 So thank you all for being here and thank you for inviting me and for giving me the opportunity to talk to all of you. I appreciate it. So, how to be the hero of your own life? I mean, I don't know what your conception of hero is, but I know what mine was when I was growing up. When I was young, my conception of heroism was directly associated with what? What do you think? Superman. God, you're younger than me. I don't think I knew what Superman was until I was in my 20s. Your father? Maybe. I don't think so. I mean, look, I grew up in Israel. Israel's in the news now, but Israel's always been in the news and it's always been the same. My conception of being a hero was jumping on the grenade when the grenade was thrown. My conception of heroism, when I was small, was sacrificing my life for some, call it, greater cause. For something above and beyond myself. Indeed, a sentence like how to be the hero of your own life would have seemed like a contradiction to me when I was growing up because heroism was about other people and something else. The state, God, the community, me. I grew up in a world where I was taught, and I think most of us were taught, that your primary moral responsibility in life is to others. That the moral responsibility is to them and that your action should be sacrificial. My mother taught me, think of yourself first. Anybody had that mother? No. Last. Think of others first. That's what it means to be good. That's what it means to be virtuous. And I have to admit, I never, never considered the obvious question that anybody who's told that should think. Why? Why? Why are the people more important than me? Why is their happiness more important than mine? Why is the state worthy of my sacrifice? Why is the key question? I never asked that question. I never asked it for me. I read Atlas Shrug when I was 16, blew my mind, changed my life, and caused me to really ask these questions. Why? And to reorient my thinking. To reorient my thinking towards thinking of, for me, I am the most important person on this planet. All I can is experience my life, my thoughts, my feelings, my values. It's all I really have. Why shouldn't I live for me? And to me at that point, and today the obvious answer is I should. I should live for me. It's mine. It's all I have. When I die, the universe is gone. All those other things are gone. And then, of course, a whole string of questions arises. What does that mean? What does it mean to live for yourself? What does it mean to strive for your own values? And how do you find those values? Where do they come from? How do you identify them? So it's one thing to say, I want to live for myself. It's a completely different question. How do you do that? The answer to that is not obvious. I mean, we live in a culture in which if I say I'm living for myself, you all think, oh, he's a really nasty, horrible person. All he cares about is himself, right? He treats other people badly. He lies to you, steals and cheats all the time. But is that really good for me? If I did all those things, would it be good for me? If I lied, would I benefit? I think most people, if they think deeply about it, realize that lying is kind of a self-destructive policy, doesn't actually do you very much good. If you do it in business, people won't do business with you. If you do it in your relationships, people won't have a relationship with you. I always tell students, you know, you should try to take your best friend and light him for a day, see how that goes. Guess who will suffer the most? You will. Won't have that friend anymore. If that friend is a value to you, he's a friend after all, designates him as a value, it's gone. You've just lost a value. Same cheating. Talk about stealing if you want. It just doesn't make any sense. But more importantly is what does make sense? What are the positive things that one needs to do in order to live a good life, in order to live the best life you could live on this planet for you, for yourself? How do we even identify that? Well, the first thing Rand does, and I think the first thing one has to do, is think about what kind of being are we? John alluded to this, we'll talk quite a bit about this in his presentation. What it makes human beings human beings? What makes us as individuals what we are? How do we survive? How do we have all this? How was this building built, I don't know when was this, 300 years ago, 400 years ago? 1400, so even more than that, right? How is this building built in 1400? How do people know that this would stand? How did they figure all this out? I mean it's pretty amazing when you think about it, not to mention the skyscrapers we see today, or my favorite little toy, my toy instruments, communication, science fiction thingy, my iPhone, how did they do this? How do we survive as a species? I mean you got to think about it, right? Because you look around this room, this pretty standard room, probably from the Netherlands, right? You all look like average people in that sense, right? You're all weak, you're all slow, you don't have claws, you don't have fangs, your ancestors does not run down bison and bite into them, and eat that way, right? How do we survive? I mean compared to us, the sabertooth tiger, you put anybody in this room across to a sabertooth tiger, guess who wins? You do, that's the amazing thing. The last time I saw a sabertooth tiger, he was in a museum, and you guys all here. So how did we win? Using what? Not muscle, not speed, not strength, not anything like that, how did we win? We're using our minds. What makes us unique, what makes us unique from all of the species is in order to survive we need to use our reason. We need to identify the threat, know what it is, figure out a strategy to deal with it, which is not obvious. Again, Jan described that process, it's not obvious how to deal with the threat. It might be a tumor, right? We might have to do surgery. We as human beings must use our reason in order to survive. So if I care about my life, if I want to live the best life that I can, and I understand my nature as a human being, then doesn't it make sense then that the most important thing I could do is use the thing that allows me to survive, use the thing that allows me to beat the Saber 2 Tag, but not just to beat the Saber 2 Tag, but also to build this. Nobody in this room or ever in all of human existence has the instinct to build a building. At most we might have an instinct to hide in a cave. But as soon as we start building huts, instinct is out the window, and what we have to rely on is reason, experimentation, scientific method, whether we know it's a scientific method or not, to figure out the world around us. So if I value my life, if I want to live for me, then what I need to do is use my mind, apply my reason. And it's not like there's some areas in life where no, reason doesn't apply there. No, it's every part of our lives we need to be thoughtful. We need to think. We need to figure it out. We need to consider the facts. We need to integrate them. We need to use logic. There's almost no area in life where that is out the window. So use reason is one. And notice that reason relies on facts. Reason relies on reality. And you don't know what's true and what's not. What's real and what's not. What's fantasy and what's reality. And that immediately excludes things like lying. Because what are lies? They're unreality. They're the opposite of facts. They're the opposite of what I need in order to do my living well. My job well. The things that I do well. Then the negation of reason. There's a slap in the face that the method by which human beings survive. So you don't do it. I think everybody in the room can agree. Don't lie. But I don't lie not because I think I'll hurt other people. I don't want to hurt anybody. But the main reason I don't lie is because I don't want to hurt myself. It's bad for me. It's just not healthy. It's that dedication to reason which makes all that horrible negative behavior associated with supposedly thinking about yourself irrelevant to people who actually do think about