 Alright, I'm here with Yaron Brooke. He is an author, a podcaster and the current chairman of Ayn Rand Institute. Welcome to the show, Yaron. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Alright, so I have a bunch of questions that I and topics that I wrote down. It's the first I do to any guest because I've been a fan of your work for quite a while now. And my first question for you would be, what is your favorite Shakespeare play? Wow, favorite Shakespeare play. I mean, I think that probably Othello, just because it is, it is so dramatic. It is so, you know, the drama is so meaningful. I think it's probably the greatest portrayal of evil. Oh, yeah. Yorgo is such an interesting character in the sense that his nihilism and his evil is so blatant. And the tragedy of Othello is that he sanctions this evil. He won't recognize it. He won't look past it. And of course, the tragic consequence of that. But Shakespeare has so many good plays. It's very, you know, it's very hard to choose one. I'm also a Shakespeare fan myself. Last year, I took a year long class where I studied great many Shakespeare plays. Tragically, Othello was not part of the curriculum. So what is your favorite? What is your favorite Shakespeare play? It's a rather unpopular pick, but Titus Andronicus. Oh, wow. Okay. It is popular. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very farcical tragedy. And that everything is so over the top. It's a lot like Tinto Brass's Caligula. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. So yeah, I wish to mention Shakespeare because there's a play that you discuss in a lecture that was featured on your podcast called the Yaron Brooks Show, which I would recommend everyone listening to check it out. So the play is The Merchant of Venice. Yes. And of course, one of the most well known characters is Shylock, a Jewish moneylender who it he didn't end up like a better off, isn't it? He it's a it's a it's built as a comedy. Of course, it ends with a wedding, but for Shylock, it's a tragedy. And it's a very, it's a very stark portrayal of anti Semitism, even in Elizabethan England. Yeah, it's definitely it's interesting because it's anti Semitism in Elizabethan England, even though what's interesting about it is there are no Jews in Elizabethan England, because Jews were Jews were banned from England before Elizabeth came to the throne. So for 200 years, there were no Jews in England. And Shakespeare never met a Jew, right? So he was basically writing this off of things he had read about Jews in in in Europe. And like a lot of Shakespeare plays, The Merchant of Venice is his interpretation of a story that comes from another author from from mainland Europe. And not only is it is a portrayal of anti Semitism, it's also portrayal a very interesting and very, I think deep portrayal of the hatred of money lending of finance of the process of money lending. And it shows the religious origins of that hatred because the the Christian money lender who gives people money doesn't lend it to them. And just when he lends it to them, he doesn't charge interest. You know, lectures Shylock about the evils of charging interest when you when you lend money. And it's quite like most of Shakespeare, it's very insightful, right? And it's very insightful. Shakespeare really knows his stuff. And he knows any and he builds real characters. But like most of Shakespeare, unfortunately, they're no good guys. They're no good people. This is like every Shakespeare play, there's nobody good in a Shakespeare play, maybe some of his comedies, but not none in the in the dramas. And and it ends in tragedy for at least some of the characters. Oh, yeah. So the reason I brought up Merchant is that you made your lecture made the connection between at least anti capitalist ideas, Marxism being the most prominent one, and an anti Semitism itself. And I have a quote here that says, wherever you find a group that is railing against capitalism, it won't be long before you attract types who want to blame Jews. And I do hope to hear more of your thoughts on that, like you elaborate elaborate more of that quotation, please. I mean, absolutely. You know, from the from the really from the beginning of capitalism, from the beginning of the 19th century, you know, capitalism and being Jewish were connected and in the minds of those who opposed capitalism, whether it was German thinkers in who longed for the small villages and, and thought that capitalism was corrupting people in their cities, they associated capitalism with moneyed Jews with Jewish bankers, remember, but bankers throughout history had been Jewish. And if I can, I can tell the story of why but but but Jews have always been involved in money, at least in modern sense, since the rise of Christianity. And but Karl Marx himself, who who who's has a linear Jewish lineage was very anti Semitic. He has an essay called on the Jewish question, in which he says that the problem is Jews are self interested. self interest is the primary feature of capitalism. self interest is evil. Jews are evil capitalism is evil. And indeed, the problem with Christian society is that they become Jewish in their love of money and their love of self interest. So the connection between self interest, money, and then Jews was made by Marx and really, it permeates society and of course was also made at the same time as Marx by conservative Germans. So