 The debate series that features topics of special interest to libertarians and aims to enhance social and professional ties within New York City's libertarian community. This is an Oxford style debate in which the audience initially votes for, against, or undecided on the resolution. Whoever moves the vote in his or her favor is declared the winner. Go into sohovote.com to cast your initial vote. You'll find that tonight's resolution reads selfishness is a virtue. We're partnered with Reason Magazine in presenting these debates, and you can catch audio of all our events on the Reason podcast, which you'll find in the iTunes store. Thanks to the Smith Family Foundation for making this series possible. For more information and to buy tickets to our future debates, go to our website at thesohoforum.org. I'm Gene Epstein, director of the Soho Forum. Arguing for the affirmative on the resolution, selfishness is a virtue. We have Yaron Brooke, director of the Ireland Rand Institute. Yaron, please come to the stage. And since I will be arguing for the negative, I must recuse myself as moderator. For our guest moderator, we are honored to bring you Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, please come to the stage. I feel like this is some kind of a conspiracy in the basement of an old theater. Everybody's Italian, Catholic, Jewish, or atheist. Very happy to be here. So Yaron has the burden of proving the case that selfishness is a virtue, and we'll start his time now. And once Yaron starts, the voting is closed until we are told it is open again, which it will open at the end of the debate. Wow, it's lights. All right, good evening, everybody. I can't see you. I think you're there. Thank you, Gene, for inviting me and for choosing this particular topic for us to debate. I'm really looking forward to this. And thank you, Judge, for moderating tonight's event. And thank you all for being here tonight. Selfishness is a virtue. Now, that is a difficult proposition to make in the world in which we live. In a world in which selfishness is perceived to be a real vice, right? What do we associate with the word selfishness? We associate in popular culture with lying, stealing, cheating, backstabbing, being a real SOB, exploiting other people for one's own benefit. That is what the culture has come to identify with the term selfish, self-interest, egoist, all of those terms. When we point at somebody in the schoolyard and say, that kid's selfish. What we mean by that is he's a nasty, nasty person. He's going to do anything to anybody to get his way. There's a problem. Because at the same time as that is true. It's also true if you think a little objectively about the world's selfish, which means taking care of self. And we see artists pursuing their passion and willing to give up everything to achieve their goal that they set for themselves. Well, that's pretty selfish. We see business leaders trying to make money by trading, by producing, by making, think Steve Jobs. What a selfish guy. How many people in the audience were asked by Steve Jobs what features you wanted in the iPhone? I can't see you, but I'm guessing the answer is zero. Steve Jobs built the iPhone the way he wanted it to be. He built the iPhone in his image to pursue a passion of his for the monetary benefit of himself. Steve Jobs was selfish. And the athletes out there, Michael Phelps, who worked tirelessly to become the greatest swimmer in history. For whom? For me? He cares that I enjoy watching swimming? No. For his parents? I hope not. He did it for himself. He was being selfish. So what's happened is that we have this term that has these mixed meanings inside of it. It has this idea of exploitation, of being mean, of being nasty, of being bad. And at the same time, it has all these positive things associated, pursuing your values, pursuing your passion. Trading, making, building, we call this a package deal. When you take one concept and you put two things inside of them, you put two things that ultimately are kind of contradictory. Because when you actually look at life and when you have time to look at history and look at the people around you and look at who is successful and who fails, is lying, cheating, stealing and being an SOB a successful strategy in life? Does it actually lead other than in politics? Does it actually lead to success and prosperity and happiness and living a full human life, flourishing as a human being? And the answer is no. If you actually look at the world around us, Bonny Madoff lands up in jail, but more than that. Bonny Madoff is miserable before he's caught. Not because he feels some innate guilt because he's lied and cheated and steal, but because he has no self-esteem because he lied, cheated and chilled because he can't look his kids in the eye because he can't have a conversation because something might slip out and they all discover that he lied, stole and cheated. Of course, it was the kids who told the feds about him. You know, God forbid they actually catch us, anybody who commits fraud. They're too busy monitoring Don and my 13Ds and 13Gs, right? So no, it doesn't pay off. It's not in your self-interest to be the SOB in the schoolyard. Those people don't turn out well. They live horrible, miserable, pathetic lives. And this is, by the way, true of politicians. I've never met a happy politician. All you have to do is look at Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton and see how miserable they are. They carry it on their faces. And I think this is true of most politicians. I've met a lot of politicians. I've never met a happy politician. They all look miserable because they've achieved what they've achieved, primarily, through lying, cheating, some of them through stealing. But have you ever wondered how these guys go into office poor and come out rich? I mean, it's just weird. $250,000 speaking fees at Goldman Sachs. So we've got a muddled concept. What does selfishness actually mean? If you look it up in the dictionary, it says taking care of self, karma, any modern dictionary has the karma, at the expense of others. Now what the hell at the expense of others? Where did that come from? The only people with an incentive to add that at the expense of others are the people who want you not to be selfish, who want you to sacrifice, who want you to think always in terms of the public good and the public interest in the common. And who are those? The people who want to control you. The people who want to tell you how to live and what to do because they know what's good for the public. They don't want you to live for yourself because they know that people who live for themselves want to be free, they want to be free of authority, free of courage and free of force. So the only people who want you to live for the public interest, for the common good are the people who are gonna channel the public good and the common interest to you and tell you how to live and destroy your ability to be free. But more than that, we've been taught for 2,000 years. That what is good is to sacrifice. What is good is to live for others. What is good is not your happiness but other people's happiness. And altruism is an ism, it means other ism and Augustine Comte who came up with the term altruism didn't mean being nice to people and opening doors. Even egoists open doors for people. I know that's a shock for you. No, Augustine Comte meant that altruism means living for the sake of others. Living for the sake of their happiness. Living for the sake of their well-being. And the standard of your morality is how much you've sacrificed for the sake of other people. In other words, how much you have suffered for the sake of other people. Bill Gates makes 70 billion dollars by changing the world and making people better off. I'm not gonna explain the trade as a principle to this audience, I think you understand it. That the only way to become super rich is to benefit other people through trade. But he gets zero moral credit for that. Negative moral credit, because he did it and made, make 70 billion dollars in the process. But he leaves Microsoft and starts a charity. Oh, now he's a good guy. Not quite a saint. Now I don't have any inroads with the Catholic Church. I'll have to ask the judge about this. But I suspect, I suspect that to become a saint, Bill Gates will have to do what? Yeah, he'd have