 I've got all the titles wrong, though radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Thursday, Thursday before Christmas. Hope everybody's excited by the prospects of Christmas coming up and having a great week. All right, today we've got Don joining me, Don Watkins. I guess I should have looked up your bio because I don't know who knows what Don's been doing. Don, obviously, worked with me at the Ironman Institute for many years, co-author of Free Market Revolution and Equalism Fair, as well as the Mall case for Finance. He went off and worked for that guy, Alex something, Alex something, Alex Epstein, and worked there for a few years, then became a freelancer, and now is back at the Ironman Institute. We're going to talk about what he's doing at the Ironman Institute because that relates, I think, to a lot of what we want to talk about today, which is ambition and how that fits into kind of the objectivist ethics, purpose, and productiveness and everything else. So, hey, Don. Hey, Ron, how's it going? Good, good. So, I was at back at the Ironman Institute. I don't think I've talked to you on the show since you're back. Well, no. I was back when we were in the UK together. Oh, that's right. That's right. No, but not, and we, but we went on the show. So, I haven't talked to you on the show. Yeah, absolutely. No, it's been amazing. Part of what I realized when I was working with Alex was my favorite thing to do was to kind of mentor others, and people kind of came to me informally to improve his writers or to build intellectual careers. And I was like, this is really fun. It's sort of all the best parts of thinking about philosophy and writing, but I don't have to actually implement them. And so it was a great hobby. But then I kind of started turning it into part of my career when I was freelancing. I did a lot of communication and career coaching. And when Tal Safani, CEO of AIRI, was planning Ironman University, which is a big revamp of our educational programs, he got a bunch of us together in Colorado and invited me out there. And we thought, like, how are you going to make the educational programs even better in world class? And the basic idea was, well, if you could personalize it more, if the educational experience was customized to each individual and helping them implement these ideas in their life, succeed in the program, that would be revolutionary. And that's essentially what I came on board to do. So, so tell us a little bit about what it is you actually do, who you're doing it with. Go through some of what's going on at the Ironman University and also what is the data activity look like? So I mean, you know, when you or I came up, there's kind of a handful of courses that were aimed at future intellectuals, like very intensive, very high level and amazing. And, I mean, of course, you got to learn from Leonard Pieckoff and Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz directly. I got to learn from Ankar Gathe directly. And Ironman University is taking that really building on and expanding in a few ways. One is that we're trying to reach a broader swath of people, basically anybody who's had a fire lit into them by Ayn Rand, who's been inspired by her books and ideas. This is a place where you can come to really learn more. So we're definitely focused and a major focus is always going to be on future intellectuals because ARI's mission is to get these ideas into the culture. And as you talk about time and time again, it's intellectuals who are kind of taking those ideas and using them to illuminate the world who are crucial to that and central to that. But basically, everybody can benefit from an intensive study of objectivism. And but there's also an expansion of, well, what are they going to learn? Back in my day, it was objectivism as a philosophy and how to communicate it. And we still have that still at the center. But now it's how does objectivism illuminate the foundations of human knowledge? In other words, it's really valuable to have kind of a basic account of things like science, law, art and literature from an objectivist perspective. And so we're expanding, massively expanding the curriculum. I'm actually going to be teaching or co-teaching two courses in this year. One is with Tal and Ankar on work and philosophy, which is helping people understand objectivism's unique view of work, but then use it to build a career that they're really passionate about. And we'll probably talk about some of that today. And then I'm also going to be teaching a course on persuasion and how to persuade people of radical ideas. So it's basically what we were doing before, but much more intensive. Now my particular role is creating this coaching department where in addition to taking classes, let's say you signed up, you're on and, you know, it's, let's call it 20 year old, you're on, you're signing up for it. So you enroll, you're taking a class, let's say on objectivism or on Inran and her philosophy and literature. And you're taking classes with Ankar and some of our other instructors there. You'd also be meeting every other week with a coach who's helping you get the most out of those classes and use what you're learning in class to pursue your productive goals and build the kind of career that you want and modeling for you what it looks like to use objectivism in real life in a healthy, proactive way. And so I work with a few different coaches, Amanda Maxim, Steven Shub, who are really outstanding. And then I work with some students and a lot of what I do in terms of one-on-one coaching nowadays is our higher level students. So we have a junior fellows program for people want to be future intellectuals. And so I oversee the whole program and work with them, but it's really, how are you getting the most out of your courses and more broadly, how are you getting the most out of the philosophy? Because I don't know if you had this experience you're on, but I found it really hard to understand how to use it in my life. And I wanted to and I got a lot out of it, but I still felt like, how do I make sense of this? And I was running into all sorts of problems for many years. And if I had had somebody, it wasn't really until I started to meet people like you and Alex and on car and got to see what it actually looked like to function by a philosophy that it really became clear in my mind and being able to give that to students and role model for them, I think is a huge value. Yeah, no, absolutely. When I was coming up, it took me 10 years before I met an Objectivist Intellectual. So it was very confusing and it was a lot of, I'm sure I held a lot of views about these things that were wrong. And it took a while to get straightened out and figure out what was and what wasn't Objectivism and how to apply it. People think it's easy, just be rational. It's easy. But no, it is complex and some of that complexity you see in the fact that there are real disagreements and the people who disagree about things. Because it's not easy to apply these ideas to concrete. It's not easy to apply these ideas to your life or to the concretes of the world out there and trying to explain it, trying to understand it. So you're trying to mentor them both in terms of the application of Objectivism and then also career-wise. Yeah, well, I mean, you could theoretically have a program where you had a coach that was helping you with any problem you had in your life. Here's how Objectivism can help you have a better sex life or be more creative or something like that. I don't think there's many people qualified to do that. And there's reasons why you might not want ARI taking responsibility for doing that. But the idea is, if we can help you use what you're learning in class in your productive role, because the Objectivism is you as your productive career is at the center of your life and the core of what makes you happy. But it also models how to be a value or how to pursue rational values across your life. So I think if somebody really has somebody helping them walk through with achieving hard, ambitious, creative career goals, you're going to learn a lot that's going to apply to your personal life and apply to other issues. So I think it does. Gina Gorlin, who you've had on the show and who's been really generous in helping us build this program, you know, she's really stressed this idea to me of think about a lot of the coaches and mentors who have had the biggest personal impact on you. And often it's not like some generic life coach who helps you with everything. It's somebody who helped you in one area of your life, but you took away bigger lessons. So like when I used to take martial arts, like there was a real impact on me in terms of what it meant to be a good person, confident to work hard at something that I think carried way beyond the sport itself. And I think a lot of us have had things like that, whether it's from a teacher or something. So by being really kind of focused on a delimited area of life, I think you still get much bigger benefits. And the area that we're picking is from Objectivism's view really important and where people don't really have a lot of models in the culture that I think get career right. I mean, think about somebody like Sam Bateman Freed, right? He is trying to decide what to do with his life and he goes to a mentor. What's the guy who did long termism, McCaskill, right? And McCaskill gives him the career advice of a lifetime. No, stop trying to promote your ideas, go out there and make a lot of money and then give it away to support altruistic causes. Well, wouldn't it be great if somebody who's clearly intelligent and interested in ideas as Sam Bateman Freed had somebody who said, like, that no, that's not at all what you should be doing. Like, start thinking about what's actually good for your life and what would actually promote your happiness and what kind of moral character you need in order to genuinely value yourself and achieve your that the world could be a different place right now. And I mean, that's, you know, how I think about the kind of upside of what we're doing. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm not convinced Sam would have been open to it given, given his upbringing, but in given how easily he took to McCaskill, right? I mean, he latched onto that really easily. But yes, I mean, there are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who are looking for, who are looking for advice, who want to understand the world in which they live. They have ambition, but they don't know quite how to guide it, maybe beyond the startup, maybe beyond the one thing that they know what to do. And I think philosophy is the answer for them. They just don't know it. Well, I was talking to Tau, Savani, our CEO, he went to a an entrepreneurial, a conference of entrepreneurs, successful people. And he was really he called me he's really depressed afterwards, because the whole time he's meeting people and all the topics were how we're unhappy, no matter how much money we make, we're all addicted to this and that. We're super sad. And, and I think it really bothered him. He was expecting to find these happy fulfilled people. And that's what I mean, we can delve into this more, but part of I think a right attitude towards ambition is a more holistic ambition towards all of the values life requires. Whereas I think what happens with a lot of people is they use ambition to escape all of their misery. They think it's going to solve all their problems and kind of misery. But if you're not on a quest for values across your life and if you don't have the guidance of philosophy to cultivate a character that you can genuinely be proud of and that puts you on a path to happiness, then sometimes the most misery you see is from successful people. Because I mean, if you think about the setup, a lot of people are pursuing some form of money fame in order to fill some hole. And one of the worst things that can happen is that you get it and realize that hole is still there. And that's a metaphysical emergency for people and things can go really wrong. And I think you're right. Philosophy is what's trying to philosophy is putting you on a track where success is actually fulfilling and not an escape from those kinds of negatives. Yeah, I mean, a big part of it is not, you know, is not what they argue is like the life, life, work balance or whatever. It's having the right attitude to work and having the right attitude towards achievements and what, you know, they achieve for the sake of achievements and they don't know exactly why they're doing it. And they don't have a sense of pride. And it doesn't really at the end of the day doesn't give them what they thought it would, which is happiness. And they have they can understand it because they don't have the foundations on which to generate, if you will, that kind of that kind of sense of themselves and that kind of sense of a proper achievement, real achievement. And part of it is guilt. But it's much more complex than that. It's a lot more than just guilt. Well, that's why I think it's a really important question to ask yourself. If you're not ambitious, there's things to say about that. But if you are ambitious, and a lot of people, young people are to really try to get it, why? And because the, I think you said in passing, they don't know why they're kind of after what's motivating them in terms of pursuing achievement. I think that's really right. And if you think about to take one of Inran's novels, and I don't consider this a spoiler, Peter Keating, he's really ambitious. But if you stopped and ask him, like, well, why, why do you want to be at the top of your profession? What are you going to get out of it? He would not be able to answer that. And if he could answer it, and when he realizes by the end of the novel, is that the answer is not an answer. You wouldn't do that if you were really upfront with yourself about why you're chasing status or fame or recognitions that you're trying to fill a hole in yourself, versus if you think about somebody like Howard Work in The Fountainhead, he's very ambitious. But it's because he wants to challenge himself to create greater and greater buildings, to produce greater and greater values for the sake of his ultimate value that is his life and happiness. And as a result, achieves a kind of fulfillment that somebody who's trying to impress other people is never going to be able to get. Yeah. And I think my sense is that the most successful entrepreneurs, at least that I see on stage or whatever, Steve Jobs, even Microsoft Bill Gates and Bezos and others, you get a sense that they know they've achieved something, they understand it, they have all that. But it just doesn't connect with the rest of their lives. They don't have it as a holistic thing. So they can be completely irrational in other aspects of their lives. And it creates tension and conflict. And then they have their moral code, particularly Bill Gates, that contradicts what they've succeeded. They can't really fully immerse themselves in the success. They can't feel the full pride, which you kind of know that they feel, but they won't admit, or it's almost like they're not admitting to themselves that they feel it because you see Bill Gates light up when he talks about Microsoft or when he talks about investing. And then he immediately goes to talk about philanthropy or something because he knows that's where he's supposed to go. So it's being torn between your morality and between your personal ambitions, or you have this morality that's just war with itself. Your values and conflict with one another. And that will make you unhappy. When your values and conflict with one another, you're going to be unhappy. Yeah. No, I think particularly Bill Gates is like that. Steve Jobs was interesting and I don't think he felt any moral conflict about Apple. I think he recognized that he did something really virtuous and really good. It's harder to say about some of the more kooky aspects of his personal life. Yeah, Easton philosophy and juicing is a cure for cancer, which probably killed him. He was still compartmentalized, but I don't think he had a moral conflict in the way that Gates does. And Bezos, I don't have a good read on, will probably get a better feel as he opens up a little bit more now that he's not CEO of Amazon. He's probably waiting for some of the controversy of his private life to go away. But we'll see. Yeah. All right. So let's jump into talking about ambition specifically. I am curious if you could include in this some of what you do with the junior fellows. So I don't know what that was. So how do you view ambition? Let's say what is it? What does it mean to be ambitious? And how does it fit into the ethics of objectivism? Yeah. And I mean, part of why I've been thinking a lot about this is A, it comes up a lot whenever you're setting goals. And then B, and that's one of the things we do with the people we work with at Ayn Rand University is help them set and pursue goals. And we're also now a little over a week away from New Year's when a lot of people are thinking about their goals for the oncoming year. So I think it's a very ripe topic. Now, Ayn Rand, and it's interesting, where she most explicitly talks about ambition is, and do you happen to know offhand? You would never. Tax credits for education, of course. But she talks about the ambitious poor. I don't remember offhand. There's another essay I think she talks about the ambitious poor as the victims of the welfare state and the victims of statism. But that's where she gives her definition where it's something like the systematic pursuit of achievement is a way of life. And all those pieces are important. But the whole idea is that you're continually setting out to improve in a given area. And what she stresses, she's stressing there is that it's actually a morally neutral concept in the sense of, but that she thinks it's been treated the same way selfishness has for the same reasons it has been equated with evil, though she thinks selfishness is actually a moral concept, whereas she thinks ambition is actually neutral. Like you can be an ambitious killer, an ambitious thief, and you can be ambitious in all kinds of bad ways, but that being ambitious for values, being ambitious for positives, seeking the best possible, that is part of what it means to be virtuous. That is, you can't really be a value if you're not ambitious, if you're not relentlessly seeking the best. And if you think about in my favorite paragraph and anything she's ever written is her part and galt speech on pride. And part of what she talks about is that pride is crucial to self-esteem and that the root of self-esteem, she says is something like that radiant selfishness of soul that desires the best in all things, material and spiritual. And it's like that is ambition is I want the best in all things. And so if you think about her definitions of being the systematic pursuit of achievement, it's that this is something across life. Like there's plenty of people who are kind of passive, but man, I really want the best baseball card collection, right? They'll have one area where, oh man, I'll get revved up, but no, you want to be this way across your life, you want to be seeking out the best. And the, so in that sense, it's something we should all strive to cultivate, but you have to be careful because you can, I think ambition can go wrong in various ways. I think there's ways that you can be under ambitious, but one of the things I see most among young objectivists is that they go wrong. It's not that they want to be too ambitious. I think that's not the right way to think about it. I personally call it rationalistic ambition, which maybe isn't the best phrase, but it's something like this. Well, I have to do work that's important. I have to work 18 hours a day. I have to care about nothing more than my work. And it becomes very duty bound. And if you just think about something like working 18 hours a day, work should be at the center of your life, but it's at the center of your life, but it's at the center of your life. And aside from maybe some people who that's all they care about or certain periods of your life where you may have to go all in on work, there's a whole range of values that comprise a human life and to be ambitious is to attend to all of them. So if you're working 18 hours a day and you don't ever get to establish a romantic relationship or friendships or have any time for art rejuvenation, for most people, I'd say you're missing out on something. And certainly, if you think that's what your philosophy is demanding of you, you've gone really off the rails. And so I think part of what you should be thinking is I want to be ambitious for values, not as a duty, not and let me take that one case of I want to choose work that's important. So I worked with a student who was struggling to think of a career and said, well, I want to do work that's important. And I ran, you know, she says the most important thing is to be an intellectual. Now, you're on, you have to understand my job is to recruit intellectuals. And so you think like, all right, I've got one on the hook right here. But like my blood ran cold. I can imagine. I can imagine. Because I and this is literally what I said, I said, works not an intellectual and I ran seems to think he's pretty good. But you can see how a person can kind of go down that route. Whereas the right perspective is it's work that's important to you, to you personally. And I'm sure if you asked Rourke, what's more important for human flourishing as a total? Is it intellectuals? Or is it builder, you know, architects, he would concede? Yeah, well, probably overall, like it's more important. You need an intellectual so you have a free society. And then he'd shrug and he'd go back to building. Yeah, right. So but his personal mission was