you see it in the conservative movement, you see it on the right wing, like anti capitalists on the right tend to be anti Semitic. And you see it on the left. Marxists tend to be a Marxist anti capitalists tend to be anti Semitic. And, and you know, it goes back to Jesus throwing out the money lenders from the church from the from the temple, money lending, money changing has always been deemed sinful creation of money from money. And Jews could do it. Because in the Old Testament, it says, God says to the Jews, you're not allowed to charge interest on money unless from from your brother. Jews interpret that as you can't charge interest from other Jews because all the Jews are brothers. Christianity is a universal religion. So everybody is your brother. So Christianity interpreted as you cannot charge interest from anybody. So Christians were banned from being bankers, even though they were and they found ways around it and they cheated. But Jews didn't have to cheat because to them the meaning of the passage was different. So Jews became and Jews weren't allowed to own property. And they were excluded from certain professions during the post Rome, during the dark ages, the Middle Ages. So they became the money lenders. And people have always hated money lenders and they've associated that with being Jewish. Let's see. Well, so a bit of personal history. I grew up in Hanoi, Vietnam. And of course, I think Marxist philosophy was introduced as I was entering from middle school to high school. And of course, this was not discussed. You know, it's a it's a rather, if I can remember a rather simplistic portrayal of say, you know, the natural progression and how, of course, those who the there's a system called capitalism, which is founded by, say, exploiting the working man. And of course, the communism, which a phrase, a key phrase is emphasized, that was emphasized is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the worker will rise up and, you know, run things. And, well, obviously, we can see how well that has worked in history. Since the workers are not going to run things, somebody has to run it for them. And in order to run it for them, you need a Stalin or Lenin or Mao, or I don't remember the name of the leader of North Korea of Vietnam, but you need a representative, you need a dictator, you need an authoritarian who then guides the proletarian and decides what's good for the proletarian decides what's good for you as an individual, and and views individuals as dispensable, because what is important is the collective good, the group, the the the the state or the, you know, if it's an internationalist view, then the proletariat and the individual doesn't matter. And therefore, killing individuals is fine, silencing individuals is fine, discriminating against individuals is fine. Anything goes as long as the dictator says it's good for the group. And the group just goes along because what do they know that, you know, that they have taught your taught from when you're very small that you as an individual don't count don't matter. Yeah. And one of the things I learned, one of the darker chapters in in Vietnamese history is that so the Vietnamese leader is Ho Chi Minh. He enacted Maoist land reform. And one of the scariest details I found is that they it was an active persecution witch hunt of landowners, mainly just because they happened to have land. And even some of the landowners were were active with were, you know, as was it sympathetic with the Vietnamese cause during the colonial wars against France. And even then after the war, they were persecuted by the Ho Chi Minh government. But of course, I mean, it's communism, communism, there's no such thing as private property. There's no such thing as private land. And they're going to be prosecuted because they are part of the, they're not polluterine. They're not part of the polluterine. So it doesn't matter if they fought on the same side. It doesn't matter if they fought against the French and the Americans. What matters is that they're not polluterine and they are part of a, you know, an anti from from the communist perspective part of the anti-polluterine middle class and therefore need to be destroyed and need to be criminalized. Oh yeah. And I think upon like arriving in Canada that I think this was the first time that I learned about the the Vietnamese boat people. And there was there was completely a race from, I think I didn't learn about it in history books and no one really talked about it. And upon learning about the Vietnamese boat people, I thought, I mean, what kind of political, social and economic system compels people to risk their lives and the lives of their families and children to to go overseas and and escape it. And Well, everywhere you go, whether it's Cuba and the boat people out of Cuba, whether it's a Soviet, it's East Berlin where people tried to climb the fence and most of them got shot. And they still tried to keep they kept doing it. They kept trying oppression, oppression, you know, leads people who value freedom to do crazy things and to really risk their life and to and to risk the lives of their family. Because the fact is that without freedom, often life is not worth living. And I think people realize that and there's a consequence of willing to take big risks. So which brings me to our author of the day and ran. And I believe I believe it was the interview