 Yes, I don't know if our speakers actually need an introduction, but they'll get one anyway. So Nicos is, I think everybody knows him from being the star of the Daily Objective, but he is also an author of two books. He is the director of the Iron Red Institute of Europe, he's a fellow, visiting fellow, and we're still visiting. Your own book is the Chairman of the Board of the Iron Red Institute, and John Watkins has I think several titles with Shane for a long time, the head of the coaching program. Director of coaching and mentoring, and final enduring until next year. And Don and Yorona are also co-authors of three books, Pre-Market Revolution, Equal and Unfair, and The World Case for Finance. Just because Rosy ignored it, I am the host of the Yorona book show. Yes, it's that little side gig I have. We were saving that for when we go live, so people on YouTube know that. Yeah, a lot of things. Am I producing the speakers again? No. No. People on our channel should know, but yeah. So please join me in welcoming our speakers, and Daniel, we can go live. Okay, good. So, first of all, thanks so much for honoring us with your presence. As Don says, whenever someone consumes your contents, all other things equal, they consider it more interesting than everything in the world from Netflix to sex, so we really appreciate you being here. So what was the idea behind today's topic? There are philosophies out there, like stoicism or effective doctrine, that in some ways promise the same thing as objectless promise, which is a good life, that follow this philosophy, and your life will be in some way better. Stoicism says you will be prepared for the suffering which is life. So with stoicism, you make sure that you suffer when you're tired, so then you're ready for the real deal. And with effective algorithm, it is that you make sure how every day of your life, and all aspects of your life, including your career, is targeted towards the good, which for that I believe the good is helping others. Now here's what I find very mysterious, and I hope you help me solve it. Stoicism, with various expressions, books, podcasts, has millions of followers, I checked before we enter the room, the daily story, has close to 750,000 subscribers on YouTube. How many subscribers have we got, Razzi? A bit less. And the question is why? Why is it that this philosophy becomes more inspiring or more appealing to people? And when it comes to effective altruism, it's, as I found on internet, a billion dollar business, which means entrepreneurs, productive people, so people who should be also our audience, target, as we want to call it, are considered it's a very appealing philosophy. So today we're trying to answer two questions. First, what is that objective, that effective egoism is offering people in terms of the good life? And second, and personally the most interesting thing for me, why is it that we're not winning? I think we have a better idea. Why is it that Stoicism, which tells you that suffering is cool? Why is it more appealing that the philosophy which tells you life is good living? So we start with Don and then we go to Dearon and make sure you actively participate in the Q&A because I consider this very important that when we're in this room we have a better understanding of what is happening and we start fixing it. I don't want in three years to still wonder, oh why is Objective less popular than Stoicism? It should be. Do you remember three years ago when the counter attack started? So, Don. So are we answering both questions at once or are we answering them one at a time? You say you're not to whatever you want, but just thinking about the agenda, so. Yeah, so we'll get to the why. You will get, yeah. Certain ideas are winning, but I think I'm going to start out by just giving a little bit of the lay of the land or how I think about the lay of the land, and that is if we're thinking about the good life and what we want from life, the culture offers kind of two basic alternatives. One is happiness without morality, and the second is morality without happiness. So happiness without morality, this is, so morality is basically fundamental guidance on what it needs to be a good person on how to live and how to act. And the conventional approach to anybody offering happiness has nothing to do with morality. It's, there's really kind of two places that people will turn if they're seeking guidance on happiness. So one will be more broadly, you could be of a self-help genre, right? And here there's, it's an eclectic kind of set of ideas, tactics, many of them are contradictory, a lot of them are superficial. So just to give an example, you'll have a lot of the gurus like Tony Robbins will talk about it. You got to set goals and pursue your goals. But what advice do they offer about what kind of goals to set? What kind of goals are worth striving for? And what are the fundamental virtues that will allow me to achieve goals? And what kind of goals can fit together coherently? There's no guidance on that at all. And so what it basically amounts to is, do what you want and be really excited about it. Like that's the kind of guidance you get, I think, from the self-help world. And I don't want to devalue it completely because it can give you very cool tactical things as Nikos may talk about, it can be inspiring and motivational. But it definitely does not give you a coherent framework for what happiness is and how to achieve it. The other place that we get happiness without morality is psychology. And here you have psychologists who will often engage in studies that will try to assess what really makes people happy. Being bonus week. Being bonus week. So what they'll use is happiness studies. And happiness studies, they're conducted in different ways, but one way is they just ask people, how happy are you? Rank it. And just to give one brief, you mentioned Sweden. One brief illustration of how it really, let's call it, unrevealing these studies are. So in Sweden, it's something like, I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, but the relationships are right. About 10% of people will say, yeah, I'm absolutely happy. Or no, it's what it basically amounts to. I wish I could remember the exact numbers. What it basically amounts to is that the number of people who say they're happy, it doesn't integrate the number of people who say they're clinically depressed. So it'll be like 90% of people say that they're happy and 20% of people will say they're clinically depressed. And so you get, there's some kind of clash going on here. And again, it's not that these psychological studies tell us nothing, but how you define happiness is a philosophic question. And so people can say they're happy when by any standard, their life isn't going the way they want it to. They're suffering different cultures generally. Well, I mean, there's some cultures that it's just culturally, you never admit to being happy. I think you've said to Israelis, you're on there. It's never okay to... Yeah, Jews never said they're happy. Yeah. Happy? How do you mean happy? Whereas other cultures, you can be completely miserable, but it's expected that you say that you're happy. So I just think it's not sufficient guidance that you get when you have happiness without morality. And then morality without happiness, I think we'll explore this in more detail. I think you guys mentioned the effect of altruism. This is basically, and the Stoics, this is basically the idea that morality, being good, what the good life consists of is something other than your personal happiness. So the effect of altruism, for instance, they take for granted you should do the most good. Well, what is the most good? It's placing others above yourself. And so here's some of the concrete guidance that you should give. What do you want to do with your life? What kind of work would fill you with passion? Screw that. No, no, no. You need to pick a job that's going to be really high pay so that you can donate most of the money to charity. You're going to be miserable, too bad. You can save lives that way. How many kidneys do you have? Anybody here have more than one? Get rid of the other one. Give it to some stranger because that's what it means to be a good person. It's the elevation of others above your own personal happiness. And Stoicism is a similar sort of thing. It's the idea that it's not striving to be happy. It's striving not to experience negative emotions by not caring about anything in particular. And so a kind of ideal would be if you can feel indifferent to winning the lottery versus having your best friend killed right in front of you, great job. You've managed to attain the right orientation to life. And to me, that's not a description of happiness. It's not a description of the good life. It's a description of a lobotomy. And so what I ran the authors and what I think is so inspiring and valuable about it is a morality of happiness. It's going to give you fundamental guidance on what it means to be a good person, but being a good person means good for you for your happiness and for your joy. So I'll just leave it at that. There's a lot more to say about that, but Iran, maybe you can fill in if you want to elaborate on anything else, but definitely on the positive of what it means to be egoistic. Yeah, I mean, first let's be clear that, because I saw some stuff online about this, the title of this, which I assume is yours. Yeah, my next book will have the name. Effective Egoism, OK. Effective Egoism, which I assume is Don's because it's a clever title. And Don always comes up with the clever titles. In a sense, again, it's like anything egoism, like rational