 The 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, what day is it? God, it's Tuesday. Tuesday on the way to Christmas, so hope everybody's having a great week, great start of the work week, and excited today on the show. We are going to have, we're going to have a conversation with Don Watkins. We're going to talk about all things writing, all things communicating ideas. We'll see where the conversation goes. And of course, you guys can participate in the conversation quite easily. We've got the super chat open, so any questions you have for Don, for me. You know, because it's Don, I'm going to say you can ask about anything. And if Don doesn't have something to say about anything, I'm sure I will have something to say about anything. But we can be pretty informal here and you guys can go ahead. As long as you have a good dollar amount associated with the question, we're definitely open to answering it. And let's see. So I think most of you know Don. Don and I have co-authored a number of books. Oh, look, Jonathan, whoa, Jonathan. Jonathan usually comes in with like a buck or two and there's $20. And look who's here. Well, Yaron, I'm happy to support the show and support Don, whose work I really admire and encourage all of our audience, global audience to make it worth your own's while. He always talks about the trader principles, so I'm sleeping on your own couch tonight. Oh, yeah, but no, I'm happy to be here and thank you, Don, for all you do. Let's see some super chats tonight to support your own and bringing us all this great content. So be well. I'll be listening. Thanks guys. That was Jonathan. The only other gig he does is Fox News. So we've hit the big time. This is this is great. This is Jonathan Honing who is visiting Puerto Rico and dropped by tonight. And it's great to see him. We've been friends for a long time. So we thought we'd give him a giving shot. All right. I was introducing Don. Yes, Don. We've coauthored a number of books free market revolution equal is unfair. The mall case for finance, but Don has recent and of course he published a book on was the title on FDR Roosevelt care how social security is sabotaging the land of self reliance. It's a great title and a great book. Somebody mentioned it in the in the chat the other day. So I know people have read it. I heard Peacock is really responsible for that title though. No, I didn't know. I mean, now that you mentioned it, I vaguely now remember something about that. But he gave a writing class at the iron Institute, like a workshop, and I was working on the book so I wrote like a little piece for it. And I just threw on that title Roosevelt care and he went on for like five minutes about like, you don't need to read the rest of the piece the title does everything and I said, All right, well now that's the middle of my book. That's excellent. It's always good to get positive feedback like that from from Leonard so that's great. And but Don is now a fiction writer. And he has is his latest book is a fiction book I am justice, and it is available for sale on Amazon and pretty much every way I guess that books sold. It's like a book sold anywhere else except Amazon. I'm sure bonds and noble has a few copies you can probably find the book at bonds and noble at least online. And yeah, Valger and Jonathan did break into my house pretty much. But he wanted to see the condo, but Jonathan honing is in Puerto Rico that was that was surprising I only found out about 10 minutes before he showed up so it was a lot of fun. All right. Fiction. How come how did this come about, you know, if you always been interested in writing fiction is this something new. And yeah, Well, I mean some people would say that I've been writing fiction all along. Paul Krugman would say we'd be right. No, I mean the funny thing is I dabbled in it for a long time but I thought that was really going to be my career path until I got offered the job at the institute like I always loved writing about philosophy but it never dawned on me that like there was a career writing about ideas from an objectivist point of view. And I think one of the things we should talk about is how much opportunity I think there is for people who want to write in the nonfiction realm about objectivism, or from an objectivist perspective either But it was something I always dabbled in but then in like after I stopped working at the institute I was helping our mutual friend Alex Epstein, and I realized that like I needed kind of an outlet for just me. And I was also at that time listening to Hamilton the musical. And it had a huge emotional impact on me I just thought it was so powerful and I thought it'd be really cool to like not just help people think more clearly but to give them that kind of experience. And so I wrote a novel spent a couple years on it and basically shoved it in a drawer because you know it was promising, but it was not anywhere near publishable, and kind of set aside fiction writing for a whole other year, but I had this idea that had been kind of lingering in my mind and then just decided at some point all right let me give it a go. And like over the course of a few years that ultimately became my first published novel I am justice but it was always this thing in the background, where I loved reading stories, obviously, and always had. I would find myself reading like any kind of book but particularly thrillers and other crime novels which is like my favorite genre fiction. And I would always be in two mental spaces one would be engrossed in the book and the other being like, could I do that, I think I could do that. And so finally I was like all right let's let's figure out if I can do that. Yeah I read fiction and I never think to myself could I do that. I never comes up to my mind, but that's because I'm not a writer. So, what kind of the thrillers what tell us a little bit about thrillers you like authors you like. What is it about this genre that particularly particularly attraction. Well you know it's funny now that you mentioned it. The first time I really started I just thought about this just now. The first time I really started reading crime novels was as a result of there used to be an objective as book service second Renaissance. And it was mostly objective as works but occasionally they had a few fiction items by other authors that were recommended one of them was Robert B Parker who wrote a sense series about this detective Spencer. I always remember the show Spencer for hire or they just did a revive version the last few years, I think on Amazon, or maybe Netflix, and I just devoured those and they, they weren't particularly interesting plots but it's just the character was so great he was funny heroic that I fell in love with them and read a few others, and then really gotten to thrillers a few years later when the mother of a girl I was dating like would just she every evening would just be sitting there reading these books, and handed me one of them one day and I was like, oh man this takes everything I like about mysteries and like takes it up to 11. And I just love the I'm very impatient as a reader. And so like I can read one serious maybe two serious works of literature year, but like you know my, my kind of TV kind of candy entertainment has always been crime novels because you get the heroic but it's very much for the ones I like very set in this world very kind of like heroes in reality, and in our current reality. And that just has always had a big appeal to me and so there's part like I'm my favorite kind of school of literature, no surprise here is Romanticism, but I really loved what ran used to call bootleg Romanticism, where you just kind of get the stripped down plot with, you know, some hero heroism and kind of a basic good versus evil thematic thing but it's mostly just the joy of innovative plots and kind of cool characters. And I have part of me that likes not strict naturalism where it's anti plot but I mean we both like to show the wire. And I really love that kind of storytelling, where you feel like you're seeing your actual world with a microscope. And, and I like it when then you can combine those two things great storytelling and that kind of realism so it's not naturalism in the strict literary sense, but it's also not like high Romanticism, which I think is like the apex of literature but it's not the only thing that I'm interested in. So, so you mentioned a couple of names would give us a few other names of mystery thriller writers that you like. Well, I mean my my all time favorite thrillers this book I am pilgrim by this guy Terry Hayes who used to write for the movies. And then like he just came out of nowhere wrote this one thriller and like hasn't done anything now and like six or seven years. And it was just incredible from beginning to end, but then recently I become obsessed with this guy Don Winslow, who wrote he's wrote a bunch of things, but he wrote this series about the cartels. And he basically took the real history of the drug cartels but put it in a fictionalized form. And he's just such a brilliant writer hilarious, insightful, very thematic. In other words, he has a message but he's he does it. You never feel you're being preached to which, like I try to do that with my books I want to have something to say something deeper than just here's a cool story, but it should never feel preachy it should never feel like the message is swallowing the the actual storytelling. And then I mean my other current favorite is Lee child who's Jack Reacher novels like I think it's, you know, unabashedly a hero, and he's smarter and tougher than everybody. And doesn't shy away from that doesn't get kind of caught up in this idea that well everybody should be a little gray and you know you got to have your weaknesses and things is like, no here's just a guy who's really, really awesome. So I think I think I saw a preview of a TV show that is going to be about Jack Reacher. Yeah, I think it comes out the end of this year and so hopefully it's good they did Tom Cruise did one, two movies I think I like those are very good with Tom Cruise those are those are good movies. Yeah, the fans. I mean the super fans didn't like it because Reacher supposed to be this you know six foot two huge, you know 250 pound guy. I didn't care as weird as Tom Cruise is in real life I like watching him on the screen so it looks like it has a big 250. Yeah, they got they got that right. And I'm not sure he can act so that's my fear. That's the problem with guys 250 pounds and six something they're not there for the acting. Historically, yeah, Hollywood is not a land of giants in many respects. No, I mean think short snag I think all the former football players that became actors, all the, yeah, not actors, hulks, but not actors. Did you ever read Go with the Dragon Tattoo. You recommended it to me, like right after I think the last book had been published or shortly after. And I have it on my shelf and I started but I never finish it and I'm glad I didn't. Because people have drawn parallels between my lead character and the female character in that book. So I desperately want to read them. But I'm glad I didn't because I'm worried it would have influenced me. Yeah, now now I'm even more tempted to read your book. Because I really like her in particularly how she evolves particularly the way I thought the first of all there's a real plot in the in it goes with that. Dragon Tattoo, but she have both the lead characters, particularly the female really evolves through the series and really grows through the series, more so in the in the in the books than in the movies. And, yeah, I mean, I'm a fan of those. All right, well, yeah, then I then I definitely have to go back to that because I think I got just the point where they introduced her in the first book, and not much. Oh, so you're still early. You're still because one of the things he does creepy. She's a little creepy early on because she's. Yeah, I mean, you learn about why she's like she is but she's she's definitely an outsider and a and very much. You know, she's got the tattoos and she's got you know she's very much weird and she grows on you throughout the thing and it's really does. I mean, she the description that I read she sounds like the girls I wanted to date in high school. I never want to taste may differ. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, you're learning things about Don you didn't expect to. This is good. So I promised people this is going to be the best episode and we've the Europe show ever and so far we've started with they. We've started with a special guest and we've had revelations several revelations so we're off to a good start. This is good. This is good. So you mentioned. Oh, so before we get to that, what can you say about I am justice without giving anything away that will intrigue people enough to want to read the book. I mean, this is about a softball of a question. You know, it's like, you know, you say that pitch that just knocks this out of the ballpark. You say that and yet the struggle I've always had with all of our books all my books is. Alright, I've written it. I know it's good. How do I what is the pitch. And but the basic idea is that you have this girl who's, you know, by all accounts pretty normal seems to have some secrets in her past. But basically something comes up where she ends up killing a classmate in pretty much self-defense for various reasons can't go to the cops. But what happens is the next morning, what she finds out is the cops didn't find one body. They found three and it doesn't look like self-defense. It looks like a vicious hate crime. And so now this college student basically has to solve a crime that she was involved with in order to save herself. And so, you know, this is taking place on college campus and, you know, you get into some of the cancel culture issues and a lot of struggles with questions about race. But ultimately a lot of questions just about the nature of good and evil that she has to grapple with in order to try to come out of this thing alive. So everybody go out and buy the book is you said there was going to be a marketing push is there is anything happening towards the end of the year. Well, so I went with this publisher called story grid, which is sort of a hybrid between indie publishing and traditional publishing it was founded by a guy who used to be one of the top editors and agents in New York. And he came up with a whole methodology to help you write books, which I found really helpful. But then he and his partner decided they were going to start their own publishing because they saw kind of problems both in independent and in traditional publishing. I know you've seen some of the traditional published in traditional publishing. This is basically what they tell you which is bring us a finished book. We're going to do almost no editing. Bring us an audience. We're going to do almost no marketing and we're going to keep like 90% of the money from the book. And it's like, oh, that sounds like a great deal. What what what am I getting out of it? It's like, well, we'll get you in bookstores. Maybe maybe and and then if you look at where your sales come from, you see, yeah, that's really not a great deal. But then on the other hand, indie publishing is hard because you're all on your own. You have to pay all the upfront cost. You have to do all the marketing. If you have editing, you're paying for all of it. And so they kind of take over that and they say like, look, we're going to give you in-depth editing by some of the best editors you'll ever find, which is certainly my experience. We're going to do, you know, we're going to pay all the upfront costs and things like that. And we're going to do a big part of the marketing and then we're going to give you 50% of the money from the book. So I was like, that's a much better deal. But the marketing specifically right now, what our focus is, is getting in those first hundred reviews on Amazon. Because until you have a significant number of reviews, you don't really have the credibility to be able to kind of push the novel to new readers. Because what most readers do if they reach an unfamiliar author, because think about how you buy fiction books, right? It's either an author you know, or it's you came with a really strong word of mouth recommendation, right? It's not like you heard some really good kind of hook for a story, usually not. It's usually one of those two avenues. But if you are going to try to push out and reach new readers, you have no choice to try to overcome that barrier. And one of the most important things that you do is when people do find the book, they need to see like, all right, I have good reason to think this might be good. And Amazon reviews are just so important here. So if anybody has read the book, you might see, oh, there's 70 reviews now, what does mine matter? No, no, no, they really, really matter. Even once we're past 100, like books that do well in novels that do well, really you're talking a thousand plus reviews is like the real kind of winner. But in any case, our push right now is just to get in the reviews. And then in February, we're going to start making a real marketing push. And there's they have a bunch of stuff that they do, including, you know, different kinds of specials, advertising dollars, things like that. So right now it's kind of laying the groundwork. And part of what I like about what they're doing is if you remember our books, you're on the idea was like, the first two or three weeks was really all that the publisher cared about. That's all that mattered. Everything was about crushing those weeks. And after that, it was like, all right, we're on to the next thing on what we could. It's over. Yeah. Publishing is generally historically is everything is in the first few weeks. You try to get on the bestseller lists. And then nobody puts any effort to doing book sales. Just plummet after that unless it's, you know, a few classic books that keep on selling, but most books just just go nowhere after that. Yeah. I mean, if you're, you know, one of the top zero zero one percent, your book will have legs, but it's it's super difficult. But there the way they think about editing is over the course of a year or marketing is over the course of a year. And then what they really believe in is that it's really over the course of an author's career so that to really build a readership. And if you look at people who are super successful, likely child who does the Jack Reacher series. You know, it's a slow, steady climb. And it's not until you get to like the fifth or sixth book where you've really started to build up a foundation and you start kind of hitting the bestseller list. So I'm not patient, but I'm trying to learn to be with this book and just really focus on trying to get as many readers as possible and then working on the follow up and hopefully a series of follow ups as quickly as possible. So the idea here is this is a series with the same with the same heroin. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm I finished the first draft of the follow up right now and I'm doing a second draft and then we'll send it along to my editor. So I mean, I hope that by this time next year, people will have the second one in their hands. So, you know, if I can crank one of those out a year, that will be. That would be amazing. On top. Well, that yeah, I mean, I hear a lot of independent authors, their business model requires like four plus books a year. And that that just leaves me baffled how they do it. But yeah, I mean, the way the way I do it is actually pretty simple, which is just I wake up really early and every day get in a couple hours of work on it. And then, you know, when I have some free time like on weekends or vacations, just really hammer at it with with everything. And, you know, it adds up quicker than you think. So, and I mean, I wrote another nonfiction book this year that's right now with editors. So, I mean, and this is mostly again, just in a couple hours a day of consistent work. That's amazing. All right, so all of you who read the red dance novel already. You've got your homework homework is simple. Go to Amazon right of review it can be three sentences, but right of review just get something written. Don't just give it a ranking don't just, you know what I do, which is just click on the five stars. No actually write a few sentences right so that is the most valuable thing you can do in terms of helping the book right now. So, plus, of course, by 20 copies and give it as Christmas presents that that would be good too. But short of buying a bunch of copies and giving them out to friends, writing a review is the next best thing you can do. Just a shout out to my friend Steve who was kind of to buy 10 copies. And then in order to get me to sign them decided to give me a set of baseball cards and I thought what shouldn't I be the one doing a favor for you for for buying them so that they're definitely amazing amazing fans out there. Yeah guys. You don't have to bribe us to get us to sign out books. Everybody could you please say of course I'll sign your book what do you mean. Yeah, we are not yet at the stage of having trouble getting through the airport or something. No, not at all. So how do you come up with these stories I mean, I kind of get. Well, I mean we know how we work on nonfiction, but it's not just kind of straightforward I mean you look out into the world it's kind of stuff. We're trying to describe what's actually happening in reality, and and explain it with a philosophy, we understand and know. It's not necessarily easy, but it seems pretty straightforward fiction is like you're creating another universe you're creating something that doesn't exist. How do you come up with those stories. What's created process like. Yeah, it's interesting, like it's surprising to me how few authors have interesting things to say about this, because I think there is so much that you can actually respect about like how that actually happens. One thing that I'll mention that I think is really helpful is like it starts with a not very good idea. And I don't mean like a bad idea but the hardest part is and I ran makes this point about editing that people make the people freeze up because they try to like write the perfect draft. And she has this idea that like no until there's something in existence you can't improve it you can improve on a zero. And what I found with my novels is that it usually starts with an idea that isn't really much of an idea but it's something and then I can build on it and keep adding to it until you know now it's interesting but I need a something and with this one. This gives away a little bit but it's in the first couple chapters so I think you can probably get this far just looking on Amazon. The preview. I was watching a net Netflix they had a documentary about strip clubs. And I was watching it I think with my wife and it was just I was like this is a really weird bizarre and intriguing world. And it would be really fascinating to have something that was kind of partially set in this world and like what would that look like and how would it, you know, I'm not into like something writing something extremely or whatever but like that world just fascinated me because it's this weird