 Thank you so much for coming out. My name is Vivian, and we'd like to welcome you on behalf of Students for Liberty, ERA Rotterdam, and J.O.V.D. Reinmond. So shortly, we will be hearing about why capitalism is the only moral system from Yaron Brook from the Einrand Institute in California. He's accompanied today by Robert and Yarnas who are also representing the Institute. So Yaron Brook is the author of several published works, including his latest book, Equal is Unfair, and he has spoken at events all around the world about the object of his philosophy. So without further ado, I will let Yaron Brook take the stage. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Sorry you're late, but you have a complicated university, and we couldn't find the building. Actually, like all universities, they make them purposefully, I think, challenging so that it increases brain stimulation, I guess. So capitalism, what do we mean when we talk about capitalism? Because everybody banters the word around. Everybody uses the word. I don't actually know anybody who's not, in some way, claims to be full capitalism. So what do we mean by capitalism? What is capitalism? Anybody? Don't be shy. What's that? Free market. So capitalism, a good stand-in for capitalism, is free markets. But when we talk about free markets, what do we talk about, free from what? Yeah, for government regulations, government interference, government controls, do we have a free market today? No, I mean, we've got lots of controls, lots of regulations, the elements that are free. You can still go to the grocery store and choose what you want to buy, not always true in human history. So the elements that are free, but the elements that are heavily controlled. So I think the first point to make, just so there's no confusion, is we don't have capitalism today. So when I talk about the morality of capitalism, I'm not talking about the morality of what we have today. We're talking about capitalism as a true free market, where technically individual rights are protected and everything is owned by private individuals. The government doesn't own anything. The government's there to protect property rights and to protect our rights. Not the world we live in today, really not the world we've ever had. Iron Man has a famous book called Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. It's an ideal. We've gotten close. There's still some countries that are fairly close, haven't quite reached there yet, and hopefully one day, maybe in your lifetimes. So capitalism is about free markets. Now what are free markets about? What's the central characteristic of a free market? What do we do in a free market? We trade. And why do we trade? Because of supply and demand. Well, anybody here go to the mall and think about supply and demand? No, because you benefit from it. Yeah, you're going to the mall to try to benefit from it, right? So the central characteristic of trade is that each one of us is out there trading in order to benefit ourselves. Right? You know, I always use my iPhone and talks. Why does Steve Jobs make this? Because he loves us. He wants to make money. Yeah, he wants to make money. Usually it takes longer for somebody to actually say that because everybody's embarrassed to talk about money. So good for you for jumping in. He wants to make money, right? Businessmen want to make money. People in a free market want to make money. Is it only about money? Not really. What else? Why else does he make this? Trading values? What's that? Trading values. Yeah, so he wants to make something of value, right? And why? What does he feel about this? What did Steve Jobs feel about this? He wanted to revolutionize. Yeah, he wanted to revolutionize. He wanted to innovate. He wanted to do something new. He wanted to challenge himself. And he wanted to create something beautiful. For whom? For himself in the first place. Yeah, for himself. Did he ask me what I wanted? No, he didn't ask anybody what they wanted. No, I don't know if there are any marketing students here. But Steve Jobs did know what he got, focus groups. No focus groups. He said, I'm going to create something beautiful. I'm going to create something I would love to use. And my guess is everybody else is going to love it because I'm Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs made this for Steve Jobs. To make money for Steve Jobs. But because he had a passion for beautiful, efficient, creative things. He loved getting up in the morning and thinking about, how can I create something amazing today? How can I do something inspiring today? That was his passion. That was his love. That's what he loved to do. And I like to tell the story of my first iPhone when I bought my first iPhone. It was 2008. And you guys are young, but in 2008 there was a big financial crisis, vaguely remember. And the US economy was going down. And I thought I would go buy an iPhone because I wanted to help stimulate the economy. Because I know you guys go and buy clothes and buy stuff for yourself in the mall because you want to make sure your fellow man have jobs. But an economy keeps, right? No, you actually don't, right? Why do you go to the mall? Fulfill your needs. Yeah, fulfill your needs, your wants, your desires to do stuff that you'll make your life better. So markets are places in which we