 Excuse that. Fixed it. Yep. There we go. No radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show, and this, what is it? Oh, it's Thursday. It's that day that I do three shows, three whole shows. I don't know that Don knows this, but I did a show earlier this morning in Hebrew. Yeah, popped up into my podcast feed, a bunch of writing I couldn't read. Yes, and writing, but you should have heard the talk. People were thinking I was talking from right to left. Anyway, it was actually a lot of fun, and my Hebrew was actually better than I expected. It was better than my wife expected, so that's always good to exceed your wife's expectations, and it was a lot of fun. All right, I'm really excited about having Don here and having the opportunity to talk about his new book. So we will be discussing effective egoism. We talked about effective altruism two days ago. We talked about selfishness, but today we're really going to dive in on egoism. Why is this not working? I'm going to try something here. Give me a second. Yeah, I'm modeling the technological complexity of, all right, that's working. All right. So I'm here with Don. Let me remind everybody to ask questions in Super Chat. There was kind of a competition going on, although it's going to be hard to catch Harry. I don't know what it is about you guys and Harry, but Harry is way ahead of everybody in terms of the Super Chat numbers. Those are numbers that are going to be hard to beat. Alex did pretty well. Don did well last time he was here, so we'll see. So I remind you, you can ask questions on the Super Chat. You can pretty much ask questions about anything. Don is kind of a generalist. He can handle pretty much anything, so feel free to ask anything that comes to mind. I also want to remind you this show is sponsored by the Inran Institute and what I'm supposed to remind you this week is that you can apply. If you're a red Inran, a red sun for nonfiction, interested in the ideas, interested in studying more, and you'd like to apply for the Inran conference in Austin, Texas at the end of March, you should do that. You should do that now. Applications are being submitted now. Don, does it include a scholarship? That I don't know. That's a good question. So we need to find out. I think it includes this. For Europe, it includes a scholarship. I assume here some people get scholarships, but apply. Austin is a great city as you all know, and you'll have Greg Salmiere and Ben Baer, and I'm not sure who else, but at least those two I know will be the teachers, and there'll be in-depth courses on Objectivism. It'll be kind of a prep for the more intense Inran University. And particularly if you're interested in intellectual career, this would be great for you. It's a phenomenal opportunity to spend a weekend with some amazing people and study these ideas. So you can do that, inran.org slash start here. All the information is there. You can click to the page and fill in the application. All right. So Don, you've written another book without me. That I did. So you just get to be lazy and cash in on it with show content. So it works out nicely for you. This is terrible. No, no. But I lose all the, what is it, the lobster credit that Jordan Peterson would give for a happy written book. Anyway, Don has written a new nonfiction book. I think we've discussed this fiction book in the past, but he's written a nonfiction book, Effective Egoism. So when we started just telling us why we need another book on Egoism, and then we can talk a little bit about the title. Well, we don't have that many to begin with, right? No, we don't. No. But I mean, so we wrote a lot of books on different elements of politics together. But my interest in philosophy was always primarily ethics and some epistemology too. But more broadly, I was just interested in philosophy as a guide to my life. And so it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something about that. And a couple things kind of clicked into place over the years. One of them was just the kind of general conviction that that kind of style that we came up with writing our books, where it's really accessible, popular, but deep, you know, not shallow, not superficial, but really targeted towards the context of, you know, contemporary audience. I thought something like that should exist. And then I did a series of videos in 2020 on where I was commenting on Leonard Peekoff's book, Objectives in the Philosophy, Vine Rand, section by section. So I think there were like 52, 54 videos on that. And I came away just feeling like an enormous amount of clarity about the philosophy that I hadn't had before. And so that kind of put me like ready to write. And then there was this general sense I had about the perspective that you get on ethics reading the novels of Ayn Rand. There's something reverential and deep and noble about self-interest. And that doesn't often come through when Objectivists write about it in a nonfiction way. And so I wanted to have a nonfiction book that you could hand somebody who hadn't read Ayn Rand, hadn't heard of her, might not be interested in her, but that would capture not only the case for egoism in a compelling way, but in a way that made real on some level that happiness is something with rich meaning and spiritual depth to it, that it's about the sacredness of life. And I hadn't seen anything that did that. And one final aspect that went into this was I don't think there's any good nonfiction introductions to Ayn Rand. I mean, apart from her own works, but her own works generally presuppose you've read Atlas Shrugged, you're familiar with the novels. And even the essays that don't exactly presuppose that, I mean, you know, like, they're incredible, but they're very sophisticated. There's a lot of depth to them. And they're not, it's not the whole picture. It's taking a little slice of her kind of outlook. So I saw just a lot of opportunity for a book that would reach out somebody who's intellectual, deeply interested, who's interested in ideas, but also once they're practical cash value, and to make the case for egoism to that kind of person. And to make the case at a philosophic level, but also a tactical implementation level. So my book is not just philosophy. It's written not in order to codify this is what objectivism is to say, this is what Don has to say, where all the philosophy comes from objectivism, but there's more than philosophy. And just to give one example, so that people get a sense of what I'm talking about, philosophy tells you build your life around a productive career, center your life around creating material values. But there's a lot to say about how do you decide what career will be fulfilling? How do you achieve such a career? And philosophy can't tell you that, but I certainly try to tell you that. And so it's philosophy and things I've learned about how to implement that philosophy and practice that go beyond philosophy proper. And so where did the title come from? Effective Egoism. That was funny. Play on effective altruism, but... Well, what happened was the original title, my working title, I've had this working title for years before I ever had a book for it called Self Made Manifesto, which I still think is a great title. I hope nobody steals it, but if they do, they do. I've already mentioned it publicly. So that was my working title. And I went to Greg Salmiere organized a conference among several philosophers to give me feedback on a draft of the book. And Greg had mentioned he didn't like the title. And I was defiant. No, this is a great title. It's so clever. But Ben Bayer came marching down the stairs of his house early on in the process. And he had in his hand Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. And I hope Ben won't get mad at me saying this, but then Andy Bernstein's Capitalist Manifesto. And he holds up Karl Marx. He goes, this is a manifesto. It's a brief call to action. Yours is much closer to this non-manifesto. And once the point was made that it's a misleading title. That's not what you're doing. I said, okay, fine. But then I had a real nightmare, which is what the heck do I call this thing? And it just so happened that later that night, we were just sitting around chatting and I was, we were riffing on effective altruism just as a phenomenon in the culture. And I said, somebody needs to write a book effective egoism. And Greg and I kind of looked at each other. And then I forget which of us said it. One of us said, you did write a book on effective egoism. So that's the story of the title. So I did want to give a plug. I did a show a couple of days ago on effective altruism. And you had written a blog post. So Don has a substack, which I highly recommend. And you guys should definitely subscribe to it. And you had done a substack on effective altruism a week ago recently. And you riff off of kind of the same article that I had, Astral Codex 10's kidney donation, which I have to say the first time I read it was blown away by it because I really respect that guy. And I respect him a lot less. I have to admit after reading that. So tell us a little bit about that article. Yeah. So I write it earthlyidealism.com. And I really like Scott as well. I definitely admire him as a writer. I think he's a brilliant writer. He's a really interesting thinker. He's right about a lot of things. And I thought your analysis was good. But that one, a few things jumped out at me. Number one is just any defensive effective altruism. And of course, my alarm bells go off. And I want to say something about it. But he talked about his decision to donate his kidney. And so I talked to my girlfriend, Sam, and she had done the same thing in her altruist days. And I said, are you okay with me writing about this? And she said, I'll write something for it. And so I was able to write kind of my analysis of it at a philosophic level, but she was able to share not just her analysis looking back, but something that is really, you won't find anywhere else, which is she had journals at the time of how she was thinking about it, what her motives were and everything. And so you get somebody who was really, for idealistic reasons, engaging in this action, you get to see how they're thinking about it in a real honest way. And then you get to hear their analysis of it after they've become a committed egoist. The pieces, I think my part is pretty interesting, but what she adds to it is really mind blowing. So I really hope people will check it out. But I think one of the most interesting points that she makes, which really helped, all of us get the question of aren't people altruistic? Aren't they really doing what they want to do? So isn't it selfish? Isn't it self-interested? Isn't that their motive? And part of what she, the way that she put it was that what she experienced was she was ambitious, right? Like she wanted to do the most good that she can as a person. And yet when you're morally ambitious and altruistic, there's a really quick limit that you run up against. Like you give away your kidney, what's next? And you even talked about this on your show, right? You're on about like, well, now you have to start looking, what organs could I get away with? But you're depleting yourself. And so you run up into the wall of, unless you're just going to go full throttle and kill yourself, that ambition for values is ultimately leading you more and more quickly to ruin. And that what you really want and what altruism destroys is the kind of ambition for the growth and achievement and creation of values. And that, you know, if you ask somebody, like, aren't they doing what they really want to do? That is so superficial versus the kind of perspective that you get reading Sam's analysis, that I think the piece because of that, I'm really proud of it. And I think people get a lot from it. So what's the name of the sub-stack again? earthlyidealism.com. And it's a focus on on ethics, but it's really aimed at a secular audience who's interested and feels vulnerable on issues of morality. And it's making the case that there is an objective morality. It's not Christianity secularized. It's something radically different. It's effective egoism. So if you're effective altruists, you could just go start a crypto company, commit massive fraud and donate hundreds of millions of dollars. And even if you land up in jail, you studied a lot of good in the world, right? Yeah, well, so Scott had had a follow up piece defending effective altruism. You also talked about this one, right? Like look at all the lives that we've saved. I have a piece that's coming out, so I'm not going to steal all of my thunder for it. But part of what you have to think about is what life? Imagine Stalin instead of butchering millions of his own people had just enslaved them. And they live the kind of life that you see in we the living where you don't get to pick your career and you don't get to live where you want to live and you have to follow everybody's orders. Like you have a bunch of more people alive, but they're all miserable. And effective altruism is look at all the lives we saved, but what are we saving them for so that they can all take jobs that they don't want to earn money for other people so that they can give up their body parts so that they can be servants. It's servants all the way down. And so there's more to say about whether or not they even can take credit for saving lives. When you think about what impact does altruism have on freedom, which is the number one technology we have for enhancing and improving and saving. Freedom capitalism has given us billions more lives and saved billions of lives. 