 On behalf of my colleagues, Domingo García from Objetivismo Internacional, Alvaro Pabón from Students for Liberty Spain and myself, I would like to express our gratitude to the Rafael Del Pino Foundation for their kind disposition to lend us this great facility to host our conference on capitalism. We always regard them as a house of liberty and their commitment to help advance liberty ideas is highly appreciated by all of us here. After my intervention, I asked Domingo and Alvaro to do the same because it is important to spread the word that in Spain there are many liberty champions and promoters of free market capitalism and that not all is socialism. Well, on the foundation for the advancement of liberty, it is no secret to many of you who know me that Ayn Rand is my favorite 20th century thinker and liberty fighter. I had a hard time choosing a favorite topic because her whole work deserves to be quoted all the time. However, I decided that there is one quote that truly defines the work we have been doing in the libertarian movement since 2009 and afterwards since we started the foundation for the advancement of liberty. Ayn Rand said, anyone who fights for the future lives in it today. Well, the foundation for the advancement of liberty is an organization fighting for the future, leaving it as we speak. From the political libertarian movement, we inherited the main libertarian principle live and let live. We want to push for those ideas and projects that help build free prosperous human societies organized for the spontaneous order of culture and free market and respectful of all their members' individual freedom. Our mission is to promote the advancement of individual human liberty and the success of the organizations and entities which further and defend it. This mission is to fold. To act as a think tank oriented to digesting research work for the general public and act as an incubator of grassroots associations supporting liberty causes in Spain. Among our intellectual publications, I would like to outstand the World Moral Freedom Index. Its next edition will be published in next year. The Guevara report about the juridical setback in Venezuela drawing useful parallelism with political reforms proposed in Spain by the leftists or the first world electoral freedom index to be published under the coordination of Professor José Antonio Pena from Pablo de Olavide University in Seville with participation of several outstanding universities from Europe and Latin America. All of us are aware that the success of socialism comes from being able to mobilize the masses. To detect and build at the same time all kinds of organizations in different areas. We have to admit they are masters. When it comes to be influential day by day, decade after decade in the civil society. They are so experts that for decades they've managed to make the public debate only among opposed collectivism. As of us, non-collectivists, the individuals wouldn't exist. And with this reality in front of us, it isn't enough to rely on the great intellectual work of our main thinkers in the academia. All of us, all of you, have a practical role to unfold. And for that, our foundation wants to become a support and that we can together induce a profound change of cultural mentality in our country. Dear friends, as libertarians we don't have the luxury to relax and walk slowly towards our goal because collectivism is getting stronger, building legion with every minute we abdicate from our own responsibility to actively defend free market capitalism. If we keep leaving them the civil society background, our ideas won't be able to penetrate into our society. We need all the support we can get both for the foundation and the associations to go deeper in the society. Our pro-liberty grassroots associations incubator, Liberty Hub Spain, fosters already some pro-liberty entities. The main feature is the defense and determination to promote liberty. We support the taxpayer unions, Unión de Contribuyentes, the first association nationwide to defend taxpayers against IRS, high taxes, and legal instability. This entity released two weeks ago the first Indice Autonomico de Competitividad Fiscal to measure regional fiscal competitiveness in Spain based on the U.S. Tax Foundation methodology and its work has already produced concrete results. The leader of the opposition of parliament of Extremadura, the worst performing region, has used the index in her statement against the socialist regional cabinet. According to the main newspaper in the Basque country, the region of Giputkoa, the provincial president, deputado general, has also reacted to the index and is now expected to finally reintroduce the tax shield. As the index has proved that its abolition is the main reason for the province performing lower than the other two Basque provinces. We expect further political reactions and we are eager to carry out the second edition next year in order to compare both years. Another association under the Liberty Hub Spain is the Association for the Pension Reform as an entity that pushes for an individualized capitalization system for retirement. One of their projects, a mobile app that helps comparing easily the pay-as-you-go system with the capitalization one based on savings, reached the finals at the Sharktown Competition this year in Budapest Liberty Forum and managed with our foundation's help to obtain international financial support to develop the tool. There is also the platform for free education, promoting free market education like vouchers and ESA education saving accounts, private schools competition and homeschooling. I would like to extend an invitation to collaborate to all individuals, companies and entities who share our vision of a free society