 So I think we both, I think we both agree that moral character is kind of crucial for living a good life, for being happy, for having psychological health. But how do you, in the context of being a therapist, how do you not preach morality and, right, how do you not, oh, you know, you've got to be rational. I mean, how do you handle the idea that you've got to guide somebody who's non-objectivist or- Sure is. Is. The same, yep, issues arise. That morality is a big part of psychological health, but you're not a philosophy, you know, you're not there to preach philosophy, you're not there to convince them of that. Right. For say. So how do you deal with those? Because I would like to give them a lecture on morality, right, but that's why I'm not a psychologist. Yeah, so there are a couple of thoughts. So the first thought is I've been surprised over the years at how rarely I've felt the temptation to lecture or even like to hand a book. I've never, to this day, I'm still waiting for the day. In principle, I'm not against it. You know, it's just I need to have a good reason to like recommend the fountain head or to hand somebody a book to reader just to say, go look up at, you know, or whatever. To this day, I have not found justification to do that even once with patients who are not objectivist or objectivist because they already know about it anyway. So never, okay. So that's one thing. And as to why, why it doesn't come up more, I think it's in the nature, not just of the therapeutic process. Like I think based on the things I've learned from doing therapy, I think this is also the approach I would take generally with people even if not in the capacity of a therapist. And the approach Galt takes with Dagny and Reardon and everyone who isn't on board with him yet for that matter, like he doesn't preach except in a radio speech to the world, right? Like that's your medium at that point. You have to preach. But up to that point, rarely does he make big long speeches privately one-on-one, right, to Reardon or to Dagny. Rarely does Dagny preach to Reardon. Never does Dagny preach to Reardon. Look, dude, you have a dichotomy in you between the mind and the body and you need to get over that and you just need to realize that it's okay to love me and you're just being silly. Why doesn't she do, I mean, I think partly it's because she doesn't have it fully articulated. But even if she did or once she does, she doesn't try to lecture him about it because she knows he has to go through a process. Like she knows that it's not gonna convince him and if anything, it's just gonna make him kind of defensive or diggisy. I don't know if she knows that. That's too much psychologizing of fictional characters but she probably, you know, or in the real life equivalent of that situation which I face in therapy all the time, it's never, it never strikes me as the most impactful move or anyway, very rarely to say to someone, okay, the thing is your morality is all wrong, I'm just gonna explain to you that you should be selfish and then that'll make things easier because the way that we come to that, you know, so yes, if we read the novels at the right time, you know, like all the stars align and it clicks and we're sort of ready for it and then bam, we start to at least, it's not that we get it, right? But on some level, we're at least motivated enough to keep pursuing an understanding of it but if you give someone the novel at the wrong time and I've seen this happen more often than not, people don't have that response, they kind of feel turned off by it, they feel like it's preachy or they feel like those people who've read Atlas Shrugged didn't get it. They get it, like we responded, right? Yeah, yeah. And if it's pushed on you, I think it's even less likely that you're gonna have that response that we want you to have because now you're already sort of feeling beholden and you feel like someone's breathing down your neck and it's not as likely to be, as I put it, internalized in the sense that you're pursuing this goal because of reasons that you can see and feel to be your own, that you've gotten to it through this organic process of making your own choices and struggling and being conflicted and grappling with that and sort of seeing a path you can follow. Now, there are a few exceptions, not where I've given someone the book, but where I have felt the tension you just described when you asked me, but what do you do when someone's just clearly got the wrong moral perspective? And I can tell you about, I won't obviously tell you in detail about the cases, but I can tell you in a semi-obstracted way that in those moments, the challenge I found was to hit them where not necessary, I mean, usually it does end up hurting, but that's not the goal, to kind of hit them where it resonates. So I will give one example that sort of semi-altered but still captures the essence of what happened, which was that somebody who is very religious and has a custom that they feel beholden to, that they have to follow, such that the only time that they would otherwise be able to devote to a job search that could help them move forward in their lives, they're instead feeling beholden to this religious custom. So this is the kind of thing, it's like almost a fictional scenario now, it's like, okay, clearly there's a conflict here that comes from your ideology that is direct conflict with your life. It doesn't come up in that crystal clear way as often as you think, but here it's come up in this crystal clear way. And the way that I navigated it and I think it worked pretty well, though I'm gonna keep trying different things, is that I imbued their professional goals with sacredness. And I put it to them that way, is it more sacred? Imagine, could it be, just consider the possibility, like might it be more sacred to you to actually stand up for yourself and pursue your real actual passion? And we've built up a lot of context where there's this thing, this person actually really loves the most to do and then this thing she's doing kind of out of guilt, obligation, duty, and all the usual suspects. And so we know like