 Next up is a returning speaker to the 21 convention. I had the pleasure to introduce him just a few months ago in London. Amazing speech. Can't wait to hear what Euron's got in store for us today. This is Euron Brooke. He is the president and executive director of the Einrand Institute. He's the co-author of an upcoming bestseller. Keep your eyes peeled for it called Free Market Revolution. You can find out more at Einrand.org. That's A-Y-N-R-A-N-D.org. So let me help to help me introduce Euron to the stage. Thanks. Thank you all and yeah, it is going to be a bestseller and I need your help so you can pre-order copies on Amazon as we speak on your phone. So I want to kind of leverage what you just heard from Eric and kind of use the material we just talked about to kind of take it to what I think is maybe a deeper level or the next level and build on the material we've already heard. One of the issues that I think exists out there in the whole if you will self-help industry, which is a huge industry and it seems to ebb and flow in terms of the theories and as Eric mentioned it's been around since the early part of the century and hey, if they got it right, why do we still need more stuff? I mean, why isn't this a done deal? And I think that the whole phenomena brings up some interesting questions of why is there a need for this industry? Why is it so challenging? Why is it such that we keep getting these ups and downs and we keep getting all this contradictory advice? And I think it goes back to something that Eric mentioned and it's this notion that the two kind of ways in which to view self-made or to view self-help but to view what it means to live a good life, what it means to live a life and that is one, this Christian notion that ultimately the purpose of life is not your own well-being. Ultimately you want to become good at whatever you want to do so you can help other people. So the focus of everything in life is other people. That's one approach that I think is very, very dominant in our culture. Think about Bill Gates, right? Think about Bill Gates making billions and billions of dollars in the 1980s and 1990s. How does he make his billions of dollars? He makes it by creating a product. And what does he do with that product? How do you make money? How do you make money? General question. You what? Sell millions of copies. But there has to be an assumption, right? Because if it costs me 100 bucks to produce something and I sell millions of copies for a buck, do I make millions? No. I have to be able to sell it for what? For a profit which means above whatever it costs me to make, right? And it has to be a good enough product so people value it more than what? More than their money. So if I sell you a piece of software for 100 bucks, it has to be worth more than 100 bucks the person who buys it. And in Bill Gates's case, anybody have an assessment of how much that piece of software actually was worth to people who bought in the 80s and 90s? So you paid 100 bucks, let's say, for wood or for DOS or something like that. How much was it worth to the person buying it? A lot. A lot. I mean, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a lot. Maybe even millions. Because it changed your life. Because it changed computers. And it changed everybody's life. And suddenly we were all networked. Suddenly you didn't have to have a typewriter. You guys are too young to even know what that is. I know. It's those old things. Suddenly everything changed. And the value of that piece of software is a lot more than 100 bucks. So here is Bill Gates. He's making all of our lives infinitely better. Infinitely better. And he's making gazillions of dollars doing that. And as a culture, what do we think of him? Going back to that culture. I mean, is he a good guy? Is this a guy? You know, we all think he's a great businessman. We all want to be gazillionaires, right? But is he a good guy? Is he like, you know, are we going to build statues to him? Are we going to praise him to the hilt? Is this like Mother Teresa's over here? Where's Bill Gates? Right? Way down there, right? I mean, he's not a good... He's not morally from an ethical perspective from the kind of, you know, the view of what goodness is, Bill Gates doesn't rank. He's made all of our lives better, but he's made money at it, so he doesn't count. When does he become a good guy? When he gives it away. And that's that view, 19th century Christian view. It's okay to make billions only if you land up giving it away. Only if you land up serving other people. That's the purpose of life, is to serve other people. That's the essential. And if you make stuff, money, while serving other people, that's not that good. It's okay, but it's not that good. So for example, you know, you know micro loans? These loans, the people going to developing countries, and they give these small little loans to very poor people, and they, you know, to help them start businesses, and it's proved to be incredibly successful in really getting entrepreneurship going in poor countries. So there are companies that do it that are not for profit. And their success is so-so. And then there are companies that do it for profit, and they're phenomenally successful. But who is considered better? The non-profit. Because they're not getting anything in return. So notice that there's a, we live in a culture that in terms of respect, in terms of admiration, in terms of what gets moral, ethical, virtue points, right? You get them when you sacrifice. And what does the sacrifice mean? You give something, what do you get in return? Nothing. Or something less, valuable. Right? Because if you give something and you get more in return, what do we call that? Profit, we call it a trade. Right? That's a trade. When I give you something and you give me something that's worth more to me, you got something more and I got something more, that's a trade, right? And what do we, that's a win-win. We're both better off. When I buy Microsoft product, Bill Gates is better off. I'm better off. It's a win-win. Sacrifice is? Lose-win. Lose-win. Or win-lose, depending on what side of the sacrifice you're on, right? So, and that, that is way up here. That's up there with Mother Teresa, right? That's good. So we live in a culture where lose-wins are good. And win-wins are just okay. Kind of weird, right? Just doesn't, there's something strange about that. But think about relationships. Think about the value we place and just our terminology. We talk in hushed tones and with reverence towards people who sacrifice. How wonderful that is. In other words, losing is good. That comes out of this notion that your life is not your life. The only purpose to make your life better is to serve other people. The alternative to that has always been presented