 Before this election, it seemed like the major issue that intellectuals, politicians were talking about was this question in inequality. The gap between rich people and poor people, the gap between the middle class and the poor, the rich and the middle class, all kinds of gaps that they come up with. And that was the main problem in our society, and indeed every other problem that we face seemed to be blamed on inequality, including, for example, terrorism in the Middle East, right? Syria was a consequence of inequality, we were told. And the Pope talked about this, and he said it was the most important issue of our time, and President Obama said it over and over and over again. And Elizabeth Warren talks about it constantly. And this, in terms of the intellectuals on the left, there is no issue that they use more in order to try to frame the discussion today than this question of inequality. It keeps coming back over and over again. And they try to explain, as I said, try to explain everything using it, but they try to say it's a real problem for a variety of different reasons. There are a lot of economic reasons, which I'm not going to talk a lot about today, but they try to say inequality is destroying economy, we don't have economic growth because of it. Inequality is the cause, not the consequence of it, but the cause of cronyism. It's the cause of all these phenomena. I'm just going to say from an economic perspective, because I don't want to talk about the economics issues tonight, there just isn't anything there. There's no there there. There's no economic issue with inequality. There just isn't. There's no economic theory that has anything to do with inequality or inequality that relates it to economic growth or relates it to levels of poverty or relates it to any economic phenomenon. So I want to put that kind of aside, because I think there's a deeper, more important issue that relates to the whole inequality discussion that they're really trying to get at. And they use economics as an excuse because people care, right? We care about economics. We care about our standard of living. We care about how well our future, how well we can do in the future. And if people tell us this inequality thing, it's going to limit your opportunities in the future. Because of inequality, you're going to be poor in the future. People get excited about that. That riles people up. But what's really going on here? And there are a couple of assumptions that they make that are related to economics but are not really economics. And the fundamental is, I think the fundamental in politics, if you will, is that the fundamental idea behind the idea of, behind the emphasis on inequality and making this a big issue, this idea of you should care about how rich the rich are and how poor the poor are and where the middle class and about all this stuff, is fundamentally the idea of collectivism, right? And think about it. If collectivism is right, and collectivism, I mean, that we place the group above the individual, that the standard in morality, in politics, and everything that we think is the good of the group. It's the good of the collective. It's the value to the collective, right? And that indeed values are produced, not by individuals, but by a collective. Then suddenly we care, right? We care about the fact that some people have more why. Because that means that we are produced stuff and some people get a bigger slice of what we are produced. Because the perspective is, we all did it. We all created it. It's a big pie, right? That we bake together, and now is being divvied up based on, who knows, you know, political poll, cronyism, based on inheritance, based on... We don't know, but it just doesn't seem fair, because it's we made this pie, therefore we should all get a piece of it. So at the heart of this, politically, is this idea of the group creates, the group builds, the group makes. Which is very anti-American. Which is very hard for Americans to absorb. Now, I know there's some non-Americans here. Europeans have a much easier way of this. You know, America was built on the idea that we're individuals. That the standard is our individual life, our individual happiness. Each individual makes and creates, right? I like to say, there's no collective pie, each one of us bakes a pie, right? And we can as economists aggregate all those numbers up and say there's social wealth, but there's no such thing. There's just your wealth, and your wealth, and your wealth, and your pie, and your pie, and your pie. And we can squish all the pies together. But it's still somebody bake those pies, individuals bake the pie. And that's the perspective that Americans have always had. That perspective of I did it, you did it. That's always been the standard. So the left is at a hard time with this inequality issue because Americans don't buy into this collectivistic standard of value. But the group produced, the group created. So how do we undercut the American sense of individualism? How do we undercut the American sense of you bake the pie? Well, Obama told us, right? Obama, I mean, my favorite in quotes, speech of Obamas is the, anybody know? You didn't build that speech. You didn't build that speech. Obama says very explicitly, and this is based on a speech or a paper that Elizabeth Warren had written months before. And it's based, we'll see philosophically where. But it's the idea that you didn't build it. Individuals don't build anything. They're dependent on, and they get help from the group. And you can fill in the blank for the group, right? They're dependent on the teachers and the roads and the government that did X and the government that did Y. You're not alone. And of course, there's a sense in which that's true. That's why it gains credibility. It's why he can get away with it. Because there's a sense in which, yeah, we had great teachers. That's cool. But the idea is that, the idea is that you are not responsible for what you build, what you create, what you make. It's all these other people's influence on you. All these other people's shaping of you. Shaping of the environment in which you build and create and make the stuff that made it possible for you to contribute a little bit, right? And it's to contribute, right? To contribute to the social pie. It's not making anything for yourself. It's contributing. That's the terminology of collectivism. You don't count. It's what you do for the group that counts. So think about it. So what you are, Obama's telling us and Elizabeth Warren's telling us, is not you. It's what other people have shaped you into being. What you create is not created by you, but was created together, but not in a sense of trade, but in a sense of deep dependency by a group of people. You as an individual don't count. You count only as a unit within the group. And now if you go deeper into