 I mean, a lot of objectivists who really have, seems like a separation between those ideas and those almost like ideas that are written somewhere or I don't know, like a dogmatic point of view. And then there's this life and life is messy and life is hard. And they're like, you don't get what you want. How do you see that yourself? I mean, this separation that does exist in some people. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that for many people, there is that separation. I think the two issues here. One is it takes time to integrate the ideas into your psychology and into your goal orientation. And the younger you start, I think the easier it is. I think the more you wait, the more unpacking there is, the more difficult it is, the more psychological effort it takes, the more introspection it takes. So suddenly, I think that there are real challenges that it just takes time, right? So part of it is just, it takes time. Second part of it is, there's some people who never get it, right? And we all know people like this. And we've all known, I think if you've been around objectivism for long enough, you've known people who just never get it. They never get the world of philosophy and life. They never get what objectivism is really about. It's really just a tool for them to argue or a tool for them to rationalize their own weird behavior or a tool for them to rationalize their own subjectivist behavior, because many of them are subjectivist, or they're super smart, and it's just a game for them. It's a rationalistic game attached from reality, or with some people, and actually, this is more prevalent, it's an excuse for them. It's an excuse to justify their failures. I know several objectivists who say, yeah, I didn't succeed in life because the world sucks, or yeah, I didn't succeed in life because other people are now rational enough. I didn't succeed enough because X, Y, Z. And there are circumstances in which that can be true. There are narrow circumstances, certain professions and certain circumstances of life, but certainly that can be true, right? If you are, I don't know, and I think things have gotten better because I think the objectivist movement's grown quite a bit that has made things better, but if you were, I don't know, if you're an artist, I can certainly see that in the world in which we live today, it's very difficult to be successful if you're a really good artist, because there's just no market for it, because even objectivists don't really understand art, never mind the rest of the world, there's just not enough appreciation for it, but there are not that many professions that that's true of, and there's always something you can do. You know, to be able to advance your own life and advance your own cause. So for the most part, I think it is an excuse more than anything else. You know, I couldn't get that novel published because the world is so rotten. You know, forgetting that Ayn Rand was rejected 12 times for the Fountain Edge, he kept at it and she ultimately got it published. And you know, when you read their work, you just go, well, maybe, you know, there's a reason it wasn't published. Yeah, but so let me take you to the positive. I mean, if we lived in, you know, objectivist heaven, how would you integrate philosophy into the education of a teenager or a young adult to understand that this is really a guide for happiness? I mean, what is happy? How would you, you know, maybe how did you communicate with your own kids about, okay, what is the purpose of life? And it's happiness, how do we get happiness? There's a, you know, there's a guide. There's a blueprint for that, right? It's called philosophy. How would you think about presenting to young minds and young adults and maybe older people presenting philosophy as a blueprint for a happy life? I mean, I think it's not simple. And I think this is where, you know, in an objectivist world, I think that art would serve an important function here because I think ultimately, art is the best way to do it. This is really the power of the fountain head and to a large extent, this is the power of Alice Shrug. It's a power to, not to preach, not to give people a set of diagrams, but to show, to point and to inspire. And I think that is ultimately, to a large extent, the role of good arts, you know, not propaganda, which unfortunately, some objectivists who try to create art, produce, but really good, deep meaningful art is to show you how and to point. It's also incredibly valuable that in, as you presented it in an objectivist world, you've got real life examples. Hopefully you as a parent are living that life. So it's not that you sit your kids down or you sit the class down and say, okay, purpose of life is to be happy. You have five ways to be happy. It's much more that, you know, driving, the seeking values is just a part of life. And, you know, you exhibit rationality, you exhibit productiveness, you exhibit the virtues, you live the virtues and the kids or the people around you see that. And then there is a point in, in a sense, teaching, you know, some elementary philosophy, you know, philosophy 101, objectivism 101, in some way to high school kids, you know, what age very much depends on the kids themselves, where you basically study the big questions and what they are and what different people have given answers to. What you might argue that here are my answers, they are the things that I think are pro-life. And, you know, so I think the combination of art, specific examples, and then a introductory course to philosophy, because at the end, in an objectivist world, most of us would not study philosophy in great depth. We wouldn't need to. The philosophy would be very much integrated and we would integrate it into our own lives very quickly, easily, and with very little conflict. It wouldn't require a huge amount of study, right? Right. You devote yourself to living rather than figuring out how to live. Now, I wanna jump to you. I mean, your own experience with this concept of happiness. What is happiness to you? How do you experience it? What does it mean to you? When do you feel the sense of, you know, the sense of fulfillment where you say, I'm living it? I'm, are there, what does happiness mean to you and how do you experience it? Well, I mean, it's tricky to talk about because, you know, I'm not very good at kind of the vocabulary of describing feelings and emotions, not my strength. I'm not a poet. You're not a poet. Okay. I'm not a poet. But it, you know, it's a general sense of satisfaction. It's a general sense of, I'm achieving the things I wanna achieve in life. I got what I want and I'm on the path to getting the things that I don't have that I still want, that there are still values out there with pursuing and I'm on the path to getting them. I've looking back, I've achieved the things that