 All right, everyone. Welcome to iWizard. So we have two special guests with us today. I'm going to start with Yaron because my other guest is running a little bit late. Yaron Brooke is an Israeli-American writer, speaker, entrepreneur, and executive. He served in the Israeli army. He earned his MBA and PhD in finance at the University of Texas at Austin, and he taught at Santa Clara University. Yaron co-founded BH Equity Research. He is the chairman of the board at the Ein Rand Institute. He's the co-author of three books, most recently the book In Pursuit of Wealth, The Moral Case for Finance. Yaron's articles have been published in USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Forbes, The Objective Standard, and plenty of other outlets. So you can listen to his excellent podcast, The Yaron Brooke Show. I would highly recommend. Yaron has been on this program before. You definitely can check out that video. We talked about Jonathan Haidt. We talked about Jordan Peterson. We talked about why Ein Rand is so loathed by the intelligentsia of our day. And so I think that's also on Yaron's channel. He made that a video on his channel as well. So thank you so much, Yaron, for being here. And I'm excited for Don to join us as well. Sure. Thanks for having me on. It's good to be back. I invited you on to talk about Ein Rand's The Fountainhead. I did a lengthy glowing review on this book a little over a month ago. I've been kind of, you know, dismayed at the lack of a presence of any kind of, you know, objectivist or Ein Rand content on BookTube. You know, BookTube is a robust, robust kind of enterprise at this point. And I'm just feeling like there isn't enough Ein Rand content. So it's definitely a pleasure to have you on. And personally, and this is just a kind of a subjective sort of thing, The Fountainhead is, in my opinion, Ein Rand's best novel. So my audience knows my thoughts, but I wanted to have a couple of experts on so that we could really dig deep and explore this book. So let's just start with this, Yaron. Sell this book to my audience. What is The Fountainhead really about? You know, I'm not asking for a synopsis. What I want to know is at its core, what ideas is The Fountainhead exploring? And why should people read this book? I mean, I think the book is really exploring the ideas of what it means to live a full life as a human being. What does it mean to make the most of your life? It's a book about integrity. It's a book about living your values, but also about what those values should be and what are values that ultimately lead to happiness and success and flourishing and prosperity. And then there are a variety of different characters who have wrong values, wrong attitudes towards life and suffer the consequences of their choices. So it really is a book in a deeper sense about ethics, about morality, about what it means to live as a human being and what is good and what is right and what is just. And what can really mess you up? What kind of choices, values can really mess up your ability to live a successful life as a human being? So what is good? What is just? What is right? And how does Howard Rourke represent that? How is that embodied in the novel? Yeah, I mean, Howard Rourke is the hero of the novel. And I think the essential characteristic of Howard Rourke is that he lives based on his own judgment, based on the judgment of his own mind, based on his own. He is an architect based on his own aesthetic judgment in pursuit of his own values with the ultimate goal being his own happiness. So he represents, in Rand, kind of an ideal, a form of an ideal man, a man who is pursuing his own happiness, a man who is an egoist, somebody who is seeking his own rational, long term self-interest, his own well-being, and is doing so by using his mind, by using his rational faculty, by using reason, and then consistently living by it. So being an independent thinker, choosing his own values, and then sticking to those values. I mean, there's a famous scene in The Fountainhead where Howard Rourke has offered a lot of money. And at this point, he's super poor. He has nothing, right? Nothing. And he's offered a lot of money to compromise, to build a building that's got most of what he wants in the building, but just a few of the features are going to be the exact opposite of what he wants. And it's going to be a little bit of a mishmash between the two. And he basically walks out and discussed and refuses to do it. And he's so poor at this point that he has to basically, he has to go and work in a quarry, basically cutting up rock, right? So very physical labor, very hard labor. And he's an architect. He is a guy who just, you know, who wants to be an architect, then he is doing this manual labor. But that's what it means to have integrity. That's what it means to secure values. That's what it means not to compromise. And it's also a good scene because Ayn Rand is often maligned as all she cares about is money. All her characters care about his money. And that's what self interest really means is just money. And that's a great scene to show that it's not about money. It's about, it's about values. And it's about moral values. And it's about integrity and independence. And he's willing to give up a huge amount of money in order to live based on his standards, his values and his objective standards. So these are not just subjective whims. He can explain to you exactly why the building has to be the way he designed it. So yeah, so it's a book about how to live that kind of life, how to live a moral life. That's really the theme of the book. Yes. I wonder, Yaron, and also welcome Don. Don is a writer. Don is a philosopher and a speaker. He was a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute from 2006 to 2017. He worked at the Center for Industrial Progress from 2017 to 2020. He's been a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute. And I believe now he is back at the Ayn Rand Institute, which is encouraging. He is the co-author along with Yaron of the bestselling books, Free Market Revolution. Equal is unfair. I love that book, The Pursuit of Wealth. And most recently, Don actually wrote a novel, a thriller for the philosophically-minded. It's called, Don, is it called I Am Justice? Is that what it is? You got it. So we may have to review that one on this booktube channel here pretty soon. Don's articles have been published at Forbes, The Guardian, USA Today, Fox News, CNBC, the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, The Washington Times, and other outlets. So it's lovely having you guys on. I appreciate you being here, Don. So Yaron, I want to follow up with what you just said. This is something that my students will often ask me. Is there a difference between psychological egoism and ethical egoism? There's this question that comes up, which is among young people, which is often that, is it possible to be selfless? Aren't we always, students will ask me, and I believe this is called psychological egoism, aren't we always doing everything out of self-interest? And so I'll bring up challenge examples to my students like, well, what about the professor who jumped in front of his students to sacrifice himself to save his classroom full of students? This old guy jumps in front of the gunman to save his students. And it would seem like that would be an inherently selfless act. But there's also an argument that you could make about the fact that he's trying to secure his legacy. He's trying to appear heroic. He's trying to be heroic so that he's remembered that way. And so there's psychological egoism. But what do you mean when you say egoism in terms of Ayn Rand? What does Ayn Rand mean by egoism? And why should we take that seriously, Yaron? Well, I don't think the teacher jumping in front of the killer has to be either altruistic or psychological egoism. It could actually be egoism. So one has to be careful and partially it's hard to tell without knowing the actual motivations of the teacher and what is driving them. But look, egoism is an achievement. It's not something automatic. It's not something we'll program to do because it requires actually figuring out and therefore it requires real thought. It requires figuring out what is truly in my self interest? What does my life actually require? What are the values necessary for me to live a successful flourishing happy life? And that is not going to be whatever I feel like in the moment. It's not going to be whatever reduces the, I don't know, the emotional tension at the moment. I'll just do what my mother says because that's the thing that is going to create the least friction possible right now. It's not something that is going to be generated through whim and through something that is just automatic. It actually requires thinking. It actually requires focus. It actually requires having a set of values and a hierarchy of values. So you know what's more important, what's less important. So you never give up something more important for something less important. So it's true that a lot of people out there live lives where they're trying to minimize pain or they're trying to minimize short term discomfort or they're trying to maximize short term pleasure. But it's also true that they're very, very, very few people who actually have hold the idea of a life as over the long run and the idea of certain values that are going to guide that life and have a commitment to sticking to those values or to evaluating constantly, evaluating those values rationally and living their life based on those values