that, right? What's at the heart of this notion? What are they trying to convince us when they say you were shaped by your teachers and by your environment or by other people? What are they rejecting? They're rejecting your shaping of your own life. They're rejecting your own choices that you make. They're rejecting your own free will. Now they're rejecting a lot of other things at the same time, right? The idea of trade, right? I mean, because you can take any one of those elements, you know, who builds the roads and, you know, Bill Gates didn't do it alone. He did it with employees. But what they're rejecting is the trade, right? But what's a trade? What's at the core of a trade? What's at the core of the relationship between a trade? What are we doing? We're exchanging values. We're making choices about our own lives. We're making choices for ourselves and choosing to engage in a transaction. Emphasis on choosing. But they want us to start doubting those choices. Not what choices we make, but the very fact that we make choices. Do we make choices? If we're really shaped by our teachers, if we're really shaped by our parents, if we're really shaped by our environment, then are we making any choices? Are we not just automatons determined by the group, by the collective? And if we are just automatons determined by the group, by the collective, then is anything we make ours? Is it anything? Does it belong? Does property? Does rights? Does my sly, my baking a pie mean anything? When no, it was the fact that you had really good parents and they invested in you. And you had a good teacher and I had a lousy teacher. So you got to build something and make something of yourself and I didn't. But that's only because you had a particular influence and I didn't have that. And what we don't get at all, what we don't get at all in the debate is what did I do with whatever environment I had? So they make a big deal out of the environmental influences, each one of us experiences and how that shapes us and makes us. And again, there's an element of truth to it. If you had a great teacher, that might have opened doors that you wouldn't have had otherwise. So it's that element of truth that makes what they say convincing to so many. It's not, you can't just reject everything they say, you didn't build that, oh that's stupid, as many conservatives do, that's just stupid. Because there's a sense in which, yeah. But you have to dig deeper, you have to think about, okay, there were a lot of kids who had the great teacher. Some kids let that open a door for them and other kids didn't do anything with that fact that there was a great teacher. So we're all shaped by our environment, we are told. And therefore the environment is other people, and therefore other people deserve as much or a significant amount of what we create as we do. But that's not deep enough, that's not good enough, right? Because everybody knows it's not just an environment that shapes us, right? What else shapes us? Genetics, right? We're not just shaped by environment, we are told. We're also clearly shaped by our genes, and Obama doesn't quite say this, but somebody else does. You know, Juan Buffett talks about this quite a bit. I know if you know Juan Buffett, second richest man in America. Juan Buffett says, I'm just lucky. I was born with the right genes in the right time, he says, and he's right, right? The genes that he was born with, let's assume the talents and skills that he was born with, would not have been useful if he had been born in the 15th century. He says, I was lucky twice. I got the right genes in the right century. And then I had loving parents, and I had great teachers, and I have all these other people. So what's the conclusion of that, right? If I had all this, if I had great genes, great timing, great parents, great teachers, help from everybody else, then what's the status of the pie that I created, of all the wealth that I've built? Is it mine? No, really, right? It's other people's. And some of it, even though it's mine, I can't really take credit for it because I just had good genes by chance, by luck. And I can't really take credit for luck. Luck is just arbitrary. So Buffett says, well, sometimes he says, sometimes he contradicts himself. That doesn't seem to bother him very much. He says, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve it. I mean, I haven't seen him giving it all away until he dies, which is convenient. But he explicitly says that there's no real desert here. There's no real desert here. I don't really deserve it because it's all a function of luck and influence is external. And it's fascinating to me in all these discussions, these discussions that are not being done by philosophers or superintellectual politicians and business leaders, and that they're all making these assumptions about what shapes themselves and what shapes all of us. All of them assume that we are being shaped by our environment, or our genes, or, if you're really radical, if you're really cutting edge, right? Some are both. But that's it. And I often talk to audiences and I say, okay, environment, genes, some are both. Is there something missing? And almost, yeah, this group I assume would know. But in a lot of cases, you get complete silence. People don't think that there's an alternative, even though implicitly they kind of assume it, but they don't think it. And it's almost intellectually not cool to think that we actually have free will, that we actually are responsible for the choices that we make, that we actually choose what to do with what the environment actually provides us, the good teacher, the bad teacher. What we do with the genes that we actually have, that it's our choices, our decisions, our free will that actually is shaping what we do. That it's not, I mean luck is there, but it's what you do with the luck and how you create your own luck because you make the right kind of choices. That is almost unheard of in the world in which we live today. I mean, people might say, yeah, yeah, no, I did build that, but they don't go any deeper than that. And the attack is clearly an attack on the very notion of individual free will. Now think about it again in reverse. If you attack, if we attack free will, if you are not responsible for what you do, then the stuff that you create is that yours, in what sense? What does it mean to talk about yours if you're not actually the agent creating it, building it, making it? And if it's not yours, then it's easy to take it away from you. It's easy to justify taking it away from you. It's easy to say, well, there's the collective pie and you got a bigger slice, so we're going to trim away a little bit of those slices. So many of these political issues, and we'll talk about this during the conference quite a bit, many of these political issues really come out of a perception