 Okay, welcome everybody, we're here for another episode of Objectivist Living on the Iran Brookshow and we got a real treat today. We've got Professor Tara Smith joining us to talk about happiness, a great topic for the new year. Just to give you a quick introduction, Tara is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas. She's actually the BB&T Chair for the study of Objectivism, the only chair in Objectivism anywhere in the world, so that is really terrific and exciting. She's got a very distinguished academic career. I'm not going to go over the whole list, but I will mention her four books, which I highly recommend. Her first book was on political philosophy, on moral rights and political freedom, and then on metaethics, viable values. Then a study of Ain-Ran's ethics, Ain-Ran's normative ethics, which was published by Cambridge University Press, and then the latest judicial review in an objective legal system, also by Cambridge University Press, so congratulations, Tara, on all those books. Thank you. And we're going to roll right into discussion of happiness, so what is happiness? It's a little bit complicated, but in some ways it's not too complicated at all. It is a two-part phenomenon, I think, and we often lose sight of that. That is, people tend to think of happiness as a feeling or a way you feel. Maybe it's a longer-term feeling than, oh, I feel good because my team won last night, or the sun is out, or that particular pleasure that I'm having now, oh, the ice cream is pleasing. It's not a feeling like that. It's a more all-encompassing, long-range kind of state of awareness, but I think Ain-Ran put it very well, and she said basically, happiness is the way you feel, the state of awareness that comes from your achieving values. And this is why I say it's two-part. It's not just awareness or a state of consciousness, though that's part of it, and that's the natural part that most people most readily speak of, is he happy? How is he feeling? But underneath that, how is he living? How is his life going? In particular, is he achieving? Is he making progress on the things that are most important to him? So the achievement of values really brings in the fact that being happy is doing something. It's an activity. It's a course of action. This is why even philosophers today who speak of happiness who really examine it, but also going back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle and Plato, they didn't use the word happiness so much as flourishing, which is something that you do or think about thriving. Now, you have to interrupt me, probably not too many people probably say this to your own. Feel free to interrupt me because I can get excited about happiness as long as I want. No, this is great. Go for it. So it's this sort of, I won't say to track, but happiness is feeling good about your life for good reason because your life is basically going well. But again, in particular, you are achieving your values. You are challenging yourself, pushing yourself, growing in a constructive direction, such that, oh yeah, yeah, this feels good. I'm generally in a good mode in terms of my attitude, my outlook on it. An emotional state or a state of awareness and an activity, something you actively engaged in. Yeah. It's not just a static or kind of passive condition, yeah, definitely. So you could be momentarily sad, but be happy. Definitely. And I think we all are. I think even the happiest people in the world, it is absolutely natural that, a couple of things, both that sometimes some bad things will happen. That will, you know, some seriously bad things will happen. That will naturally affect your emotions, right? And the more significant, the negative that occurs, the more natural and the more acutely you will feel badly, right? So happiness isn't a report on the ups and downs, you know. It's not your emotional temperature Monday over Tuesday because they won last night. Oh, but now it's really cold, so now miserable again. It's not that kind of up and down thing, but it's perfectly compatible with being happy, with even knowing my life is in good shape. You know, the last couple of weeks, things have been a little, I've gotten a couple of rejection letters from journals or something, or you had that setback on my taxes, right? I mean, ups and downs are certainly compatible with the basic trajectory. The basic direction and course is one of positive progress, yeah. And is it, do you think it's, it's easy to tell when somebody's happy or is it something you can only do about yourself? That's a really interesting question, I think. It's so, I don't know, a few thoughts. You know, it's hard to really know another person and what's going on for that person. In many of our lives, there are, though, one or two or three people that you get really close to, such that you come to know her really well, right? And, you know, so maybe it's your, your husband or wife or spouse or a really close friend, I'm sorry. Yeah, really close friend, yep. Really close friend, but sometimes it's a family member who you've been, you know, close with for better or worse for, you know, decades. There are a few people you can get to know really well, such that I think you can pretty much know or have a good indication, you know, you know, this person in enough depth through enough variety of experience, you get to see really how they're leading their life, such that you can make some pretty educated conjectures about whether or not they're happy. But at the same time, you know, it's hard to know ultimately how they feel. You can certainly make judgments about what you think they're doing with their lives and how they're spending it and you could, you know, how they're spending their lives. And sometimes I think it's quite natural and rational and appropriate to think, but some of what my friend, Jack is doing is getting in his way and setting himself up for the kinds of frustrations that he's experiencing and his feeling, but all of that said, I also want to say, you know, what's most important in thinking about happiness is thinking about one's own, right? And that's what this is for, because you've got to do it for yourself, ultimately, nobody else can make you happy. That's something I could say a lot on. But what's most important isn't, oh, let me assess the others out there. And are they, you