to make the world beautiful, which for him was the buildings that, you know, created the landscapes and and habitations for human beings. That's what had the most meaning to him. And that's really what I think the respect in which you want to be ambitious is what's most meaningful to me. And and and so it's being able to think about your values in an ambitious way, but not as in, you know, the God of Objectivism is saying thou shalt pick, you know, the most admirable, greatest works know what do I care about? And how do I get the most out of my life? So let me just remind everybody that just because Don Sia doesn't mean you off the hook for the super chat. Yeah, but you can use the super chat to ask Don questions and you can ask him questions about anything, not just about ambition. So feel free to use it. You know, we've got the goal of $650. I'll try not to bug you too often about that, but I do want to thank Cook. And I want to thank Len for the contributions. And I do see we've got a few questions. So we will get to them. We will get to them soon. So let me just say to the audience, like, don't make me look bad. If Iran does not get the money here, I'm not going to be a guest again. So I need your help so that I can remain a part of the Iran Brook show. I'm going to rank my guests based on how much money I raise during each show. So we're going to make it competitive here. Yes, because this is a regular Thursday feature now we're going to do it. I'm going to try to do an interview every Thursday. And given that I'm doing a show every day during the week, this is this is somewhat a little bit of respite. Don's doing the heavy lifting. So in terms of the how you view ambition, give you ambition as primarily focused on one's career, one's central purpose or is ambition more general than that? Is one ambitious with regard to love? Is one ambitious with regard to other values that are important? I mean, it's definitely most pronounced with career, right? Because that's what's giving the direction to your life. And so you can see somebody rising from achievement to achievement, whereas it's less visible in other areas. But I definitely think, I mean, if you think about personal relationships, a lot of people, it's okay, you kind of date, you try to impress them, you get married, and then that just kind of gets taken for granted and falls into the background. Whereas if you're ambitious for values, it's how am I going to get the most out of this? The most pleasure, the most joy, make sure you get the most out of it. And it's the constant seeking of the best in every area that I think is important. Or here, one that I think a lot about, because this is an area where I think I've been under ambitious in the past is in art, that the way I grew up, my mom would take us to movies all the time and we would watch them and we walk out of the theater and then one of me or my brother, she would say, what'd you think? And then we'd all say, that was pretty good, or it wasn't that good. And that was the conversation. And to get that, no, you can actually think about these things in deeper and deeper ways and it makes it more enjoyable and you connect it more to your life. And then you can do it with more demanding art, right? It's not just going to the movies and getting more joy out of it. It's sinking your teeth into Hugo or even, God forbid, somebody like Tolstoy or Targanyev or somebody, you can put in the work and get more and more out of it. I think that every aspect of life can be like that. And I find it actually more sometimes, like I was naturally ambitious with work. That came kind of pre-installed. I was always driven to do, push myself really, really hard to grow fast to achieve things that I thought were new, interesting, exciting. But to be ambitious in more kind of small grain ways about like, is my working environment like the best one I could possibly create? Do I walk into my office and just feel like, yeah, this is my universe. I'm excited to be creative. Every aspect of life just seeking out the best for me. I find, I found that really helpful and it's rewarding, particularly, you know, if you think the more ambitious you are with something like work, that means the longer range goals you're pursuing, the harder you're pushing yourself. And if you can have these little, you know, ambition-laden pleasures throughout your day-to-day existence, it really helps with that larger enterprise and pursuit I've found. Yes, no, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, looking at your bare walls behind you, you need to listen to my show on surrounding yourself with beauty. This apartment, I've been in for exactly one week, so we are to be forgiven. People are already commenting. We're already commenting right from the back. What a bare walls. They're not used to that on the Iran bookshows. So, surround yourself with beauty, guys. Don't listen to Don. No, don't look at Don. Listen to Don. Well, I just got us a painting for here that is really glorious Steve Hanks painting. We'll have to put it back here. Which one? Which Steve Hanks? It has the thinker, Rodin's the thinker, but then it has a little kid posed in thinking. And the interesting thing is, Marianne Surrey's wrote an amazing piece called Metaphysics and Marble About Sculpture, and she slams Rodin properly about being anti-human being. But whereas Rodin is, the thinker is scrunched over and, you know, uncomfortable. It's not really an aspirational portrait of the mind. The child is not. The child is erect, deeply thoughtful, and has this kind of excitement and wonder about the world. It's a really glorious painting. Yeah, I really enjoy Steve Hanks's work. All right. So, one of the things I've noticed is that objectivists use the state of the world to rationalize their lack of ambition. So, in a sense, you know, world's irrational, everybody's irrational, nobody will hire me. I'm so smart, but I can't get anything done because they have a bad philosophy. And my guess is some of your students probably have elements of that. How do you deal with that? Yeah, I mean, that is a, I mean, sending back what I would say directly to the students, because sometimes in coaching, you need to help have a person have the realization themselves, rather than just like lecture them. But if you think part of what's going on there is that it's, you're really telling yourself a story to excuse yourself from doing the hard work of making your life better. And to me, like, when I hear that, I just think, okay, we'll give up on life. Like, what's the end game there? Like, okay, I don't have to be happy because it's impossible. Well, fine, go be miserable. But like my view is, compared to most times in history, we have way more freedom, way more wealth, way more opportunity. We have Inran's philosophy and a whole community that values it. There's so much you can do today. And so, I just regarded as off the table insane to hold a view that in effect says, well, it's impossible. I mean, imagine somebody who was living, let's say in Russia in the early part of the 20th century, where, you know, literally, you have totalitarians taking over. And that, you could imagine a person in that environment saying, no, I'm still going to try to make the best of my life. Well, you know, if I ran, did that, like, what excuse do we have? And you've got a great model of that in Kira and We The Living. Now, it doesn't end well, but you get that sense of she's never going to give up her ambition for life. She's never going to give up her ambition to live life. And no matter even if it costs her life. And I think you're a really good model here, Yaron, because you're somebody who's super engaged in the fight, right? In these issues, I'm going to read the news, I'm going to talk about these issues, I'm going to get out there. But clearly, you're not obsessed and, you know, by this stuff, the point, like, you're also predominantly focused on the stuff you enjoy making money, talking about ideas, enjoying great art, having great relationships with people. And I think, like, that's what you need to aspire to do. And the fact that you've done it, like, should be a model for people that, oh, maybe I can still engage with these ideas and not let it turn me away from actually getting enjoyment out of life. Yeah, they'd rather argue with me about Trump. So it's coming up in new years, give us some pointers. And so if somebody wants to, or let me ask you this week, how do you get yourself to be more ambitious? What are the tools to inspire yourself to be ambitious? Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm, me and Nico said, air, I are going to do a whole podcast on New Year's resolutions next Thursday for New Ideal Live. So if people want to hear that, they can tune in there. But I definitely would say a few things about that. So when I think of why people are under ambitious, let's start there. I think it's usually one of two things or a combination of the two. So one is there can be self-esteem issues where you just don't think I'm capable of a lot. And we could talk about that. But another one that I think is actually pretty common, but nobody talks about is environmental. And one of the things I noticed was when I was a teenager, like I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know any writers. Like I had never met anybody who did. And so it didn't really seem real that you could do that. Like I wanted to, but it didn't, it didn't seem like something where, okay, well, let me now start executing on that. Cause how does one even do that? Like I know in theory, there's people out there, but they seem just different for me. There's these remote creatures. And I remember I did an interview on my personal podcast, the Don Watkins show a while ago with our mutual friend, Jeff Britting, who is an artist, a composer, an archivist for AI does a lot of amazing things. And he talked about growing up surrounded by artists. And for him, it was perfectly not, yeah, of course you could make a living as an artist. I know people who did it. It seemed very relatable. And therefore he was willing to cultivate that kind of ambition. And so I think one thing, one easy thing that you can do to become more ambitious is surround yourself with ambitious people or people who've done the kinds of things that you want to do, because it makes it seem really real in a way that is hard to connect to if you haven't been around it. And so that's kind of a small way of doing things. And then the other thing is that we often think of ambition as formulating a very clear long range vision that we're shooting towards. And I think it can, and in many cases ultimately will take something like that. But particularly at the start, ambition is much more about taking the biggest next step that I'm capable of. So for instance, if you're out of college, you're 23 years old, you might not know what you want to do with your life. And so the idea of well, be