interact, in which we exchange, in which we trade for the purpose of making our lives as individuals better. And yet, we pay pockets, right? We believe we should control them. We should regulate them. We don't trust people to do it by themselves, right? We have to supervise everything that, God forbid, supermarkets would sell you food without the government inspecting the food beforehand. You can't employ people without the government telling you how to pay them, what to pay them, what pension to give them, and all of that. We engage in these trades, you would think, for our own benefit. But yet, everything about it is controlled and regulated, and there's interference. Why? Why don't they just let us go out there into the marketplace and do our thing, right, and try to make our lives better? What is it? What is it about? What's that? Fear. Fear. But what are we fearing? What is it that we fear? What is it? It's fear. It's a lack of trust, right? And what are we fearing? We are losing power. Who? We will lose power, because we vote for those guys. Yeah, but we vote for them. It's like, if you ask, I mean, you guys are students for liberty, so you're already kind of free marketer. We ended and everything. But you take a random group of students out there and say, should the government have food inspectors? And I'd bet you 99% of them would say yes. Should the government have building inspectors when there's construction going on here? I'm sure a government bureaucrat comes once in a while to inspect and make sure that everything's in code and everything. And they can't build more if the inspector doesn't come. I actually built a little extension to my house. Tiny little extension to the house. All it involved was laying some concrete on the floor and building three walls, because the ceiling was already there. It was like, it's a porch from the top floor and just expanded like a lower. Somebody from the county had to come and inspect the rebar in the concrete on the floor. Like, what was going to happen to me if they didn't do a perfect job? Like, I was going to fall into where? The building wasn't going to come down. There was no structural. I'm a civil engineer, right? There's no in a previous life. I mean, this world of a previous life. But no, my contractors showed up in the morning and they sat down and I said, why are you sitting? I said, we're waiting for the inspector. When's the inspector going to come? Someway between now and five o'clock. And I paid them to sit for a whole day waiting for the government inspector to make sure that they created a floor that was in code, which had no safety, no nothing. But tell people we shouldn't have building inspectors. They will freak out. Why? What is it that we fear? We said markets are where people go and engage in transactions for their own benefit. What do we think about that, about this idea of pursuing your own benefit, your own self-interest? Historically, you know, morally, morally, what is the perception of people who pursue their own benefit? Their own interests. What do we call that? What's a word for that? Selfish. Selfish. And what do we think? What did your mother teach you about being selfish? Selfish. Yeah, that's bad. It's not good. My mother taught me, think of yourself last. You know, be selfless. Selflessness, that's good. All right, that's goodness. If you think about nobility, if you think about virtue, if you think about goodness from a moral perspective, that's all about sacrifice. It's all about selflessness. It's all about giving. It's not about pursuing your own self-interest. And what do we, when we say in a schoolyard, when we look at a kid and we say, oh, he's selfish, what do we mean? He doesn't share. He doesn't share. What else? He's not social, man. Yeah, he's not social. He's not nice. But sometimes it's even worse than that, right? What else do we think? What do we think he will do? Yeah, take advantage of other people. Here's a lying, stealing SOB. Do you know what SOB is? Well, I don't know if there's a translation. He's a bad person. He's going to take advantage of people. He's going to do things to other people, bad things to other people that we can all agree are bad things. That's what we associate in our mind with self-interest. Self-interest is about exploiting other people. It's about lying, stealing, and cheating. So in a moral part of our cognitive brain, in a place where we hold a moral concept, self-interest is connected to lying, stealing, cheating, not sharing, not being a nice person, ugliness, badness, vice, not virtue. And there's an equation there. Self-interest equals bad stuff, immorality. And now I tell you, and I don't have to tell you because everybody knows this, that in the marketplace, that's exactly what people do. They pursue self-interest. And it's not just that they pursue self-interest. We reward them for pursuing self-interest, like if you're a businessman, and the more money you make, like for my company, the bigger the bonus I'm going to give you. The more you pursue your self-interest, the more focused you are on your own interest, the more money you make, the bigger your business is going to be, the more successful you are. So it's a system that rewards people who are self-interested. So what do we think about that system? It's a selfish system. It's a