know, are they doing well enough? Where would I score them in the scorekeeping ledger? It's what can I be doing differently? To the extent I feel some satisfaction, some dissatisfaction, let's say, that doesn't seem just sporadic or or only a reaction to things out of my control. If I look back on 2017, for instance, as I hope we're all doing this week. And, you know, as I think about, as I try to think honestly about the good, the bad, the what can I control or if not ultimate, you know, wholly control, what can I affect more, you know, affect, have more influence over. I'm looking for those things where I can, you know, make some difference to how things really go for me, as well as how I feel. Good. So before we get to how to, how to, to what extent is this view of happiness uniquely objectivist? And, and, you know, maybe we can contrast it a little bit with Aristotle or with some modern philosophers or even psychology. To what extent the psychologist recognized this as being what we mean by happiness? I haven't done enough systematic study of the subject to say definitively. I will say this. I've read a number of books on happiness, some written basically by philosophers, some by psychologists, a little bit of history, too, of the concept. And there are some really good ideas in a lot of those books. I mean, many of them have two or three really good ideas or really good spins on ways of putting important truths. I haven't seen anything remotely close to putting the whole package together or in a sense getting that it's not just a package, you know, it's not better time management and, you know, have a better sex life and be bolder with your boss to ask for a raise. It's not so much that kind of self-help piecemeal approach, which I think is a lot of what we get in the happiness studies these days as. Having, you know, and this is where objectivism is, I think, unique. It takes the right philosophy to be happy. You've got to be living on premises, on fundamental beliefs that are in tune, attuned to the way things are, to the realities that you face about yourself, your own abilities and weaknesses and strengths and limitations and intelligence and what have you, as well as premises that are realistic to the demands of human nature in general and the world around us. So, and I'll come back to Aristotle in a second, but I think objectivism, to my knowledge, uniquely says you have to have a reality-respecting philosophy. In particular, you have to have an ethic, a moral code, a set of virtues or principles or basic guidelines for how to lead your life that is geared toward your fulfillment, your feeling rewarded, your being productive and achieving and proud. So, the whole approach to happiness is just hand and glove with the whole approach to the purpose of living. So, let me say a little bit about Aristotle. And here again, I'm not an Aristotle expert. There are others you could get on who know their Aristotle more fully than I. Basically, a very right-minded approach, I think, to happiness. Ultimately, he says something like, and again, he uses eudaimonia, is the Greek, usually translated, flourishing these days. It's activity in accordance with virtue. So, he very much agreed with objectivism, obviously, before our time. He agreed with this idea that it's a manner of living, at least at its heart. At its center. He made some other important points. He was realistic about the fact that you can control everything. You can live as virtuously as is desirable. But some things out of your control can seriously mar your experience and the way you will feel. He was realistic about that. But, I mean, also, I think he wasn't a full-throated individualist. He saw the role of the community as somewhat larger and different, I think, than objectivism sees it, which is not-to-not community or social friendships and relationships. Okay, so he was, I think, very much on the right track, but I don't know any philosophy other than objectivism that puts it all together in the right way. And again, I do want to say there is some really interesting material out there these days on happiness. It's a good thing that it's been getting more attention, even called happiness. And psychologists in particular now have a lot of skepticism about a lot of their ways of having people self-report happiness and what they count as happiness. But in some of the works and some of the philosophy works that I've read, and some of them will talk about well-being. Again, they're not always using that same vocabulary, but you'll see some really important aspects of living a good life and a life that will be fulfilling. You'll see a lot of them talked about there. Good. So let's talk about the fact that objectivism is unique, well, I mean, with the exception maybe of Aristotle, in saying that the individual deserves to be happy. That it's, you know, because there's so much original sin in one variety of the other out there in the world. And when I think of the refreshing things about there being so many books about happiness and self-help is, it seems like people are maybe overcoming that and maybe seeking. Yeah. No, that is good. I think it's also to some extent a sign of how miserable people have gotten. I think to some extent really it's, God damn it, this is lousy, this, you know, not feeling fulfilled or feeling lost or distressed and so on. So, okay, if that guy, if that self-help guy, or that not just self-help, but if that deeper area of real systematic research in psychology is going to give me permission to be happy, at least in some corners of my life, yeah, I want to read that, I want to get that. That's a good thing. But again, I do think it comes from this general denial that you should be happy. And by the way, I don't want to make it sound like Aristotle is the only person in the history of philosophy to have ever said some positive things about happiness. I mean, even John Locke does say things like, it is your duty to be happy now. Again, that's got some problems, but at any rate. Well, it made the Declaration of Independence, so it was prevalent during the Enlightenment that idea of happiness was definitely. Yes, and the idea that your individual thriving is a worthwhile goal. And you know, we get such at best mixed signals on this. Just think quickly for a second. You go to somebody's college commencement, and