I've wanted to achieve in my life, you know, with all the bumps and problems and challenges, overall, you know, I'm in a better place than it used to be. The big goals that one sets for kind of long-term, you can see a path to achieving them. And if you don't, even if you don't see a path to achieving them, you can see a path to achieving subsidiary goals, the goals on the way there, even if you never make, you know, this is some ultimate goals, you know, it's good to have some, what did they, what they call them? Silicon Valley, big, hairy, audacious goals, something like that. If I forget the exact acronym for these, that you know, there's good likelihood you won't achieve them, but you know, it's good to have some real ambitious stuff. But it's generally a sense of satisfaction with yourself, with the world, you know, in which you live, or at least that part of it that you have control over and the people you're living around, you know, people around you and so your relationships. And you know, and the things that, the kind of the values you're pursuing and your achievements in the past. So it's something that builds over time, that sense of, of contentment and satisfaction. You know, so you're on, I started, I don't know, in February working with people, I wanted to share, you know, my experience. And like you said, I love to systemize things. So I was testing it on humans, my system. So what I found that a lot of people find it very hard to know what they want. I mean, really what do I want? Because it's a combination of like, what do I have already? What I'm used to want? What people told me to want? How do I separate between what I truly want? What I wanted as a kid and kind of come back and connect with things that are really mine versus, you know, what's possible to me today or maybe even what the culture expects me to want. How was your relationship with your values? I mean, knowing what you want. Even today, like, you know, you're where you are, how conscious are you about what you want next? Do you think about those things? Do you prioritize? Cause we all have limited time, you know, we can't do all, so what's your relationship with, with values? Saib always tried to get everything. Go after everything all the time. I've never had one career. And it's, it's, it's, so I'm always, I'm always juggling top priority values. It's never been the case where I could settle on one. And I don't recommend it to other people, but it's the reality that I've never had one job. I've always had at least two, sometimes three. And it's, you know, it's not easy. But I didn't know what I wanted to do for a long, long, long time. Really for, you know, 23 years until I really got the job at the Ironman Institute, I didn't know what I really wanted to do. I knew, I knew approximately what I wanted to do. I knew, but I didn't have a broad passion around anything in particular. I learned as, as I had different jobs, what I liked and what I didn't like. And I think that helped me slowly gain a focus on what, you know, I really did want. I don't think if I thought about it at 22, I would have discovered what I wanted because I don't think I had enough life experience. So I had, one of the things I tell young people is you don't have to decide because life is long. It's much longer now than it was a hundred years ago. And you can switch careers and it's not like, as you have tall as many of us have, it's not like what you decide when you're 18 is somehow fixed and going to determine everything. And what do you know when you're 18? Most of us, with the exception of the how it works of the world who know exactly what they want when they're 18, and that's great. And that's fantastic if you have that insight. But most of us don't have that. Then go figure it out and you figure it out by finding something proximate that you like, not the ultimate, but something that you enjoy, doing it, figuring out what you enjoy about it. And it's hard to do rationalistically without doing it. It's hard to sit back and say, I will enjoy XYZ about engineering. Well, until you do it, you don't know what you're actually going to enjoy. You might have some ideas, but it won't actually be real until you do it. And then kind of going with that. And my life was really doing that. It was, I had a few goals. They weren't career oriented. I wanted to come to the US. So it was just a question of how do I finagle? How do I manipulate the system to be able to make it to the US? So I came to get an MBA, not because I particularly wanted an MBA, not because I thought I needed an MBA, turned out what you studied in MBA is useless anyways. I didn't need an MBA for anything really important in life. But it was a good way to get into the US. It was a good way to get a diploma that gave you both that. And it did expose me to finance, which I ended up liking. So I went into finance, but again, not because that was going to be my ultimate passion and my ultimate thing that I wanted to do in life. But because of that, I discovered I love teaching. I didn't know I liked teaching. And there was no way for me to know I'd love teaching because I never taught. The one experience I had teaching in graduate school was not a very positive experience. So, you know, I am a big believer in introspect, plan it all out, and then test. Like everything else in life, like startups and Silicon Valley, right? Test, fail quickly and often and identify failure quickly and move on, right? So don't overcommit in a sense of something that you're not, I mean, obviously don't just give up, but realize when something is not working in your own life and move on. So, you know, and I think that's true in every aspect of life. But yeah, I mean, I've lived my life that way. I've lived my life, you know, I can say with friendships, that's true. I'd say that's definitely true with Korea. So I only discovered what I really wanted to do, which was, you know, one aspect of, you know, one of the two things was to promote objectivism and find ways to promote objectivism and become an intellectual. I never thought of myself as one until pretty late in life. But until then, I obviously was building up my toolkit. So when that was what I decided to do, it was based on particular tools that I already had and it was based on things that I was clearly enjoying and clearly liked and were clearly positive. And you never know how those things come together, right? That when you say you build this toolkit, yeah. Concept and objectivism was a spiral of knowledge. Right. It's a really, really important concept, which Leonard Peacuff talks about. I don't remember if it's in Iran, maybe in objectivism or cosmology, but maybe not. I think it's a Leonard Peacuff, or at least he talked about it significantly. And that idea is that you always come back to previous knowledge. And you come back to previous