 Hi, everyone. Great to be here. I'm very excited to — Yoran and I decided to put together — and I'm really excited about this talk because purpose for me is such an important concept. And when we prepared for this, I got more and more excited about how much I can get out of this conversation about purpose. So, Yoran, I want to start just — I just want to say hello to everybody, hello to Tal and to everybody else. I also want to say that I miss you guys. I mean, how much better would this be if there were 238 people live in an audience right now sitting in front of me? That would be so much cooler, so much better. So, we're making the most of this, but it just ain't the same with you guys not hearing the flesh. Right. And as you know, we announced next year's Ocon is going to be in Washington, DC. And if you can't wait, there are going to be a couple of opportunities. It's going to be Atlanta is going to be in October — sorry, November 6th to 8th. We're going to have a student conference in Atlanta. And then, if you want to join us in the gala, it's going to be October 1st in New York. Hopefully, everything will be opened by then. So, let's kick it off, Yoran. You know, when we started talking about purpose, it reminded me of a story when I was a young, very young CEO. My first week as a CEO, I was overwhelmed and I started working like crazy 14-hour days. And in the end of the first week, the CEO — sorry, the owner of the company invited me to his room and said, what are you doing every day? 14 hours, I see the lights on at 10 p.m. What's going on? I said, like, I'm working. I'm working as hard as I can. I'm a CEO now. And he said, what are you trying to achieve? And I said, that's a really good question. And then he gave me an analogy that I'll never forget. He said, we're all dancing in the dance floor. But from time to time, you have to go up to the balcony and look at what's going on and look far and know what you're — and for me, that's stuck as always have a vision, a purpose to what you're doing. So, let's kick it off by, what is for you, what is the meaning of purpose? What is it? So, purpose is the why. Why am I doing this? You know, why am I giving this talk right now? I could be at the beach. No, wait, we're in lockdowns. I couldn't be at the beach. But I could be doing a dozen, two dozen, a million other things. Why am I doing this? What is the goal? Do I have a goal? Am I trying to achieve something? If so, is it a legitimate goal? How does it relate to all my other goals? So, it really is the pursuit of a goal intentionally. Purpose is about being intentional. It's about knowing what you're doing, knowing why you are doing it. And it's a recognition of the fact that I can actually choose. I can be here, or I can be at the beach. I can be somewhere else. I can choose how to set my life. I can choose what values to pursue. I can choose how to live. I'm actually in control. And that means I've got a whole selection of values. I'm not set to go in one path. I can change paths. I can pursue lots of different things. So, purpose is really that goal-directness. It's the idea that you are goal-directed in every aspect of your life, in every aspect of your existence. That is open to choice where you can choose. It's about being a valuer. It's about pursuing values in an intentional way, in a thoughtful way, in a purposeful way. Okay. I'm being told that something's wrong with the video. Is everything good? The video's not great. So, you're kind of jagged. It looks like low-quality bandwidth on your end. Okay. Well, we'll try. Anyway, so I wanted to continue. It seems like, before we dive in, more kind of detail, but it seems like there's a need, a human need. Is it psychological? What is it about the need of having a purpose? Because sometimes, you know, when you lose purpose, it seems like everything's going down, right? So what is that need that humans have to have purpose? Where is that coming from? Well, at the most foundational level, at the most basic level, it's the fact that we don't know, instinctually, automatically, how to live. That we have to choose our values. And because of that, if you think about the fact that we have so many values, there's so many things you could be doing. There's so many things you could be choosing. You have to consciously decide what's important and what's not. What's going to lead you towards your goals and what is not? What goals are worthy of having? From the most abstract to the most concrete, there's no automatic mechanism to make that happen. You have to actively pursue it. You have to actively engage. You have to actually actively think. And this is all the way at the level of survival, right? At the very basic of just as a human being to survive, we have no automatic knowledge of how to survive. So you have to, in every activity in life, from the basic activity of getting food, and you have to pursue certain goals. You have to pursue a certain path, and you have to figure out what those goals are and figure out what that path has to be, needs to be. And that is at the very core of why we need purpose because we don't know how to live. We have to figure it out. We have to make the right kind of choices. We have to use our reason and allow our reason to help us solve the problems of survival. And then as you go up from survival, as you go up to living life as a human being with all the spiritual and material needs that human beings actually have, well, it gets more and more complex. It gets more and more challenging. But all of that is part of living. And all of that requires us to be very goal oriented, to be very focused, to be very rational, to be very systematic about the values that we choose. And if we're not, then we flounder. If we're not, then we choose values that are anti-life or we waste a lot of time or we go in directions that are unproductive and unconstructive to a happy life or to a productive life. And the bad thing that happens as a consequence is unhappiness and lack of focus and depression and drift, not knowing what's going on. Why? So why is it so hard? Why do we see so many people confused, unhappy in the world around us? Why is that so hard to achieve? Why is it like it's not like a nature to us to always pursue something? Why