 And welcome back to another episode of Amir Approved. In today's episode I have Yaron Brooke. Yaron Brooke is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer, activist. He is an objectivist and current chairman of the board at the Ayn-Ren Institute. So before we continue, a little bit house cleaning. Number one, we did this video a day ago and Zoom was having some issues and there's some bandwidth issues. So for the first one to two minutes of the video has been cut off due to the very nature that you couldn't even see it here properly. There are some parts within this interview that might be glitchy once again for bandwidth issues. But you're gonna really enjoy this episode. We talk about why free markets are very important, why individual rights supersede nation-state rights and why we must, I can't stress this enough, we must focus on sovereign individual rights. We must focus on free markets, freedom of speech and freedom of expression for us to have a better global society. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode, now on with the show. Well, the reason why I brought you on the show is I've been watching you for a while and you talk about the free market. The best thing is where you go around to the university, specifically in Europe and you talk about the free market and you bring up the story is like, did Apple create more opportunities for people as opposed to like say governments, right? And how many people came out of poverty towards the free market? And in our current situation with the pandemic, with the coronavirus and the United States government doing all the, and not just the US, every centralized federal reserve around the world doing bailouts, it's more or less looking like to me this whole notion and in the last like 20, 30 years, it's been kind of being mitigated. But the whole notion on free markets, like we don't really don't live in a free market system anymore, do we? No, we haven't lived in a free market for a long, long time and every decade it gets worse. So maybe it got a little bit better in the 80s with Reagan and Thatcher, but generally in Canada maybe it got better in the 90s. But generally the amount of regulation, the amount of controls, the amount of intervention has only increased decade by decade since probably 1914 or something in the US at least. Yeah, and the last thing I read, so the bailout, part of the proposition for this bailout was they're not even giving money, they're literally buying equities within the companies. And so like the classical definition of socialism is the means of production. So when I read this, I'm like, is this like socialism, like hidden socialism? Like what is this? So I don't think they're actually gonna buy equities. I think they've walked away from that. There was some plans to buy equities, but it became obvious that that was gonna be ridiculous. What this is is a form of fascism, of economic fascism. Fascism, when applied to economics, put aside the racism, the Nazism, just fascism is controlling the economy without owning the means of production. So what they do is they say, oh no, your company's yours, you own it, but you can't do this, you can't do that. You can't pay your employees less than this. You can't play your CEO more than that. They tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. So in a sense, they control every aspect of your business, but you have a piece of paper saying it's yours. So what we get, and this is how they dull the American people and how they get this American people to go along, because they pretend to the American people, oh no, we're still capitalist. We're still private property. We still believe in markets. And the American people say, okay, we'll find them. But what they don't realize is no, they're no markets. There's no private property. There's no businesses. Everything is, to some extent, a large extent controlled by the government. So we live today in a mixed economy with a lot of state control and a little bit of freedom. And the piece that's free keeps shrinking. And this big stimulus package, politicians, what do they say, never let a crisis go to waste? Of course. Politicians, as soon as they see a crisis, the first thing they jump in is more controls, more limitations, more power for them. Yeah, and I always tell people like, listen, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I love building businesses. I love the challenge. And when you look at the reality, it's daunting because it's like, how on earth does a brand new startup compete? The answer, it's no. Like when you have government-backed companies that have a bankroll that's unlimited, that has policies and regulations that stifle, especially these patent awards that they have, which is ridiculous. You look back and you sit back and you're like, I can't even start. I can't even do anything. Yeah, I mean, what government does is it creates, it provides monopolistic powers to companies. It creates regulations that barbie from entering. And if you think about it, that's what's gonna happen when you give politicians a lot of power. So I always, people like to blame the businessman. Oh, the business man manipulate the government, but it's not, it's the government. My favorite story here is, in the 1990s, when Microsoft was the largest company in the world, they had the highest market cap in the world, they spent a lobbying in Washington DC exactly $0.00. Never went to DC, didn't have lawyers there, didn't have lobbyists, no buildings, nothing. And Congress said, Microsoft, we wanna talk to you. So they brought Microsoft executives in front of this committee in Congress. And literally, these congressmen started yelling at them and Aaron Hatch, who is a Republican from Utah, stood up and he was a young senator then. And he said, you guys need to start spending money here. You guys need to start lobbying. You guys need to build a building here in DC. You better start lining our pockets. He didn't say it that way, but basically that's the implication. Otherwise you're in trouble. And Microsoft walked out of there and basically the guy who was there wasn't even Bill Gates, the guy who was there said, you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. You've got nothing to give us. We create jobs. We're producing, we're busy competing, right? Six months later, not gonna do