self-interested system. There will reward self-interest. And yet, self-interest, our other part of our brain tells us is wrong. It's bad people. They're lying, stealing, cheaters. And indeed, if you take an average person out there and talk to them about, I just came from a little, I just spoke at a conference on the other side of town, to a bunch of financiers. So pension plan managers, money managers, maybe some bankers, finance people. And the talk that I gave was the morality of finance. Why finance was a moral thing. And they all thought that was ridiculous. It's a contradiction in terms. How can you be a finance person? How can finance be moral? Why? Because finance is a pursuit of what? Self-interest. It's a pursuit of profit. It's a pursuit of money. That can be moral. Morality is about selflessness. It's about giving, not trading, giving, sharing. They couldn't get their head around it. What's he talking about? And we associate the lying, stealing, cheating with self-interest and behavior. So when we see a businessman, we say, he's going to lie, steal, and cheat. So I better, I better control him. I need a regulator. And what do we love regulators? We love government officials. We love regulators. We trust them. We never question them. We don't have regulators to regulate the regulators. Why do we trust regulators? What is their incentive? Why do regulators do what they do? They don't have self-interest. They don't have self-interest. Or at least, they pretend not to have any self-interest. They're doing it for the public good. They're selfless. They just care about you. They're just trying to help you. They're not doing it for themselves. There's no profit. They're not making money. Oh, we love those guys. We hate bankers, hate bankers, because they're selfish, greedy, self-interest. They're trying to make a lot of money. We love central bankers. Like central bankers are noble. We give central bankers 10 trillion more power than we ever gave a banker. They have, you know, what's his name, Dougie or whatever his name is, the European Central Bank. He has power over the global economy like nobody else other than the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. These are the two most powerful economic actors in the world. And we don't care. We're fine with it, because they're doing it for the public good. They don't have a selfish interest in it. He doesn't get a bonus. So it's OK. It's OK. If it was a private banker, we would, oh my god, they're creating a disaster. You know, these negative interest rates, that's ridiculous. They're making a profit off of it. That's immoral. That's wrong. We would shut them down if there was a bank big enough to have that kind of influence that was private. Because we don't dare allow people to have self-interest. That's unacceptable. So we have regulations to control these things. I mean, I tell the story of, I don't know how it is in Netherlands, but in the United States, when you walk into an elevator, there's always a little diploma on the wall of the elevator saying that a government inspector has inspected the elevator. It won't fall and kill you. Because we know that if we left it up to self-interested greedy businessmen, they would build shoddy elevators that killed you. Because the best way to make money is to kill your customers. Without food inspectors, McDonald's would poison us. Without building inspectors, these buildings would fall down. That's people's perception. Why? Because without the regulators, the self-interest of people would run amok. And they would lie, steal, and cheat. That's how we hold it in our minds. So we don't trust capitalism. We don't trust markets. We don't trust free markets. And I tell my economist friends, I tell them, you can talk about economics all day long. It doesn't matter. We won the economic argument. I don't know if in this room I've won it, but capitalism works. It just does. All the historical evidence suggests it. All the economic theory suggests it. There's just no argument against free market that is economic. There isn't any. You can even plot it out. Economies that have freedom do better than economics that don't. Economies that are run by central planners do worse than economies where you let the market run. Sectors within a particular economy, where you don't regulate, do well. Sectors that you regulate do poorly. By every measure, economic measure, capitalism does better than any other system out there. And the closer you get to capitalism, because we said there is no pure capitalism, it hasn't been any pure capitalism, the closer you get, the better the economy does. You take really, really poor countries like India and China 30 years ago, and you give them a little bit of capitalism, a little bit of freedom, a little bit of markets, a little bit of self-interest. And what happens? Two billion people have come out of poverty over the last 30 years in Asia, per million Asia. We should be celebrating in the streets unless a world depressed. Life is terrible. Two billion people never in human history have so many people, so many people done so well as over the last 30 years, because of a little bit of capitalism, imagine if they embraced it fully. It would be amazing. Well, they did embrace it fully in Hong Kong. You know the story of Hong Kong? 75 years ago, there was almost