by, I don't know if it's by default, we're not pursuing rational values. Well, but that's the point. There's no default. It's so hard because it's not automatic. It's so hard because it requires choices, it requires action, it requires thinking and reason. And it's so hard because at the end it is dependent on our fundamental choices in life. It is dependent on our fundamental philosophy, our fundamental morality. That is going to guide the purpose or lack of purpose in our life. And if the purpose in our life is anti-life, then you get this constant clash between the values that you're pursuing and the needs for self-preservation, the needs for living a life as a human being. And that clash manifests itself in anxiety, in stress, in unhappiness, and in difficulty in life, in midlife crises, in all of these kind of phenomenals where self-preservation requires a certain path because reality is what it is and human nature is what it is. And you are pursuing a completely other path because you're guided by let's say altruism, a philosophy that tells you self-preservation doesn't matter, what really matters or living doesn't matter or taking care of your own needs or your own happiness doesn't matter. What really matters is other people, what really matters is sacrifice, what really matters is denying yourself for the sake of others, what really matters is sacrifice. Then even if you choose a purpose, let's say in your career and you're successful in it, at some point that's going to clash against this other idea but wait a minute, what am I doing? I should be sacrificing, I should be taking care of others and that conflict is psychological, that conflict is in every dimension of your life and it causes people to rethink their life, to question everything, but then they still lack, okay, but what do I do now? Unless they will need to question their morality, unless they will need to question their most fundamental, the purpose of morality, the goal of morality, right, then they are stuck with purposes that clash with their actually human nature, with actual requirements of happiness, with actual requirements of success qua human being and that creates all these disasters. Yeah, would you say that a midlife crisis, yeah, would you say that a midlife crisis as we know it is related to that? Yeah, absolutely, I mean, there's a sense in which when you're young, you're focused on a few things, right, and you know, one of them being career, you know, if you're a better person, if you're a good person, you're focused on career, you may be one a romantic relationship and you're driven and you're full of energy and you're just experiencing life and you're coming out of the gate and everything looks possible and you haven't really thought about ethics, morality is in the background, but for most of us it's altruism in the background, but you're just focused right now because you want to be successful, you want to do good and many people who have been life crisis are very successful people, are people who have, you know, from their 20s on, single-minded focused on this career and then they've got a family and they've got two kids and they've got a dog and they've got a house and they've got an old days of station wagon or whatever and everything looks like it's clicking right and then at some point I think the altruism and comes into the forefront and it says, well what are you doing? On the one hand, isn't the good something else, isn't the good that you've been taught you're entitled to something else and you haven't been doing that, but also, you know, why have I devoted myself long term to a family and a wife? What's the, where am I going with this? What's the purpose of this? Why can't I just go with any young, you know, beautiful woman? Why can't I drive a sport? You know, why can't I do these other things? If I'm not going to be moral because they usually put that aside, right, they put, I'm not really going to be mother to race and nobody wants that, then, well, why this? Why career? What's the point in career, right? Why follow that? Why family? Why any of these things? And there's no answer because they've divorced their fundamental abstract moral concepts which they've never really articulated, never made, really made real from the day-to-day life and that conflict manifests itself in, you know, in this midlife crisis and then, you know, and you look at, and it's not just midlife crisis. Look, young people, young people experiencing this as well. There's a, there's a well-documented phenomena and you can see it with people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and Religion and Rick Warren who wrote a book about, you know, purpose in life, the evangelical preacher. Young people who don't know what to make of their life, they don't know what to do with their life, they don't know why they should do anything, they don't know what the, what the purpose is and they're drifting and they're going nowhere and they're in their mother's basement and they, you know, they're attracted to crazy ideas or they're just playing video games because they don't know what life is about and then you listen and then what happens is people, these self-help people and people who may be a little bit more intellectual than just self-help people like Sam Harris or Jordan or Religion, they come about and say, yeah, there's a, you need a purpose guys, let me help you find a purpose, but almost all of them, Sam Harris is a bit of an exception here but certainly Jordan Peterson and certainly Religion and so on, they say, yeah, life and this is Jordan, right, this is what he says, he says, life is miserable, life is pain, life is suffering and the only way you can deal with it is to find a purpose and the real purpose, if you really want a meaningful purpose, a purpose that will really animate your life, it has to be outside of you, it has to be focused on others, it has to be on other people, he talks about taking responsibility, first he says you have to take responsibility for your own life, you know, make your bed, stand up straight, do stuff like that, take responsibility for your own life but then to really achieve, he never talks about happiness because he doesn't think that can be achieved, that just