with less political intervention in our lives and in our pockets and therefore more prosperous. Together with Objetivismo Internacional and Students for Liberty, the foundation for the advancement of liberty is working towards a profound cultural change to restore liberty as supreme value. Let's do it together to make the process even faster. Working unavoidable as a consequence of the evolution of technology developed by the people of the mind as Indrand would put it, towards a social, cultural and economic order much more spontaneous and far less controlled by that NANI state. That small minded conservative intermediary, we call hyper state less and less needed in the 21st century work for the society especially for us individuals who are working, creating, living and loving in a global peer to peer world. Our foundation is cooperating globally with other prestigious like minded entities and we are proud member of Atlas Network, the worldwide think tank and foundation network that liberty champions are promoting free market capitalism all over the world. We're a Spanish foundation but open to the world. Our board of trustees is formed by individuals from various countries and I would like to take this opportunity to express a special gratitude to our beloved honorary chair, Carlos Alberto Montaner. Thank you for your attention and after the conference I am at your disposal to talk more on our work and on our projects. And now I ask Alvaro Pavón, board chairman of students for Liberty Spain and Portugal to present their organization and the wonderful work they are doing in the university to spread the free market capitalism and the ideas of liberty. We all know it is a tough and a risky job but they are doing it. Alvaro, you have the floor. Thank you Roxana. It's great to be back here in Madrid just a month after our students for Liberty original conference because I'm from Seville and it's even a great privilege to be here sitting next to Jaron Brooke. I have to say thanks to Jaron because it was due to him that I first became acquainted with students for Liberty. It was 2013 and he had come to Madrid to deliver a lecture more or less similar to this one and I hadn't even started my first year studying philosophy at the university but I came to listen to him to learn about objectivism and thankfully I met a local coordinator in students for Liberty Guillermo Trutrello who was and still is a fellow objectivist and he introduced me to ESFL and the rest is history as they say. So I'm here today to explain a little bit what is students for Liberty and for those of you who may not know it, it's a worldwide student-driven organization that promotes free market values and pro-liberty ideas. It was born in 2008 in Washington D.C. and our first CEO, one of our funders, Alexander Markovin, has a state as he himself has a state many times he became acquainted with free market capitalism through reading at La Shrap. So Ingram's objectivism has always been present in the core of students for Liberty. In Spain and Portugal students for Liberty arrived in 2013 precisely and maybe Yaron had something to do with that too, I don't know and I can say that after 2015 we've experienced an incredible growth, actually nowadays we've got local groups in 20 different cities in Spain and Portugal and probably 600 registered members we're still waiting to the last latest census update but yeah it's amazing. And our regional conference which is the biggest open door event we organize every year since 2014, gathers more and more people each year. Last month we had our fourth regional conference and 630 people attended which is awesome. Yeah it's 200 more people than the previous year which is even more awesome. So we of course organize smaller events like David's lectures, street activism and we are pleased to collaborate with all the pro-liberty think tanks such as Fundación para la Amanza de la Libertad, Objetivismo Internacional. And all of these we do because in students for Liberty we believe we can win the battle against socialism, against collectivism, against any other death cult because collectivism is a death cult, wish it or not only free market capitalism makes possible for men to live their own lives, to live in their own right. But of course Jaron will explain it much further than I could possibly do it. So suffice it to say that in students for Liberty we acknowledge how important ideas are and how important the moral high ground is if we ever want to win this battle. So I think nothing else that's all so thank you very much for being here and I hope you enjoy Jaron's lecture. Okay, did I unplug something? No. I have been asked to present Objetivismo, Punto Org and then present Jaron or introduce Jaron. So I would like to spend more time talking about him than talking about Objetivismo but I have to do both. How many people here are familiar with the website Objetivismo.org? I would like it to be more but good. Objetivismo Internacional is a non-profit association that I started about nine years ago and the goal is to divulge the philosophy of high and grand exclusively. You may think a lot of people here are here because they're interested in liberty, in economics, in politics but you do need, and I'm sure Jaron will touch on this at some point, you do need a philosophical base to support freedom or liberty. That is not a starting point. So students for liberty is fine but they need to have some backing, some philosophical support and that is what Objetivismo provides you. Today we are in the Spanish speaking world, Objetivismo is the official, and I say official in quotes because nobody has appointed us as being official but the fact to, in fact, we are the reference for the Spanish speaking world for Objetivismo. And