egoism, it's a redundancy. The whole point of egoism is to be effective at living. To be effective at living your life for the purpose of your happiness, your success, your achievement, your flourishing at living. And what, of course, because we're talking about a philosophy, it tells you why you should live your life for you. It gives you a reason for it. And then what Ryan does is she provides a approach, a whole system of looking at the world on how to choose your values, what should guide your choice of the values to pursue. It's not what you feel like. It's not avoiding pain. It's not doing what the culture expects. That is altruism. It's not other. It's what really is good for me. And, of course, the methodology of doing that is to use reason to look at the world to evaluate what is actually good for human beings, what is not good for human beings, what should be embraced the good and what should be avoided the bad for human life. So first, what are the principles? What are the principles that are universal, that are true of all human beings, right? For the reason that's true of all human beings. And only once you get the principles, you know, reason, productiveness, honesty, and so on, then can you start talking about, okay, now what values are going to lead to my happiness? How do I take that and break it down into more concrete values that are actually personal? Now we're going to choose different careers. We're going to choose different people to marry. We're going to choose different types of restaurants to go to. We have a lot of optional values now, but the focus orientation is towards our own happiness and it's always guided by the universal principles. So we have to achieve them through the use of reason, through an understanding of who we are and the nature of the world around us. So this is an incredibly powerful tool we now have, which is morality, the principles of morality, that now can shape each of our lives. Now we can take it, turn it into, and this is why, you know, whenever somebody says, oh, you guys are called libertarians, for example, often a critique we hear from libertarians is objectivism is authoritarian. It's not really a philosophy of liberty. Why? Because you have principles of morality, which means everybody has to be the same. And you have to, you have to, you know, if somebody's not rational, they're out according to objectives. And that leads to political authoritarianism. Now we can have a government saying, what's rational, what's not. And I got this question in a literary movement in Buenos Aires. I mean, you guys are serious. He just read the virtue of selfishness and he took it as this is some kind of authoritarian morality. And you know, the confusion was just typical of libertarian and morality with politics, right? They can't think of morality separate from politics. So if we have principles that therefore, that dictates their political, that is, their punishments, not from reality from other people. So we have... Let me just, as an aside, like, but that's like saying like the principles of gravity is authoritarian because the plane, if it doesn't obey the laws of the aerodynamics is going to crash through the ground. Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't mean that that dictates where the plane flies or the exact design of the plane. There's plenty of personal decisions that are left over, but it's accepting the framework of what does the human being actually require in order to thrive? And that's what they're throwing away and saying is authoritarian, that there are real requirements. And this is true of the culture generally. So the culture generally, for example, accepts broadly that there is a science of nutrition. Like, there are certain things that you eat, now we're not very good at the science of nutrition maybe, but there is a science. And there are certain things that we don't poison and certain things that we think or know with some level of certainty that are good for you. And the methodology, there's a certain methodology that differentiates, and there's a certain methodology that ultimately arrive at what an ideal diet is. And there's a science in a scientific method. But as soon as it comes to human behavior, as you will the spiritual world, the world of ideas, the world of values and virtues and human action, there's no science. And this is, again, tip of the libertarian. There's no science. People should do whatever the hell they want. It doesn't matter. Who are you to tell me what's going to achieve happiness and what's not going to achieve happiness? I'm not anybody. It's reality that's going to dictate what will achieve happiness and what will be desired. So it's interesting how there are certain lines going on what is science and what is not science. We consider the spiritual values a question of science, a question of objective reality, studying reality, discovering truths about what actually leads to human survival, thriving, and happiness. And that is both a empirical question and a question that is derived logically from our nature, from what we are as human beings, our rational faculty. And the beauty is that we now have these principles. And now every value and every thing that you want, that you think might lead to happiness, you can test against these principles. You can figure out, is it rational? Does it disrupt my career, which I know is an important value to me because that's my purpose. Is it disruptive to that? You now have a framework from which to choose your values. And now you also know that the reason you choose in these values is not because Nico's told you. It's not because this is going to lead to somebody else's what-being and society values that. But it's because it's your life. So you're immediately motivated to pursue that because it's you. It's about your life, your happiness, everything to do with you. So you take this self-help stuff, which a lot of people seem to be motivated by. So there's something in all of human beings out there that wants to pursue their own happiness. They're not allowed to do it because altruism nudges them backwards. But that's constantly seeking the superficial stuff so they can taste a little bit of the happiness, a little bit of the success. And what objectives of liberate us and say, no, the self-help stuff, the good one, the good stuff. That's what it's all about. That's morality. That's what you should be pursuing. And here's the principles by which to evaluate how to do it and by which to guide your direction and to motivate you and to drive you. And in that sense, we should, you know, objectivists, when you integrate the philosophy, it makes you a passionate, the opposite of services, right? You're engaged with your life. You're involved in your life. Everything is about this because everything is integrated. Everything is integrated around these principles that are leading you to happiness and are leading you to be a successful human being and to have this thing called life. So it's everything that effective altruism and historicism isn't. It's fully, completely integrated because we need an effective altruist. Yeah, give up where your passion is and go and do it because they're scientific, right? They're not the kind of altruists of past. Why are they effective altruists? Because altruists of past say, go become militarists. And these new altruists are saying, actually becoming militarists might not be the best use of my time. If I care about other people, maybe the best use of my time is I go and start a company, make a zillions of dollars a day, and then I can really have a huge impact. So they recognize that wealthy people have more of an impact than mother Teresa have. So they're being scientific about it. They're thinking it through, right? Well, I call them naive altruists. So they're really trying to take seriously that we're trying to lead to a good result for other people. They don't have a clear conception of what good would mean for another person, but they're really trying to think, what's the benefit that my sacrifices are bestowing on other people? But I think it's actually the mother Teresa type who are really taking altruism seriously because altruism is really about the sacrifice. It's not about the benefit to other people. And so if you want a pure example of altruism, it's the kind of thing you run into every day. You very rarely run into somebody who's like, yeah, I gave a kidney away or I took a job on Wall Street that I hate just so I can give 90% to charity. But how many of us have met or experienced the equivalent of the father who's having health problems and says to his daughter, you need to take care of me. You owe me. You need to put family first. It's people who try to instill guilt in order to demand your sacrifices. That is the face of altruism. It's not the person who's thinking about how can I do the most charitable thing. And that's where we really see it every day. And so in the sense of I don't put Peter Singer as the leader of effective altruism. I put them in that very negative category. But a lot of the attraction of effective altruism is people say, yeah, I really do want to do good. And I realize that just living among the poor doesn't do good. How can I do good? But I think they're being naive about the nature of the moral code that they're trying to serve. Yeah, very much so. I mean altruism is at the end of the day all about sacrifice. And even they, as scientific as they try to be, vaguely recognize that maybe business does good as well because many of them are in business, particularly in Silicon Valley. But they can't really hold that. They can't hold that the profit motive is actually helping