as, yeah, you should make your most of your life and what that means is, whatever you feel like it is, whatever you feel like doing, anything goes. There is no standard for determining what is a good life, right? Whether it's a billion dollars, a hot woman, whether it's this career, that career, whatever you feel like doing is good. Feelings is the, is the guide. Feelings is the motivation. If you think that a good life comes from lying, cheating, stealing, well, we don't advise it because you might get caught and stuff and go to jail, but who are we to say that that's not right? Anything goes. Anything's permissible. That's what being a self-made person is supposed to mean. And nobody actually says it, but it's no because nobody actually tells you to go lie, steal, and cheat. You would actually advocate, right? But the implication is that it's all okay as long as you can achieve the outcome. You know, there's a whole school of philosophy in a, you know, going back to Dewey, right? There's a whole school of pragmatism, right? Which basically says, you know, if you can get away with it, whatever you can, whatever will it get you to your goal, that's okay. And self-interest, when you talk about people being self-interested, when we talk about people being selfish, that's the kind of image we have. Because when you say to somebody, you're selfish, do you mean that as a compliment? No. You mean that as a derogatory term. When we look at somebody and say that person's selfish, what do we mean by that? We mean he's a what? What? Yeah, but what do we mean by that? What kind of behavior is he exhibiting when we say that? What's that? Do we really mean he's being successful? He's a taker, he's a, you know, mean, lying, cheating, stealing, would stab you in the back if he thought he could get away with it. That's what we mean by it. But what does selfish as a would actually mean? What does the term mean? Yeah, taking care of self. Taking care of self. Which is what you're all here to do, to take care of yourself, to make your lives better, to improve your diet, improve your physique. I mean, this is one of the few self-help kind of conferences that actually has a kind of philosophical component to it. But you're here to make your lives better. And yet that term, making your life better, being selfish, is associated with all this garbage. Backstabbing, lying, stealing, cheating, whatever it takes. The symbol of being selfish today in America is Bernie Madoff. You know Bernie Madoff was? Permit scheme guy, you know? Fifty billion dollars. So the notion is that selfish, and this is how words work, this is how concepts work. Selfish, i.e., taking care of self, equals Bernie Madoff. Who wants to take care of themselves if you're going to be Bernie Madoff? That sucks. I mean, we all know he's an evil criminal. He's a bad guy. So we've got Christianity over here telling you, take care of yourself only for the purpose of helping other people. And that sounds like a conflicting contradictory message. It's not just Christianity. Everybody says that, right? It's secular philosophy. Everybody gives that kind of advice. And then over here is, yeah, but what selfish really means is Bernie Madoff. So I don't want to quite live for other people. I kind of want to make myself better for myself, but I don't want to be Bernie Madoff either. It's a contradiction, right? And this is where I think a proper understanding of what self-interest means and what it requires and what it takes is necessary if you're going to take on the responsibility of making yourself the best that you can be. Because the psychological traps that are involved in both of these are going to undercut you constantly. So if you believe that Mother Teresa, that giving up everything and going and living for other people, that's a moral ideal. Now we don't really want to do that because we like our lives and life's too good to actually do that and dating and stuff like that. She had no sex and everything. Right? I mean, it kind of sucks being Mother Teresa, but she's a moral ideal. It does. I mean, and you read her diary, she was miserable. Miserable, miserable, miserable. She had a horrible life. But that's okay because she did it in order to be miserable. That was her goal. Right? Because happiness is selfish. If that's a moral ideal and yet we're living this life of sex and money and doing well and happiness, what are we going to feel? If we want to be Mother Teresa, but we know we can never achieve that. If we know that's what good means, but we know we'll never be good, what does that lead to a feeling inside? What kind of feeling? Guilt. Starts with a G. Yeah, guilt. And so many people are guilty out there. So many people do not succeed in life. They're not attaining their values. They're not pursue their own values. And when they pursue them, when they're successful, they don't enjoy it. You know how many rich people are unhappy? Lots of rich people unhappy. Lots of people who, you know, what was it, a hot wife and money and I can't remember the third one, but, you know, are attaining those things, right? But they don't, it's meaningless to them because they feel guilty about it. So guilt kills you. And what this, you know, what this religious base, but it's also secular and everything, this idea of living for other people, generates in people trying to pursue self-help is guilt. And that's why so many self-help programs in my view fail. It's because what are we leading to? You're not going to help other people by helping yourself. That's not, can't be the purpose. That's contradiction. And this notion that you can do whatever you feel like doing can lead you easily to Brunei Madoff. And is that happy? Is Brunei happy? No, he's in jail. Not very happy place. His son committed suicide because of what he did. A year after Brunei Madoff was arrested, his son committed suicide. I can't think of a more horrific thing to happen to a human being than to know that you caused the death of your own child, your behavior. But even before he was caught, you think he was happy? How many of you have ever lied? Yeah, you can be honest. Come on. For a change, you can be honest. Lies, the lies make you feel good. Do they help you actually achieve, talk about relationships? Do you think that you can have a healthy relationship with a woman by lying to her? Do you think that leads to good stuff? I mean lying just doesn't work. It sucks. It really is a bad strategy for success. It doesn't work in the workplace. It doesn't work with relationships. It doesn't work the worst kind of lies. The worst by far kind of lies is when you lie to whom? Yourself. Yourself. It completely screws you up. So the Brunei Madoff strategy doesn't work if you want to pursue yourself. So Brunei Madoff was a miserable, pathetic