 The Radical, Fundamental Principles of Freedom, Rational Self-Interest, and Individual Rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday, February 2nd. It's Iron Man's birthday. Happy birthday, Iron Man. This morning I did the math book. I said 117. No, no, it's 118. She's one year older. So, wow. 118 years if she were alive. I don't know, I go back and forth between whether I want, I wish she was alive. I think that would be amazing and phenomenal. On the other hand, seeing the world, some of the stuff that's going on in the world today. I'm not sure how happy she would be about it. But yes, it would be amazing if she was alive. We would all be better off. All right. I'm excited today. We've got Gina Golan on. Hi, Gina. Hi, very happy to be here. Gina's been on the show before, but she is now in Austin, Texas. She is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. She's one of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many objectivists who now live in Austin. It's become the center of the universe for objectivists. It's exciting. It's exciting to visit this. So how are you, how are you liking Austin? It's everything I hoped it would be. Namely the objectivist pod, as you know. And yeah, and a place where I can, well, we can still afford a larger place for our now two children. Yes. Even more important than Austin, Gina just had her second child. So mother. Mother. That is super exciting. And in spite of that, which just happened like two weeks ago, right? Something like that. It's three now. Three weeks ago. I agreed to be here. So I hope you guys all, all appreciate that. And if she. Sleep in between questions. You're all. No, I'm excited. And I'm sure we'll get, we're going to get a, a lot of interesting questions across the board. But I thought we'd start at least with a conversation about entrepreneurship. It's something you've been working on quite a bit and you've got a substack called building the builders. And a podcast, which is called founders mindset podcast. You get, they can find that on, I guess, any podcast app, Apple, whatever you can find these things. So we'll talk about that. But of course you guys can ask questions about anything. I'm not sure we can answer questions about anything, but, but you can, you can ask and certainly anything in psychology. Gina is prepared to at least attempt to answer. See what else I need to tell you guys. I think that's, I think that's it. Oh yeah. We do have a little running competition between my guests who come on to see who can raise the most money with the super chat who get, who, who can raise the most money with, with the questions. I think Adam Mosseff is in the lead. I think he just went past Nikos. So I'll keep you guys, I'll keep you guys abreast of how we're doing in terms of, in terms of that. But in the meantime, we haven't even said a word. And, and the, the questions are coming in. All right. So we'll see, we'll see how this goes. All right. So what gets you interested in entrepreneurship and from, you know, as a psychologist, what's what, what excites you about this in particular? Yeah. It was a confluence of things, but I can say in essence that I realized that this is where I have my most unique value proposition, that this is a group of people who, by the nature of what they're trying to do, they're trying to do really ambitious things for which there's no playbook, right? They're by definition, they're trying to disrupt existing norms and procedures and expectations, right? They're trying to do things in new ways. And that comes with inherent psychological challenges, many of which are of the sort that we treat as clinical psychologists, right, in contexts where someone is struggling with depression or anxiety or, you know, attentional issues, but whether or not they meet criteria for a mental health problem, the fact that they're entering this realm of incredible risk, right, incredible uncertainty and trying to do something really independent and new, they're going to encounter the whole heap of psychological challenges. And my colleagues in psychology don't tend to care about them as a group, right, as a population, because, well, those, you know, spoiled rich kids who are just trying to make money and who are successful and like they're not one of our identified, you know, high need underserved populations. And one of the points I've actually been making to my fellow psychologists is they're very much an underserved population. They're among the most underserved populations with respect to the tools that we've developed, you know, our science of psychological well-being. We don't focus on the most ambitious. We leave them, you know, kind of by the silence, even though you can make a case to anyone who cares about humanity, you can make the case that if you want to have your, the biggest impact on humanity on the good of mankind, you should be working with entrepreneurs because they're the ones for better or worse who are going to affect what we spend our days, you know, what devices we use and what, how we interface with the world and with each other and how long we live and, you know, all the things that actually affect our day-to-day quality of life. So like it or not, you know, this is a way to have massive impact. And most psychologists just kind of look down on, you know, on profit making, right, that as a kind of professional focus. And so, so I've realized that this is where I can, this is where my professional training and my philosophical and moral orientation meet. And this is where I can offer something really distinctive. So that's an answer I haven't been able to give as explicitly elsewhere. So I'm, you know, that's a great answer. And it's really interesting. I mean, it's, it's another place in which altruism kind of shapes the culture, the areas in which psychologists are interested in are going to be, where there's the greatest core need rather than need in terms of people really challenged in suffering rather than need in terms of what can enhance your potential the most, what can, what can bring out the best in yourself as possible. So it's Exactly. Exactly. To the good of all, right? Because that's a win-win proposition. It's similar to the school system that it spends a lot of time and a lot of money on kids that are behind. Right. And if there was no resources to kids that could go, could go zooming ahead and could enhance their lives and everybody else's lives, but the school system is not going to, not going to help them and not going to support them. It's the same thing, really. Yeah. So, you know, do you find that, that the kind of people who become entrepreneurs, what is their attitude to psychologists? Because I just reflect back on myself at 20 or 22 or 20. I mean, your entrepreneurs might be even younger. I don't know. But in my 20s, I would have poo pooed the whole, I mean, what the hell the, you know, what the hell is the psychologist going to tell me? I know exactly what. Right. I'm creating, I'm building. How do you, how do you actually find clients in a sense? And how do you get them to slow down for a minute and to value what you have to offer? Because it's so hard to gain perspective when you're young and to value these things. Yeah. So it's interesting. A lot of that work has been done for me. Just within Silicon Valley culture. And I would say even more broadly, just like kind of within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I often hear that as a buzzword, you know, within those circles, a lot of buzzwords. But there's a lot of, there's been this kind of swelling of interest in self-care and in, you know, meditation and mindfulness and executive coaching and wellness, caring for yourself and for your own mental health as a concomitant of being able to care for your business and for your team. And so that's already in the air. And that's been really nice to kind of come in and build on where what I find is missing from that discourse, if you will, is this connection, this kind of, these more explicit connections between the moral sanction that you need as an entrepreneur for what you're doing, right? The inspiration that, you know, psychology isn't just about getting to limping. It's not just about, you know, not getting burnt out and not dying from severe imposter syndrome and, you know, and just an overwork, but it's also about building a positive conception of yourself. It's about developing your virtues, right? It's about deciding very consciously who you want to be and building yourself just as intentionally as you build your company and your company culture, right? And that your company culture starts with you. And some of the ways that I challenge my clients, I think are more heterodox, if you will, are less familiar to them relative to other coaches they've worked with or therapists who work with founders, because there are plenty of people in that space. Though again, far fewer than for any other population and certainly are less sort of scientifically grounded, but that's the new part for them, I would say. So how do you differentiate and how do they differentiate between kind of psychology and self-help, which is, I mean, there's tons of self-help out there. And what is the difference between the two? I would say it's not that clearly differentiated at all, either within entrepreneurship or within psychology because we have a lot of kind of muddy distinctions that are partly based in some kind of conceptual need to distinguish. So for example, the distinction between a coach and a therapist, which I've been having many conversations with my own clients, with people who are asking about my work, like what is the difference? Because sometimes I brand myself as a coach, sometimes as a therapist, and sometimes I'm referring people for one versus the other. And when asked what the difference is, what I can say most clearly actually doesn't well down to any real conceptual distinction, so much as a regulatory one, that if you want to be able to work with someone outside the states where you have formal licensure as a trained psychologist, then you have to call yourself something else because I'm not allowed to do therapy with anyone outside of New York or now Texas. Oh, okay. I'm totally forbidden. But I can coach. Anyone can coach. You know, you could hang a shingle as a coach and you could start coaching and you can charge whatever you want. Yeah. You can do whatever you want and nobody's going to ask anybody. You can't, what you can't do is reimburse insurance. Whereas when I'm working with someone as a therapist, they can at least submit receipts. I'm out of network with their insurance companies, but they can at least get some partial reimbursement because then it's a medical service. So that's honestly what's driven a lot of the distinctions that we kind of hear about. Whereas conceptually, I would say it's a lot muddier and I'm still trying to decide what I think about the differences. Like when do you actually go, when do you see a specialist and what kind of a specialist do you see depending on the nature of your struggles? I've written an article that sort of touches on this. What is it? Now the builder's guide to finding a therapist. I think it's called, it's on that sub stack. But a lot of it comes down to use your own judgment, trial and error, kind of talk to people and see what they're about because both across and within these different fields, there's so much variability and people don't really have a clear idea of what these terms mean. So how did you find this? I mean, how do you find clients? How did you find this particular specialization, I guess, or niche? Yeah, sure. So at the beginning, I was interested in it largely as an aspiration because A, I was married into the startup world, through Matt, who some of you are familiar with, he's my husband and who is, you know, on the founding team of higher ground education. And I kind of watched their journey to founding higher ground and heard about a lot of the, you know, trials and tribulations and had other friends who I really admired, you know, Keith Schacht and, you know, and Doug Peltz and their incredible, you know, ventures and kind of just others whose story I was following as they went through the Silicon Valley, you know, kind of process and internalized that mindset, which I just really admired and which really felt congruent with a lot of the moral psychology I was developing within my work. And then COVID happened and I was really, I was trying to think kind of more intentionally about how do I want to brand myself? This was also the point in my career where I was really ready to just do whatever it is I want to do and be more independent about my brand, if you will. And around that time, I managed to network my way into connecting with a startup incubator that's actually in Europe called Entrepreneur First. That's sort of like the Y Combinator, you know, of Europe, but they have a very specific model where they set you up with a co-founder. So they're working with really, really early stage, basically promising high potential wannabe founders, if you will. And they try to groom them and coach them through the process of very rapidly iterating on ideas and getting set up with a complimentary co-founder and then pitching them, because they're also a VC, they're also investors, so pitching them on the idea and then a subset of them goes on, you know, to be a seed or pre-seed company, and then the EF helps them to, you know, go up for a bigger round of