other people, is making lives with other people. Yeah, notice they never say go start a business that makes a billion dollars, but it always a whole bunch of people like that off the table. Well, they want to do that so that they can do good afterwards. So that they can do the good so they can give the money away, but not viewing the actual creating the business as a good, even though in their context, doing good for other people, it is. It's much better than the charity you do. So yes, they're completely evading. In that sense, they strike me as the most benevolent of all the altruists that they seem to have this real idea of doing good, of helping other people. They seem to really care about it. And they don't seem to really be suffering as much, right? So most of them actually, the ones I met, actually pursuing careers and doing fun things and doing, but they know they've got this tug-of-war tourism on there, so they've got the piercing as it's all, piercing as the philosophy, the Australian philosophy, who is, you know, who inspires many of these. Yes, it's all, take 10% of your income, like a tiny thing, and give it to charity, you know, give it to good charities, effective charities, right? And they're happy to do that, you know, they do that, but then they can go on with their life pretending that they were virtuous and then they get into this happiness without morality. They're still trying to look for happiness without any morality, because the morality is the 10% they gave away, right? That covers their guilt. It doesn't really, of course. Well, no, I mean, that's the thing. If you read Singer's books, part of what he's holding up, so he tries to, in one way, swage your guilt, being like, hey, if you do 10%, that's good enough. But on the other hand, he talks about in-laws. He talks about this one girl who's struggling, going, I really want to become a parent, but how can I justify that when I won't be able to give as much to charity, I won't be able to sacrifice enough? And the most that Singer can say is, well, look, maybe your kid will go up to be an altruist. That's the justification for parenthood, and that is the level at which these people who take this seriously, they wrestle with guilt every day. It's, yeah, I give 10% so I'm not a monster, but Singer's own reasoning basically says, you should be giving away as much as you can to Africa to the point where you would live like somebody in a poor African country. And he says, yeah, I don't do that, but I try my best. He is not one of those people, but he's riddled with guilt. If you ever see interviews, or you ever see talks of Peter Singer, you can tell he's riddled with guilt over the fact that he doesn't do more, that he's not willing to sacrifice, he's not willing to suffer like his philosophy, in a sense, and says things. So again, they come up with formulas and gimmicks to reduce the guilt without having to actually live a real altruistic life, because it's impossible. And I think they know deep down that it's impossible. Now, Nico's asked the question, why are they successful? And by implication, why are we not? And that's a question we should always be asking, so I don't think we'll have the definitive answer today because we should always be getting better at what we do. But why are they successful? They're successful because they haven't challenged status quo. They're successful because they're taking what is in the culture, what is deeply rooted in our religion, in our secular philosophy, and has been for 2,000 years. And they're just spitting off of it. They're just accepting it and then giving a little twist and making it sexy, making it a little bit more appealing. You know, the Stoics pretend to care about you as an individual, but they've accepted the Christian view of life sucks and life is misery and life is suffering, and they're giving you a cure for that. Detachment your emotions from it. You know, handle your suffering better. Become stronger to handle those emotions. So it's a pretend self-help. It's kind of a self-help by ignoring what you are, but accepting, fundamentally accepting the Christian vision of life as suffering, and life as a disaster. And of course, the effect of altruists, again, they're altruists. Everybody's an altruist. What's new about that? Well, the only new thing is about it is they give it a guise of science. They give it a guise of sophistication. They give it a guise of success. You're going to be effective this time. It's like we're really going to help other people. And to life that has not said, they do it by ignoring what altruism is really about, which is, you won't suffer. You won't sacrifice. So they're effective or they're successful because they're mainstream. Because they're never challenging the mainstream. They're not questioning the mainstream. They're just embracing it in the mainstream intellectually, in the mainstream philosophically, in the mainstream in the street out there. If you stop somebody out there, ask them what morality is. They answer something vague that is similar to effective altruism with stoicism. That's what they actually could use. Yeah. I mean, I would say, first of all, I don't think effective altruism is popular. I think it's trendy. I think it's a cool thing for people who are like in the know intellectually to be involved in. Stoicism, I think it's popular in comparison to other ideas. I think with stoicism, I agree with what you're on said, but I think part of it is one thing you see, so there's an objective view that ideas drive history, but the state of a culture can also drive ideas. And so what you've seen historically is that something like stoicism often becomes attractive when life feels very unstable and people don't know how to cope with it. And I think one of the attractions to stoicism is that life has been very scary and unstable at least since 9-11 in the West, but particularly in the last 10 or so years. And that creates a certain kind of attraction to it. But let me also name, I think, a better attraction to it. If you're pursuing your happiness and you're pursuing ambitious goals, one of the things you have to endure is challenging costs. And some of what people have taken from stoicism is sort of like what are the mind frames and tactics you can use to endure hardship on the way to an inspiring goal? And so one of the things, part of how stoicism became trendy is athletes got really turned on to it through Ryan Holiday's work. And I don't think they were sitting there going, I'm not going to pursue values, I'm detached from reality. What they liked was the idea of I need to push myself for six hours a day to train. That's really hard. How do I make myself accept that pain in order to get to my exciting goal playing in the NFL or winning a championship? And that kind of advice was appealing to them. So I think there's an appeal to better people there. And even with effective altruism, as your honor was saying, there's an appeal to better people, which is I want to do something amazing in the world. I don't just want to sit around and be poor with somebody. I want to solve cool problems. So I think both of them also try to appeal to better parts of human beings. We can talk about objectivism and the extent to which we've been successful or unsuccessful. That's sort of how I think about how those ideas have achieved, if not exactly popularity, then kind of being sexy. I want to push the speakers a bit more on this. So if you want to be inspired on how to hustle, if you want to be inspired on how to give everything for your purpose, why Ryan Holiday and not Howard Rock? So I get what you say that effective altruism is more in tune with dominant ideas. But particularly with Stoices, we can ask you to do difficult things. If you think about David Goding's, it's not easy to be David Goding's. And the mere fact that you see him, he puts the bar high. You see him say, oh, I could be better. I could do better. And the same happens with the heroes of Iron Run, particularly with Rock. Ask once more. Why choices were not to ask? Well, I'll name one part of it. This may or may not be a fundamental, but I think it's real. Ryan Holiday's alive, Iron Run's not. If Iron Run was writing this today, I think, let me put it more broadly, people respond to living figures who are helping them understand the world today. And the challenge we have is to be a compelling cultural figure in our own right who also is sharing Iron Run's framework. But part of the challenge is, when you're presenting yourself as, hey, I'm an expert on Iron Run's framework, it's like, okay, but you know, that's from the past. I want to know what's cool today. Ryan Holiday's cool today. I know, but people don't respond to Marcus Aurelius. They respond to Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, and then they go, oh, I guess I'll read your influences. But she was alive. But at some time, she was a major cultural figure. Yeah, but not enough to have the kind of impact these people had. Oh, no, she was as big as Ryan Holiday is today. Not of any individual, but in terms of a movement. Snoresism today is bigger than Objectivism was when she was alive. Because it's available. The influence. The internet. I mean, it depends on the internet. The Atlas as a cultural force that people took seriously and were inspired by, I think was as big. Certainly, Objectivism is a philosophy shaping people's thinking. There, you're definitely right. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's part of it. Objectivism is a philosophy. It's a philosophy shaping our system. It's kind of a philosophy, but it's relatively shallow. It doesn't demand that much. I mean, demand certain actions, but it doesn't demand intellectually that much. Objectivism, I mean, some people hate it when they see this, but quite philosophy is hard. It is demanding because, and maybe it's the art in demanding, because it's so new and because it overturns so much of what philosophy is today. I mean, everything she says is in many respects the opposite of what philosophers have been saying for 2,000 years. People ask, oh, there must be another egoistic philosopher. I mean, after 2,500 years ago, that's it. And then I mean, maybe Spinoza did a little bit, but no, there hasn't been an egoistic philosopher for 2,500 years. And suddenly a man comes on board and says, egoism, well, it's going to take a while. 2,500 years of, you know, just going after egoism and proposing the alternative, it's a very different, it's very difficult to shift people's attitudes around these things, particularly in a Christian culture. And we're still in Christian culture, even though we demand a Christianity. We're still very much Christian in that sense. So I think it's the fact, you know, if I ran was a, I mean, I think of Stoicism as kind of a self-help, maybe a slightly different, a deeper self-help guide. If we were just about like a superficial kind of morality thing, do your best, live the life for the fullest, yeah, we would probably be bigger. But we actually have a whole theory about you have to use reason, and we have a theory about what reason is, and it's not just anything you want it to be, and it functions by a particular methodology, and it's important for at least some of us to understand that methodology, so we can exhibit it. There's so much there, it's not just, at the end of the day, it boils down to morality and living your life. I know so much more in order to do that well. And it just is too much of a heavy lift, I think, for most people. Well, even the people who want, so I work with a lot of young people trying to implement this philosophy in their lives. And the striking thing, and this is true for me too, and in many ways still is, it's a work in progress. Even when you want to live by the philosophy because you think it's really getting reality right, even when you finally come to understand kind of asking you, how would I actually live by this? You can still struggle with it. I mean, there's plenty of objectivists who find you like, I still have kind of Christian attitudes towards sex that makes me feel uncomfortable or guilty, or I still struggle with certain things in the productive realm. It's really hard because it's so fundamental. So one way to think about what morality does to a person or is to a person is that it's shaping your self-esteem and how you evaluate your self-esteem. And so when you ask somebody to change your philosophy, particularly change your morality, what you're saying is your whole self-concept is now thrown into question and you have to rearrange how you evaluate yourself in the deepest sense. That is a big, big ask and no other philosophy today is asking something that fundamental of people. Cool. So let's go to the old themes. There's also a couple of super charts. Let's start with the two super charts because we're for a profit business so we need to do that. And the first super chart is actually on the topic of profit so thanks to our friend who asked the question and he asked, isn't profit motive inherently amoral or morally ambiguous at best? So maybe you translated you might want to make money when you do this by drugs or you want to make money because you want to buy a Ferrari and you want to make your neighbor jealous. So why is profit motive inherently more or is it? I think it absolutely is. It's like saying Absolutely is amoral or Absolutely is moral. Absolutely is moral. It's like saying sex is absolutely good with everyone under any circumstances can you imagine a circumstance where sex is not good for you? Yeah, lots. But does that mean sex in what we mean by sex? Not good. Yes, it's absolutely good. Right? So everything is you have to have old context. You always have to have old context. Nothing is in that sense absolute and that applies everywhere all the time absolutely every circumstance The profit motive is absolutely a good because it represents the best in you. It represents your ability to produce and create value to create value that is then objectively validated by if you are the marketplace by the fact that people are willing to pay for it more than it costs you to produce so it's a value that the market validates so it's it's absolutely good because you're producing throw life throw human being values that the market is willing to compensate you for and validate for you. What happens? What about drugs? Or what about something that you produce that's harmful to other people? Well, that's a real exception but that's an exception to the whole issue of production that is yes people can be unbelievable and willing to engage in self-destructive activities and you're producing to satisfy the irrationality is not a good whether it's whether it produces a profit or not profit is not relevant there to the actual fact that what you're doing is not good you're producing a product that inherently is self-destructive it causes destruction to your client. The fact that they want to destroy yourself the fact that they're masochists in some weird way is not something you should be proud of helping them to do so profit even if it's a losing venture it's a bad venture profit is not a relevant parameter the parameter there is the unvirtuousness of producing the thing that you're producing that doesn't make productiveness for example not a virtue but some things to produce is not good that makes sense let me have one of the mics of the audience so who have their hunters there so the order will be one super chat one audience if you would live audience of a super chat I agree but the boss disagrees the way you say it is somebody who's more of a boss than me my other boss who pays you more sorry Rosie so Don first of all I appreciate it I'm happy that you're writing effective because I own the domain name .com if you want I can transfer it to you you're not going to give it away he said transfer it to you you didn't say sell yeah that's fine my question is if you follow a rational epistemology isn't evidence based psychology more rational and evidence based than the objective theory of happiness because they do clinical trials they have a scientific method and we do not that's a good question so the issue comes down to how are you even defining happiness it makes a big difference like what are you measuring and there's no real answer to that I mean they have certain kinds of answers but it's a complete haphazard mixture of things like what we would consider happiness a feeling good for some reason lack of anxiety and depression so you can call it like a zero it's a whole conglomeration of things and even that they don't directly measure it's not like they measure this thing that they don't quite define it's that they have what they do is they have a whole bunch of questions that if you look at most of the the questionnaires used to assess happiness what they really are is anti-anxiety or anti-depression measures so it's not even attempting to measure happiness it's just these things are correlated with lack of depression and anxiety and we're going to call that happiness and that's going to be our standard for happiness studies you can't get around the fact that what happiness is is a philosophic question and then you have to get that once you get to that what happiness is is that it's a condition that one achieves through the attainment of a non-contradictory code of values you realize that there's a philosophic assessment involved and what kind of values are good are achievable and can fit together in a non-contradictory way and then if you see if you think about Einrann's guidance what are the kind of virtues that one would have to practice to bring those values into existence you get that it's philosophic it's not an issue of watch people walk around for 20 years and they seem to be in a pretty good mood at the end that's good for them it's a certain relationship between consciousness and existence all of her virtues are the right relationship between your mind and reality which is a whole philosophic perspective on reality so in that sense it's scientific in the sense of it's the science that is relevant to happiness at the most fundamental level is philosophy it's how do I bring myself in the proper alignment with reality that said is it valuable as supplemental guidance to have studies on things like what are the kinds of activities that people do that reduce anxiety and depression and that build solid relationships absolutely and before before I was coming over here today I was listening to an interview with John Gottman who does psychological research on what makes for healthy relationships that's hugely valuable and you couldn't get that from philosophy but you still need a fundamental guidance from philosophy for what is the role of a relationship in my life and what is the fundamental thing I should be seeking from it and so what philosophy is giving you is fundamental guidance that can't be replaced by psychology because psychology is counting on a lot of insight from philosophy in these realms and the most fundamental thing it counts on I think is what even is happens but how falsifiable is it the whole theory of objectivity well it's falsifiable but come up with a better argument come up with an argument why it's not true I don't think falsifiable is the standard for what's rational that comes from a not very in kind of perspective