 live and thank you for all those listening, listening by podcast later on. We're also on Facebook live for those of you who who have access to computer and want to see live video of this, although you don't get to see anything you can't hear, right? All right, today we're going to take a break a little bit, at least for a portion of this, in order to end from politics and from talking about Donald Trump, I'm a little sick of the whole topic. But and we're going to talk about something more fundamental, something more philosophical, and then maybe try to bridge it into politics. And we're going to talk about selfishness and what selfishness means and why, you know, what I mean means by the whole concept of selfishness. And we can talk about all the ways in which this is misunderstood and all the ways in which the whole idea of selfishness is distorted in the popular culture and even among people who claim to be supportive of our ideas. So I want to, that's where I'll bring in some of the politics, because I think it's really important to talk about selfishness. And I'm using the word selfishness on purpose right now for the same reason I ran it because it makes some people uncomfortable. Self-interest, selfishness. But I want to talk about how it's applied or misapplied in the debate in politics. And in this context, maybe we can talk about towards the end of the show about robots, robots, you know, robots, going to replace all that manual labor, that horrible manual labor that we all, that we all have to do. I don't know, people have to work in factories and cleaning the house and driving your car and soon, soon, all of that is going to be handled on by a robot, by artificial, so-called artificial intelligence. It's not exactly intelligence. It's the human beings that are the intelligence, but the computer, the computer becomes almost mimics, in a sense, some human processes. So you don't have to drive a car and you don't have to drive trucks and traffic accidents drop dramatically. And you can go on and on in all the benefits of robots. But some would argue we should be selfish. And in a sense, robots are going to affect my job. Actually, my job is pretty safe. Robots can't do what I do. But, you know, a lot of your jobs are going to be affected. You should be against robots. And indeed, Bill Gates has come out and said we should tax robots. And we'll talk about why he's saying this. Where does this come from? What drives somebody like Bill Gates to say something like let's tax robots? What is happening here? And I want to talk in that context also about the role of philosophy and the role of ideas and the role of morality in these political debates. How is that? How is morality shaping what Bill Gates is saying about robots? Because it's all about philosophy. I mean, I got a lot of posts saying Bill Gates is doing that because he's so rich. And because, you know, he's made it. And his startups don't have to make any money. Who cares? As if life is about all life is about his material values. All life is about his money, which is a typical Marxist view. It's a typical leftist view. But first life is not primarily about money. And therefore, to evaluate other people's behavior to measure things, to measure things in terms of their effect on money alone or as a primary is a massive mistake and unselfish as we'll see as we go along today. All right, really important. I'd love for you guys to call in with questions about this topic, but let's stick to selfishness, self-interest, morality for the first 45 minutes or so. So feel free to call in 347-324-3075. Any questions you have about Einren's view of morality, about self-interest, what self-interest means, about selfishness, but misunderstandings about it, misconceptions you might have or people you know might have or how to explain it better. You know, let's really take this opportunity to dig deeper into this and to dig deeper into what you find as confusing or what you find as difficult in this idea of being selfish or being self-interested in and how to explain it or how to live it. More importantly, much more importantly, much, much, much more importantly, how to live it. What does it mean for you, for your life to be selfish? And how to apply it. All right, so you can call in 347-324-3075. And just to remind you, you have to press the one, I think, in order to let me know that you want to ask a question that you're not just dialing in to listen in because some people do that. They just dial in just to listen to the show over the phone, which you can do at 347-324-3075. But you can also ask a question using that number. So go for it. All right. Great. We were on Facebook Live. I think everybody, everything's working fine on Facebook Live. Everything's working fine on Blocked Arc Radio, in spite of the fact that I thought there were some problems. Still think there might be. Everybody seems to be happy. So, cool. What do we mean by self-interest? What is the, when we talk about selfishness, there's so much confusion about selfishness, right? What does Ayn Rand, what do we as objectivists or those of us who are objectivists mean when we talk about self-interest? Well, first of all, this is a concept in morality. Morality is that field that studies, right? Studies the values and virtues that are fundamental for life, that shape your life, that shape your character. So, you know, morality is about general truths that are chosen. Morality is chosen and fundamental to shape your character and life. And the question is what should be the standard by which one makes decisions that are important? What should be the standard? Standard answer always has been one of a number. One is just follow orders. You don't have to worry about this too much. Follow the commandments. Choose to follow the commandments, right? We got 10 commandments. We got 624, something like that. Different prescriptions by the Jewish faith and what you should do in every aspect of your life. Christianity has something similar. Islam has something similar. Judaism and Islam, I think, are more comprehensive in terms of covering actually giving you guidelines, instruction manuals on almost every aspect of your life and what to do and what not to do in that sense. Judaism and Islam are very similar in that in that respect. So that's one option is just follow orders and basically where do the orders come from? They come from God and it's not about it's just you living for the sake of God by following these orders. The alternative to that has always been. No, you should live by your own choices, by your own decisions and the standard for those choices and those decisions, the moral standard for those choices and decisions should be other people's lives. The wellbeing of the group, the wellbeing of your majority, the wellbeing of the tribe, the wellbeing of somebody else and you have to figure out what that means or you can just follow the guidelines of God, I don't know, the dictator, the philosopher, king, the fewer, whoever who will tell you what's good for the group and you just have to follow orders. I mean, both moral alternatives usually refer to follow orders. But of course, there are, you know, alternatives to that, which tend to be, well, you figure out what's good for other people. Morality deals primarily with what to do with other people, how to behave towards other people and generally morality tells you that other people's lives are more important than yours and therefore sacrifice is the moral standard and being selfless and helping other people and focusing on other people and sacrificing for the people and other people are the focal point of morality. And as we'll see when we get to Bill Gates's article, that really, that morality is really underpins the whole thrust of what he's arguing. He's not making an economic argument. He's not making a tax policy argument really. He's fundamentally making a moral argument. He's making a moral argument from the perspective of altruism, the idea otherism, the idea that others are the primary focus, the primary and particularly which others, well, those that need your help, those that have a need. So it's the weak, it's the poor, it's the meek, it's the suffering. It's anybody who has a need is the other for which you need to sacrifice, for which you need to be selfless. And this animates Bill Gates's proposal. This is what drives Bill Gates's proposal. So it's need that drives this. Now, if you wanna really, if you wanna really good discussion of altruism and how it plays out in politics and how it plays out in the whole political debate, then I really recommend to you Peter Schwartz's book on in defense of selfishness, which I think is the title. I'll check on Amazon in a second and let you know. But Peter Schwartz's book is excellent on particularly on this point of describing what altruism really means and then on showing how altruism is used politically across the board in everything, right? And this is at the end of the day, I'll just make this political point quickly. This is at the end of the day, why I think it matters. It