I know this was a, it's only one season here, but how was it, how was your time here in Portland? Time was cool. I got to be around some, some Hall of Fame guys. So, you know, I learned a lot and it was pretty, it was a pretty cool time for me. You know what I'm saying? First time being on the training camp deal and it had to make the most out of the situation. So it was dope.  Just was this kind of like another step for you? Just kind of getting back to, you know, back to that road a little bit? Yeah, you know, it's a process, ups and downs, some really good ups and some long, some long downs. You know, it is what it is. I deal with it all. I take it all inscribed. You know, I'll never let anything like that make or break me. So like I said, it was cool, man. I enjoyed it. I never thought less of myself throughout the time. It was an experience that I needed. What did you learn most from being here, being around Damon, Chauncey and some of those guys? It's a lot. It's so much that I soaked up. Just from, I knew Chauncey since I was in high school and actually the same with Damon. I knew him since I was in high school, but to be with him every day, it's a lot of game that I soaked up. You know, just how to carry myself, how to win games, what teams really need, how I can be super impactful to team. So I soaked up a lot of game from them. And now obviously for you guys as a team, these last three games, what have you seen this been maybe the biggest concern? Is it the offense? Is it just the defense? What do you see maybe the biggest concern these last few games? Last game, we got a lot of good looks. We just wasn't making them. You know what I'm saying? We did a good job defensively. I want to say we held them under 100 during regulation, correct? Well, yeah, we just got made shots then. You know what I'm saying? We got made shots. We got some good looks. Like I said, the people who we want to shoot in the ball, we're shooting the ball. So I feel like we're going to capitalize. We're going to turn the night. Them same shots, we're going to get them and they're going to fall. And you know, we can get some good, some good momentum starting here. Dennis, when you look at just the last couple of weeks, you guys have put in a lot of sky miles. Does it feel like you guys have lived and played in so many different time zones? Yes. I don't know who did this, but it's crazy because it's like we just came back from Paris. Like, so everybody's like, how you feel about going to Paris? I'm like, man, we just got off of a road trip. You know, now we got to go to Paris, setting our flight. And then as soon as we get back from there, we got one game and we back on the road all the way out west. You know what I'm saying? So I like, honestly, on some for real, for real talk that don't make sense to me, but it is what it is. We got to deal with it. We're here now. So we're going to make the most out of it and try to get a win. When it comes to this Portland team, you just saw them a few days ago. What do you remember about that game? What has to be different here tonight? We got to do a better job of container ant. He did a really good job of doing everything. He had like 40 double digit assists as well. So, you know, if he going to cook, we can't let him also find guys, you know what I'm saying? We got to, we got to limit something. And I think if we do that, we give ourselves a good chance tonight. Is that going to be your main point of emphasis and focus on when it comes to potentially a match between you two? Oh yeah. I don't like Anthony Simons. I don't like him as a person. You know what I'm saying? So, you know, yeah, I'm joking. That's my dog. That's my light. That's really my dog. But yeah, we got to stop, man. He one of the best young guards in the league, you know, and I'm a fan of his game. He one of my favorite players to be honest. So, you know, we got to limit him. We can't let him cook us tonight. Is there a lot of trash talking going on between you two since you guys are close friends and that could be something that a player that you want to contain? I mean, I'm going to talk to anybody. He don't talk a lot, though. You know what I'm saying? Like, he don't talk a lot. He just come in. He about his business. He kind of, he's very similar to Dane, you know what I'm saying? In terms of like just even kill, not too high, not too low, not too much talking. But you know, they just about their business. Dennis, I got to ask you just about when it comes to the rotation to them in the minutes. You mentioned the other day the other day that it's something that whenever your number is called, you're going to just step up and perform and play. But when it comes to 40 games into a season, you're almost halfway there. And Jock mentioned how it's sometimes match up base and performance space. How do you approach that individually and as a team when you're trying to find that consistency? I can't speak. I can't speak for how the team may approach it. I know as a, me individually, I just got to, you know what I'm saying? Just get ready to go out there and max out. But it's tough. Like, you got to look at it like the Paris game, I didn't play the whole third. And then I played the whole fourth. And, you know, I ended up with however many minutes. And then last game I played 22 minutes straight. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, I don't really know when I'm going to play or what I'm saying. When I'm not going to play, I'm not sure, but I just got to be ready whenever my number get called, you know.


What's up Navigation Traders? Today is Friday, December 21st. Welcome to this week's video update. Before we jump into the alerts for the week, a couple of housekeeping notes. One, in our community, in the Trade Hacker community, we have added our courses. So instead of having to go out of the community, go into the membership area at navigationtrading.com. You can now access the courses from the community. And so over on the left hand side, you'll see this Trading Courses navigation menu item. Just click on that. And then you just have to request to join. Unfortunately, we wanted to have it just as so pro members would just immediately have access. But the way this platform is set up, you actually have to request it. And then our support will approve you right away. So just click on Trading Courses hit request to join. And then you'll have access to all the courses right there in your community. And so what that'll look like, let me go back to this one here. So then you'll have it all here. So Iron Condor Core, Short Strangles, Calendar Spreads, Butterfly Spreads, you know, each of these will drop down and you will be able to view all the videos right here in the community. So hopefully that's helpful. Hopefully that creates a little bit of efficiency. If you need to go back and watch a video on a specific topic, it'll be right here in the community for you. So just wanted to update you on that. What else we got going here? So real quick, Market Hours over the holidays, Monday, December 24th on Christmas Eve, the market closes early at 1pm Eastern, 12pm Central. So we may send out some alerts in the morning if necessary, but volume is going to be really thin. So not looking to do a bunch of trading unless obviously it's warranted with our positions. Tuesday, Christmas market is closed. And then Tuesday, January 1st on New Year's Day, the markets closed too. So just a little FYI there. And then lastly, before we get into the alerts, just wanted to update you on this week's Who Got Caught Being Hot? Helping Other Traders. Our man DR, as he goes by in the community, is our contributor this week. So a lot of great questions, a lot of great helping other traders, answering questions, providing just thoughts and different value in the community. So thank you DR, you got caught being hot. And we're going to give you a little bit of swag. I already sent you the link. So enjoy that and make sure you take your picture with your swag when you get it and post it in the community. All right, so let's jump into the alerts for the week, starting with Monday, which was the 17th, I believe, yes. So we did an opening adjusting trade in FXI. We had a butterfly on there. We just added a put butterfly out in the February cycle. At that point, I had 60 days to expiration. And then we still are holding our other call butterfly as well. So if we take a look, here's the one that we just added pretty close to where we just put it on. And then here's our one in Jan. Let me reset these so I can check the appropriate boxes for you. Here's the one in Jan. So you can see prices moved out of its range. We entered that new one, centered around price here. So just waiting for price to kind of ping pong back and forth. Hopefully that's the goal anyway. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in CL, our arch nemesis oil at this point. So we basically just rolled one of our short strangles from February to March. So February had 29 days. March had 58. There was very little value left on our untested side on those calls. So we just wanted to roll them down. And with 29 days to expiration, instead of staying in that cycle and then having to roll again, when we got down to 21 days, we just rolled the entire spread out to March. So now we're holding the inverted 54 calls, 56 puts in March. So let's take a look at that one. We've got two different pieces in here. This is the, what did I say, 54, 56. Yeah, 54 calls, 56 puts. 54 calls, 56 puts. So it's this one here. So you can see a price has kind of, it's moved down a little bit since then. It's a little bit out of our range. So definitely looking for some upside in oil. It's up a tiny, tiny bit today. I posted in the community that oil is actually green. It's something wrong with my screen because it has been doing nothing but going down, down, down. Hopefully we can get a little bounce here. I mean literally if we could get a bounce of just a few dollars, let it consolidate and hang out, roll a couple times, we'd be fine. We just got to stop the bleeding from it continuing to go down. So hopefully that accommodates us here over the next couple of cycles. The next trade was a closing trade in MU. This is Micron Technology. This was a pre-earnings long straddle. Haven't been doing many earnings related trades just because implied volatility has been so high.  