ambitious about it. Well, what does that even mean? Does it mean try to get a high paying job or run a company? I don't know what I want to do. How can I be ambitious when I don't have even my industry picked out? But I think you can be ambitious with the next step. So let's say you think about, well, I'm interested in XYZ. So like I really like music. I really like being around creative people. I'm going to go do an internship in the record industry or in a recording studio or something like that. And then once you're there, being ambitious means, all right, well, how can I put more into the job? How am I going to, I want to learn, if I'm going to be interning at a record label, I want to be paying attention and asking questions about everybody to learn like how does this place work and how do you get ahead and what actually, you know, are we contributing against the art? Like you're ambitious for knowledge about the whole kind of arena that you're interested in and you're ambitious for skills. You're trying to learn how to do as much as you can and be as capable as you can. And so I think thinking about ambition that way of what can I do today? To learn as much as I can, to grow as much as I can, to figure out what I value. I think starting there versus saying, oh, I'm just going to sit down with a notepad and come up with, you know, some grand plan will I'll be a millionaire in five years or something like that, which very rarely gets people to do anything. So do you suggest that people sit down and kind of make short-term and intermediate term kind of goals, set goals, ambitious goals for what they're going to do in the short run, things that they can actually execute it right away? Yeah, I find that really fruitful, particularly if those goals are generated from reflecting on their actual experience. So for instance, I've talked to a lot of young people who, oh, I want to become a CEO of a company, but if you kind of press them, the content of their mind and what a CEO does is something like Steve Jobs standing on a stage announcing the iPhone. And it's like, that's a great start. It's inspiring, it's amazing. I've watched those videos more than I would even like to admit to. But 99.9% of the time, Steve Jobs was not standing on a stage announcing the new iPhone. And so the question is, well, what's he actually doing? And am I interested in doing that? And so a lot of how I think about what you should be introspecting about and looking for is not some projection and does that seem exciting to me, but look at your actual experience and what has been engaging and exciting and energizing for you. So for me, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my life when I was young, well, since I was six years old, I was obsessed with writing. I was doing that my free time. I was reading books in the top. I was taking extra writing classes. And from the time I was 15 and discovered objectivism, that's what I did from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. I'd be in math class or Spanish class, virtue of selfishness behind the textbook and whatever. So I didn't know exactly what form was I going to be a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer? Was I going to be a professional philosopher or maybe go into journalism? There were a lot of options that I didn't know, but I at least knew, okay, these are the things that really motivate me. And so, yeah, I should have been taking the next step in that direction. And for several reasons, I didn't for a while, at least not in the way that I would now knowing like if I had had a coach, I would have gotten where I got even faster. But that's sort of where I would start is what are my actual values today in practice? And then what can I do tomorrow to really move the needle? So I would have been more challenging because I had no idea what I wanted to do. So, you know, ever, I mean, I thought I want to be a doctor. I certainly knew I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, but beyond those kind of, and I gave up on being a doctor like when I was 12. So I had no idea what I wanted to do. I don't think I quite figured it out until I was 40. I mean, literally, I enjoyed everything I did until then it wasn't like I was suffering through it. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. Well, can I say one thing about that? Because that's actually important. You know, I'm 40 now. And I would say I've known what I wanted to do. But I did not have what you would strictly call like a crystal clear to find central purpose until the last couple years. And a lot of young objectives I worked to. So this is mistakes of ambition. Um, they feel guilty like, Oh, I should have my central that I ran says you need a central purpose. I should have, you know, my equivalent of I want to write a novel presenting a moral ideal that she had, you know, like, no, no, no, often your central purpose when you're starting out is going to be super vague. It's going to be like pursue career opportunities that are interesting and have an opportunity to learn. And it's only over time that it will get really refined and crystallized. And you should not feel guilt at all over not knowing what you want to do. You should go gold if you're not trying to figure it out. Exactly. And you're going to make mistakes. Oh, yeah, you make mistakes. You're going to study things that you don't actually need. You're going to maybe take a job that you hate. But that's all the learning experience. And particularly when you're young, you've got time to make mistakes and to learn. So the worst thing you can do is be passive about it and not try and not be ambitious. And that's the thing I always try to do try to find something that I was interested in try to do it well. But I never I always thought I never really had the biggest concept. Okay, this is really what I want to do. And this is really what I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing until I think I joined the Institute. So and even then the job morphed quite a bit from when I arrived to when when I think I hit my stride. So so you would have the people should really break it down a short term, not try to overdo it, not try to project their whole life, particularly when they're young, their whole life forward, any other kind of practical guidance on what people can do. If they're struggling with ambition, or because they lack it, or or they've given up, or they, you know, they've, I think a lot of people have this notion of it's too hard. How do you bounce back? And do you think you can use art to motivate you? Well, I think you need to use art to motivate you. And certainly for the larger, so I mean, if you think about I ran as a whole book on why we need art. And part of her view, though this isn't the whole of it is the pursuit of life, like if you're saying like your life is what counts and make the most of it, like there's no more long by definition, like that's the longest range endeavor that you're ever going to be involved in. And how are you going to keep that fire alive? So think about how many like young people there's, we talked about youthful idealism, and that burns out for many, many people who have it all. Why does it burn out? And part of it is, it's an achievement to keep that alive is an achievement to keep that real that image of what you want from life. And art is really the thing that keeps it real. It prevents you, it presents you at its best with the image of, yeah, this is what it would mean to live in your ideal world and to achieve your values. And it gives you the experience of achieving your values in the here and now. And I mean, it's one of the reasons that, you know, I find myself returning to I ran over and over again. Sometimes it's more intellectual, like I want to understand the ideas more and so on. But a lot of times it's just a reminder of, you know what, like, like, step up your game. Like, don't, don't fall prey to the kind of day to day struggles and tribulations and so on. Like, keep your eye on the big picture of what you're in this for. And I think art is really crucial to that. You know, so I think art is a good starting place. I mentioned, you know, the idea of surrounding yourself with people in an environment that encourages, because I think it can play a similar kind of role. I mean, I certainly know that having friends who are building companies and who are writing books and who are running schools and things, it acts in this, it has a similar kind of inspiration, where it's like, all right, I'm really excited to think about, you know, what I'm going to do and, you know, when you see how much energy and joy it kind of brings to the lives. So that's certainly good place to start, along with more like, what can I do in the short term? What kind of actions can I take now? But another good thing to think about at a more tactical level is just getting really clear on what are the barriers? So this is not revolutionary. A lot of people who talk about goal setting, one of the things you want to think about is, all right, what's my goal? And then what are the obstacles? In other words, what are the things that keep this goal from being just to guarantee 100% it's going to happen? And you just make a list of every sort of obstacle. And then you can start to get really tactical about, okay, well, what are the things I can do to overcome these obstacles? And what are the resources I can use to overcome these obstacles? And so if you think about it that way, you'll often get a lot of insights on how to overcome stumbling blocks and the kind of things that can prevent success. And a lot of it is just trial and error. So for instance, I'm actually going through a period of being really good about like my diet and exercise. And the main thing that I changed this time, and who knows, you know, that it's going to work a year from now, right? Everybody has their pet theory. I'm not giving diet exercise advice. You'll see that's not what it is. But I changed instead of trying to come up with like a perfect set of rules, it was just, I want to do whatever will help me wake up in the morning feeling really good. And just had that kind of like, you know, basic orientation. So I think a lot of times experimenting with things until something clicks for you and like, oh yeah, this gets me on the right track can work really well. So that kind of just open-minded experimentation and trying things that you learn from other people can work really well. Yeah, I have my whoop for. All right. Whoop, W-H-O-O-P. Yes, it tells me whether I slept well, it tells me how I should feel in the morning, it tells me how much exercise I have to have. I like these things dictated to me. You know, too much of this free will stuff is dangerous. But no, I actually really enjoy it. It really keeps track of everything that I'm doing and tells me how I'm doing. But yes, you need to figure out what is going to motivate you and each one of us are