 Be productive. Mouches. 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 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. 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, ten years later. Because they didn't earn it, so it's meaningless to them. You think that it's the yacht that's going to 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 the 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 going to get a huge throat on the chalk that you'll die in five minutes. I mean, you'd never even think about it. 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 going to 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 in 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 principle is not to have to rethink it, because it's complicated, right? Let me stop right now. I'll tell you what I think in a minute, because I have to figure out if I'm going to lie or not. And if you rely on your emotions, because sometimes telling the truth, and I'm not saying tell the truth, you have to tell people exactly what you think, that's not saying everything is not equivalent to not lying. Not lying is a negative. 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 acquires and to me to be happy, I need to do this, and 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. Starting now. Hi, I was wondering 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 wanna receive stuff. It goes back to the idea of earning. You wanna 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, you know, 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. But, you know, and she looks amazing for being married 30 years, so amazing for being married 10 years, but. 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? All right, 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. You know, I don't think it has to crumble. I don't think it's inevitable. But I think, you know, 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 a 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, that sugar is 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 that 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.