 How many people here have taken a philosophy course? Wow, I'm in trouble. You want to cancel? Well, I have never taken a formal philosophy course, but I did receive one when at 16 years old I read the book Atlas from. I didn't even know it, but I was taking a philosophy course. And I can't say it really changed my life because I really had no certain direction in life at 16 years old yet, but I know for a fact that it influenced my life and it influenced my business after that. It was about 10 years ago or so. Actually, it was probably November of 2008 when I took a renewed interest in philosophy and the direction that the country was going. And I started to go back and I re-read Atlas Shrug, then went on to the fountain head, and then went on to some non-fiction work and read some other people's philosophies. And I started to observe the world and I saw that whenever my side, the side I thought I was on, would compromise legislatively we were going in the wrong direction. And I studied the situation and I learned that it was probably due to the fact that we didn't have an opposing philosophy that was so clearly articulated by those that were taking us in what I considered the wrong direction. Tonight I've asked Dr. Brook to speak on that subject and the title of the speech is the individual versus the collective opposing philosophies. I have did have to get it again. I have Dr. Brook's bio here. It's an impressive one that I want to read. I forgot it for my employees and he had to recount it. He did pretty good. But Yaron Brook is the executive chairman of the Einstein Institute. He wears many hats at the institute and travels extensively as ARI spokesman. Recently I followed him from Mongolia to Azerbaijan to Israel to even France. Brook can be heard weekly on the Yaron Brook show which airs live on BlogTalk Radio broadcast. He is also a frequent guest on national radio and television programs. And internationally sought after speaker and debater, Brook also pens works that make one think Brook is team, excuse me, that makes one think. Brook is team with co-author Don Watkins and the national best seller Free Market Revolution. How Ion Rands ideas can end big government. Last year Brook and Watkins released a new book. Equal is unfair. America's misguided fight against income inequality. Continuing the collaboration in the last month, back only weeks ago I believe, Brook and Watkins released yet another book in pursuit of wealth. The Moral Case for Finance. Should be of interest, special interest to a few people in the group here. Brook is also contributing author to new conservatism and obituary for an idea, winning the unwinnable war, America's self crippled response to Islamic totalitarianism and big tent the story of the conservative revolution. He was a columnist at Forbes.com and his articles have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investors Business Daily and many other publications. Brook was born and raised in Israel. He served as the first sergeant in the Israeli military intelligence and earned a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in IFA. In 1987, he moved to the United States where he received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. He became an American citizen in 2003. For seven years, he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University. And in 1998, he co-founded BH Equity Research, a private equity and hedge fund manager of which he is managing founder and director. Brook serves on the boards of the Iron Rand Institute, the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and the Center for Excellence in Higher Education. And he is a member of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Mont Pillerless Society. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brook. It's good to be back in Minnesota and thank you all for coming out this evening and being here. So I want to talk about, I mean it talks about individualism as a collective as a bit, I really want to talk about America. Because I feel like our idea of America, the idea of what America stands for and what America represents is very much slipping away from us. People don't have a sense of what it is we are talking about when we talk about America. What is indeed American exceptionalism? What makes America different? If anything, anymore. So what made America different? What was the American Revolution about? What was the founding of America about? What is the fundamental idea behind America? Is America different than any other state? I believe it is. I believe it is, it believed it was. She actually called America the only, in its founding, the only moral country in human history in its founding. But why is it? What is it about America that would be perceived or should be perceived as moral? And are we that still? It's really the question. So what is America? What was the core of its founding? But if you think about it, before the American Revolution, who did your life, people at the time's life, belong to? What did they think about who their life belonged to? Who did it belong to? Real question. Subject of a king? Yeah, the king. Some place didn't have kings and then it belonged to the tribal leader, the council, the pope, the community, the tribe, the fill in the blank. Your life belonged to somebody, some group out there, some entity out there. And you know nobody ever really said, well it belongs to this particular person, it usually was, your life belonged to the tribe, the fine tribe anywhere you want. It belonged to England as represented by the king. It belonged to a collective. Your life as an individual was worthless. You were meant to serve, serve the greater good, the greater good of filling the blank. Further back you go on history, you see this continuously, almost throughout all of history, maybe with the exception of a certain period in 18th Greece, in almost every society on earth. The lives of individual human beings were perceived to be just cogs in a collective machine. Just a piece of a tribe, a piece of a group. And that you gave value from being a member of a particular group. For the first time in human history, for the first time in human history, men stood up and said, no. My life is mine. It belongs to me. You don't get to tell me what to do. You don't get to run my life. You don't get to dictate what I should think, what I should write, what I should say, how I should behave, how I should act. I get to make that decision. Now, we now take that somewhat for granted, but this was the first time in human history. Never before in all the hundreds of thousands or millions of years human beings have been on this planet has a political entity come about where people have said, we've created this political entity for the sole purpose of protecting my ability to live my life as I see fit. The reason the American government was created was to protect our rights as individuals. Now this whole new idea of the individual only his own life of the individual as having rights was even to the founders a relatively new idea. There's no idea, concept of individual rights before, I don't know, 1700. That's only 76 years before the founding of America. And really to articulate the inception of individual rights that the founders understood, it was John Locke the great Scottish philosopher. Before that again, your life didn't mean anything. It was part of the group. Suddenly people changed their mind. What caused them to change their mind? Why did suddenly the individual gain value when he had no value previously or had very little value previously? What changed? What changed I think was a rediscovery, a discovery of the ideas of those Greeks who for a moment in history a long time ago had this new conception. What the Greeks discovered a long time ago and somewhat we all forgot for hundreds of years is the nature of the human being. What is it that makes us unique as human beings? Don't say thumbs. That's what they say at the University of Minnesota maybe but you shouldn't say that. What makes human beings human beings? What makes us special? What makes us different? And all of animals. Yeah, a reason. A capacity to reason. A capacity to think. A capacity to observe reality