Objective Standard Institute launched its first programs in June 2020, led by Sarah and Craig Biddle, with funding from Prometheus Foundation. The Institute’s mission is to teach people about the importance of philosophy, the principles of Objectivism, and related ideas for living fully and advancing liberty.
Toward this end, OSI delivers courses, podcasts, articles, and conferences; trains new intellectuals to write, speak, and teach with precision and clarity; and works with other organizations to advance their understanding of the nature and importance of philosophy in general and Objectivism in particular.
OSI’s primary target audience is active-minded young adults, aged 18–35, who want to think clearly, live fully, and advance liberty.
OSI’s general strategy is to meet people at their rational values—especially their desire to achieve happiness and support freedom—and to help them level up intellectually from there. They call this their “value-up” approach. It consists in showing people the use-value of rational philosophy for achieving their life-serving aims.
Using their value-up strategy, They create a multiplier effect: a steady stream of new intellectuals who genuinely understand Objectivism and rational philosophy from the ground up (rather than as a set of floating abstractions or commandments from “on high”). These new intellectuals help spread rational ideas through writing, speaking, teaching, and by example—by living beautiful lives, defending liberty on solid ground, and thus modeling rational philosophy in practice.
Activities and Achievements So Far in 2025
From January through July 2025, OSI staff and fellows:
- Delivered 2 live courses with a total of 32 participants. These are “Rational Egoism: The Morality for Loving Life” (live version) and “How to Love Literature Even More Through Philosophy.”
- Led 3 reading groups with a total of 20 participants. The books studied were Andrew Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto; George Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God; and Ayn Rand’s We The Living.
- Led a listening group with 11 participants on Leonard Peikoff’s “The Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume.” (Part two, “Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present,” begins in September.)
- Created OSI’s first asynchronous course, “Rational Egoism: The Morality for Loving Life,” which launched in June. This 4-part course is now the “Start Here” introduction on OSI’s website and is available on YouTube (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).
- Created and launched OSI’s new website, which is faster; easier to manage, update, and expand; and optimized for online courses.
- Generated and published 47 articles in The Objective Standard or on fellows’ Substacks (see Angel’s, Thomas’s, Maddox’s, Craig’s).
- Continued their Intellectual Accelerator Program (IAP) with Melanya Hovhannisyan, Aleksander Szydlowski, Hein Kyaw, and Maddox Locher. (We removed Abdullah Tijani from the program in June 2025 because he wasn’t keeping up with the work.) These “Accelerators” (as we call them) have completed the following since the program began in September 2024:
- Virtue of Selfishness reading group
- Philosophy: Who Needs It reading group
- “Rational Egoism” course (live and separate from the asynchronous course)
- “Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume” listening group
- We the Living reading group
- Writing seminar with Craig
- Public speaking workshops with OSI intellectuals
Each Accelerator works closely with an OSI fellow as a mentor. Future projects for this cohort include: The Fountainhead reading group; “Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present” listening group; Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology reading group; and intensive training in both writing and speaking.
- Continued their Junior Fellowship program with Nadav Sternheim, Daria Topchii, and Aditya Patil. Nadav and Daria have published articles in The Objective Standard (see here and here), and all three have articles in the pipeline. (Seamus Riley, who was an OSI Intern in 2023, will be joining OSI as a junior fellow in September 2025. Seamus gave an excellent talk at LevelUp 2025, and they expect great material from him both in terms of written content and video production.)
- Published 25 video podcasts (see Angel’s, Thomas’s, Jon’s, Craig’s).
- Garnered 656,801 views across video podcasts, talk recordings, and video shorts.
- Delivered 8 lectures to outside audiences of 20+ attendees (e.g., “Intellectual Bootcamp 2025” in Kyiv and “The Future of Liberty” in London).
- Grew OSI’s and OSI fellows’ social media accounts to 169,000 followers.
- Organized and delivered 2 LevelUp conferences (Sofia and Orlando) with total attendance and ticket sales of 229. Attendance was substantially lower than past conferences per their decision to downsize these events for quality over quantity.
