 Thank you. I've got some bad news. The bad news is, I'm not be giving this talk in Portuguese. But of course, that's also the good news. Because I only know three words in Portuguese. To do Ben, I'm sure I destroyed that. Obrigado e juntos. Wouldn't make a good speech if I had to do all three. So, this is my fourth time in Brazil. And we've traveled all over the country and visited a lot of different places. And when you travel around Brazil, what you discover is that the people are amazing. I mean, the friendliest people in the world. They seem to be hard-working. There is a energy, a vibrancy, a certain, you know, sense of joy in the air. It's a beautiful country. It's a big country. It has massive amounts of natural resources. So, the question, the question that has to come to anybody's mind who travels around Brazil is, why are you so poor? Because you're pretty poor. Why? You have great people. You have natural resources. Pneumoxys will tell you that's all it takes. A little bit of gold on the internet because there's Wi-Fi. Even as poor as Brazil is, wow, by historical standards, you're super rich. So, what happened that made that go up like that? What is it that changed suddenly in human history? That made us suddenly rich after 10,000 years of being, or 100,000 years, or however you want to calculate it, of being doot poor. When did this happen? What happened sometime in the late 18th century? Anybody know what that era is called? What the era before the 19th century is called as an intellectual era? The age of what? The age of enlightenment, or the age of reason. This is an era in which we discovered something really, really, really important. We rediscovered it, if you will. People ask me, where does western civilization come from? And I know I'm going to say something controversial, but it doesn't come from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It comes from Greece. Because what we discovered in the 18th century was a principle Aristotle knew way back then. And the principle is that we know about the world. We discover truth in the world by using what? By using our mind. By using reason. By thinking, thinking, thinking. By observing, figuring stuff out, integrating. We know it by using our minds. The great scientist taught us that of the scientific revolution, where there was Newton or the other scientists of the 18th century. And then the philosophers picked up on that and they said, yes, human beings, what makes us special, what makes us different is not thumbs. It's a stupid anthropological, I don't know who came up with that. It's our mind. It's our capacity to reason. Think and therefore communicate. Plan. Strategize. Anybody here have the gene for hunting? Agriculture? Anybody just know how to do it? Alright, we have one. I'm going to drop you in the middle of the Amazon and we'll see. No one has it. It's not in our genes. Sorry evolutionary psychologists. We're not programmed to any of this stuff. You try running down. I don't know. Do you have bison here? What would be a good animal in Brazil to run down, right? We're weak. I mean, just look around the audience, right? We're weak. We're slow. We have no claws. We have no fangs. You can't run down an animal and chew on it. What do you have to do? You have to invent weapons, invent traps. You have to strategize and work in teams. From the beginning, our means of survival as human beings has been the mind, has been reason, has been thinking. But what's interesting is in the 18th century, they didn't stop there. They said, okay, we all have this capacity to reason. Now who has this capacity to reason? Is there a collective consciousness floating over here in the space here? And we all think in this collective consciousness place? No. Just like there's no collective belly and you can't eat for somebody else. You have to eat for yourself. There's no collective mind. Reason is a faculty of the individual. Each one of us reasons. Well, if each one of us can reason, and if we can understand the equations of Newton and if we can understand the world in which we live, then why can't we choose our own profession, which you couldn't 300 years ago? Why can't we choose our own spouse, our own wife or husband? You couldn't 300 years ago. Why can't we choose our own political leaders, which you couldn't 300 years ago? Suddenly, suddenly, a movement is born, a movement of liberty, a movement of freedom, not based on the idea that we're just some animal out there leaving loose, but based on the idea that each one of us possesses the capacity to think, to take care of himself, to reason, make decisions, make choices for oneself. If you think people are stupid, which is what in most of human history we thought, then they need a guardian. They need somebody, somebody to protect them, somebody to tell them what to do, somebody to help them out. So, through this idea that each one of us can reason, each one of us can take care of himself and therefore choices must be left for the individual, a new conception of human life came about. I mean, it was new. The idea for the first time in human history, for the first time in human history was that your life belonged to, who did your life belong to? You. Now we take that for granted today. I can go to any audience anywhere in the world and ask them who does your life belong to, and they say me. But if you'd asked 300 years ago, it would be the answer. 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, your life belonged to the king, the tribe, the council, the state, to a whole variety of entities. And what was your purpose as an individual? Your purpose as an individual was to serve that entity that owned you. You were meaningless, you were nothing. They would take care of you, because you were too stupid to take care of yourself. And in return, you would sacrifice everything for them. And this is a scam that's been going on for a long time. For a long time. Thousands and thousands of years. But suddenly, in the late 18th century, people started to say no. Our lives belong to ourselves. We don't accept your authority over us. We have a right, a right to life. Now that sounds, everybody talks today about rights. They throw around the world all the time, right? But this is a massive revolution. This is an amazing new idea. You have a right to live your life free of coercion. You have a right to be free. Free from authority, free from