 Lucky to have the pleasure to introduce our next speaker. His name is Dr. Eric Daniels, and he's a new speaker to the 21 Convention. He's a guest speaker for the Ein Rand Institute. He's also an assistant professor at Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. And he's been teaching all over internationally on American history and philosophy for the past 12 years, which is astounding because he looks very young. And I'm pleased to introduce Dr. Eric. Thank you, I appreciate it. All right, well, welcome. My topic for today that I want you to think about is the idea of the self-made man. It's an idea which many of us are familiar with. And what I wanna start out by doing is just to ask you briefly to come up with some examples to think of a few ideas of who are some of the best examples of self-made men. Think of people like Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Oprah, Martha Stewart, Pierre Omendar, who started eBay out of his own house. People like Mark Cuban, Michael Jordan. We can think of these examples all across different realms of business, different industries, a sports figure, an entertainment figure. There are a lot of people that we call self-made men. And these are usually the most successful and what ought to be the most admired people in our culture. And indeed, if you go back into American history and you look at some of the people in American history, you look at the Andrew Carnegie's, the John Rockefeller's, you look at some of the names that you probably don't even know, the Charles Ketterings, right, who was founder of AC Delco or Thompson, the one of the minds behind General Electric. Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney. America, in a sense, compared to other countries to compare to other cultures, is literally, in a sense, littered with stories of rags to riches, self-made men, people who picked themselves up and grew to prominence, fame, success. Now there's a problem though. These people are not venerated. They're not held up as the kinds of heroes that they actually are because of certain problems in our culture. One of the things that you notice when you look at the Bill Gates or the Steve Jobs, what do people actually think about these individuals? Not, wow, think about how terrific it is that this individual basically went from almost nothing or from very modest circumstances, came up with a brilliant idea, came up with a brilliant new invention or new way of doing things or new way of organizing and made a success out of it. Actually succeeded in this world despite obstacles, despite things in their way and achieved something great. What do people actually look at? They try to drag them down. They try to say, oh, Bill Gates is only great when he gives away billions of dollars, not when he makes billions of dollars, right? Steve Jobs, oh, he was a jerk, right? Yeah, despite the fact that everybody has an iPhone or an iPad, despite the fact that the whole telecommunications industry has been fundamentally transformed by the people that Jobs hired and the people that he worked with and the ideas that he came up with. But everybody wants to focus on the negative. Everybody wants to focus, I mean, look, when Jobs died, one of the things, one of the most important things that the media reported that they obsessed about was the fact that he hadn't given away as much money as Bill Gates. Rather than focus on his achievements, rather than focus on all of the great things that he did, the ways that he transformed everyone's lives through his achievements, they wanted to focus on some of the negatives. Now, the idea of self-making, the idea of the self-made man is a relatively new concept in the history of thought. The idea of social mobility as such is relatively new. It's really only been around for about the last 200 years. And there are a couple of really important reasons why social mobility or self-making, the idea that someone can rise from lower circumstances and move up the social ladder, move up the economic ladder, or contrary, to move down it by accident or by fault of their own. There's two reasons, really, that this idea is so new. Number one, the idea is so new because it's only in a free society that such possibilities exist, that people actually have the room and the freedom protected politically to be able to move up and down the social ladder. To have the idea that just because someone was born to modest circumstances or just because someone has fallen on hard luck doesn't mean that they can't rise up, that they can't succeed in life. Now, the other reason, of course, is just the fact of history. For thousands of years, people didn't have these opportunities because there weren't a lot of opportunities to be had. Modern civilization, in some ways, is what gives rise to the idea of a stratified social hierarchy, a stratified economic hierarchy. Before this, people basically did what their parents did. If your father was a farmer, you were a farmer, his parents were probably farmers, his parents' parents were farmers, all the way back for generations. And the techniques that you were using, the things that you were doing were probably not substantially different in terms of your work life, your daily life than they had been for generations. But suddenly, during the 17th and 18th century, at the time of the Enlightenment, a whole change in Western culture started to take place. People started to believe in political freedom. They started to set up the institutions, as imperfect as they may be today, for our cultural, political, and economic freedom that give us the possibility of rising up and down the social ladder. Also, the idea of the self started to change. What does it mean to define oneself? If someone came up to you on the street and said, tell me about yourself, who are you? Well, you might say your name and what you do for a living, what your interests are. I mean, imagine filling out an online dating profile or something, you say, go to a matchmaker. They say, well, what are you? Who are you? The things that you reveal about yourself is what you see in yourself, but it's more complicated than that. There's something deeper than this. So what I wanna do with this idea of the self-made man, or self-making as an idea, today I want to take a look at some of the history of this. Where does this come from? What are the best examples of this? And then see some of the ways in which it's been corrupted. Because as I said, today, the people who are the best exemplars of self-making are often seen as objects of derision by the popular media, by popular culture, et cetera. And that's a very damaging thing. Because in a sense, for us, for people who actually seek self-improvement, for people who want to be better themselves on all levels of our lives, it's very important that we understand the proper justification for this. Why should we embrace this idea? In some sense, does one defend oneself against such attacks? And they're myriad today. You just take a look at some of the ways that people talk about the idea of self-making. As I said, in the outset, they're culturally devalued. People disapprove in many ways. They want to find flaws. They want to say, oh, successful people may have lots of money, or lots of fame, or lots of whatever it is that they seek, but they're unhappy. Their souls are dead inside. And then that's why you get these biographies or these tabloids detailing all of the lives of the famous people, trying to bring them down a notch. But also, it's under explicit attack. There's a new book out. There's certain people in the politics today. You've heard this phrase, you didn't build that. Well, believe me, this isn't just about what some people think about your business if you own a business, if you've created a business or your success. They think this is in a fundamental way about yourself.