 to introduce our next speaker, Yaron Brooks. I just met Yaron a few minutes ago actually and I'm really excited to hear his speech. He's talking about why be selfish and I'm pretty selfish so I'm excited to learn why I should be selfish. It makes me feel better already. So Yaron's a president executive director of the Einrand Institute. He's all the way here from Southern California and he's a columnist at Forbes.com and he's got his MBA and PhD in finance from UT Austin. Also he's an award-winning finance professor and he's a first sergeant or was a first sergeant in the Israeli military intelligence. So not only is he smart but he could probably take you down. So I'd like to welcome Yaron. Thank you. Thanks guys, good afternoon. Not exactly sure what I'm doing here. I have no diet advice for you guys. Even though I probably practice a lot of the kind of diets that you're gonna hear about, I have no real exercise advice for you and I certainly don't have any dating advice for you. I've been married for almost 30 years so I've been out of that game for a very, very long time. So I have nothing to say about any of those topics but what I do wanna say is about what unifies all that. So what is common between the fact that you're all here to pursue having a better diet and feeling better and being more energized and just being healthier about exercising, being stronger, again being healthier, having more energy, living life more, dating, finding a relationship with somebody that's meaningful, that's again good for you. What unifies all those things is that you're here to try to make your life better. You're here to try to make your life a good life. And what I wanna talk about this afternoon is what does that really mean and why is that a good thing? Why is that okay? Because we live in a culture, we live in an interesting kind of culture where there's a lot of advice about self-help and a lot of advice like that but there's also a whole section of ideas within the culture that you study whether you study it in school or whether you hear it in church or in whatever your religion is by religious leaders which tells you in a sense the exact opposite. So before I get to why be selfish or what is selfishness even and we're gonna talk mostly about what it is rather than why be it. I wanna cover why is it so disturbing to think about selfishness because when I say to somebody, when typically in our culture we say to somebody, he's selfish, is that a compliment? No, it's a derogatory statement. We're saying that person is a bad person. We have all been raised to believe. We have all been raised to believe. Then when it comes to ethics, when it comes to morality, when it comes to being good, to being noble, to being just, to being a good human being, right? Ethics demands that we be what? Selfless. I mean I grew up in a good Jewish household, right? I was born and raised in Israel. And my mother taught me that to be selfless was to be good. That to think of others first and think of yourself last was to be good. That self-sacrifice, what is a sacrifice? Sacrifice is you give something up and you get what in return? Nothing. That's what makes it noble and good, we are told. So give, don't expect anything. Do for others, don't expect anything for yourself. Don't think about yourself. If you think about yourself, that's somehow morally tainted. The moral ideal we have all been taught is Mother Teresa, right? Good, middle class upbringing gives it all up to go to Africa to help the poor and lives a miserable, horrible, pathetic life. If you don't believe me that she lived a miserable, horrible, pathetic life, just read her diary, right? In her diary she's very explicit about how horrible her life is, but she does it because it's a moral duty. It makes her a good person. Indeed the Pope sainted her, right? They made her a saint. That in our culture is the essence of morality. And what you're doing right here is pretty frivolous, meaningless, doesn't get you any moral points, doesn't get you any kind of ethical credit. This is just you being selfish or self-interested or self-centered, which is from an ethical perspective, from a nobility perspective, eh, we don't really like this, you know. One of the examples I like when I talk about capitalism, which I do a lot, I like to give is Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates during the 1980s and 1990s made tens of billions of dollars for himself, right? And he built this company up and he made a lot of money and what did we think of him from an ethical moral perspective? What did we think of him? Eh, right? I mean, from a business perspective, great businessman, but from Mother Teresa, Bill Gates not in the same class, right? She's a saint. He's just a selfish guy trying to make a lot of money. He retires from Microsoft, he starts giving his money away. What do we think of him? Good guy, right? And I know how he could get sainthood, right? To get sainthood, Bill Gates would have to give all his money away, live in a tent, and if you could show a little blood, right? If you could bleed a little bit, show a little bit of suffering, where it was really bad, that would give him nobility, sainthood, that would make him a hero. Now that is perverse. There's something really crazy about that, right? Creating wealth, eh. Giving it away, yeah. Giving it all away, oh. Absolutely sainthood. There's something perverse about thinking that your life should be in the service of other people, that that's what nobility is, right? And that your pursuit of your own self-affirming, of your own health and wealth and so on, is somehow tainted. And you're all young, so you're all kind of focused on making yourself better. But in the culture we live in, as you grow older, you will start feeling like, what have I done with my life? All I've done is pursue money and good body and my relationship and my happiness and stuff like that. There has to be something more, right? There's Mother Teresa over here telling me that that's what I really should be doing if I wanna be counted as a good person. And what does that create when you've got a moral ideal up here and you're living a different life? What tension does that create? What do we call the emotion that that creates? You know you should be doing this, but you're not doing it, you're doing something else. Starts with a G, guilt. And you'll notice older people, you know, my age and older, right? They're not quite pursuing their life like you might be right now. They're not quite taking their life as seriously. They're torn from within, they're not very happy, generally. And they're torn by this notion that they need to do something else, that there's something that they missed in life because their mother taught them that they should be selfless and they haven't been. Most of us, you know, get in the moment to why I don't think most people are selfish either. But most people are not altruistic. Most people don't sell sacrifice. Most people don't think of others first. Most people don't think. But when we go to the mall, we'll get to thinking in a minute. When we go to the mall to buy stuff, when we go to work to do stuff, we're trying to, mostly on some way, we're trying to make our lives kind of better. It's not consistent with this morality of selflessness, of self-sacrifice, of anti-selfishness. So people, as they grow up, are torn by a feeling of guilt. And I'm here to try to prevent you from doing that, right? Guilt, unearned guilt, which this is, is a horrible, horrible thing and unjustified and wrong. So I wanna challenge this whole notion that morality is about selflessness. I wanna challenge the whole notion that your life somehow belongs to other people, belongs to society, belongs to your neighbor, that you should love your neighbor like yourself, or that you are your brother's keeper to use a little bit of biblical terms, right? Because I think that the best way to challenge that is to ask one very simple question that nobody ever asks. And that is, why? Why should I be selfless? Why should I live for other people? Why is morality that? Why does that make me good? And there's no answer to the why. I mean, ask your priest sometime, ask your philosophy, whatever, professor at university, or ask your mother, why? And the answer is always, because some authority said so. Your mother said so, the priest said so, the philosopher said so, but somebody said so. There's no actually logical reason for why your life is not yours. Why your life somehow has been mortgaged to some other cause, which is what? A morality that says that you have to sacrifice implies. Your life belongs to somebody else. When you make decisions, you have to think of other people first. Why? No answer. Now, before I get to what my answer is, I wanna ask this question. Why do we care about morality? I mean, what's it all about? What is morality for? What's ethics for? Why do we care about any of these issues at all? And I'm sure many of your minds are going, I don't, right? But you should. What is morality? Morality is a code of values that helps you pursue your life, that helps you tell what is right and what is wrong. And this is complicated, cause life is complicated. It's not always obvious what's right and what's wrong. And I would argue that life is an immense complexity with lots and lots of choices and lots of paths that you can take. And what you need in life, generally, I mean, this is true of science, this is true of every field in human endeavor, what you need is some principles to help you deal with the complexity that's involved. To come up to every decision in life and say, I'm gonna start from scratch, accumulating all the data I need to figure out should I lie or shouldn't I lie, right? Is lying good for me or lying bad for me? And every concrete situation we do that experiment is very, very difficult. Whereas if I can prove to you that lying is not good ever, because it's immoral and ultimately I'll show you, it hurts you, it's bad for you, then you don't have to think about it every time, you just don't, you don't lie and that's simple. That's called a principle. It's always gonna be then, it's always gonna help you. So every fork in the road you reach, you know which way to go. Not everyone, we're talking about big questions, big principles. So morality is, if you will, a map to life. It's the principles that guide you in pursuing your life. It's like with our morality, being dropped in the middle of London and being told you how to reach somewhere and you can't ask anybody questions or you can, but they're all a bunch of idiots anyway and they have no clue where anything is. And you have no map and you're supposed to reach somewhere. What are you gonna do? You might reach there, but what's the probability that you reach the point? It's low. And then you're gonna talk about waste of time and exercise. Are you gonna waste a lot of time in life trying to reach that point? Yeah, you're gonna go zigzag, you're gonna go in the wrong directions, you're gonna go all over the place. You might get mugged on the way, bad things can happen. What you want is the most efficient way to get to the point you're dropped in to the point where you wanna reach. And we'll talk about what that point you wanna reach is in life, okay? So morality gives you that map. It gives you the principles by which to get to the point where you wanna get to. So morality is maybe the most important thing you can make a decision about in your life. And whether you believe it or not, all of you have principles about morality. Most of you, most of you have those principles because you've absorbed them from the culture around you. From your parents, from your teachers, from your friends, from books you read. They've just come in, most of you haven't even thought about it. I'm guessing, right? I don't want to insult anybody here. But you haven't really sat down and thought, what's really good? What's really bad? What do I wanna go in life long term? How do I get there? What are the principles that I wanna live my life by? Most people never think that they just absorb it from reality, from community, from whatever outside. I wanna encourage you today, because I don't expect anybody here to completely accept everything that I'm gonna say or agree with everything I'm saying. This is the challenge. I want you to take this question seriously. And you do the thinking. And do the, just like you do the thinking about diet and you do the reading about diet, just like you're gonna read a bunch of books and really take seriously the questions about exercise. Or you're gonna really take seriously about finding a woman to date and having a relationship and making that relationship work. I want you to take your life just as seriously, the big question of what are the principles that I'm gonna shape my life? I want you to think about it. I want you to read about it. The same kind of books, right? And make the choices about what map you want guiding you. And I'm gonna make my case for what map that should be. But you ultimately have to make the decision about what your map should be. I think mine's the right one, but you have to come to that conclusion. I can't just brainwash you into it. So what I wanna argue is that it's meaningless to think about morality in terms of what you should do for other people. That morality is fundamentally about, should be about. Unfortunately it's not about, but that's a mistake of Western civilization for the last 2000 years. Morality should be about what you can do for yourself. That the purpose of morality, the purpose of this map, is to help you live life. To help you stay alive, but much more importantly, to help you live the best life that you can live. To make life the best that it can be. To make it fulfilling. To make it exciting. To make it fun. Ultimately, with the end result being, if you do that, if you challenge yourself, if you engage in living life, if you live life to the fullest potential that you have