of whether there is free will or not and then what is the nature of that free will. And you'll hear a lot, particularly tomorrow morning, from Ankar Gathe about the objectives theory, about Ayn Rand's theory of what free will is. You'll hear later about, you know, much more detail about both the philosophical, the psychological, the scientific basis for the idea of free will. What I want to just indicate today, and we'll talk about this again tomorrow, is that these questions are not just theoretical, philosophical musings. They're not just fun things that we get to talk about with our pals hours and hours and hours late at night, which I think some of you have probably had those discussions, right? Particularly free will is a good one, right, because people love debating it and discussing it and getting into it and prove it and show it and so on. These have real world consequences. Real world consequences, again, we'll discuss tomorrow. We'll talk about immigration and foreign policy and one other one I forget. Free speech and free speech, right? All, but it really affects every policy issue. Because your perspective of free will will determine to a large extent your perspective on the question of individualism versus collectivism. Your perspective on whether there is such a thing as individual rights or not. Do rights really have meaning? Ask Ankar or Greg this. Do rights really have meaning if there's no free will? If we're just deterministic? I think the answer is no. It doesn't mean anything to say you have a right to your life if there's just a deterministic world out there. So all the policy decisions that we hear today, all the economic discussions that we hear out there, ultimately are shaped by very basic philosophical assumptions. Basic philosophical assumptions that Einran had a unique perspective on. So obviously Einran is an advocate for free will. Free will is at the base of both a moral system and as a consequence of that at the base of a political system. You do control your own life. You control your own life because you control your own mind. Because you are thinking being and you get to choose. The fundamental choice that you make is to think or not to think. To focus your mind or not to focus your mind. And if you choose to think, your experiences with the teacher, your experiences with your parents, your experiences with poverty, your experiences with wealth, whatever environment you grew up are going to be different than if you choose not to think. So you at the end of the day are responsible for what you do with whatever environment you have. And you at the end of the day are responsible for what you do with whatever the, I hate to call it a genetic lottery because that's their terminology, with the genes that you have. We all have different genes. Look around the room. We're all different, right? We're all different, which is cool. It's actually really cool. Imagine if everybody was the same. Even if they were all like me, it would be terrible and it would be boring, right? So to try to condition people to collectivism, the left, primarily the left, is trying to undercut the idea of free will. Now whether they're doing it for that reason, I mean that could be debated. They might first believe there's no free will and they come up with collectivism as a result. It depends on which direction you're going in. It's going in both directions, of course. We want, they want us to view everything in terms of groups. Everything's in terms of collectives. You're seeing that on the right as well. You're seeing more and more of that on the right. The idea that the group, your group identity is what matters, not who you are as an individual. And we need to fight this. We need to combat this. So at least we need to have good answers when these issues come up. And we need to have solid philosophical answers. And I mean, I think this is, I think free will is a relatively easy one, right? How do we know we have free will? What's that? You were guided by your environment. You were destined to come here from when you were two years old. Thanks to Jennifer. Not just Jennifer, but Jennifer. How do we know we have free will? The same way, yeah. We have the element of choice. How do you know you have the element of choice? How do you know it? What's that? Reason, rational thinking. No. How do you know? How do you know? How do I know this podium exists right here and it has this shape? Is it because of my rational thinking? What's that? Because I see it. How do you know you have free will? Because you can see it, not with your eyes, but you can introspect and observe yourself choosing. You can observe yourself thinking. You can observe yourself not thinking, drifting. You can observe yourself waking up and switching it on. It's an observational thing. You can't, I mean, you can't reason yourself into it. Just like, you know, I don't even know what to do with the podium at this point, right? How do you reason yourself into a podium? I'm sure Kant would have a good explanation. But it's exactly the doubt in your own observation about yourself. The doubt even in our own observations in terms of sensual data, in terms of seeing and thinking and touching. It's the doubt that they've instilled that many philosophers instilled in us that makes us question these things. And these things have vast consequences in almost everything that we do in life. And certainly in every one of these political decisions. So the right way to think about the inequality question is to start with a question of did you build it? And Obama's right. That is the key question. The key question about, you know, in political society is are you responsible for your own actions? Can you be judged? And if you create something, is it you creating it? And if it is, then it's yours. Then you get to own it. Then nobody can take it away from you. Then who cares about inequality? It's not a grand big pie. There is no pie. I hate that metaphor. There is no pie. Each one of us does our thing. Each one of us creates our own values. There's no, all the value that J.K. Rowland's created and all the value that you created and we put it all together and it's somehow something combined. Bill Gates, so in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and everybody in this room and everybody out there and we all throw it in together. That doesn't exist. We must look at things from an individualistic perspective from the individual. And if you create it, if you build it, if you bake it, if you make it, you get to decide what's done with it. It's yours. It's nobody else's. So the whole point here is to defend, to defend the idea that each one of us does build it. And to do that, we have to have a solid foundation of free will. And that's what we're going to be talking about the rest of the conference. So with that, I'll take questions. Thanks. We