to give it all away, move in, live in a tent and maybe show us a little bit of blood. Because that's what conventional morality suggests. It suggests that virtue equals suffering. Have you ever seen a painting in a museum of a saint with a smile on their face? No, because that's not the point. The whole point is to suffer. It's not how much you benefit other people. If it was based on how much you benefit other people, Bill Gates would already be a saint. It's how much you suffer. And the question has to be asked. Why? Why is other people's happiness more important than mine? Why should I live for some common good? I don't know any common. Why should I live for the public interest? I don't know the public. Why shouldn't I live? I've got one shot at this. This is the atheist in me coming out, right? I've got one shot at this. I've got one world in which to live. Why not make the most of my life in this world? Why not live the best, happiest, most flourishing, most successful, most engaging life that I can possibly live? And what does such a life require? Now this, I think, is what morality should really be studying. Morality should be the science that studies what virtues and values people should pursue in order to achieve their maximum potential in order to live the best life that they can live. Now that would be an amazing project, a project started by Aristotle, continued by Iron Man. That is a project worth engaging in. What are those actions that we take that really lead scientifically to a good life? Because we are a biological entity, we have a particular nature. Some things hurt us, some things are good for us, just like some food is poison, other food is good for us. So certain actions that we take in our lives, certain virtues that we engage in are good for us and others are bad for us. We have our particular nature. So let's try to focus on what is good for us and do that and it turns out, and again, you don't need to be a nuclear scientist to figure this out, it turns out that what's good for us is not exploiting other people. It's not lying, cheating and stealing. It's using that one thing, that one resource that we have that makes us human. All our values come from one place. All our values come from one activity. All of our values, spiritual as well as material. And that is the human mind, a reasoning capability. To be selfish means to be rational. It means to use reason. It means to think about your own life and how you can maximize your own well-being, your own capacity to flourish over a lifetime, long term. Rationally, that's what virtue of selfishness really means. It means to think, to engage with the world, with your mind, to figure out the actions necessary and the values we're pursuing that will lead to a good, flourishing, successful life. At the end of the day, your happiness is the purpose. What other reason are we here for? If not, to live, to flourish, to be happy and not the happiness that comes from a line of cocaine. The happiness that comes from living a good life, from producing, from creating, from building something, from making your life have meaning. Having a purpose, having self-esteem. So selfishness is the only virtue in a sense. It's the purpose of life. Is life? Is your life? Make the most of it. Make the most of it by thinking, by reasoning, and by living. Thank you. Thank you, Iran. Gene Epstein will now make the negative case for 12 minutes. Well, my friend, Yaren Brooke, is a force of nature in the cause of freedom and free markets. And I put Ayn Rand in the pantheon, and not just because of the enduring impact of her novels. In her Objectivist writings, Rand reminds us that there is a real world out there and that the only way to understand it is through reason. But is selfishness a virtue? Yaren says yes, and so did Rand. She applied reason to this question in her book of 1964, The Virtue of Selfishness. So let's go back to the seminal text. We'll find that on the rational terms, Rand herself said, selfishness is clearly not a virtue. Rand begins by confronting the question of why she chose the word selfishness to quote, denote virtuous qualities of character. In characteristic fashion, she answers quote, for the reason that makes people afraid of it. She continues. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word selfishness is not merely wrong. It is responsible for the moral, for the arrested moral development of mankind. Yet, she continues, the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word selfishness is concern with one's own interests. This concept does not include a moral evaluation. Now, Yaren has at times referred to selfishness as Rand defined it, but in her own statement, Rand made it clear that it would be unreasonable for her to define an English word according to her own preferences. That's why she cites the quote, exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word, which does not include a moral evaluation. Now, Yaren just commendably did cite the exact meaning and definition of the word because it always includes a moral evaluation. It always means ever since Samuel Johnson's dictionary was written in 1773 and on through all of Webster's dictionaries, it always means moral disapproval. The dictionary writers were doing their job by reflecting the fact that all written records of the word have used it in this way. The only difference between what Yaren just said and what I and Rand wrote is that she was quoting what she called the exact dictionary definition of the word and she defined it as concern with one's own interests, full stop, not concern with one's own interests to the detriment of others, not to the expense of others, full stop, just concern with one's own interests. So Rand was being rational. She was pinning a definition on the dictionary, but she was misquoting the dictionary. Now, why the sleight of hand? Why did Rand pretend she was citing the dictionary when she was clearly not doing so? Think of the heroic struggle she went through as an immigrant from the Soviet Union. Imagine that, like Rand, you and I grew up with the suffocating idea that anyone who refuses to serve the state is selfish. Also imagine that even in the US, we witnessed President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address declare to much acclaim that we citizens must all ask what we can do for our country. If we had these experiences, we too might want to shout from the rooftops that selfishness is a virtue just to jolt people out of their civility to the state. We too might want to rail against what Rand called the arrested moral development of mankind by calling selfishness the virtue, given the popularity of Kennedy's statement. But since we don't bear Rand's scars, we don't have to go down that false and destructive route and neither does Yaren. To echo the words Rand herself used in her book, her use of the word selfishness is not merely wrong. It's done serious damage to public perception of the set of beliefs that Yaren and I both share. The use of the term needlessly antagonizes people by making it seem as though we who advocate freedom really do endorse a world in which people act in disregard of or at the expense of others. It does harm in another way. I've met followers of Rand who know what the word selfish really means and like to flaunt their indifference to others. These people do us no service. In a speech Rand delivered, she attacked Kennedy's statement which read in full, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And in 1962, two years before the virtue of selfishness was published, a free market economist Milton Friedman took a principle stand against that statement in his book, Capitalism and Freedom, the same principle stand Rand had taken. But he declared that the free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather, how can we keep the government from destroying the very freedom we establish it to protect? Joining Friedman and picking up on a phrase she herself strongly endorsed, Rand might have declared that the individual's pursuit of happiness is a virtue. We're picking up on a popular word in the 1960s, she might have argued that quote self actualization is a virtue, especially since self actualization has been defined as the achievement of one's full potential through creativity, independence, spontaneity, and a grasp of the real world. There are of