human being, human mother Teresa, right? I think that's true. He was miserable and pathetic before he was caught. He says today that he's happier in jail than before he was caught. And I believe him because he doesn't have to lie anymore. Lying makes you miserable. So this doesn't lead to happiness. This, do whatever you feel like doing, you know, whatever. This doesn't make you happy because you're always going to feel guilty because you're not actually pursuing other people's well-being. You're trying to make yourself better. It's a no-win situation. Of course, you need new strategies to self-help all the time because there's no way to get out of this trap. Well, there is. And Eric started to talk about it and I think it's Inran's idea of what morality is really about. What goodness, what righteousness, what virtue is really about. And it's not about other people. When people tell you your purpose in life should be to help other people, the real question to ask them is very simple. It's three letters. It's why. And there's never any answer. Why should I help other people? Why should my purpose in life be to serve others? Why? Because somebody said so. That's the only answer that exists. But the real question is, you know, you all will all living beings. We're all living beings. Individual living beings. What should be our purpose as a living being? What is the purpose of every living being? There are no plants in this room. I would have pointed to a plant. But, you know, what do plants try to do? Have you ever had a plant? I hope you have plants. Life is good, right? All life. Plants, you put a plant in a shade. What does it try to do? Life. What's it pursuing? What's it trying to attain? Life. It wants to live. It's trying to figure out, trying to get the value that is acquired for its life. What is the value in this case? Light. If you put it in dry soil, what does it do? Roots. Go searching for water. For the value, which is water. Because the ultimate value for that plant is what? It's life. Face is a choice, just like all of us. Life or death. Existence and non-existence. That's the ultimate choice every one of us faces. Self-improvement ultimately is all about choosing to live. Making the choice that the plant automatically makes. We're the only species, by the way, who can choose not to make that choice. We can choose to commit suicide. We can choose to do it fast by jumping off a building. Or we can choose to do it slow by getting Bernie Madoff. But he's chosen to die. He's not living. Life in prison is not life. Life as a lying, cheating SOB is not a life. It's death. Very slow, with lots of torture on the way. Just think about what it would mean to lie every day to your best friends and to your family, which is what Madoff did. That's torture. That's death, wisdom death. So, every species out there has automatically geared in it the choice to live. We have something unique. We have something special. It's called free will. We can make choices. We can make decisions. Should we choose life or do we choose something else? Death. There is nothing else other than death. Rand says that the choice of life is the fundamental choice in ethics and morality in what is good. And therefore it is the context by which we should measure what goodness means. Does it lead us towards life and what kind of life? Well, a good life. Life as a human being. Life to the fullest that we are capable of of human beings. In this sense, this is the morality, the philosophy that should guide anybody pursuing self-help and self-help ideology. This is a self-help philosophy. It's about identifying the good, identifying morality, identifying virtue with living the best life that you can live. Living the fullest, most complete. Eric used the word flourishing. It comes from Aristotle. Aristotle was the first one to identify this notion of purpose of life is to live it to the fullest. It's to flourish in it. Now what does it take for a human being to actually achieve that kind of life? To live a great life. To live, you know, a life of fulfillment. To live a flourishing life. To live a, at the end of the day, what is it all about? If you live a good life, why are you living a good life? What's the purpose? What should be the purpose of every life? Is it the billion dollars and a hot wife and whatever the nice car? Is that the purpose? No, what's that even that? Even if those are values, what is that for? What are we trying to attain? Happiness. It's all about happiness. We want to live life in order to be happy. Happiness is the ultimate goal. So the question is for us, for human beings, what is going to lead to that? We know what a plant needs, right? A plant needs water and it needs sunlight. We know what a cheetah needs, right? Or a lion. We know how lions, what lions need. What do we need? Before we get to the billion dollars and before we get to the wife, what do we need? And what is unique to us in terms of values? What is the most important value that we need? And for this, what I want you to do is look at your neighbor, look around the room, and what you'll see is a pathetic, weak animal. We are not equipped, we are not equipped physically to survive in this world. Each one of you, I know you work out and everything, it's not impressive. You go up against a sabertooth tiger, you're finished. You try to run down a bison and bite into it. Have you ever tried that? No fangs, no claws, no speed, not really. I mean, even bolts, I mean, he's fast, but a cheetah wipes them out like that, right? There's nothing there. We're just not equipped physically to survive. We're not. Yet, we thrive. We don't just survive, we thrive as a human race, human species. We thrive. I mean, where is the sabertooth tiger? We killed them all. We did. Human beings, how do we do that? We're so weak and pathetic. Big sticks. Big sticks, but where did we get sharp sticks from? They're what? Somebody said, they're mine. Yeah, so it's all about what's up here. We don't have a gene, you know, birds have a gene that tells them how to build a nest. You know, they just know automatically how to build a nest. We don't have that gene. You know, we started out living in caves. Not a good idea. Tigers like caves, bears like caves that are bigger, stronger than us. We had to figure out how to build homes and how to build them strong so the wolf wouldn't blow them down, right? It takes thought. None of us, I drop you into the Amazon jungle. We don't have the instinct to figure out how to survive. You don't. If you just rely on instinct, you're dead very, very quickly. You have to sit down and think and figure it out. When Robinson Caruso is on an island by himself, he doesn't know what to do until he thinks about it. And he looks around and uses his mind. Everything we have, everything you