themselves. Consider themselves. So to me to be a hero. Hero meaning dealing with challenges, struggling is about using one's reason. Applying one's reason to one's own life to the challenges and struggles that one has in one's life. Now reason is not enough. You need motivation. We talked about motivation, right? And here I think for most of us for everybody, every human being needs a purpose in his life. We need something to strive towards. We need some goal to achieve. Something we're moving towards. For most of us, that purpose is our career, our work, the thing that we engage in most of the time. It's what gives us purpose in life. And I know everybody when they ask everybody what's the most important thing in your life, we all say the same thing. What do we say? Family. We all say family. And yet all of us spend more time at work than we do with our family. All of us. Almost all of us. I always go by, I measure what's important in your life by how much time and how much energy and how much effort and how much stimulation you actually get. And most of us spend most of our time at work. Not with our family. Which suggests to me the work is pretty important. Maybe the most important in our life and maybe it's the work, maybe it's the purpose, maybe it's the career that makes family possible, makes our life with family possible. And look, some people, family is work. If you've dedicated yourself to raising your children, that becomes work. And that's a career. And it's not to counter one another. Many of us have work and we have family and most of us spend most of our time at work. Which is an indication. Because I think the reality is that that's where we challenge ourselves. That's where we apply our reason. That's where we really push ourselves. And as a consequence, that's where we get most of our satisfaction. And it gives us purpose. It's why people who retire and don't pick up something else with a purpose often struggle. There's some statistics about, you know, if you retire and don't pick up a hobby or don't pick up something that really, really drives you and motivates you, people tend to die young. Relatively speaking. We need purpose. We need a goal. We need a strive towards something. Psychologically, we need to have a sense of achievement. And purpose provides us with that. And holding that purpose and having that purpose and dedicating oneself to the purpose and taking it seriously and driving towards it is often a heroic activity. And finally, let's say we have reason and we have purpose. We have to have a certain comfort with this world and this environment and the world in which we live. A certain confidence that things can be achieved. I call that self-esteem. Self-esteem is that knowledge that I am capable of dealing with the world around me. I am of this world. I can use my reason to shape reality, to change the world out there. That's what human beings do. They take wood and they turn it into houses. They don't just accept what it is. That's the productive function. But to do that, not everybody does it. To do that, you have to have a certain confidence in your ability. You have to have a certain confidence in you, in yourself, in who you are and what you are. You have to be comfortable in this world. So to achieve great things, and I think the greatest thing anyone of us can achieve is to live a great life. It's to live well. We live a finite period as I get older. I realize this, right? When you're young, you think it's infinite. It goes on forever. Time really moves slowly when you're young. As you get older, time keeps to get faster and faster. And the time horizon shrinks. And you realize it's too short. And you want to make the most of it. You should make the most of it. Life is too short to waste. Waste a minute of it. The other thing about life that you realize is you don't get reduced. You don't get to do anything over. You can't rewind. I love science fiction and I wish you could time travel. But it ain't happening. This is it. And I think to recognize that and to dedicate oneself to doing the best one can do with the life one has, to living the best life one can live in the span that we have. To make every second count. I know it often sounds like a cliche, but how many people actually do it? And it's worth it. Because this is it. There's nothing else. So, I-N-R-A-N-D calls us, if you will, to live a great life. And that's what it means to be a hero in your own life. It means to live to your full potential. To live to your full potential requires that you use your mind, figure stuff out, solve problems, decide, choose your values. Make sure those values are consistent. Make sure those values are pro-you. There are lots of values that seem to be pro-you, that seem to be, you know, pleasure is a dangerous thing, right? That seem to provide pleasure, but it turns out that they're destructive long term. Lots of those. I-I like, you know, if there's a line of cocaine here and I snort it, I can guarantee it will cause me pleasure. There's no question about that. It's pure biology. Is it good for me? No. But how do I know it's not good for me? I have to observe the world, know what's going on, and think about it. And choose to avoid that. Generally in life, we get into trouble. Not when we think too much, but when we think too little. It's rare that somebody does something and says, ah, I thought about it too much. Usually we do something, we get into trouble, we say, I wish I'd given it more thought before I did it. We get into trouble when we follow our emotions. Our emotions are wonderful. I'm an emotional guy, pretty passionate myself. But emotions don't tell us what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's not. It tells us, I'm reacting in this particular way to this particular phenomenon that's happening out there. That might be good, might be bad, who knows. Because our emotions are based on all kinds of stuff. But based on conclusions, we've made in our childhood based on experiences we've had in our past. So we always need to evaluate. We always need that filter of reason to evaluate and to assess the world around us. So watch out for emotions. They're not great to experience life. They're not great as ways of deciding what to do and what not to do. And when you have your values, when you choose your values, when you decide what you want to do with your life, make sure that's guided by reason. Make sure that the values you choose are ultimately consistent with your life, consistent with growth, consistent with success. To be a hero of your own life is to commit yourself to happiness, to commit yourself to success, to commit yourself to your own life and to commit yourself to using your mind to do it. And I think for those of you who have not read Rand yet, I'll highly recommend The Fountainhead which I think we've got copies of. Because at the end of the day, The Fountainhead is about a man committed to his own life, to his own values, without compromise. And sometimes that takes him on very difficult routes. He's an architect who lands up working in a quarry, chopping stones, rocks, because he won't compromise on his art. But the book I think illustrates what happens when you embrace that kind of integrity, when you embrace that kind of honesty with yourself and what is integrity? It's honesty is applied to action, right? It's honesty is applied to your values. It's being honest with yourself, saying this is what matters to me, and if this is really what matters to me, why would I compromise? Why would I not do it? I'd rather work in the quarry. I'd rather not do it at all than compromise on it. It shows the struggles that he has to overcome, but ultimately what it shows is that that leads to the kind of life that that leads to it. A life of integrity, a life of integration, a life where you're integrated with your values, you're integrated with your beliefs, you're integrated with reality. And as a consequence, a life of happiness. So to be a hero again is to strive and pursue your own happiness and your own terms without compromise. And the heroism of course