It never, never could get profitable. Well, this was a, we're looking for an expansion in implied volatility, which we got a little bit of, but there wasn't enough of a price movement to make a difference for this one. So if we just take a look at a chart of MU, we got in back on the 12th. So we got in right here and price did move down some and then implied volatility. So we got in after implied volatility contracted. So implied volatility did come up a little bit. Price did come down, but just not enough before earnings. And we want to be out of these before earnings because that implied volatility got crushed, although it didn't get crushed as much as it normally would after an earnings announcement just because of the overall market volatility. But anyway, ended up booking that one as a small loser in MU. Next trade was an opening trade in ZB. So he sold some premium in the bonds, IV percentile for TLT was up at 77 at that point. It's pretty close to where we put it on now. Bonds have been fairly strong over the last few weeks with the market going down, having that inverse correlation. You can see this is pretty close to where we put it on, pretty dead centered within our strangle there. So just waiting for some time to pass in ZB. Next trade was another rolling adjusting trade in CL. So very same thing that we did with our other one. We just adjusted our calls down and with 28 days to expiration, we went ahead and rolled out to the next expiration cycle. So now we're in this one, we're holding the 53 calls, 63 and a half puts. So if we go back to oil and take a look at that one, let's go ahead and reset this. I really don't know why TOS does that. It makes you reset to uncheck and check these boxes sometimes. But pretty similar scenario here. So here's our adjusted inverted strangle, just looking for some upside to benefit that oil trade. So hopefully we get some of that cyclicality in the next couple of cycles here. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in ES. So this is our long put vertical that we've just continued to keep on for that short delta exposure. We're over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. So we just wanted to roll our strikes closer. And we went ahead and rolled out from January to Feb, out there with 58 days to expiration. So if we take a look at that now, ES has gone down a little bit even since then, we're almost at another 50% of max profit again after we've rolled. So we'll look at that next week. And if prices continue lower, we'll continue to rinse and repeat, do the same thing. We are in February, so we're not going to roll out in time again. So we would stay in February, which currently has 56 days to expiration. We would just simply roll our strikes closer, lock in that credit, and then just continue to manage that as needed. Next trade was a closing trade in EEM. So we closed our short strangle, booked around 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. We had several adjustments on that EEM trade. So we ended up just booking a small profit overall, but we, out of EEM, implied volatility is still nice and high. And so I'll get to the EWZ trade here in a minute, but we could have, we were looking at both re-entering in EEM, which if we take a look at that, you know, implied volatility up at that IV percentile in that mid 70 range. And then EWZ is a little bit lower, but I just liked the risk reward and the amount of, and the capital usage a little bit better on EWZ. So we went ahead and sold premium in EWZ, which, which I'll get to here in alert here in a second, but we're out of EEM. So we booked that one. If we go to our closed trades real quick, just want to show you, we were in that EEM trade going back to August. So we had quite a few different adjustments and roles, but again, just by staying mechanical, collecting those credits along the way, adjusting, just as we teach, we were able to come out of a, out of profit after the move went significantly against us right out of the gate. So good little learning lesson trade in EEM. Let's go back to the alerts here. And getting back to, okay, next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in DIA. So we've got a couple sets of short call verticals in DIA, which we've continued to roll for that short Delta exposure and just doing that again. So here in January, we rolled out to February and adjusted our strikes down to compensate for the market moving in our favor, going down. We're well over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. So we just wanted to extend that duration, keep that short Delta in our overall portfolio and continue to manage as needed. By the way, so we are, we took off our NVIDIA short call vertical today. So overall, we're actually slightly long Delta in the market. We're, we're basically at Delta neutral. We went ahead and booked profits in our NVIDIA trade. And so now we are just slightly long. So any rally in the market, we're going to be looking to add some short Delta, but that's where we're at right now. So maybe we can get a little Santa Claus rally and that'll benefit us. So we'll see what happens. Suresh posted in the community today that there won't be a Santa Claus rally. And he posted a little video of some Santa Claus dress up people getting in a fight in New York City. It's pretty funny. So if you haven't seen that in the community, go check that out. All right, moving. Oh, let's look at the platform. So DIA, so we've got two sets of short call verticals. Here is our one that was already out in February. It's already over 50% of max profit. We just did so many trades and so many roles today. I don't like to do them all at one time. I like to spread that out over time. So we're letting this one ride over the weekend, even though it surely could have been adjusted by rolling these strikes closer today, you know, depending on your overall portfolio, but we're just holding for now. The alert that I just mentioned is this one. So we rolled out to February and then it's already moved down some since then. So price is hanging out right here. Got a little bit of profit just looking for some more potential downside to benefit that piece. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in IWM. So we had an iron condor. We closed out the call vertical side because price breached our downside break even. So we just closed the untested side and we're still holding that put vertical side. So if we take a look at IWM, this is that put vertical side as prices move down, it's busted out of our range. So still holding this, you know, I like just kind of as a visual trader. This gives you a good idea on toss. You've got this gray area, which represents the one standard deviation move. And you can see there's still a probability of price going back into range based on this, right? So for that case, we are at a negative theta position with price out here. However, you know, there's still a probability that price could move back into range. And so we're going to hold that for now. Of course, if price continues lower, we may just close that out. It'll close out that, you know, this is now a long delta position. And so, you know, we could close this out to kind of rebalance or acquire that balance in our portfolio by removing that that long delta. But for now, we're holding it. And we also have this other iron condor, which you can see is dead centered here. So we'll just continue to manage these as needed and play the game. Next was opening adjusting trade. And so that's the the iron condor that I just showed you. So we closed out the untested side of that one. And then we added a new centered one around price, which is pretty close to where we put it on. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in QQQ. So very similar to DIA, we've got a couple of short call verticals. Same thing, roll this one from January to Feb adjusted our strikes down. We were well over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. And so just wanted to lock that in and make the adjustment QQQs. So also similar to DIA, we've got this other one that's, you know, way up here. And then here is the, here's the current one that we just rolled. So already moved down since then in our favor. So just continue to hold those for that short delta exposure. Next trade was opening trade in EWZ. So that's the one I mentioned earlier. So we went ahead and sold some premium in EWZ. And that's pretty dead center right where we put it on. We've got a tiny bit of profit, just waiting for some theta to decay there. Did rolling adjusting trade in XLK. So this is another short delta position. This is a long put vertical in this case. And in this case, we, we just stayed in January with 29 days to expiration, not because we wanted to, but because there are no February monthly options yet. And so we just simply stayed in January and rolled our strikes down to lock in that credit and to keep that short delta exposure in our overall portfolio. So if we look at XLK, here's what that looks like. It's moved down a tiny bit since we did the roll, but not much. So just continuing to hold that for that short delta exposure. I did, I messaged toss. Let me actually bring that up. I messaged toss and I said, hopefully you can see this. I can't really make the print much bigger. So I said, Hey, when will the FEB monthly options be available in XRT and EWW? And this includes XLK as well. And here's what they said, the exchanges and market makers will offer the next option dates on a rolling basis. I've seen several spiders that for whatever reason are missing the FEB monthly. When I reached out and asked, they said, as more than likely has something to do with the spiders themselves and honestly didn't know, I'm sorry. So thank you for that brilliant insight, thinkorswim and the spiders. So I can't recall ever seeing a situation where the monthly options weren't available at this point. So I mean, we've got the January, but, and then it goes, there's a couple of weeklies, but the problem is, if you look at these weeklies, they are really illiquid. The bid ask spreads are much wider. There's some strikes that don't have any open interest. And so I'm not interested in getting into those options. So it's a case where we just stayed in January and we're going to wait for the February ones to open. And once they do, we may not roll right away, but depending on the situation of the trade, you know, eventually we may roll out to February, but we'll just see what happens there. All right. Next trade is in Apple. So this is one we did today on Friday. This was a long put vertical that we're holding for that short Delta exposure. We were well over 50% of max profit on this piece of the trade and similar to XLK, we just wanted to roll that to extend duration. So we rolled that from Jan to Feb and rolled down our strikes. So let's take a look at Apple. Here's what that one looks like. It's gone down a little bit since our roll even today. So looking good there, but just again, holding this for that short Delta exposure, take a look at a chart of Apple. I mean, it's just been on a slide to the downside with very little pullback. So continuing to work in our favor after it was working against us for so long. So almost back to even on that one, which is good. Next trade was a closing trade in GC. So in the gold futures, we had a short strangle on. We were only in this trade for 11 days booked a profit of over 30% of max profit in just 11 days. So we're out of gold. If we take a look at GLD, the implied volatility percentile implied volatility really contracted today, which gave us the opportunity to get out of there. So the IV percentile is right at 50. So if it pops back up next week, we'll look to potentially sell some more premium in either GLD or in the gold futures forward slash GC. So we are out of gold at this point. Good trade there. Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in IYR. So this is the real estate ETF. We had a kind of a tight iron condor in IYR and price moved out of its range slightly. And so we haven't adjusted that, that current one, but all we did was we added another one. And so, and we did it out in the next expiration cycle in February. So here's our January one. You can see prices come out of there. We haven't, we haven't closed the untested side yet. We're going to give it a little bit more time, a little bit more room to run. And so what we did is we just added the February one and we did that with four, four options just to keep that a little bit different than the five here. So that's what this one looks like here. Because we were further out in time, we could go a little bit wider. You know, as I, as I mentioned, to collect a good credit on our January one, we did this one a little bit tighter. So our short strikes were closer to the current price since then implied volatility has gone up and we're going out further in time. So we were able to collect a better credit, which allowed us to get wider on this one. And so we're just, we're just playing the waiting game there in IYR. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in SPY. So we had an iron condor and price as in the rest of the market has moved down, came through our break even. So we closed out the untested side. We were still holding this put vertical side. And so in this alert, we closed it out. And the reason we did it a couple of reasons. One, it was way out of our range. So the probability of it getting back between now and expiration was pretty slim. And so we went ahead and closed it out. And by doing so, it also removed some of that long delta in our overall portfolio, which helped kind of balance that back out a little bit. So we are now out of that iron condor. We still have another full iron condor in SPY. And you can see with this move, it's slightly out of range here. We're going to give it over the weekend again, you know, if it bounces back in, great. We'll hold on. If not, we'll close out the untested side and then potentially add a new centered iron condor around the current price. But that's where we're at on SPY. And you can see on the chart, I mean, again, you know, just major sell off this last couple of weeks here, which has been great. Unfortunately, it's taken away all of our short delta. But that's okay. I'd rather see this because down markets mean higher implied volatility, which means more opportunity. So just continuing to play the game as needed. We definitely could use a little bounce here though. You know, so we'll see what happens. Okay, next trade. And the last trade is a closing trade in Nvidia. So we had a short call vertical. We got to about 50% of max profit. We went ahead and rolled that to extend duration. Got another 50% of max profit on after the roll. And then today, we went ahead and booked that booked over $500 of profit on that trade. So nice trade in Nvidia and if we just want to take a look at the charts here, NVDA, you can see we got in after it, you know, it fell down, bounced back up. We'd like to enter after a little bit of a pullback, took a little bit of heat, but then it rolled over and treated us nicely and we booked a nice profit there. So good trade in Nvidia. Alright, so that's all the alerts. Let's take a look at some of the other positions that I didn't mention. Natty gas is actually after that big, painful move that it made, it has reversed and really come back into range and has been treating us nicely this week. So if we take a look at our two positions here, we've got this inverted strangle, where price is sitting right here, pretty dead centered. And, you know, we're not going to do anything yet. I mean, we're collecting that positive theta every day, we're getting that positive time decay, and it's pretty centered, even though it's, you know, getting to the point where almost 50% of max profit, we've got 38 days to expiration. You know, so if we're not going to roll out to March yet, the March options have, let's take a look, the March options have 60 some days to export, yeah, 66. So, you know, maybe at the end of next week, we might consider rolling to go ahead and lock that in. But right now we're just going to hold it at least for another week and just let that time decay happen.  And so we're just the same thing here, just continue to play that waiting game, letting more theta decay as we get closer to expiration as we get closer to that 21 days to expiration, we will potentially cannot, you know, book this credit rollout for another credit and continue to play that game with Natty gas. So hopefully, I mean, it'd be great if Nat gas just kind of settled down right in here and just kind of bounced around in this range. I mean, that would be optimal. Of course, the market doesn't always do what you want it to. So we'll see what happens and play the game as necessary. Oops. Let's go back here. Bonds, I mentioned wheat. We've got an iron condor in wheat still. And we're pretty close to a point of booking that one. We may look to add to this and go out this one's in February with 35. Next week at the end of the week, when March gets kind of under that 60 60 day point, we may add to this, add some more credit into our wheat trade. Apple, I mentioned DIA, EWW. I mentioned that one. No, I didn't. Okay. So we've got this adjusted strangle. So this is kind of in the same situation with that whole February option issue. We've got January with 28 days goes right to March. So there's no February monthly. Same thing with these weeklies. They're just not very liquid. So, you know, I mean, look at how wide these bid ask spreads are. So I'm not interested in going to the weeklies. We're going to wait for those February monthlies to come out or, you know, if we get to a point, we're almost, we're almost to back to profit in EWW after it had that huge move against us. And we've, we've, we had to roll. So we're pretty close to profit. So we may just book a profit or if those February options come out, then we will potentially roll to February and extend duration. I'd really like to roll because the implied volatility is nice and high. Of course, we could always reopen a new position anyway, but we'll just wait to see what happens and play it accordingly. I mentioned EWZ Facebook. We've got this adjusted strangle here. What a, what a move Facebook has seen to the downside over the last few days. We were up here at the upper end of our range and now we're down here at the lower end of our range. So just playing the game here. We'll, we'll probably roll this out. Once we get closer to expiration, if prices do continue lower, if it bounces back into range, then we'd be basically out of profit or, or right at break even. So we'll just wait for more, more decay, but we'll see what happens in Facebook over the next couple weeks. FXI, I mentioned IWM, I mentioned IYR, LULU. This is one we put on for some short Delta. It's coming around. It's actually positive today, even if, even though the market's down, barely holding on to positive. And so just waiting for a little bit more before we do anything there. We want, we'll probably wait till we get at least 50% of max profit on this one. And then we'll decide if we want to roll to extend duration or if we would, or if we just want to book it. Or if we just want to book it, we'll see. Just since I've been talking, Netflix has dropped. It's about 11, 15, 11, 14 AM. So we've got another half, half a day left in the market. So it's not over, but wow, Netflix is, is falling like a rock. So we're at a point here where we can almost take this one off for a nice profit, but we're going to hold that. Again, we need that short Delta exposure. So more than likely on LULU and Netflix, we would probably continue to hold in the way of rolling to extend that duration. QQQ's I mentioned, SMH. So we've got a short strangle on here. Price has breached the short strike here. If we take a look at just the calls, you know, we've got a little bit of premium in there yet. So haven't rolled down our calls, but just kind of holding on to that. We'll wait over the weekend before we do anything in SMH. Obviously, if it bounces back up, we'll just continue to wait before we book any profit. I mentioned FX, SPY, I mentioned XLK, XRT, another victim of the no options in February issue. Now, the reality is if we look at how much values in these calls, you know, we've got, you know, we've got 30 bucks left of premium. So it wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be abnormal just to not be doing anything anyway. But, you know, I do want to roll down these calls because if the market does continue lower, those calls aren't really helping us. You know, most of that profit is already out of there. So once we get those FEB options, then we will definitely do that, you know, roll out to FEB and roll our calls down. If next week we still don't have the FEB options, we'll just simply roll the calls down and stay in January and do what's necessary there. The other thing is we may add another piece to this. So applied volatility nice and high at the 98 level, you know, add another short strangle kind of centered around the current price. So that is where we are with all of our alerts. That's where we're at with all of our positions. Everybody have a great weekend, have a merry Christmas. And we will talk to you next week. Like I said, we'll do, we'll probably do some alerts early on Monday morning when the market opens. It's closed in the afternoon. And then it's closed on Christmas day, which is Tuesday. So short week of trading next week. Everybody have a great holiday, spend some time with your family, get away from trading, reset and look to come back strong later in the week. Talk to you later everybody.


I'm about to react to a trailer called Alien Tampon. Normally probably wouldn't because I'm sure it's a B movie but I just had to see exactly what this was. Let's get it. Those are the subcultures that women watch. Girls say let's pull that string. Oh my god. So post a comment down below. Let me know who actually is part of this subculture that loves B movies. You know watches trolls too. Yeah isn't trolls too. Considered the best worst movie of all time. Tell me who you are and tell me why you watch these movies. I would assume it's the humor in them. Like it's just so bad that it's just it's it's entertaining to watch. You know what I mean? I understand that. I think that that's what it is. I'm not part of this subculture. If I came to a party and people's like yeah we go what? I'm like okay let's watch it and laugh you know. It's not something that I would go out of my way to do but I could see these movies being entertaining. Wasn't there like some movie where sharks were like Sharkopolis or something. I forgot. Were they like raining from the sky or something.   Anyway post a comment down below. Let me know what you think. If you enjoyed my reaction hit the like button and subscribe. If you didn't hit the like button and subscribe. What about my subscribers? Woo! And now... Subscribe.