can point out in this room, literally everything you can point in this room, is a product of somebody's thinking. Somebody's figuring out. What do we call that characteristic of human beings, that ability to think, that ability to observe nature out, to integrate it, understand it, do stuff with it, right? Figure stuff out. What do we call that? What's that? This is how we self-actualize. Creativity is an aspect of this. Starts with an R. Rationality, it's actually reason, right? Reason. And kind of, again, until he woke up with Eric's talk, it's not an accident that the Enlightenment, what's the other name for the Enlightenment? The age of reason. Not an accident. Not an accident that all of the... Have you ever seen a chart? I don't have a whiteboard here. Have you ever seen a chart of per capita wealth, the history of per capita wealth, that is, dollars that the average wealth the human beings have had throughout history? Have you ever seen a chart of that? I can do it in the air. So it starts at some point, let's say 10,000 years ago, and per capita wealth, that is, the wealth on average that a person has is basically flat and flat and flat until a certain point, and then it goes like that. Just skyrocket. And what's that inflection point? Anybody know what that date is? It starts going up. Now, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I like to use 1776. It's an arbitrary date. It's anywhere in that period. I like 1776 for two reasons. Two important things happened in 1776. The founding of this country, which creates the political... lays down the political principles necessary for that spike in wealth creation. And one other thing happens in 1776. It's just cool that both these things happen. The wealth of nations is published by Adam Smith, the first real book of economics, right? A defense of capitalism. But that's an arbitrary date. Somewhere in the 18th century, this happens. And it happens because it's the first century that explicitly recognizes reason as man's tool for dealing with the world. Explicitly recognizes the importance of reason in making human life better. And once that happens, what do you get at the same time? You get a scientific revolution and you get an industrial revolution. And you get whose reason? Who reasons? Eric says something about digesting. We can't digest collectively. Can we reason collectively? Is there a consciousness up here somewhere that is collecting all our consciousnesses in which we reason? Now, who reasons? Individuals. Each one of us reasons. We each have a mind. We can share ideas. We can feed off of each other. We can trade intellectually. But it's us as individuals who are the only ones who can actually reason. And it's true that the age of reason leads to a political revolution that's about individualism, which is what the founding of this country is about, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You're right, each one of you as individuals. Not some collective right. You're right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? So the age of reason leads to industrialization. It leads to individualism. It leads to that. And that until reason is discovered during the Enlightenment. Before that, you know, if you think of the way, think of the poorest people in the world today, I don't know, Africa, Asia, wherever, probably Africa, that's how everybody lived 300 years ago, pretty much. I mean, there were some people who lived up here, but they were talking about income inequality. Income inequality was really dramatic back then, right? The kings and then everybody else. But everybody else pretty much lived subsistence farmers like the poorest people in the world today. Just to give you a sense of how, you know, in a sense, not really lucky, but how much we benefited from the fact that this happened. This is all before us and we're benefiting from it. So reason. Reason of what makes everything we have around us, these lights, I mean, Thomas Edison's reason, right? We get electricity. We get the light bulb. Benjamin Franklin. Without his work, we wouldn't have electricity. We wouldn't have a light bulb. These buildings, architects, somebody had to figure that out. Again, no gene. But everything in your life is about that. Everything in your life needs to be figured out. You don't have an instinct for mating. We don't. It's hard, right? You got to figure it out. I mean, you got to talk this morning about some strategies around that and how to think. How to think about relationships. That was the whole point. How to plan. And it's really crucial. This is about thinking. Even when talking about how to think about yourself and how to undo, you know, maybe certain psychological issues, it's about thinking about yourself. There's no other way, you know, they have these rooms that all pattern. You go and you yell and you scream and you bang on the walls. It's fun, but it doesn't help you. The only self-help is from figuring out what the problems are and figuring out what the solution should be. Thinking, thinking, thinking. So if you really want to be properly selfish, not the lying, stealing type, but the type who takes care of self, then the number one value, the number one virtue has to be thinking. Has to be taking reason, taking rationality seriously. Taking your own mind seriously. So we're here about cultivating a body, and that's great about how to eat right and how to have a good physique. And you need that, right? Because you need to be healthy in order to do anything in life. But to really achieve something in life. To really be good at what you want to be, you need to use your mind. You need to figure it out. Even when it comes to diet and exercise, right? Who are we bringing? Who is being brought up here? It's people who've studied it, who've done research, who've figured it out, right? They've used their mind. They've used reason in order to figure out diet. And if you spend, you know, a lot of us spend a lot of time on diet books and reading nutrition books and looking at the labels and figuring out what we can and cannot eat. And we spend a lot of time figuring out what kind of weights to use and how many times a day to exercise, or how many times a day, how many times a year to exercise, I guess, it's going to be, right? Because the whole idea is you shouldn't exercise too much. But, you know, what kind of weights and all this stuff, right? We spend a huge amount of time on that. Well, what I'm saying is that's the kind of time and thought and effort and energy that needs to be spent on every aspect of your life. Every aspect of it. What kind of career do you want? What am I really good at? And it can't just be about the money. I mean, money can be important. But it can't just be about the money, because believe me, if you set the career