 They called me up a few weeks ago, or a few months ago, and said, hey, do you want to give an Edison talk? I said, sure, sounds like fun. What's the topic? And they said, it's departure. I said, what? Departure? That's a topic? And I started thinking about it. And I started out by thinking this is the nothing space, right? There's nothing in front of you. That's a good beginning, as we learned earlier. I don't know anything about departure. But then I started thinking. I depart almost every week to do my job, to go somewhere in the world, to talk, to debate, to discuss ideas. How did I get to this place? I departed from a career that everybody expected me to have, that the world imagined that I would have. My parents expected me to live up to and went on a path that is completely different. And by the way, a great embarrassment to my parents. If you've read Atlas Shrugged, you know why. I left my country of origin. I was born in Israel. I left my culture. I left my family. I've departed many, many times during my life. Departure is a part of my life. But when did it all start? What is the origin of all these departures? There's a moment in time for all of us. You know, here I'm talking primarily to the students here. There's a moment in time, sometime between, I don't know, the ages of 14 and the ages of 25, where those hormones kick in and suddenly the world opens up. And yes, there are all kinds of expectations from other people. There are all kinds of demands that our culture has on us, that our parents have on us, that our family. Everybody expects that our friends, you know, whether it's to join a gang, do drugs, be in a band, be an engineer, be a doctor or a lawyer, as my parents expected from me. But suddenly those hormones kick in and our minds open up. And there's an incredible opportunity that we face as young people. It's to shape our own lives. It's to make decisions for ourselves. It's to truly become independent. We leave the home. And there's a certain level of independence involved in that. You have to be financially independent. You have to start, you know, making your own food and cleaning your own clothes and taking care of yourself in a thousand different ways. But there's a much more fundamental issue at stake during these years when we're maturing into adulthood. And that is the independence of mind. Discovering our own mind, discovering who we are, discovering the ideas that are right for us, discovering what we believe the truth to be. And that might be what our parents have always told us. It might be what the preachers have taught us, depending on what, well, I find it interesting that people who were born into a particular religion, to the dying day, believe that that is the true religion, right? The only reason they believe it's the true religion is because they were born into it. If you're born into a different one, you believe just as between the age of 15 and 25, this is the period we're gonna challenge all that. Now, why do I cap it at 25? Because the fact is that most of the adults here who are over 25, 30, don't change their mind about anything important ever. It's just the fact. There's a certain calcification that happens in the mind, particularly about fundamental questions, about really important issues. We grow up with certain ideas, then there's a window where we can challenge them, where we can become who we really are, where we can make choices that are fresh, that are new, that are original, to us, that are independent. And then whatever those choices are, whether we chose to choose or chose just to continue on the path that our parents set for us, that's what gets locked in for most of us, not for everybody, for the rest of our lives. So this period is really, really important. Now for me, when I was growing up, I grew up in Israel, those teen years were years, were in the 70s. And if you were in Israel in the 70s, everybody pretty much had the same mindset. You were an adamant collectivist. Being an Israeli, being part of the Jewish tribe was everything. It was the most important thing in the world. We grew up with songs describing the sacrifice of soldiers and other Jews to make our lives possible. Life was about living for the tribe. Life was about living, sacrificing for the collective. And I believed it. I bought into it 100%. That was me. You were brought up politically with socialism. Everybody was a socialist. You didn't know anything else. This was the reality. So your life belonged to the group and the group got to make decisions, which basically is socialism. And I had a friend who was spouting these kind of capitalist ideas. And I said to him one day, I said, what is this nonsense that you're talking about? Where do you get this BS? And he handed me a copy of Atlas Shrugged. I know the adults in the audience and I'm freaking out because most of you probably hate Atlas Shrugged. Whether you've read it or not, you probably hate Atlas Shrugged. But this book literally changed my life. It taught me that my life does not belong to the group. That my life is not to be sacrificed for the tribe. That the tribe is not the entity. And replace tribe with your community, with your country, with your group, any group that you want, right? Tribe