200,000 is a drop in the bucket. And their ideas, I think, though they're not crusaders against capitalism by and large, their ideas are certainly running contrary and undermining capitalism. But at the very minimum, the lives that they save in so far as their altruists, who cares? That's not a life. I mean, it's similar to Mother Teresa who saved lives, but actively prevented them from actually pursuing any kind of achievement because the virtue was to be poor. The virtue was to suffer. She was, in that sense, woke before there was woke. The more of a victim you are, the more virtuous you are. So give us kind of a summary of the book, and then I've got the outline in front of me. I haven't read it yet because I'm waiting for the Kindle version, but it actually allows me to look at the table of contents so we can talk about the outline. Yeah, I was hoping it should have been out already, but there's been a little bit of a holdup. But by next week, the Kindle will be available. So I might email you and say, remind your audience. Definitely remind me, but I'll probably be buying it next week, so don't remind me. Yeah. No, so the basic argument comes in seven lessons. And really, the foundational lesson is that we have free will. And free will gives us this incredible power to shape our own soul and our own life. But in order to use that power in a way that actually leads to a life worth living, a life rich in happiness, we need moral guidance. So the first lesson is that your life matters and the way I start. So I'm going to spoil the first sentence for everybody, but it's all about you, which for those of you who remember the Purpose Driven Life, which was a mega blockbuster back, what, 15 years ago or so by the Christian Rick Warren. The first sentence is not about you. And this book, no, this is about you. It's about making the most of your own life. The second lesson is take charge. And that is really, what are you as a human being? You are a being who has free will and that free will consists of the ability to function by reason, to live by reason. And that gives you fundamental control over your own mind, over your emotions and over your life. The third lesson is pursue happiness, that the way you should exercise that control is by directing your life towards enjoying it at the deepest way possible. And yet in order to do that, what you need to successfully do it is a moral code, a moral code that's aimed at happiness. The next lesson is, what exactly do I put in? Follow reason. Follow reason. Yeah, I don't always remember all the formulations. And that is that the fundamental way that you pursue happiness, the fundamental advice that morality has to give is to follow reason. And so that chapter is both about the necessity of living by reason, operating by reason, both in the realm of knowledge and in the realm of values. And then it's a lot of guidance on how do you think? How do you become a more impactful, effective thinker? Next is create values. And create values means setting your life around the production of material values and pursue a career that you love and that fills you with deep satisfaction and joy. The next lesson is honor the self, which is that if you're going to pursue happiness, that means placing your interests as your top priority. And that's where we really talk about this idea of effective egoism. And the final lesson is seek pleasure. And that is that in order to actually experience in the moment that life is an end in itself and that life is worth living, you have to go after pleasure. Now, it's not anything that is pleasurable as good, but rational values to actually be enjoyed here and now. It's by finding values that fill the moments of your life with deep pleasure. And so, you know, I've already talked about career, but most of the chapter is about, I think, the two most profound sources of pleasure aside from career. And that is art and relationships. And more specifically, I mean, I talk about friendship, but romantic love, children. And then I end like any good book on ethics should with sex. Absolutely. Good. So you spent quite a bit of time early on on the question of free will. So why do you view that as so important? It seems foundational here. And why do you think it's such a challenge out there that we need to spend so much time on free will? Well, I think every ethics in order to understand it and find it plausible is based on a certain conception of human nature. And if you do not hold the objective as conception of human nature, if you don't believe that we have free will, and if you don't believe that reason is capable of understanding reality. And if you don't believe that emotions are the product of ideas, if you don't have that kind of perspective on human nature, then all of the rest falls apart. It's not plausible at all. You've heard every objection to self-interest under the sun, and I think all of them in the end are challenging some part of the conception of human nature that objectivism holds. And I think the one that is, let's call it the least popular today, or that even the best people are skeptical of and don't see the importance of is free will. I mean, how many of our favorite thinkers outside of the objectivist orbit are determinists? Somebody like Sam Harris, whom I like, I respect, I learn a lot from. I mean, he's a crusading determinist, and he's, by far, not the only one. Indeed, my general assumption is that if somebody's not religious and they're at all intellectual, my assumption is they're a determinist. And if they're not, it's a real pleasant surprise. So it was something that you had to tackle head on, because you can't even get the project of ethics off the ground if the view is, yeah, well, you have no control over the choices that you make. How does Sam rationalize it? Because he obviously thinks there is such a thing as ethics. He has a whole book on it. He even believes we have choices, but we don't have, but we're determined. I mean, in the end, it's an outright contradiction. Now they go through all sorts of hoops and things to get away with it, but it's the basic point that they try to make is they try to say, look, in the end, yes, we're determined by forces outside of our control, but there's still a difference from the behaviors and actions that come from us and that we identify with versus the ones that, let's say, we're coerced to take, or that we take through kind of, I'm falling down the stairs and I knock over my cat. That's very different from something that I feel like is emanating from my own agency, even if in the final analysis, the things that I feel like I'm doing with my own agency were determined by the nature of the Big Bang billions of years ago. But in the end, if you really accept that, there is no distinction. There's no guidance you can offer. There's no way you can say you should do this when you couldn't have done otherwise. So they try to square the circle, but a circle can't be squared. Yeah, I mean, I find Pinker is the same way. I mean, he's got a whole book basically saying there's no free will, but then he implies this free will in so much of what he writes and so much of what he says. And I saw him the other day. I can't remember what context, basically defending free will. I saw that on Twitter, yeah. What was the context? It was about, yeah, yeah, I can't remember. Somebody was making a deterministic claim and he was like, no, it was bizarre given what we know about him, but they hold this contradiction somehow because I don't think they could live with a purely deterministic view. No, I mean, look, if you really take determinism seriously, then you have to shut your mouth off for no advice. And that's the end of the story. Part of the objectivist view is that free will is an axiom. And what an axiom means is it's inescapable. It's an underlying assumption. Now, of any conceptual knowledge, any claim that, yeah, you can go through a process that has the potential to arrive at knowledge and it can go wrong in various ways. But if you adhere to the right method, you can reach knowledge. All of that presupposes that you exercise control over your mind and you can direct it in a way that will keep it conforming to reality or not. And so in so far as they give any sort of guidance and say anything about how a person should function or what they should believe or what kind of argument is the kind of argument we should be convinced by, then yeah, they're conceding and accepting free will, but they don't want to admit that. So to what extent in this section do you try to refute some of the arguments that they're making or do you just make the positive case? No, and this is, I'm glad you asked that. This is one of the really important points about the book. So I mentioned, the book is a lot about implementing ethics, but I wanted a book that would appeal to the way I held it was what would be a book that if I met like a young Bill Gates and he was like, I'm not going to read a novel, but I'll read something that, you know, I'll read like a nonfiction treatment that's really practical and really useful. What would I give him? And I think to appeal to that kind of intelligent reader, even if they want action, they want to know, is this true? Why I think this is true? And so it's not just high level, like these are my conclusions go out and do it. I really try to give the arguments and try to give them in the most compelling way I can. And so the chapter on sections on free will, I go into every standard objection that you get that free will conflicts with causality, the Lebed experiments prove we don't have free will Sam Harris's own like, well, we don't even introspect ourselves making choices. Like every single thing that you've heard about free will, I or at least everyone that has any kind of cultural currency, I go into and I try to do that throughout the book, which is that if I'm taking a philosophic stand, I want to address the arguments for it. In a way that I think is like deep and compelling, but also it's not an academic book, it's not trying to, you know, convince a professional philosopher. It's, you know, part of what I do is if you are a professional philosopher, I cite, you know, the people who go into the nitty gritty of it all. But a lot of what I do, starting with our books, right, is like what you and I like, we're the, we're the ones who will read those like scholarly treaties on, you know, the monetary experts debating the intricacies of how interest rates work. But then we package that and communicate it in a way that we think is rigorous, even if it's not as in depth for a more popular kind of audience. And so I feel like a lot of what I do in philosophy is the same thing. I get to learn from people like Ankar Ghatay and Greg Salmiere and Harry Binswanger. And then I get to give it to people who, you know, they're not going to buy the $80, whatever it is right now, Blackwell companion. But, you know, they'll buy my $10 book and hopefully get a lot of value. And then if somebody wants to go deeper, all the references are right there to go deeper. That's great. That's exactly what we need. We need, we need exactly books like this on scale and we need to get them read. So go to Amazon. It's on Amazon. It's not easy to find on Amazon, which is weird. But I think if you look under Don Watkins, you can find it pops up. If you look down the effective egos, they have a bunch of anti-effective egos and books first. Like it's not about your ego and it's not about this before you get to the effective egos and book. I don't know why Amazon's doing that. You might, I don't know if it's worth looking into it. But it's there. It's only $9, $10 in paperback and it'll be, the Kindle version will be out next week, hopefully. So you guys should definitely be buying that. Don't forget, if you've got any questions about egos and altruism, philosophy, politics, state of the world, whatever you want to ask, you can use the super chat, super chat to ask. And by doing that, you also support the show. And please support the show. I get all my news from your own. That's not 100% true, but it's definitely my first stop. Yep. And now those of you who speak Hebrew can even get into Hebrew, so which is weird. But anyway, you have a chapter on happiness. Happiness is a, it's always a tricky topic to talk about or to think about because it's in the culture, it's got this wishy, ill-defined, there's a wishy, ill-defined sense about it. Even Aristotle, it's not exactly clear what he means by it. And Rand doesn't talk a lot about it. Is she kind of that? That's the ultimate value, but there's no, there really isn't a lot of talk about it. So tell us how you think about happiness and how you kind of were integrated into the book. I mean, it's obviously crucial to being an egoist. Yeah, it's one of the hardest things actually to communicate because I think the conventional view of happiness treats it as a very superficial emotion, right? Oh, you got a smile on your face, everything's fine, feeling good, you know, life at the party. Yeah, he in particular is one of the people who treats it as this kind of light emotion that can go away very quickly if something bad happens to your life. And part of what makes it difficult to counter that is you're trying to characterize an emotion that people have not experienced or rather they have experienced it in glimpses, in part, that inconsistently. And so you're trying to draw attention to it and convey the kind of grandeur and depth of happiness that the only deep portrayal of it that I am aware of is Ayn Rand's novels. I even asked some of my friends who were more widely read in literature than even I am. I said, when I was writing it, I was like, Hey, who in like, you know, literature that my audience might have read like, what are other portrayals of happiness that you think really capture what it means? And like, people just came up flat, which is interesting in and of itself. And so, I mean, basically, I just had to attack it from a lot of different angles, like, you can't exactly use people as examples, but you can use aspects of people. So it'll often talk about is, you know, the kind of like, passion for beauty of a Steve Jobs, or the entrepreneurial ambition of a Bill Gates, you can get features and components of it. And, and so I try to kind of cobble together a vision of happiness for the reader. But frankly, I think that's one of the things that, you know, when I over the next 10 years, I'll hopefully solve even more effectively how to convey that is a hard thing to convey that when we're talking about happiness, it's really a the the kind of psychological emotional concomitant of a life well lived. And so my hope is that by the end of the book, if not by that point in the book, people will walk away at the sense of, okay, I'm starting to get like, when if you're going to go after happiness, this, this is really what it means. In Rand's novels, what would you say is the best description of happiness or illustration of happiness, which character, maybe which scenes? Well, A or I just reprinted on New Ideal. So people should go to the I&R Institute and check this out chapters, chapters five and six from our first book Free Market Revolution. And I still think if I had to pick just one thing, because we struggled with how to solve this back in 2011, when we were when we were writing that, I mean, it took us three years. So we've been, we've been working on this problem a long time. And what we settled on, I still think is the best answer, which is the way that Dagny is the way that we're getting Dagny's description or her view of galt the first time she sees him spoiler alert. I'll leave it there. But that I think captures the kind of deep serenity, lack of guilt, love of being alive, perceptiveness of a mind, all of the crucial ingredients that really make for a happy life. And, you know, and part of what I think is striking about it is one of the things I've noticed, and maybe you have too, you're on some of the happiest people I know, they like they're quiet, almost solemn in their kind of way that they go about life, not all of them. Some of them are like you, they're pretty gregarious people. But many of them are quiet and reserved. But you when you're around them, you experience just this deep, profound love of life that they hold. And I think that's what's so interesting is she's capturing happiness, but she's capturing the form of it that is it's a love of being alive, not so much stressing, which some of her other characters like Francisco do that kind of like, have you an emotional state of, you know, the fun and being alive. Yep. Jennifer says Dagny on the train, which is actually my favorite scene in Atlas Shrugged. Yeah, that's what that's hard to beat as well. The opening of the John Galt line. But see, but here's the difference. I wouldn't want to even if I could manage to describe that and convey it to the reader, I wouldn't want to use that. Yeah, absolutely. And the reason why, besides just I don't want to steal thunder from Atlas, is that is, you know, up to that point in her life, the high moment of her life. And so it best captures joy, which is like she's experiencing the total some summary summation of her achievement. This is her life's greatest achievement, right, that she's enjoying in that moment. But when we're talking about happiness, we're talking about something that's a much more of a through line. The way I always describe it is that happiness isn't whether it's climate. Yeah, right. It's that thing that's there, even through ups and downs, even when things are going bad in your life, you can still have that undercurrent of love for life, you know, work in the quarry and work on top of the wine and building. And so even though that's such a great answer, for my purposes, it wouldn't be because I want what is that steady thing, that steady love of life that you hold, and that is cashed in on the most in those highest moments? Yep, no, that's good. All right, let's see. That's an interesting question. Okay, we'll get to the we'll get to the questions. So becoming creating values, becoming a value, to what extent is that about career? To what extent is that broader than than career in the book? The the focus is on career, but part of it is seeing career as a wider career is really the central part of a wider phenomenon, which is that your whole focus on life should be on