that you did with Ben Shapiro, where you said that you were at one point in your life. I think having socialist ideals. And then a friend of yours lent you a copy of Atlas Rock, and then it changes your life. So I wonder if you can elaborate on that. Yeah, I mean, I grew up, I grew up in Israel. I grew up in Israel in the 1960s and 70s. And in those days, everybody was a socialist. It just wasn't anything else. Now that it wasn't communist, but it was socialist. The largest employer in the country was the labor unions. So the labor unions own the means of production. And socialism was revered. And really, there was no presentation of an alternative except nationalism and religion, a combination of nationalism and religion. So I didn't know anything else. I visited America. I didn't particularly like it. I found Americans to be superficial and shallow. And I couldn't think of what was wrong with socialism. And I was young. I was 15, 16. And that's when I read Atlas Shrugged. And when I read Atlas Shrugged, I fought it because my whole upbringing was collectivist, tribal, socialist, altruist. And I ran questions and challenges, all of that and presented a complete opposite alternative to all of these ideas. And it was very difficult to undo all the years and years of training, if you're brainwashing, whatever you want to call it, of the Israeli state and of the intellectuals and of the people around me. But in the end, I ran one. In the end, she was right. And by the end of the book, I was convinced she was right and that I had been wrong all those years. And the rest is history. And the rest is history. And I'm glad it happened when I was 16. So I had a long history afterwards. But yeah, I mean, after that, I basically tried to try to read everything I could of Ayn Rand and study who ideas and who ideas are deep, they're important, they require real thinking, and they require time. So you really need to study them. And I spent a lot of time doing that and getting involved in the Ayn Rand kind of movement, objectivist movement, and ultimately, landed up running and being the CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute and today being chairman. So yeah, it's been a long path, but it's been an incredibly rewarding path because ultimately, Ayn Rand's idea is about you and about making your life the best life that it can be and having a good life. And I think that that is I've benefited enormously from having that focus. And so, yeah, it's incredible. And can you give us a quotation from Atlas Shrubb that really resonates with you? I don't do quotations. I don't remember things by heart. So I mean, obviously, both of the valley, which is that I shall not live for the sake of any other man. And I will never ask them to live for mine. But yeah, I don't retain quotes. They don't stick with me. Sorry. It's a whole book that counts. It's the ideas. It's not the particular formulation of them. I can't retain the particular formulation. It's not how my memory works. All right. So here's a piece of interesting news that you may or may not have already known. The actor Michael Cain of Alfie and the Batman movies thing. He was interviewed by BBC for the show Desert Island Dis. And when he was asked which book he would like to bring to the Desert Island, if he was a castaway there, along with a bunch of records and a piece of luxury. So he, in addition to the Holy Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, Mr. Cain chose the fountainhead. Oh, well. Yeah. I mean, it is quite popular in Hollywood. It's surprisingly so. I mean, a number of directors and a number of artists over the years have been interested in making the fountainhead. I think because it's about one of its main themes is artistic integrity. It appeals to the artist and many people and particularly in haze in the movie industry. So in many architects obviously because the book is about an architect. But that's good to know. I like Michael Cain. I like some of his movies and he's always quite funny when he's calm. He's quite good. I think my favorite film of his and also my favorite of Woody Allen's films, which is Hannah and her sisters. I find it to be an utterly profound piece of screenplay and cinema and Woody Allen is my inspiration as a writer. And Michael Cain's daughter, he named his daughter Dominique after the character Dominique Rancourt. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. But it doesn't surprise me again. I think that fountainhead appeals to a lot of people. Dominique is a tough character and I don't know that I'd want my daughter to be a Dominique, right? Inran described Dominique as herself in a bad mood. So, you know, that's Dominique. And so one of my other favorite, one of my favorite authors is Franz Kafka. And I like to make a comparison in that in Kafka's world, Kafka is obviously German. He describes a world in which the bureaucracy has become so large and entrenched to everyone's lives that you, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, you know, you're obviously stuck there. And the trial is a really stark portray of it. And in contrast, I think Andran is obviously more inspirational in that it portrays the individual. And in the case of fountainhead is the architect Howard Rohr trying to think over the bureaucracy, over the conformance, over these collectivists. I think that's the key difference. And Inran, the focus at the end