 So let's go back to this issue of self-interest and so you said something, you said that to the extent that people are successful in life, Silicon Valley or just people who are productive and successful in living are in some ways being self-interested morally. So tell us more about that and in what way, since they don't hold the morality, they don't hold it as a moral code, how is it, how is it driving them to behave in these things? What is it that's driving to behave these things, particularly given that what they hold as a moral code would drive them away from this kind of behavior? Yeah, I think the way to think about it is what are these people value? What are their lives about to them? And then thinking about how valuing itself is selfish. So if you think of someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or someone who's been successful in any industry or just anyone who's happy, right? There are things that are important to them, their career, their family, their kids, their hobbies, but especially I think for somebody who's really happy, their career, including parenting as a kind of quasi or semi career, off-due career. And they have a particular view about what that thing is and what its place in their life is. And they're thinking about how the rest of their life relates to that. And that has a kind of priority for them. Also, you know, other projects or causes they might be involved in, some of them might have this role, not all of them usually. But there's some kind of center to their life, that their life's about. And they think about that in connection to all the other things they do. They experience love for it. They work for it. They evaluate other things in connection to it. And they shape their life around. Their life has some direction. They have some sense of meaning or what their life's about that comes from the core values they have, the core commitments they have. And I mean here, concrete, not things like justice, unless your career is being a cop or something that's actually concretely promoting justice. But some thing that you do in the world, that you're trying to achieve something by doing it, and you're trying to build a life around that. So you want it to be remunerative so that you can live by doing it, and it's not just a hobby, right? You see the kind of, there was an onion article I really like that came out a few years ago saying, you know, find something you passionately love and then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life. Right? And the joke was, of course, you shouldn't do that. If you can, you should find a way to make a career out of that. Make that what you do. And then you could have, you know, a drum kit and do music on the weekend. But I think a lot of people and the best people, particularly when they're young and when they're older if they've been really successful, have that as an important part of their thinking about life and about what they want to raise their kids to do and the kind of advice they give to people. And that is, let's call it before we call it selfishness, let's call it the morality of life. That is the coder way of living by which human beings sustain themselves. And then in what sense is it selfish? Well, it's something you can only do for yourself. Nobody else can pick something and make it of tremendous value to you and make it give your life meaning and infuse you with joy and make you motivated towards it. And you can't do it for anybody else. And if you're going to have that kind of value at all, you can only have it for yourself. And values aren't just out there in the world to be achieved. Things just don't have some glow to them that calls to people or calls to everybody. If they call out to you or attractive to you, it's because of something you're doing. You've made them important to you. You've invested them with that value and meaning and significance. And you've invested them with that for you. And if you don't do it, the world will be a bleak and boring and empty, depressing place for you. And again, you can't do it for other people except by inspiring them in ways. But you can only do that by first having values and achieving them and going after them and being a happy, energetic, productive, creative person. And again, that's something you can only do for yourself. So the whole process of living, of coming up with values of achieving them, of figuring out what things are really valuable is something that one does as an individual. We don't do it as collectives and we can't do it for one another. And in that sense, to value, to really live is to be selfish. And the alternative is a kind of grey indifference or resentment or boredom. Or hatred or kind of the nihilism that is common today. I think all the results of the lack of lack of that. So would you say that that was so that people hold, in a sense, an implicit selfish moral code in spite of kind of the explicit moral code that they claim to hold? Would you say it's not even morality because it's not at that level? It depends on the person. So the people of someone like Steve Jobs, I would say he definitely held an implicit moral code. Someone who's a real hero, despite some uglier episodes in his life, or I don't think he was being selfish. But of someone like that, of someone like Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrug before he learns the full philosophy, I would say he definitely had an implicit code. His life had a direction, it was focused. I think for most people, maybe it doesn't rise to that level of a consistent code directing their life, but there are elements of it in them. And those elements of it in them are what give them genuine self-esteem, genuine joy, genuine enthusiasm. It's what enables them to actually experience love for other people and also for other things. And it's reinforced by whatever actions they take in pursuit of those loves. So what would you say to people? Sargon said this, but I get this a lot, particularly from libertarians. Well, we're all self-interested all the time. I mean, it's coded in our genes. Everybody wants to have a better life. Everybody is pursuing life in one way or another. Selfishness is just how we are, little babies are selfish. And then, in a sense, to the extent that they get to this point, they would say, well, you need morality to kind of tone that down a little bit and control it a little