We see three representatives from our sponsors today who are all supporting the conference in a number of ways. And I think we are quite fortunate because a lot of companies do please come down, there's a lot of seats down the front, make your way down towards us. But a lot of companies that support our conference, not just help us keep the costs of attendance as low as we can, but also get involved in a whole other way in the delivery of the event and in our community. So this year we thought we'll give each of our sponsors a two-minute opportunity to just tell you a little bit more about them. And I hope that before I introduce the first one in a moment, Robbie, for me too, you can put your hands together and give them a really warm welcome. So your two and a half minutes starts now. Do come up and say hello. Thanks, Marine. So my name's Robbie Weigers. I'm the commercial director for a company called Looney. And for the next, we're on about a minute and a half now, I'm going to talk to you about a product of ours called Me Too. So Me Too is our simple, single-minded solution for vibrant, engaged, excited meetings and classrooms that can be set up in minutes. With Me Too, we wanted to create the sharpest possible tool for real-time polling and moderated chat. Me Too can be accessed on any device and is transforming meetings and learning worldwide. Four points I want you to remember today. The first is, and I'm sure it would all agree, that more engaged students results in better learning outcomes, the challenge being how to create that environment within the classroom. Now we're not the only polling and messaging solution out there, however, Me Too is unique because it's powerful integration, it's Office 365 support, simplicity and ease of use. It's not just the teachers that like Me Too, students love it too. In fact, we're conducting some research about the impact of Me Too in the classroom and later this year, we'll be publishing a white paper on that subject. Last point, it's free for you guys. So if you're interested, come and find us in the exhibition booth, number three I believe, and get your free account. And look, don't just take my word for it. Since our launch in January, 300 institutions have signed up for Me Too and the Me Too community is growing daily. Thank you. Thank you very much, Robbie, and one thing I want to say is that we're excited because we're using this up tomorrow at the AGM for the first time in 23 years. We'll be voting digitally, so we'll be able to give you a first hand testimonial after that. But onwards, and if you've picked up a conference bag today, then you'll already be familiar with Ref Me, but please give a big round of applause for Jock from Ref Me who's our next sponsor. Good afternoon, conference, and thank you for lending me years for at least the next two minutes. It's not an unfamiliar tale when you hear about a student that struggles with the idea of how to format references, and Tom Hatton was a dyslexic undergraduate student at Oxford Brooks and was spending more time doing that than he was doing his research, and he's learning, and he's writing of his dissertation, and he had a conversation with his subject librarian and said, hey, there must be something out there that can help me do this, because I'm sinking an awful lot of time into my commas and full stops, and I'm scratching my head because I haven't figured it out, and it was an unsatisfactory conversation because he said, well, yeah, there are reference software tools out there, but actually, the learning curve such that the time you figured out, you probably could have learned how to format your references yourself, and I think that's probably a fairly common tale in the undergraduate world, and so most students would obviously cobble the reference list together, submit it, go to the pub and never think about citations again, but Tom's slightly different, and of course, as all 21st century students do, he launched an app where you could actually scan an ISBN barcode and create a reference in the click of a button, basically. It got very quick traction in this very beta app, which led him to realise that there was something, he was on to something that actually ease of use was really important in terms of creating the citations and the references, and we launched a fully cloud-based platform on web and on mobile, and 18 months later, we have a million and a half users, one in four students in the universities in the UK have used RefMe, and its success is solely down to two things. One, it's ease of use, it's got a self-learning curve of minutes, but two, it's accurate as well. It's not a simple, cheap citation generator that you might throw into Google and say, give me a Harvard reference and hope for the best. My call to action for you as delegates is, if you haven't discovered RefMe, do come by and have a look at what we're doing. It really is quite unique in the space. It's a really great way that we believe will help improve the student experience in the long term, and because we've got such organic wide adoption in the UK higher education sector, we've got an interesting citation data set that we're looking into with some of our partners. So we're at Stand6. Here are some of our 11 UK universities have adopted as confirmed already. We've got another four or five in the pipeline for the new academic year. So come by, don't miss out, and see how we can change yours and your students' lives. Thank you. All right, and last but not least, please put your hands together from Andrew, who is from co-sector. And this year, they're helping us celebrate 10 years of the Learning Technologist of the Year Award. So Andrew, come on in. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew. My last name is actually Hercules. So if you want to come by and see me, it really is Hercules. So remember me for that if anything, if nothing else. But I work at co-sector, which is the University of London. We used to be known as ULCC. So some of you might know us as ULCC. We've recently had a rebrand, so we're now known as co-sector. We provide a managed and flexible learning, virtual learning environment, excuse me, for 90 institutions across the UK, including 30 HE institutions. We are here essentially to not only let you know about what we offer in terms of a managed VLE, but also because we actually have been taking quite a substantial amount of time in research and development of our VLE solution. And we now have a white paper that is free to download that actually talks about what students, what learning technologists, what lectures are looking for in a VLE. And we think that it's really important because we see that there's going to be a correlation sort of between a good VLE, a very positive student experience, higher NSS scores, and also higher scores with the TEF as well. We are in booth number 11, I believe, so you can pop by. We have persona cards where you can actually see what we've sort of already started to develop the student personas that we've built. We've built HE personas. We've built learning technologists personas as well. We also have a prototype where you can actually see the changes that we've already started to make in our VLE when it comes to sort of the landing page, the dashboard, if you will, when students first sign on. So please come by and see it. You can also come by. If you give us your email address, we'll send you our white paper for free. It's got our insights that we've found so far. And we're always looking for participants in our research.  So that is it. Thank you very much for listening to me up here. And yes, please do come by and see me at booth number 11. Thank you very much. Have a great afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for staying so long. It's my absolute pleasure now to introduce Leah Commissar, who's going to give our final keynote. Leah is a program manager at Welcome, and she leads on the Education and Neuroscience strand. Now we have a project in that strand, so I have to be very careful what I say about her.  So please join me in welcoming Leah to the stage. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Leah Commissar, and I work at the Welcome Trust. And this afternoon, I like to talk to you about education and neuroscience, the general field and how it's progressing, but also about the work that we've been doing in that field and how it links to education technology and the work that lots of you are involved in. So quickly for those of you that don't know the Welcome Trust, it's a global biomedical charity with the aim of trying to improve health. And it does this primarily by funding biomedical research, but also funding research in social science and humanities, by doing policy work, and by doing lots of engagement work. And also there's an education team, which is where I sit. And the education team where I work, our main mission is to try and improve science education in the UK, so that we have the scientists of the future to do the research to improve health. And because we think having a scientific literate population means that they'll make better informed, if not better health choices. So I'm just going to talk through briefly what has neuroscience got to do with education? What impact is neuroscience having on education currently? A bit about the work that we've been doing in the neuroscience and education initiative that Nick's involved in. And then thinking a little bit about what the future is for this field. So what has neuroscience got to do with education? Well, if education is about learning something, be it a skill or some content subject, and neuroscience is to do with the study of the brain and in part how we learn, then you would think that these two fields are quite linked or should be, but historically they haven't been. And so lots of people have been talking about building a bridge between these two sectors. And there are lots of journal articles that have been written over the past 10, 20, maybe 40 years, with titles such as A Bridge Too Far, then it was a prime time to build a bridge, then it was a two-way path as possible, building the bridge from both ends. So lots of bridge talking, but not many people have been building the bridge. There's been lots of discussion about the difficulties of building it, but nobody's been really getting going with it. And this is kind of understandable. Neuroscience is a new-ish field. It's only probably within the last 10, 20 years that it's progressed enough that it might, that the research is such that we can start to take insight from it and apply it to education. And this is really exciting. There's huge potential and it's really understandable why teachers, why policy makers, why technology developers want to start taking these insights from neuroscience and applying them. But my word of warning or caution is, don't jump too quickly. Make sure that you look at the research, make sure that you do the research, make sure that you're doing some evaluation, so that we're not implementing things too quickly that we don't know if they're going to be positive or have a positive impact on classroom practice or learning in universities. So the other thing I must say, just before I continue, is that I'm not saying in any way that neuroscience is the field that's going to solve all classroom or university, all learning problems. It's just a new-ish field and hopefully one that we can use alongside psychology, alongside educational research and alongside teachers' tacit knowledge to really build powerful learning experiences for young people. So what impact is neuroscience having on education? So before I talk any more, and to kind of wake you up a little bit, I thought I'd find out what impact neuroscience has been having on your understanding about learning. So I'm going to present three statements and what I would like you to do is simply raise your hand afterwards as to whether, if you think it's true. So the first statement, we mostly only use ten percent of our brain. Hands up if you think that's true. I'll show you some stats. I'll tell you which paper this comes from in a minute. So this are the percentage of teachers and these are school teachers who also agree with this statement about 50 percent in five countries. This isn't true. In fact this is a common neuromyth.  