that's because we have been doing it the longest because we have the most complete materials, the best translated materials. We have 50,000 visitors in our website, objetivismo.org, whatever. We have a YouTube channel that has had almost four million views in its lifetime and we have there Aynra and interviews, courses by Leonard Picoff, all kinds of very important stuff that I'm sure you will enjoy, even podcasts from Jaron, from Leonard. So I encourage you all to come to our website, learn more about, it is in Spanish, I know you must speak English if you're here and not falling asleep, but it is a very rich resource that is important to be familiar with for any of you. Also we are, I believe, no I know, the only institution that is really divulging or expressing the real principles of Objetivismo, of Aynra, because there are many people, individuals and institutions that call themselves Objetivists and then they go off the main track and they do their own version of Objetivism which is wrong. So if you want to get to the source, Rida and Aynra, which is obviously the first advice, come to our website, come to the Aynra Institute website. So that's basically what I wanted to say about Objetivismo. If you have any special skills or want to work with us, we are doing a lot of volunteer work, myself included, Guillermo that Alvaro mentioned is my right hand man and we have a few other people that are helping but if you have any special skills in websites or online marketing or in any other, or you want to write articles, you're welcome and we'll be happy to talk to you and publish them. So that's Objetivismo. Now introducing Yaron, Yaron is a very special person. The official presentation is from Israel. He moved to the United States in 1987, that's about 30 years ago. He went to the military in Israel, which I know it must be quite an experience. He studied civil engineering there. Then he moved to, he got an MBA in finance in the University of Austin, Texas. Then he moved to Silicon Valley, that's when a new period started. He became a teacher of finance, being a foreigner, an immigrant as he is and he started his own hedge fund, which I presume is still active. He became a US citizen in 2003. That was 15 years ago, approximately, and I don't know if shortly after that or at some point he became involved with the Einrand Institute, became its executive director, basically the person who runs the organization and started doing all kinds of things. For example, he wrote together with other people several books that are, I don't know if they're as best sellers as Adla Shraqt, probably not, but they're very key, very important books. One is about foreign policy, which was very important, especially after September 11th. That is called Winning the Unwinnable War, with a specialist, Ilan Giorono of the Einrand Institute, another book that followed, I may miss one or two, but he has a bunch of them, Free Market Revolution, how Einrand's ideas can change the world, basically. That was also a key thought, a key book to educate people as to why they need a whole philosophy. The third book that I have here on my list is Equal is Unfair, another very, what's the word, controversial topic, equality, igualdad, up until, I don't know, a few years ago, I don't follow a lot of politics in Spain, they bore me, but we had a ministerio de igualdad, do you remember? A ministerio de igualdad we had, with a lady in charge, making sure that we're all the same. And then the last book, which I am lucky, there was one copy and I said I'll take it, is called Impursuit of Wealth, the Moral Case for Finance, with him being an expert in finance, he has written a book defending the bankers, hedge fund managers, et cetera, the whole world of finance from a moral point of view, so very important. So in addition to books, he has been doing podcasts, TV appearances, debates against the enemies of objectivist, he has been doing interviews, he has written articles in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, some of the most, the most important publications in the United States, USA Today for example. More recently, he has started doing radio shows, I think he started with Leonard Pickoff's podcast, he started taking over one weekend, Leonard would speak, another one he would, and so he started taking over that, but then he broke off on his own, and he has his own, I don't know how many shows, I lose track, but one is the Yaron Brooks Show on the radio, one is Block Talk Radio, I don't know if it's the same or, I just listened to him. And more recently, the Blaze Radio Network, which has a huge number of followers and he's making a good impact there, in addition to that, he's flying around the world making speeches like this, and he was in Brazil last year, I was with him, and he did a presentation to almost 2,000 people, Brazil, you know, it's on a different plane, it's a different level, here we have 100 and some people there, they have 2,000, no problem. And he got a standing ovation for a presentation he did about, and the title was Who is John Galt, in other words, the crowd already knew I ran, and the whole 3 days of the show was dedicated to objective, so that was brilliant. But let me make some comments, personal comments about Yaron, because I've known him for 22 years, he used to live in Northern California and so did I, so in 1995, I went to his home, his children were what, 7 or 8, now they're grown-ups, but he used to have this event, he would show a movie, good movies normally, he says, always good, and then we would discuss them from an objective point of view, so sometimes there were people there, 15 or 20 people, he had a big TV screen for those days, and he would show, I don't know, the African Queen or Braveheart