bit because selfishness is just the way we are. Well, let's think of it first about self-interest and then come to selfishness later because selfishness has this extra connotation of being a derogatory term. There are some questions about what exactly it means. But let's start with the idea of self-interest. And what do we need this word self-interest for? If everything anybody ever does is self-interest. It's like saying every color is pink. And if someone shows you something that's not pink, doesn't appear to be pink, looks very different from pink. I could tell you well, but it's really pink deep down or something. If you understand true pinkness, everything is pink. If everything turns out to be X, it's dubious why we need this word X. Now, there are a few words existence or something that are meant to assume everything. But we have a whole lot of words to do with our motivational sets, right? What motivates us? Desire, motive, incentive, want. Self-interest is a fairly complicated term. It's two words bunched together. What is meant by it? Why do we need such a term? And I take it that you need such a term to think about there are different people's interests. They can possibly conflict. There are different motives that people can have. And you want to know when people are acting on the motive of their own interest, as opposed to somebody else's interest, or as opposed to acting in some way at random or without any thought to anyone's interest. If you didn't have that context of a contrast, you want to say here's when we're acting self-interested versus here's when we're not, there'd be no context and no need for this term. So if even when you're giving up everything you love because of some feeling of guilt and some need to sacrifice, even if Mother Teresa is acting on her self-interest, then there's no use for a word like that. It includes everything and doesn't mean much. But even apart from that, even if you, I think the concept of self-interest, even if we put aside clear cases of intentional sacrifices that are viewed as I'm giving up my self-interest. If you think about the role of a concept of interest in reasoning, right, the concept of anyone's interest, as opposed to just saying desire or what you want. It's the concept that does the work of summing up over time and over areas of your life to give you a view of what's on the whole good for you. So if you just have the idea of my desires, then you don't yet have the idea of self-interest. You don't have the idea of what promotes my self-interest rather than what feeds my hunger or quenches my thirst or satisfies whatever other desire I might have now. You have to have the idea that you've got a lot of desires, you'll have different ones over time, some of them might pull you in opposite directions, and you're thinking about sort of what is in general good for me, as opposed to these many desires which might be in conflict with one another. And then there are different theories, maybe your self-interest is what fulfills as many of your desires as possible or the strongest ones, or maybe it's not really about desire. But there's some, you don't have the idea of someone's interest or your own self-interest until you have the idea of something other than the many discreet desires. And then you think about what is this thing that is good for you as a whole or in general, rather than just in this moment versus that moment, or what you want in this moment versus that moment. Yeah, and so it's, I mean, it's interesting how you approach it. I mean, you approach it very epistemologically from looking, okay, why do we need this concept? What is this concept denote as compared to other concepts that denote something that seems similar? What cognitively is being activated by using self-interest, and that's great. I should say that idea of self-interest is something over and above the desires of a given moment, or any one subset of your desire isn't something that's distinctive to me or distinctive to objectivism. I mean, philosophers who have thought about a person's interest, including some who are not egoists, some who are utilitarian and so forth, have often thought about this. Because if you're going to try to achieve, say, the greatest happiness for the greatest number and you're going to be serious about it, you want to try to think about, well, what is that? Giving everybody what they want when they want it, or how do we tell what's good for people long term? So other philosophers have thought about this. Even Kant thinks about this, right? He thinks that there's a kind of practical reasoning, which is what he calls prudential reasoning. And he separates it off from moral reasoning, and that's his big innovation for the bad, to separate this off from moral reasoning. But it's about figuring out what's good for you, which might be different from what he calls an immediate inclination, what you want right now. And that's a different thing. And then yet in his view, not in mine, yet a third thing is thinking morally, which doesn't have to do with your interest. So yeah, so let's talk a little bit. An aspect of this is this idea that again comes up in whenever we debate these kind of issues is the long term versus short term, right? The idea that okay, what we mean as objectivists is long term rational self interest. And that's two things, right? Versus short term or irrational self interest, both of which. So talk a little bit about the short term long term and we can also talk about the rational irrational. Yeah, I don't think the idea of short term self interest makes sense. And I don't think the things that are offered as examples of it are really coherent. I mean, so when you were talking to Sargon, I don't forget if you or he brought this up, but I think you brought it up as a kind of ridiculous, you know, counter example and he started embracing it of, you know, snorting a line of cocaine. As though that's obviously in your immediate. Because I always use that. Yeah, as though that's obviously in your immediate or short term self interest. But it's not, I mean, it's not like there's something or at least I got a snort a line of cocaine, you know, something good. I have no desire to snort a line of cocaine. My wife had a medical procedure recently, a minor one, no problem, but she had some pain, and she had to be on opiates for a day or two about it. She couldn't wait to