course greedy and selfish people, but we don't have to endorse Gordon Gekko's view that greed is good any more than we believe that selfishness is a virtue. Instead, we cite Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand. As Smith pointed out, in a market economy, greedy and selfish people can satisfy their aims only by selling us products we want to buy. The selfish are therefore led by a hand that is invisible to them to advance the interests of others. Yaron has written that business is a selfish activity and it's a simple matter to correct Yaron's abuse of the English language through Smith's classic insight about the invisible hand. For Smith, who deplored selfishness, business can't be a selfish activity precisely because it advances the interests of others. And as he explains, the marvel of the market is that through the invisible hand, the efforts of the greedy and selfish are channeled to serve the interests of others. The distinction is simple. People may have selfish motives for offering others products they may want to buy, but the activity is not selfish in itself. And plenty of people are in business for idealistic motives. Think of Steve Jobs, who by the way, spoke about money only as a means of investment in the products he wanted to sell, or of John Mackey, or of Howard Rourke of Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, who consciously devoted themselves to offering products that enhance the world. Now, oddly enough, Yaron's tough-mindedness yields to naivete when he says, well, honesty is the best policy for all of us. Unfortunately, even in a market economy, the moral does not work that way. Yaron may decide that dishonest people and selfish people in this world are personally unhappy. But I wonder, economist Thomas Piketty and Paul Krugman have been made millionaires by the market for services that are without merit and have in fact done great harm. You can bet that if these two con men, or countless others like them, ever do pay the piper, it won't be until the afterlife. What do Harvey Weinstein, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Alfred Hitchcock-Cock, and Louis B. Mayer have in common? Well, they're all Hollywood producers who were sexual predators against women. Now, what they don't have in common is that only one of them, Harvey Weinstein, ever got caught. So we must tough-mindedly admit that honesty is not always the best policy, and that the market that people are often naive and they buy snake oil from others. So we cannot endorse the idea that selfishness leads always to honesty. Selfishness can sometimes pay off. And to those who think government is the answer to regulating the potentially destructive effects of greed and selfishness, we cite the public choice theory of Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan, who called his theory politics without romance. Greedy and selfish opportunists will also be found in government, where the absence of market constraints permits them to act destructively and further their own selfishness. However unhappy Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are, according to Yaren, who probably hasn't had them confide in him for quite a long time. As Yaren and I both know, we advocates of laissez-faire capitalism are the only ones who can truly say that we care about the well-being of the broad masses of people, while the Bernie Sanders of this world are offering them snake oil that can only make matters worse. Yaren has also disavowed selfishness correctly defined. In a recent interview, Yaren was asked about whether he believed in a social safety net, and here's what he said, I believe in a safety net. I just don't believe the government should provide it. I don't believe I should be coerced to help them. You want to help them. I want to help them. We can get together and help them voluntarily. Notice that Yaren said, I want to help them, and so would I. Adam Smith could have had us in mind when he wrote in 1759, how selfish, so ever, man may be supposed. There are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others. Are this kind as pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others. Compassion is a virtue. Self-actualization is a virtue. But selfishness is not a virtue. You must vote no on the resolution. And in doing so, you'll be even truer to the rational ideals that I and Rand advocated. Thanks. Thank you, Gene. Yaren, you now have five minutes of rebuttal, and we trust you will pull no punches. Five minutes. This is going to take a while. So Gene's view, as articulated, is the view the most free market supporters since Adam Smith has held. How's that worked out for you guys? Not very well. We are losing the battle for liberty. We're losing the battle for freedom exactly because of this view. Adam Smith laid the foundation for the defeat of the system he tried to defend by positing that the activities of people in the marketplace was selfish. And therefore, eh, not so very positive morally. But if you aggregate them and you bring in something called the invisible hand, somehow they become virtuous. He laid the death knell for capitalism. Nobody believes that if you add up vices, you get a virtue. It doesn't make any sense. Indeed, morally, it is offensive. And that is why, even though almost all moralists agree with Adam Smith that the individual's behavior is selfish, therefore, bad, they conclude that when you aggregate them all up, you must get a bad, 1 plus 1 equals 2. By inventing an invisible hand that is not explained, morally, I'm not talking about economically. Economically, we understand how it works. Adam Smith laid the foundation for the defeat of capitalism. And unfortunately, one of the great tragedies of the 20th century is that free market economists continue with that deceit. No, the action of the baker in trying to take care of himself and his family is the essence of virtue. What is more important than living your life and making the best of your life and taking care of the people you love? That is the essential characteristic of what virtue is about. Now, Jean, of course, has to, as all opponents of selfishness, have to, create strawmen in order to attack Iron Man's view. Yeah, Steve Jobs didn't care about the money, but nobody said selfishness was about money. Selfishness is about human flourishing. That's not money as a component, but money is not everything. So of course, Steve Jobs didn't care about the additional dollar that we cared in terms of measuring his success in the success of his products. But yeah, Steve Jobs did what he did. Why? Because he loved it. He did it for himself. Hopefully, you all go to work and love what you do. For whom? For you. It's your self-esteem. It's your job. It's your life. And that is all selfish. And we can play dictionary games here. But the fact is that the people who wrote the dictionary don't want us to believe in selfishness. The people who write the dictionaries want us to believe it's a vice because they want us to hold a self-sacrificial altruistic morality because they want altruism is a great mechanism of which to control us all, by which to inflict guilt on us all. So think about why we regulate business. We regulate business because we have this confusion about selfishness. They're obviously selfish. Steve Jobs was obviously selfish. But selfish people are people who lie, steal, and cheat. And there are SOBs generally. So Steve Jobs must also be, in spite of his turtleneck shirts and being cool, also be a lying, stealing SOB. So we better get that government on his shoulder to watch and monitor. We distribute wealth because you are a businessman of too selfish to consider the fate of other people. I think selfish people have a huge interest in the fate of other people. It's not their top priority. Charity is not a top priority. But charity is part of life, particularly in a free market where there is no, where they're not taking 55% of our money. There's no contradiction between some charity and selfishness. So you have to create a straw man in order to knock it down. Steve Jobs, businessman generally, of course, they're greedy. They're trying to make more money. What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that. But if we have a negative perception of greed and selfishness, we're obviously going to want to regulate and control. So the battle in my view for