or, you know, other very interesting movies, and I saw that he was a leader already, but the first thing that I admire him for is his endless energy. He was in Poland this morning, tomorrow he will be in the United States, so I don't know how he does it. Leonard Picov in Las Vegas, when he, Leonard Picov made a speech at one of the objectivist conferences, he says, I'm not going to do any more philosophy, I'm retiring, that is Leonard, and he kind of passed the baton, you know what that means, right there, he passed the, his role to Yaron, and he says, I don't know how he can do it, he runs the Ainran Institute, he motivates the employees, he writes books, he makes speeches, and he still has time to go on a vacation to Tahiti, so, you know, he has been continuing doing that, so that's the first thing that I admire him for, I have three more and we're finished. The second one is, but no, this is serious, he has a unique view, I don't think there is another individual like him in the world, because there are not that many objectivists, relatively speaking, but there is only one objectivist who knows, who has been around the world the way he has, and so he has feedback from people in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Colombia, in Mongolia, in Hong Kong, and he has the feeling that he has talked about that in some of his speeches, but he has a world view that very few people have, and I think I admire him for that, he's not a philosopher, but he has very clear ideas, and he expresses them very well, so that, I admire him for that, the unique perspective in the world, so if you, I think we'll have time for questions, I'm extending myself too much, third thing that I admire him for, you may have heard him say that our goal in life is to make the best life that we can live, and to me he's a perfect example, how would you like travel around the world, all expenses paid, just talking to people, no, he's doing a great job, but I mean he was in Poland, he's a very nice architecture, and I went to some restaurant and whatever, in Spain unfortunately we cannot take him anywhere because he's flying off tomorrow morning, but he was here before at the Juan de Mariana Institute, but he has concretized, he created this job, and now he got rid of all the managing, daily, day-to-day management, he's the chairman of the board, and he can just make speeches and make some money and be happy, so he's really concretizing the objectivist way of life, if you follow what I mean, I am being a little bit on that, but, so last point I think that I admire him for is his self-control, in spite of being a very popular person, he's a very nice guy, you will see that he's not arrogant or you know, he's just a normal guy, very nice, and I think that requires a lot of self-confidence and a lot of self-control, he does get emotional at times, you can hear that in his radio speeches, but he manages that very well, and the most important thing that I admire him for on this point of self-control is when he's debating somebody, and you know, the ridiculous and irrational things that people can say, he has the enough control not to jump at somebody's throat and kill them, because I mean, it's amazing that he can sit there and just say, yeah, make his case, so ladies and gentlemen, you're on, Brooke. Thank you, it's easier for me to speak standing than to speak sitting, I'm usually walking around, but the mics, the mics situation, so this is, you can come in, there's plenty of place to sit, this is talk 16 in the last two weeks on this trip, number 16, so last one for a while, thank you to all of you, thanks for the introductions, thank you for all the amazing work you guys do to try to bring liberty and these ideas, there is objectivism, but the ideas of freedom and capitalism to Spain, I mean, people have no clue about any of it, so any work we do to educate people about any portion of the battle for freedom and liberty is incredibly valuable, and thank you Domingo for that introduction. So what I want to focus on today is really this question, why are we losing? Because we're losing, so the first thing you have to do in life is to face facts and face reality, the cause of liberty is in decline, we are less free today if you aggregate kind of the west at least, then we were 30 years ago, 50 years ago, certainly 100 years ago, now that's not true globally, in a sense we're winning globally and losing the west, but the ideas of liberty, even though they're being practiced in places like China and India, they have no idea what the ideas are, they just know it somehow works, and they practice it, the ideas of liberty are losing, they're not taught at our universities, it's very rare, I know here in Spain you have some Austrian economists who teach, but it's unusual and rare, you travel all over the world, the cause of liberty is not being taught, it's not being advocated, it's not being discussed, and politically in the west we are losing, and really a sign of the fact that we are losing, I think, is when the right who used to somewhat maybe symbolize liberty and freedom and individual rights is today almost as bad as the left, it's become as collectivistic, it's become as ignorant of economic ideas, just watch Donald Trump's tweets, the right has completely failed, collapsed, disappeared in terms of any kind of real advocacy for liberty, I was just in Poland, and in Poland it's a conservative government, and the conservative government there is as interventionist in the economy as the leftist government was before, so right, left, the ideas of liberty are not represented in our political lives, and indeed the whole political map has shifted to the left, and continues to shift to the left, I like to say in America the democrats today are