does not matter who the president is. It doesn't matter who runs Congress. It doesn't matter what they say and their best intentions and their offering market people and Donald Trump wants to shrink government and reduce regulations and he wants to cut taxes and do away with Obamacare and all these things. All of that doesn't matter. They cannot do it. They cannot do it. Why? Why can't they do it? Why can't they do it? Because the animating factor, the animating factor in our world today, the animating moral factor in our world today is altruism and you're not gonna be able to eliminate all those government programs. You're not gonna be able to get rid of Obamacare and really replace it with free market medicine without challenging the fundamental premise of altruism. And the same thing is true with regard to deregulation. The same thing is true with regard to really cutting taxes in a meaningful way. The same thing is true of any free market program. It cannot be done even if you believe that the politicians of the world have their best intentions in the world. They can't do it. They won't be able to convince the American people. People have the best intentions of the world. They're not gonna get, you know, it's that famous sign that the Tea Party held up. Keep your hands off of my Medicare. You know, you can't touch my Medicare. Oh my God, well, old people do. They'll suffer, they'll die. They're throwing mother, grandmother's off the cliff. In conditions of what about children or what about babies and what about this and what about that? There's no end to it, right? All right, the book in defense of selfishness, why the code of self-sacrifice is unjust and destructive. If you wanna understand the mechanism by which altruism animates every single one of our political decisions today, this is the book to read. And I know a lot of you have not read it because I know the sales figures and a lot of you listening to this need to get this book in defense of selfishness by Peter Schwartz. I also recommend The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, of course. And, you know, there's a chapter in The Companion to Ayn Rand. That's a very, very expensive book, so I hate to. But it is brilliant. It is a brilliant book. And edited by Greg Selimari and Alan Godhelf. It's called The Companion to Ayn Rand, excellent book. Everybody against you buy it, it's 129 bucks. Although you can get the Kindle Edition for $32. But Greg Selimari is an excellent chapter in that book as well on this whole issue of egoism and altruism. All right, so, yeah. I mean, The Companion is brilliant, so you should definitely get it. So those are three book recommendations. In Defense of Selfishness by Peter Schwartz, The Virtue of Selfishness, of course, by Ayn Rand and The Companion to Ayn Rand. And of course, you should buy all of my books. Which one is this one? This one would be Free Market Revolution. Deals with some of these issues as well. So Free Market Revolution is another book. All of you should really have. Like, it's these books are essentials in your library. And look, you cannot understand objectivism. And I'd love to run a poll. I'm gonna run a poll on Twitter, Facebook. To find out how many of the people who follow me have actually read Ayn Rand's Not Fiction, read Opa, Virtue of Selfishness Capitalism, not known ideal, read some of the other books like Peter Schwartz's book, some of my books, but how many have actually read the literature, the actual writings on objectivism? I mean, pretty much everybody's read Atlas Shrugged and the Font Head, I assume, although some of you I know have not, but most of you have. But how many of you read the non-fiction? And let me tell you, you cannot understand objectivism. You don't know objectivism. And please, I don't think you should call yourself an objectivist unless you have read and actually studied those books. And know what Ayn Rand is actually referring to. All right. So fundamental to Ayn Rand is this idea, to the objectivist ethics is the idea that man's life, your life, every individual's life is the standard of value for that individual. So morality is about your life. It's about making your life the best that it can be. It's about figuring out more than that, right? It's about figuring out how to live. And this is the, I think, really interesting original point that Ayn Rand makes, right? Life is conditional. We can die or we can live. And dying is not just a minor issue. Dying is going out of existence. So we can exist or we can not exist. We can be alive or not be alive. That every living being faces this basic alternative, life or nonexistence. And for human beings, this is a non-trivial choice because as conceptual beings, because we have free will, because we have reason, because we are fundamentally conceptual, we do not have life inscribed into our genes. We do not have the blueprint for how to live, how to live well, how to succeed in life, inscribed into our genes. We have to figure all that out for ourselves. It's because of the unique form of our consciousness. Most of all other animals have, to some degree or another, it inscribed, they know exactly what to do. It's pre-programmed. Everything comes pre-programmed. How to survive, how to live, how to be a cheetah, how to be a lion, how to be a plant. It's all pre-programmed. It's all inscribed. You know what to do. Human beings are not like that. Human beings have to figure it out, to live as a human being, to survive as a human being. Everything, everything from finding food on a scale appropriate to human beings, like agriculture or large-scale hunting or any form of significant nutrition for human beings has to be figured out, has to be reasoned, has to be thought through, has to be discovered. So for human beings, the choice to live, the choice to live is not, why don't you make that choice? Why don't you make that choice? There's still a lot of work to do. Animals can't make the choice. They automatically have life turned on. And then they know exactly what to do about it. Human beings have to make the choice to live and then have to figure out how to do it. And the figuring out how to do it, the figuring out what to do, what things are good for you and what not good for you. That is about choosing values, what I should seek, what I should go out and gain and keep, what I should hold on to, right? What I should go out there and pursue. That human beings have to choose. Now, but all in the context of life, first you have to choose life and then the question arises, well, what do I do in order to survive? I need food. How do I get food? And that's not obvious. None of that is obvious, right? How to get food. So ultimately, how do I get clothes? How do I get fire? Ooh, fire is very useful for my existence, for my living life as a human being. So for objectivism, life, your existence, your existence as a human being, qua human being, is the standard of all value, fire, good, bad, good. It helps me cook, it gives me light, it helps me defend myself, bad, it can burn me. But the standard, notice the standard of why it's good and why some things are bad. It's bad to the extent that it threatens my life. It can burn me, it can kill me. It's good to the extent that it enhances my life. Cook, light, self-defense. So man's life is the standard of value for objectivism. And to some extent, implicit, before you get a corruption of ethics. To some extent, implicit in man's behavior is this seeking out life, trying to make a better life for yourself. So we discover fire way before we discover ethics. And yet, like other animals, we are seeking to live, to survive, to succeed, to make our lives more comfortable, better, happier, ultimately. So for objectivism, man's life is the standard of value and happiness or flourishing or living life to the fullest as a human being is our purpose, is the purpose. Now, what does that require? What does it require? If your life is the standard, what's the next step? What is the most important value you should pursue? What are the virtues that are most important to you? Now, as I mentioned, it's not self-evident, not self-evident, what kind of life you should live. It's not self-evident what values you should pursue. It's not self-evident what kind of behaviors you're gonna lead to a good life or not. Why? Because it's life's complicated. It's complex. It's long. We, particularly today, we live to be 80, 90 years old. What kind of actions, what kind of values are gonna make my life a good life over the next? Well, I'm not gonna live another 80 years, so I'm gonna live, let's say, let's say 40, let's be generous, right? What kind of actions that I do today, what effect are they gonna have over the next 40 years of my life? What is gonna enhance that life? What is gonna make that life miserable? What's gonna enhance my existence? What's gonna make me a better person? What's gonna allow me to live a better, more fulfilling, more successful, more flourishing life? And what is not? That's hard. And we have the ability as human beings to see not just first-level