goal, if you set your goal as, I want to make a million bucks. But the only way to do that and get a million bucks is to do something that I hate doing. Getting the million bucks is not going to be satisfying. It's not going to be fun. It's not going to satisfy yourself. Rather be poorer and do something that you love doing than be rich and hate what you're doing. It's about the process. It's about what you love and understanding what you love. Take Eric. You know, he could have gone and invented a light bulb or something, right? But he loves teaching. And you know how much they pay teachers? Nothing. I mean, it's like one of the poorest professions out there. True or not, right? Yeah, absolutely. But he loves it, right? So, I mean, I can guarantee you, he's happier standing in front of a classroom, teaching on a regular basis and making less money than going out and working, I don't know, on what would you, I don't know Eric Wellenifton or what he would have done otherwise. You know, I would have done. I've got a PhD in finance. I could have gone to Wall Street. I could have gone to Wall Street. But I would have been bored in Wall Street. This is much more fun than making millions of dollars in Wall Street for me, not necessarily for you, but for me. I wouldn't exchange my life for life on Wall Street any day. Yeah, I'd have a fancier car. You know, I don't think I could have a hotter wife than I already have. It's true. I'd be married. I'll be married in February. I'll be married 30 years. 30, so. I can't talk about dating because I don't remember dating. So, for Ayn Rand, for the idea of truly being self-interested, the key is to think, but to think about everything in life, including, as I said, career. What do I love doing? Why do I love it? Do I love it for the right reasons? Somebody talked about parents giving advice, right? A parent cannot choose a career for you. Cannot choose a career for you have to choose it. And, you know, I used to ask, because there's this idea that you should choose a career based on what will do the most good for humanity, right? It's this, again, this 19th century notion. I used to ask my students, how many of you made a list of all the professions in the world and then ranked them based on the social utility, where you could do the best for humankind and chose that? And usually there's one poor soul who raises their hand. And then it's to tell the class, you selfish bastards, right? Because you chose based on what you wanted to do, but that's a good thing. That's what it's about. Being selfish is not a bad thing. It's done right. It's done properly. It's done fully in what means, it means to take care of self. So be rational in everything. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean no emotions? Robots. Like me, right? No emotionless. No passion. No. Emotions is what you live for, right? It's the emotion. It's the good feeling. It's the happiness. It's the fun. It's the satisfaction. Those are all emotions. Those are all of feelings. That's what you live for. But they're not mechanisms. Your emotions don't tell you what's good for you. They don't tell you what's right. They don't tell you, you know. And you don't live for the highs. You live for constant high. I mean, you don't live for the highs when you know there's going to be a big bust at the end. So being selfish, being self-interested, doesn't mean that if there's a line of cocaine here, I'm going to take it because, you know what? I'm going to feel better afterwards. Why not? Because I also realize, because I can think, that there's a negative consequence. And in this case, I believe at least, that the negative consequence is greater than the high. So I don't do it. And you can apply this to the kind of food you eat, right? Sometimes emotionally, we'd love to have that huge super great chocolate full of sugar and carved piece of cake. And we understand when it comes to food that we sometimes have to avoid that and depress, you know, not follow our emotions that we've had. Well, again, that same principle needs to apply in everything in life. You might be attracted to an incredible woman who is going to incredibly destroy you. And if you sat down for a minute and thought about it, you'd realize it, but you know she's hot. But weigh the benefit of one night of hot sex versus she's going to demolish you, right? I wouldn't know what that feels like, in the movie, right? It's just not worth it. It's like the chocolate cake. It's not worth it. But you need to be able to use this consistently in your life in order to be able to make those kind of judgments and be able to be strong enough. And this takes strength because we're not taught this. We're not taught to stop and think. Particularly with modern education, we're taught to emote. We're taught to follow our feelings. We're very touchy-feeling these days. But that's not right. That's not what's going to lead you to the right decisions. We're taught to listen to everybody's advice. Well, most people don't know what's good for you. You know who knows what's good for you? You do. If you spend the time to think about it. So my pitch today is thinking. It's thinking, thinking, thinking. Underlies everything. Everything in life and underlies the whole foundation of self-improvement. Every aspect of it. Everything you hear up here over the weekend needs to be evaluated based on that. Does this make sense? Is this the way I want to live my life? Is this going to lead me to a better life? And that's their burden to show you nationally through reason that it is. That it's going to. I hope I haven't spoiled the weekend. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So that's self-interest. So emotions, good things, but they're not tools for making decisions. Where do emotions come from? What do we have the emotions that we have? They keep us alive. In what sense do they keep us alive? Yeah, but should we... I just made a whole case for now making decisions in your survival based on emotions. Because where do emotions come from? Are they just random, chemical, whatever in the body? Yeah, I don't... Maybe, but I don't think that factors. Have you ever had a change in emotion? Because change leads one to understand what happens. Because have you ever had an emotion about something and then it's changed? I don't know. You loved a woman and then you stopped loving her? Yeah, it comes from your... It's not even thoughts, it's conclusions. It comes from conclusions that you've come to. It's an automatic response to subconscious conclusions that you've made already. So it's all subconscious, but it's the conclusions. And when the conclusions change, what happens to their emotions? Did they change instantly? No, it takes a while, but they do change. So for example, if you're in love with a