happens, then you need something external to you, say again, even the self-help gurus, at the end in the guise of self-help, helping you, they sell altruism, at the end it's not about how to achieve your values, your life, your happiness, it's about, in John Peterson's case, reducing pain, it's about eliminating struggle and but the only way to do that is by adopting some, in some form, adopting altruism or some kind of altruism. So let's go for the positive, let's talk to an 18 year old, a 20 year old, they're ambitious, how would you guide them towards, you know, well, what would you answer if they ask you, okay, Iran, what is the purpose of life? What am I trying to achieve here? And then maybe the next question is how should I go about figuring my purpose, because I don't know yet, I just graduated, I don't know what I'm interested in, where should I go, how should I start building my purpose? Yeah, so first, the purpose is the purpose of your life, it's not purpose to life, other than life, the question is what is the purpose of my life, and what is the purpose of human life, if you will, as individuals, and the purpose is to live, to live well, to live as Iran described a life as a human being, as a life that is fitting for a rational being. So you can't, and this is what, this is the problem with most of the self-help guys, so some of them want to divorce purpose from morality, and some of them want to sell purpose in the frame of altruism, neither one of those can be successful, I mean you can give somebody purpose that's altruistic, but there'll be a clash and it'll destroy them, and you can try to divorce purpose from morality, but again that'll clash and that'll destroy them. The beauty of objectivism, the beauty of Iran's ideas is that purpose is a cardinal value in morality, it is an essential part of what it means to be moral, it is an essential part of what it means to live, it means to pursue your life, and what is the moral purpose of your life? Well it's happiness, it's to achieve happiness, it's to achieve that state of non-country dictatorial and to counter the Jordan Peterson's of the world, it's not this momentary pleasure, it's not just having a party, it's not having fun, it's something much deeper, much more sustainable over time, it's a state of being that is a positive state of being, a belonging in this world of embracing and loving the love, the life that you have. So that is your purpose in life, it's to live that kind of life, the kind of life suitable for a rational being, and to do that, well you need to do I think two things, I mean you need to do a lot more than that, two things to start off with. First you have to embrace morality, you have to embrace certain abstract values, you have to understand them, integrate them, and really understand how they adhere towards making your life purposeful, making your life valuable and ultimately leading to happiness. So you start with the most abstract values and then you have to have more concrete values that lead you to those greater abstractions and ways in which to achieve them, you know, and a lot of those values are going to be personal values, so you have to figure out what your personal values are. But is it, let me ask you this, so it seems like there's a relationship between value and purpose and isn't like a spiral, would you say that me is beginning my life, trying to figure out what my values are and being more purposeful around it, is this like a spiral that grows and grows over time, would you describe it like that? Absolutely, as you achieve your values, as you learn more about life, as you understand moral principles better, as your knowledge both abstract and at the concrete level expands, you know more, you're better integrated, your choice of values becomes more mature, but more informed and more meaningful. So it's a constant spiral, you're constantly learning, you're constantly proving, it's not like, you know, again, other than the abstract values, the universal values, it's not like, you know, you fix values when you're 18 and those are the values for the rest of your life, I mean, thank God, that's not true. I mean, the things I liked when I was 18, I, you know, I completely reject, some of them I reject today, right, so you want to be able to grow and to learn and to integrate your knowledge into your values, and that's, that's what purpose allows you to do. Purpose is this focus on doing that, it's about focusing on your values, it's about focusing on your choices, it's about focusing on your goals, and it's about prioritizing them, choosing between them, creating hierarchies of them, and it's not fixed every day, requires you to re-engage that purpose, because every day there are new value potential values, there are values you might want to drop, there are things that there's new information, new knowledge, new ideas that you've encountered that will, you know, make your life richer. So purpose is the standing command, if you will, you know, focus on the values in my life, and it's a huge abstraction, because it covers self-esteem, it covers every, you know, it's one of the three cardinal values in objectivism, reason, purpose, self-esteem, it covers every human activity, because every human activity, every individual activity, is about values, it's about pursuit of the things that are important to you, that you want to act again or keep, and it's, so it's a task, and as the value, it's that I am going to be focused on this, this is important to me, this is what I'm going to spend real energy and real thought and real effort to do, I'm going to figure out what's really important, and it's more than just what's really important, because you have to be careful here of subjectivity, you know, a lot of times people say, oh well think about what's really important to you and what you love, and then go pursue what you love, that's your values, but one of the important steps there is to make sure what you love is good, and what is good mean, again, what is the purpose of it, make sure that what you love is life-enhancing, it is truly life-enhancing, and it is life-enhancing relative to the other values you could, you could follow that, or you could pursue that, you know, there might be more life-enhancing, so