funding and so on. And they found me kind of through mutual connections and through an article I wrote on the art and science of self-creation. And then I got to coach hundreds of them in a very short time frame through the pressure cooker of this eight week program where they had to try to find a co-founder and basically, you know, build something out of nothing, right? Go from zero to one. And that was my bootcamp. I learned so much about the early stage founding journey and about all the, you know, a lot of the terminology and a lot of the hurdles and like what does imposter syndrome actually look like on the ground when you're pitching, when you have mentors, but you know that those mentors are also gonna be deciding whether to invest in you and do you talk to, you know, do you level with them or do you try to present a really, you know, kind of rosy colored version of what's really happening on the ground, you know, how much customer development do you do? How closely do you adhere to EF's own frameworks given that you're trying to build something new? So if the recipe already existed, someone would have already done it. So you've got to also, you know, be willing to disrupt even this paradigm, even while you're, you know, trying to impress these talent investors and so on. So that was where I really hit the ground running. And then since then, lots of referrals, I've also got a connection through Keith to Andreessen Horowitz, which now has a seed fund for, you know, early seed fund. So from there, you know, I've started to build some momentum. So what are you seeing in terms of what would you say is psychologically common to entrepreneurs? What makes somebody an entrepreneur? I think, I mean, what makes them an entrepreneur is that they're taking a real credible stab at founding a venture backed company or even more broadly doesn't have to be a venture backed company. You know, I think there's a broader and a narrower sense of the term entrepreneur, right? And entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial, where I think of the adjective entrepreneurial as like universal, right? Like we can all do with a more entrepreneurial approach to life, whereas an entrepreneur in the narrower sense of, you know, someone who is starting something new through venture backed, you know, through the backing of investors who believe in them and taking a big risk on a vision, right? For the future that needs to make a lot of money in order to ultimately succeed. So what psychologically is necessary for somebody to be that, to be able to do that? Not, I mean, a lot of people are not entrepreneurs. Right. Most people, myself included at least, you know, at the present time. Sounds like you're pretty much an entrepreneur anyway. I'm kind of, you know, drinking it in as I go. Yeah. But so, I mean, I've written, this has been a way what my whole sub-stack is about, sort of like, what are the ingredients, right? Like what makes a builder and more specifically, you know, what makes a successful founder. And some of the ingredients I've identified that have sort of floated to the top as really being differentiating, I would say one is what I've been referring to a self-trust as this kind of fundamental conviction. And it's somewhere in the interface between, you know, what Rand refers to as self esteem and as honesty. And it's definitely, it's got close relationships to a lot of kind of objectivist, like virtues and cardinal values. But I mean something pretty specific by it psychologically, which is that you, in effect, find yourself credible in the same sort of way that you might, you know, find a leader or a boss or supervisor, a mentor credible to varying degrees, right? Like you would follow them into war or not, right? Or you would follow them into, you know, a small scale invasion, but you wouldn't like follow them into a nuclear war because they're not quite, you know, they haven't quite proven themselves to that. You know, so this is actually a continuum on which you could really vary. And like you could be doing pretty well on your self-trust to a point, you know, but it sort of sets a limit on just how big and bold a venture you can credibly pursue and hold yourself accountable and stay motivated. So it's kind of the felt conviction, this internalized conviction, not just a, you know, purely floaty intellectual, but like felt conviction that, yeah, I can trust myself not to fall off the rails. I can trust myself to stay accountable to reality while I pursue a venture this big or this complex. Like, you know, I will catch myself if I start BSing. I will notice the signals. If it's not work, you know, I will continue to pay attention to, you know, if like 20, if 20 months in, we still are no closer to product market fit. I will notice that and I will iterate on that and not just keep telling myself a story that conveniently allows me to, you know, waste more time. How many of these entrepreneurs are aware of that? Or you may know where. Self-aware, hold it as I trust myself to do the right thing or I trust myself. I mean, That's often not that explicit at all. In fact, I would say the ones that I have ascribed the highest self-trust to the ones that I would assess as having, you know, as being exemplars of this, rarely are that introspective about it in my, you know, observation, some of them. I mean, so like Ben Horowitz, like there are a few entrepreneurs, there's entrepreneurial types who've written about it and they've really self-reflected on their own psychological journeys and they're sort of archetypes for me and I draw on them heavily. But I would say by and large, those for whom it's kind of all native in the sense that I think they've been practicing this from early on, they got a good, you know, maybe some of them went to Montessori schools or, you know, they had a really good kind of early formative experiences to just internalize this. They're probably the least aware of it because it's, it doesn't come up as an issue for them. They're just in action mode. They're just kind of getting it done, you know, but though, but all the rest who are struggling with this, I think that's partly why it's so hard to understand that this can be like, why can't I be as confident as these people, you know, or kind of what are they drinking? What do they have that I lack? And that's what I'm trying to help articulate. So you get to help them trust themselves more or do you get them to just realize, you know, to make it explicit in a sense of both, I guess. It really depends on the founder. And I would say probably more of the former, because almost everyone I've worked with could stand to develop and bolster their self-trust at least a little bit, given, I mean, and partly it's a selection bias of who comes to me, right, for help, right, for coaching. Like if they're, if they're full steam ahead and, you know, firing all cylinders, whatever metaphors we want to use, doing great, not encountering sort of friction or internal resistance or obstacles, I probably won't hear from them, you know, until and unless they do encounter, until they kind of hit their barrier, right, their sound barrier. So think of it as I'm helping people break their sound barrier, wherever that is. And so if they're hitting their sound barrier, often part of the problem is that they don't have the requisite self-trust quite yet. So self-trust, what else would you consider part of this builders mindset? Yeah. So, well, a builders mindset, that's sort of how I've tried to conceptualize the whole mixture, by which I mean a really causal and I mean, fundamentally selfish perspective on life and values and work, right? Where they're approaching everything they do from that, take what you want and pay for it mentality, right? I think that phrase sums it up as well as anything I could ever say, right? But that's what I'm trying to sort of cash out, that it's not about proving themselves worthy to anyone because, you know, like that's a kind of settled issue implicitly, right? Like of course it's worth living my fullest and best life. And why is that even a question, right? It's not about patching up some sort of hole in their, you know, self-esteem or in their kind of need fulfillment. It's not about kind of getting rid of a fear, right? They're not primarily on a kind of avoidance of pain, avoidance of fear mindset. It's not about some arbitrary standard that they're trying to live up to because, you know, it's kind of clamoring in their heads. It's really just about something they've envisioned building, right? Like I really want this to exist in the world. And I'm really thinking in a reality-based way about like, what's that actually going to take? And it's between me and reality, right? There's no, there aren't these kind of artificial intermediaries of like, okay, but it's like, but what would mom say about that? Or what would this big name investor say about that even, right? From like the fundamental standpoint of that's not going to weigh in their judgment of what's true. It might matter for, you know, if they really want funding from that investor, because that's part of what it takes to build it, but it's not epistemically factoring into their judgment. So, so that's huge. And so that covers a lot of ground actually. That's, you've got first-handedness in there and you've got, you've got the kind of first principles thinking in there of really being able to formulate and to make identifications independently, but not just any identifications, but like pretty deep ones, right? Like being able to see something that most people aren't seeing and it not be BS. So I think Peter Thiel writes about this as, right? Like you have to be, you have to have a belief that is both contrarian and important and right or something like that. That's kind of the recipe. Something important true that most people disagree with you about. And that's really hard. So how do you, how do you contrast kind of this mindset, the mindset that entrepreneurs seem to have with, I guess you've talked about kind of a drill soldier mentality or a Zen master mindset, what are those and how do they contrast with the, with the builders mindset? Yeah. Yeah. So these are the easier ones to introduce because everybody's to some extent at least familiar with one or both. Yeah. So the drill sergeant is the internal. Critic is the voice of constant, you know, censure the, I'm never good enough. What the hell are you doing? Get up. You lazy, you know, so and so get back to work. What's, you know, like the, the kind of internal bully or the tiger mother, which probably is no longer PC, you know, whichever stereotype we want to use, right? But we all know it like it's that. So kind of the, is it also a duty premise, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, philosophically, that's, it's, yeah, it's day and tall. It's Kant. Like, but most people, you know, don't know Kant as well as they know their own, you know, Jewish or Catholic mother. I always get in trouble when I use those stereotypes. Not all Jewish or Catholic mothers are like this anymore. It's a good stereotype. It actually works. I'm a Jewish mother, technically speaking. And I aspire to be very different. Jewish and name only exactly. But the point is what, these are all stereotypes. None of them are, you know, a real, like accurate identifications of a group of people in the world who are all identically act this way. But the stereotype gets at something real, right? That we've all in some form encountered and more importantly, that lives in many of our heads because we internalize that duty premise. We internalize that voice of, of punishment and censure where we are, one way that I see it psychologically show up is it's like, we're a means to some other end, right? Like I'm, I can be happy after I've achieved X. Like I can't worry about that now because first I have to prove myself worthy of happiness by getting into Harvard or by getting this, you know, promotion or by, you know, achieving this much funding or whatever the case, right? The standards you can fill them in by being a good enough objectivist because I see this all the time among objectivists who are absolutely not exempt from it. In fact, probably, you know, it can sometimes show up even stronger. I've seen some of the worst manifestations I've seen have been among objectivists. I'm just going to put that out there because objectivism is a very demanding philosophy and it comes with a bunch of prescriptions that are very easy to digest it through this kind of dantological, you know, duty like form, right? To digest them not the way they're intended or the way they actually integrate or hang together, but just to kind of have them replace whatever you had there before as a kind of frozen mandate for, by which to judge yourself, right? Instead of being a good Catholic, you have to be a good objectivist and it's just as disconnected from your actual needs from your, from what's going to bring you joy, you know, from what's actually realistic, right? So that's the drill sergeant. The drill sergeant is mean and ultimately views you as a means to whatever arbitrary end. And then on the other side, we have the Zen master and the Zen master is a kind of reaction to the drill sergeant. I've come to understand that, largely the Zen master gets its inspiration from stoicism, though not exclusively, you know, you see him show up in various guises across different. Silicon Valley. That's the, that's the popular, the latest fad into master's come I'm showing. Yeah. And you see it. It rises. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's not like pure perfect stoicism and I don't want any of the philosophers in the crowd, you know, I mean, feel free to correct me on this, but what I'm not saying is it's just stoicism and disguise because, you know, it's got, it's a hybrid, but it's what's real for people today. I think as a kind of motivating premise and perspective. And in effect, it's this defensive detachment. It's this stance of, I mean, so we hear it come up in the form of, for example, it's about the journey, not the destination. It's about the process, not the outcome. Right. It's about the effort, not the outcome. Right. And there's a lot of sound and wise judgment, I think baked into a lot of those, you know, edicts, right? Or a lot of that perspective where you're trying to help somebody to really focus on the work, to really, you know, to develop a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset about developing their skills. Right. But it often comes in a baked in or what also comes baked in with it is this deemphasis on outcomes and on the actual final cause, right? On the actual why of what you're doing and the thing you're trying to build. Right. It's all, it's like, if you were to say to an architect, and this is the example I use in my build, the builders mindset piece, it's like, if you said, well, it doesn't matter if ultimately, you know, you can't control earthquakes and, you know, various weather events. And I mean, maybe your building will crumble and everyone in it will perish within a year. But, you know, you should focus on what you can control. Just, you know, lay brick on brick. And don't worry about if it collapses and kills everything. Like what? That would be incoherent, right? As a perspective for a builder. And it's, but I think it's actually the same mindset when you tell someone, you know, it doesn't matter if you fail, it's just about doing your best. Like, well, if it doesn't matter if you fail, how much do you care about succeeding? Like how much does this actually matter to you as an outcome? If you're not focused on getting it, right? And so there's this weird disconnect that you see in the other direction where there's all of this kind of detachment from outcomes at the cost of genuine motivation toward the outcome. Because I see it then, you know, the way this often manifests with founders that, you know, who come to me is they have this team with which they've really emphasized work-life balance and self-care. And, you know, we want a happy team. We want a culture of wellness. And then they find themselves with a culture of equity. And then their hands are tied. Why are they leaving at five? And why do they not seem bothered when none of their OKRs, you know, got met by the end of it? And we keep shifting all the targets. And like, how is this just not bothering them, right? Like, we're just, you know, reflexively on this. We're like, we're always here into the late hours. And we just sort of assumed that they would see that and, you know, that somehow they would model. But like, they're not. They don't care. And we don't know how to get them to care. And we've already set up this expectation that, you know, it's all about the effort, not the results. So it's a real problem for founders. Yes, I can, I can imagine. So how much, how much resistance do you get, you know, to your ideas and to the, at least the selfishness implied by them, the self-interest that is embedded in them? Is this something that they are open to? Or is this something that you get resistance over? Good question. I mean, it's funny. I don't even think about it in those terms because as a therapist, you know, I'm trained to meet someone where they're at and to constantly be monitoring the patient's level of buy-in. And dialogue with them accordingly. And we have lots of tools for both assessing that and for calibrating, right? Like, you know, I can very quickly tell if someone is retrenching, is kind of digging their heels in because I'm pushing something a little bit harder than they've actually been sold on it. And so suddenly like, they don't want to do the homework that we've agreed to. And, you know, like, suddenly we're in this argument instead of having a collaborative, you know, collaborative, you know, discussion around what's going on for them. And that's true with any given therapeutic intervention that, you know, that happens all the time in therapy or coaching or whatever you want to call it. And so I'd almost don't distinguish between, you know, when that comes up around, you know, changing their drinking behavior, which philosophically is uncontroversial, but they just may not be ready to do that and moving and casting off their altruistic, you know, internal critic who doesn't actually, who's not actually grounded in their needs and doesn't actually care about their well-being. So I don't, I never use the terms of objectivism or almost never, maybe when working with objectivists, but even they're not as much as you'd think, maybe in some cases, I deliberately do less of it because I want them to be thinking about it afresh and not just importing objectivist lingo, right? So I don't experience it as resistance to selfishness. And, you know, and I've got plenty of clients, patients, non-objectivists who have moved pretty dramatically in the direction of, yeah, my life matters. And this is, you know, I only have so many years on this earth. And why am I any less, you know, like this is a double standard. This is not what I wish for my loved ones. Why am I putting myself last, right? Like I deserve, and not just that I deserve the happiness that anyone does, but also like I'm the only one who can make it happen. And I'm the only one for whom that's true, right? Like I don't control any of their happinesses, but I do control mine. And like I'm the final, you know, not just beneficiary, but agent in bringing it about. And that hasn't been any harder to get across to people than, you know, than more conventional things, I would say. That's great. I mean, that's, that's the, that's ultimately what you want. People taking their life seriously. I mean, that's, that's the holy grail, right? Yeah. Yeah, but it's different, but it takes a different form. Sorry. Yeah, like you wouldn't recognize it from one client to the next in terms of the kind of vocabulary we developed together around that idea. Like, you know, with one client, it's like channeling your inner Lincoln because for that client, like that was what captured it was just like Lincoln was for real. He was not about appearances or impressions. You know, there was no like middleman in his head or middle mom as a client, unless you get a cut, you know, there was what he saw as the right thing and the necessary thing and there was his execution of it. And it's, you know, and he still struggled and he still made massive, you know, unforced errors, but here's how he thought about that. And he recouped and it was it was for his ideal. It was not, you know, for anybody's, for anyone else's sake. And that's how I kind of transmitted the idea of selfishness. To that particular rounder, so yeah, it just really varies. And so, yeah, but it yeah, it's going to be it's going to be reflected differently in different people. So we have, you know, a gazillion questions all of on topics all over the place. So you want to get into that and then now we can see where that takes us. Sure. Let's do it. All right. Landon just jumped in. Let's see. OK, let's do this. This one's on entrepreneurship. Do you think entrepreneurs are this is from Hunter Hunter? Do you think entrepreneurs are easily dissatisfied with the status quo, thus driving them to create their own company's products? If so, can this dissatisfaction have negative ramifications in their personal lives? Interesting. Do I think founders are dissatisfied with the status quo? Can this have negative ramifications in their personal life? So, a, and this is one of those annoying, like, questions to a question. But I don't think that there's a way that all founders are. And I'd say that in a strong sense, like, not just, you know, well, obviously, you know, people are different. But founders have widely varied in my experience and not just any old founders, but successful founders have widely varying motivations and kind of issues that they need to deal with the dragons they need to slay psychologically to a degree that's surprised me. Like, I expected a more homogeneous group, if you will. So I just want to sort of say that as a caveat. You could be a founder with wide ranging, especially kind of starting points, and you could be doing it for a wide range of reasons that for one reason or another, you can't do it any other way. But to go and raise money from investors to do it, or at least that that's kind of the quickest way or the most or the the most autonomous way, which matters, given the nature of your venture. So like, why that's a determination for, you know, why you decide that that's your best move, given the particular thing you want to do could vary widely. And it's I don't think there's one psychology that necessarily corresponds to deciding that, you know, rightly deciding that that's a good idea. And by the same token, deciding that's not a good idea because not everybody should be a founder. Like, that's a pretty specific way to build, right? You could be a builder without being an entrepreneur. So with that said, I would say all else being equal, you have to be dissatisfied with something about the status quo to want to take this route, because otherwise, you know, if there's already an existing framework and existing company and existing methodology, product, et cetera, you know, that does what you want to do or that kind of provides you with the way to create the kind of value you want to create, like them. Why go to all the trouble and all the risk of starting your own thing, right? Just go join an existing venture. Go be part of, you know, AI or go be part of Facebook or Google or, you know, or SpaceX or whatever the thing that you already find inspiring or like go study the subject with other scholars who are already studying it. It's great news if there's, you know, if someone's already done enough of it that you don't have to do all the leg work, right? Like that's in a way, that's the dream for a lot of founders. Like, like I wish someone had already figured out at least this part. So I didn't, you know, have to learn everything from scratch and figure it all out kind of, you know, scrappily by the seat of my pants. Right. So so that's so, yes, in a local sense, there's something about the status quo you're dissatisfied with, but that's not necessarily global. You know, there definitely there's a certain subset of founders who have a kind of distinguishable personality profile where, yeah, they're kind of contrarian, you know, think of Elon Musk to a lesser extent, you know, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, kind of these high profile characters, right? And then a lot of lesser founders but who resonate with that kind of profile. And yeah, they're contrarian. They often are also a little bit kind of they carry their contrarianness on their sleeves to varying degrees. And I see that as sometimes healthier than other times. You know, we can have a separate podcast on just Elon Musk and what the heck, you know, is kind of going on with him. Just like a very mixed character, you ask me that. I certainly never met the guy and can't personally diagnose him. But it's it's that profile, perhaps, that this question is referring to. And oftentimes there's a packaging together of a kind of healthy ability to think in first principles. And with that, a healthy impatience with mediocre status quo ways of doing things. On the one hand, which by itself, I don't think should cause any problems for you in your personal life because you can be that much more innovative and creative about how you approach dating and about, you know, how you address communication challenges with your partners or your friends. And that can only help you to that extent. It's when that healthy impatience is sort of packaged with some of the psychological problems or challenges that often come up for somebody growing up with that kind of spirit and without the kind of but isn't equipped with the corresponding perspective and tools to develop it healthily. And so you develop a kind of standoffishness or kind of malevolence or, you know, a kind of defensiveness where, you know, like growing up in a culture that's sort of hostile to profit making or hostile to genius or, you know, to individualism, you kind of you develop a chip on your shoulder. And so by default, you kind of assume that everyone's attacking you and you've got this hostile attribution bias where, you know, you assume guilty till proven innocent. And that can create all sorts of problems in your personal life. But it would be that and not per se, the fact that you're impatient with the status quo. So it's a very long answer to that question. I think it's an interesting good answer. Yeah, it's an interesting question. All right, let's see. Landon asks, how does one let go or grieve? My anger and sense for a desire for justice tends to overpower my ability to move on, for example, expecting someone to change instead of cutting them out of my life. Any advice? Yeah, I mean, that's a big one. And it definitely comes