with no compromise. And in that sense, they're very few egoistic people, even though it might seem like people are doing things for themselves, but they're not. They're doing things to satisfy whims. They're doing things to maybe maximize pleasure, but is maximizing pleasure really good for you in the long run? Is it snowing the cocaine that's in front of you? It'll give you a high. It'll maximize your pleasure in the moment. Is it really good for you in the long run? Well, one can just look at the empirical evidence to suggest that the answers no. And I think we can back it up also with some knowledge of what cocaine does to your mind to explain why it's the answers no, even though it gives you a high. So you can't say that the person snowing the cocaine is psychologically egoistic. They're not egoistic at all. They're indeed they're self-destructive. Now, they're not sacrificing by doing it, other than the sacrificing their whole life for nothing, not, you know, so the being self-destructive. I think that's an important distinction. And I'm glad that you brought it up because I think that's a popular misconception. I wonder if, and I want to move to Don now, but maybe I could just get you to give me like a 30 second follow up your own. I wonder if I know that the Iran folks do not like Kant. So that's no surprise to either of you, but there is when you're studying Kant a distinction between heteronymous and autonomous. And I wonder if the ethical egoist is autonomous. And I think a lot of what you're talking about being under the possession of drugs like cocaine or heroin. There's an idea. There's this sense in which when you're using those drugs, there's a sense in which you're not fully autonomous. You're under the sway of those drugs and that sort of thing. So would you say that the egoist? Well, that's a sense in which you're not truly an egoist because you're not in control. You're not suppressing the ability of your mind, your reason to be fully functional. And if as objective as them argues, the reason is our basic means of survival. Reason is the way in which is required to live and being in focus and being able to engage that focus. Even when you're relaxing, you have the capacity to engage that focus is so crucial to human survival and flourishing. Then dulling that ability and dulling that control by using drugs is self-destructive. Can I add to this really briefly? Just to underline something Yaron said, which I really agree with, but it's that egoism and altruism are not exhaustive categories. So what they are is they're about your ultimate motivation for action. So every action, you have some kind of motivation. There's some in some sense, you want to take it. But what are you ultimately out for? And the egoist is somebody who sets his intention that what I want my actions to add up to is my well-being. And not many people do that. And they don't engage in the kind of thought that Yaron was talking about. What would it mean to really be for my well-being? And the altruist is somebody, you can use it in different senses, but as a moral category, it's about a person who's acting ultimately for the sake of others. That that's the kind of trump card in their actions. And so you could say in a sense, yes, they have to want that, but they're not doing it because they want it. They want it because they think this is the right thing. This is my duty. And that's the way in which psychological egoism is applying. It's that not everybody is falling into a category of altruism or egoism. And first of all, Don, I want to say, you know, very shameful of you to show up here with not only a better beard than me, but a better head of hair than me. Man, last time I saw you, you had, you did not have the beard, but the beard looks great, man. I appreciate it. I want to certainly longer, better, I think, is a matter of taste. I think you're wrong. There's a level of courage there. I'm just, I'm just afraid to grow it out as long as you, you know, I'm up in front of kids every day, you know, but looking good, man. So I want to back up and actually, based on what you said there, Don, I'm reminded of utilitarianism. There were echoes of utilitarianism and what you said there. And I know that there's difference here. I wonder if, and I'm not an objectivist, I love Inran's works, but I wouldn't call myself an objectivist. I'm more objectivist questioning, curious. And I want to know, would you say that objectivism is more deontological or more utilitarian? Because the way that you put it, it almost sounded like utilitarian arguments about, well, no, it's not just about pursuing John Stuart Mill, pursuing your short-term pleasure and living hedonistically and binging and being a total hedonist and then ruining your life and engaging in, you know, unprotected sex with multiple people and, you know, losing your job because you're a drunk and because you're in the pursuit of pleasure. What utilitarianism is about is long-term pleasure. It's about higher pleasures versus lower pleasures. It is much better to read Shakespeare than to watch The Simpsons, etc. How would you say that objectivism distinguishes itself from, you know, philosophies that use a kind of pain-pleasure matrix that argue for the sort of common good, which I know is problematic for objectivists, Don. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot there. So objectivism is definitely not deontological, which is do your duty because it's your duty. Consequences be damned. It's not utilitarian for a number of reasons, but one of which utilitarianism is a variant of altruism. So, I mean, the way Mill argues is he said everybody wants happiness, so that therefore is the thing we should pursue. But what they should pursue is Aristotle. Aristotle says that as well, correct? Everyone. But I'm not finished with his reasoning. He goes on then to say, so what you should pursue is the happiness of everyone, which you only count as this much. And so you need to be completely oblivious to your personal values if what the happiness of the whole requires is, and so like effective altruism is a utilitarian movement largely. And what it says is pick your job, not because you want it, but because it serves other people. So Peter Singer talks about a philosophy student he had with a really promising career who said, no, I'm going to go work on Wall Street, not because I want to work on Wall Street, but so I can make more money to give to the poor. So it's complete obliteration to self. Now, you can ask is, is Objectivism consequential? A consequentialist philosophy like utilitarianism? And it's not. And that, but that's a sort of complicated point. But it's part of Inrian's view is that the way you establish the good is by the value is you want to achieve your wellbeing. And you have to think about what your wellbeing requires. But part of what your wellbeing requires is a certain kind of virtuous action that constitute your self-interest. So it's not consequentialist in the sense of, well, there's these goods and just go after them however you want to. It's there's these goods that require virtue and part of what it means to pursue your self-interest is to be living a virtuous life. So it's a subtle point, but it's it's profound in the way that it distinguishes her from the kind of consequentialist line of thought in the history philosophy. So in that sense, she's closer to Aristotle in the way that he thinks the good is living a kind of life, not just the the sort of ends made possible by that life. Great. So I want to just repeat to you, Don, the question that I asked your own, we're here to talk about the Fountainhead. I did a lengthy review of the Fountainhead. It's in my top five all-time favorite books. It is, Inrian wouldn't like this, but it's to me it's sublime. Okay. So I wanted to ask you, Don, what is the Fountainhead really about at its core? What ideas do you think the Fountainhead is exploring? And why should people read this book? And then we'll move on to your own after that. Well, I find it helpful to think about why Inrian wrote it and what she thought she was doing and that her goal as a writer was to present the ideal man or which is a moral ideal. What would somebody who's actually living up to the moral ideal look like? What kind of life would they lead? What kind of choices would they make? And so this is a vision of the ideal, but it's focused around a basic distinction she saw in the world between people who were first-handed and what she called people who were second-handed, people who were fundamentally focused on a life of creativity and independent thought versus people whose whole orientation was, I'm going to serve others. I'm going to conform to others. I'm going to rebel blindly against others just so I can be a contrarian. I'm going to try to dominate others. It was that no other people can be an important part of life. And indeed, one of the really striking things are these deep human relationships that her ideal human being, her moral ideal engages in and develops, but that your focus is on your relationship to reality. And that means being an independent thinker, pursuing independent goals, supporting your life by your own independent mind. So that's kind of like the, I think the core thing that the novel is doing is it's showing to live a moral life is to live an independent life. But at the end of the day, the way I think about the novel is it's about this really amazing man who cares deeply about building a career that he loves and triumphing over a lot of really hard obstacles. Yeah, that's great. So