 Please give a warm welcome for an evening of storytelling with none other than Larry Reed. Thank you. Larry is good to be up here with you, man. Oh, golly, I'm thrilled. Whoa, if I can get this chair to stop. You know, I was telling my wife just the other day that one of my goals in life is to be as prolific and powerful of a storyteller as you. Thank you. What's wrong with his chair? That's all right. I'll put one point on this. Looks like we're going to get a new one. Well, you're good at jokes, too. So you might have some material right now. All right. So for people that are new to this kind of event, this kind of space, there are certain words that get thrown out a lot. Words like liberty, philosophy of freedom. What do those words mean to you? And what is a story that captures your understanding of that? Well, liberty to me means the absence of the initiation of force. Liberty is what you have when you can live in a society or no one attacks you by depriving you of an inherent natural right that comes with you upon the moment of your birth. As long as you're left alone because you leave others alone, you have liberty. It's the initiation of forces that is at the root of so much harm in society. It's different from, say, retaliatory force, which is responding if you are first attack. But throwing that first stone is something I think we should devote ourselves to try to stop and to prevent and not commit ourselves. The philosophy of freedom is the second point you raised, right? Well, once you understand that humans are each of us unique and precious, that no two people who have ever lived have been precisely the same, then you realize that we're not a fleet of robots waiting to be programmed by some central planner at the top, but rather to be fully human, we each have to have considerable freedom to exercise our uniqueness. The philosophy of freedom, of course, has that at its core, but it's so much more than that. It is the philosophy of self-improvement, of recognizing that if you really want to change the world, you have to start by changing yourself, improving yourself, being the best example you can possibly be. It means a lot about how you interrelate with other people. It means respecting the lives and the property and the rights and the contracts of other people. It means living a philosophy, not for the moment, but for your entire life. Once you understand the importance of freedom, you commit yourself to it and all those elements that make you a special, unique, wealth-creating, value-adding individual. So I have a chapter on this in the book that you just touted. Are we good enough for liberty? I hope everybody will pick up a copy and read about it in a little more detail. Littery talked a lot about self-improvement. You talk a lot about it. I've had people ask me before, what in the world does that have to do with economics? What's your answer to that? Well, if you want to succeed economically, you have to discover where you can add value. Before you can do that, you have to understand yourself and what your talents are, what your abilities may be to provide service and value to other people. So I think there's a direct connection between the two. All right. What's your story, Larry? When did you come to embrace this philosophy of freedom? I know many of you perhaps have heard this before. I know you know it, TK, rather well, but my mother was not all that interested in public affairs and political or economic ideas. My dad's interest in those things was pretty minimal. But he planted some great instincts in me, anti-authoritarian instincts. Some of you may know the story I've told before about the incident in third grade when my father decided he was going to take me to Florida to visit relatives for a week. I was in public school and I mentioned to the teacher that we were going to Florida. And she just immediately said, he can't do that. You can't go to Florida. He can't take you out of class for a whole week. And I went home just terrified. I thought, what's she going to do? And she said she was going to tell the principal. She did. And he called. And I remember hearing my dad's side of that conversation. He said, listen carefully. He was not an impetuous man. He was very patient. But when the principal was done, he said, and this is verbatim. I remember it like it was yesterday. He said, he's my son. We're going to Florida. Don't call here again. Click. And hung up. And oh, he was my hero. So I think he planted those instincts. But it was a movie, the sound of music, that my mother took me to in 1966, when I was only 12 or 13, that made a huge difference. Because I saw that as, wow, this family just wants to be left alone. And here's this rotten foreign regime that's coming in, taking over the country and trying to draft the father. My mother said, this is a true story. And so I started reading a lot about the history of pre-World War II Eastern Europe. And then when the Soviets invaded neighboring Czechoslovakia, neighboring to where the movie was set to Austria in 1968, I really came alive. I just saw, I still get goosebumps thinking of it. I saw these tanks and troops invading this country for no more reason than that people there wanted to be free, that they were talking about having free elections and freedoms of speech and press. And so I went to Pittsburgh on a bus to join into a demonstration where we protested the Soviet invasion, burned a Soviet flag, and began reading fee materials. That was 1968. And the message was, hey, if you want to be a good anti-communist, you can't just be against tanks in the street. You've got to know your morality, your philosophy, your economics, your