values, and that values have to be created and achieved, that they're not ready made, they are not handed to you. Even the ones that you're not actually making, it's the making of values that allows you to get them, right? So like, you're not making your romantic partner, but if you're going to take them out to dinner, and have a beautiful date, what you're going to need material resources, right? So there's creation involved in every aspect of living a life. And one of the main reasons why career is so important is because in order to pursue any values, in order to be value oriented, you have to center your life around creating values. Because look, every other thing that you do to enjoy life, it has a cost to it. It's taking resources in order to do it, right? Like even for me to be here with you, there's electricity running in the room and so on. I need to be constantly replenishing those resources in order to do everything else I want in life. And so the centerpiece of it, just at that existential level, is that I have to build my life around this foundation of creating values. But then psychologically, just where does your joy and your ability to decide what's important in life and where should I devote my time? All of that in the end comes from career. So to make pursuing values the centerpiece of a life, creating values as part of a career is the centerpiece of life and the most important part of pursuing happiness. And what kind of advice do you give people for figuring out what their values are, in this case, what their career is, and then the values beyond that? Well, one thing I'll say is by the book, and there's some good advice there, and I'll give a little bit of it here. But at Einren University, Tal Safani, our CEO and I are going to be teaching a course called Philosophy, Work and Business, which we taught last year. It was a really, really successful course. And this is something we spend a lot of time and get a lot of detailed guidance on and help our students work through, which is, how do you choose a career? Now, for some people, they're pretty lucky that it's just obvious to them. Like, I knew I wanted to be a writer as far back as I could remember. I flirted with some other ideas at various times. But like, I knew from a very young age, writing, I really love, I'm really good at it. And then once I discovered objectivism, I want to write about these ideas. And I didn't know how to do it. Like, I didn't know how can you build a career like that? So again, I kept searching for a while. But like, to me, that was just obvious and home base. And it really took me a few years after working a writer realized not every objectivist wants to be an objectivist writer. That's weird. I thought everybody else was just settling for other jobs because they couldn't do it. But for many people, the it's not obvious. And so I talk about a lot of different strategies for how you can find it. But I think the most important thing to realize is that it's not in there. It's not like all you have to do is just sit around. And if you introspect enough, then it'll come to you that really what discovering your career you want, I think of it not as discovering but as building a career that you want. And you can start that process of building before you know what it is you're building. You can go up there and just start doing things that are interesting to you. Do work that seems kind of interesting and intriguing. Build up skills, experiences, reflect on those, try to draw lessons from them. And that if you keep doing that, if you keep and you're thoughtful about your experiences, you can start to build towards a more specific career. But the advice shouldn't be that surprising for people who've really studied objectivism for a long time. Because in effect, what it's really saying is don't be rationalistic about your career, be objective, like get real data by going out there and doing work. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know what I wanted to do until I was 40. That's real, right? I had no idea. So it's and I had no clue when I was young what I wanted to do. I kind of had vague notions of what I didn't want to do more than I had any kind of clue what I did want to do. And so I picked something and did it. And it turns out you can enjoy a lot of things, right? I mean, a capacity once you apply your mind to it, you always find something interesting in almost any activity, and particularly an intellectual one. And then it's the matter of figuring out what you like and what you don't like and moving through a career or shifting career or changing careers. But it's people who think that the whole weight of the world lands on them when they're 18 when they choose a career. And if they don't get it right, it's all over. I think that orientation, it stretches way beyond career. But there is just more generally, I remember years ago, this is a slightly different kind of case, but I think it captures something important. We were sitting, we were on Capitol Hill just sitting outside of a building shouting one day and you said, one of your frustrations, you were running the Institute in those days. One of your frustrations was like people were not getting as good as they could be because they were too afraid of making a mistake. I said, no, you got to get out there and just do it. And I think there's something really right about that, which is we often feel like there's a right decision about what we should do with our life that's out there. And if we don't pick right, like that's a disaster. But there is no right decision out there. Your life is not written. God doesn't, does not have a plan for you. And so like all that can happen is that you gain knowledge that's going to help you figure out an even better option down the road. Like there, there is no like failure in that sense. If you're being thoughtful and active about doing what you want, if you're not being thoughtful, yeah, you can make a lot of really wrong decisions. But the better people, they're often paralyzed by the fear of making a wrong decision. And that stops them from pursuing anything. And that, that is a failure. Absolutely. And it's, people can learn a lot from the culture of Silicon Valley, because the culture of Silicon Valley is very much a culture of try, fail, learn. I mean, learn really internalize that learning, try again, or try something completely different. But don't be afraid of failure. I mean, the idea of failure as catastrophic or failure as a hit on your self-esteem. I mean, imagine, you know, look at Elon Musk launching rockets, knowing with almost certainty that the rockets are going to blow up, right? They're not going to, it's not going to be successful. But he knows also that the only way to learn so that one day he is successful is to blow the rockets up. So let's launch them into space and watch them explode. It's the idea of trying, testing, iterative experimentation, and being willing and understanding the world of failure in business. But I think it's much broader than business. I think it applies to life. Yeah. I mean, I remember, I'm struggling with an article that I'm writing and I was like, I'm not sure, I was talking to my girlfriend, the other day I was like, I'm not sure whether I should do this or do that. And I said, you know, I'm probably just going to write it. And if it doesn't write it that way, if it doesn't work, I'll throw it out and start over. And she's a writer and just was looking in horror at like, you're going to write something you think you might throw away. But like, that's my attitude is like, I'll try it. And worst case, I'll learn something from it. But it takes a certain kind of discipline. But it has a huge payoff. Yeah, but it's something people really should learn how to do because there's a huge payoff to it. And too many people are crippled by, I mean, people call it sometimes perfectionism, but it's this fear of failure, which I think drives a lot of it. And it's about fear. I mean, we could have a whole discussion about fear, but fear is not an emotion you should let drive your life. It could drive a particular occurrence because it's a survival emotion, but fear is way too dominant in too many people's life. And it's often coming from a place that views life as a test and views life as offering you these mini tests. Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Am I capable of this? And if you're taking a bunch of tests, what's the worst thing that you can do in a test? Fail it. And so like, but when you get a value orientation, it's like, no, life is not a test. It's an opportunity for me to pursue values and get things that I want. Then like you said, failure is just part of the process of how you figure out what you want and get what you want. Yeah, I mean, a test is a sense is a zero. It's like a zero sum world. It's okay. There's a certain amount of knowledge here. I know it. I don't know it. I'm retested about it. But life is about this infinite knowledge. There's no end to knowledge. There's no end to values. There's no end to possibilities. And it's about expanding that universe. It's about growing it. It's not about, do I know this finite little thing? And can I repeat it back? And in that sense, life is a process and processes, you're not infallible and you're going to fail. That has to be accepted. And yeah, I mean, people are crippled, crippled by fear. Cool. We're starting to get some questions. That's good. So I'm not going to ask you about seeking pleasure. I think that's the payoff at the end of the book. So you don't want to give it away. But pursuing self-esteem, how do you approach the idea of pursuing self-esteem? What is, how do you pursue, I mean, self-esteem in the culture we have today is like something you just have, or somebody gives you a ribbon, or your parents give it to you. But how do you actually you pursue self-esteem, your own self-esteem? I mean, it's in a certain way simple and a certain way it's the most complex thing possible. The simple way is that you try to live up to a moral code. The hard part is that that contains a lot and that there's a real challenge in living by a moral code. Now, it's not the challenge that people think it is, right? The challenge of living by a moral code, if you have anything like a conventional altruistic view of ethics, is that there's a tug of war between what you want and what you're supposed to do between your interests and the fact that you're supposed to sacrifice your interests. And a code of self-interest, there's not that tug of war, right? This is guiding you to what is in your interest. And yet it's often hard to see that in the moment when making a decision, often hard to hold that context in mind that this thing I want, this thing I'm experiencing a desire for is not actually good for me, or this thing that I don't want is actually good for me. I don't want to have this argument with my husband or wife. I would rather avoid that, but actually that's the thing that's going to save our relationship and make it better or end it and let us go our separate ways and have something even better, right? So the holding context is such a core part of being able to pursue your genuine interest, and that's very hard. So as simple as it is to earn self-esteem, which is like live by a moral code, that's a demanding kind of thing to do. And yet the payoff is profound because self-esteem is my confidence in my ability to navigate my life effectively. And it's the idea that when I do so and achieve things that I'm worthy of them, and that I can really enjoy them. And I just met so many people who are crippled by like not having the confidence to go after what they want, not having the common, you know, we were just talking about career. A lot of what I talk about is the path to mastery, which is the path from I'm completely incompetent to know I can perform at a high level doing what I want to do. That is hard. Like most of my first 10 years working at the Institute was mostly getting told, yeah, this isn't very good. And to be able to keep going through that and grow, like you need to have a kind of basic confidence in yourself. And it's going to get shaken, hopefully not at a fundamental level, but you're going to take up some beatings. Like can I really do that? I certainly struggled with, yeah, can I really do this? Like I don't know. I haven't done it before and it seems really hard. Is it going well? And the more that you have at least a fundamental confidence that, yeah, I'm a person who can figure things out. Like I'm a person who can rise to challenges, then that's what's going to hold you through that kind of period. And then I meet people who, you know, they actually do it. They get to the mountaintop by every kind of standard you would think. And they don't feel deserving success. They can't really enjoy it. They're waiting for the other shoe to drop. They're waiting for people to find out. Yeah, you don't really belong here. I mean, you had to have heard, you know, successful people talk about imposter syndrome and struggling with that all the time. And I think often all of us can have a little bit about that when we're like in a new role or trying something new out, right? Like I haven't done this before. Like the first time you get up as, you know, the first time you taught a class, I'm sure as a professor of finance, you're on, you feel a little bit like, like I don't really belong up here because you haven't done it yet. But, but I'm talking about that more enduring sense that like, like people when it happens to people who are super successful, not people to do it for the first time, but if we're ready of cheap, they made it the amount of top and they still don't believe they belong. Yeah. And that is so sad. And often the kind of people I meet, they won't necessarily have that in their career, maybe, but maybe they have in their relationships or vice versa. Like there's plenty of people who, you know, they're desperate to find somebody great for them and then they find somebody great for them and they don't feel they deserve it. And then they sabotage it, worrying that they don't deserve it. And there's so many of our tragedies and failures are rooted in lack of self-esteem. And so nothing is more important than having that commitment to a rational moral code so that you can get what you want from life and enjoy it once you get it. Yeah, absolutely. So before we go to the questions from the super chat, give us a summary of what you mean by effective altruism. Effective altruism or effective egosm? Effective. Effective just comes along with altruism. We'll have to change that. Effective egosm. I mean, the core thing of what I mean is regular egosm, but it's sort of like Rand's point about laissez-faire capitalism, right? It's a necessary redundancy. Now, you could put it rational egosm. I wanted something that deliberately kind of entered the cultural conversation and seemed very relevant to it, but I do think it's a good term in part because it's kind of punching back against this idea that what an egoist would really do if they were really after their self-interest. Iran, I know you've encountered this. We'll often get it from our free market friends who will be like, yeah, you guys, you're not into lying, cheating, stealing, but if you were really egoist, you're too good. In effect, you've taken off the rough edges, and part of what I'm trying to say is, no, what you're calling what an egoist would really do, that's ineffective egoism. Now, in the end, I don't even think it's egoism because I don't even think the intention of such people is their actual own interests, and I don't think they're giving any thought to their actual own interests. But no, to be genuinely effective as an egoist, the only way to do that is to be deeply committed to a morality of reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Yeah, I mean, I get that too about happiness, right? You get, well, how do you know Stalin wasn't happy? Yeah. How do you know, you know, the