the socialists of yesterday, and the republicans of today are the democrats of yesterday, maybe not yesterday, maybe 50 years ago, but the point is the whole map has shifted to the left, and of course this is tragic, it has unbelievable real consequences to real people, to real lives, and maybe the best illustration of this is happening in Latin America right now with Venezuela, the richest country in Latin America 30 years ago on a per capita basis, more oil in the ground than Saudi Arabia, some of the richest land for agriculture in all of South America, and yet babies are starving, middle-aged income young people are going into the trash to look for food because they are hungry, they have eaten their cats and dogs, they have broken into the zoos and eaten the zoo animals, they are literally in modern world, in the modern world in which we live, a rich country, people are starving because of socialism, now we all knew this would happen, we predicted it, we told them, nobody cares, nobody cares, and to illustrate that nobody cares, you look just across from Venezuela to Chile, a country that 30 years ago was the poorest country in Latin America, and today indeed is the richest country in Latin America on a per capita GDP basis, and you think everybody would learn what Chile did and everybody would want to be Chile, but nobody does, including Chile, so they've elected twice now a socialist as president, she is undoing everything that made Chile rich, everything that made them materially well off, she is unraveling, so that in 20 to 30 years Chile will be poor again, and this again has real consequences, look at Venezuela, real lives are affected, this is not some theory we play around with, oh what's the best system, let's pretend, this makes it different in real people's lives, so this is the question I think everybody in the liberty movement, everybody concerned about capitalism, everybody who understands the evil or the danger of socialism from material well-being and the huge benefit capitalism has provided material well-being, the question we have to ask is why are we losing, because we are losing, I mean if I was Norm Chomsky you would have had to close off the streets and we would have thousands of people here listening to me, Norm Chomsky is one of the most evil people on the planet, I'm being nice, he was a huge fan of Chavez and the venetual experiment, even worse, he was a huge fan of Pol Pot and the Camerouge and the killing fields of Cambodia and excuse Stalin for years after they already knew what Stalin did, yet the socialists, the communists, the Norm Chomsky, I don't know what you call him, the communist anarchist I guess, would generate thousands of people, I mean it's great what you're doing with students for liberty, 600 people is probably the biggest or second biggest in Europe and it's fantastic, but if it was the socialist student union you would have 5000 people and you would have to shut it down because more people would want to come and this is not just in Spain, 62% of British young people voted for Corbyn and want socialism, over 50% of American kids say socialism is a pretty good idea and they love Bernie Sanders, we are losing, so why and I think we have to understand why if we have any chance of winning, we have to understand what capitalism requires, what's it's about, what everybody knows it's about, what's capitalism about, question, what's it about, what are free markets about, what do people do in free markets, trade, why, why do we trade, why do we work, why do we do these things, these are phenomena, everybody works but why, what is it about free markets that make it, or markets generally that make it unique, what are we trying to achieve in a marketplace, what's that, yeah I know you buy your shoes at the store you don't care about win-win, you don't even think about win-win, what are you trying to do when you're buying your shoes, see you can't even say it, you're trying to make your life better, you're trying to make your life better, we enter the marketplace to make our lives better, we enter the marketplace because we are self-interested and we want to live a good life and we want to be more productive and we buy iPhones and we want to look good so we buy a nice pair of shoes or a suit but we enter the marketplace because we want to make our lives better and the producer when they enter the marketplace, why does Steve Jobs build this, why does he work so hard, I mean he worked amazing hours to make this thing, why, for money, he wanted to make a profit, absolutely, right but what else, just money, so just money, did he really, I mean he didn't really know me, he didn't ask me what I needed, why does this make him happy, this is passion, this is love, this is Steve Jobs expressing himself, this is Steve Jobs creating his dream, so it produces we enter the marketplace because we need to make money, we want to make money, we like having a lot of money if we're producing it and because we love, hopefully, we're going to be what we do, we enjoy it, work is good, work is what we challenge ourselves, work is what we push ourselves, we get our self-esteem from, you know Steve Jobs got up every morning saying I want to make something beautiful today and I hope every one of you ultimately finds a career where you wake up any morning saying what a great day I'm going to have today because I'm going to go to work, because I'm going to achieve something, I'm going to make something for me, for you, producers are self-interested and consumers are self-interested, they make it in the marketplace to try to make each one of them better off and yes, at the end of the day because it's a voluntary transaction and unless they're cheating or lying or stealing, it's a win-win relationship