but not just react to it instinctually but actually integrate the information, learn from it, analyze it, think about it, create abstractions, communicate innovate, create, build, make but all are products of reason, of the ability to think Aristotle defined man as the rational being. So it is our reason, our rational capacity. Knowledge according to Aristotle comes from reason from observing reality. Plato, since we do philosophy, right? Where did knowledge come from? For Plato. So some kind of revelation, right? And only philosophers have it. Like we all, if you've ever heard Plato, we all live in a cave and all we see are shadows and the philosophers get to go outside the cave and they get to see the sun and that's real knowledge. And then they can come back into the cave and teach us about the real knowledge but we never get to leave the cave. We're too dumb in some sense. We need philosophers to guide us, we need philosophers, kings who are authorities to tell us how life needs to be lived because we don't have the reasoning capacity and Plato's not really reason. There's another world out there that owning the philosophers can somehow observe. Think about that. If Plato's right if you need these philosophers to observe the world to tell us what the truth is because we don't know it and cannot know it what kind of political system does that lead to? What kind of conception of the individual does that lead to? What leads to the perception of the individual doesn't matter because he doesn't know the truth, he can observe reality. The only people who matter are who? Who are the only people who matter? The philosophers. And in the Republic the philosopher kings run our lives. They determine who we marry, what profession we have everything is dictated from the top. Aristotle comes around and says, oh wait a minute, that's just not true. There is no other dimension, there is no somewhere where this truth is right here in front of us. And we can observe it and discover it. But nobody took Aristotle seriously. And what we got was political systems once Athenian democracy disappeared political systems that were platonic. You had a king, you had a pope you had rulers who told us how to live and what to do because well we were too incompetent to know any better. And we didn't rebel because who are we? We're nothing. And then in the late 17th century, early 18th century well earlier than that people rediscovered Aristotle but what happens is this guy by the name of Isaac Newton comes around and Isaac Newton shows us that we can understand the world the physical motions of objects with simple mathematical equations that pretty much everybody can understand. You don't need philosopher kings to explain the world. Now if you don't understand Newton's three laws of motion in physics class it's because you have a lousy teacher. They're not hard. Anybody who can think and all of us can think I mean none of us can invent that. That takes an Isaac Newton. I mean not invent to discover it. But to actually understand them we're all capable of inventing. People suddenly say wait a minute we can understand the world. The world's right there. We get it. And if we can understand the way things move around in the planets and all this stuff around us if we can do science then how come we don't get to decide what profession we have? How come we don't get to decide who rules over us? Who are politicians of? How come we don't decide how we get to live? How come that's dictated from the top? If it turns out that we actually have a mind of our own and we can understand things then why can't we be free? And in the 17th century what's today in the 17th century? We call it the era of what? The age of enlightenment or the age of reason. We call it the age of reason enlightenment because people discovered reason and embraced reason and embraced science called the age of science and with that they discovered that they as individuals could know the world and by the time we get to 1776 they're ready to declare that they can live their own life without philosopher kings and that their life is worth living for its own sake not for the sake of the group, not for the sake of other people because once you realize that you can actually figure stuff out you don't need to cheat off of your neighbor's tests it gives you huge power over your life I don't know anything, it's all useless then what do you look for? When we diminish knowledge and we diminish the mind where do we get comfort? From other people, maybe they know something I don't know anything, I'm just too stupid so we look for other people to tell us what to do and how to live so the fundamental idea behind America is the idea that every individual has the capacity to take care of himself every individual has the capacity to reason and to think and as a consequence every individual must be left free to use that capacity and if the role of government is not to rule us, it's not to tell us what to do and how to do it because nobody can tell you how to live, only you can decide how to live your life the role of government is to protect us because there's always going to be bad people, we're going to try to get in our way steal our stuff, be fought us, there's always going to be a booty made off in the groove and instead of us running around with guns and our hips to protect ourselves it's much more efficient to have the police do it and we want clear definition of property rights and we want and we need a government to do those things, a few things that protect us and make it possible for us to do what to be free, to think for ourselves, to produce, to create to build, that's what America was, that's the principle in which America was founded, it's the principle of individualism, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the individual and the individual's mind because it rests on the idea of reason, the idea of fundamental idea that we all have this capacity and amazing things happen once America was founded I mean it's truly stunning, unfortunately nobody teaches this history anywhere in our schools but it's truly stunning what happened not just in America but across the world because everybody emulated us or a lot of people emulated us and learned from us what happens when you free people up, what happens when you free the human mind what happens when people start taking their own life seriously and don't perceive themselves just as a piece and a swarm in a collective but actually as individuals massive amounts of wealth get created, people produce, people create, people build, so if you look at a graph, there's a famous graph of wealth per capita or income per capita, either way it doesn't really matter, you can start at 10,000 years ago, we'll start it here, I'm going to draw it in the air, right, 10,000 years ago it's about somewhere under three dollars a day, imagine a living of three dollars a day, but that's what they lived on in today's dollars 95% of the population 10,000 years ago and this is what happened over the 10,000 years, nothing nothing happened, yeah it went up a little bit during Rome and then it went down a little bit during the Dark Ages and nothing happened and then suddenly it went like that I mean I have to go my tiptoes, it went really hot and then in Asia it continued to go like this for a little while longer and then it went like that what's the date when it went like that? what's the inflection point when it suddenly starts going up? 1800 is not a bad, not a bad I have a preferred date but it's somewhat random I like 1776 but for two reasons one the symbolic reason but I don't think it's symbolic, I think it's cause the ideas of the enlightenment, the ideas of individualism, the ideas of reason became prevalent and as a consequence freedom became prevalent, at least in the west and that's what happened something else happened in 1776, a famous book was published, do you know what book was published in 1776? Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, so even in the field of economics people now understood that if you leave people free, if you don't control and regulate and try to plan everything for them just leave them free and protect them and establish private property that's what happens and he wrote the book and it happened and yeah it took, I don't know, it took Asia another 200 years to figure that out but that's starting to figure it out, they haven't quite got it completely yet and they benefit from the fact that we've created a lot of wealth and capital since then and if you look at that reflection point, when did that happen? In Asia not that long ago, somewhere around you know it depends on the country, China in 1979 South Korea a little earlier, Taiwan a little earlier, India a little later 1991 probably, but basically when they tilted, not a lot, a little bit maybe, towards respect for the individual, respect for the individual freedom respect for the individual mind and less collectivism and as soon as they did that, they didn't even do a lot of it, just a little bit of it, bam, massive amounts of wealth prosperity are created, over the last 30 years between 1 to 2 billion people, billion, have come out of poverty in the world that's the most under-reported story you know, ever, I think, that should be reason to celebrate in the streets and you're all depressed, 1 to 2 billion people have come out of poverty, I said 10,000 years ago 10,095% of people, $3 a day or less 300 years ago, what was the number? also about 95%, nothing much had changed what's the number today? how many people in the world today? 8 billion people, back then we had about half a billion, maybe 300 years ago 8 billion people, what percentage of those people live under $3 a day today? it's about 8, just 30 years ago it was over 20, so a little bit of freedom, a little bit of individualism a little bit of respect for the individual over the group and wow, life becomes much better for everybody in world but we seem to be living in times where there's little respect for the individual, quite individual where there's little respect for your ability to take care of your own life where people want to dictate what you do even what you say on some American campuses what do you think? there's some things that are just unthinkable it turns out, like when people want to tell you how to run your business, that's certainly in every aspect of that business how much you can pay your employees, what kind of deal you can cover with them or what you can how to treat your suppliers, and every aspect of the business world somebody wants to have a say over what you do why? because they don't trust you you don't have what it takes, or your employees don't have what it takes and the transaction, what we've lost over 200 years is any respect for the individuals and an individual's mind indeed, philosophers today, there's no philosophers defending reason at American universities today I don't know the latest big thing at universities less on philosophy departments, but certainly in English and in many of the other disciplines you go to postmodernism, what does postmodernism teach us? anybody here postmodernism? no? you guys are way out here in Minnesota you are so lucky postmodernism is probably the most prevalent intellectual ideas today on campuses, what do they teach us? they teach us that there's no truth anybody here about the post-truth era, politically that we've just entered and that's where it comes from all of us have different perceptions, we have our own truth there is no reason, because there is no real reality we make it up as we go along the world doesn't really exist, and we don't have the tools to know it even if it did it sounds weird, but this is particularly the Midwesterns because you guys have a core common sense that a lot of people don't but this is what people believe and therefore you can't take care of yourself, you don't know what's right, you don't know what's good you don't know what's just, you don't know what's moral, you don't know what reality is even and what do you need there for? you need a bunch of experts to tell you you need the philosopher kings of Plato, now post-modernism is even worse than Plato, because Plato at least believed there's some truth somewhere these people believe there's no truth anyway, to be found so all it is is about power so today we have, I don't know we have truth depending on the ethnic group you believe in it's all about groups today, which groups yet? anybody have an intersectionality? oh good now it's healthy that you haven't heard of this crap intersectionality is the big thing now on campuses it actually has a whole diagram of oppression so since there's no truth and there really is no reality, all there is is human relationships and human relationships are based on power who has power over whom and who has, who's better than whom and who has, have you heard of the term privilege? everyone's talking about privilege who has privilege and who doesn't and you can rank them, you can rank them and some people are the most oppressed they're the most oppressed and some people are pure privilege I hate to break this to you guys in this room just looking, most of you are like up here you're like the exploiters, you're the privileged you should feel really really really really guilty now if you're female you're slightly better because you're one rung down because you're being oppressed by the males in this room, by definition and it just, and it continues like this right, so who's at the bottom who's like everybody owes them because this is a pyramid of who owes what yeah if you're indigenous but today it's even more expansive than that because today it's if you're transsexual indigenous so it's not about treating them as equal that's not the discussion, it's not about treating them as individuals which I am all for it's about them being a group that deserves extra because we as a group somehow got extra it's all about your group membership it has nothing to do with you as an individual and maybe the struggles you've gone through in life or maybe some people are privileged, there are a lot of cronies they get all kind of goodies out there but this is about just your group membership, this has nothing to do with your particular circumstances as an individual we've elevated our groups above anything else and our president does the same thing, so it's on the kind of radical left of you, what are we doing on the same thing on the radical right make America great again, what does that mean what America, the America of individualism I don't see any, in the politics of today I don't see much individualism or advocacy for individualistic policies I see a lot of talk about group rights I see a lot of talk about, you know it drives me nuts when I hear about American jobs, what the hell does American jobs you have a job and I have a job and you might not have a job, go find one right? but America doesn't have jobs, oh trade, I love trade America doesn't trade with China but America doesn't trade with China we don't really trade with China, we trade with Chinese guy who happens to be making t-shirts and who happens to live in China and be making them and you're probably using as an intermediary for the trade Walmart or someplace like that and you go to the store and you buy something and that store pays some Chinese company what is the government's business where I buy my stuff why isn't anybody's business where I buy my stuff and who happens to make it unless there's some crime involved which I'm not aware of why isn't anybody's business who I employ what I buy, where I buy it, from whom I buy it and yet this is supposed to be the issues of the day this is really really important but it's because we think about these things as, this nation trades with that nation but now we're just individuals, buying stuff at Walmart or the local grocery store or the technology store where's this made, anybody know where this is made, Korea, Taiwan anybody else what's that, Wisconsin soon all those jobs will come back, hold your breath I think it's something like 30 different countries 30 different countries who the hell cares, it's beautiful, it's cool it's made my life better, it's probably made your life better if it hasn't, draw it away people all over the world have worked on this, isn't that amazing talented people all over the world have built this and they all got paid none of them were slave laborers