that I think is really wrong the issue is not is this falsifiable the issue is did you prove it did you validate it did you provide evidence existence exists is not falsifiable but it's true that's the right perspective on knowledge there is an empirical dimension here right so if it turns out that a bunch of people following man's philosophy and following these principles and somehow nobody's happy right then there would be a problem you know we'd have to question maybe we've made some errors in our assumptions maybe we've made some errors in application maybe we made some errors somewhere so there has to be there has to be a realization right and empirical and where do we get these principles for and the understanding of the logic we get it from reality so I think that at the end of the day if psychology understood what happened is what had a proper definition of it and had the ability to measure aspects of it at least elements of it then there would be complete consistent and there would be no difference between what our mobility teaches us and what they're saying because there is no difference between the theory and the facts they should be integrated they should be the same I think what the fact that we're seeing a difference today supposedly is exactly what Don said they don't know what happiness is they don't know what they're measuring they're measuring the absence of things not the positive elements of it they have no theory of it you can't have empirical studies without theory that's part of what comes out of the popular nonsense is that you come up with some abstract theory that can be random there's a logical theory a logical theory connected to reality which you can test but the tests have to be congruent with theoretical knowledge which they don't have so it doesn't surprise me that it doesn't line up today because they don't know what they do today since we're talking about that it's very early in the I mean all the humanities, all the social sciences and humanities are misaligned in the way they measure the stuff that they measure and what they are looking at and the kind of studies including economics most of the empirics and economics are worthless because they don't have a proper theoretical context in which they're looking at the empirical data we have a relevant super chat with Daniel for your contribution where does the idea that human beings are more motivated by avoiding pain than pursuing pleasure comes from? yeah it depends on how you want to answer it well look I think there's a certain plausibility to it you just think biologically the downside of death is pretty big compared to the upside of being a little bit happier so in a sense you could say that there's a stronger pool of negatives or a stronger urgency of them but that's not really the issue the issue is what's your orientation in life is it towards the achievement of positives and then dealing with negatives when they come up and you have to deal with them or is it your whole focus is avoiding negatives and what objectivism says is not that positives are the only thing that matter in life it's that your orientation is towards the positive and that when negatives come up then you focus on them you deal with them and you get back to the positive I think there's a certain kind of plausibility I see why people have that kind of view but it's not getting to the issue the issue is where's my focus in life what do I regard as important worthy of attention what do I regard as essential this is one of the core themes of Atlas Shrug it took me a long time to appreciate that this was central to it which was what matters in life and it's the positive happiness, joy, success I ran was not a fool she grew up in Soviet Russia she knew what suffering fear destruction enslavement were and she still is able to maintain the view that that's not what matters in life and the stoics of the people who in the face of living in a western country look out and say ah man there's some problems I guess life is suffering but yeah I mean it's all of a Christianity the purpose of life is not some positive to be pursued in this life it's an afterlife it's something afterwards right now in this life life sucks avoid pain avoid pain as much as you can so that you can you can make it right to ultimately to where you know a pleasure exists it doesn't exist here the good doesn't exist here it exists in this afterlife and there's another aspect to it in human history how many people have had the time and if you will the energy to focus on the good like life sucked for people most of history so it's not just pain really is real there's a I mean it's kind of weird in the 21st century to assume that life sucks when life is like unbelievably good but for most of human history people got up in the morning went to work drudgery the work was drudgery for the most part came home ate and went to sleep and that was life and they died at 36 and so you could see why Hobbes would say you know life is short what is it nasty buddhist is short because it was for most people for a big chunk of the population it was nasty buddhist is short and there were a few people who had it a little better right but for most of history people didn't have the time and the energy to focus on the positive and to devote time to the positive and that was the exception the rule was drudgery and the reason for that is the is the lack of reason and the lack of industry and the lack of what ultimately led to a prosperity which allows us time to think about happiness and to think about the values the values to pursue and in a sense there are very few cultures in history in Greece a little bit in Rome and then the renaissance on and even the renaissance on what percentage of the population benefited from that until the industrial revolution 10% most of people lived in drudgery so it's an achievement to get to the point where most of humanity could really focus on happiness a friend of the back then a friend of the front I have a question don't you think that these ideas of morality they are really like for naive people what is the measure of morality is it a law is it as long as you can get away with things this means you haven't done anything wrong because we can pretend there is good and bad but then ultimately who is stronger this person wins what is morality I came to the conclusion that really like this sort of biblical I'm now asking myself these biblical things of good what are they for because yeah like as long as you can get away there are plenty of examples of people who win if you can get away with things and I mean it's just let's be a little bit thankful not to say oh this is going to be bad you know a starting point for thinking about is clearly there are some things good and bad for your life right it's not a matter of opinion would that be good for your life or bad for your life it would be bad so there's an objective standard that might be hard to articulate but there's some clear things that impact you and allow you to live better and that things that hold you back tear you down move you towards death and then it's a question of how you discover those and how you figure out what those things are and so I don't think there can really be any objection that there's some objective standard what's good and bad for you like it's self-evident that people's lives can be going in better and worse directions can be in better and worse conditions and then the question is can you articulate a standard that helps you assess okay well what choices can I make that will actually put my life in the best state possible now once you've answered that and we can talk about iRan's answer to that but I think the core of the answer comes from the fact that in order to figure out what is objectively good for an entity what you have to think about is their basic means of survival that's going to give you the deepest insight into what improves their life and what holds it back and I think one of iRan's most profound insights and it's central to her philosophy is that human beings are basic means of survival is our mind is reason reason is what allows us to identify our values formulate a long-range vision for our life build a life that is actually achievable successful and can achieve happiness and so that is what allows us to assess the fundamental things that are good for us and the fundamental things that are bad for us now then if you ask okay if that's true and I'm stipulating and I haven't proven it obviously right if that's true what does it mean to say if I get away with something like what would that even mean well I mean I guess you could take like an example right it's wrong to lie is it okay to lie then if I can get away with it which means not get caught by somebody well first of all you can't too quickly say oh I won't get caught right every thief thinks he's not going to get caught but if you if you steal something it's a fact and in principle a fact can be discovered so you don't know you're going to get away with it but even there what's the whole meaning of it what am I trying to achieve because this is really the I think the core of the issue the reason not to lie or not to steal or not to murder or not to cheat on your spouse is not because I might get caught it's because that's not what I want from life I have a vision of what I want from life I want to be a writer who's surrounded by friends who provide me with intellectual stimulation who spends my days enjoying great heroic art that inspires me who falls in love with somebody that I admire that's what I want from life is a policy of lying cheating and stealing going to move me closer towards that or away from that