history. And so I just devoured all that. And very early on, I decided in some way, advancing these ideas would be my career. He was my hero. Those are the words you used to describe your father when he hung up the phone about Florida. You wrote an entire book on heroes called Real Heroes. What inspired you to write that book? And also, what is your definition of a hero? As far back as I can remember, I've always been fascinated by people who stand out from the crowd. You know how often we all hear people say praises of one kind or another to the so-called common man. And that has always hit me as a little off. It's the uncommon among us that really make the difference. I mean, we're not all the same. We're very different. And the ones who speak truth to power, who courageously stand in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, things like that, the ones who really inspire make a difference in the world. So I've always had that interest. And over the years, and in my writing and research, there were names that popped up. And I said, ah, I'd like to come back and write something about that person. So I had an ongoing list for some time. A hero to me is more than just the man or woman who runs into a burning home to save a job. That person is certainly heroic. Nobody would argue with that, I don't think. But I was interested more in heroes who live heroic lives, not just heroic moments. People who, maybe not from the start, but at some point and then thereafter, decided I'm going to make a difference in the world for what I know to be right. I'm going to do it by voluntary means. I'm going to be interested in the liberty of others. And I'm going to take whatever risk I may have in order to advance that. That's my definition of a hero. And it really comes from, such a person does those things because of their character. A hero to me has a wellspring of character that outshines the average or the common. What's your favorite story from that book? Oh, from the book. There are 40 chapters in there. Probably the story of Witold Poletski, the bravest man I've ever come across. And he was not one that I had on my list when I started the book. I sort of discovered him as I was doing research on some others. A Polish man who is the only person we know to have volunteered to get arrested by the Nazis after his country was invaded in 1939 for the purpose of being sent to Auschwitz. So he could find out from the inside what was going on and hopefully form a resistance movement to tell the world. And he got his wish. He got sentenced to Auschwitz. And from inside that notorious Nazi concentration camp for the better part of three years, he formed an underground resistance. They stole documents. They smuggled them out. They helped a few people escape. He himself ultimately escaped. But wow, that isn't even the end of the story. After he finally escaped when the Nazis were about to uncover him, he made his way 200 miles north to Warsaw, fought during the Warsaw uprising, was captured by the Germans. They never made the connection that he had been at Auschwitz because not being Jewish, he didn't have, I think it was because he wasn't so marked. So he spent the last weeks of the war in a prisoner of war camp. But after that, he was able then briefly to see his family again. And then in September of 45, several months after the war ended, he's sent by the Polish Army from Italy where he was stationed briefly back to Poland to spy on the Soviets. And for two years underground, he spied on the Soviets because of the Polish concern, which was very valid of course, that the Soviets were not planning to leave Poland. And he did that until his cover was blown and he was arrested, tried and executed for espionage. But what a story of such an uncommon man and his son who had the privilege of meeting only three years ago is still living and helping to tell that story. One of the things you mentioned is that heroes are people who do uncommon things. And even in the description you just gave, you said such an uncommon man. A lot of people when they think of heroes, they think people who do these uncommon things, but they also have these uncommonly special attributes. They're superheroes. What's your favorite story of the most common hero, an unassuming hero? Or someone who came maybe with an uncommon background and did very uncommon things? Probably Augustine from the fifth century. If you want an example of a person who was in his teen years completely disillute, a problem for his parents, just messed up in many ways. And then at some point not only turned his life around, but went on to become a pillar of Western thought. And I believe a libertarian, somebody we would today regard as a libertarian. His views on government were that the smaller the better. He famously said, an unjust law is no law at all. But you can't talk about the development of Western political thought or Western Christian thought in particular without talking about the great contributions of Augustine. And he's an example of a guy who completely turned his life around. I want to talk about some of your stories. I don't have the book on me right now. But for those of you who have the Larry Reed tribute book on you, I have the page numbers written down so you can check out what I'm referring to here. But there is a picture of you holding a gun and you're standing in the center of a group of soldiers. I believe you're in Mozambique. It's on page five of that book. And this was back in 1991. I want to know, here you are in the middle of all these brothers with a gun. How did you get in that situation? Okay. Well, I've told you that I was motivated at an early