have a mic here, I guess. We've got a mic here. We'd like you to use the mic. Sorry. There's a mic over there, so there's one close to you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Joshua Glossner from Pasadena, California. You made a statement that all of our judgments are based on axiomatic perceptions and that based on what we see is what we know as what's real. And so what I'm asking you is, when I said that reason was the way that we determined what's real and what's not real, magic is a great example of that. We think we see certain things and we see certain things happening and we swear to ourselves that those are the things that are happening, yet those are not what are happening. I think that objective value actually determines that whether or not we believe what's happening or what's not happening, it doesn't matter that it is what it is, that necessity is key in this instance. So what you said was that what we see is what determines what's real. I don't think that that's necessarily true, and I want you to explain a little bit more on that. So it doesn't mean we're infallible in terms of making mistakes. But at the end of the day, what we see is what is real. So I might make a mistake about this podium because I've seen it in an angle the way it looks like a table and I say it's a table and it turns out to be a podium. But ultimately, it sends evidence that will suggest to me that it's something different. And all I'm saying is that that's the level at which we experience our own free will. That is, it is in the same category. So I'm not saying that every time you see something, you're seeing it right. But I would suggest you ask the philosophers that question tomorrow. You'll have lots of opportunity because I'm sure I'm screwing it up. So I think we can all agree that the idea of free will is absolutely necessary for the premises of objectiveism to work. But I don't see how that proves that free will is true just because we want free will to be true in order for objectiveism to work. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. And the idea of consciousness, which is what you're saying, how we see us making the choice, just because we're conscious of us making the choice doesn't necessarily mean that we're freely making those choices. So your first statement is absolutely right. Just because we need free will to be right in order to be individualists and objectivists doesn't make it right. My purpose is not to try to prove free will right now. So leave all those questions for Ankhon Gregg. Sorry. That's it. Everybody's now worried about what kind of questions they can ask. Well, hopefully it'll be a good one. My name is Chatham and I'm from Arizona. So show the love. But anyway, so my question is, so what are the roles of common goods, such as roads and things built by the government and how can individuals supplement the need or at least the perceived need for government to establish these kinds of things for infrastructure? Well, I mean, I don't consider them common goods. This is property that has been built by confiscating people's wealth by government. And that's wrong. So these could easily all be private goods and in a sense the only way the government could build them is how. I mean, people say, Obama accused, says about wealthy people, he says, you owe society something because you drove on the roads to get to work. Well, who pays for those roads? Well, we do. Yeah, but we, who in particular pays for those roads? The individual. Yeah, but which individuals in particular pay for those roads? Tax payers. My guess is this room is not, there are a lot of people who pay for those roads. There are few of us in this room who pay a lot of money for those roads, right? And they're the ones Obama's going after, right? What comes first? Roads or business? What comes first? Roads or business? I mean government roads in the sense that we know them today. Business. You have to have people making money so you can steal from them in order to build the roads. So business and the wealthy people pay for the roads, right? So all the things that people talk about, education, science, roads, all things that are created by private individuals, the money's created by private individuals and the work is done by private individuals and the government has stuck itself in the middle to take from some and decide how to plan out the space and it's just unnecessary for the government to do that. Indeed, it's bad and wrong for the government to do that. So almost, I mean, all the cases of public goods, as economists often talk about it, are just goods that should be private and indeed are in a sense private because again, wealth is created by private people, work is done by private people, the government is just redistributing wealth and planning and controlling and manipulating. Thank you. Good evening. Here. There you go. First, thank you for the lecture. My name is Peter, I'm from Brazil. I love Brazil. Yeah, it's a great country. It is a great country. Now it's getting better, right? I hope so. Yeah. So my question is, do you think that free will is the only factor that influence in someone's life or you think that in certain circumstances free will is not enough to make an individual get out of a condition of poverty and make his life better? No, clearly it's not the only thing that influences a person's life, right? So for example, in Brazil, you have an economy that is often so controlled and so corrupt that you might be the best person in the world and you might have the best ideas and do all the right things and the bureaucracy or the autocrats will crush you and they will keep you poor and they will not let you exercise your free will. So particularly when there's no freedom then suddenly it's not just up to you and this is why, why should we care about politics? I mean, really you could do whatever you wanted, right? If you really could do anything and it was not dependent on what other people did. We wouldn't care about politics. The reason we care about politics is no, they can crush us. They can stop us from doing what we want to do. We could have the best idea. We could apply ourselves. We can work hard and they can shut you down tomorrow. They could pass a regulation saying the particular business that you want to go in is wiped out. It's gone. So it doesn't matter what you thought. It doesn't matter how you trained yourself, how you worked hard, everything you did. They have guns, right? And they can shut you down. So in that sense, no, of course it's not enough. You have to have freedom. And why is freedom good? One of the main reasons freedom is good is because it allows you to exercise your free will in the pursuit of the values necessary for your own survival, for your own thriving. So that's why we're pro-freedom. But it's more than that. Look, there's no