of the day is always on the positive. It's always on the heroic. It's always on what's possible. It's always on the ideal. And the bureaucracy, the evil, the bad guys are really background. They're not the movers of the plot. They're not the people who are important in the world. The people who are important to the world are the good guys are the other heroes. And so her focus is very positive, whereas Kafka's whole sense of life, whole vision is very, very negative and dark. I mean, one of his major characters turns into a cockroach after a while. Like Gregor and a metamorphosis. Metamorphosis. Yes, exactly. So not a pleasant thought for anybody. But Inran would never write a play like that, right? Because the whole orientation is grandeur and success. And you only have the villains in order to drive certain points home, but they're not the essence. They're not the focus. And when you read about her life, it's a very inspirational American dream tale, isn't it? She was born in the Soviet Union. And then she escaped from the Iron Curtain. And then she made a career for herself initially as, I believe, as a film screenwriter. Well, initially as an extra on movies. She worked in the woodwork department. She did anything she could just to make a living while she pursued a career as a screenwriter. And then ultimately wrote plays that made it to Broadway and wrote novels that became some of the biggest bestsellers ever and still sell. She's a unique historical figure in that her books probably sell more today than they did or as much today as when she put them out originally. And they were bestseller at the time. Usually, once an author dies, their books die with them. But with Inran, her books continue to sell, they continue to sell strongly. There's no lapse in readership. And it's not because like, let's say Shakespeare, it's not because universities and schools require them as reading quite the contrary. University and schools often dismiss Inran. But it's because the public loves it. Fathers, you recommend it to their kids, uncles recommend it to their nephews and nieces. And what you see is word of mouth really drives sales of Inran. So she started out with nothing. She came to the US with literally nothing. She stayed with relatives in Chicago. She went on to Hollywood where she scraped together a living and then she made it. She became one of the most successful serious authors in American history. She became a well-known philosopher and public intellectual. To this day, major political figures and major cultural figures attribute and major business figures, of course, attribute parts of their success to the influence she had on them. And she sold millions of books. So she is a real American success story, from nothing to being one of the most successful authors in American history. See? Yeah. Incredible. So there is, I think one of the ideas that you proposed that I think I had some challenge, like, you know, what do you call it, processing or contemplating or digesting, is how you view, is your views on thoughts on altruism. And it took a while for me to, you know, finally come into terms and agreements with it. But of course, when you hear that, you know, I am against altruism, you're likely to erase some eyebrows. So would you like to elaborate on that? How would you define altruism? Sure. And part of the problem is the definition in our culture is wrong. The definition our culture tries to soft paddle altruism, tries to make it different than what it is. But altruism is the idea that the purpose of your life, the moral purpose of your life, altruism is an ethical concept, it's an ethical idea, that the moral purpose of your life is the wellbeing of other people. That you should sacrifice. Sacrifice means you should make yourself worse off. You should give without expecting anything in return. You should, you know, you should self-sacrifice. You should be on a cross. You should suffer gravely for the benefit of other people. That your life doesn't really matter. What matters is their life. Altruism is not being nice to people, being friendly, opening a door, getting up and letting an old, you know, an older woman sit in your chair. That is not altruism. That's just being friendly and nice and so on. None of that is necessarily a sacrifice. It could just be done out of benevolence. But people want to associate sacrifice, the worst kind of sacrifice, not pursuing new interests, being self-less and sacrificing everything for others with being nice and friendly and opening doors to old women. But that is a confusion. So I reject the idea that somebody else's life is more important than mine. To me, my life is the most important thing there is. And then I structure my life based on that. I look at my values. I look at my value system. I look at my hierarchy of values. What's important to me? What's less important to me? Based on the value of my life and the impact people, events have on my life. So I'm nice to people because I value life and being nice to people is doesn't cost me much. And it tends to be reciprocated. And I just get pleasure out of the fact that other people are doing well. So thinking about myself, trying to value myself above all in a sense and valuing my life does not involve sacrificing other people. Goes back to that gold quote, right? Sacrificing other people to me hoots me. It's not good for me. I want to deal with people