 all the selfish goals, all the things that he defined as selfish. Every single one of them is a goal that is a material goal. There's no spiritual goal, there's no even career goal is not mentioned. So selfish is narrowly construed as at least right now as material as stuff. This guy doesn't like stuff but it is interesting. Listen to what he says about this. It is interesting kind of this is the positive element that Patrick brings to this discussion. By you being that way you're not a positive to the world. That's the other thing to note and I'm sorry I'm stopping in maybe two seconds but we'll get to a flow here in a minute. The other thing is from the beginning the standard of value is the world. So what he's criticizing this guy is hey you're not a knit positive to the world. What about being a knit positive to you? Because he'll talk positively about selfishness in a sense but always in the context of what selfishness makes possible for you to do for the world. That's the context. The context is not you so there's no there's no real selfishness. There's no deep selfishness in a sense of caring about you, your life, your values, your happiness, your world. It's out there. What can you do to make out there better? And it turns out that thinking about yourself making your life a little bit better is good for the world out there so do it. But the standard is the world and so if you take the standard as the world then you've undermined the whole concept of selfishness to begin with. The whole selfishness you've predetermined it to be immoral and bad and unacceptable because your standard whether you know implicitly and in this case explicitly is others, is the world, is external to you. That's the standard and yeah you should think about yourself more in order to make them better off. But you see this is how we're conditioned. All of them are conditioning in the culture. All of them are conditioning in the world out there. Is oriented around conditioning you to think of others to place others first and even in thinking about yourself and being quote selfish. It's because that motivates you, that gets you excited, that gets you going for the world out there for somebody else. All right we're gonna we're going to rewind it a little bit again. I mean if I have it I give it to other people and I'm going through like what selfish goals do you have in place? Nothing. I said you realize by you being that way you're not a positive to the world. This is what you mean. I said if you're slightly more driven other people win. I win, you win, your family wins, your peers win, your legacy wins, your future kids win, everybody wins. So if you're slightly more selfishly driven that is if you're more driven towards values everybody wins. Now there's that truth to that but notice that your family wins, I win, they win, they win, over there they win. But the whole point is I win and it's still too loud, huh? All right, all right. So slightly. So the standard, the standard, note the standard. Driven, other people win. I win, you win, your family wins, your peers win, your legacy wins, your future kids win, everybody wins. If you have something you're going after, the world is a better place if you're in the hunt for some of your selfish goals. So he sits then he starts thinking about it. Which is absolutely true. Absolutely true. Everybody's better off if people are self-interested, if people are selfish, if people pursue values, if people pursue selfish goals, you know, in a selfish way. We'll talk about what selfish goals and selfish way means. Everybody's better off, including you. This guy's ubering around all over the place. He's wearing the same thing pretty much every day, same shoes, same shirts, same pants, maybe changes that up here and there but it's pretty much the same routine things. There's nothing exciting going on that he's looking forward to except for his job. We have this conversation. Mario starts making changes. He makes a video about alcohol. I think the last time Mario drank alcohol was three and a half years ago. The video inspires a bunch of different people. And then he says, Pat, I want to buy this. He buys a nice red challenger. Car comes in, it's in the back of the building, guys see his eyes light up. So look at what it feels like. They know why. Which is great. I mean, what he's showing is what happens to people once they engage in their values, once they develop loves and passions and favorites and things they desire. Now again, the focus here is almost all on material things. But even in the material world, we have to desire, we have to want, we have to value, we have to appreciate, we have to strive. It makes our life better. Material things make our life better. We should want material things because they make our life better. What's sad is that it's totally limited to that and that limits you completely in terms of your understanding of selfishness. We'll get to that, right? But yeah, I mean, this guy suddenly discovers he likes stuff. He wants stuff. He values stuff and surprise, surprise. His life becomes more meaningful. His life becomes more fun. His life becomes more exciting. Watch, then a nice suit, then nice shoes, and he starts saving money. Fast forward to today. He's been living on the water in Florida for a few years now, drives a nice car, has more savings than he's ever had in his life. And I'm talking a few hundred thousand dollars of savings. Just three years ago, he had $1,000 in a bank. He's got $300,000 in savings today. Doing good for himself, just got married, about to be a father. Parents was here. Family was here. They're looking at