 But what I'm seeing today, what I'm seeing today more than anything else, is that people, I won't call people in business, people who have traditionally made an effort in defending capitalism. People who have obviously benefited enormously from whatever capitalism we might still have or some of them might have benefited from the cronyism that exists today. But people in business, people in finance. Are coming out not to defend capitalism, although they pretend they are. And they're not coming out kind of to say, you know, we're not getting involved, which I think in the past, they just stayed silent. They just stayed out of it. They just stayed away from the debate. What we're seeing today is them coming out and talking about the problems of capitalism, the issues related to capitalism. How capitalism needs to be reformed. How capitalism needs to be adjusted. How capitalism is failing America. And Ray Dalio, the CEO, the owner of the largest hedge fund in the world, the richest hedge fund guy in the world, has led the pack here. But everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. And again, I think what's happened is that the Occupy Wall Street, the 1%, the whole inequality debate, Thomas Piketty have not only shifted the left, leftwards, dramatically leftwards. But they have also caused many in the business elite, if you will, of America to question the system as it is. And to accept something that I don't think they accepted in the past, to accept that things like inequality are real problems. Real problems, not fake problems, like I think it's a fake problem, but that it's a real problem. And to see the election of Donald Trump as the first signs of an uprising, a revolution against them, against the business elite, against those people, against the 1%, against the people. So not so much that Occupy Wall Street was the uprising against business. But it's the frustration of the working class, the frustration of the lower middle class and the middle class, the frustration of Trump voters with the economic system as it exists today that they see as a real threat. I mean, Ray Dalio constantly talks about class, a real class war, a real revolution, a real revolution. And I think that that is shared by more and more and more of the business leadership in this country, the producers, the wealth generators, because they have seen now that they are being demonized not only by the Occupy Wall Street left, but now by Trump, who criticized and made fun of Wall Street throughout his campaign, by much of Trump's base, which view them as part of the problem, which view what they consider it isn't, but what they consider modern capitalism as much as the problem, what they view the current mixed economy as the problem, but they don't view it in terms of mixed economy. Donald Trump's base views capitalism as the problem, free trade, not good. Companies deciding where to put their factories, which factories to close, which factories to open and where to open them, not good. Capitalism, the essential features of capitalism, CEOs making those kind of decisions, not good. So you're seeing more and more CEOs of America's most successful companies, primarily in finance, not ignore the issue anymore, but actually come out and Ray Dalio side and say, we need to fix the system, we need to alter the system, we need to fix and alter capitalism. We should not adopt socialism, they say, because socialism can't deliver the goods. But what we need to do is modify the current system so the goods are better. Okay, so basically all these businessmen are coming out now and they are positioning themselves as there's a real problem with capitalism. There's a real issue here and the problem is capitalism itself and we need to reform it, we need to adjust it, we need to change it. Ray Dalio was at this last week, he was at the Milken conference, I don't know if you know about the Milken conference, but the Milken named after Mike Milken, one of my personal heroes. Mike Milken has something called the Milken Institute, which is kind of a middle of the road, stand for nothing institute. It's called the Milken Institute for Global Conference, the name of the conference that was held. And all these, I mean, you basically get the top people from the business world and a lot of government people at this conference. This is the, other than Davos, this is the schmoozing conference of the year for the people at the, people who run companies, people who have money, people at Wall Street. This is the most important conference of the year. So, Ray Dalio was at this conference and Ray Dalio, this is a quote from Ray Dalio, says, every system needs to be renovated, needs to be improved. Can we agree that we need to do that? He said, right? And he says, if you agree, you'll have some, we'll have some form, no, he says, if you don't agree, we'll have some form of revolution. And he views, by the way, Trump's election is the first shot in the beginning of this revolution. That could be to abandon capitalism or to go on to another extreme. So he wants, he wants us not to abandon capitalism. He wants us to preserve capitalism. And we need to preserve capitalism. He says, otherwise we're going to have