in everything that you do, not just in the things you're gonna hear at the conference, but in everything that you do, then what's the end game? What is the point that you're gonna reach? It starts with an H. Happiness. That happiness, your happiness, your individual happiness is the end game. But that there are ways to get there. And that there are many obstacles, and that there are ways to guarantee that you will never get there. Okay? So morality should be, if morality was conceived rationally. And you know, I'm from the Inran Institute. I believe that Inran conceived of it rationally. She comes from a tradition which goes back to Aristotle of thinking about these ideas with the purpose of this happiness, of this purpose of living life to the fullest. So if morality was conceived properly, it would be a science. A science that studied, a science that studied the requirements of human life. What are the principles that are necessary to lead a successful life? That's what morality is about. But whose life, your life, each one of yours? Because it's meaningless to talk about morality outside of your life. What does it mean? So, in that sense, Rand's morality, and I believe all morality ultimately should be selfish. It's about the self. It's about figuring out what is good for the self. And what is good for the self when? Well, throughout one's life. You guys are all young. You've got 50, 60, 70 years still to live. Western civilization survives, maybe even longer than that. You can ask me about the probability of Western civilization surviving. But with science advancing now, I meet more and more people in the 90s who look great. More and more people are here of dying in their hundreds, over a hundred. By the time you guys reach that age, you should be living to be 110, 120. So, life is long, and it's that whole life. Then when I talk about self-interest, when I talk about selfishness, I'm talking about living, not just a moment, not just right now. So let's think about what this entails. What are these principles? What does life entail? Well, what is it? You know, we're all a specific biological entity. We all have a particular nature. We all function by particular principles. You heard today kind of the way muscles function and the biology of exercise, right? But, because we're all a biological entity, but we're more than the muscles and everything. What is it that makes us as human beings function? What is it that makes us create a room like this and a camera like that and everything we have here on stage and everything that we create as human being? Where does that come from? You know, if you think about, if you think about the way, I don't know, the way a lion survives, right? What is, what makes it possible for a lion survive? You know, physical strength, right? It's muscular, right? This thing pounces on a gazelle and a gazelle is done. You know, massive jaws that can lock into that gazelle and just chew it up. But if you look around the room, right? As fit as you guys are, none of you are a lion, right? We, as human beings, are pretty pathetic animals, right? We're weak as strong as you are. You go up again, a saber-toothed tiger, you ain't surviving, right? We're slow, we have no fangs, we have no huge jaws to bite into an animal and kill it. What is it that makes us able to survive? What is it that is uniquely human that makes it possible not just to survive, right? I mean, we've thrived. We're the lions, they're still doing the same stuff they did 5,000 years ago, right? We live in places like this, right? What's the difference? What's uniquely human that makes it possible for us to do that in spite of our physical weakness to still succeed so well? Our brain, what is it about our brain? Because they have a brain, it's intelligence, but it's our ability to reason, it's our ability to think rationally, it's ability to look out into reality and not just accept the senses, right? Accept the data and automatically respond like an animal does, it's ability to get the data and analyze it and think about it and generate something new from it. It's ability to absorb lots of information and integrate it and then go out into our environment and change our environment. You see, the gazelle or the lion are stuck. They can never change, and they can never change their environment. They are what they are, they function automatically just like your computer, inputs in and it's an automatic response. We have free will. We have the ability to actually engage with the world around us, to understand it, to figure it out and to change it. The lion can't change his environment. He's gonna be doing the same stuff 5,000 years from now as he did 5,000 years ago. He might change genetically through evolution, but not, we build homes, right? So, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I do not have a gene for that automatically would let me know how to build a home, right? Initially human beings probably lived in caves and in trees like animals. And then one genius one day said, you know, if we put some bricks together or maybe it was mud or maybe it was straw, who knows? I can create this thing that we can live inside and then other geniuses made it better and better and better. And today we live in these magnificent skyscrapers and magnificent homes and buildings that a lot of thought, rational thought, had to go into and by definition, what we did was change the environment in which we live. We're not just dependent on a cave which we have to share with the sabertooth tiger or bear or something. We can now go and build a house waiver we want to live under our terms and under our conditions, including for example, one of the greatest inventions in human history, air conditioning, right? Which makes much of the world habitable whereas before it wasn't or shouldn't have been. It was, I guess, but it shouldn't have been habitable. So, it's our mind that makes that possible. We don't have a gene that lets us know automatically how to hunt like the lion does. I mean, how do you catch a bison? Anybody just instinctually know? No, none of you do. You'd have to think about it. You'd have to develop weapons, have to build tools. Those tools take thought. Somebody had to figure them out. Lions don't have tools. They can't think. You can think. Every value that we have, our ability to communicate, ability to have relationships, ability to love is dependent on our ability to think. Everything, everything at the end of the day, all our values, all the things we live for, figuring out what the right diet is. How do you do that? Do we just know, go out into the Farage or just pick whatever? No, it's not obvious, especially in modern times when the choices are unbelievable, the amount of choices we have in terms of food, right? What's good for us, what's not good for us? It's not obvious, not obvious. I think we're still confused. I don't think anybody really knows even today what's really good for us and what. But how are we gonna discover that? How are we working to discover that? By using our minds, by using science, which is the epitome of rationality. So for human survival, if you had to name one thing that is required to be successful in life, to be good at life, to achieve the goals that you wanna set in life, I'd say it's simple. There's only one principle that you need to know. And that is think. Now, it sounds easy, right? But it's not. How many times in life do we get a sense, we're doing something and we get a sense that something's wrong? But it's unpleasant. So we say, you know what? I don't wanna think about that. Because the conclusion might not be the conclusion that I wanna get to. The conclusion might not be one that's pleasant to me. And it's gonna require a lot of effort to figure out if it's true or not. Your girlfriend might be cheating on you. You don't know, but some things just not quite right. But if I think about it, I might discover some bad news and I don't wanna go there. Nah, I just don't wanna go there. Or the cocaine is right there. And you're gonna get a really cool high from it. And emotionally, you might be very happy for a little while. But that's not happiness. That's some emotion. What's it gonna do to my ability to function over the next 30 years, particularly if I do it repeatedly? Well, the empirical evidence is pretty clear. Not that good for you. But you have to think about it to figure that out. It's not obvious. I mean, I'm gonna get a high. So it requires stopping a minute and saying, is this really good for me? Not easy. Not if you're in a party with lots of friends and everybody's doing it. So to be truly selfish, to think about what's good for you. To think about what's good for you in the long term. To live life to the fullest. My biggest piece of advice today is think. This thing that we got between our ears is the most powerful tool for living that we have. It's actually the only tool for living that we have. Everything else is a product of that. Again, your exercise routine is gonna come from science, which is gonna come from thinking. Your diet routine is gonna come from science, which is a product of thinking. Even the dating ideas that you're gonna get are gonna come from people's experience and then figuring out, because experience itself doesn't teach you anything. It's you have to think about the experiences and don't have to learn anything from it. So it's all about thinking, thinking, thinking. So everything I'm gonna say from now on, it makes that assumption. It's all about how you apply your thoughts to your life. How do you apply the rational process of your mind to your life? And this is hard. I like to tell people being truly selfish, and I'll say something in a minute about what untruely selfish is. Being truly selfish is hard work. It's fun, but it's work. You don't have a selfish gene. You don't have selfish instincts. You don't know what's good for you until you think about it and figure it out. So think, think, think. Now, this is the difference between my conception of selfishness and the common conception of selfishness. Most people, when I said we'd point to somebody and say he's selfish, what we mean is what? He's a lying, cheating SOB. We mean he's motivated by whims. He just does whatever he feels like doing. But is doing whatever you feel like doing really selfish? Is lying, cheating, stealing really selfish? Let's take doing whatever you feel like doing. We'll go back to the cocaine example. Sometimes it feels good to do cocaine. Sometimes it feels good to drive like a maniac, risking your life and the lives of others. Sometimes it feels good, a little bit, to lie, cheat and steal from people. Bernie Madoff probably got a little bit of a kick when he stole $50 billion from his best friends. But what are the consequences of all those actions ultimately? Are they good for you? Are they really selfish? Not in the long term. Not if you think about the entire life. I'm assuming you get the cocaine example. Maybe somebody will challenge me on that one. But I'm assuming cocaine's bad for you over the length of your life. We've got some probably physiologists here who could prove that. But think of the lying example. I like the whole idea of lying because people associate selfishness with lying. Selfishness just means doing whatever it takes to get what you want, which includes lying. Lying is almost, people do it all the time, unfortunately. But think about whether you really get anything from lying. Let's take Bernie Madoff. Everybody know who Bernie Madoff is? I'm assuming you do. Anybody not know? Bernie Madoff basically was, I see somebody doesn't know. So Bernie Madoff basically had a pyramid scheme going where he would, I could tell you guys, I'll get you 20% return a year. And you give me all your money. And I basically, I don't do anything with the money or I spend it or I just stick it in the bank. And then what I do is I, but you guys want 20%, right? You want the money back. So I go to another group and say, I'll give you 20% a year. And then they give me their money and I give it to you. And you got your 20%. Now that group has to be bigger than your group, right? Why is that? Because there has to be your group plus 20%. So how am I gonna, how am I gonna pay them back? Well, I'm gonna have to find another group that's even bigger and use their money to pay those guys back. Now by this point, everybody in the marketplace knows that I can give 20% returns and everybody's excited to give me their money. And now money's just flooding in and I can give everybody whatever they want. For a while, right? Until what happens? Until I run out of money, run out of people to con. And then I've promised them a huge amount of return because now remember it's grown and grown and grown and I can't pay them back. A Bernie Madoff did this on the largest scale in human history. He basically ended up losing people $50 billion. Because I'm not suspending some of this money as it's coming in, right? I'm buying nice cars, nice boats, vacation homes, doing all that up. This other guy, I think it's Rick Stanford, just went to jail for life, for doing a similar thing. So this happens, right? Now people say Bernie Madoff is selfish. And by the way, Madoff was unique. One of the things unique about him is he actually did this with his best buddies. He did this to his friends. Now Madoff was caught and has gone to jail. What's interesting about the story is the people who turned Madoff in were his sons who were in the business with him. They called the police, right? The other interesting aspect of it is about a year after he was arrested, exactly a year after he was arrested, one of his sons committed suicide. Nobody in this family talks to him anymore. He's sitting in jail. And as miserable as you'd expect him to be in jail, Bernie Madoff has said that he is happier in jail than he was before he was caught. Because cheating people sucks. It destroys you. It destroys your soul. It destroys your ability to function in the