up, obviously, not just for founders, but, you know, humans and wide ranging circumstances. And I mean, on a high level, having a really ruthless reality orientation is very healing when it comes to that kind of challenge. Right. And this is reflected in a lot of therapeutic approaches out there, like dialectical behavior therapy has a whole kind of module on what Marsha Linehan who came up with dialectical behavior therapy calls radical acceptance. And what she really means by it is recognizing reality and recognizing that it's going to be what it is, whether you like it or not, and that the only way through the pain, the only way out of the pain is through it. And and so radically accepting that, you know, yeah, this person isn't going to change or radically accepting that, yeah, I've made these grievous errors that I'm just going to have to move on from if I want the rest of my life to be as fulfilling as possible. I'm just going to have to accept it at some point. Like I just I can't undo it. I can't make it, you know, not have happened. I need to feel the feelings and that's always going to be a big part of the process is like actually feeling the pain, right? Going through the grief, letting yourself actually experience it, because that's part of accepting reality is also feeling the feelings associated with that reality and not avoiding them, pushing them away, you know, kind of trying to rationalize them away, talk yourself out of them. So that's a big part of it. But yeah, but there are lots of tools, therapeutic tools that exist to help with that. And I think that's my biggest takeaway is, you know, if you're on the premise, look, I want to accept reality selfishly, because that's the only way for me to make the most of my life. Reality just will be what it is, whether I accept it or not. Once you're on that premise and you're really committed to it, there's a whole bunch of tools to help you actually implement that psychologically in the context of painful realities, right? That you've got to come to terms with. All right. Thank you, Landon. Let's see. I like Ike 23. All right. Please choose the concept of trust. And why is it not? Why is it or is not important in one's intra-inter personal relationships? Or, well, clearly, I think it's important. You know, I write about it a lot. I write about self-trust in particular, but I think that the two are intimately related, so in both directions, in the sense of, you know, how do we earn trust with other people, but also why it's important for us to trust people and to, you know, associate with people that we can trust and to be open to earning trust, because I actually think that in itself is a really important aspect of. Of virtuous living and particularly, you know, virtue in the human realm or in the interpersonal and the social realm is the the value orientation that comes with, you know, loving other human beings, loving human connection, wanting to build really deep, profound, meaningful, you know, life-enhancing relationships, right? And if you want that and if you're motivated by that love and not by hate and fear, right, then that means opening yourself to that means taking risks, right? That means giving people every chance within a context where, you know, they haven't specifically kind of, you know, solid the relationship or they haven't given you cause for caution or skepticism, you know, right? Kind of innocent until proven guilty and giving people openings and opportunities to surprise you and to earn your trust and, you know, to be values in your life. And that's hard to do. And it's a really it's a learned skill. And I find that I work on that with people quite a lot, including the founders. So I hope you've got babysitters who are willing to to stay a while because. Oh, no. Be a long night. My babysitters, alas, are pro bono. They're Greg, who most of you. Oh, they all they all. And this is for the cause. They're not going to come to us. Yeah, that's how we do. We got Alexi says with the startup, slow to get to market traction. How do you how do you know when to walk away to a different project or continue with it and be patient? Yeah, I mean, that's a really big question on the minds of a lot of early stage founders. So I can answer this question at a really kind of high level, you know, at a psychological level of analysis, so to speak. And what I can't do is give you the strategic you know, framework for deciding in a particular case, whether you've got a shot at product market fit, you know, do you like is this really the go to market? You know, do you have a 10 X proposition, etc. etc. Like that's not my area of expertise. And there, you know, my my best move is to refer you to an executive coach or to someone with a lot of business experience. But at a psychological level, I can tell you a lot of the signals to watch for that can help you introspect the extent to which you're on a premise of, you know, building a genuinely reality based model, right, the extent to which you're really trying to answer that question in earnest versus the extent to which you're indulging in some kind of pseudo cognitive, you know, self persuasion, right, what psychologists call motivated reasoning, which I think is an awful term because it implies that good reasoning is unmotivated, right, and therein lies your first problem. But but ill motivated reasoning, right, biased and the kind of self deceptive reasoning. And the thing is, and to recognize that sometimes you're going to be doing the best founders and the most virtuous, you know, of again, including objectivists, like they'll sometimes catch themselves in little subtle exaggerations or self deceptions or just, you know, I tend to focus on my calls with these customers and not those ones or I kind of tend to to think back on these three conversations and make a lot of them while kind of deemphasizing these other 20 where they never got back to me afterward and why am I doing that? And should I look at that more soberly, right, more so. So I would say, you know, things like the honesty log, which I've kind of written about and spoken of in my earning your interest talk, et cetera, tools for keeping yourself honest are at least my biggest contribution to that process. And also that includes realizing when you need to go seek some mentorship on that question from not me, but, you know, someone with the relevant business expertise or someone in the industry, right, who you who you can actually really expect to tell you if it's not worth pursuing, right, and not just someone who will give you the green light, no matter what. Right, where again, that's where the self honesty comes in. All right, let's see. I like Ike again. Please choose the concept of respect and why it is important to once intra and enter relationship. Thank you. But I mean, I love it. Where else am I going to be asked to just like chew on concepts that are important to me? Respect is what we're chewing on. So having said that, I'm trying to just think, you know, which piece to chew on kind of where to where to bite in. I mean, I think, again, there are underlying premises that I think need to be really real to us and that aren't real to us by default that are really important to bring to our interactions, you know, like the premise that every life is an end in itself, right? And like, what does that actually imply for your interactions with this member of your team and this person you're interviewing to hire? Right, like, what what what is important for you to how is it important for you to honor their time, right, to be polite, to be professional? Like, how does those particular behavioral norms kind of flow from and connect to the fundamental conviction that you know, that every life is an end in itself, right? That they have a right to their life and the pursuit of their happiness just as much as you have a right to yours, right? And that and to John Galtz oath, right? Like, I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine. Like, if you really it infuse your day to day interactions with the full meaning, the full reality of that conviction, how does that translate into, you know, getting back to people more quickly than versus keeping them waiting, right? Which I've still I'm probably the worst defender, especially having just had a baby and my email inbox is out of control. So anyone out there listening, I'm sorry, you're not alone. Someday I am still managing. I have a very, very, very long GTD inbox, which is my inbox of emails that I absolutely have to eventually, you know, get back to. But some of them are over a year old. You need to get is is one of these new artificial intelligence chat things. Auto replies, yeah, and they can answer all your emails for you. They can they can scan all your past emails. I know exactly how Gina would respond to X email and they would. Oh, that's this game changing. Yeah, there's a question about this. Yeah, what was that question? Yeah, Ian asks, Ian wants to know, is Gina worried that as tools like GPPT improves the AI, people will replace real therapists with AI ones. I'm just zero percent worried. She's I think the real question is how excited am I? Because that's a real question on my mind. Like how excited do I want to be at this point about the potential for that sort of tool to aid what I'm doing and to automate parts of what I'm doing? Because I would love to automatically replying emails. I would like to please God replace me as an email or fire. Yeah, I mean, and lots of things with great energy, by the way, it's exciting. It's not worrying. It shouldn't worry anybody. It should excite everybody. Yeah, I mean, and I get like there are particular problems for sure to be like, I definitely don't know what I'm going to do the next time I assign an essay because I just assume, you know, people just release the tool Chad GPP, just release the tool that allows you to it will look at the essay and tell you if a person wrote it on AI. Done. Look at that. I just met about it this morning or yesterday. So cool. Of course, like if a GTP, GPPT, if it can write these essays, it can also check for plagiarism using its own method. That's brilliant. See, that's such a great exam. But anyway, so no, what I what I don't know is how excited because people have pitched me on, you know, like AI based solutions for like journaling, where it's an enhanced journal that actually talks back to you in your own voice and reminds you of how you felt about this as a teenager and like in principle sounds like it could be a really cool way to aid and enhance your own introspection and effect. And I could imagine really neat applications for it. And I just don't know how far along it is. And people have kind of done little demos for me. And yeah, it's pretty cool, but it's also pretty generic. And if I give it something more off the beaten path, you know, like now be a therapist with a self honest orientation, like it still just sounds like a generic CVT therapist. So it can't actually like iterate on something new. It can take, you know, the kind of the accumulated status quo to get a database that it's been trained on, right? And then be really credible and articulate in applying that in kind of utilizing that database, but that's still what it's doing. So but yeah, there's if you if you experience being a provider in the mental health realm, even for a week or a month, I imagine that all such questions just kind of sees to worry you because you realize that the demand is infinite and that the much bigger problem is how on earth to ever match the supply. You know, I wish that there that I could refer people to a decent AI therapy bot. I wish I could and I can't wait to be able to do that so that I can work on the more, you know, kind of specialized cases where AI just ain't going to cut it. But I don't think we're quite there yet. No, I think there's quite a while. All right, Ryan, ask what is the cause of imposter syndrome and how should one deal with it? I'm writing an article on that topic, at least, but briefly. So I think one of the big causes of imposter syndrome is having in our heads a set of cost of syndrome. Yes, thank you, sorry. So imposter syndrome, I keep I forget, you know, it's such commonly go in whatever, you know, in the field. But yeah, so it's feeling like you are an imposter in whatever context you're operating in the sense that you're actually, you don't know what you're doing and you don't really deserve this job or this position and your graduate program or, you know, to be leading this company or whatever it may be. And it's sort of an accident. It's a fluke. You manage to fool everyone. And that's the only reason that you're in this role. And any minute, you're going to be found out. So and it's an extremely common feeling to the point where it's like near universal among first year grad grad students and medical students, among most early stage founders, among, you know, pretty much anyone doing anything ambitious, like if you kind of survey them and I've actually surveyed them and some like two thirds of my EF founders, you know, in that cohort I mentioned, rated themselves as having, like, you know, quite a lot to an extreme amount of imposter syndrome or whatever it was. So that's what it is. And I would say big part of the cause has to do with the standards in our heads that we assume, A, that we're judging ourselves by and that we assume everyone is judging us by, that are of that drill sergeant variety in that they're both they're impossible, but more