corner, Syria killer is not happy, and you get that a lot from kind of the free market subjectivist crowd, right? Because they want to believe that their subjectivism will lead them to somehow achieve happiness. What they don't want, what they won't commit to is a moral code. It's exactly what they want to reject, what they don't want to commit themselves, because they don't like anything prescribed. They want to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do. Yeah, my attitude is go for it. How's it working out for you? And I'm not interested in what you say in a public debating stage to me about how it's working out for you. Reflect in your own soul, in your own life. How is that really working out for you? And the fact is, I know how hard and how demanding it is to really get what you want from life and really know what you want from life. The idea that you can get it just, yeah, well, whatever I like, whatever makes me happy. It's so outrageously wrong and implausible to anybody who's lived more than 10 minutes, like that the only person who could say it with a straight face is an intellectual. Yep. Yep. All right, let's see. Shazbot. Thank you, Shazbot. $53, interesting inflation. Where the three came from. That's good. Who is Don's favorite rationally egoistic movie character besides how it would walk? Oh, man. I'm so bad at coming up with great answers to these kinds of questions on the spot. Well, the first one that pops to mind, and this is probably not the best answer, but it just was already on my mind today. There's a movie that was made in the 90s called The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. And he's not exactly an egress because I think he engages in an act of what I consider self-sacrifice at the end of the movie. But I'm going to abstract away from that because the core idea is he's a billionaire businessman who's a genius and he's presented as, and so that he gets stranded out in the wilderness and has to survive with a handful of other people. And I'm certain as a teenager, I discovered I ran like a year before. It's a billionaire businessman who's a genius. What's going to happen is he's going to land in nature and we're going to see, oh, all that intelligence and money, you're not going to be able to handle it out here. You're going to learn what really counts in nature. No, he's the one who uses his mind in order to navigate his way through that world and save his life and the lives of the people around him. So it's not exactly stressing the egoism, but it's stressing the most important part of the egoism, which is he's a man of ability who's deeply confident in his own ability and ruthlessly committed to doing whatever it takes to save his life and the life of the people that he cares about. And it's explicitly pro-reason. If I remember what he's explicit about, I need to think about this. I need to figure this out. And yeah, I mean, it's a really, really phenomenal movie because it's so rare to combine both the survival skills, the explicitness, and it's not like he's a survivalist. It's not like he has these skills from before. He's developing them on the spot because he's a man of reason and to be a billionaire. I don't know who made that movie. It's a David Mamet movie. And David Mamet is very interesting. He's conservative. I don't know if he was conservative in those days, but he's kind of a weird sort of conservative, but he's a real thinker. He's a really interesting thinker. And I think really has a, whatever his flaws, he's a real reverence for human intelligence. And it comes through in that, which is funny because his most famous play was, do you know, maybe you've seen the movie or seen the play Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, which is basically beating up on businessmen, salesmen, capitalists. It's well written, but it's not romanticism and it doesn't have a great message. But yeah, so David Mamet wrote it, but it's a really interesting film. In that sense, I think there's some movies, some of James Cameron's early movies have these rational, again, the emphasis never on egoism, but rational people who are incredible rational. One of my favorites is Queen Christina. And have you seen Queen Christina? Oh, you got to watch that. You got to see Queen Christina. It's with Greta Garbo. It's a very old movie, but it's about Swedish Queen Christina and the choices she makes. And at the end of the day, the choice she makes is an egoistic one. And it's based on a true story. And of course, Greta Garbo is gorgeous in it. And it's got this, it's a movie made one of the first talkies. So it's got this, the acting is like silent movie acting, but it's also talking and there's a lot of power in that acting. But yeah, that's one of my favorites is Queen Christina. One other one that people might not have heard of. Dangerous Beauty takes place during the Inquisition in Venice, right? Yeah. And has a really interesting main character who stands up against the Inquisition in the name of her enjoyment of life on earth. Now, she has an interesting career, which I won't spoil. Though, it's contextualized enough that I'm okay with it in the movie. Oh, Scott mentioned the Inochka. And Inochka is interesting because, have you seen Inochka? Yeah. Yeah. And Inochka is interesting because it is, he has a committed communist who experiences the joys of freedom, the joys of capitalism and converts. And there's a certain like there's a real egoism there. I mean, she's, yeah, she's, she's not going back to what she was before she discovered how to laugh, right? All right. Charles, good question. There's a lot we can talk about that. All right. Daniel says, I don't know if you have an answer to this, but why have the concept red pill, why have the concept red pill seems inspired by Plato, Augustine and Marx, people who accept this concept tend to form a bit of truth bias and look at the world that way. The proper perspective is the primacy of existence. I mean, I definitely wouldn't use the phrase. And part is just all it means is woke. It means I've got the revelation. I took the pill and no, like what you want is knowledge. Like you wouldn't say like, oh my God, I got the red pill. I learned chemistry. And it's like I went through the steps to learn a body of knowledge and really assimilate it and so on. But it's sort of like, and part of getting the revelation is itself complimentary. Like, oh, I've got the truth. I open my eyes to it, like a big pat on the back. There's probably much more to it. I really sat down and analyzed it. I had a knee jerk reaction and have since I hear these kinds of terms. But the core objection to it is, no, what I want is not a revelation. What I want is rational knowledge. Did it come from the Matrix? That's my understanding. Yeah, it comes from the Matrix movies. So that's a world in which you have to take a pill in order to not be completely manipulated by the people outside. But the reality is that you need to think. You need to discover knowledge. You need to actually use reason in order to escape whatever Matrix is out there. And the Matrix in our world is just bad knowledge. It's not some mystical or some electrons connected to your brain. But I don't even like, there is something really right about that. There is this kind of Matrix of bad philosophy that causes people to see the world in a really bad way. And you can escape that kind of Matrix of philosophy. So there's something right about that. But it activates and the kind of people who use these terms deliberately are trying to activate the conspiratorial mindset. Somebody's trying to put something over at you. And now you can be one of the few who knows what's really going on and really understands things and so on. And that should always send off alarm bells, any kind of that analysis of the world. Yeah, there's definitely a conspiratorial element. And I like the way you phrase it. It's a revelatory thing. It's a platonic, take the pill and you can be like the philosopher king. You can see the light. And life and knowledge don't work that way. Ian says the book could be important. I'd love to hear more about the behind the scenes making of the book. How did it change over the process? Why go self-published? What are the promotional plans? Yeah, I can say a little bit about that. So I had the idea of bubbling around for a while. But the thing that finally said I have to write it is, let's see, what can I say without stirring up unnecessary controversy? I saw somebody online recommending a book that was an introduction to Einrein's ethics that I thought was total garbage. And I said, no, I've got to show them what a real introduction to objectivism looks like. And so I basically just sat down, started writing it, got a draft after probably six months, and spent all the time since then has been spent basically revisions and getting feedback and so on. A big turning point and the most important feedback that I was able to get. There were really two, but the major one was I mentioned that Greg Sanmeri put on this workshop where I was able to get feedback from some of the best philosophers in objectivism. One person who wasn't there was Ankar Gathe, but I eventually got his feedback on it too. So I was able to get a lot of input both from philosophers but also just from a lot of different readers. Because again, the goal here was to create a book that would be interesting, appealing, and convincing to somebody who had never heard of Einrein. So it's not about, it's not pitched as an introduction to her. It's just pitched as, hey, you're interested in pursuing your happiness. Here's a tape that could be really valuable to your life. And I mean, one of the great things I've heard from people, we gave away free copies of a pre-publication version at Ocon back in June. And a number of people reached out to me, said they shared it with people in their lives who hadn't read Einrein. And they loved it. They thought it was great. And that to me, like that, okay, that's the acid test. Objectivists love it because I do think there's a lot of new stuff in there and a lot of old stuff put in new interesting ways. But it's designed in order that you could hand it to anybody in your life who is at all, if they're intellectual enough to listen to a Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or a Ben Shapiro, then I think they could be really interested in a book like this. Now, in terms of a promotion and why I went the self-publishing route, I thought about it for a while, but you're wrong, we've gone a few times through mainstream publishers. And I have nothing bad to say about our publishers in particular, but I have a lot bad to say about the publishing industry itself, because this is how publishing works for those that don't know, which is you bring them a book that has to be essentially perfect. They'll give some editorial feedback, but it's very, very minor. Then they will tell you what cover and what title to put on it, and they'll pretend that you have input, but it's very minimal. You will have to market the book, so they're not going to do any of the marketing for you unless you're one of the people that they spend seven figures on, in which case, yeah, they'll throw some marketing money at it. But in general, most writers who get a mainstream publisher, you're expected to do all the marketing, and even those people who get a lot of money put behind them, they're still responsible for most of the marketing for the books. So you have the book, you do the marketing. What do they do? Essentially, they get into bookstores, which you'll look at your sales. The bookstore makes a tiny little fraction of any of your sales, and it's probably even less today than when we published our books. And then they keep 90% of the money. That's the deal. That's a garbage deal. What's the benefit for me as an author? There are cases where an author, I think, benefits from it, but the idea that that's the default, that that's somehow superior, or it makes the book more legitimate, it's just not true today. David Goggins had one of the bestselling books in the last 10 years, self-published. Now, he went all out self-publishing, so I mean, he took a really professional attitude towards it. He didn't just put something up on Amazon. But the major point is that if the content is good, and you have any sort of platform, then you can reach the readers that you want to reach. Now, I was much more concerned with money when I was writing it than I am now that it's published, and I have a great job. I'm no longer doing freelance. I'm working for ARI. And ARI doesn't know this, but all the proceeds from it, I'm going to give to ARI. So help the cause by buying the book. But the major thing is I wanted the control. I didn't want to have somebody sit on it for a year, a year and a half, and then put it out like I wanted to be able to give it away at whatever price and whatever formats I wanted to. And so just having that kind of control was important to me. What's the promotional plan? So for me, this book is really part of a long game. So this is not the book where I'm trying to get a million sales out of the gate. My main hope with this book is that it just really makes an impact on the people who read it. But it's part of the project that I'm engaged in with earthly idealism, where what I'm doing right now is writing on a very specific set of topics, which is ethics. And especially though the book itself is not targeted toward this audience, my essays are, as I mentioned, targeted towards secular readers interested in ethics. But it's really part of an audience growth project so that when the next book comes out in three years or five years, now I've got a following of 100,000 people that have slowly over the years read this book, but now they're ready to make a New York Times bestseller out of the next one. So that's the basic plan. It'll be kind of a slow burn promotion of just doing talks when they come up. But most of the audience growth I'm doing is just trying to write really attention getting powerful pieces and being effective on social media. But it's the kind of thing that shows dividends over time. It's not like a big marketing splash where I'm trying to be on every podcast for three weeks or something. I will do that one day once I'm in a position to do it. But the thing with a book launch is if you're trying to do a big splashy thing, the groundwork has to be laid years in advance. The only way that that pays off is you're dialing your Rolodex like six months in advance with people who are ready to commit to, yeah, I'm going to have you on my huge podcast on this date and so on. So I just am not in a position to do that right now, even if I wanted to. So it's really targeted towards something more in the future. And guys, it is on Amazon right now. So it is available. As I said, I know some people questioning, but it's up there in paperback. It'll be on Kindle hopefully next week. And there's a question about audiobooks. Is it going to be an audiobook? I want to. Basically what I just need to do is sit down and do some research and best practices for recording them. It's going to take a lot of time. So I don't know when I'm going to get to it, but look, I like audiobooks, so I get it. I'm going to suck it up and do it at some time. Yeah, I mean, I'll definitely do it at some point. But if you're impatient, like don't hold your breath. Yeah, it's probably expensive to hire somebody to just read it. Well, yeah, in nonfiction, I like the author to do anyway. So I would do this one. And I mean, I have the equipment to do a high quality one, but I need to change some details of my current setup. But it's more just an issue of the patience. Because I am, for some reason, like when I read to my kids, it really strains my voice. I can talk all day, but if I read aloud, it really strains my voice. So we'll see how I'm going to get through reading 250 pages. But he answers good as a podcast a chapter week. That that's actually more plausible. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. All right. Ruedown says there's a video going around with Rick Rubin. I don't know who Rick Rubin is explaining how he creates art for himself, knowing that if he loves it, the client or customer will love it. It would be cool if you could comment on it and make a short video. I'll look for it. You should. Rick Rubin is a music producer, is a music producer. He's produced, I mean, probably nobody you like, but everybody popular from all kinds of genres from hip hop to metal to punk. He's a really interesting guy. He has a lot of woo-woo mysticism crap, but he's a real deep thinker about creativity. Indeed, he has a book on creativity. The book, I thought, it had some gems. I didn't love it. Better him in interviews. I think he did one. He's done a few for Tim Ferriss that are really good, but he is a really thoughtful person. It's interesting to hear somebody who's deeply thoughtful about artistic creativity, because most of the best things on creativity are ironically not by people in the arts. They tend to be by people who think about creativity where there's much more of a feedback loop of does this thing work, like Silicon Valley type people? But to get an artist who I think can articulate the kind of processes that he goes through in being creative, I find him really interesting, even if kind of uneven in his views. I like a lot of the people he produces. There you go. Another reason for Don and I to have conflict. I will still never forgive Iran's review of tool, but... That's right. I remember there was some metal band that I completely got wrong, obviously, but couldn't remember the name. Andrew, thanks for your work, Don. Do you think Iran described happiness? Why do you think Iran described happiness as non-contradictory joy instead of integrated joy or something positive? What are some of the contradictions to joy that egoism removes? Well, I think what she's stressing there is that the essence of unhappiness is conflict. Yeah. It's that you're in conflict with yourself, you're in conflict with reality, and in particular, what she's, I think, drawing attention to is the kind of contradictory she's pushing back against any sort of out-of-context momentary sort of joy and saying, like, no, that's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about happiness or a compartmentalized joy of happiness as somebody who really loves their work life. No, we're talking about a joy where there is no fundamental conflicts between you and reality and you and yourself. If you think about what's called the main hero of Atlas Shrugged, the most defining quality of him is his serenity. It's that kind of just completely at peace with himself and reality, and that that capture, I think part of what non-contradictory joy captures is just that deep serenity of the lack of conflict. And so, you can put integrated, in a sense, says the same thing from a positive, but this is a case where I think you have to stress the negative integration. It doesn't stress this idea of, no, there is no conflict here. It's stressing, well, how do you get no conflict through integration? But it's the no conflict that I think is the most salient and certainly the most, it would be hard. Even if I ask myself, oh, do I have an integrated happiness? Not even as somebody who really values integration in general likes positive formulations better than negative ones. That's not very evocative, but when I think of non-contradictory joy, I get it. Man, do I get that? Yep. Raymond says, thanks, Iran, and thank you for all you do. Thanks, Raymond. Really appreciate it. Rafael says, is Rand egoism useful when you are not in a John Golt moment, but going through a bad period like health issues? And how do you use effective egoism on a date when you're evaluating if it's the right person for life? Well, those are two really big questions. You'll probably have to remind me. So the first one is the health issues or something similar. Life sometimes can throw curveball at you and it's rough. Suddenly things are rough. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say. And I think that's actually an underdeveloped part of objectivism. Objectivists have under commented on it. Now, there's a good reason why it's in effect under commented, right? Because part of the perspective, that's not the essence of life. That's not where your focus should be. But it's real, like bad stuff happens. And almost all of us are going to go through really tough moments in life. And part of what's good about practicing egoism is you minimize as many of those moments are in your control as possible. So you're not creating pitfalls for you. But yeah, health issues, losing people that you love, like there's bad things that are going to happen. And I think part of how egoism helps you through those moments is, first of all, to remind you this is not the essence of life, that it's a bad moment to get through so that you can get back to what is the essence, which is achievement, joy, and happiness. But there's there's so much more that helps you part of one of the most important ways that it helps you. So I've written on earthly idealism on stoicism. And one of the main things, you know, Stoics, we're supposed to get so much that people get so much value from stoicism is that it helps clarify what you can control and what you can't. Well, they talk a lot about what you control and what you can't. But in essence, their view is you can't really control anything. Objectivism and rational egoism on the other hand, do give real clarity about what's in your control and what you can't. And I mean, the best thing to read by Ayn Randon, this is her essay, the metaphysical versus the man made, it's in philosophy needs it, it might be one of the ones that's freely available online, if you search for it, I might be wrong about that. But I think it is available. And so part of a proper morality is allows you to know, like, even if I'm going through this, there's a big difference between saying, like, I can serenely accept it because it's outside my control. There's nothing to be done about it versus people feeling guilty for things that aren't in their control or for settling when they shouldn't. Like, yeah, maybe there is something I can do about this. Maybe there is a way that I can improve on it. So there's a lot more to say about it. And I don't think everything that could be said has been said by any means. So I hope to say right more in it. But that's at least some initial thoughts. There's a lot that it can help you with. I'm curious before we move on to the other one, Yaron, what are your thoughts? No, I agree with all of that. And I think this, but I agree with you, there's a lot more that can be said. I mean, how you deal with tragedy, how you deal with adversity, how, you know, there's the how it works statement of the pain only goes so far, how you get to the point where you only allow the pain to go deep so far. And I think a lot of that is sustaining an orientation towards life, towards your life, towards your values. And even if right now you can't achieve them because you're sick or because you know, you know, you're striving towards getting better so that you can, there's a reason why you're trying to get better. You're not trying to get better so you can go and give a kidney away again, or give a kidney away, but you're trying to get better because you again would be a whole thing because life is a blast because it's exciting and fun. And you want to get back to that sense of sustained joy. So it's motivation. It's knowing that the world is better than this. It's all of that. And then different circumstances are going to require different tools. But I can't imagine facing any of that, not being an egoist, that is being an altruist or being a cynic or being a pragmatist, you'd be much more confused and much more depressed and much more and you'd have no orientation towards why am I even fighting this? What am I trying to achieve? Yeah, the idea that like, egoism has nothing to say or nothing valuable to say. Ayn Rand spent the first 21 years of her life in Russia, most of it under a brutal dictatorship where her whole, there was a question of, can I ever do what I want to do in life? There's a, you know, question of, did the thing that I just didn't, wasn't able to hold back from saying, is that going to get me and my family killed? Indeed, if people who want to do work in this area, I think there's a lot to mind from her biographical interviews on it. Yeah, Kira. You know, Kira from We The Living, I mean, she's dealing with horrors and yet she never gives up. But she never gives up her ego. She never gives up her selfishness. She never gives up her life. Incredibly powerful. Yeah, I mean, the fountain had most of it is work where things are not going well at all with the thing that he cares most about in life, which is his career. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot to say about it. And there's a lot, a lot in the novels to mine. And then how do you use effective egoism on a date when you're evaluating if the goal is the right person for life? What do I want to say about that? Well, what I'm not doing is sitting around with pulling out my book, checking off. Does she, does she, does she meet chapter lesson one? Does she meet lesson two? Oh, no, you screwed up lesson three. You're off my list. That's definitely not how it works. Yes. I mean, if you're on a date, the thing you're interested in is like, is this person interesting? Do I like being with them? Like, how do I feel? How do they look? Are we like, are we having a fun conversation? But part of what I'm interested in just as a person is like, what are a person's values, including their moral values, but not just including their moral values? What kind of person are they, which is about their virtues, but it's about more than virtues. And so it's, it's not like there's this separate morality checklist that you should be interested in when you're thinking about somebody for a date, but you're thinking about like, is this the kind of person that I want to spend time with? Because in reality, like that's what a relationship is. It's just, I want to spend a lot of time with this person and increasing in the more intimate ways. And so like, what are the values and virtues, moral and personal that make up who they are? And like, those are the kinds of questions that I'm interested in. So it's not that morality is not a live part of it. It's a crucial part of it, but it's not a separate part of it. It's just part of that whole package of discovering a new person and being interested in what makes up a person. And so the, you know, there probably are some realms where what I'm primarily interested in is somebody's moral character, but a date is definitely not that there's not the primary thing that you're thinking about in that way. And I agree with all of that. And I'd add, you're not, you should spend a date trying to evaluate if the person is the right person for life. Yeah. I mean, are they right for a second date? Do you want to go to a movie with this person? Do you want to have a dinner with this person? Do you want to have sex with this person? But the right person for life will either come to you that it's the right person for life or maybe on the 10th date, you should maybe think about it. But it's not something, not every date is supposed to lead to marriage, right? That's not how it works in life. I like the idea of seek pleasure as lesson number seven. It fits into a bunch of my rules for life. You want rules for life about, but these things, you know, you don't go into every relationship as the be all and all of everything. There's lots of different levels of joy and pleasure you can get out of people that don't require commitment for, you know, lifelong commitments. Yeah, no, I think that that's a really good point. And part of the reason not to have that mindset is you're just not in a position to know anything close to that on a first encounter anyway. Yeah. And so the more that you're kind of trying to see things through that lens, you're almost certainly going to make all kinds of bad evaluations and wrong and both ways you'll either be too eager to jump to, yeah, this person's amazing and I'm seeing them with rose colored glasses and not really seeing them for who they are, or it's in the other direction. You know, it's the kind of objectivist right who will watch a movie and it'll be a perfect movie, but there'll be one line about businessmen or bad. This is the most immoral, awful thing. And like that, you're going to rob yourself of great experiences and great people if you do that. So yeah, I think what you're on says really right. All right, let's see. Christian says Ben Shapiro and YouTuber Alex O'Connor discussed religion and free will in a video, they discussed free will versus determinism. Why is that the free will is often packaged with religion video may be worth reviewing for content. I looked at the video, I haven't listened to the whole thing, but basically it was religion, Ben Shapiro versus an atheist of religion, the value of religion, I think the title was Is There Value in Religion, but much of the debate was, well, atheism means determinism, religion is on the side of free will. So most of the debate turned around free will, right, with the atheist, you know, rejecting free will. What's the, why is religion tied to, why is religion packaged with the idea of free will? Well, I'll give my answer. You did an interview with Ben Bayer a while back on altruism, and I think he addressed this there and he gave a really good answer because Ben has studied both religion and free will in a lot of depth. So I'll just give you kind of my thoughts and understanding from what I've seen. I'll name one aspect of it. This is not the full story, but it's one important aspect, which is Kant played a really important turning point here, which is that Kant basically said that in what there, the big ideas of metaphysics that metaphysics is trying to answer are God, freedom and immortality. And by freedom, he meant free will. And he says, we're going to save these ideas from attacks of reason by saying, like, no, that belongs in the numinal realm, which reason can't know. It can't prove them. It can't disprove them. Those are going to be, in effect, articles of faith that we adopt because they're necessary ingredients for believing in morality. Morality, as Kant believed it, but reason, he says, no, reason, of course, it overthrows free will. Of course, if you follow reason, then you have to agree with determinism because, well, reason says that the world is based on causality and causality can't have free will. Now, as an aside, what's really interesting about Kant is some scholars have argued that his understanding of causality was not the humane conception of event necessitating event. It was much more close to Aristotle's view of entity-based causation. So I wrote a paper on this once for a graduate level class that ARI gave to some of us on Kant. I would want to sit down with Kant one day and say, like, see, could I argue him into, no, by your own view of causality, you can't rule out free will even in the phenomenal world. But that's neither here nor there. The important part is that historically, in philosophy then, that was seen as, well, like, no, clearly there's no rational case that you can make for free will. It's tied to a faith-based kind of conception, which is crazy because in the end, if you believe in an all-knowing God, there's no room for free will. There just isn't. And they have all kinds of rationalizations for that. But no, I think the big turning point was Kant saying, no, in the phenomenal world, clearly there's no grounds for doubting determinism. And so if you're going to believe in free will, and we have to believe in free will because you need morality, that has to be based on faith. It really is tragic that so many atheists, determinists, and that in good, interesting debates around religion, you