Okay, second one, individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style. So visually seeing it, auditory, hearing it, kinesthetic, by moving and doing things. Hands up if you believe it's true. Quite a few hands around the audits. Here's some stats again from some teachers you can see very high all in the 90s, 93% in the UK. This is not true. It is true that you have a preference. You might prefer to learn the material in a particular way. You might think, oh yes I'm a visual learner, I like to learn things visually. That's fine, but the research at the moment suggests that you don't learn information any better if it's delivered in that mode, and actually the best way to learn something and get that learning embedded is to use multiple modes, so learning the same material visually, hearing about it, doing something with it. Third one, differences in hemispheric dominance, i.e. the left brain, right brain that we often hear about, can help to explain individual differences amongst learners. Hands up if you think it's true. Fewer hands this time, maybe there's a pattern emerging, I don't know. So again, really high in the UK, lots of teachers believing this. Again, this one's not true. So anything claiming to better integrate your right and left brain, probably best avoided. Your brain's made up of I think the latest estimates about 86 billion neurons or nerve cells that each connected to hundreds or thousands of others. Simple activities are going to be using both sides of your brain. There's no evidence to suggest that some people are logical and other people are creative, but this is very common, as you can see amongst teachers and I think amongst lots of other education professionals. So those stats that I just showed, in case you're interested, comes from a paper by Paul Havid Jones in 2004, sorry 2014, which got lots of social media interest and it became open access for a short while. I'm not sure that it is now and it goes through some more of those neuro myths and things like about how many glasses of water you've got to drink, other ways your brain shrinks or the impact of fish oils perhaps on your learning. So it's one to check out and there's quite a few other papers looking at neuro myths if you're interested. So just quickly, where do they come from? Are they a problem and what should we do about them? So where do they come from? Usually they originate in science, but it's science that gets misal over interpreted in some way and they find their way into common culture or into the education sector and they stick around basically. The ones that are really persistent, it's often because they're either easy to understand or they fit kind of what you see around you or they're pushed by kind of organisations or companies that are trying to sell a product or they're just easy to implement. So the vac thing, visual auditory kinesthetic kind of seems right, it fits kind of what you feel about your own learning and it's fairly simple to implement in a sense. So are they a problem? Well I think this depends on the neuro myth. So believing that you only use 10% of your brain, I don't know if that's a huge problem, it's not accurate, is it going to change your behaviour? Probably not, but the one about say visual auditory and kinesthetic learning and learning styles I think could be a problem and I'll give you an example from personal experience. So I started teaching in the in a school just outside of London about 10 years ago and at the time it was common practice and in many schools to get students to fill in a sheet and they had to write about how they like to learn, did they like to look at pictures, did they like to read things and at the end of it it gave them a score and it gave them a score on what kind of learner they were, were they predominantly a visual learner and as the teacher I was given a spreadsheet in a handout saying this many students in this class are visual learners and this many are auditory learners and was kind of encouraged to try and make sure that my learning fitted the styles of the students in the class. Now you could have teachers spending a lot spending a lot of time and wasted effort trying to tailor learning to those individual students and and that's a problem obviously teachers quite busy anyway but more of a problem was that students started labelling themselves so I'd have students saying miss I'm not doing this activity because I'm a visual learner and and what they're doing is limiting themselves they need to be learning visually auditory kinesthetically and that's the best way to embed the learning and so what to do about them well I think that we need to help people to ask the right questions and to ask for evidence and to be more discerning and we have to support people to do that and and there's some interesting work going on in this space which I'll come back to at the end so back to my question what was my question what impact is neuroscience having on education at the moment is there's it is having some impact impact in a way with lots of neuro myths there's lots of research going on at a small scale in animal models or in small groups of people in the lab and which in the future will have impact on education I'm sure and slowly now there's more research going on at a larger scale and in classrooms which is taking insight from neuroscience and starting it to really apply it to the classroom situation which is what we've been doing and which I will tell you a little bit more about so we launched the education and neuroscience initiative in 2014 with the Education Endowment Foundation who are the what works centre for education in the UK and we did it for two reasons one because we could see there was lots of promise coming from neuroscience and really exciting potentials for things to improve learning and we wanted to start testing it at scale in classrooms to find out if it was beneficial and secondly because we knew there was lots of pseudo science or neuro myths out there and we wanted to start debunking them so we have two main aims one to start building the research and the evidence of what worked and secondly to help support educators about what we do and don't know and the level of the evidence maybe there's a small study that shows something but can we say that's true for all students so we opened a funding round and all the projects had to have some pilot evidence some evidence of promise that they had positive impact and they all had to be scalable and affordable so that if they worked that they could be rolled out and beneficial to all students we didn't want to test anything that would be too expensive or too difficult to implement and all the projects that we funded used independent evaluators I'm just looking at Nick because she's one of them and the methodology that EF uses is quite interesting so you have the project team which in this case was neuroscientists but in other cases might be education developers or charities and they're paired with another academic team who are the evaluators and they work together to work out a robust evaluation methodology the evaluators collect some of the primary outcomes and they also the first people to report on those outcomes so ensuring that the research is not ever overstating what it finds and ensuring that the results are kind of fairly and accurately reported where people might have a vested interest for example so I'll just tell you there are six projects that we funded they're all taking place in around 40 to 100 schools around the UK most of them have started now and I'll just tell you briefly about some of them so fit to study is looking at what happens in P lessons at school so there's really promising evidence from the research that physical activity has impact on your ability to learn and retain information both long and short and long term but a lot of the research it hasn't been done on school children or in a school environment so they're looking at changing what goes on in P lessons testing students outcomes short and long term and also doing an MRI study so that if positive impacts are found they can also start to see what is going on in the brain and how exercise is changing what's going on there team sleep we know that sleep is incredibly important for learning students don't really get taught about this they get taught about sex they get taught about diet and exercise but no one ever talks about their sleep or the importance of it or how to get good sleep so we're testing a sleep education program and then looking at teenagers sleep and also their academic outcomes to see if it has a positive impact these two projects I'll just go back these two in secondary school these are both in primary school with quite young children and they are both using adaptive technologies the bottom one graph again rhyme to teach a new way of teaching young children to read using rhyme analogy and the top one is training inhibition in young students before maths and science lessons and so to help them when they encounter counterintuitive sub concepts the next one about engaging the wreck the brains reward system and this is being led by Paul Howard Jones and this is taking ideas from the gaming world so gaming is people get very engaged with it and part of what is found is that it's because of this uncertain reward so 50 you know sometimes getting something sometimes not getting something and in the school system reward is very consistent everything is about consistency you get something right you get a point and instead what they're saying is is if you have this uncertain reward i.e. get something right and you can choose to game your point you might get double you might get nothing is it ramps up dopamine in the reward center in your brain it's a very teachable moment if you can go through the answers and why they're right and wrong during that period then you might get enhanced learning so they're testing that and the last one space learning is looking at the length of time between learning periods so learning the same material multiple times with different spaces between them and looking at how long you can retain that information for excuse me so these projects are all taking place over the next four or five years in UK schools and I thought I would just mention the Education Endowment Foundation who we're paired with in case you haven't come across them they're running hundreds of big scale randomized control trials in schools all across the UK they have a very useful toolkit and looking at different interventions and how strong the evidence is for them and their cost effectiveness and they've recently quite recently I believe done a whole set of projects looking at digital technologies they've got a literature review on it and some some trials going on so that was the research now how are we supporting teachers well and we feel like it's important to support teachers because we want to empower them with good quality information so they can make informed choices about the things that they're doing in the classroom and one thing that we did last year was using this platform I'm a scientist get me out here which is usually used for students to go on and chat to scientists and we used a different version of it where we had neuroscientists and psychologists on online and any teachers could come on and ask them questions about late learning of the brain and you can go on you can see the questions are asked we have a lot of engagement about 7000 people were on there reading huge numbers of papers because this is an area that lots of educators are very interested in and in terms of supporting teachers we've got more work that's going to be coming out so what's the space and digital promise as an organization which you may all have heard of before and I'm not really in your