 But let me say something about the college admission and it fits into this. I mean, the college admissions scandal is pretty amazing, shocking, but not surprising really. It's the depth and the extent of it and the sophistication of the fraud is, I thought, was a little surprising. But the fact that people are doing this is not. And I have to say that this relates to something I observed when I first came to the United States and when I had kids, it became even more and more and more evident. And that is the obsession that Americans have, the obsession that Americans have with higher education, with prestige in higher education, with where are my kids going to go to college? I mean, there are parents out there who are planning this from birth. What kindergarten? We'll get my kid into the best primary school. We'll get my kid into the best high school, which we'll get my kid into the best college. Best defined as what? As ranked the highest as prestigious as the school I went to as what other people say is the best. With all these parents, with all these parents that I have encountered over many, many years, I've never heard once of the question of where will my child get the best education? Where will my child learn to use his mind most effectively? Where will my child get the most knowledge? Where will my child flourish? What university best fits the interests of my child? No, I'm going to have to go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale. Why? Because it's prestige, prestige for whom? Well, often it's for the parents. Often it's for the parent in the cocktail party can say, well, my kid's at Yale, my kid's at Oxford, whatever. It's this second-handed mentality that we just talked about applied to universities and colleges, and it's obsessive. And it's all, I think, mostly driven by second-handedness, by wanting to appear important, wanting to appear successful, caring about what other people think of you, and elevating that to a primary. And therefore, driving your kid's nuts, or, which I think is more prevalent in some senses, more disastrous, turning your kid's into conventional little bromides of the kind of kids who go to Harvard, the kind of kids, you know, completely conventional in their ideas, completely conventional in their behavior, completely conventional in their activities, just completely conventional, all so they can go to the esteemed college so that other people can look at them and say, whoa, you went to Harvard. So they'll get a job not based on their skills. They'll get a job not based on their success. They'll get a job not based on what they know or how hard they work or how much they apply they mind. They'll get a job based on a resume. And unfortunately, there are many jobs given away based on resume. I don't think long term you succeed very much other than in politics and maybe a couple of other professions based on what school you went to, your connections. But as I ran illustrates in the fountainhead, you can go a very, very long way, even in corporate America, even in law firms and investment banks and certainly in architectural firms and others by being a second-handed, not uncreative, conventional player of the game everybody else is playing. And it's sometimes the individualist, the one who's a little different, the one who's a little bit quirky, the one who's a little bit brilliant, gets penalized for that. And you have to find the right firm, you have to find the right environment. I think Silicon Valley is a lot more tolerant of that and a lot more open to that, to the real genius and less focused on resumes. But actually that's interesting. I was sitting with a couple of very successful businessmen the other day at a very successful company in the financial industry and we were sitting about chatting and one of them said, we were talking about education and one of them said, I don't know, for years we've been talking about just having a test and just hiring people without even looking at where they went to school and without even requiring them to have gone to school. He says most of our hires today are from Ivy League schools and most of them suck, most of them are terrible. And we know we can do better. We know we can put in a regime where we did the testing. We didn't just rely on the reputation of the school but we actually relied on an objective test on some kind of interaction to determine who are the best and we could do much better in hiring. And I said, I said to him, I said, why don't you? And he basically said, you know, we're too lazy. We're too lazy to do it. It's just easy to look at a resume, oh Harvard, Princeton. Yeah, they went MIT. Great, let's just hire them. There's a book by Brian Kaplan about higher education where he says one of the real values of the top schools is not in the superior education. Indeed, Lenny Peekov has argued for years and I think there's some truth to this certainly in the humanities and social sciences that the better the school, the worse the education you get. It's not a correlation. It doesn't mean in bad schools you get a good education. It just means that you're guaranteed to get a really, really bad education if you go to the really, really good schools. They tend to be the most PC schools. They tend to be to have the worst of the professors. It's not about the education. It's not about the quality. It's about the signaling. If you could get into Harvard and if you could pass Harvard, you must be smart. You must be a hard worker. Therefore, we're going to hire you. And even if it turns out it's not a great signal. A lot of those Harvard grads are no good. It's still easier I guess for many businesses just to use it as a signal. So I've always found this phenomenon disturbing and upsetting and disgusting in many ways and sad. And the fact that parents treat their kids in a way that turns them, makes them so conventional. It turns them into these bromides is sad. And the scandal of course is an illustration of what happens to those kind of parents when suddenly it turns out that the kid is not working hard enough, not getting good enough grades, not doing the things with all the parents' help and all the tutoring and all the best schools and everything. The kid is still not fitting into the box. He's still not what the parent wants him to be. Maybe they're