free markets, the battle in my view for liberty and freedom is not an economic battle. We won that 50, 60, 70 years ago. Maybe we even won it with Adam Smith. The battle is to eradicate the old Christian, Judeo-Christian, whatever you want to call it, morality of altruism, morality of living for the sake of others, and replace it with a morality of the virtue of selfishness. Thank you. Let him have it, Jane. Karl Popper, the philosopher, once said, no rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. And it's very clear that, on the one hand, Ayn Rand did have a rational attitude. She did not permit herself to define a word like selfishness according to her own preferences. She cited the dictionary, albeit erroneously. Now, Yellen is unfortunately enthralled to the cult of Ayn Rand's personality. If she lays down the law that selfishness is a virtue, we've got to stick to it no matter what. Doesn't matter if everybody else knows what the word really means. We've got to stick to it. Well, Yellen has talked about how we've been arguing for free markets for a long time, and where did that get us? Well, he probably knows that 30, 40 years ago, libertarians would have their meetings in phone booths because there are usually only two or three of them in any city. Now we are countless. Now there are numerous libertarians. He probably knows that free markets since 1776 have played a huge role despite what government has tried to do to lift the living standards of the broad masses of people. And I trust he recognizes that it's really just a desire to be in people's faces, to try to use a word that offends most people. To use the kind of word that's meant as an insult and have put down with others. Because Yellen doesn't think that Adam Smith was truly retrograde in his views. I just quoted his book Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Adam Smith said that most people do have how selfish, so ever, they are. There's compassion in all of us. So that's Adam Smith talking. His concept of the invisible hand is an extremely valuable one precisely because we must tough-mindedly recognize that there are selfish people in this world. Totally self-interested, self-loving types. But if they want greedy people and if they want to survive, then they have to provide us with products we want to buy. It's the selfish and the greedy prey on us, precisely via, by the way, the Bill Clinton's and the Hillary's and the rest of them, via government. So all of that is straightforward. Ayn Rand could have echoed Milton Friedman. He was writing two years before and putting down Kennedy's views. He was coming out for freedom, self-actualization. Ayn Rand could have stood up for any number of things. I cut her a lot of slack. She was a refugee from the Soviet Union. She experienced the horrors of Bolshevism. She wanted to be in our face about these matters. I deeply respect her. But there's no reason for Yaren, who carries her torch, to continue to alienate so many progressives, so many people who think that libertarians are uncaring with this silly word selfishness. Why doesn't, look, I have a quote from Mike, from that movie with Michael Douglas, playing Gordon Gekko, greed is good. He writes, greed is good. Greed for knowledge, greed for bettering yourself. Greed brings evolution. It's all very nice and persuasive. And I no doubt, if Ayn Rand had written, greed is a virtue. And then she said, all greed really means is wanting a little bit more. It doesn't mean, of course, wanting more to access it. It's not an ugly fashion. Yaren, unfortunately, might, again, be enthralled to our cult and go around calling greed a virtue. It's, this silliness should stop. Yaren is indeed a force, listen to some of his interviews when he talks about crony capitalism, when he talks about charity, about the safety net. All of those things are extremely valuable. He is an asset to our movement. And so are the vast majority of people who subscribe to Objectivism and to Ayn Rand's view. I'm only asking them to quit the madness, quit talking in terms of these silly words that everybody knows are offensive, and quit trying to claim that they're good. You don't need that vocabulary to defend free markets and freedom. Thank you. All right, Gene, I'll let you catch your breath for just a minute, because I want to put a question to you first. Well, the other questions come in, and Jim has begun to text me the questions that are coming in from the folks that are not with us. Aren't you and Yaren really on the same page, and isn't this just a semantic argument over the sounds of the word selfish, and doesn't it really have nothing to do with Ayn Rand? Nothing to do with Ayn Rand? Well, is greed, can I ask you a question, Judge? Is greed a virtue? No, no, no, no, no. This is my courtroom, and I've, and I've put the question to you, Professor. Ayn Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. She put it out into the language. She defended the virtue of selfishness. She said, I want this word to be out there precisely because it gets people upset. This is the exact meaning of the word. Ever since she wrote that book in 1964, a good many decades ago, we've been hearing this selfish mantra over and over again from Yaren. So it's not, and others. So it's hardly, hardly something that has nothing to do with Ayn Rand. She put it out there, and she put it out there because she was a refugee from Bolshevism, and she hated, hated the state that would accuse her of being selfish because she didn't serve the state. We don't bear her scars. We don't have to continue this foolish satire. Yaron, respond please. Well, I think it's ridiculous to attribute everything you don't like about Ayn Rand to experiences in the Soviet Union. But you know, there's this tendency now to make everybody a product of their environment. Ayn Rand was a genius. She knew exactly what she was doing when she suggested the word selfish. She was trying to overturn a moral tradition. She was trying to question and challenge the long standing primarily Christian, but secular as well, tradition of self-sacrifice and altruism. And she was arguing that if you believe in man, not forget economics, forget freedom, forget politics, if you believe in you as a human being, then what we need is a different morality, a different moral code. She was challenging Adam Smith's moral code. She believed, and I believe, and I know he thinks I'm just a mouthpiece, an unthinking, I guess, mouthpiece fine man. That was the suggestion. No one could suggest that you were unthinking. Well, I think Jean did. I caught you a force of nature in the course of freedom and free markets. But, no. And I believe that. But to me, freedom and free markets are secondary. To me, much more important is what individuals pursue in their own life, the kind of life you as an individual take on yourself. And most important to me is the kind of life I take on for myself. And what Einran is trying to do is challenge us, is say, this Christian morality of sacrifice and altruism is wrong. The morality that Adam Smith upheld in the theory of moral sentiments is wrong. It's anti-life, it's anti-human, and ultimately it's anti-freedom and anti-capitalism. And she is presenting in that essay a new morality and to the extent that we, as a free market movement, don't take that seriously, we will ultimately lose. This is a battle, the battle for liberty and freedom, that is won or lost in philosophy and morality, not in economics. And if we don't pick up the mantle, if you don't like the word selfish, use self-interest, use egoist. But the idea of placing one's own life, one's own well-being, one's own flourishing at the center of one's life as the goal of one's life, that is crucial to our victory political and economic. But more importantly again, it's crucial to you living a good life and that's what you should care about. You should care about living a good life. All right, I know you wanna catch your breath but the questions have started to come in. No, I never wanna catch my breath. So here's a very interesting question for Iran. If a selfish person does a moral action such as donating to a charity because it makes him feel better, can we really call it selfishness? Wouldn't it just be the empathy of the inherent human condition? But you see, the question has already bought into the anti-morality that I believe. Giving