sector so maybe this is why I haven't but they're doing some really interesting work and so I just thought it was worth highlighting one thing that they've developed is a research map which you can see on the screen and it's all interactive and it's opening up research to teachers to education developers to policymakers so that they can start to be more informed about the decisions they're making in developing technologies or their classroom practice by using the research and it's a fully interactive map it's great you click on it expands it shows you different research areas it gives you access to easy access to all the open access research and so I thought I'd mention that the second thing that they're doing of many is that they have realized that as schools and education systems become are moving towards becoming more evidence in fact evidence informed that people are starting to ask developers for evidence and for research and so they've got a competition open at the moment which is asking developers to submit what research and evidence they've used to do for their development of their product and so getting a really good example and to show to the world and I believe there's some kind of price and the final thing is tools for schools to help them evaluate the research provided by develop developers so if a developer says this is going to enhance your learning is the research to show it schools aren't all teachers aren't always best place to do that and this tool helps and to evaluate whether that research is quality and so education neuroscience in the future and this is a really new and expanding field mind, brain and education and trends in education, neuroscience and education are two journals that have been around for a little while and two more have just popped up in the last year or so and in case you want to find out more there's a literature review that the Education Endowment Foundation funded and it goes through lots of different areas of research relevant to neuroscience and education and it tells you the confidence of that research and how close it is to being implemented in the classroom. A couple of other places if you're interested to find out more the Centre for Educational Neuroscience recently wrote a blog called NeuroHIT or Neuromyth and that goes through 12 of these Neuromyths in a bit more detail and using the research and explaining in a lot of cases how it's not quite a cut and dry answer and at the end they say whether it's a Neuromyth or a NeuroHIT but it goes through the research really carefully and there are just two other books in case you're interested which I would highly recommend. So education neuroscience in the future there's lots of promising areas which are things such as recognising that adolescents are a very unique group of learners and that we might need to deal with them in a specific way research around reward, attention, motivation, understanding neuroplasticity and how we can all continue to learn throughout life and the benefits of doing that. The impacts of stress and anxiety and how that affects our learning. There's a lot of research looking at maths learning for example but also language and science strategies about how we might better foster creativity, early screening for learning disorders and how other things which we might not associate with neuroscience such as exercise sleep, caffeine, consumption might also affect our brains and our learning. I'm thinking about how actually this might be something that should be embedded in professional development of educators in the future so that even if when they do their training it might be different to 20 years later when they're still teaching not giving them just all the knowledge but the ability to access some of that research and understand it or at least ask questions when the new fad comes into schools so that they're not following things that haven't been substantiated. So just to sum up in terms of issues I think we need to be patient. It does take time. Research takes time and we've got to be careful not to over interpret things and the translation of this knowledge is really just beginning but everybody can be part of the process and kind of evaluating and making sure that you're robustly testing everything that you're doing. Opportunities, there's great potential, there's loads of potential but we need multi-disciplinary teams working on this. We need educators, we need neuroscientists, we need psychologists, we need educational technologists so that we get robust trials and that we get the information that we need to support learning as quickly as possible. And I think education technology sector has got great potential to do this if we can collect lots of data in real time and start working out what's working for students and not. We need to get rid of some of these neuro myths so that they're not damaging learning of students who think that they're a visual learner perhaps. And eventually we might have some findings which might lead to policy change and be evidence informed. So I'll just leave you with this quote and say thank you. Is that you're having to take some questions? There'll be helpers with mics. If you could just say who you are and where you're from if you ask your questions and raise your hand clearly so our helpers can hear. Hello down there. Hi. Hi, I'm Andrew Smith from the Open University. Thank you about learning styles.  I hate people drumming it into our poor children learning styles of how toe to toe fights with teachers and teacher trainers about learning styles. So it's just a thank you but I think there's another important observation. It's not just stopping teachers. It's stopping those that are teaching the teachers because it's still appearing in different sort of teacher training programs out there. Yeah, you would not have a learning style auditory if you're deaf. You would not have a visual learning style if you're blind but we use all of them and sorry I'm passionate about it. No, it's great. If welcome trust can get it into the educators that teach our teachers as well that would be a fantastic thing. Yeah, I totally agree with you and it's also quite right in any kind of professional development that even goes on throughout life. I often have colleagues coming to me and saying oh I've just been on this course. Look what they asked me to do and I'm like brilliant. Did you say something? No, great. Yeah, are there any other questions? Got one down here in front of me. Hi, I've mentioned this earlier but my six-year-old came home from school at the end of last term telling me that they'd all been labeled left brain or right brain. What I immediately printed out Paul's paper and was going to go gung-ho into school and was advised against this by my more sensible husband. But what can we do to do something about this when it's still... We'll be a husband. Well said that man. I suppose I worry that if you go in and score the paper that that might be a bit high level. I used to be a teacher. I'm not disrespecting teachers in any way but they also might not have the time to read it. But I think that everybody needs to wear possible you know try and stand up for what we do know which is a little bit about neuroscience at the moment. And so going to school speak to that teacher it's probably happening in the other classes if there are more classes. Yeah every little helps I guess but it is everywhere. There was an interesting hashtag a while ago I don't know if it's still going which was back off which I quite enjoyed. I thought it was quite good. So if you see anything to do with the back hashtag back off might still be running you could have a go at that. Maybe we could start one up for left brain right brain but it's quite extreme. I don't know what they're hoping to achieve by labeling students so early on but it's quite dangerous and worrying I think. Yeah yeah. I advocate for that too maybe just you. Any other questions. Nils Willis from Manchester one question a debate I've had with a female colleague of mine was that actually for example in science learning there is actually a difference between male and female brains. My argument is probably not as much as we believe but my female colleague believes it is. What's the current evidence for that? Yeah so if I the centre the blog that I mentioned from the centre of educational neuroscience has got a really interesting article on that and I think it's basically suggested there's not that much difference between male and female brains but a lot of the differences occur by the way that males and females are treated so there's lots of differences the expectations on females for example to be not as good at maths or where it's more psychology I guess but where people are told you know girls are not as good at maths then underperforming tests and things like that so it's quite hard to tease it apart sometimes because we just live in a society where there are these gender differences and expectations still but I would probably suggest that yeah there's there's not so much difference as some people believe. Any other questions or one more? Yeah so we've dispelled the you know the learning styles to the left right what are the myths are there out there that that research we need to look at so we can dispel them later? About drinking water your brain doesn't shrink if you don't if you don't drink I think it's six or eight cups fish oils there's not very good evidence around fish oils improving your learning trying to think what else is on the Center of Educational Neuroscience website things about brain training I think a lot of the brain training type things you get better at a particular thing that you're training your brain on but it doesn't necessarily transfer to more general things so if it's telling you that you're going to improve the age of your brain not so much. Can I, what about 10,000 hours? Myth or truth? Well I don't know if anyone's done their research on that probably if you spend 10,000 hours on something you do get better at it the person behind you is shaking his head he's not so sure I don't know what he's had a failure with and does personal experience so true okay I think that's it for questions so thank you very much thank you thank you very much Lea that was absolutely brilliant and I just wanted to finish off today everybody is free to go in just a second