not smart enough but my guess is it's not about smarts. It's about the kid is just not fitting into what the parent's expectations are, the parent demands and of course what these top schools expect. I mean I could have never gotten into any of those top schools. I mean I didn't take high school seriously enough to get grades good enough to get into any of those top schools and neither did I want to or did I care. I grew up in a different world, different time in a different continent, different country where these things were not that important. But hey, 12th grade I spent a lot of time at the beach instead of classes. It was a lot more fun. I learned probably more stuff at the beach than I would have in class. I did okay but I didn't do great. It wasn't that important to me at the time and it hasn't turned out to be a great detriment to my success in life. So it's not surprising then that when parents are so ambitious for their second-handed kids that they are willing to bribe, to cheat, to literally hire people to fake test results, to change their kids' answers on tests so they score higher grades. I mean it's just unbelievable to pretend that their kid can play tennis and bribe the coach to get him into or her into the school on an athletic scholarship. I mean it's truly stunning what these parents were willing to do to get their kids. I mean you should read some of the articles about this. It's quite amazing and not surprising. It's this kind of completely second-handed what other people think of me, what other people think of my kid and my kid then will be successful because other people think good of them and it's all about what other people think because what other people think Harvard is good, therefore it's good. And it's nothing zero zilch. A single parent said, I wanted my kid to have the best education possible. They don't know. They've never researched. How many of these parents actually researched the quality of the schools they send their kids to? How many of these parents researched the quality of the programs at the universities they send their kids to? And how many of these parents would know what good quality is and what it isn't? By what standard would they even measure it? So this is pure second-handedness, second-handedness meaning care what other people think. Using other people's judgments instead of your own. Taken to the nth degree, that's what the college scandal is and it's really sad and it's sad that parents like this exist and many of these parents are incredibly successful and it just proves that you can be successful. You can be a Peter kidding and be successful. Make a lot of money. Rise very high in certain organizations. Some of them are even compartmentalized where they might be even first-handed. They might be even actually good at what they do in one realm of life and complete second-handedness in a different realm of life. Human psychology is amazing in terms of its ability to compartmentalize and have us functioning at different levels and different attitudes with different values in different parts of our lives. It's truly stunning but all of that by the way all of that by the way is, you know, hurts you, right? So you can't be happy. You can't be completely successful at living if that's the kind of life you're living, if that's the kind of compartmentalization going on. Of course, think of what this does to the kids themselves. Some of them of course knew that this was happening so they, you know, they already corrupt themselves. Why didn't they fight it? Why didn't they say, no, I don't want to go to Harvard if I can't get into Harvard. Why didn't they stand up for themselves? No, they bought into this already. But some of the kids didn't know because the parents were doing it behind their backs. They were even getting their test scores bumped up and the kids, now my guess is they must have known to some extent that they didn't score that well on the ACT or the SATs or whatever. Certainly the ones who couldn't play tennis and who got a tennis scholarship knew. But think about those who didn't know and now suddenly have discovered that they got into these prestigious schools not on their own merit but because their parents lied and cheated. I mean, their self-esteem, think about what it does to their self-esteem, their ability to have pride, their ability to have to respect themselves. It destroys them. And now of course it's out so to the extent that their second hand is and who care what other people think of them. Well, other people think really badly of them now. And this is why it's so important to be first-handed. Well, I mean, there are lots of reasons why it's so important. But it's so important to make decisions based on your own rationality, your own thinking and your own values to go to the school that you think is best for you and to earn your success because that contributes to your self-esteem and it justifies your pride. And pride is that working towards moral perfection. Is that working to be better, to be more moral, to be more first-handed. You can't be proud if you're cheating, stealing. You can't be proud if what you care about is what other people think of you. These people are hopeless, hopeless. They're never going to be happy, never going to be successful unless they completely rethink their values. And these kids, you know, I won't say their lives have been destroyed because there's a way of coming back from their lives being destroyed. But it's pretty horrific for them. And then, of course, they're the kids who didn't get into Harvard and Yale and Princeton, who might have worked hard and might have deserved getting into those schools and might have had a good reason to go to those schools and who didn't get in because somebody cheated to get in. Now, you know, for the most part, I don't think that matters that much. I mean, those kids were really truly ambitious and really truly valued that. They probably went to another good school and probably did fine. But it's still true. You know, somebody got kicked, didn't get in because somebody else got it. And to the extent that, to the extent that top schools are bad for you then maybe some people are not getting in. Maybe we did them a favor. Maybe the cheaters did them a favor by not allowing them in. I doubt that's the case. All right.