 And what you're doing right here is pretty frivolous, meaningless, doesn't get you any moral points, doesn't get you any kind of ethical credit. This is just you being selfish or self-interested or self-centered, which is from an ethical perspective, from a nobility perspective, eh, we don't really like this. One of the examples I like when I talk about capitalism, which I do a lot, I like to give is Bill Gates, Bill Gates during the 1980s and 1990s, made tens of billions of dollars for himself, and he built this company up and he made a lot of money, and what did we think of him from an ethical, moral perspective, what did we think of him, eh, right. I mean from a business perspective, great businessmen, but from Mother Teresa, Bill Gates not in the same class, she's a saint, he's just a selfish guy trying to make a lot of money. He retires from Microsoft, he starts giving his money away. What do we think of him, good guy, right. And I know how he could get sainthood, right. To get sainthood, Bill Gates would have to give all his money away, live in a tent, and if he could show a little blood, right, if he could bleed a little bit, show a little bit of suffering where it was really bad, that would give him nobility, sainthood, that would make him a hero. Now that is perverse, there's something really crazy about that, right. Creating wealth, eh, giving it away, yeah, giving it all away, oh, absolutely sainthood. There's something perverse about thinking that your life should be in the service of other people, that that's what nobility is, right. And that your pursuit of your own self-fulfillment, of your own, you know, health and wealth and so on, is somehow tainted. And you know, you're all young, so you're all kind of focused on making yourself better. But in the culture we live in, as you grow older, you will start feeling like, what have I done with my life? All I've done is pursue money and good body and, you know, my relationship and my happiness and stuff like that, there has to be something more, right. There's Mother Teresa over here telling me that that's what I really should be doing if I want to be counted as a good person. And what does that create when you've got a moral ideal up here and you're living a different life? What tension does that create? What do we call the emotion that that creates? You know you should be doing this, but you're not doing it, you're doing something else. It starts with a G, guilt. And you'll notice older people, you know, my age and older, right, they're not quite pursuing their life like you might be right now. They're not quite taking their life as seriously. They're torn from within, they're not very happy generally. And they're torn by this notion that they need to do something else, that there's something that they missed in life because their mother taught them that they should be selfless and they haven't been. Most of us, you know, I'll get in the moment to why I don't think most people are selfish either, but most people are not altruistic. Most people don't sell sacrifice. Most people don't think of others first. Most people don't think. But when we go to the mall, we'll get to thinking in a minute. When we go to the mall to buy stuff, when we go to work to do stuff, we're trying to emotionally, in some way, we're trying to make our lives kind of better. It's not consistent with this morality of selflessness, of self-sacrifice, of, you know, anti-selfishness. So people as they grow up are torn by a feeling of guilt. And I'm here to try to prevent you from doing that, right, guilt, unearned guilt, which this is, is a horrible, horrible thing and unjustified and wrong. So I want to challenge this whole notion that morality is about selflessness. I want to challenge the whole notion that your life somehow belongs to other people, belongs to society, belongs to your neighbor, that you should love your neighbor like yourself or that you are your brother's keeper to use a little bit of biblical terms, right? Because I think that the best way to challenge that is to ask one very simple question that nobody ever asks, and that is, why? Why should I be selfless? Why should I live for other people? Why, why is morality that? Why does that make me good? And there's no answer to the why. I mean, ask your priest sometime, ask your philosophy, whatever, professor at university, or ask your mother. Why? And the answer is always, because some authority said so. Your mother said so, the priest said so, the philosopher said so. But somebody said so. There's no actually logical reason for why your life is not yours. Why your life somehow has been mortgaged to some other cause, which is what a morality that says that you have to sacrifice implies. Your life belongs to somebody else. When you make decisions, you have to think of other people first. Why? No answer. Now, before I get to what my answer is, I want to ask this question. Why do we care about morality? I mean, what's it all about? What is morality for? What's ethics for? Why do we care about any of these issues at all? And I'm sure in many of your minds are going, I don't, right? But you should. What is morality? Morality is a code of values that helps you pursue your life, that helps you tell what is right and what is wrong. And this is complicated, because life is complicated. It's not always obvious what's right and what's wrong. And I would argue that life is an immense complexity with lots and lots of choices and