consequences, not just evaluate our emotions, but to look at second-level consequences and third-level consequences. If I lie, I might get a short-term emotional benefit by reducing the level of fear because this person's gonna be angry at me. But what are the second-level consequences? What does this imply to my relationship with this person? What happens if I ever get caught one day? What happens to my ability to think otherwise, to think about, you know, to use my mind? Does it impact that? We have the ability to look beyond the immediate range of our senses, to think about the future, to estimate the consequences of our actions, to think, to reason, and ultimately conceptualize, and indeed, none of do we have that ability, but that is what makes human life possible. Without that ability, we would die tomorrow. Without the ability to conceptualize, without the ability to reason and think, we would all die tomorrow. We cannot live on our emotions. We cannot live by intuition. We cannot live by instinct. So it's complicated. There are so many levels of consequences. Human life is such a complex, wonderful, amazing, but complex phenomena to be successful at it is hard. You have to deal with yourself, your own mind, your own knowledge, you have to deal with reality, what's going on around you, with physical reality, and then you have to deal with other people. Talk about complex, hugely complex. So how do we do it? How do we do it? We need guidance. We need guidance in order to be successful. We can't just drift. We need guidance. So where does this guidance come from? Well, it comes from our conceptual ability. It comes from our conceptual faculty. We need guidance in the form of particular types of concepts. And here we need guidance from principles. We need principles. We need general truths that we can rely on, we can depend on, right? And that we know other truths depend on them. So we need to prove to ourselves certain general truths, like, honesty is a good strategy in life. Because lying, deception, faking it to yourself and to others has been proven over and over again to be destructive. I can come up with a general principle that says, you know, trying to achieve a value through dishonest means is bad. And I'm going to be honest from now on, always on principle. I don't have to re-prove this over and over again. Every time I have a conversation with another human being. Or every time I attempt it to tell a lie. I just know it's wrong. So I don't do it. Not because it's a commandment, because at some point I proved it to myself. Now principles of fundamentals reached by induction, by inductive reasoning. So I've seen it, you know, it just doesn't work. It's bad for human life. It's bad for me. And therefore, I form a principle, a moral principle. And of course, we are taught these moral principles. But if you teach them right, you don't teach them as commandments, right, as religion does. You teach moral principles as, look, this is what works if you want to survive. If you want to thrive as human beings, hear the things that work and hear the things that don't work. Here examples, often you can use literature or you can use other mechanisms by which to show the dangers of certain actions and the benefits of other actions. Sometimes people actually have to experience it. Sometimes people actually have to lie. You know, to see that it doesn't work and have to watch other people lie and see it doesn't work for them before they get it, before they get a principle around it. So you need principles. You need principles to help guide your life. You need these fundamentals that are not achieved by revelation, that are reached from reading a book, even if that book is out of shrugged. They are reached by thinking, by integrating, by the process of induction. So from reality, inducing a principle and the principle, in this case, a moral principle that helps guide your actions. So moral principles, these are practical principles. They're supposed to help you live. They're supposed to be earthly, right? They're necessary. They're concerned with living. That's what morality is about. And this is the whole perversion of Christianity and altruism and so on. Christianity, morality is all about suffering, saints. Have you ever seen a happy saint, like sitting on a cross with a smile on his face? No! The whole point of being a saint is that you're suffering, you're miserable, your life is just horrible. That's the point of sainthood. That's what morality is about, according to Christianity, right? Whereas Ayn Rand's morality is about living. It's about the principles that will help you live a successful, flourishing, and ultimately happy life. That's so phenomenal. That is so phenomenal, right? For the first time really in human history, you know, maybe I've started to some extent here and there, people dabbled in this. But for the first time in human history, somebody's come up with a morality whose whole purpose, whose whole purpose is the successful living of individuals. The whole purpose is to give you tools to give you tools to live well, ultimately to achieve happiness. And that's what Ayn Rand's morality is about. That's what being selfish means. Being selfish is to follow moral principles, requires following moral principles, in attainment of a successful, flourishing, purposeful life. It's selfishness. It's all that you're concerned as a selfish human being. You should be concerned with the moral principles that lead to life as a human being, to a successful human being. Alright, so any questions up to this point? It's pretty abstract today. 3-4-7-3-2-4-3-0-7-5 3-4-7-3-2-4-3-0-7-5 Right? So we need moral principles because we don't know automatically what to do. We don't know how to live a good life automatically. We need concepts, we need ideas, and ultimately we need principles because principles are shortcuts. They make it possible for us to think they're efficiency builders, right? They make it possible to say, I should always be rational. I don't need to figure out in this particular situation whether I should be rational or not. I should just always be rational. And if you think about it, the primary virtue, the primary virtue, and really every other virtue is just an application of this. The primary virtue, if you want to live a successful life, is thinking. It's rationality. It's think, think, think. Think, think, think because all of human life depends on one's ability to think. It depends on one's ability to reason. To the extent that one is rational, to the extent that one is rational, only to that extent can one be successful in life. So when we look around, at Bill Gates and other people and their successes in life, it's because in that at least area within their life, they were rational. They used their reason. They used their mind. You don't get successful lives, really success in anything. Just from emotion or just from, I don't know, intuition. If it's a sustained success, it's a consequence of somebody having focused their mind, used it effectively, connected it with real reality, found truths. It's about being rational. It's about being rational. So to be selfish, to be selfish means to place your own life as a standard of value. It means to live the best life that you can be, to achieve, to attain, to strive towards flourishing and happiness. And the way to do it is by being rational. By applying rationality, by applying the thinking to every aspect of your life. And one way to do that is by applying principles. So being selfish equals being rational. To be rational is to be selfish to the extent that people are rational in their lives. That's good. They're doing something that's good for them even when they don't know it. Even when they don't know it. All right. If you want to ask anything, take the conversation in a different direction. Have I said something that doesn't make any sense or that is too simplistic or too abstract or... Yeah. No feedback. Well, I can tell that half the students are falling asleep and I can tell the others kind of eager to ask a question and some are just bewildered and some are getting it and there's this light in their eye. The problem with doing a podcast is I have no idea what you guys... what you guys are responding. Some people are leaving the chat. Some people are entering the chat. So I guess the people leaving are the ones who fell asleep So give a call and let me know what you think. 