another thing that I want to talk about, and you do get that sense of what you were talking about, Don, in the book, one thing that I think that people don't talk about enough is that the fountain head actually has a lot to say about cancel culture and the way that sort of group think drives cancel culture. And I'm not talking about rights here. And I'm not talking about the fact that a company, say, has no obligation to employ someone that they don't want to employ. Obviously, that's true. I'm talking about the larger phenomenon and why it's happening. It's something that Rourke struggles with for nearly the entire novel, right? There are so many examples in this book of the way in which these institutions, these intellectual monocultures can expel anyone who thinks differently. In fact, I couldn't help but think of this atrocious new concept of ESG. That's exactly what I was going to raise as soon as you started talking about this. Do you want to elaborate on that? What is ESG? Can you explain that to my audience who might not have heard of that? I mean, ESG kind of arose in the investing world and it's the idea that we should judge companies and judge them financially as investors, not primarily or solely by how well they do in terms of achieving profit, but by how well they accord with certain ideas about environmental, that's the E, social, things like diversity, that's the S, and in governance, things like CEO pay. But really what it amounts to is egalitarianism and environmentalism. It's our companies following the ideals set out by environmentalists and by egalitarians. And it's this idea that I mean, Yaron and I talked about it a few short years ago, I think two or three years ago, I was like, had you heard this thing? And he kind of heard of it and it was bubbling. And now it's everywhere. And basically you can't explain how it got everywhere by a whole bunch of people thought, yeah, you know what really is going to make companies great is if oil companies stop producing oil and if instead of hiring the best people for the boards, we look at their skin color and try to judge them. This is clearly an intellectual fad that got taken over for a number of reasons, but one of the driving reasons is conformity. And you really see that in the fountainhead. Einran is often put as, oh, all her heroes are businessmen and all businessmen are heroes. That's definitely not fair in Atlas Shrug because some of the villains are businessmen as well. But in the fountainhead, what you really see is she thinks that the businessmen, even though she admires businesses and enterprise, there's so much conformity. There's so much hostility towards innovators because it's dominant in the culture that we live in a secondhand culture and that it's a real achievement for anybody to innovate and do something new. And there's a lot about the dynamics of how conformity works and how it's cashed in on by people who know that they're in effect have useful idiots at their disposal. And you get a lot of really deep dynamics about how that plays out in a society. Yaron, I would love for you to follow up on that, Yaron, if you wouldn't mind. I mean, the villain of the novel is an intellectual who understands the dynamics of conformity, understands how to shape popular views. I mean, if he was a real-life person, he'd be the guy behind the ESG movement in a sense that he'd be the guy who wrote all the newspaper articles, wrote up ads, appeared on television, made the argument, if you can call it an argument, for ESG, and then everybody conformed to him. He's the guy telling people who should be canceled and who should not. And he admits this. His goal in life is to destroy the achiever. It's to celebrate mediocrity and to tear down achievement and innovation and success and really to destroy the hero of the novel, Howard Ruck. And so you get very much kind of the intellectual atmosphere of cancel culture. You get the conformity. You get the intellectual leadership. But what Rand presents is the antidote to cancel culture, which I think is so lacking in the culture we have today, and then is courage. She has a character who basically says, I don't care. I mean, you cancel me. I'll fight you when it's relevant. I'll walk away and ignore you when that's the appropriate thing to do. But I'm not going to let you change my values. I'm not going to let you change my life. I'm not going to let you hurt me in any substantial way. I'm not going to go cower. I'm not going to go grovel. I'm not going to apologize. I'm not going to admit there's something wrong. There's so many in our cancel culture who attacked tend to do. They tend to grovel and they tend to compromise and they tend to appease. He never appeases. He never compromises. He never gives an inch. And she shows that when you do that, and I think this is still true even today, you can win. And indeed, you will win. You'll win not just professionally as he does, but you'll win in life. You'll win by living a successful, fantastic life. So the solution for a lot of people for cancel culture, the people being canceled, is to stand up to the bastards. And I think that is really illustrated in the front. And I appreciate that. And yeah, just reading and the past couple of weeks, the past month or so reading this book, you have all of these corrupted, rotten institutions that have no real standards, but who basically police the field of architecture and work to keep the atmosphere of architecture this kind of self-dealing fraternity. And you guys pointed out second handers of what Rand would call second handers. And I feel like Rand really gets at the way that these guilds and these professional associations work so tirelessly to gatekeep and make sure that people like Rourke are locked out of the profession. I mean, like in the very first chapter of the book, you can't escape this, which is why I've been telling people this is a novel about cancel culture. In the very first chapter, Rourke is being expelled from the Stanton Institute for refusing to design buildings that essentially have no integrity. And so I think in large part, this is a story about, in part, this is a story about this phenomenon that today we would call cancel culture, just the way that the unions and these different guilds and academia and the government and the press all collude to snap into gear to keep someone like Rourke from achieving any success. And for me, that's one of the most exciting aspects of the story. And I think it has so much to say about what we're going through today that Rourke is surrounded by conformity. And we're constantly asking, will Rourke get to display his genius? Will he finally be able to convince someone with power and money that his work is brilliant? Or will he have to sacrifice his integrity? And Rourke is a hero, I would say, precisely because he is the one person who will never sacrifice his integrity. He's constantly being canceled. I mean, there's this, you pointed this out earlier your own, there's this long stretch of the book where Rourke is just like locked out of the profession. And he has to work at like a granite quarry because no one will hire him. And not because he isn't good, but precisely because he is good. And so the whole book is just filled with suspense and tension. Will someone give Rourke a chance? Will he finally get his big break? And so I wanted to ask you your own. And then we can go to Don is what does the found head ultimately have to say about cancel culture? And also how to beat it? Because there are solutions from the new right, which is to say how to beat it is to use the government to stifle industry to engage in protectionism. Yeah, the new right wants to use cancel culture to beat cancel culture. It just wants cancel culture in its control. Which is the equivalent of using racism to beat racism. Yes, which is what the left is trying to do on the issue of race. But I think the most important issue here is to understand, and this is what Ironman illustrates in the found head, to understand where cancel culture comes from. And it comes from the hatred of the innovator. It comes from the hatred of genius. It comes from the hatred of success, of prosperity, of happiness, of somebody who is living his own life by his own standard. So Howard Rourke is hated because he's the good, because he's successful, because he's self interested. Cancel culture comes from a society that doesn't want people to stand on their own two feet, doesn't want people to live their own lives by their own standard, doesn't want people to achieve and be successful. And in a sense, the only antidote to cancel culture is rejection of this philosophy and ideology of envy, which is hatred of the good for being the good, hatred of somebody because of their virtues. It is a rejection of the idea that people should not see. The thing that's so destructive about the morality of altruism is not so much that people are running out there to become Mother Teresa, because nobody wants to be the Mother Teresa, nobody actually goes out and becomes Mother Teresa. The real evil of altruism of the philosophy that says that what matters is other people, not you, is that you don't matter. That is the real evil of it is it teaches us not to think about our own happiness, not to think about how to live the best life that we can, not to think about our own integrity, not to make the most of our life, not to be great innovators and successful and stick to our values and be Howard Rourke's to the extent that we can give an ability. And the only way to get rid of that kind of envious