control, free from regulation, free from other people dictating your life for you. And suddenly, people took responsibility for their own lives. People were left free to live their lives in places like the United States and in England and parts of Europe. And suddenly, not by accident, but suddenly they started to use their mind to discover new ideas and to take those ideas and to apply them in reality. They didn't have to get permission to invent the steam engine. They just invented it and then commercialized it and then made money on it and then took that money and invested in new other products and production processes. It's the liberation of the human spirit, the liberation of the human mind from authority and coercion that made the world rich. And it's the ideas that made that liberation possible. The founding fathers of America, it's not an accident that they wrote such amazing documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These men were well-read, real intellectuals who understood the ideas at the foundation of freedom and liberty. And it is those ideas we must resurrect. It is those ideas that we have given up on, that we have lost. It's that idea of individualism and the idea of the efficacy of reason that stand at the core of what makes wealth creation possible. What makes for a healthy society. The sad reality is that from somewhere around 1800 these ideas have been under attack by intellectuals. Primarily German intellectuals do with that as you will from Kant to Schopenhauer to Hegel to Marx to onwards they march. The anti-reason, anti-individualist philosophers and nobody has stood up against them. Nobody has challenged these fundamental ideas about the efficacy of reason and the sanctity of individual life. And yet that is what the battle is really about. We still live in a world, we still live in a world that both on the left and on the right doesn't treat you as an individual. The only difference between the left and the right in the world we live in today is which collective they want you to sacrifice to. The left wants you to sacrifice the poor and the proletarian and fill in the blank. Trees, they love trees more than human beings. They love desert rats more than human beings. They want to sacrifice you to all of that. The right wants you to sacrifice for the nation, for the tribe, for the group. But both of them agree on the fundamental. Your life does not belong to you. It belongs to them. And then they're just arguing about what to do with your life. How to sacrifice your life. They get to decide what business you get to open. I hear it takes, what, a hundred and something days to start a business in Brazil instead of what, how long should it take to start a business in a free country? Twenty-four hours seems like a long time. What business they have looking over, you know, in New Zealand it takes four hours. I'm not sure why it takes that long in the digital world. I think you fill out a form online just, you know, so they have a record of it, right? And you press send and you start your business. Why not? Why not? I'll tell you why not. Because it's not your life. How dare you do something without my there permission? That's the principle. The principle is the collectivistic principle of your life is not yours. You cannot think for yourself. What is regulation all about? Why do we regulate businesses? Because consumers are too stupid to know what's good for them. And businessmen are all lying, cheating, stealing crooks. Maybe not yet, but they will be if they have the opportunity. Now, this is a view of mankind. This is a particular view of what human beings are. And it's an anti-reason, anti-individualistic view of human beings. And again, it is that view. That view which must be challenged. My life is mine. You don't get to decide what business I start, how much I pay my employees, what salary I take, where I live, how much I give to charity. They call it the welfare state where they decide how much you should give for charity. And then, of course, they take a cut and put it on the side, right? The fundamental question is still, whose life, who does your life belong to? And are you capable? Are you capable of making something of it? Now, all of this, all of this is so popular. All of this is so common. All of this is everywhere. Because there was one idea that was not challenged during the Enlightenment. And in my view, the only thinker to have challenged it since is Ayn Rand. This is why I think you should all read Atlas Shrugged, which is in Portuguese, right? And that idea is, what does it mean to be moral? What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to do the right thing and to be noble and to be just? What do those things mean? We all want to be good. We all have been taught that being good is important. We've got religious teachers and philosophers and our mothers all telling us, be good. But what does that mean? Everybody, what that means is taking care of other people. Taking care of other people, thinking of other people before you think of yourself. Sacrificing to other people. We built statues for people who sacrifice. We think sacrifice is noble and good. What's sacrifice? You give something up, what do you get in return? What do you get in return if you give something up and a sacrifice? Well, death is the extreme. But nothing. Nothing. The whole idea is you give something up and not get anything in return or something less valuable in return. What's a trade? What's a trade? Do you give something up? What do you get in return? Something more valuable. Why isn't a trade good and a sacrifice bad? Why isn't win-win good and win-lose bad? That's at the heart of everything. Why should I live for other people? Why are other people's interests more important than mine? I don't love my neighbor like myself. I love me much more than my neighbor. And I think that's the moral thing. So, for Rand, morality is not about sacrifice. It's not about helping others by losing. It's about living. It's about making the most of your life. It's about living the best life that you can live as an individual who owns their own life. But owning your own life means owning it all the way down. It means owning, being responsible for how you're going to live and living the best damn life you can live. I'll give you a quick example. Take Bogates, Microsoft. Bogates built this amazing company at Microsoft. Became the richest