nobody there. There was a fishing village, tens of thousands, a few tens of thousands of people lived. No natural resources, nothing in Hong Kong, right? It's a rock in the middle of nowhere. Anybody been there? We've got a few. Once in your life, at least you should go to Hong Kong. It's an amazing place. Today, most skyscrapers in New York, a capital GDP, so measure of income, wealth for citizens of Hong Kong, is the same as the United States, a little higher, higher than the Netherlands. They did it in 75 years, from nothing. They had nothing there. How did they do it? Basically, by having free markets. No safety net. Almost no safety net. No very little government regulations, very little government controls, a little bit. But now much, no real central bank. It's a currency board. They just basically are linked to the dollar. They don't print money unless they get dollars in. No government controls over the economy, basically. A legal system that protects contracts, and that's it. And they're now, among the richest countries in the world, on a per capita basis, 7.5 million people live on this tiny little place. That's why you have to build skyscrapers, because there's not enough place to put them, unless you go tall, right? That's what free markets do. And that's what they do anyway they're tried. Estonia over here, not far from here, is going to be richer than Scandinavia soon, because they've adopted free markets. They were built poor, because they just come out of communism. And yet estimates are that within 10 years they'll be richer than Finland on a per capita basis, because they've adopted relatively free market policies. There is no legitimate argument about capitalism and its ability to create wealth. And there's no legitimate argument anymore about the destructive nature of regulations. All you have to do is study the 2008 financial crisis, and you discover that that financial crisis is all, from beginning to end, caused by regulations. And the massive destruction that's come about as a consequence of that is all because of government intervention. And not everybody knows this, but most economists know it, whether they'll admit it or not. Most people who've actually looked at it know it, but nobody will admit it. And nobody adopts anything different, but more regulations, more controls, particularly in the West. In Europe and in the United States, we're just sliding away from capitalism, speeding away from capitalism on some days. And it has to do with this idea that we can't trust the elevator guy to build a proper elevator unless we have an inspector. Or we believe we can't trust him. We can't trust McDonald's unless we had a food inspector at McDonald's. We can't trust you because you are self-interested, because you are selfish, and you're going to do bad, bad things. Bill Gates created Microsoft. He became the richest man in the world. Worse something, about $70 billion. That's a lot of money. How did he do it? How do you become really, really rich? You should write this down. This is a secret to success. How do you become really, really rich? Do you create a lot of value for other people? Yeah, you create massive amounts of value for huge numbers of people. Because even if you make just a little bit of profit because there's so many transactions, you become super rich. So think about Microsoft selling $100 product to over a billion people. And an update every year. That's a nice business model. But you know what? Every person who bought that product for $100, what was it worth to them? More. So their life got better because they bought a Microsoft product. So the billion people who bought Microsoft smaller than billion, their lives got better. So Bill Gates literally improved the lives of billions of people on the planet. And he made $70 billion off of it. What do we care that he made $70 billion? I mean, good for him. He created trillions of dollars of worth of wealth. And he made the world a better place to live for billions of people. Molly, how much credit does he get for that? Anybody building statues for what's that? Zero. Zero. Yeah, and the best may be negative. Zero is the best. Because why do we give him negative? Because he did to make money off of it. He has a charity. OK, so he didn't used to have a charity. I'm talking about the old days when he was productive. He actually made something and actually had a huge impact on the world. In those days, eh, we didn't really like it. I mean, we had a lot of people in America cheered when the Justice Department won after him. Not because he'd done something wrong, but because he was a successful billionaire. Knock him down a little bit. It's good for him. And it's not moral. It's not moral that he should be so rich. Because, so he helped billions of people. The world is a better place because of him by trillions of dollars. But he did make money for himself in the process. He did to be self-interested. When does Bill Gates become a good guy? When he leaves Microsoft, God forbid he should work for a living and create something and build something. And he creates a foundation. And now all he does is give away the wealth that he created in Microsoft. And now he's not making any money for himself, right? He's just giving the money away. So now we like him. Now he's a good guy. So building, creating, making, changing