they all got compensated for their time and their ability and their efforts it's a beautiful thing and yet we're supposed to resent it because it wasn't made in America it was designed in America, it was invented in America but who cares, because we now are created in our society, for years kids today, we don't spend a huge amount of time teaching them how to think, what do we spend a lot of time asking them to do, well we got some kids here but I'm afraid of what they're going to say they might not say what I want them to say what do we spend a lot of time teaching kids what to do well we tell them what not to do, suddenly there's too much memorization I agree, but that's not the worst of it what's that? I'm not convinced of that what's that? you guys haven't attended school in a long time I don't know, when I go to colleges, when I go to universities, what kids are really good at is feeling we sit 8, 9, 10 year olds around in a circle and ask them what they think about politics you know what 8, 9, 10 year olds think about politics they don't know anything about life why would they have any thoughts about politics and why should we care about what they think about politics all they're conveying is their emotions there's a lot of schools at Ivy League schools today you can't say something that people find offensive well how do you learn anything if you can't offend somebody you know what we have the First Amendment so we can speak niceties to one another you don't need to protect niceties what was the Declaration of Independence if not an offensive document to offend the King of England I mean if you were the King you would be offended the whole point of the First Amendment is to protect our way to offend people and indeed every truth ever discovered in human history has offended somebody, the people who held the false belief before Uber, offends taxi drivers the people who are entrenched in the old beliefs the only reason how free speech is to protect our ability to speak, sometimes to speak things that are offensive that's the point, that's how you discover truth now true a lot of stuff that's said is false and is offensive, but who gets to decide that's the other thing American Revolution was about what is true and what is false the King, the government, the authorities who gets to decide the individual you get to decide you don't like, you think that's false and offensive turn your back and walk the other way, you don't have to listen to it or argue against it, present facts and contradict what they said the individual is responsible for what is true and what is not not authorities, that's what we rebelled against was the idea of authorities telling us what's true and what's false Isaac Newton, your formulas you think are correct show me, prove it to me Isaac Newton's theory is correct not because my physics teacher said so but because I understood hopefully the physics, and yeah it works we know it works because we created a bunch of stuff so when we denigrate reason and elevate emotion we denigrate the individual and elevate the group by default, when we're just feeling beings walking around, we can't discover truth, we can't discover knowledge, we don't, we're bewildered we look for the safety and comfort of a group, of a collective and that's where this country is heading towards, unfortunately in the whole world I mean I travel a lot all over the world and all I see are tribes that are fighting one another tribes that hate each other's guts for no reason, I mean reasons that have to do with like a thousand years ago what they did to each other, who cares and all I see is us reverting backwards away from the Declaration of Independence, away from what America represents, back to a much darker age a dark of, an age of little groups all fighting with one another, all being ruled by some authority who, you know, what is the authority want us to fight with one another why do kings always go to war authoritarian regimes always, always start wars, why? so they, you know, the North Koreans don't revolt against their leader because they've got a much bigger enemy, the United States of America they believe is about to kill them all because their propaganda's been saying this over and over again you need a bigger enemy than you, so dictate this love wars it helps them consolidate power and it helps them distract the people's attention to something else so we seem to be moving away, or we are moving away from the concept of the individual, to the concept of the collective where everything is based on what's good for the group now, more and more in America we talk about the public interest, the common good I don't know, when I hear the public interest, I run so what's the public interest, like what's the interest of this group never mind the public, which is much bigger, what's the interest of this group I don't know, how to tell we can vote, right, what happens when you vote the interest of the majority overwhelm the interest of the minority, so we get somebody's interest but we don't get the public interest, not everybody's going to be happy, some people are not this thing is a public interest, what is there there's also this thing as a collective good, there's also this thing as a common good what is there, is my good and your good and your good and your good each one of us, and the only thing that you could say is common, common good, is to leave us free to go pursue our individual good, and so ours might be right, so ours might be pursuing stupid things might be pursuing good things they have a responsibility for their own life, but when we start imposing a common good on all of us, so-called common good, or what the majority wants on all of us, we get into trouble one of the sacred concepts that you're not allowed to talk against is democracy, democracy's supposed to be a reflection of this common good but I have some qualms about democracy, because democracy is in a position of the majority rule over the minority, and what's the smallest minority we left to talk about rights, minority rights, what's the smallest minority, the individual, each one of you is a minority, smaller than any minority that the government recognizes because you're just one and when the majority opposes their will on you you lost freedom founding fathers were not pro-democracy, or at least not the conception of democracy that says majority rule, whatever this is why we have a bill of rights, you can all decide that I should be silenced, but all you can do about it is walk out, you can't actually silence me 99% of Americans decide I should be silenced, and my guess is they voted, they would vote that way but they can't, at least if we had a decent Supreme Court they wouldn't uphold it because we have a bill of rights, our fathers understood that you cannot and never should impose the will of the majority over the individual the rule of government is not to tell us how to live, the rule of government is to protect us, period, so yeah we can vote for our politicians but in a proper government, how much power do politicians have? Very little, that's the beauty of the American constitution and declaration that gives politicians very little power, and we've had to move away from that constitution in order to get to where we are today where they have a huge amount of power, in the name of always in the name of the common good and the public everything Hitler did, he did for the common good and the public everything Stalin and Mao and everybody does, is always in the common good and the public I'm not interested in the common good and the public I'm interested in individual rights so I hope that as this country is sliding towards great and great collectivism, great and great authoritarianism, and I think as a consequence great and great authoritarianism, which is where we're going, that we can instigate a new American revolution but first we have to understand what the original one was about so I hope you join me and help me educate our fellow Americans on the idea that the American revolution was about individualism, was about leaving the individual alone free to live his life because that's the only antidote to the problems, the political problems we face today to