comes from this aspect of no compromise. So I encourage you to read The Fountainhead, and particularly those young, I know there's students here, the young people, read it, and I encourage you all to think about life maybe outside of the conventional way that our society approaches it, but in a situation it says your life is... In a sense they'll never say it like this, right? But you're just a pawn in a bigger scheme. Your life is for some other purpose. No, it's all you have. The purpose is you. The purpose is your happiness. Thank you all. Okay, thank you Jeroen. And now it's time for questions basically obviously people who want to start maybe to give everybody off the floor try to make it short and one question a person and then if only one has questions then we can move on from that. Yeah, go ahead, I'll walk to you. And you can ask questions on anything. I have answers on everything. I am reading The Fountainhead for the third time. Third time? And still I cannot comply the character of Dominic Franken to Howard Rourke. Why does she marry two men she doesn't love? Why does he degenerate Howard Rourke? And finally gets together with him. I still cannot understand that character. Thank you. I think she is... Dominic Franken is the most complex, difficult character Rand wrote in any of her novels. She once described Dominic as herself in a bad mood. But this is a whole life, you know, so... She's a very difficult character to understand. Here's a woman who is obviously brilliant who is obviously passionate about her values knows what she loves, knows what she cares about and is passionate. But it's so convinced that the world generally is evil is going to destroy those values. Right? That she'd rather not have them. So she's one who believes it's better not to have loved and lost than, you know, because... So one of the scenes early in the novel, so I'm not giving anything away too much is she takes a sculpture she loves and she destroys it. And there's a sense in which she would rather destroy herself than watch the world destroy it and that it's so beautiful, it means so much to her that she doesn't want all these people, horrible people out there in the world enjoying something that she loves so much. She doesn't want to give them the pleasure they don't deserve it in her view. So she has a very, very malevolent view of the world. What she learns at the end of the novel is that she's wrong. That her values can't survive the attacks from the world. That the world in the end is not that important. What's important is her, her values and the values of the people she loves. And she's... Again, it's a novel, it's not real life, right? So in the novel, Ayn Rand pushes her to the fullest extreme of that malevolent attitude to the point where in her attempt to hurt the equivalent of breaking the sculpture, hurting the man she loves, she marries people who are his enemies, in a sense, so one of them is an enemy, one is half an enemy, two of them in order to destroy him, right? And she can't. And that's how she learns the lesson, which is it doesn't matter what the world thinks. It doesn't... And if you stick to your principles, if you stick, if you're committed to your ideals and your principles, you can still survive in this world. We're not to the point in the world we live in where it's so evil, you know, it's just everything is going to die. How it works does not. And so she... Her values change from that malevolence to a benevolent view of the world, to a view of the world where she can be successful. She can, you know, a love and those loves will not be destroyed. But yes, I mean, in many ways, she's a hollow character, she's a complicated character, but also she's purposefully there to be a contrast. She's a good person, but very, very different than rock. So it's the contrast that Ayn Rand is trying to illustrate. You know, these two approaches, both love values, both love life, both want to... But if you have this malevolent position, you can't achieve happiness, you can't achieve your values. You have to have this... a confidence, a self-esteem and a confidence in the universe in the world and in your own ability to understand reality and an uncompromising commitment to that that rock has in order to be successful. Good. That's good. Yeah. Who's first? Well, you said that living for yourself is about doing what's best for yourself, so what doesn't hurt you in the long run. But what if, for you personally, helping others and doing something for the greater good is something that fulfills you the most? What if what you want is to do the best for the collective? Well, there's a mishmash of concepts there that we have to unpack a little bit, right? There's helping others. There's the common good and there's collective. They're not the same thing. You can help others for a variety of different reasons, right? You can help others because as you recognize that human beings as individuals are a value to you, that individuals who succeed and who produce and who live good lives ultimately become trading partners with you, whether spiritually or materially, directly or indirectly, other human beings are a value to you. Even when they live on the other side of the planet, they are some value to you. And you can choose to help them. You can even commit to a profession that basically engages in helping people, you know, doctors, right? It's a profession that you can say helps people. It's also super interesting and super challenging. And other people value you want to save them and this is your career. You could even be in an iron-red world, you could be a social worker. If you took that seriously and you thought about what it means to help individuals become better human beings and be successful, rise out of poverty or rise out of whatever. You know, a psychologist helps people. But again, each one of those are a career and you're enjoying yourself. That is, you're challenging yourself, you're pushing yourself, you're doing something that is a value to you. There's nothing in man's philosophy that says you don't help other people. But the standard is you, right? You don't help them if your suffer as a consequence. You don't help them if it makes you worse off. You don't go, you know, my father, the number one thing in life that he wanted was for me to be a doctor, right? I mean, towards those ages where I was trying to choose a profession, every day it was like, and he was a doctor, of course, and it was like the day I went to engineering school, he said, I can still get you into medical school. He could, he was the vice dean, I think, or something. I can still get you in. I said, I don't want to be a doctor, right? But I could have said, I want to go help people. I hate it. I don't want to be a doctor, but I'll be a doctor to please my dad because I want to help my dad. That would be wrong is my point, right? You have to live your values. Decide what the values are. You might decide that you want to be a social worker, but don't feel guilty if you decide you want to build an engineer or an artist. And yes, even then you're helping people, right? Because you build a bridge and people benefit. Every profession that's productive, i.e. that makes money, helps people. How do you know it helps people? How do you know it helps people? Because you make money at it. The feedback you get is that people pay you. Why do people pay you? I left my iPhone. Why did I pay $1,000 for this? What's that? It represents a value. How valuable is that value? More than $1,000. Not less, I value this more than $1,000. Now I could give a whole speech on why this is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to me and how it's improved my life gazillion times way more than $1,000, right? So I was happy, and indeed I am happy because I'm getting a new one soon, to take $1,000 out of my pocket and give it to Apple and get this in return because this is worth more than $1,000 to me. Apple made this. Apple is making the world a better place by making this. How do I know that? Because all of us are better off by having it than not having it. If you're not, don't buy it. It's very easy. Again, our actions indicate our hierarchy of values. When I go to Grocery Store and pay $3 for a loaf of bread, it's because the loaf of bread is worth more than $3 to me. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. It's an interesting idea because that suggests that the thing that helps other people the most is to be a businessman. And one indication that you've helped the world more is how much money you make. The more money you've made, the more people have traded with you. The more people are better off as a consequence of engaging with you. If you want to be a billionaire, change the world for the better. If you made people worse off, they wouldn't trade with you. If I didn't want an iPhone, I wouldn't buy it. If I didn't want Microsoft, I wouldn't give Bill Gates my money. The fact that I gave the money means he's made my life better. I love billionaires just generally. If I have a male one, I'd say thank you because they've made my life better. Otherwise they wouldn't be billionaires. So the whole conception of helping other people is every profession in a sense helps other people. What's that? The drug dealer. Why do you always think of that, John? The only reason the drug dealer makes a lot of money is what? Why do drug dealers make a lot of money? Because we love drugs so much. So it's true, some people are short-sighted, but imagine this radical idea. Imagine drugs were legal. Imagine you could go to the corner grocery store here or the pharmacy and buy cocaine. How much money do you think drug dealers would make? Almost nothing. Almost nothing. Because the reality is it's a commodity. Prices would be driven down. The only reason drugs are expensive and they can make a lot of money is because it's illegal. The illegality drives it out. So you could argue that for some people their subjective, irrational values are being fulfilled by buying the drug and you're not making the world a better place. Sure, but you're also not going to make a lot of money. It's almost impossible to make a lot of money by destroying people's lives. Oh, God. No, I'm saying oh, God, because again, I could do a whole, and I've got a book out called The Moral Case for Finance. Moral Case for Finance with a chapter on speculation. And I've got a lot of lectures on the morality of finance. You can find them on YouTube. No, speculating in finance is incredibly productive and incredibly beneficial to mankind, if you will, to the economy and to the extent that we all benefit from the economy. Why? Because prices in the marketplace, in the stock market, in financial markets, determine the allocation of capital. They determine where capital flows to. Having an efficient market, having a market in which people are trading and that prices reflect information is crucial for the allocation of capital to its most efficient, productive use in satisfying our values, our desires, our needs as human beings. So you want speculators, smart speculators, going in there and whatever information they have, embedding it into the price by buying and selling, so that capital is allocated effectively. So, no. Financiers, in my view, and this is forever this myth about bankers and financiers, but financiers, in my view, are one of the most important pieces in a functioning economy. And without them, you get collapses. No, it's an accident that it's Amsterdam that had the first stock exchange. And it's Amsterdam that became the richest city in the world just at about the same time, right? Finance, wealth, production, trade all go together. And they're essential for making us rich. Rich relatively, because we can always become... But I want to unpack two other things quickly that you mentioned. One is common good, greater good. I don't know what the common good is. I mean, I see a room full of people here. All of you have things that you view as good. All of you have your own set of values. I could argue that there are some things that are in common. Maybe that some of you won't even acknowledge that of your values, I think your certain values that we all share. But there is no floating common good here anymore than there is a common consciousness or common body. You can't eat for me. You can't think for me. You can't define what's good for me in the end. Not in the sense of concrete application. So there is no common in that sense. There's individual good. And yes, I can say there's certain conditions that allow each one of us to have that good as individual. And that is common. And we all must use reason, for example, as a universal value. We all must use reason. That's the level at which there would be a common good. But what usually common good means is, all right, he needs, you have extra, I'm going to take from you and give to him. And I'm going to decide who needs what and who's going to get extra and how we're going to allocate stuff. Very dangerous stuff there. Very dangerous stuff. And then you said at the end collective. Collective, again, is a different concept. It could just mean a group. And then what's good for the group is what's good for its individuals. And then we have to know what's good for the individual and what's good for the individuals to make his own decisions about his own life fundamentally. You can't impose good on other people. But there's also the sense of collectivism, right? And that sense is use an individual don't matter. Use an individual don't count. What counts is the group and we should sacrifice you to the group. And that I'm challenging. Helping other people, not a problem. There in there. I think you were first. Yeah, I can't remember saying pleasure really, really high, but I'm sure I did say something. Yeah, no, no, I wasn't saying you were. Yeah, I mean, I don't think pleasure equals happiness, although I think pleasure is certainly an indication towards happiness, right? Pleasure is a survival mechanism at the sensation level that says this is probably something good. But again, without the application of reason, we don't know if that's right. We have to evaluate our pleasures. It's like the cocaine. Generally that feeling we get from cocaine is a good feeling, but do we want to get it that way? Do we want to be addicted to it? Do we want all the associates? No, that's when we have to apply reason. Happiness is not about just feeling momentary joy or momentary satisfaction or momentary pleasure. Happiness is really a state of being. It's a state of consciousness. It's a feeling that sustains over the long run, not in the moment. One can be a happy person and still be sad. One can be happy overall in life and still something objectively happens that causes you to be sad. You're sad. So happiness is a state of sustained satisfaction, joy, well-being, a feeling of, yeah, life is good. Life is exciting. Life is fun to live. Life is pleasurable in the bigger sense. But it's something that's not about the moment. It's about the long run, right? Stuff, I'm a generally happy person. Stuff happens in Israel two weeks ago, pretty depressing, pretty sad. It shakes your life. But it doesn't shake your underlying, hopefully it doesn't shake your underlying belief in what's possible in this world and what the positives are and in your own satisfaction with your own life. It doesn't do that. Although it can, if one of your kids was one of the people murdered, it's going to be hard to recover, right? It's going to be hard to ever attain that state of happiness when something like that happens. So, but it's, you know, don't, we're not, I mean, we're not advocating for just a pleasure and joy in the moment. We're looking for a state of being that is long-term. Who else said his hand up? Yeah. Well, I haven't said the emails of billionaires, but if I met a billionaire, I would thank them. Yes. Well, objectives have not upholded the, did anybody hear the question? No. Okay, so the question was, I said I thank billionaires for the values they've created, but did the billionaire even create the value, right? Other people did the work, so did he actually create the