what is everybody, all the graduates are told, now you can turn and give back. Now you can serve something larger than yourself. I mean, it's all about others, basically, service. That's the price. That's the rent we pay for living, as a few people have said. But you go to somebody's wedding, and you wish them all the happiness in the world. Well, now wait a second. Am I supposed to be happy? I thought I wasn't supposed to be happy. I've been trained my whole life. I've been educated into it's all about serving others. It's all about me. It's not about me. So no wonder people emerge when they're 18 or 22 or 35, and they don't know what they want. So you say, I mean, happiness, I said at the beginning, it has to do with achieving values. People don't know what they value. They know what they've been told to value. They know what the good people in quotes, what the supposedly good people value, and they go along. But they haven't really paid serious attention or devoted serious thought to, what's going to make me happy? What are the kind of values I enjoy achieving? What's the kind of work I enjoy doing? So I feel like I've drifted a little bit from the heart of your question here. But I do think that because we live in a basically collectivist, altruist culture, those are the dominant philosophies. We're steered away from thinking about happiness. And we cheat and we steal it here and there. So self-help books are self-help books. That's a good thing. And they've been around for a long time. That's not just a new phenomenon, but we cheat on the self-sacrifice because we have to. What I hope happiness studies can lead to, but apart from what else is going on, what objectivism says is, you have no reason to apologize for pursuing your rational happiness, your rational interest. Yeah, and so many people, I think the way you phrased it, they steal these moments of happiness, but those moments of happiness, exactly what doesn't add up to real happiness, which is this because that requires a whole different approach to life. No, I think that's true. A certain consistency about life. So even that makes them frustrated because they start feeling guilty and you see this in so many people because the altruism is so deeply entrenched. You've said, right. No, it is. I mean, we've just, it's as if we have a tin ear when people like objectivists talk in a positive way about egotism or, you know, self, like, we can't be understood. You know, we, what now I'm speaking, let's say I'm a non-objectivist, right? What is she talking about, Tara? Like, she seems a nice person and a normal person, but what could he possibly mean your own when he says things that are good about selfishness? We're so just enmeshed in this mindset that can conceive. But again, we conceive it when we wish a couple, all the happiness in the world, when a baby is born and you want that kid to flourish. But, oh no, but I can't flourish, right? Not really. Or I've got to feel guilty about that. So yeah, then these moments or just these little pockets where, well, you're allowed to ask for a raise, but not too much. Otherwise, you're a greedy SOV or something, right? Of course, that's going to chip away at your own sense of how you're leading your life. Really hard to be happy if you don't have self-esteem. Yes, sir. Really hard to be happy if you don't believe in what you're doing and believe in the rightness, that, you know, yeah, this is good what I'm doing. But if you think, oh no, selfishness is ultimately rotten, well, it's going to be really hard to be happy. And that's why I think we have so many people today who are at least recognizing this isn't working. But of course, they do tend to then, look for solutions. If it isn't medication, it's meditation, isn't it, right? Just reshuffle what you care about. Or it's focus on others. Or it's try to be more consistently altruistic somehow, and that'll, you know, but they can't, it seems like, well, they want to have their altruism and they'll try to massage everything in order to somehow keep it. And that's the one thing that I find most difficult to challenge people on, is to give up their altruism. Yeah. No, a good life is not a kind of checkerboard of moments spent at odds. That kind of conflict is just a recipe for frustration, for self-doubt, and for good reason. I mean, when you try to live on antithetical premises of egoism and of altruism, it can't be done. And you're undermining your own sense of your own judgment, the part of you that thinks, not just feels, but thinks. Yeah, I'm gonna die someday, right? The years are going 17, 18. I ought to try to have a good time here. And again, what people have to understand is, when I say have a good time, this is not about the expense of other people. This is not about exploitation or anything like that, right? It's about people being happy by spending enough time really thinking about the kind of work and activity and values that they want to embrace, such that pursuing those values in a deeply thoughtful and sustained and sustainable way will achieve values and give them that sense of reward. Yeah. And that's what differentiates us from the, not just from the, you know, not just from the exploiters, but also from the hedonists, right? So you're emphasizing the deep thought that goes into a long term pursuit of values. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one clear example that I think about a lot just because I, as a university professor, you know, you think about college age students thinking about their careers and what they want to do with their lives. That is such an important question. And while on the one hand, you see people really struggle with this, in some ways, I don't see them struggle all that deeply at all. You know, they, you know, they feel a little uncertainty about what major majors, they all declare two or three these days, to declare and that sort of thing. But ultimately it's, you know, well, the pressures from the parents, the pressures from society to do good. I'll make one comment too, is a little bit tangential, but I read some poll recently of, I think it was entering college students. And I was taken aback. I don't remember the figure, but by how many said what they really wanted was to make a lot of money. And part of why I was surprised was because, man, even if you think that you're