world. Why? Because if our rational faculty, if our minds are the tools by which we survive, lying, cheating, means distorting reality. Reality is the facts that we need. So think about this, there's a saying in computers, junk in, junk out. When you lie, when you cheat, you're feeding the machinery of your mind with junk. And the junk out is usually a feeling of frustration, fear, guilt, misery. Nobody that I know, nobody that I know who is a regular liar or cheater has any eye odor of happiness in their life. They are miserable human beings. The key to happiness is staying connected to reality, is making the machine that makes it possible for you to achieve what you do as efficient and as productive as possible. Again, you guys think about making your muscles as efficient as possible, right? Now think of your mind as another muscle. How do I make it as efficient, as productive as possible? You don't do stuff that you know will rip your muscles to shreds. Lying, cheating, rips the muscle up here to shreds. You can't do it, you can't do it. You cannot gain anything from it long-term. Short-term, yeah, sure. Short-term, you'll get the money and you can spend it on a nice yacht. But it's gonna go just like that. Just a little bit more on lying. In my age, I'm quite a bit older than you guys, I find it very difficult to remember anything. Like what I did, you asked me what I did a couple of days ago, I'd really find it hard to remember what I did, right? So I find it hard to remember what actually happened. If I lie, I now have to, and this'll happen to all of you, right, as you get older, you'll find it more and more difficult to remember actually what happened. But if I lie about something that happened, I have to remember now two different things, two distinct things. Actually, it's more than two, but at least two, right? I have to remember what happened and I have to remember my lie. And I have to remember who I told what to, right? Who I told what happened and who I told the lie to. And what is likely to be happened to me given my state of lack of memory? I'm gonna trip up, I'm gonna screw up. And what are the consequence of that? The consequence of that in business is simple. If you lie in business, nobody trusts you, you're gonna lose a lot of money. In life, it's the same thing. Try having a relationship with somebody and establishing their relationships on lies doesn't last. Lying doesn't work. On top of that, our brain, our machinery here, likes to integrate things, it likes to connect things. And I've got this set of facts that really happen, this set of falsehoods that I lied about. My brain wants to make those two, wants to connect them. And soon enough, people who lie all the time can't tell the difference between what they lie and what they tell the truth. It's unbelievable, it's destructive. So our perception of what selfishness is, line-cheating, stealing, being a Wim worship or going by emotions are just wrong. Those people are not selfish. We need a new word. Those people are self-destructive. They're not self-less, but they're self-destructive. They're destroying themselves. You don't wanna do that. You don't wanna be self-destructive. You wanna be self-building, self-creating. You wanna be happy. You wanna be successful. To do that, you have to stick to this notion of thinking. Okay, now, we could go, we could talk about this topic for days. I would recommend that you guys read, there's a book called The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. That I would recommend. It talks about these principles in more detail. It talks about beyond kind of the being rational, not lying, not cheating. What are the other principles? And I'm just gonna give you a quick overview of some of these. One of the things necessary for human happiness, one of the things necessary for human happiness is self-esteem. And I know you probably heard a lot about self-esteem and you probably at school they had self-esteem and all this stuff. But what is self-esteem? Self-esteem is a certain sense of confidence, a certain sense of ability that you have about your own life, about your ability to succeed, about pursuing challenges and goals. Without that sense, you cannot ever achieve happiness. You will always undercut yourself. You have to, you will never challenge yourself. You need to have the confidence in yourself to be able to challenge yourself. It's a sense of all being about yourself. It's a sense that you are worthy. That's what self-esteem is. Now where does self-esteem come from? Now we're taught that self-esteem comes from getting a ribbon in school, right? And the more ribbons we give to more people, the more people will have self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from patting people in the back, right? No. Self-esteem doesn't come from other people. Nobody can give you self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from you. Self-esteem comes from you setting goals and achieving them and when you achieve them, patting yourself on the back, acknowledging your own success, acknowledging the fact that you've made an achievement, that you've done something special. That's where self-esteem comes from. And self-esteem is crucial, crucial for the idea of happiness. Now what activity in life do you think generates the most self-esteem? Where are you gonna get the self-esteem from? Where is it that you're gonna be challenged? Where is it that you're gonna be pushed? Where is it that you're gonna have this opportunity to pat yourself on the back? It's primarily where you spend, or going to spend, whether you like it or not, and I encourage you to like it, where you're gonna spend most of your time, which is at work, which is doing stuff, creating stuff. So I wanna talk just a little bit and then I'll end about the virtues of work and having a career and taking that career seriously and not just going to work for the sake of going to work, not doing work that you don't like, but finding work that you love, finding work you're passionate about, and going to work because you love it and you wanna do it and it's exciting. To me, this is the most important decision you're making life because the fact is that whoever you marry or whatever hobbies you have or however much weightlifting you do or everything, you're gonna spend a majority of your life at work. You wanna make it count. You wanna make it good. You wanna make it fun. Now it's not always gonna be fun, right? I mean, the challenge is, but you wanna make it something that you are passionate about. Don't settle. Just like I would say don't settle for a relationship that's just there, blah, right? Don't settle for a job that's just, find something that really excites you and then challenge yourself and push yourself and achieve stuff. And when you achieve stuff, recognize the fact that you've achieved it and don't wait for your boss to recognize it. I mean, what external people think of you is not that important in life. The most important thing in life is what you think of yourself. So patch yourself on the shoulder. Go out for an ice meal, celebrate. Build that self-esteem. Build that confidence that you can attain stuff, that you can build stuff, that you can make something of your own life. And if you do that systematically over life, if you find something that you're passionate, excited about, if you pursue it, if you achieve stuff, that's what's gonna build this sense of happiness and success and prosperity. Be productive. Mutuals, people who live off of other people are never, ever happy from a completely different topic. People who receive welfare will never be happy. I can guarantee it. You cannot achieve happiness off of somebody else's back. This is the big tragedy of welfare. It's not that they're taking my money to give it to somebody else, but that they're giving it to somebody else because that somebody else is now deprived of their ability to ever achieve happiness. Happiness comes from working for yourself, creating, I mean, the money, money's not, money's just a piece of paper. It's what that money represents. When you get a raise, it's not about more money, it's about the fact that you earned a raise. That you cannot take care of yourself better than you could before. That you are now creating more wealth than you did before. It's about the stuff that you can buy with that money, not the money in and out of itself. But it's what the money represents, which is your skill and ability, your achievement, right? Money represents your achievement when you earn it. But if somebody gives you the money, or if you win the lottery, most lottery winners are incredibly unhappy people, five, 10 years later. Because they didn't earn it, so it's meaningless to them. You think that it's the yacht that's gonna make you happy, no. It's earning the money to buy the yacht that will make you happy. The yacht is just cherry on top of the cake. But the real cake, the real happiness, the real good stuff is the making the money. It's the work, it's your knowledge that you are worth this, right? That you earned it, okay? So, I'll end with this. Be selfish. Being selfish means think, think, think. But it's not just about thinking, it's about acting. It's about acting based on those thoughts. And the most important activity that you will engage in in your life is your work. Do it with passion, do it with fun, and recognize it when you achieve stuff. The most important thing you can do in life is to pursue happiness. Pursue it with passion and with relish. Thank you all. Questions? Author of the book is Ayn Rand, A-Y-N. That's her first name. Rand, R-A-N-D, and I would recommend anything she wrote. If you're more into fiction than nonfiction, I would definitely recommend The Fountainhead, would be the first book I would read. Now, these are big books, but I think you'll get into them and enjoy them. And Atlas Shrugged is the second book. But the other books are The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, Unknown Ideal, these are nonfiction essays which are incredibly enlightening. Go for it. So, the challenge here is to make this automatic so there is no thought process. That is to me, lying is not an option. It's not an option. It's like you saying, here's some chocolate flavored cyanide. You're gonna get a huge throat from the chocolate, but you'll die in five minutes. I mean, you'd never even think about it, right? It's automatically, no. So, if you get to the point, and this is what you have to do, to automatize it and think about it and convince yourself of it. If you can convince yourself that lying is cyanide, if your purpose in life is to be happy, if you're taking that idea seriously, if you're gonna engage with that notion, then you need to get to the point where we are convinced. And you talked about integrity before, but integrity is a huge virtue. And this is the point is if you can get to the point where you're convinced that lying is poison and that sticking to it is important, then it becomes automatic. Then you don't think about it. The whole point of principles is not to have to rethink it, because it's complicated, right? No, let me stop right now. I'll tell you what I think in a minute, because I have to figure out if I'm gonna lie or not. I mean, even, and if you rely on your emotions, right? Because sometimes telling the truth, and I'm not saying tell the truth, you have to tell people exactly what you think. You know, that's not, saying everything is not equivalent to not lying, right? Not lying is a negative, just, but I was going somewhere with this. Oh, your emotions, sometimes, it's just easier, right? Emotionally, it would feel like it's easier, like it's unpleasant to tell somebody the truth. They've asked you something and you have to tell them the truth. But if you have automatized this notion that it's poison, you just don't do it. You just don't lie. And look, the real virtue here is not about lying. The real virtue is about being honest. And what honesty means is staying true to the facts. This is about keeping the machinery healthy, right? It's being true to the facts and always being true to the facts. So, automatize it, practice it, but think about it. You know, the most underrated thing in the world is thinking, figuring stuff out. It's like, and I think that's true of all these things which you talked about integrity before. The more you ultimately convince yourself that exercising every day or twice a week is crucial, the easier it'll become to do it because it's life, right? This is what's required and it's good for me. So it's easy, but if you don't think about it and you're going by emotion, it's too much effort to go to the gym today. If you're like, then you have to rethink about it and it's just too hard. But if you make it an automatized thing, this is something my life requires and to me to be happy, I need to do this. Then again, then you stick to those virtues because it's part of your integrity. It's part of who you are. Somebody else had his hand up. Hi, I was wondering like about varying degrees of honesty because obviously you can tell someone the truth but to a varying degree, do you have to tell them certain parts of the truth or would you just advocate just everything? No, I don't advocate just everything. I mean, I think you have to know the context in which you're speaking, what the purpose is. This is the point. I don't think you should ever get a value from somebody under a false pretense. Now, there are a lot of circumstances where you're not really getting a value out of them. It doesn't really matter one way or another. So you don't owe anybody. Somebody comes up to you and says, how are you doing today? I mean, they're not really asking you for the whole medical history and what you ate this morning and everything, right? There's a context. And even there, if you barely know them and you're not feeling well, well, you don't have to tell them you're not feeling well. But you're not getting anything out of them because