be going 70 or 80 miles an hour. it was death-defying as you might imagine in the 1870s without a single safety device, and those were probably the people traveling the fastest in the world at that time, the people writing the lumber flumes down. anyway, and another big environmental cost was the mercury that they used to mail the war. they mixed it up and then you will provide state and asked about in these huge amalgamating pans which torn out the gold and silver in the mercury and they tore off the mercury and you are left with this gold and silver. you lose some of the mercury and gold and silver in this process, and that's why you wouldn't want to eat trout out of the lower river because lots of mercury is lining the bottom of the river.

charles sauer, what is "the profit motive," and how do you define it? >> it is a way to look at the world around you. people are motivated. they act because of different motivation in their lives. iodine that as a prophet and i do find it almost right a way to say it isn't just money. it is may be feeling good, getting back to your community. maybe it is more time with your family but the fact is when people make a decision and action, they are driven by profit. in general we all know businesses are driven by profit. that's a general fact we all understand that i take it a step down further and show managers are driven by profit and that is often different than the company's motivations in that the employees under them are

also driven by profit and then i moved from the air because mostf us understand business. i moved that into other sectors like government and show a 28-year-old bureaucrat sitting at a desk might not always have the best intentions of the country on his mind and he is sitting at the desk. sometimes he wants to get off work and go with his friends on a date or move up in the bureaucracy himself. the guy is sitting at the desk in government have motivation and those don't often go exactly with the program he's working for and this also works in the media and also applies to family life and nonprofits. it's an interesting theory when you start expanding on it. >> when you talk about the noneconomic profit motives, how do you you do drive the benefits? >> profit is a weird term anyway. if you look at the webster's action area version of it, it's

kind of a weird thing to go back to. it's not good in writing necessarily a, but i think that it helps here because it shows the profit is not just money. it's something that is of a benefit and so i read a lot of ayn rand and i've been a fan. that's one of hebut one of her s selfishness or greed is good. i think that a lot of her ideas are right, but i don't think they caught on because people don't like to consider themselves as greedy. if you look at other people and show they are acting in their self-interest, you can look what other people want as a benefit. i don't know the question how you would be arrived at the benefits and profit are kind intrinsic i don't think you really get to deriving the benefits, but it's whatever the person defines themselves as good, the person or the business or the organization. there's a lothere is a lot of ca

catholic air goal is and i don't agree with that as a prophet i don't think it makes sense. but that isn't for me to define. they think it is a prophet and they will either live by that or die by that. if i understand that's what they are going after and i can help them get their, that is going to help me in the future. >> u.s. 230 million or so americans each driven by their own profit motives with millions of businesses doing the same thing. how does that work? >> the invisible hand. my profit motive, i driven by families and i had the opportunity that i got to walk with my daughter to school in the morning and they've driven a little bit by money so i can afford the lifestyle in which to do that. it works because if i am bad to

people and not doing the right things, i am not going to be able to pursue that lifestyle. so that is the individual scale. if you increase that and move it up a notch and go into this mess is, if the businesses are making their customers mad or their employees matter, then they are going to stay around long either so it works because everybody is working for a prophet and the only way to do that is to work together. i have to try to make you profit more and if i help you profit more than maybe you will keep me on longer. >> charles sauer, you open the book "profit motive: what drives the things we do" with a thought experiment. >> i think that it's nice to open people up and get them thinking right from the beginning. so, the way that i started the book was an employee is working at a company and they are

designing a building and that company also makes metric fasteners, what kind of building are they going to design? are they going to design a building that use standard fasteners or metric fasteners. the fact is if they don't want to get fired, they will design a building that either uses the metric fasteners that their company makes. we see this kind of all throughout life, we see hospitals if you are a doctor and don't refer int them to youn hospital system, then you're likely going to get less patience or you're goinpatientst moved out, were you're going to get a bad referral. the fact is profit motives do drive what we do. but i like opening up with the thought experiment. i think it gets people thinking from the beginning. hopefully they'll must understand right away the basic idea of profit motive. >> host: dot closing experiment could go one of two ways. >> i think the closing thought

experiment could almost go three ways. the closing thought experiment is who profits more, the person who writes the book or the person who reads the book. not mentioned in there is a question of whether you understand the profit motive enough. there's also the book person who publishes the book. and there's also the bookstores that sell the book. so maybe there are four ways and i missed one when i was talking about it. but the fact is, i do profit from writing the book and a prophet in several ways. the people that he did the book are also profiting from the book and hopefully they are profiting at least as much as the price i think that they are going to profit a lot more. but also involved as a publisher and i decided to write the book based on leveraging the profit motive of my publisher. writing a book is you are going