is kind of deeply ingrained in us because we all kind of started long time ago in tribes. It taught me that my life was mine. It was mine to be happy, to pursue values, to pursue my success, to live my life as icy fit, to think for myself, not to accept necessarily what my parents, what my culture, what my political leaders, what my teachers were telling me, not to reject it either, but to think about it, to evaluate it, to examine it, to use my mind to figure stuff out. It taught me the value of using your mind. Now, why is it important? Why is the human mind so important? You know, if you think about human beings, all the people in this auditorium, it's hard for me to see you guys, but you know, you're pretty normal, right? As a biological species, we are pretty pathetic. And if you don't believe me, just look at your neighbor. We're weak, we're slow, we have no claws, we have no fangs. You know, you try running down a bison and biting into it. You try going up against a sabre to tiger. We lose, in the biological game out there, we lose over and over and over again. And yet, we haven't lost. Here we are, we're incredibly successful. Why is that? It's not because we have thumbs, as some anthropologists would suggest. It's because we have brains. It's because we have reason. It's because we have our mind. Every value that we have is a consequence of somebody thinking. Usually, somebody thinking out of the box. Somebody innovating, somebody discovering something. Somebody using his reason, using his mind. And usually, if it was a real revolutionary idea, what did the culture around him do to him? Burn him at the stake, crucify him, put him at the house arrest. The historical examples are numerous. The real breakthroughs are not well tolerated. You know, none of us here have the gene to make clothes. Somebody had to figure that out, and it's not easy. You try cutting up an animal and turning it into clothing or taking cotton and turning it into a jacket. None of you know how to do this. I can guarantee that. But some genius, somewhere thousands of years ago, figured it out. Agriculture, you guys have the gene for agriculture? There might be some farmers here. But even then, it's not a gene. Somebody figured out that seed that dropped and grew into a shrub. Somebody figured out that the seed was the cause of the plant and the watering the seed produced it. That was the Einstein of his day, probably crucified for that discovery. And then somebody had to take that discovery and turn it into an industry called agriculture. Actually do the work. That was Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of his day, the entrepreneur who turned it into a profit seeking. And he was probably vilified forever for being greedy and thinking only of himself as we do to most of our very successful entrepreneurs. Okay, successful entrepreneurs we tolerate. It's the real successful ones we don't like. But all of that, all of that is a consequence of the use of your mind, of the use of reason. That is our unique means of surviving, of thriving, of achieving happiness, of achieving success. And what it means to be independent, really independent, it means to use your mind. Now you can come to the same conclusions that your parents had. You can decide that particular ideas are right and wrong and they might conform to what's around you and they might not. But you have to make that decision based on your reason, based on your capacity to think. It is your mind that is gonna guide your life for the rest of your life. Use it, use it well, use it now and use these years where there's this opening, where you're open to the world to challenge yourself. We're all born in a particular culture, a particular time with particular, I don't know, let's say music. I was born in the 70s, best popular music ever. Right, rock and roll, nothing better than that. Right, we all think that when we grew up we had the best music. But that's just the music we grew up with. There's music that goes back hundreds of years. There's great music that has, that comes from different cultures. Go out and experience it, live it, figure out what you like, what you love, what's really good for you. Make your life mission at 16, at 17, at 20. Make your life mission to discover the things that you are most passionate about. And don't do it through whim, don't do it through emotion, don't do it because other people tell it, do it by using your mind, by using your brain, by using reason, by using thinking. Depart from the norm, be unconventional, but not unconventional in the sense of rejecting for the sake of rejecting, but unconventional because you want to understand, you want to figure out, you want to discover the truth, the truth that will lead you to the best life that you can lead for yourself. Because that's, at the end of the day, what I discovered for mine, Rand, and what led to all my departures. My departure from country, from family, and from Korea, is that my life is mine. Happiness is the goal. I have a great tool in my mind. Each one of us has a great tool to find our happiness, to be successful, to pursue life. And it's that pursuit of life, that pursuit of happiness, which is what we are all about, what we should be all about.