it, Microsoft. We're from the Justice Department. And we're here because you're violating antitrust laws. What were they doing? They were offering a product for free. Like you're too young to remember this, but when the first internet browsers came out, you had to pay for them. Downloaded Netscape and you had to pay 70 bucks to use it. And Microsoft was offering internet explorer for free. So then they went through court cases 10 years and then another 10 years of a government regulator sitting at Microsoft and telling them what they couldn't, couldn't do and controlling everything. This is when Bill Gates left the company and everything, what was the lesson Microsoft learned? Yeah, we better have somebody in Washington so this doesn't happen again. So how much money they spent today on lobbying? Tens of millions of dollars. So for businesses, a lot of the lobbying is just self-defense. Now it's true, after a while, when they get into the habit of going to politicians, they start asking for favors and they start manipulating the market and start protecting themselves. But the only way to get rid of cronyism is to get rid of government power over the economy. I would love to rewrite the American constitution and have a separation of state from economics. Government should have no role in economics. I agree. I always say, Nassim Tlaib has a good saying. It's like, I'm not opposed to communism. I think communism is great with my family. It works perfectly between my mom, my brother, my sister. I know them. It's a small group of people. That's it. Beyond that, it doesn't work, right? So the higher level you go up, it has to be... Even in the family, it's not true that you sacrifice some for the sake of others. It's not about sacrifices and it's not about equality. It's not about equality. We don't, you know, the kids don't have as much say as I do. No. My home, I bring the money in. My rules, that's like communism. So it's not some, you know, there's nothing good about egalitarianism. There's nothing good about sacrifice. What the home is, is it again, it's contracts and trade. When you have a child, you basically having entered into an implicit contract to take care of that child for 18 years and do your best to produce a good human being. So you take care of them. You're not sacrificing. You committed to this any more than a business sacrifices when it pays its employees because it's got a contract with them. No, that's what they do, right? And with your spouse, even if let's say she stays home and you work, it's not that you're not sharing the money equally because no, there's a trade there, right? You have a relationship that is fundamentally a trade relationship. Yeah, there's definitely not equal share of money. I'll tell you that much. No, egalitarianism is a pipe dream. Communism is evil through and through. There's nothing good about communism and not in the family, not outside the family. I mean, if Nassim was serious and he actually practiced communism in the household, his wife would leave. So it brings me to that question though, it's like I'm a 100% firm believer that the government's only responsibility is military defense and private property protection. That's it. Everything else, education, leave, private corporation, that's it, leave. You should just defend my freedom of rights, speech, my sovereign individual, protect the borders and protect my right on property. Everything else, bugger off. Correct, correct. But at the exact same time what we're seeing is the opposite. We're seeing the bureaucracons as I call them grow in employees every single year. So it's not the opposite. The government increases by size every single year. You can't fire these people, it's impossible. So they have no accountability whatsoever. So they can make a million times mistakes but no one's held accountable for these mistakes. And yet here we are sitting back and we're preaching what Iran talked about, individual responsibility, self-sovereanship, more or less kind of like the non-aggressive principles but I'm also a realist when I see right now I still think if I'm looking around the world still United States is still one of the best countries per se comparing to the global. Even here in Canada, I don't have the same constitutional rights as you guys have in United States. Freedom of speech is not really freedom of speech in Canada to be honest with you. I can end up to jail saying some things over here. Reminds me of like communist fucking Yugoslavia, the stories my parents told me. And the question is what can we do? Is there any actual steps that we can take to change things? I mean the only thing, I mean people always want shortcuts and they always want a quick solution to these things but it doesn't work that way unfortunately. I wish there was and I don't know if there is one. I don't know. To me it's about education, education, education. It's about speaking, speaking, speaking. It's about doing podcasts and writing editorials and recommending people read out with shrugged and trying to get the word out there to people. People have been incockated with an ideology of what I meant called altruism. An ideology that says that basically your life, your happiness is not what's important. Your moral duty, your moral responsibility is to take care of others. And if you have to sacrifice for that, self-sacrifice for that, if you're worse off for that, then that's okay. That's why we view Mother Teresa as a moral hero, right? Because she suffered to help other people. Bill Gates helped many more people than Mother Teresa did but he made money doing it so that's a no-no. So we live in a culture that believes that self-interest, that pursuing your own happiness, that pursuing your own life, that pursuing your own values is bad. Now that is incockated through Christianity, that's incockated through our secular philosophers, that's incockated from every direction in the culture and that's what we have to overcome. We have to undo the programming that so many people have just accepted and bought into and the revolution really is not about economics or politics, it's really an ethical revolution. We have to teach people that their life is theirs, that they should be pursuing their happiness, not just because that's what their self-help gurus say, but that's because it's their moral responsibility. And