as, in a sense, equals as traders, as value for value. I'm an advocate for a social system in which we interact with one another as traders when we maximize the win-win opportunities we all have, the win-win relationships we have. So altruism is the indication of that. Altruism is about win-lose. It's about somebody losing, you. And why do win-lose, when you can do win-win? When everybody is better off and win-win is more sustainable, win-win results are better, win-lose almost always turns into lose-lose. We're both parties lose. That's true in business. That's true in marriage. That's true in relationships and friendship. That's true in almost every in every realm of life. If one party loses, the other party tends to lose as well. So I refuse to sacrifice my life and my values for other people. Right. Yeah, I do remember last year when I was living in a different house and my former roommate, when I mentioned the name and ran to him, he, well, I mean, he's, you can imagine the angry expression on his face and, you know, he would reserve some of the most violent, terrible words to attribute to Mrs. Rand. And unsurprisingly, he identifies himself as a socialist. And of course, one of the, I believe one of the various things that he has with Ian Rand is how, you know, she, she teaches you to be, you know, put yourself first. And, and yeah, I do, I do agree with your, with your ideas in that. I think when you, when you sacrifice certain things, including your life to them, suddenly it becomes an unequal relationship, like you either less than or more than the other person. Yes, absolutely. And what does it mean to put your life first? It means that if you're going to listen to music, you want to listen to music you like. A sacrifice would be to put on music you don't like. So you suffer. So you're worse off. It means using your mind, because your mind is your tool of cognition, your mind, your reason is, is how you discover values. It's how you understand the world. It's how you know what reality is. It means using your mind and every aspect of your life thinking, right, her ethics really boils down to think, right, think for yourself. Don't let other people think for you. And then think, use your mind to figure out what are the important values in your life? And if you do that, you become focused on your values, on pursuing those values and achieving those values and finding things that you love and finding things that really add value to your life. But it isn't the case that what somebody who is focused on self is not focused on putting other people down, because putting other people down does not add to my life. It doesn't, it doesn't make me better. You know, lying, stealing, cheating, for example, all destructive strategies. They're not strategies that make my life better. I mean, I always tell audiences, if you don't understand that lying is destructive, then just try it for a day. Lie to everybody you meet for a day, see what happens. I mean, you'll feel bad, but importantly, people won't want to deal with you. They'll write you off. And that's not a good way to live. It's not a productive way to live. It's not a live. And of course, the person you should be most careful not to lie to is you. Because if you lie to yourself, you're destroying your capacity to reason, you're destroying your capacity to be rational, because rationality depends on what? On facts, on truth, on reality. And once you poison that, you poison your capacity to take care of yourself and be, you know, truly egoistic. So egoism requires thinking, requires rational thinking, and therefore rejects any kind of cheating, any kind of deceiving any kind of lying. It's a perfect segue to the music section, since this is a show about music. And I believe that one of the, I think one of the first things that I find myself to be separate from, say, my environment as in the subset of society where I was born and raised in is how my tastes in music were different from the others. I remember listening to Pink Floyd and Neil Young constantly while their names are completely alien to my peers back in Hanoi. And it was then when I, you know, as an adolescent, I find, I guess, my sense of self and my individuality. And I wonder, does music have the same effect? Was that music available in Hanoi? Well, you can find it on streaming sites. Back then, I think Apple music was available. So interesting. So my question is, does music have the same effect on you? And what what kinds of music does that if that is the case? Yes, I mean, definitely. I think I think music is, I mean, music elicits a very powerful, emotional, visible response from me. And I think from a lot of people. And it's it's individual because, you know, you're feeling it, you're feeling it intensely. And so some music is very important in my life, I think should be very important in everybody's life, because I think it's a great source of values, a great source of positive emotion. It's a great source of connecting with yourself, experience yourself, introspecting about yourself, learning about your own values and learning about your own emotions. And, you know, my, my, I grew up as a teenager, I say my musical taste was very similar in a sense of Pink Floyd and Neil Young and, and a lot of kind of the 1970s rock music. I never liked heavy metal. I never liked punk. I never liked kind of the more nihilist, what I viewed as nihilistic. But