borderline between legitimate but illegitimate and if you remember the wire and this is something very true. You know, it's a really great place to own if you're trying to launder money and being connected to crime. And so I that was just the start but that's not a story right and so then just little pieces would get added to it. But it was having this kind of like one magnet piece and then kind of building around it and so what I always tell people is don't try to come up with a good idea come up with an idea you can always figure out a way to make it better. But if you sit around going what's my great idea that that never happens and if it does it I think it kind of happened with my previous novel the one that didn't work out like I just had this premise. It was a real what if so I'll even give it away because I'm never actually going to write it. But it was, you know, what if there was an illegal immigrant but instead of like, you know, having a typical immigrant job, he ended up creating like the next Uber, you know, the next breakthrough company. And yet, you know, there's a target on his back if his identity is ever found out. And that one I think just came to me sort of out of the blue. But usually it's a bad idea that just you keep adding layers to it keep adding complexity keep looking for sources of conflict. There's a really good example in Inran's the Art of Fiction, where she kind of goes through how I mean she doesn't tell you she's doing this but it's in effect. How would you create from scratch the plot of Notre Dame by Hugo. And you see just starting with kind of a basic setup that isn't too interesting if you keep thinking in terms of intensifying conflict, you can create this larger than life story and I think that's really right. Yeah. So now we know that everything that Don knows about strip clubs come from a Netflix documentary. Oh no well thankfully I was able to do a good amount of research. Here you go. I was going to say it's a little rationalistically rationalism to do it on base of a documentary so good. Yeah, so, but actually that I will say that's the area that I'm weakest at or if I look at the people who are like the top people in the crime genre. They're not excellent enforcement. They're often journalists. Okay. And if they're not journalists at the very least they've built up a lot of relationships with people in the FBI or in, you know, military intelligence, and it allows them to have a lot of specificity that builds realism and credibility. And so, you know, that's something that I think, you know, longer term, I'm trying to do more and more raise the threshold of like how well researched this is. Because I think to really compete at the top levels, you have to have that you can't just be going off your own plaudibility. And that's part of why my book is really about an amateur sleuth. Right. It's not about the police. It's not about the FBI. It's about a college girl trying to deal with some, you know, a lot of bad stuff happening to her. And it's like, all right, I know that world. Like, I mean, I went to I went to college. I live it's written, you know, in places I've lived in. And it's, you know, kind of situations that I had firsthand experience it with. And so part of my vision for the series was this idea of, you know, we have these kind of larger than life heroes like Jack Reacher, and we get their backstory, but we never see somebody go from like pretty normal to becoming like how do you become that? How do you gain those skills? How do you develop those relationships? So I wanted to like take a normal person and kind of put her on that trajectory. And one of the things that I anticipated was, as I learn, she'll be learning and we can kind of like grow up together in terms of knowing more about these different universes. Yeah, that's very cool. So by the way, if you're looking for the book, I just put the link in the chat. I'll put it in the description below after the show I should have thought of that in advance. But you're probably having a hard time finding it on Amazon because you're putting in Don Watkins, which was that I did for a long time and couldn't get it. It's under DP Watkins. So it doesn't come up with together with Don's nonfiction books. Yeah, that's a separate world. Yeah, my publishers. I did submit before I submitted them to a few agents and I didn't get any responses. And I'm not using this as a full excuse because it was definitely not a perfect novel when I sent it out. But the publishing world is, I mean, if you go on Twitter and look up and type an agent and just look up all the people with agents in their profile, almost all of them will have their pronouns in it just to give you an indication of it's very woke, very left. And the book world is really skewed that way as much as like college universities. It's very much that way. I mean, they're all English majors, right? So like, what are you going to expect? And my publishers, you know, they're pretty courageous in the sense of here's a white guy writing about race issues who has a background writing books like Equal is Unfair. But they did say, look, we don't want to alienate new people who might not agree with your politics. I said, I don't want to alienate them either. So they said, would you be open to a pen name? I'm not close to yours, but something to separate the two, you know, just create a little space and I said, yeah, absolutely. And so I didn't view that as a kind of weakness and I kind of like having that sort of separation. It helps me separate my projects. You know, I have like an email list for people who are interested in fiction and versus all the stuff that I do in my name and with you, you're on. So I think that kind of separation is good. But yeah, I should, I should have made sure to let people know that. So thank you for pointing it out. So there's somebody's got a sense of humor here. They say, you're on should write a novel to imagine how good it would be. Yeah, imagine. It would be terrible. I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a storyteller unless it's true stories which which I can tell. Let's see. Daniel asked a question here directly related. Let's see. In what way did writing fiction supplement improve your nonfiction writing? I don't know that it did. I definitely know that getting better as a nonfiction writer helped my fiction. Because, I mean, A, you just get constant practice at making sentences that are clear. And it's the surprising. I think one thing people underestimate in fiction is how important clarity is and how hard it is, right? Because it's hard enough to kind of explain a philosophic concept. I mean, it's extremely hard and certainly to do it precisely. But it's a different kind of hard to paint a whole universe in people's minds that feels real and they can see everything. Particularly if you're writing action sequences, having a sense of where people are and how they're moving and so on, it's really hard. And I think there's no way. I know for a fact that, you know, having spent a decade at the Inron Institute with Alex Epstein and getting constant feedback on my writing and really knowing what it meant to write clear and logically. That was such a huge asset. And then writing books generally, you learn to keep an enormous context in your mind. And that is, it is very hard in any book. But with a novel, there's so many threads, including different plot arcs, different character arcs that and those have to be integrated. You're trying to track a bunch of clues surprises. And it, I mean, it's the most overwhelming thing and only because I built up that muscle writing, you know, the four books that I had done before then. So I think there was even a hope that I was able to do it in the realm of storytelling. That's great. It's not always the case that the skill translates. But it's, that's great. So Daniel writes a different Daniel Daniel Chapman. I audibly laughed when I read the name Paul called Cobra. I think his name appears exactly once in it. I feel like I know everything about him. Great book look forward to the sequel. So Daniel go go to Amazon right of review. That's all right, let's see. You know, that's an interesting compliment. When you're able. So I think it's a real skill I ran was masterful at this if you particularly when you read like her like at party scenes when she's introducing a bunch of characters. And yet all of them feel so distinct just because of one or two little details, because there's kind of two ways that you can convey character very quickly. One is that you come up with just a really distinctive and original way to bring out who they are. You know, think of and I'm going to go blank on his name. So this is undermining my point, but the character in the fountain had to like, you know, dandruff, something like that. But in any case, the, the other way that you can do it, and this is the more common way is that you're using kind of a stock character right and so all you have to do is suggest a type and then the person gets. Oh, that's the kind of, you know, rich smarmy businessman. Oh, that's the kind of like wild frat boy. And, you know, that kind of thing is easy and hopefully the compliment is that I was able to convey this, you know, a real distinctive character quickly because that I think is, it's a challenge when you do it, it feels I mean it's really fulfilling. So it turns out somebody in the chat Chandler has done review of I am justice a video review on his YouTube channel. Oh, that's awesome. Email me Don at dawnswriting.com I need to see that. That's Chandler so I don't know what his YouTube channel is. Yeah, I can't I don't think he's provided that info but Chandler emailed on with a link to your view. Let's see these other questions if any of them have anything to do with what we're talking about. Nope, nope. Don't forget you want to ask Don a question about writing about anything. Use the super chat we'll take the writing questions first and then we're leaving the kind of more broad questions of until afterwards so we'll get to those later on. So you mentioned before that you're interested in kind of using or, you know, fiction to convey or to communicate an idea to convey to communicate something more abstract. It's the same over there because, you know, most of the time that objectivist have tried to write fiction. It's the story is the writing is terrible the story is blah, but they get all the speeches in you know and they're hitting you over the head with objectivism. How do you find the balance and what kind of ideas do you think you know unless you I ran right but what kind of ideas do you think you can convey in a in a in a thriller in a in a who done it type story. Well yeah so I mean one thing I'll definitely stress is my goal certainly wasn't to sell objectivism with the book. Now I didn't think that selling objectivism is irrelevant to writing the book I think the best thing I could do to sell objectivism would become famous as a as a good fiction writer and have that huge platform from which to talk about my ideas and you know promote nonfiction works. So I don't think that they're conflicting goals but my goal certainly wasn't to spread objectivism but look I mean you know me you're on the only thing I'm really interested in is philosophy, or other issues and so far as I can relate them to philosophy. And so there was no way there wasn't going to be philosophy in the book, but I mean look I really took seriously who is this character, and that there's there's no way that just some like college girl discovered objectivism right is going to go around preaching it. And I, I just thought it would have been really an authentic to the