the world through trade, mutually beneficial trade, that morally is, eh, zero, maybe a little negative. Giving the money away. Not making any money for yourself. Now we're starting to like Bill Gates. Now we're not ready to build statues. And the Pope was probably not going to saint him. Why? What would it take to make Bill Gates a moral hero, where we get boulevards named after him, statues, maybe a sainthood from the Catholic Church? What do we, what do you have to do? You have to die first. But if he died tomorrow, nobody would care. If Bill Gates dropped dead tomorrow, I would care. A few other people would care. Nobody would care, right? Who cares, right? I felt another philanthropist dropped it. What would he have to do before he died? What's that? Suffer. He'd have to suffer. And what would be a good way for him to suffer? Give away $70 billion. Give away all of it. But that wouldn't be enough, because he'd still live in a nice house. He'd have to move out of the house, live in a tent maybe, bleed, a little bleeding helps, right? I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a painting of a saint with a smile on his face? No, the whole point of sainthood is suffering. The whole point of moral virtue is suffering. It's not about helping other people, because Bill Gates, when he was in Microsoft, helped more people than his charity will ever help, even if he gave all $70 billion away. They will help fewer people than what Bill Gates did in Microsoft. Bill Gates and Microsoft changed the world in ways no philanthropy ever, ever will and can. It's just a reality. You live in rich Netherlands, not because a philanthropic charity, but because a greedy business who made money for hundreds of years. That's a reality. All the wonderful buildings, this university, is funded from money taken from. I don't know if it's a public university or not. If it's a public, it was taken. If it wasn't, it was invested. If it's half, half, then it's half, half. By capitalists, by businessmen, by industrialists, by traders, by merchants who made tons of money and who the intelligentsia and the clergy always look down on because they were self-interested, because they were about money, because they were about, even though they were the ones who built the Netherlands. I like the example of the United States. 1776, the United States was a third-rate colony. That's why the British never really fought. The Americans don't like this, but the fact is, the British were worried about the Spanish and the French, and they never sent the real army to fight the Americans. That's why America won. 1776, it was poor. By 1914, it was the richest country in the world with the strongest industry, strongest economy in the world. How did that happen? Because of charity, because of foundations, because of community service, which Americans love. Oh, it happened because of businessmen, because people went out there and make money, and they changed the world. Bill Gates changes the world, just like Steve Jobs changes the world, just like the guy who started Uber changes the world. They're the ones who build stuff. They're the ones who create the world in which we live. They're the real heroes, but we can't see it because they're self-interested, and they haven't suffered. They haven't given, and then they create charities, and then we think they're good guys, which is nuts. Giving your money away, that's good. Creating it? How are you going to give it away if you don't create it? So you have to engage in immorality in order to remodel. That's a crazy world. That's the world we live in. And it's why we don't buy into capitalism. We don't buy into it. We don't believe it. We don't want it. I can show you all the economic proof in the world. We can spend all day studying economics, and nobody cares. Indeed, the free market movement has had great economists. They wonder about prizes. They've written great books. They've explained everything. Does anybody care? No. Like Milton Friedman explained that the minimum wage was stupid decades ago. He's got some great videos on YouTube where he does that, right? And it makes complete sense, and it's completely true. No economic factors change since then. Many, many economists teach it all the time that the minimum wage puts the people who you're supposedly trying to help, because it creates unemployment among teenagers, young people who don't have an education. It stopped people from voting for minimum wage increases over and over and over again? No. And I've taught, right? I'll teach it. I'll do the graphs. I'll teach it to everybody who will get an exam. They all understand supply and demand, labor, all of that. And then you ask them, are you full minimum wage? And everybody raises their hand. Why? Because it feels good. Because we shouldn't let good economic facts interfere with what makes us feel good, with morality, with what we think is right. So I believe that if we are going to defend capitalism, if we're going to move the world in the direction of capitalism, which I think it urgently needs, because I think where the economy is growing very little, we're becoming less rich, not more rich, or at least we're stagnating, we need to rethink our moral code. We need to rethink this idea that selfishness is bad and that selflessness is good. That sacrifice is good. What's