question that your genes matter. I mean, look at me. I use this example often. And look at LeBron James. We have different genes. He's built to be a basketball player or an athlete. I am not. So our genes are different. Now, is it enough that he's got the genes? No. I mean, LeBron James works unbelievably hard. And he thinks about the game. And he thinks about how to play it and how to train himself and how to get in the best physical shape possible. Those are all choices he's made. And he's had to give up certain values in order to achieve this value of being the best basketball player in the world. Sorry, Steph Curry. So genes matter. You could train me all you want and I'm not going to be the best basketball player in the world. It just ain't happening. And your environment happens. There's no question that if you were born poor with abusive parents and a bad school system, it's going to be harder for you to achieve whatever you achieve in life. It's going to be tougher. You're going to have to be stronger in many ways. But the point is that it's still you. It's so you have to make those choices. But to assume that the external environment has no impact on us or that our genes have no impact on us would be wrong. But the determining factor of who you are and what you are is you. You can't put aside truly abusive and real force or genes that just, you know, if you're born with an IQ of 50, I mean, it's just a reality. There's only so much you'll be able to ever achieve. But assuming freedom and assuming normalcy, I mean, if your parents lock you up in a closet for 12 years, I don't think free will matters. You're probably screwed up forever. All these things play into it. But that doesn't, but that just elevates the importance of free will. Because all these are conditions and then what do you do with them? And thank you for answering this question. And about a second thought, do you think that we can make an analogy between this ideology and the thought of Ayn Rand and Machiavelli with Virtu and Fortuna is just something that occurred to me when you were speaking, because I bet you have already read the prince. So when she is saying about Virtu and Fortuna, you think that free will can be like you playing with the environments surrounding you and taking advantage of it? I don't think so. But I don't think so. But I don't want to say more than that because I read it a long time ago. We can discuss more. I suspect that it's not in a very deep and important sense, but I don't want to speculate on why that is. Okay, thank you. Hi, Luis from Guatemala. My question is... Yeah. So when you talk about rights, I immediately thought about slaves and do these people actually have rights? I mean, they live the entire lives of a right to free will, right to property or whatever. Is there such a thing as rights if there isn't a bigger power there to grant them to you? No, rights are not granted. You have rights as a human being from the sense that the moment you're born, you have the right to life. You have a right to pursue those values necessary for your own survival. You have a right to act for your own flourishing, for your own success as a human being. You have a right to pursue those rational values. Now, in the case of slavery, those rights are being denied from you. Those, you know, people are oppressing you, are denying you that freedom. That's the... And this is why one of the reasons... The reason we establish government is not to give us those rights, but to secure those rights. That is to protect us from oppressors, right? This is why slavery is such a travesty in the context... I mean, it's a travesty in any context, but in the context of the American Revolution, it's a huge, you know, the travesty is that here we are declaring the rights of man, right? That inalienable rights of man and yet allowing the institution of slavery to exist at the same time, which contradicts the idea that the world of government is securing those rights. So, no, every human being on the planet, whether they know it or whether the government knows it or whether they have rights, now it's just a question of do they have a government that secures those rights or do they have a government that violates those rights? In the case of slavery, our government violated those rights. They violated by allowing slave owners to own slaves. Because slave owners violated rights. Yeah, no, thank you. But then what do the rights mean to any individual being that there's not a stronger power there to protect them from slavery? It means it's something for them. It means something to strive towards. It means to fight for their own freedom. It means that their lives is theirs. It's not their... There's no owners, right? It's not the states. It's not the dictators. It's the slave owners. Their life is theirs and they need to fight for that life, right? But because... because your rights are being denied you, doesn't mean you don't have them. Then it's a recognition that you have them that gives you the spirit to fight the oppressors. Because otherwise, if we don't have rights, right, if they're only granted to us, then as long as they're not granted to us, then by what right do we demand our freedom? It's the states. No, it's how... My life is mine. You don't get to tell me what to do and you don't get to whip me when you feel like it. It's my life. I have a right to live it as I see fit. And so I think it's that... It gives them that spirit of rebellion, I guess would be the case. When they identify it, the problem in so many places around the world is that they have rights. They don't recognize that they have rights and they submit in too many places around the world. People submit not to slavery, although that exists as well, but to oppression. So people don't rise up against dictators. People don't rise up against religions that oppress them or ideas that oppress them or theocrats or dictators that are oppressing them. They accept the fact that their life belongs to the state, their life belongs to the dictator, their life belongs to the class or tribe or whatever. So it's a huge achievement, a huge achievement to recognize that you have rights, to identify that. And the philosophers who first identified it, that's a huge achievement and a huge benefit to all of us. But each one of us has to recognize, again, free will, right? We have to recognize in our own lives that we have a right to our own life. That's an achievement which many, many people, I'd say most people on the planet, have not achieved. So remember Bush said, George Bush at some point said that all men yearn for freedom or something. He made some statement like that. We all have freedom in our hearts. It's not true. I wish it was. Because it's not in our hearts. It's in our reason. We have to reason to freedom. It's not an emotion. And a lot of people don't have that