fundamentally, they're sort of detached from the reality of what it looks like to build the thing and to be in this role. So the founder case is a really useful example because as a founder, by definition, you're trying to figure out how to do something that no one's done, including you, right? So like you're trying to build a AI therapy bot, right? And like you've had the idea and you've gone and raised funds before you can even build the thing, right? Because to build the thing, you need to hire engineers and you need a bunch of, you know, capital and you can't try it until people have already invested in it. And at the point where they're investing, you literally like, you don't know if it's going to work. You don't know any of the details of how you're actually going to implement it. You don't know what your engineers will be able to do and what they won't be able to do in any of the kind of particulars that you can only learn on the job. And so you just are going to be operating as a beginner constantly. And because as a founder, you're the one who's doing the things no one else can do. And by definition, again, if there was already a role that existed, that was well operationalized, then you wouldn't need to found a new company. There wouldn't be a market for what you're doing. And so you're always at the edge of your knowledge and anybody's knowledge. If, you know, if there's already kind of a well, well honed protocol, then you can just hire someone outsource it to that, right? And so you're always solving problems that you haven't solved and no one has solved. And so you're always in the thick of like messy trial and error, fail a bunch, be completely off in your predictions of when something is going to be built or how it can't even be built or which technologies or who's going to want to buy it. So if you go into that position, thinking, I'm supposed to have it all figured out, like, well, Musk always just knows what he's talking about, which by the way, he never even has claimed except when he's just posturing on Twitter. But like the things he has actually said when he's serious and doing, you know, like interviews about his process are like, I knew that there was a 10% chance for both SpaceX and Tesla. And here's why it was worth making that bet from right. Like he didn't know what he was doing. And he didn't claim to. But in any case, that's kind of the persona that we have in our heads. And if that's what we're measuring ourselves against, then of course, yeah, we're imposters, because we don't know what we're doing. And we are screwing up a bunch. And we are sort of operating blind. So if we if we come to really understand the nature of the role, right, like the pay for it part of take what you want and pay for it, given the context of our endeavor, I think that that solves for a lot of the imposters. And then realize, oh, yeah, right. No, I'm going to mess up. Right. Like, I'm just going to model that in to what I expect of myself in this job. Is there something this is my question. Is there something unique about founders attitude to its failure relative to the rest of the population? Are they less afraid of it? Are they more willing to embrace it? It's a good question. Yeah. So on average, as a group, right, as a sample of the larger population, yeah, founders tend to be more failure tolerant, and kind of generally more risk tolerant, and distress tolerant, right, more broadly. And they kind of have to be because it's inherent, again, right, in the nature of the bets you're taking, like you're going to fail a bunch in somewhat unpredictable ways. And that's not to say that people who are averse to failure shouldn't be founders or have no chances founders, but it is going to be something for them to grapple with. Right. And that's often what I'm helping people work through is how to approach failure differently, not from the Zen master mindset, right, because that's the default solution within Silicon Valley and kind of within these circles, as we talked, we're like, it's fine, failure is fine. Don't worry about failure. Don't be afraid. Who cares? Failure is all part of like, well, no, you don't want to fail. Like, if you want to fail, then you don't really actually want the thing badly enough to want to fail, then do something else. It's not worth it. It's not worth all of this, you know, work and all of this pressure and all of this risk for something that like wouldn't matter to you that much if you fail, right? On the one hand, and on the other hand, again, like both of these have to be, you're going to fail. You don't know exactly how or when or how many times, and it's going to hurt. And it's okay that it's right, like at a really fundamental level, it's necessary. Like, Rorick lives in a quarry for however long and doesn't know when he's going to go back to work. And it's neither like, he's neither blasé about it. Right? Like, I think that's what I would channel in terms of what's the entrepreneurial approach to failure, right? Like, it's the Rorick approach. It's like, this stinks, right? Like, not just in a kind of, you know, casual way, like this, it's awful. Yeah, it's really awful. And it only goes down to a certain point. Right? It's all it's part of the it is part of a journey. It is part of a lot. And the thing is, it would hurt more if he were 50. Or if he were 70, right? Like, depending on how much he because remember, like, he's modeled for himself. This is the builder's mindset. You know, epitomize like, I have this many years to live, give or take. How do I want to spend it? Right? And like, how long is it going to take for me to develop these skills? And how long do I get to spend collecting, you know, finding clients and what what are going to be some of the obstacles I encounter. So you kind of build that into my kind of modeling, because I really want the bulk of my life to be architecting buildings, I want to get to build a skyscraper or two, right? And like, somewhere along the way, there's going to be a bunch of curveballs. And I don't know how long it'll take for this type of client or that type to come along. I know they will eventually in principle, because there will be people who respond to what I'm doing, right? But like, yeah, there will be massive curveballs along the way. And then you are able to tolerate the failures and take seriously that you, like you want to be on the lookout for that next client, right? Like you still, like you still want to be on the premise of succeeding. Yeah, so it really is a synthesis of those two. Good. All right, we got a ton of questions. So Oh, sorry, I'll give brief answers. Yes, that run. Yeah, same way. I mean, everything's great. But let's try. Okay. Which it says I grew up feeling like a burden on my parents ashamed of my needs. I later misrepresented at the shrugged to believe needs were bad. Have you seen cases like that? If so, how did you work with them? So cases of being led to believe you're sorry. To believe needs were bad. That having me, I guess, so having needs. Yes. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole attachment style associated with that with that perspective, kind of avoidant attachment style. I mean, and you can be anxiously attached and sort of have that mindset too. But in any case, in psychology, there's a lot of work on how the kind of early messaging that we receive subtly from whoever from our caregivers or from school or wherever they, you know, the culture around, I mean, fundamentally, like, do you matter? And therefore, you know, do your needs matter? Do your emotions matter? Does your life matter? And it's common for us to walk away with the message that they don't. And that, yeah, that it's wrong, that it's needy, like, that you should be able to kind of bottle those up. And that's something that takes work as an adult to, you know, to kind of reorient. And I write a lot about that process. There. I'm gonna stop there. Andrew says, How do you guide people to stay in the present more and stop thinking and stop always thinking about the past or the future? But so here I can defer to all the stuff on mindfulness practice and stuff I've already kind of said in talks and in some of my writing about how to use mindfulness based practices with that aim. And I would say that there are tools that can be used for good or for ill like any tools. Because sometimes you do want to be thinking about the future, right? Sometimes you do want to be connecting kind of what you're doing now with some sort of long term vision. And oftentimes, it's both important and really hard to be in the present and to be really gathering data and really noticing and experiencing enjoying the fruits of, you know, whatever labors you've already put in. And that is also an acquired skill. So you know, I would definitely refer you to a lot of the work on kind of mindfulness practice and how to use it for good. Where can they find some of your work on that? So a couple of my Ocon talks got into at least a little bit. Taking responsibility for your happiness. I think yeah, if you look that up and my name in YouTube, that's one talk where I literally did a little mindfulness exercise at the beginning so you can kind of get a taste of it. And I talk about it a little bit in the talk. I'm pretty sure I talked about it in the using reason to cultivate passion talk as well. So those are two talks to check out where I talk about mindfulness. Yeah. Jennifer. Hi, Gina. Congrats on you, baby. How come one person's personality, mannerisms, etc. attract you while another person's won't even though they are both good people? Easily. I'm not laughing at the question. I'm sort of laughing at just, you know, the funniness of life that that is true and common. I mean, you know, Rand writes about sense of life and about how particularized it is to people, right? And it's so much more, you know, like what you as an as an individual person respond to, the kinds of cues that you've come to associate with certain virtues or, you know, that have come to mean certain things you're kind of what you emphasize as really important aspects of a life, you know, worth living or a relationship worth cultivating. It's just going to be so different depending on your personal kind of, you know, your personality, your developmental history, your experiences to date. And that doesn't mean that it's not also tied to those fundamental values, but it's your manifestation of that. So even if you think like which characters do you resonate with, you know, like we all love the heroes of Atlas Trug, but probably we all have different ones that we gravitate toward or that we tend to think back to fondly or that we resonate with personally, right, that are attractive to us characters. And that's, you know, like, and those are deliberately selectively recreated to only have fundamental attributes, right? So humans are real life humans are much more mixed and complex. So it's just, it's natural to have very particularized reactions like that. A friend Harper says, is the concept of psychopistemology as opa objectivism understands, widely accepted a thought of in psychology, does it go by another name? To me, it seems either in between a philosophy and psychology. That's a great question. Definitely not widely accepted as a concept. I don't think anybody uses it outside of objectivism. I I've thought about this a fair amount. I find myself using it less partly just because, you know, I'm discoursing with psychologists and I need to use terms that they'll understand. And it's often easier to kind of get it what I'm describing through terms they're already familiar with. But I think also because I have found that there are just easier ways to describe it. In psychology. So we have a lot of concepts that are I think kind of that, at least intersect with it. We have within the cognitive behavioral therapy, literature, we have schemas and automatic thoughts and implicit cognitions or implicit implicit biases, a lot of terminology around both the content and processes of thinking that we have automatized, right? And again, the term automatized isn't the term that's used, but, you know, that it's implicit, that it's overlearned, that it's habitual, which all are getting a similar idea. There's lots and lots of work on things like that, that I think are part of what Rand actually meant by psychopathismology, but not the whole of it. And then there are other, you know, there's a concept of the internal working model within I mentioned attachment before within attachment theory that gets it also something very similar, like from a slightly different, but I think kind of more fundamental angle that there's a way you see the world, there's this kind of lens, and attachment theorists emphasize the interpersonal part of that, probably too much at the expense of our broader, you know, metaphysical orientation and our kind of thinking more broadly. But I think what they're getting at is very similar. So there's a lot of work in psychology that's kind of loosely organized and still needs to be conceptualized. But that I do think is getting at something very similar to psychopathismology. I hope that's helpful. Andrew asks thoughts on interpreting the virtue of justice by applying moral condemnation to every behavior, flow or error. I thought on the difference between judgmentalism and rational judgment. Interesting. I mean, I think this is one where I can probably largely defer to the talk, which I haven't heard in years, but I know I really loved at the time, which was judging feeling and not being moralistic, which is I think Leonard T. Koff's talk, that I remember as being like seminal for me in thinking through that set of issues, because that's sort of, and you're on, you might be able to correct me this, but I think that's more or less what it's about. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I can stop there as much as it pains me, but I can do Tim. Tim asks, Hi, Dr. Golan, a controversial question, I admit, but leaving aside his favorite side, his role in objectivism, what is your take on Nathaniel Brandon's work? Did you find value in the six pillars of self esteem? Okay, so this is an easy one for me to answer, unfortunately, because I just I haven't read it. Full disclosure. And I haven't read it partly because I do have a bad taste in my mouth from knowing the story of, you know, his personal life and actions and how they impacted, you know, Rand and others, you know, who are important to me, right, as figures. And so I can't really speak in it great detail to the quality of his work. It comes up sometimes like I've, he's one of the few figures within objectivism that I've maybe once or twice heard his name come up among non objectivists just talking about self esteem, like they've come across his books, you know, so for whatever that's worth, like, you know, he was successful at disseminating his ideas for better or for worse. I mostly just have anecdotes to go on and the anecdotes have left me with that bad taste, you know, where he would go around at parties saying to like everyone who encountered like you are being watched and judged, my friend, watched and judged, like, what is that about? But that's not a formal assessment of his work by any means. And so I'm sure that there's, there's value and there's also probably questionable aspects, but I can't speak to the particulars, I'm just not prepared. All right. Landon says, congrats on the baby. When reprogramming one's automated response, does practice repetition, wallplay help, but does something else have to give first? Also, are you talking at Ocon this year? If so, how on what topic? I get a fair question. Can I do it in reverse order? Because that's the easier one. I have, I have no plans to talk at Ocon this year, and it pains me to say that because it's breaking with a long standing tradition of mine to be at Ocon and to speak at Ocon, but I did just have a baby. And if there's going to be a year, you know, that I skip out, this kind of has to be the year. So, but we'll see, maybe I'll end up getting roped into something small, like a panel. We'll see. So, but that's the Ocon answer. To the other question, which is a great question and a bigger one, does something have to, I mean, yeah. So here I can largely defer to the piece I wrote for this publication. Every piece is called in defense of radical self-betterment. I also link to it in my building the builder's sub-sex, you can find it in either place, where I kind of describe the whole process of psychological change as I currently conceptualize it, basically, it's long, accordingly. But I kind of break it down into very loose steps. And one of the steps is something to the effect of figure out where you stand. So, you know, in order to start practicing, you've got to have a clear sense of what you're practicing, right, and why you're practicing it. So you've got to kind of know, at least provisionally, like, what is my considered judgment on this issue? And do I actually understand, like, to the point where I can feel the feelings associated with, like, no, I do have agency in my life, or I do own my life, like, I do have the right to, you know, go against my family and pursue this thing that I'm more excited about, or I do have a right to stop talking to this person who's toxic for me, like, my happiness does matter. Do I believe it enough? And do I understand it? Can I kind of marshal the evidence and, you know, the objectives, arguments, and the experiences I've already had in my life such that that becomes very real to me as a truth, where I'm not just sort of holding it in this floaty way. And can I feel it, at least in the moment that I'm really contemplating it in a serious way? And if I've, if I've gotten there, and that can take time and work, like just deciding kind of where do you say, you know, if you think about, like, how long Dagny takes to get to where, oh, yeah, I should go on strike, right? Or how long Dominique takes to really, really see, oh, yeah, like evil is impotent, right? Like the whole book, it takes her the vast majority of and work is patient with her through that process. That's the process. She's not yet practicing. She doesn't believe in the thing she would need to practice, right? Like she has to get to where she really has a conviction that, no, I shouldn't toss out my statues. I shouldn't be working against work, because actually the world is conducive to our happiness and thriving, right? And then at that point, she still has a lot of work to do that we don't see in the book, right? But like she starts doing it when we see her make that phone call and their tears in her eyes and work like later, I won't remind you that you were crying, right? Like it's still really hard for you. But now you're on the right premise and now you're practicing. That's what I would say. Daniel says, I forgot the term she used, but either pack said particular emotions have an essential characteristic. For example, anger means you're feeling an injustice. What are your thoughts? Not sure if I 100% agree. So I wouldn't use the language essential characteristic. And I'm not sure I would have to kind of think about what I think of that terminology. The way I think about emotions is that they contain value judgments, they contain appraisals to use, you know, whether you want to use the language of clinical psychology, the language of rectivism, they contain premises about the goodness or badness of something for you and different emotions, you know, like we conceptualize them largely based on the kind of appraisal that they contain. So it's definitely the case that anger is different from fear in that anger involves a perceived injustice or something that's been intentionally inflicted on you, right? Like a violation of your what kind of rights or your integrity or your values that was intended by another person, right? So so that's why we think there's something really funny about being angry at a chair because you, you know, stubbed your toe on it, right? Like something is off about that because, you know, the chair didn't intend to hurt you. So maybe you're actually angry at yourself, right? And the same thing with other emotions like fear, you know, is there's an appraisal of threat to something you presumably, you know, care about or just to your bodily integrity to your life, your survival, etc. Sadness, there's a loss. So in that sense, yeah, emotions are differentiated on the nature of the appraisal that they activate for you. And I'm not sure if that's exactly what she meant, but that's how I think about it. Good. Let's see, Shazba says, who is Gina's favorite fictional psychologist? Interesting. I don't want to say Frazier because I know that's what Greg wants me to say. And because he's, you know, ridiculous. But if I if you just mean favorite in terms of like, who do I kind of, you know, who have I enjoyed? Got in literary or narrative pleasure from, you know, probably Frazier, but I'm trying to think of their other Oh, Paul Weston is pretty great. He's the therapist in the show in treatment. Who you might. There's the original is actually an Israeli show. And then it was remade as and it's a good show. I like it a lot, but I mean, it's definitely not a realistic portrayal of therapy, you know, with all due caveats, but it's fun. It's, you know, if you. Yeah. And it's all just dialogue. It's all just people sitting in a room talking and it's I find it engrossing. So good worth of viewing. Richard, what what's your take on the self compassion meme? How can one best deal with their internal suffering? The builder's mindset. That's an easy one. I've got, you know, well formulated answer. But yeah, I mean, I think self compassion is a very healthy and reasonable. Tack to take, right? I think it's reasonable to have. In effect, to be your own ally and friend and to, you know, empathize with yourself as you would with someone you love and care about. And that's often what self compassion is sort of getting at. But I think it comes baked in with this kind of emphasis on suffering, right, and this implication of a kind of vulnerability that is only, you know, that implies a certain kind of overemphasis on weakness and pain, even though it has a lot of value in it. That's my very quick and dirty attempt. Daniel says, practical tips on finding a central purpose. Oh. Lots, I could say about this. So I think one subversive tip that I can give with a deliberately subversive tone to it. So please take it, you know, in that vein, like I'm being perhaps deliberately provocative is stop thinking about it in that in those terms, just like take the pressure off of yourself to come up with a central purpose and instead start to think about what do I like to do? What are things I would like to accomplish or to build? Like, what are my, you know, what are some aptitudes that I have and how do they fit together? How might they add up in the context of the next job that I do or in the context of what major I choose or whatever the kind of proximal choices ahead of me? Like, what do I want to be spending a lot of my time on? Right? Like, Rourke doesn't think in terms of my central purpose is to be an architect, right? Like, he thinks in terms of, OK, I have this many years and this is what it takes. You know, these are the skills that I need and I've had these jobs. And so this is, you know, I've got this down pat and this will, you know, like I don't want to work at an office because I have to deal with all these bureaucrats. I'm going to be on my own. What, you know, what kinds of jobs are conducive to? I want to go work for Henry Cameron next. And that's the natural kind of step in my project. Right? So really think about it in the context of the life you're building and the purpose will emerge naturally out of that process. Good. All right. So we got a bunch of more questions. These ones, the answers need to be even shorter. OK, you can just you can cut me off. Don't be afraid to. Yeah, your time. I'm I can spend all night here, but I know you're kind of on a. So you have. Yeah, I have a selfish. Yeah. OK, we'll do our best here. So Naven says, why is introspection more difficult than extrospection? It's because it's meta because we have to use our thinking to look at our thinking, and that's really, really hard to do. And there's a sort of like added layer of complexity to it, given that we're kind of trying to look in on processes that were also, you know, like there's a kind of Schrodinger's cat phenomenon which isn't literally the case. And it's not actually a problem in this kind of like, you know, introspection is possible. You can get the hang of it. It's just it's hard. But I think probably just because the human mind is extremely complex and, you know, just like it would, you know, why is why was it hard for Darwin to figure out evolution? Because it's a really complex, you know, array of different observations that didn't fit together in obvious ways and had to be really like slowly kind of conceptualized and integrated. And the human mind is probably one of the most complex kind of phenomena in the universe that we know of. So, you know, it takes work. OK, next question. Seamaster, what is the limit of self-destructive immorality when accepting a patient? What is the limit of self destructive immorality when accepting a patient? Meaning like what like what patients would I not accept? Yeah, one of the unsavable, I guess. Ooh, that's a great and a tough question. And I have to answer it in a minute or less. This one you can spend a little he did. He did. This is he did put some significant money on it. So maybe. Oh, OK. So fair enough. I thought about that a lot and it's somewhat of a moving target for me. I have yet to meet the patient whom I consider to be unsavable. And I have probably. Much higher bar on what it would take for me to consider someone unsavable than like someone who's not working in a therapeutic context. Right. Like if you're evaluating someone for a job or for marriage or for almost any other human interaction, like you shouldn't have as high a bar as I have on, you know, who you're willing to put up with the workout. Right. But inherent in my line of work is that I'm here to help people improve. And if someone's coming to me, I mean, one thing that I don't do is I don't, for example, do mandated therapy. Like I don't do court mandated therapy. And there I think I would encounter it a lot more. And I have in my training, I definitely encounter people who I just wouldn't work with willingly as a, you know, as an autonomous professional could like not all but most sex offenders. I don't know for most of it, but but like hardened sex offenders who, you know, like they're unapologetic and they are, you know, like have a really long standing history of just being like, rule and abusive to innocent people, especially children, right? Like, you know, like past a certain point, I don't care if they chose it or what, like maybe it's a disease, but I just don't want, I don't