 I'm the chairman of the Einwand Institute. Yeah, at this point I'm the chairman of the board of the Einwand Institute. I used to be the CEO, but I've shifted positions. I've mainly been the spokesman for the Institute. I help a little bit with fundraising. But I travel the world speaking about ideas I'm passionate about. So it's a great position to be in. It's a lot of fun. This idea is to promote the ideas of Einwand. To promote the ideas expressed in the Fountainhead and in Atlas Shrug to Magnus Opus and a lot of philosophical work, the philosophy of Objectivism. The idea is to promote it primarily young people, primarily in colleges and high schools. And really today with technology and the internet any movement is a global movement. So it really has become a global phenomenon. We do anything from providing free books to teachers if they promise to teach the books. We run the largest high school essay contest in the world. We have a lot of online courses, a lot of online classes on her ideas, on her philosophies. We have thinkers and writers at the Institute who speak and who write books, who write articles, applying her ideas to common events. And we have kind of a school at the Institute where you can really, if you really want to become an expert in philosophy and you want to become an intellectual, then we can train you and we can help you do that. So we do a lot of different things. We help graduate schools, we support campus clubs, you know, student clubs. We try to get people when they're young. I mean the fact is that, you know, after age 30 almost nobody changes their mind about anything important in life. We get calcified, we get families, we get, you know, we get careers, we get put into a box. And people shape their lives in terms of the ideas that they're going to hold from between 16 and 30, you know, plus or minus, right? That's where we want to expose them to their ideas. They're fairly radical, fully different. So I speak all over the world. I also have a regular podcast. I don't know, three, four times a week. And, you know, tons of videos on YouTube and everything else. I don't know that Ayn Rand would have had much of an opinion about blockchain one way or the other because I don't think she would have understood it. It's real sophisticated technology. I know something about technology and I'm struggling. But I think what Ayn Rand would have said was, you know, let the market play out, right? You know, she would have admired the entrepreneurial spirit that is expressed by many people within the blockchain community. She would have admired the idea of creating more efficient, more productive ways for us to exchange, for us to provide value to one another. So I think she would have been a supporter of the entrepreneurial spirit and the marketplace in blockchain, even without understanding, you know, the actual technology. And to the extent that the blockchain makes it possible for people to become more independent of government, to become more independent of kind of the structures that exist today because of government regulation and government control, then of course she would have been all for that. Well, I mean, I don't think that there's anything special that needs to be done. I mean, I don't think women are different in that sense, right? I think women are quite capable of choosing their own professions. Women are quite capable of deciding what interests them and what doesn't interest them. And, you know, Ayn Rand was the... Think about her heroes in her books. I mean, many of them were women way ahead of their time. The sex in her books was not typical of the 40s and 50s. A Dagney Tagout runs a railroad, right? And this is before women broke the glass ceiling. I think we've come a long way since then. I think today it's natural to think of a woman running a railroad or a woman running a blockchain company or a woman being a CEO of a technology company. And I think we need to stop being paternalistic about it. And I think the idea should be to embrace those women who come in just as colleagues and to encourage them, but not to obsess about it. The fact is that, you know, if you treat everybody the same in a sense of equal rights, if you don't skew education to promote certain things to men and certain things to women, there's still differences between men and women. Men and women are interested in different things. I don't know exactly why, but it's a fact. And women will choose the things that interest them or some women, right? Because you don't want to...not all women are the same either. And there are going to be differences and we should embrace that. So I think we obsess way too much. I mean, look, I would be much happier attending a conference if there were a lot more women in it, because it would just be much more pleasant for me as a man. But putting that aside, we obsess way too much about how many women are here, how many women are there. You know, treat people decently, treat people right, and let them self-select in terms of where they go and where they don't go. Puerto Rico is this amazing... And it's an island. It's an island that has phenomenal weather. It's right on close to Equator. So you have almost perfect weather year-round. It doesn't get super, super hot, and it never gets below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's got this perfect weather. It's a beautiful island. It's got terrific beaches. But what I think makes it unique right now, in this point in history, is that it has put in place a tax regime that is incredibly attractive for entrepreneurs who come here, particularly from the United States. It is the only place that I know of on planet Earth. Actually, probably in the universe, because I think