you're not telling them the complete truth. But if they're about to give you something because X, Y, Z is happening, you can't pretend that X, Y, Z is happening when it's not. So think of it, you don't want to receive stuff. It goes back to the idea of earning. You want to make sure that the values you get from people in your relationships with them are earned. You've earned them. You're not faking. You're not cheating. You're not lying in order to get something. And remember, people play games, right? When your wife asks you, do I look fat in this dress? She's not asking you for a real answer. This is not a real question. This is a game you play, right? And if she is, then you should tell her what you really think. But usually, this is just a kind of a... Everybody knows the rules, particularly if you've been married as long as I have, right? Now I tell my wife the truth because I know she's really asking. And she looks amazing for being married 30 years. So amazing for being married 10 years. So there is a context. The point is that the strategy has to be a strategy of honesty. The strategy is I'm connected to reality. What I care about are facts. What I care about in my relationships with other people is that they're factual, that they're real, that they're upfront, that they're on the table, that we're not deceiving one another. And that that person therefore can trust me and therefore I can trust that other person and that the relationship can go forward, right? Thank you. Hi, I couldn't resist asking the obvious question. What is the probability of Western civilization surviving and why? Why such a depressing topic? I guess I asked for it, huh? Well, I mean, you can be optimistic is my view. It's a mistake to be optimistic because the world around us is financially, economically, culturally, morally crumbling. I don't think it has to crumble. I don't think it's inevitable, but I think the risks that are out there in the world are tremendous. They're not marginal. What's happening right now in Europe is not trivial. I mean, again, you guys are young. You tend to view the world as only with opportunities and I don't want to destroy that because I think that's wonderful, right? But if you look around the world today from an economic perspective, from the perspective of opportunities for jobs and entrepreneurship and everything, they are being decimated, those opportunities. Now, I'll tell you why I think, but I don't have time to prove the whole thing. I think it has to do with statism. It has to do with the growth of government. It has to do with the fact that we live in societies where the government wants to dictate how we live, what we should do, how we should do it, when we should do it. To start a business in the world today is becoming more and more and more difficult. To be an entrepreneur is becoming more and more and more difficult. To make money is becoming more and more and more difficult. To live, you know, in New York City, they now want to tell us how big our drinks should be, you know, how much sugar we should have in our drinks and I'm against sugar. I don't like sugar and you'll probably hear some lectures about diet, the sugar's bad for you, but it's none of their business. None of anybody's business, how much sugar I consume. We want to socialize everything. We want to regulate everything. We want to control everything. And bring it back to what I was talking about. Think of it this way. I believe in self-interest. I believe that each one of us is capable of pursuing our own happiness. I believe you're all rational. Each one of you is rational. I can't decide anything for you. I can't choose values for you. You have to make those choices for yourself. Each one of your life is precious to you and should be precious to everybody else, but it's your life delivers you choose to see fit. We live in a society that won't let us alone to live our life as we choose fit. We live in a society that wants to dictate our lives, that wants to tell us how to do and what to do and when to do it. And that is incredibly destructive. Western civilization came into being or flourished in the intersection of two ideas that happened in the 18th century. And that is the idea of science, the idea of reason, the idea of rationality. This is the scientific revolution, coming out of Newton and all those scientists in the 17th and 18th century. So the idea of science and reason and the idea of individualism, and those are not unrelated, right? Who thinks? Who uses their minds? Individuals. There's no collective consciousness. There's no collective mind. We don't choose values for all of us. Only you choose your values. Only you can figure out what's good for you. So individualism reason, reason can only be used by individuals. When those two things think about the Declaration of Independence in the United States where it was said that each individual has an inalienable right to their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, not accident that I used that term. And that intersection with the scientific revolution, bam, what you get is the industrial revolution, what you get is life expectancy is going from 35. 35, I'd be dead. Most of you are entering the last few, you know, decade of your life, right? That was life 200, only 200 years ago. Human beings have been living for 10,000 years, 20,000 years, 100,000 years. I don't know the science of this, right? 35 years was the life expectancy from much of that history. And the only last 200 years that we've gone from 35 years to 80, for you guys maybe 100, that is the consequence of capitalism, of individualism and of science. And science is under attack, it's under attack philosophically and it's under attack by government funding because government decides what's good science and what's bad science. Capitalism is under attack, capitalism doesn't exist anymore. We all live in various socialist countries to various degrees and individualism is under attack. We all believe that we should live for the group in some group sense, right? In some sense, everybody has their own group they want to sacrifice for, right? And selfishness is considered an evil and bad thing. So the probability of all us reversing all those trends and getting things back on the right track and fixing all our economies and fixing our cultures and fixing our lives is not zero, but it's not 90% either. It's, I think it's low, but you know what? You only live once and if you don't fight for your own life, what are you gonna do? What, roll over and play dead? This is about fighting for life. This is about enjoying it and finding whatever, the best life that you can live in the given the circumstances. My life is dedicated for fighting the fight. I want to save Western civilization. That's my goal in life. And I spend many, many, this is my passion. I enjoy my work, whether I'm successful or not, you know. Who knows? But yeah, just look at Greece, project 20 years in the future, that's America. If nothing changes. I mean, that's just the numbers. I'm a finance guy, right? Just the numbers. America is gonna have as much debt as Greece and as an awful situation economically as Greece has right now in 20 years unless something changes. And I could give you the numbers but I don't want to bore you with that stuff. James. I just want to come back to some of the points you made about lying with respect to integrity. So assuming that, speak up. Assuming that integrity is obviously the consistent application of your virtues in pursuit of your values. And you spoke about kind of automatizing that process. I'm a big believer that we can kind of recondition ourselves to, you know, automatically pursue these things and achieve these things and affect our emotions. But what would you say should be someone's response to themselves if without the intention, they accidentally were inconsistent in their application of that or their pursuit of that. They didn't realize it at the time but in hindsight they looked back and thought, oh, I didn't quite do what I should have done then. What would you suggest, you know, what should someone go through in terms of dealing with that? So look, we all make mistakes. Mistakes are a part of learning about life. I mean, like, you know, failure has done properly, right? Is not horrific, right? Look at Steve Jobs. You know the story of Steve Jobs. He was fired from Apple, right? And his life seemed over. And he started a company and the company went nowhere and he didn't do that much and then he, but he learned from that. He figured stuff out. He used that opportunity to grow and to be better. The same thing happens when you slip on anything, you know, when you slip on your diet, when you slip on your exercise routine or when you slip in lying or in a relationship. Learn from it. Make amends. Making amends is important. I didn't talk about justice and the virtue of justice and what justice means but you want to be just to the people. If you've hurt somebody accidentally or if you've hurt somebody because you didn't think it through and so on, the first thing you need to do is fix it. Just make amends. Don't come down on yourself other than in a sense of trying to fix it. The purpose is to fix. The purpose is to live, right? And you're not viling some kind of intrinsic code that, you know, somebody's gonna come down with a bolt of lightning and strike you. So it's all about you. It's all about how do I take what I did and turn it into something positive that I can learn from, that I can build on and I can make better, right? Again, the focus is always making your life better. Building, you know, on their life. And integrity, you know, the concept, again, according to Rand, there are seven virtues and I barely touched on two. You could, again, you could do this for a whole day easily. But integrity is this consistent application of these virtues to your life rational virtues, right virtues, right? So it's about not just saying I'm honest but being honest all the time, consistently, in the sense in which we've discussed, right? It's about, it's not about just saying, yeah, you know, rationality's okay, but being rational and applying it. So, you know, when I encounter something new that I've never encountered before, so I can't rely on the automatic on what I've automatized. I stop for a minute if I have the time, right? If it's an emergency, you don't have time. But I stop for a minute and I think it's through. You know, what's going on here? Why is this happening? What are my options? What's the rational choice? What's the irrational choice? What is a probable outcome? Two days from now, five years from now, 400 years from now. You know, what's 400 years in exaggeration? My lifespan, right? I don't really care what happens in 400 years. I can kind of project my children's lifespan and maybe vaguely my grandkids but beyond that, to hell with the world. No, I mean, this is about being self-interested. It's about me. I can't even project, I can't think in terms of a thousand years from now. I mean, it's meaningless. So why bother? So think, you know, stop, evaluate, figure out. So let me talk briefly about emotions if we have a moment, because it's a really important topic. What are emotions? Where do they come from, right? You feel stuff. We all feel stuff. It's good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's pleasant. Sometimes not. But we have these emotions that come up. Where do they come from? Why do we feel fear in the night when we see a shadow flashing in the background? You know, where does that come from? What's that? It comes from previous thinking that we've done or previous experiences that we've had. So we've come to certain conclusions and you do this through our childhood without even knowing. You come to conclusions. Maybe a dog scared you when you were three and you might today, every time you see a dog, feel fear, a pang of fear. Is it rational? No, but you came to a conclusion about dogs when you were three, that they're bad nasty animals and now it's hard to get rid of it. Not everybody comes to these conclusions, but we do, we come to some conclusions. And our emotions are consequences of ideas, consequences of conclusions. And the best example of this is the fact that our emotions change, right? You fall in love with somebody and you spend some time with them and you learn some new stuff about them and you fall out of love with them. Why? Because of the new information you have leads you to new conclusions which leads your emotions to change. I used to get teary-eyed when I lived in Israel every time the national anthem and flag would go up and I was very patriotic and a big Zionist in those days. To some extent it's the law, but I'd get teary-eyed and everything, but at some point my values changed and I decided, for example, to go to America. And now I can hear the Israeli anthem and I have no emotional response to it. I just don't feel it. My values changed, my thinking about what's good for me and what's right has changed, my emotions change as a consequence. So your emotions change based on your thinking, but some of the thinking, you're not away you did. You might have done it when you were a kid. Some of you are thinking it might be flawed, it might be mistakes. Emotions are these automatic responses that are results from these thinking. You want to embrace your emotions, you want to recognize your emotions, you want to live through your emotions which you don't want to make decisions based on emotions. Emotions are not cognition, they're not thinking, they're outcomes from thinking. So unless you're in an emergency and you have to work on emotions and instinct because there's nothing else, think, think, think because you can't always trust. I'm not against emotions, I'm all for emotions because that's how we experience life. But they're not tools of cognition, they don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad, what's true and what's false. They can give you signals, they