 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Sunday, Sunday night, it's the weekend. I hope everybody's had a fantastic weekend and yeah, all right let's see, let me just play around with a sound here just for a second. I want to get this up a little bit. One, two, all right, yeah I think that's better. All right, we're going to do that, I should put myself on video, there I am. All right, hi everybody, and today we are going to be talking about selfishness. So I'm going to take a little bit of a break from talking about new stuff. We'll do that in the morning, talk about my new show, but you know the day-to-day stuff we will be talking about selfishness today. And in particular we'll be watching a video of Patrick Bendavid who was a big shot on YouTube and value entertainment and who has four million subscribers. And he did a little segment on selfishness versus selflessness, selfishness versus selflessness, which I think was very revealing and really, really interesting. So I thought we would go over that today and it's a good opportunity to just talk about being selfish, what it means, and remind everybody also we've always got newbies here. So it's a good opportunity to kind of let everybody, let everybody know that what selfishness actually means, some of the new people. All right, if you guys can tell me, let me know if the sound is okay, as I'm still tinkering with stuff. It was okay, but the podcast sound was too soft I was told in the previous podcast. So I'm trying to calibrate it so we get the right amount of sound on the YouTube, but also the right amount of sound for the podcast so that the podcast doesn't come across at too low of a volume. So let me know what the volume is good, the volume for you guys who are listening on YouTube is good. And when I play Patrick Bindavid, let him know if that is good and we'll go from there. And we'll go from there. Anyway, Patrick Bindavid is big, he's interviewed everybody. He did come to Ocon one year basically to interview me. So he contacted me in advance that he wanted to interview me, said he would like to have to Ocon to do it. I mean, it was great. He was there and we did it on the main stage. And I thought it was a good interview. I've posted the link to that interview in the chat. I will post it again. So I'll post it now. So anybody who wants to reference it later, bookmark it and watch. If you haven't watched the interview, watch it because I thought it was a really, I thought it was a really good interview of mine that I did. So hopefully you'll enjoy that. All right, if anybody's listening on the, well, I know lots of people are listening on the podcast, audio only. If you want to let me know, just drop me an email or drop me a note somewhere. Just let me know what the volume is like. Is the volume okay? Is it too soft? I know it was too soft on the Greg Salmiere video. I'm going to correct that on the Greg Salmiere podcasting. I'll correct that. But let me know if it's too soft here as well. And if there's a bigger problem that I can solve. In the previous setup, I had it all worked out. I don't think I've worked out yet on this setup, which I'm going to kill anyway, because I've got this massive soundboard here. And I need to buy a small soundboard and get rid of this. This is like a 12 channel soundboard and I'm just using two. All right, let's see. Have I seen A yet? I have not, but I plan to. It's on my list to see. And I know I still owe two movie reviews, which I do intend to do really, really soon. And then get those Puss in Boots and Whiplash. Whiplash. And did Shaz about to ask for another movie review? I can't remember. It's listed here, if it is. So it shouldn't be a problem. Oh, the last of a season one, episode three. Okay, I've got that. I've watched that. So I just need to watch it again so I can do the review. All right, let's jump in with Patrick and David. We are talking about selfishness. I don't want you to see that. That wasn't what I want you to see. I want you to see this. There you go. So this is a show. Now, first, before we even start, let me just say this is great. This is great. I mean, we've got a major player in the podcasting world. Four million subscribers who does a video, a 10 minute video, on selfish versus selfless. And that's already good. I mean, who has these kind of conversations? Who uses the word selfish even semi-positively? And here you'll see he uses it wrong. We'll talk about that. But at least there's an element of positivism in it's kind of. So we're going to listen to this. We're going to critique it. I think it's a great opportunity to really think about what selfish is and to really kind of peel off what the misconceptions are and show you how it plays out, how the misconceptions play out in somebody's thinking. Now, here's Patrick Grindavid. He's already interviewed me. He has read Ayn Rand. So he's, we've talked about selfishness. He's read Ayn Rand, but it doesn't have a reality to him. It hasn't, he hasn't absorbed whatever Ayn Rand said or whatever I said. He still has, or at least he, or the alternative, of course, is he doesn't agree with it. But my sense is he just hasn't absorbed it. He hasn't absorbed this alternative view of what selfishness is, can be. Oh no, properly is, not can be, properly is. Hasn't really integrated this. Action Jackson likes this topic because he chose it. He sent me the video. Catherine's here. Let me just remind you of a bit. Catherine's here somewhere. She's been silent for a little bit. Catherine's here and I have no super chat questions. So I don't know, this might be, this might be like you guys, you know, upset because Catherine hasn't been here for a long time and, and you're snubbing her a little bit right now. But hey, Catherine's here and, and, right. And it's, it's super chat is available. So please use it. It's a way to fund the show, but importantly, you guys, this is a way in which you guys determine the content of the show because you ask questions and then I get to, I get to talk about the things you want me to talk about because you ask the questions, it's your content. So please think about questions, think about things you want me to talk about, use the super chat in order to get me to talk about them. All right, let's press play and let me know what the sound is like if it's too loud or too soft or whatever. So before I show this chart to, let me tell you a story about Mario Aguilom. Sounds too loud to me. So what am I going to do here? Maybe it's my headphones. Maybe it's not you. It's my headphones. All right. You tell me if this, if it was, it was loud. Okay, it was loud. Let me, let me see what I can do. All right. Let's try this. Push it back. So before I show this chart to, let me tell you a story about Mario Aguilom. Mario has been with me now for 18 years. Mario just had a wedding. He got married this past weekend at my house. Beautiful wedding. He had a great time. But I want to tell you about a conversation I had with him five years ago. We're sitting down in the office in Dallas. I said, Mario, why don't you own a car? Cars don't move me. How come you don't own a watch? I don't need to have a nice watch. How come you don't have money and savings? I don't care if I have money. If I have it, I give it to other people. And I'm going through like. Notice all the examples. Notice all the examples he's giving, right? All the examples, a watch, a, I can increase it somewhere else. A watch, a