to spend a lot of hours and i have three daughters i love. i like spending time with them and playing with them. i have a wife that i get along with and she is my teammates. to write a book, i have to take time away from them and take time away from my life and my business. in order to do that, i needs were a publisher picked up my book before i devoted my time to writing it. a publisher said yes this book is valuable. we are going to invest in it. so that's why i decided it was good to invest the rest of my time writing the book and finishing it. >> you are clearly the president of the market institute. >> it is a 501(c4). i do advocacy on capitol hill. i focus on healthcare and intellectual property. intellectual property, both issues go wit over this book pe,

but intellectual property are patented a is what gives the inventor the governments right with a government monopoly -- it gives the inventor of the incentive, the profit motive to take an idea and take it into the marketplace to actually get consumer. what i do is what i wrote about. >> when you worked on the senate finance committee staff, what was the profit motive there? >> there is a lot that i think when you are early in your career, there is interest in profit motives involved. i looked at -- i had a friend i grew up with, he was my best friend and he was an accountant for one of the large firms. when i was sitting at my desk in the senate, i kept wondering why is he working for the accounting firm? she needs to start his own business.

that is who both he and i are. while i was sitting at the desk, i didn't realize i was doing the same thing. what we were doing is building up our resume, building up our network and knowledge base. the fact is most of the people i work with today are still the people i met them. not on the desk, but when i was working for governor jeb bush, i worked with the person who is now chief of staff for the majority leader cornyn i'm actually the majority whip cornyn over in the senate. so it's interesting to see where your networks go and with the profit motive is to be at the time, it was a paycheck and trying to move up and learn that network to get me where i wanted which is to start my own marketing business. >> charles sauer, in your view, does the government take into consideration our personal profit motives when they make

policy? >> i think sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. one of the groups i worked with his goodman institute. john goodman is the father of health savings accounts, and health savings accounts is one of the only types i've seen a government policy that does leverage those that benefit people. so it puts the patient back in the drivers seat by making them the client when they go to the doctor. hsa is a healthcare device, it is a savings account you put your own money in, it is tax preferred and then you can use that money in conjunction with a high deductible health plan. so what you are giving now is the incentive to shop. and the doctors are given the incentive to treat you like the client. so when you go into a doctors officdr.'soffice normally, yes a patient. yes, you might be sick. but the fact is you are not really paying the doctor. you might be paying 10% of what the doctor gets paid but the

real payers of the insurance companies or hospitals or government. so the hsa puts that back in place. with 99% of the time, the government doesn't understand the profit motive of the people and politically, we don't understand the profit motive of the bureaucrats implementing it and that is one of the bigger issues. >> from your book if you could expand on this, elon musk is one of the capitalists who knows that he is in a war and has built a company prepared to fight each and every crony battle to get his business is really advantage as possible. >> elon musk is an interesting character. i work with inventors and elon is that weird piece. there's two inventors that are well known. everybody knows, you have edison and tesla. people like to think of elon musk has tesla and this kind of wild haired inventor going out

doing crazy things. the fact is, he's edited. -- edison. i personally am a tesla fan, but edison built a business. he was inventive himself, but he was ruthless in growing the business, and in fact, he attacked tesla for many years. elon musk does much of the same. he's innovative, but he is running a business. so, when you look at when he goes into states, like if he's going to decide to put a launch pad in arizona or build tesla in nevada where we are right now, the fact is he's going to shop. he's going to push them coming and he pushes them for tax rebates and everything he can, because that's the bottom line. that innovative, does that sound like a creative type that he is? i don't think it does, but it's interesting to look at someone i

hold in high regard and look at the profit motive of how they are running the business and how that translates. he's not just inventing for america's greatness, he's inventing for his business and that's how he's running. >> or loss of profit motives being inoculated in the amazon search? >> yeah, i mean come amazon hq search is interesting to watch the states kind of scramble for it, and also watch some of the states opt out. so, today is on the search, companies are now giving out tax breaks and areas of land, promising to build up their infrastructure. so we are seeing the profit motive and what's interesting is if you dig down deeper as an economist of those tax breaks are badand all the promises are bad. so i would say the does are badd

to profit motives. they are actually looking at what they are doing. they are going after it as hard as they can. so then you can look at and see if the profit motive is correct if they are doing things correctly. the trade war would be one of those. i personally think president trump comes from the right place in his heart. he's trying to do something about it. it's a profit motive trying to make america great again that if we look at the economics behind what the trade war causes, if we look at what that does to us, then i would say the policies that he is pursuing while profit