it's going to move it away from it I'm not going to be a person worthy of admiration I'm going to turn other people's rationality instead of the biggest reward a huge threat to me the stupider they are the less likely I'll get caught the smarter they are the more likely the more I'm vulnerable it's throwing away the life that I want to do something even if I might not get caught there's no value there there's no reward money what's that money going to buy me if I've lost everything on this earth that I care about nice I mean this is the problem of the fact that we associate morality with what you said biblical the Bible we associate morality with religion and yeah why should we follow the thing commandments who cares if I can get away with it cool there's no God anyway so who's going to catch me and who's going to punish me there's no having a hell so I'm going to do whatever the hell I want as long as I can get away with it and other people let me get away with it I'll do it but that's a false orientation around what morality means and what morality is morality is not about cheating on some others not about a system imposed on you that somebody arbitrarily decided it was right or wrong which is what religion religious morality is morality is about and this is Iman's innovation in a sense it's Aristotle's but Iman really flushes it out and really gives it foundation morality is a set of guidelines on how to live a good life and if it's a set of guidelines on how to live a good life and it's a good set of guidelines on how to live a good life why would you want to cheat on why would you want to get away with anything because it's not that other people are judging you if she's moral or isn't she moral that's not morality it's you judging yourself am I living a good life or aren't I living a good life so if you know if you teach me how to you know how to think of an analogy how to be a good surgeon and there's a way to be a bad surgeon you kill all your patients and there's a way to be a good surgeon you get the exact result why would I ever want to be a bad surgeon I only want to do this well because that's what I am if I give you some principles on how to live a good life what's the temptation of living a bad life I want to give you can lie, you cheat, you steal sometimes you can get away with it it's very rare that you can actually get away with it but you're not going to live well now if you tell me no, no, no I know people who like to cheat and they live a great life they're so happy this is successful but I've never met anybody like that it empirically doesn't exist go back to the empirical evidence they just don't exist I mean I like to say the only career in the world where lying is a virtue is politics but if you've ever seen a happy politician the pathetic, miserable, horrible human being they really are because they lie and lying has consequences of your own soul this is kind of what Don was getting to it it's not just you don't live the life you want to live some of them don't know what life they want to live they want power power is not a rational goal and as a consequence seeking power destroys you it destroys your soul it destroys who you are if you accept that you can attain values through lying yes you'll be able to attain certain things so maybe you won't get caught but that very action destroys your soul and it destroys your soul because it destroys your capacity to be rational because it introduces falsehood into a machine a thing that requires facts but you assume that it destroys the soul oh no the empirical evidence is unequivocal and not only is the empirical evidence unequivocal you can introspect and see it you can introspect and see it and I often tell young people you want to see the lying destroys the soul spend a couple of days just lying take your best friend and lie to them periodically I know plenty of people who lie very easily and they're all miserable and if they're not miserable yet they will be soon don't look at adults because you can train yourself not to feel guilty and even to get a certain power trip out of lying look at kids when they do it and there's a real you can see the destruction of the soul in those moments as a father of children at the end of the day fine, if you think lying is the path to happiness go for it go out and try it I'm not going to I mean this is morality is again it's not this dogma that is imposed on you by an external force and everybody is watching you you can do all kinds of lies particularly you can lie to yourself very effectively without getting caught although you know you lie to yourself but try it and it doesn't work it's interesting for example here what we're talking it's like a masturbation we just talked about but then see a real life example of morality people go to war and they see things that their heads can't process the pain they witnessed a problem with post traumatic post traumatic so somebody who's been to war no, I have been to war so somebody who's been to war and been in a war and somebody who is not masturbating here because I live it now I want to elaborate on that one that was complicated but this is not an masturbation because it's life this might seem like we're talking we're just talking but just talk me something because it's reflective of how we behave and what kind of life we live this is not some theory that is over then we don't live it so people go to war and what they discover is that there's a lot of evil in the world and there is indeed a lot of evil in the world and the question is and part of how people process that is determined by what kind of self esteem they have and what kind of attitude they have towards their own life so I can process the evil of war in the context of that's something I want to avoid that's something I don't want to have to live through that's why I want to live a different kind of life and I want to fight against the things that create this evil the things that make this evil possible so the fact that there's real evil in the world just makes it very real and concrete to all of us that we need morality we need morality to avoid that evil and indeed a moral world would not have war let me give two examples in terms of getting away with it one fiction or one from real life have you watched the Casa de Papel the heist there's a figure there the professor he's a very clever guy you could imagine would be a millionaire in any line of business he decides to be a thief a crook he quotes sorry for the spoiler get away with it what does this mean though for the rest of his life his success is that now he has to live in an island somewhere in the middle of nowhere and he has to hide for the rest of his life he got away with it and the rest of his life is hiding a real life example one of the most evil persons in history he died of old age and the last 40 to 50 years of his life probably the last 50 years of his life he was paranoid he was so paranoid that one day he's presumably best friends Lavretti Beria, the head of the secret police shows up in his house and because Stalin had screwed up the war it was the beginning of the Nazi invasion he was sure that Beria came to arrest him now imagine this you've led the life which has led you to the point that you hear your best friend being outside of your house and your assumption is again I'm going to end up in the torture chamber and I'm going to be killed this life sucks and what was Stalin's last moments lying on the floor and no one daring to go there because all his friends wanted to make sure that he dies and he got away with it he didn't die in the gulag he wasn't executed, he didn't fall in the coup but he led the life which sucked his wife committed suicide because probably she hated him so much imagine living with this because he loved his wife imagine having this in your consciousness so the fact that you get away with it if you do the wrong things doesn't mean that your life is a the real life story of the heist so there's a famous robbery in Britain a great train robbery where they got away with a huge amount of money and some of them got away and a famous example one of the top guys who was part of the robbery it was a very sophisticated robbery he made it to South America with a lot of money and he lived in South America you know he lived there with a lot of money and had all the luxuries of money and about 20 I think it was 20 years after the heist he came back to the UK and gave himself in and he said I can't live with myself I hate my life I hate everything about my life and I have to everybody knew he was the train robber so there was a one out phase arrest there was no treaty so he literally came back to the UK and gave himself up because he couldn't live with it actually I can tell you the real story yeah it was Ronnie Biggs he lived in Rio de Janeiro Brazil married a local girl, had kids that's why he could not be extradited back to England to go to Brazil with children but he got cancer and he could not get good treatment in Brazil so that's why he came back to the UK because he felt he could get better treatment for his cancer in the UK he knew that he would be sent to prison in the UK but he preferred to have in the hospital wing of a UK prison rather than in Brazil so he had money, he could have gone to a lot of other places in the world that don't have extradition treaties with the UK to get his cancer treatment at least what I read I remember there was a whole article about the guilty felt and how horrible he felt and the fact that he wanted to in a sense I'm not saying you're wrong by the way I'm not saying you're wrong in your theory of what it is that was what I read it's on my theorizing around