if you go to Mars, you still have to pay the federal government taxes. It's the only place where you don't have to pay the federal government of the United States any taxes. And that's a big deal. And the Puerto Rican government has created a regime on money that you generate in Puerto Rico from, in a sense, from importing, money that comes into Puerto Rico, from outside of Puerto Rico, from services you provide here. The tax rate is 4% to a company set up to do that. Any distributions from that company to shareholders who live in Puerto Rico is taxed to them at 0%. All capital gains, short-term and long-term, are taxed at 0%. So if you found a company here and you take it public, your capital gain is taxed at 0%. All of that is pretty unique. It's the only place in the world where an American can do that. And it's phenomenally attractive. It's almost the tax rates in an ideal society that I would project, a laissez-faire capitalist society. So it's sad that Puerto Ricans don't enjoy these tax breaks, that you have to come to Puerto Rico to enjoy them. And I would like to see all of Puerto Rico have these kind of taxes. But, you know, I'll take it, right, as somebody who comes from the United States and can set up a business here that is taxed at these low rates. It's a real ideal situation for many entrepreneurs in any technology company, or many technology companies, but many other businesses as well. The way to do that is to be entrepreneurial to the island. The way to do that is to create jobs. The way to do that is to create a regulatory tax environment that encourages wealth creation and encourages job creation. The way to do that is to shrink government so that it does only what it's supposed to do, which is protect individual rights. You know, currently in Puerto Rico, a third of all employed people work for the government. That is insanity. That is a recipe for poverty. What blockchain can do is I think blockchain can help privatize government services. It can start taking away all the stuff that government does and bring it into the public sector. We can start working with the Puerto Rican government to unload all the things that they do that they shouldn't do and don't do well and do incompetently and bring into the private sector in order to do that. And if we do that, we have a regulatory environment in Puerto Rico and we lower taxes for the Puerto Ricans and we make it easy for them to create jobs. I'm not worried about social impact. The fact is that a billion people have come out of poverty in the last 30 years. A billion people. Poverty rates in the world, extreme poverty rates in the world have dropped from 30% to 9% in the last 30 years. Not one person came out of poverty because of people trying to impact social impact. Not one person came out of poverty because of charity because of nonprofits because of foreign aid because of community service. Not one person, but a billion people came out because of business because of job creation because of profit seeking greedy entrepreneurs trying to make money and employing people and creating products in order to do that. That is how you bring people out of poverty. You bring people, and Adam Smith understood this 250 years ago and the name of the game is capitalism. The name of the game is free markets and we need to stop all this googly-gar about nonprofits and helping the community. We want to help the community bring capitalism to the community, bring free markets, bring entrepreneurship, let's make money. Well the media is clueless. The media really doesn't know how the world works and has no clue and doesn't know where to look. It views somehow entrepreneurs as the enemy. They're so obsessed with wealth inequality. Who cares about wealth inequality? Why is wealth inequality an issue? Why do I care how much money you make? I care how much money I make. I care whether I have upward mobility. Poor people shouldn't care about how much money I make. They should care about their own ability to rise up from poverty. And the media has no conception of this. They have demonized wealth. They've been doing it for 150 years at least since the mud rockers of the late 19th century. They've been demonizing progress. They would like us to stagnate and look they're always looking for sensation. They're always looking for sensationalism. Of course they don't understand technology. They've never understood technology. They've always been behind the curve as technology has emerged. So yes, you're not going to get an objective. You're not going to get a real perspective on anything really. When I read The New York Times on stuff I know Israel let's say or finance. I'm a finance professor in the previous life. So finance. 80% of what they say is just not true. It's just BS. And then I think, okay this is the stuff I know. My assumption is when I read any newspaper today almost any newspaper, that 80% of everything I read is BS. They've lost the ability to be objective. They don't even believe in objectivity anymore. They're not taught to be objective in journalism schools. So I think the media is a mess. It's a disaster. And I think it has to do with the philosophy of the culture. The culture itself has lost the belief in objectivity. It's lost the belief in truth. According to both left and right we live in a post-truth era. Well, that's a disaster if that's true. So everything I know, everything of value is based on the idea that reality exists and truth is there and that we as human beings have the capacity to discover that truth. So the media is a reflection of the culture and the culture is in bad bad shape. Welcome Chairman of the Iron Man Institute and host of the Iran Brook show and you're watching Decentric Media.