not supposed to say that these days, and God knows they all know that, right? But I thought this is in a way, a sign of how people don't think about the substance of what's going to be fulfilling for me. What do I enjoy? Do I enjoy soft, you know, programming software? Do I enjoy solving this kind of engineering problem? Do I enjoy working with other people or these medical things, right? What's the actual substance of values I think we often just say, oh, yeah, well, money, because it's this kind of stand-in for real values, or at least that's the way it's often treated in our society. And oh, yeah, other people will know what you mean if you say you want to make a lot of money. So this way, I can avoid really thinking about, what the hell am I going to do with all that money? Like, what do I want to do? If somebody said I want more time, it would be natural to ask, oh, what do you want to do with this more time you're going to have in your retirement or whatever it might be, right? You want a lot of money. Oh, we just take that as, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense. Yeah, people want that. What do you want to do with your life? Oh, that's a hard, self-interested question to grapple with, but it's got to be grappled with for people to be happy. And again, they've got to accept that it's okay, again, to put it mildly. It's okay. It's good to pursue your happiness. So let's shift over to talk about how one achieves happiness. So you've already said quite a bit, but what advice does objectivism give to an individual who wants and believes he deserves to be happy? Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to start by saying, you do have to have this conviction that you deserve it, right? That I don't have to apologize for this. This doesn't have to be half-hearted or, well, but I'm given half my week to the soup kitchen or anything like that. I mean, A, you have to believe. You have to think and you have to believe. It's got to be sort of in your soul. Yeah, this is right for me to be happy, right? And if you want it, then you've got to think, as we were saying, you've got to think really hard about the most enjoyable activities for you. And you know, one of, well, one of the really central things that Ayn Rand sees as at the heart of a happy life is productive work, productive achievement. Now, I mean, the reasons for this, I won't get into here they have to do with the nature of men. We have to produce just to sustain ourselves in very bare physical terms, but also psychologically. It's in our nature that we have to be creating and growing in order to sustain ourselves physically and psychologically and emotionally. So this is why repeatedly, I think, come back to this notion of work, production, achievement, but again, it's achievement of values. You're creating values, right? They could be material values. They could be spiritual values. You could be creating art. You could be writing music, right? You could be making mousetraps. It could be the most physical and mundane, whatever combination. But you're making things that are good for human life. But you've got to figure out, what do I enjoy doing? That's going to pay the bills as well. And I think a lot of the happiest people in the world are the people who are the most productive. When you read sometimes, just earlier, I was reading from an essay by your co-author of your new book on finance, your own on wealth, a very good book, I might say. Thank you. Thank you. Now, I was reminded of Steve Jobs, things I've read before about him, but he so loved the doing. It was great that he was acquiring all this money along the way, but he didn't retire the first time he had a few million dollars. It's like, great! That can fuel me being even more exploratory, more adventurous, more ambitious. I get to do more of what I want to do. Just why I love Mondays. I'm a little resentful at Mondays, a holiday, and I'm actually going to make myself take this. It's like, damn it! It's so much fun, but you've got to find what is the fun thing that's a worthwhile thing that's objectively valuable. But you've got to give serious thought. You've got to pay honest attention to what you really enjoy. You've got to be open, for instance, to finding, I went down a long path there. I thought majoring in this, or I thought a career in that, and I've spent two or three years, but you've got to be honest with yourself. One thing I think the pursuit of happiness takes is a lot of ongoing introspection, honest reflection about what's working and what's not, both in terms of your core commitments as well as some of the more peripheral things in your life. But I would say, so one of... Again, I've stressed production, I hope, but purpose. You've got to have a main thing that your life is about, that it's for, that's going to structure what you do. And even if that does not provide as much money. I mean, that is the scary thing about people pursuing money for money's sake is that they're foregoing, well, what really... What do you enjoy doing? What do you love doing? Sometimes those things are not going to make as much money. Right. But I mean, we all know, I mean, it's cliche to say, a lot of people will... I mean, but it's true. Many people will turn down a career or a job, a specific job that might give them a good amount more money because they find it more rewarding to be the elementary school teacher or the thing in a not so well-paying job. Now, obviously there are people... There are pursuits that aren't even that well structured as an elementary school teacher. Try to make it as a playwright or what have you. So there are obviously periods in a life where it'll make sense to do some things primarily just for the money but, you know, and other things more for the love. But you've got to keep that alive, which is really difficult. You've got to keep time for doing it and you can't eternally postpone. I mean, there is that danger of constantly, okay, but I'm just going to make the money this year. Oh, well, just this year. Just the clock is ticking. Your experience is going by. You want to try to... And obviously people are in different circumstances financially and health-wise and so on. I don't want to minimize any of that. But you've got to be looking and heaven knows we have so much more control over this than anybody else at