it's a constant, you're constantly choosing, and you're constantly creating hierarchies, and you're constantly evaluating, and that's what it means to have a life of purpose, it's not you do it once and it's over, I mean maybe what you do once is define the abstractions, but even then, I learn something about the objectivist ethics every day, or every time I listen to one of our philosophers, or every time I pick up one of Van Rijn's books, or one of Van Rijn's essays and read, I learn something new, so even there, you're constantly evolving, you're constantly learning, you're constantly growing, and that's going to affect your hierarchy of values that's going to affect the purposes that you have in your life. Let's talk about the concept of central purpose, the idea that you have, you know, of course on the productive side, one central purpose that really guides your life, the direction of your life, can you talk a little bit about the relationship between purpose and central purpose? Yes, so there are a lot of values in life, and there are a lot of even, you just think of the different categories of values, right, there is love, there's friendship, there's family which relates to love, but in some ways doesn't, there's entertainment, did I mention career, there's, you know, there's, there are a lot of different categories, your values, what's that, health, yeah there's health, there's a lot of different categories, and each one of those, the work that purpose requires you to gauge in, the purpose kind of is to create hierarchies in each one of those and figure out, but that's a lot, and you need some integrating, something to integrate them around, you know, the one thing in life that's limited is time, and the older you get, the more you realize how limited it is, it's every second is gone, every second you don't live again, and if you're an egoist, oh my god, you need to make every second count, well count towards what, how do I integrate it all, now you can say happiness, but happiness is not, it's hard to concretize what that means, right, so you need something to help integrate, to help make your choices, so when you make a choice between two values, purpose is what determines which one of these values you're going to choose, well what is my purpose, what is my goal, what am I heading towards, but there's so many values, and there's so many different hierarchies, you need something that integrates them all, so that you can use the time that you have as effectively as possible to live the best life that you can to live a life appropriate for a human being, and the, the, the purpose that is, the purpose, so you need a central purpose, you need something that allows integration of everything else to it, that every other activity you do integrates to it, and for human beings, again, if you go back to the original, if you, if because survival is not automatic, and knowledge is not automatic or anything like that, the central purpose, so, so just getting food or anything is not automatic, we have to work for it, the central purpose of our life is productivity, it's to be productive, it's productiveness, it's career, it's work, right, it's taking care of ourselves in the material realm, and to do that, we have to engage everything we know about morality, about the principles of morale, I mean, and that's one of the reasons it is the central purpose, it is the integrating purpose, it is where we spend, where we engage our mind the most, it's, it's where we challenge ourselves, it's where we engage with problems in reality the most, it's where we achieve the most and gain our self-esteem, so it's, it's, it's the integrating activity that we engage in is our career, and then everything else has to be measured accordingly, right, so family, you know, one of the confusing things that people suffer in our culture is people say everywhere, they say family's the most important thing, I mean, you ask anybody, anybody, they'll say family's the most important thing, and then if you want them to feel an instant element of guilt, because I do this to my audiences, and you can see them feel guilty, well what activity do you spend most time on, most effort on, most thought on, they always say my work, and immediately they feel guilty, because again they've been taught, and it's just a cliche by religion, by that it's family that's the most important thing, but you can't integrate around that, you can't integrate every activity, it's not, the fact is it's not important enough in terms of engaging your mind, in terms of challenging yourself, and so now maybe for a woman who, or a man who's staying home to raise their kids, then that is the career, that is the activity they're engaged in as their productive endeavor, but for the most part family is not enough to be a central purpose, and again this confusing messages in our culture that elevates family above all, career is selfish, career is just you, career is about money, career is about these things, it's about your passion, that creates some of these middle life crisis issues, that creates some of this angst that exists out there, and that angst is reinforced by all the self-help guys who tell people that their family is the most important thing to them, that that's what they, so it's just again reinforcing the negatives, and why I think this is a big reason why people are so unhappy in the culture, why there's so much misery and unhappiness in the culture, so the central purpose has to be the one activity that really engages everything that it means to be human, engages your reason, it engages your productive juices, your productiveness, it requires you to be the best that you can be at any moment, and it's not just any career, and this is true of all values by the way, it's to be ambitious about a career, that's what a career means, it's to be ambitious about your work, it's to push yourself, it's to elevate, it's to really constantly strive for more, because a career is not just work, it's a path, it's progress. So you're right, now I wanted to ask you something, you know, I'll give you a compliment on the way, you know, every time we're together I feel this sense of energy that you have, and I know that with a lot of people that I know are so passionate