world to have it at that level, but I do think their ideas that I agree with that objectivism agrees with that are more accessible and the kind of thing that an honest person would come to on their own. And certainly if you think in the crime genre you're dealing pretty much with. Let's call it like more evident kinds of values not so much the conflicts of individualism versus collectivism reason versus mysticism, but good versus evil and having a sense of what it means to be good and and how people corrupt their souls. And there's a lot of kind of conventional or semi conventional wisdom I think that is you know on the right track. I mean if you just take something like the virtue of justice or the virtue of honesty. Objectivism shines a much greater deeper light on what those mean, but most people regard them as virtues and I think you can bring it that out in a in a novel like this and I certainly tried to bring them out. And certainly a lot of psychology that's informed about Objectivism is going to inform my characters, like my understanding of, you know, how a person goes bad and the kind of trajectory that evasion, like leads and the kind of logic of evasion, I think is very much sort of in the back of my mind but even comes out in the novel. So there's ideas in the novel. This is a look it's really challenging to integrate plot and theme. And the, I mean I ran one of our underappreciated insights was what she called a plot theme, which is not just a summary of your plot, it's a one sentence summary plot that embodies an abstract theme. And it's only by having that, you know, plot theme, for example an Atlas shrugged, you know the theme the abstract idea is the role of the mind in human life. But the plot theme is the mind on strike the men in the mind going on strike. And that plot theme you can see translates directly into this abstract idea and it's that plot theme that allows her to select the characters the events and so on. And that's the only way that you can really figure out how to actually embody ideas and not just make it characters mouthing ideas. It's a really tricky thing and you know that's why I say like with it with a thriller any genre fiction with the possible exception of fantasy and science fiction where I think you can do more with ideas. And in bootleg romanticism said that thrillers the theme is always good versus evil I would put it a little bit more. It's good versus evil with life or death stakes. And so you're dealing with almost a perceptual level form of good versus evil right like to he is evil, but he never physically assaults anybody right. It's very hard for people to get why is he evil what like he doesn't even seem evil at the beginning, but you know character who plants a bomb in New York City, we can all see. Okay, that's evil like you don't have to know much more than that so you can deal with moral issues I think at a level that has to bring in less philosophy. To what extent, do you have a plot theme worked out before you right. When, when does the plot theme come into consciousness. I'm constantly going back and forth on it with this new book, it was more clear cut in my mind because I had more context I had learned a lot with the last one I would just constantly throw stuff into a draft and then go wait what the heck am I really trying to say and you know it was. It was a very messy sort of process, but that's fine. The key is that you need to know by the end of the process, what it is, it's just very helpful to know it at the beginning of the process. But yeah, that that took me a long while to get clear on. And I would say probably it was only halfway through the book that I got. Alright, what I'm really trying to illustrate something about justice which shouldn't have been a big surprise to me given the name of my character but it it actually was. It strikes me as one of the things that this kind of art can concretize is the idea of a heroism and the idea of of of man as as an efficacious and the use of his mind as being efficacious right so those seem to be other philosophical kind of characteristics that can be expressed in the form of novels. Totally and in fact that's one reason why I respond more to thrillers in books than I tend to in TV and movies, TV and movies properly can be primarily visual that is you know you can watch john wick, just doing awesome karate you know shooting up a thousand bad guys and it looks really cool it's a fun experience or something like die hard right where you know you just have these crazy action sets and scenes in a book that doesn't really work that well. It's if you if I just described somebody punching a lot of people for 30 pages you you would just go cold right I fast forward in those scenes in the movies anyway. It's really hard I mean it is hard to make them interesting in movies I mean that's why not every action film is die hard right you have to care about the characters they have to be clever. But I think in in books, it really has to be more the problem solving ability the mind of a protagonist that you fall in love with even if there's action, even if they're strong. It's they have to outsmart their opponent they have to get out of impossible situations to their intelligence. And so that's my favorite kind of thing and so I really worked hard to do that and that I think is the hardest part for me of writing thrillers is how do I make something that like I I if I was reading it wouldn't be able to figure out you know how it was going to play out like how am I going to outsmart the readers because readers are so smart if they're into a genre right they've read a thousand of these probably literally many thousands of them. And you know they've seen all the tropes they know a lot of the tricks that authors play. And so trying to think one step ahead of that that is to me the one of the most challenging parts of the genre. So Brad is asking what valuable insights were gained for you during the process of thinking up and writing I am justice. The most valuable insights were really just about the process of thinking. So I gave the one example of starting with an idea, and then striving to make it interesting. But one of the things that I found, and this has worked really well for me in my nonfiction writing to is, and indeed I really discovered this initially though I hadn't really kind of put a pin in it as a method point. One of the things that I found when we were writing our first book together is the crucial power of you hit a problem in writing or in thinking. And what do you do if you just can't figure it out now what I would often do is go ask you or ask on card I can't do that with my storytelling. But for when you can't do that. The major thing that I found was that if I really precisely articulated the problem is clearly as possible, and then went for a walk 1520 30 minute walk. I'm not exaggerating when I would say 80% of the time I'll have the answer by the end of the walk. It's that kind of, but I really want to stress the first part because people will often give that advice right go for a walk get away from your computer and that's true. But what most people skip is the first part which is really precisely pinpoint the problem or the question you're trying to answer because the clear that is the more your subconscious really can work for you. If it's kind of murky or muddy, you'll spend the whole time just going what am I confused about and that's fine but you're not going to get the kind of answers and so it was more insights like that about how to be creative and come up with creative ideas not just creative fiction, but all kind of creative thinking. And I indeed for I'm writing a book on essentially an ethics and one of the things that I kind of go into is the kind of creative thinking that every productive career involves. And I would say the vast majority of those insights I got at from writing fiction. And that's where I was really able to isolate and pinpoint it because you can make a clear distinction in that universe between is this a knowledge problem or a thinking problem right like it in philosophy sometimes is I just don't know know enough about what caught thought or you know if for one of our books I don't understand exactly how inflation works and so it's more of a knowledge gathering problem and versus a pure thinking problem and fiction really isolates into predominantly pure thinking problems. So Brie asks, how do you avoid accidental plagiarism. All the stories I have read swimming around in my head. That's really interesting. I mean, I think I wouldn't worry about it because first of all, to actually execute in a story like if you were plagiarizing more than like tidbits here or there like you would realize it. And so I think the story will largely come out original and given our culture today, people will view any of that as Easter eggs or at least you can sell them as Easter eggs, because I certainly have a few tidbits in there that are direct references to things. But it's, I don't mean to suggest that like plagiarism is okay but I just think that it's probably not as big as as big as a problem as you're worried about because there's just so much that goes into making anything work that your influences will be there but not in a way that's like actually stealing from them. And then if you're stealing from them like I have a scene where I steal from Hugo, it's completely changed like the fundamental dynamic of it is there. And so I basically do plagiarize one of his lines but I consider it a hymn or an ode rather than stealing. And he's copyrighted. All right, Seth asks, Don you produce and distribute much of your own content. How do you know when it's time to get a team of professionals behind you. I know they answered that when he's making so much money that he can afford to hire them. That helps yeah. I mean for most of the stuff I do. Well I shouldn't say most for some projects that I do, you know it's just me and I'll just put it out there and I'm okay with it, you know not being as great as it could be like I couldn't put out the content that I do if everything was going through a review process. For the most serious important projects I go through, I want feedback from people so if I'm you know writing my book on ethics you better believe I'm knocking on the door, as it were. I won't name their names but you know you the usual suspects people who really understand Objectivism really understand communication and in fiction. That was even more apparent like I look I came into Objectivism, a career and Objectivism, like I had spent 10 years on my own reading and writing about it and by one standard I knew a lot. But I mean, as you're wrong could attest like it was probably five or six years before it was really like, Oh, like this is really good work this. This stands out and it and the only reason I got there was because I got people like you're on an on car saying week after week. This isn't right this isn't convincing nobody's going to understand this. And so I knew when I got to fiction. It would be ridiculous not to be able to really go to excellent editors and storytellers and get feedback and in terms of when in the process. There's two ways to think about it one is you do the best that you can and then you seek out feedback. The other is you try to get feedback kind of early knowing that you know you're going to make a lot of mistakes anyway so get feedback early. I'm somewhere in the middle. I write something I'm generally genuinely happy with and maybe I could eke out some improvements but I know like, No, this is pretty close to where I would be able to take it on my own. And then go to editors with the new book I've been, you know, blessed as maybe two religious a word for it but that's how it feels emotionally to be able to work again with the same editor I did for my first novel. And so I've been able to have more upfront discussions, the way that like, you know, when you're on and I were writing together, we do a lot of, you know, talking at the beginning in the middle and at the end bring in other editors at the end. So I'm a big fan of getting as much feedback. I shouldn't say as much as you can, getting a lot of feedback, a lot of quality feedback. And, but at a certain point, you just need to say right, like this is where I am, I'm going to put something out. You know, there's a philosophy that some writers have, like our friend Leonard peek off. You know, you've had it where you're writing for the ages and if you're going to put something in writing, it better be by the, you know, best of your possible human ability, as perfect as you can make it. I admire that. That's not how I approach my writing my goal is that I want to turn out something that I'm proud of, and that I think is good. But I want to move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and I'm willing to live with the fact that, you know, 10 years after my death, maybe nobody will read what I wrote during my lifetime. But I had fun writing it and I made an impact on the world I lived in. And that I think you just have to decide what kind of writer you want to be. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I like that. I was about to ask Don, would you consider writing a story that takes place in an objectivist parallel universe? Probably not. And the basic reason is this. Objectivism is not known to the public, which means if you're going to put it in your books, you've got to make a big deal out of it. And it's got to make sense of what the ideas are, how they're shaping things, what's wrong with conventional ideas. It's, you know, if Ayn Rand had grown up in a world where everybody had already, you know, where Aristotle's ideas, you know, had reigned with, you know, some improvements that had evolved over the years and it was essentially objectivism. And it's a real question of if she would have written such philosophic novels. She might have, but I mean the way she explained is she wanted to write about the ideal man and it was because no philosopher, the culture at large didn't share her view of the ideal that she had to formulate a whole philosophy in order to portray it. So I don't want to insist that hers would have been less philosophic, but I would say it was her mission necessitated it. But my mission is different. Like I write fiction because I really enjoy reading crime novels and telling crime stories. So my real goal for the reader is I want them to have a lot of fun and but walk away with the sense that, you know, if there was more here than just like, you know, a couple fight scenes they should get that there's some depth they should feel like there's some there's some weight to it that the heroes are not just, you know, strong and, you know, good at shooting guns. But my the goal of for me personally in fiction is not ideological or philosophic. But that's why I'm always going to do both. I'm always going to be. I mean, the my my in my ideal world I'd put out two books a year one nonfiction and one fiction. And that that's sort of how I see the division of labor. Florida Nick says he just bought a kind of version and start reading it soon. Awesome. Thanks, Florida. Nick. Daniel asked how do you objectively judge your own creative work. Example sometimes I've already seen creative description analogy, etc. And think this is good. And then this pure shit a minute later. Yeah, so I mean this goes back to what I was saying about nonfiction, what I learned from nonfiction, which is it takes a long time to judge your work objectively. And when I moved into fiction, there is a lot. There is still a gap between what I thought was good and then what really was good but it wasn't as big as it would have been with I hadn't spent, you know, 10 years professionally or I guess 12 professionally that point of really learning how to be objective to people. But the other thing that I'll I'll say. And so that that is a role where editors can help you learn how to judge your own work. The other thing I say so I just started a newsletter called chapter one. I think it's like first chapter dot substack.com. And part of what I do is really start to look at and evaluate the first chapter by other crime writers at a really fine grain level. And so part of what I'm trying to do there is solve what I think is the hardest problem to teach somebody, which is, you know, you can teach them structure you can teach them how to weave a good plot. But how do you sentence by sentence make a scene pop make it real. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to learn inductively or conceptualize through inductive examples as I'm trying to look at just, you know, three different authors a week their first chapters, try to draw every lesson I can. And so hopefully, you know, in a year or two, what I would really like to do is at some point be able to write a book just on that problem which I think would go a long way to helping people. How do I write, you know, a scene that's really killer and know that it's good, because there's a lot of amazing advice for big picture macro level stuff and writing. I don't think there's a lot of good stuff at the line by line level. And so hopefully that's something I can, if not solve, contribute to enabling people to improve. Cool. Let's see. Travis is asking for Richard. It's a little weirdly phrased. We'll see if he get what he's getting at this don do children are they superfluous to his thinking as well. Yeah, so I assume this means like including them in the books because I ran was often criticized for not having kids in her books. I don't think there's any kids in this novel. And I don't even think there might be in the next one. I'm not opposed to it and I'm really interested in kids. I mean, I have two of them. Hey, Don definitely does kids. Yeah, I mean, I'm really pro kid and think they're amazing. They're really hard to write well. Oh, I do actually have some scenes in the first book, but definitely in the second one that are have some kids in them. And it's really hard to do well. And but particularly, it's amazing how much you forget as my kids are eight and six and I already if you asked me to write a four year old. You know, I would have a lot of trouble so I'd have to hunt down whatever friends or family have, you know, four year olds if that's what I was doing. But but also, you know, if I'm if I'm writing crime novels and thrillers, there's not much that makes me uncomfortable. Like I'm I can deal with like pretty dark stuff and books but anything that in where kids are in danger is like a little bit of a trigger warning for me. So I probably wouldn't want to write that. But I'd love to work them in, you know, as like comic relief. Yeah, I think there's this implication that I don't know that you got to write everything in I mean, you probably don't have any philosophers in the book does that mean you're anti philosophy Don is that it. Right. You don't like philosophers anymore because you didn't put any philosophers in your book. I, you know, it's, it's, it's ridiculous to it to view fiction and and I was struck them found had ultimately a fiction in that kind of way that she had to cover everything, every form of human experience has to be in the book. Otherwise, she was obviously against it. I mean, I would have loved to see her write about children but it wasn't a primary interest of her and it wouldn't have fit what she was trying to do with her heroes to see them as children because look, seeing them as children you're inherently showing them as kind of vulnerable and like in a certain way and she's trying to give you reverence for an ideal. And so the like the it you experience the ideal more powerfully if you see them fully formed and kind of ready made and I think, given her purpose. It would have been detrimental to do anything else. And so even when you do get, you know, younger not super young kids like Dagny and Francisco, they're believably young in terms of their spirit and level of knowledge but they're also incredibly mature and more fully formed than most kids are. And, and it's important that they're that, you know, galt is really the pinnacle of the novel and there we don't see, you know, any of his childhood. No, but we don't know much about gold anyway. Right. I mean, we don't know much about a story we know, we have episodes that we know we see shadows, but we don't know much about gold that's not the novels not about gold in the end. I mean, it's, it's, it's about in terms of the characters characterization, Dagny and read and the ones who really developed. Let's see Scott asks, you've been one of the better people offering practical skills to spread good ideas. How do you see the path to objectivism gaining more influence. I mean, we could talk about that forever, but I'll just name one thing and I kind of indicated earlier, but my basic view is that there's kind of two different. There's two different paths that we have to go down. One is that we have to have world class training for people who want to use the idea certainly as professional intellectuals but in any sort of field. And thankfully we do have world class training. I think that's what the iron Institute provides and I think what Tal and his team are doing with the new iron ran university and really making training their focus. I have, I'm 100% behind. I mean, I have said many, many times I would not be where I am without the OAC and all of the other things I learned from AI. But then it's alright. What are all those people you're training doing? Like what, what does it work out? And there my view is that the way I'll often put it, which is a little bit of an overstatement, but not much is that ideas don't persuade people. It's ideas as advocated and embodied by individuals that persuade people. What it is is that you have to have people who are compelling, interesting, who people look up to and think, yeah, I want to be like that person, maybe not totally, but in at least in the relevant sphere. Like I want to be like that businessman. I want my mind to work, you know, like people say that about, oh, I want my mind to work like Elon Musk. They need to be saying that about objectivists. Not all of them. Yeah, yeah. But the, but the point being that if you're telling people how to think and how to live, they need to look at you and go, I want to think and live like that person. And so we need people like that in the culture. And thankfully we have some of them in different fields who have really risen to the pinnacle of their fields. If you take, you know, Adam Mossoff and law. If you take Alex Epstein and kind of the energy debate. If you take what a number of objectivists are doing in the field of education. And there's, I think, more examples like that, what John Allison did as the head of BB&T, there's a number. These are examples of people who have achieved tremendous amount and they embody objectivism, let alone, you know, use and preach it. And I think that's what you need to do at scale. And I think that's hard because you can't teach a lot of what goes into that, right? You can teach somebody objectivism. You can give them a great methodology, but at the end of the day, you're really asking for innovators. And if you're talking in the field of ideas, frankly, you need also charismatic interview, charismatic intellectuals, if not charismatic in person, then at least