motivated a little differently. All right, we've got a bunch of questions on ambition. So I'm going to start there and then we'll broaden it. Just because we talked about art, Jackson asks, this is a great conversation you wanted Don. This question is for Don. Other than I ran, which novelists have provided you with the most ambition influence as a writer? Oh, as a writer? That's a harder question. As a person, it's a no-brainer, but it's also not that interesting because if you pull 100 objectives, 99 of them, we're going to say Hugo. But for me, and indeed, this might be a little controversial. As a writer, I gravitate to him stylistically, not that I'm anything like him. But in the sense of I ran stylistically, and this is almost certainly at least on her theory because she is a better, what she calls psycho epistemology than I do. It's really that clarity and precision of every word that she strove to inject. Whereas you can think of Hugo as painting with a broader brush and just throwing out these gorgeous, beautiful things that open any line of Les Mis, and it's as beautiful as any poetry you've ever read. But that stylistically, he's closer to what resonates with me personally. And in that sense has been an inspiration, though the thing is the only thing I've actually published is a thriller. So my Hugo-esque tendencies that have shown up in certain drafts kind of vanish in the face of the genre. But no, those I ran in Hugo are by far the two biggest influences on me, both in life and in literature. If you're just talking purely at the level of detective novels and thrillers, he's not an early influence because I discovered him late, but I'm a huge Don Winslow fan. Don't look him up on Twitter because he's like a raging, crazy leftist. And he's disqualified on this chat here in the Iran Book Show if you have leftist political views, nothing else matters. Yeah, but if you read his cartel trilogy, it's in Iran, you like the wire. So if you like the wire, you'll love this. He's just an incredible, incredible writer and is able to take the thriller genre outside of the cookie cutter. I've read this a million times feeling that I get from most of them. All right, let's see. So we're going to do we're going to start with 20 plus on, but I'm going to focus on the ambitious ones on the ambition ones. Seth asks always have always great having Don on the show. What is the relationship between happiness and ambition? I'm generally happy with life, but ambition leaves me discontent and restless if I'm not actively moving towards my goals. Well, that makes me really suspicious that there's a like it should never feel like that you're thinking about ambition too much as a duty, but think about it differently. Like, all right, I have a great relationship. Like, should I want to make it better? I achieve something. I'm really proud of it work. Do I just want to repeat the same thing or do something worse next time? I think it's inherent in pursuing values that that are actually meaningful to you, that there's a constant desire for wanting to better them. And indeed, most of the people who say, well, happiness is an illusion. Often that's what they point to to say it's an illusion. So the the idea of, you know, hedonic treadmill, oh life, you think this is going to make you happy, but all it makes you when you achieve it, all it does is make you want more and more and more and you can never be satisfied. And there's something right about that, that life never stands still. There is no happily ever after I've achieved enough, I've got enough values. No, life is a constant process of growth, or it's a process of disintegration. So if you're if you're feeling a disconnect between happiness and ambition, my guess is that the ambitions feel more like a should like, oh, I should make more money, or I should get a be pursuing a promotion, or I should be putting in more hours. And that's not it should be an ambition for values. And if you find yourself continually trying to improve the different value realms that you're engaged in, then you're being sufficiently ambitious, I think all is being equal. Yeah, and I don't think you can achieve happiness without being ambitious. Because happiness is about values and attaining values requires ambition. We're attaining the right kind of values, the values that actually need you to be happy. Let's see. No. Casey's just reserving a question. This is the perfect conversation for me to hear today. Now I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm glad. I'm ambitious for that question. Alright, Larry, Larry says, are you familiar with the book with a book older and not well known called ambition by psychologist Gilbert brim? No. It is back in print. And I found it insightful. This is Larry Salisman. So I'll make a note of that one. Psychologist Gilbert brim. Alright, let's see. Thanks Larry. Adam, I think I heard Don mention a part of the course maybe deals with people at work that don't share objective values. I assume altruists. Can you expand on that? How do you deal with people like that? I assume. Oh, yeah, well, I don't know what I said that made him think of that, though one issue that I think will come up in the philosophy and work course is you definitely are going to unless you work at the Ironman Institute and even then in the objectless world, there's plenty of value clashes that come up. But one thing you do have to learn how to do is to navigate the world where there are clashing values. And I mean, particularly in certain fields, I mean, what could be a bigger clash than the kind of regulatory hoops that people. So I mean, I worked with somebody once who, for instance, and this wasn't through ARU, but just one of my clients who was in the financial realm and was trying to figure out how to navigate their career when they were being asked for their opinion on ESG and how to rate things according to ESG, which I'm sure your listeners know is basically like, are you a good environmentalist and anti-racist and all of that. And those can be really difficult. There's no single universal answer that I can give here. The main thing I try to think of is always just like, what's my purpose. And I think it's rare that you have to, in effect, be a crusader and like a loudmouth and like, oh, my companies require me to do diversity training. I'm going to stand up and protest and reject it. I think very rarely that kind of thing is required. But in most cases and most places, just raising to your manager, hey, I have objections to this or I think it's problematic for these reasons, can go a long way to both maintaining your integrity, but also part of what you usually find out is everybody agrees with you and everybody's terrified of saying it. And so it usually doesn't lead to the backlash that you think it will. But those can be tricky situations. Here's the briefest answer I can give, given that it depends on the issue. This is one of the reasons I think it's really good for people to really know their philosophy and to go through something like Ayn Rand University is because the more rationalistic or like the less firsthanded and internalized your philosophy is, the more likely you are to see it at odds with your well-being in practice. That the more you hold it firsthandedly, the more it's an aid to pursuing your interest. Whereas a lot of objectivists, I think, feel like they have to be martyrs for their philosophy in a work context because people disagree with them and it should not feel like that. Or that they're somehow violating their integrity by not speaking up and arguing and debating and disagreeing with everybody. Yeah. And that's what I was trying to get at, but with less clarity. So thank you. All right. Thanks, Adam. Colleen says, how do you manage wanting to be ambitious in many areas of your life? Let me know if you figure that one out, Colleen. I struggle to work in many areas at once, but how do you prioritize, grow my business, have quality experience with my kids, have a passionate marriage, et cetera? I mean, I think about it in two ways or from two aspects. So one is at the level of part of how you're choosing your values is in the you should be choosing them in the context of I'm trying to build a life that's meeting all of my needs. And so I'm always thinking about the integration. Even when I'm choosing a career, part of the question I'm asking myself is not just what do I want out of a career, but what do I want out of a life? And so, for instance, if I'm thinking about like, well, I want to be a soldier and I'll be on deployment for years at a time, how does that fit with maybe my desire to have a family and does it fit and so on? Or like the most important thing to me is travel. Well, then I probably shouldn't have a kind of job that involves me not making much money and being like a factory for 60 hours a week because it's not conducive to that. So one should just be you're thinking about your values holistically, but then you're rarely in a position to be able to optimize every part of your life at any given time. I think there's some periods, I'll just speak for me personally, there's some periods where I'm really focused on my career and getting that right and building that as much as I can. And then that's going pretty well and I'm continuing to improve, but I've noticed that my relationships aren't where I want them to be and I'm going to give more time and attention to that. And it's in that sense that you can't focus on everything all the time in different periods of your life, I think will shift in terms of where you put your attention. But if you're thinking about it in a big picture way throughout of how do I integrate all my values, then it shouldn't feel like I'm just letting one completely collapse into a puddle or a disaster while I work on one and then I turn to the next and then that collapses into a disaster. It should feel like I'm able to make improvements that are sustainable in each area of my life at different times. And I mean, it's why something like, if you really haven't gotten a good diet and fitness routine, it takes a lot of mental energy to get that off the ground. But once you kind of get it going and at least semi-automatized, then you have the attention that you can turn somewhere else and you've built up a series of habits that will carry on while you turn your attention to something else. But it's the same thing in every life. If I build up, for instance, a person I'm dating or married to, all right, make sure that we have a date night, make sure we're having conversations and I have a habit of each morning kind of thinking about all these are the things I really appreciate about the person. Once you've kind of built up a system of habits, it doesn't require that full attention in order to be ambitious on and you can turn to it from time to time rather than give it that kind of singular all-encompassing focus. All right. Adam says, my curiosity drove me into