it that was the story that was told as I read it and I can tell you exactly so we have a super sat on Kanye because it's autotopic it's going to be last so Kanye yeah I can't believe how we are pronouncing wrong but before we're going to end with Kanye because it's autotopic you're next right? Kanye is never autotopic so I've read The Psychology of Pleasure Nathaniel Brandon in Virtues Health Business where he states that pleasure as a reward is the ultimate statement of reality that I am in control and pain being the statement of I am helpless so could it be that the appeal of socialism being so much pain or with so much stimulus that it does feel painful the socialism kind of allows them to feel a sense of control through that pain because from my memory like the most you've reached the ideals of socialism when you can be tortured and be okay with it and sorry yeah I mean that's a good analysis in a certain front but what you're describing is heroin it's I'm suffering and now I'm numbing and the whole thing is like a numbed life is not a life and so look I'd rather somebody not suffer than suffer but you can actually be happy and joyful and that's the kind of perspective that we're reaching out which is like the ideal life is not I'm in a heroin induced bliss for 30 years or whatever and I completely agree with you as well I just wanted to add in terms of helping other people choose objectivism as the preferred one because we are biologically programmed to avoid pain more than go towards pleasure how can we create or how can we take these abstract principles and create a very good framework where it gives them those first few steps on the ladder like first do this then this does that make sense? oh yeah I have an answer to that you go first yeah I wanted to say something about pain and pleasure because I don't quite interpret it the way you did so Nathaniel I think is making a metaphysical point that this is kind of how this is the most basic most fundamental, most metaphysical thing that babies feel right they avoid pain the most important part of pain is the kind of realities against you you have to control pleasure it's supportive of you because if you think about John Gold's being tortured right he's not a slowing but he also doesn't let the pain go he doesn't let the pain in a sense get to him right it doesn't change who he is he's not out of control because he has a cognition he can control that he knows what's going on right so even though that gives him that metaphysical sense about control because he's who he is because he has a set of ideas because he has a philosophy the torture is not him feeling out of control what happens with most people don't have a philosophy is exactly what you describe for them that pain stays I'm out of control instead of okay this is a context I feel the pain in this context I can handle it because I know what the antidote to it is I think it's important to not take that not say that pain is a sense of out of control that's not how it's always perceived because once you become conceptual you have the ability to control that it's what the stories are taking advantage of in a sense because he has a philosophy because he has a life so this idea of controlling and living with pain is not unique to the stories they want you to eject the positive that's what really controlling pain or being able to live with pain or being able to manage pain is something that I think any rational person can do because they know pain is not the essential of what life is one and also part of it is the best way to cope with pain isn't so far as you can see it in service of a pleasure think about like a work out is deeply painful and uncomfortable and the way that it becomes it doesn't make you feel out of control or like life is awful because you can see it almost as this is like my tribute to the positive I'm trying to achieve which is health, a good body energy and so on and it's the more that you can see pain is serving a positive that's actually a better way to cope with it than just trying to disengage from life and nothing bothers me at all it's more that you're tying it to a positive value that you're pursuing the thing I was going to say to get to the end part of your question which is one thing that I definitely think will help objectivism be more of a cultural influence is it's presented and it is a philosophy so it's abstract, fundamental guidance on how to live what is you want a philosophy translated into much more actionable tactical kind of guidance and so for instance my book Effective Ego is a part of what I'm trying to do is take objectivism and give more specific guidance on how you implement this what would it look like to take the first steps on the journey to be more productive more rational to grow my self-esteem and I think there's a lot more work to make it all the way down to tactical like okay here's an exercise you can use that's going to help you form the clearer values that's going to help you overcome the obstacles and indeed part of what I'm doing at the Ironman Institute is I run the coaching and mentoring program and part of what we're trying to do is get to that very very tactical level so that hopefully in a few years we can have the workbook to objectivism in 90 days it's not really going to be that but you get my point where it's going to be you'll have the fundamental guidance on understanding the ideas and what's their justification but then like okay now I know what I can really do to build myself confidence to become a better thinker to discover a career that I love to you know you know wind my way through romance and so on in really healthy rational ways I think we're going to get there to the point where you'll basically just have a toolkit to really make the most of this philosophy but we're kind of in the earliest stages there it's taken a lot of us just decades to learn what the hell the philosophy is let alone be able to kind of serve it up in a very digestible form but I agree 100% once that exists I think that helps objectivism as a cultural force it's one reason I'm excited about the work I'm doing the main reason is I just love working with our students and helping them in their goals but I can see where this leads in 10 years and I think we'll have some amazing amazing tools for people to become inspired by I'm really happy about the full version of like Robert Green's mastery and my throw work for that big apprenticeship yeah but I mean I'll just say one of my inspirations for the kind of book I wanted effective egos and to be was Robert Green who I disagree with him about a lot of things what's that yeah that's true but that kind of book where it just feels like it's rich with a lot of really actionable stuff but it has a deep perspective on life as well so yeah no I think there's a lot we can do and I mean you mentioned Mike Rowe that's another thing that I'm not personally doing but other objectives are and I hope to see more which is in effect creating companies and apps and things that kind of like I'll give you one example somebody who's already doing something like this Lisa Van Dam is an objective start to school it's an amazing school and she educated that her peak off daughter and so on now she's created her passion is getting people to fall in love with literature well one thing you could have done was you could be Lisa's friend and she invites you over for a book club which I was lucky enough to go through but how do you scale that to millions of people will she create an app where she leads you through the books that she really loves and so this is something that kind of scales learning how to love literature which is it promotes objective is in a really fundamental way that it teaches you how to be a value or in a fundamental way and I think the more that we can in effect like product eyes different aspects of getting value out of philosophy that really creates an enormous cultural impact of the time yeah and let me just say something positive or we can't can't get I'm not sure but Don is going to take that question I'm not going to I don't know what the question is yet I make no promises I mean this this is really relates to the original question of why has an objective is being more successful and how do we become more successful and it's to some extent it's a numbers game you know at some point objective will grow exponentially and a part of that is going to be the curve we have right now which looks very very shallow but all exponential graphs go very very very slow and then you see that and the question is what causes that and I think what causes it is the kind of work that Don described I think what causes it is just the sheer number of intellectuals actually talking and teaching and speaking and and in a sense at whatever level they do it taking these very very abstract difficult ideas and chewing them for people and making them more palatable and easier to digest for people what we need is you know anyway between a hundred a thousand intellectuals what active we're in the culture we're constantly talking about this at writing speaking you know engaging with people that is what will lead to you know this real change because this is not superficial it's not like one guy can go oh I've got another twist and outroism let me do this and oh that's kind of cool and for 50 years I'll follow that and then somebody else will come up with another twist we're asking people to change everything and to change everything requires you know kind of what enlightenment did or what content on the negative or what any significant intellectual movement that challenges the very foundations of everything and enlightenment