age with an anti-communist zeal because I saw that evil empire, as President Reagan put it, as the source of so much oppression, tyranny and bloodshed in the world. So I wanted to do something to help liberate people in those places. So as a freelance journalist, I went to a number of countries behind the Iron Curtain. One of them was Mozambique at the height of the Civil War. This was June of 1991. And I was able to do that because an old friend, now deceased, Jim Blanchard, a great businessman from New Orleans. I was his chief economist for two years. He was the kind of guy who, if you showed up in his doorstep and said, I'm from ex-country and I'm fighting communists, he'd say, how much do you want? I mean, he'd write out a check. So he came to me and he said, Larry, I know you've been doing this stuff in Poland and Nicaragua and other places like that. I want to send you to Mozambique. I've come to know, he said, the president of the rebels who are fighting a communist regime there, Jim arranged for me to meet with the president of the rebels first in Nairobi, Kenya twice, January and March of 1991. And at the end of that March meeting, President Jacques Hama was his name. He said, okay, we'll arrange this. You will simply be informed when it's time to come. That's all I knew. I didn't know when I was going, how I was going to get there. And he said, when I asked, can I bring a second person? There'll be a photography. He said, yep, bring both people. So it was in June of 1991, I got a phone call. And the voice on the other side of the phone said, go to the Mount Socha Hotel in Blantyre, Malawi, a neighboring country, immediately. You didn't know who this was. No, no, but I, nobody would say that to me who wasn't connected. But you basically got the Morpheus call. We were waiting for it. So we said, great. So Joe Overton, my late friend and senior vice president at the Mackinac Center, he and I immediately booked flights. We went to Blantyre, Malawi, waited two days in that hotel, walking back and forth, wondering who's going to contact us, how are we going to get into Mozambique. And after about two and a half days, a guy came up to me from behind in the lobby as we were coming from lunch. And he said, excuse me, I'm here to take you. And we said, great, where you been? So we went with him to the small airport outside of Blantyre, got in his little four-seater Cessna 172. And as long as we were in Malawi and airspace, we flew at proper altitude. But when we hit the Mozambique border, he dove, because it was broad daylight, we could have been shot down if the government knew that we were doing this. They would have put the migs in the air. And we flew at treetop level about 200 miles until the rebels, this is all on videotape too, they had carved an airstrip out of the bush. And as we were landing in that airstrip, I said to Joe, I said, this is not wide enough, the wings are going to clip the trees. Well, they had calculated and the pilot was so good, we just missed the trees, landed, a bunch of rebels came in their uniforms. They pushed the airplane under the canopy of the trees, put us on motorbikes, and off we went several kilometers to rebel headquarters where President Shikama was waiting for us. So we spent two weeks there, even venturing out into the liberated areas on motorbike to visit with villagers who were so thankful that their village had been liberated from communist, communist rule. So that's the long and short of it. Okay. I was wondering this the whole time you're talking. Have you ever been in a situation where you feared for your life? Well, on that trip, there was one moment, I didn't fear the plane ride-ins, you might think, you know, with the possibility of being shot down, wouldn't you be afraid? I thought we were not in a problem there, that we were going to make it all right. But when they organized the motorcade, the rebels, to go to some of the villages, Joe and I were talking and we were venturing against as to what it was going to look like, and I said to him, I said, well, they'll probably put us in the middle bikes and the guys with all the guns will be in the front and the back. But they put me on the front bike with President, and that picture I think is in the thing that my staff has put together, they put me on the bike with President Chikama. So I thought, oh, if anybody is not such a good shot and they're aiming for him, they might get me. That was the only time when I was worried. But nothing happened. There's a picture you have with Margaret Thatcher, and I believe this, I have it. It's on the back page of the book. This was in 1996, and the two of you, it's just a face-off. It's an intense stare. She's looking at you, you're looking at her. What's that moment all about? Well, that was one of two times I met with Margaret Thatcher, and I really think so highly of her. Second time was dinner with her and a small number of people in London. But on that occasion, of that picture, that was 1996 at a fee event. It was our 50th anniversary and it was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City and Margaret Thatcher. Then out of the Prime Minister's ship, only what, not even 10 years, came and was our speaker. And so we had an opportunity to meet with her privately, and I'll just never forget that. She truly was the iron lady, but she could also be just as gracious as can be. Can I tell a quick story? Please. This is not from personal experience, but it's one I love to tell because the inimitable Peggy Newton told this in the Wall Street Journal a while back. She said there was a time when Margaret Thatcher had just won the Falklands War. She was at the height of