mentality is to get rid of the ideology and therefore the morality that makes it possible, which is a morality of selflessness. It's a morality that tells you not to be self-interested. And as long as that is a morality that's dominant in a culture, you will have various forms of cancelling. Look, the church canceled Galileo for thousands of years. Tribes and societies have basically burnt at the stake, which is an extreme form of cancelling. Any innovator and any genius who challenged the status quo, the cancelling going on today is mild as compared to the cancelling that the Catholic Church engaged in, or the cancelling that the religious societies have engaged in for thousands of years and the tribal and national societies have engaged in for thousands of years. So we have always, society has always gone after the individual list, gone after the man, woman who stood out, definitely who lived by their own standards. And that's what has to change. And to change that, you're not going to get government-involved. You're not going to get, you have to adopt a different set of ideas. You have to adopt a different philosophy, a different morality. Don. Well, so part of what Yaron said was that the problem with altruism isn't that people are becoming Mother Teresa's. And I think that leads into exactly what I wanted to say, which is the main reason that it exists and the main reason, the main way it comes up in life is it's not meant for you to practice. It's meant to saddle you with guilt. And that's part of what we get with Tui is that he doesn't actually need people or want people to try to live up to the demands. And indeed, he has his niece who does try to live up the demands and he's not particularly interested in her. It's they want to settle you with guilt because then they can actually order you around and control you. And that gives us that the novel shows us then, well, what's required to defeat that? And it's not accepting the guilt, not being coward. And if you think about something like ESG, if you just had businessmen who said, no, this is a dumb trend, I'm not going to sacrifice my shareholders. I'm not going to sacrifice my judgment of what's best for this company. If you had one or two major CEOs stand up and say that, then these things couldn't even get off the ground. But then for you as an individual, part of what we see in the book without giving you spoilers is you don't need to win over everybody in order to be able to live your life the way you want to. Rourke doesn't need everybody to accept his architecture in order to be able to build. He just has to find his kind of people. And I think that's a real clue is that if your Twitter mob goes after you, like it's awful, like it's not fun, but that's not the end of the world. Because what you need in order to live a full life is you need to find a handful of good people to work with, a handful of good people to be friends with, at least one person to be in a romantic relationship with. And that there are still in the world a lot of rational people and at least mostly rational people. And part of the attitude should be like, fine, cancel me. The people who matter to me won't. Okay. Unless I do something objectively bad. So, Yaron, what is our modern day equivalent of Galt's Gulch? How can we do this? How can we form this? We're not doing a good enough job of it. I think both of you would agree with me here. I think that's something that all three of us are interested in. How do we form our own Galt's Gulch? How do we compromise? Do we want fusionism, right? Do we want a fusion between people with different interests who aren't objectivists and who are traditionalists but believe in a certain kind of liberty and people who believe in protecting American sovereignty? Is Galt's Gulch kind of, how do we achieve that? Well, Galt's Gulch is clearly not fusionist, right? I mean, Galt's Gulch is a community of people who all have the same philosophy and guided by the same philosophy and living in isolation from the rest of the world. So, I'm not sure right now we want a Galt's Gulch. Right now what we want is to change the world. Right now what we want is to make the world a better place and to start moving the world in a better direction. And for that, I don't think fusionism necessarily is a good thing but certainly injecting good ideas into the culture, into a variety of different places in the culture, into a variety of different movements in the culture is a very positive thing. It's the way you move things in our direction. Certainly there is no objectivist, iron-rand, political movement out there. It's way too early. There are way too few of us in order to achieve anything. But I think she's having Rand, the Fountainhead at La Shrug, have and are having a profound impact on the lives of individuals, on the lives of millions of individuals. And in that sense, maybe there's some fusionism within the minds of certain people who maybe are picking and choosing certain things for my Rand that they like. And over time, I think she'll have a bigger impact. I think over time, she will impact people more and in a more wholesome way with the rejection of the fusionism, rejection of the negative aspects that people adopt. And over time, she will gain real impact and real influence on the culture. I think even today, we live in a world that's far better than if there had never been iron-rand and the Fountainhead at La Shrug had not been written. Not only because our individual lives would not be as good, but also because I think Rand has had an influence on people's view of what capitalism is. Rand has had an influence on people's views, what morality is. Not as much of an influence as we would like, but still an influence that the margin has made the world a better place than it otherwise would be. Yeah. And I should mention this, that every time I bring up iron-rand, I work at a charter school, very intelligent students, high-achieving type A students, a suburb right outside of Boston. And when my students hear about her, what I usually hear is the capitalist, right? This is the capitalist who, and then they say, they pick out, they cherry pick a couple of things that she said. Doesn't she hate gay people? Doesn't she hate, didn't she say something really mean about our colonization of America and our treatment of Native Americans and things like that? And so they are, which is of course why I am trying to change the perception of iron-rand. I'm using my student edition, the Iron-rand Institute copies. I am teaching my students the fountain head to try to change that. Let me change gears here a little bit. And I also want to talk about Howard Roark as an iron-rand hero. We're here to talk about the fountain head and whether ordinary people can live like Roark. In other words, is it possible to live a life completely consistent with your values or say, objectivist values without having to compromise at all? Because Roark is famously not willing to compromise. He can get the most lucrative deal. He's in New York City. He's working for Guy Francoin. He's got the world at his fingertips. And the moment that Francoin asks him to do something, to design something that compromises his values, he's out. He's done. He makes his stand. He quits. And what I would say is that the thing is that there's another strategy aside from the one that Roark pursues that ordinary people such as myself pursue. There's another way of handling this cancel culture, this situation. You have to do sometimes what you have to do. You have to go about your business. You have to do what is asked of you and bide your time until you're in power. And then once you've learned the culture, once you've put in the work, once you're in charge, then you can work on changing the system. And look, guys, I get it. I work at a charter school. I have to bite the bullet all the time. But it's a trade-off because it earns me the opportunity to teach lesions of students and to do it in my own way. So, yes, I have to sit through degrading and ludicrous training seminars that involve critical race theory. And I have to roll my eyes when some stupid, fattish educational theory is shoved down my throat by some bureaucrat or some overpaid consultant. But at the end of the day, I teach six classes a day, five days a week, and I get to do it my own way. And no one bothers me. And I get to teach this book. And I could certainly go out in the blaze of glory. I could certainly make a standing quit. But then I'd be bagging groceries for a living. And so I guess what I'm asking you, guys, is another way of putting this is, is Howard Rourke real? Or is he just an objectivist fantasy? What can we do to be more like Howard Rourke? What is it going to take for the average person who is not a genius to stand up against these forces and to do what is right? And is this—is the model that Ayn Rand's setting out for us? Is that realistic? Can everyone just be the chiseled, jod Ayn Rand hero in the workplace? Or are the forces just too daunting? I want to start with you, Don, and then go to your own. So there's always a question when you're reading fiction of exactly what you're supposed to take away from it. And I think part of what's going on in your question is that it's blending two different things. It's blending, what is the principles that cause us to—that Rourke embodies, that causes us to admire him? And are those principles real and right? And then there's a question of, well, how do you actually apply them in practice? And would you apply them in your life exactly the way Rourke would seem to