any time in history, right? So we've got to take responsibility, I think, for our lives. Realize that happiness isn't a matter of chance. You know, chance things out of your control can impact it, but the core of it, it's what you do. It's how you lead your life. And being honest about that, not so much to berate yourself if you think you've taken some missteps or fallen into some bad habits, but to get... Again, I have this new year's outlook in mind to get on the best track, the most fruitful track you can. And these questions, because they're deep about what's really going to be satisfying work to you, they're not the kinds of questions you can answer in a weekend. Okay, everybody have your answers by the first. Monday's coming. It's like, be thinking about this. And that's... I get that question a lot. I get the question of, how do I discover what I'm passionate about? How do I do it? And it's interesting that so many people are struggling with that. And they're looking for some external answer to come up. So any practical advice on how somebody could go about... Oh, wow. That's interesting. I mean, obviously it involves a lot of introspection and maybe even a little bit of trial and error. I was going to say, because I think some people, there really are two or three or four really viable contenders. So you may need to try them out a little bit, but you've got to try them in a thoughtful way. What I mean there is, be paying attention to the specifics of, here's what I like about this. Here's what I don't like about this. All right. I mean, I know these days, for instance, a lot of young people, internships are just more in than ever. Well, okay, take advantage of some of those so that you can shadow the doctor or shadow the engineer or shadow the principal of the school. So you're actually walking through a little of what this other person does, but you've got to be thoughtfully paying attention to what you like and what you think about it and try to avoid that trap of, well, this is so respectable. The parents are so impressed. I mean, it's not to unconsciously think that, but you've got to screen out the unconscious there. I don't know in terms of practical advice, but again, I do want to bring it back at some level to the more abstract. You've got to think about the basic principles you're trying to uphold in your life. So this is where I think Inran's virtues, the virtues I talk about in one of the books that you mentioned, Inran's Normative Ethics. She talks about rationality. She talks about pride. She talks about independence and a handful of integrity. Did I say justice? I mean, there are real keys that help you even assess not just job prospects, but career prospects. Would it really be worthwhile to be successful in this field, in this kind of work? Or is this actually something that's not terribly objectively valuable for you and me? So it does take a fair amount of thought. You talked about money and I know you wrote an essay on can money buy happiness. So link those two because on the one hand, you're saying, well, you can't just focus on money. On the other hand, well, money is kind of important. Oh, no, no, good question. And yes, I did write an essay called Money Can Buy Happiness, which I meant a little tongue in cheek, but only a little. So yeah, I'm, yeah, I welcome the chance to clarify a little bit on this, because again, a few minutes ago, I was saying, oh, these students who report they just want money, money as an end in itself is stupid. It's useless. It's like, what's that money as an end in itself? If you want to talk about making money, the process of making money, earning money, the only way to do that in an honest economy in an honest society is by producing things that are valuable to people, producing things that are valuable, right? That's how you make money. And what we've been talking about, having a productive career, productive work, creative work, that kind of purpose and commitment and drive and loving that, that's going to make you money. If you're any good at it, which is another question, right? Some are more skilled than others. They're better, hard. They might be equally hard-working and purposeful and virtuous, right? But if you're any good at it, that's how you make money. And the making is fun. And this even goes back to what we were saying about the very nature of happiness at the beginning of the conversation, right? It's doing things. It's doing things in a certain way and feeling good about it. You feel good when you've made something valuable. Well, I've given a good lecture, just taught a good class. Oh, good. Oh, I handled that question well. Good. And believe me, many of the time, oh, damn, I didn't give a good answer to that question. I wasn't clear enough to that. No. But you're going to feel the reaction, right? But again, the larger thought here is the way you do your work, if you do your work well in an objectively valuable way, that will be rewarded. You will get money, and that's a wonderful thing. Money for its own sake, and I think again, using money just as a tag, because other people will understand the language of money, can often be an evasion for thinking about what do you really value, what do you want to be doing. But let me say something else. Wonderful on money's behalf. Money, the more money you have, the more options you have, the more freedom you have to choose how you want to spend the weekend or the week, whether you want to make dinner tonight or just order in or whatever it might be. Go out for a nice dinner, right? I mean, there's a range. I mean, from the most simple to the most glamorous and luxurious, the more money you have piled up, the more you are liberated from the need to, okay, put tonight's dinner on the table, right? Or pay the bills next week or next, right? The more money you have gives you more options to tailor your experience all the more to your enjoyment, right? But again, it also will fuel your taking more chances, perhaps in your work or doing more adventurous or ambitious things. So money is so maligned and so unfairly maligned and those attitudes that most people have toward money are antithetical to the idea you should pursue your happiness because we're material beings, among other things, right? Among other things, we're not only material beings, but we sure as hell are material beings, right? I see your face across the sky, right? I mean, we're material beings with material needs, with material wants, fulfilling them. Material pleasures, I mean, absolutely. Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, it reminds me, you know, people always say, you know, how much money's enough, these billionaires, and then you get somebody like Jeff Bezos, who takes his billions of dollars and invests them in a spacecraft to go to Mars, right? I mean, wow. I mean, that's, well, how much fun is that? It's so great, right, yeah. Yeah, and if he had- You know, like, dream big. Yeah. That's what, oh, yeah. If he had more tens of billions, he could do more big dreaming. I mean, there's no limit to how much we potentially want and can do and can value. And part of what's interesting, even in a case like that is, there are limits to how much wine he can drink in a day, right? Or how luxurious he can make his own life. And I wish him a very comfortable, and I mean, you know, I wish him all the comfort in the world, right? But what's going to drive that ambition to make more, isn't more money in the bank, it's, I can fuel these ambitious dreams. Yep. God bless these people because we all benefit from these people. Absolutely. I mean, I love the thought that somebody I know, you know, it's like making more money. That's great. That, you know, if I know that's an honest person, that's a hardworking person, deserving person and all, I bless people's riches in the same way that you want their happiness, you want their flourishing, and that's part of it. Like, it gives them more freedom in so many ways. So one question that often comes up is, is kind of the relative importance for happiness of a career, I wouldn't say for a romantic relationship or, you know, kind of the social context we have with other people. Well, I think your own work has to be central. That has to be the primary, who you are, what you are. That's what you bring to any relationship, right? Friendships of different levels and depths, a romantic relationship, these are tremendously valuable. And I think they're also really important to the best kind of life that you can have, the ideally happy life you will have. You know, a person who gets you, who understands you, who shares your values at the most important levels and most fundamental levels. But that means you've got to have those values to share, right? There's got to be somebody home, so to speak. There's got to be somebody there on the part of the two people, you know, the husband and wife, the two good friends. They've each got to have lives that are about something. They've got to have values that are not just in lip service. You know, they pay lip service to these values. No, in real commitment, in the way they're leading their lives. And it's having those values and having a productive career that will lead them to be happy, such that then they can, I mean, that's part of what they bring to a relationship. Ah, this person doesn't necessarily have the same career that I do. They might not enjoy the, you know, the software design that I do or whatever it might be. But this person cares about happiness. This person cares about rationality. This person cares about integrity. This person cares about limited government, right? I mean, there's some more fundamental values. They care about romantic art. But again, the point is, there's got to be content or substance for a relationship to be a genuinely valuable, mutually beneficial relationship, such that the two people can grow and the relationship can grow because they've got those core commitments. I should say, I think that's an area within this whole subject of happiness and well-being that I haven't explored as much as I would like, you know, one had all the time in the world. If I had millions, I guess, if I were Jeff Bezos, I'd have more time to devote to some of these questions. But that's one. I think, you know, there are the psychological rewards that we get from the people we can be closest to. And we get important rewards from other people. I don't want to diss everybody other than, you know, your best friend and your husband or wife or something like that. I mean, we get all sorts of really positive, positives from a lot of different friends that we have. Yeah, and there's not a lot of an objectivism about that. There's not a lot of... No, it's true. There really isn't. And it would be helpful, I think, if we developed more on that. And I also want to come back. I mean, again, something we talked about a little bit earlier, but self-esteem is so important to being happy, to having a good relationship with other people. I mean, the more, I think, self-esteem you have, the more you can sniff the people who have serious deficiencies of self-esteem and it will set them up for failures of different sorts, including in relationships. You know, if you're not sort of comfortable in your own skin for good reason, because you're leading your life in a basically good way. And again, part of what that takes is I'm doing productive work, right? I'm committed to something and I'm going after it full throttle. So the psychological aspects of the relationship are going to in part be a function of your psychological relationship with yourself, your self-esteem and living productively, but living rationally and virtuously in general. Again, there's even Aristotle had, though he had it said, but he had a slightly different set of virtues. These all sort of, I think, mesh together. Yeah, so I was actually going to ask you as the relationship between self-esteem and happiness. I mean, it strikes me you cannot be happy unless you have self-esteem. Yeah. And yet, to attain self-esteem in many respects, you have to do the same things that you're going to do to be happy. Yeah. No, I think it's a, I don't know, virtuous cycle maybe or just reinforcing the more you do the kinds of things that will make you happy, the more you lead your life virtuously. And at its center, you have productive work relationships with, if you can find them, some really good people who share the same values, right? Those are going to be part of its core, but you're also living virtuously, making your decisions, in a rational, honest, just, et cetera, manner. That's going to build up your self-esteem, your sense that you're fit for this world. Ayn