value? What's my view on the labor theory of value, which is Marx's theory, but it's also Adam Smith's theory, so it has a long tradition, even John Locke. So, labor theory of value is the idea that value is created through the physical work. Its primary is the physical labor. So, the real value in the iPhone is the creation of that chip and then the assembly of it all into this. The workers who put it together, they're the ones who actually created this. And, you know, Marx called this, you know, he has this whole pyramid of exploitation, right? I mean, it's the workers who do all the work, it's the workers who produce everything, and the people at the top, the capitalists, the CEO, the management, they're really just exploiting the work, even though they get the major share of the income that comes, they're just exploiting the workers here at the bottom who actually are assembling and creating and making everything and putting everything together. And Rand view that as upside down. That is that the essential work to create an iPhone was done by Steve Jobs. And the essential work to create the iPhone is, you know, there are multiple categories even for the essential work. One is to imagine it. That is to come up with the idea of it. Workers do not come up with ideas for products. Never happened. That's what an entrepreneur is. They have an idea, an innovator. They have an idea which they then work to make a reality. And that is, anybody in business knows, that is complex. Even if I have an idea, how do I make it reality? And again, nobody else but the entrepreneur can make it. Well, I need design teams, I need engineering teams, I need chip manufacturing, I need a certain type of chip. I don't even know if that certain type of chip exists today. But I need to find people who can make these kind of chips and maybe help them make those kind of chips. I need a screen, I need a million different things, right? And then you can't do all the actual work, but you hire a bunch of engineers to do that, and then you hire a bunch of subcontractors, then you hire a bunch of assembly workers. And yes, every single one in that pyramid contributes to the ultimate product. But none of that happens without one, one idea and second, the organizational skill that every CEO and every entrepreneur must have in assembling the process that will make it happen. So I think that's 99.9% of the work is that. Everything else is details. So I think value is created by entrepreneurs. And, you know, and people say, well, a CEO, what does he do? He's just paper shuffling or the speculator or whatever, just paper shufflers. But are they? I mean, go to shadow, just follow around the CEO once to see what kind of work they do and how much work they do. But the kind of work, what is the kind of work that they do? It's mental work. It's organization. It's prioritizing. It's solving problems. It's the solutions that make everything else function. And by the way, CEOs, at least in the United States, don't last very long. They're very short ten years. Because it's very rare for a CEO to be good. They're not many good CEOs. Boards kick them out because they're not very good. It's a rare skill. It's a rare talent. That's why they make a lot of money. Supply and demand. They're just not a lot of people who can do the job. So the people who can get a lot. But without them, everything falls apart. And if you're interested in that theme, then I encourage you to read Atlas Shrugged. Because Atlas Shrugged, in a sense, is the theme of the novel. The theme of the novel, and I'm not giving anything away here, is the wall of the mind in human life. And specifically, it relates to your question, the wall of the mind in production. So our view is values come from the mind, from reasoning. Emil had a question. Thank you both for that, in that respect. And I have a question about it. And I'm very interested in your opinion about artificial intelligence. And I'm not talking about the JetGPT thing. It's just a clever summary of already existing knowledge. But I'm talking about the next level artificial intelligence where systems are really reasoning, not in a human way, but in, well, we don't know yet what way. And I'm very curious, do you think of it as the crown of the human evolution, where we really get to the point that we... Or do you think, well, it's a bit lazy that we can outsource reasoning, and maybe it's a real danger. We don't need humans. Well, the reason for our own existence is, well, at stake. So, I mean, I don't know what the next stage of whatever the evolution is of what today is called AI is going to be. And I don't think anybody knows. But I don't think that human reason is going to be challenged, or I don't think it's going to be a problem for human reason. I think there's something that human beings can do that computers can't do. We're alive, they're not. Life matters. Life provides the context for values, for valuing. Without life, there's no death. Without that alternative of life to death, there is no valuing. There is no goal setting. There is no purpose. You know, people are worried that the computers will kill us all. Why? Why would they care to kill us or not to kill us? I mean, it's not like they have any goals. So, I don't think that that kind of value-oriented reasoning is going to be threatened anytime soon. Now, could it be one day? Yeah. I don't think from computers, as we understand them today. But will the day come when we create artificial life? Yeah. Will the day come when we create artificial life that has consciousness? Probably. Will the day come when we create life that has artificial context and the capacity to reason and maybe even the capacity for free will? Yeah? I mean, if I put my science fiction hat on, I think we're a thousand years away from that, or several hundred, I don't know who knows. But we're not, it's not going to be computers. It's not going to be the zero ones. It's going to be the way we think about computing today. I think we're going to get better and better and better at ChatGBT, which is huge, right? I don't want to minimize that, because I think it's going to change the world. I think it's the most exciting technology we have today. It eliminates a lot of the drudgery work that we have to do as reasoning being. It'll take out all the simple stuff, because a lot of what we do is search. How many of you spend a lot of time in Google searching? Well, ChatGBT could do it like that, much more effectively than we can. A lot of things. You know, looking at a radiology scan, looking for cancer is pretty, there's a lot of drudgery there. I mean, there's real skill, but there's a lot of drudgery there. Well, machines will be able to cut out all the simple answers and maybe bring to a human being the more challenging ones where there can be a collaboration. I see huge collaboration between human beings and computers as the kind of the next step. And a lot of jobs changing and our world changing, I think in positive, overwhelmingly positive ways. So I think it's an exciting technology. I don't worry about them replacing human beings, because I don't worry about computers becoming consciousness. Consciousness is not a phenomena of the number of executed algorithms or whatever. Consciousness is something else connected to life somehow. And without life, and they're not alive, they don't have the biological... As far as we know, all life is carbon. It comes from carbon is a biological phenomena. It's not an electronic phenomena. So we will see. I'm excited. I love progress. I love technology. But I'm not worried. I'm much more excited than worried. Yeah, over here. 18 years old switch. It's clearly a slow process, right? And for those of us who are parents, we know this, right? At 13, they're already wanting to decide a lot of things, some of which they have the capacity to do and some of which they don't. At 14, the balance is a little different. At 18, it's much different. And according to biology, particularly boys, don't fully develop their final cortex until the age of 21, 22. Just watch them drive and you can