one central goal after another, central purpose I think he means. I have been told that I would have achieved more if I'd stuck to one career. Is pursuit of what draws my curiosity my ambition or is it a sophisticated hedonism? Well, I don't know in your case, but I will say this. Barbara Scher wrote, she's written a lot of books on finding a career that you love, but she wrote one book on a concept that you can Google. I forget the name of the book called Scanners and she's writing exactly about people like this, people who they're just constantly starting projects and leaving a bunch of them unfinished and part of her view is that you need to embrace that and that you can actually be purposeful and happy and you don't have to change that and fit into the mold of a singular kind of focus. I don't know 100% if she's right, but because I haven't thought about it too deeply and I certainly haven't tried to work with many people in that orientation, but it's very plausible to me. So I would look up her work. I would say don't jump to, well, clearly there's something wrong with me. I think there's a very good case that you can embrace something like that and use it to have a really fun, fulfilling career. So I'm finished her book, so that's why I don't know what her ultimate advice is on what to do with that, but I met a number of people like that and I don't think that the first thing to conclude is no, you should force yourself just to focus on one single thing, maybe, but I'd have a high threshold for recommending that to somebody. Marilyn is saying that that book is called Refuse to Choose. Thank you. All right, let's see. Len says, I've been intellectual all my life but focused on practical occupations but have noticed my discussions are quietly considered in my circle of influence. As an old guy, I find enjoyment using that, especially with new social media tools, et cetera. Is that okay? Sounds like it. Yeah, I didn't quite fully get the question, but have I got the gist of it? Yeah, I mean, if I got it, how would you rephrase it, Yaron? How did you take it? Well, most of his life, he's been, he's had practical occupations, he's been intellectual, he's an influence of people around him, and as he's getting older, he's using that skill he's developed of influencing people around him to do more of that, both I guess in the physical world and over social media. Yeah. No, I think that's fantastic. So let me, I'm not, I don't know if you call this a recommendation. So somebody that I have a very low opinion of in many ways, Arthur Brooks, he's undertaken what I think is a good mission, which is thinking about happiness and career for people who are older, who are, you know, 40, 50 beyond and the way in which your career goals naturally change. And he, he has some good stuff to say, but he's such an altruist and such a mixed bag that it undercuts it. But one of the points he makes that I think is really true is that often you reach a point where you can't be in the cutting edge, you don't have the full energy to, you know, compete at the highest levels in a realm. And a lot of what your interests will evolve to is more being a mentor, being a coach, giving advice, using your wisdom in various ways. And that's really something good and healthy. And I think it's an area that I would like to see more people thinking about, which is how the way that being purposeful and having a central purpose evolves over time and how you can pick something later in life that may look quite different than what you were doing earlier, but they can still be really fulfilling and enjoyable. And it sounds like that's what you're doing. And I think that's really great. That's good. Thanks, Len. All right. Okay. Does more ambition lead to more willingness to go through more suffering to achieve or is it too malevolent of a view? Well, I wouldn't put it as suffering. I mean, it depends on the career. If you want to be a Navy SEAL, you're on use that example. I think there is an aspect of like literal suffering that you have to go through. There's no two ways around it. And yeah, it's like, no, this is what I care about. And I'm willing to go all in for it. But I think in the normal case, if you're experiencing anything except for something very temporary as suffering, there is a real big problem. Things can be really hard. They can be challenging. They can make you feel incompetent and bad about yourself as you're trying to learn a new skill. I think all of that can often happen. But aside from things that, and particularly the more in the physical realm, where it's going to actual physical suffering, the more that their experience is suffering, the more I'm dubious that that's involved. I think that it should at least be a red flag that you should think, am I going about this in the optimal way? Am I going about this in a way that's needlessly hard? Am I pushing myself more out of duty than joy? I worked really, really hard to get to where I am and to get to no objectivism and communication skills well enough that people were at all interested in what I thought. But there were very few times that I would say that I was experiencing something close to suffering. And when I was, it was almost always a situation that I needed to get out of, not just grit my teething and get through. It wasn't the right situation to be in. I was on a project I shouldn't have been involved in. Whatever the circumstances were, it was a flag that says, no, you need to find a different situation here because I don't think that in general career should feel like that. All right. Thank you, Justin. Let's see here. Thank you, Steven. Thank you, theme-master. Thank you, Jay. I appreciate the support. Let's see. Justin also asks, is Donald Trump ambitious? Yeah. He's ambitious for approval and love to fill the hole that is his lack of self-esteem. Yep. And it's not a good thing. He would be better if he was like that and not ambitious. Of course, he would really be better if he wasn't like that. Good answer. All right. Goopta asks, which of the objectives, virtues, values closely relate to ambition? I mean, I think all of them, but the two most prominent. So one is obviously productiveness, which is the ambitious creation of material values. And then pride, which I ran put as morally ambitiousness. And I was actually talking to my girlfriend because I was thinking about it just before this show. It always made me go, why would she put it as morally ambitiousness? Because her view is that what you should be achieving is moral perfection, that that's possible. And so is morally ambitiousness just capturing like, hey, keep going until you're perfect? Well, that didn't seem right. That didn't seem at all her perspective. And what I realized, though, was from Ayn Rand's perspective, you can be perfect, but still because you're making the best choice, given the knowledge that you have available, but you don't have that much knowledge. So for instance, imagine somebody who's in 1820, they haven't read Atlas Shrugged. They're being as honest and hard working as they can. And they have integrity, but they don't have any grasp of issues about selfishness or what it means to truly be just in a fully objective sense. And so part of what morally ambitious is capturing is that it's not good enough to settle for doing the best you can with the moral knowledge that you have. It's striving for more and more knowledge about what's good and what's evil. It's being genuinely interested in expanding your knowledge of morality. So yes, it's always being perfect in the sense of making the best choice given what you know now, but then pushing yourself to try to learn more about what's right and what's wrong and being really personally interested in that. And I think that's part of what's being captured with morally ambitiousness. And it's why that she would bring that in and emphasize that in a realm where what she's counseling is, yeah, but you should make good choices all the time, not just once in a while. Yeah. And perfection is not static. I'm perfect. I'm done. It requires constant effort. It requires constant vigilance. It requires constant work. And it requires ambition. You can't be perfect unless you're ambitious to be perfect. And all right, let's see. Was God the number of questions you've crammed into $5? It's impressive. It's ambitious. It's very ambitious. We have a six month baby. We are burnout. Who isn't when you have a six month baby? Any tips to bring back motivation and fight procrastination? And then any thoughts on Bitcoin, NFT and top books for 2022? Oh, my gosh. I mean, look, my view is the first two to three years of a kid's life. It's survive intact as much as you can. Go very easy on yourself in terms of what you're demanding in various spheres of your life. Because it's so, and maybe you're on new of different view, but my view is that period is so difficult. The adjustment is so radical that if you, that most of the time when you're kicking yourself or not doing enough, it's, you're really holding yourself to an impossible standard. So not an ambitious standard, but an impossible standard. Human being only has so much energy and so much focus that I'd be, I wouldn't be too quick to condemn yourself. I definitely think like, make it through it will get easier. Though, I mean, I should say, I mean, I, you know, wrote two of my books during those first three years with my kids. And part of it was the more that you and your partner can work out like a way to support each other in the venture and give them the space to be ambitious in other areas of life, the more possible it is. So there's things you can do, but just don't be too quick to condemn yourself. As for Bitcoin and all that, I mean, I really took, take seriously, I'm interested in those things. I mean, you're on and I've spent a lot of time talking about crypto and things like that. But I really take seriously when somebody like Warren Buffett says like, I only invest in the things I understand. And if you don't understand it, you should be kind of parked in an index fund. And that's, and my view is the smartest people in the world are out there trying to make money in these areas. Do I think that I have any edge over them? No, I absolutely do not have an edge, certainly not because I read some guy on Twitter or follow some TikTok account or whatever. And so I don't engage in that kind of speculation. I would if I had money where it literally was gambling, maybe I would, I don't really gamble either. So I don't, from that perspective, I don't follow it super closely except as somebody who I'm interested in where the technology will lead, but I certainly don't try to make money unless I was really going to make it a kind of career where I can have some sort of edge. And I definitely don't. So I didn't gain on the upside. I didn't lose on the downside. I'm happy with that. In terms of books, oh, that's a really interesting question. What did I just