 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 the president executive director of the Ein Rand 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. And 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. 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 businessmen, but from a, 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-fulfillment, 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 you know, 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 want to 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, 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 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 emotionally or in 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 want to 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 in 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, because 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 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? 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. It's a simple, that's called a principle. It's always gonna be then, it's always gonna help. You say, 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 without 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 now 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. 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? Where 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 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 relative, 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 are 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? 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 I'm from the Ayn Rand Institute, I believe that Ayn Rand 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 100. 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 in 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, you know, 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 makes it possible for a lion to survive? You know, physical strength, right? It's muscular, right? This thing pounces on a gazelle and the 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 sabre to 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 our 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 our ability to get the data and analyze it and think about it and generate something new from it. It's our 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. 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, wherever we want to live under our terms and under our conditions. Including, for example, one of the greatest inventions in human history, air conditioning, 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, our ability to have relationships, our 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 forage 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. 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 want to 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 want to think about that. Because the conclusion might not be the conclusion that I want to get to. The conclusion might not be one that's pleasant to me. And it's going to 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 are just not quite right. But if I think about it, I might discover some bad news and I don't want to go there. Nah, I just don't want to go there. Or the cocaine is right there. And you're going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 going to come from science, which is going to come from thinking. Your diet routine is going to come from science, which is a product of thinking. Even the dating ideas that you're going to get are going to 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 in order to learn anything from it. So it's all about thinking, thinking, thinking. So everything I'm going to 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. You know, 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 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. Booney Madoff probably got a little bit of a kick when he stole $50 billion from his best friend. 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 Booney Madoff. Everybody know Booney Madoff is? I'm assuming you do. Anybody not know? Booney Madoff basically was, I see somebody doesn't know. Booney Madoff basically had a pyramid scheme going where he would, you know, 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, I 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. Now, Bernie Madoff did this on the largest scale in human history. He basically ended up losing people $50 billion, right? Because I'm not suspending some of this money is it's coming in, right? I'm buying nice cars, nice boats, vacation homes, new and all that. 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 was 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, you know, this is 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 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. You know, 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 will 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. It 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 happened, 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 that it's destructive. So our perception of what selfishness is, line-cheating, stealing, being a wind worshiper, 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 want to do that. You don't want to be self-destructive. You want to be self-building, self-creating. You want to be happy. You want to 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 details. 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've probably heard a lot about self-esteem and you're 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 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 are you 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 challenges. 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, blur, 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 pat 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 the sense of happiness and success and prosperity. 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, 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 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, right? 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, is 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 this is, 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. And you don't think about it. The whole point of principles is not to have to rethink it because it's complicated, right? Don't, 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 like 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. You 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 acquires and to me to be happy, I need to do this, 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. 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 that delivers you 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 for much of that history. And the only last 200 years that we've gone from 35 years to 80, for you guys, maybe a hundred. 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. 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 given the circumstances. My life is dedicated for fighting the fight. I wanna 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, I 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 wanna bore you with that stuff. James. I just wanna 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 part of learning about life. I mean, like, you know, failure is, 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. 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 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. Again, the focus is always making your life better. Building on their life and integrity. The concept, again, according to Rand, there are seven virtues and I barely touched on two. 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 a sense in which we've discussed, right? It's not about just saying, yeah, rationality's okay, but being rational and applying it. So 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. 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. 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. 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, right? 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 anything. 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 kids. Some of your thinking might be flawed, it might be mistakes. Emotions are these automatic responses that it results from these thinking. You wanna embrace your emotions, you wanna recognize your emotions, you wanna live through your emotions which you don't wanna 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 them. 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 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 or 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 wanna be happy but they don't know what that even constitutes. They say, oh, I'll make more money, and 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 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 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 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, not 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, 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, we'd all die. Every value that you have, the food that you eat, the cars that you drive, the 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 that 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.