know, they're forced into this deterministic position. And I think they undermine a lot of the virtues that they bring to the debate. Although I try to view it a little bit, so I agree with that. And it really is a blame word. It's a dumb position. Like free will really is self-evident. But on the other hand, I take it a little bit the other way. It is such an achievement of I and Rand to be able to make sense of free will and see how is it consistent with causality and how can it be... What is the argument for it? And her getting that, no, it's introspectively self-evident, but here's what you're introspecting. And how do you put into words what it is you're introspecting when you introspect free will? It was such a profound identification by her. So in the one sense, I mean, this is what's tricky about free will. It is self-evident, but it's really hard to conceptualize what it is. And it's hard to conceptualize it in such a way as you can understand how it is consistent with all kinds of other things that we know. And so there is a real challenge involved in it. I wish some of them, though, would just say I don't know. That would be cool. I know I have free will. I observe it. I don't know. I don't quite understand it. We know all the physics in the world and there's no physical explanation for free will. Therefore, there's no free will. And even that's stupid because everybody knows we don't even know all the physics in the world. Even if you claim there has to be a physical explanation for free will, okay, we just don't know what it is. But they can't conceptualize things that way. I like to say to people, until Newton, we had no conception, no understanding of gravity. None. Did it not exist? I mean, did people deny its existence? And even today, we don't really have an explanation, a complete explanation for gravity, a quantum gravity or whatever. People don't know where it comes from. And yet, it's still something everybody knows exists. Andrew, I think that the main motive for rejecting free will is a standard of perfection for self-esteem. That's the motive to reject responsibility for one's own faults. The opponents seem emotionalistically wedded to determinism. Thoughts. I didn't quite follow it. I mean, I think so you don't want to make mistakes. So in a sense, they don't want to take responsibility for their own actions in some sense. Yeah, I think there's definitely, I think the appeal of determinism is often that kind of thing, though I tend not to think that that's what's going on with many of the intellectuals. I do think there's psychological motives involved, but I much more think of it's, I'm superior because I'm willing to face the tragic truth about our pathetic nature of human beings as billiard balls who can't control anything that we do. I think that kind of motivation to it is that they have a low human beings and they feel superior by quote embracing the facts. But I think for anybody who's sophisticated, there has to be a motive. Because again, you can't get around the fact that you know you make choices and that they fall into talking about us making choices. It's inescapable to think from the framework that we make genuine choices. But certainly one motive is that determinism is a great way to rationalize any vice. Because if determinism is true, then there are no vices. There's no virtues either. Yeah. Richard said, what do you think of creating fables or short stories with an objective model? Has any creative writer proposed that fables and short stories could go to video at low cost but should be too long for TikTok? Well, it would be very anti-objective. So in one sense, you could say we already have that, right? Like, I ran wrote novels that have morals, i.e. they have themes. But if you mean like literally what a fable is doing, which is like a tale that is pure propaganda, it would be bad art. It would be bad art. It's not that it would be wrong to do. It would be kind of fun if somebody did it well. You just have to realize that it's not art. Art is not, you tell a story for the purposes of pulling out a propaganda message. The way fables work is that it's kind of tacked on. So I don't know. I'd be curious if somebody wanted to do it well. I don't necessarily think it would have that much value unless it was just so startlingly clever. But does anybody like, how often did you break out a book of fables? Well, maybe children. Maybe for children it's a kind of a simple concretization of morality. Yeah, I mean, I guess people still break out the, you know, the scorpion tale and like invoke it, right? Like it has, it sits with you and so on. So, yeah, like I said, I'd be interested to see it. But like, I mean, I certainly wouldn't be able to do it. And contrary to what people think, Yuran and I don't get to sit around like assigning people in the Objectivist movement different tasks. Like you go create this thing we have decided is a good intellectual product. And even if we could, God help the result. Adam says, Yuran, recently you told us not to send our kids to MIT. I think it was yesterday from my life as an MIT alumni and a retired professor at Cal State, Louisiana, LA, not Louisiana, Cal State, LA. That is not that if not for MIT, it would have taken me years more to reach my MIT level. Were you serious? Yeah, I was serious. I mean, at some point you have to take a moral stand about these things. And MIT right now, based on what I saw yesterday, and based on the testimony of some of the students who are going there, is a morally corrupt institution. And at some point you have to draw a line and say, I get this value that I could squeeze out of this, but I would rather go find that same value somewhere else, which is where morality is not corrupt. And Adam, I think you're Jewish, I can't remember. But to be Jewish right now at MIT is very distressing. And I don't know if the same thing is true, for example, at Caltech. But Caltech is very close to equal in some ways, from a technical perspective as MIT. Choose another school where you can get as much or close to as much and not sanction and participate in the horrors that these universities right now are exposing people. And I would also say that the fact, Adam, that you, whenever you went to MIT, I assume was a long time ago, because you, like me, are not very young. You know, does it still have the same edge as it did back then? Is it still so unique and above any other engineering program in the United States? Are there as good engineering schools where you don't have to be exposed to the real horrors that are going on right now? And again, at some point, you just, you have to, not as a sacrifice, but as a act in favor of your life, you have to take a mall stand against institutions that are undermining your life, your values, your sanity. Yeah, one thing I'll say, I agree with everything that you said you're on. So there's, you know, if you take what they're doing at the University of Austin, I think I got the name of the school, right? Which is like, in effect, like an alternative university. I don't know what they're doing if it's just a humanities school. Or are they trying to go? Think of the ideas to go bigger than that, but it will take decades before they reach the MIT status, right? That's a reality, sadly. Yeah, and so, but part of what I would be thinking of, if I recognize the deep rot of these institutions is, I think you could much more easily create alternatives that were just like the tech schools, that is, as much as they've been polluted by in academia, it's much more easy to extract, I think, the better people and create alternative institutions for those people than it is in the humanities. Because I think the whole frame, even the better people in the humanities have all kinds of corruptions in their framework anyway. And there's very few better people in the way that there's a lot of really good scientists and mathematicians and so on. So I think that part of the overall project of, I don't think the universities can be reformed from within. I think you have to create alternatives. And so part of what I would be thinking is, if I was a billionaire who had a bunch of billionaire friends, yeah, hey, great what they're doing at the University of Austin. I hope it works out. But I'd also be thinking about the University of Science and just like get the best scientists. Just hire all the Jewish scientists out of MIT and Harvard and some of these universities and bring because a lot of them I'm sure right now would like to explore opportunities. I actually, I think I advocated on the same show that the Jewish professors at these universities should consider shifting to other universities. I mean, they have resumes that could easily get them jobs at other places. And they should think about leaving. MIT does not have to stay. It's going to be sad and tragic and horrible. I mean, my dad worked at MIT. I used to play around in the lab at MIT when my dad had a lab there. It's one of the great institutions of Western civilization. There's no question about it. But it's rotting. It is rotting. If you saw the president of MIT in front of Congress, it is rotting talk. And if you saw the student talk about who experiences at MIT, there's what they and unless the alumni speak up and boycott the place, how are you going to get rid of the rot? And it's not that just they're rotting. They are attacking every value we care about. They are using unimaginable number of resources and the credibility of this good scientists and mathematicians is it's making it it's part of what's fueling their ability to go on injecting the ideas that are destroying the West into the culture. Like, I mean, this is part of what Atlas Shrugged is about, how it's precisely the better people who continue to go there and continue to give money that are enabling this mass destruction, where if the better people remove their sanctions saying, yeah, like, yeah, I know that there's some good people there, but the institution is fundamentally corrupt. That's the only thing you can do to stop them from poisoning the culture. And it's not like, oh, well, let's get some good people hired. No, it is a guild system and the guild system is designed so that even if somebody good sneaks through, they can't do anything. And I mean, today, somebody good sneaking through, it's hard to imagine how that happens. When you part of what it means to be able to sneak through is you have to mouth these DEI slogans and all this other stuff that you're expressing agreement with ideas that you disagree with, like, nobody with intake, like, yes, 50 years ago, if you can get through on your own terms, like, do it. But if you're part of how you're being chosen and promoted is by saying, I agree with ideas that no good person should agree with. They're beyond redemption and it's a fantasy to think you can reform them from within. I do not believe it. And I think it's folly even to try at this point. Yeah, I think that's right. Rafael says, to my favorite thinkers, thanks, Rafael, Fred Hopper. I think the podcast, oh, I see. Okay. I think I fixed that. Justin, Don, what are your thoughts on Holland's Dominion? I don't know if you've read Dominion. Yeah. I haven't heard all of your comments, Iran. Have you done a whole show yet? I'm going to do a book. I'll say a few things, but Iran will probably have a really good definitive take. I mean, I think he's a really good writer. The book is really interesting. The scope of history he picks is enormous, but he picks some of the best things to focus in on. But I think he comes nowhere close to proving what he thinks he's proving, though part of what he's proving is really right. And this you have talked about, Iran. Yeah, you cannot understand the West if you don't take seriously that Christian ethics has saturated it even when people think, no, I'm completely secular or something like that. But where I think he's really wrong, and I have an essay about this at Earth, the idealism, or I think he's really wrong, is giving Christianity credit for the best parts of the West. I think that that is, let's put it way under argued in the book. And indeed, I think part of what he gives is some of the evidence for why that's not true. I mean, he even points out, for instance, that some of the good ideas that make up the West that Christianity takes credit for actually came from the Stoics. So like, yeah, they could in a sense get credit for being a transmission belt for those ideas. But even that is overstated. So my view is the book for what it's doing is a good book. But if you actually think that the history he covers supports giving Christianity credit for the best parts of the West, no, there's not at all. And I don't think he can claim that given that he does not really give an account of the Greek contribution. It's not that he says nothing about it, but he does not take seriously how profound what the Greeks did was. And which is particularly egregious given that he's a scholar of ancient history. He's a scholar of the Greeks and the Romans more than he is a scholar of Christianity. That's what he spent most of his career on is Greece and Rome. And what I find interesting is the he picks these periods in Christian history to talk about, which are fascinating. And he's a great I agree with you completely. He's a really wonderful writer. What I find interesting is the periods he picks not the ones he doesn't pick, right? What he chooses to ignore and the big one is the Renaissance, nothing on the Renaissance. Just as if it never happens. The other thing that he completely ignores is Plato's influence on Christianity. He wants all of Christianity to be attributable to Paul as a disciple of Jesus. But the reality is that much of Christianity is a consequence of Plato. At some point says Neoplaton has had an influence on Christians. It's much more than that. I mean, Christianity is Plato. I mean, and it's through and through not so much. And it's not maybe not as much in its altruism, which is the main thing he focuses on. But in its epistemology and it's in a lot of the way it views the world and they could never come up with a trinity without Plato. I mean, this idea of three things that are actually one, but no, they're actually three things and but they're one at the same time. And that requires real philosophical sophistication, which I mean, in a perverse way. So yeah, but I'm going to do a review of it. It's I need to do it soon, because otherwise I'll forget the the the concretes, but it is a very interesting attempt. I don't I mean, it's only that he's a good writer that it's getting so much attention, because it's actually not even the most powerful version of the argument that he thinks he's making a much better book. It's called The Birth of Modern Belief by a guy named Shagon, which is covering Oh, no, I'm actually mixing up with an even different book. Inventing the individual is the one that I thought was such a better. I can't see the author's name. Yeah. And it's but both of those like this is a well trotted territory. Yeah. And Holland's is the most entertaining historical book. But in turn, if you want the strongest argument, those two books I named, which I think Holland cites them, so he's a he's aware of them. But I think they're much better in terms of trying to turn it into a real argument. I still think it's completely wrong. But you can get, I think, a more sophisticated case for it from them. It's an important book. I mean, obviously, a lot of people are citing it and I and her CLE, it had a huge impact on her. Justin, how do you make yourself care about money more? How do you make yourself to make more money, I guess? Why would you be motivated to motivate yourself to care about money more? Because that's going to be the answer to the question. If it's, I don't care enough, and it's holding me back from the things I want in life, which like that can happen, you can be so uninterested in money that you find yourself, you know what, like, I can't pay my medical bills, like, and my