woman and you discover that she's cheating on you, right? Do you immediately not love her? I wish it was that easy, right? But it's not. It usually takes some time. Because what happens is our minds are these integrating machines. They like to connect stuff, and it takes a time for the subconscious to catch up with your consciousness. So your emotions over time will change and they will change if you've come to a conclusion. But it takes time. So emotions are responses to conclusions that we've come to in the past. Now, sometimes we've come to conclusions in our childhood about things that we weren't even aware we were making conclusions about. And that leads us to have emotional responses today that we might not even understand, because they're based on conclusions that we came to a long time ago. And the only way to undo those emotions, go see a good psychotherapist if one existed, is ultimately to change those conclusions, identify what they weren't changed. But emotions are just concluding. Those conclusions might be wrong. We might have had a nasty, mean mother and we came to a conclusion about women because of that when we were three or four years old, without even really being fully conscious and being fully rational, that might just be wrong. And today we have certain emotional responses that just don't match to how we'd like to have. And this is why emotions are not tools of making decisions. Because we don't know where exactly they come from. I think the more we introspect, the more we think about ourselves, the more we study ourselves, the more we know about our emotions, the more we can fix the bad conclusions and therefore change our emotional responses. But that's hard work. And you're never quite sure you're there and that's why emotions are not the way in which we make decisions. The only time you want to make a decision based on emotion is in a true emergency. When you just don't have time to think. And then emotions are as good as anything else. And hopefully your emotions are tuned with your conclusions and you're making the right decision. But that's rarity. How many of us really live in situations while survival depends on making instantaneous decisions? Almost none of us. Almost every decision we make, we can afford to stop and think about it. And I highly recommend doing that. Most of us get into trouble when we don't do that. So emotions come from thoughts. They come from conclusions. But we don't always know if those conclusions were right. We don't always know if those thoughts were rational and therefore we can't always trust our emotions. And that's why we always need to step back and think them through. Maybe they're fine. Maybe that emotion is absolutely right. Maybe it's not. We have to be open to that. So again, the mechanism is reason. And as a consequence, this is one of the reasons, you know, lying doesn't work. Because of our means of survival, the way in which we create stuff is through reason. Reason means what? Reason means absorbing information and analyzing it and being what about that information? Being honest about it. We want real facts. You know the computer terminology of garbage in, garbage out? You know if you feed something to a computer that's BS, then you're going to get BS. You're not going to get good stuff out of feeding. You have a computer up here. It's kind of a computer. It's more than a computer, right? If you feed it garbage, it's going to spew out garbage. If you feed it lies, you're going to fail. And you think that you can hold the lies separate from the truth? Good luck. Because as I said, our minds are integrating machines. They love to integrate stuff. Our mind, our subconscious doesn't know what you've defined as a lie and what isn't. It's going to mesh them up. Most people who lie constantly can't tell the difference. Now I'm pretty old, particularly in this room, right? And I have a hard time remembering what actually happens. Like a week ago, you asked me, what did you do a week ago? I have to really think about it? I don't remember. I really don't. Now what happens when you lie? You have to remember what you did and then what else do you have to remember? What you told, the lie. And the lie comes with all kinds of complicated circumstances, right? Because you have to remember what you lied, who you lied to, and who you didn't lie to. I mean, it's, wow, it's way too complicated. And you're going to fail. I can't remember one thing. Now you want to remember two or three or four. It's, you know, and it's layered. You know, I used to do these seminars at this company, and I used to give this example of a guy who, you know, goes out and drinks with his buddies and comes home and tells his wife, all right, I was at work late. And I used to explain why this was, you can't sustain a lie like that. Even a simple lie like that just can't sustainable, because what if the wife meets one of the buddies and other buddies have to know that you're lying and they have to say, yeah, he works late and what if she bumps into your boss and complains to the boss, how come he's working late all the time? And the boss says, he's not. So somebody raises the hand and says, this is exactly what happened, right? This guy was telling his wife he was working late, he was out drinking or whatever, and the wife called the boss and said, how come my husband's working late all the time? And the boss says, he's not. Guess how that relationship worked out, right? Lies don't work because they're anti-reason, because they're anti-reality, because they're anti-fact, okay? So, rationality. Iron Man defines seven virtues to live by for good life and I'm not going to, you know, so it's, I'm probably going to forget one. Eric's laughing. Rationality, honesty, right? We just talked about honesty. And honesty is primarily not faking reality, primarily for yourself. Justice. Justice is being rational in how you deal with other people. It should be rational in how you deal with yourself, it should be rational in how you deal with other people. People should get what they deserve from you. Good or bad. And you have to be objective and rational about that. Not emotional and subjective about it. Independence. You have reason. You have a mind. You are the only person who can do thinking for you. You can get advice from other people. Advice is great. You want to listen to other people, particularly smart and if they have your interests in mind. But you are the one who's going to make the decision. You have to. You can't relinquish that. It's your life, nobody else's. You can't listen to your mother after a certain age. I mean, she's great. And I'm sure she's smart and I'm sure she has your own interests. But you have to, you know, you have to make those decisions. You have to understand what she's saying if