think I can help them, right? Like, and that's the assessment I'm making. But short of that, and especially again, there's a selection bias because people are coming to me willingly and they're willing to invest some money and they're willing to invest time and to be vulnerable and to put themselves out there for the sake of trying to improve for the sake of changing. And within that context, I find that it's rare, although I've definitely like I've encountered edge cases where like, I'm not sure, at least I'm not sure this person is at a point where they're choosing to change, right? Like maybe they could and maybe down the line they will, but they also might not. And it's really up to them. And I've done my stuff, like I've done what I can do. And at a certain point, I just have to let go, right? And I have and the best service I can perform for them is to say, I don't think this is working, come back, feel free to come back, you know, when you're a little bit like when you're in a place in your life where you've got bandwidth for doing this work or where you're a little bit more comfortable trying these things out, because I don't think I'm helping you, right? Is that yeah, Richard? Richard says, what's your babysitter's Venmo handle will pay her, I don't know why they assume it's a her and keep this party going? I don't that's a tough one. Give it the pro bono nature of my helpers. And I don't know how much I want they want to be a share of their identifying info, but I'll give an extra five minutes, because I'm not hearing shrill screams of protest from the toddler yet from down to like that's really good. That'll be the real stop signal for me is when I hear screams. But when are you writing the book and being the world's best parent? And shouldn't everyone move to Austin now that Matt and Gina? I think there are a couple books I need to write first. And there are a couple of people more qualified than me to write the best parent book, but I would love to, you know, contribute to it, however I can. My husband might be the more natural initial choice, but but he's also got a book in him that he's going to need, although his book will be related. It'll be on, I don't know if I'm allowed to. It'll have a related theme. So it's, you know, some such book is forthcoming from my general corner of the world as to moving Austin. I mean, I'm not one of the more aggressive proselytizers where that's concerned, but, you know, it's pretty nice to have this Olympic, you know, community around me and to have regular get togethers. I mean, here I am in a little family pod with some of my favorite people because, you know, several of us don't have power because of the stupid ice storm, which itself is not a painful feature to recommend Austin, but it doesn't happen that often. All right, let's see. I heard that many famous CEOs have ADHD and 12% of the entrepreneurs compared to 5% in the population. What's the connection risk taking, divergent thinking? Oh, this is a big one. So to some extent, partly because this topic is actually so close to my heart, I need to kind of plead some ignorance because that's a number I have some skepticism about for various reasons to do with kind of how those statistics are derived and, you know, like different ways of screening for actually diagnosing ADHD versus just sort of somebody's self report. Lots of people think they have ADHD, not all of them do. Lots of people don't think they have ADHD, who probably, you know, who very well might. It's it's diagnostically complicated. So, you know, so I would take that statistic with somewhat of a grain of salt, but it's also like there are intuitive reasons that that may well be the case. And part of that has to do with think the ways that people leverage certain strengths that tend to sort of correlate with some of the challenges of ADHD. And it's really hard to say which way the causality of this goes. So, you know, and I can speak first personally as much as I can speak professionally as somebody who is a poster child for the currently the current set of criteria for an ADHD diagnosis. But with the kind of impulsivity with the kind of what we sometimes here describe as divergent thinking of somebody who also has a lot of problematic, you know, symptoms of ADHD, like difficulty concentrating, difficulty following through on plans, you know, so I don't want to kind of paint it with a rosy like people think talk about it as like a superpower. And I don't want to imply that. Oh, yeah, like it can be your superpower and it needn't in any way. You know, you needn't worry about being impaired by this set of symptoms if you have them as long as you pick the right line of work, you know, there's a view out there like that. And I think that that can set you up for disaster that because no, like you will also get blindsided, you will hyper focus on one thing at the neglect of other things if you're not really vigilant for that, you know, and like you may really want to look into medication to help you actually stay on track with your goals. And, you know, like there are real challenges to having extreme enough levels of these symptoms that you would get an ADHD diagnosis. But with that, you're also less likely to fall into certain traps that lots of people do fall into, like to get really fixated on, you know, like a status quo kind of perspective on how to set up your, you know, your team or your organizational kind of structure, your, you know, by the same thing that you're kind of you have a harder time sticking to a topic or, you know, staying on a single track, you also have an easier time in letting other stuff in. And I could say a lot more about this, but there are ways to leverage some of the differences that come with having this kind of neuro cognitive profile. And I think the best CEOs with ADHD are finding ways to leverage it. That's probably enough. Yeah, Justin asks, are conditions like autism and ADHD genetic? They are somewhere in the range of 50 to 90 percent heritable. I can actually put numbers on this particular, but there's a lot more to say about that, of course, right. So partially, yes, never entirely. And that doesn't actually tell us about the specific causal mechanism by which any of these things develop. We just know that correlationally and, you know, statistically, twins who are who share 100 percent of their genes tend to be quite a bit more similar on these traits than twins who share only half their genes. So controlling for the same environment, you know, for the same schooling, the same parents, everything, still just sharing more genes in common makes you much more similar on these traits. And that's much truer for autism than, sorry, you said actually, they're both quite heritable. They're both in like the 80, 90 percent range. I don't know what I said before. But yeah, so yes, but not 50 to 90. So yeah, 50 is more for depression, anxiety, neuroticism, extroversion, most percent. 50 percent is like the modal kind of average of most behavioral of most kind of complex psychological traits we get about 50 percent heritability for. But that's actually ADHD and autism both happen to be quite a bit higher. For whatever it's worth. Doug asks, what are the psychology effects of being diagnosed with ADHD? Can it be better, healthier to have ADHD and not to know? Interesting. Again, not laughing at the question. If anything, I can relate to this question. Only if you if you kind of were to drop a lot of context about what it means to know and what you know versus not about like what, you know, there's that phrase, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. And I think what that actually means is if you get some sort of like claim in your head that you don't actually know where it comes from or have it well contextualized or understand it fully or know how it actually applies in your life and that just kind of becomes this out of context edict that can do more harm than good. Right. So and I think that that's equally true of like if you get this diagnosis and your understanding of it makes you think like, OK, well, now I'm doomed to like, you know, now I'm broken and now all I can, you know, like I have to depend on this medication because otherwise or like I can't develop virtue or now my life will be forever, you know, whatever stereotypes or kind of whatever misgeneralizations get packaged together with that label for you. Like, yeah, that could actually be harmful. That could be worse than just having no label at all. But that's not knowledge, right? Like real knowledge would be oh, OK, so there's this whole field that studies this loose constellation of symptoms and they're calling it ADHD. And, you know, there's a whole debate around whether it's overdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. And here's what the doctor sees in my particular profile and like what I've told them on which they're basing this diagnosis. And like, here's what's what really resonates about that. Here's what doesn't. Here's here are options they're offering me that actually seem compelling and worth trying. And here are others that don't, you know, don't really do much for me or that might actually, you know, be contraindicated for me because of X, Y, Z because I get really anxious on psychostimulants or whatever. Right. And like, you really like, you do the work of contextualizing it for yourself knowing like it's a very loose construct that we don't have great understanding of. Then I then knowledge is power. Right. Like real knowledge is power. Real knowledge is always power. Just has to be real. Yeah. Right. And that's that's includes the context includes that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Let's see. Paul Azuz says like how do anxiety disorders which involve panic attacks and derealization, depersonalization relate to a person's self-esteem and sense of life and how to best deal with that problem. That's a big one. That's a big one. Yeah. I mean, can I defer to like let's just do a separate show on that? Yes, you can defer. Is that allowed? Yes. What is what is what is the show we're doing? Depersonalization and derealization. That could be the short hand. But any of that means so but I assume we can do a show on it. OK. Yeah. I mean, it's the they relate in complex ways. And there's lots and lots to be said about them. Sure. I mean, but not in straightforward ways. And, you know, there's a lot, you know, there's usually trauma history. I mean, they're just there's lots to say. But I would any really simple like one liner attempt to connect them in some universal way is probably an oversimplification. I'll say that much. Good. OK. Well, we'll definitely have Gina back. So that could be definitely one of the topics we cover. Maybe I'll know what it means by then we'll see. Fed officer says it's mine. Again, actually, I'm going to skip that one. What's the difference between what a psychological problem is and how to go about resolving it? Well, that's interesting. That's one. That's a big theme of a class that I teach the. There are sort of four big questions. What is it? What causes it? What is how do we classify it? And how do we treat it? Those are the four big questions and we talk about both how those questions are and are not independent of each other. So there's a whole lot I could say on it, but I'm trying to think what's the kind of essence. And I mean, I think it largely I mean, like you could know that you have pneumonia that doesn't yet tell you how to treat it. There are treatments. You know, once you know you have pneumonia, you're much farther ahead in being able to figure out what to do about it because there are no treatments and knowing the cause, particularly where we do is going to go a long way toward telling you what you're trying to intervene on, right? Like what do you need to change? And that's often much complicated with mental health issues because sometimes the cause is almost always multifactorial and complicated. And there are many different ways to attack it, you know, from different kind of angle. You know, their behavioral and and epistemic and and pharmacological ways to attack it. And all of those could have some impact, but probably no one, no one thing alone is enough to solve it. So there's there's often going to still be more work to do once, you know, what it is. But that gets you a long way. I hope that helps. All right, Justin, our psychological differences between male and female biological or cultural nature versus nurture, man on average, you're more aggressive. Oh, my gosh, these are getting. Yeah, they're all like this. All the questions. There's no way that you could pay a babysitter enough. Say yes. Yes, but thank you, Iran. But that gave me the out that I needed. Yes, they are and they are. Yeah, I mean, that is in fact the answer. Yes, they are both of those things and irreducible to either of them. Yep. And on a new on the next show, we'll ask her what specifically she means by that we can do that. We can do a whole show on that. And actually, I'm now looking at the questions. No, I don't approve of shock therapy. That's an easy one. Oh, I didn't see that. Where's that question? It's heard that. I mean, I don't know how to actually like, I don't know what order these are in or anything, but I just happened to glimpse that one. So let me let's do the order. Why are romantic and nonromantic relationships important? Um, wait, romantic and non-romantic. I mean, so I think that's the whole that's my relationship list. Why