or something like that? And so I think the principle that you get in the fountainhead is don't compromise your values. That is, don't sacrifice what you think is right. And indeed, a person who follows the kind of strategy of kind of set aside my personal ideals until I get in power and then I'm going to be able to do what I want to do, there's a whole character whose trajectory we see precisely that way. And that's Gail Weynan. That's exactly what he tries to do is he thinks, yeah, I'll compromise my integrity. I'll compromise my values. And then when I'm in power, then I'll be able to do what I really want and fight for what I believe. And we see—you can read the novel to see what Rand thinks of that. But the problem with Gail Weynan is often Gail Weynan's end up like Jeff Bezos or Jack. Who's Jack Dorsey, right? Is that they will set aside their reason and do what the mob wants. And then they don't stand up for their principles until they're out of power, right? But that's the whole thing. The thing is, if you sacrifice your principles because, oh, it's inconvenient to stand by them now, it's never going to be convenient to stand by them. And indeed, it becomes less and less convenient because you have to more and more rationalize abandoning them in the first place. But then there's a real question of what does it mean not to compromise your principles? Is working in an organization where you don't agree with all the ideas, is that a sacrifice of your principles? Well, you'd have to talk about specific cases, but often it's not. So, I mean, part of what a novel is doing is it's making issues that are kind of murky in real life very stark and clear. And so, Inran is giving this guy who doesn't compromise to the T even in the kind of compromises that aren't compromises of principle. She wouldn't show, you know, Rourke going, okay, I'll work at this architecture. But even, I mean, actually, I take that back because the Found Head gives a really good example of exactly what you're talking about. Rourke does work with Guy Franccon. He will work even though he doesn't respect the kind of work that they turn out. He doesn't agree with the approach of his other employers. But his view is as long as I personally don't have to undermine my work, I'm not going to do it. And so, that's the challenge in life is what does it really mean to compromise your principles? And many of the things that people think will life requires compromise, they're right. But it doesn't, you're not compromising your principles, you're compromising on a particular concrete, or they're wrong. And no, you really should stand by your principles in that case. There's another like, there's another architecture firm beyond Guy Franccon. And I'm forgetting his name for some reason. And it's this like heterodox libertarian guy who's like, okay, I'm going to employ, you know, like five different people, and we're going to have our modernist, and we're going to have our Victorian, and we're going to have our, you know, medievalist, and we're going to have our, and he's like, everyone can just submit their ideas, and then I'm going to make every architectural design an admixture of those things. Do you guys remember who that is? Is it, it's not Austin Heller, obviously, it's I'm going blank on the name right now, unfortunately. Yeah, me too. It really doesn't matter. But you do see that principle at work throughout where Rourke has to sacrifice and compromise a little bit of his values. And he has to say, I'm going to design this building and they call him modernist. And he just says, okay, Yaron, what do you think about that, about that question that I asked Don? Well, first, I don't think how it works sacrifices. I mean, sacrifices is a loaded word and it's important. I triggered you guys, I said sacrifice, sorry about that. It's a triggering word for objectivists. I mean, sacrifice, it's just the way it's used in a culture and our culture uses it very loosely to mean a lot of different things. And I think generally, particularly with moral concepts, it's really, really important to be very clear what you mean. And sacrifice is not just doing something where, you know, you might give up something in the short run to for a long term benefit, or you might give up something that's not very important to you. The whole point of sacrifice to give up something important to you for something less important to you or for nothing. The whole point of a sacrifice is to suffer, is to be less well off at the end of it, to well off in the broader sense, not just monetarily. So sacrifice is not just to postpone, you know, gratification of this postpone success. But that's how it's used often. And it's a shame because it dilutes the power of these concepts. Yeah, but in your run, what advice would you give to, let's say that you have an objectivist, a fan of Iron Man's ideas and her novels, who goes to work for Google and has to sit through these trainings and has to work in such a way that compromises daily his values. What advice is that really realistic to be the sort of Howard Roark, the reindeer hero? It depends on the extent to which you are truly sacrificing your values, right? I mean, if they're truly sacrificing their integrity and they're sacrificing their values, and they're not getting anywhere because, you know, they're not completely dedicated to this job because then they're not enjoying it, they're not having fun. Then leave Google, right? Google is not the only game in town. There are lots of other companies out there. And it is true that as society becomes worse, as the political environment, the cultural environment, the philosophical environment becomes worse, then your options become limited. The fountainhead is written in a particular world, as the world becomes more oppressive. The number of options for you shrink, the number of options for you to stand up and actually be successful in life. This is why liberty is so important, right? You know, I'm going to start giving this talk because, you know, people take freedom and liberty for granted, but why should we care about freedom of liberty? We should care about freedom for liberty because it's the only way we can be happy, right? Happiness is not possible under authoritarianism. Happiness is not possible when all your options are blocked. Happiness is not possible in a culture that does not allow you to do anything to act consistent with your values. So what's the point of living? So I don't think we're quite there in the world in which we live today. Don and I have a friend who left Facebook, he had a senior position in Facebook, making a lot of money at Facebook, doing phenomenally well in Facebook. And at some point, he said, you know, this is, I can't stay in this place. It requires me to compromise. It's an environment that's not pleasant. I'm not enjoying my work because, you know, I have to live in this kind of atmosphere and he went and he started his own company. I mean, ultimately, you can join other companies, you can go and be a startup. I mean, the world is still, we still live in a world in which there are options. And what we're trying to fight for is to prevent the world from going in a direction where there's no options. And indeed, we want to do is create more options, more optionality for people. So I'm not quite ready to tell people, forget about morality, forget about life, forget about happiness, forget about being successful and anything you do, life sucks just given compromise and sell out. I don't think that's the world in which we live in yet. Maybe that day will come, but that day, when it comes, there will be a tragic, sad, horrible day in which we will have to say we failed and in which it's time to really think about creating gold's gulch or moving or really shaking the world up in some dramatic way. Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned all of that because I had Sora Bamari on my show, on my program back when it was Western Canada. He was literally my last guest and I decided I wanted to switch it over to this different book. So you decided to have a guest who is against the Western Canada non-principle? Well, what happened, well, your own, what happened was, is that I wrote an article, a very long 5,500 word article in Quillette, basically abusing him for a long stretch of it. And he DMed me and he said he was really offended by the way that I wrote about him and he wanted to know if I would review his book. And he listed all of the reasons why he was offended by what I said about him and he felt I treated him unfairly and he was so nice to me and he reached out to me and he chatted with me and he was just so friendly. And so I reviewed his book, The Unbroken Thread, and he said he wanted to come on my podcast and talk to me. So he came on and talked to me and we had a really nice conversation. And what I said to him was I brought up the example. I just created this example on the fly. I said, imagine that you are a drunkard, right? You're addicted to some substance like you're on, you're addicted to drugs or alcohol, and we lock you in a cage, right? And then you become sober. That's great, right? You become sober because I locked you in a cage and you have no access to alcohol. Do we get to give moral credit to the man who abstains from using alcohol because he was forced to abstain from using alcohol? And so I told him that I think it seems to me that your worldview is that we should give moral credit to people. I said you wouldn't give credit to Tom Brady if he had absolutely no free will and he was just throwing