347-324-3075 347-324-3075 You can press a 1. You can press a 1 for... That's a good question. That's a good question. All right. So selfishness is about being rational and it's about identifying the principles that are necessary for human life, for human success, for human thriving, for human flourishing. Now that's not an easy task. It is an enormous, enormous achievement to recognize those principles and indeed it's taken, I don't know, 100,000 years of human life before a philosopher by the name of Ayn Rand came up with those principles. The virtues and the values and the whole system, the whole ethical system that is a massive, massive human history like achievement. The fact that Ayn Rand's ethical system is not celebrated throughout the land on a regular basis. The fact that Ayn Rand isn't as celebrated as Thomas Jefferson is in America, or George Washington is in America is really, really sad given how revolutionary and how dramatic and how life-changing the ethical system that Ayn Rand discovered is. I mean, there were always people who lived like this but they were made to feel guilty for it and they had no answer when they were made to feel guilty for it in response so they felt guilty and indeed it's one of the great tragedies of human history is that the great achievers were often persecuted and never got the credit they deserved were condemned were condemned for what? for using their mind, were condemned for what? for being selfish, for being rational condemned for what? for taking their life seriously so for millennia the best people have been condemned have been ridiculed, have been put down because of their virtues because of how good they are because they've used their mind because, let me say, think of how many people have been burnt at the stake through human history because they've discovered something new that upset people whether it's an idea or whether it's a product or whether it's science and it's because until Ayn Rand you could not defend man seeking his own world being by the use of reason you know you couldn't defend it against the onslaught of Christianity against the onslaught of altruism I mean there was a brief period in Greece where the good was celebrated where man's reason and rationality was celebrated and maybe a brief period in the Enlightenment where they had some notion, some idea of the truth of this but these are rare moments in human history rare moments in human history and now Ayn Rand has finally a philosophy an ethical code that justifies thinking morally that says that it's the most important thing you can do and that says that the purpose of your life is to think for the purpose of living a good life and that those those who promote your life, those who make your life better, should be rewarded not punished should be admired, not resented they should be heroes not condemned to the gallows or the crosses or the antitrust regulations or whatever the modern equivalent of the gallows is so before we get into what about the poor and what about I don't know selfish people treat other people badly all this garbage all this misconception all this nonsense selfish people only think about themselves that would be bizarre before you get any of that you got to focus on the positive what a selfish person is is a person who cares about himself is a person who takes his life seriously it's a person who wants to live the best life that he can live it's a person who wants to flourish as a human being as a consequence as a consequence venerates his own reason views rationality as his primary virtue and seeks to discover and constantly use more principles wow that must be evil those selfish bastards selfish bastards they want to be principled and they want to use their mind oh my god what's going to happen we're all going to die alright let's take a call before I go nuts who's this I can you're breaking up a little bit we'll see if we can cope hey I have a quick question for you sure people out there they say they're into what they call honest they're into what say that again they're into what they call it radical it means basically just saying what's ever on your mind how you feel if you go up to a total stranger in a restaurant and just tell them and they feel that if they don't do that if they don't repeat all those feelings that they're being dishonest well I think it's your position on honesty with that yeah I mean I think that's just silly unfortunately I'm going to I'm going to take you off because whenever I'm dependent on today for some reason the calls and the music that I heard is all chopped up and I can't hear it but somebody's helping me on the chat because I think because I think you guys can probably hear the calls better than I can so it's called radical yeah radical honesty this idea of I need to say everything that's on my mind whenever it appears on my mind to whoever is not interested or whatever I mean it's just out of context nonsense it's silly it's stupid to put it simply right honesty has to have a purpose everything you do has to have a purpose and that purpose is guided by what's good for your life long so going up to strange and telling him you're ugly serves no purpose it adds nothing to your life you don't know the strange or anything they don't know you anything you have no relationship nobody asked your opinion it's just rude and and silly and again selfishness is not about emotions now the outcome of being selfish is partially emotional in the sense that you experience happiness partially as an emotion but it's not about emotions so just because you feel like you know I don't know I'm sad right now doesn't mean you have to tell the world you said it again it has to be motivated by a purpose by what am I trying to gain if it's not furthering your life then it's a waste of your time and you're penalizing somebody else for no reason it actually hurts your life because you're just upsetting somebody who doesn't deserve to be upset who hasn't done anything to you so it's just a silly out of context absolute that ignores the whole purpose of being honest the whole purpose of being honest is to further your life the purpose of being honest is to live a flourishing life imagine if I I mean just imagine the waste of time if I had to go around telling everybody everything that I came into my mind what a waste of time for me and you know I wouldn't want to deal with a person like that and as a consequence people wouldn't want to deal with me I wouldn't be selfish of me so it's just it's just silliness I'm just silliness being honest doesn't mean saying everything that's on your mind if somebody asks you a question and you think they deserve an answer or you think you for whatever reason an answer forthcoming then give them an answer and tell them honestly what your answer is but there's also the option of saying I don't want to answer that question or you know another time or whatever get away from you don't you don't even have to answer questions being asked for you if answering the question doesn't serve a purpose now the purpose is a long term purpose it has to be a rational purpose it's not about the emotions of the moment it's not about what's convenient it's not about what feels good it really is about long term is this good for me isn't it good for me in reason is this good for me isn't it good for me alright well let me see if I can get you back on the line and see if I've answered your question is that an answer your question yeah that I kind of so I can hear every other word but let's make a try at it yeah I think that's really good the one thing that always comes up is whoop I lost you the one thing that comes up is if you're no no absolutely not unless your job is philosophical and political so again I'm going to put you on hold unless your job relates to that absolutely not you have no obligation now I wouldn't lie about it but you say I don't want to talk about politics at work that's fine right so absolutely not you don't owe anybody you know anything unless you owe them but you have to figure what you owe them depends on the context but there are any complexities here right I'm not saying this is simple so we can do a whole show just on honesty because it's so fascinating but it is complicated for example I used to do seminars at a tech company on this and honesty used to come up and so they used to ask me this question you know if we think there is a problem with a product that is so trivial they have no impact on the performance that the customer needs the product for are we obligated to give them that information and if you're really convinced that it will have no impact on the performance then no you're not obligated to give them that information unless the contract that you have with that client says else something else but it surely would be dishonest if you know there is a flaw in the product that will affect performance then you are obligated to tell them and you can see why because it's in your absolute long term self interest to do so because when it has the impact on the performance of the product and the customer comes back to you and says hey what happened here did you know about this if you're not going to give them the performance then never going to deal with you again they're never going to deal with you again so it's really I mean lying or not lying honesty can be on a practical level a very complex issue right and one has to think about the context one has to think about what is the contract I have with this person you have a different contract a different set of obligations then towards some stranger so you don't have to tell every stranger what's in your mind about I don't know the latest life changing decision you made but you probably are obligated