about what they do, they emit this level of energy that you don't see, they're just passionate about it, they, you know, they wouldn't go to sleep just to do more of it, the question that I have that I hear a lot of people is like, how do you find it, how do I know that this is it, because it's like an evolution, and maybe, so maybe you're from your own experience, how do you know that this is what my central purpose should be, because there's so many opportunities out there, and life, you know, comes at you in many different angles, and there are opportunities that present themselves and so on, what is the, you know, the best tip you can give a younger person on how to really slowly figure out what it is that, you know, that will make them exert so much energy. So, first I'd say that I'm probably not the right person to ask, because it took me about 20 years to figure it out, or 22 years to be like that, right, so you know, very few people that I know are like Howard Walk, Howard Walk knew he wanted to be an architect from when he was a little kid, and that was it, and it was never in question, and he just knew it, he loved the act of creating the building, you know, Iron Man describes it in the Fountainhead, and it's that he introspected, and that was obvious, it was just there, most of us, it's not, for me it certainly was. It's like her by the way, right, Howard Walk is like an Iron Man, it's like an Iron Man. Iron Man knew when she was nine or ten, or eight, I can't remember, that she wanted to be a writer, that she wanted, that was her purpose, and she knew exactly what it was, and it was a central purpose, and it was for most of her life, I think philosophy became a central purpose once she finished out of the shrug, but so for me it didn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was 18, you know, in Israel you go off to the army, so you don't even think about it in some sense, and then coming out of the army I had no idea, so what did I do, I introspect, I started by saying what do I like doing, and I made a list of you know, a list of the things that I kind of like, and the kind of activities I think I would enjoy, and you know, the kind of activities that I think I would enjoy that I could also make a living at, the kind of activities that I would enjoy that I would study, that I would go because it was obvious to go to school, and I have to say that I wasn't completely first-handed back then, so it took me a while to get rid of the kind of the second-handedness that I think I was raised with, so there certainly was an element when I was when I was very young of what would be acceptable to my family, right, so I look back and I say I love history, why didn't I go study history, because it wasn't even one of the, you know, it wasn't in the scope of the possible, I was going to be a doctor or an engineer or scientist, that was it, there was nothing else since I was young, not because I necessarily knew that that's what I wanted, but that's because how my life had been framed, so I made a list and I knew I didn't want to be the kind of engineer that sits behind the desk all day, but I figured it was engineering, I wanted to build something, I wanted to create something, so I knew I didn't want to be the kind of engineer that sits behind the desk all day and I was really terrified of having a nine to five job where you go to a desk job and you just sit there, and so I looked at all the different engineering jobs, so one you introspect and then you look out into the world, okay, where's the match, where's the fit, I looked at all the engineering and I looked at all of them and by the way I was supposed to be a doctor, right, this was what I wanted to be when I was very little or my father wanted me to be, he's a doctor, and what until the day I went to the first classes in engineering my dad still said I can get you into medical school, and you know, but I knew I didn't want that, so I took all the engineering and I said okay desk job, desk job, desk job, that job, and of course I missed the opportunity of a lifetime to be a computer engineer at the best time in history to go into that and become super wealthy, but the one that looked like it involved the least amount of sitting behind the desk and building and creating stuff was civil engineering, so I went and studied civil engineering and I embraced it and I enjoyed it and that's the other thing, you're going to hopefully, and part of this is developing and I don't know how to do it, developing a mentality, I enjoy a lot of things, I enjoy a lot of different topics, my biggest challenge is always to limit the scope because I enjoy doing so many different things and engaging in so many different things, so then engineering, so I was an engineer for a while and then I said well what do I like about engineering, well I liked the management, so I went and I went to get an MBA and I got an MBA and then I said well I really like the management, I really like this finance stuff, this finance stuff is fun, so I got a PhD in finance and then I taught a class and I said I kind of like this teaching stuff, you know, so I always gravitated, what am I doing now, do I love the most, and I became, I was a finance professor all the while by the way studying objectivism, that was kind of a theme throughout, I was always serious about the philosophy, so and I was engaged with it, so by the time I got to a position where I had the job at the institute at ARI which was my purpose and my purpose in a sense is teaching, but it's teaching something very specific which is not engineering and it's not finance, it's living and even then, I'm not somebody who does one thing, I've never done one thing, so my central purpose is a little tricky because I have, I've often had two careers, but it's about teaching, it's about engaging the world with this philosophy, engaging minds with this philosophy and that became my purpose, but it took me a long time and it took a route to get there and once I got to that point in my life it was obvious, so it wasn't something I could have ever predicted when I was 18 or 22 or 30, maybe into my early 30s I could have predicted this, but not when I was young, so the point is find things that you love to do that intersect with