knowledge now with a new context. Right. And it's never over, right? You're constantly learning, you're constantly gaining, you're constantly getting a better understanding because the human mind and life is about integration and you're constantly integrating your knowledge and you're constantly spiraling and spiraling and spiraling. And that's true, I think of learning about yourself and learning what you like and learning about what you're good at, learning about what you're passionate about and making sure that what you're good at is what you're passionate about, because I know people who are passionate about things they're not very good at, which is not a good situation to be at in. You got to get rid of that passion, if that's the case. And you got to keep learning, keep being willing to be flexible about your goals and your plans. So my experience that when I met a lot of people in my life and there's something very unique about introspective people, people that are thoughtful about who they are, what they love, what they don't love, they're very protective of their time and their values. I mean, it's very clear. They tell you, hey, don't mess with, don't tell me what to do. Like I've met bosses and employees and friends and there's a set of people that I would say are very serious about their values. Were you always serious about your values in the sense that are you introspective? Are you thinking about what am I doing? What am I not doing? Because you said I like to do a lot of things and it's always a battle between doing what you want and leading with your own values versus doing what needs to be done. Or so how serious would you say one has to be about protecting the time needed to pursue values? That's something that I'm struggling with. Yeah, I don't know that I'm particularly good at that. I, you know, introspection is an interesting phenomena, right, because people introspect in different ways. And I am generally very introspective in a sense about my values, about my goals and about the future. I'm very bad in looking at the past, in evaluating kind of what maybe kind of, to some extent what worked and what didn't. I'm not interested in the past, right? It's over, the past is history. It's at some cost in finance terms, right? Now you can learn from the past, but I know people who spend a lot of time learning from the past. And I want to learn quickly and move on. So my whole orientation, since I was a kid, I think there's been a future orientation, and one of the reasons I can't remember anything. And I really see the difference between people. I literally can't remember stuff. I can't remember stuff from my childhood. And it's not because it's traumatized, because I had a great childhood, but because it's not interesting. I can't remember stuff from 10 years ago. I just can't remember it. It's not real to me in many respects. It's like almost an out-of-body experience to try to remember things from the past. Because I'm not interested in it. It's not motivating. So my introspection is very much focused on now and the future. And I'm not saying that's good, right? Because I probably don't spend enough time learning from the past and figuring out what went wrong or what went right and dealing with that. I probably, there's probably a better balance between those two things. But I find it very difficult to dwell on the past. And I find it somewhat frustrating to deal with people who tend to dwell on the past. It's like, forget it, let's move on. The second aspect of being serious, like I wanna stress, from the minute I met you, you struck me with one of those people who was like, I know what I want and it's the most important thing in life. So if you're aligning with what I want, great. But if you're not, you know how to make people understand that this is not important to you. So for me, you're in the category of people who do protect their time and mainly their time. So how do you perceive that? Because you see people like Steve Jobs who were just that don't waste my time on things that don't matter to me. And there are a lot of people where they will meet you at any time, they will talk to you at any time. It's like their life doesn't matter. And it's other people who can have claims on their time. So how do you perceive that? I really admire the ability to say no. Yeah, I mean, Steve Jobs is truly a role model here and I was just actually, just today, I watched a video from a few years ago of Johnny Ives talking about Steve Jobs. And when Johnny Ives says the one thing that stands out about Steve Jobs is focus. Focus, focus, focus. You got one aim, one, just get it done. This is a pure focus. And there's a broad sense in which I have that and there's a sense in which I don't. I'm super curious. I'm super looking for the next opportunity. I'm not as confident that Steve Jobs was that this is the thing that I should be focused on. So I'm always looking for other stuff. I'm always taking that extra phone call, making that extra meeting. I might then cut it off very quickly when I figure out, no, this is a dead end. But I am always kind of on the lookout for new things, new opportunities. I'm also super curious. But I think Steve Jobs was as well. I mean, that's I think his other real strength was both his curiosity and his focus. Yeah, he was spending a lot of time meeting people and getting new ideas. Yeah, so I'm similar in that sense. Not that I want to compare myself to him, but I'm similar in that sense. I constantly want to learn more and understand more and see, but I'm also impatient. Impatient with people with ideas. I mean, I just did this interview with Mark Moss. You can see it on YouTube. It was published earlier this week. And it's fascinating to read the comments because people hate me, right? And why do they hate me? They hate me because I come across as I have the answers. And I'm impatient with anybody who doesn't. And it's like, how does this guy, who is this guy who thinks he knows all the stuff and why is he so certain? And why, he comes across as arrogant. And those of you who know me, I think. I'm not arrogant in particular. And I think I know stuff, but I don't have this, but I get it in an interview. I come across as that because, yeah, I've answered this question like 3,555 times. I've looked at it from every angle possible. This is the right answer. You told me that the hardest part of your job is to know that you know the answers. That's this. Everybody is more arrogant than that. Somebody asked me one, what's the most frustrating part of the job? And I said that I know how to solve the problems of the world and nobody is listening. And that is absolutely right. The, for me, the most frustrating part of the job is, I know how to solve the Middle East crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the world hunger, you know, the stagnation in the United States, inflation, you know. Yeah. Just give me a year. Yeah. It might take more than a year, but I know how to do it. Yeah. And nobody gives a damn. Yeah. Nobody's interested. And it's not that I invented any of this stuff. So I just said I wasn't arrogant and here I am. I just, I just know how to fix everything, but I'm not. Yoran, I want to talk to you about another aspect of being serious about values, which is I see a lot of people saying, yes, that's what I want. I'm going to get it. And then you're a really hard worker. I mean, you are serious about what you do, the way you travel, the way you, you know, you would take any, you know, any classroom anywhere in the world and go and fly anywhere and sleep in hotels 200 nights a year if needed. What is it about the drive? How do you think about it? Is it something innate? Is it something you can develop? Like being serious about getting, not just knowing, but getting what you want. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's innate. There's nothing innate in it other than there's no question. There's a certain something you develop as a young person that we have less control over as adults. So we have to do a lot more work if it doesn't, if we haven't developed it when we're young, a certain commitment, certain independence, a certain commitment to life. I don't know that it's a deep, it's a sense of life thing. It's a deep, deep sense of I'm committed to doing the job, doing it right and doing it well. And it's harder when you're an adult if you don't have that to undo the psychological and reframe yourself. I think part of it is knowing why you're doing it. Part of it is understanding the context. Part of it is loving what you do. I don't think there's no way I could work as hard as I do if I didn't like it. If I didn't enjoy it, if it didn't get me the high, right? If I didn't get the dopamine fix, right? Then it, and if I didn't see how it fit into the broader context of my larger scale, longer term goals. So if I, and I know this of myself, you know, if I am supposed to do something that I don't really like or that is just about some short-term goal, but it doesn't really fit into my long-term goals, it's hard for me to get motivated in to do it. I don't have the energy. It's much more difficult to actually get done. The more you can structure your life in a way that everything you do is organized around your core values, around your long-term core values, around the things you want to achieve long-term, the more motivated, the more energetic, the more serious you can do about them because everything that you do, you will know why you're doing it. And it will, you won't even have to ask the question because it'll be so well-integrated. You'll be able to count in your emotions. I mean, one of the problems is, and I don't know if it's a sidetrack, but one of the problems is that if you're in your 20s or even in your 30s and you list the things you're passionate about or interested in, and that is your guide. Well, how do you know these things are good? How do you know that they really integrate with the rest of your values? I mean, there's a lot of work to be done. Taking, looking inside, okay, I enjoy this, and then deciding this is good. This is consistent with everything else that I believe in. This will actually lead to my success in every other thing. And sometimes you have to say, no, this passion is stupid. And I'm gonna put it aside because it's not consistent with my goals. It might be a passion, but it's more of a fantasy. It's not something that is really gonna further my life and I can't integrate it with that. And that's hard, right? Because we believe, you know, follow your passion. But the passions have to be rational in a sense. They have to be based on rational. They have to be consistent with life as the standard. They have to be consistent with the idea of happiness. They have to integrate with all your other values. And those are, those are real challenges. Ezra, your daughter is a massive distraction. I mean, God is, wow. She's very cute. Yaron, I wanna ask you about, is there an area in your life, you know, because a lot of people want to want and they think they know what they want, but there's almost like something that they get stuck with. I think mainly anxiety, fear of failure. They didn't orient their lives around core values and they're getting older and now changing everything. You've got two kids in a mortgage. And, you know, do you, do you, well, first do you have those areas of like, yeah, I would really like to do it, but I feel stuck emotionally. And what's your relationship with anxiety or fear of failure or all of this? How would you consult someone who is suffering from this? Yeah, look, anxiety is a healthy phenomena, right? If we didn't have, it's part of your psychology telling you there's a challenge here you have to solve. And there are real risks here and you have to deal with them. And it would be bizarre to live in a life without anxiety. I mean, I don't know what that looks like. I've never experienced it. I mean, sure, there are periods in which you have less anxiety, periods you have a lot of anxiety, but anxiety is a tool, a psychological tool to tell you something's off, something needs, and not often the sense that you're bad, but often a sense that needs to be taken care of needs to be dealt with. And certainly there were periods, you know, a little bit about them, you know, towards my end of the, my tenure at the Indian issue where I had a lot of anxiety. And it was not simple to, you know, in terms of dealing with it, it was dealt with ultimately by hiring you in the end. But it was, but you know, the things like that, you know, I found myself last year during COVID, it was a very, very difficult year for me. And in some ways the last five years have been difficult not only because of the job transition, but because, you know, many of you know, I took, I take the state of the world quite seriously and I take what happens in the world very seriously. It affects me, it affects the people I love, it affects the future, it affects my kids. And, you know, what happened in the world over the last five years was very, was very difficult to deal with it. It was anxiety, you don't have to pretend otherwise, I think is wrong. It was scary, COVID was scary, not the disease. I never found myself not once being afraid of COVID or being stressed out about COVID or being worried about COVID. My wife had COVID and even then, well, partially we didn't know, so I guess it was good that we didn't know she had COVID. But I don't think I would have been that worried. But when I saw the world fall apart in the irrationality and the, you know, so my belief in human beings has taken a big beating over the last few years. And, you know, it's, you know, that's, I was much