to your wife if it's truly a wife a life I was going to say a wife changing if it truly was a life changing decision that you make your life partner so there's an obligation there right so what you tell to whom when and how is all dependent on context all guided by the principle of honesty right so applying the virtues is not trivial and self evidence in this I will recommend to you like I did last week I think to read a book and that's book is objective is in the philosophy vine read objectives in the philosophy vine read read the chapters on the virtues read what the virtues actually mean versus what a superficial understanding of the virtues seems to mean we got to get educated about this philosophy if we're going to change the world we got to get educated more importantly about this philosophy if we want to have the best life that we can live if we want to live a happy successful purposeful life then read the guide book read the manual understand the manual and then go and apply it every single day every moment you're alive I should have said every moment you're awake so put aside politics put aside Donald Trump put aside what's going on in congress put aside Obama kid put aside Muslims you know what the Islamic threat is nothing as compared to the threat of not knowing what's good for you of not knowing the ethical principles of objectiveism and letting altruism slip into your thinking all of that garbage that's happening every day on the news stop watching it take a break say for two months I'm not watching Fox I'm going to read a section of opal opal objectives in philosophy vine read and think about it now I also think another book you should be reading about this that also kind of digs deeper into these choose them helps you integrate them helps you really think about it is a book by Tara Smith the virtuous egoist I think it's called so you know there's tons of resources now in objectiveism tons of resources to study integrate this forget about politics just a little bit you know the Trump administration will still be there in three months the wall will still have not been built in three months Islamic immigration will still be a topic in three months really study the virtues because studying the virtues is about living your life yeah so Tara Smith's book is called normative ethics the virtuous egoist the virtuous egoist so fabulous book again choose those virtues helps you so I would definitely do that and by the way if you read one of these books like opal I find myself jumping to the virtues section what does he say about integrity what does integrity actually mean does this really apply oh I see and every time I read it I discover something new that can improve my life what's more important than that this is Ayn Rand's books are really I mean properly taken I'm not talking about dogmatically taken but properly understood and thought about and integrated and chewed are really guides for living a good life politics you're not going to make a difference I'm not going to make a difference I can stand here yelling at Donald Trump all day long and it doesn't make a difference nobody cares I mean maybe five people care it doesn't matter but you know what I can make a small improvement tomorrow in my thinking in my understanding of the objective objective ethics will improve my life immediately and for the next 40 years I'm assuming I've got 40 years left to live it's good to be optimistic about some things alright we got another call we'll see if I can we'll see if I can make it out hi you're in the Iran book show who's this hi you're on hey George how are you I'm doing an excellent thank you good I appreciate you talking about this topic very returning to the idea of this as not being easy I lack that for people who have misunderstandings being selfish is just doing what you want yeah putting theory on a consistent basis it's just very very so my question how we apply these principles regular basis because it's just easy to kind of you want to be a musician practice piano every day day off and then make a practice of taking days off can you see if you can formulate a short question because you're breaking up so I'm missing half of the words so unfortunately it's awful today see if you can and this was the day where I wanted to actually have a conversation with you guys so I apologize see if you can I think I get the gist of what you're asking but see if you can formulate it quickly okay so yeah no I think it is easy to slip and it's easy to slip enough thinking and I want to get and I do want to get a politics in a bit because I think I think I see the slippage so much there partially because um I don't know all you guys but I see you posting on Facebook and I see people posting on Twitter and I see people referring to different issues and they tend to be talking about politics I see the slippage there but yeah it's very easy to slip and and the thing to do is to be rational about it to think about it so what the virtues require a serious study I mean really serious study really to try to understand them and to think about situations in your own life and how they apply and to constantly integrate them into your thinking and then in practice while living them identify situations in your own mind I slipped there why did I slip because I was afraid why was I afraid you know do a little psycho analysis but it's not psychological it's philosophical you know fear emotions are not tools of cognition emotions are not guides to living if I care about my long-term life I shouldn't let fear stop me from doing X, Y and Z I'm not going to do that again so it's about constantly thinking about what you're doing right it's the same with getting good at anything you mentioned piano playing she played a piano and there's a certain passage that's really hard for you so you practice that in particular or you try to figure out why is that hard for you what am I not conceiving of right I shouldn't talk about playing piano because I know nothing about it I'll talk about teaching right okay so I remember you know so I would teach I teach finance or something like that and there would be sections where I'd go while I was teaching in my head I would go I don't really know what I'm doing here I'm just I'm just like parroting what I read in the book I'm not really teaching these kids anything I'm just telling them stuff and then I would really get upset because like no I'm supposed to be good at this right I'm a teacher and I would go back to my office and I figure it out and I'd say I need to really understand this and I need to come up with original examples and I need to come up with new ways of explaining this and I can't just mimic the book and I'd figure it out and the next time my teacher taught it I'd be much better right so you're gonna make mistakes you're gonna make mistakes you're gonna make mistakes with people you're gonna make mistakes with yourself you're gonna violate the morality once in a while because altruism is so ingrained in us it's so ingrained in the culture it's so everywhere that it's hard so what you need to do is think about it when you notice yourself doing something where you're not exactly sure if it's the right thing follow it through follow the lines of thought try to try to analyze it tell yourself I'm not gonna do that again because look what I did was altruistic what I did was not in a pursuit of own flourishing these are the long-term consequences this is not good I need to improve myself and if you constantly do that you will ultimately automate it now it's still true that when you encounter new situations you'll have to often rethink certain things but there's no alternative that's it's hard in the sense that life is hard in the sense that thinking is hard and to live well you need to think so that's those are all connected they're all the same thing life is complicated it's complex thinking in terms of 40 years into the future is hard so many variables so many factors condensing in a sense generalizing into fundamental principles makes it easier but then applying those principles not always easy but the more practice you get the better you become at it and you just have to hold the principles and challenge yourself but every time you violate it analyze it and commit yourself to not doing it again and remember that you're gonna have psychological pulls in the other direction and you're gonna have a tendency I see this all the time I see it in everybody to rationalize what does it mean to rationalize come up with false detached from reality explanations for why what you did was okay because you don't want to challenge yourself but the tug of collectivism the tug of altruism the tug of wanting to fit in the tug of everything we've been taught since we were zero years old over and over and over again is always gonna be there unfortunately until we have a more integrated objectivist culture where the schools and everything it's integrated as long as that's not the case you have stuff inside your subconscious that you were taught to believe when you were eight years old