something that with a real job that's available out there and go and do it and but always look around and look at other things, do I enjoy something else even more and always be open and always be curious and always, you know, look at a broad set of values, don't shrink yourself, don't limit yourself, don't you know, so and I think even if their first attempt at finding a central purpose is not exactly right, it's not the ultimate central purpose you want in your life, it'll serve as a central purpose for that period in your life and it was when I was an engineer, I was an engineer, I loved it and I engaged with it and that was my central purpose and the same with any other step in my life, that helped. You know, I think we're very much so and actually everything you say is just, it's exactly, you know, with me, I've done several things in my life, I enjoyed it, if you asked me at the point in time when I was doing it, is that your central purpose, I would say, yes, that's what I want to do and then you find something better and you look back, it's like, wow, this is so much better than before. Yeah, so I think we're on to something here, you're on. I want to read something, I'm going to talk about this book, you know, recognize this of course, a little bit about tomorrow, but I want to read something when we're preparing for this, this is from the chapter on virtue from OPAR. I think the last sentence says it all, he says, so Leonard talks about, you know, man of purpose, he says, he's the person with a passionate ambition for values who wants every moment and step of his life to count in their service. Such a person does not resent the effort which purpose imposes, he enjoys the fact that the object his desires are not given to him, but must be achieved. In his eyes, purpose is not drudgery or duty, but something good. The process of pursuing values is itself a value. Absolutely, you know, it's very powerful and it's true and you know, to live a purposeful life, I think you have to take every one of these different realms of life, family, love, art, I forgot art before, entertainment, career, every one of them, and you need to give them all. You need to really think about them and you really, really engage with them and take the time to really prioritize and create hierarchies for each one of them. And yes, they all need to be integrated around a central purpose, but central purpose doesn't mean all consuming purpose. It doesn't mean no time for anything else, but think about what you like about having friends, what friends you like and what you don't, which kind of friends you want to pursue, which you don't. Your romantic relationship, your art, the art that you love, it does surround yourself. I've often said this on my show, take the things that you are in control of in your life. You're not in control of politics, by the way. Take the things that you are in control of in your life, the art you consume, the friends that you have, your romantic relationships, the recreation, the vacation, the entertainment. And I'm not listing these as if they're all equal because they're not. They're different places in your hierarchy. So you need to make them such and then create hierarchies in each one of them and pursue them with passion, as if your life depended on it, because your life does depend on it, right? And know what you like and why you like it. And if you don't know what you like, and a lot of us don't know what you like, when I started pursuing art, I didn't know what I liked. But don't limit yourself too to what you like today. That's the other thing. Stay dynamic in work, in friends, in art, in everything that you do. Constantly be open to improving, to building. We talked about this last year when we talked about art. Don't settle for the music you grew up with. Push the boundaries, test new stuff, go and explore. And if there are things that are classic that your friends recommended, so on, take it seriously. You may not like them in there. There might not be values for you. But at least try, because again, life is short. You don't get a single second of it back. And it's got to be enjoyed, because that's the experience of the happiness, is that joy. So you've got to enjoy it, not in a superficial way, but in a deep sense. So constantly be ambitious about your values. Don't settle. Seek out the best in your context, given your abilities, given your interests, and live them. Your values and your purposes are you. They are what define you. You are your values. You create your soul. I mean, Ayn Rand has these great passages about, and Ankar has an essay about this. You are the creator of your own soul. And the way you create your soul is by the purposes you choose, and by the values you pursue, and that you gain and you keep. So be ambitious, be passionate, and go out there and do it. And look, I thought you were going to ask me earlier, why have I got so much energy and passion? It's because I love what I do, and it's because I care about it, and because it's completely integrated into everything that I am. It's me. It's not a face I have to put on in order to do it. It's not like I drink some energy potion or switch some energy switch in my mind. This is just who I am. And if you engage me with something that interests me that I love, the passion is just there. The energy is just there. I don't know why it comes up. But it comes from that purpose. It comes on those values. It comes on being ambitious and caring. And really at the end of the day, it comes on loving life, loving this life. So just to concretize your last recommendation, Last Okon, I don't know if you remember, but you recommended me to start listening to classical music and Rachmaninov in specific. So since I bought a stereo system with two mute speakers, and I did exactly what you told me Last Okon, just to lie down in the dark, high volume, and oh boy, it's a whole new world. And as a musician, you keep on learning about, wow, this is possible. And this is so, yeah, go educate yourself in so many different ways, because you don't know what's possible and what other values you can pursue. And it goes back to the idea of a spiral. It's an ongoing spiral and you get better and better. So I want to leave some time for Q&A. We're