there's this thing that is holy to her in a certain way. And I used that language, that it's, might this be holier to you, even holier than this other thing that is based on tradition and what your parents taught you and everyone has a different version of it anyway. And it gave this person pause, which is what makes me think maybe that that's a wedge, that that's sort of a way in and that it was at the right moment. So, I mean, but you'd think that at some point, somebody like that would benefit from actually having the philosophical knowledge that could help them. At some point, I might well give for, put it this way, there are lots of patients who if I weren't their therapist, if that weren't my role, I would have given one of the novels to them by now. And the reason for that is I'd have a lot less to lose in terms of the nature of my relationship with them. What I think I can offer them, the kind of value I think I can offer them by being their therapist would potentially be lost because suddenly now I enter into this weird role of preacher, if you will. And then if they are turned off by that or if they just feel kind of, you know, weird or confused about it, they've kind of lost me. It's a doubtful, yeah. So, but it's again, I'm not against it in principle, like that is the patient who I could see potentially down the line getting to a place where I say, you know what, there's a book you should read. But there is a way in which part of what you're doing in interacting with them is trying to guide them towards a better moral character or try to focus them on- Yeah, I mean- Part of what therapy is. So I see it as the fundamental essence of what therapy is. And I think for a lot of therapists even, you know, who wouldn't obviously put it that way. But to the extent that they are working with people on major foundational parts of themselves, I think that's what they're doing. So, but the way that this is partly why I'm so interested in this cognitive integrity concept because I think where I have been able to impact my clients most directly in improving their moral character is first of all, in appealing to the values that they already either have in the sense that they already live by them and they exemplify them, you know, that they're already productive or that they're already courageous. And courage is one of the first ones and most common ones that I have occasion to utilize because people who come to therapy have done at least one courageous thing already. Because we've talked about the, you know, we're talking about assassin. It's really hard and scary and there's a lot of false starts and a lot of crackpots out there and it's putting yourself on the line, you know. So I already have an entry point with most of the people who come in. I don't do like court ordered therapy. That would be a different kind of challenge there. But with patients who come in to see me, we're starting from a foundation of virtue in a fact that whatever wasn't working in their lives, whatever they see as bothering them, rather than seek whatever quick fixes they've been seeking, rather than keep lying to themselves, rather than do whatever it is that they might do otherwise to try to cope with the problem. They're doing this thing that inherently calls upon them to be vulnerable and to be open and to do work. At least that's how I do therapy. So, you know, they know from early on that there's gonna be work. And so the fact that they're willing to, I mean, and if you think about how do you build up someone's moral character, what I'm having people do is be honest and do work and set goals and find ways to be accountable to themselves and thereby increase their level of confidence and their happiness and, you know, go for more ambitious goals than they've been willing to up to this point and can talk themselves into it and stick it out and see it through. So everything I'm doing builds moral character as I see it. And implicitly the whole, I mean, implicitly the field is about selfishness, right? Because you're trying to make their lives better. That's why they're there to see you. That, you know, it's the whole, you know, everybody holds altruism as a small ideal, but at the end of the day, in the bookstore, the section of self-help and all of that is what people are running to because at some level people understand that people wanna be happy. Yeah, and it's interesting that I've had this debate before. Is that universal to the therapeutic process as such? You know, is there something inherent in therapy or is it actually a kind of happy side effect of American culture that it so happens that the therapies that have grown up largely, certainly, you know, in the West and CBT has grown up primarily in the US that they have this implicit selfishness to them that now there's actually a lot of push to incorporate multicultural considerations in the therapy and to adapt psychotherapy to different cultures. And I think that we're actually seeing some attrition from that implicitly selfish model, if you will. Yeah. So it's not inherent in therapy, but I do think in the West that's still mostly true. Good, well at least in, I mean, I wonder if Freud would have seen it that way, if Freud's goal was to help you be a happier person. His goal, he actually said what his goal was and I was reminded recently, it was to turn, I don't remember the exact wording, which is too bad, because it's very eloquent, but it's something like to turn overwhelming pathological neurosis into normal everyday misery, something like that. So and to promote self-awareness. What's that, and to? And to promote self-awareness. He actually did, he and certainly his. The misery is the, or the suffering is the metaphysical state of man. And I think unfortunately a lot of psychology originated there, but maybe it is an American spin or an American kind of the American sense of life that has directed it in a more positive pro-happiness. We do have the pursuit of happiness in our founding documents. So maybe there's something healthy about modern psychology or at least in the U.S. Yeah, I think that's likely. All right, great. I think we,