car, all the examples about material things. And this is really, really important. So everything's about, all those examples about this Mario guy in terms of material things. I'm going to take it back a little bit. See you can, so you can listen to this again. But this, we'll come back to this because this is, I think, really, really important. Why don't you own a car? Cars don't move me. How come you don't own a watch? I don't need to have a nice watch. How come you never have money and savings? I don't care if I have money. If I have it, I give it to other people. And I'm going through like, what selfish goals do you have in place? Nothing. I said, you realize. But notice all the selfish goals, all the things that he defined as selfish. Every single one of them is a goal that is a material goal. There's no spiritual goal. There's no, even career goal is not mentioned. So selfish is narrowly construed as, at least right now, as material, as stuff, stuff. This guy doesn't like stuff. But it is interesting. Listen to what he says about this. It is interesting. Kind of, this is the positive element that Patrick brings to this discussion. By you being that way, you're not a positive to the world. He says, what are you? That's the other thing to note. And I'm sorry, I'm stopping him every two seconds, but we'll get to a flow here in a minute. The other thing is, from the beginning, the standard of value is the world. So what he's criticizing this guy is, hey, you're not a knit positive to the world. What about being a knit positive to you? Because he'll talk positively about selfishness in a sense. But always in the context of what selfishness makes possible for you to do for the world. That's the context. The context is not you. So there's no, there's no real selfishness. There's no deep selfishness in a sense of caring about you, your life, your values, your happiness, your world. It's out there. What can you do to make out there better? And it turns out that thinking about yourself, making your life a little bit better, is good for the world out there to do it. But the standard is the world. And so if you take the standard as the world, then you've undermined the whole concept of selfishness to begin with. The whole selfishness you've predetermined it to be immoral and bad and unacceptable. Because your standard, where they're implicitly, and in this case explicitly, is others. Is the world. Is external to you. That's the standard. And yeah, you should think about yourself more in order to make them better off. But you see, this is how we're conditioned. All of them are conditioning in the culture. All of them are conditioning in the world out there. Is oriented around conditioning you to think of others, to place others first. And even in thinking about yourself and being quote selfish, it's because that motivates you, that gets you excited, that gets you going for the world out there, for somebody else. All right, we're going to rewind it a little bit again. I mean, if I have it, I give it to other people. And I'm going through like, what selfish goals do you have in place? Nothing. I said, you realize by you being that way, you're not a positive to the world. This is what you mean. I said, if you're slightly more driven, other people win. I win, you win, your family wins, your peers win, your legacy wins, your future kids win. Everybody wins. So if you're slightly more selfishly driven, that is, if you're more driven towards values, everybody wins. Now, there's a truth to that. But notice that your family wins. I win. They win. They win over there. They win. But the whole point is I win. And it's still too loud, huh? All right, all right. So slightly. So the standard, the standard, note the standard. Driven, other people win. I win, you win, your family wins, your peers win, your legacy wins, your future kids win. Everybody wins. If you have something, you're going after. The world is a better place if you're in the hunt for some of your selfish goals. So he sits there and starts thinking about it. Which is absolutely true. Absolutely true. Everybody's better off if people are self-interested, if people are selfish, if people pursue values, if people pursue selfish goals, you know, in a selfish way. We'll talk about what selfish goals and selfish way means. Everybody's better off, including you. Which is great. I mean, what he's showing is what happens to people once they engage in their values, once they develop loves and passions and favorites and things they desire. Now again, the focus here is almost all on material things. But even in the material world, we have to desire, we have to want, we have to value, we have to appreciate, we have to strive. It makes our life better. Material things make our life better. We should want material things because they make our life better. What's sad is that it's totally limited to that and that limits you completely in terms of your understanding of selfishness. We'll get to that, right? But yeah, I mean, this guy suddenly discovers he likes stuff. He wants stuff. He values stuff and surprise, surprise. His life becomes more meaningful. His life becomes more fun. His life becomes more exciting. Watch, then a nice suit, then nice shoes. Then he starts saving money. Fast forward to today. He's been living on the water in Florida for a few years now. Drives a nice car, has more savings than he's ever had in his life. And I'm talking a few hundred thousand dollars of savings. Just three years ago, he had $1,000 in a bank. He's got $300,000 in savings today. Doing good for himself. Just got married, about to be a father. Parents was here. Family was here. They're looking at him so proud of him. What happened to this guy? Just in five years. We don't recognize this guy anymore. What happened to this guy? He finally chose to be a little bit more selfish. So watch this. And here, what I would say is, yeah, there's a sense in which he chose to be more selfish. But what's really happened here is he chose to be a valuer. And that's ultimately what it means to be selfish. What it means to be selfish in the most important sense is to become a valuer, to choose your values, to pursue your values, to gain your values, to identify your values, to go after your values, to live for your values, for your own values. And indeed, you know, we took a guy who didn't care about anything. It wasn't that he was, he was selfless. He was selfless in a sense that he didn't care about self. He didn't care about what he liked. He didn't, he didn't like anything. He didn't focus on liking anything. He didn't think about liking anything. He didn't value liking anything. And suddenly he oriented himself towards valuing, towards liking, towards caring. Patrick caused us being selfish. That's good. That's a good, you know, it's a good presentation of selfishness up to this point, up to this limited point. And the guy changed his life and it made his life, his family's life, his people around him, and the people he works with, everybody's better off. It indeed is win-win. This is good. This is the positive influence that maybe Ayn Rand has had on Patrick Bendavid, in terms of, you know, he's willing to at least say that something can be selfish is good. I create this chart, yes. And I want you to think about and kind of grade yourself as well. Then I'm going to give you different levels. Say we have a chart. In this chart that you're looking at, on the top left, this