can give you hints and you want to use that in your thinking but the ultimate arbitrator of all these issues is your mind, is your rational thought. This guy here was waiting patiently. Okay, we'll get him, yep. If we make a decision to decide that we're going to tell the truth, moving forward, does that then imply that actually what we need to do is look at it retrospectively and sort of almost right the wrongs that we've done in the past, particularly with people that are close to us in our lives? You know, I'm not a psychologist but I would suggest that if there are people important to you in your life going forward, then the answer is probably yes. That is that you can't have a healthy relationship with somebody going forward if you've deceived them in the past. Even if they'll never figure it out, you will never be whole with that relationship. There'll be something always that keeps you apart. So, what do you have to do with everybody? No, but I think certainly if anybody you think you're going to have a relationship with, yes. And again, context and how you do it, all of that is nuanced and I leave that to the professional psychologist. I'm not an expert on these things. But the real issue is to make a commitment and the commitment is, you guys are focusing primarily on lying but I want you to focus on the thinking and I want you to understand that lying is destructive to thinking and that's why you shouldn't do it and that's the context in which you shouldn't do it. So, figure it out. Each one of you has a different circumstances. Each one of you lives your own lives. Figure out what's right in your life. Within this context of thinking, thinking, thinking, I want facts, I don't want falsehood. I want my relationships to be healthy and truthful and good and growing and flourishing and to do that, I can't lie or I shouldn't lie. Hi, I've been reading some books on happiness and self-confidence and you also mentioned those two concepts quite a lot in your talk and you mentioned that both can be achieved but more recently I stumbled upon the idea that happiness and self-confidence can be achieved or based upon a flawed mental model of if I work hard then I can be happy or if I get a car then I can be happy. So, the idea was that both happiness and self-confidence are innate or default states, something you simply have and you spent your entire life being or learning how to be unhappy and not self-confident. It wasn't that... So, there's a lot of, I hate to call it science because I don't believe it is, pseudoscience out there that suggests that we are innately happy or we innately have self-confidence or we're not innately happy. There's actually science, so-called science that suggests that some people are born with a happiness gene and other people are not born with a happiness gene and therefore some people will never be happy and some people are always happy no matter what they do. I don't think any of that is true. I just think it's bogus science and it's bogus research. I believe that happiness and all human values are earned. They are things that you gain. The problem is that most people, most people, I mean most, 90 plus percent of people don't think about being happy. They don't plan for being happy. They don't even consider happiness they say to themselves, I want to be happy but they don't know what that even constitutes. They say, oh, I'll make more money, I'll be happy but they haven't really thought about it. They haven't thought about what more money means to them, why they want more money, what they're gonna do with it, is it symbolic of something virtuous? And indeed most of them are ripped to shreds by the fact that they know that to be really good, they must not be happy. There's an economy in our society between morality, goodness, being just, being noble, being virtuous, and being happy. Emmanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher said that if you meet somebody who's happy, be wary of them, be very suspicious of them because they're probably immoral. And the reason they're immoral is because they achieve happiness if you have to think about yourself and selfishness is a bad thing. I mean that's the logic. But that's the logic we all have in our heads because that's the logic conventional morality has taught us and we've absorbed. We might not hold it consciously but it's in there, it's in your subconscious. So most people achieve happiness and they feel guilty about it and that undercuts their happiness. And then they say, oh, but I've achieved all this and I'm not feeling happy as their theory doesn't work. No, you have to get rid of all this unearned guilt. You have to unload it. You have to commit yourself to scientifically, just like in everything else, scientifically figuring out what's good for you. What will really lead you to happiness? It's not achieving for the sake of achieving, it's achieving for the sake of being happy. Now let's say you really wanna become, I'll take an example out of the found head. You really wanna become a painter. But your mother really wants you to become an architect or society thinks that painting is frivolous and you can't ever make enough money in painting to live. So you become an architect instead and you hate architecture. But you achieve, your peers love you and you make a lot of money in architecture, but you're real passion is to be a painter. Do you think you'll ever be happy? Probably not, probably not. And you see, people's achievements are measured by the wrong factor, not by their values, not by their standards, but by societies, by their families, by their neighbors, by other peoples. You have to decide what makes you happy. You have to decide what achievements count and if you do that, you will gain happiness. You know, I know it, I wasn't born happy. I cried a lot when I was a baby. No, I mean, there's no, this is ridiculous. This is a Buddhist kind of passivity is life. Just hang out, just don't do anything and that's the natural state, but that's bullshit. If that happened, we'd all die. We'd all die. The value that you have, the food that you eat, the cause that you drive, everything that you own is because somebody is working hard, including you, hopefully, right? It's that thought, it's that work, it's that energy, it's that creation. That's what life is really about and that's what happiness will really lead to and I would be very suspicious of happiness books generally. I'd be very suspicious if anybody tells you that, you know, unthinking, not thinking, not engaging, not being passionate, not being going out there and doing the stuff that you love to do is somehow detrimental, you know, that doing all that is somehow detrimental to you. It's not true. We done? Thank you all. Next up is a returning speaker to the 21 convention. I had the pleasure to introduce him just a few months ago in London. Amazing speech, can't wait to hear what Yaron's got in store for us today. This is Yaron Brooke. He is the president and executive director of the Ein Rand Institute. He's the co-author of an upcoming bestseller, keep your eyes peeled for it, called Free Market Revolution and you can find out more at einrand.org. That's A-Y-N-R-A-N-D dot org. So let me help to, help me introduce Yaron to the stage. Thanks. Thank you all and yeah, it is gonna be a bestseller and I need your help so you can pre-order copies on Amazon as we speak on your phone. So I wanna kind of leverage what you just heard from Eric and kind of use the material we just talked about to kind of take it to what I think is maybe a deeper level of the next level and build on the material we've already heard. One of the issues that I think exists out there in the whole, if you will, self-help industry, I mean, which is a huge industry and it seems to ebb and flow in terms of the theories and it's as Eric mentioned, it's been around since the early part of the century and hey, if they got it right, why do we still need more stuff, right? I mean, why isn't this a done deal? And I think that the whole phenomena brings up some interesting questions of why is there a need for this industry, why is it so challenging, right? Why is it such that we keep getting these ups and downs and we keep getting all this contradictory advice? And I think it goes back to something that Eric mentioned and it's this notion that the two kind of ways in which to view self-made or to view self-help or to view what it means to live a good life, what it means to live a life. And that is one, this Christian notion that ultimately the purpose of life is not your own well-being. Ultimately, you wanna become good or whatever you wanna do so you can help other people. So the focus of everything in life is other people. That's one approach that I think is very, very dominant in our culture. Think about Bill Gates, right? Think about Bill Gates making billions and billions of dollars. In the 1980s and the 1990s, how does he make his billions of dollars? He makes it by creating a product. And what does he do with that product? How do you make money? How do you make money? General question. So millions of copies. What? So millions of copies, but there has to be an assumption, right? Because if it costs me 100 bucks to produce something and I sell millions of copies for a buck, do I make millions? No, so what do I have to be able to sell it for? What? For a profit, which means above whatever it costs me to make, right? And it has to be a good enough products of people value it more than what? More than their money. So if I sell you a piece of software for 100 bucks, it has to be worth more than 100 bucks the person who buys it. And in Bill Gates's case, anybody have an assessment of how much that piece of software actually was worth to people who bought it in the 80s and 90s? So you paid 100 bucks, let's say for wood or for DOS or something like that. How much was it worth to the person buying it? A lot. I mean, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a lot. Maybe even millions. Because it changed your life. Because it changed computers and it changed everybody's life. And suddenly we were all networked. Suddenly you didn't have to have a typewriter. You guys are too young to even know what that is, I know. But it's those old things where you clunk. Suddenly everything changed and the value of that piece of software is a lot more than 100 bucks. So here is Bill Gates. He's making all of our lives infinitely better, infinitely better. And he's making gazillions of dollars doing that. And as a culture, what do we think of him? Going back to that culture. I mean, is he a good guy? Is this a guy? We all think he's a great businessman. We all want to be gazillionaires, right? But is he a good guy, right? Is he like, are we going to build statues to him? Are we going to praise him to the hilt? Is this like Mother Teresa's over here? Where's Bill Gates? Way down there, right? I mean, he's not a good, he's not morally from an ethical perspective from the kind of, the view of what goodness is Bill Gates doesn't rank. He's made all of our lives better but he's made money at it so he doesn't count. When does he become a good guy? When he gives it away. And that's that view, 19th century Christian view. It's okay to make billions, only if you land up giving it away. Only if you land up serving other people. That's the purpose of life is to serve other people. That's the essential. And if you make stuff, money, while serving other people, that's not that good. It's okay, but it's not that good. So for example, you know, you know micro loans? These loans that people go into developing countries and they give these small little loans to very poor people and they, you know, to help them start businesses on. And it's proved to be incredibly successful in really getting entrepreneurship going in poor countries. So there are companies that do it that are not for profit and their success is so-so. And then there are companies that do it for profit and they're phenomenally successful. But who is considered better? The nonprofit. Because they're not getting anything in return. So notice that there's a, we live in a culture that in terms of respect, in terms of admiration, in terms of what gets moral, ethical, virtue points, right? You get them when you sacrifice. What does the sacrifice mean? You give something or do you get it in return? Nothing or something less, valuable, right? Because if you give something and you get more in return, what do we call that? Profit, we call it a trade, right? That's a trade. When I give you something and you give me something that's worth more to me, you got something more and I got something more, that's a trade, right? And that's a win-win. We're both better off. When I buy Microsoft product, Bill Gates is better off, I'm better off. It's a win-win. Sacrifice is lose-win or win-lose, depending on what side of the sacrifice you're on, right? So, and that, that is way up here. That's up there with Mother Teresa, right? That's good. So we live in a culture where lose-wins are good and win-wins are just okay. Kind of weird, right? Just doesn't, there's something strange about that, but think about relationships. Think about the value we place just our terminology. We talk in hushed tones and with reverence towards people who sacrifice, how wonderful that is. In other words, losing is good. That comes out of this notion that your life is not your life. The only purpose to make your life better is to serve other people. The alternative to that has always be presented as, yeah, you should make your most of your life and what that means is whatever you feel like it is, whatever you feel like doing, anything goes. There is no standard for determining what is a good life, right, whether it's a billion dollars, a hot woman, whether it's this career, that career, whatever you feel like doing is good. Feelings is the guide. Feelings is the motivation. If you think that a good life comes from lying, cheating, stealing, well, we don't