to charity is not necessarily moral. It might be, it might not be. What makes it moral is is it rationally in your self-interest to give to charity? And I believe in some situations it is and in some situations it isn't. If it comes out of the money that you would feed your kids, it is downright evil to give to charity. If your kids are more important than your neighbor's kids, you know, how many of you, if your kids are drowning and your neighbor kids are drowning, go for the neighbor's kids first? You selfish bastard, you love your children more than your neighbor's children. Okay. No, so the framework has to be, the framework of this new moral code is not is that what is your self-interest is moral. So charity is moral only if it's in your self-interest, if it's rationally supportive of your life in some way. And I believe charity can be, but isn't always. Bearing in mind that Professor Epstein's offspring is seated in the front row, he wants to address the choice of who to rescue. I'm kidding, you wanna respond to this. Look, look, again. I think Gene's. Again, we could throw out a lot of different words for on-rand and for yarring to defend. The word self-interest, by the way, is essentially in the dictionary. It's a milder version. He's a self-interested person, slightly milder than selfish. Look, we have a lot of self-actualization. The pursuit of happiness. All of the individual's pursuit of happiness is a virtue. Isn't that good enough for all of us, for Yaren? Self-actualization is a virtue. Individuals do matter. And that's partly because, partly because I believe that Yaren and I both share Adam Smith's view that we are all compassionate. Some of us very compassionate. Adam Smith even added that you find compassion even in the worst brigade. That simple vocabulary that the English language offers covers all the bases that Yaren is so concerned about. So we don't need to misuse and abuse and do violence to the English language by establishing these principles. With respect to his comment about charity, of course, there are a lot of charitable people in this audience. And you're concerned. It's a lot of hard work, because I've spoken to some of these people. I could mention Don Smith, who's in the front row, who's been at us. It's a lot of hard work to make sure that your money is going to a good cause. Hopefully, Don Smith still thinks that the so-form is a good cause. And Yaren and I have been a mind on manners. Keep flattering him. Well, I don't know exactly. So we don't know. But of course, Yaren is right insofar as that's concerned. But why does he have to throw verbal wreckage at statements that he's making? So let me just quickly address this. Look, selfish is opposed to what? It's opposed to selfless. We have lived, it is selfless and they're selfish. So, and that's the choice. Because again, for 2,000 years, we've been told that goodness lies in being selfless. I'm not selfless. I think being selfless is bad, is wrong. And to counter that is the word selfish. And yeah, we can redefine, we can rewrite the dictionaries. That's a good thing to do. That's a good thing to do in some cases. And let me just burst one of the bubble the gene has. I don't think compassion is that important. I don't think compassion changes the world. Compassion's nice. Most of us are compassionate. Sometimes there's some people I'm not compassionate at all towards, at all. But compassionate is not a major virtue at all, in my view. One more question, hang on, Gene, from the streamers, which is a good one, because of your very eloquent reliance on words. Why do you rely so heavily on the dictionary definition which is tainted by 2,000 years of historical adoration of self-sacrifice? Your, your on, your on did not text me that question. As far as you know. As far as I know. It came from your son's filtering out here. We, granting, potentially granting that assumption about the dictionary, about the English language, about how Adam Smith, Jane Austen and others use words. We are unfortunately, Yaron and I, and everybody in the audience, we are stuck. We have to deal with the cards that are played us. There are many, many words that by the way change their meaning over time, that have ambiguous definitions, but this word is not one of them. It's always meant, moral, meant to convey moral disapproval. So we are stuck with the English language. Why should the devil have the best tunes? We've got to use the devil's language. But also addressing Yaron's concern, by the way, I agree with him, and by the way, in that answer he gave about helping people in need, he made a very good point as well, which is echoing, by the way, Adam Smith, who said, I have never known in the wealth of nations, when he's talking about the invisible hand, he says, I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It's absolutely true that the market via the invisible hand, where greedy and selfish people are involved and where the idealists are involved, the market takes care of human needs overwhelmingly. And indeed, probably Yaron and I share the view that it seems to have been antitrust who forced Bill Gates out of his business. Bill Gates did far more for the world with his operating system that pushed up the production possibility frontier of the world than he has done so far with his charity. Absolutely true. However, as Yaron himself said, there are people in need who through no fault of their own. There are people who slip through the net, and he and I both believe in a social safety net done by compassionate people like Yaron and me. Now I'm going to address you as the founder of this feast. What is the procedure now for getting the audience to ask the questions? Well, you'll line up, there's a microphone there that people see. Are they going to turn the lights up so I can see them? Maybe not. Is there a question or there? Please do your question. Great question. All right, so while they're lining up, do you find problems dealing with university students who are repelled perhaps because of what their professors have told them by the use of the word selfish and cannot sell that concept to their colleagues? I don't think the word is ever the problem. Can you help young people sell the concept of selfishness without the sting often associated, perhaps by culture, with that word? Absolutely, because if you translate it into caring for self, if you translate it into flourishing as a human being, making your flourishing your primary moral goal in life, that the goal in life is the pursuit of happiness. What's more selfish than the pursuit of happiness? That is the essence of selfishness. Is the pursuit of happiness the essence of selfishness? The essence of selfishness, as the word means, and as the word definitely denotes, is that it means somebody who pursues his own goals to the detriment of others, who rolls over the interests of others. But you see, Gene is not interested in the pursuit of happiness. This is the issue, right? Because Gene, every time returns to this moral obligation that he feels towards charity and towards helping the poor. Yes, the poor people, but there are minor issue in a free market. The issue of poor people is a minor trivial issue, and yet, every conversation we keep coming back to, but we need a safety net. You know, a safety net, yes, making it, there'll be a safety net. Who cares? It's less than one percent of the people. That is not the barrier to explaining capitalism. It's people taking seriously their own lives. Can a selfish person contribute voluntarily to a safety net and still remain selfish? Well, I think Harvey Weinstein probably contributed to a safety net, and he's a real selfish pick. But look what kind of life he's had. But by the way, I completely agree with what Yaren said. He doesn't seem to be listening to me. He's behind the, I said indeed, I agree with him, that a flourishing capitalism where everybody participates will take care of most people, the vast majority of us. It will lift the standard of living of the broad mess of people. That has to be taught to people, absolutely. And Yaren is an important voice for that. Of course, indeed, compassion is a relatively minor affair in that. On the other hand, we do want idealists like Steve Jobs, people, and Howard Rourke, by the way, who want to change the work through their products. Real visionaries who care about