is a person that's 100% selfish and they're zero selfless. The center where the two collide is 50-50, meaning they're 50% selfish, 50% selfless. And then the person on the top right is a person that's 100% selfless, meaning they don't care anything about themselves. Everything's about other people. And in the bottom right, if somebody that has zero selfish genes, meaning all I care about is as much as I do for you, I don't need anything from anybody. So then we continue this conversation and we said, so which one is more realistic and which one doesn't exist? So we created a chart and gave it a name with 11 different levels on where people would be based on their breakdown. And here's what we found out. On the top and the bottom, if a person is 100% selfless and zero percent selfish on the bottom, that's non-existent. Yeah, so he's saying selfless people don't exist. You can't be selfless. And this is actually pretty good. It's a myth. You know why? It's impossible for a person not to be selfish. If you're not selfish, you don't eat, you don't drink, you don't take care of yourself, you don't wash, you don't do anything. You don't exist. So that's a myth. A person cannot be 100% selfless. You have to be selfish in order to live or else you're dead. However, at the top. So that's good, right? So at least he's rejecting the idea that anybody can be selfless. He recognizes that basic survival, basic existence, basic existence in any kind of world requires you to think about yourself. It requires you to take care of yourself. It requires you to do some basic things that allow you to live. So truly selfless people would die. So pretty, so so far so good. Let's see where he goes with 100% self-interest. When you look at the person that's 100% selfish and 0% selfless, those people can actually exist. Some of them are criminals, sociopaths. They're a danger to society because they're willing to sacrifice friends, family, relative, business, career. It doesn't matter. They're 100% all about themselves. However, now this is the amazing thing, right? How does he not get this? How does he not get that criminals and psychopaths and all these others are not selfish? Isn't it obvious that these people are undermining themselves? Isn't it obvious that these people are self-destructive? You know, isn't the criminal going to jail? Is going to jail a selfish thing? Is alienating your friends, your family, everybody around you, and being like a totally isolated and not having anybody who want to do business with you? Is that self-interested? Is that in your self-interest? Is that selfish? If selfish means, and here is an important point, you have to define it, right? But he's defined selfless as not caring about yourself, only caring about other people. Then let's say selfish means caring only about yourself and not caring about other people, only caring about yourself. But if you only care about yourself, doesn't that mean that you don't want to go to jail? Doesn't only caring about yourself mean that you want to have friends? Doesn't only caring about yourself mean that you want to succeed in business and you don't want everybody in business to be alienated from you? Or to shun you? If you only care about yourself, don't you want to still have a romantic relationship with somebody? Just because sex is great and love is great and you feel great when you do it. So they can't escape and sadly Patrick can't escape this conventional notion that selfishness just means self-gratification, short-term self-gratification. Why can't they integrate into this conception the idea of, but there's a future and in order to achieve my goals in the future, if I piss everybody off today, I'm not going to achieve my goals in the future. So why wouldn't I incorporate my future goals into my self-interest today? And isn't that too self-interest? Isn't being lying, cheating, stealing, I mean, is equivalent of being selfish, being a criminal or whatever. Isn't that self-destructive, not selfish? I mean, don't you think that if you're going to do graphs, wouldn't you have to do it in three dimensions? The selfish, the self-less, well, but an element of being self-less is being self-destructive. Wouldn't you say that being a criminal is actually self-less? Because it actually hurts you. It actually destroys you. It actually does things, it makes you worse off. So it's curious how difficult this concept is. It's curious how really hard it is for people to embrace the idea that the future is part of you and that in order to succeed in life, you have to take the future and take out. And in order to succeed in life, you can't be a joke to everybody. In order to succeed in life, you can't lie, steal, and cheat. In order to succeed in life, you can't be a psychopath and a criminal. That's not successful in life. That doesn't lead to success. So it's not selfish. And I think that the fundamental, one of the reasons, there are many reasons they can't integrate this, but one of the reasons they don't integrate it is that they don't actually, in order to integrate it, I think what you have to identify is reason as man's basic means of survival, is that in order to be selfish, in order to be successful in life, you have to reason, you have to think. And while when you talk to people in an telescope, if I asked Patrick with David, if you want to be good in, if you want to make a lot of money over time, over time, is lying, cheating, stealing a good strategy? He would say, no, of course not. Is alienating everybody around you? Is turning other people you do business with off against you? Is that a good strategy? He needs to go, well, no, of course not. And he would actually recognize that it's thinking important in setting a strategy like that. Yeah, probably. So in any given narrow goal, I think they would see it. But I don't think they could see it as a general. They can't see it beyond that. And then he can't connect that to selfishness, because selfishness is so being corrupted. So even he who's trying to give it a positive spin, you need some selfishness, just not the lying, stealing, cheating part. And you need some selflessness we'll see. We'll see how that integrates. What does it even mean to be selfless? But he does, he has some good stuff coming up on selflessness. So I think you're getting it, right? It's this lack of reason, long-term thinking. And it's all about selfishness, at least in its pure form, is 100% about instant gratification. It's 100% about exploiting other people. However, we looked at the different tiers and here's what we came up with. So the next level would be somebody that is 10% selfish and 90% selfless, meaning there's 10% selfish, 90% selfless. Selfish enough to eat, to shower, to have a job, to do the basic type of things, but they'll agree with anything anybody tells them. These are people that are weak-willed and generally cowardly. Now I love this. This is actually really, really good. Because he's identifying selflessness with weak-willed, with second-handedness, with having no opinion for themselves, with being weak. That's fantastic because that's a good integration. I wish he integrated the other side as well. I wish he integrated the selfish as being rational. He gets that a little bit. You'll see it later. He gets a little bit of it, but he can't get it at 100%. 