 So, I want to challenge this whole notion that morality is about selflessness. I want to challenge the whole notion that your life somehow belongs to other people, belongs to society, belongs to your neighbor, that you should love your neighbor like yourself or that you are your brother's keeper to use a little bit of biblical terms, right? Because I think that the best way to challenge that is to ask one very simple question that nobody ever asks, and that is, why? Why should I be selfless? Why should I live for other people? Why is morality that? Why does that make me good? And there's no answer to the why. I mean, ask your priest sometime, ask your philosophy, whatever, profess at university, or ask your mother, why? And the answer is always, because some authority said so. Your mother said so, the priest said so, the philosopher said so. But somebody said so. There's no actually logical reason for why your life is not yours, why your life somehow has been mortgaged to some other cause, which is what a morality that says that you have to sacrifice implies. Your life belongs to somebody else. When you make decisions, you have to think of other people first. Why? No answer. Now, before I get to what my answer is, I want to ask this question. Why do we care about morality? I mean, what's it all about? What is morality for? What's ethics for? Why do we care about any of these issues at all? And I'm sure many of your minds are going, I don't, right? But you should. What is morality? Reality is a code of values that helps you pursue your life, that helps you tell what is right and what is wrong. And this is complicated because life is complicated. It's not always obvious what's right and what's wrong. And I would argue that, you know, life is an immense complexity with lots and lots of choices and lots of paths that you can take. And what you need in life, generally, I mean, this is true of science, this is true of every field in human endeavor, what you need is some principles to help you deal with the complexity that's involved. To come up to every decision in life and say, I'm going to start from scratch, accumulating all the data I need to figure out should I lie or shouldn't I lie, right? Is lying good for me or lying bad for me? And every concrete situation we do that experiment is very, very difficult. Whereas if I can prove to you that lying is not good ever, because it's immoral and ultimately I'll show you it hurts you, it's bad for you, then you don't have to think about it every time. You just don't, you don't lie and that's simple. It's a simple, that's called a principle. It's always going to be then, it's always going to help you. So every fork in the road you reach, you know which way to go. And not everyone, we're talking about big questions, big principles. So morality is if you will, a map to life. It's the principles that guide you in pursuing your life. It's like with our morality being dropped in the middle of London and being told you how to reach somewhere and you can't ask anybody questions or you can but they're all a bunch of idiots anyway and they have no clue, you know, where anything is and you have no map and you're supposed to reach somewhere. What are you going to do? You might reach there, but what's the probability that you reach the point? It's low and then you're going to talk about waste of time and exercise. Are you going to waste a lot of time in life trying to reach that point? Yeah, you're going to go zigzag, you're going to go in the wrong directions, you're going to go all over the place. You might get mugged on the way, you know, bad things can happen. What you want is the most efficient way to get to the point you're dropped in to the point where you want to reach and we'll talk about what that point you want to reach is in life, okay? So morality gives you that map. It gives you the principles by which to get to the point where you want to get to. So morality is maybe the most important thing you can make a decision about in your life and whether you believe it or not, all of you have principles about morality. Most of you, most of you have those principles because you've absorbed them from the culture around you, from your parents, from your teachers, from your friends, from books you read. They've just come in, most of you haven't even thought about it. I'm guessing, right? I don't want to insult anybody here. But you haven't really sat down and thought, what's really good? What's really bad? Where do I want to go in life long term? How do I get there? What are the principles that I want to live my life by? Most people never think that they just absorb it from reality, from community, from whatever outside. I want to encourage you today because I, you know, I don't expect anybody here to completely accept everything I'm going to say or agree with everything I'm saying. This is the challenge. I want you to take this question seriously and you do the thinking and do the well just like you do the thinking about diet and you do the reading about diet, just like you're going to, you know, read a bunch of books and really take seriously the questions about exercise or you're going to really take seriously about, you know, finding a woman to date and having a relationship and making that relationship work. I want you to take your life just as seriously, the big question of what are the principles that I'm going to shape my life? I want you to think about it. I want you to read about it, the same kind of books, right, and make the choices about what map you want guiding you and I'm going to make my case for what map that should be, but you ultimately have to make the decision about what your map should be. I think mine's the right one, but you have to come to that conclusion. I can't just brainwash you into it. So what I want to argue is that it's meaningless to think about morality in terms of what you should do for other people. That morality is fundamentally about, should be about. Unfortunately, it's not about, but that's a mistake of Western civilization for the last 2,000 years. Morality should be about what you can do for yourself.