tell that the front of cortex is missing some stuff, right? And I was one of them. I was nuts when I was 18, 19, 20. So it's definitely a gradual process. It's a gradual process of biologically and experientially gaining the capacity to overcome your emotions and to place reason where it belongs and to evaluate reality and to make choices about it and to do, if you will, the work, the computation, the analysis of... And you need a certain... You need the brain and you need experience. You need those two things. When should we legally draw the line where they... I mean, I think 18 is a pretty good number. It's where they probably can decide much more than they can't. There's still things that I'd love to be able to control about them, but I don't think it's feasible anymore. And then there are also teenagers who are 16, a really, really adult and really, really can take care of themselves. And I think there should be a process in the law and I think there is in most countries where somebody can go in front of a judge and say, look, I want to be emancipated from my parents because I am an adult. I'm only 16, but I'm more mature than a lot of 18-year-olds I know. And the judge would evaluate them and a lot of times they emancipate them. They allow them to make those decisions. So there should be a process. Sadly, I don't think we can stop the line being somewhere at 18. But I find it... The way we deal with those ages is weird. In America, at least, Europe is a little bit better. But in America, you can't drink until you're 21. But you can vote when you're 18. So we trust you to make a good political decision, which almost nobody makes even when they're 30, 40, 50. But we don't trust you to make a decision about drinking. And then, you know, we'll give you a gun and send you to the battlefield at 18. But you can't drink. Just bizarre to me, right? That all goes together. So either you have a line or you don't have a line. But don't try to segment what you think you can and cannot do and where it is. I think 18 is a reasonable line. You know, I don't want to offend anybody. But maybe as, you know, without technology and everything, they're less mature today than they used to be. So maybe it's 19. We can adjust. Or maybe they're more mature. And maybe over time, we'll make it 17. Well, you know, there's a movement in America to have 14-year-olds vote. Which I'm all for because it'll be the same quality of voting as everybody else. I don't think... I think when it comes to voting, both people are all 14-year-olds, it seems. Oh, yeah. So your political system is so effective and just smooth because you have 26 options. I get it. Absolutely. Yeah, 26 options makes life so much easier. Don't tempt me. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with that. There's no question that women mature... that girls mature faster than boys. And I don't know how you manifest that in law, but it's a reality. It's faster than boys. So, you know, it's a biological reality. It's a psychological reality. But I don't... So I have no answer to that one. Let me do... Yeah, go ahead. You talked a lot about that your own happiness should be your... and are you allowed to, in pursuit of your own happiness, impede on all those people's happiness and kind of push them aside in a non-violent way? Well, it all depends on what you mean by impede and push to the side, right? I don't know what that means if the two of us are for the same job and I'm gonna make the most effort that I can to get that job without lying, cheating, stealing, without punching you in the nose and without stopping you from making the interview, I'll try to get that job. Is that impeding you? Is my getting the job impeding you? I don't think so. I don't think that would count as impeding. So I think that as long as you're not violating somebody else's rights, as long as you're not using force on somebody else and include cheating and lying as a form of force, you pursue your own happiness. Other people pursue their happiness and it kind of gets... it kind of sorts itself out in a sense in the marketplace of work, in the marketplace of love, in the marketplace of ideas. So two guys love the same woman, is one really pursuing her, impeding the other guy? Sure, in a sense, but are you supposed to say, oh, well somebody else loves her, I'll walk away? That doesn't mean you probably don't love her, right? So you have to pursue your own values in any way that you can, again, minus using force of thought on other people. I mean, we are brought up to obsess about worrying about other people. I mean, this is a reality. Let me just do this and I'll take the question. We're brought up to obsess about other people. And instead, it would be phenomenal if we brought up to think about ourselves and actually think about how to live our lives, how to pursue our values, how to live the best life that we can be. What values, what tools do we have to live great, successful lives? And nobody talks about that. I mean, you do. You get to the self-help section in the bookstore that gives you all kind of superficial answers to those questions. And actually, people read those books when they have a midlife crisis. But when we really should learn the things that will make our life better is when we're young, not when we're old and maybe it's too late to change the main habits of our life. So, you know, if people focused on themselves, on their own happiness, on making themselves the best that they could be, there'd be a lot fewer problems in this world. Instead, we focus on other people and put our values on them. Yeah, so again, it depends on what we mean by harm. If I'm the CEO of a company and somebody is doing a lousy job and I fire them, am I harming them? There's a sense in which I am, but they weren't doing the job or they're not good enough for the job. So, it's the right thing to do. I think it's always wrong to use force on other people, to harm people physically, to use violence on other people, to lie, steal and cheat, as I said, is always wrong and I think it's always wrong for you, not just for the other person. But short of that, I mean, if I'm trying to think of an example where I'm harming somebody else while not violating their rights, you know, again, I might be setting somebody back by laying them off, by firing them, or sometimes I'm not even firing them and I'm not doing a good job. Sometimes, you know, you're in a business and the business is losing money because tastes have shifted, the market has changed, the company is not doing well. You have to fire half your employees. I know that's hard in Europe and maybe you don't do it, but you have to fire half your employees. Are you harming them? In a sense, yes, but what is the choice? What is the option? They'd be worse off if the company went bankrupt and then they'd lose everything. Between rational people, people willing to use their reason, there's a harmony of interest, not a conflict of interest. Again, we are taught that the world is a zero-sum game, that my success comes at your expense, that everything is about, you know, if somebody does well or somebody must have done badly. But I don't believe that that is the fundamental nature of human interaction. I think the fundamental nature of human interaction is win-win. It's mutual gain. It's trade. It's what I said about the iPhone. I gained. I got something, and I gave up something I didn't want, $1,000. And Apple gained. They made money. They didn't want the iPhones. They make them to sell, to me. So both parties gain. And every trade is like that, and I think spiritually, we have the same, you know, we should have the same kind of relationship. You want to build relationships that are win-win. If you have a relationship that's win-lose, it won't last. If you have a marriage where only one side gives and one side takes, it won't last. It has to be a win-win situation. That's the way to build healthy human relationships. And I think in that sense, I don't think what I do harms other people, even though in the moment they might be worse off, but overall, they