 We are college students for Liberty. We started our society just three to four months ago. We are the only society that believes in individual responsibility or in the political society. Other sort of political societies are usually believing in collectivism or these kinds of ideas. So we've had a few events before. We've had one major event and a few socials. But this event is probably very controversial for according to the university. As you all know, they've put a lot of restrictions on us. They've put three conditions on us, which is first of all, we had a larger room and they suspended the venue. They said you need to find a different room closer to security. Second, they asked us to hire a member of security so that in case of any public safety issue, we have someone to control the crowd. And we totally don't believe that we needed it. The university cited a tab article. It said that there were nonviolent protests in Exeter and because of that, you need to have security to maintain freedom of speech. Otherwise the speaker might be under threat, which is totally bollocks. Because that event happened in Exeter a year ago and the speaker just yesterday gave another talk at Exeter and Exeter had no objections. They did not ask for any public safety measures to be taken. And the speaker gave a UK tour at around six to seven universities where he spoke, including King's College. And none of the universities asked for any kind of security. It's just got a university and the students union which are saying that he's very controversial. And this topic is not really that controversial as Dr. Yanbrook will make a moral case for why capitalism is the best way to cure poverty. So yeah, without any further ado, I'll introduce Dr. Yanbrook. He's an Israeli born American entrepreneur. He has worked in his own hedge fund and he was in the Israeli military intelligence long ago. Then he went to US and he studied MBA and PhD and he was a very distinguished lecturer at Santa Clara. And then he gained citizenship as well in the US and now he's the executive chairman of the Einbrandt Institute. So yeah, he's a very distinguished speaker and great round of applause for him please. So thank you, thank you for the kind introduction. And as you'll see, yeah, I am controversial. So what, right? The whole idea of we wouldn't need protections of free speech if nobody was controversial. If we all were nice to each other and always agreed, then we wouldn't need to be protecting speech. The only reason we have protections of free speech is to protect those who offend, right? So if I offend anybody, good I guess. Not my intent, but the truth sometimes offends. So be it. I'm just curious before I start and since people are still coming in. I'm curious, how many people here have red Einrandt, anything by Einrandt? Wait, about almost half. It's pretty cool. So if you're curious about Einrandt, if you're curious about a philosophy in more detail or anything like that, ask me in the Q&A. I'll make some references while we talk about capitalism today, to her ideas, particularly to her ethics, which I think is, for me, the heart of her philosophy, the heart of her ideas. I also would recommend, there's a bunch of free flyers. I think in fact free brochures on different topics. I highly recommend that you pick them up and hopefully actually read them. It's intellectual content and writing is always, I know for your generation this might not be true, but it's always better than just listening to a lecture. When you read, you're actually engaged in a way that you don't when you listen. So capitalism and poverty, I mean, why do we have to give a lecture on this exactly? It should be kind of obvious. What was the way to poverty? I mean real poverty, not the kind of poverty we have today even, real deep poverty, the kind of poverty we have today in Africa, the kind of poverty we might have in Cambodia, the kind of poverty where people live at less than $3 a day in real terms, $3 a day, not dollars a long time ago, today's dollars. $3 a day is what the UN says is real poverty. What do you think the percentage of the population that lived on $3 a day was 250 years ago in the world, but including in England and in Western Europe and in the colonies, the 13 colonies, what was the percentage of the population that lived on less than $3 a day? Yeah, 99s close, I'm a little bit more generous, I say 95, but it was well into the 90s, almost everybody. Now think about what it means, think about your life, think about how long you could survive on $3, you know, not very long, a few hours maybe, if you count rent, not even that, right? And I'm not even gonna talk about your internet connection and your phones and everything else that cost a lot of money even if you're not directly paying for them. $3 a day, and that's not unique to 250 years ago, it's not like 250 years ago is a different period in human history. Indeed, if we go back 10,000 years to the agricultural revolution, kind of the beginnings of human civilization, if you will, and you look at average income or average wealth, it doesn't really matter. I'm drawing in the air, so for those of you in the back, it goes something like this, right? It's basically flat and around, I don't know, somewhere under $3 a day, somewhere between $1 to $3 a day. And it continues like this, almost forever, like it goes up a little bit during rural home and it goes down a little bit during the Middle Ages, but generally it's right here, nowhere, good, poor, everybody, and then something amazing happens. It goes like that, and I can't even reach high enough to get to where it actually gets to. But none of you live on $3 a day, nobody in England lives on $3 a day, nobody in America lives on $3 a day, and today, what percentage of the world population lives on $3 today in the world we live in today, right now? 5%, okay, you're a little optimistic, it's eight, it's eight, right? And if you consider Africa and how many people are in Africa, it's mostly in Africa, still some in Asia, but it may be sprinkled here and there in Latin America, but it's rare, 8%. 30 years ago, just 30 years ago, what do you think the percentage was? It was 30%. So just in the last 30 years, it's gone from 30 to eight, and over the last 200 and something years, it's gone from 95 to eight. So extreme poverty is almost being eradicated from the face of the earth. How? What did it? So if we look back at when it eradicated poverty in a sense here in the West, we see this massive inflection point, and inflection point, by the way, that happened in Asia about 200 years later, about 30 years ago, you see the same kind of inflection point, what happens in that inflection point? What is that, if you had a year where everything's flat, flat, flat, and then it goes up like that, what year would you pick? Everything starts getting better dramatically. Anybody want to try out a year? A little bit of history, we've got some history majors here right now. What's that? 1960s, no, 1960s were already rich. What's that even meant to the moon? We're not on $3 a day in 1960s, right? What's that? 1820s is not bad, it's certainly closer, but I think it's actually before the 1820s. The 1820s Industrial Revolution is already really kicking its stride, it's really starting to generate wealth and generate prosperity, and it's really rolling there. I have a date in mind, I like this date for a lot of different reasons, and it's a nice date, because it's each of our member, not a very popular date in the United Kingdom, but what the hell, right? I'm here to offend. 1776. Yeah, that's right. You're wearing a Clinton t-shirt, what are you talking about? Clinton, on your t-shirt. Why 1776? For three reasons, one more important than the other two, but three reasons. Two having to do with England actually, or you can have to be careful when we're in Wales, so I don't wanna again offend anybody for no good reason. Offending is only good when it has good reasons for it. What book was published? A great, important, significant book was published in 1776. Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, that way you can easily remember when Adam Smith published the book, 1776. And 1776 is the first, for the first time, the steam engine was commercialized. It had been invented earlier, but its first commercial use was put into place here in England, in the UK, in 1776. So in that sense, you could argue that that's the very, very beginning of that industrial revolution. I think Adam Smith is more important than the commercialization, because the commercialization happens in 1776 for the same very reason that the book gets published in 1776. And in many respects, the same reason that the United States is founded, or that the Declaration of Independence at least is written and signed in 1776. To me, the Declaration of Independence, in spite of how you, Brits, might feel about it, is probably the most significant political event in human history, because it declares a new principle that would never really be articulated in a political context before. It had been discussed by philosophers, primarily John Locke, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and to some extent, the French Enlightenment, but it had never been placed into action, never been put into action, never actually been articulated in a political working document. And that is the idea, the idea coming out of the Enlightenment, that fundamentally your light belongs to, who does your light belong to? You. But that's new, right? We take it for granted. I'll travel all over the world and ask audiences that question, and they all say, yeah, my light belongs to me. You didn't think that, not that long ago, in some places in the world, but even in the West, pre-1776, your light belonged to whom? To the king, to the tribe, to the council, to the pope, to God, to fill in the blank, some group outside of you, to society, to the community, but not to you. You are nothing, you are a cognitive, grand machine, striving towards something, that something led to flat income and flat wealth and a pretty brutish, by the way, what was life expectancy? From negative 10,000 until 1776. Yeah, 35 to 39, something in that range, sometimes got worse, sometimes got worse. Depends on the particulars of the plague, right? At any given point in time. But yeah, it was below 40. When things like that went like that, in income and wealth, what happened to life expectancy? Same thing. It doubled, within about 150 years and a sense of gone up a lot more, and if not for, no, I won't say it, I'll leave my attack on the NHS to later. I don't want to spoil the evening so early. But we're now at what, 80s, well into our 80s in terms of life expectancy, and for many of you, your actual life expectancy, given where you are today, is controlling for the NHS, is probably well into your 90s, which is pretty astounding. So for the first time in human history, we have a situation where individuals believe, individuals declare that their life belongs to them. And indeed, we start establishing political systems all over Europe, particularly in the UK and the United States, that respect the individual as sovereign, the individual as an end in himself, and not as a sacrificial animal for some greater good, not as a sacrificial animal for some collectivistic venture, not as just a soldier to be butchered on the field, but as an end in himself with structured governments for the sake of protecting individual rights. And we acknowledge the existence of individual rights. The idea of a right, as Locke understood it, not as we understand it today, we have no understanding of rights today. The idea as Locke has understood it, and I think has discovered it and has legitimately held it, is it's an idea about individual freedom. You have a right to use your mind. You have a right to apply your mind to the problem of your individual existence and your individual flourishing. And nobody should be able to interfere with you doing that. And the only way to interfere with your freedom to live your life as you see fit is how? How can people interfere? Well, no, because then you can certainly, you can certainly convince somebody to do something stupid, but how can somebody interfere with your ability to live your life the way you see fit? Violent coercion is the only way they can do it. The only way to stop you from thinking the thoughts that you want to think is by placing a gun to your head and saying, if you think I'm, if you utter one word about this, boom, your head is exploded. Or you go to jail. This is why laws against free speech are so insidious and evil