are romantic? Why have other people important? They're the root of life. They're the best there. What makes human life largely worth that I mean, they're among the greatest values we can pursue in terms of just like being sources of joy via, you know, visibility and inspiration and connection and shared experience and just like exchange of knowledge and values and and just all the things you can accomplish together. So there. Oh, I refer you to my talk, deeper connection through mutual selfishness where I actually do address this. That one. Yeah, right. What is your view of Jordan Peterson as a psychologist, ignoring his political cultural commentary? He says a lot of things that are good in out of context, but I don't think, you know, that he has a very deep whatever his deeper kind of perspective or framework. I don't think it's that good. I think it's very mixed. But, you know, I think there are real reasons he appeals to a lot of young people. And I think, you know, especially his work on self-deception was actually very useful to me when I was sort of starting down that path. Yeah. So briefly, that's what I can say. I find his talks and honesty some of the best, the best stuff he's done. Thank you for all you do. All right. Andrew says, I don't think psychotherapists treat their patients like this, but the ones who speak publicly seem to encourage self-pity and blaming others. Do you agree? And if so, why is that? That hasn't been my experience with the therapists I've trained with and seen and worked with. But there are probably some such therapists. There's just such a wide range of both, you know, perspective, both kind of content and quality among therapists. Therapists are just such a kind of loose and variable group that I couldn't speak to them as a, you know, quaw category. But to the extent that those kinds of therapists are out there, I'm sorry if you've had to deal with them. That sounds terrible. And I would say there are some therapeutic approaches that might lend themselves more than others to that kind of perspective, but I wouldn't like CVT tends to be much more empowering, though, you know, depends on the therapist, how they interpret it. And yeah. So Kayfax says, Gino, when are you going to start the Gino Golden Show? Imagine the profits from the sheer volume of superchats. Fair point. Well, right now, what I can offer you is the Founders Mindset podcast that you're on mentioned earlier. You know, which is not it's not conducive to live superchats, unfortunately, so that is still pending. What I am also just starting to pilot and kind of low key iterate on is a coaching group. And ultimately, I hope it'll become a kind of community where people can ask questions in a more ongoing way and be part of ongoing chats. And if you want to learn more about that, you can go to borlingroupcoaching.com. I should probably learn the URL, huh? For this is very this is such a new initiative that yeah, borlingroupcoaching.com and there's a little interest form you can fill in if you'd like to learn more about it and become a member. I think I spelled it right. So I put it I put it in the chat. Hopefully I spelled it right. Thank you. Justin says, how do you how do you how to get good at forcing oneself to do the unpleasant, but must be done? That's a great question. And again, I have a big one and a lot of psychological, a lot of the sort of technology of therapy and coaching deals with that challenge. But I would say that you wanna be on a builder's mindset. So you wanna approach it from a standpoint of really connecting it to your values and making salient, making real to yourself through all the different means available to you why it's worth it, what you stand to gain from it. What is the take what you want part of the take what you want and pay for it, right? And keep that real to yourself and make sure that it's actually real that you actually do want it and that it is something worth whatever the struggle or the effort and realize that's a selfish thing to do and don't do it selflessly. That's kind of the really high level of big picture answer. And then more concretely get read if you read my article in defense of radical self betterment I have at least some of the I referenced some of the tools. And I can tell you that there are lots of tools like you don't have to just tough it out. You don't white knuckle it, right? Like there are tons of strategies that make it less painful and more enjoyable even when it's still a struggle. All right, here's the I know you wanted to answer the electroshock therapy that used to be used for depression. What do you think of it? ECT works really well for treatment resistant the severe depression bipolar disorders schizophrenia, psychotic disorders and it's under, it gets a really bad rap because it used to be very different than it is now and because people think of one flu over the Cuckoo's nest and sort of media portrayals of it that are like horrific. And just it seems like a really weird, scary thing because we don't actually know why it works. And yeah, we're, you know you're sending an electric shock through the brain which is spooky. But the fact is that it actually works really well for the cases, you know, where it's indicated and with fairly low side effects and their context like pregnancy which people really don't think of because you think, oh, you're not allowed to do anything in pregnancy. Turns out actually this is among the safest treatments for severe perinatal depression and anxiety and well tolerated. And I think it should be prescribed actually probably much more often than it is given kind of where the biases lie. So that might have been an unexpected answer that question. Yeah, glad it came up. Good. Matthew asked, any thought on the efficacy of sentence stems for introspection? This is something I got from Brandon's self esteem book. Any other fun ways to query subconscious besides regularly journaling? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fine tool among many, many other tools that are similar and sort of on a par. And I think, you know, there's nothing magical about it but I like the nature of the query. Like are there fun ways? Cause you can get creative. There are lots of fun ways to sort of check in with yourself and to just follow certainly, you know I have a whole kind of worksheet. If you get kind of look up the article I mentioned the radical self betterment one and there's a link to a life vision worksheet that has various prompts to help you identify your values. And a lot of those prompts could also just more generally work as introspective prompts to kind of, you know pull stuff up that might not be immediately, you know explicit like what do I tend to cry at? What are the weird? When do I tear up for weird, right? Like what are the commercials that I tear up and it's weird that I'm tearing up? Why am I tearing up at them? What is that telling me? Right? Like what's, what is that signaling? And lots of other examples like that. All right, here's some really easy ones. You should have quick answers, right? Let's do it. And then after these. Yeah, they'll be the really easy ones. Thoughts on Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I see what you did there, you're on. That was just mean. Lots of thoughts, very mixed but very influential characters in the history of psychology. You know, we should study them especially anyone who is interested in psychology and you know wants to specialize in anything related to psychology should read them and be aware of their contributions as well as, you know, their errors more than most of us actually are. Like we never read a single primary source Freud document which is bizarre to me. Like, you know, we really should have studied him a lot more than we did in graduate school because he's a really important contributor to the field even though he got so many things wrong. It sounds like another topic for another show. How is the state of academic psychology seems better today than 50 years ago? Well, I wasn't around 50 years ago. I can speak to like up to 15, 20 years ago and I can sort of imagine how things might have been 50. I would say one of the ways it's better is that there's a lot more openness to approaches what we sometimes call third wave approaches or integrative approaches that are less doctrinaire in terms of kind of being either hardcore behavioral in their kind of underlying, you know, theoretical commitments or sort of hardcore psychodynamic, you know, like either in the Freudian tradition or the Fuelbeckian tradition that there's just a lot more creativity around like or values-based treatments. There are these acceptance and mindfulness-based treatments. There are experimental treatments that people are experimenting with psychedelics. People are trying all kinds of different things. There's just like a lot more of a recognition of how little we know and the kind of willingness to explore different kind of perspectives, some of which of course are gonna turn out to be total bogus but some of which are gonna offer a lot of value or already do even if we don't know exactly why like ECT is a good example. Like why on earth it works? We don't know, but we've gotten really good at delivering it in a safe way that we know for whom it tends to work, right? Like we at least have, what is it? Techna, if not episteme, you know, about a lot of these tools. So there's just a lot more, there's lots of tools that didn't exist before and we're not much farther along in having conceptualized them all in an integrated way but we have a lot more to work with. How's the replication crisis hurt the psychology field? That's a loaded question, I believe, is the technical part. Oh, no, how has the crisis, no, that, I mean, that's totally fair. How has the crisis hurt the field, that's fair. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's totally reasonable. I thought, yeah, the question is like how has the kind of work on the replication, because it doesn't erase, you know, if this weren't live, we would just snip out the last minute. Anyway, especially given that I do really need to sign off in another two minutes, let's say. But these last two minutes, okay, let's try to make them count. I think it's a symptom and not a cause. So I don't think that's, yeah, the crisis itself, I don't think has hurt it. If anything, it's sort of shed light on problems that were always there. But I think the underlying problems have hurt the field a great deal and I think that they go much deeper than most of the current commentators to recognize. Like I don't think the problem is, you know, just that we don't publish enough of our null results. I think the problem is with our whole philosophy of science. So also a good topic for another show. Yeah, these are all good. And I'm gonna just have to copy paste these questions and keep them from the next show. Let's do this one. What is evolutionary psychology? What is evolutionary psychology's explanatory power? Many romantic preferences of men and women seem universal and cross-cultural according to evolutionary psychology. Men crave promissory sex more. Well, some men, yeah. I hate to end on a low note, but evolutionary psychology is mostly terrible. And there aren't a lot of things that I'm willing to say that about. So take that for what it's worth. These are largely just those stories. At that level of like, well, here's why, here's the evolutionary explanation for why men crave promiscuous sex. Like, A, that just ceases to be true as soon as you get down past a very superficial kind of level. And it's like, which men and what do they mean by that? And how much of that is easily explained by widespread cultural norms and, you know, and longstanding kind of philosophical trends around how we think about sex, et cetera, et cetera. And I certainly know very notable exceptions, that are overrepresented in my friend group. Like, I just, that's utterly false for my friend group, for example. And that's not an accident because I collected my friends very carefully, yeah. But there are deep reasons why evolutionary psychology is mostly bad that again, have to do with its kind of basic assumptions, kind of both methodological and substantive about kind of the nature of science and the nature of, and human nature. So. All right, so this has been amazing, Gina. Thank you. Thank you. You've been on the show almost two hours and I don't think it's felt that way at all. Maybe to you for enough of the rest of this. No, no, it flew right behind me. Great questions, everyone. Thank you. I still have, there are still 20 questions in the queue. So we're gonna leave those for next time on the top and paste them. You are now the record holder of getting the most super chat, money and getting the most questions of anybody. Thank you, everyone. The competition continues, but Gina now holds the record. And. I didn't even know there was a contest until it came on. So. Yes, nobody does. It's just a contest that Yaron's had. It's an honor. That's good. That's good. Anyway, congratulations again on the baby. Thank you. Send Matt and the baby's kids our love and we'll see you back soon. And to the rest of you, thanks guys. Great questions, great participation. Really appreciate you guys. Thanks for the support. And we'll see you all. I'll see you guys all tomorrow morning. Gina, who knows when I'll see you, but hopefully. Come back to Austin. Sounds good. All right. Thanks, everyone. This was really fun. Great questions, everyone.