but nobody enters in really caring about win-win, they enter in to make their lives better and the result is a win-win relationship, a win-win transaction, trade is about individuals trying to better their own life, if we didn't want to better our own life, we'd still be subsistence farmers, you eat what you grow and you go to sleep, life is miserable in my, you know, and that's why we got out of it quickly, that's why the Chinese peasants rush to the cities to get jobs because they're fed up with growing vegetables to eat, it's a horrible existence, now you can work, you can save, you can send money home and you can actually have a life we, in the marketplace, act to make our lives better but what have we been taught since we were this big about self-interest, it's bad, right, I don't know what they teach in Spain but my mother was a good Jewish mother, right, and she taught me, think of yourself, last, think of other people first, right, to be good, to be noble, to be virtuous, to be moral, means to be self-less, self-less, we build statues, we build monuments, we name streets, we make saints out of people who we believe, right, did for others, contributed to society, sacrificed, sacrificed is good, self-sacrifice, sacrificing your values and the more important the value is, the more likely you are to become a saint, you ever seen paintings of saints like at the Prado or at museums, you ever see a painting of a saint with a smile on their face, no, because the purpose of virtue, the purpose of morality is to make you suffer, happiness is not in the, in the code of morality, thou shalt be happy, doesn't appear there, you're not supposed to be happy, that's for the afterlife, not for this life and the more noble you are, the more virtuous you are, the more you suffer, I mean I'll give you, I'll give you a simple example because one of the things people think is no, this code of ethic is about helping other people, it's about making other people's lives better, but it's not, that's the trick they try to pull on us, the real purpose of the morality is to make you worse off, to make you suffer, now I'll give you an example, Bill Gates, do you know who Bill Gates is? With these days only the second richest man in the world because Jeff Bezos I think is bumped, bumped ahead of him, but Steve Jobs built Microsoft, he made 70 billion dollars building Microsoft, now how do you become a billionaire, what does it take to be a billionaire? A real question, how do you become a billionaire, I mean this is the secret of success, you should be writing this down, you create a product, a value that hundreds of millions of people or billions of people want and are willing to pay for more than it costs you to produce and if you can do this with hundreds of millions of people over and over and over again, you become a billionaire, it's just math, but notice that every one of these transactions is, to quote somebody from the back, a win-win transaction, I don't pay a hundred dollars for Microsoft product unless my life is going to be better for buying the product, so the product is worth more to me than a hundred dollars, Microsoft makes a profit and my life is better, so the only way to become a billionaire is to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people or maybe even billions of people better, better because they wouldn't interact with you if not, right, we wouldn't enter the marketplace if we didn't think our lives are going to be better by engaging in the transaction and the fact that they keep coming back suggests that the product is good, right, we keep buying these things every year, right, because it's good, my life is going to be better even when I go back to the States and buy that thousand dollar one that they just came out with because it's worth more than a thousand dollars to me, much more than a thousand dollars to me, change our lives, so Bill Gates made 73 billion dollars by creating trillions of dollars worth of value by making the world a better place, by changing for the better the lives of tens of hundreds of millions if not billions of people, I don't think there's a person on the planet whose life is not better because of Bill Gates, now you think that people who care about other people would say wow Bill Gates, you're a hero, this is amazing, you have helped other people, good for you, oh no, what do we think of Bill Gates, morally, ethically, he helped other people, what did he do with himself, he helped himself at the same time and that's not acceptable, it's not good, so how does Bill Gates become a good guy, he leaves Microsoft and starts a foundation, that's good because he's not making money anymore, now he's a good guy because he's giving it all away, because giving your money away, that's good, making it, creating it, changing the world, we don't really like that, I mean think about how perverse that is, how many people is he going to help by giving his money away, I mean maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, not billions, he's not going to change the world, philanthropy has never in any way changed the world, anyway, but now we perceive it as a good guy, not a saint, why is he not a saint, it's that smile problem, he seems to be having fun, he's enjoying giving his money away, he takes it as a challenge and he's doing it kind of thoughtfully if you will, and he invests and he lives in a big house and he flies to Africa on a private jet, saints don't fly private jets, so what would it take for Bill Gates to be a saint, he'd have to stop smiling which means he'd have to give up his house if we could move into a tent, that would be good, and at the end of the day he has to show us a little bit of blood, then we'd say none of us would want to be Bill Gates, right, but