get off the things it was not pleasant. It's not like the things that people think of as in their automatic short term self in their short term self interest are automatically good for them or even automatically desired by everyone. Right, so it's not like pleasurable right so we could separate those two out as well. Although even there I mean, pleasure is a kind of as a physiological sensation, it's there, but a lot of pleasures aren't enjoyable. And that is you don't like having them like you feel numb or something and it's not pleasant in the moment to you you don't enjoy it even though the physical sensation is maybe the same one that other people find pleasant or you would find pleasant in a different context. So, it's not the case that that I'm not doing some cocaine now is a drag, but better for me long range you know I had to be on this show this morning or this morning this afternoon, and I could have taken some cocaine but oh no I better hold off till later or maybe never take it, but damn it you know if only I could have cocaine and do the other stuff too it's not something I want, and it's not something most people want. The same thing with you know sleeping with a bunch of slots or whatever these aren't. I wish I could do this I wish I could always be in orgies and you know damn it I have to give it up there there are occasions where there are polls into directions. But when you say, you know, like Ben Shapiro does you know staying with your wife and kid is a sacrifice. I mean what kind of disgusting creepy view makes you think short term it would be in my self interest to you know sell my kid for money to buy crap. That's that a decent person doesn't have that thought, and either someone who says like Ben Shapiro doesn't love his family and doesn't know what love is, or he does, but he's made to suppress that knowledge by this disgusting sewer that he calls a moral code. Yeah, and partially it's to it's the color the other side right it's to create a straw man because he needs that straw man in order to attack so it's it's it's to but it is reflective of himself right when he says I could have gone with the slot that the bar. He's saying something about himself he's saying something about the fact that that is, even in his imagination desirable that he could imagine a situation when that's desirable where somebody who is egoistic who cares about himself in any sense that is never tempted by that it's never ever a desirable thing really says to me is that he's because I don't think he really would be tempted by those things I don't think is that he's thought so little about what he wants out of life. And that is sad. Especially for someone who I mean I think you have a little more regard for him as a political commentator than I do, but he's someone who's got some integrity, who's productive, who's, you know, whatever we think of the content of his work is built up an audience in ways that are really impressive and who's shown some real integrity breaking with Breitbart at certain times so he's not someone who's just going by the whims of the moment. And I think he really cares about his career and I imagine he cares about his family, but all of that he chalks off to something he does because he's got to right because God tells him to. Yeah, I think that's, I wonder how he chalks it up in his own mind it would be interesting to talk to him, but I also think that partially people like Ben was smart and present themselves as intellectuals. They're struggling to come up they're coming up with counter arguments that they in a sense, don't really believe it. Right. So, you know, he as you said I don't think he's attracted to the slot I don't think he really thinks anybody or anybody good would be attracted to the slide. I can't square that with his understanding of morality and his understanding of his understanding of an objectivism to the extent he's trying to understand it. So he projects that onto objectivism in a sense, intellectual laziness, and, and a way to get a one up on the other guy, rather than think about it, what I think he's not doing is thinking. I don't mean to say there are no cases of real temptation if you're an egoist or you're an objective. There are lots of cases where there's something you know you should do. You have reason to do it in the moment it doesn't feel motivating to you. There are cases where you might, you know, not be tempted to go and sell your baby to buy money for crack but not to do the. I mean, maybe you've become addicted to crack and maybe that would happen but not to do the kinds of things that you need to do to sustain your life. There's a hard things that are difficult you discussed an example the other day I think somewhere where maybe you have become addicted to opiate through just you were prescribed some but you find it really hard to get off of them now and in that kind of a situation it would be hard to to take some willpower or take some work it would take some real effort to to do the thing that you know to be right. But it's the thing that's good for you and this is true of we have to talk about how you know that what's right and what's good for you were the same, but in the case of breaking an opioid addiction, I think it's pretty clear how it's better for you to be off of the right and though that's hard what you can do to to bring yourself forward and likewise for any goals you have ambitious all you have is not imagine some, you know, external God or something chastising you are wanting to punish you for not doing it or some society, but you recognize that all the things that you want and value out of life are being compromised or destroyed by this addiction or on the other hand we're talking about achieving something positive depend on or would be enhanced by getting to this next level in your career that the various things that frighten you are more frightening if you don't look at them and address them and it's you want to connect them to your actual values. And all of the virtues of brands morality are virtues that are about doing that are about recognizing values and learning how to connect things to them and to see how certain actions are required by them. And that's how you motivate yourself to do what's hard, not by, you know, scoffing at yourself or imagining God doing it. Yeah, fearing God is going to come down and strike you with a bolt of night thing.