because they stop the thinking mind. They're an assault on human reason. So coercion, violent coercion, authorities that would place under house arrest are scientists because they don't agree with the truth he has discovered, referring to Galileo, or sometimes even burn them at the stake, which they did often when they disagreed with truths or falsehoods that people preach. The only way to violate your right is with a gun, it's with a sword, it's with a fist, it's with violence. It's to stop you from acting, to stop you from thinking. This is the great achievement of Locke and the Enlightenment thinkers and ultimately of the establishment of the US and the political systems that evolved post the establishment of the United States of America. Now what does that do to human life? Suddenly, we are free to live for ourselves. We are free to go out there and produce and create and invent. We suddenly have the ability to take science, A, expand science, think about science without the fear that the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church or the Church of England or somebody will tell us that's not approved or the government saying that's not approved as some governments do today, including the American one, certain fields of science are not allowed. We suddenly were free to think these big thoughts and then we could take the science and apply it, call that engineering, and then we could take that engineering and turn it into businesses. And for the first time in human history, you didn't have permission to start a business. You didn't have to get permission to change careers. You didn't have to get permission to choose a job and a life for yourself. You got to decide what kind of life you were going to live. That's unusual in human history, right? Before the late 18th century in England, you belong to a guild because your father belonged to a guild and a grandfather belonged to a guild or you are peasants and therefore you are a serf and you belong to some aristocrat who told you what to plant, what to harvest, when to do it, and if you didn't, he would beat you or he'd kick you out into nowhere. That's the reality of human life. Everyone on the planet until this amazing thing happened and we were freed up. And suddenly, when we were freed up, what happened? We built, we created, we produced, we made and we could own it. We could keep it. That's the other part of this, right? Because individual rights included a right over property. Not only can we think for ourselves, not only could we live our lives but we can now own stuff and it was ours and no aristocrat could come and just take it from us. We got to own our life and we got to own the things that are necessary to make our life possible. And as a consequence of that, we started producing huge amounts. And what happened? Well, that happened. We started making huge quantities of wealth. Life expectancy doubled. Poverty on the level of 1776 poverty disappeared basically in the West went to zero. Now, what do we call this system that protects individual rights? The respect property that allows people to keep what they own, that encourages innovation, entrepreneurship. What do we call that? What's our nice one word? What did Marx call it? Let's go to the authority, right? Karl Marx, what did he call it? Capitalism. Capitalism eradicated poverty. Poverty, which had been systemic, which had been natural, which had been part of human life for 10,000 years, that level of poverty disappeared from the face of at least the countries that adopted capitalism. It completely disappeared. It was eliminated. It went away. So there's a year of does capitalism, can capitalism solve poverty? I mean, that was answered a long time ago. There's no debate here. There's no discussion. Of course it does. And then what happens is, if you keep following history, right? What you see is, yeah, people stay poor in Asia, but then some countries in Asia adopt elements, not even pure capitalism, just elements of this idea of individual rights, this idea of freedom, this idea of property rights, this idea of encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship, and encouraging people to keep their wealth and invest that wealth. In other words, embrace elements of capitalism. What happens in those economies? Well, they create huge amounts of wealth and they eradicate or eliminate, for the large extent, real poverty. So if you go, I mean, one of the most miraculous places, of course, is the Korean Peninsula. Miraculous for half the population, not the other. I don't know if you've seen the satellite images of Korea, right? South Korea, lit up, North Korea, dark because they have no electricity at night, because they're poor. One indication of poverty is no lighting. And I didn't know this. I actually visited Seoul earlier this year. I gave a couple of talks in Seoul in May. And I didn't know this, but it turns out that at the end of the Korean War in the 1950s, South Korea was a lot poorer than North Korea. A lot poorer. Because most of the war had been fought in the South and it was devastated and crushed. And for almost a decade after the war, South Korea was poorer than North Korea. And then South Korea adopted a few, not even many elements of capitalism. And it took off. It just took off. And today you go to Seoul, South Korea, and it looks like any Western city anywhere in the world, skyscrapers and large roads and people driving. I mean, they have high tariffs and importation of cars. They're all driving Korean cars. But Korean cars are pretty good, right? So here they are producing cars, right? Producing all of our TV sets. I don't know, in America you can't buy a TV set that's not made in Korea now. But they become rich. Life expectancy has grown. They actually are now innovating in stem cells and in certain genetic engineering because they have more freedom over there than we do in the United States to do that kind of research. South Korea is booming. And you go country by country. You go to Taiwan, which was very poor when they came over from mainland China and it was too many people because it was a tiny little island and look at them today. They're far richer than the Chinese. China, on a per capita basis, far richer than the Chinese and China because they adopted some, not a lot, of capitalism. You go all across Asia, every place you go, everywhere you touch, where they've adopted capitalism and to the extent that they adopt capitalism, they become rich. India, 1991, up until 1991, was committed to British socialism. They loved socialism. And they suffered about as badly as Britain suffered from socialism. But you've forgotten because you loved Jeremy Corbyn now. Um, maybe not in this room. Maybe not in this room. Maybe we've actually got all the people in Cardiff who do not support Jeremy Corbyn in one room. I mean, that would be quite an achievement. Yeah, it's basically the Students' Union. But, you know, India was dirt poor. It had nothing. It was going nowhere. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, under the legendary governments of Gandhi's and News and all this stuff, nothing from economic development, nothing. They stayed dirt poor. And then in 1991, they started liberalizing just a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more. And today it's one of the most dynamic economies in the world because they allowed a little bit of capitalism. Imagine what India could do if they actually allowed full capitalism for the whole shebang. So that was 1991. Previously, that's 79. Mao Zedong finally died a little late for about 60, 70 million people that he managed to murder in between. But he finally died. That's a lot of people. Think about what we think about when we think of Hitler and for some reason when we think about Mao, we don't think the same thing. Or we think about Stalin and Lenin. You think that they would all be in the same category of hell. Maybe Stalin, Lenin and Mao even lower wrong of hell, you know, because they killed more people. Many, many, many more people by odors of magnitude. And Deng Cha Peng was a bad guy, not a good guy, but had some good features and he was experimenting. And he kind of said to Southern China, the region around Hong Kong, I'm gonna leave you alone. See what you can do. I'm not gonna intervene, no regulations, no controls, do what you want. Boom, they started creating wealth. You know the story, do you know the story of how Chinese agriculture shifted from communal to basically pseudo-private style agriculture? Anybody know the story? It's a great story. So there was this village. So agriculture in China was, that was horrific in the 60s. About 40 to 60 million people died of starvation. They continued to struggle. They never met their quarters that the Central Committee gave to them. They weren't producing enough food to feed the Chinese people. And many of these villages were literally starving. So one of these villages in the late 1970s got together in a secret meeting where they had a hide because they were a representative of the Communist Party was in the village and they had a hide from the representative. And they got together and said, look guys, we're starving. This is not working. So let's run and experiment. You get this piece of land and anything you provide on that piece of land is yours. And if they're simplest, you can keep it. And you have this piece of land and they give it up among the village secretly. So no documents, no contracts, nothing. Just a handshake agreement. Everybody knew what their piece of land was and they cultivated. The production went through the roof the next year and this was very suspicious. So the Central Committee sent people down there and they said, what's going on? And they tried to hide it originally and then finally the truth came out and the Communists were very upset and they basically wanted to wipe the village out but the Communists do, right? You don't do what we say. Off you go with their heads. And Dr. Chopin said, no, it works. By this point he was a complete pragmatist, look for practical solutions. And he said, it works. Let's try it in another three villages. See if it works there. And they did and it worked. So they established the system of, I call it pseudo private property because it's not real private property because they don't have deeds to the land but it's pseudo private property all over China and since then China has not had a food problem. Capitalism cures poverty even in China. Even in China. Maybe my favorite story is Hong Kong. I don't know, anybody beat Hong Kong? One, two, all right, two people. Everybody's gotta go to Hong Kong at least once in life. Really, I mean it's worth it. It's a stunning, amazing place. But 75 years ago or so, it was nothing. It was a rock in the middle of nowhere. No natural resources and very few people lived there about a few tens of thousands of people lived on this rock. And China didn't care about it. That's why they were willing to lease it to the English. The English liked it because they wanted a port and it was strategically situated as a port with access to China and control over that part of the China Sea. And all the British did when they came there is they said, look, we're gonna establish a rule of law. We're gonna give you property rights. We're gonna have respect contracts and other than that, we're basically gonna leave you alone. No central bank, there's no central bank in Hong Kong that what's called a currency vote which basically means they're 100% pegged to the dollar and they can't undo the peg. It's pegged and finished and that's it. So they don't have a currency, they don't have a central bank. Nothing, no government intervention economy until recently basically left it alone. And what happened? Millions of people came to this rock from all over Asia, poor people. People without anything. People went to boats and almost swam. Why? Not for their safety net, not for the free healthcare, not for the wonderful welfare benefits because none of that existed. They came because on this rock they were free, at least economically, free. They could start their own businesses, they could keep the money that they own, they could invest it any way they wanted to. And today, 7.5 million people live on this rock, more skyscrapers than New York City. And a GDP per capita, higher than America, higher than the United States of America on a purchasing power parity level. They're richer than Americans. Took them 70 years, it took America 250 years to achieve the same level of wealth. Why? Because they have capitalism. Are they poor people in Hong Kong? Relatively speaking, absolutely. But they are quite happy to go there because the poverty in Hong Kong is far better than being poor anywhere else. And because poor in Hong Kong have an opportunity to rise up, whereas other places they don't. So does capitalism help with poverty? Yeah, big time. Indeed, the only social system in human history to deal with the issue of poverty, to eradicate poverty, at least extreme poverty, to eliminate starvation, to eliminate subsistence farming, to eliminate the kind of deprivation that $3 a day results in is capitalism. There is no other system. And that's one of the many reasons it's the only moral ethical system that exists. Every other system, every other combination of it and socialism or statism is bad, is wrong, is immoral, and suddenly once you get into socialism, is downright evil. The real mystery, the real challenge, I think, for everybody who knows the facts and who knows history and studies it a little bit, is why don't we all know this? Why isn't this one of those self-evident truths that is just obvious? Why do we continuously flirt with socialism? A system of government that has given us nothing but suffering, starvation, and murder, and poverty. I mean, the best example of this right now, we're living through it right now, is the country of Venezuela. 