that it's gonna mess you up once in a while and you have to fight you have to be conscious of it and you're gonna make mistakes and you can't beat yourself up when you make mistakes you just have to learn from those mistakes so yeah it is hard but that's again one of the ways I think to deal with it is to study the ideas and to refresh yourself with the ideas every few months, years, whatever depending on where you are in life refresh, refresh, refresh because every time you refresh those ideas they get better integrated and remember not to think about not to think about you know how I go back to this we spent way too much time on politics and way too little time on this stuff this is what matters and if we could change enough people's minds about morality politics wouldn't matter anymore everything would fall into place nicely and if we don't change people's ideas about morality it doesn't matter how much you do in politics it doesn't matter so somebody on the chat is suggesting that I become Secretary of State or Joe Sanders becomes president no, Pellegrino is president it won't matter it can't make a difference because if I as president said okay we're doing away with Medicare we're phasing it out within a generation there'll be no Medicare there'd be riots in the streets you think Brooklyn was violent I mean you can't do it the world won't accept it it's way too early for an objectivist to win political office the world is fundamentally altruistic out there and you see it even in the way objectivists discuss political issues right oh I still see on Facebook and everywhere I see people writing um oh no you know trade is bad because uh those uh those Mexican free trade zones that taking our jobs away from us what are our jobs what are our jobs our jobs whose jobs there is no our jobs there's my job and there's your job and I've had something on Twitter today you can take my job come and get it right I love competition come and get it if you can take my job you deserve it you deserve it good for you I don't resent that if somebody can do my job better than I can good for them I'll find something else to do I'm not I'm not you know my self-interest is not in using government force to save my job that would be bizarre right if we believe again in principles so I'm gonna skip a bunch of stuff in morality right and say that we have come to the agreement right based on the objectives to ethics that individual rights must be protected and that is the job of government oh but wait a minute I'm gonna lose my job if we have more trade um and that would be that would be unselfish of me right because losing a job is not selfish so I wanted to violate rights just in this one case that's not selfishness that's dropping the entire context of your entire morality it's dropping the context of your entire life to focus on one concrete in the moment thing this is exactly the opposite of what I ran selfishness is all about it's about I know selfishness about making your life the best that it can be and the only way to make your life the best it can be is to live is in a free society and once you agree to violate somebody's rights once you've basically agreed to the violation of the principle of a free society you succumbed you've accepted the idea that a free society shouldn't exist which is counter to your self-interest so some there's a contradiction and the contradiction is it was never in your self-interest to violate somebody's rights to keep a job for example it's your self-interest to live in a free society in which people compete and yes you might get fired one day because somebody overseas does a better job than you can doing what you do or whatever or that some immigrant comes in and takes your job because they're better at it than you are or they're cheaper, more efficient at it than you are your responsibility is then to figure out what to do next with your life it's nobody else's responsibility to retrain you it's nobody else's responsibility to figure out what to do for you how to take care of you it's your responsibility and if you want in the world we live in today in the mixed economy we live in today where jobs are being lost because of government regulations because of taxes and yes by default because of trade and because of immigration then it's your job to demand that the government stop regulating and stop taxing so that more jobs are created more opportunities not the opposite, not to build barriers so other people can't come so that you're protected again that's not selfish selfishness is not is not momentary, it's about principles it's not momentary it's not what will make you feel good in the moment it's not what will save your job for you, what is selfish is to live in a political system in which people will compete for your job that's the best thing for you it means your standard of living is going to be higher because there's going to be competition and new people coming in and new ideas being produced and free trade will generate a higher standard of living for you and yeah it means you will have to work harder you will have to retrain yourself you will have to be constantly constantly pursuing new opportunities and new skills and new knowledge yes, you will have to live live nice thing about capitalism is in some senses it forces people forces the wrong word it incentivizes people to live to use their minds it forces people to be virtuous this is why capitalism is in a sense kind of self perpetuating if we have the right moral system by following the virtues you do well under capitalism and capitalism will reward you for following the virtues and if you are not virtuous if you are not rational in other words then you will now be rewarded by capitalism and that will provide you with an incentive that means how can you become rational so you see it's a self reinforcing morality and economics, morality and politics when they are based on a proper principle of human individual life are self reinforcing and are beautiful things alright we can take I guess another call if somebody wants to call 347-324-3075 347-324-3075 I want to look at this article on Bill Gates this interview with Bill Gates where he is arguing for a tax on robots robots are taking human jobs and Bill Gates believes that government should tax companies use of them as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment right and what does he want done with the tax money what he wants done with the tax money is to spend it on those kind of jobs that are uniquely human taking care of poor people and taking care of old people and teaching kids in schools and why is he concerned about this tax and he actually says here that he believes that we should slow down innovation and innovation is going to take away jobs like truck drivers and cleaners I guess there were a number of examples here but drivers were a big one because of self-driving cars robots are going to replace us and we should slow down then innovation why because there is a whole group of people out there who we shouldn't let be responsible for their own future but we need for them that they can cope with this change and therefore we need to slow it down and then government needs to be involved and the government needs to enter in order to protect them from this change by giving them new jobs or by training them and if you want to see the power of philosophy if you want to see the power of ideas go read this Bill Gates interview right it's all about altruism it's all about collectivism we we we we we have these jobs these jobs are going to be replaced by some people we need to take care of those people there are no individuals here no individuals here and you know so let's slow things down now forget about principles forget about the principle you know the free markets work and free markets are left alone people find jobs every time in history talk about induction every time in history technology is entered this will be no unemployment quite the contrary think about the disruptive nature of the automobile industry or think about the disruptive nature of the first automatic weaving machines he thinks self-driving cars are disruptive he has no clue what he's talking about think about the disruptive nature of mass agriculture automated agriculture I mean we went from 90% of all people working in agriculture to less than 1% how do we do that I don't get it where those 99% they must have all died of starvation can't think in principles so there's no principle here and then it's the idea of ooh people are going to lose their job there's no way they can take care of themselves there's no way they can figure out what to do we shouldn't lobby government or try to influence government to reduce regulation reduce taxes so companies can create new jobs for these people increase wealth in society generally so there's more jobs and more things for people to do God forbid we do any of that oh no we need to take care of them we we society need to take care of them because they as individuals cannot take care of themselves it's just complete and utter motivation through