lots of paths that you can take. And what you need in life, generally, I mean, this is true of science, this is true of every field in human endeavor, what you need is some principles to help you deal with the complexity that's involved. To come up to every decision in life and say, I'm going to start from scratch, accumulating all the data I need to figure out, should I lie or shouldn't I lie, right? Is lying good for me or lying bad for me? And every concrete situation we do that experiment is very, very difficult, whereas if I can prove to you that lying is not good ever, because it's immoral and ultimately I'll show you it hurts you, it's bad for you, then you don't have to think about it every time, you just don't, you don't lie and that's simple. It's a simple, that's called a principle. It's always going to be then, it's always going to help you, so every fork in the road you reach, you know which way to go. Not everyone, we're talking about big questions, big principles. So morality is, if you will, a map to life. It's the principles that guide you in pursuing your life. It's like with our morality, being dropped in the middle of London and being told you how to reach somewhere and you can't ask anybody questions or you can, but they're all a bunch of idiots anyway and they have no clue where anything is and you have no map and you're supposed to reach somewhere, what are you going to do? You might reach there, but what's the probability that you reach the point? It's low. And now you're going to talk about waste of time and exercise, are you going to waste a lot of time in life trying to reach that point? Yeah, you're going to go zigzag, you're going to go in the wrong directions, you're going to go all over the place, you might get mugged on the way, you know, bad things can happen. What you want is the most efficient way to get to the point you're dropped in to the point where you want to reach and we'll talk about what that point you want to reach is in life. So morality gives you that map, it gives you the principles by which to get to the point where you want to get to. So morality is maybe the most important thing you can make a decision about in your life and whether you believe it or not, all of you have principles about morality. Most of you, most of you have those principles because you've absorbed them from the culture around you, from your parents, from your teachers, from your friends, from books you read, they've just come in, most of you haven't even thought about it. I'm guessing, right? I don't want to insult anybody here. But you haven't really sat down and thought, what's really good? What's really bad? Where do I want to go in life long term? How do I get there? What are the principles that I want to live my life by? Most people never think that they just absorb it from reality, from community, from whatever outside. I want to encourage you today, because I don't expect anybody here to completely accept everything I'm going to say or agree with everything I say. This is the challenge. I want you to take this question seriously. And you do the thinking. And do the, just like you do the thinking about diet and you do the reading about diet, just like you're going to read a bunch of books and really take seriously the questions about exercise, or you're going to really take seriously about finding a woman to date and having a relationship and making that relationship work. I want you to take your life just as seriously, the big question of what are the principles that I'm going to shape my life. I want you to think about it. I want you to read about it, the same kind of books, right? And make the choices about what map you want guiding you. And I'm going to make my case for what map that should be. But you ultimately have to make the decision about what your map should be. I think mine's the right one, but you have to come to that conclusion. I can't just brainwash you into it. So what I want to argue is that it's meaningless to think about morality in terms of what you should do for other people. That morality is fundamentally about, should be about. Unfortunately, it's not about, but that's a mistake of Western civilization for the last 2,000 years. Morality should be about what you can do for yourself. That the purpose of morality, the purpose of this map, is to help you live life. To help you stay alive, but much more importantly, to help you live the best life that you can live. To make life the best that it can be. To make it fulfilling. To make it exciting. To make it fun. Ultimately, with the end result being, if you do that, if you challenge yourself, if you engage in living life, if you live life to the fullest potential that you have in everything that you do, not just in the things you're going to hear at the conference, but in everything that you do, then what's the end game? What is the point that you're going to reach? It starts with an H. Happiness. That happiness, your happiness, your individual happiness is the end game. But that there are ways to get there. And that there are many obstacles. And that there are ways to guarantee that you will never get there. So morality should be if morality was conceived rationally. And I'm from the Einran Institute. I believe that Einran conceived of it rationally. She comes from a tradition which goes back to Aristotle of thinking about these ideas with the purpose of this happiness, of this purpose of living life to the fullest.