30 years ago, Venezuela was the richest country in Latin America, not a particularly free country, not a country you wanna uphold as a model for anybody, but because they had great natural resources, they had more oil than Saudi Arabia, more oil in the ground than Saudi Arabia, known reserves highest in the world in Venezuela. They had incredibly fertile land, so they were basically a food basket of Latin America. They were exporting food. And they were relatively wealthy. Again, not a particularly good society and there's a lot of oppression and exploitation and just a lot of bad people there, but they were rich, relatively speaking, for Latin America. Richest country on a per capita GDP basis in all of Latin America. Today, 30 years later, they are the poorest country in Latin America with the lowest GDP per capita in all of Latin America. They still have the oil, doesn't make any difference because they nationalize their oil companies, nationalize their oil servicing companies, nationalize every aspect of the oil industry and it is collapsed. They can't pump anything out of the ground. So yeah, it's in the ground, but you know what you need in order to get oil out of the ground? Capitalism. You can import it by hiring foreign companies to come and do it and high-fond technology as the Middle East does, or you can try to nationalize it, destroy it thus, bring socialism to it. Not only are they poor, but they're starving. Like socialism always does. It starves people. They're going back to that pre-1776 life. Babies are dying of malnutrition. Friends of mine who've been to Caracas said there are no pets in Caracas. Nobody has dogs or cats anymore. Why? Because they've eaten them. The zoos were broken into, all the animals were eaten from the zoos. There's no, the land, which is no fertile, is all centrally planned, centrally planned agriculture, communal farming, which in every country it's been tried but uses exactly the same thing, famine, and people are dying. This is always the consequences of taking socialism seriously. Always. We just remember that Jeremy Corbyn praised Chavez for the wonderful socialist country he was creating in Venezuela. Bernie Sanders did the same thing as did most Hollywood superstars, you know, actors, as if we should care what actors think about anything other than what they act in. But they did. None of them have retracted those statements. None of them have condemned the current regime. None of them have condemned socialism because it failed so badly. They all either silence or say, oh, now there's corruption. What's interesting about Latin America is that in another country, very close to Venezuela, not that far, which used to be the poorest country in Latin America 30 years ago, and is now the richest country in Latin America. And it got to be rich by adopting pro-market, pro-capitalist policies, by liberalizing its economy, by privatizing its natural resources, by privatizing its social security, which was one of the most outstanding things that was done. That country is Chile. And it today is on a pro-capital basis the richest country in Latin America. But what's really interesting about this example is the fact that in Chile, they have now voted twice for a socialist as president. And she is systematically undoing all the things that made Chile rich. So what is it about socialism that is so appealing? And what is it about capitalism that is so offensive? And it can't be that capitalism leads to poverty because it's the other way around. Capitalism leads to success. It's socialism that leads to poverty. So it's not because we care about the poor, we want socialism. We don't care about the poor, that's why we want socialism. Envy is certainly a part of it, but one wonders what kind of culture generates envy. It's such quantities, such quantities. And at the expense of one's own life, quality of life. So what half the population of the United States, half the population of Great Britain are just envious. It has to be something deeper than that. What is generating such a disgusting, evil emotion as envy when people are willing to vote on it and in a sense sacrifice their own lives for the sake of it? Well, ignorance is certainly part of it, but then one wonders why are people so ignorant? This is not hard. Well, you have to go visit Hong Kong. You can see it right in front of you. So I believe it's something much deeper than any of that. I believe that we hold in this design man's point, that we hold a moral code, a belief in ethics and morality that is incompatible with capitalism, that is incompatible with freedom, that's incompatible with individualism, and indeed it's 100% compatible with socialism. And it's a moral code we've had for at least 2,000 years and that we're not, for a variety of reasons, willing to give up. And our philosophers provide us with no alternatives. They all continue to preach and promote the same moral code. Because what do we, in the West or everywhere, what do we believe is moral, good, virtuous? What's noble? Yeah, but what is altruism means? A nice word. Self-sacrifice. Yeah, it's all about self-sacrifice. To be good, to be noble is to self-sacrifice. It's to give and expect what in return. Nothing. Nothing. And the less you get in return, the more noble the gesture was. Because what we believe is noble and good is selflessness. It's placing the interest of other people above our own. Augustine Comte, the French philosopher coined the term altruism, said that if you do an act for somebody else and you think, oh, I'm going to enjoy this because I'm helping somebody, it's not moral anymore. So any tinge of self-interest, any tinge of making you feel good, any tinge of personal motivation, wipes out the act as noble, good, virtuous. The point of altruism, as Comte described it, was that your purpose of your life is to serve other people. It's to pursue their well-being, not your own. And when you pursue your own well-being, at best, you are doing something amoral. And at worst, you are doing something amoral. But it can never be something good. What do we do when we as good capitalists? What do capitalists do? I thought I just showed you. They eradicate poverty. So what do capitalists do? Pay tax, create wealth, exchange capital. Set themselves, find them an opportunity. Yeah, that's the same as serving themselves. Capitalists serve themselves. And by the way, hooray to those who manage this, protect their money by putting it offshore. I'm a big supporter of Panama and any tax haven that allows you to protect the money you earn from the thieves who want to take it from you. So the essence of capitalism is not paying taxes. It's the opposite. It's not even creating wealth. Because many of us, or many of us, will create little amounts of wealth, not huge amounts of wealth. And yet, we're still practicing in the context of individual freedom, in the context of property rights, in the context of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is the pursuit of one's own self-interest. I often use my iPhone. What is Steve Jobs? Who did he build this for? Steve Jobs. Why? Why did he do it? To do what? What's the purpose of doing this? Make money. Made a lot of money. Billions of dollars for himself and for Apple his shareholders. But it's just about money. Capitalism is just about money. The businessman just goes, why else did he build this? Yeah, he loved it. He loved this. Like, this is beautiful because Steve Jobs designed it beautiful. And Steve Jobs woke up every morning thinking, thinking, I want to make beautiful stuff. I want to make great stuff. And that's what motivated him. It was the passion of excellence that motivated Steve Jobs and motivates every entrepreneur who is successful. Yes, money as well. And they should be proud of that, because we'll get to how you make money in a minute. But this was made for Steve Jobs. This is a selfish, self-interested activity that Steve Jobs engaged in. And I like to tell the story of going and buying my first iPhone. It was 2008. The economy was in decline. And I wanted to help stimulate the economy. And I was told that consumption is good for the economy, so I went to consume. Because I know that's why you guys go shopping. You guys go shopping because you care about your fellow man. Want to make sure their jobs, make sure the economy's churning along and doing well. That's why you buy the shoes and the nice clothes and iPhones and your computers and everything else. No, why do you go shopping? Why did I go shopping? To make my life better. You go shopping to make your life better. You're all motivated by self-interest. Indeed, the marketplace where we meet to trade is a place where we are all pursuing our self-interest. And indeed, how do we pursue our self-interest by exploiting one another? As somebody argued here a minute ago. How does Steve Jobs, how does he pursue his self-interest by creating something that I value, by creating something that I'm willing to pay him more for than it cost him to produce? That's how he makes a profit. Then why am I willing to give $600 to Steve Jobs for one of these? Because this is worth what to me? More than $600. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. So I'm better off for having bought an iPhone. I like better. Steve Jobs is better off because he made a profit and he produced something beautiful. So he's happy. I'm happy. That's beautiful. Win-win. You're better off. I'm better off. So the way capitalism works, the way wealth is created, is by people pursuing their self-interest in mutually beneficial voluntary transactions, in transactions that essentially are win-win. But that's no good because nobody suffered. No, there's no pain. There's no blood. There's no morality, therefore. Everybody's pursuing their self-interest. It can be a moral system. There must be a trick here. Somebody's exploiting somebody. Somebody has to be. But this is how our ethical minds work. This is how we think in terms of morality. So take Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a better example for this than Steve Jobs because he's still alive. When he made Microsoft, how many people did he help? Millions, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions. Maybe almost every human being on the planet is better today because of Microsoft. Their life is just marginally better than it was before because we've networked. One doubts whether there'd be an internet if not for some company creating the standardized platform that Microsoft did. So here's Bill Gates. Basically making the world a better place to live. Basically helping almost every human being on the planet. And how much moral credit do we give him for that? Zero, or maybe a little negative because what happened while he was doing that? He got rich, really rich. The richest guy in the world, like $70 billion rich. That can't be a good thing. So we give him negative moral credit. Now when does Bill Gates become a good guy? We kinda like him. He's trying to cure Malaria. Yeah, he leaves. No, it's not just he's trying to cure Malaria. He leaves Microsoft. God forbid you make anything. Create wealth, help anybody on massive scale. And now he's got a philanthropy. He's got a whole foundation and he's giving money away to Africa far away so you cannot accuse him of being self-interested. It's not like he's trying