altruism and this is the point Bill Gates to the extent that he was successful in Microsoft was a rational selfish human being and as a consequence was unbelievably successful but he can't hold it he can't hold it because he has not accepted I don't know if he's familiar he's not accepted he's not accepted the morality of selfishness he still holds the morality of altruism and the morality of altruism is chipping away at it now when he was young and hungry and poor relatively poor he was driven and he was driven by reason, by rationality he was driven to be successful he loved it he got wealthier and plus he's been kicked out of Microsoft he doesn't really have a job the government kicked him out basically I mean he left voluntarily but the government made it untenable for him to be able to do a creative job in Microsoft since now he's kind of not busy all of the philosophical premises that his parents taught him and a one-buffet preaches to him regularly when they play bridge and bubbling up to the surface and you're seeing the altruism come out and reason decline he can't think anymore literally can't think really this is what technology does it causes people to lose jobs and without government intervention again where are all those people where are they who died because they lost their jobs and there was no benevolent government 100 years ago 150, 200 years ago so philosophy is powerful ethics is powerful and you have to get it when you're young and you have to reinforce it daily constantly all the time and practice it on your political debates practice it in your political debates whenever you have whenever you attempt to say it's good for the economy stop and think about it are you using it's good for the economy in an individualistic selfish sense of the effect it has on individuals are you using it in the collectivistic sense so somebody said what if Trump does all these good things and the economy booms and everything's successful the economy is doing well and my argument is none of that will matter long term if he does it in the name of collectivism quite the opposite what will that do that will reaffirm people's belief that collectivism is a good thing and look it produces good results it produces good results so is it good for the economy well I can think of things that might be good for the economy short run maybe even in the medium run but that are against individual rights and that therefore destroy us long term this is people will lose their jobs so what I mean every time you make some of these political arguments right think about you know I want to cut taxes because it'll spur economic growth well is that really the reason you want to cut taxes is it? I want to cut taxes because I want to return the money to the people from whom it belongs to I want to reduce the amount of stealing that goes on in our economy I want to cut regulation because I want to lift the burden off of the producers I want to cut regulation so that I can free up the human mind the individual human mind and yes the consequence of that is destroying the economy but that is not the primary the primary is what impact do these things have on the individual are they violating individual rights yes so they should be gone oh yeah and it has a good effect on the economy practice practice practice practice applying principles not in an out of context rationalistic dogmatic way but in your own thinking and in the way you express yourself online in other places taxes a violation of rights so you want to reduce them you want to minimize them probably not to zero because we can't get there anytime soon but the lower the better from that perspective but from the economic perspective actually unless you cut spending it doesn't have much of an impact well if Dodd-Frank for example is eliminated for a bad reason then that bad reason for example collectivism or what is it nationalism then and it has positive results then nationalism and collectivism get the credit and then for every Dodd-Frank that is eliminated you'll get five thousand new violations of individual rights in the name of the nationalism or collectivism on net you're a loser on net you're a loser every single time when Ronald Reagan lower taxes in the name of spurring economic growth then they were raised immediately afterwards and it didn't matter it made no difference when regulations were somewhat loosened on banks in the 1990s and you had to fight for the wrong reasons and then you had a financial crisis who got blamed the wrong reasons banks got blamed and you got massive new regulations the reasons matter they matter more than the action itself more than the action itself I prefer a president to only got half the stuff done but did that have stuff for the right reason that a president that got a lot of the stuff done all for the wrong reason it's the reasons that survive it's the reasons that animate what will happen in the future again this is what I'm trying to get through to really be selfish means to think long term it means to take everything into account not just the immediate impact on your life but the whole impact on your life over the long run alright now I mean the selfishness topic we can go on and on about it because there are a lot of fallacies out there the fallacy that will automatically selfish everybody selfish right now selfishness is an achievement you have to figure out what's good for you just like you have to figure out what good food is and what bad food is and we still not sure exactly what an appropriate diet in the modern world is it's hard to figure out what actions what values, what virtues are good for you and what are not which values are bad for you it requires figuring out really thinking about it it's a huge huge achievement so every one of these things nothing out there is going to be simple in terms of applying this it has to be thought through again your life is the standard value for 40, 50, 60 years the complexity of what happens it's not simple it's not simple you know if you don't want to lose your job even for the future of freedom so in other words what you're saying to yourself is I would rather have this job than live in a free country than you're not being selfish you don't understand what selfishness is you don't get you don't get life you don't get what flourishing life is life is not about a job not about any particular job even if it was an alternate you could face a situation where you could either keep your job but raise barriers to enter entry and reduce freedom or the other way around lose your job because you have advocated for lowering barriers of entry for more people competing with you I'd say you're not selfish if you vote for raising the barriers and that's fine you can live an altruistic life thought less life the options are not selfish altruistic there's also the third option which is thought less or self-destructive and choosing your job over freedom is self-destructive it's not being selfish but that's why I said selfishness properly understood is a massive achievement and it requires consistency and I see very very few people actually being able to hold this and use it consistently in how they argue and I see myself slip into this all the time using collectivistic even altruistic premises in the way I argue for things in the way I argue for things so encourage everybody the positive value of today is to go read opa particularly in the context of today the chapters on the good and on virtue once chapter after virtue I think is happiness the good virtue and happiness I mean nothing will do more to make your life better than that suddenly it's going to be better it's going to be better than writing another post on politics and I am asking self-sufficiency job loss for an unknown future no again principles you have to be able to think in principles it's not an issue of an unknown future it's an issue of the principle of freedom versus unfreedom the principle of am I defending individual rights or not defending if you understand the principle that defending individual rights is crucial to your life then you will never be tempted to advocate for a position that is anti-individual rights of you losing a job in that context as sacrificial it's not sacrificial I don't believe in sacrifice but the the greater value is protecting individual rights the principle of individual rights than any particular job now it's a sad state of the world that we have to be in a position where those can even be at odds but that's the state of the world in which we find ourselves for an objectivist to advocate for violating individual rights on others in order to keep his own job means he doesn't understand in my view the morality the morality of selfishness properly alright we got another caller we'll see if we can hi you in the Iran book show oh wow I can barely hear you see if you can really speak up and quickly because you're all choppy yeah can you hear me but make it quick because it's so choppy I can't understand if you have the word okay altruism come into many cultures you see it in Buddhism you see it in