Rand talks about that concept of sense of life. Your sense of life, your sense of yourself is an important part of that. Your sense of this world, yeah, that's a pretty good place to be. I'm looking forward to this 2018. I'm looking forward to tonight. You know, I mean, this is good. This is fun. That is all reinforced. That is all fed by making good choices, setting yourself up for success. Right? You can't control everything that happens by any means. And again, sometimes we suffer serious setbacks through no fault of our own. But you can set yourself up to be happy, to succeed. And to the extent that you know you're doing that, well, you know, I did what I could. I've been doing what I am doing what I can. Then even when you have the setbacks, your self-esteem is not injured. Your basic sense of the world is not injured. And you can go on and, and I think this is part of why so many people will recover from, you know, devastating losses in their lives. You know, of a loved one, of a limb. I mean, it's a pretty serious, serious thing. What do you think that the, and I don't know that there is a clear separating line of how much guidance we can get in terms of achieving happiness from philosophy versus psychology. From the, you know, the self-help books. Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. I think we can get a lot from both. I think the foundations have to be in the philosophy. And, and I do think, I think ultimately why so many attempts at self-help fail, or, you know, they seem to work for a while, for a given person. They might try this new technique, or this new therapy, or this new meditation technique, or these new, all right. While a lot of them will work for a while, but not ultimately is, because they're trying to reconcile their pursuit of their own happiness with their being a good, altruist girl. You know, their being a good Christian soldier, or whatever the guys, be it religious, or secular, or, you know, Peter Singer, give it all up to, you know, the needier kids in Africa or whatever. So this is where I think philosophy is fundamental. Psychology is a tremendous help. And so anyway, I mean, your premises, you can't be happy on wrong premises. Again, happiness isn't your mood tonight for this week. It's how your life is going, your sense of how your life is going. You've got to be living on premises that are basically attuned to reality, rational, self-interested virtues, okay. But in addition, we are complicated psychological beings. Again, I'm not a psychologist, right. And I do want to acknowledge that a person's just internal chemistry can make a difference to how they feel. So even while basically, I think, the way you're leading your life will give you good, you know, if you're leading your life well, you'll be inclined to have positive feelings about your life, we are, it seems, chemically complex, you know, neurochemically complex, and we do vary, and I do think there are people with just inherent physical, I don't know, deficiencies, or just abnormalities that can get in the way of their feet, you know, their being, their having as positive an outlook as others. So I want to acknowledge that. What I, you know, I mentioned earlier that from some of my reading of both some philosophy and some psychology, you do find some, I think, very right-minded ideas. And I think it's great to try to borrow and take what you can. Again, even if it's just a good way, a good new angle on something, but you've got to try to put the pieces from psychology together with philosophical, you know, fundamentals. Shortcuts won't do it, you know. And again, these days, you know, I've mentioned meditation a couple of times, and I have nothing against meditation, but so much of, I think so much of the instruction of meditation is, don't care so much about this, or just put things in perspective. But if you're putting the wrong things in a different perspective, if you're just shuffling a deck of false premises, that's not the solution, nor is stoicism, which is very in, you know, so don't care so much. Detach, or down, or let go. No. Happiness is the opposite. It's about caring. It's about caring. It's about committing and acting like it and thinking like it, such that, you know, I care and damn it. This hurt. This was a setback. This was a failure. This was a screw up on my part. What am I going to do differently? But it's going in full throttle, but thoughtfully full throttle, right? Don't care about, I mean, the things you can't control, yeah, you got to let them go, right? But there's so much that we can control, and this is again why I say, taking responsibility for your happiness for everything that you can do to try to construct it is really important. And I think a really positive message that I hope people will think about and take on. The part of the challenge with it, with the taking responsibility message these days is there seems to be this skepticism about free will, attack on free will, where all these, you know, what is the evolutionary psychology, we just, you know, you, and there's even a, there's any studies that say you either got the happiness gene or you don't have the happiness gene. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just horrific. Yeah. And I think that's ridiculous. And such, again, an evasion. Oh, it's all in our genes. You wish, I want to say, to some people or some miserable people. It's like, it's not all in there. Again, we have different genes. We have different internal dispositions. We've got choices every waking hour of the day. We've got choices. And we know that. And we see a thousand instances just in our own personal lives of the people who have the same upbringing, the same parents, and the same time of life with those parents all make radically different choices and set themselves up for very different outcomes and just on a million different levels. But no, I think that's a really interesting observation that again, so many people absorb this idea and we've been teaching it for a while in its different forms, the denial of free will, you know, be it in the genes or in the advertising or it's something else that's responsible for what we think and what we want. Like hell, right? I mean, that's an evasion. That's a recipe for unhappiness, right? That's resignation. That's self-permission for not trying, right? I get