touchdowns because God was allowing him to throw touchdowns. But at the same time, you're saying that we should have this society that rewards, that says that the common good is based on coercion and he was not having it, man. He was so mad at me. He was angry. He disagreed with me and he said, you don't understand what I'm talking about. And man, he just really was not happy with me. And I think that's a lot of what you were talking about is I just don't believe we can have morality with coercion and that sort of thing. What do you think about that, Don, to bring you into this? Well, I'm not familiar enough with his views. I know Iran is quite familiar. He's a Catholic integralist. I know broadly what it is, but what I will say is certainly the moral is the chosen. And part of the view is that morality is not about winning moral points. So it's not about, oh, should we bless this person with moral credit or bless him with blame? It's guiding you towards a life worth living. And their view is that, no, we're not concerned with individuals living a life worth living, that there are certain things that we're just declaring are intrinsically good, inherently good. And if you have that view that the good is not a life that a person is living and it's intimately connected to their choices and actions, then of course you can force the good on people. Indeed, any view that says the good is something apart from the kind of actual activity of a human individual living their life ends up seeing physical force as good. Because why not? If what's good is obedient, well, think about it. The basic views of good are its obedience to God or obedience to other people. Well, if obedience is the standard, then you sure as hell can make somebody obey by force. That's what I told him. And I said, Sorab, here's the thing. I would call that man good if he had broken his alcoholism and I invited him out to a bar and he was surrounded by alcohol and he abstained because he had overcome his addiction. But Sorab seemed to believe that if I locked someone in a cage and they could not have done otherwise, right, the counterfactual, that somehow moral. I don't understand how that's moral. Well, because his standard is obedience, right? So you have to be obedient to God. It doesn't matter if it's chosen or not chosen. What matters is your action. What matters is if God says don't drink, then what matters is you don't drink. How you come about not to drink whether because you're cursed or because you choose not to drink is a secondary issue. The main thing is that you don't do what God told you not to do. And part of what's tripping you up is that you have an understandable attitude, which is, yeah, but does the person not drink and get moral credit? But the whole view is we don't care about that guy getting moral credit. We care about the good being achieved. The good is not him getting moral credit. The good is that he's not breaking God's law, right? So that's the view is that there's a good. It's not about you getting moral credit or lacking moral credit. It's about us obeying whatever morality is. The moral authority is commanding us to do. And notice that morality, the conventional morality always leads to force. So you're not helping the poor enough. And the standard of goodness is helping the poor. So we're going to tax you. Now, how many people object to taxation when it's positioned as we're just forcing you to do what you should do anyway, we're just forcing you to help the poor, which you should be doing. And most people say, yeah, okay, I get it. Fine. Right. And they don't object to it because it's small, right? And so this idea that coercion is counter to morality requires a certain view of morality and requires a certain view of the purpose of morality. And their view is not shared by mainstream philosophers, and it's not shared by religion. Religion is full of force. God is constantly using force on people to attain whatever ends he deems necessary. I mean, the God of the Old Testament, at least. Yeah, so just not the real God, the God of the Old Testament. Right, right. So going along with that, I do also want to get to, since we're talking about the fountainhead, I've got my student copy here, I've got my my other copy here. I also want to talk about the antagonist here, Ellsworth Tuey, the sort of collectivist bad guy. And I want to know what you gentlemen think. Why you think he's such a compelling villain? What is Ellsworth Tuey's ideology? What is it that he does and says that makes him such a vivid and memorable protagonist? Why is his ideology so attractive to so many people, especially young people? Guys, what do you think? But what's interesting about Tuey is that he's one of the few bad guys, and I don't think there's a bad guy like him in the real world, because what makes him unique is how aware he is of his own badness, right? How aware he is of what he's doing, why he's doing it, what he's trying to achieve. He's like Dr. Evil, right? He's like Dr. Evil. And I don't think there are people, most bad guys, maybe no bad guys in the world, actually fully intellectually, philosophically, can put words to what they're doing as Ellsworth Tuey does. And in that sense, Tuey is not collectivist. He is collectivism to achieve his goal, which is ultimately nihilism. That is, Tuey wants to destroy. He wants to knock down. He wants to bring about the mediocrity and destroy all able, but it's not even mediocrity. He just wants to rip out, tear up, and destroy. He is motivated by hatred. And the collectivism is a tool basically to destroy the opposite of collectivism, which is the individualism, which is the source of achievement. So what Ellsworth Tuey recognizes, which most bad guys don't recognize explicitly, is that the source of achievement, the source of values, the source of success, the source of anything beautiful and anything that's been achieved is the individual. Is the individual mind, the individual integrity, the individual productive capacity. And that's what he wants to destroy. And the way to destroy it is to feed and to provide ammunition to the various collectivists. And in that sense, he's not life, right, and he's not left. He's just anti-individualist. And if he thought that he could destroy individualism by preaching fascism and what's associated with the right, he would preach that. If he thought that what was going to be destroyed the individualist is to preach communism, he'd preach that. He is dedicated to destruction. And he recognizes the individual as the enemy. Yeah. And I like how you pointed out that he has a fascination with the lowest and he prioritizes and values what is lowest. So if you actually, if you read closely, he actually praises fertilizer. He praises fertilizer. He praises what is lowest in man? He praises slums. He praises inaction. He praises nothingness in a kind of metaphysical nihilistic fashion in a kind of Buddhist fashion. He's a nihilist. He's a metaphysical nihilist. Everything that is lowest and most graded about man, he celebrates that. And I wonder if there's an ideology for that. Don, do you want to follow up on the question that I asked your own? And I'm also fascinated with just this idea that he, that there's a kind of archetypal person that is, that celebrates the lowest, the lowest common denominator, the most, the victim, the it just seems like a not a life affirming philosophy, Don. No, but part of what you should get from the fountainhead and definitely from Atlas Shrugged is that is not like some weird ideology you haven't heard from. That's the morality that we've all been taught since we're kids. Like that is what altruism is all about. That's exactly what unites every kind of variant of collectivism. And it's why it becomes appealing. It becomes appealing because these are movements that speak to the idea that if the good is sacrifice, what does that mean? It means that the more you achieve, the more moral you are, the more honest you are, the more values you create, the more that you owe those who haven't achieved them. And so it's complete inversion that if you think about the kind of Greek orientation or Inran's orientation, it's that if you exercise the effort to achieve values, that is what entitles you to them. You know, if you plant the corn, that's what gives you a moral right to the corn. And then what altruism says is that no, it's precisely because you planted the corn that means you don't have a right to it. So Thomas Sol had this quote about, I never understood why it's greedy to want to keep the money you earn, but it's moral to want to take it from somebody else, something like that. And Inran addresses exactly that kind of point. And her view is she does understand it. That's exactly what altruism says, that you gain the moral right to something through need, through a lack, through being like the lower you are to the ground, the worse off you are, then that's what gives you moral status. Victimhood is more morally noble than heroism is basically what it amounts to. And so I mean, yeah, we see that all around us. And it's why Tui is so powerful and effective. And if you were going to say kind of what variant, the most open variant that you see today, where we get something like Tui's explicitness is egalitarianism, because egalitarianism openly is an attack on achievement. And on any form of achieving something positive and said, no, we need to level down. And so in that sense, it's the closest to a Tui-like ideology that is out there. Yeah. Yeah. And guys, another thing I wanted to talk about is something that I think often gets overlooked when we're talking about the fountain head. And I'm talking about the ideas that she explores related to architecture and originality. Howard Rourke spends a good portion of the novel criticizing derivative art, art of the past that just kind of copies outdated, worn out, uninspired forms, either that or she's criticizing these modernists who don't have any values who are beholden to these trendy sort of fads in architecture. Their work has no coherent unifying themes. They're just doing what is popular at the moment. And there's a quote here. And Don, I saw this on your website. There was a piece that you wrote. I think, guys, everyone, my audience listening to this, you should check out Don's writing. You should go to Don's website. I'll link to it in the description. She says, and this is describing Rourke's philosophy. She says, every piece of it is there because the house needs it and for no other reason. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of the masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction and emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets at your own eyes go through a structural process. When you look at the house, you can follow each step. You see it rise. You see what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, moldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall. They have a solid columns and single solid windows, six floors high. And then Rourke basically then goes on to describe this fad and architecture of designing these buildings in this kind of second-hand fashion of building structures with no organizing principles, structures that just make their clients feel good, feel virtuous, that aren't true in the most important sense. And Rourke says, do you understand the difference? Your house was made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house and the determining motive of the other is in the audience. And so I wanted to know what you guys thought of the metaphor that Ayn Rand is bringing up here in the fountain head. She's not just in a vacuum abstractly using architecture as this kind of like plot device. Architecture is a stand-in. The structure of buildings, the integrity, the structural integrity of buildings is a metaphor for integrity in general, philosophically. Jaron, what do you think about that, about how architecture and originality is explored in this book? Yeah, I mean, she is very much drawing a parallel between the integrity of an artwork, the integrity that is necessitated by the architecture, by a particular function, by a particular space, by a particular place, by the particular materials and all of that, with the integrity that our particular biological construct requires of human beings. We're structured in a particular way. We have a particular biological nature. We have, therefore, a particular way of living, a particular way of living that's only one way consistent with that structure, that is living by reason. And as an individual, we have certain values that we can't reject or deny, and those values are the ones that must guide us. So there is an integrity to the building, there's an integrity to the individual, but there's also an integrity to human beings, core human beings, and that is that they have to live by their mind. And if they don't live by their mind, and they don't live by their mind as independent beings, then they become meaningless. And it parallels this idea of think of how many people do things that we call, you know, they're just virtue signaling, that is, they're telling the world that they're good, they're not really being good, they just want people to think that they're good. And what they care about is not being good, what they care about is that people think that they're good. Well, that parallels exactly that building that she's describing that where the owner wants to get the ooze and the audience, but the building makes no sense and the building doesn't actually provide the person who's going to live in it with the kind of values that it could and should. So yeah, she's very much paralleling, you know, what it means to be a second-hander and both in the response to art and in the art itself versus what it means to be a truly independent human being. Yeah, but Jordan, I think you called it an analogy. It's not an analogy, it's the exact same thing. So her view is that the central human activity is valuing. And what is valuing? Valuing is establishing certain standards in a given sphere of action and then organizing everything around that standard. So you're writing a book, you have a theme, the integrating idea, and then you make everything fit to it. You're trying to build a building, you have a solution to an architectural problem, and then that sets the standard for everything. She thinks that what it looks like to pursue values in every part of life is that you have a central idea that then you're organizing everything according to. And then she thinks that that's what life as such should amount to is that you have an idea and organizing theme about your life and that everything is kind of integrated around that. And I mean, in philosophy, the concept here is that you have a standard of value that you're using to evaluate things as right or wrong. That's your organizing principle. No, it's a standard of value. So for instance, what is the good? What is the bad? Well, it depends on my standard. And in architecture, it's what makes for a good building. You have to establish standards. So it's that evaluation, which is the central activity involved in pursuing values, you have to establish standards. And then the reason that you have integrity is anything that abandons that standard is bad by virtue of the very fact that it's not aligned with what you're trying to achieve. Yeah. So I know in a few minutes, Yaron has to run pretty soon. And so I wanted to give a chance for, I have a good friend, my good buddy, Mike, over at Mike's Books. Mike is, and this is something I've been complaining about for a while, is that I really want to see the Ayn Rand Institute. Again, I'm not criticizing you guys. It's just something that from my vantage point, from my perspective, that I think you guys could do to get a much, much wider reach, which is that Booktube is really big right now. And you have these fantasy and sci-fi Booktubers, and they're reviewing all of these books. And these videos are getting 30,000 views. One of my good buddies, Mike, over at the channel, Mike's Books, you guys can Google this. Mike has over 70,000 followers, and he's growing really rapidly. He just started his channel a couple of years ago, and he is just very smart and shrewd. And he loves Ayn Rand. And he's never made a video about her. And one of the things he's worried about is he feels like he's getting shadow banned. And if he talks about Ayn Rand, he's worried that he's just really conscientious about his business and his channel is growing. And so I went on to his Discord channel and I asked his followers, I said, I'm having your own brook on. I'm having Don Watkins on. What questions do you want me to ask him? He's red, fountain head, anthem, Atlas shrugged. He loves Ayn Rand. But he doesn't really review her. And he said, so I asked the question and he said, yeah, I have a question. What do these guys think of all the 20-somethings that whine about Ayn Rand's books and have never read them? And I hope you guys reach out to Mike because he's a great guy. And he personally finds it weird that he feels like a lot of the criticism coming at Ayn Rand comes from people that have never really dived or dipped into her books. And so what do you guys have to say about that? Well, I mean, this is the generation of TikTok, right? I mean, this is not a generation that seems to want to read an 1,100 page book. And they get sound bites from, I don't know, Wikipedia or from TikTok or wherever it is, teachers, from professors, from the culture generally about Ayn Rand. They don't bother to investigate it. They don't bother to check it out for themselves. And they just repeat the kind of silly bromides that are told about the falsehoods. And that's the level at which they engage, which is sad and disappointing. So yes, I mean, it's very, very dangerous to criticize a book you haven't read. It's very, very dangerous to criticize a philosophy or set of ideas you haven't really studied, you haven't really dug into. And almost all of their criticisms are false or are just completely out of context and lack an understanding of what she's actually getting to and what is actually, what is actually involved. Don? I mean, I 100% agree with that. But it's even, look, they are being conformist. It's my teachers told me X, and not just about Ayn Rand, it's my teachers told me that to be a good person is to have a certain view of LBG issues. It's to have certain views on racism. And I can't question that. And anybody who seems to question it, and I don't even have to look into it too much, if I hear that somebody questions it, I automatically know they're wrong. I automatically know they're bad. And part of what that's rejecting, this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, it's rejecting the whole enterprise of philosophy. The whole enterprise of philosophy is that the conventional wisdom in your culture can be 100% wrong. The fact that it seems self-evident, because everybody agrees to it, that can be totally wrong. And that you need philosophy precisely to question the deepest assumptions that everybody around you might be making about the nature of