a sacrifice? I give you something and I get one in return. Nothing or something less important. That's the sense of sacrifice that's suffering. I have to take a hit. Otherwise, if I give you something, you get something more important in return. What is that? That's a trade, right? The essence of trade is win-win, right? I get something more for giving you something. That's greedy, that's selfish, right? So win-win we don't like. Win-lose, that's good, as long as you're the loser. But that's insane. There's something fundamentally wrong with an ethical theory that says that suffering is noble, that sacrifice is good, that being selfless is right. Why should I be selfless? Selfless means not caring about self. We all care about ourselves, I hope. We might not admit it to the priest or to our philosophy teacher that it's your life. Why somebody else's life is more important than yours? You have one shot at living on earth, one. As far as I can tell anyway, right? Not a Buddhist yet. One shot at living, and even then, you might return as a cockroach. You've got one shot, either way. Why in that one shot should I live with other people? It's my life. How come their life became better than mine? Why is sacrifice good? If you ask a philosopher that, why is sacrifice good? There's no answer, because somebody said so. Because I said so, because God said so, because it's written in a book. But there's no answer to why. Why should you be selfless? There's an answer to why not, because it's my life. And I want to live it. And here I am on earth. Here I am. I'm capable of living it. Why not live it to the fullest? So I ran challenges with the conventional morality. She basically says, that's him all. It's him all not to take your own life seriously. It's him all not to live for you. It's him all not to make the most of the one shot you have on this planet. And in this, she carries on a tradition that goes back to the Greek philosophers. Greek philosophers didn't think use the sacrifice. They didn't think it was noble to sacrifice. The whole point of Greek philosophy is to figure out how to live the good life, for whom, for you. And Aristotle, I think the best of the Greek philosophers, basically says the purpose of morality is not to teach you how to die, or how to be in pain, or how to suffer, how to sacrifice, how to give. It's to teach you how to live. The point of morality is to give you a code of values and virtues that leads you to live the good life, which means a happy life, happy for you. So we can argue about what leads to a happy life. That's a good argument to have. That's a good discussion to have. But the standard of morality for 2,000 years is being suffering. We won't admit it, because it's an uncomfortable truth, and nobody actually wants to face it. But that's what morality expects from us. That's what it demands from us. And capitalism is inconsistent with this, because capitalism is not about suffering. It's about cool stuff, but doing cool things. It's about living. So Rand proposes immorality, discovered immorality, of self-interest. She takes Aristotle's principle of striving towards a good life, of eudaumonia, which the Greeks hate, because that's not how you pronounce it. But there's another pronunciation, which I cannot do in Greek. But it means flourishing, happiness, living a complete life as a human being, everything that that means as a human being. Not the momentary emotion of joy that you get at a party or from certain drugs. But the sense you get about living a good life, about fulfilling yourself as a human being, living over decades to your fullest potential, making the most of what it means to be alive. And that's the moral imperative. That's what you want to do. And then when you look at broke age, you say, wow, what a life. How cool was it to drop out of MIT? I think it was MIT. But in an industry that didn't yet exist. And yeah, he didn't write DOS. He bought it from IBM. But think of the vision to do that. And of course, in high school, he would program at night. He wanted to learn this new thing. Wow, that's a life lived. Now, I don't know what he does in his personal life. I can only jump what I know about his public life. And in his public life, in his life, his business. He built something. He made something. He made something that will be with us forever. He changed the world by using his mind, taking risks. Wow, I want to live a life like that. That's philanthropy. He doesn't even seem to really enjoy it. When I see interviews with him, this is a sad thing. He is OK with the philanthropy. He's not suffering. He doesn't look like. But when he talks about his investments, like he does some investing, he lights up. That's what really excites him. He'd love to be like a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley investing in new startups. And he does a little bit of it. But imagine if you chucked a moral burden off of him. And you said, it's good to be self-interested. It's good to make money. Don't feel guilty. Go for it. Then he'd drop his philanthropy like that. And he would go and invest his money and change the world probably three or four more times. And do a lot more good for all of us than he's doing in his philanthropy. He's helping people. I'm not saying he's not. Just not on the same scale. So what Rand is encouraging