we'd say yes, now he's ready for sainthood, like none of us want to be Mother Teresa, but in our minds we still think Mother Teresa, ooh, saint, that's good morally, she sacrificed for the sake of other people, right, she was miserable, yes, that's good, well she was, just read her diary and you'll see how miserable she was, but that's the essence of virtue, that's what we've been taught by religion, by philosophy, by our mothers who learned from philosophy and religion for 2,000 years, we have been taught that suffering is virtue if you're doing it for other people, if you're doing it for greater cause than yourself, that being selfless is the essence of morality and any tinge, any tinge of self-interest is bad, Augustine Comte, the French philosopher of the 19th century who coined the term altruism, said that if you help somebody else and by helping him you say oh I'm going to feel good by helping this person, you know it's going to make me feel good because I'm helping them, it doesn't count, it doesn't count as more moral because you have to help another person for the 100% sake of the other person, now let me postulate that that is a morality that is inconsistent with capitalism, inconsistent with markets, inconsistent with liberty, inconsistent with freedom, everybody knows, everybody knows that markets and capitalism are about self-interest, it's about making money and having fun in a sense, enjoying oneself, fulfilling oneself, doing something meaningful with one's life, it's about the values you choose for you, everybody knows this, so nobody wants capitalism, it's ugly, it's immoral, it's offensive, it's a bunch of selfish people going around doing their own thing for themselves, that's immoral, that's the essence of immorality, indeed this morality of sacrifice, this morality of other people, of the ism, of selflessness is 100% consistent with which political economic system, what's that, feudalism or socialism, socialism or communism, right, sacrifice, you want sacrifice, communism is the best at that, like 200 million people were sacrificed with communism, right, they're good at sacrifice, socialism is just as good, sacrifice babies in Venezuela every day, for the greater good, for the cause, for the grandeur of the proletarian one day, you know, that's the morality that drives us towards socialism, it's about sharing, it's about being nice, it's about caring about other people, it's about giving, not expecting anything in return, these are all wonderful words that are really consistent with socialism, so at the end of the day, people are not driven by economic ideas, at the end of the day, people are not driven by their pocketbook, by what to make them money, people are driven by what will make them feel good about themselves, and that is morality, that is ethics, people are driven by the ethical code, and this is why every time we achieve some freedom, I asked one of the architects of Chilean, you know, the capitalism in Chile, I asked him, why is this turning around, why is it going the other way, and he said, because the people who've been successful now feel guilty, why do you feel guilty, where does guilt come from, it comes from living one kind of life, but believing you should be Mother Teresa, and getting to the age of 50 or 60 or 70, and looking back on your life and saying, yeah, I've made a lot of money, I've sent my kids to college, I've done all these things, but you know what, I didn't live a Mother Teresa life like, that's what my mother taught me, that's what the preacher said in church, that's what my philosophers taught me in class, that that is real virtue, so what have I done, so let me vote to raise my taxes, let me vote to redistribute my wealth, let me vote to reduce my guilt, and it's exactly what they do, rich people vote to raise their taxes all the time, rich people vote for the welfare state, rich people vote to have themselves regulated, because that's the other part of, that's the other part of self-interest, right, what do we think when we say selfish, that person's selfish, he's self-interested, what have they taught us to think, he's a lying cheating stealing SOB, you know what SOB means, ask somebody later, he's a really bad person, he behaves badly, we've associated the word of self-interest with bad behavior, so what's a businessman, a businessman is somebody who pursues his self-interest, so he must be a crook, we just hadn't caught him yet, we will, my mother told me every millionaire in the world is a crook, she believed that, because that's what her morality dictates, he's self-interested, therefore he's a crook, so I don't have a lot of time, so let me position it this way, we're faced in the world in which we live today with two options, morally, ethically, philosophers teach us two options, you can live for the sake of others, you can be self-less, you can sacrifice, and that is nobility and goodness and everything else, that's altruism if you will, or you can be selfish, which means a lying, stealing, you know, horrible human being, nobody wants to be that, iron range, part of iron range genius is to take those kind of distinctions and say, wait a minute, are those the only two options, that can't be right, and she does this in every, almost every field, she takes, you know, a kind of a, one perspective and an un-perspective and she says, neither want to write, here's the right one, and she says, wait a minute, why can't I be self-interested, pursue my life without exploiting other people, without being a mad mean person, and indeed she says, if you actually figure out what drives self-interest, what self-interest actually means, what your interest is as a human being, then exploiting other people, lying, stealing and cheating is actually self-destructive, not