more optimistic five years ago than I am today about the future of the world. But, you know, you overcome that. And again, you have your own values, you have your own life and you've got to live it in this world. And, you know, with the limitations that exist, take that into account. You can't ignore them, you can't evade them, but you can't let them, you can't let the problems dominate you. I fear of failure. I don't know. I mean, I've never really had that. You know, and I'm somebody who likes to live in many respects on the edge. I've lived most of my life on the financial edge and pushed myself on the financial edge. I don't any more as much, partially because I'm much older, partially because I, you know, once you get to certain, you know, because I'm more comfortable materially. But yeah, I really don't get anxiety from failure. I get anxiety from the things I don't, you know, this is the sad thing. I get anxiety from the things I can't control. And that's all the things that should matter because I can't control them. So, but it's, but they have an impact. So it's hard, you know, so when COVID happened last March, when the stock market went down as much as it did, and financially, I took a dramatic beating in my other part of my life on my hedge fund. Whoa, that was, and it wasn't that, and I didn't understand what was going on because none of us did, because what happened to us in my world is something none of us had ever imagined could happen. My partners and I, it was an event that we had never modeled, right? Finance guys. And now I understand why it happened. It took me a while to figure out what happened. Now I understand what happened and it will never happen again. Put it that way, I've bought insurance, it never happens again. But it was a shock to the system. And, you know, was I not, did that not upset me? Did that not bring about real anxiety and some fear, not fear, but fear because I didn't understand what was going on and it was weird and it was crazy. Since then we've done fine. So, you know, when stuff like this happens, you learn and you fix it. But on the same time, I think you can have anxiety and you can have some level of fear, but you can't let it paralyze you. Right. Because you've got other values, you've got other things you have to strive towards. You deal with the emergency in the ways you have to deal with. So, and you go on. And, you know, so while all this was happening, I think I did more, you run bookshows than ever before. And I don't think anybody could tell while I was doing it that anything else was going on in my life. So, and I think that's important. Yeah, that's a real big one for me. I know that whenever I feel anxious or paralyzed or something, I just move. I move, you know, I do something. It's going out for a run or a talk. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in running. But yeah, okay. I don't run much. So, we're on the same. But really moving, I mean like. Yeah, you gotta do something. You gotta do something. You gotta do something and get out of it. So, let's leave about 15 minutes for questions. So, if you have questions now, you can raise your hand and maybe Amanda, you can prioritize and I would, I just want maybe, well, you're on first. Thank you very much. You're an inspiration to a lot of people. I know that when I got into Objectivism, I remember it was 2012 and I met you for the first time and I asked you something about, what is it? I think it was the Israeli army and draft and something like that. And you answered with such conviction and passion. And I remember it's like, oh, wow. So, well, first I'm not the only person in the world who's so passionate about ideas and you've been an inspiration since. So, thank you very much for doing this and let's open it up for questions. So, Steven, maybe you can go first. Sure, thanks, Tal. I actually typed my question in some time ago, but I'll read it. In addition to philosophy, I mean, there's been a lot of studies on what makes people happy and the techniques that people can use to achieve happiness and well-being. Do you have any techniques that you've thought of or that you can recommend or that might be based on philosophy? And those include things like learned optimism, positive self-talk, positive habit formation. You want to do something, but you have to form a habit around it. It doesn't happen automatically. Gratitude is a technique, time management and the other part of the question was or how about attitudes to cultivate? So things like resiliency, curiosity, optimism, internal locus of control, self-efficacy, things like this. Yeah, I mean, I cannot say that I have, I mean, I probably do implicitly, but I don't have any techniques that I could give you a list of and at least when I was growing up, I wasn't exposed to kind of the self-help books that gave you the kind of techniques that out then. I'm sure they're good, but it was never part of my way of doing things. I've even tried to use various to-do apps and I get very excited about them and I use them for like a week or two and then I just can't get in the habit of using any of those things. I have slips of paper like this with my to-do list for, and I only do that when I feel like, oh, my God, it's getting out of control. I better write it down because otherwise I won't do everything. But I have not been able to get into those habits. I know a lot of objectivists who've cultivated those kind of techniques and are very conscious of it and studied them and are better resources than I am for things like that. In terms of attitudes, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of various attitudes. I don't know how you exactly cultivate the attitudes, but attitudes that I see that I have that other people don't. And then the question is, how do you develop them? I think probably the most important thing is my mind always goes in the face of an issue, a problem. My mind always goes to solutions. And often I'm trying to solve problems that are not even my business, other people's problems because I'm always going for the solution. I'm not interested in getting my head in the problem and analyzing it and figuring out who's fault it is and who's to blame, although maybe I should have done that more often, but analyzing it to great, I wanna know how to solve this problem. I wanna move forward, right? So I'm always focused on that. So I think it's a problem-solving kind of attitude of here's the data, how do we go, how do we move? I think that that orientation is what leads you to be optimistic because optimism is an inductive thing, right? You learn that when you solve problems, you can. Problems get solved. Things, very few things in life are irreversible. Very few things in life are so tragic that you can't cope or that's just horrific. You can cope, you can survive, you can solve the problems, you can