to do something good for Seattle where there are lots of homeless people and drug addicted teens and lots of things that he could be helping with. No, no, if he'd done it in Seattle we would have said you're being selfish again. We don't accept that. No, he had to go all the way to Africa and he'd probably help a thousand, maybe 100,000. I don't know, you'll do good work. I'm not against philanthropy, it's great. It's just not that important. Not that big of a deal. He won't help billions, he'll help a few thousands. But now it's okay because he's not making money, God forbid. He's not doing anything too self-interested, God forbid. He's not benefiting himself in any too big of a way, right? Because we don't like that. Morally. And our philosophers don't like it. Now, he's still not a saint, why is that? Yeah, he's rich. He has a big house. He flies private jet to Africa not coach, right, his own private jet. He's got a massive yacht. I mean, he's living a good life. And actually when you see him interviewed he actually looks like he's enjoying what he's doing. Now, no saint enjoys what they're doing. If you enjoy what you're doing, you don't become a saint. If you go to any museum, right, and you go look at paintings of saints, any one of them have a smile on their face? No, they're usually in great pain and I was sticking out of all parts of their bodies and they're dying some horrible death. That's what makes you a saint. The suffering, the pain, the sacrifice. Mother Teresa hated her life. Rita Diaries, that's what made her a saint. If she'd loved it, nobody would have given it a second thought. That's the kind of moral code that we hold. This moral code of altruism. So if you wanna make Bill Gates a saint he'd have to give all his money away. He'd have to move into a tent. And a little bit of blood would help. Some suffering, some real pain would really be good. That's sick. It really is sick. Here's a guy who has made the world a better place. Bill created, made something of himself and changed the world in the process. And we have no respect for that. We'll probably call him a Robert Barron one day after he's dead. The way we call the 19th century great industrialist Robert Barron's bad guys. So when you think about a morality that says giving is good. Sharing is good. Sacrifice is good. Human sacrifice even better. That's socialism. Socialism is very good at human sacrifice on a massive scale. That is socialism. So we have deep in our psyche from Christianity and from our philosophers and from pretty much every source out there. We have this deeply ingrained sense of ethics that it is about sacrifice and selflessness and other people's well-being. And this is what Iron Man really challenges. Because she asked a simple question. Why? Why is their life more important than yours? Why is somebody else's happiness more important than your own happiness? Why is your flourishing not as important as anybody else's? And there's no answer other than some ancient book that said so or some philosopher decided. So Iron Man presents us with an alternative which I don't have a lot of time to go into. I'll just give you a quick outline of it. But I encourage you to read her out the shrugged or if you like nonfiction, which is a fictional book but if you like nonfiction, the virtue of selfishness is a title for you. The virtue of selfishness. There's some essays in the back, the meaning of money and some others that kind of hits on different points around her ethics. But the core of her ethics says that your life is yours. You should live your life to the best of your ability so that you as an individual flourish and succeed and live the best damn life that you can live on this planet because you got one shot at it. You know, we're not Buddhist or I'm not at least, right? And who knows, even if I wasn't Buddhist I might come back as a cockroach. So you only got one shot at this. So make the most of it, this is simple stuff. Live the best life that you can live for yourself. And what does that mean to live the best life that you can live for yourself? What is it that makes us human? What is it that makes all human values possible? What do we have to cultivate if we want to cultivate a good life as a human being? What makes humans humans? Thumbs? You haven't taken that class in sociology yet? What makes human beings human? We as an ability to think. Ability to think, which creates everything else. That allows us to communicate. That allows us to produce food. It allows us to close. Anybody here know how to make clothes? Cause I don't. It's hard, right? You have to know what to do with cotton. Cotton's just a fun little thing. I don't know what you do with it to make it into a shirt. Nevermind, skinny animals drying their pelts and then figuring out what to do with that, right? Some genius had to figure this out and apply it. Some genius had to figure out agriculture. Everything that we have is dependent on somebody at some point having to use their mind in a creative, innovative way and we probably burnt that person at the stake. Cause that's what we did to great innovators and great producers of the past. Luckily we don't do that anymore. Although we come close sometimes. So if you want to care about yourself you develop your mind. You develop your capacity to reason. You develop your capacity to think rationally, to produce and create and build and make. For Iron Man, Bill Gates is a hero. We should have statues out there in the street form. We should make boulevards off them not because of his philanthropy. It's not that important. Because of Microsoft. Because he built something, he created something that didn't exist before because he changed the world for the better. He changed our lives as individuals for the better and he made his life better at the same time. Wow, what an achievement. That's greatness. That's real greatness. So if you want to defend capitalism, if you want all the goodies, the material and I believe spiritual goodies that capitalism produces and it produces lots of spiritual goodies. Just one quick example. 19th century is the first time in human history that artists, like let's take musicians, classical music, right? Could actually make a living without having to suck up to some religious authority or some aristocrat. Beethoven, in his last days, is making money off of his music for the first time ever. What a concept. He sells tickets to his concerts. He sells music to people playing the piano. And that unleashes a massive amount of innovation in the arts, in music and literature and painting and sculpture. Massive, if you look at the 19th century, there's probably never been, maybe with the exception of Greece, such a rich period in terms of the arts. Even today, think about how many people in the world are there to entertain us because we're rich and we can't afford it, right? I guess I made the mistake of telling both my sons who are about your age, maybe older than you, that they should follow their passion. Forget about money, do what you love to do. So they took me seriously, particularly forgetting about the money parts, right? And one's a musician and one writes comedy, right? Now, there's a shot that'll make some money, but the fact is that there are millions of people writing music, writing comedy, writing plays, making movies, doing these things, because we're so rich because of capitalism, we can afford to pay them, which is an amazing thing and that's all the spiritual values that we benefit from, the aesthetic values that we benefit from. So if you care about material wealth, if you care about spiritual wealth, if you care about living a great life, then the real revolution that has to happen, the real changing of people's minds that has to happen is not about economics. The free market side of the economic argument won 50, 60 years ago. We have the greatest economist, they've explained it all, they've refuted every single one of Keynes's arguments, Marx's arguments, every single one of them has been done. I don't know if you've ever in a small book called Economics in One Lesson, it was written in 1947 and it could have been written yesterday, it was refuting then the same stupid government policies that are being exposed to today. It doesn't matter. Von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, they've done it. Economics is over, we won. History is over, we won. Should be over anyway, it's not. The capitalism side, one, the graphs all show it. The history of every region in the world doesn't matter what race, ethnicity, background you have. If you adopt the principles of individual liberty and freedom, you will be successful. If you don't, you will fail, period. Capitalism works, socialism doesn't, period. There's no refuting the historical facts. What keeps dragging us towards socialism, what keeps dragging us towards the left is not economics and it's not history, it's morality. We still have a 2,000-year-old morality. We haven't learned a damn thing. So what needs to happen is we need a moral revolution and ethical revolution, we need abandoned altruism and we need to adopt what Ayn Rand called rational self-interest. Using your mind to figure out what's truly good for you and living your life for yourself, for your values, for your own happiness, for your own flourishing. It's a project Aristotle started over 2,000 years ago. The purpose of morality, according to Aristotle, was to scientifically determine what are the virtues that lead to human eudaumonia, called flourishing or happiness. The Greeks hate it when I say eudaumonia because I'm pronouncing it completely wrong. But you get the point. But nobody does that. There have been almost no philosophers that study what leads to individual flourishing. No, your purpose in life is to sacrifice, your purpose in life is to die for some greater cause which doesn't exist. So we need to rediscover Aristotle and the best way to rediscover Aristotle is through Ayn Rand and we need to study the virtues and the values necessary to lead a great life and if we do that, if we commit ourselves to our own happiness, if we commit ourselves to our own individual flourishing, then capitalism is self-evident because if I wanna live a good life, if I wanna do what I wanna do and pursue the values necessary for my life, I don't want mother government over here telling me what I can and cannot eat, what I can and cannot start a business, how much of my money is they can just take away from me. I want to be left alone. Protect me from bad guys and leave me alone. Let me produce, let me live, let me think, let me pursue values. So I hope you'll take this talk not as much about capitalism, but at the end of the day as a call to a revolution, maybe I'm controversial, I guess. For a new monocode, read Ayn Rand and join me in trying to change the world. Thank you all. Questions? Yeah, in the back. That's right. So a lot of knowledge and cultural things we are inherited from the human civilization. So when you were talking about the, you live for your own good as your end look, you can't really justify that because you're not addressing the part that you inherited a great deal from the whole human civilization. You just live for your own life then and then it comes to the morality part. Then I don't think it can be justified as a revolutionary method to the capitalism. Oh, through you, you get me. I get you and I get a disagree, but I get you. I don't think living for myself is disrespecting the achievements of past generations. Quite the contrary, in respecting my own life, I recognize all the things that I've learned from all the past people, but the fact is that as civilization, as my ancestors, I don't give a damn about my ancestors. It's irrelevant what they did. You know who I care about? I care about our stuff. I care about Newton, I care about Locke. They have no genetic relationship to me, believe me. And I care about the great industrialists of the 19th century. I care about the people who made my life better, my life possible. And all those people who lived in poverty and basically barely survived all those generations and all the thinkers and philosophies and civilizations that oppressed the human mind and oppressed human being and destroyed human achievement. I have no respect for them. I don't have any respect for tradition because tradition gave us starvation. I respect those people who stood up against tradition, challenged tradition and gave us the tools that we today can make something new. But when I say I wanna live for myself, yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna live for my great, great