him, so proud of him. What happened to this guy? Just in five years, we don't recognize this guy anymore. What happened to this guy? He finally chose to be a little bit more selfish, so watch this. And here, what I would say is, yeah, there's a sense in which he chose to be more selfish. But what's really happened here is he chose to be a valuer. And that's ultimately what it means to be selfish. What it means to be selfish in the most important sense is to become a valuer, to choose your values, to pursue your values, to gain your values, to identify your values, to go after your values, to live for your values, for your own values. And indeed, we took a guy who didn't care about anything. It wasn't that he was selfless. He was selfless in a sense that he didn't care about self. He didn't care about what he liked. He didn't like anything. He didn't focus on liking anything. He didn't think about liking anything. He didn't value liking anything. And suddenly he oriented himself towards valuing, towards liking, towards caring. Patrick caused us being selfish. That's good. That's a good presentation of selfishness up to this point, up to this limited point. And the guy changed his life and it made his life, his family's life, his people around him, the people he works with, everybody's better off. It indeed is win-win. This is good. This is the positive influence that maybe Ayn Rand has had on Patrick Bendavid in terms of, you know, he's willing to at least say that something can be selfish is good. I create this chart, yes. And I want you to think about it and kind of grade yourself as well. Then I'm going to give you different levels too. Say we have a chart. In this chart that you're looking at, on the top left, this is a person that's 100% selfish and they're zero selfless. The center where the two collide is 50-50, meaning they're 50% selfish, 50% selfless. And then the person on the top right is a person that's 100% selfless, meaning they don't care anything about themselves. Everything's about other people. And in the bottom right, if somebody that has zero selfish genes, meaning all I care about is as much as I do for you, I don't need anything from anybody. So then we continue this conversation and we said, so which one is more realistic and which one doesn't exist? So we created a chart and gave it a name with 11 different levels on where people would be based on their breakdown. And here's what we found out. On the top and the bottom, if a person is 100% selfless and zero percent selfish on the bottom, that's non-existent. Yeah. So he's saying selfless people don't exist. You can't be selfless. And this is actually pretty good. It's a myth. You know why? It's impossible for a person not to be selfish. If you're not selfish, you don't eat, you don't drink, you don't take care of yourself, you don't wash, you don't do anything. You don't exist. So that's a myth. A person cannot be 100% selfless. You have to be selfish in order to live or else you're dead. However, at the top. So that's good, right? So at least he's rejecting the idea that anybody can be selfless. Recognizes that basic survival, basic existence, basic existence in any kind of world requires you to think about yourself. It requires you to take care of yourself. It requires you to do some basic things that allow you to live. So truly selfless people would die. So pretty, so so far so good. Let's see where he goes with 100% self-interest. When you look at the person that's 100% selfish and 0% selfless, those people can actually exist. Some of them are criminals, sociopaths, they're a danger to society because they're willing to sacrifice friends, family, relative, business, career. It doesn't matter. They're 100% all about themselves. Now, this is the amazing thing, right? How does he not get this? How does he not get that criminals and psychopaths and all these others are not selfish? Isn't it obvious that these people are undermining themselves? Isn't it obvious that these people are self-destructive? You know, isn't the criminal going to jail? Is going to jail a selfish thing? Is alienating your friends, your family, everybody around you and being like a totally isolated and not having anybody who want to do business with you? Is that self-interested? Is that in your self-interest? Is that selfish? If selfish means, and here is an important point, you have to define it, right? But he's defined selfless as not caring about yourself, only caring about other people. Then let's say selfish means caring only about yourself and not caring about other people, only caring about yourself. But if you only care about yourself, doesn't that mean that you don't want to go to jail? Doesn't only caring about yourself mean that you want to have friends? Doesn't only caring about yourself mean that you want to succeed in business and you don't want everybody in business to be alienated from you? Or to shun you? Does only caring about, if you only care about yourself, don't you want to still have a romantic relationship with somebody? Just because sex is great and love is great and you feel great when you do it? So they can't escape and sadly Patrick can't escape this conventional notion that selfishness just means self-gratification, short-term self-gratification. Why can't they integrate into this conception the idea of, but there's a future and in order to achieve my goals in the future, if I piss everybody off today, I'm not going to achieve my goals in the future. So why wouldn't I incorporate my future goals into my self-interest today? And isn't that too self-interest? Isn't being, lying, cheating, stealing, I