her popularity. She had an all-male cabinet and they just had a cabinet meeting and all these guys were kind of like, oh, Madam Prime Minister, you're so great. She didn't want yes men. She wanted people to have the courage to speak up. Anyway, after this meeting, they adjourned to the adjacent room for dinner and a waiter came up first to the Prime Minister and was about to ask her what she would like and she just blurted out, I'll have the beef. And the waiter said, okay, Madam Prime Minister, what about the vegetables? And she said, oh, they'll have beef too. Iron lady. Okay. On page six, there's a picture of you in Egypt and you're riding on a camel. I believe this is 1996. What's that all about? What's the story about? Oh, that was pure vacation. I didn't go out to the Suez Canal, but I didn't have any speeches to give on that trip and my assistant at the Mackinac Center at that time, Kender Schrode, and I went and we spent about a week in Israel and a few days in Egypt. When we went to Egypt, we wanted, of course, to see the Great Pyramid. So that's why you see the Great Pyramid in the background, but we actually went inside. You have to kind of crouch because it's not high enough even for somebody as short as me to walk straight, but we went all the way to the center of the Great Pyramid to the area where, at one time, a Pharaoh must have been buried there. He's gone, though. But that was kind of cool to go right inside the place. So we thought we're in Egypt. We got to get on a camel somewhere. And so we did. So one of the things I love the most is the opportunity to learn from successful people about how to overcome failure. I love to hear a story from your life where you failed at something and how you turned that around or found the strength to get back up again. This, I mean, I've made many mistakes. I've had failures. This is probably a better example of a crisis that I had to deal with, but it was so comprehensive. It was a crisis in every sense that maybe I'll just slightly remove from your question, but it was the untimely death of my best friend and senior vice president at the Mackinac Center, the very Joe Overton I mentioned, who had gone to Mozambique with me. That was in a plane crash in June of 2003. He was a pivotal figure at the Mackinac Center. He was my very best friend. We'd been 22 countries together. I was best man in his wedding. I always thought he was the most sterling example of a person of character that I have ever met. He could light up a room just by standing in it. He was just a solid, good, and Christian man, honest as the day is long. And I'll never forget it was about midnight, one night, June 30, 2003. I got a phone call from his brother and he said, Larry, there's been an accident that Joe was killed in a plane crash. Sorry, all these years later it's still very traumatic, but we had to deal with that at the office. So it really stretched me to the limit in so many ways because it was just an incalculable loss. But he left behind such a model, an example of character and integrity that I think in the end, if he could look back, be here today, he'd be very proud of what we accomplished in his absence and because of the example he set. I want you to imagine my final question for you. I want you to imagine that he's looking down right now from heaven and he hears this whole conversation. What's the story about his life and the impact that he's had on you that he wants you to tell right now? You're talking about Joe? Yeah. Humility? I think if he heard what I just said about him, he'd blush because he wasn't the kind of person to demand attention. He didn't need his ego stroked. He was humble. That came across all the time and it rubbed off on other people. I mean, he had gigantic self-esteem and self-confidence, but he never let that show itself in the form of arrogance or condescension or an uncaring attitude or lack of humility. And that always greatly affected me. That's another characteristic, I think, of most heroes and certainly of all the ones that I actually met that I wrote about in the book. They were all humble people. Like Nicky Winton, who saved almost 700 Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939. I knew him in the last dozen years of his life. Died only four years ago. And I took students over to England many times to meet with him. And I had them watch the documentary about him and say, this great man who saved so many when he didn't have to. I want you to meet him. And they were always in awe. And invariably, there'd be one of the students who would say, Mr. Winton, you're such a hero. And that's about all they could get out before he would say, no, no, no, I did what I could. So many other people were able to do more and so many others didn't make it through at all. So I think Joe would say, Larry, maybe I wasn't as great as you thought I was. I think he was. But he certainly taught the value of humility. And that doesn't mean running yourself down. It means recognizing, as Leonard Reed did, that as smart as you may be, there is still a universe of knowledge out there that you don't know. So life should be an endless, endless learning project from start to finish. Larry, they say that the greatest performers in any craft are the ones who are students of the greats. And it's clear to me that you have not only studied heroes, but that shows forth in your life because you're not only a hero to me, but a hero to so many. You've influenced so many people's careers, so many people's lives, so many people's pursuit of truth. Thank you so much for gracing us with your presence. Thank you, Joe. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Joe.