move on and I think that breeds optimism just having that go-to-problem-solving kind of attitude of moving forward and trying to drive things forward rather than analyzing them to death. Self-esteem is obviously crucial and here I think just having, just probably spending some time on a regular basis with a little bit of introspection about your achievements, about what you have done. It's patting yourself on the back, I think is an important thing to do and sometimes more often, maybe in times of more anxiety, it's good to focus on the good things on the things that you have achieved and the things that have done well. You know, I enjoy hearing the impact I've had on people's lives and I like when I get emails like that because it's a good opportunity for me to think, yeah, in spite of all the issues, in spite of all the one mind at a time and here's a mind and here's a mind and here's a mind and it's having an impact and that allows me to overcome but that self-esteem is something you develop because of that, self-esteem won't come out of no way. You have to actually do stuff and this is to some extent a virtue of pride, taking your morality seriously and recognizing the fact that you're taking it seriously and striving to take it seriously and acknowledging that you're good enough to take it seriously, but it requires self-recognition, self-esteem just doesn't happen. It requires that introspection in order to do that. I'm looking at some of the other ones you have, but yeah, I mean, if you listen to my Iran book show later today, I'm gonna be talking about curiosity. So I don't, you know, I'm doing this Iran's rules for life, which I've made up and- You're following Ray Dalio, right? No, I'm following Jordan Peterson. Oh, Peterson, the 12 rules, okay. Oh, I'm doing, I'm gonna do 13 because it's an unlucky number and it's one more than Jordan. One more than Jordan. But so the one today is be curious. Great. So yes, curiosity is something you need to develop. It's something you need to cultivate. It's something you need to work on. Some people have it in a sense naturally. They developed it when they were very young. Some people don't, but it's really, really important to cultivate and to internalize and to make part of who you are and what you are. So I wanna, you're on promoted, you're on Brookshow. I wanna tell you that I've read a lot of, I wanna promote the happiness team. So I've read a lot of self-help books and before finding Objectivism, I was an avid radio of those. What Objectivism did for me that I think focused everything and changed everything for me is the idea of value orientation. I mean, this just the vocabulary of values. What does that mean? What is a value? Is a meal a value? Is it before or after or during? Is a, you know, of course a car or a spiritual values, just this idea that I can look at life and say those things is what I want. And those things are making my life, what it is, I think was a huge integration for me. So a lot of what we do in the happiness team is identifying and organizing and putting a hierarchy and categories of values and then choosing them consciously. And I think that the second thing is introspection and managing feelings. The whole clarity that I think I got from the way Rand looks at feelings. And it's not a dichotomy, you know, when I met psychologists, it's like, oh, there's the rational world and there's another unknown world and it's all mystical and you don't know what feeling you're gonna get. And the clarity I got from what a feeling is, in a way, you know, I met someone and she says, the boss is the subconscious. That's what she called it. And she said, because you're serving it, you know, what is this thing you're trying to achieve happiness? It's something that comes from your subconscious. So that's the way she thought about it. For me, it was more about knowing my subconscious, knowing and understanding or I did this and that really felt good. Why did it feel good? So introspection and develop an introspective mind, which I was not, by the way, I was more like a, like you're on maybe a problem solver. Okay, next thing, next thing, next thing, never stopping and saying, okay, what worked for me and why? So an introspective mindset. And another thing that you're, I think you're on mention is being rational. By that, I mean it's reality you're dealing with. So fantasizing about things that you want and the world, no, it's always, for me, the connection between what I want and what's possible and the marriage between those two things. So those are the things that I really worked for me and made me have a much more positive outlook on life. I was not such an optimistic person before. I was pretty pessimistic. But when you look at life, it's like, what's possible? Where's the next value I can gain or derives more happiness and fulfillment from? Then everything is an opportunity. And another thing that happened to me, I left all of the bad things. I think I told many times, like I fired half of my family. I got rid of friends I didn't want. I moved to a different place. And this, you know, I really liked the whole movement of positive psychology in the sense that, yeah, focus on the good, you know, you don't have it a lot of time. So those are the things that I took and really define my journey. Okay, let's go with Ezra. Yeah, go ahead. No, yeah, just we got four questions up. So let's try to get to all of them because I'm curious what you have to ask. Thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate this. I'm wondering if you could talk about identifying role models of happiness. I think it seems fairly straightforward for things like your career. You know, I admired Steve Jobs and Alex Epstein, stuff like that, you know? And they provided good examples for my career. But I'm wondering if you guys can talk about identifying happiness role models, people who have achieved significant fulfillment in different areas, how you might go about that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think that's a tough one. It's a tough one because to some extent you can't really tell completely if somebody's happy. It's something that is very inside somebody else's mind and you don't have the projection of it. You can tell when somebody is enjoying what they're doing, where they're really creative and producing. I mean, and you can tell when somebody loves the activity that they engage in and you can certainly develop role models about the particulars. It's, and you can also look at somebody who just seems content with life and just has, it seems to have it all together. But that's hard. And again, this is why I think art is so crucial, right? Because art gives you that projection in an essentialized sense without the miscellaneous stuff, right? Without the momentary anxiety, without COVID hitting, the stock market