a revolution that would destroy everything that we cherish, that would destroy the system as it exists today that has benefited all of us so much. So he's making kind of a self-interested appeal to them to stand up and work to renovate capitalism. And when he asked them, do you agree that it needs to be renovated? Almost every hand in the ballroom went up. Now, you could argue that, yeah, I believe it should be renovated, the system we have today. I don't believe it's capitalism, the system we have today. It needs massive renovation. It needs massive changes. It needs to be freed up. The government has to get out of the way. We need massive deregulation. We need massive freeing up of the entrepreneurial spirits, massive freeing up of American business. What we need is to eliminate the socialism. What we need is to eliminate the statism from our system so that we can move towards a real capitalist system. Real capitalism. But that's not what any of these people mean. I mean, what Ray Dalio says is, we need to get together. We need to get some experts together. Look, he says, this is an engineering problem. We need to fix capitalism. It's economics. It's just poles and levers and dials and we need to dial it in or dial it out. In other words, the essence of capitalism for Ray Dalio and for many of these people is central planning. And what we need to do is get better at central planning. What we need to do is get better at engineering the economy. What we need to do is get better at changing the levers. So we need to get together in a bipartisan way, have a committee, have a commission that will restructure the economy along the lines of better outcomes for those people who've had bad outcomes in the past. In other words, let's see socialism, in other words, statism, or fascism, however you want to call it. But what he's calling for, and Alan Schwartz, the executive chairman of the Guggenheim Partners, who are also big financiers, former chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, he suggested a bipartisan commission that would tackle issues like reducing occupational licensing. You don't need a bipartisan commission to do that. You just need to do it. But that's a minor issue. You need government out of the economy completely. Ivanka Trump was there, Ivanka Trump representing the Trump administration, I assume. And she highlighted we need the government to get more involved in workforce training and more certification, more certification. What we need is less certification, less government certificates, not more. Now somebody on the chat earlier asked, do I think Trump makes us worse? Yes, I think Trump makes us a lot worse because what Trump does is he presents himself as a capitalist and acts like a statist. So it makes it more and more difficult to present capitalist ideas, to present real free market ideas, to present what capitalism really means. When everybody, everybody, from the president to all these CEOs, everybody who is viewed in the culture and by the world as a capitalist, misrepresent what capitalism is, misrepresent what the solutions to the problems we have today are, and misrepresent what the problems are. Almost every speaker at this conference talked about the dangers of continuing the system as it is and that we needed to solve issues like inequality. How do we solve all these issues by more government controls or by changing the controls? One hedge fund guy was riffing on car marks and the whole conference, by the way, the whole conference was titled Driving Shared Prosperity because the argument is that the left makes and that the right has no argument against, even, which is not true even on the numbers level. It's not even true, quite economics, but the idea is that all the prosperity that's been created over the last 30 to 40 years has gone to the super rich and everybody else is actually worse off. Now I've talked about this in the past and I talk about this in great length in my book Equal is Unfair, which I highly recommend to all of you. But that is blatantly false. It is blatantly false that the average American's life has not improved, that purchasing power has not increased, that the availability of a higher standard of living is not there. It is. We live at a much higher standard of living today than we did 30, 40 years ago and I include here the lower middle class. But we're told constantly that we haven't. And one of the things, one of the problems is that people conflate things like inflation as measured by the government's CPI and purchasing power, which are not the same standard of living with wages, not the same. And people just do bad work when they study inequality. They look at wrong numbers. They extrapolate from correlations that don't imply causation and they have a collectivistic view of the whole area of economics. The whole idea of shared prosperity is collectivism writ large. There is no shared prosperity any more than this shared wealth. I mean, to a large extent, the view of economics today is that economics is the science that figures out how to distribute wealth. Who gets what piece of the pie? But there is no pie. There is no wealth to distribute. There's no wealth each of us creates, even