the only way they can pursue their happiness is by taking personal responsibility, by thinking for themselves, by producing for themselves and that people who become dependent on government are never gonna be happy, cannot be happy because they've given up their own self-esteem, their own self-respect because now they live off of other people. They're like beggars in the street. So the only way to attain happiness is to be an independent thinking rational being and that to convince people of that is gonna take just a lot of educating, a lot of speaking, a lot of getting them to read the right books and will top against everybody else in the culture. Everybody's against us. But it seems like getting worse and worse at the exact same time. Like I made a video the other day and I'm looking at it and I see people actively sticking their hands out and saying, please government, track my phone for this stuff. Please government, give me money. I can't even wipe my own ass anymore. I just can't even be a human being. You said it before when you said the government controls education and it shouldn't. It controls education, which means it controls kids from when they're very young, controls their minds, controls their attitudes, tells them what is true and what is not, what is knowledge and what is not. It doesn't teach them to think for themselves. It doesn't teach them reality, facts, history, what really happens, math, science, those things are not important. What's important is social sciences and kumbaya, all together and feel and socialization is really important. And as a consequence, you get these snowflakes, these kids who are the results of this educational system they can't think, can't produce for themselves. They can't be entrepreneurs. They can't go work, get a decent job and they don't know anything. So they think socialism is wonderful because they don't know anything. They think the government will solve all their problems because that's all they've been taught. That's all they've been. So our job is to undo the programming and to get them when they're young, to try to get them when they're 15, 60, 17 and to really undo everything that the government schools have programmed into them. And again, it's hard and we're probably gonna lose certainly in the short run but I think it's the only thing we can do. Yeah, I agree. It's interesting because when I watch some of your videos with the students, you have some who are like almost triggered. They're like, ah, this is impossible. But then you have the select few who you kind of almost in real time, you can see their gears are like, wait a second. And oh, that, oh, shit. That kind of makes sense. I was afterwards after talks like that, telling me, you know, that it opened their eyes that they completely changed their attitudes towards the world. So yeah, I mean, that's what you have to do. You have to go out and talk to people and present them. These new ideas, these different ideas are not just gonna flop down on top of them. And too many kind of within the free market movement, if you will, too many people focus in economics and focus in economics all the time. It's not convincing to people. You need to be able to make a moral ethical case for individualism, for capitalism, for freedom. And the only way to do that is to attack things that people don't like attacking like religion, like philosophy, like the ethics their mom taught them, right? But it's the only way to do it. And in Europe, you have to attack tribalism on top of all that. So at least in America, we have a little less, although it's growing of the tribalistic attitude. But yes, you have to upend all the fundamental beliefs people have. Yeah, it's fascinating. Guys, I always tell people this too. I'm like, listen, it's not like people are packing up their suitcases in United States and heading over to China or Russia. It's the opposite way around. It's not like, oh man, today's a great day. I'm gonna leave and go to a fucking live under the CCP because there's so much better over there. And you talk to these snowflakes, you talk to these people who, you know, scream so, and listen, I understand why they want socialism. I understand it, I get it. But then I'm like, you're talking to somebody whose family grew up there, you're talking to people who's lost their grandfather and grandparents in gulags. You're talking to people who escaped China. The chairman Mao killed 100 million people. First hand accounts, but yet you can't get through you. See, but this is the point. Socialism for them is a moral, ethical ideal. Correct. It's, so the fact that it's been tried and failed just means we need to try again and harder because it's an ideal. So unless you challenge the fact that it's an ideal and stuff like what Naseem Talib said about the family doesn't help, you have to challenge it at its core. You have to challenge it at the level of, you know, it's noble to sacrifice yourself for the people. You know, right now, you know, the coronavirus, we've all accepted the fact that it's okay to sacrifice young people for old people. We've all said, we're gonna change our lives. We're gonna stop working. We're gonna stop doing everything. Why? Because God forbid we only isolate old people and we treat them differently because the solution to this is to isolate the people who are most susceptible to it, who happen by the way not to be the workforce because most of them are tired. So isolate them, you know, try to put them in places where they won't get affected and let the rest of us live our lives. But no, the moral thing is you can't treat some people differently than others. Egalatimianism requires you to treat everybody the same. So everybody needs to be sacrificed, young and old, for the cause of, I don't know, safety. This reminds me of René Rejard's Mimesis theory where there has to be a sacrificial process. It's not our fault, it's not our sins. No, God forbid it's our sins, you know? Someone else's fault, let's go sacrifice that person. There's always a scapegoat and there's always a sacrificial element that kind of purifies you from it. I mean, think about Donald Trump's campaign. I mean, you ran a campaign saying all the problems in America are your fault, they're not, you know, Americans fault, they're the fault of the Chinese and immigrants and Mexicans and elites and we