100% is only caring about yourself. Well, reason just imploded. Reason just went out the window. Now you're just being self-gratifying, self-destructive, doing anything, exploiting people, even though it doesn't help you. It doesn't make you better. It doesn't add to your life. All right, let's listen to that again. 10% selfless, meaning they're selfish enough to eat, to shower, to have a job, to do the basic type of things, but they'll agree with anything anybody tells them. These are people that are weak-willed and generally cowardly. They're a net negative to society. Now the other thing I like about this is the net cowardly. Sorry, the cowardly. They associate cowardly with self-lessness. I think he's absolutely right. I think courage comes from selfishness. So again, some good integrations here. Second-handed, don't think for themselves, look to other people for everything, and are cowards. And then he has to add net negative to society. Also true, just that's not the point. We're not trying to evaluate it here by that standard. And what does it even mean, the standard of society? Who's measuring? How do you measure? Which society? In what world? In what era? A net negative to society. One minute they're having a conversation with somebody saying, do you know what that person said? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, wow, I can't believe it. Then they'll go to the next person who completely disagrees with that person. No, that person said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Zero backbone. Okay, there's other words for it, but that's the level of 1090. I like that, zero backbone. If you're 10% selfish, 90% selflessness, according to him, no backbone, fantastic, because absolutely true. Okay, there's other words for it, but that's the level of 1090. The next person is somebody that's 2080. These are folks that are indecisive. They're conforming to everyone. They can't make a decision. So I don't know, I don't know. They're afraid to make selfish goals and selfish dreams. And I don't know if this is good for me. I don't want to offend anybody. I'm just kind of like conforming again. I'm indecisive, so I'm staying out of it. No pride. Again, conformity, lack of values, lack of drive. He's identifying it. That comes from caring about your own life. Selflessness means caring about your own life, which means setting your own values, living by your own standards. He gets the opposite. He gets the selflessness, means no values for yourself. It means not living by your own standard, but other people whispering. It means conformity. It means negation of you and not even having values. That's what selflessness means. So he gets the negative, which is good. Proud. 3070, these are people that are passive, meek, submissive, tame, still a little more selfish than others, but not enough yet to start getting some kind of progress about them. They're still more in the net negative community. Then you have 4060, supporting cast, very good supporting cast, very helpful. They're great people to be having a business to help out with different structures, but they're in the 4060 mode still. So notice that once we get into the middle, the selflessness translates now into what? It now translates into being helpful, helping others, being nice to people, opening doors to grandma, helping the old woman cross the street. It's gone is the, so that and a little bit of selfishness, right? It's this mixture. I mean, there's something very wrong about this whole approach. And of course, we all want to ultimately be 100% of something, right? 100% of the good, 100% of being selfish and what that implies. But it's interesting to see how he's conceiving of it. And it's interesting to see the true identifications that he is making about the role that thinking about self serves in one's life and the role and what happens when and what doesn't do enough thinking about oneself. The problem is that he views selflessness as kind and nice to people. And it's much worse than that, of course. And to some extent, he's identified that that it's the water down selflessness that is kindness, but you can be kind and still be selfish. The middle is thinker advisor. These are people that are 50-50. They're good thinkers. What do you think about this? I think we should do this. What about that? I don't know. Let me think about the other person's side. Well, you know what? Their side is this. This side is that. So they get you to think because they can both be selfish and they're selfless. So they're actually a good person to have on the team because they can give you both sides of what to do and what not. So what's sense in what sense of being selfless here? What's the sense in which people are being selfless in the sense that they can think about what other people might think? Think about what other people might want. They might have some empathy. So now selflessness becomes empathy. If you're truly selfish and you're in a team, isn't it selfish to try to understand what the other team members want? Isn't it selfish to try to understand what the context is? Isn't it selfish to try to think and not jump to answers? So again, this conceptual confusion that he has is really screwing this up because all the good things he's saying now about 50, 50, 60, 40 are all consistent with 100% selfish. There's nothing selfless about it because now he's confusing selflessness before he got what it was. Now in this watered-down form because it's watered-down by selfishness, now it's becoming kindness, friendliness, thoughtfulness, but all those are characteristics of somebody who is potentially 100% selfish. It's frustrating that he can't see it. To do. The synergist and the great teammate is the 60, 40. They have goals. They have dreams. They go out there and get it done. They push other people. There's somebody that you're going to want in any great organization because they are 60, 40 and they have their own things that they still want to drive to improve the company, improve themselves. They're reading. They're improving. They're doing all that. They're not content with where they are. So they have bigger selfish goals than being selfless. Then you have the kingmaker. And what is sense in which, what's the sense in which they're selfless? See, the way he's construing it is somebody who's selfish doesn't deal with other people, isn't interested in other people, doesn't care about other people, doesn't want to trade with other people, doesn't want to cooperate with other people, doesn't want other people. But that's screwed up because it's in your selfish interest to deal with other people. It's in their selfish interest to want other people. It's in their selfish interest to trade with other people. It's in your selfish interest to have sex with other people, I don't know, and so on. So what is it? But he cannot acknowledge that. To him, being selfish means no other people. It doesn't mean taking care of self. It means no other people. So note, here's the interesting thing that integrates it all. At the end, everything is about other people. Being selfish is not taking care of self. Being selfish to Patrick Wintervid means negating other people. Being selfless is approving of other people, is working for other people, is all about other people. So the balance here is not about so much about self, although that doesn't enter into the values and so on. But it's primarily, there's a big chunk of it is either negate other people or I sacrificed other people. But to be selfish means to cooperate with other people, to trade