in the mixed economy today. That is the case and the government steals some of that wealth and distributes it, redistributes it. So Dalio says, for example, capitalism is very good at creating wealth. Socialism is good at redistributing wealth. We need more of a mixture between capitalism and socialism to get it just right because the socialism part can help with the redistribution and the capitalism part can help with the growing the pie and we can grow the pie. And this brings me to I think the most important point here. I know that makes the point in capitalism not known that deal that the real reason why capitalism is in decline, the real reason why everybody is anti-capitalist that nobody understands capitalism and nobody cares about capitalism, is the defenders of capitalism. The people who so supposedly stand a full capitalism have betrayed what capitalism really is. In other words, they have done it. They have defended capitalism on the basis of altruism, on the basis of collectivism, on the basis of maximizing the growth of the pie. And that as long as that is how we defend capitalism, it helps the poor, it grows the pie, it's good for society. As long as we conceive of that as the moral defense of capitalism, we will lose. We will always lose. We will continue to lose. Because what that legitimizes is that frame of mind, that way of thinking, what matters is society, what matters is the poor, what matters is other people. And capitalism is a system of individualism and egoism and everybody knows that. And it is not, will not be tolerated. And it is not tolerated by society that thinks that those ideas, individualism, egoism and evil, and that what really matters is society. And we'll just feed, we'll feed capitalists, we'll keep the capitalists going so they could create a big pie so we can then redistribute it. That's exactly how you get the mixed economy. It's exactly how you get statism. It's exactly how you get the disastrous economic policies that we've had over the last hundred years and getting worse and worse with every decade. The problem is not stupidity. The problem is the moral perspective that these people have. Ray Dalio and all these other millionaires and billionaires believe that their moral responsibility is to society. Their moral responsibility is to others. And it's not, they realize that just giving away their wealth won't solve anybody's problem. That what they need is a structural change in the system. And they're smart enough to recognize that capitalism produces the goods. But their altruism causes them to think but they need to be better redistributed. And their altruism also causes them to think. But we can't trust capitalism. One of them says, you know, we can't have too much capitalism. We can't have too much freedom. We need a bunch of regulation because if you don't have regulation, the shit hits the fan. Bad stuff happens. Why? Because we don't trust, he doesn't say this, I'm saying this, because we don't trust those egoists, those capitalists, the profit motive. You can't trust any of that. If you let capitalists free, if you let human beings be free, if you just leave human beings to their own nature, to their own minds, to their own desires, to their own decisions, to their own choice of values, bad stuff will happen. This is why this is a philosophical struggle. It's not a struggle about economics. They all get that economics, economically capitalism or freedom works. But they also think that it causes really, really bad behavior because it causes selfishness. And they all think that it's not good enough for society because we need mechanisms, force, coercion to redistribute the wealth to those who do not have it. Oh, you mentioned Kat. You mentioned Aristotle and his influence on the Renaissance. Under whose influence was the world before the Renaissance? Let's go back and look at some of the... According to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages and Dark Ages were ruled by mysticism, that is, by religion and philosophy. And in those periods, the philosophy was considered a handmaiden of theology. The predominant philosophical influence was Plato. Plato threw Plotinus and Augustine, who were philosophical Platonists. Aristotle's triumph, in effect, began with Thomas Aquinas, who brought back the philosophy of Aristotle, most particularly, the most important part, epistemology, logic, reason. What in particular about Kant's system of philosophy do you think was responsible for the trend that we see today in philosophy? The very cumbersome, very complex and very false and phony system are dividing man's intellect, man's mind from reality. Are declaring that what we perceive is only an illusion created by some special kind of categories in forms of perception in our own mind? By declaring and allegedly proving, allegedly, that we can never perceive things as they are, which simply means that any object which is perceived is there by false. If an object is perceived, it means our perception is interactive. It was in effect an attack on the whole concept of consciousness, not only human consciousness, but any consciousness. It was the denial of the reality or the validity of our perceptions.