can sacrifice them and then we, good-hearted Americans, we will live better lives. And of course, it's complete BS. It's any problems that exist in America are the results of American's choices. I agree, you travel a lot, you've spoken around the world a lot. Do you see any places around the world that people are more, I'm gonna say waking up a more accepting of this type of story, like kind of a surprise to you, like certain areas around the world that you see, like people are like, okay, you know. I think it's places around the world where people are just fed up. They've tried everything and it's just nothing has worked so far and they're willing to be radical. They're willing to question deep down. So for example, I understand for what you said before your family's from Serbia. Yeah, former Yugoslavia, yeah. The Balkans, you can see some responses in the Balkans, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia. So former Soviet republics who lived under communism, remember fascism, and since the war came down they've tried all kinds of mixed economies and everything sucks, everything's failed, it's all corrupt. So young people, they're willing to think radical ideas. Somewhat Latin America, you get a little bit of that in Latin America, still difficult, but young people again, so pissed off. They promise to be middle class, they're poor, their societies are going nowhere, their economies are going nowhere. They're willing to consider something radical, they're willing to think outside the box and that's an opening for us. Yeah, funny you bring that up there. It's more of a counter-markets economy in the Balkans. So you have, the Balkans are screwed up, you have Croatia slowly entering the EU. The EU dollar has inflated everything and the locals are like, oh my, this is fucked up, please leave the EU. And the average salary over there is probably two, 300 euros a month, which is nothing. But you see people, no one pays taxes. Everybody's doing cash. It's a massive counter-market. And it's fascinating to watch how people kind of completely go underneath the radar from like the government. Well, that's what happens in societies where the government is dysfunctional and corrupt and interventionist, but not totalitarian. So like you get away with it. See his establishment of a black market. It happens in any country that, you see that in South America, you see it in all of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Any place where the government is weak and corrupt and authoritarian, there's a huge black market. Yeah. My biggest fear that are going in the future is, and I got pissed off and I shouldn't have, but like I see people applauding what China did during the coronavirus. I'm like, guys, they fucking welded people shut in their homes. What the hell are you talking about? Doing something similar now. I mean, a lot of people in the US are modeled after China. And they say it worked rather than using the South Korean model. Yes. No travel bans. No restrictions on at least small gatherings. No restrictions on travel. No restrictions like that. And what they did is they tested, they tracked and they isolated on a case by case basis. Not everyone, they didn't shut down their economy. So instead of that, we're mimicking the Chinese model and it's truly atrocious. And look, the leftists admire China for a long time. They admire the central planning. They misidentify what has led to China's success because it's not the central planning. It's actually those parts of the economy where China's left alone, which are less regulated than are here in the West. That's what led to China's success, not the central planning of the Communist Party. People also forget too when I talk about leftists and socialists, the psychology, the psychographic design of a leftist is a sociopath. They crave and yearn power, absolute power. It's a group of individuals that decide the rules for all. And I tell that people, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always say they're the same, left and right are the same. Like if you're looking at these different parties, like I don't agree with everything that Chomsky talks about, but like Chomsky has a good saying, the party's in power. You know, I think it's both left and right. It's people. Yeah, yeah, both of us. One power, that's what they are on that's there. They think they can run our lives. They think they know what's better for us. They have no respect for the individual, no respect for the human mind. They are just power-lusting little dictators. And that dominates who goes into politics, left and right. Yeah, yeah. And so where do we go from here? Like what can people do as an individual person right now going through the, we're in a big recession. Like I don't care what people say, this is going to be horrible. But what can a person who's reading information and looking online, like what's something active they can do? Well, first study the ideas. Study the ideas that are behind freedom, that are at the base of freedom. It's not enough just to get a superficial understanding because then you're not going to be a good communicator to really get the communicator to help teach people and educate people. You've got to be, you've got to know the ideas. So here I recommend reading, not just Atlas Shrug, but a lot of Ayn Rand's essays, a lot of her nonfiction. And then there's a gazillion of content on the Ayn Rand Institute website, Ayn Rand.org. If you come to my YouTube channel, Iranbrookshow.com and YouTube channel, Iranbrook, you'll find lots and lots of videos, some of the lectures I've given in Europe and elsewhere. I mean, study, get good at it. And then, so two things, know the ideas, live them, go out and live them, be successful, be happy, in spite of the recession, make something of yourself. And then become an advocate, become a supporter, find ways to support people who are doing the work to promote these ideas. And then you start promoting these ideas within whatever circle you have influence. Well said. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your thoughts. What's the best resource people can reach you at? So Iranbrookshow.com and in my YouTube channel, of course, Twitter, Facebook, I'm on all those. So just put my name onto Google and all of that will pop up. Awesome, thank you so much. My pleasure, thank you.