running out of time. So I don't know, Keith, if you want to come back and tell us if there are any more, any questions out there that we can answer. Yeah, so okay, good. So we've got just about 10 minutes left for questions. We're using the Zoom Q&A module. So if you look at your Zoom controls, you might need to click on more, but you'll see a thing that says Q&A and you can post questions there. We already have a few posted. So I'm going to start with those, give priority to people who've posted questions already. One thing we're going to do throughout the conference, I think for this session we just have a little bit of time, so I don't know if we'll do it right now, but we're going to prioritize questions from people who are willing to ask their questions live and we're going to use the hand raising feature. So you can use, if you go into the chat, I think you can use, there's a hand raising button. And if you want to turn on your camera, turn on your microphone and ask the question live, we can do that. As I said, probably we'll do it at the next time around. So let me just, let me jump in with taking some of the questions that we already have in the Q&A module. So Andrew asked the question, what is the connection between purpose and pride? Can you say something about that, Yoram? Sure. So it relates to the point I was making at the end here. Pride is moral ambitiousness. Pride is the seeking moral perfection. It is the action necessary to achieve your purpose. You're not going to achieve happiness unless you strive towards moral perfection, unless you're ambitious in morality, unless you pursue the virtues, the virtues, all seven of them, including pride, lead you to reason, purpose, and self-esteem. They are the means by which one attains those values. Pride is the one that says you have to take all of them seriously, and you have to be ambitious about all of them and no compromise. So it's a necessary means to attaining purpose as a value. Okay, Abten is asking, are the concepts of human life and purpose essentially the same thing? You talked about values, you being, your values are your purpose. What about human life? Is it, without purpose, is it even possible to live life as a human being? No, you know, you can, well, I mean, not as a human being, not a fully human life. Now, you certainly can, you know, people, you can see people, and we didn't talk about this, you can see people who are purposed less, you know, midlife crisis is a mild version of this, but you can see people from very young who are unfocused, drift, have no ambition, don't do anything with their time and their life and really a waste. And in that sense, they're completely not living in any single dimension. A lot of people are mixed. They might be, for example, very serious about their career and have some purpose in parts of their life, but are drift in other parts of their life. And they're just unhappy, right? And they're not living to their fullest potential and they're not living the fullest life that they can live. But to really abandon purpose in every aspect of your life, life is impossible unless somebody feeds you, right? Because you can't even feed yourself. You need some purpose at some level to even do the basic requirements of life. So no purposeful, no purpose is no life at the end of the day, and certainly not a human life. Okay. You know, we probably can take some using the hand raising, but I'm going to ask one more question from the Q&A module and then we can go do the hand raising. I think some of the hand raises put the questions here as well. Yeah. So Debbie, while Debbie is asking, what advice do you have when you when you face setbacks in life, bad luck, like a car accident or an illness, or when you've taken a wrong turn? How do you get yourself back on track? And that's actually related to a question from Mark, you know, what do you do if you no longer like what your purpose has been so far? So what about if you've taken a wrong turn or a wrong choice somewhere along the way? Well, let's take the bad luck and accident or something. You know, first, you can't let it go too deep, right? So you have to put it in the perspective of your entire life. Hopefully you still have enough of your capabilities to be able to still engage with life, engage in positive aspects of life. There are some values that are still open to you. It requires a new introspection about what values are open to me, what values are now achievable, given you might have had an accident and now you can't, there's some things you can do. I've had back problems for a long time. I can't play soccer. I love playing soccer. I can't do it. That can be a value. And of course, for some people who've had much more serious injuries, you know, the scope of what you cannot do might be larger. But what you need to do in those circumstances is that instead of regret, regret is useless. You cannot go back in time. It goes back to, you know, time is one directional and there's no second chances. There's no going back in time. So all you can do is, okay, this is where I am. This is the context. These are my values. What can I do? What is open to me? And I'm going to be ambitious about that. I'm going to pursue that with a passion. I'm going to, even if it's a much narrower set of values, that's what I'm going to go after. And for Mark's question, I'd say, again, you should always be questioning and challenging. And if you discover that your purpose has changed, then change, you know, change the purpose. If you're not enjoying your job, if you're not enjoying your career, if you're not, if you're not happy with your wife or your family or whatever it happens to be, then first make sure that, again, it's objective. Again, the danger here is subjectivism or one worship. You've got to make sure it's objective. You've got to make sure it's tied to life and tied to your pursuit of life and tied to your largest scale purposes. And then you've got to make changes in life. And life is not static. Changes are necessary. You know, again, I've had five careers, only one wife, though. And I think I'll only have one wife. But you've got to be able to re-evaluate constantly every one of these things and then shift. And it takes courage. It takes courage to