Confucianism yep why is it so so common yeah that's a great question yeah it's a great question so why is altruism so common in so many different cultures why is it so common you go back to primitive tribes you go every religion with the exception of Greece and the enlightenment altruism has been a dominant morality all over the world in every culture really and I think it really it goes back to two two ideas one that reason is a massive human achievement and reason is an attribute of the individual only individuals reason but the identification of that is very hard so man at the perceptual level man who's not thinking and conceptualizing and really a thinker I think man wasn't doing that much thinking unfortunately I didn't know how for probably tens of thousands of years still needed guidance they needed some kind of guidance from somebody on how to live a life and it was easier just to get it as authority and so altruism was what the authority will always what an authority will always present to you so authorities want to rule use altruism and on to rule so think about it if you're in a tribe and you've got all these people in a tribe and they're starting to think for themselves and they're starting to do their own thing and I'm kind of the ruler I've been the ruler for I don't know my family's been ruling this tribe for a thousand years but now people are starting to think and they're discovering a little bit of science and maybe the beginnings of maybe agriculture, toolmaking whatever it is, whatever phase in human beings it was and I go wait a minute, this isn't good I'm going to lose my power I want to preserve my power let me see if I can, they're really searching they're searching for meaning and I can give them meaning and the meaning is the tribe and I can anoint my pal over here to be the witch doctor and he can channel the tribe the tribe's needs and he can tell them what the tribe wants and what the tribe requires and it's a telling the witch doctor I ran for the new intellectual, talks about this coming together and telling people and using force this is what you should live for and hear the rules and hear the principles, hear the commandments and we talk to God, you don't we talk to God and this is what God says and you can tell human beings at the very early stages of cognition are struggling with this and they don't quite get science and they're floods and there's weird weather and there's all these strange things happening about them and they don't have explanations to them and religion is a great explanation and the religious authorities are always going to say you've got to live for the tribe because they don't want them to live for themselves and for them at a given that they don't have for cognizant of their own cognition I'm not sure they can live for themselves completely at that point so there's this strong incentive to come together in the tribe, to stick together to do what you're told and the rulers have an incentive and the religious leaders have an incentive to perpetuate that and then come the Greeks and the Greeks in a sense challenge that, how do they challenge that by asking questions what explains the world what are the basic constituents of the world you know, fire or whatever whatever the explanations are, some of them are looking back seem pretty dumb, but they were starting to ask questions they were starting to become human in the fullest sense they were starting to ask questions and discover ways to generate truths and they were discovering that they could actually explain things and they were discovering that people could actually think for themselves and ask questions for themselves and answer, and you could do a dialogue and you could discuss philosophical ideas and difficult ideas with people in the streets because anybody could think and the whole idea of individualism the whole idea of reason comes out of that but that's a massive human achievement and for them, for the Greeks to live for somebody else I mean, they would ask why I mean, even Plato and Socrates would ask why because they'd have to invent an afterworld and so on and Aristotle would come around it well, no you don't have to live for the group that's meaningless, why? right? so you have to have the Greeks and then unfortunately unfortunately the Greeks didn't have all a fully full philosophy for whatever reason Aristotle failed to really ignite in the culture in there and Christianity ultimately fills that gap and you know, Christianity and in other cultures Chinese, in India and other places never had Greeks so they never got this flowering of the idea of reason and the idea of individualism and I think that is why that is fundamentally why you never got Chinese culture always reached a certain point and then declined and would reach a certain point and then decline but it never broke through the way western culture did in the 18th and 19th centuries until recently and never broke through because now this is me completely speculating because they didn't have the concept of reason and as a consequence of that they didn't really have the concept of individualism and without those two concepts you cannot break through as a culture, as a civilization so they remained at the level of Confucius they remained at the level of Christianity and only now are they learning from the west the ideas only now are they learning from the west the ideas of individualism and reason over the last 30, 40, 50 years and as a consequence they're breaking through, they're exploding they're doing well because they've learned these ideas they couldn't, they didn't generate them from within they had to import them that's our biggest export the west is ideas and these are the most important exports and this is why places like Japan and China and South Korea and everywhere in Asia is doing well because they've recognized to one level or another not fully not from an objective perspective but to one extent or another the value of individualism the value of an individual the economic system is starting to reflect that only starting, right? there's a long way to go and the economic system is starting to reflect that and of course the value of reason and science and innovation all of that, they're starting to they've discovered what the west discovered in Greece originally and then rediscovered during the Enlightenment and we are product of alright, so there you go go study be selfish, be truly selfish which means go read up about selfishness that's the best way you can be selfish is to read up about selfishness will periodically keep coming back to this topic there's a lot to talk about I think originally I thought I'd do an episode in each one of the virtues and we're going to get back to that we'll do that, I want to go back to making these more philosophical I also want to see if people listen to them if I make them more philosophical if they listen to other ones are like the Muslim ban and on alt-right and on Donald Trump so if you want more shows like this that are maybe a little bit more philosophical then you've got to share them more you've got to tweet them more you've got to Facebook them more you've got to get the word out there so we get the viewership up so I get incentivized to do more shows like this if I do a show Milo which I'm thinking of doing lots of people will listen to it but is that the most value we can get? No, probably not probably not all right have a great rest of your weekend have a great week, I'll be here we go back to Saturday next week and after that who knows what my schedule is going to be because I'm going to be traveling all over the place oh I wanted to pitch a few events before we go February 25th if you're in Southern California you've got to come to an ARI event building a future of recent capitalism it's in Costa Mesa, California it's kind of a northern part of Orange County so you can come down from LA come up from San Diego if you're in Orange County go to the ari.inran.org you can sign up then in Chicago now we've got a bunch of speakers of this one Steve Simpson, Aaron Smith, Don Watkins Jim Brown, the new CEO of ARI and Chris Locke a relatively new VP of marketing and communication and then on March 11th in Chicago we'll be doing another one of these building a future of recent capitalism with Jonathan Honing he's going to be there that's going to be a blast Aaron Smith, Ilan Juno and Don Watkins it'll be a lot of fun so you should be there that's in Chicago I'm going to be in London the week after next for a week not doing any public events but doing a lot of events at high schools I'll talk a little bit about that next Saturday I'll be in Bogota, Colombia in two and a half weeks if any of you listening from Colombia I hope to see you in Bogota in Denver for a leadership program with the Rockies and a number of events there and I think that's it have a great rest of the weekend and see you talk to you all Saturday don't forget to pitch the show tweet Facebook, email let people know that if they want to know about selfishness this is the show they should listen to bye