declining, without any of that, you just get Michelangelo's David. You just get David and that's it. And it's pure inspiration. There's no but, if maybe, and the same with how it worked, right? You get it in that pure form. And I think for happiness, art is the best place to look for that inspiration for the more concrete things, for the more, the values you have to get to happiness, you can find role models in particular places. Now, you might be lucky to find somebody who you're close to who you can say, yeah, wow, this person exudes happiness and you can really tell. And then they can become a role model, but you have to be pretty close to somebody to be able to really tell that that is the reality. It's always the documentaries of people who admire that really, I found really disappointing sometimes to hear like all the mess, you know, for me, my relationship with heroes, real life heroes is they're there for me to get inspired from. I don't wanna be them. Cause only I take what I like, if I love, I don't know, Roger Federer is a tennis player, right? Formula, Ayrton Senna is a Formula One driver. If it's sting as a musician, it doesn't matter. You know, and I've seen, for instance, I've seen the documentary about sting. There's a lot of stuff there, right, that I don't like. But I always think about the aspects that they represent and really reflect to me as almost like a character in the novel, because they, like Yaron said, they exude this passion for life and for excellence, mainly for me, excellence does it for me. So my relationship with the heroes is I take what I want from them and I leave the rest. It's not my business, you know, how they got there and what the good ideas and what the bad ideas. This is why they can be role models around happiness because happiness is the integration. It's not just this or that. Happiness is all encompassing. Adam, you have so much appreciation. Yes. Yes, would you have any advice for someone like me where I knew what my values were and what I was going to achieve when I was four years old? I was a curious kid, like all kids are curious, but fortunately, both my parents were medical scientists. They were very good at explaining things and they honored my curiosity. And so I decided one day I'm going to find out more things that I don't know and that's been my life. On the other hand, I also came to realize over time that if you have a specific value set like that, you're not going to be on top of the hierarchy. For example, one of the papers in my PhD thesis was about the age of a child. In my PhD thesis was about speed accuracy trade-offs. And that was one of the building blocks of Don Normans whom you may know as the former chief scientist at Apple of the user-centered system design methodology which is what makes it possible for ordinary humans to use computers. And I think that has been the biggest step in augmenting human cognition since the invention of writing. But don't worry about it. I just wanna say we are running three minutes late and there's one more question. So if you can make it a little shorter, just what the question is. So I just want Gilad to have the opportunity to ask his question as well. Okay, however, how do you deal with obstacles such as health problems resulting from growing up in post-World War II communist Poland? I don't know if you can try. You know, I don't know. I mean, the focus has to be to do the best that you can within the context of the unchangeable, right? If the health problems are ones that they are what they are, you know, you can strive to fix them to the extent that you can. But there's only so much you can do and you have to make the most of life within the context in which you live. And, you know, that's not super satisfying, but there are consequences to, this is what I said before, there are real consequences to living in a place where the political system sucks. This is why politics is so important. I don't want to live under post-communism Poland because I don't want to have those kinds of issues. I don't want my kids or my grandkids to have them. So it's why I care about politics. The only reason I care about politics is because otherwise it's pretty boring, but it's important to our lives. There are real consequences. This is why I tell a lot of people, it's like make it to the United States. I don't know how, but make it a life goal to be here. I mean, my psychology, when I was in Israel, it was completely different. I mean, just the way you live. I mean, door to door with another person who can knock on your door at any point in time and open it. Like that's the Israeli way of living with neighbors. I didn't know I hated it until I came here. And things like that. So I agree with you, Ron. I think that politics really matters. Gilad, do you want to ask the last question? Yeah, Peter, it's kind of related to what you've been talking about now. So I'm asking how early did you begin realizing that you want to take part in spreading objectivism? And how important is the value of spreading objectivism for your happiness? And also the fact that that value is so dependent of others. How did you know it's not some secondhand aspiration or a tendency for rationalization? Yeah, I mean, how early did I know? I mean, really, to articulate it kind of in those terms, I would say, are pretty late. I don't know, sometime probably in my early 30s, late 20s, early 30s, that I wanted that to be part of my life. I didn't know I wanted to be a major part of my life, but I wanted it that it was important to me and I wanted it to be part of my life. I think it's only happened when the ideas were really fully integrated and I really understood them and then when did it become a major part? I would say when I realized that I enjoyed doing it and when I realized that I loved teaching. So, if you wanna spread objectivism, you better enjoy the spreading, right? Look, everything is, most things that you do in life involve to some extent other people, right? You produce an iPhone, you can say I did it for myself and I built it. It's beautiful and it's my vision and all that, but if nobody buys it, it's a frigging failure and it doesn't go anywhere. And you're not gonna be that happy. So, how do you know you're not being second-handed because you're just being happy because people bought your thing and it's all about them, it's not about you. Well, no, I mean, you're creating values and often the values you're creating are for other people. You're trading with them, we are trading animal. And I think that, to me, it's there's no question of the joy I get from teaching, from changing other people's, or from helping people gain new knowledge. And how do I know it's for me, partially because I enjoy it so much, I get a huge amount of satisfaction and it's rationally so because other people are valued to me and I know why other