walk away from something that you've dedicated a lot of time and effort and thought to, but now is not good for you anymore. Yaron, I want to add one more layer to it. You know, when there's a setback or you make mistakes, sometimes people get caught up with their negative emotions. You know, they can't see beyond that. You say, okay, get over it, go. What would you say about the fact that you're sometimes just stuck in regret, stuck in, you know, I made a horrible mistake. I have anxiety of changing my well-paid job to something else. What is your answer to dealing with emotions that in a way get you caught up in all this? I'm not a psychologist. All I can say and I'm not trying to be flippant here is you've got to get over it. You've got to refocus yourself on your purpose in life. That is to live and to live life as a human being and to make the most of your life. You've got to find a way to psychologically reorient yourself to your ultimate purpose, which is life, life as a human being. Okay. And sometimes that's hard. And that's why psychologists are so important. And that's why psychology is an important field to, because they are methodologies and how to do that and how to overcome overwhelming emotions. I don't want this to be sound rationalistically. Well, yeah, just say to yourself as a mantra every day. No, I mean, this is something you have to integrate and psychologists. It's a positive profession. It's not about fixing you. It's about helping you orient your life in the best direction possible when sometimes you're stuck. And understand the role of emotions and what they are and how to deal with them. Okay, let's try having somebody come online. So Rivka, I just allowed you to speak so you can unmute. I just muted you. There we go. So you can unmute, you can turn your camera on. And would you like to ask your question? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. Good. I don't know how to turn on my camera. But I think there's a thing that I could do. That's okay. It just says microphone. Well, anyway, I think the public school system in our country really fosters dependence. And it's strange that at such a young age, when students are 18, they're expected to go off in the world and know what they're supposed to do. When all along they've been told what to do and what they should choose. And being told this is good, this is not. Would you have perhaps advice or a way of thinking for, let's say, an adolescent who's in that position of their, you know, in school because I have to be, my parents will go to jail if I don't go to school. And so how can they, how can an adolescent maximize his potential, his independence, his ability to make conscious decisions within these constraints? I mean, I think that it's a matter of, again, if the adolescent, how aware the adolescent is of himself and of ideas and of the world around him, it's really hard when they're young and your ideas are not formed yet and your moral code in a sense is not formed yet and you're learning. I would say that at that age, the most important thing for a young person to do is learn, learn, learn, learn. And I'm not just saying learn in the bookish sense, although that's also important, but learn by experiencing, go out into the world and try things and experiment within boundaries and, you know, and again, the tricky part is you've got parents and you're still in a legal situation. But experience things and parents should encourage adolescents to experience things, experience new things, try new things, not fit themselves into a box in terms of what they are supposed to do, what people expect them to do, what they need to do, what their parents want them to do, but really open their minds and open them to what it is. Now, again, some adolescents know exactly what they want to do, like a hard work. There are people like that, but not everybody does and you want them to give, you want them to have the space as a parent and you want them as children, as adolescents to feel confident enough to go out there and test and experiment and try new things within the boundaries of life-enhancing values. And I'd also say this, I think one of the, I never understood this about the U.S., but American parents, it seems like since from the age of like two, kids are trained to go to college. And which college and, you know, they have to get the grades to go to Harvard and there's this obsession with going to college at 18 and going to the white college, you know, exactly what you want to do and, you know, doing, everything is oriented towards this nuttiness and then in high school, your entire high school is oriented towards college. It's like, let me enjoy high school. I, you know, I haven't even, I don't know what I want to do. You know, college is later. It's this crazy long-term planning at a time of life when the kids can't do long-term planning because they don't know enough about the present. They don't know enough about the past and they don't know enough about themselves. So it strikes me that I think a lot of kids in the world today need a year off. They shouldn't go to college. Maybe two years off. They should go travel around the world. They should get a job. They should do something. They should meet new people. They should leave their neighborhood. They, you know, they really need some real-world experience before because they're so sheltered and they're so protected and so oriented towards this goal, which was never their goal. Nobody, they didn't choose to go to college. It's the parents have chosen. They didn't choose to go to Harvard versus their local community college or whatever. Their parents chose it for them. So to break away from that, I mean, I struggled with that in terms of, as I described earlier, I struggled with being limited by a parent and what are the options I had at the time. And I think it's much worse today with kids. And yeah, I would, I would suggest delaying college and taking some time. If you don't, if you're not sure what you want to do, if you're, if you're one of these, then and go on, go and work or go travel or, you know, find something else. Don't play video games, but go travel or work. I think both of those are good activities for a young person to do before they go to college.