man in the world. How do you become the richest man in the world? What's the secret to being a billionaire? This is important. You better write this down. What's the secret to becoming a billionaire? Making a great product that everybody wants and are willing to pay more for than what it costs you to produce. Why are they willing to pay more for it? Why? Because it makes their lives better. Because they're trading. They're engaging in a win-win. So the only way to become a billionaire is by making other people's lives better. Only way to become a billionaire in a free market where you're not just scamming off from government. In a free market, the only way to become a billionaire is by making the lives of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people better. And I would argue that nobody has done that in the modern era more than Bill Gates. He changed the world. Microsoft made the world a better place. The whole computer revolution we live through today is possible because of Bill Gates. He made the world a better place, but we don't like him. Why don't we like him? Because while he was making the world a better place, he dared to make $70 billion for himself. And we don't like that. When does Bill Gates become a good guy? When he leaves Microsoft, God forbid you make money. God forbid you work for a company that makes money. And he starts giving his money away. And now everybody loves Bill Gates because he's got a foundation. And he gives money away. And he's not making money. He's not making the world a better place a little bit. Charity is fine. It's not huge, but it's fine. But where did he have a bigger impact on the world? At Microsoft during this charity, it's not in the same universe. So why do we love Bill Gates when he's giving his money away and we don't love him when he makes it? And how do we make Bill Gates a saint? Because he's still a little skeptical about Bill. Why? He lives in a big house. He flies around in a private jet. And he seems to be having fun. How do we make Bill Gates a saint? Now, I haven't spoken to the Pope and I know this is a Catholic country, so I have to be careful. How do we make Bill Gates a saint? What would he have to do? Yeah, he'd have to give it all away, move into a tent and bleed for us. He'd have to suffer. Have you ever gone to a museum and seen paintings of saints? Do you ever see a painting of a saint smiling? No. The purpose of the morality we live with, the purpose of the morality that dominates our world, the purpose of the morality that has been inculcated into us for at least 2,000 years, is a morality of suffering. It's a morality of denial. It's a morality of sacrifice. You want to be rich? You want to be free? Then that is what has to be rejected. You don't live for other people. You don't owe other people other than the respect of leaving them alone. You owe yourself. You have one shot at living life on this earth. One chance of making the most of this one life that you have. Morality should be the science, the science that teaches you how to do it effectively. That teaches you how to live well through production, through thinking, through reasoning, because it is, after all, a means of survival. Morality should be a science that explains to us how to live the best life you can live for you. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to treat other people badly. Why? Because we get huge value from other people. We're traders. Life should be about creating win-win relationships, maximizing the trading potential. Win-win relationship in your personal life, win-win relationship in your commercial life, and we should be celebrating the entrepreneurs who are up here on stage. We should be celebrating wealth creators because they created wealth by trading, by making the world in whatever way possible a better place, and by exerting their own effort doing it, by using their mind to make this world a better place. They, the entrepreneurs, the bogates, the Steve Jobs, the Bezos, the entrepreneurs we celebrated here today, they are the two heroes of the world. We should be erecting statues to them, naming boulevards after them, not politicians and generals. The people who really change the world in which we live are the business leaders, are the people who create and make and build, and the intellectuals, there are only like five of them, I think, right, who actually have good ideas because they make the world hospitable to those business leaders, those entrepreneurs. So, if we're going to fight this battle, and if we're going to win, the first thing I think every individual needs to have is a commitment to their own life. Forget politics for a moment. It doesn't matter who wins the next election, not in a big scheme of things. Think about your own life. Think about how you can make your life the best life that it can be, how you can maximize your ability in this world. And only think about politics in that context. You care about politics for only one, you should care about politics for only one reason, because you want an environment that makes it possible for you to live a great life. I want to be free. Not so much because I care about you, I care about you, you all seem nice people. I want you to all do well. But I care about being free because I care about me and the people I love and the people I care about. I want to make my life the best life that it can be right now, right here on Earth. And if you're motivated by that, by love of yourself, by love of your life, by love of the world, and everything that is possible in that world, and if you're willing to fight, fight this morality of sacrifice, morality of duty, a morality of subjugation of the individual, then we can win. Then we can win. We're not going to win on their terms. We're not going to win with their vocabulary. We're not going to win with their philosophy. We need a new philosophy, new terms, new ideas. Embrace them so that we can all experience this freedom and liberty. Right, left in politics, the fundamental, if you will, spectrum is collectivists of the right and of the left, which is pretty much almost every political party out there, and individualists, people who care about their own life, people who care about lives of other individuals, people who want to interact with one another as equals, as traitors, engage in win-win transactions. So go out there, live, fight, and we will win. Thank you all.