the existential problems we face today, is a renewed respect for the individual and to do that we must have a renewed respect for reason, for the human mind, thank you time for questions and answers of Dr. Brooke does anybody have a question the first question is always the talk, afterwards it gets easier over the weekend I read your book, equality is unfair equalism I mean equality is unfair I thought it was an outstanding book thank you and it is a point of view that just never gets discussed inequality has really made America great and it just speaks to that we have this notion, again, this false notion about what equality means, because in our Declaration of Independence it actually says all men are created equal put aside the contradiction of slavery, which is a horrible contradiction that the founders have fortunately compromised about we need to say all men are created equal now in the modern sense we believe that that means that we should all have some kind of equal outcome, or some kind of even if you're conservative then you say oh no I don't believe in equal outcome, I just believe in equal opportunities but opportunities is just another outcome I mean there is no such thing as equal opportunities, I mean I've worked very hard and try to make as much money as I can so my kids have more opportunities I'm trying to maximize my kids opportunities I'm sure you guys are too, we don't believe in equal opportunities, we shouldn't so why did the founders say equal, all men are created equal well we've lost the sense of equality they meant what they meant was equality of rights equality of liberty, equality of freedom you could have exchanged that term to say all men are created free that's what they meant but they couldn't conceive that all men are going to have the same outcome we're all different, I mean that's beautiful and great if we're all the same it would suck even if everybody's like me it would really be boring and guess what happens when you take a bunch of different people and you give them equal rights and you give them equal liberties equality before the law, in other words you set them free what happens? do anything with it? yeah some people but do anything with it is even not the right way to think about it we're all going to do different things with what we have life's not about money, right so the fact that some people are going to make a lot of money how do you make a lot of money by the way, what's the only way to make a lot of money in a free market? create values and who's going to benefit from those values? other people the only way to make a lot of money is to create something that other people are willing to buy freely, voluntarily, if they have their own choice because they're going to make their lives better for a price that's higher than what it costs you to produce it business 101 the only way to become a billionaire is to make hundreds of millions of people's lives better, it's the only way because they have to buy hundreds of millions of people have to buy your product and if they bought their product why would, how much, if I buy this for 600 bucks how much is it worth to me? you know ours was 600 when Nevada it was just 600, more than 600 so it's better or worse when I bought this better, but note that inequality increased I'm $600 poorer and Apple is $600 richer so inequality based on economists and how they measure stuff has just increased, but I'm better off for having $600 less in my bank account because I have this, but you can't measure that how do you measure that? so when you leave people free they become unequal, create because somebody creates the iPhone, which makes my life better so what if they're richer? I got a Ph.D. in finance I could have gone to Wall Street, made millions of dollars, but you know what? this, what we're doing right now is worth more to me than millions of dollars, I'm a teacher I'm not a trading guy, I love finance and I've got a book defending financiers but I'm not, that's not what really gets me literally, I have given up millions of dollars to do this because life's not about money life's about happiness, life's about flourishing, life's about success and again, when you leave people free they're unequal because we're different that's just reality and what is the only way to make us the same what's the only way to make us the same I'm really upset I'm really upset at basketball inequality LeBron James is a much better player than me I'm upset, I don't like that I want basketball equality so how do we make me and LeBron equal? break his legs you get the break his legs and I like to say even if you broke LeBron James' legs you probably beat me you only have to break one of his arms now we laugh, but that's the reality of every single day because when we redistribute wealth we're breaking people's legs I live in California, luckily for me, at least for now I pay 55% of my income in taxes somewhere between 50 and 55% of every dollar I own goes to the government now if you give me a choice, or break your legs once a year or take 55% of your income once a year, I'm not sure which one I take legs can be fixed, that money is gone forever, I'll never see it again if I really exploit Medicare, maybe I'll see a little bit of that it's gone and what does money represent? your effort, your time, your life, money is life we've got a negative perception of money for all kinds of weird reasons, but the fact is when you earn money it's because you have spent hours, life, time, and effort and your best effort in making that money and that's something you decide to take in 50% of it that's as evil as breaking people's legs, maybe more evil than that but we all understand if you can't break LeBron's legs, that's wrong but you can take a businessman's earnings, you can take the worker's earnings, you can just take them however much the majority votes to take, Soviet right now when the top marginal rates go up to 42% or they should go down to 35%, really those are the choices, you're going to take a third of my life or half of my life, that's the choice nobody's talking about lowering to what it should be as close to zero as possible, so the only way to make free, the unequal people equal are breaking legs, in other words the only way is to use force, the only way is to violate the quality that the founding fathers stood for, to make some people less free because you're stealing and taking their stuff, it's the only way to do it so I'm for equality of liberty, of freedom, I'm for freedom and for freedom you can't be for equality of outcome or opportunity and the book goes into a lot more detail but that's basically the story, any other questions? so the national media and the news for the most part are witnessing something and they're giving their perspective and telling us what we should think how come there's not more of that from the individualistic viewpoint it's always different what they feel like? well because the individualistic perspective is not promoted, it's not expected, it's not out there, it just doesn't exist out there it's so many years, I'd say 100 plus years infiltrated with philosophical ideas that are collectivistic, that are anti-american, that are anti-individualistic and that we have to comment and you very very rarely see it now the American spirit is still there, you still see it periodically, but as a society we become more and more collectivistic and we want to be told one of the things that you notice with this last election is how tribal we become so this creepy monster this Harvey Weinstein and the media responses he's a lefty who cares if he's a lefty or a righty or a middleman he's a horrible human being and there goes Hannity condemning this guy and he's a lefty and he's horrible Roger Ailes, Hannity's former boss did exactly the same thing as Weinstein Hannity suspended him to the end because it's all politics, has nothing to do with actual individual behavior it's about their team and my team I'm a Boston Celtics fan if you play for Cleveland you're just damn evil now if you leave Cleveland and come to Celtics then you become a good guy it's just mind-boggling to me that we've taken a story that should be about men in power abusing their power and