advise it because you might get caught and stuff and go to jail, but who are we to say that that's not right? Anything goes. Anything's permissible. That's what being a self-made person is supposed to mean. And nobody actually says it, but it's no because nobody actually tells you to go lie, steal, and cheat. Nobody would actually advocate that, but the implication is that it's all okay. As long as you can achieve the outcome, there's a whole school of philosophy and going back to Dewey, those whole school of pragmatism, which basically says, if you can get away with it, whatever will get you to your goal, that's okay. And self-interest, when you talk about people being self-interested, when we talk about people being selfish, that's the kind of image we have. Because when you say to somebody, you're selfish. Do you mean that as a compliment? No. You mean that as a derogatory term? When we look at somebody and say that person's selfish, what do we mean by that? We mean he's a what? What? Yeah, but what do we mean by that? What kind of behavior is he exhibiting when we say that? What's that? Do we really mean he's being successful? He's a taker. He's a mean, lying, cheating, stealing, would stab you in the back if he thought he could get away with it. That's what we mean by it. But what does selfish as a word actually mean? What does the term mean? Yeah, taking care of self. Taking care of self, which is what you're all here to do, to take care of yourself, to make your lives better, to improve your diet, improve your physique. I mean, this is one of the few self-help conferences that actually has a kind of philosophical component to it, but you're here to make your lives better. And yet that term, making your life better, being selfish, is associated with all this garbage. Backstabbing, lying, stealing, cheating, whatever it takes. The symbol of being selfish today in America is booty made of. You know booty made of us? Permit scheme guy, $50 billion. So the notion is that selfish, and then this is how words work. This is our concept of selfish, i.e., taking care of self equals booty made of. Who wants to take care of themselves if you're gonna be booty made of? That sucks. I mean, we all know he's an evil criminal. He's a bad guy, nobody. So even, so we've got Christianity over here telling you take care of yourself only for the purpose of helping other people. And that sounds like a conflicting contradictory message. It's not just Christianity. Everybody says that, right? It's secular philosophy. Everybody gives that kind of advice. And then over here is, yeah, but what selfish really means is booty made of. So I don't wanna quite live for other people. I kinda wanna make myself better for myself, but I don't wanna be booty made of either. And it's a contradiction, right? And this is where I think a proper understanding of what self-interest means and what it requires and what it takes is necessary if you're gonna take on the responsibility of making yourself the best that you can be. Because the psychological traps that are involved in both of these are gonna undercut you constantly. So if you believe that Mother Teresa that giving up everything and going and living for other people, that's a moral ideal. Now we don't really wanna do that cause we like our lives and life's too good to actually do that and dating and stuff like that. She had no sex and everything, right? I mean, it kinda sucks being Mother Teresa, but she's a moral ideal, it does. And you read her diary, she was miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable. She had a horrible life, but that's okay because she did it in order to be miserable, that was her goal, right? Because happiness is selfish. If that's a moral ideal and yet we're living this life of sex and money and doing well and happiness, what are we gonna feel? If we wanna be Mother Teresa, but we know we can never achieve that. If we know that's what good means, but we know we'll never be good, what does that lead to a feeling inside? What kind of feeling? Starts with a G, yeah, guilt. And so many people are guilty out there. So many people do not succeed in life, do not attain their values, do not pursue their own values and when they pursue them, when they're successful, they don't enjoy it. You know how many rich people are unhappy? Lots of rich people unhappy. Lots of people who, you know, what was it, a hot wife and money and I can't remember the third one, but you know, I'll attain those things, right? But they don't, it's meaningless to them because they feel guilty about it. So guilt kills you and what this, you know, what this religious base, but it's also secular and everything, this idea of living for other people generates and people trying to pursue self-help is guilt. And that's why so many self-help programs in my view fail. It's because what are we leading to? You're not gonna help other people by helping yourself. That's not, can't be the purpose, that's contradiction. And this notion that you can do whatever you feel like doing can lead you easily to Bernie Madoff and is that happy, is Bernie happy? No, he's in jail, not very happy place. His son committed suicide because of what he did. A year after Bernie Madoff was arrested, his son committed suicide. I can't think of a more horrific thing to happen to a human being than to know that you caused the death of your own child, your behavior. But even before he was caught, do you think he was happy? How many of you have ever lied? Yeah, you can be honest, come on. For a change, you can be honest. Lies, the lies make you feel good. Do they help you actually achieve, talk about relationships? Do you think that you can have a healthy relationship with a woman by lying to her? Do you think that leads to good stuff? I mean lying just doesn't work, it sucks. It really is a bad strategy for success. It doesn't work in the workplace. It doesn't work with relationships. It doesn't work the worst kind of lies. The worst by far kind of lies is when you like to whom? Yourself, it completely screws you up. So the Bernie Madoff strategy doesn't work if you want to pursue yourself. So Bernie Madoff was a miserable, pathetic human being, human mother Teresa, right? I think that's true. He was miserable, pathetic before he was caught. He says today that he's happy in jail than before he was caught, and I believe him. Because he doesn't have to lie anymore. Lying makes you miserable. So this doesn't lead to happiness. This do whatever you feel like doing whatever. This doesn't make you happy because you're always gonna feel guilty because you're not actually pursuing other people's well-being. You're trying to make yourself better. It's a no-win situation. Of course, you need new strategies for self-help all the time because there's no way to get out of this trap. Well, there is. And Eric started to talk about it, and I think it's Ayn Rand's idea of what Morale is really about. What goodness, what righteousness, what virtue is really about. And it's not about other people. When people tell you your purpose in life should be to help other people, the real question to ask them is very simple. It's three letters. It's why. And there's never any answer. Why should I help other people? Why should my purpose in life be to serve others? Why? It's because somebody said so. That's the only answer that exists. But the real question is you all will all living beings. We're all living beings. Individual living beings. What should be our purpose as a living being? What is the purpose of every living being? There are no plants in this room. I would have pointed to a plant. But what if plants try to do? If they had a plant, I hope you have plants. Life is good, right? All life. Plants, you put a plant in a shade. What does it try to do? Try to grow towards the light. Why? What's it pursuing? What's it trying to attain? Life. It wants to live. It's trying to figure out, trying to get the value that is acquired for its life. What is the value in this case? Light. If 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? Is 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 Bernie Madoff. 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 Madoff did. 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, the philosophy that should guide anybody pursuing self-help and 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. 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 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 wanna 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? When 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 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 sabertooth 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 them 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 sabertooth tiger? We killed them all, we did. Human beings, how do we do that? We're so weak and pathetic. Big sticks, but 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, 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 are 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's 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, to integrate it, understand it, do stuff with it, right? Figure stuff out. What do we call that? Starts with an R. What's that? This is how we self-actualize. Creativity is an aspect of this. 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, if you've ever seen a chart, I don't have a whiteboard here, but I've 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, he starts, 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 that inflection point? Anybody know what that date is? It starts going up. Now at 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 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. Explicitly recognizes the importance of reason in making human life better. And once that happens, what do you get at the same time? You get a scientific revolution and you get an industrial revolution. And you get whose reason, who reasons? Eric said something about digesting. We can't digest collectively. Can we reason collectively? Is there a consciousness up here somewhere that are collecting all our consciousnesses in which we reason? Now, who reasons? Individuals. Each one of us reasons. We each have a mind. We can share ideas. We can feed off of each other. We can trade intellectually. But it's us as individuals who are the only ones who can actually reason. It's not an accident too that the age of reason leads to a political revolution that's about individualism, which is what the founding of this country is about, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You're right, each one of you as individuals. Not some collective right. You're right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right? So the age of reason leads to industrialization. It leads to individualism. It leads to that. You don't get that until reason is discovered during the Enlightenment. Before that, if you think of the way, think of the poorest people in the world today, I don't know, Africa, Asia, wherever, probably Africa, that's how everybody lived 300 years ago, pretty much. I mean, there was some people who lived up here, but they were talking about income inequality. Income inequality was really dramatic back then, right? The kings and then everybody else. But everybody else pretty much lived subsistence farmers like the poorest people in the world today. Just to give you a sense of how, in a sense, not really lucky, but how much we benefited from the fact that this happened. This is all before us and we're benefiting from it. So reason. Reason of what makes everything we have around us, these lights, I mean, Thomas Edison's reason, right? We get electricity. We get the light bulb. I mean, Benjamin Franklin. Without his work, we wouldn't have electricity. We wouldn't have a light bulb. These buildings, architects, somebody had to figure that out. Again, no gene. But everything in your life is about that. Everything in your life needs to be figured out. You don't have an instinct for mating. We don't. It's hard, right? You gotta figure it out. I mean, you gotta talk this morning about some strategies around that and how to think, how to think about relationships. That was the whole point. How to plan. And it's really crucial. This is about thinking. Even when talking about how to think about yourself and how to undo maybe certain psychological issues, it's about thinking about yourself. There's no other way. They have these rooms that all pattern. You go and you yell and you scream and you bang on the walls. It's fun, but it doesn't help you. The only self-help is from figuring out what the problems are and figuring out what the solution should be. Thinking, thinking, thinking. So if you really wanna be properly selfish, not the lying, stealing type, but the type who takes care of self, then the number one value, the number one virtue has to be thinking. It has to be taking reason, taking rationality seriously. Taking your own mind seriously. So we're here about cultivating a body and that's great about how to eat right and how to have a good physique. And you need that, right? Cause you need to be healthy in order to do anything in life, but to really achieve something in life. To really be good at what you wanna be. You need to use your mind. You need to figure it out. Even when it comes to diet and exercise, right? Who are we bringing, who is being brought up here? It's people who've studied it, who've done research, who've figured it out, right? They've used their mind. They've used reason in order to figure out diet. And if you spend, you know, a lot of us spend a lot of time reading diet books and reading nutrition books and looking at the labels and figuring out what we can and cannot eat. And we spend a lot of time figuring out what kind of weights to use and how many times a day to exercise or how many times a day, how many times a year to exercise, I guess, it's gonna be, right? Cause the whole idea is