driven are not going to bring us the end result that he's looking for to promote small innovators. >> is there a difference especially speaking of the amazon and trade policy, is there a difference between long-term goals and short-term profit is? >> there's an interesting -- i don't see a difference, and i don't think that an economist with ea difference necessarily between the short-term profit motive and the long-term profit motive, because if you are a short-term profit motive and it doesn't serve, then it's not giving what it's supposedoing wo even in the short term. there is a fight on this about ceos trying to get quarterly returns for their investors. so, i think it is open for debate. i think, and this is one of those things if you look at the company working in the self-interest of their company, it is that's long gone profit

motive that they need to be driving for, which is one of the reasons i do support capitalism at its fullest. >> charles sauer, in the book you ask the question should we all be scared of the media is going to brainwash us into supporting a certain group just to make more money? >> we shouldn't be worried about that. we should all just by profit motive. no, the media isn't going to brainwash us into supporting something, and that's because there is the media -- >> can you give an example, supporting what? >> i'm a libertarian. that means i'm right flaming. so i am often in republican circles, sitting in conservative rooms. there is always the leftist media coming to get us that's going to sell a story that isn't true. but the fact is there are

countries may be 50/50. and it's not too far off on the liberal conservatives. and so, if you look at the profit motive of the media company, they want to deliver media in the right way. they want to deliver media and the want to deliver news and the way that it's happening because if they continue not to deliver news and in an organization if they continue to deliver fake news, they are going to lose market share and advertiser revenue and they are going to lose the listeners. i think it is one of the reasons that fox has taken off and it is because the lead in the direction that they always lean in that direction, so it is fairly easy to know each story what you are hearing so you can kind of edit it back to the middle without doing it. without needing much work. so now, the media isn't going to brainwash us and i wanted to pose that in there i do a lot of media, i do a lot of media with the far left.

they have me on because the listeners find it interesting to listen to both sides. >> on the back, one of the endorsements profit motive isn't must reach for someone both on the left and right. on the left, we need to understand how a radical charles sauer views the world, and on the right, you all can do what you want. >> you know, so tom sent me that endorsement and i've done a lot of things with tom, including one saturday i was sitting at home and -- if you don't know thom hartmann, he has an underlying radio show, he's a top-ranked liberal radio show. he is an amazing guy that slightly left of bernie sanders. so, he's pretty far down over on the left. but he called me up on a saturday. he e-mailed me and said i have an idea for next week's show.

do you want to switch sides? if so -- we got on the radio and we switched sides and argued each other's point of view. he showed that respect there, and when you read that, it actually makes me happy because he says you need to read it if you are on the left, and you need to know how a radical like charles sauer things. and when somebody is as far left as tom and calls you left, it is a term of endearment. so it's interesting to me because of the difference between how it lead believes ant he meant by it. >> greed is good, true or false? >> i think greed is true. it's everywhere. i answered your question in a way that might not have been expected on that. but i think that greed is everywhere. it is just on the president.

i don't know if it is good necessarily. we talked about several instances of greed could be -- amazon h. two q. it might be at the detriment of the state's economy. is it good, that good, i don'tt it is true and it's not necessarily greed as much as profit-seeking. i think somebody that is serving their church is being greedy but for their church. they might not be looking for growth themselves, but they are looking for the growth of their church. so i think that these are -- i think profit is the word most people think money right away. greed is a word people think of selfishness. but if we look at the words a little bit differently and just greed for your church or profit as a benefit, then you define it a little different. >> is there anything in our lives or world that shouldn't be driven by the profit motive?

>> i don't know. i talk in the book about my relationship with my wife. i think that if i were to go someplace -- if you were to ask me that question, and i wasn't thinking or whatever, i might say your family life for friendship. but honestly, when you look at your friendships and good friendships or good marriages, there is give and take in those relationships. so, you kind of go back and forth. if i'm always taking from my wife and she's never getting any profit from our relationship, then that's not a good relationship for her. so i have to find ways to get her profit. i have to find ways to give her what she wants out of that relationship. i come with quarks. i'm a writer that works with inventors. i'm kind of a weird person. and my wife deals with that, and so i have to get her things that

she wants to deal with that. and that doesn't mean money. it means sitting and listening. it means making sure that i am sure i imprisoned because she needs that. i have a great wife. she's at home with my three daughters that i've mentioned, every day. so she also needs that adult interaction. if you don't realize that and see that, then it's not there. it's around our everyday lives i don't think there's an area where does not fix this. you might be able to look at your relationship with your ki kids. >> here's the book, "profit motive: what drives the things we do." charles sauer is the author. >> think you.

here's a look at the life and career of media mogul sumner redstone. good evening, everybody. i'm the professor of the la press club. [applause] i will note that this is being recorded by c-span, which is exciting for us. a quick introduction a lot of you probably know sumner redstone already but we are here to talk about