exploiting women in a horrible way and maybe the prevalence of this kind of phenomenon in our culture and we've turned it into these on the left and these guys on the right but everything now is like that all of our media is now echo chamber so I don't consider myself on the right anymore because to me the right has become just like the left they're all collectivists and to me the political spectrum today is collectivism and me over here so I don't even have the vocabulary to describe the nuttiness that I think is going on now in the political parties they see the founding fathers wouldn't recognize the country based on that and you remember the founding fathers didn't even want political parties originally they railed against because they didn't want that group think what they wanted was every individual candidate to run in his own merit and remember the person who came in second in the presidential election became the vice president so Jefferson won and he decided that he didn't like Bo because he was on the other side and he deteriorated into the parties very quickly but the mentality right now is completely group think and completely focused on them versus us but it's us it's not my particular level it's all in terms of the collective group and that's why I see this country descending into tribalism because I left Israel the main reason I left Israel is because I hate tribalism as much as I love Israel but everybody in Israel believes that they are family members like it's one being happy tribe and everybody thinks that they have a say in what and how you do stuff and the beauty in America is you want to be best friends with your neighbor next door great you don't want to ever talk to them great nobody cares you get to decide how close you get to people or not there's not this expectation everybody gets along all the time in Israel it's very group think you belong to the tribe you're supposed to sacrifice for the tribe it's that kind of collectivism in green and I thought I left that maybe it's me who wanted it but now I see it here and of course the Middle East is full of it it's full of it it seems like with the founding fathers many of them were people of means but they also sacrificed a lot a lot of them didn't fare so well after 1776 many of them their livelihoods were affected and so forth and yet they had a statement they were making a statement not only for the public but beyond they had a vision of where they wanted to take or at least see where society would go and it's an amazing document when you think about it I don't know I think declaration of independence is the greatest most important political document in human history I don't think anything comes close to the Magna Carta and not even the Constitution I think it's a declaration that is important and at the end of the declaration they say you know we pledge our property our honor and our lives because they knew like it was 90% they were going to lose the war they were fighting and the world had never known the British Empire and they were probably going to lose them they were probably all going to die and yet they fought because they valued freedom they valued individual freedom and they said we will not live as serfs we will only if we're going to live we're going to live as free men and that's fairer think about what they did and think about what we do you know life's easy life's pretty cool and their revolution is disappearing and what are we doing to fight for what are we doing to bring it back nothing or very little compared to what they did so for them life without freedom wasn't worth living it was they were fighting for themselves for themselves the people they loved they wanted freedom in their lifetime they wanted to see it and we're letting it slip away what do you think it's catalyzed the ship away from individualism is it the profitability of the tribalism or is it the absence of that that was created I think it's the absence of a proper defensive reason so I think it's all driven by the view of the human mind so during the enlightenment there was this brief period about 100 years maybe less where the human mind was venerated and philosophers venerated the human mind and then came a couple of philosophers one French one German all bad things come from primarily German so was the French and the German of Kant and Kant was this brilliant philosophy the greatest philosopher of his time and he basically said you can't know reality realities you know realities are normal our senses and our mind distort everything we see and we all think we see the same thing because we all have the same kind of categories in our mind that shape our viewing of reality but we have no clue what reality is really like and for a variety of reasons that have to do with some of the weakness in the case of the enlightenment made that took off that became dominant in the Kant and then Hegel says contradictions they're just part of reality everything's a contradiction contradictions are wonderful we should embrace contradictions which is basically rejecting logic rejecting science rejecting reality because the whole idea of logic is to figure out you know if you see a contradiction to figure out why it's not a contradiction as Aristotle said A is A A cannot be A and non A at the same time that's basic laws of logic and yet Hegel says no contradictions are wonderful and for whatever reason you know Europe embraced that philosophy and then you get you get Schopenhauer and then you get Karl Marx and then you get Nietzsche and not accidentally consequences you get communism and fascism because that's the ultimate outcome of those set of ideas and America so they had this perception of reality and Kant's moral code also a Frenchman also articulates this again in Augustine Kant's C-O-M-T-E they say look in morality what makes something good in moral is if you do it for purely 100% selfless reasons so if you help somebody else and you feel good as a consequence so when you're going to help them you think oh I'm gonna feel good from this so I you know charity's nice because it makes me feel good it doesn't count you have to be completely selfish completely negate you think about that in comparison declaration of dependence we have an inalienable right to pursue your happiness not other people's yours so you've got this and Kant is very big on duty you have to do what's moral because you have to do what's moral and you know what's moral because you have these categorical imperatives and of course you don't so somebody has to tell you what's moral a few or somebody has to tell you these philosophical ideas were in Europe and I think ultimately led to the catastrophes of the 20th century what happened in America we had no intellectuals to a large extent Americans were too busy building the country like if you were smart in America you went into business you didn't go into it you didn't become a professor you know we have the term in America we say you know those who do do and those who can't do teach right so we never took intellectuals very seriously in America we just didn't so we were too busy building this country too busy going into business taming the world and whatever so when we became rich and we wanted to send our kids to the best schools in the world like in the late 19th century would we send them to Germany and France and they came back with those nasty European ideas and when Princeton Yale and Harvard wanted to become the best universities in the world they had the money because all these people were showing them with money because they had gone out and made money in business where did they go get their professors Germany and France and that's how our universities became bastions of these ideas which are fundamentally collectivistic Europe never went through particularly Germany never went through an individualistic phase France a little bit during the 18th century with Voltaire and the Encyclopedians they named Langdon France and England certainly did but the rest of Europe has always been collectivistic the Europeans are so collectivistic think about this you live in Spain you live in this one corner in Spain called Catalonia you have to have your own Catalonian state because your