reality, the nature of the good, the kind of political system that's right. And part of what Ayn Rand's doing is offering new answers to those questions. And that's what the whole project of philosophy is. If you want to have a view of what's good and evil, of what's right and wrong, of how to live, then you need to think about it. And you need to see what are the different worldviews being articulated. And you can't go from, well, this is what everybody believes. And this is what my teachers told me. And this is what the people I follow on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram think is cool and think is what it means to be a moral person. That is conformity. And cultures where that kind of conformity happens, those are cultures can go really, really wrong. How was it that Germany marched in Nazism? It wasn't that there was some kind of like, it wasn't like, if you were living in that culture, you would notice it was obviously evil. If, unless you were questioning it and thinking for yourself, because everybody around you thought, yeah, well, of course, we need to serve the bulk and sacrifice for the fatherland and uphold the area and race. That's clearly obvious. That's what everybody believes. And so part of being a non-conformist is I'm not going to conform to what you tell me I should think about Ayn Rand. I'm going to figure it out for myself. And I'm not going to believe what you tell me about SART or any thinker who's significant. I want to form a view on my own. So the Fountainhead, one of its lessons is precisely, don't be a conformist on these issues that are of life and death importance. I wanted to ask this question because I've been harping on this for years and I've said this publicly. I love the Fountainhead. It is in my top five, maybe my top three favorite books. It just connects with me so much. And I wanted to ask you guys, and you're going to bulk at this question probably, but I wanted to ask you, which is the better novel, and I'll give you my take. Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? Clearly those are your two choices in terms of Ayn Rand. I think they're both great books, but I've argued in the past that Atlas Shrugged is designed, and I think Ayn Rand admitted as much, that it's designed to consciously and systematically flesh out her philosophy. And I've said this before. I've had discussions publicly with Mike over at Mike's Books and a few other booktubers that there are like three or four characters in Atlas Shrugged that are very much, and guys, by the way, I love Atlas Shrugged. It is brilliant. It's a masterpiece. But as a novel versus a work of philosophy, there are characters in Atlas Shrugged that feel a bit wooden and feel like mouthpieces for Ayn Rand's worldview. They speak like her. They espouse her ideas to the letter at times. Some of the characters in Atlas Shrugged just kind of feel wooden to me. Whereas the Fountainhead, I feel like it's different. It was written before Ayn Rand had fully concretized her philosophy. And so to me, it's better art. And I know you guys would disagree with that. That's why I brought you on. You should read Atlas Shrugged. It's amazing. It's going to change your life. I'm going to review it on this channel. But for me, the Fountainhead is less rigid. It's less dogmatic. The story is more graceful. It's about individualism versus very hyper-specific nuances of her philosophy. Rourke is one of the great heroes of literature. And so I just wanted to ask you guys, how do they compare and contrast these two books? And do you agree with me? Probably not. Do they serve different purposes and that sort of thing? And how do you think they compare? Or is it impossible to say that? Should we just look at them as serving different purposes and they're each good in their own way? Start with you, Yaron. Well, I mean, I think that both masterpieces, I'm sympathetic to the idea that many people have that Fountainhead either resonates more with them. I can completely understand that or that it's even the better novel. I'm not a literature expert. I'm not in a position to rank the best literature. My favorite is Adler Shrug partially because I read it first, partially because it blew my mind. It changed my life. And partially because I think the achievement in Adler Shrug is greater. Adler Shrug is a book that integrates an entire philosophy into a story, an entire world from the political realm, the aesthetic realm, all the way down to the personal realm. I consider Reardon and Dagny as fleshed out and as real personalities and people as Rourke and Dominica. And yet, so she manages both to give us these personal heroes of immense integrity who change Reardon, changes through the novel. I mean, people talk about her wooden characters, but Reardon is the opposite because he is really affected and changes and has to resolve those conflicts through the novel. So to me, it's a greater novel. For me, certainly personally, it meant more, it means more, but I certainly understand people who prefer the Fountainhead. It's certainly a more personal, more intimate novel. Adler Shrug is about the world and about integrating a perspective of the world into the story. And also, I don't mean to cheapen the book, but because of course, and I've listened to Don's podcast where he talks about this, so I don't mean to over allegorize it, but Adler Shrug is happening right now. And you can say that I'm sure you can go through any presidential administration, you could say, this is, we're living through Adler Shrug. It isn't, it isn't because Adler Shrug, this is not about the politics of it. It's not about, it's about Reardon and Dagny and Francisco and ultimately about Gault. And so what's happening around is the backdrop to illustrate something really, really crucial. And do we have Dagny's Reardon and Francisco's? To some extent, do we have Gault? We don't. So it's not happening around us. And indeed, if it was happening around us, I'd be a lot more optimistic about the future of the world. But should I not be noticing, Yaron, should I not be noticing these strong parallels, the cronyism, the corruption, the collectivism, the second-handerism, all happening, but you could notice public intellectuals. In the world of architecture, you would notice all of that about the Fountainhead. You'd say the Fountainhead is happening right now. And it is. I mean, there's no question that they are innovative, brilliant architects out there who are being repressed and being canceled, as you noted. And that is true in the arts more broadly and it's true at Google. So I think the Fountainhead is happening all around us. It's just a matter that it's happening in one particular realm where Adler Shrug is so much poorer. All right, Don. And then you'll be the last word on this here, Don. And then we'll close out. Yeah. I mean, I agree with Yaron. Atlas has always been my favorite as literature. And I don't think it's that she's trying to make a mouthpiece for her philosophy. It's that her theme is the role of the mind in human life. And to get the role of the human mind, you're seeing a whole bunch of variants and aspects of the mind's role in life. And it's fundamental. So it's throughout human life. But I will say this about the Fountainhead that I think is one of the things I love about it and it makes it so impressive. Think about, there's this YouTube series called Pitch Meeting. I forget exactly what it's called. But it's basically like a guy coming in and pitching movies to Hollywood, like real movies, but they sound insane once you're trying to make the pitch. Think about the pitch for the Fountainhead. Okay, I'm going to write about a guy who's trying to become an architect and that's the book. It's just a guy trying to get a job. You go, like, how is that? That's not even a story. Get out of my office. I mean, it's really just a guy living his life. And yet it has this heroic stature because part of the message is the noblest, most heroic thing is not some kind of caped crusader running through the streets. It is a person truly dedicated to the pursuit of their happiness and living by the kind of virtues that make that possible and that kind of dedication and uncompromising integrity towards them. And to me, that's just an amazing achievement that you can take something that on the face of it is not as hardly even a story and make it a gripping page turner and one of the most inspiring books ever written. And really, I mean, it's, Yaron mentioned, it's more intimate. Part of what it is is you really understand the people around you way more after you read the Fountainhead. And you can look around and see, like, I really get what makes my sister tick and what makes my mother tick and why my teachers treated me this way. It's the kind of book that growing up everybody should read because it gives you that kind of illuminating look at the kind of life I'm going to live. I'm not going to invent a new motor and take down the world through some, well, I don't want to say anything more, but take on all of society, but I am going to try to build a career in a life that I love and the Fountainhead speaks directly to that. Yeah. Thank you guys for joining me. I want to say goodbye to you guys and I want to say how much I appreciate your work. You're both brilliant. You're both heroes to me. You've inspired me. So thank you for being on iWizard. I really appreciate you joining me. And I hope that when I review Atlas Shrugged, you guys will consider coming on again. Thank you so much, guys, and be well. Thanks, Jordan. Okay. Thank you.