she's got your own interests in mind. But you have to make the decisions about what's right and wrong for you. Integrity. If you say stuff, if you believe that you're going to be rational, that rationality is good for you, then you've got to do it. You've got to walk the walk. Of reason. I always miss one. What am I missing? Productiveness. Your life is yours. Therefore, you are responsible for maintaining it. For getting the physical material that needs, that you need in order to survive. Being productive is essential for your happiness. I'm going to end with these two virtues. Productiveness and pride. Pride is your commitment to be morally perfect. To be the best that you can be. Not in a superficial sense. Not just the biggest, the richest, the strongest, but the best in everything that you do. That's what pride is, that commitment. And what do you need in order to have that kind of commitment? You don't need to have self-esteem. You need to know that you are worthy of being good. And where do you get self-esteem from? It gets from other people, from ribbons, from medals. We live in a generation where everybody gets a ribbon. Because they think that's how you're going to get self-esteem. Only you can give yourself self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from achievement. But it doesn't just come from achievement. It comes from recognizing the achievement. You achieve and you pat yourself on the back. Not your mother patting you on the back. Not your friends patting you back. Not your coach patting you on the back. Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan because he recognized that he could be the best. And every time he was good, he recognized that he was good and he recognized that he could get better and worked hard to get better. He recognized, if you look at Michael Jordan, there's a guy with self-esteem. He's incredibly self-confident. Incredible to have a sense that he's worthy of being the greatest basketball player of all time. It's not just an accident. He's worthy of it because he worked hard. He attained it. He's got what it takes. And so it's getting those achievements, recognizing those. And what area in life do you think you get the most self-esteem from? Where do you achieve stuff in life? Really, you know, people talk about, you know, where do you spend most of your life? At work. At work. It's not with family. It's not at the gym. It's not in the front of the mirror. It's at work. So if you want to build the life of self-esteem, then find work you love and do it really, really, really well. Not because other people expect you. Not because you'll get rewarded for it, but because you will reward yourself when you make those achievements. Stretch yourself, push yourself, challenge yourself. That's where you'll get the self-confidence to be good at everything else in life. But that's the foundation. The foundation is to be good at what you do at work. Being productive. And I wouldn't even call it work. I'd call it a career. Because a career is something planned. A career is something long-term. A career is something you develop, you move towards. It's not just the work I'm doing right now. It's the career I have. And a career is not about money. It's not about prestige. And it's not about other people. It's about you. And it's about making the most of your life. It's about fulfilling yourself. It's about being happy. So that's the seven. That's the formula for success. But it takes work. I like to say that being selfish is the hardest thing you can do. It takes hard work. Because it takes figuring out what is good for me. Which is not easy. And how do I achieve it? It takes using your mind all the time. In pursuit of a partner, exercising pursuit of your work, in pursuit of your life. But the reward, the reward of that is what life is all about. The reward for that is that flourishing, that fulfillment. The reward for that is happiness. That's the payoff. That's what it's all about. Thank you all. Questions? Thank you very much. I really enjoyed your speech. I have a question. You mentioned earlier about free choice and also how others make you feel guilty and how it's okay to be selfish. But then where does responsibility come into that? For example, let's say you have a sick child or a child who needs special attention. Or maybe you might have aging parents. And are those responsibilities that you have to take on? Are you socially obligated to take those responsibilities or should you have the free choice to say no, I don't want to do those things and I want to pursue whatever I want to pursue? So I don't believe that you have any social obligations other than to leave your neighbor alone. That is not to infringe on his right to pursue his happiness. But I don't consider a relationship with a child or a relationship with your parents as social. They're your relationships. They're your obligations if they are obligations. Now I think there's a difference when you're talking about with a child or with a parent and I'm going to say something controversial. My son's in the room which makes it even more complicated. I don't think children owe anything to their parents. I don't think children owe anything to their parents except to the extent that they love them. If you love somebody, then that love determines your relationship with them. But you don't owe them anything for bringing you into this world. You didn't ask for it. There's no contractor. You are not obliged to your parents other than you have to do what they tell you to do up until a certain age and if they pay for your college and stuff then I think you owe them something in gratitude for that. But if you don't love your parents you don't love their parents. I think there's a biblical commandment that they'll show whatever to your parents but that's just a commandment. A lot of people, not most people a lot of people don't love their parents because their parents didn't own it. Their parents are not that good. They're not nice people. You shouldn't love people who are not nice. You're not automatically obliged to love anybody. Anybody. Everybody's love needs to be earned. So if you love your older parents and you feel that part of your happiness is in helping them out when they're sick then do it. Absolutely you should do it. But it has to be in the context of your happiness. If it's a sacrifice to help your elderly parents you should not do it. It's your life. Your life is not theirs. You own your life, not your parents. So you should help your parents to the extent that it's part of your life. Now I think most of us love our parents and want to help them and don't want to see them suffer. We love our parents but I don't condemn somebody who doesn't. Who says you know what? I don't like my parents. I'm not going to help them