you shouldn't exercise too much. But you know, what kind of weights and all this stuff, right? We spend a huge amount of time on that. Well, what I'm saying is that's the kind of time and thought and effort and energy that needs to be spent on every aspect of your life. Every aspect of life. What kind of career do you want? What am I really good at? And it can't just be about the money. I mean, money can be important, but it can't just be about the money. Cause believe me, if you set the career goal, if you set your goal as I wanna make a million bucks, but the only way to do that and get a million bucks is to do something that I hate doing, getting a million bucks is not gonna be satisfying. It's not gonna be fun. You're not gonna enjoy yourself. Rather be poorer and do something that you love doing than be rich and hate what you're doing. It's about the process. It's about what you love and understanding what you love. Take Eric, you know, he could have gone and invented a light bulb or something, right? But he loves teaching. And you know how much they pay teachers? Nothing. I mean, it's like one of the poorest professions out there. True or not, right? Yeah, absolutely. But he loves it, right? So, I mean, I can guarantee you, he's happier standing in front of a classroom, teaching on a regular basis and making less money than going out and working, I don't know on, what would you, I don't know Eric Wellenifton or what he would have done otherwise. You know, I would have done, I've got a PhD in finance. I could have gone to Wall Street. I could have gone to Wall Street. But I would have been bored in Wall Street. This is much more fun than making millions of dollars in Wall Street for me, not necessarily for you, but for me. I wouldn't exchange my life for a life on Wall Street any day. Yeah, I'd have a fancier car. You know, I don't think I could have a hotter wife than I already have. Uh, it's true. I'd be married, I'll be married in February. I'll be married 30 years, three zero. So, I can't talk about dating because I don't remember dating. So, for Ayn Rand, for the idea of truly being self-interested, the key is to think, but to think about everything in life, including, as I said, career. What do I love doing? Why do I love it? Do I love it for the right reasons? Somebody talked about parents giving advice, right? A parent cannot choose a career for you. Cannot choose a career for you, you have to choose it. And, you know, I used to ask my, you know, because there's this idea that you should choose a career based on what will do the most good for humanity, right? It's this, again, this 19th century notion. I used to ask my students, how many of you, how many of you made a list of all the professions in the world and then ranked them based on the social utility where you could do the best for humankind and chose that? And usually there's one poor soul who raises their hand. And then it is to tell the class, you selfish bastard, right? Because you chose based on what you wanted to do, but that's a good thing. That's what it's about. Being selfish is not a bad thing. If done right, if done properly, if done fully in what means, it means to take care of self. So be rational in everything. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean no emotions? Robots, like me, right? Emotionalists, no passion. No, emotions is what you live for, right? It's the emotion, it's the good feeling, it's the happiness, it's the fun, it's the satisfaction, those are all emotions. Those are all of feelings. That's what you live for. But they're not mechanisms. Your emotions don't tell you what's good for you. They don't tell you what's right. They don't tell you, you know. And you don't live for the highs. You live for constant high. I mean, you don't live for the highs when you know there's gonna be a big bust at the end. So being selfish, being self-interested doesn't mean that if there's a line of cocaine here, I'm gonna take it because you know what? I'm gonna feel better afterwards. Why not? Because I also realize, because I can think, that there's a negative consequence. And in this case, I believe at least, that the negative consequence is greater than the high. So I don't do it. And you can apply this to the kind of food you eat, right? Sometimes emotionally we'd love to have that huge super great chocolate full of sugar and carved piece of cake, right? And we understand when it comes to food, that we sometimes have to avoid that and depress, you know, not follow our emotions but use our head. Well, again, that same principle needs to apply in everything in life. You might be attracted to an incredible woman who is gonna incredibly destroy you. And if you sat down for a minute and thought about it, you'd realize it. But you know she's hot. But weigh the benefit of one night of hot sex versus she's gonna demolish you, right? I wouldn't know what that feels like but I've seen the movie, right? It's just not worth it. It's like the chocolate cake. It's not worth it. But that's, you need to be able to use this consistently in your life in order to be able to make those kinds of judgments and be able to be strong enough. And this takes strength because we're not taught this. We're not taught to stop and think. Particularly with modern education, we're taught to emote. We're taught to follow our feelings. We're very touchy feeling these days. But that's not right. That's not what's gonna lead you to the right decisions. We're taught to listen to everybody's advice. Well, most people don't know what's good for you. You know who knows what's good for you? You do. If you spend the time to think about it. Okay, so my pitch today is thinking, right? It's thinking, thinking, thinking. Underlies everything. Everything in life and underlies the whole foundation of self-improvement. Every aspect of it, everything you hear up here over the weekend needs to be evaluated based on that. Does this make sense? Is this the way I want to live my life? Is this gonna lead me to a better life? And that's their burden to show you rationally through reason that it is, that it's going to. Hope I haven't spoiled the weekend, so. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. So that's self-interest. So emotions, good things, but they're not tools for making decisions. Where do emotions come from? How do, what do we have the emotions that we have? They keep us alive, in what sense they keep us alive? Yeah, but should we, I just made a whole case for not making decisions in your survival based on emotions. Because where do emotions come from? Are they just random, chemical, whatever in the body? Yeah, I don't, maybe, but I don't think that factors. Have you ever had a change in emotion? Because change, change leads one to understand what happens. Because have you ever had an emotion about something and then it's changed? I don't know, you loved a woman and then you stopped loving her? Yeah, it comes from your, but not, it's not even thoughts, it's conclusions. It comes from conclusions that you've come to. It's an automatic response, the subconscious conclusions that you've made already. So it's all subconscious, but it's the conclusions and when the conclusions change, what happens to their emotions? Did they change instantly? No, it takes a while, but they do change. So for example, if you're in love with a woman and you discover that she's cheating on you, right? Do you immediately not love her? I wish it was that easy, right? But it's not, it usually takes some time because what happens is our minds are these integrating machines, they like to connect stuff and it takes a time for the subconscious to catch up with your consciousness. So your emotions over time will change and they will change if you've come to a conclusion, but it takes time. So emotions are responses to conclusions that we've come to in the past. Now sometimes we've come to conclusions in our childhood about things that we weren't even aware we were making conclusions about. And that leads us to have emotional responses today that we might not even understand because they're based on conclusions that we came to a long time ago. And the only way to undo those emotions, go see a good psychotherapist if one existed, is ultimately to change those conclusions, identify what they were and change them. But emotions are just concluding, they might, those conclusions might be wrong. We might have had a nasty, mean mother and we came to conclusion about women because of that when we were three or four years old without even really being fully conscious and being fully rational, that might just be wrong. And today we have certain emotional responses that just don't match to how we'd like to have. This is why emotions are not tools of making decisions because we don't know where exactly they come from. I think the more we introspect, the more we think about ourselves, the more we study ourselves, the more we know about our emotions, the more we can fix the bad conclusions and therefore change our emotional responses. But that's hard work. And you're never quite sure you're there and that's why emotions are not the way in which we make decisions. The only time you wanna make a decision based on emotion is in a true emergency, right? When you just don't have time to think and then emotions as good as anything else. And hopefully your emotions are tuned with your conclusions and you're making the right decision. But that's rarity. How many of us really live in situations while survival depends on making instantaneous decisions? Almost none of us. Almost every decision we make, we can afford to stop and think about it. And I highly recommend doing that. Most of us get into trouble when we don't do that. So emotions come from thoughts, they come from conclusions, but we don't always know if those conclusions were right. We don't always know if those thoughts were rational and therefore we can't always trust our emotions. And that's why we always need to step back and think them through. Maybe they're fine. Maybe that emotion is absolutely right. Maybe it's not. We have to be open to that. So again, the mechanism is reason. And as a consequence, this is one of the reasons lying doesn't work. Because if our means of survival, if the way in which we create stuff is to reason, reason means what? Reason means absorbing information and analyzing it and being what about that information? Being honest about it. We want real facts. You know the computer terminology of garbage in, garbage out? If you feed something to a computer that's BS, then you're gonna get BS. You're not gonna get good stuff out of feeding. You have a computer up here. It's kind of a computer. It's more than a computer, right? If you feed it garbage, it's gonna spew out garbage. If you feed it lies, you're gonna fail. And you think that you can hold the lie separate from the truth, good luck. Because as I said, our minds are integrating machines. They love to integrate stuff. Our mind, our subconscious, doesn't know what you've defined as a lie and what isn't. It's gonna mesh them up. Most people who lie constantly can't tell the difference. Now I'm pretty old, particularly in this room, right? And I have a hard time remembering what actually happens. Like a week ago, you asked me, what did you do a week ago? I have to really think about it? I don't remember. I really don't. Now what happens when you lie? You have to remember what you did and then what else do you have to remember? What you told, the lie. And the lie comes with all kinds of complicated circumstances, right? Because you have to remember what you lied, who you lied to and who you didn't lie to. I mean, it's, wow, it's way too complicated. And you're gonna fail. I can't remember one thing. Now you want to remember two or three or four. And it's, you know, and it's layered. You know, I used to do these seminars at this company and I used to give this example of a guy who, you know, goes out and drinks with his buddies and comes home and tells his wife, oh, I was at work late. And I used to explain why this was, you can't sustain a lie like that. Even a simple lie like that just can't sustain about because what if the wife meets one of the buddies and other buddies have to know that you're lying and they have to say, yeah, he works late and what if she bumps into your boss and complains to the boss, how come he's working late all the time? And the boss says, he's not. So somebody raises the hand and says, this is exactly what happened, right? This guy was telling his wife he was working late, he was out drinking or whatever. And the wife called the boss and said, how come my husband's working late all the time? And the boss says, he's not. Guess how that relationship worked out, right? Lies don't work because they're anti-reason because they're anti-reality because they're anti-fact. So, rationality. Iron Man defines seven virtues to live by for good life. And I'm not gonna, so it's, I'm probably gonna forget one. Eric's laughing. Rationality, honesty, right? We just talked about honesty. And honesty is primarily not faking reality, primarily for yourself. Justice, justice is being rational in how you deal with other people. It should be rational how you deal with yourself, it should be rational how you deal with other people. People should get what they deserve from you. Good or bad. And you have to be objective and rational about that. Not emotional and subjective about it. Independence, you have reason. You have a mind. You are the only person who can do thinking for you. You can get advice from other people. Advice is great. You wanna listen to other people, particularly smart if they have your interests in mind. But you are the one who's gonna make the decision. You have to. You can't relinquish that. It's your life, nobody else's. You can't listen to your mother after a certain age. I mean, she's great. And I'm sure she's smart. And I'm sure she has your own interests. But you have to, you know, you have to make those decisions. You have to understand what she's saying if she's got your own interests in mind. But you have to make the decisions about what's right and wrong for you. Integrity, if you say stuff, if you believe that you're gonna be rational, that rationality is good for you, then you gotta do it, right? You gotta walk the walk of reason. I always miss one. What am I missing? Productiveness, yeah, I miss productiveness. Your life is yours, therefore you are responsible for maintaining it, for getting the physical material that needs, that you need in order to survive. Being productive is essential for your happiness. I'm gonna end with these two virtues, productiveness and pride. Pride is your commitment to be morally perfect, to be the best that you can be. Not in a superficial sense, not just the biggest, the richest, the strongest, but the best in everything that you do. That's what pride is, that commitment. And what do you need in order to have that kind of commitment? You don't need to have self-esteem. You need to be, know that you are worthy of being good. And what do you get self-esteem from? Gets from other people, from ribbons, from medals. You know, we live in a generation where everybody gets a ribbon because they think that's how you're gonna get self-esteem. Now, only you can give yourself self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from achievement. But it doesn't just come from achievement, it comes from recognizing the achievement. You achieve and you pat yourself on the back. Not your mother patting you on the back, not your friends patting you back, not your coach patting you on the back. Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan because he recognized that he could be the best. And every time he was good, he recognized that he was good and he recognized that he could get better. And worked hard to get better. He recognized, if you're looking at Michael Jordan, there's a guy with self-esteem. He's incredibly self-confident. Incredible, have a sense that he's worthy of being the greatest basketball player of all time. It's not just an accident, he's worthy of it because he worked hard, he attained it. He's got what it takes. And so it's getting those achievements, recognizing those and what area in life do you think you get the most self-esteem from? Where do you achieve stuff in life? Really, you know, people talk about, you know, where do you spend most of your life? At work, at work. It's not with family, it's not at the gym, it's not in the front of the mirror, it's at work. So if you want to build a life of self-esteem and find work you love and do it really, really, really well, not because other people expect you, not because you'll get rewarded for it, but because you will reward yourself when you make those achievements. Stretch yourself, push yourself, challenge yourself. That's where you'll get the self-confidence to be good at everything else in life. But that's the foundation. The foundation is to be good at what you do at work, being productive. And I wouldn't even call it work, I'd call it a career because a career is something planned, a career is something long-term, a career is something you develop, you move towards. It's not just the work I'm doing right now. It's the career I have. And a career is not about money, it's not about prestige, and it's not about other people, it's about you. And it's about making the most of your life, it's about fulfilling yourself, it's about being happy. So that's the seven. That's the formula for success. But it takes work. I like to say that being selfish is the hardest thing you can do. It takes hard work, because it takes figuring out what is good for me, which is not easy, and how do I achieve it? It takes using your mind all the time, in pursuit of a partner, in pursuit of a diet, in pursuit of exercise, in pursuit of your work, in pursuit of your life. But the reward, the reward of that, is what life is all about. The reward for that is that flourishing, that fulfillment. The reward for that is happiness. That's the payoff, that's what it's all about. Thank you all. Questions? Thank you very much, I really enjoyed your speech. And I had a question like you mentioned earlier about free choice, and also how others make you feel guilty, and how it's okay to be selfish. But then where does responsibility come into that? For example, let's say you have a sick child, or a child who needs special attention, or maybe you might have aging parents, and are those responsibilities that you have to take on? Are you socially obligated to take those responsibilities, or should you have the free choice to say, no, I don't want to do those things, and I want to pursue whatever I want to pursue? So I don't believe that you have any social obligations, other than to leave your neighbor alone, that is not to infringe on his right to pursue his happiness. But I don't consider a relationship with a child, or a relationship with your parents, a social. They're your relationships, they're your obligations, if they are obligations. Now, I think there's a difference when you're talking about with a child or with a parent, and I'm gonna say something controversial. My son's in the room, which makes it even more complicated. I don't think children owe anything to their parents. I don't think children owe anything to their parents, except to the extent that they love them. If you love somebody, then that love determines your relationship with them. But you don't owe them anything for bringing you into this world, you didn't ask for it. There's no contractor, right? You are not obliged to your parents, other than you have to do what they tell you to do up until a certain age, and if they pay for your college and stuff, then I think you owe them something in gratitude for that. But if you don't love your parents, I think there are plenty of people who don't love their parents. I think there's a biblical commandment that they'll show whatever to your parents, but that's just a commandment. A lot of people, not most people, a lot of people don't love their parents because their parents didn't own it. Their parents are not that good, they're not nice people. You shouldn't love people who are not nice. You're not automatically obliged to love anybody. Anybody. Everybody's love needs to be earned. So if you love your older parents and you feel part of your happiness is in helping them out when they're sick, then do it. Absolutely you should do it. But it has to be in the context of your happiness. If it's a sacrifice to help your elderly parents, you should not do it. It's your life. Your life is not theirs. You own your life, not your parents. So you should help your parents to the extent that it's part of your life. Now I think most of us love our parents and wanna help them and don't wanna see them suffer. Most of us would help our parents, but I don't condemn somebody who doesn't who says, you know what? I don't like my parents. I'm not gonna help them when they're old. Fine, I think that's perfectly. It's different with children. You brought them into the world. They are your responsibility. Even if you don't like them. Even if you don't love them. You took on an obligation when you had them. You didn't have to have sex. You could have used birth control. You could still in this country have an abortion. Once you chose to have the child, you have taken on a mountain of obligation. It's a mountain. Don't have kids if you're not willing to take it on. You don't sleep the first couple of years. They cost you, I did the calculation once. It's an astronomical amount of money, particularly if you're gonna pay for them for college. They're a huge, huge responsibility in Bhutan. You should only do it if you really want to. But once you do it, you're locked in. It's like, you know, you sign a contract to buy a house. You bought it, right? You signed the contract. You might hate the house after you move in. You might regret doing it, but it's your house. With a child, you can't sell it. With a house, you can sell. So, but that's why having children is such a huge deal. Nobody should have children until they are committed to having children. Nobody should have children until they're sure that's what they want. That's why I think it's actually a healthy thing that Americans are having children later in life because I think they're more mature and they realize what they're doing and they're taking on the obligation much more consciously versus 67 years ago when people would get married in their late teens, early 20s and just have kids automatically. And then suddenly realize, oh my God, you know, I've taken on this obligation without having the maturity, the wealth or the thought that's involved in doing it. So I think it's a very different type of relationship. With children, you are obliged because you took on that responsibility, but you chose it. You can't say somebody forced me. With parents, you don't have that obligation, but it's certainly part of most of our lives because we do love our parents. I think you had a question, right? I suppose my question's a similar sort of vibe in terms of caring about other people looking after, you say like the Mother Teresa example. If she generally got pleasure or satisfaction from helping other people, she was purely selfish, would that sort of go against your example then? No, if she'd actually got pleasure, that is if she had sat down and said, you know, I love helping other people, this is, it's like teaching, right? I can really help them become better human beings. I can help them rise up. And she would have enjoyed it, absolutely to rat, being a social worker is not an irrational profession. You can be a social worker rationally. That's not what she did, by the way, right? She didn't help them become better. She helped them stay poor because she believed the poor should inherit the earth, right, the meat should inherit the earth, so she discouraged them from getting an education. She discouraged them from trying to rise up and become middle class. I mean, I truly believe Mother Teresa was a horrible human being. I mean, I'm on record, on video, saying that because I think it's true. And she didn't pursue helping other people rationally in terms of her own values, in terms of her make. And as a consequence, she was miserable. I mean, if you read the diary, she was even doubting the existence of God and she didn't know why she was doing this. And I mean, it's very difficult when you commit yourself out of a sense of duty. And that's the difference. So I'm all for helping other people, right? You know, I love people. I'm not gonna help bad people. Hitler can come and I don't, you know, I'll help shoot him. I'm not helping him, right? So you wanna help people who you have identified as good or who are innocent, who have fallen in bad times for no fault of one. I have a soft spot for children because I think they are innocent, right? To the extent that they're poor or whatever, it's not their fault. It's kind of, you know, it's either their parents fault or it's just, it's the way it is. So, but you don't wanna just be random in your help. You don't wanna help. So I'll help children, but I'm not gonna help them at the expense of my kids. So my kids come first. Now, I don't buy this love their neighbor like yourself. Sorry. I mean, I love my, I don't love some of my neighbors. Some of my neighbors I hate. Some of my neighbors I like. None of them do I really love and none of them come close to how much I love myself. And their kids, I mean, if there's a burning house, who am I gonna say, my kids or their kids? I mean, who are you gonna save? See, I'm gonna do it but you're not gonna feel guilty about it. I'm gonna say my kids. You're gonna save, some of you will save your kids and feel guilty about not having to save their kids because that's how you were brought up. I reject that. You know, it's my life. I'm gonna pursue my values. And I'm gonna help people that I think deserve help and that I get something out of helping. Am I gonna help strangers? Sure. You know, if it doesn't cost me too much. You know, but if somebody's drowning, people always give me the drowning example, right? If somebody's drowning, do you just jump in and help them? What depends? It depends. Is it an ocean in which the probability of me dying is 99%? I'm not jumping in, sorry. Not my job. Now, if I was a lifeguard, it's my job, my responsibility, going back to a spot. I signed a contract, then I do it. It's not my job. Is the risk minor and it's just a matter of effort? Sure, human life is incredibly valuable and I would go and jump in and save them. But the fact is, and we all know this, that you're gonna make a risk assessment of what's the cost? You know, every day, every American chooses not to help dying children, right? Because the dying children in Africa, and you could write a check. You could write a check, but you choose to let them die. Rather than give up whatever money it would take to write the check. And that's okay. That's actually good. Because your life comes first. And you shouldn't give up that nice meal. You shouldn't give up the college education. You shouldn't give up to help kids in Africa. And I'm saying it bluntly, even though all of you kinda feel a little uncomfortable with this, right? But it's the reality. We all do it all the time. We all make choices about ourselves. I'm saying, stop feeling guilty for it. You don't owe that kid anything. I mean, it's sad, and I feel sad when I see it, but you don't owe it. It's not your fault and you are not responsible. You're responsible for you. And that responsibility doesn't mean to be callous. It means to be thoughtful. It needs to be rational. It needs to be figured out what is really good for you. And kids that are close by are gonna be, are gonna get more of my help than kids that are far away because they impact my life more, because I'm being selfish. We have to cut lunch, food. Thank you.