are, you know, they are in a position. What's that? A dilemma. Okay. No drugs, though. They're in the same business. Yes. And we are poking for a new one. For me, it's just a bit more profit. For the other one, I know if he doesn't get the order, he loses business. You go back to it. Do I go for my own profit, and he proves that, or give it to the other one for his supplier? Or you go for your own profit? Of course. I mean, it's not your responsibility. There will always be somebody who, you know, you could sacrifice your own profits for their well-being. But you go for your own profits, and you might be sad because he's a colleague and you might know him in the industry and everything, but, you know, that's the nature of what you're acting. And indeed, if every time this happened, you gave up your profit and gave it to them, you'd be the one going under in the future. So, the ability to live in a system that allows for profit and allows people to pursue profit is good for everybody, including, ultimately, the person who goes out of business because he lives in a free world. He lives in a world in which people are producing stuff and creating stuff and not driving everybody into bankruptcy. They're, you know, imagine an industry where everybody looked after each other. I mean, it would go bust like that. Plus, the government would come after you because they'd claim you have an oligopoly or a monopoly or something, right? Antitrust and break you up. Yeah. Thank you. But if you make decisions based on the reason of a buyer for their profit from and have emotions as well, apart from, let's say, business objectives and great ideas of what the market may need, I'm not even talking about artists whose lives are great because they depend on emotions and mood swings and whatever. Unhappiness, you know. Why does that fit in this story? Look, your emotions are crucial to your motivation. Your emotions are crucial to how you experience the world. They are really, really, really important. But they are not the arbitrator of decisions. They're not cognition. An emotion tells you something about how you respond to the world, to a particular thing that happened in the world, to a particular artwork, to a particular idea. But they don't tell you if the idea is good or bad. They just tell you how you're responding to it. So you want if, assuming you're healthy, because some people have pretty sick emotions and we don't want them pursuing those emotions, but assuming you're healthy, emotions are definitely inputs into your decision making. Like, what am I passionate about? And then is what I'm passionate about good? Do I think the idea will lead somewhere? Do I think there'll be a market? So I have to always, given that emotion, have to evaluate it. Evaluate its compatibility with reality. I fall in love with another with a beautiful woman. Is she good for me? Is she good for me? If you ever fall in love with somebody who's not so good for you? Probably. Yeah. Well, that's where reason comes in. See, emotions are doing their thing, and we can talk about where emotions come from and so on, but they're doing their thing. But reason is the ultimate arbitra of what is good for you and what is not. And emotions are one of the inputs that come into the, it's an internal input that comes into what should I do, right? If I come up with an idea and I'm just not excited about it, right? It sounds good, but I'm just not excited about it. I mean, it would be good to understand why I'm not excited about it. It's always good to know oneself, know thy emotions, know why, and I come to the, you know, it involves doing things that I don't enjoy and it makes complete sense. Don't do it, right? So it's an important feedback at the end of the day. Again, what we experience in life is through our emotions. You want them to be positive, and ideally what you want is to integrate your emotions with your values. Like a lot of our emotions are products of our childhood. Like it or not, a lot of stuff happens to us when we're children. We come to conclusions about the world. We don't really know what we're doing, as we said before, children, you know, they don't have that full front of cortex. So about, we come to conclusions, we have this feedback mechanism, and therefore we more, I don't know, when I was a little a dog, kind of, I don't know if he attacked me or not. I seemed to think he attacked me, but who knows, right? And I came to conclusion, dog's bad. When I see a dog, I feel an emotion, right? I can just accept that or as an adult, I can say does it make sense that I fear every single dog? Probably not. I don't know what exactly caused that. I remember something vague about a dog attacking me once. So maybe I go to therapy and work it through, right? I think psychology and therapy are good things to work through and get rid of some of the emotional baggage that is unjustified because of bad conclusions we came to as children. Or you do your work yourself, like, okay, here's a cute dog, let me go pet him, turns out he's not going to bite me. I do that a hundred times, the emotion goes away. I'll give you a real example because I just made up, but a real example. It's related to current events. It's not a really good example, but I'll give it anyway, right? I grew up in Israel, as I said, you remember the grenade? I said I grew up in Israel, literally, everything was for the state. Everything was for the Jewish people, you know, that was it. Me as an individual didn't matter. All that mattered was the collective. Every story we learned at school, every song we sung was about somebody sacrificing their lives. And so I would get teary-eyed when I hear the anthem or would see the flag, or when, you know, and I wanted to volunteer for the special forces. I was going to be the super soldier that that, you know, got everything done. And then I read Iran, and she changed my orientation. I still love Israel, but I'm not eager to go jump on the grenade. I'm not willing to give up my life for the sake of the Jewish people or any other people for that matter. I'm willing to fight for freedom, and I think the battle in Israel is about freedom at the end of the day, so I'm on a particular side there, and I would be willing to fight for them. But I'm not willing to jump on grenades whenever a grenade is thrown. I'm not willing to, and I don't get teary-eyed anymore when the flag is raised. And I don't, you know, it doesn't happen and I don't, it doesn't affect me emotionally anymore, because my values changed, and it took a few years, literally a few years, it didn't happen instantaneously, and at the end my emotions changed. You fall in love with somebody, you feel the love, they do something horrible. You still might feel the love, but you know they're not good for you. And about a month later, you stop loving them maybe, or a year later, or two years later, depending how deep your emotions are. Your emotions follow your understanding, they follow your values, they follow your convictions. But that means you have to be, you have to think it through. You have to internalize it, you have to really think about what's going on, and then your emotions will change. So ideally, emotions and values are aligned. So you're excited about the thing that's really good. But it doesn't always happen, and when it doesn't happen you need to figure out why, but the best of all aligns. You're on a stand for five, so I do one question from the audience, and then I have my final one to you. Casper has a question. Yeah, so why are there so few heroes in our world really, in our art in particular, and movies is a good illustration of this. Fundamentally it's because we hold a moral ethical system that is in contradiction with the idea of heroism. You know a lot of movies you notice that the good guy is always depressed and has a horrible life. The bad guy has money, women nice cars and does phenomenally well. That's because morally we associate goodness with suffering. We associate goodness with sacrifice. We associate goodness with not thinking about self and to have fun you have