grandparents, they're dead already. I don't know them, I don't really care about them. I have no emotional attachment to them or the great civilizations of the world. Like what? Like Europe that killed 6 million of my people, like that. I mean, I have no respect for that. So again, if you put it in the context of my life, what should I respect? I should respect those things that have provided me with real value. And they're not that many. I mean, they're a lot, but they're not that many as compared to human history. Human history is mostly about slaughter, about oppression, about slavery, and about poverty and death and destruction. That's history. It's not how we study it, because nobody wants to think about those things, but that's what history is really is. So I don't have respect for that. Also about self-interest and self-fulfillment. Do you not envisage even a marginal role for state-operated such-as-well-fair for those who, through circumstances, beyond their control, are unable to pursue their own happiness or their own independence? So what do you do, the question is, what do you do with that portion of the population who really can't pursue their own happiness because they don't have the tools, whether they were born physically or mentally disabled or whether they had an accident or became disabled. There's a certain percentage of the population that can't do it, so what do we do about those people? Now, let's be clear. That percentage of the population is probably less than 1%. Well, less than 1%. It's certainly not the 47% of Americans who get checks from the government today or, and I don't know what the number is here in the UK, but the welfare state is massive. It's not about people who can't take care of themselves. It's about people who don't want to get off the sofa or that we've, in a sense, institutionalized into accepting a welfare check in place of actually getting a job. So what do we do with that? Less than 1% of the population. Well, I usually ask my audience, how many of you would be willing to put some money to the site to help those people out? And almost always, most of the audience, if not all of the audience, raise their hand. They say, fine, let's start a charity. And let's go home. I don't want to see people dying for no reason. I don't just want to see human beings suffering for no reason. I'm happy to provide charity. I think philanthropy is important. But to get the state involved is a massive mistake. The state, the essence of the state is corrosion. The essence of a state is a gun. The state doesn't help anybody. This gun doesn't help anybody. The only reason they have corrosion, the only reason they have a gun is to protect. And that's the job of the state. It's to protect us from cooks and criminals and gangsters and fraudsters. So that we can voluntarily get together and solve problems that we see exist. And if we see people struggling, we can help them out. If a friend of mine has an accident, I'm happy to wait him a check. Happy to, because he's my friend. And of course, the first line of defense again for people who are born, you know, incapable of taking care of themselves as their families. But then if the family can't cope, then you're being brought up, brought up individuals who are willing to help. That's what charities have always been around for. So I believe in a safety net, a private safety net, a safety net that's done voluntarily. I do not believe in corrosion. Coorsion should be banned from human life forever. On the sexual, when it's popular, and they would, how would you deal with discrimination? Because it's free choice. Yeah, so in discrimination. It's a synonym, I'm discriminating. No, well, I don't think it's synonym or discrimination at all. I think discrimination happens, but discrimination is not the essence of choice. The essence of choice is achievement and happiness and progress and the change. And even the elimination of discrimination, because discrimination is much older than individual choice. You know, we discriminated, you know, at 2,000 years ago, there was slavery. There's always been slavery in human society. Indeed, I didn't even mention this, but the only political, social, economic system to eradicate slavery was capitalism. It's no accident that slavery went away in the middle of the 1960s. And in my view, it's no accident that the only countries in the world that have slowly accepted homosexuals are the capitalist countries. And indeed, the non-capitalist countries, you know, try to be homosexual in Iran or in Saudi Arabia, they throw you off a towel, right? So when people are free, then we have the one means by which to solve issues of discrimination. And that is argument. When people are free, we can argue against their biases, against their racism or whatever happens to me. You cannot force somebody not to be a racist. You have a right to be irrational. You have a right to commit suicide. You have a right to be stupid. You have a right to be a racist. So I would argue that in such a society, there's enough wealth and enough money that if there was discrimination, there would be charities that would specialize in the group that was being discriminated against. Gays in America are a fairly wealthy group. If gays were being discriminated or at a great point couldn't take care of themselves, gays would raise money and take care of those people. Now, I don't think that's ideal because I think we shouldn't discriminate. I think a charity should just give to anybody who really needs it and is not capable of taking care of themselves. But in a case of discrimination, I think the best way to solve it is to argue against discrimination. If somebody, you know, there's this big case in the U.S. about a baker who won't bake a cake for gay wedding. I completely believe that bakers are right not to bake a cake for gay wedding if they don't want to. But I tell you, I would never use that bakery. Not only that. I would organize a boycott of that bakery. I would demonstrate outside the bakery. I would make sure everybody in the universe knew that this bakery was bigoted. And that's the way you solve these problems. I don't think you take out guns. I don't think that's a solution. But that's what you do when you involve the state. The state is an instrument of force and the interest of coercion. And I don't want to anywhere near voluntary activities of human beings. Yes. Yeah, so it was that. Yeah, sorry. It's the role of the time. Quiet. Yeah. Well, technically, the military of the UK, it swears its allegiance to the Queen. Yeah, it's small to the tongue. But if the only role of the state is to defend those citizens in the state, I'm pretty sure you'd agree with me that tax is theft, right? So if nobody was to pay taxes, how you fund your police services and your defense services would pretty much be the only two services that would. Judiciary in the state is a success. How do you fund them? So my first response to that was, you know, we've probably got 100 years to figure this out because we're so far away from that society. I mean, just cut my taxes a little bit right now. I'll be happy. So I'm paying 55%. The zero way out there is way out there. I'm not worried about it too much. So how we fund the rational government is I don't think it's going to be that complicated. Among other things, because it's so small. So you think about the United States, United States, which has probably got one of the smaller, relatively speaking, states in terms of taxes. So the United States today spends, federal, local, and state, spends about almost 40% of GDP, 40% of GDP. In the 19th century, a century in which the United States grew at the fastest economic rate in human history. A century in which the United States absorbed millions and millions and millions of ignorant, poor immigrants. And got them all jobs. And they all became middle class and relatively did well. You know, you guys sent the people you didn't like. I wish primarily. But Swedes and Poles and Jews from little villages in the middle of nowhere who knew nothing and had no education and were barely farmers. And they all came and they all succeeded. And the government spent during that period, federal, at the federal level, never more than 4% of GDP. And in total, all entities, less than 10% of GDP. So you could cut tomorrow. You could cut the American government by 75%. And we still have a government that could defend itself, could still have a government with a police force and a judiciary, and maybe some leftover money. Probably. So cut my taxes by 75%. And then we can sit down and talk about what will happen. Because taxation is still theft. How do we get rid of the last 25? I'll give you two proposals, right? For how you would do this, ultimately. But these are just proposals, because I don't know what the ultimate result will be. One, as certain services the government provides could be based on a feat. Not all of them, because some of them are white protection. But some of them could be based on a feat. For example, I have a contract with you. And I want the government to arbitrate between us if there's a dispute. So I would take the contract to the court, have it make sure that it's like a format or whatever. And then pay a fee. And then if we got into trouble, into dispute, we could go to the court and use it. Are you sure the contract is valid? Yes. So that would be one way to kind of fund the courts. Another, and I think a more dominant way, ultimately, that Europeans always laugh at this, and some Americans do too. I believe in voluntary taxation. I believe in a free country where the government is only working to protect us, I believe we would all be happy to write a check for our self-defense and our police and our military. And I think if we were really rich, we'd be likely to write a big check if we could have a lot to lose. But all of us would be happy to write a check and to do it. We don't want people with self-esteem, people who respect themselves, which I think are kind of an requirement for such a society, would not want to get stuff for free. They wouldn't want to be free writers. Now, would they be free writers in such a society? Sure. But that's a minor problem relative to the problem we've just solved by having such a society. All right. How are we going to do this? OK, we're going to go here, and then we're going to go to the exact backwards, yes. I think that there should be more money in politics or less. Do I believe there should be more money in politics or less? I mean, ultimately, I believe a lot less. Why? Because I believe that politics should be uninteresting and unimportant. Politicians are way too important today because they control any aspect of our lives. So right now, I believe there should be more money in politics. And it should be on the side of freedom and liberty. Try to market it, right? But ultimately, nobody's going to invest in politics because politicians will be impotent. I want to make politicians able to. I want to make politicians really good or really able to protect my rights to run a police force or military judiciary otherwise have no involvement in my life. So I believe in it in rewriting the American Constitution. Americans love this. I want to rewrite the American Constitution. And instead of the separation of church and state, I want four separations. I want a separation of state from ideas. I don't think the government should be in the ideas business. I don't think it should be capitalist or socialist or anything. It should protect rights and finish. It shouldn't have an opinion about evolution. It shouldn't have an opinion about religion. It shouldn't have an opinion about anything except how to protect property rights. It's a professional responsibility. That's it. Second, there should be a complete separation between the government and economics. There shouldn't be a central bank. There shouldn't be regulatory agencies. There shouldn't be a Treasury Department. Maybe a little office to collect the voluntary taxes that people send. But that's it. Third, there should be, and this way it's controversial, there should be a complete separation in this relates to the first separation of state from education. The state should not be in the business of telling us what to think, telling us what history is composed of, telling us how to do math. It's not their business. And they do it pretty badly. Because why? Because they're in the business of guns. And guns don't belong in schools. Fourth, I believe in a separation of science from government. And this has only come about because of the recent controversies around science. And