The capitalist system came of age in the century from 1750 to 1850 as a result of three revolutions. The first was a political revolution, the triumph of liberalism, especially the doctrine of natural rights and the view that government should be limited in its function to the protection of individual rights, including property rights. The second revolution was the discovery of spontaneous order and the birth of economic understanding. Adam Smith and other economists demonstrated that a system in which individuals can produce and trade freely in pursuit of their private interests is more efficient and productive than any government could be in managing an economy. The third revolution was, of course, the industrial revolution. The political revolution, the triumph of the doctrine of individual rights, was accompanied by a spirit of moral idealism. It was the liberation of man from tyranny, the recognition that every individual is an end in himself. But the economic revolution was cast in morally ambiguous terms. The desire for wealth fell under the shadow of the Christian injunction against selfishness and avarice. The early students of economic order were conscious that they were asserting a moral paradox. The paradox, as Bernard Mandeville put it, that private vices could produce public benefits. The critics of the market have always capitalized on these doubts about its morality. The socialist movement was sustained by allegations that capitalism breeds selfishness, exploitation, alienation, injustice. In milder forms, these same accusations produced the welfare state, which redistributes income through government programs in the name of social justice. The effort to build a socialist society has now collapsed, bringing to an end a vast and tragic social experiment, which has demonstrated that a collectivist system is incompatible with prosperity, freedom, and justice. And it is now clear that the welfare state is subject to all the same problems that have made socialism unworkable. It creates perverse incentives among the people it tries to serve. It is run by a vast bureaucracy that is more interested in preserving its own power than in achieving results. Few people would now deny the economic virtues of the market. Yet capitalism has not escaped the moral ambiguity in which it was conceived. It is valued for the prosperity it brings. It is valued as a necessary condition for political and intellectual freedom. But few people seem prepared to assert that the mode of life central to capitalism, the pursuit of self-interest through production and trade, is morally honorable, much less noble or ideal. And despite the fall of socialism, the welfare state endures throughout the West, sustained not only by the momentum of vested interests, but also by the feeling that social justice demands it. Now, there is no mystery, I think, about where the moral antipathy toward the market comes from. It comes from the ethics of altruism, which is deeply rooted in Western culture, as in most cultures. By the standards of altruism, the pursuit of self-interest is, at best, a neutral act outside the realm of morality and, at worst, a sin. It is true that success in the market is achieved by voluntary trade, and thus by satisfying the needs of others. But it is also true that those who do succeed are motivated by personal gain, and ethics is as much concerned with motives as with results. What does altruism mean? To some, it means nothing more than kindness or common courtesy. To others, it means the complete submersion of the self in a larger social whole. These are the extremes. And the submersion of the self is what was the meaning that Auguste Comte intended when he coined the term altruism. To live for others, he said, to become in corporate with humanity, this is the cardinal virtue of the religion of humanity. My purpose in this discussion is, first, to isolate a particular principle of altruism that lies at the root of the demand for social justice. And secondly, I will try to show that this principle is wrong, it's false. My argument is based on the work of the American author and philosopher Ein Rand. Ein Rand is one of the leading theorists of free market, classical liberalism in the United States. In Europe, she is much less well known. For those of you who are not so familiar with her, I intend this discussion to be partly an introduction. And I have prepared a list of her works together with a list of the translations into European languages, which I have with me. You're welcome to have a copy for your later use. Let me say at the outset, my main conclusion is that I share with Ein Rand the position that we can have an idealistic moral defense of capitalism, only if we are willing to challenge the reign of altruism in ethics. So my concern is ethics more than political philosophy or law. Now let us begin by examining the concept of social justice. I believe there are two distinct forms of the idea of social justice. The first is I will call the theory of welfare rights. And the second is egalitarianism. According to the theory of welfare rights, individuals have a right to certain necessities of life, including minimal levels of food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and so on. It is the responsibility of society to ensure that all members have access to these necessities. But the theory says capitalism does not guarantee everyone access to these necessities, so we cannot have pure capitalism. At best, we can have the market with a welfare state. According to egalitarianism, the wealth produced by a society must be distributed fairly. On this view, it is unjust for some people to earn 15 or 50 or 100 times as much income as others. But laissez-faire capitalism, egalitarians say, permits and encourages these disparities in income and wealth, and is, therefore, unjust. So society must redistribute wealth. Now, the difference in these two conceptions of social justice is the difference between absolute and relative levels of well-being. The theory of welfare rights says that people must have access to a certain minimum level of standard of living, as long as they have that minimum level, according to this theory, it doesn't matter how far others may rise in their income or wealth. They are primarily concerned with programs that benefit people below a certain level of poverty. Egalitarians are concerned with relative well-being. The egalitarians have often said that of two societies, they would prefer the one in which wealth is more evenly distributed, even if the overall standard of living is lower. Better people should be more equal than that some should have more than others. So egalitarians favor government measures such as progressive income tax, which aim to redistribute wealth across the entire income scale, not merely at the bottom. Now, I'm going to discuss these two theories of social justice separately, but I will show that they rest ultimately on the same ethical principle. But I think it's interesting to see how the same principle is at work in the two branches of social justice. The fundamental concept of welfare, of the theory of welfare rights, is that people have rights to goods such as food, shelter, and medical care. That is, on this theory, people are entitled to these things. On this assumption, someone who receives benefits from a government program is merely getting what is due to him in the same way that a buyer who receives a good he has paid for is merely getting his due. When the state dispenses welfare benefits on this theory, it is merely protecting rights, just as it is when the state protects a buyer against fraud. In neither case is there any necessity for gratitude. The concept of welfare rights, or positive rights, as they are often called, is modeled on the traditional liberal rights of life, liberty, and property. In the famous United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, both kinds of rights are included together with no distinction. But in fact, there is a well-known distinction. The liberal rights are rights to act without interference from others. For example, the right of free speech is a right to speak without being prevented by someone else who wants to stop you from saying what is on your mind. But this right does not give you the right to have other people listen if they are not interested in what you have to say. The right of free speech doesn't mean that you will be able to afford a lecture hall. It just means the government cannot stop you. So the traditional liberal rights impose on other people only the negative obligation not to interfere with you, not to restrain you forcibly from acting as you choose. By contrast, welfare rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy certain goods, regardless of one's actions. They are rights to have the goods provided by others, even if one cannot earn them oneself. Therefore, welfare rights impose positive obligations on other people. If I have a right to food, then someone has an obligation to grow the food. If I cannot pay for the food, someone has an obligation to buy it for me. Now, the people who advocate welfare rights sometimes argue that the obligation is imposed on society as a whole, not on any particular individual. But society is not an entity. It is not a moral agent over and above its individual members. So any obligation that society has falls on us as individuals. Insofar as welfare rights are implemented through government programs, for example, the obligation is distributed over all taxpayers. From an ethical standpoint, therefore, the essence of welfare rights is the premise that the need of one individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim that it is imposed on you by someone else's need does not depend, according to this theory, on your personal relationship to that person. It does not depend on your choice to help. It does not depend on your evaluation of that person as worthy of your help. It is an unchosen obligation arising from the sheer fact of his need. But we need to carry the analysis one step further. If I am living alone on a desert island, then, of course, I have no welfare rights, for there is no one around to provide the goods. For the same reason, if I live in a primitive society where medicine is unknown, then I have no right to medical care. The content of welfare rights is relative to the level of economic wealth and productive capacity in a given society. And in the same way, the obligation of individuals to satisfy the needs of others is dependent on their ability to do so. I cannot be blamed as an individual for failing to provide others with something that I cannot produce myself. But now, suppose I can produce it and simply choose not to. Suppose I am capable of earning a much larger income than I do, and being an academic, I hope that's true, an income where the taxes would support a person who will otherwise go hungry. Am I obliged to work harder to earn more for the sake of that person? Well, I don't know any philosopher of welfare rights who would say that I am obliged. The moral claim imposed on me by another person's need is contingent not only on my ability, but also on my willingness to produce. Now, in one way, this is very good. It means the welfare rights theory does not regard me as a slave. But in another way, it reveals something not so good. It reveals that the focus of welfare rights is not really the need of those who have them or are said to have them, but rather the constraints that are imposed on those who produce the goods that are being distributed. If you value the satisfaction of human needs, then in all logic, you must value the activity of producing what we need, the activity of creating wealth by overcoming the obstacles that nature places in our way. The theorists of welfare rights seem strangely indifferent to this activity of production. They often have looked with yearning on more primitive communitarian societies with lower standards of living and shorter life expectancies, because in those societies, at least those who did survive benefited from help from the tribe. I believe the moral essence of the theory of welfare rights is not the satisfaction of need, per se. It does not assert an obligation to pursue the satisfaction of need, much less an obligation to succeed. The obligation is conditional. Those who do succeed in creating wealth may do so only on condition that others are allowed to share their wealth. The goal is not so much to benefit the needy as to bind the able. It is a philosophy which says that ability, intelligence, initiative, ambition are liabilities that impose on you special obligations not possessed by others. Now, if we turn to egalitarianism, we find that we arrive at the same principle by a different logical route. The ethical framework of the egalitarian is defined by the concept of justice rather than rights. Egalitarians rarely speak about rights. If we look at society as a whole, they say, we see that income, wealth, and power are distributed in a certain way. The basic question is, is the existing distribution fair? If not, then it must be corrected by government programs of redistribution. A pure market economy, of course, does not produce equality among individuals. But very few egalitarians have claimed that strict equality of outcome, equality of result, as we were discussing earlier this afternoon, is the ideal. For example, the English writer, R.H. Tony, wrote that inequality of circumstance is reasonable insofar as it is a necessary condition of securing the services which the community requires. In the same way, more recent theorists, the American writer, John Rawls, proposed what he called the difference principle, according to which differences in income and wealth are