to think about yourself. You have to figure out what's good for you and where does pleasure come from. So this morality of sacrifice, morality of altruism necessitates heroes that are not happy, that are not successful. And you do find those kind of heroes but they're miserable usually and cops usually Scandinavians are really good at this the noir kind of noir kind of thrillers if you've seen them. They have a brilliant incredible detective who's just super depressed and he always solves the crime and always gets the killer but he's super depressed and he's divorced and his kids hate him and all Scandinavian noir I mean we've got one Scandinavian here at least is the same. I don't know what it's like in the Netherlands but that's true of the Scandinavian and it's true of so many so the idea of a hero who lives a full life a successful life which challenges and overcomes them I mean I think our modern culture doesn't know where that comes from it doesn't know where those values would come from because again goodness means sacrifice sacrifice means suffering suffering means you can be successful so the only way we can conceive of a hero then is to take him outside of what's human and then we can allow for a hero who helps everybody else and still somehow survives and doesn't suffer quite as much and that's why we need to conceive of a superhero because they can't be human so we take them outside of humanity so we have lots of you know to be a hero today in modern culture you have to be super you have to be outside of what it means to be a human because a human being can do it human beings not good enough crashes and even the superheroes even the superheroes the better conceived ones the ones where the artist is actually thought about they're all miserable too so even when they do that they have to be miserable because they hold what makes them a hero is other people never thinking about their own values one of the best things about this trilogy of Batman anybody seen this trilogy of Batman is at the end of Batman at the end of the third one giving away some I'm sorry if there's a spoiler he says screw this and he goes to Paris with his girlfriend and that's how it ends and I love that right enough they don't appreciate what I do they don't like me I slave away I almost die my life is hell enough right and you know I wouldn't be surprised if the director had read Atlas Shrugged and that's where he got that idea it's inconceivable today the only time where you see heroes like that are when they're doing something historical when they're finding some character who's lived the life and therefore they can't deny it but even there they're not a lot of those but it's the only there's one other type of hero we have to mention and that's the action hero and those are some of the only places where you can find a human being who's a hero but then it's super boring because all they do is fight and I find, I don't know about you guys but I find the most boring parts of these movies the fight scenes it's just stupid boom boom boom I mean it's unrealistic and it's still it's not what makes us human if we relied on that physicality we'd be wiped out as a species what really makes a hero hero is the mind and the kind of artistic integrity that Howard Walken in the fountain has or the struggles Dagny has to build a railroad that's what makes you a hero right it's not you know how many people you can confoe in five seconds whatever the thing happens to be it's what can you achieve with what makes you human which is the mind but that you need an understanding what makes us human about the mind about heroes about self-interest about pursuit of happiness which our culture does not have and very few cultures have had so they haven't been that many heroes in history in terms of literary or artistic heroes and you can see that even when you get it you know I can go on and on for this for a long time but you know my favorite sculpture in the world is you all know it's easy right it's Michelangelo's David and to me Michelangelo there's a hero a fully grown complete hero and it's a hero of the mind and this is why Michelangelo portrays him not in the action not in the moment of slinging the thing or in the moment after almost all other davids he's cut Goliath's head off already but the genius of Michelangelo is to portray him in the moment before he goes into action and your focus is on that brow and on that face and on that determination on the stress in the muscle on the readiness on the commitment on the heroism here's David who's supposed to be small but he's huge facing Goliath and he's determined and he's going to do this and it's a spiritual thing not a physical thing and that's the greatness of it but note that Michelangelo never portrays another hero like that in all his sculpture and he can't you know he does it and the reason he can't after that one more he is dominated by a particular religious view of the world that excludes David from its imagination the more religious Michelangelo becomes the less connected he is to the David and the more his characters are magnificent right but now they're the dying slave now they're struggling, they're torn they're not you know heroic in the sense of David so your ideas as an artist are going to impact and you talked about are going to impact the emotions that you then express in the canvas but you can't even there divorce it from the reasoning that brought about the ideas and when artists suffer they can't portray heroes what they portray are tortured images and Michelangelo is suffering spiritually you know maybe because for a bunch of reasons where he's got conflict with the church but all kinds of reasons why he's suffering and that manifests itself and when he's young David is the first sculpture he ever makes I mean of size stunning right one of the greatest masterpieces in all of history he does at age of 21 I think but you know it's so your ideas and your reasoning are very much engaged with the creative process as an artist final question we have a lot of young people here could you maybe a little bit elaborate on living a heroic life in today's world I mean I think it doesn't matter what world we live in today so any other time the focus the focus needs to be on developing your own values on developing independently your independent thinking thinking for yourselves it's so easy particularly when we're young but at any age to just join a tribe join a group follow the leader jump off the cliff because everybody else is jumping off the cliff and I think the heroism is to stand up on your own values which means your own mind your own thinking your own ideas and to ground those in reality in fact right and to make yourself you grow older to make yourself into an independent thinking passionate human being passionate not arbitrarily but passionate because you care because you care about life that's the origin of all passion I think is caring about your own life caring about your own happiness the world is difficult it's gray not just the sky is gray but there's a lot of greenness in the world around us but and it's very easy to get caught up in the gray greenness it's very easy to get caught up in on twitter or facebook or on politics and I know this is not just about age all of us it's too easy to get caught up in what's going on far away places and the horrors and all of that but at the end of the day you've got to live and your focus should always be on the positive on your life and what you can do and what values you can pursue so don't let the group dictate that for you don't let world events take that for you fight for your own values your own life for determining what those values are and for living it I like to say living with a capital L take that idea of being alive seriously and when young you know it's easy not to take it too seriously because it seems like you've got endless time in front of you but that's when it's most important because that's when you're really building the foundation for the rest of your life so go read Iron Man that's a good start right well thank you