may be the best example it takes decades and right we're we're the enlightenment on steroids because we're not afraid to challenge even deeper beliefs than the enlightenment we wouldn't challenge the religion not at the metaphysical and epistemological level they wouldn't challenge a lot of issues at the very deep level they wouldn't challenge morality we're challenging all of that plus everything that the enlightenment is through so it takes time but it takes people it takes intellectuals it takes the people doing that kind of intellectual work to get the ideas out there that will ultimately change the world so that's we need a lot of dawns and we need dawns to be training a lot of people and again that exponential growth will happen if we continue on the path along today so the positive message of the night is the compound effect works to our advantage so many thanks to Christopher to link and Apollo Zeus for their superstars and we go to the next question he's taking your last so Kani is the last person so my question was how does one argue someone for whom happiness and flourishing how does one argue someone for whom happiness and flourishing are not the standard like an environmentalist or a Christian and can one argue with them at all? well one can argue with any environmentalist or any Christian some of them are hopeless and it's good to figure out who's hopeless quickly so you don't waste too much of your time but some of them are not then what you're arguing is about the standard that is you have to argue about why do you care about the environment why is mother with so you have to challenge them where they live you have to challenge the very foundations of what and show the contradiction in what they are holding what they believe and what they're living towards the same with religion you have to show them that that is you have to challenge why that is the standard for which they believe as long as they accept that standard they can't accept yours so you have to you have to challenge it at its root yeah I agree 100% with what you're on set the way I think about it is whenever you have a disagreement at the level of the framework sometimes just making explicit what your framework is is enough for people to go oh yeah that makes more sense I had kind of a vague hazy idea but often it's not and there you have there's two things that you need to do one is you expose contradictions in their framework and provide a clarifying alternative and two is you expose injustices or destruction that follows from their framework and offer an inspiring alternative and if you think about why Atlas Shrugged is so effective that's exactly what she does in Atlas Shrugged she exposes the incoherence and contradictions and altruism and unreason and then offers a clarifying alternative and you see the destruction and injustice that follows from the kind of conventional philosophy and you get this inspiring alternative but that's basically how you attack a framework but as you're on pointed out that only works with somebody who has some amount of desire to live some amount of valuing their life some positive values to appeal to and there are people who really don't and you can't convince them but that's fine you don't need to convince them they're irrelevant in a context where the culture is not controlled and defined by them and also I'm not don't be weird and creepy so not to be impersonated by someone who is weird and creepy so the other day I wrote something about this is why we're failed so the other day I wrote something solidarity related to Ukraine on Twitter and someone replied I don't view an objectivist that doesn't selfishness meaning we don't send help to Ukraine something like that now from the profile peak the guy was probably 16 or 17 and he got like 15 followers and then there were three people who said no what are you saying? these guys perhaps the first time in his life is interacting with objectivists and the idea he gets that three people are telling him that's not the way and you mentioned Lisa what she does very well is she doesn't preach objectivism like that so she has this up on the read with me and she's analyzing Les Miserables and for those of you who've read Les Miserables there are some very religious figures there and when she's analyzing them she's pointing out notice how they stick to their principles how they're people of values it doesn't say all these persons are sacrificing we condemn that because then people ok that's weird so let's try not to be weird what's the positive version of that let's try to be thoughtful well yeah I'll put it this way I've become increasingly convinced so I teach a lot I'm teaching of course at the our school iron university on persuasion in a few months and I've become increasingly convinced that a big part of persuasion is not like the communication tactics you use it's who you are and how you are and you can put this as authenticity but part of how people are persuaded is they perceive you as a real person that they would like whenever you're trying to convince somebody of something philosophical particularly morality you're saying in effect think like me live like me and if you come across as either kind of like this guy who's just melding an ideology and you have no personality or it seems spony or you come across as weird what people take away is I'm not listening to your argument if this is what your ideas achieve I want nothing to do with it whereas if you come across as a person it's like yeah that guy seems like or that woman seems like they're living a life that I would want to live or they have a quality that I would want to have then now it's okay let me hear your argument and I'm interested in it and I'm kind of likely to process it in a more intrigued way rather than a more I'm trying to reject it way and so a big part of how I think about persuasion now is be somebody who I want to emulate and then give me your argument like that's I think the right recipe good I will go to any final questions or is it kind of a tie no we got one more we got one more so my question is you talked about good life what is a good life do you define it subjectively or objectively as in can somebody just out of nowhere say hey this is what I think a good life is and this is how I'm going to live it and I don't care what anyone else and people do that but I think part of what we try to get across is that we definitely think there's objective conception of what a good life is and to kind of summarize points that we've made but Iran was really elaborating on the briefest summary I can give is that it's a life of reason where you're using your mind as your tool of survival to select your ideas to select your goals to pursue your values reason all the time in every issue it's a life of purpose where you're aiming at pro life goals you're trying to achieve your happiness with every choice that you make and above all that you have a productive purpose that is at the center of your life that the core of how you walk through this world is as a created being who's generating the values that they need to live to put it more simply find a career you love and build your life around it and then finally it's a life of self where you set demanding moral standards for yourself based on reality and based on human nature and you strive to live up to them and you never let you never settle for less than the best for life that is the core of what is objectively good for a person and it's your own point out that leaves a lot of optionality for where do you want to live what kind of work do you want to do what kind of jokes do you like what kind of men or women do you fall in love with there's a lot of options but those three run throughout all of us in terms of what actually is good and what will allow you to thrive and achieve happiness and they run through all your optional values as the optional values can't contradict any one of them because that will create conflict and internal conflict and it will be it will subvert the survival value of the three that that Don articulated and then of course the integration of all of them they should all be integrated around you around your life and your love of life and your pursuit of life so it can be you just decide I'm living a good life it can be something arbitrary like that it can be anything that you do to live a good life is to pursue a specific type of life with a specific methodology the methodology of reason okay comments on Kanye West made this statements what was it that okay the one was that obesity is the the glorification of obesity is demonic and something about the Jews the Jews related to the obesity no but they're behind cats and cats or something like that no I mean my like look my view is Kanye West if you like hip hop at all he's a really brilliant creator particularly early and middle period Kanye but he's clearly a person who is severe, severe psychological problems he's admitted it and I don't take these comments as these are considered comments of somebody who like hates Jews this is somebody with severe bipolar disorder and it's really tragic that it's not being handled in a way clearly that is conducive to his well-being so I find it really sad and the fact that people are treating it as if like you know I came up here and was starting to say anti-semitic things hopefully you're wrong to punch me in the nose if I did it like I don't put it in that category I just find the whole thing really tragic and it makes sense so many thanks again for honoring us with your time Razi, any part in thoughts Razi is the creator and the organizer of anything that happens near to you so he deserves the last word