permissible only so long as they serve the interests of the least advantaged people in society. In other words, virtually all egalitarians, not all, I know some exceptions, but virtually all egalitarians, recognize that strict leveling would have a disastrous effect on production. They admit that not everyone contributes equally to production, to the wealth of a society. To some extent, therefore, they say, people must be rewarded. They must be given incentives in accordance with their productive ability, as an incentive to put forth the efforts they are capable of. But any such differences must be limited to those which are necessary for the public good. Why? What is the philosophical basis of that principle? Well, egalitarians often argue that it follows logically from the basic principle of justice. The basic principle is that people are to be treated differently only if they differ in some morally relevant way. Now, we discussed this principle in the previous session. Professor Volvers-Berger identified the principle. And in my comments, I noted that the reasons why it could not be applied to distribution. So I will just summarize quickly here. In order to apply that principle, that basic principle of justice, to issues of distribution, you must assume that society engages in some act of distribution. But it does not. In a market economy, incomes are determined by the choices of millions of individuals, consumers, investors, entrepreneurs, workers. These choices are coordinated by the laws of supply and demand. So it is no accident, for example, that a successful entrepreneur earns more than a day laborer. But there is no one person who pays the entrepreneur and who pays the day laborer. In 1989, the most highly paid entertainer in the United States was Michael Jackson, who earned $65 million. Why? It was not because society decided that Michael Jackson was worth $65 million. It was because millions of fans of Michael Jackson each decided that his albums were worth whatever they cost. Even in a socialist economy, as we now know, economic outcomes are not under the control of central planners. Even in socialism, there is a kind of spontaneous order, although it is a corrupt one, in which outcomes are determined by bureaucratic infighting, black markets, theft, and so forth. So we must abandon this picture of a giant pie which is being distributed and must therefore be distributed fairly. Once we do abandon this picture, what is left of the principle put forward by Tawny and Rawls and others? The principle that inequalities are acceptable only if they serve the interests of all. If this cannot be grounded in justice, then it must be regarded as a matter of the obligations we bear to each other as individuals. And when we consider it in this slide, we can see that it is the same principle that we identified at the basis of the theory of welfare rights. The principle is that the productive may enjoy the fruits of their efforts only on condition that their efforts benefit others as well. There is no obligation to produce, to create, to earn an income. But if you do, the needs of others arise as a constraint on your actions, your ability, your initiative, your intelligence, your dedication to your goals, and all the other qualities that make success possible are personal assets that put you under an obligation to those with less ability, initiative, intelligence, or dedication. In other words, every form of social justice rests on the assumption that individual ability is a social asset. And I might add that the philosopher John Rawls is quite explicit about this. He says that the principle he believes in represents an effort on the part of all of us to regard each other's personal talents, personal assets as a collective resource. This assumption is not merely that the individual must respect the rights of the less able. And it is not merely to say that kindness or generosity are virtues. It says something much more. It says that the individual must regard himself, in part, at least, as a means to the good of others. And here we come to the crux of the matter. When I respect the rights of other people, I recognize that they are ends in themselves, that I may not treat them merely as means to my satisfaction. This is widely regarded as the moral thing to do. Why, then, is it not equally moral to regard myself as an end? Why should I not refuse, out of respect for my own dignity, as a moral agent, to regard myself as a means in the service of others? Now, in questioning the ethics of altruism as I have, I want to do something more than simply raise these troubling questions. I want to outline an alternative ethical philosophy developed by Ein Rand. It is an individualist ethics, which defends the moral right, as well as the political right, of every individual to pursue his own self-interest. Altruists argue, typically, that life presents us with a basic choice. We must either sacrifice others to ourselves, or sacrifice ourselves to others. Self-sacrifice is the altruist way. And the assumption is that the only alternative is to live as a predator on other people. But this is a false alternative, according to Rand. Life does not require sacrifices in either direction. The interests of rational people do not conflict. And the pursuit of our genuine self-interest requires that we deal with other people by means of peaceful, voluntary exchange. To see why this is the case, let us consider how we decide what is in our self-interest. And interest is a value that we seek to obtain, whether it's wealth, pleasure, security, love, self-esteem, some other good. Rand's ethical philosophy is based on her insight that the fundamental value, the sumum bonum, is life itself. It is the existence of living organisms, and their need to maintain themselves through constant action to satisfy their needs that gives rise to the entire phenomenon of values. Imagine a world without life. It would be a world of facts, but not of values. It would be a world in which no condition could be said to be better or worse than any other. But as soon as we introduce a living organism into such a world, then some things are better and worse for it, because some things threaten its survival or help maintain its survival. So the fundamental standard of value, by reference to which a person must judge what is in his interest, is his own life. And by this, we mean not mere survival from one moment to another, but the full satisfaction of our needs through the ongoing exercise of our faculties. Man's primary faculty, our primary means of survival, is our capacity for reason. It is reason that allows us to live by production, and thus to rise above the precarious level of hunting and gathering. Reason is the basis of language, which makes it possible for us to cooperate and transmit knowledge. Reason is the basis of social institutions governed by abstract rules. In Rand's view, therefore, the purpose of ethics is to provide standards for living in accordance with reason in pursuit of one's own life. To live by reason, and here I must summarize an entire ethical philosophy very quickly, we must accept independence as a virtue. Reason is a faculty of the individual. No matter how much we learn from others, the act of thought takes place in the individual mind, and must be initiated by each of us by our own choice, and directed by our own effort. So rationality requires that we accept responsibility for directing and sustaining our own lives. To live by reason, also, we must accept productiveness as a virtue. Production is the act of creating value. Human beings cannot live by fulfilling lives by finding what they need in nature, or killing it, as animals do, nor can they live as parasites on others. As Ein Rand says, and I'm quoting here, if some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating, or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Finally, to live by reason, we must accept honesty and integrity as virtues. Reason is a faculty of cognition, of knowledge. That's its biological function. It is our means of understanding the world for the sake of guiding our actions. To act without integrity, to act against our judgment of what is right, is to sever our actions from our mind. To act without honesty, by fraud or deceit, is to act in violation of our knowledge of what is true and to make ourselves dependent on the ignorance and the stupidity of others. The opposite of altruism is egoism. And the egoist is usually pictured as someone who will do anything to get what he wants, someone who will lie, cheat, steal, and seek to dominate other people in order to satisfy his desires. Like most people, Rand would regard this mode of life as immoral. But her reason is not that it harms others. Her reason is that it harms the self. Subjective desire is not the test for whether something is in our interest. And deceit, theft, and power are not the means for achieving happiness or a successful life. The virtues that I've mentioned are objective standards. They are rooted in man's nature and thus apply to all human beings. But their purpose, as she says, is to enable each person to achieve, maintain, fulfill, and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life. So how shall we deal with others? Rand's social ethics rests on two basic principles. A principle of rights and a principle of justice. The principle of rights says that we must deal with other people peaceably by voluntary exchange without initiating the use of force against them. It is only in this way that we can live independently on the basis of our own productive efforts. The person who attempts to live by others is a parasite. And it is only in this way that we can obtain the many benefits that come from social interaction. The benefits of economic and intellectual exchange, as well as the values of more personal intimate relationships. The source of these benefits is the rationality, the productiveness, the individuality of the other person. And these things require freedom to flourish. If I live by force, then I attack the source, the root of the values I seek. That's the principle of rights. The principle of justice is what Rand calls the trader principle. Living by trade, offering value for value, neither seeking nor granting the unearned. An honorable person does not offer his needs as a claim on others. He offers value as the basis of any relationship. Nor does he accept and unshows an obligation to serve the needs of others. No one who values his own life can accept an open-ended responsibility to be his brother's keeper. Nor would an independent person desire to be kept. The principle of trade, Rand notes, is the only basis on which human beings can deal with each other as independent equals. Now, what I have given you is only a very brief summary of Rand's ethical philosophy, the objectivist ethics, as she calls it. But I think it is enough to indicate that there is an alternative to the traditional ethics of altruism, an alternative that treats the individual as an end in himself in the full meaning of that term. And the implication of this approach is that capitalism is the only just and moral system. A capitalist system is based on the recognition and protection of individual rights. In a capitalist society, men are free to pursue their own ends by the exercise of their own minds. The only social constraint that capitalism imposes is the requirement that those who wish the services of others must offer value in return. No one may use the state to expropriate what others have produced. I said at the outset that capitalism was the outcome of three revolutions, the political revolution of individual rights, the economic revolution of understanding markets, and the industrial revolution which unleashed man's productive ability. Capitalism has been rediscovered in our own day through the economic failure of all the alternatives. But I believe that if it is to survive and flourish, we need a fourth revolution, a moral revolution that establishes the moral right of the individual to live for himself. Thank you.