self-interested, it actually hurts you and harms you, and if you want examples, ask me in the Q&A, right, but just think about somebody who's a systemic liar, what happens to them, they get caught, nobody wants to have anything to do with them, and they live a miserable, pathetic life, think about crooks, yeah, they get the money, but they live in constant fear of being caught, and ultimately they go to jail, or even if they don't get to go to jail, they never really enjoy the money, you know who enjoys money, people who make it, not people who steal it, so she says, wait a minute, this is bogus, this dichotomy, this, yes there's altruism, which you consider evil, yes there's self-destructiveness, which is all these other things we talked about, and then there's real self-interest, and what is real self-interest, if you care about yourself as a human being, what is the thing that makes human life possible, what is it that makes us human, what is it that makes every value, everything in this room possible, reason, you can't have clothes without reason, somebody had to figure out how to take cotton and turn it into cloth, I have no idea how to do that, and I guess there's nobody in this room has any idea how you do that, I never mind how to skin an animal, dry its pelt, and then somehow turn that into clothing, some genius came up with that, or agriculture, or hunting, or building weapons to hunt, or any of the basic things, or building a hut, put me in the forest and tell me you gotta build a hut, I don't know how to build a hut, I mean I really have to think about it, we are unique animal, we don't have the means by which to survive programmed into us, we have to figure it out, we have to use our reason, we have to use our thought, so Iran says if you care about your own life, if you want to be self-interested, if you want to live the best life that you can live, what is the number one value you must pursue, it's your mind, you must use your reason, you must figure out what is necessary for me in order to survive, to thrive, to succeed, to be the best that I can be at living a life, and she said living is not just about, you know, living as an animal, it's about living as a human being, living as a full-fledged human being, with everything that is made possible because of our cognitive abilities, it means using our mind to make our life wonderful, to flourish, to experience life to the fullest, not to settle, not to compromise, not just to be like everybody else, but to live our lives you have one shot at this, I'm not a Buddhist, and even if I would, be worried about returning as a cockroach, right? So you've got one opportunity to live life as a human being, Ayn Rand says jump on it, embrace it, live it, and use your mind to do it, and then she says okay, so we have to use our mind to figure out what was good for human beings, now the question is what are the values and what are the virtues that are going to make this possible, and to her ethics, morality is a science, like Aristotle, it's a science to determine the values and virtues that human beings must embrace in order for them to survive and to thrive, that's it, that's what ethics should be about, but nobody does ethics like that, ethics teaches us today how to die and struggle and suffer, not how to live and thrive and succeed, ethics should be what you teach in business school, so that people go out and know how to make money, because making money is an ethical endeavor, because it's about creating values in win-win transactions, so what kind of society, the people who value their own life, value their own reason what, and this is kind of the bridge between an ethical system and a free society, because you need that bridge, but before I do that I just want to make it clear, the ethics we live in today is 100% consistent with socialism, and unless we challenge it, we will never have capitalism, and a little bit of flotation we had with capitalism, maybe in the 19th century, maybe in Hong Kong, doesn't last, because at some point some bleeding heart altruists will say, oh this is too selfish, and these people are bad people, we have to control them, we have to regulate them, because otherwise they'll lost their own life, steal and cheat, so if you think about reason, what is the enemy of human reason, what's the thing that makes reason impotent, well fear can be overcome, this cannot be overcome, force, a gun, I put a gun to the back of your head, forget about thinking, because all you care about at this point is what I have to say, I tell you two plus two equals five, and you have to live by that, you can't build a bridge, you can't program a computer, you can't do anything, you're shut down, force, coercion, authority shuts the human mind down, it's not an accident, that the scientific revolution happened in parallel to more and more and more liberty in society, because if you were a scientist in the 15th century and you discovered something that contradicted the Bible, what happened to you? If you, yeah you were burnt at the stake, so luckily Galileo came a little bit later and he was only put on the house arrest, and then by the time Newton comes around, we've already accepted the idea that, yeah okay, you can challenge the Bible, we still don't quite believe you, but we can challenge the Bible, we'll leave you alone, it's the ideas of liberty that make science possible, and then post-Newton, boom, science explodes, because suddenly there's this freedom, there's this liberty to challenge the status quo, to challenge authority, to not be cursed, so to be free to live your life as you see fit based on your values, based on your mind, based on your reason requires that coercion be extracted from society, that it be eliminated from society.