when they're old. Fine. I think that's perfectly... It's different with children. You brought them into the world. They are your responsibility. Even if you don't like them. Even if you don't love them. You took on an obligation when you had them. You didn't have to have sex. You could have used both control. You could still in this country have an abortion. Right? Once you chose to have the child. You have taken on a mountain of obligation. It's a mountain. Don't have kids if you're not willing to take it on. You don't sleep the first couple of years. They cost you... I did the calculation once. It's an astronomical amount of money. Particularly if you're going to pay for them for college. They're a huge, huge responsibility in Boudin. You should only do it if you really want to. But once you do it, you're locked in. It's like you signed a contract to buy a house. You bought it. You signed the contract. You bought it. You might hate the house after you move in. You might regret doing it. But it's your house. With a child you can't sell it. With a house you can sell. But that's why having children is such a huge deal. Nobody should have children until they are committed to having children. Nobody should have children until they're sure that's what they want. That's actually a healthy thing that Americans are having children later in life because I think they're more mature and they realize what they're doing and they're taking on the obligation much more consciously versus 60, 70 years ago when people would get married in their late teens, early 20s and just have kids automatically and then suddenly realize, oh my God, I've taken on this obligation without having the maturity, the wealth or the thought of having children, you are obliged because you took on that responsibility but you chose it. You can't say somebody forced me. With parents, you don't have that obligation but it's certainly part of most of our lives because we do love our parents. I think you had a question. Right? I suppose my question is a similar sort of vibe in terms of caring about other people or looking after say like the Mother Teresa example. If she generally got from helping other people was purely selfish would that sort of go against your example then? No, if she'd actually got pleasure that is if she had sat down and said, you know I love helping other people it's like teaching, right? I can really help them become better human beings I can help them rise up and she would have enjoyed it absolutely. Being a social worker is not an irrational profession. You can be a social worker rationally. That's not what she did by the way, right? She didn't help them become better she helped them stay poor because she believed the poor should inherit the earth, right? The meat should inherit the earth. She discouraged them from getting an education. She discouraged them from trying to rise up and become middle class. I mean I truly believe Mother Teresa was a horrible human being. I mean I'm on record on video saying that because I think it's true and she didn't pursue helping other people rationally in terms of her own values in terms of make a difference. As a consequence she was miserable. I mean if you read the diary she was even doubting the existence of God and she didn't know why she was doing this and I mean it's very difficult when you commit yourself out of a sense of duty and that's the difference. So I'm all for helping other people, right? I love people. I'm not going to help bad people. Hitler can come and I'll help shoot him. I'm not helping him, right? You want to help people who you have identified as good or who are innocent who have fallen in bad times for no fault of one. I have a soft spot for children because I think they are innocent. Right to the extent that they're poor or whatever it's not their fault it's kind of you know it's either their parents fault or it's just it's the way it is. So you don't want to just be random in your help. You don't want to help. So I'll help children but I'm not going to help them at the expense of my kids. So my kids come first. I don't buy this love the neighbor like yourself. Sorry. I don't love some of my neighbors. Some of my neighbors I hate. Some of my neighbors I like. None of them do I really love and none of them come close to how much I love myself. And their kids I mean if there's a burning house who am I going to save? My kids are their kids. I mean who are you going to save? See I'm going to do it and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. I'm going to say my kids. You're going to save, some of you will save your kids and feel guilty about not having to save their kids because that's how you were brought up. I reject that. You know, it's my life. I'm going to pursue my values and I'm going to help people that I think deserve help and that I get something out of helping. Am I going to help strangers? Sure. You know, if it doesn't cost me too much. You know, but if somebody is drowning, people always give me the drowning example, right? If somebody drowning, do you jump in and help them? What depends? It depends. Is it an ocean in which the probability of me dying is 99%? I'm not jumping in, sorry. Not my job. Now, if I was a lifeguard, it's my job, my responsibility going back to the contract, then I do it. It's not my job. Is the risk minor and it's just a matter of effort? Sure, human life is incredibly valuable and I would go and jump in and save them. But the fact is, and we all know this that you're going to make a risk assessment of what's the cost. You know, every day, every American chooses not to help dying children, right? Because they're dying children in Africa and you could write a check. You could write a check, but you choose to let them die rather than give up whatever money it would take to write the check and that's okay. That's actually good because your life comes first and you shouldn't give up that nice meal. You shouldn't give up the college education, you shouldn't give up to help kids in Africa. And I'm saying it bluntly even though all of you kind of feel a little uncomfortable with this, right? But it's the reality. We all do it all the time. We all make choices about ourselves. I'm saying stop feeling guilty for it. You don't owe that kid anything. I mean, it's sad, and I feel sad when I see it, but you don't owe it. It's not your fault and you are not responsible. You're responsible for you. And that responsibility doesn't mean to be callous. It means to be thoughtful. It needs to be rational. It needs to be figured out what is really good for you. And kids that are close by are going to be, are going to get more of my help than kids that are far away because they impact my life more because I'm being selfish. We have to cut lunch, food. Thank you.