changing the world. That's what most of the great entrepreneurs were all about. They cared less about money than about changing and helping the world in a compassionate way. Before I go to the podium to take questions from the audience, I can't see you. Are there questions? All right, good. For the first one, I reserve the right to edit them, to rephrase them, or redirect them. So no speech is just a question. Sir. Right, Yaron Jean started off twice by referencing Ayn Rand's statement that selfish is a neutral term. So I guess you lose. But the whole book is entitled The Virtue of Selfishness. So isn't there a equivocation between the word selfish and selfishness, the action? You're on. Are we hair splitting over the meaning of words, or is there an inherent conflict between the concept of selfishness and the concept of virtuousness? No, there's obviously no conflict, I think the two are the same. I think we're not splitting words because at the end of the day, Jean and I disagree about the content of morality in spite of here trying to deny that fact. So put aside the word, let's forget selfishness. The actual content of morality we disagree in. And he's trying to paint my view as, again he returned to this idea of money. Nobody mentioned money. Ayn Rand doesn't mention money in that essay. Money is not what she's talking about when she talks about the virtue of selfishness. The virtue of selfishness is about living. It's about making the most of your life. That's what selfishness is, that's what selfishness means. And while in the, I don't know what dictionary she pulled that definition of, I will research that for Jean's sake. I will send him the reference in the dictionary where she took that form. I bet you there was such a dictionary she didn't make it up. Jean, would you have this conflict with your on if the word selfishness did not have the odious sting that it does? Suppose it was the word flowers. Well if the word, I guess if the word greed, it didn't have the odious sting, he's a greedy, usually it's greedy bastard. The opposite of the word greed, I guess it gives, everybody gives. The word greed, the word hateful, the word Jew-hater, the word, all of those things, if those words didn't have a sting, I guess I'd be all for Yaron, that would be fine. However, there are words that we use for people who are morally odious. And that's part of our language, that important parts of the language. Now I don't know if Harvey Weinstein was in it for the money, it seemed like he basically wanted the sex. Of course that's true. So I didn't say that selfish predators, like Weinstein, are only after money. Of course they may be after other odious things, of course. But these hypothetical questions obviously have no point. These words are unambiguously for bad people. When you call Weinstein selfish, you then are confusing people by putting him in the same back at Steve Jobs. Because everybody knows Steve Jobs was selfish because he was out there to pursue his vision for the world, not your vision for the world, his vision for the world. All right, Gene, you shouldn't. So what I'm asking for is to separate Weinstein out and keep the purity of Steve Jobs, and you do that by not calling Weinstein selfish, but by calling him what he truly is, which is a predator, a self-destructive human being. His behavior, see selfish means promoting self. Weinstein did not promote himself. Weinstein destroyed himself, and just look at him. He's a destroyed human being. And he is a self, just like Bernie Madoff, these people are self-destructive. And to call them selfish confuses people about the nature of capitalism, and this is why, one of the reasons why we cannot convince people because they think we know that businessmen are selfish. You're not gonna convince us otherwise, right? And selfishness is bad. Okay, next question from the audience. Steve, our job had a vision to change the world and offer us change, to change our lives. Hang on, hang on. Time out. Who's next from the audience? Yes, Shayne? Hi. This question is for Yaron. So I'd like to probe a little bit how you feel about a situation where your self-flourishing and your self-actualization has to pit against some kind of social duty or responsibility towards, say, your family members. So a classic example is a person who is called to be so passionately involved in some kind of calling that they may abandon their parental responsibilities or other kinds of social responsibilities. And is that selfish and how do you feel about that? Okay, so can selfishness justify the impairment of other voluntarily accepted duties and responsibilities like being a good parent? So I don't consider being a good parent a social responsibility. I don't know what social responsibility means. I don't know what that concept is. When you have a baby, you are taking on a responsibility. You're taking on a implicit contract to take care of this child until they're an adult. And that is a primary responsibility. It's not the only responsibility you have, but a primary responsibility that you have to, for your own well-being, for your selfish own life. But not everyone may have. No, I know. But you look, sometimes I sign a contract, right? And halfway through the implementation of that contract, I change my mind. Okay. It's tough, right? I still have to fulfill that contract, right? And the same thing with having kids. You can change your mind. Certainly many of us, somewhere around between nine months and three years, had a change of heart over and over and over again. But you made that commitment when you have that baby and it's in your selfish interest to fulfill that commitment because you couldn't live with yourself, I think, as a complete human being otherwise. Many people abandon that commitment. And I personally think, I mean, Jean might not agree with me, I think Weinstein and all those scumbags in Hollywood suffer the consequence of their evil behavior. I think people abandon their children, suffer the consequences, not in an afterlife. Right here and now, this life, they are dealt with, psychologically, they're dealt with. Let's let, thank you, thank you, hold on, hold on. Let's have another question and this one for Jane Epstein, please. So who's up next with a question for Jane Epstein? Sir. Do you think there's a difference between sacrifice and investment? Like a baseball player does a sacrifice pop fly for his team. I sacrificed, so Mike, but it was my kids that went to college. Does anybody really do something for something less? Or as you said, is it just, is it a bad investment? Or I think you used the word unreasonable, but yeah. Again, I do think that there is a word called compassion, which Adam Smith used, and that we all feel it. And so people who make sacrifices to some degree sacrifice of money, sacrifice of time, they feel compassion and they feel good about it. They are not selfish. And just to comment, the oddity in Yaren's view is indeed that all selfish and hateful and predatory people eventually have to pay the piper or that they're deeply unhappy. This is, that honesty is always the best policy. This is unfortunately a terribly naive view. And so again, I add that other Hollywood producers, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Alfred Hitchcock, Louis B. Mayer, they all got away with it. And it's only lately that people are not getting away with it. And it's a little silly, it's a little childish for us to say, oh well, they were deeply unhappy in their heart. Or that Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty actually will eventually look at themselves in the mirror and realize what professional liars they are. And even though they've been enriched by the market, again, unfortunately rather naive. In that case, as I say, the crucial point to bear in mind is that at least these people are functioning in the market. They are selling snake oil and the market is buying it. But how much more dangerous would they be if they were in government? Your Honor, do you want to reply? Yeah, I mean, I'd say, yeah, I am completely convinced that Paul Krugman is suffering from the fact that he is a real scumbag. There's no question about that. But again, I don't equate money with happiness. Yes, he's making a lot of money. That doesn't mean much to me. The fact that he is cheating on reality, the fact that he is lying to himself