language is a little different you have a little bit different customs I was in a place called Montenegro which is a country of 600,000 people and I said why do you have a country? oh because we're Montenegro I mean how are you different than Serbs or Albanians or Bosnians oh we're a different tribe like why I mean how do you do that if you want genetic tests I mean it's so stupid barbaric and primitive each one of us has to be with our own people who look exactly like us who have the same heritage it reminds me that in Iceland you know Iceland is a tiny little country 250,000 people live in Iceland and the population has never grown much because I guess it's so cold they don't have a lot of kids but 250,000 people in Iceland so they have an app an app that you could put in let's say you're dating somebody you could put in their name into the app and they would tell you whether they were cousin of yours or not you have to do that because otherwise you can get real problems genetically right so they have to worry about that but that's just you know we're going to stay in a little group but not Europe has always been like that like World War I broke out because this tribe wanted to separate itself from that tribe and millions of people died because of that we had a war in Yugoslavia right between Bosnians and even today they called Bosnia Herzegovina right slash Herzegovina God forbid you know you should have disliked it because your tribe wasn't named in the name of the country and they fought against the Serbs who fought against the Croats who fought against the Montenegroans who fought against the Macedonians over what over ideas over anything important over the white to be a Macedonian this is in America we have Macedonians and we have Italians and we have Poles and we have Jews and we have Mexicans and we have blacks and we have people from all over the world and the whole idea of America is who cares you're an individual I don't care where you're from I don't care what your ancestors did I don't care what color skin you have I don't care what religion you have I don't care about any of those things I care about you as an individual you good guy or bad guy that's all I care that's it and that's why you can have massive country with people as diverse as we have until recently I guess peaceful and now what the left is trying to do is break us into little tribes and what the right is doing is saying oh you want to play that game we can play that game too we're white and now you have these rides and white supremacists and white nationalists and white all this stuff because we've learned the identity politics game from the left so we want to break ourselves into tribes so fundamentally this comes from the idea that individuals can't reason it comes from philosophy it comes from universities it comes from the philosophers the philosopher kings they taught us this and we have not resisted it we have not fought back and I think I mean I don't know how many of you here have read Ein Rand but I think Ein Rand is an historically important figure here because in my view Ein Rand completes the revolution that was started in the Enlightenment Ein Rand is the first American philosopher she's the first philosopher to articulate a philosophy consistent with the ideas of the founding fathers consistent with the political system that is America and the only way I believe to save America is for our intellectual classes one day to respect Ein Rand and to teach Ein Rand and for those ideas to become felt because they're ideas that in the Enlightenment they're about individualism and about everything that that implies and the sad day is during the 20th century and into the 21st century most of the smart people have turned their backs on her and either embrace those ideas or embrace the other ideas that are much weaker in defending us against the ideas of collectivism and rising up bubbling up to the surface our philosophy matters it's life or death and you gotta find the good philosophers and support them and because it's the only weapon we have I mean I tell my libertarian free market conservative friends you can argue economics all day I can show you how socialism doesn't work a million different ways on a million different issues I can take any one of these policies the government and show you that it doesn't work and prove it I mean real proof and point and examples where it doesn't work and nobody cares nobody cares about economics they don't care about politics people care about morality people care about what they think is true what they think is noble what they think is just and that the left dominates we don't have a chance it's the issue of equality right equality is just it doesn't work we know it doesn't work but it's just so we have to have equality so what about economics we won the economic debate those of us who live in freedom won the economic debate 50 60 70 years ago we lived in the Poland wall we wanted to be it doesn't matter we're still losing because it's not about it's not about that who are the questions you had a question I was coming back on the media thing that when you think of right and left and the media that's it you've lost this journalism well you've lost this objective truth because actually philosophically nobody believes in objective truth so if you don't believe in objective truth what are you going to do you're going to preach you're going to do what gives you power do what gives you money which is preach to go quiet and manipulate emotions it's not about that anymore it's about emotions the mainstream media let's call them who tend to be left preaching to a leftist audience and preaching that but then you have Fox you think the New York Times lies any more than Fox does they're just lying from a different perspective white bod lying machine that's what you're getting in what you're not getting is objective journalism because nobody believes in objectivity anymore we're in a post-truth era we're in a fake everything is fake news according to the pundit it just depends on which perspective you have on it it's more objective which reality I think they're all pandering once in a while somebody in one of these medias will do a good story like the New York Times broke the white speech story and did a really good write up and interviewed people and got facts and they didn't just read it and of course Fox slams the mainstream media as you knew this was going on along all the time why didn't you reveal it before well if Fox knew that why didn't Fox do it if everybody knew that Weinstein was doing this why didn't Fox reveal it right why didn't white bod reveal it white bod was looking for dudes on a democratic donors because it's not that simple if you're going to go after somebody you have your facts because they'll sue you otherwise New York Times got actively did it most of the time I think the New York Times is horrible it's a rag but so let it all the rest I find figuring out what the actual news is a challenge every single day and I'm in this business and I have to read multiple sources if you're being quoted I want to see the video because I don't even trust them to quote you it's that bad now 20 years ago that wasn't the case it's getting worse and worse and worse and it goes back to this idea if there's no objective reality it's all about manipulating people it's all about power I can do whatever it takes it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if I'm just quoting you because what you said was just interpreted by different people different ways anyway because there is no objective interpretation for what you say in modernism we took a text in different ways and different perspectives depends on our genes and our heritage and the color of our skin right there's female truth and male truth and black truth and Hispanic truth and if you believe that then yeah then they should be Hispanic news or black news and female news and male news and Democratic news and Republican news because and that's what we're getting we're getting exactly that so we're getting everything that you would expect given the philosophy and that's the real story and the only way to challenge what's really going on is to challenge the