanical physical manufacturing stuff and are doing more with our brains? It's kind of a good thing. We have more service jobs and fewer manufacturing jobs. You know how many people used to be farmers like 150 years ago? What percentage of the American population were farmers? Like 90%. How many potato farmers? Less than 1%. We move constantly towards more and more work of the mind and less and less physical work. But the mixed economy creates the zero sum mentality and then the manufacturing stuff in China. We used to manufacture stuff here. By the way, we manufacture more stuff, stuff, product. Like more stuff is manufactured in the U.S. than ever in all of American history. Look it up in terms of units. But we do it with less than half the number of people because we have robots and computers, so we don't need the people. But we manufacture more stuff than we ever did. But again, we've been told stories and stories again by unions that want the jobs. Unions have always been anti-immigration. Anti-immigration used to be an issue on the left. Unions hated immigration where George Bush actually was going to pass a Comprehensive Immigration Bill in 2007, I think it was. It was the left that stopped it because the unions didn't want the competition for labor. It's only become a so-called right-wing issue in recent times. So welfare is the best excuse people can come up with, I think. So my solution to that is allow anybody into the country who has a job. Like allow employment agencies to issue visas. And if some employee in Bangladesh, if somebody's willing to hire them, they get a visa automatically to come to U.S. And not a job that an American won't do. Bullshit, let the Americans compete for the jobs. But that's where you get rid of welfare. You get rid of the welfare argument. Because you can't come to America unless you have a job. And most of the illegal immigration goes out the window if you do that because most of the illegal immigrants are coming here to work. So if you allow them to work, if you give them a path to work, then they stop being illegal. Nobody wants to be illegal. It's not fun for them. They'd much rather be illegal. They'd much rather have documents and be able to have a real job and do stuff right. So just make it possible for them. But we have the dumbest immigration laws in the world today. Well, we don't allow people to come in even when they're needed at crucial jobs. So certain jobs don't get done in America today because we don't allow the immigrants to come in and do them. And Silicon Valley, when I talk to Silicon Valley executives, and what's his name? The CEO of Apple recently said this in one of the interviews. He said, the reason we go to China is not because they're cheaper over there. The reason because we go to China is because they have engineers on a scale that we don't have here. You can go to Shanghai and hire a thousand engineers tomorrow, a thousand, or people who do high-skilled welding and high-skilled tool manufacturing and stuff like that. They don't exist here, or it's very hard to find them. Now we could import them. That would be cool. We could have good immigration laws that brings them into America. They would benefit. We would benefit. Win-win. But no, God forbid, we do immigration. So yeah, so you have to go to China to manufacture because the engineers are there. They're not here. Like Amazon goes to China and they hire hundreds of engineers like that. They can't do it here. Just not enough of you are going to engineering school. You're too busy doing social work with other degrees that you don't like. Sociology and gender studies and stuff like that. I think it's a zero-sum mentality that comes from that. It's a zero-sum mentality comes from the ideas of collectivism that has destroyed this attitude. Welfare creates us versus them mentality that you see on the right in particular because they supposedly are standing for Americans who work and are hardworking and so on. The left is for the welfare, but they don't want to do away with welfare. Nobody on the right wants to do away with welfare, which would be nice. But they just want to complain about welfare and they don't want to grow welfare. So no more immigrants because they take that. But even if you say, well, okay, just jobs. Anybody can come in who has a job. I still get harassed over that. Because then it's the competition. They don't want competition. Oh, they'll come in and they'll charge the same dumping. We're very against dumping. I love dumping. If you want to dump your product, dumping means selling at a really cheap price. If you want to dump your product in my backyard anytime, I'm willing to buy. Dumping's great. We benefit. We get cheap stuff. What's better than cheap stuff? And when we do, we use that cheap stuff. Imagine if they were dumping steel. Who would benefit if they dumped steel in the U.S.? Every steel company that uses steel. Now, how many jobs are there in companies that use steel versus jobs in companies that actually produce steel in the United States? It's 50 to 1. So when you raise tariffs on steel, as this president has done, you're benefiting the one and you're sacrificing the 50. So people who use steel are going to lose the jobs. People who manufacture steel are going to gain jobs. But again, it's us versus them. This is what government does. Zero-sum gain. Instead of letting the market work, and I, you know, market works. And supposedly, I don't think this has ever really been true. People underwrite like markets. But, you know, when push comes to shove, it turns out they don't. It's just sad. Thank you so much for your presentation. My question is, should conservatives redress their code of ethics and look at egoism as a possible code of morality? Everybody should re-examine their code of ethics. I don't think there's anything unique about conservatives. Yes, I think everybody should re-examine their code of ethics, and I do think Ayn Rand has a superior alternative, much better alternative, to the prevailing ethics. I think that the big problem that conservatives have, and the reason conservatives always lose, even when they win politically, they lose when it comes to policy. In every policy realm, every policy realm, over the last 100 years, the left has won on every single issue. Every single issue. Right? Think about the progressive platform from 1900. They've achieved almost everything in that platform. Conservatives have not won a single major battle. The only thing conservatives are good for, the only thing Republicans are good for, there's one thing Republicans are good for, for a while. What's that? What does every single Republican administration do? Yeah, they cut taxes. They don't cut spending. So ultimately, we have to raise taxes to cover all the spending that they do, but they cut taxes. They increase spending. The worst spenders in the world were Reagan and Bush Jr. Right? Through the roof, government spending went through the roof under those administrations. They cut taxes? Good for them. Now, everybody needs to re-examine their ethical views. The reason conservatives always lose is the conservatives share their ethics with the left. They have the same ethic. The difference is that the left's ethic is consistent with their politics. Socialism is consistent with their ethics. Conservatives' ethics contradicts their politics. Their politics is individualistic. It's freedom, supposedly, right? It contradicts it. So whenever there's a conflict between politics or economics and ethics, who do you think wins? Ethics always wins. Ethics always wins. People always vote what they think is right, what they think is good. So if what you think is right and good is consistent with socialism, you can't win. Now, what is the ethics the conservatives have to share with the liberal? The ethics is basically, sorry, basically a Christian ethic. He knows what I'm referring to. It's the ethic that says that the standard for goodness is selflessness. The standard for goodness is self-sacrifice. The standard for goodness is other people's well-being. It's about sharing. It's about not being too self-interested. It's about not being too egoistic. What do we think when we talk about selfishness? What is the first thing that pops into our mind? Greed, which means what? Because I have a relatively positive view of greed. But what is it in the common culture? It's really negative. He's being selfish. It's a negative term. What's capitalism about? What do people do under capitalism? Yeah, right. I wake up every morning thinking I'm going to work really, really hard because I want to benefit society. I don't give a shit about society. I'm not allowed to say shit. That's one of my seven words. That's right. This is one of the seven words. I mean, no, I get up every morning trying to do the best job I can for me to feed my family, to take care of my family and my friends, and to make my life the best life that it can be. And yeah, and Adam Smith recognizes this. What did Adam Smith say? The baker bakes the bread for whom? For you? For the consumer? No. He makes the bread because he loves making bread, and he's trying to feed his family. He cares about himself. But this is the problem that conservatives had, and you just said it. Let me wait. I have to finish, right? Because you might agree with me. They don't. The baker bakes the bread for himself. But Adam Smith says, look, and if you read the theory of mass sentiment, you'll see this. And in the world of nations, he says. Look.