and to the world has, because I understand human nature, has consequences to his consciousness. He is not a flourishing, successful human being. But let me answer the question about sacrifice. Sacrifice is another one of these terms that is muddled, that is confused. And many people use sacrifice instead of investment. I think that is bad English and bad linguistics. Sacrifice is what Jesus did. He got crucified for sins he did not commit. He got crucified for your sins. Sacrifice is giving up something more important, your life for the sake of something less important, your sins, other people's sins. So sacrifice is a negative. It is a bad thing. It's self-sacrifice. But again, a lot of people use it like in basketball. He's sacrificed for the team. Oh, he wants to win. He's selfish. He wants his team to win. And he's willing to score a few less points or take a few less shots in order to achieve victory. That's what selfishness means. So there are a lot of terms, unfortunately, the bad guys have made this very clear. You see it in economics as well. There are a lot of terms that are being muddled by the people who do not want us to realize our own potential as human beings. And there's a lot of cleaning up the dictionary, if you will, and sacrifice and selfishness are two words that need to be cleaned up. Darren and I are both Jews who chose not to follow Jesus, so I agree with him about that part of it, by the way. Did you have to bring Jesus into this? We did. And what's this Jewish stuff? What are you talking about? You told me your parents kept kosher. You told me that. Parents kept kosher. They're Jews. Oh, okay. I'm a good atheist. Okay. Gene, do you want a reply to this and then we're gonna go to the summations? No, it's okay. No. Okay. Next question for Gene, please. Actually, my question is to you both. I wanna bring up an unlikely thinker, I think, a lefty who, by accident, made a good point about this topic, Richard Dawkins, to be more precise. In his book, The Selfish Gene, he explains that selfishness is about maximizing the probability, survival, the probability of your genes, and also your memes. So that means, of course, your thoughts, whether it is liberty or equality, whatever. So I think he explains well in that regard because that explains why I would care most about my children. Okay, can you put this in the form of a question, please? Sure. Could you please comment? Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. You wanna take that one first, Mr. Energy? I mean, there's a lot to say about the book, The Selfish Gene. And I think a lot of issues there, a lot of challenges. And primarily, human beings are different. Evolution has done something to human beings that is amazing and great. And we have free will. And we get a recode. We're not just, in spite of the evolutionary psychologist, we don't just do what our genes tell us to do. We actually have reason and we have the capacity to dictate what our life will be. So while Richard Dawkins' perspective on The Selfish Gene is, all you wanna do is multiply. And if that were the case, all we'd wanna do is, you know what, is everything we would do would be focused on sex and procreation. I think we're more than that because of the capacity to reason, because of the capacity to rewrite the software, if you will, because we have free will. Gene. Well, rather interesting. I can only comment on it that you could, there's a movie I love called The Hateful Eight. Now, maybe you could have called the book The Greedy Gene. Now, obviously, when people write books, they use titles, they might use our words in slightly odd contexts. But obviously, when we are talking in objective terms, in rational terms, about the world and about human behavior, then we have to use words according to definitions that, in the case of Selfish, has never, ever changed. There are words that do change their meaning. There are words that have ambiguous meanings, not words like greedy, hateful, selfish. All right, in order to keep to our pre-arranged time schedule, we're gonna have the closing arguments now. Yuran will go first for five minutes and Gene will follow for five minutes and then we'll have the voting. So as Gene admitted, words change over time. For 2,000 years, those who advocated for self-sacrifice, for enslaving the individual to the group, enslaving the individual to the collective, have wanted us to believe that there are two alternatives in morality, two alternatives in living. One, is to live for the sake of others, to be altruistic, to place the world being, happiness, and good of other people above self. The alternative to that has been presented as being a lying, stealing, cheating, SOB. Selfish in other words. Those are the two alternatives presented. What Iron Man is offering is a third alternative. An alternative that says that you can live for yourself, rationally, honesty, with integrity, pursuing justice, being proud, committed to your own morality and your own moral perfection. Living the best life that you can live for yourself in pursuit of your own happiness. That new moral code, and it's a new moral code, at least since the advent of Christianity, it's somewhat reminiscent of Aristotle's moral code. Again, his focus on self, on egoism. Guys. So, what Iron Man is asking is to eliminate this dichotomy that is being set up by the enemies of the individual, by the enemies of human life, by the enemies of freedom and liberty. It's not sacrifice for others or be an SOB. No, there is the third alternative, which is to be long-term, rationally self-interested, long-term, rationally selfish, long-term, rationally an egoist. And if you understand what egoism means, what it means to live a life, what it means to flourish, what it means to attain human happiness, then you don't need the long-term rational anymore. It's just to be an egoist, to be self-interested, to be selfish. It's time to change the definition of the word. It's time to reject the 2,000 years definition of what morality was. It's time for a new moral code. A moral code based on what leads to individual success, what leads to individual happiness. Not, it's not about money, although money is a component of happiness and success and flourishing, but it's not just about money. It's about living the best life that you can live. And making that your moral mission. Now what is morality? Morality, morality is about the values, the virtues and values that you choose in pursuit of your life, the important values. And the question is, who should be the beneficiary of those values? Selfishness says you should be that beneficiary. You should benefit from the stuff you produce and that nobody has a right to guilt you into taking the things that you produce. That you shouldn't feel guilty about your success. So many businessmen I meet feel guilty, why? Because they've been taught that their self-interest is somehow tainted, that their willingness, their interest in pursuing success in life, put aside the money, success in producing great products, in changing the world based on their vision. They are taught that that is immoral somehow, that they should feel bad about it. And they're inflicted with guilt here are incredibly successful people who've done wonderful things in the world and they feel guilty, that's tragic. And why are they feel guilty? Because they're told that the motivation, their motivation to make the most of their life, their selfish motivation is somehow tainted and somehow evil and that the ideal is some Mother Teresa somewhere. No, Mother Teresa is not the moral ideal. The moral ideal is a productive individual pursuing his values without sacrificing to anybody and without asking anybody to sacrifice for him, living an independent, rational, successful, happy life. It's about each individual. That's what morality should be about and that's what Ayn Rand offers us in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. Thank you. Jane Epstein for five minutes. Well, it's time to change the dictionary definition of the word. I guess that's what Yaron said. Also, I guess part of the joke is that I bet he said, I bet that Ayn Rand did find that definition in the dictionary that did not include a moral evaluation and I'll find it by God. Well, I actually went to the trouble of looking up dictionaries published at the time and they all obviously said that