I like the more melodic, the most sophisticated, I'd say kind of kind of kind of rock that that I think Pink Floyd represents, even though it's very dark. But it's also very contemplative. It's also very thoughtful, and beautiful, melodically beautiful. But then I'd say in my in my 20s, I discovered classical music. And really, I mean, I love classical music since then. So I'd say today, 90% of the music I listen to is classical music. And, you know, I dabble in everything else. I can listen to some jazz, I listen to some old, or Pink Floyd, but also listen to maybe, when I'm driving a smattering of country or anything that happens in this melody, I can't stand anything. I can't stand things that have a beat and are centered around a beat where everything is about a pulse, a beat, I find it annoying and primitive in some sense, very, very basic, very unsophisticated. And a lot of modern music, almost all modern music today is just a beat. It's just a beat and everything else, whatever harmony and melody there is, it's just centered around this beat that is supposed to drive you. And I can't listen to that for very long. Right. Speaking of classical music, I believe one of my favorite movies centered around that topic is Miloš Forman's Amadeus, and which there are some relations there because Forman himself escaped from the Soviet Union. Yeah, it's a wonderful movie. It's fantastically done. It's beautifully acted and filmed and the music is fantastic. You know, I don't know how well it relates to reality in terms of the true history of Mozart, but it doesn't matter. It's a movie. And you can enjoy it on its own. The scenes in the end of the creation of some of the most fabulous scenes I've ever filmed, I think, in terms of drama, music, intensity, integration of drama, music and acting, it all kind of comes together. I also think the whole portrayal of Salieri and Envy that drives him towards Mozart is very incisive psychologically. You can see that kind of Envy in our culture today. So yes, it's a brilliant movie and you really gain an appreciation for Mozart music if you didn't have one before through that. Oh, yeah. Do you listen to the music composed by Antonio Salieri, the actual man himself? I have a little bit. I haven't heard a lot of it. It sounds good, but it just lacks that sense of greatness that you get a sense from Haydn or from Mozart from that period of time. Oh, yeah. Which Mozart piece would you recommend for people who are in my age? I know. I have no idea what people in your age would listen to. But I would recommend Mamedeus because I think the movie introduces a lot of the music to the audience. But his piano cottoes, his later piano cottoes are just beautiful. The melodies are just fantastic. I don't know how many people are interested in opera, but of course some of it is operas, the magic flutes. It's a wonderful opera and has some fantastic music and singing and comedy and drama and some just beautiful scenes. But really, I mean, I think another Kintra Kosifantuti I think is in, what was the movie about the prison escape, the guy who was in prison? The great escape? No, no, no, no, Moomar and Shawshank Redemption? Is the Kintra Kosifantuti that they play in the prison? I can't remember. They play in Aria from Mozart and some of his operas at some point in the movie and it's just beautiful. And you see the prisoner stop and it's stunning. He replaces the soundtrack at some point. There's an act of rebellion. So check it out if you don't remember it. Oh yeah. And I would like to talk about Milos Forman a bit because I believe he passed away in 2018 and 19. And one of the things I find really fascinating and incredible about his films is that they always, they're always centered on this individual who's rather kind of an outsider. Of course, one of his most well-known films is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In which, you know, Jack Nicholson and Jack Nicholson, he pretends to be insane and then he goes into this, you know, mental hospital and there's Nurse Ratchett, which is the most like memorable portrayal of, you know, bureaucratic evil ever. And I believe one of the most memorable scenes in the film is that when Jack Nicholson, Mac Murphy, I think that's his character, he asks the other like patients why they are there and they ask, well, we just volunteered ourselves to be here. Like, we're here on our own will and he was staggered by it. And which makes me wonder, like, and which makes me really think about like how in, in certain circumstances, there are people who they would rather choose this kind of co-comfort and predictability over freedom and exploration. Absolutely. And it's tragic. And, you know, there's a sudden view that George Bush actually expressed at some point that freedom is in the heart of every man, everybody in the planet wants to be free. But the fact is that that is just not true. Most people don't want to be free. Most people in some way, in some sense, want to be taken care of. And, you know, that's reflected in the fact that people vote constantly too for political parties that will not make the fear that actually will provide for them and politicians compete on who can provide more. And people in welfare, people who receive welfare should rebel against welfare because it institutionalizes them into poverty and institutionalize them into being wards of the state. Yet they