 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 for 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. 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 going to do? 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 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 going to 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 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? 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 part of learning about life. I mean, like, you know, failure, if failure is 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. 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. 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 somebody is going to 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, you know, according to Rand, there are seven virtues and I, you know, 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 is 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, 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? 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. What are those 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. 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 aware you did. You might have done it when you were a kid. Some of your thinking 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 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. 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, contacts 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 know, 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 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 the idea that happiness and self-confidence can be achieved are 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 learning how to be unhappy and not self-confident. So, there's a lot of, I hate to call it science because I don't believe it is, pseudo-science out there that suggests that we are innately happy or we innately have self-confidence or we're not innately happy. There's actually 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 going to 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 a dichotomy in our society between morality, goodness, being just, being noble, being virtuous, and being happy. Immanuel 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 to achieve happiness 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 because the 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, so 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 want to become, I'll take an example out of the found head, you really want to 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. You can't ever 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 your 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 decide what achievements count and if you do that, you will gain happiness. You know, I know it. You know, 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, you know, 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. Every value that you have, the food that you eat, the cars 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.