mean, is equivalent of being selfish, being a criminal or whatever. Isn't that self-destructive, not selfish? I mean, don't you think that if you're going to do graphs, wouldn't you have to do it in three dimensions? The selfish, the self-less, well, but an element of being self-less is being self-destructive. Wouldn't you say that being a criminal is actually self-less? Because it actually hurts you, it actually destroys you, it actually does things, it makes you worse off. So it's curious how difficult this concept is. It's curious how really hard it is for people to embrace the idea that the future is part of you and that in order to succeed in life, you have to take the future and take out. And in order to succeed in life, you can't be a joke to everybody. In order to succeed in life, you can't lie, steal, and cheat. In order to succeed in life, you can't be a psychopath and a criminal. That's not successful in life. That doesn't lead to success. So it's not selfish. And I think that the fundamental, one of the reasons, there are many reasons they can't integrate this, but one of the reasons they don't integrate it is that they don't actually, in order to integrate it, I think what you have to identify is reason, as man's basic means of survival, is that in order to be selfish, in order to be successful in life, you have to reason, you have to think. And while when you talk to people in an telescope, if I asked Patrick with the feed, if you want to make a lot of money over time, over time, is lying, cheating, stealing a good strategy, you would say, no, of course not, is alienating everybody around you, is turning other people you do business with off against you. Is that a good strategy? Well, no, of course not. And he would actually recognize that it's thinking important in setting a strategy like that. Yeah, probably. So in any given narrow goal, I think they would see it. But I don't think they can see it as a general. They can't see it beyond that. And then he can't connect that to selfishness, because selfishness is so being corrupted. So even he who's trying to give it a positive spin, you need some selfishness, just not the lying, stealing, cheating part. And you need some selflessness, we'll see. We'll see how that integrates. What does it even mean to be selfless? But he does some good stuff coming up on selflessness. All right. So I think you're getting it, right? It's this lack of reason, long term thinking. And it's all about selfishness, at least in its pure form, is 100% about instant gratification. It's 100% about exploiting other people. However, we looked at the different tiers. And here's what we came up with. So the next level would be somebody that is 10% selfish and 90% selfless, meaning there's 10% selfish, 90% selfless, selfish enough to eat, to shower, to have a job, to do the basic type of things. But they'll agree with anything anybody tells them, these are people that are weak willed and generally cowardly. Now I love this. This is actually really, really good. Because he's identifying selflessness with weak willed, with second handedness, with having no opinion for themselves, with being weak. That's fantastic. Because that's a good integration. I wish he integrated the other side as well. I wish he integrated the selfish as being rational. He gets that a little bit. You'll see it later. He gets a little bit of it. But he can't get it at 100%. 100% is only caring about yourself. Well, reason just imploded. Reason just went out the window. Now you're just being self gratifying, self destructive, doing anything, exploiting people even though it doesn't help you, it doesn't make you better, it doesn't add to your life. All right, let's listen to that again. 10% selfless, meaning they're selfish enough to eat, to shower, to have a job, to do the basic type of things. But they'll agree with anything anybody tells them. These are people that are weak willed and generally cowardly. They're a net negative to society. Now the other thing I like about this is the net cowardly. Sorry, the cowardly. They associate cowardly with self-lessness. I think he's absolutely right. I think courage comes from selfishness. So again, some good integrations here. Second-handed don't think for themselves, look to other people for everything and are cowards. And then he has to add net negative to society. Also true. Just that's not the point. We're not trying to evaluate it here by that standard. And what does it even mean, the standard of society? Who's measuring? How do you measure? Which society? In what world? In what era? We're a net negative to society. One minute they're having a conversation with somebody saying, did you hear what that person said? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, wow, I can't believe it. Then they'll go to the next person who completely disagrees with that person. No, that person said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, zero backbone. Okay, there's other words for it, but that's the level of 1090. I like that. Zero backbone. If you're 10% selfish, 90% self-lessness, according to him, no backbone. Fantastic. Because absolutely true. Okay, there's other words for it, but that's the level of 1090. The next person is somebody that's 2080. These are folks that are indecisive. They're conforming to everyone. They can't make a decision. I don't know. I don't know. They're afraid to make selfish goals and selfish dreams. And I don't know if this is good for me. I don't want to offend anybody. I'm just kind of like conforming again. I'm indecisive. So I'm staying out of it. Again, conformity, lack of values, lack of