 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 at what kind of life he's... By the way, I completely agree with what John said. He doesn't seem to be listening to me. 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 brad, 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. You're the first one. I reserve the right to edit them, to rephrase them, or redirect them. So no speech is just a question, sir. Yaron Jean started off twice by referencing Einrhein's statement that selfish is a neutral term. So I guess you'll 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? Yaron, 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. Einrhein 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 from. I bet you there was such a dictionary she didn't make it up. Jean, would you have this conflict with Yaron 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 didn't have the odious sting, usually it's greedy bastard. The opposite of the word greed 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, the 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 as 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 going to 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 promise and change our lives. Hang on, hang on. Time out. Who's next from the audience? Yes, Sharon? 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, you know, 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, you know, 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's playing around. 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. Tough, right? I still have the 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, you know, they are dealt with psychologically. They're dealt with. Thank you. Thank you. Hold on. Hold on. Let's have another question and this one for Jean Epstein, please. So who's up next with a question for Jean 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? Yeah. Well, 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? Euron, do you want to reply? Yeah, 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. Yaron 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. Yaron's kept kosher. They're Jews. Oh, okay. I'm a good atheist. Okay. Jean, do you want to reply to this and then we're going to go to the summations? No, it's okay. No. Okay. Next question for Jean, please. Actually, my question is to you both. I want to bring up an unlikely thinker, I think, a lefty who, by accident, made good points about this topic, Richard Dawkins, to be more precise. In his book, The Selfish Jean, he explains that selfishness is about maximizing the probability, survival probability of your genes, and also your means. 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? You want to take that one first, Mr. Energy? I mean, there's a lot to say about the book, The Selfish Jean, and I think there are 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 Jean says, all you want to do is multiply. And if that were the case, all we'd want to do is, you know what, 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. All rather interesting, God. I can only comment on that. There's a movie I love called The Hateful Eight. Now, maybe you could have called the book The Greedy Jean. Now, obviously, when people write books, they use titles, they might use 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 prearranged time schedule, we're going to have the closing arguments now. You're on. We'll go first for five minutes, and Jean will follow for five minutes, and then we'll have the voting. So, as Jean 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 this to believe that there are two alternatives in morality. Two alternatives in living. It's 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, honestly, 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 BNSOB. 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 2000 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. 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 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 that nobody has a right to guilt you into taking the things that you produce. They 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 Ein Rand offers us in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. Thank you. You don't go for altruism and charity and do good and liberal and... No. And conservative. You might as well edit all. You don't like the conservatives either? No. Not today's conservatives. I want to help people. I want to do good for other people. What's so bad about that? Nothing. If you do it by your own choice and if it's not your primary aim in life and if you don't regard it as a moral virtue, on those conditions it's fine to help people if you want to. Why can't I think of it as a moral virtue? I mean, can I take some bows for myself for doing all these good things? Because that would be cannibalism. Because that would mean that you preach altruism, which means not merely kindness, but self-sacrifice. It means that you place the welfare of others above your own. That you live for others for the sake of helping them and that justifies your life. That's immoral, according to my morality.