philosophy to fight for objective truth I think part of that is the result there's tremendous apathy in the American and I don't know why that exists I'm not sure because I don't know what it was like but there just seems to be an apathy towards learning more about your own government before it would break I think it's always been around but this is the point it never used to matter that much this is the beauty of the American system we shouldn't have to care about politics that much because they shouldn't be that powerful the only really powerful decision government makes is whether to go to war now and even that's a hard decision for them in the original conception of the American government because there was no standing army so they had to raise an army to go to war so if you didn't like the war you said the hell with you I'm not joining and if not enough people joined they didn't go to war so historically the whole way the American system was built it's not to care about government because what should we care about our lives, a farm, a factory, a work, a children a family doing the things that are necessary to live and yeah they had to pass some laws about property maybe the police had to be fair and stuff like that relatively speaking war was a big deal but that was it this country made a lot of mistakes when it comes to war there was no reason because of that but that's almost all in the 20th century once government got really big and really powerful now we should care because they're in our lives they dictate everything that we do but we're too busy living our lives and I think that's a virtue of Americans I go other places in Europe and places like that they were obsessed with politics and I find that impulsive Americans are obsessed with living that's great politics are not living exactly our politician friend left so we can say this he had one of your representatives here it's about, America is about an individual living his life in pursuit of his own happiness and yeah there are politicians out there so I think it was a virtue originally now it's advice, I also think it's a lack of leadership we're not taught, we're not encouraged to participate at this point it's so despicable it's so horrible I mean when you know when they lie I mean one of the things that makes Donald Trump unique is that all politicians lie but Donald Trump relishes it it's like yeah I like why are you spying so I promised that and I'm going to do something else what difference does it make other politicians kind of justify it and they put themselves into a pretzel trying to explain why they lie but he kind of said yeah okay I need to get elected right so I said the Mexicans will build the wall they pay for the wall and they're not going to pay for the wall we're at that point where we're willing to accept that and of course the people who voted for it I mean not everybody but it's unfortunate anything he does is great and the people who hate him everything he does is evil I'm more close to the others guys but you look at politics I I used to go to Washington a lot I used to do these seminars for congressional staffers who are very young and idealistic so it's great I love talking to them and they used to take me my staff used to take me to visit congressmen and senators I met a lot of senators at congressmen and I did this like a couple of times and I said I never do it again I like these people they're not interesting they're not particularly smart they all they are dealing with minutiae they don't care about ideas they're not I mean they're not people you would want to hang out with so why should we care I mean we have no choice I guess we have to elect them but then just believe us alone that's the healthy attitude but yeah we need to get involved we need to we need to care because it's getting to the point where they're destroying our lives or at least trying to yeah is technology, internet, smart phones, social media and move us, more knowledge is that maybe going to shift things you think education more knowledge I mean angry boots in the answers so IT was having an argument yesterday with somebody who said and as a prevalent view among certain free market thinkers that technology is going to save us and the idea is that technology is advancing so fast or has the potential to advance so fast we're just at the beginning it really is there's a whole singularity university in Silicon Valley there's the whole idea that we're just at the point where this is going to take off we're going to be living 250-200 years soon you know and data and AI and robots are going to be able to do all these things and it's just going to and the government won't be able to keep up they just won't have the tools so we'll be able to hide our money with cryptocurrency we'll be able to hide our activities they won't even know it and we'll basically be free because they won't be able to catch us I'm a skeptic I don't think those people appreciate it now I believe in technology and I believe that if we were the potential that is being unleashed right now technologically is unbelievable just in biology just the stuff that they know about the cell and what they can do with gene splicing and you know we could live I think to be 150-200 years old if we didn't have an FDA given that we have an FDA you know 90's going to be stretching because they're trying to kill us as much as fast as they can because you're expensive after so many years they don't want you this is a side note but George Bush had a special committee appointed to study life extension and whether this was a good thing that's strange to me they studied this and a very well known guy whose name escapes me but he works at the American Enterprise Institute as a charge of this and they came back and said no it's not a good thing we should not be investing in life extension it's like why they had all these reasons and some of the reasons were things like well we can't afford it's a security we'll go bankrupt it's like people will retire at 65 if they're going to live to be 200 well I want to work longer right and we'll be healthier and so on so stupid stuff like that and then they said they had the thing that said it will be the end of marriage right people will be a lot more divorce why I mean it's okay to live with a woman for like 50-60 years but 200 so even if that were true I would love to live a little more life for 200 years but even if that were true who cares you get to live to be 200 I mean so the divorce rate is more important than human life it's just that whole thing and these are conservatives we're tinkering with nature this is playing God yeah that's what we do we tinker with nature we play God that's the human race great isn't that cool that we can do that so they had all these excuses where we can't live long so technology is amazing and the technology that's coming is amazing technology in and of itself will solve the problem and I don't think it's about knowledge put it differently I don't think what technology gives us is knowledge but technology gives us is information turning information into knowledge is hard and it's a skill you need to learn and practice and I think most people don't know how to do it with they know how to do it in their job in their work in their business they don't know how to do it on these abstract philosophical scale and we don't have leaders who help us and teach us how to do it so I think if anything a lot of us feel we're overwhelmed by the amount of information we get tons of information and from all different sources and all different types and we don't know what to do with it I mean I barely know what to do with it and again I'm a pro this is my job and I don't know what to do with it so my guess is it's doing the opposite it's making people somewhat say well this is too much for me I'm walking away or I'm going to go join my group or just hear information I want to hear I'll only listen to Fox News I'll only listen to MSNBC so people are looking to simplify by simplifying them so I don't think what we're gaining from technology is knowledge I think what we're gaining is information and we are all suffering from information alright we'll end on that note thank you all