us to do is live for ourselves. And what she develops is a more code of self-interest. A more code of self-interest. Now, what about the lying, stealing, and cheating? Doesn't that go together with self-interest? Well, let's think for a minute about what self-interest really means. What is the most important thing to you if you're self-interested? If you want to live this amazing life, right? What is the one thing that you need to cultivate, that you really need to embrace to live a good life? What is the thing that human beings, that produces, that really is responsible for all human values, all good stuff. The lighting, your clothing, the chairs, the music you listen to on the way in. What does that all come from? Your mind? Yeah, human mind. Human mind. We don't have instincts for any of this. We're not like animals who know how to build a nest automatically. We can't build skyscrapers automatically. Nobody has that gene. We can't even build a mud hut automatically. The best we can do is walk into a cave. You try it sometimes. You're going to drop yourself into the wilderness with nothing. See what happens. You're going to have to think. You're going to have to use your mind to survive even 24 hours. I'd love to do this to environmentalists. Just drop them in the middle of the Amazon. Now, let's see what happens. You have to use this. We don't have an instinct to hunt. You have to figure it out. And different animals are going to require different hunting techniques. You're going to have to build a weapon. Anybody know how to build a weapon? We kind of think we do. Take a string, and you take a piece of wood. But which wood? Some would bend. Some would break. Trial and error. You're going to have to study agriculture. Anybody here know how to do agriculture? Maybe somebody came from a farm? It's not obvious. I don't know how to do it. And we know stuff like if a seed drops and you water it, something will grow. But 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, people did not know even that. Some genius had to figure that out. Einstein of his day. Then somebody ate a camera along and said, hey, we could take seeds, and we could put them in rows, and we could do whatever you do as a farmer, and created the industry of farming. That was the Bill Gates of his day, the entrepreneur of his day. All of that required human reason. Now today, it's obvious, because we have computers and stuff like that. And it's obvious that what was really productive is the human mind, not muscle. As Marx told us, Marx taught us, it's all muscle. It's all labor. Now, this is where all goods come from. All products, all values, including the music and the painting and the sculpture, requires use of the human mind. It requires human reason. So if you want to be self-interested, what's the tool to make your life the best life that it can be? It's reason. It's your human mind. It's being rational. That's where values come from. Is it rational to lie, steal, or cheat? Well, let's take lying. Anybody done that? I don't want to know. It sucks. It's not a good strategy. You almost always get caught. If you're not getting caught, you're worried about getting caught, which consumes a huge amount of energy. When you get caught, very bad for relationships. If you don't believe me, try it sometime. On your best friend, your spouse, whatever. Just try it. Business relations. No, it's not good. You might get a small alleviation of stress by lying and not telling the truth in certain circumstances. But it's short-term, and it doesn't last. And the anxiety is much greater afterwards than it was before. So if you're rational, why would you do this to yourself? Rationality also means thinking long-term. It means planning. It means actually thinking about the consequences of actions. I, for example, am at an age where I can barely remember what I did last week. I mean, we were having conversations. Somebody asked me, where were you two days ago? And I couldn't remember. I had to go through. It took me a while, right? Now imagine if I lied about what I did last week. Now I have to remember two things, what I actually did and what I lied. But it's actually more than two things. Because I have to remember who I lied to and who I didn't. And more than that, I have to remember why I lied to these people, but I didn't lie to these people. It's just way too complicated. And what a waste of time. And I can't even remember what I did last week. Never mind 73 other different things. Then now I have to remember. It's what a waste of brain cells. So if you're rational and you're selfish, you don't lie. By the way, there's a computer thing where you say garbage in, garbage out. Familiar with this? You put garbage in, you get garbage out. Same thing with the human brain. If you lie, at some point you'll stop being able to tell what's a lie and what's truth, which means lies fill your brain. And now it's garbage in, garbage out. And if reason and rationality are the most important tools you have in life, why would you want to put garbage into that tool? Stealing. What do human beings get most of their self-esteem? What's self-esteem, by the way? Everybody talks about self-esteem. But what's self-esteem? Do you have a term in Dutch for self-esteem? What's self-esteem? Yeah, it's a sense of confidence. I am able. I'm competent. I'm