on the page. And you just can't train that what you can do, though, is you can try to appeal to the best minds in the culture. And so one of the things that I get very frustrated by is when we're too, we too much judge success or failure by pure numbers. Oh, look at this guy got it. He was on a video with 5 million people that viewed it. I don't care about 5 million. If it alienates the five best young minds who go, this is kindergarten philosophy. That's not the real thing. You need to appeal to the best minds because they're the ones who become those John Allison's and Adam Mossos. And so I think that, again, it's another thing that AI does really well is putting out, you know, people like on car, front and center and showing objectivism in its full depth and power and not dumbing it down, and not not shying away from its real meaning and implications. And so that's the short version is do a lot of training and then allow the best minds to rise to the top and hopefully do great things. And in my view, there's not really any other shortcuts than that. Yeah, it's it's good to see on car doing a lot more videos and a lot more, a lot more stuff out there. He's been on YouTube all the time recently. So which is great. I know I hear from him more than I did when I worked from him with him. I know, I know. I get more people watching because it's too good of material to have this few which brings us to Daniel's question for nonfiction. Sometimes it's demoralizing for objectives to know how few people will read and be persuaded by their work. How do you stay motivated to stretches like this. PS bought your book today. I mean, it depends on your goals. I mean, in general, you should be motivated by your goal, right. And if, and if you're not achieving it, like that just means right what do I need to learn to get closer to my goal. Now, for me, like, my goal in terms of my personal motivation has never been changing the world like that was more just a, I want that to happen. I worked in an organization where that was our mission. So I like I was aiming at that. But for me personally, what I really wanted to do was understand 9 Reigns ideas and write books that I thought were the most effective way to communicate those ideas and whatever issue that I was dealing with. And so it was, the numbers really didn't matter that much to me. It was, you know, and I think we did some decent numbers, given how hard it is to sell books and given that we're selling super unpopular ideas. And we're still, our books are still selling. I mean, I still do events where I'm doing book signings and stuff like that. So free market revolution and and equals unfair still sell, you know, decent numbers. Yeah, I mean, and I've had the same experience and and going back to my previous point it's who's reading them is impressive to is that many of the people who I hear about they read it and everything. They're there, you know, this isn't just like some high schooler and I love that high schoolers, you know, read them so I'm not putting that down. But it's, you know, people who are high level business men, like really smart really sharp people who recognize like this is an interesting kind of take on these issues. So yeah, it just, it doesn't a I'm not very easily frustrated by that kind of thing but then be it's just not my personal mission in life and I wasn't that clear on that in my 20s and most of my 30s but certainly in the last few years. I realized that I mean look I once I started once I left working full time with Alex Epstein and went out on my own part of what became clear to me is that I'm not really interested in reaching a big audience. I was interested in helping objectives reach big audiences and be effective with them. So that's kind of my personal mission. The only reason that that's changed now is that to reach my fiction goals which is to be able to sell enough copies to be able to free up more time to write fiction, that audience growth has become more of a thing. And yeah, it's not so much frustrating is it's just how do you solve the puzzle. And I think I've gotten enough feedback, including from like non objectivist and non fans of mine, who really love the novel that they that I know the novels good so it's just an issue of how to raise awareness. And then it's just a puzzle to be solved, not something that you know, you take personally. Let's see. Michael says Don, why aren't you doing more debates and talks. We need you. You're too low profile. I think this direct fees into what you just said. Yeah, I mean, I would love to do more talks. I love talks. It's for me, it's kind of like the writer's reward. Writing is rewarding in the in the sense that, you know, a good workout is rewarding. It's tough. It's intense, but you feel amazing after it's through. More like sex, right? Yeah, I think that's a really great analogy. I mean, it's you get to just step on a stage and kind of like bask in all the hard work you've done and you get that immediate connection to the audience. And so I love it. I'd love to do more that I do not like debates. They stress me out to watch that I actually have more stress like watching Iran and Alex and people debate than I do myself but even so. And to do them well at least for me to do them well I'm not very quick on my feet. So I have to do a lot of preparation and basically think what's everything they could say how would I answer it in a punchy effective way. It's it's a whole big thing and when I do that I can do them well but it's not an enjoyable experience for me so I'd much rather like cheer on your on and you know if I can give any assistance to the prep side I'm happy to do that. And to teach people how to debate. But no, if I if I never do it another debate again in my life I will not be displeased but I do want to do more speaking and hopefully be able to make that happen. Yeah, if you guys know anybody who can get get done some speaking gigs paying gigs, then then you can contact on. We definitely definitely don't a great speaker so it would be great to get him on the road speaking. Let's see Frank says do you. I didn't plant this question but here it is it was it's on my list of questions. Frank Frank scooped us. You know, you knew this was coming. Do you ever have to deal with sensitivity readers. Oh good I was worried we weren't going to get to this. So that is a very good question. So this book takes, you know, it had deals with issues like race. And now I was writing this before the kind of second wave of black lives batter. So it only became more contentious and more relevant since, you know, as the book was about to come out. And for those of you who don't know, one of the trends in the literary world over the last I don't know five years or so is that if you're going to deal with other so called races and genders and sexual identities. Then, well that's not really your story to tell but you should also have representation so you have to include them, but to make sure that you do it in a non offensive way what you need to do is give it to a sensitivity reader. And there the idea is that by virtue of having dark skin or by virtue of being attracted to the same sex, you are somehow a you are now a spokesperson for what is offensive and not offensive to people who share these characteristics. So that's kind of the basic theory and then people can give you feedback so as you might guess I, I have a pretty low opinion of this. And, but I was very curious, as I was about to begin querying agents for the book. I was curious as like I wonder what they would say about my book. And so I looked up for somebody who had a lot of experience as a young black female and she got her sister to do it with her so I got two opinions and then also found a different young black woman to look at it so I was trying to get, you know, not just one person to do it and then it turned out my publisher without telling me they had a sensitivity reader look at it much later in the process so I've been sensitivity read up the wazoo. But I will tell you this, I was actually pleasantly surprised with the experience. And in part, in part it's because my, the main sensitivity reader I got gave a lot of good writing feedback quite apart from anything to do with, you know, race sex class that just was really smart about writing and I mean her background is in psychology and she's some really good insights about psychology. So that really helped to if you can get a sensitivity reader who's a great editor. But the other thing that surprised me is that she gen she genuinely seemed to want to help like her goal was not to tell you don't say this. I won't say that. That's wrong. Rather it was to bring to my awareness things that I might not have been aware of. Like, Oh, did you realize that this character comes across as a stereotype. And she pointed that out in several cases and most of the times I said, No, there's a reason I'm doing that. Several times though I didn't realize it. It was unnecessary. I found it really helpful that and they weren't big things like it wasn't, you know, something where it would have, you know, made gotten me canceled or made headlines, but it was just something that I had overlooked. And it goes to a point of a lot of our discussions about race are plausible. The bad ideas about race are made plausible through package dealing. It really is easy not to understand people that you don't spend a lot of time with and I spend time with people from all places and colors and things, but I'm not living in those. You know that I think it's probably a byproduct of a lot of historical racism, that there is very definite subcultures by skin color and by sexual identity and things like that. But nevertheless, it is true that there's a lot I don't know or wouldn't realize, you know, could come across as clueless or thoughtless and so on. So there was little things like that she pointed out I found valuable, but I will say this, that as much as she was trying her best to be helpful. And as much as in some cases she was helpful, what writers are being told to do is outrageous and irrational, which as I indicated before it was you better have representation. And it better, but it better not be, but you better not be trying to speak for, you know, races that aren't yours and sexual preferences that aren't yours and so on. And then it's you better not be stereotypical, but you better not be inauthentic. So this is one thing where I really did object to the advice, which is that you were put in this position. I'll give you this example. If I had a black woman who was ugly overweight or something. Oh, this is the stereotype of the overweight big bold black woman. And then it was, I had a character who was black and very beautiful and it's oh that's the stereotype of the seductress black woman. And it's well what do you want me to do. And so it makes them black, but great. Yeah. And so it really is an impossible completely irrational situation, situation the way that it's done. But there is a real thing of if you're trying to write about the people in our world today. So, you know, I ran was writing about her universe that she was projecting, you know, with Atlas shrugged she wanted like no, she wanted to be fully created by her. I'm trying to set my things in today's world. And so if I'm trying to write a person who's like in, you know, a kind of typical person you'd meet in the white nationalist movement, they need to talk like that movement they need to act like people Yeah, they're probably going to be white, you know, or if I'm going to write about a black character. I at least want to know, does he see himself or herself as rebelling against what most you know the