with other people, to identify other people who are good for you and to bring them close into your life, to have friendship, to have love. And that he can't get. That he can't get. All right, let's see. The driver, these people are misunderstood. These people are going to be pushing everybody, raising standards, disturbing people. But at the same time, they are selfless enough. It's about a bigger dream, a bigger cause, a bigger vision where everybody wins instead of just being about themselves. But a bigger vision, a bigger cause, isn't it their cause, their vision? Is that really selfless? They're winning by it. Again, massive confusion here about what these terms refer to and what is actually going on and what these human beings actually are. So there's something he's capturing here. Something is capturing here. But he's not capturing a spectrum of selfishness to selflessness. Even though there is value in such a spectrum, we could imagine such a spectrum. Such a spectrum would evolve maybe guilt, maybe people who are selfish in some way and some of them they're life and selfless in other realms of their life. But selfishness means thinking about what's good for you and doing what's good for you, but what's good over the long run. Thinking, using reason. That is the 30% mixture of selfless and selfish to be able to drive the organization to the next level. The next one is a solopreneur, 80-20. Selfish, 20% selfless. They're still in that positive to society. They set an example of success, but they're bad at duplicating, meaning, look, I'm good. I'm not disrespectful to you. I don't hurt you. I don't take advantage of you, but I'm just taking care of myself. You do you, I do me, and I'm still in that positive to society. Not a great leader, not great at driving other people, but they're good at for themselves. Then yeah. Now again, they are, he is identifying characteristics. It's just nothing to do with selfishness to selfless. The next level, which is 90-10. This is a narcissist. The world revolves around them. And a narcissist is actually not a net positive to society. They're bigger net positive to society than the weak world cowardly, but they're not a net positive to society. But how is a narcissist selfish? I mean, narcissism is a problem, again, self-destructive. But how is a narcissist selfish? How is thinking that the world revolves around you, which is clearly false, for pretty much every one of us, even even somebody like Donald Trump, where it comes very close to rotating around him. For those people, it's a narcissist. The world doesn't revolve around you. So you're living a lie. You cannot be happy. You cannot be successful. You cannot win. You cannot be great at anything. Well, they might not know that they, but they know they're failing. They know they're unhappy. They know they're not successful. So reality is the judge in the end. And that ultimately is the standard. But the standard is also, the standard philosophically, or the standard is really, you know, human nature, what human beings require, what human beings need. And this is the biggest issue of selfishness. Selfishness needs not just to value a bunch of material stuff. It needs a moral framework. It needs a, you know, a moral system. You need principles by which to live. It's purely about them, and they're willing to do it generally at all costs. They'll use you as a pawn. They'll look at you as a way to get what they can get out of you. It's not about how they can help you. It's what they can get out of you, rather than making everybody at the same time. So when you look at this chart here, some people will come back and say, I can't believe you just said that, Pat. You mean to tell me somebody that's this, they're weak world cowardly? Yes, that's generally what happens. You just called me out, Pat. I don't like this feeling you're giving me. I'm not doing this to make you feel good. When I create charts like this, I go and think about myself, how I was at 18, then 28, and what I had to choose to change, and it wasn't easy, then 34, then 35. The only reason I'm looking at this, because the last 20 years and having been in the insurance industry, having trained 40,000 different licensed agents in the insurance industry, you look at traits of qualities, and you say, man, that guy could have been very big. But man, it was all about him. That person could be very big, but dude, he couldn't get over the fact that his wife kept telling him, you got to come home early, you got to come home early. He wanted to please everybody. She could have been amazing, but her mom made her feel so guilty all the time when she fell for it. That person could have been amazing that they could never make up their minds. It was always one day this, one day that. That person was an incredible driver and they built so many different leaders. They pissed a lot of people off, but they also built a lot of different leaders. So if you judge them on success, they helped a lot of people become financially free. These are case studies on different people. Now, somebody may say, does this apply to every aspect of your life? Now, this is important. So does this apply to every aspect of your life, right? And given that he doesn't have a proper definition of selfish and selfless, given that he doesn't really grasp it, although he's getting close to some things, but he doesn't quite grasp it, the answer, of course, is going to be no. As a mother, if I'm pregnant, shouldn't I be selfless? Yes, this applies. If you're mother and pregnant, you're going to be selfless 100%. So you should have the baby even if you don't want it. Right? Really? I mean, this is part of the, yes, I mean, this is certainly the Christian ideal, ideal, and this is certainly the anti-abortionist. Aren't you having a baby because you want to have a baby? Aren't you having a baby because you love the idea of being a mother? Aren't you having a baby for selfish reasons? Aren't you taking care of your body and your health and not smoking and not drinking because you're selfish because you want your baby to be as healthy as you possibly can? Why? Because it's your baby. So again, viewing selfish as this narrow thing, as this narrow materialistic short-term thing is deadly. It really is deadly because now he's going to say, you should be selfless in your family life. You should be selfish in business, selfless in your family life. Now that's a disaster. We can, you can go and look at, God, what was I going to say? I was going to say something. Anyway, we'll get back to it, but you know, it's a disaster to live this bifurcated life. Selflessness, just as you described in business, is bad for you and everything. Is it good to be a coward in your family life? Is it good to be a coward in any part of your life? But to be selfless means not to have values, means not, so, oh yeah, I was going to give the example I'm always given. I always use about the wedding, right? You go to your spouse to be, the night before the wedding you say, I'm not getting married with you for any selfish reasons. You know, it's not because you make me feel any better. I'm doing it purely for you. This is completely selfless. I am, this is a major sacrifice for me to marry you tomorrow. Really? Priced the business. Let me read a quote to you that maybe this makes sense to you. And this is by Nassim Taleb. He wrote a book called Skinning Again and he said this. He said, I am at the federal level