hear about the other day that I'm except, oh, I'll just need one, which is hopefully my next book will be coming out this year. In fact, it almost certainly will. I can tell you the title is effective egoism. And I'm just wrapping up work on that. And I think it's going to be the best introduction to the objectivist ethics for somebody who might not even have heard of I ran an Atlas shrugged in nonfiction form that will be available. My personal very biased opinion, but at the very least it will be a book talking about the objectivist ethics and a lot of what you're on and I are talking about today. Great. It will definitely have done on when that gets published. Yeah, I mean, I started my PhD program a few weeks before my first son was born. I finished my dissertation a year into my second son. So I got a PhD during those years, but I don't think I did much else. I mean, it was, well, we did a lot of stuff. Anyway, but yes, it's unbelievable hard work. And it's all consuming. It really is. Oh, but let me say one more thing, because I did give people kind of an easy and I stand by that. But to what the point you just made, I'm always really dubious about myself and other people where it's I claim to care about something, but I there's a reason I can't do it. And I've just seen too many examples of people who are getting a PhD while raising two kids. I wrote, I read a book about it was a single mother who was like working in a factory into her mid 30s and then decided to become a doctor and then became and became a doctor. She was poor and doesn't have a babysitter for a kid half the time and managed to become a freaking doctor. In my own case, I wrote my novel when I was working full time for Alex Epstein. If you know anything about Alex, you know, he's not, he does not, he demands a lot of himself and of other people. And yet, and I had two kids and managed to still wait. I woke up at four, four 30 in the morning, wrote until I had to go to work. And that's how I got the novel done. My view is you, you're, you're probably capable of a lot more than you think you are. And it's worth trying to push yourself and see what you can do. Yeah, I agree with that completely. All right, let's see. Frank says, my wife bugs me for not making money to buy a house all because I wanted to be a science fiction writer and then became a teacher. Did I choose wrong? I really want to say yes, but probably about the wife, but I don't really know the situation. But no, I mean, look, when you marry somebody, part of what you're doing is integrating your lives and you need to make sure you're on the same page about career goals and what that will require financially. And if you will find yourself married and that you're not aligned, it's something you have to work out one way or the other. And maybe with the help of, you know, a therapist or something. But yeah, I mean, that your partner and your career goal, like all of that needs to be integrated and everybody needs to be in the same page. And whether that means you need to make a career change or a partner change or she needs to change what she expects of you, something has to change because that kind of conflict will really undercut your happiness in a lot of ways. Yeah. Gail, thank you for the support. All right, we'll get to that at the end. All right, Marilyn asks, what are some reasons to be optimistic about 20, 23? So we're moving away from ambition. These are more general questions. Well, you gave a whole talk on that, you're the expert on why we should be optimistic. This is your opportunity for 2023. Any reasons to be optimistic? I don't know. It's hard for me to answer it just because it's so foreign from how I think about things. I'm interested in the culture. I write whole books on it and I give commentary on it and I understand that it's real. From my day to day life, does the fact that we elected Trump and he was awful and that we have bad policies, does it really impact my ability to get up and spend time with people I care about and do work? It so doesn't. I mean, if I really thought the world was going to completely crumble and we're going to lose all our freedom in the next year, yeah, I mean, I guess it would affect me in that way. But I just don't see any evidence for that. And until I see specific evidence that there's an outright emergency where everything has to be directed towards fighting that emergency, then it just doesn't arise as a real issue of should I be more optimistic or less optimistic? Here's another way to put it. I'm always and only focused on what can I do. And so insofar as I'm worried about the state of the culture, the question is not sitting around going, how bad is it going to be and when is it going to be, when is it going to get here? It's, well, what can I do? And what I can do is what I'm doing. And I feel like, all right, is that going to solve the world's problems? No, but it's a mistake to think that that's the standard you hold yourself to. The standard you hold yourself to is what can I do, given my capabilities, my interests, my other values. And then if you do it, all right, cool, now I don't have to worry about it anymore. Like, all right, I went and I wrote and I spoke out on this and so on. And I think that's the right way to think about it is just, all right, if I'm concerned about something, I'm going to take the action open to me to address it and then I'm not going to worry about it anymore. So here's the answer you should have given. I'm working with some of the most talented intellectuals that you guys will see in the future. You know, there's amazing talents, there's amazing potential. The Ironman University is going to blow up. It's going to be huge. And whether that's 2023 or 2032 or 2057, that's less relevant. What's relevant is what we're doing right now to ultimately being about significant change in the future. Yeah, well, this is why I'm optimistic about what Don is doing. I'm optimistic for Don. Yeah, well, this is why you're the best speaker in Objectivism and I aspire at most to be one of the better writers. I would never think of something that good off the cuff, but it's true. You're a good speaker. Very good speaker. Let's see, Andrew says, initially I agreed with Don's reaction to Kanye's anti-Semitism that he's mentally ill. But now I think that an undeserved, I think that is an undeserved moral pass. He's not insane. Many people have bipolar and don't spew hatred. Any updated thoughts? It's funny. So this is going back to our UK event, Iran. We've got a Kanye question. I've actually thought about this since then and I'm closer to agreeing with the questionnaire. And so I don't have a final, I don't know Kanye well, I don't follow him too closely to be able to say definitively, but I'm also definitely want to take back any kind of emphatic insistence that it's mental illness and that there's some kind of excuse. There's definitely something going on there, but I think there's real culpability. And so yeah, I do, I am happy to have the opportunity to take back what I said in the UK. Did you see his interview with Lex Friedman? Not the whole thing I saw as much as I could bear to watch. It made me admire Lex a lot because nobody ever pushes back in uncomfortable situations like that. And Lex was able to combine being incredibly in the best sense moralistic, but not a jerk. I'm going to give you space to talk, but I'm not going to back off what I think is right and what I think is true. And in that sense, he was a real model. And I thought Kanye part of what definitely made me take back my comments is this is clearly somebody who is connected to reality in the sense of enough to know what he's saying and deliberately saying evil things. And you don't get a moral pass just because you happen to have bipolar disorder. Like that's not insanity. And he seemed detached from reality, not just in some mentally ill way, but in a, I don't want to go there kind of way in an evasive way. Now, I don't know enough of a mental illness to know how connected they are, but I mean, he was terrible. I mean, he couldn't think about it. He's writing stuff in a weird kind of, the whole thing was weird. Kanye's behavior was just bizarre. All right, let's see. So I've got one, I got an email question from a supporter in Costa Rica. And I'd be putting this off because I remember that you had done something about Immanuel Kant. So I figured you'd probably have a good answer to this, but basically the question was, what do we got against Kant? I mean, why did I ran and I think most of us think that Kant was as bad, as destructive as evil as he was. Yeah, I'm not an expert, but I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about him and about the whole project of the enlightenment and how he related to it. And what you saw during the Enlightenment among the philosophers. So the Enlightenment is embracing reason as a cultural value, embracing the individual, embracing freedom. But among the philosophers, when it came to getting how does reason work? And is it really competent to know? There was a real struggle where they couldn't give an account of reason. And you had the rationalists like Descartes saying, well, our senses clearly deceive us, but we have these innate ideas we can deduce from. And then you had people like Locke saying, no, we don't have any innate ideas. That's done, but we have our sense experience, but it's really, we can't really get outside of our experience. And it's hard to say how it relates to the real world out there. And there's this whole debate that seems to be going nowhere. Nobody can give a really count account of how reason gives us knowledge of reality. And Kant sees this and he sees even more deeply than anybody else, what's really going on, what the real issue is. And the real issue to use objective is terminology is how do you integrate the fact that consciousness has an identity with our ability to grasp reality? And what Kant says is because consciousness has our identity, because it works somehow, we don't know reality. All we know is reality as it appears to consciousness. And the reason I think Ayn Rand thinks he's the most evil philosopher is because she thinks he's right. Kant saw in a way that nobody else did that this was the real issue, which is how to integrate the identity of consciousness and reality, our ability to grasp reality. But he gave exactly the wrong answer that from the objective's view, the identity of consciousness is a precondition for achieving knowledge and reality. The fact that we know somehow doesn't erase that what we know is reality somehow through a human process. And Kant's view is no, because we gain knowledge in a certain way and our mind works only in the human way of working, all we can really know is reality as it appears to us, not reality as it really is. And Ayn Rand's view is because our mind works in a certain way, that's how we actually achieve knowledge of reality. So you can think of