health is falling apart, or, you know, I would like to spend more time with my friends, but I can't travel to see them. So whatever's prompting you to ask that question, that's the answer. It's reflecting the values that you want and can't have because you're not interested enough in money. I was never interested in money at all. Like, it was just so not on my hierarchy of values. And then it was much more, I was very late in my 20s before I recognized, I was like, there's so much really cool stuff I could do because I wasn't interested in things. But I, but the main thing for me was, man, I would be able to make, I would be able to optimize my career choices just for pure enjoyment if I wasn't worried about money. So let me make like, let me make more money, and then I'll be able to have, you know, this huge emergency fund. So if I'm not totally happy in my work, I'll quit. And yeah, it doesn't matter if I don't have an option for six months, I can keep looking and trying. Like, even if all you're optimizing is enjoyment of a career, having a lot of money really helps. Let's see, Justin, why should we listen to your career advice when you're not a billionaire? Well, I think that's a question you might hear. He's trying to distance himself from the question. Okay, fair enough. I mean, no, it's a perfectly good question. So first of all, you don't have to listen to my advice at all. But the, the, the second thing is a lot of what you're thinking about is what does success mean in a career? And certainly one aspect of success is the scale of like financial achievement. Like, and indeed I talk a lot about like, it's wrong to undervalue that. If a person's giving you career advice and they're broke, that's a problem. But what success in a career really means is a career that's fully fulfilling to you and contributes all of the vital, to all the vital values that you need in life. And I made a deliberate decision. Now, I'm not saying I could have become a billionaire. Very few people can. And very few people really would want to if they know what that involved, not just achieving the billions, but managing the billions and what it does to your life. It's not necessarily desirable. I think it's desirable for most people to be a millionaire, like legitimately, like we would be better off if we had 10 million bucks in the bank, having a billion dollars, probably not. That's a whole different ballgame. But no, what I'll say is I love my career. I've had really interesting jobs and really enjoyable jobs for many years. And how about this? I get to make a career writing and speaking on ideas. And, Yaron, do you even know what my degree is in? You have a degree? Yeah, I have a business, I have a BA in business from a night school. I have no credentials, but I view that as a selling point, which is like I made my way to the career I wanted, not by following some kind of clear cut path, but by just figuring out how to be really good at the thing I wanted to do. And so I think I've learned a lot about like, what really does it take to have a successful career? Because I don't think it is, hey, follow the rules that everybody lays out for you, and then you'll get some nice paying job that sounds really good to your mother-in-law, and that's what career success is. No, it's how do you identify what really you'll enjoy and how do you realize that? And that's something that I've done myself and I've helped a number of other people do. But if you still don't want to listen to me, that's fine. Doesn't hurt me at all. Justin says, specialist versus generalist when pursuing a career. I mean, I thought mostly about this in the context of intellectuals. I actually don't, I think it's often a phony division. A generalist is a specialist, but what they specialize in is integration. Now, to be a really good integrator of things, you better damn well have pretty well specialized in a few places. Iran is probably the best generalist that I know personally, but Iran, you're good at it in part because you really know finance. You know a lot about economics. You know a lot about philosophy. You know a lot about foreign policy. The idea that you just kind of like, yeah, I know a little bit about a lot. No, you know a lot about a number of things and a little bit about a lot. And that's what you need to be a good integrator. And so in a sense, I don't think that it's as big a division as people make it out to be. Though there is a difference. There's a book that I started and really liked, but have not been able to get through, which is maybe, Iran, you'll remember. It's a book by somebody Epstein on being a generalist. Yeah. The name is escaping me. So there's more to say on it, but I would say you need to specialize enough to develop really valuable skills and a knowledge base in something, but it doesn't have to be a kind of lifelong, super narrow area of specialization. And part of what will often happen is if you're very exploratory in your career, you'll spend two or three years doing this thing, two or three years doing that, and two or three years doing that. And then what you'll end up doing is figuring out a really interesting way to put them all together. And that's sort of what I did. I've never been a super specialist, but I would dive in and spend three years with Iran. We do morality of capitalism, then I did social security, then I did inequality, then we did finance, then I worked with Alex Epstein and energy. All the while I also had hobbies where I really studied marketing and I really studied kind of psychology and I put that together in a career doing coaching with AI, which now I'm running their marketing department. So like I've had a very kind of generalist exploratory career, but it was all made possible by being pretty specialized at any given point in time. Yep. And it depends on the person's interest and skills. I mean, some people are built to be specialists. They want to do one thing, they want to do it really well, and that's it. And other people are going to gravitate towards something that's more general. Thank God, I don't get it. I don't know how anybody could do the same thing for 10 years. I would go out of my mind. Joseph asks, please explain the idea of worthy in Iron Man's definition of self-esteem. On readings, Don Book, I understand more fully what she meant when she wrote that it is man's inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means is worthy of living. What exactly is self-worth? Well, I mean, look, here's the dictionary definition of worthy is a pretty good place to start. And it just says having or showing the qualities or abilities that merit recognition in a specified way, deserving effort, attention, or respect. It's the basic idea is not that you have happiness, but that you've earned it, you've achieved it. Think about a farmer who works for his crops. So he exerted the causes necessary to achieve the effects of the crops. And in doing so, that's how he deserved them. And the guy who walks along and goes, oh man, I wish I had some crops, I'm going to take his. Well, he's not deserving of them, he's not worthy of them. And so the whole idea is to achieve happiness and enjoy it, you have to think, yeah, I really earned it. I'm worthy of the good things that have come into my life and the good things that make up my life. And the worthiness comes ultimately from, yeah, because I enacted the causes necessary to get them. The one who put in the effort, I lived up to these moral standards. And so if you don't want to be the con man of your own soul, you have to think, yeah, I created in myself a character that I admire. I can look in the mirror and I'm proud to be that person. And it's indispensable to achieve any value and to really enjoy the achievement of any value. Yep, absolutely. All right, Shahzad, what is the unusual object under Don's copy of equal is unfair? Now, I'm gonna say it's a canova sculpture. Yeah, it's cupid and psyche, I think. It's cupid and psyche. It's the original is in the Louvre. Oh, this isn't the original, man, I got ripped off. You got ripped off. The original is bigger. What people should really ask about, though, is that framed A up there. Do you know what that is? Yeah, it looks like some mystical symbol. No, that was a handkerchief that was Ayn Rand's that a friend made for her. And I bought at auction. It's the only Ayn Rand memorabilia that I own yet. Because I'm not a billionaire. So I have not yet been able to get much more from the yeah, I don't have any Ayn Rand memorabilia. So no, I have a few things small. So Shahzad, I assume that's what you were asking about was the sculpture. So because that's under equal is unfair. But that is a beautiful sculpture that was made in the late 18th century, maybe early 19th. All right, talk about arts. Florida, Nick says, this is for Don, not for me. What are your favorite tool songs, albums? Can you explain what you like about them? What are the bands do you like? Great show of the energy between the U2 is great. Well, I won't give a super long answer to this, but I'll say briefly that what I like about about tool is I mean, I played guitar, and I just grew up on rock music. And what what I really loved about them is that there's an enormous amount of of just there's originality and creativity that goes into their songs that most most rock music follows. Like we have it's sort of like reading, you know, a detective novel, we have the formula. And here's our take on the formula. And that's fine. Cool. A lot of bands do that. Tool is doing what a composer does. We're not taking any formula. We're gonna we're gonna build something much larger scale and still have it integrated and connect and not just be arbitrary. And to me to see when bands can do that well, I'm very impressed. And they just have there's other bands who have done it well, like Rush and so on. But I don't like that style as much as what tool does. So I'm a favorite songs albums. The their their second album, while it's technically their their third enema is probably my favorite. But I find myself listening to their newest one the most but it may just be because I listened to the earlier ones so much so much. Yeah. Other bands. Oh, I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. There's a lot of different stuff I really really like. Actually, no, let me give I'm going to the I'm going to give an answer to that and be deliberately scandalous, but I'm forgetting their name right now. But I'll tell you the the band that I have been playing an absurd amount the last two weeks is Nickelback, the most hated band in the planet. Yeah, so I've just instantly and deliberately lowered everybody's opinion of me. You're on you have no clue how what the damage I've just done to my reputation. Okay, guys, you probably know what he's talking about. I have no idea. Thanks, Nick. Let's see. Justin says Don Great article on I and Hosea Lee. That's in Don Substack. Raphael, you're on mentioned that if you came all about politics then applying objectivism in your life, you still hold altruistic morality. This may be happening to me. How to change this and why is it so hard? Well, it's so hard because it takes effort to go out there and actually do something in life. It's really easy to sit around and in effect, politics can be the same the same sort of distraction that people have that they use video games for or alcohol for or any kind of other escape. Now I think politics is important and you're on you've been giving a class with on-car and current events for ARU. I knew I was going to get a lot from it. I've been blown away. It's one of the best courses I've ever heard. You guys are really doing some astonishing things, but part of what you make, both of you is a really powerful case on why be interested in politics. Part of the why is that a person should be interested in the world that they're living and functioning in, but if you're not living and functioning in that world then that's the fundamental problem you have to solve for. That's the thing is you have to go out there prioritize living your life. If I had that problem, it would be like the same advice I'd give to somebody who had a drinking problem, which is look for many people that can be a healthy part of their life that they occasionally have a glass of wine. Right now you have a problem. Maybe you can come back to one glass of wine a day at some point, but right now get it out of your life, go out there develop some healthy habits and make something of yourself. That's how I would think about it. Go cold turkey for three months and see what happens. And I'd recommend get Don's book. I think it'll provide you with the fuel, I think, necessary to go and pursue those values and pursue a life. At the end of the day that's what it's all about. Politics is interesting. It's important for living, but first you have to live, as Don said. Oops, what did I do? A boy says, how do I keep motivated, focused with an 18 month old kid? What makes you think you can? The funny thing is I didn't find that hard. I found it hard when there were two of them. Yeah, two of them was definitely us. It wasn't double. It was like triple to work. Your kids were young at a crazy point in your life, if I recall correctly. No, I think part of what you want to work out, if your husband or wife is still in the picture, part of what you want to do is come up with an integrated plan so that each of you can have pockets of focus. And it's not going to be, hey, 12 hours of pure focus and then I'll come home and pat the kid on the head. But you need to come up with an arrangement if you can where you can build pockets of focus of, all right, hey, I have three to five hours or whatever it is. If you can only get 90 minutes, you get 90 minutes, but like pockets of focus and you have to treat it like any other distraction. And unfortunately, it's a very demanding distraction and a really adorable distraction. So it's really hard to navigate, but look, people do it. And what's astonishing is how many even single parents are able to do it. And you have to look at it like any other challenge of dealing with a distraction. Distraction, I don't mean as a negative thing. Often some of the biggest distractions are positive things in our lives. How productive are people when they're falling in love? Like that's a really hard time to navigate, right? Because your mind is just in another place. And when you have a young kid like that, your mind is often going to be in another place. And so the general category is how do you manage distractions in your life? And there's a lot to say on that. But the biggest thing or at least a thing that I think is very simple is you just make a plan for what is my plan to be distraction free for this time. And if you work at home, that can be particularly challenging. I work at home and have dealt with that. But it can be done particularly again, if you have support from a partner. I used to spend my focus. The time that I needed to do focused work was basically 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. And then I would go to sleep. So I would take care of the kid when they woke up in the middle of the night. And my wife took over in the morning and I'd sleep in. So you modify your routines in order to create the time that you need. Yeah. And if somebody hears that, I think those stories are really important. So this wasn't to deal with kids. But when I wrote my novel, I was working with Alex Epstein and helping raise a family. And I was a busy dude. And so what I did is I wanted to write a novel. And so instead of going, oh, I don't have time to write a novel, I made the time. I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning and I wrote until the kids woke up at like 7 or whatever it was. And that's what made it happen. And so many people say they want to do things and then they'll give you all of the excuses in the world. And they might sound like really good excuses. But okay, cool. You've just justified not living the life you want to live. Good for