In one of your tweets, you listed out some of the things you should study like programming,

sales, reading, writing, arithmetic. One of the items that ended up on the cutting room floor

was that you should also study ethics. I was originally going to put that out there as a

concession to people who believe that making money is evil and that the only way to make it is evil.

But then I realized ethics is not necessarily something you study. It's something you think about

and it's something you do. Every one of us has a personal moral code and where you got that

moral code from is different for everybody. It's not like I can point you to a textbook. Sure,

I could point you to some Roman and Greek texts, but that's not going to suddenly make you ethical.

There's the golden rule, right? Do unto others as you would have them do into you or there's

Nassim Taleb silver rule, which is don't do unto others, which you don't want them doing unto you.

Once you've been in business long enough, you will realize how much of business is about trust.

And so about trust because you want to compound interest, you want to be able to work for a long

period of time with trustworthy people without having to agree, evaluate every discussion without

having to rethink each time and without having to constantly look over your shoulder. And so over time,

you gravitate towards working with certain kinds of people. And similarly, those people will

gravitate towards working with other ethical quote-unquote people. So being ethical turns out to be

a selfish imperative. You want to be ethical because it attracts the other long term players

in the network. And then they want to do business with you. And if you build a good enough

reputation for being ethical, eventually people will pay you just to do deals through you,

because you're the one who will validate and ensure the deals by your presence because you wouldn't

be involved with low quality stuff. So being ethical actually pays off in the long run, but it's

the very long run in the short run being unethical pays off, which is why so many people go for it.

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