emotion. A lot of people are quite happy to just follow orders and just... because they haven't achieved the recognition that they have the right to their own life. Again, it's a huge achievement. Historically, I mean remember, the idea of a right to life is something that was recognized, what, three, 400 years ago? In the history of 100,000 years of the human race? So it's new and it's a tremendous philosophical achievement. Thank you. There was somebody here. One of the... I'm Josh. I'm from Oregon. One of the biggest issues in the West recently that I've noticed is that some copyright laws can be ridiculously long, granting rights to an idea decades past the author's death. Can you kind of talk about the extent to which that right should exist? I mean, you guys are pushing the limits of my knowledge. There's no question in my mind that copyright laws should exist and that you ever write not to have your work just copied when you publish it and produce it and anybody can then benefit from the work that you have put into it. Whether they should be 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, how long after an author's death, all of those technical questions beyond my pay grade, talk to Adam Marsoff at George Mason. But the point is that there needs to be a period in which you can benefit from the creative work that you have put in and how we determine that exactly, I'll leave that the philosophers of law, that's their job to do that calculation. I suspect that right now it's too long. 75 years, I can't figure out after death or something, strikes me it's too long. But I don't know what the right number is and again, I would leave it to philosophers of law. But I am a big proponent of copyright and patents and intellectual property rights more broadly. Can you lend any insight on connecting America's perspective on free will and America's attitude or I should say millennials' attitude towards the election this year? So America's attitude towards free will and the millennials, I don't even know what the millennials' attitude towards this election is. How many millennials are actually going to vote? I assume they're mostly going to vote for Hillary, but I don't know that that many are going to vote. Look, I think that this is a generation, your generation, that has been raised under a collectivistic, anti-individualistic philosophical framework. And this is what we're saying, this is the appeal of Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is basically reflecting back to you guys everything your teachers have been telling you for the last 12 years in one form or another. You need to be taken care of, why? Well, because you can't take care of yourself. Why can't you take care of yourself partially because you don't really have free will? You can't really control your own life. You don't really know the world out there. So you have to be taken care of. So it's altruism and collectivism dominate the thinking of your teachers and therefore, again, Bernie Sanders and to some extent Hillary Clinton, if she ever talks about ideas at all, just reflect back to you what you've actually been taught all these years. And yes, there's a decline in, there's no question there's a decline in America in the idea and the belief in individualism. In the idea that existed 100 years ago, 120, 150 years ago in a big way, that you can shape your own life. You can start a new, you can go into this new country and you can make of it, of your life what you want to make of it. There was this sometimes called rugged individualism but more fundamentally, it's the idea that your life is yours to shape by your own will and through your own actions. And that is what America used to be and that doesn't exist anymore. I know so many millennials who think that what they really want to do is about what is it, social entrepreneurship or I don't even know what that means. It's the idea that we have to work for the group, we have to work for the collective, even if it's voluntary but they all focus on other people. Instead of shaping their own souls and just shaping who they are as human beings, they're worried about what's going on out there and how do I deal with other people. They're so second-handed in that sense. There are things about other people and I think that this generation has a lot of that. Now how much of it, I don't know, you guys know your generation better than I do. I just worry about you guys. So yeah, so I think it's very much that individualism is missing and I think part of that individualism is you being told that it's your peer group that shapes you. You got lucky because you got good genes and therefore you're privileged and therefore you owe people who didn't get good genes because they're not privileged. I mean the whole language is a language of it's not about you, it's about all the other ways in which you were shaped by external forces that are outside of your control. I think the whole idea of privilege is the idea that you didn't build it, that you got it from the outside whether through your parents or whether through your genetic makeup. I think I answered the question. Hi Yi. Hi, so I'll have a question about like compatibilism. So what can you say about like compatibilist claims that you know free will and determinism are like compatible with one another because here's like their main argument it's that you know man can really freely make choices but here's the thing that those choices are conditioned by their moral nature like you know our hearts and mind like yes they have choices but then are those choices already like given to them that they have preference over those choices so that means that technically determinism free will exist with one another so like or are you like clearly rejecting the possibility of determinism and just free will exist. This is why I didn't go study philosophy. Anybody tell me what you, no I mean I don't get these discussions but no economics and finance is so much easier. Where do we get our moral assumptions right? I mean this assumes that we're somehow a morality imprinted in us and that shapes what we decide but how do we get morality? We get morality by making choices. We shape our own morality our own moral character by the choices that we make. Now the fundamental choices that some people make is not to think. What happens to you if you don't think? You make the choice not to think. Then who shapes you? Others. Then it's true. So if I'm not thinking, if I'm not engaged, if I'm not focused on reality, if I'm not making choices then by default I'm just drifting and then I get shaped by other people, by circumstances, by events but if I'm engaged if I'm in control of my own consciousness, if I'm in control of my own reason, if I'm engaged with the world out there, if I'm then I'm shaping my morality I'm shaping the choices and I'm shaping my