drive. He's identifying it. That comes from caring about your own life. Selflessness means caring about your own life, which means setting your own values, living by your own standards. He gets the opposite. He gets the selflessness means no values for yourself. It means not living by your own standard, but other people whispering. It means conformity. It means negation of you and not even having values. That's what selflessness means. So he gets the negative, which is good. Proud. The 3070, these are people that are passive, meek, submissive, tame, still a little more selfish than others, but not enough yet to start getting some kind of progress about them. They're still more in the net negative community. Then you have 4060 supporting cast, very good supporting cast, very helpful. They're great people to be having a business to help out with different structures, but they're in the 4060 mode still. So notice that once we get into the middle, the selflessness translates now into what? It now translates into being helpful, helping others, being nice to people, opening doors to grandma, helping the old woman cross the street. It's gone is the, so that and a little bit of selfishness, right? It's this mixture. I mean, there's something very wrong about this whole approach. And of course, we all want to ultimately be 100% of something, right? 100% of the good, 100% of being selfish and what that implies. But it's interesting to see how he's conceiving of it. And it's interesting to see the true identifications that he is making about the role that thinking about self serves in one's life and the role and what happens when someone doesn't do enough thinking about oneself. The problem is that he views selflessness as kind and nice to people. And it's much worse than that, of course. And to some extent, he's identified that that's, it's the water down selflessness that is kindness. But you can be kind and still be selfish. The middle is thinker advisor. These are people that are 5050. They're good thinkers. What do you think about this? I think we should do this. What about that? I don't know. Let me think about the other person's side. Well, you know what their side is this, this side is that, so they get you to think because they can both be selfish and they're selfless. So they're actually a good person to have on the team because they can give you both sides of what to do and what not. So what's what sense in what sense of being selfless here? What's the sense in which people are being selfless in the sense that they can think about what other people might think, think about what other people might want. They might have some empathy. So now selflessness becomes empathy. If you're truly selfish, and you're in a team, isn't it selfish to try to understand what the other team members want? Isn't it selfish to try to understand what the context is? Isn't it selfish to try to think and not jump to answers? So again, this conceptual confusion that he has is really screwing this up because all the good things he's saying now about 50, 50, 60, 40 are all consistent with 100% selfish. There's nothing selfless about it because now he's confusing selflessness before he got what it was. Now in this watered down form because it's watered down by selfishness, now it's becoming kindness, friendliness, thoughtfulness. But all those are characteristics of somebody who is potentially 100% selfish. It's frustrating that he can't see it to do. The synergists and the great teammate is the 60, 40. They have goals, they have dreams, they go out there and get it done, they push other people, there's somebody that you're going to want in any great organization because they are 60, 40, and they have their own things that they still want to drive to improve the company, improve themselves, they're reading, they're improving, they're doing all that. They're not content with where they are, so they have bigger selfish goals than being selfless. Then you have the kingmaker. And what is sense in which, what's the sense in which they're selfless? See, the way he's construing it is somebody who's selfish doesn't deal with other people, isn't interested in other people, doesn't care about other people, doesn't want to trade with other people, doesn't want to cooperate with other people, doesn't want other people. But that's screwed up because it's in your selfish interest to deal with other people, it's in their selfish interest to want other people, it's in their selfish interest to trade with other people, it's in your selfish interest to have sex with other people, I don't know, and so on. So what is it? But he cannot acknowledge that. To him, being selfish means no other people. It doesn't mean taking care of yourself. It means no other people. So note, here's the interesting thing that integrates it all. At the end, everything is about other people. Being selfish is not taking care of self. Being selfish to Patrick Wintervid means negating other people. Being selfless is approving of other people, is working for other people, is all about other people. So the balance here is not about so much about self, although that doesn't enter into the values and so on. But it's primarily, there's a big chunk of it is either negating other people or I sacrificed other people. But to be selfish means to cooperate with other people, to trade with other people, to identify other people who are good for you and to bring them close into your life, to have friendship, to have love. And that he can't get. That he can't get. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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