in one of your tweets, you listed out some of the things you should study, like programming, sales, reading, writing arithmetic. One of the items that ended up on the cutting room floor was that you should also study ethics. I was originally gonna put that out there as a concession to people who believe that making money is evil and that the only way to make it is evil. But then I realized ethics is not necessarily something you study. It's something you think about as something you do. Every one of us has a personal moral code, and where you got that moral code from is different for everybody. It's not like I can point you to a textbook. Sure, I could point to some Roman and Greek text, but that's not gonna suddenly make you ethical. There's the golden rule,

right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or there's nothing tell of silver rule, which is don't do unto others what you don't want them doing unto you. Once you've been in business long enough, you will realize how much of business is about trust. It's about trust because you want a compound interest. You wanna be able to work for long periods of time with trustworthy people without having degree, evaluate every discussion without and rethink each time and without having a constant look over your shoulder. And so, over time you gravitate towards working with certain kinds of people, and similarly, those people will gravitate towards working with other ethical quote unquote people. So being ethical turns out to be a selfish imperative. You want to be ethical because it attracts the other long term players in the network, and then they want to do business with you.

And if you build a good enough reputation for being ethical, eventually people will pay you just to do deals through you because you're the one who will validate and ensure the deals by your presence, because you wouldn't be involved with low quality stuff. So being ethical actually pays off in the long run. But it's the very long run. In the short run, being unethical pays off, which is why so many people go for It's a greedy algorithm, but you can be ethical simply because your long term greedy and I can even outline a framework for different parts of so called ethics just based on the idea of long term selfishness, for example, you want to be honest because it leaves you with a clear mind. You don't have to threads running in your head. One is the lies that you told you to keep track of, and the other one is what you're saying. You just have to think about one thing at a time, so you have more energy to think about that things.

You're clear thinker. Also, by being honest, you're rejecting the people who only want to hear the pretty lies. So you forced those people out of your network and sometimes painful, like friends and family. But long term, you create room for the people who like you exactly the way that you are, so that is a selfish reason to be honest. For example, in negotiations, if you're the kind of person who always tries to get the best deal for yourself, you will win a lot of very early deals, and it'll feel very good. But on the other hand, there are a few people who will recognize that you're always scrabbling and not acting fairly,

and they will tend to avoid you. Over time, those people end up being the dealmakers in the network because people go to them for a fair shake or to figure out what's fair. And so if you are cutting people fair deals, you don't get paid in the short term. But in the long term, everybody wants to deal with you and you end up being a market hub. You have more information, you have trust, you have reputation, and people end up doing deals through you. A lot of wisdom is just realized in the long term consequences of your actions, and so the longer term, you're willing to look the wiser that you're going to seem to everybody around you.