 You put it in dry soil. What does it do? Roots go searching for water, for the value which is water because the ultimate value for that plant is what? It's life. Face is a choice just like all of us. Life or death. Existence and non-existence. That's the ultimate choice every one of us faces. Self-improvement ultimately is all about choosing to live. Making the choice that the plant automatically makes. We're the only species by the way who can choose not to make that choice. We can choose to commit suicide. We can choose to do it fast by jumping off a building or we can choose to do it slow by being born and made of. But he's chosen to die. He's not living. Life in prison is not life. Life as a lying, cheating SOB is not a life. It's death. Very slow with lots of torture on the way. Just think about what it would mean to lie every day to your best friends and to your family which is what made off there. That's torture. That's death. Wisdom death. So every species out there has automatically geared in it the choice to live. We have something unique. We have something special. It's called free will. We can make choices. We can make decisions. Should we choose life or do we choose something else? Death. There is nothing else other than that. Rand says that the choice of life is the fundamental choice in ethics and morality in what is good. And therefore it is the context by which we should measure what goodness means. Does it lead us towards life and what kind of life? Well a good life. Life as a human being. Life to the fullest. That we are capable of of human beings. In this sense this is the morality of the philosophy that should guide anybody pursuing self-help and a self-help ideology. This is a self-help philosophy. It's about identifying their good. Identifying morality. Identifying virtue with living the best life that you can live. Living the fullest. Most complete. Eric used the word flourishing. It comes from Aristotle. Aristotle was the first one to identify this notion of purpose of life is to live it to the fullest. It's to flourish in it. Now what does it take for a human being to actually achieve that kind of life? To live a great life. To live a life of fulfillment. To live a flourishing life. To live a, at the end of the day what is it all about? If you live a good life why are you living a good life? What's the purpose? What should be the purpose of every life? Is it the billion dollars and a hot wife and whatever the, you know, the nice car? Is that the purpose? No what's that even that? Even if those are values what is that for? What are we trying to attain? Happiness. It's all about happiness. We want to live life in order to be happy. Happiness is the ultimate goal. So the question is for us, for human beings, what is going to lead to that? We know what a plant needs, right? A plant needs water and it needs sunlight. We know what a cheetah needs, right? On the lion. We know how lions, what lions need. What do we need? Before we get to the billion dollars and before we get to the wife what do we need? And what is, what is unique to us in terms of values? What is the most important value that we need? And for this what I want you to do is look at your neighbor, look around the room. And what you'll see is a pathetic weak animal. We are not equipped, we are not equipped physically to survive in this world. Each one of you, I know you work out and everything, it's not impressive. You go up against a sabre-toothed tiger, you're finished. You try to run down a bison and bite into it. Ever tried that? No fangs, no claws, no speed, not really. I mean even bolts, I mean he's fast, but a cheetah wipes him out like that, right? There's nothing there. We're just not equipped physically to survive. We're not. Yet we thrive. We don't just survive, we thrive as a human race, human species. We thrive. I mean where is the sabre-toothed tiger? We killed them all. We did. Human beings, how do we do that? We're so weak and pathetic. Big sticks, but how did, where did we get sharp sticks from? They're what? Somebody said, they're mine. Yeah, so it's all about what's up here. We don't have a gene, you know, birds have a gene that tells them how to build a nest. They just know automatically how to build a nest. We don't have that gene. We started out living in caves. Not a good idea. Tigers like caves, bears like caves that bigger, stronger than us. We had to figure out how to build homes and how to build them strong so the wolf wouldn't blow them down, right? It takes thought. None of us. I drop you into the Amazon jungle. You don't have the instinct to figure out how to survive. You don't. If you just rely on instinct, you're dead very, very quickly. You have to sit down and think and figure it out. When Robinson Caruso is on an island by himself, he doesn't know what to do until he thinks about it and he looks around and he uses his mind. Everything we have, everything you can point out in this room, literally everything you can point in this room, is a product of somebody's thinking. Somebody's figuring out. What do we call that characteristic of human beings? That ability to think, that ability to observe, nature out, they integrate it, understand it, do stuff with it, right? Figure stuff out. What do we call that? What's that? This is how we self-actualize. Creativity is an aspect of this. It starts with an R. Rationality. Rationality. It's actually reason, right? Reason. And kind of again, to hook up with Eric's talk, it's not an accident that the Enlightenment, what's the other name for the Enlightenment? The age of reason. Not an accident. Not an accident that all of, all the, have you ever seen a chart? I don't have a whiteboard here. Have you ever seen a chart of per capita wealth? The history of per capita wealth, that is, dollars that the average wealth the human beings have had throughout history. Have you ever seen a chart of that? So it starts, you start, I don't, I can do it in the air. So it starts at some point, let's say, 10,000 years ago. And per capita wealth, that is, the wealth on average that a person has is basically flat and flat and flat until a certain point, and then it goes like that. Just skywalkers. And what's, what's that inflection point? Anybody know what that date is? It starts going up. Yeah, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I like to use 1776. It's an arbitrary date. It's anywhere in that period. I like 1776 for two reasons. Two important things happened in 1776. The founding of this country, which creates the political, lays down the political principles necessary for that spike in wealth creation. And one other thing happens in 1776. It's just cool that both these things happen. Wealth of Nations is published by Adam Smith, the, you know, the first real book of economics, right? A defense of capitalism. But that's an arbitrary date. Somewhere in the 18th century, this happens. And it happens because it's the first century that explicitly recognizes reason as man's tool for dealing with the world.