place he grew up in does he see himself as conforming is he conforming like I need to get that dynamic. And, like, you know, I grew up in a more diverse background than most people I'm from a military family and so like we were it was, I really didn't believe that racism existed until I was like in my late teens just because I couldn't comprehend it was so alien from what I had seen growing up. But again, that's something that like only a white kid is going to like have the luxury of believing doesn't exist right. So, there are things to learn and a sensitivity reader. God help that title can be in my case was helpful in some cases, but the overarching motive for it and the way that it's done is really anti writer, and, and frankly filled with a lot of racism, and so on. So, I thought it was an interesting experience, and I'm glad that I did it, but it's really a shame that it's thought of the way it is today is these are the gatekeepers for your novel. Yeah, and it's destructive to creativity. It's unbelievably destructive to creativity. Jeff, thank you that's very generous. Thanks for the support Jeff gave 100 bucks. Let's see. Super kill. Ask. Super pill. It's not kill it's pill. Super kills a good thriller novel title. He's got a K P I L L so super pill. Super K pill. Let's see. Don, you still do a podcast. I used to listen to one called debt dialogues every day on my woodwork. I did that with the ironware Institute and I've done several since so one is for a project that you're on and I have along with our colleague Robert Hendershott, and it's the ingenuism project. Go to ingenuism.com you should sign up for newsletter, but you're on I just did a podcast for that today. We have a newsletter we have an interview show there. That's a really amazing project where one of the one of the great things you run and I for the last few years have been thinking about how could we work together again. But what one thing that we really wanted to do is something that was positive something that was optimistic. And within genuism our focus is on what is what creates what are the forces that create progress. And in particular, how are they shaping up in the 21st century in ways that might be unique to what we've seen in the past so that's one of the main areas that I do I also have my personal podcast the Don Watkins show which is on YouTube at Don Watkins live so youtube.com slash Don Watkins live and that's more of an indulgence. I kind of just will interview people I find interesting about all sorts of topics. Iran's been on it to talk about speaking, which is a really excellent episode. And I've had a bunch of different guests and I've also done kind of other things on that channel. Actually, the thing that people are most have been most found most valuable is I did a, I took Leonard Peacock's book objectives in the philosophy of Iran. And it has something like I don't know 60 sections to it each major principle and objectivism. And I went through into the commentaries on Opar series where for each section I do a video where I just kind of summarize what Leonard said and then add any elaborations, any kind of tools to help people understand it apply it and I do a lot of some of the puzzles that I had and that others tend to have their first time reading it so you could find all that there, but yeah I do a lot of different things and I also do some stuff with the Iran Center UK people, including a communication boot camp where you can help anybody who wants to become a better communicator. I basically do for them for for members who I think pay like 10 bucks a month, what I usually charge people you know 250 an hour to do as private clients. So, Brad just put us over the top so Brad thank you it's another hundred bucks so we're now over 600 bucks that's that's a goal yeah it's it's somebody asked what percentage you get of the super chat. Indirectly probably a lot. Hopefully you guys are buying a lot of the books. I get no royalties in the books on this book. I get no royalties in any books. Yeah, yeah. Don and I are talking about a project but you know to be to be determined still so we somebody asked about are we are going to be doing books together so there was a there's we are talking about something we'll see. We will hopefully that hopefully that I'll be my next nonfiction project so. All right. Wow, we've really got an hour 25 okay we've got some miscellaneous questions here. Liam asked I guess this is for you because you wrote the book and so security. This was the first question asked in a super chat, Liam asked, would you recommend taking out so security, as soon as you turn 62 waiting until you 65 or 70. I mean, the general advice is to wait, because the net benefit tends to be greater if you take it later. So, but that's more an accountants question, I assume that it's sort of a question based on like what's going to happen to it politically. But nobody really knows that and something will change. But really mine and I mean that I just hit that age group so I'm keeping mine. I mean, I can't even imagine takes us good you know it seems. Yeah, I mean I maybe I should get skeptical there's going to be big changes to social security because it's actually not that hard to make it. How would you put it politically acceptable in terms of its cost. Medicare is the big one where there's going to have to be dramatic changes and I mean essentially I think that unless the country really changes direction the next decade. We're going to unfortunately get some form of socialized healthcare just because the way that our current system is structured is so bad and unsustainably bad. But yeah, with social security I think it's, they will do enough small tweaks that it'll probably go on for another, you know, at least for our relevant time scales in a form more or less like it is. I think that's right. I think that the bigger issue is healthcare, because that's where the real expenses are that's where the deficits are massive. And that's where the system is inefficient so you either go to truly private system and that means getting, you know, somehow privatizing Medicare which there's a way to do it but a few people talking about it or you go to complete socialized medicine. There's the current systems not sustainable. Yeah, so Ziv puts in $20 he's just excited by the fact that the Atlanta Braves one. I don't know if that's just to piss you off Don I guess it is. Don's a Philly, Philly fan. Philly's fan. Yeah. I read Talks Coffee by Houston too so it was not a good playoff so they didn't make it much further than anybody expected. Okay, Michael's got the cat out of the bag. When are you and Don writing your rules for life book? We'll see. We'll see to be determined but you guys will know. If you super chat a few $10,000, we will definitely do it. That's right. So there was a threshold of we'll need to raise some money to do it once we once we're fully committed to it we're not fully committed to it yet. Once we're fully committed to it we will. Michael also asked have you and Alex ever done mushrooms and discussed philosophy? To my knowledge Alex has not done any drugs. I have certainly not done them with him but we have certainly discussed philosophy and my drug days ended before I really knew anything. But I guess I kind of knew philosophy but I was like a college freshman that they were not I was more interested at that point in girls than having philosophic discussions. Yeah, this is not an endorsement of any kind of behavior. No, and I'm not sure. I'm not sure mushrooms is the right thing to be taking if you want to talk about philosophy. Just now from experience but from what I've heard about mushrooms. So, you know, unless the philosophy is content. And then, then maybe the mushrooms connect you directly to the actual reality. That's according to, what's his name? Sam Harris. Sam Harris, yes. Drugs connect you to the real reality. That's when you're on drugs, you know, the truth. Yeah, no, I really find that outrageous as somebody who like experimented with all the ones that Sam talks about when I was younger and somebody really interested in philosophy. I can say, like, you don't learn anything important, like you can have interesting experiences or whatever, but you don't learn anything valuable about reality. Like it's just, I don't even think you really learn anything valuable about your mind. I think they can be therapeutic. I think they could be using therapeutic context. I think there's more and more evidence that like mushrooms and MDMA and potentially others ketamine have therapeutic uses. So I'm not downgrading that, but the idea that it gives you philosophic insight, I just flatly deny it. And that's why I'm saying like I'm informed. So, you know, if he's going to throw around his experience as evidence, I'll throw around mine. And I'm going to take Don's experiential evidence any day over Sam Harris. So because I have none personally. So, you know, I grew up in Israel. You ate mushrooms. That's about it. Or you didn't because they were poisonous and you left them alone. All right, let's see. Don I'm an avid listener. Rita Alex Epstein's. Do you have any future collaboration plans with him? Nothing in particular, but I mean, we're on great terms and still stay in touch and, you know, I would love to work together. I mean, my problem at this point is just there I have to I'm having to become way more disciplined about saying no to things. There's this really when you're early in your career, it's really important to say yes, because that's where all your opportunities come from. Thankfully, I've, you know, been able to reach the point in my career where there's more opportunity than there is what I can take advantage of. And so a lot of it is I'm really happy with the projects I'm working on. Now I get to work with Iran. I get to work with a couple other people that I really value. And I get to write the kind of books I want to write. And that's more than a full plate already. So I have to be really disciplined about saying yes to things. And certainly if it was time to limited, you know, there's virtually nothing I wouldn't do with Alex just because I have a lot of admiration for him. And, you know, he's a really good friend. Jennifer recommends truffles. Oh, yeah. All right, Ian writes, did you know Canada's national post is doing a pro capitalism series called the capitalist manifesto might be worth commenting on PS Don's new book is great. Look forward to the sequel. I did not know the Canada's national posters doing that I will look for it. They have some really good writers that have clearly been influenced by Iron Man at the national post. They used to write some pretty good articles that interviewed me a few times when I was at the Institute. So it's definitely some good people at the national post. All right, Mike. Michael writes, is gold gulp a good name for the first objectivist coffee shop in Austin, Texas. No, no, no, no, it's not. But I actually take that if you put this in the wider perspective you're on. Look, ideally, I mean, a movement is going to have a culture to it and it's going to have certain traditions it's going to have, you know, things and there's a kind of cringe factor and certainly I ran hated it when people kind of like ape the characters and everything like that. But there's got to be something like that. It's fine. I mean, I could, I could, I could take Gold's coffee shop even but Gold's gulp. I mean, yeah, I think the problem is the pun. Doesn't work and it's a little, I don't know, to what would be the word. And I love puns, but, you know, look, there's a danger. There's a real one of the hardest. I ran had this point about, you know, you