there are a lot of controversies around science. Global warming, climate change being just one of them. But I don't know science. I don't know if the globe is changing, is the weather is changing or not, if it's getting warmer, and more hurricanes and all this stuff. That's scientists. I should be able to trust scientists. But I don't trust scientists. Because you know who they get their money from? The government. You know what the government has? They got strings that attach to political agendas with that money. I guarantee you, if you're a scientist, and you do a major study on any topic you want, and the conclusion of a major study is, life is good. You know, we're going to live a long time. They have massive opportunities for human beings. We're going to become richer and better and everything's good. They will never get a dime again. On the other hand, if you write a paper, if you do a study, and your conclusion from the study is, well, think the world might end one day. We're not sure exactly, but we need to do more research. Please give us more money. Oh, you're going to flood them with money. Flood them with money. So I don't have a position of climate change, partially on that part of the science of climate change. Partially because I just don't trust them. I don't know what motivates them. But the same is true of stem cells in the United States. There's a whole religious agenda about stem cells, about embryonic stem cells, about cloning. I mean, you guys are way ahead of us in terms of cloning because you have your religious hang-ups. But what's religion got to do with science? Nothing. So religion is being imposed by government on science in the United States. Through a strict law, we can do with science. So separate, those are the four separations. So if you separate, if you do that, then I forget the question. What was the question? Do you owe all money to politics? Yes, so if you create those four separations, businessmen have no incentive to pour money into politics because politics can't affect them. And you're done with money in politics. It becomes very cheap. So, but as long as politicians have power, the more money the better. All right, we'll go in this way. All right. Talk about the revolution of morality. Do you think the best way to cheaply under the Christian values in the West? So in talking about a moral revolution is the solution to achieving that, the complete abandonment of Christian values in the West. I think that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. So yes, I think Christian values have to be abandoned. But I don't think it's, and when I say that in America, the audience goes, I mean, I'm almost stoned to death. I'm happy. I'm in Europe today where people have a little bit of sympathy towards that view. But it's not sufficient because the post-modernists, once they eradicate Christian values, but they want to replace it with zero. Would do whatever you feel like and do whatever the group feels like. And my group is stronger than your group. So we're gonna press, you know, so if that's a mess, you have to have a positive. So I never argue for the negative, eliminate those values. I'm arguing for a positive. Replace those values. So put it differently. In order to achieve the moral revolution, we have to replace Christian values with rational secular values. Emphasis on rational. And that's Iron Man. I don't know any other philosopher. Aristotle, maybe Spinoza and Iron Man. There's nobody else in the history of philosophy who's advocated for rational, secular, individualistic morality. Those are the only three philosophers in the ministry of history. All right, okay, we'll go there and that one. So first of all, thanks for a great talk. Really appreciate you coming here to speak to us. I'm pretty much on board with everything that you say, so I'm kind of gonna play a little bit, that was advocate here, but. We're arguing for freedom, liberty and so on. But when we allow for radical capitalism, the wealth to be concentrated in the hands of very few members of society, are we actually free? Because we're effectively, all of us, just scrabbling around for chicken feet while the incredibly wealthy are able to pretty much have us dancing to their tune. And people like Bill Gates decide to release some of the wealth that they have, for whatever their prep projects are, then that's great, I'm not gonna employ people to do their research or whatever. But we also got people who decide to, either not release that wealth or use it for various purposes. Now I'm not really into conspiracy theories, but there's talk about people like George Soros using his fantastic wealth, fun groups like Antifa, and do other theory, as far as I'm concerned, negative social engineering. So are we actually going to have freedom and liberty if we allow for a radical capitalism? Yeah, what do I, that's what I talked about the whole thing. Yeah, I mean I'm not looking for chicken feet, and I'm no billionaire, and I'm not looking for chicken feet, and indeed, whenever I see a billionaire, I try to go up and thank him. Because they've made my life so much better, far beyond what I've spent on their products. I mean, I wish Steve George was alive so I could thank him for this. This has changed my life. Now I've been using Apple since 1989, so I've had so many Apple products, I probably have 20 computers just at home right now, various models of Apple computers. I mean, I love the guy, I love Apple, I love the company, I love everybody, and I don't view myself as chicken feet, I view myself as wow, look how better my life is. My life's great. And any one of you can find a job, and you can make a living, why are you making a living? Because somebody started a company that's paying you a salary, how cool is that? You don't have to go and work on a farm, and grow the vegetables that you're gonna eat. You can go to a restaurant, you can call it, and get steak and fish and chips or whatever, right? So I don't see that we're looking for chicken feet, I see us living great, successful, wonderful lives. Yeah, they depend on entrepreneurs, they depend on innovators, they depend on engineers, doing what's in their self interest, but that's cool because that's consistent with myself. Now with regard to freeing up their money, I guess I don't get that, like we'll talk about George Storz in a minute. What are they gonna do with the money? What does a rich guy do with his money? He consumes it, he buys yachts and planes and big houses, but you can't spend a billion dollars. I have a friend who once tried to spend on consumption goods, a million dollars a year, and he gave up, it's just too hard. You can stay at the fanciest hotels in the world, you can go to the best resorts, you can eat at the best restaurants, you can buy a nice car, okay, what next, right? It's just not possible. So what are they gonna do with the money? What do rich people do with their money? They invest it. The only thing they're gonna see is that they match it, so nobody sticks their money in their match. So they invest it, which means that they're creating jobs, they're creating prosperity, they're creating values, they're creating goods that we can trade on. Now, are some of them gonna take some of their money and give it to philanthropy? Yes, I think the least productive use of their money could be philanthropy. And then some of them will support ideological causes they believe in, right? George Soros, right? So it would be nice if the businessman, well, if a capitalism gave me some money, so I can find George Soros, but so what? You know, it's his money, he could burn it for all I care, right? It's his. He wants to fund socialists, that's sad, it's unfortunate, and there is, it's not a conspiracy theory, it just is. George Soros funds almost every leftist group out there. It's his project, it's his belief, right? So you have to fight back, right? We still believe in freedom, we believe in free speech, we believe you can use your money anywhere you want, so I go up against Soros funded people all the time. It's just what you have to do, but there's no shortcuts. I can't say, in the name of liberty, I'm gonna stop George Soros from funding his leftist groups. I mean, you're giving up on liberty, you know, to defend liberty, and that doesn't make any sense. Okay, next to you. Do you think it's a very natural and human, almost built into our DNA? What would have made us successful when we're in a small tribe in front of the galleries? You did have to work together as a cooperative, we didn't have money, we didn't have tools to treat value. I don't agree with it, it's being appropriate for today, any more than I agree, violence is appropriate for today, it's very useful when you're the tribe of 30 people and you have to fight still the tribe off, but it's not for a bit anymore. I'm not convinced of that, I know an anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist make all kinds of excuses for tribalism, but I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that a tribe of 30 people couldn't have organized itself better on the principles of individual liberty and the trade of principle, so that you are really good as a hunter. So you hunt, and I'm really good at skinning animals or making clothes or whatever, and we have a division of labor society as Adam Smith envisions and the wealth of nations, even 10,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago when Hunter Gallagher's, I'm not convinced that tribal organization is optimal. I think the tribal organization is optimal for two people. The tribal chief and his witch doctor. Every tribal chief has to have a witch doctor. Why? Because the whole idea of a tribe is this, and this is where altruism comes from in my view, this is where this whole morality comes from, it comes from those roots, not because we needed it, but because the tribal leaders wanted you to need it, so this is the deal. Why should you listen to me? Because I'm the only one who knows what's good for the tribe, right? We haven't discovered human reason yet. We don't know that every individual could take care of himself and knows how to create and make and stuff, so we haven't discovered that. And people are wondering around trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong and what's true and what's false, and we don't have science. So the tribal leader says, you see my buddy here, the witch doctor? He communes with the spirits and he can tell us what's good for the tribe. And as long as we do what he tells us, they were good and you need me in order to be able to communicate, he's kind of a bubbling idiot, you need me to communicate with you and you need me to protect you and you need me to guide you and you need me. And that's how you get kings and tribal leaders and dictators and all these things. I mean, what is Hitler? Hitler's the guy who communes with the Aryan spirits. It tells the Aryan people what's good for the Aryan people. And they all go yes faster, right? Same witch doctor as 20,000 years ago, no difference. What do we need? Why do we need a, what do you call, Lenin and Stalin? Because somebody has to figure out what's good for the Poleterian. And the only way to figure out what's good for the Poleterian is somehow mystically to commune with the spirit of the Poleterian. And to know, I mean, Marx talks about this, the will of the Poleterian. How do you know what the will of the Poleterian is? There's your will of your will of your will of your will. How do you aggregate them? Well, you have to be a mystic. This is the whole idea that communism is atheistic. No, communism is a mysticism. It's just not a religion. It's a different type of mysticism. It's so mystical. It's like there's a spirit of the Poleterian and I commune with it. And only I can do it. That's why you have to listen to it. And this is where it tells me that a hundred million people have to die. Slabs and oh good, get rid of them, right? And then that's how these things function and all. And if you think about philosophically, if you know a little bit about philosophy, the history of philosophy, then that's Plato. Plato says that we as individuals don't know reality. We can't, when a cave, right? All living in a cave, we see shadows. You don't see the real world. Who sees the real world? The philosopher kings. They get communed with the will of the spirit in a sense, with the will of the forms. They know, you know, we see these chairs, these are not real chairs. These are just fake chairs. They're real chairs in a different dimension. The essence of che hood is in a different dimension. And only the philosopher