too angry about that once even. No, but that's a good, I've got to think about that more because that really is a pernicious increasing part of this. And it's in the culture everywhere. Everywhere I go, I mean, I get pushed back on free will. It's really from Sam Harris on the one hand, right, to the whole gamut of the whole spectrum. The assumptions, right. Now, so many of the assumptions that are in even on campuses these days in some of the identity politics going, well, no, no, you think that because you're in Israeli, right? I ran, well, she was a, you know, she was a Russian Jew. Yeah, she didn't have any option, but she and all the other Russian Jews who wrote about John Gall, right? I mean, it's so absurd. And I think people with a little bit of honest thought but just a little bit of honest thought could see through it and see through, well, how am I making this argument? If I want to try to convince somebody else of this argument, but if they don't have free will, what is it that I'm even hoping to accomplish by talking about it? Yeah. So to what extent do you think one has to hold explicitly the virtues or the ideas of objectivism or the ideas of the objectivist ethics in order to be able to be happy? In other words, can you be a non-objectivist and be happy? Yes, but I would say, yeah, I don't think the only people who've ever been happy in the history of the world were objectivists. And man, Tilline Rand was born, nobody was happy. I don't know, I just think that's out to lunch. But the reason I say there's a but, you have to be leading your life in a way that is basically in tune with the facts of reality. And not everybody is explicit. Not everybody is consistent in the way they live. So I mean, I even think there are people who have adhered to some extent to religious beliefs. But when push came to shove, really the most important things in life, they were doing what they wanted to do, and I don't just mean in that hedonistic way of what they wanted to do, they were doing what was rationally good for them because it was good for them. So it's not that I think one explicitly has to endorse all of the principles of objectivism. But you've got to be living basically. And again, most people are inconsistent, will live on a certain premise much of the time, but not absolutely all of the time. But to the extent that you're living on fundamentally right-minded premises, you can lead a good life. However, I mean, what is so much more liberating and empowering is, get the right philosophy, embrace the right philosophy, don't apologize in any way consciously, subconsciously for wanting your happiness, the best life you can have. Wishing that for everybody else as well. I wish us all the best, but I wish us all doing the deeds that'll get us the best life that we can have. But I think it would be a mistake, a kind of rationalistic mistake, to assume only objectivists can be happy. Yeah, no, it strikes me as to the extent that you live a rational, reality-oriented life to that extent you can be happy. Yeah, and to the extent that the values that you're pursuing are genuine, objective value, that they are worthwhile things. And of course the flip side of that is that being an objectivist doesn't guarantee you happiness. Correct, right. It's really important. It's a tremendous aid, but you can't control everything that happens. And again, even being a good objectivist, you know, a really virtuous person and all, they're important things that you can control, not just about a tragedy can strike, you or a loved one or something. I mean, your values will not, your most deep set and core values will not always be going well. And that's not going to feel good, right? When I see what's going on politically in the country, that's not exactly cheering. That's not exactly happiness conducive right now, right? But you can do what you can do, right, as you have for many years at the helm of the Ironman Institute, for instance, your own, and as a lot of people, you fight for what you care about and what you value. They're going to be setbacks and, right? But you think, again, in a big picture, long-term, conceptual, deep, systematic way about how to build the best kind of life of the best values that you can have, and you go after that. And to the extent that you do, there is a sort of a brick of happiness, I think, that nothing can take away from you. I mean, so, no, we can't completely control it. Bad things happen to good people. For all sorts of reasons. Our values do not always prosper. We're not always brilliant, along with our virtue. But we have so much control. Taking responsibility for that can do us, yeah, so much good. Good. So, one final question. You hinted at this a number of times. It is New Year. How do you celebrate, or what do you take as New Year? You mentioned, you're contemplating, you're thinking. I mean, what advice would you give people? This is a great opportunity to do what? Well, I'll sound like an academic man to think. No, I do take sort of a New Year's period every year. I also, conveniently, I have a January birthday, so it can sort of extend a little bit. But I always, you know, when Christmas is coming, I start thinking, well, you've got to be doing your serious thinking. So, I really try, and you know, it's off and on, but several days for a few weeks, I really try to think about how to make my life better. And that's coming from a position of thinking, I think I have a great life. And I, basically, my life is going well. And I think that's a function of good fortune and good choices on my part. But it's not, my point is, it's not coming from feeling dissatisfaction or deep dissatisfaction, all right? But it's, I want to constantly be tuning and be looking for where I might need more than fine tuning. You know, bigger tuning or, you know, really step back, take the big picture. No, I think it's a great opportunity to do some really serious and deep probing, thinking about are things that you thought would make you happy? Are they working in the way that you expected? So that's the main thing I really, that I do to celebrate the New Year. Well, that's wonderful advice. Thank you. So much for having me. Wish you a fantastic 2018. Likewise, a very happy, productive one, a very happy one. Good, good. Thank you, Tara. All right. Thanks a lot, your own. Bye. Okay. Bye.