a libertarian, at the state level a republican, at the local level a democrat, and at my friends and family a socialist. Pretty weird. Yeah, I mean, he's a man of no principle in other words. He doesn't stand for anything. But what does that even mean? Right? What does it mean to be a socialist at the family level? And you know, does that mean you treat truly everybody equally? One kid gets an A and one kid gets an F. That's okay. Love them both. Treat them exactly the same. Both get deserts. One is an excellent athlete. You maybe suppress him and the other ones mediocre and you try to raise him up just to make them all equal. Really? What does it even mean? I mean, people say this. I think Hayek said this. In the family, we're all altruists. In the family, we're all socialists. But we're not. Now, it's true that you cannot take a political concept and apply it to the family. Family is not a political concept. But it's still true that in a family, you have to be selfish. You have to do what's good for you. Now, the reason you have a family is because you have a selfish motivation to have a family because you love them, because you care for them, because you want them to be successful, not out of a selfless regard for them, but out of a selfish regard for them. Because you're selfish, you want them to be successful and you don't treat them the same as you treat other kids. Other families, because they're your kids. So again, this complete confusion, what does it mean that the local level to be Democrat? At the local level, we should regulate and control everything. Really? Why does that make sense? If it's wrong at the federal level, then what makes it suddenly right at the local level? So no, I mean, a principle is a principle is a principle. It applies federal level, local level. If you believe that to use force, to use coercion, to violate somebody's rights is wrong at the federal level, then it's also wrong at the state level. It's also wrong at the local level. And hey, it's even wrong in the family. Although again, you're conflating many different issues here. Federal, state, and local law political institutions, the family is not. Different kind of institution, different kind of relationship, particularly when you get into children. Democrat and at my friends and family are socialists. Pretty weird, right? Wait a minute. You can be a socialist and you can be a libertarian and a Republican and a Democrat. Yes, at different levels. No, you can't. You actually can't. That is a completely confusing, unprincipled, bizarre way of living your life, completely fragmented. I'm simply giving you who benefits. If you are somebody that you have some selfish goals. Your wife wins, your husband wins, your kids wins, your last name wins. Yeah. Yeah. Being selfish means it's good for your family. So why are you not being selfish in the family? Your family wins. Your heritage wins. The company you're working for wins. The industry wins. Everybody wins. The challenge with this conversation is this. You ever rented a car and you're like, this is supposed to go 120 miles an hour. How come when I go to 80, it goes back down. That car is a speed governor. And what it does is it doesn't allow to go over 80 miles per hour, right? And the rental companies do this so they don't have too many accidents because it's expensive and they've done the research to know what the numbers they don't want drivers to go about because it's not their car. They don't treat it like their car. The reason why this chart is being shared with you is you may be watching this and you may say, man, I'm kind of part of the narcissist community. No problem. Bring your governor down to 70, okay? And no, anytime you go above 70, people don't like to be around you because it's all about you. But you may be somebody that's at the other level. You're a little bit of a cowardly, weak-willed or you conform. Maybe you need to bring your governor up and start talking about your selfish goals, like Mario did. You know what happened to his life? It changed. Almost everybody I know that's bitter. They tend to come more from a place of self-list than a little... That's true. That's true. So it's very good at kind of critiquing the fact that people who are bitter, people who are sad, people who don't have a life, are people who don't have values and are not self-interested and not pursue their own goals, not pursue their own life. That's true. But then he doesn't understand what pursuing all that actually is. All right. A little bit of selfish. The world is a better place if you have a little bit more selfish gene in you than selfless gene in you. Everybody around you wins if you have that. So if you want the net positive index... All right. So yes, super, super important to get your concepts right. Super, super important to define them clearly. Super, super important to think it really through. What does it mean to be selfish? What does it mean to be selfless? And neither one of them is really about other people. To be selfless means not to care about self, not to take care of self, not to consider self. And in that selfless category, you would include somebody like Bernie Madoff. You would include a lot of the narcissists because what they're doing is not taking care of themselves, not doing what's good for them, not making their life the best life that it can be. They're diminishing their own life. And what it means to be selfish is to take care of yourself. And that includes cooperating with other people. It means loving friendship. It means engaging with other people. It means motivating them in a business context. It means leading. It means encouraging. It means being kind when the context is appropriate. It means taking care of your own life and making your life the best life that it can be. No, there is no such thing as destructively selfish. That's a contradiction in terms. How can you be destructive and selfish at the same time? What Madoff was is self-destructive, but self-destructive is selflessness. If Bernie Madoff had stopped early on and set himself, it's what I'm doing going to lead to my happiness, to success, to prosperity. It's lying, cheating and stealing really good for me long term. Is it good for me? Is it good for the people I love? Is it good for the things that I cherish, the things that I value, my friends? And he would say, well, of course not. And he would stop what he was doing immediately. And Bernie Madoff, you know, probably by the time he thought those thoughts, it was too late because he was so deep in it. But the problem is he didn't think. And the essence of selflessness is not to think. The essence of selflessness is not, is, the essence of selflessness is to not think about self, to not think about what's good for you, to not think about the consequences of your actions long term, to you, to your life, to your happiness, to your friendships, to your financial success, to everything. Financial success, to everything. Don't call it irrational egoism, because you shouldn't condition egoism. Egoism is taking care of self, is caring about self, it's taking care of your ego. And by doing that irrational, you can't do it irrational. It's a contradiction in terms. Those terms cannot stand next to one another. It is not irrational egoism. It's not irrational self-interest. It's not irrational selfishness. It's irrational. Period. In other words, it's irrational selflessness. It's self-destructive. Now, sometimes