don't need to break with society like an Atlas shrug, you need to break with the culture. And one of the hardest things about breaking with the cultures that, you know, in our culture, you know, everything, humor is appropriate everywhere in with regard to everything and being cute and silly like there's nothing ever wrong with it. It's really hard to hold on to reverence. And anything that robs reverence from my, you know, the thinker and novelist and the novels that I most revere. I have a really negative reaction to even if I have a very positive reaction of the intention behind it. And so I think we just have to think about like, yeah, we want to pay tribute to the things we have in common. And that's great. How do we do it without undermining the reverence for it. I think is a, it's an important question to ask ourselves. Yeah, this came out of a conversation about, we should have an objective is coffee shop where you people talk to hang around and talk philosophy and have events and and do stuff like that and then maybe we should have salons where people get together and listen to music and have conversations and read poetry and do things like that. Maybe there's there's a little bit of that starting in Texas. Coke, I think is is organizing some of that. I don't think it's on the show today. Doing salons but but yeah, I think there'll be an objective is coffee shop in Austin, Texas, I think one funny thing to look back on is not moving to Austin, Texas though that's the one. But hopefully I'll visit all the time. Yeah, I actually do like the cold. But if you think about what I ran and her friends used to do back in the day like, you know, they had these little jokes but it wasn't like hey we're going to call ourselves you know the Rourke, you know, whatever the Rourke Club it was worth a collective like it's kind of this funny tongue and cheek or I think there was a famous softball game where it was like the Attila's versus the witch doctors. So, like, there's ways that you can cash in on, you know, the things inside of objectivism in a way that's fun or whatever but doesn't quite go that route so. I have horror stories from objectives trying to play baseball so but but for another time. Don, are you optimistic about the future of Western civilization, just just just a casual. Question. This is really hard I'm optimistic by nature and I was, I think, extremely optimistic for most of my career. I'm much less so now. Yeah, though I think that one of the things that you know we see one of the things that's great about the ingenuism project is there are still a lot of amazing things happening there's a lot of amazing people. And look, it's, it's, it's very dangerous to judge long term trends from the short term. And if somebody said in the 70s are you optimistic about the future. Every objectivist would and did say like, no, we're headed towards disaster. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, and then they got to reprieve and the fact that they got one doesn't guarantee that we get one. But we're at a particularly bad time, and it's just very hard for me to be optimistic and frankly, you know, it's one of the reasons why I like to focus less on political things and more on philosophical things so I'm not pulling away from the fight, but I'd rather engage it in ways that, frankly, depressed me less. And so I'd rather be talking about ethics and how you can use objectivism to make yourself more successful, and about technology and about the virtues of progress, then I would, you know, taking on more negative issues, though I'm glad that there's people who are taking those on like Iran and Alex and them because it needs to happen. But for me personally, I just don't have the stomach for it. Not as a full time thing. Yep. I enjoy the fight in that sense, but you know the certainly division of labor is important in a movement. And not everybody should be doing politics politics is not the most important thing by far it's not even for the short term. Success or failure of a culture politics is not the most important thing so there's a lot more important work needs to be done. Two quick ones. Let's see. I'm Michael asked what's not really a question. I'm seeing a ton of videos about Iran being produced by non objectivists. YouTube channels. This is very good sign, even though most of these videos are hostile towards it. Yeah, I think our attitude has always been that publicity is good and and the fact that people feel the need the power the fact that people are listening to the stuff means that a means they see as a threat which is a good thing and be other people listen to this say why do these people view as a threat. Right. The fact that Paul Krugman has to write something negative about Iran to be six months or so is a good sign. It means that that a lot of people are being exposed to her name and her ideas as at least pissing off Paul Krugman. And that's got to increase leadership. Well, let me just give one quick story in that regard. So the way I discovered Iran is I was reading a book books by this guy Robert ringer and he would quote her a lot but he basically had this section about how like yeah eventually I realize that her books don't actually apply to reality and and so on. And I remember having the reaction of okay I mean I admired this guy he you know his books had changed my life ringers, but whatever he thought about her she sounded damn interesting. So I wanted to learn more and then once I read her I said no ringer got it wrong ran got it right and that's my view my view is often these people whether they're smearing her attacking her you know sneering at her whatever whatever they're doing. They often can't help but make Irene sound interesting because she's interesting and curious intelligent people are interested in what's interesting. And the other thing to remember if because look, I'm not above getting depressed or angered see the you know the latest lie and smear about I ran from Krugman or anybody else. But the thing that I remember is that at the end of the day, a million of those smears don't matter at all in the face of one recommendation from a person someone admires. That is, if you actually look at how people discover Iran it's often yeah they heard all those stories they heard all those misconceptions, and then somebody they looked up to in some way said hey you should read out there you go okay. So that it's the easiest thing in the world to conquer, we just need more people who are admired by more and better people. Scott says that's how he got into her. Alec writes I learned about her from the john Oliver, john Oliver video. That's amazing. Colt asks I would like to be a writer in the future I have ideas and I want to explore them. I also want to write good characters do you have any good advice, any more advice. I mean, look at the end of the day there's only two major pieces of advice because there's only two major things that you have to do to become a writer, and that's read a lot and write a lot. And that's true for nonfiction that's true in fiction is just the more that you read and the more that you write and when I say right it includes, you want to get feedback but at the end of the day if you're putting words on paper and and ideally putting them out into the world in some form so that you get some form of feedback even if it's not from a professional editor it's from the market like our people paying attention to it, are they ignoring it. And that's really the key ingredient and the worst thing that you can do is like wait till you're ready, because you will never be ready if all you're doing is waiting. And so, I mean, like, look, I, I feel very lucky in that I got this amazing chance to start my career because when I was 23. I said hey do you want to come want to come right for us, but that only happened because I was the top writing student at the OAC at that time, and that only happened, because I literally spent all my time from the age of 13 or 14, until I was 2223 reading and writing about Objectivism and other things in over and over, not just if I free time, like, I would try to get my work done in half the time so I could spend the rest of work writing about philosophy. And it's like, it was those 10 years before I even got my start at AI that like made it possible for me to get to that position so it's read and write and you're golden. Yeah, I mean this this connects to some of the work we do with ingenuism, I mean you've got to explore you've got to try you've got to be out there you've got to be willing to fail you've got to, you know, just pursuing your goals and just trying and experimenting with stuff. And you're not going to you're not going to make it unless you do that. And I will say, I should underline this because we're taught to the way we're taught to read is so passive today. When you read, really try to identify, like, how does this work what do I like about it or if it's bad what why don't I like it why did this get popular why did that not get popular like really think about it become a student of it. One of the things that's so striking is, you know, Objectivists like to read stuff that are, you know, like the, the stuff that I ran praised, but if you look at her she read everything in her field when she was, you know, trying to learn how to become a novelist. She even, you know, read Tolstoy, she called it her most boring literary duty, but she could literally by literary duty she meant if I want to write novels and this is one of the most celebrated novelists in world literature, I got to read it I got to know how they do what they do and why I don't want to do that. And so it's not just reading in the way that you'd pick up something at the beach and you know race through it but really try to figure out what works and what doesn't. And like that should be fun, like not a homework assignment right but just understanding the, like what's making things tick, and what makes readers tick. To me that's like that's the never ending puzzle of writing and that's what really motivates me. All right, let's see. Cess as my past my youth pastor told me quote be careful reading Iron Man. That's all I needed. I was sold. Yep. All right, Michael. The long I sit and listen to my professors the more I realized I'm ran was the only thing in history you actually knew anything of substance and depth and action you had to put the concepts together. A little bit of an exaggeration there Michael bed. She was amazing. She was really amazing. All right, I'm putting a link to the book again. All right guys. Don, thank you. This was great. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for being on hopefully we sold some books and we'll sell more and don't forget guys to write reviews. That's the most important thing on Amazon right now no matter how many they are on their right more. So thank you all the super chat is this is good. I mean you guys are convincing me that maybe I should do more interviews. So this is the second interview I've done where we've reached out fundraising goals so that's that's terrific. So thank you guys thanks for all of you participate in the in the chat. Thanks everybody supports the show monthly on your own book show that comes last supports and again. Thanks Don, I'll see you. I think tomorrow. Yes. Yeah, we like have turns out that we have meetings almost every day so so it's almost like when we work today instead not quite but almost. Yeah, highly recommended all of you can get daily interviews or meetings with your on a lot of fun. No thanks for having me on your on this is a pleasure. This is a great conversation. Yeah, this was fun. Good. Thanks everybody have a good.