people are valued to me and I know some people are more of a value than other people. And therefore, that is a source of joy and value, but also that I know that I want a better world, that I want to live in a better world and I know that in order to live in a better world, there's no shortcuts. In order to live in a better world, you have to convince people that they should join you in that better world, that they need to share the values that you have. There's just no other way around it. I can't, you know, escaping to some desert island is not an option. It's not an option for a lot of reasons. Among them, I really like civilization. I really, really, really enjoy civilization and everything that it produces. And I don't want me to cut myself off from that. A civilization is one of my main values. And as I see it today, whether today you would think I am doing it in order to create an objectivist world, that's one perspective, you could also view it as I'm trying to save civilization because I value civilization, you know, and that's another perspective. Now, those are pretty ambitious goals, but those are, you know, that's what I'm trying to do in some, at least from a certain perspective. And no, you know, there's nothing, other people being a value to you is not second-handed. Civilization being a value to you is not second-handed. Wanting the world to be a better place is not second-handed. Or not necessarily second-handed. Certainly you could do anything for second-handed reasons. So I want to give that perspective, Gilad, because sometimes when people talk to me, you know, because of the nature of my job about changing the world, changing the world. And sometimes it's like, why do you worry about this? Because it seems like you're forcing yourself to be concerned. I would say if you don't have the passion that you're on has or I have to go fix the world, don't. I mean, if you're really enjoying, I think the key what you're on said is that if you enjoy the spreading, then do it. But if you don't, don't. I mean, that's the thing about not being second-handed. And knowing you a little bit, if you take some steps forward with what your plan is to spread objectivism in a specific target audience, really pay attention, am I enjoying that process? That I'm not driven by a duty to educate the world of what I know. I know that my initial reaction to objectivism was like, I need to tell everybody everything all the time. And I got a lot of rejections. I blew up some Friday night dinners with friends because I was, no, I have to do it. I mean, what do you mean? You all need to read out the shrug. And that's where reality hits you in the face and you eat here in the face. It's like, it's not my job and I'm not enjoying it. It's all misery. I mean, trying to convince your friends of, you know, that objectivism is right. And trying to force it was bad, bad, bad, bad, lose, lose a proposition for me. So I learned from it, I don't enjoy it. I enjoy a specific aspect of it. And by the way, I enjoy it when people are coming to me and asking me rather than me going after them. So in that sense, what you're on, your own passion is not 100% aligned with mine. I'm not the same like, let's go, you know, fight and you're on keeping up with politics that I don't as much. So it's nuanced and I would say be introspection for me and really understanding if you're enjoying the process or not enjoying the spreading is the key to know, you know, is the right thing for you or what aspect, you know, if you change it, something a little bit, it can be all the difference. I think it has to be very nuanced. Anyway, we're... Can I comment on some of these Steven wrote? So Steven writes, research shows that things like health, wealth, marital status are not as important as attitudes like optimism, gratitude and so on. Yeah. I'm suspicious of such research because you can't control what I think is important. You can't control, you take two people with the same set of values and the same philosophy. And then, you know, let's change these particular attitudes or change. I think wealth, health and marital status are crucially important for happiness. And I think they're related to whether you're optimistic or some because I think optimistic people are gonna probably, you know, make better be better at certain things that attaining wealth and maybe, for example, willing to take risks. So I think to untie the degree to what is causal and what is not, what is correlated and what is not and to control for philosophy, to control for common values is very, very, very difficult. You would have to do one of these happiness studies on objectivists and that's a scary proposition. But I, you know. I just wanna add to that, Steve, that I find and I read a lot of that, it's just they're trying to collectivize things that are individualistic in nature. I mean, gratitude for me is bullshit. I never, I never derive any value from gratitude because I think I've earned everything. And so I have to manufacture this feeling of like, oh, the world has been so good to me and the people around me, no, I chose the people around me. I created my own environment. So I feel, so how, and I'm reading so much, I just read Stumbling on Happiness. I don't remember the author, but he's like Mr. Happiness, I see him in commercials. He did all the research in the world. It's like, it doesn't mean anything. He's trying to tell me what the set of values or even approaches to life were so different. And I, with a little I've done in the happiness team and I've talked to Gina a lot about it, it's just, I call it the respect for individualism that I have right now is unlimited in the sense that it could be the opposite. Like I hear people talking about life in the opposite way that I would perceive. And I think what they're trying to get is disaster, but it's good for them because I like, why do it? Why do it's gross? No, that's what they love. And that's where I'm like, you're wrong. I'm very suspicious of all those research they say, oh, it's gratitude and optimism and, you know, get married or well, health, we can all agree on that. Right? But I'm big and good. And I'm, thank you, Telfer, inviting me to do this. This was fun. And I'm, I feel very grateful. Thank you, Ayn Rand for writing all those novels. We're very grateful for Ayn Rand, right? Very, very grateful for actually for all of you for joining. Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful, so just to remind you there's something happening every Saturday, sorry, every Sunday, either we're starting a new team or we have what we call the workout groups of the happiness team. So again, if you want to learn some more, myhappiness.team. So Yaron, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for joining. And we'll see you next time. Be continued. Bye guys. Be continued. Bye bye. Be happy.