 I'd like 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 Ayn 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 going to 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 want to 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 want to talk about this afternoon is what does that really mean? And why is that a good thing? Why is that OK? 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 going to talk mostly about what it is rather than why be it. I want to cover why is it so disturbing to think about selfishness? Because when I say to somebody, when typically in our culture we say to somebody, he's selfish, is that a compliment? No. It's a derogatory statement. We're saying that person is a bad person. We have all been raised to believe. We have all been raised to believe. Then when it comes to ethics, when it comes to morality, when it comes to being good, to being noble, to being just, to being a good human being, 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. 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. 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.