 So, if morality was conceived properly, it would be a science. A science that studied the requirements of human life. What are the principles that are necessary to lead a successful life? That's what morality is about. Whose life? Your life. Each one of yours. Because it's meaningless to talk about morality outside of your life. What does it mean? So, in that sense, Rand's morality, and I believe all morality ultimately should be, selfish. It's about the self. It's about figuring out what is good for the self. And what is good for the self when? Well, throughout one's life. You guys are all young. You've got 50, 60, 70 years still to live. Western civilization survives, maybe even longer than that. You can ask me about the probability of Western civilization surviving. With science advancing now, I meet more and more people in their 90s who look great. More and more people are here of dying in their hundreds, over a hundred. By the time you guys reach that age, you should be living to be 110, 120. So, life is long. And it's that whole life. Then when I talk about self-interest, when I talk about selfishness, I'm talking about living, not just a moment, not just right now. So let's think about what this entails. What are these principles? What does life entail? Well, what is it? You know, we're all a specific biological entity. We all have a particular nature. We all function by particular principles. You heard today kind of the way muscles function and the biology of exercise, right? Because we're all a biological entity, but we're more than the muscles and everything. What is it that makes us as human beings function? What is it that makes us create a room like this and a camera like that and everything we have here on stage? And everything that we create as human being, where does that come from? If you think about the way, I don't know, the way a lion survives, right? What makes it possible for a lion to survive? Physical strength, right? It's muscular, right? This thing pounces on a gazelle and the gazelle is done. Massive jaws that can lock into that gazelle and just chew it up. But if you look around the room, right, as fit as you guys are, none of you are a lion, right? We, as human beings, are pretty pathetic animals, right? We're weak as strong as you are. You go up again a saber-tooth tiger, you ain't surviving, right? We're slow. We have no fangs. We have no huge jaws to bite into an animal and kill it. What is it that makes us able to survive? What is it that is uniquely human that makes it possible not just to survive, right? I mean, we've thrived. We're the lions, they're still doing the same stuff they did 5,000 years ago, right? We live in places like this, right? What's the difference? What's uniquely human that makes it possible for us to do that in spite of our physical weakness, to still succeed so well? Our brain, what is it about our brain? Because they have a brain, it's intelligence, but it's our ability to reason. It's our ability to think rationally. It's our ability to look out into reality and not just accept the senses, right? Accept the data and automatically respond like an animal does. It's our ability to get the data and analyze it and think about it and generate something new from it. It's our ability to absorb lots of information and integrate it and then go out into our environment and change our environment. You see, the gazelle or the lion are stuck. They can never change and they can never change their environment. They are what they are. They function automatically just like your computer. Inputs in and it's an automatic response. We have free will. We have the ability to actually engage with the world around us, to understand it, to figure it out and to change it. The lion can't change his environment. He's going to be doing the same stuff 5,000 years from now as he did 5,000 years ago. You know, he might change genetically through evolution, but not, we build homes, right? So, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I do not have a gene for that automatically would let me know how to build a home, right? Initially human beings probably lived in caves and in trees like animals and then one genius one day said, you know, if we put some bricks together or maybe it was mud or maybe it was straw, who knows? I can create this thing that we can live inside and then other geniuses made it better and better and today we live in these magnificent skyscrapers and magnificent homes and buildings that a lot of thought, rational thought had to go into and by definition what we did was change the environment in which we live. We're not just dependent on a cave which we have to share with the sabertooth tiger or bear or something. We can now go and build a house wherever we want to live under our terms and under our conditions. Including for example, one of the greatest inventions in human history, air conditioning, all right, which makes much of the world habitable was before it wasn't or shouldn't have been, it was I guess, but it shouldn't have been habitable. So it's our mind that makes that possible. We don't have a gene that lets us know automatically how to hunt like the lion does. I mean, how do you catch a bison? Anybody just instinctually know? No, none of you do. You'd have to think about it. You'd have to develop weapons, have to build tools. Those tools take thought. Somebody had to figure them out. Lions don't have tools. They can't think, you can think. Every value that we have, our ability to communicate, our ability to have relationships, our ability to love is dependent on our ability to think. Everything, everything at the end of the day, all our values, all the things we live for, figuring out what the right diet is. How do you do that? Do we just know, go out into the Farage or just pick whatever? No, it's not obvious, especially in modern times when the choices are unbelievable the amount of choices we have in terms of food, right? What's good for us? What's not good for us? It's not obvious, not obvious. I think we're still confused. I don't think anybody really knows even today what's really good for us and what do we, but how are we gonna discover that? How are we working to discover that? By using our minds, by using science, which is the epitome of rationality. So for human survival, if you had to name one thing that is required to be successful in life, to be good at life, to achieve the goals that you want to set in life, I'd say it's simple. There's only one principle that you need to know and that is think. Now it sounds easy, right? But it's not. How many times in life do we get a sense, we're doing something and we get a sense that something's wrong? But it's unpleasant. So we say, you know what, I don't want to think about that because the conclusion might not be the conclusion that I want to get to. The conclusion might not be one that's pleasant to me and it's gonna require a lot of effort to figure out if it's true or not. Your girlfriend might be cheating on you. You don't know, but some things just not quite right. But if I think about it, I might discover some bad news and I don't want to go there. No, I just don't want to go there. Or the cocaine is right there and you're gonna get a really cool high from it. And emotionally you might be very happy for a little while but that's not happiness, that's some emotion. What's it gonna do to my ability to function over the next 30 years, particularly if I do it repeatedly? Well, the empirical evidence is pretty clear, not that good for you. But you have to think about it to figure that out. It's not obvious. I mean, I'm gonna get a high so it requires stopping a minute and saying, is this really good for me? Not easy, not if you're in a party with lots of friends and everybody's doing it. So to be truly selfish, to think about what's good for you, to think about what's good for you in the long term, to live life to the fullest. My biggest piece of advice today is think. This thing that we got between our ears is the most powerful tool for living that we have. It's actually the only tool for living that we have. Everything else is a product of that. Again, your exercise routine is gonna come from science which is gonna come from thinking. Your diet routine is gonna come from science which is a product of thinking. Even the dating ideas that you're gonna get are gonna come from people's experience and then figuring out because experience itself doesn't teach you anything. It's you have to think about the experiences in order to learn anything from it. So it's all about thinking, thinking, thinking. So everything I'm gonna say from now on, it makes that assumption. It's all about how you apply your thoughts to your life. How do you apply the rational process of your mind to your life? And this is hard. I like to tell people being truly selfish. And I'll say something in a minute about what untruely selfish is. Being truly selfish is hard work. It's fun, but it's work. You don't have a selfish gene. You don't have selfish instincts. You don't know what's good for you until you think about it and figure it out. So think, think, think. Now, this is the difference between my conception of selfishness and the common conception of selfishness. Most people when they, when I said we'd point to somebody and say he's selfish, what we mean is what? He's a lying, cheating SOB. We mean he's motivated by whims. He just does whatever he feels like doing. But is doing whatever you feel like doing really selfish? Is lying, cheating, stealing really selfish? Let's take doing whatever you feel like doing. We'll go back to the cocaine example. Sometimes it feels good to do cocaine. Sometimes it feels good to drive like a maniac, risking your life and the lives of others. Sometimes it feels good, a little bit, to lie, cheat and steal from people. Bernie Madoff probably got a little bit of a kick when he stole $50 billion from his best friend.