king. You'll laugh, but this is like the greatest philosophy in history. Only the philosopher king, actually the philosopher gets to see che hood. So we want to make him king because he's the only one who knows what's good for us. He's the only one who can, again, communicate with the spirits and tell us what's good. And that's the role of religion. And that's the role of the witch doctor. And that's the role of our dictators, secular and religious dictators. You know, that's why we wanted to believe our kings were annoyed by God. Because we needed that, we needed that assurance that they knew what they were doing. Because they had guidance from a being on top. So all of this, you know, so I don't believe for one second that individual human beings, that tribes don't function better if you actually give people freedom. I think they do. Nobody has any set-up to do that. Yes. I'll come back to the fun afterwards. I'm going back to this point. We've got two points. What you said about Christianity. I think you need to replace all religions, not just Christianity. Yeah, sure. Christianity is just the one where most of us, you know, it's just always picked on in the West. That's okay. Even Judaism, I'm quite happy with that. I think who's picking for you, if you want. No, we'll leave that. The second point is, I think, the problem with selling capitalism is... And of course, that can't be going to Islam because they're not there for a while. That's the problem. That's the problem. The Buddhists are quite children. I feel good. I love Islam. The problem with capitalism and Islam, I think, is cronyism, which keeps you getting confused. And then trying to tell people that in a simple sense. So this is part of my answer to the before. The only way to get rid of cronyism is to get rid of government controls. I'll tell you a quick story about this. True story, completely true story. Microsoft, in the early 1990s, how much money did they spend on lobbying and controlling government? Zero, no money. They had no building in Washington, D.C. They had no lawyers in Washington, D.C. They had no lobbying group in Washington, D.C. They weren't interested. And they were brought in front of the Senate. And a Republican Senator stood up and yelled at them. He said, you have to start investing in Washington, D.C. You have to build a building here. You have to start hiring lawyers. You have to lobby. In other words, you have to bribe me and my colleagues. And Microsoft literally is the senior manager with you. I don't think Bill Gates was there, but senior managers were there. And they got up and said, look, you leave us alone. We leave you alone. We're not. And they walked out. A few months later, knock on the door. We're from the Justice Department. And we're here to investigate this antitrust issue. Anybody know what Microsoft was accused of? Well, the building was there, isn't it? It was there also. Oh, God, yes. They offered a product for free. So you guys are too young to remember this. But I used to have to pay $70 to get Netscape, which was the only real good. There was Mosaic, but there was Netscape was the real standard. And you download it. You paid $70 to get it. You didn't download it. You got it on a disk. You got it on a floppy disk in the days of floppies. And you put it in 70 bucks for this. And Microsoft came along and said, you know what? We're going to offer us for free. Whenever you buy Windows, you get Internet Explorer for free. That's what they went after. That's what they spent 10 years in court, lost, spent another 10 years with a government official at Microsoft, inspecting everything they did and having to sign off on anything. Disgusting. Guess how much money Microsoft today spends in Washington, DC. Yeah, tens of millions a year. They have this beautiful building, all glass, like equal distance in the White House and the Capitol. Just gorgeous. Now Google learned the lesson. So Google, from day one, has been giving money to all politicians in America, Democrats, Republicans. They spent more money on politics than any company in public in history. They forgot about Europe. So Europe keeps going after them. You notice not a single anti-trust accusation in the United States. Not one, right? But Europe has completely crushed them. Every few months, there's an accusation against them. Why? Because they haven't bribed the right people in the US, and they've bribed the right people in America. So cronyism is a feature of statism. Cronism is the essence of socialism. Cronism is the essence of every single system out there except capitalism. Because capitalism means the separation of state from economics, and therefore, Apple has no incentive to, oh, Microsoft has no incentive to lobby. If you leave us alone, we will leave you alone. They didn't leave them alone. Stay alone. All right, we are going this way. Yeah, in the White House. I mean, most of you are saying, but I think there are maybe areas where you still have neighborhood effects. So where your self-interest is going to cause a lot of damage to other people. So it might be my self-interest to go into places in the rainforest and just cut them down, or go and kill wild animals. I suppose I'm just talking in terms of ecological damage, which I mean, even if you argue that. Yeah, logical question. It may be a question everywhere. Exurgical damage. Yes, what do you do about ecological damage? Or in economics terms, they say, what do you do about the problems of the commons? And my solution to the problem of the commons is not to have it. If you sold the rainforest, and the rainforest became private property, then nobody would cut any trees down. Because you would sue them. It's like thieving and stealing. You know why they're cutting down trees in the rainforest today? Because poor farmers have no property rights. The state can control all the forest lands. They basically burn the forest. They plant agriculture. They use up the land as quickly as possible. Then they get up, and they burn more forest. It's because they're poor, because they're no opportunities. Now I have to put things involved over millions of years. Do we have a right to kill them? I don't think so. So think about it. We're animals. We're part of this beautiful evolutionary process. And part of the way we survive as human beings are the main way we survive is, for example, eating other animals or building buildings and building industry and living. As some species go extinct, species have always gone extinct. But we're doing it much, much quicker. And it's sort of, I don't actually totally mind about eating individual animals, but like genocide in terms of literally how you can develop a genocide. Genocide. You have. It's literally the destruction of the genus. The destruction of the whole gene, the whole life of the reflection of the genus. All of that from what I can tell is completely exaggerated and pulling way out of proportion. Imagine the genes of the dinosaurs disappeared. I don't think anybody's crying over that. Thank God that they went away, because life is much more habitable for human beings without dinosaurs around eating us, or eating the plants that we rely on in our exist. The best way to solve true ecological problems is to privatize everything. If you privatize rivers, they don't get polluted. If you privatize oceans, you don't overfish. If you privatize rainforests, you don't overcut the trees. When you recycle paper, is there more paper? Is it, are there more trees or less trees? If you recycle paper, are there more trees or less trees? I assume you think more, because that's why we recycle, is to try to save trees. That's because it matters. Yeah, of course there is less trees. The more you recycle paper, the fewer trees there will be. Because they plant fewer trees, because they project the demand for wood in the future, is lower. This is econ 101. This is not sophisticated at all. But it's hard to grasp, because we've been taught, OK, recycling is necessary to save the trees. No, consumption of wood is the way you save trees. Now, if you value old trees, then yes, because we cut down old trees and we put new trees. But a tree is a tree. You're not destroying life. You're just exchanging life from old to new. How many, what do you think, we stop eating chicken? Would there be more chickens or less chickens in the world? Yes, a lot less. If you want to see the life of that chicken, we'll be faring for it. It's a chicken. It's a chicken. I'm sorry, it's a chicken. I might be a hopeless capitalist bastard, but I really don't care about the chicken's quality of life. I care about the quality of the meat as I eat it. And that's why we produce it industrially, because that's what we care about. So, but the fact is that there would be fewer chickens. The point is that it's a renewable resource. What is a renewable resource? The more you use it, the more we will have output. Now, if you want to save the rainforest, the best way on a capitalism to save the rainforest is to buy it and not use it. There's a philanthropy, there's a charity in the United States that what it does is it raises money and it takes the money and it goes out and buys massive quantities of land in all kinds of places around the world and it buys them for the purpose of preservation. And I have a huge amount of respect for that. You care about spotted owls. Buy a forest and put spotted owls in the forest. Put spotted owls on nuisance for me and they don't taste that good, so I'm going to kill it. How do we save one other example? I think it's Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania, I can't remember which country it is. But there's a massive problem of a tricky kind of elephants. Elephants are disappearing in Africa, I saw lions and they're because of poachers. They poach and they take the ivory and stuff. So one of these countries, or maybe several of them, have discovered a way to save the elephant and that is to privatize elephants. In other words, you give people a right, a property right over a herd of elephants in a particular geographic area. You allow them to sell hunting licenses. Now you've given individual human beings an incentive that the herd grow because they can make money and over generations because they care about their children. The population of elephants in those places is growing. They issue licenses, they're doing incredible incentive not to stop poaching. The government's not doing good at stopping poaching but they are because it's their private property and when you understand private property you care about private property. To me it's interesting, what was the dirtiest place on the planet? Anybody want the dirtiest place on the planet, the most polluted place on the planet in the last 50 years was? Well, much more polluted, in terms of pollution. Much more polluted than China was there. Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union. When the Berlin Wall came down, one of the things that was most shocking was how filthy it was. It was dirty, why? Because you don't clean public property because it's not owned by anybody. But I clean my backyard. I take care of my stuff. You take care of your stuff. And if you took all land into private property it'll be taken care of. When you leave it for the state, it gets abandoned and it becomes discussed. All right, you had a question? We'll just find you. Yeah, you said that the essence of capitalism is that you'll be well off if you leave everybody else better off for your actions. You'll become better off by making other people better off. Yes, true. Yeah, so my question is do you think that people start playing with the idea of socialism when certain individuals or organizations have enough power to just act in ways that are better for themselves and not for the community or the society as a whole? But again, I think everybody should act to the benefit of themselves. But I think that the only way I have the freedom to act for your own benefit is by trading and therefore benefiting other people. You cannot make money in a free society unless you offer people a value that they want and are willing to pay for. Which means a value that is gonna make their lives better. So no, I don't think that people have turned towards socialism because capitalists have exploited them. There's no evidence of that. Who's exploited you? Apple certainly has exploited you. They keep giving you great products that we get so excited about that we go rush out and stand in line in order to buy. And are quite happily giving up our money to get. Google isn't exploiting me. Almost everything I can Google I get for how much money? Zero. That's exploitation, real exploitation, is where you don't have to pay for the stuff that you do, right? You all watch YouTube videos, probably. Half your waking hours. How much are you paying for those videos? Zero. Magic. I mean, has life ever been better on planet Earth? We get so much for nothing. And, oh, but Google's evil because it's exploiting us, really, where? So no, I don't think there's exploitation going on. I think people love socialism because they don't like the fact that people pursue their self-interest even when they're benefiting from it. And that, by the way, is why we have envy. Envy is a consequence of the fact that we believe. So we have two very crucial emotions going on here. One is guilt. How do you get guilt? You get guilt by pursuing a life of self-interest like most businessmen do. And you, but you really, you really believe that you should be Mother Teresa. And you're living Steve Jobs' life or Bill Gates' life. And as you get older, you look back at your life and say, all I've done is make money, I've created values, I've created jobs, but I had too much, I had a lot of fun. Wait a minute, real virtue is Mother Teresa. That's guilt. And the emotion you get is guilt. And in America, if you get over 60, almost all businessmen feel guilty for their success, almost all of it. And that's why they vote to raise their own taxes. That's why they become, you know, they lean more left. That's why they want the government involved because they feel guilty. And the other one is envy, is resentment. If I'm poor and all my life by being taught that the role of other people is to help me, the responsibility of other people is to help me, particularly rich bastards who've made their money and are selfish because they were self-interested and they made their money by being self-interested, they're more responsibility based on Christian values based on, Kantian values based on, you know, every philosopher in human history is they have to help me, I need stuff. So I resent them. I envy them, I hate them. For their self-interest, more than for their money. So morality is what shapes the kind of emotions that we have and those emotions ultimately shape the way we vote. So you have more socialism, the more we believe in an altruistic morality. What do we do with it then? Well, I mean, you're gonna die with it, right? That's what you're gonna do with it. What should you do with it is privatize it. Completely. All of it. Thoroughly, you have to start from scratch, you screwed it up so badly. You can't fix it and the state has no role in healthcare, zero role in healthcare. Healthcare is a service, it's a service that just like making iPhones, it's motivated by the self-interest of the producer, call him a doctor, call him a researcher, call him a drug company and a consumer, call him somebody who's sick. And what you want is to create a robust, healthy marketplace in which those meet together and usually insurance is a good eating media area, but insurance is not everything. A lot of healthcare should be provided for cash and you should have to pay for it because somebody is producing something that you will benefit from. Why should you get it for free? So the way to solve the NHS's problem is the problems, multiple, multiple problems is to completely privatize them. And if you don't, then you'll continue to have what you have today, which is the worst in mediocre healthcare. You know, you wait in line for three months to get the MRI. And you know, numerous people die just waiting in line. You don't even measure it anymore. And three months later, if you caught the cancer three months earlier, you might have been able to treat it. Three months later, you can't. That's not how, that's not how any other industry functions. I often ask people, what would this look like if a government committee made it? Shit is a good word. I'd like it to be shit. That's what it would look like. You wouldn't be strong enough to hold that. Yes, nobody would buy it. Nobody would want it. Nobody would like it. Now, this is relatively unimportant, relatively simple as compared to healthcare, which is super important, super complex. Why would you give the committee that can't produce this healthcare? I mean, it just drives me nuts that anybody believes that the government can run a healthcare system. Well, it can't make this. It can't price bread. I wouldn't give them bread production. We tried that in the Soviet Union. What do we get? Starvation. So what you want is a robust, dynamic, free market in healthcare. And we would be living to well over a hundred today. I have no doubt in my mind that the skills and the science and the ability of doctors and the ingenuity and entrepreneurship and the creativity that would be unleashed by freedom would result in the fact that we would be living a lot longer, a lot healthier. We'd be curing many more diseases. But today, if you're a drug company, why invest in starting a new drug? When the NHS is gonna slam you, which will only buy the drug if you lower it to basically zero profit margin. Why am I even gonna invest? Luckily, Americans don't pay through the nose for drugs. So there's some money for R&D. You rich don't pay, Europeans don't pay, Canadians don't pay. Luckily, we're subsidizing R&D for the entire planet so that you can have drugs. That's the reality. And the fact is that even as bad as American healthcare system is, and it's awful, and it's awful because the government spends more than 50% of all dollars on healthcare than spent by the government. So we have a semi-socialist, semi-socialism never works, any better than socialism, right? But in spite of that, if you have insurance, health insurance in the United States, you're getting the best healthcare in the world, bar none. When some, you know, when Bill Esconi gets sick, he doesn't go to France, which the UN rates as the number one healthcare system in the world. He doesn't come to the NHS to get treatment. He goes to Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic in the United States because it's the best healthcare in the world. So I feel sorry for you guys because you have to suffer through the NHS. Now, I've been there. I grew up in Israel, which has the equivalent of the NHS. My father was a doctor in the Israeli socialized healthcare system. Israel has the benefit of having more doctors to cap it up than any country on the planet. It's a Jewish country after all. So it has lots of doctors. And I wouldn't want to get sick in Israel. And if I got really sick in Israel, my father would suggest that I get on a plane and fly to the Mayo Clinic. What do you do with it? Privateized. Gotta speak up. You've got a so-and-all, so-drafted, so-and-allism. It's because they have this 2,000-year-old philosophy of morality in their mind. Should it be actually argued that the true reason is because they completely misunderstood the basic concept of happiness? Should we depend, actually depend, the classical concept on this matter? Should we depend? The classical concept of pros and cons of happiness? That the majority misunderstand and mixed up? So I think you're right in the sense of throwing these miscellaneous to the concept of happiness. But I think it's much deeper than that. I think they don't believe in happiness because they've been sold historically. The life here is supposed to be miserable. And then you get into another life and you're gonna be happy today. So that you buy into a whole market code and a whole system where it's okay to suffer here. This is why for at least 2,000 years, we've lived in poverty and complained very little. Thank God, when I die, I go to heaven, right? So yes, what we need is to explain what happiness is. Explain that it's important. That you have one shot at it on this life. And that there's only certain things that lead to happiness. That happiness just doesn't happen. You actually have to do certain things, live a certain way, pursue certain values and virtues in order to achieve happiness. So there was the trillion, the holiest the trillion we're thinking has to be inculcated. But for that, you have to accept that the purpose of move reality is to live a good life. The purpose of move reality is happiness at the end of the day. But nobody moves that in modern philosophy or in ancient philosophy, other than Aristotle and some followers, right? So yes, happiness is a key concept but you have to revolutionize the whole way of thinking about ethics. Well, you are American? Well, I am now. Yeah. I chose to go to America. Sorry, it wasn't an accident, I chose it. So you're living in a capitalist society. Do you feel like you're benefiting from that, not really seeing the true poverty and the true exploitation of the people who are making the things that you're consuming to make your life better and your own self-interest? No. I mean, does it make it easier to follow that philosophy? Well, because I don't believe anybody's been exploited to make my life better. You know, and I've traveled the world, I've gone to stay in America, I go all over the place, I've been to China, I've been to factories, I've actually talked to Chinese people, I've counted to most people who complain about Chinese labor and I don't believe there's exploitation. I've read studies, I've actually studied the issue of how capitalism works and it works beautifully and there's a middle class in China because American companies have gone and provided jobs to those people. I was poor when I came to America, I came to America with two suitcases and a wife who couldn't work because I was in a student visa and she was an American student visa which meant she couldn't work and you know, we survived. It wasn't easy, but we made it ourselves. I had two kids. I remember my largest monthly expense was diapers. Was it expensive? But I'd rather get the disposable ones than the other ones any day. I don't want it to be poor, right? In American style, poor, which is not that poor, we still had air conditioning. We had a $700 automobile which had holes in the floor so when you went to a puddle, water would come up like a Giza. You know, so what? But I wasn't exploited. I was working hard to make myself better, make my life better, get a job, start a company and today you couldn't put all my stuff into two containers on a big ship because I've done what? So that's because of capitalism and it's not because of people exploited by capitalism because they're not. Remember, before capitalism we were all poor. Now, nobody is poor in America by the standards of $3 a day. Nobody. And people in China are rising out of poverty. Only 8% of the population of the earth because of capitalism are poor by the $3 a day standard. And the workers are getting richer and richer and richer in places like China and places like India. When they're allowed to be free. And we sit here and judge the Chinese workers that are being exploited. What do they have if they don't go to work for Apple? They've got a farm where people are dying of starvation. So not only do they come to work in Apple and put some money in their pocket and actually get a little apartment and actually start wising in their place in life and become more productive and get more money and maybe even go out and become a manager and maybe even start a business. But they are sending money home. But we want to take those jobs away from them because we're exploiting them. I mean, that's to me absurd. There's no exploitation in a free market. Socialism is the system of exploitation. It exploits all people with ability. It uses them and it throws them away afterwards and sometimes it just murders them. But the essence of socialism exploitation and the essence of capitalism is training. Win-win relationships. You want to work for me? Great, here's how much I want you to pay. If this amount of pay makes your life better, take it. If not, go and find a job with somebody else. We'll pay you back. There's competition for your labor. Every one of you, there are people who are gonna compete for your labor. Everybody, even the poorest people in England have competition for their labor in a free market. And you better yourself by going out there and working and gaining knowledge and gaining productivity and improving yourself, which is the only system in human history has allowed people to do that, is capitalism. So it's the exact opposite of exploitation. Sorry, we're gonna have to interrupt this. We've got a yoga class coming in in four minutes. I didn't bring my hot pants, so it's not gonna work out. So thank you very much for this. It was absolutely excellent. Very cool. Thank you.