character in my own soul. Does that make sense? But you do observe people you look at people and you go there's no free will there. Because they're just adrift. They're not making any choices. They're just doing what's expected, what they were told, what their mother said. They're not actually turning it on. They're not engaged. They're not focused. They're not I'm thinking about, because there's this thing called cultural relativism being absolute in relative truth I'm thinking of moral things in general as something as a matter of perspectives so you can't really just say that you chose to be a good person just because you chose into there's outside factors that affects your choice that makes you a moral being. You're not born good or bad or something like that. That is true but what you choose and it's not that you choose to be a moral person or you choose to be a good person you choose the values you want to pursue and you know and you choose what you view as the good those are choices that you make and yes you're influenced by other factors but you get to choose whether you're going to, you know steal or not, you know pick up the little for bet or not even then are you not stealing because you're not thinking and some, you remember there's a tenth commandment, not ten what number is it, I don't remember that shall not steal and therefore you're not stealing and then it's not really you choosing, it's just drifting and you're being guided by some commandment you've got stuck in there and it's a default because you're refusing to think, you're refusing to engage so that's the fundamental choice as you're here tomorrow is to think or not to think and if you're not thinking then yeah you're shaped by all kinds of stuff and you're not in control that's the thing about people who don't think they're really not in control other forces are in control of them religion, tradition and people all around them but don't ask me technical questions at night 30 at night we'll make these the last questions on that, there's actually four different types of parts of this question that she asked, I just wanted to make a clarification that there's hard determinism soft determinism as well as free will and also what you call libertarianism not libertarianism as in the political aspect but actually as far as what your free will is mixed with the determinism with the determinism so yeah, highly recommend looking into that also if you were looking more into natural law highly recommend you looking into Hugo Grotus also Pufendorf Grotus and Pufendorf are great achievers of the idea and they're the originators some of the originators of the idea of individual rights but Ayn Rand's perspective of individual rights is different than theirs because they ultimately are intrinsists as I understand it and she has an objective view of individual rights which is different than Locke and Pufendorf and Grotius yes you mentioned Warren Buffett in your speech and the ability to have good sense for capital allocation is really rewarded in today's time a lot of other skills aren't rewarded as much in the nature of the economy is changing so much to where manufacturing jobs jobs with low skill there's not as much demand for those type of jobs what kind of policy solution is there since the economy is changing so much that can give opportunities to people that don't necessarily have those kind of skills that Warren Buffett has so that we can still have a consumer that can still buy products and support themselves this has nothing to do with the economy changing a lot look the economy changed much more 200 years ago when we went from basically being farmers who sowed seeds and that's all we knew how to do we knew how to farm we had no excess we basically grew the stuff that we ate and suddenly an industrial revolution comes around that is a much bigger change in terms of real people's lives and what we're experiencing today and all we need in my view is freedom all we need is to be left alone what we need is for the government to stop trying to control the economy and to control the path of economic growth moving forward so this is so there's nothing that needs to be done other than individuals taking responsibility on their own life and to figure out what they want to do in their life given what the opportunity set that exists out there in terms of the kind of professions that are going to exist moving forward but there's no doubt I don't buy any of these arguments that there's going to be no jobs computers are going to do everything we're just going to lay around all day it's nonsense it's stuff I've heard every decade I haven't heard it personally every decade for the last 200 years but it's been said every decade for the last 200 years leadites have always existed who hated technology because it was destroyed jobs it's always been the case and today you have most sophisticated leadites who talk about AI and talk about robots and computers and they use big words but it's the same the same argument the work week will probably shrink to be able to consume the same amount for some people some people still work long hours and there'll be many jobs that we can't imagine and just like 200 years ago nobody could have believed there were jobs like waiter hotels didn't really exist restaurants didn't exist vacation was not a term anybody could use because nobody went on vacations so there's a whole industry called Malaysia that was created in the last 100 years that didn't exist before that and millions of people work in these industries and there's so many other industries that are going to come out because we're wealthier and because technology creates opportunities yeah good evening I am Gustavo and shout out to my South American fellows that came up here before me I am from Colombia from Colombia from Cartago Valle that's Nicaragua I figured so my question is I'm having trouble understanding the connect between human nature and objectivism and what I mean by that is it seems to me that human nature is very collective I mean we are all here gathered today to learn we are all gathered in communities in cities we're not living in the forest I know some people are but even if they are I'm sure they have a friend or two I hope for you experimental psychologists out there we look at sad events like Jeannie who was left in isolation for decade and came out like a prune she couldn't talk I mean I know that's socialization all this but it seems to me that nature at the core is a collective thing where we come together and we help each other so that's why I'm having the disconnect between objectivism so I don't think at the core it's us coming together at the core of what makes us human or at the core of our nature there is an enormous advantage of coming together and this is why we do it because we benefit enormously from one another as traders so