you do something that is bad for you, but you couldn't have known. Or you didn't know. You really did the thinking, but you made a mistake. That's not being selfless. But people who don't think, people who don't plan and make obvious mistakes, and this is again, the advantage of having principles prevents you from making stupid mistakes. Don't be honest. Don't fake reality. That's it. Just do it all the time. Don't fake reality. And if you do that, you're not going to make many mistakes in that realm. This is the value of having virtues and having a moral system. Is it gives you a framework? It gives you shortcuts. It gives you cognitive shortcuts. To be able to live a selfish life and to make fewer and fewer mistakes, errors. But there is no... It's just like there's no such thing as conscious capitalism. I don't know what do you call it? State capitalism. There's no such thing as irrational egoism. They're not conditioned. Egoism is egoism. Staking yourself and taking yourself requires what? The number one thing taking yourself requires. Rationality. So how can you have irrational thinking care of self? You can't have that. It just doesn't make any sense. So the thing he's missing, the thing everybody's missing is the thinking. The thing everybody's missing is the reason, rationality. That's what it means to be selfish. What it means to be selfish is to think. To think about what? Think about how to make your life the best life that it can be. Think about how to pursue your values. How to achieve your values. It's not about other people. True. Unless those other people happen to be values and for all of us other people are values. All right. Hopefully that was enlightening to some of you. Expanding horizons to others of you and probably somewhat repetitive to many of you. But hopefully that was a value. I'm happy if we get a bunch of questions about ego, about being selfish, about being selfish and so on on the show. That would be now when it's time for the super chat. That would be great if we got a lot of those kinds of questions. All right. We are on our way into the show. In spite of Catherine being here, I think she's here. We are way behind on our super chat. We do have goals. And I just want to re-emphasize how important those goals are to the show, to being able to sustain it. I sustain as many shows as I do. There has to be, I have to have a sense of being compensated for it. A lot of the compensation comes from monthly contributors. Thank you for those of you who do it that way. Please more of you do it that way. That is through Patreon or Subscribestar or urunbrookshow.com slash support, which is the main way in which people support me through PayPal. But we also use super chat. Super chat has become a major source of that support. So please consider using the super chat feature. You can use just a sticker or you can ask a question to help support the show. $5 for everybody listening right now would get us over the top of our goal. So consider getting us over the goal. All right. Let's start with Shahzabat, 50 bucks. I wasn't intrigued by your news story about engineering egg cells. In order about future artificial wombs, it would be possible to cook fetuses for a whole year so that they are born more fully developed, less time dealing with diapers and vomit. I'm curious about wasn't intrigued. Why weren't you intrigued or is that a typo? So anyway, yeah, artificial wombs make it somewhat optional in terms of when in a sense they're born. So many babies are born now prematurely and have to be incubators or just very small and very sensitive and very difficult. But making this artificial makes it all the more likely that they will be more fully formed and more fully developed when they come out. Less time dealing with diapers and vomit, good thing, good thing. But of course, those early days, weeks, months of development, of engaging with the world are probably pretty crucial to cognitive development of the baby. So I'm not sure it'll turn out that it would be a value to keep them in for longer, even though it might be more convenient. So it was a typo, Charles Batesz. He was intrigued by the news story about engineering egg cells. I thought it was a fascinating story. I hope you guys check it out. All right. So we got John with $5, Catherine with $5. We need 100 more people to do $5 and they're watching right now. We're at 100 like people. So just everybody. I know Gail's already done $5. So we've got a bunch and they're just doing stickers. They're not even asking a question. So any one of you can do that. Please consider doing it. All right. Hugh Ruhm, thank you. Hugh Ruhm, thank you so much, Ruhm, for doing this live stream. Patrick with David is a really dynamic individual and has done what I think we're extremely important with a lot of people on both sides of the law. Yeah. I mean, I like Patrick. I like the interview he did of me. I encourage you guys to go watch it. Just put his name and my name. I think there are three different videos of me, one on his channel, one on the Iron Man Institute channel, one on my channel of the interviews. It's been watched by a lot of people. I thought it was a good interview. And he's a dynamic guy. He's a great salesman. He's super articulate. And he has some of the biggest guests in the world on. And maybe what you should do is, now that I've critiqued his selfish video, maybe you should encourage him to do another interview with me. Maybe talk to him about having me back on and talking about more things. Maybe talking about the state of the world, talking about what's going on in the world and also talking about why I think he's got selfishness wrong. James asks, what's making you well known is not your podcast. It's your appearances on Lex Friedman and other large platforms. I think you should do, if you pray your university videos, those are what propelled Alex to notoriety. I don't think so. I don't think that's what propelled Alex to notoriety. I think what propelled Alex to notoriety is the work he did with all companies. It's just the conferences he attended, the seminars he did, the constant work with the industry itself. I think the pre-GAU videos are nice, they're nice to have, they're a big splash. But in terms of actually getting people to identify you as an expert, actually getting people to identify you as somebody connected to this particular industry, that is all about the things that he did with the industry and the book that he wrote and the marketing that he did around that. The pre-GAU university helped a little bit. It helped with the marketing, I'm sure, but that's not what propelled him. At all, I don't think. But I agree. What made me well-known is Lex Friedman and other large platforms. And I would love to do large platforms. I don't particularly want to do pre-GAU university unless it's kind of on my terms, because I don't like pre-GAU university, I don't like that platform, I find it anti-a lot of what I believe in and what I hold dear. And it's just not worth it. Plus, they've never approached me to do it. And they would want me to pay them a lot of money to do it. So, you know, I got Lex Friedman, I got, what's his name, Shapiro, I've done Ben Shapiro. I've been on a lot of big podcasts. I'd like to be on more. I think the best way for you guys to help me get on more of these podcasts, I'd like to be, again, on Patrick, I'd like to be again on some of the even bigger platforms