worthy of living on this place. I can take care of myself. I can manage. It's not confidence related to any particular thing. It's confidence in living. It's confidence in life. How do you get that confidence? How do you get that self-esteem? Where does it come from? People patting you in the back? You need to practice a lot. You need to practice. And how do you practice? You set yourself goals, and you achieve them. And then you recognize your achievement. It's not other people who give you self-esteem. You have to give yourself self-esteem. In other words, you have to be proud of your own achievements. Pride is a vice for you. Pride is a virtue. Because it's a recognition of your own value. And if you do that, then you gain self-esteem. You say, I did that. That's cool. I achieved something. Now, where do we get most of our challenges? Where do most of our challenges occur in life? Where do you think over the lifetime you will be challenged the most? You think? Let me tell you. It's easy right now. First one, relation. I mean, people always say when they're asked, what's the most important thing in your life? And almost everybody says what? Yeah, family. Most people say family, right? That's the most important thing in their life, is family. And yet, if you actually look at where they spend their time, it's not with family. Where are you going to spend most of your life? I mean, it'd work. It's your passion. Yeah, it's your passion. But it's also where you're challenged, where you push yourself, where you try to achieve things, where you reach a certain point and then you push yourself to the next point. It's where you gain your self-esteem. And you gain your self-esteem by achieving, by pushing, by making it to the next round. What happens when you steal? Yeah, you're basically admitting you can't make it in this world. Basically, you're allowing other people to produce stuff so that you can live. Part of self-esteem comes from the idea that I know I can take care of myself. I can take care of my family. I can take care of the people I love. I can put food on the table. And this is true even of poor people. One of the great tragedies of socialism, in my view, is when you take poor people. And let's say they work really hard at something, bricklayers. A really simple job. But they make a living. And they bring a paycheck home. And they put food on the table. And they did it. They did it. They made it possible for them to feed themselves and to feed their family. They have a sense of pride. They have a sense of self-esteem. But when you tell them, oh, no, no, no. That's not good work for you. Here's a check. Stay home. Don't worry about work. What are you doing? You're destroying the capacity to ever have self-esteem. And if you can't have self-esteem, you will never be happy. I call it welfare. Welfare is an institution to guarantee unhappiness. It institutionalizes whole classes of people into unhappiness. Because they won't work. And work is where we get our happiness from. Because work is where we get our self-esteem from. And that's why we spend so much time there. Because hopefully, work is where your passion is. And if it's not, change your work. Steve Jobs has a great speech. You can find it on YouTube at Stanford University, where he talks about how people should choose their careers. And he says, follow your passion. You've got one life. Yeah, make the most of it. Live it. Live it to the fullest. So the fact is that if you're truly self-interested, if we truly have a morality of self-interest, if we understand what a morality of self-interest is, then we're not going to lie, steal, and cheat. Because that's not self-interested. It's not good for us. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws that put the cooks in jail. Suddenly, we should protect ourselves from those people who don't get it and are stupid enough to commit crimes. But I don't worry about the elevator when I get on. If it's private, I assume the guy who built the elevator has self-esteem. But I also know, by the way, that the insurance company that insured the building probably sent an inspector to make sure that the elevator was good. Markets work. The selfish, self-interested incentive of people work. But nobody's ever going to believe that given the morality that we have. So this world needs a revolution, if you will. We need capitalism. We need freedom. Freedom is on the decline. Capitalism is on the decline all around us. But to get there, we need a much more fundamental revolution, a much harder revolution, a much more challenging revolution. And that's a moral revolution. We need to shrug off the morality of sacrifice, the morality of selflessness, and embrace a new morality, a morality of self-interest. Morality of self-interest, capitalism is easy once you have that. Because we all want to be doing what? We all want to pursue our self-interest. We all want to make our lives the best that they could be. We want another government on our shoulder telling us, don't drink those soft drinks. I'll make you fat. I mean, really? We want to make our own choices. We want to make our own decisions. That's what it means to be self-interested. So once we can convince people to be self-interested, properly self-interested, capitalism and freedom are relatively easy cases to make. Thank you all.