Kant as being evil because he was genius enough to grasp what the central issue in philosophy is about the relationship between consciousness and existence, and to give exactly the wrong answer. And it's an answer then that ends the enlightenment and unleashes every brand of irrationalism that says, yeah, we're incapable of knowing reality and we should give up trying. So there had been skeptics before, there was Hume, but even going back to the Greeks, there were skeptics of various sorts. But it was never an enduring thing because it's a dead end. It's, can you know? Yeah, okay, well, like, I guess we have to give up philosophy. But what Kant said is no, you can keep going on with the project of science and math and things like this, but they just don't tell you anything about reality. They only tell you about the world as it appears to us. And so Leonard Pieckoff has put it as complacent skepticism. And it, and you could put it's an enduring smashing of knowledge, and then ultimately of human values. And so it's for that reason, I think that she thinks he's the most evil person in history, not just another philosopher who got things wrong. And can you say something about his ethics? Why was his ethics? Because an ethics is ultimately a consequence of this. But why is his ethics as bad as it is? Yeah, well, it's, so other, you know, philosophers had said, like, you should sacrifice, you should serve God, you should serve something else. But Kant basically took values out of ethics, that it's not even that you're serving the ultimate value of God or it's that you're serving nothing, that it's sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, because to be good, according to him, the only good thing is a good will, which means desiring to do the good, because it's good. And if you desire it for any other reason, such as you feel good about yourself or it leads to some value, then your action is no moral import, you get no moral credit for it. And if you think about a contrast, the way Aristotle thought about ethics. So Aristotle says, no, ethics is about your happiness and your flourishing. And from his perspective, if you had the desire to do the wrong thing, but did the right thing, okay, that's good, but it's not as good as desiring to do the right thing and doing it, then you're much more happy, you're much more successful, you're much more likely to do it. Cons view is if you desire to do the, it's precisely when you feel a conflict between what you want and what your duty is that then you know you're acting from duty. So if you want to live and then follow the moral maxim that says you should sustain your life, there's no nothing moral about that you wanted to. But if you hate your life, and you sustain it purely out of duty, well then you get moral credit. So it's completely divorcing and putting it odds, values and ethics and any set of values, anything that you're after, anything you're trying to achieve, even something as irrational as I want to act for the glory of God, it's like fundamentally severing values and morality. And I think that, again, it's, he's able to get to the most fundamental level in a field and then get it exactly 100% wrong. So Jay asks, maybe you understand this because I don't, he asks, what else was Kant really good at? That's a funny question. Well, I think he was good at, I mean, he didn't do a lot other than, I mean, by the end of his life anyway, we have kind of a caricature of Kant of basically most of what we know, like his, you know, the guy who you can wind your watch to his walks are really based off like the few, you know, last years of his life, he was kind of did a little bit more than he was younger. But no, I mean, the main thing that he was good at was coming up with ideas that got a lot of currency and cashed in on currents of the time, and therefore was able to have a huge tremendous influence. And aside from that, like, I'm trying to, I read his biography once and it would be so much funnier if I could think of like one trivial thing that he did that was kind of good. But alas, I'm going blank. So we'll just have to go with, he was good at creating a philosophy that influenced people, but influenced them in a really, really bad way. All right, Joni says, author Robert Bdenado, hunter, bad deeds and winner, take all excellent author. I haven't read Robert's books. Yeah, I haven't read it, although I need to give him credit. He did read an early draft of my novel and was really helpful and supportive in the feedback he gave. So I appreciate him doing that. Good. Well, that brings to the next question, which is, when will we see the next Justice Winter's book? Oh, this is going to be the least satisfying answer of all time, which is, I wrote a draft. It needs a lot of work. And I have no clue when I will ever get around to finishing it. It's just, I find fiction so hard that I'd rather keep writing books on ethics and maybe an epistemology and whatever technical, philosophical thing I can dig my teeth and do to avoid the difficulty of fiction. Which brings us to the next question, which is Donald asks, at one point you said you wanted, you want Don to be your co-author on Iran's rules for life book. Since you're both here, this seems like a good time to mention it again. Yeah, I mean, I've told Don that if he wants to switch careers again, or when he wants to switch careers again, I've got a whole list of books that we should co-author one day. Well, no, I'm perfectly willing to write a book on the side in addition to my other work with Iran. We just need you guys to fund it so much that the money is worth the lack of sleep that I'll get for a year, a year and a half. All right, you heard it here. So we will do a fund raising campaign, raise the money and hire Don to do the Iran rules for life book. I think I'm going to do my last episode of that next week, just because it seems like I need to do one every month and I'm stretching my walls. That's not a good place to be. You want the walls to be really walls, not things you have to come up with every week. All right, let's see. Thanks, Don. I think we're out of questions. We're short of a goal, guys. You're going to make Don look bad, but I'm just saying, you know, no pressure. Thanks, Don. This was great. This was a lot of fun. Thank you guys. Thanks for all the superchatters. And let's see. We have Tara Smith on next week, on next Thursday. And then I'm not sure what happens after that, but we're basically devoting Thursdays to interviews. Also, we do have, I want to keep reminding you guys that on December 31st, I'll be doing my year in review and looking forward to 2023. You can ask me then about my optimism for 2023 show. We've got a massive match. So bring your checkbooks with you. When you come to that show, we'll go for as long as we need to go to make the match. So join us. That's on the 31st. Other than that, you're on bookshows back tomorrow morning with my news briefing shows and then probably a show on Saturday. Thank you, Don. This was fun. Yeah. Very fun. And if people want to gain the benefits of the coaching program, just go to university.inran.org and sign up for ARU. And we'd love to have you. And I'd love to set you up with my team and work with you. Yeah. So we still, we got another question. It just came in. Fendt Hopper, thank you for the support. Yeah. I want to get you back when you finish the book or when the book is coming out. But I also want to get updates on what's going on at the Inran University. And I think the Inran University is going to become a sponsor of the Iran book show starting in January. So I'll be pitching the university to Noand starting, I have to get paid for these things. So starting in January. But I'm excited. I think there's a lot. And I'm also teaching there in the summer. I'm doing two courses on public speaking, one for beginners and one for advanced class. So that'll be a lot of fun. Richard says, effective egoism sounds like Rand's essay, Objectivist Ethics. How has Don improved upon Objectivist Ethics? That is, obviously I'm presenting the Objectivist Ethics, the title effective egoism is meant to tap into the idea of effective altruism. And so it's like a marketing title, not that I'm rebranding Objectivism in that sense. But no, my goal has never been to improve on the Objectivist Ethics per se. I think it's an amazing achievement that I stand in awe of. What I am trying to do that I think is new is two things. One is the presentation. I think there's always room to present things in new ways to try to resonate with new audiences. Inran wrote a really highly condensed essay. It assumes really that people have read Atlas Shrugged. It's only one part, I mean, it delves into many issues in her philosophy, but incredibly briefly. And then it doesn't talk almost at all about how would you translate this into practice and how would it apply in these different examples and how does it deal with a ton of things that come up. So it goes into more depth and a lot of points that she explains in a condensed way. It ties together things that aren't in that essay that either she talks about elsewhere or doesn't talk about. One way I think about what the book's trying to do is it's trying to take Objectivism and make it like one level more application-based, tactical, practical. It's not down to the level of fill out this form and now you have a hierarchy of values. But it's giving a little bit more of the advice on how to implement it. But certainly I have no pretensions of philosophically making any advances in the area of ethics. Not that that's not something somebody could do, but it's not something that I claim to have done. That essay is so brilliant and it's so world-changing and world-revolutionary and a once in a millennium kind of achievement that many books are going to be written with that as the basis. And you could take just one of the virtues that she talks about there and write a book on it. So that isn't trying to improve upon, but there's a lot of chewing that needs to be done. There's a lot of application. There's a lot of understanding. There's a lot of breaking it down and applying, applying, applying, and really understanding. I mean think about how little she writes about every virtue. I mean the only person who really wrote extensively about the virtues was Leonard and then Tara Smith. And you can't say either one of them was trying to improve, but in a sense they did by expanding our understanding, expanding our knowledge of it. So it's one of those essays historically that changes the world and in that sense it's going to be a ton of writing about it. All right. Thank you, Len. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, Gene. Thank you, Marilyn. We're getting very, very close. I mean I could drag it out and I'm sure we'd make it to our goal, but I'm getting tired. All right. Have a great night, everybody. Thanks, Don, again, and I'll see you all tomorrow morning. Bye.