the best way for that to happen, Dave Rubin, Mike Amalus, all these, I mean, Mike Amalus, I don't think added much to me. You didn't see a real bump in terms of subscribers. Is you guys, right? You guys, the way I got on Rubin is a bunch of people went on Rubin and said, hey, you should interview, you're on Brook. And then he interviewed me once and he interviewed me a few times after that. The way Lex did it is he'd been following my podcast. He still shows up once in a while over here in the chat. That's how I've got all of them. It's either you guys have urged them or they have known about me for one way or the other through something that I've done, a talk I've given, a valuable video that's gone. I've tried to get on Trigonometry. They kind of said that they weren't available when I wanted to do it. So I keep trying every time I'm in London to get on Trigonometry. But you should let them know that they should have me on. I mean, the number one way in which I will get on people's shows is if you, their customers, if you will, their supporters, their audience, tell them, hey, we'd really like you to interview it. You're on Brook. And not just do it once, but do it regularly so that they know there's real passion here. And I don't see a lot of my audience doing that. A few of you do it. And I really appreciate that. But do it consistently, do large numbers of you. The 1,000 people or 1,500 people are going to watch this video. It would be great if every single one of you did it. All right. We are still looking for $5 from everybody who hasn't done anything on the Super Chat yet. We're still $450 short. So please consider providing some support. Catherine, where are you? I don't know what's going on. People are ignoring you today, ignoring you completely. All right. Catherine's going to be very sad. Fender Harper says, Egoism being the beneficiary of your own action. Urational Egoism to me is having an irrational standard of what it is a benefit to oneself. But benefit from oneself is an objective standard. Benefit from oneself is not whatever. Benefit oneself, benefit, means something. Self means something. So if I do something and I die and I say, whoops, you know, there was irrational benefit to myself. No, I mean, it didn't benefit you. It hurt you. So Madoff didn't even think he was benefiting. He didn't think. And even if he didn't think he was benefiting, he was wrong and he was wrong, not in a subtle way. He was wrong big time. He was wrong through evasion. There's no way he really could think about it and come to the conclusion that this was good for him. So no, I think it's very, very dangerous to associate in any way benefiting of your own action with something that clearly irrationality does not benefit your own action. That's just a, it's inconsistent, those two. All right. We've got a few more five and $10 questions. If you want to ask a question now, make it a $20. I'm starting to have a feeling that, like what you guys are questioned out, that's, that's, you know, there are no more questions for me to answer in the world. That's right. I mean, you know, this is the kind of topic, if action Jackson tells me a topic and then I can't raise any super chat, then I go, God, you just, you're just killing me. Action Jackson, if I'd done a show on, you know, on Trump and Putin, I would have raised $650 like that. All right. Taze, he says it's nearly May. Can you believe it? I can't actually so much to do so many plans to execute. Absolutely. It's the year is just push. It's the year is just push passing quickly. Hoppe Campbell. Thank you. Michael says, do you think it makes people uncomfortable that I ran was right about everything. They can't accept that one person originated all these profound truths. No, I mean, I, some people, I think are made uncomfortable with that. But, but no, I think most people just don't accept that they are truths. If they accepted that their truths, we'd be way ahead. And then we could deal with the discomfort. They don't accept them as truth. It's not like these truths are obvious and they, they, they go, oh, but one person. Nah, no, the truths are not obvious and they don't accept them. Liam says, no one thinks about individual rights. They think about the outcome they desire. It's pure narcissism. Yes. And it's in, in, in, in that sense, it, it's a selfless strategy because it leads to bad outcomes for self. You know, it's other people are never the standard. It's always about negating self. I gave you, I give that example of my morality of capitalism talk. If the standard was other people, businessmen would be heroes. But the standard is not other people. The standard is your own suffering. The standard is being selfless. And as Patrick with David said, I think just to follow me, very few people are actually selfless. Nobody's actually really fully, completely selfless. There's a typo, some way he said, all right. Al says, these are the same people who believe that sacrifice is about giving something up for something better. Yes, the Jordan Peterson's of the world. The sacrifice somehow becomes investment. No, investment is investment. Sacrifice, sacrifice. Sacrifice is a net loss. That's the whole point. That's what makes it a sacrifice. Investment is a net gain. See, action, action. Nobody really cares about, about you asking them to do superchats. Sad reality. All right. Tim says, keep up the good work you're on. You're an inspiration. Appreciate that. Thank you. Daniel says, has anyone mentioned to you Ron about Elon Musk responded to Ayn Rand's tweets? Go Ayn. Yes, I saw that. He responded by saying, yeah, Ayn Rand was right, but so was O'well, and so was Huxley, and it's all coming together. All three of them were right. It's all coming together right now. Yeah. He's read Ayn Rand. There's no question. Elon Musk is right. All right. Thank you, everybody. I am, I have to admit a little concerned about the inability to raise, to raise the $650. Usually we at least make, get close. We get semi-close, but we didn't even get close tonight. So I am concerned. Maybe it's because it's Sunday night. Maybe because we've had so many shows one after the other, I am not sure. We didn't even make the $250 for the, for the, for the new shows that, you know, that we do on a daily basis. So that is, that is concerning, let's say concerning. And it was a great topic. Yes, actually, Jackson, it actually was a great topic. Well, we didn't get any of the whales here, obviously. We didn't get any of the people who can write, or who are happy to write $100 or $500 or stuff like that to, to get us over the top as often happens. Yes, we need many, many more people to, to follow you on book show and to participate in, in the live shows. But no whales today. Maybe we'll get them tomorrow. All right, so tomorrow we'll have a noon or one o'clock. We'll do our news roundup. We'll do the same thing on Tuesday. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do a show tomorrow night. We'll see. I will try, but, but no guarantees. And, but, but we definitely will do Monday and Tuesdays. The news shows. All right, everybody. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. We had well over 100 people watching live. So there should be 100 thumbs up over there. So I'm not sure, I'm not sure why we don't have. John, thank you. Thank you for, for additional support. I appreciate that. Thanks, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow. Bye.