as providers of value for value not as just lumps in a room I know lots of people I do not want to be with tonight I mean probably millions and millions of people I do not want to be with tonight I want to be with you guys why because I hope that you guys will generate value that I will benefit from and I hope that I'm generating some value to you so what makes us come together is a value proposition a win-win situation in which we're producing value for one another that value could be spiritual, it could be material but it's value and living in civilization you get layers and layers and layers because you get the benefit from all the knowledge that is accumulated in the past and you get all the knowledge that people have today all the values that they're creating today and then there's the emotional value that we create, love that is created between some people not everybody again but we're very selective about these things again there are a lot of people I do not want to hang out with so it's not this central nature wanting to hang out with people we want to hang out with people because people provide us with value now why do they provide us with value and where does the value that we can provide them come from and that's what's human nature that's what's essentially human and what's essentially human is our reasonable capabilities is our ability to reason it's ability to think it's ability to create to produce, to make stuff to paint beautiful paintings to do beautiful sculptures and to you know I always do this to build an iPhone and then we trade so it's that it's the fact that as each individual we can think we can reason and we can create and produce that makes a bunch of us grouped together an enormous value but it starts we don't have a collective stomach we don't collectively eat we eat as individuals we don't collectively think we can help each other think just like we help each other eat by somebody I didn't actually kill the chicken I ate today so that is what is the incredible benefit we get from living in society, living in civilization it's not impossible to live in your own it's just not fun it's a disaster given the alternative, given what's possible these three are going to be the last ones two last one I'm Josh I'm from Atlanta you and I were talking outside a little bit about size of government and how that's concerning my questions related to that and free will so I agree that in our history as a country the declaration of the rights of man and the individual are very important but it seems like that has moved throughout our history from being a country where we allow people to be individuals and to exercise rights on their own where if our current government is any reflection where freedom and decision to choose has resulted in a larger government, more interference in our individual lives and I guess my question is you know in view of that you look at the end of Atlas Shrugged where they're writing amendments to the constitution in Galt's Gulch and talking about new laws about private property do you think that our current system do you think the current issue is really with our government system, the constitution or do you think that this is more reflection of something that's happened in the electorate and the intellectuals that are forming I don't think there's any question government is outcome, government is the end it's never a cause right, we get the government we deserve as a culture we get the government we deserve, we get the politicians we deserve we deserve Bill Clinton and Donald Trump this is the state of the culture we have an unthinking populace we have a populace that is not exerting you know the reason and their free will we have a populace that is drifting and focused on emotion not on thought and this is what you get so it's not politics is the end this is why I think going into politics getting excited about politics and really engaging in politics while we need to care about politics you know getting overly excited about politics you're not going to change the world through politics politics is the last thing to fall our populace is shaped by our intellectuals and when the intellectuals teach over and over again you didn't build that you owe society your life is not yours you must sacrifice then we become dependent on government and we vote to get bigger and bigger government we vote for the corruption whether we like the particular corrupt I mean people don't even care that our politicians are corrupt because we voted for them we've accepted the system this is the system most people want now most people don't really think it through they just drift into it this is the issue we will but this is what we've been conditioned to be by our intellectuals so this is an intellectual philosophical battle it's not a political one it doesn't matter who wins this election it doesn't matter long term who wins it doesn't matter short term but it doesn't matter long term long term it's a question of the intellectual state of the culture and you know in which direction it goes in in terms of in terms of the intellectuals and we know the intellectuals are corrupt so it's hard to be optimistic about the direction the culture is going to take because you look at the intellectual world in which we live I don't look at the politicians and say well we're doomed because our politicians are corrupt I look at our intellectuals and I say we're doomed because look at our intellectuals and I don't say what we need to work really really hard to do is replace the politicians that'll happen what we need to work really really hard and what we hope you guys do ultimately is replace our intellectuals so if we replace the intellectuals then a generation later our politicians will be replaced as well if you replace the politicians nothing will happen and you can't replace the politicians because the people don't want the better politicians right so it's we like politics because it's immediacy and it's passion and it affects our lives right now but it doesn't it's not where the action really is the action is on your campuses the action is your professors the action are the ideas that are being taught the ideas that students millennials are advocating for and the professors are advocating for it's that intellectual debate that's going on every single day on American campuses about free will about reason about altruism morality about all these issues that's what's going to change the world right for the better for the worse it's not the politics the politics is an outcome of one's perception of one's ideas about these things if we get wrong ideas about free will wrong ideas about reason wrong ideas about morality then it doesn't how can you get good politics you're not going to get good politics so you know the battle is in ideology and in ethics it's not in politics alright thank you all