the word is indeed defined as something that does include a moral evaluation. Ayn Rand just didn't bother to do homework. Do you know, if I were to talk about Adam Smith, I could criticize him for so many other things. Is Ayn Rand perfect? Every time I hear Yaron say Ayn Rand was a genius, I know what really is implicit in that, that she was some goddess, some walk on water person who could not make any kind of mistake. Well, there's not a thinker that I personally admire and have learned from, from Adam Smith to Murray Rothbard to others who have not delivered von Mises, who have not made mistakes at times. There's no reason to live with those mistakes. Now, Yaron seems to think that by pushing the word selfishness, by misusing the English language, even though there are so many other words in the English language that we could use to promote the individual freedom that he has to keep using the word selfishness and he seems to think that he needs to say, oh, it's good to be selfish, that he can't tell businessmen, he can't quote Adam Smith who wrote in The Wealth of Nations, I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. Adam Smith who said so eloquently that all you have to do is make a living, provide a product that people want to buy, and you'll be doing good in the world because obviously people are taking the affirmative step and wanting to buy it. That's all we need to be able to tell the world. We don't have to confuse people with foolish language. We don't have to go around saying greed is good. We have to recognize again that greed is channeled, as Adam Smith said. We don't have to go around, by the way, where I agree with Yaron, is we don't have to go around saying that the world needs far more benevolence than it ever has gotten. Because look, did you know that 2% of nominal GDP goes to charity in this country? Did you know that as nominal GDP grows, that 2% continues and continues to grow? That's $400 billion a year? And that's in a situation in which government does so much crowding out of charity. So we only have to point out that to this small extent to which people will need help, that money is there, the compassion is there. We only need to point out that the pursuit of happiness, that self-actualization, that the realization of self, is very important because we believe that people, people are compassionate. We believe that people are energetic and they had visions. We don't have to call Steve Jobs selfish because he had a vision. What vision did he have? He had a vision that the world could be liberated by the products that he wanted us to buy. He had a vision for us all. That's the vision he had. That's an idealistic vision. That's not a selfish vision. And there are other vision, minor visionaries. We had back-to-back obituaries about Sam Bass of the Strand bookstore who died recently, whose vision, whose sole goal was to sell us secondhand books at a discount because he loved books. We had a vision of the guy who ran Lincoln Plaza Cinemas who wanted to sell us art forms. The world is filled with idealists who really want to sell us visions. So we have a more than adequate vocabulary that by the way that Yaren has contributed to in order to deal with our vision for freedom and free markets. And we can call a halt. We can end the craziness. We can end the situation in which Ayn Rand actually tells us that the word selfishness has no moral implication. I finally want to end on a bet. Yaren, you want to find a dictionary in which Ayn Rand found this? My hundred to your 10. I pay you 100, you send it out. You send out the dictionary and you cite it. I looked up all the dictionaries. That has got him crazy because he is so desperate, desperate to defend this goddess. My hundred to your 10, Yaren. Thank you very much. So now we'll proceed to vote. Those of you who are remote and those of you who are here, I'm gonna talk for a few minutes while everybody votes until the tabulator of the votes who's also seated in the front row tells me that she has them tabulated. This is the first time I have been to the Soho Forum even though my day job keeps me in debates like this, not usually as high-brow or as meaningful as this. I have done my best to be neutral between two dear and long-time friends even though I am sometimes referred to notwithstanding my pre-Vatican to Roman Catholicism as the Ayn Rand of Fox News. So Stossel used to call me up and say, Judge, every time you say taxation is theft, my people are killing me. I say, why are your people killing you? Because you don't wanna say that taxation is theft. The first time I tried a case, I walked out into a courtroom. There were about this many people in the courtroom. When you start out as a judge, you start out with small claims cases. So the typical case is the dry cleaner run my dress, but he also tried to pick up my sister. Lawyer said to me, Judge, we need a translator for this case because my client doesn't speak English. I said, what language does your client speak? He said, Italian. I called the courthouse administrator to see if the Italian translator was available and she was not. So I said to the throngs, is there anybody here that speaks Italian? Little guy in the back raised his hand, he comes up, we swear him into translate, literally. Here's exactly literally what happened. Lawyer to translator, give the court your name. Translator to witness, what is it your name? All right, let me see where this is gonna go. I can't still ask your next question. Lawyer to translator, give the court your address. Translator to witness, where is a your house? I looked at this character, I said, I thought you told me that you could speak Italian. He said, I can't hear you're on a, but my English, she's not at all good. One time I was trying a case involving a drug distribution, even though I am of the view that you can put into your body whatever you want. I did take on those to uphold the laws of the state of New Jersey, which employed me as a judge. Actually it wasn't the state that employed me, it was the constitution. The state paid the salary. And the state police had stopped a truckload of cocaine coming off the George Washington Bridge into Fort Lee. 1500 pounds of cocaine. I knew nobody was gonna wanna be a juror in this case, but I had this many jurors, potential jurors, from whom I had to choose 12 who had no bias, no interest, no prejudice, no interest in the outcome, no knowledge of the facts. Like a brand new, naive judge. I said, is there anybody here that doesn't wanna be on this jury, letting the back raise their hand? Yes, madam, what is it? I can't be on the jury because of my occupation. I'm thinking, what the hell does she do for a living? All right, madam, what do you do? She said, your honor, I'm a soothsayer. A soothsayer? This is 1992, and you're calling yourself a soothsayer. I foolishly said, how does that keep you from being on the jury? She said, judge, I already know how the trial ends up. I should have said, tell us now, lady, and save us the next three weeks in the courtroom. So when I was a freshman at Princeton, taking economics 101, and I was home for Thanksgiving, you're on, and Gina both, I heard this, this first time I was in my childhood bedroom, having been away at college since August. And the first night I fell asleep in my childhood bedroom, in my childhood bed, in my parents' home as a freshman at Princeton, I fell asleep reading a book for economics 101. And the next morning when my mother woke me up, she had the wooden spoon in her hands. What's this all about? The book that was on my chest was called The Virtue of Selfishness. She goes, Princeton ruined you. How can you read a book like this? Judge, that's gonna affect the voting. I think we have the results. Mother, it's about economics. So she was 42 then, she's 92 today. So whenever she wants to needle me and remind me of this event, she goes, Princeton ruined you. The judge should have been a warm up act. Well, we have the voting, why don't you come on? Are we ready with the results? Note that I had nothing to do with the tabulation. Okay, to start the debate, the affirmative had 47% of the vote and at the end of the debate, 57% of the vote for a 10% percentage point change. And the negative had 20% of the vote to start 35% of the vote to end for a 15% percentage point change. So Jean takes the day and the bar is open.