you. My view is I'm never going to tolerate not living the life that I live if it's at all under my control. And yeah, if I have to stay up all night, that's what I'm going to do to live the kind of life. And hopefully to get to a more sustainable place. Thankfully, kids grow up and they get easier might not be the best way to put it. It's different. But it's a kind of difference that tends to leave you more time for focused work. I will say that. Yeah. All right, Richard says marketing has come up a couple of times today. What is the best way to market objectivism beyond Rand's work? Well, the question is, are you asking as a movement or as an individual? And because those are I think two different questions. And as an individual, is it as an individual who's making it your career? Or as an individual who is going about your life and just wants to help? And I think those are different. I mean, I think most people undervalue that frankly, the most impactful thing most people can do to market objectivism is to support the Iran Institute. And since I'm on Iran show, supporting Iran too is not bad. But as somebody with a vested interest in AI and but who like it, when you give money to AI that's putting more Iran books in people's hands, it's educating the next generation of Iran's and Don's and the people who make their living around spreading and Iran's ideas. Like there's just there's there's just nothing else that you as an individual can do that's this high leverage as putting it in the hands of people who specialize in spreading Iran's ideas. Now, there is a larger question is AI have the right strategy? And what else besides AI needs to be happening is my AI's view of our strategy is not we're the only thing that has to happen. We're training the people who are going to go out and do things like what Alex Epstein is doing, what Adam Mossoff is doing, what people like Greg Samiri are doing. So there's a lot to be done. But if you think about just fundamentally, the most important thing is get Iran's books out there and have intellectuals who are highly capable of using objectivism as a framework and capable of making an impact in whatever way they judge is best for their particular goals. And AI is at the center of all that. So like that should be the default. And then you'd have to have a really high threshold for doing something other than supporting AI if your goal was to spread objectivism. I agree with that. I mean, at the end of the day, individual intellectuals change the world. And in supporting the creation of more and more and more intellectuals. That's how you're going to change the world. It's the number one way to market ideas. Ideas are spread by people who deal with ideas. If you look at every other movement, they have been successful by doing that, by having intellectuals who are impactful, wait, speak, wait and speak. That's about all you can do. All right. Daniel, any comments on Robert Sapolsky's new book Determined? I haven't read that. What I have been reading is there's a book by Kevin Mitchell, Free Agents. And I haven't finished it yet. But Kevin Mitchell wrote a really good book called A Nate. He's a neuroscientist. And what his free agents is arguing is it's making a case for free will, for real free will from a biological perspective. And if you look online, he debates, I'm blanking out on the guy's name you just mentioned, he debates Sapolsky on a podcast that'll come up on YouTube if you search Kevin Mitchell and his name. And it's a really interesting debate. I think you want to, and Mitchell's take on free will, his approach to it. Again, I'm not through his book yet. But part of what's interesting is his view of biology is very, very much one that is, it's striking how objective it is in this sense. He's not the only scientist. A lot of biologists now speak in our terms about the way in which living organisms are goal directed, teleological towards self preservation. What Harry Benzwinger wrote about in the late 70s in the biological basis of teleological concepts has found a lot of new adherence. And not that they necessarily got it from Harry, but they have adopted that kind of perspective about, you can't understand life except through a teleological lens of organisms engaging in self maintenance. And that's kind of his springboard for launching into how can creatures who are so constituted and driven by natural selection to be this way, how could they evolve into beings that can regulate the functioning of their own consciousness. So that's kind of where he's headed for it. But I really encouraged people to look up that debate, but I haven't read his interlocutor myself. So I can't respond to his kind of take on free will. Which I should say, by the way, his book came out after my book was essentially about to be published. So if it had come out earlier, I'm sure I would have engaged with it. Yeah, directly. I wasn't evading it. It just didn't exist. All right. Adam says, late to the show tonight. So a watch of start. Thanks for your work on atheism lately. Thanks. Thanks, Adam. Wesley, you said before the greed is good. Is the desire for power over other people a noble impulse? No, which one? Which one of us said even greed is good? Yeah, I don't know that we're, you know, in the right context, greed is good, but you know, you have to specify a context. Yeah. But no, I mean, look, I mean, this is well tread territory in the sense of both of us believe that motivation for power over others is a completely corrupt motivation. It's a central point in Ayn Rand's novels. It's the character of wine in the fountainhead and we get plenty of different versions of it in Atlas Shrugged. But there's always a question of like, what's worth achieving in life when somebody says I want power over others and they usually won't quite admit it, right? Why? Why? And there's no answer to that question. You can give a kind of psychological diagnosis in terms of an answer, but there's no real answer. No, what you want is to create amazing things worth creating and share those and share your life with people, with fellow creators. Right. Wesley says, well, no, that was Wesley. Oh, it was Fael says, QS, which sculpture's paintings Don has at home other than the Canova? Not as many as I would like because, A, I haven't had a home until the last year. Like we were always living in apartments and so on. But and so my walls are unfortunately more bare than I'd like. But I mean, I would say in gent, like, I don't think my taste would be too surprising to anybody who knows object of this. I'm not as schooled in the visual arts as I am in other areas like literature and music. And even there, I don't feel like I'm particularly deep in terms of knowledge of, you know, what the alternatives are. Um, probably the most controversial thing is I really love Van Gogh. Um, I just think like the use of color and not everything he does, but certain things he does just brings alive the world with color that I really like. But in general, you know, I like, I like big, bold, heroic art. I like very sensual art is particularly I'm a big fan of. So both in sculpture and paintings, I'm more inclined to women being depicted than men and that that's probably like the category that I'm most attracted to in terms of the art that I would actually put up in my home. So if you think about somebody like Bujaro, it's going to be, he's going to be big in part because he's much more interested in beautiful females than strong, heroic males. All right. Justin says, how do you know if you need coaching versus therapy? There's not a super simple answer to it. But the more that what you're looking for is sort of like, Hey, I'm just pursuing this goal. And I want somebody to help me like, or I, or I'm pursuing success in a defined realm. And I want somebody to help me think through what I want and overcome obstacles. The more that you're in the coaching realm, the more that you're kind of dealing with the, the, a kind of developmental, like how did I come to form these goals or I'm engaging kind of self-sabotaging behavior or so on. I mean, honestly, in most cases, I'd probably start with a therapist, unless it was a very defined sort of concrete thing. So like, if I'm trying to grow my business for $1 million to $10 million in revenue, then I probably want to coach who has helped businesses, entrepreneurs grow their businesses from $1 to $10 million in revenue. But like, that's probably going to be more effective. If I'm struggling with like, what do I want out of my career and my good place in life? Sometimes a coach can be helpful for those kinds of things, but I'd probably start with a therapist, because most likely there's deeper issues going on. And if the therapist, I worked with them for a while and they said, look, no, you're fine. You're totally healthy. You're just in a hard place in life. Then I might turn to a coach. But that's sort of how I think about it. If it's narrow and specific and there's a coach who specializes, but if I'm thinking about like, I want generic life coaching, no, I'd probably start with therapy and then you can, if a therapist signs off on it, you can look at something more in the coaching realm. Justin says best time management system. Always very personal. I've seen people try everything and respond to every different thing. And I notice in my own life, I respond to different things at different times. Essentially, what I found is I don't respond well to time management things. I have two tools. Number one is, there's a book by Brian Tracy called Eat That Frog. And you all have to buy the book because the main piece of advice is right there in the title. The idea is, take your most important, scariest, biggest task of the day, get it done first, and then the rest of the day is gravy. And I still use that a lot of the time today. The other thing is my way of functioning is I get really obsessed with something. And so my biggest problem is not how do I kind of put in the time, but how do I stop doing it so that I can attend to the other things in my life, which isn't really a time management problem. It's more like a self-control problem. But that's how like people ask, oh, you must be good at time management. You write so many books. No, I'm just really bad at not writing. So that that's the thing. But the main thing is realize there is no best system. There is only the system that is that can that resonates with you now. Justin Oss says, thoughts on Stephen Hicks and bitter debate. It was a complete mistake to debate. It was shocking how bad Hicks's arguments were because I I think well of him in certain ways. His book on postmodernism, it's not perfect. And indeed, it's outrageous because he gives he gives Inran's analysis of Kant as if it were his. He does not cite her, which that like the fact that he has not been called out on that by anybody publicly as that is such an egregious act of cowardice and of taking ideas without credit that you get a black mark from hell in my book just for that. But I admire his ability to communicate philosophic ideas clearly and excessively that he is good at, at least in writing and speaking, you can't listen without falling asleep. But his arguments were so bad, which makes Craig's inability to answer them with a decisive death blow as embarrassing and shameful. So the whole thing was a disaster from beginning to end. It could have been worse. I thought Craig did better than I expected him to do. But no, I thought the whole thing was an embarrassment and illustrated why we would never do it and why like the whole issue is it illustrates either that you're not interested in you don't have a serious interest in objectivism and taking objectivism seriously, which is more the Hicks side. Or you're just out of your depth and don't know what you're doing, which is the Biddle side. I don't know if I'm allowed to speak out on that issue, but that's that's my view. I think given given your views, you're fine. I hope University of Austin in Texas will be more than just anti-woke. I think we all do. Last question, I think if somebody comes up with something, ignoring Peterson's Jordan Peterson's politics and theology, are his self-help advice good? Well, let me so let me say this. Let's take Jordan Peterson before he went on his drug binge and disappeared. Since he's come back, I can't listen to him. He's he's become an angry, bitter, sad, radically religious person. He's a shadow of his former self. So let's take him before that when I thought he was much better in certain ways. I think his fundamental ideas have always been a mess. There's always been parts of them that I think are really evil and bad. And and and yeah, at a fundamental level, that's true. But even at a self-help level, I mean, he he's come out against masturbation, for instance, and to put that on the young men that he's giving advice to that they should feel guilty for that is so vicious and evil that anything any other good stuff in him, I take with a grain of salt. But that said, he's a mixed bag is what you could say at the level of self health advice. He says some good things. And he often says them incredibly eloquently, more eloquently than I could ever say anything I agreed with. And that's an admirable skill. And he I think has had a positive effect on some people. He's given them some sort of positive where they had nothing before. And he pushes back against some bad ideas and often courageously and effectively. So he is a mixed bad in that bag in that sense. But where he's bad, he is so bad that it's hard for me to hold a positive opinion of him, even if there's aspects of him that I really like. I mean, when Jordan Peterson came out, I was the first person to tell you about him, Iran. I was really excited by him. And you and Iran, you and on car and I were walking, I said, Have you heard of this guy? You're like, No, I said, Yeah, you should look into him. I've probably listened to 1000 hours of Jordan Peterson over the years, like I put in the time and nobody can accuse me of not knowing what I'm I even read most of his first book, which very few people have. But no, there's the bad stuff in there is really bad. So if somebody tells me they've gotten positive stuff from him, I get it. And I'm not saying don't listen and don't try to find those gems. But as a as a guide to life, the he what his views are deeply antithetical to what you need to live a life, that is, he's not teaching you how to pursue happiness. He's pushing against happiness. He's not what he's good at is pushing against some bad ideas and telling people who are not doing anything with their lives to do something with their lives. That's about it. All right, so we got two, one question, one comment. We almost three hours. So all right. Do you like Frank Rosetta art or Boris Vallejo? I don't know the names. Like I said, I'm I'm not they're both they're both fantasy artists. They they they do this fantasy but realistic art. I don't consider it. It's more like illustration posters. I don't I don't think it's great art. And Rue Downs says, Don, if you like Van Gogh, the immersive experiences was a fun way to see his art. I did it. I did not like that actually. No, let me take that back. I I thought it was really interesting. And it was a fun experience. I did not find it to be an aesthetic experience. That that's what I would say that I it was like, you know, going out having a great time and I liked it. I'm glad it exists. It's gotten people out of the house and thinking about art a little bit. But it's not the kind of experience I've gotten looking at a Van Gogh painting. It's just not. All right, this has been great. And we've literally gone two hours and 40 minutes. It's pretty amazing. All right. Thanks, Don. Thanks, you guys. Thanks all the superchatters. We are I'll see you guys tomorrow. I think it's 1 p.m. East Coast time. I'll see Don sometime. We need to chat about a few things. So we'll connect soon. You know where to find that. Have a great night. Bye. And congratulations on the book.