don't. They're willing to accept their fate. This is not enough. I mean, the world really lacks this desire to live. This desire to live fully as a human being. This desire to be free, to pursue your own values, to define your own values, to find it, to pursue them, to achieve them, and to benefit from them. You know, it lacks some self-esteem. This notion that I belong here. I'm competent. I can achieve. I will achieve. The world is dying from a lack of that, from a lack of freedom in people's hearts. People, too many people don't want freedom or afraid of freedom or scared of freedom. We'll trade security. We'll vote for security anytime. And of course, as happens in one field of the cuckoo's nest, what you discover is, you're not buying security. You're not going to be secure in a place like this because now it's your whim of some evil nurse and she can do anything to you. And it's completely arbitrary. And as Jack Nicholson discovers, his fate is horrific at the hands of her. And the fate of everybody really is. So when you give up your freedom, you're giving up security as well as freedom. Oh yeah. So my all-time favorite album is Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. And in the title track, there's obviously that well-known line, did you exchange a walk-on part in the war or a lead role in a cage? And one of my favorites. And the impact they had on, I think, 13 or 14 year old me is tremendous. I listened to it in passing. I experienced the music first and then I read the lyrics. And then it took like maybe five or six times before I understood what that meant. And so recently, I watched David Lean's film Dr. Javago based on the Boris Pasternak novel. And I recently introduced my dad to the film as well as soundtrack. And I guess it's a rather romantic film, but I think it's one of those movies that is willing to look into the horrid realities of Russia post-Lenin. Yeah, it's rare. It doesn't quite look at it deep enough, I think. It doesn't quite reflect the full horrors of it, but at least it's willing to do something. Lean is a filmmaker that first of all does movies on a grand scale. His movies are big movies with big themes and big cinematography. And really, somebody that more people should really watch. I mean, movies are fantastic. Bridge over the River Kwai, of course, Lawrence of Arabia. But Bridge over the River Kwai is one of my favorite movies. And it's got big moral dilemmas and very difficult situations and bigger-than-life characters, good and bad, and incredibly powerful. And Dr. Javago, of course, is a movie like that. Big movie, big characters, big themes. Sorry, I can't help you with that on your Mac. Oh, well, that happened. Yes. So do you listen to film soundtracks and does the soundtracks of David Lean films or any other films impress you? I don't listen to soundtracks independent of the movie. I don't think they were written for that. So I only listen to soundtracks as part of a movie. I think there are a lot of very good soundtracks. I think movies, I think the best music over the last 50, 60 years has been written for movies. Whether it's some great soundtracks for Westerns in the 1950s, or even the soundtrack for Star Wars is very good. The movie is so-so. But I think that the music is fantastic. And a lot of contemporary movies, you find really good music attached to it. I just watched this Korean show that I'm really big on and I keep raving about Mr. Sunshine. And it's one of my favorite TV shows of all time. It's romantic. It's grand. It's value-driven. It's just fantastic. And the music on Mr. Sunshine is terrific. The cinematography is stunning. And so as I'm impressed, broadly across the world, the best music, I think, without a question, written is a film. Oh, yeah. And definitely not on top 40 radio. No. So here on Brook, this has been incredibly interesting and thought-provoking conversation. And I would like to give you the honors of closing it up. So Yaron, would you like to conclude the program for the audience? Sure. I mean, I would just summarize by saying that I'd love to see more people focused on their life, on living the best life that they can live. And that involves discovering kind of the moral values that lead to a good life. And I encourage people to read on Rand to do that. But it's also an issue of discovering great things, things you love. If the topic today is music, then open your mind to new music. Go and experiment. A lot of your generation is not exposed to classical music, for example. Go and try it out. Listen to different things. You know, and I always say if you listen to classical music, take Beethoven or Brahms or Tchaikovsky, put it on, turn the lights off, lie down on the floor with a comfortable cushion, ramp up the amplifier to 11, and just let the music, you know, just listen. Just listen to the music. You know, just let experience it. Experience the emotions that it evokes. Just let it happen. And I think you'll discover a whole new world. A new world that, you know, as you said, top 40 radio just doesn't have. It just can't convey those kind of emotions. So, but this is part of taking life seriously and looking for the best and experiencing the most and the most powerful and embracing pleasure and embracing great values and embracing life. That's it. You're on, Brooke, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being on the program. Thanks for having me.