 So I think we're starting here. Well, everyone, again, as I mentioned in the introduction, I'm a very, very big fan of what Yaron has done. And with the Institute, he was executive director for many years. Did I get the right title there? Director, I think, right? Yeah. Executive director, yeah. Yeah. And now chairman of the board, I'm super excited as you can all hear my voice to have this gentleman coming to our audience. And we're going to have the pleasure, also, those of you that listen to The Wealth Standard Radio from Patrick Donohue, a paradigm live very close friend of mine. He'll be on that show and probably talking about a little bit different topics. But I'm just extremely excited and blessed to have Yaron on with us today. Dr. Brooke, thank you so much for joining our audience. Well, my pleasure. It's good meeting you. That's awesome. So beforehand, we had an opportunity to talk a little bit about what our topics might be today. And there are just so many that I would love to go down the path of. I was just mentioning to him off the air here that I had just read Anthem. And I'm in, out of the shrug, is by far my favorite book of everything out there. Creature from Jekyll Island and many others are just fantastic. But that one is by far my highest. Anthem was just a wonderful addition to it. Fountainhead, even before the Institute, could you give the audience just a couple moments of how you ended up there? And I think I mentioned in the introduction a little bit about your military history, but love to hear that from your side. Sure. When I was 16, I was a real committed socialist. I was a committed collectivist, tribalist, I would even say I was completely ready to sacrifice myself for the Israeli state. And then somebody handed me a copy of Atlas Shrugged, kind of out of nowhere. A friend of mine just handed me this book. And I ended up reading it and fighting it and disagreeing with it and not wanting to accept the message of the book. And I remember throwing the book against the wall and yelling at Ayn Rand. And this, of course, in my little bedroom in Haifa, Israel. And by the time I finished the book, that was it. I was convinced she was right. The rest of the world was wrong, which she was advocating her philosophy, her ideas were right. And I had to rethink everything. I had to rethink my life. I had to rethink my values. I had to rethink my commitments. I had to rethink my virtues. I really had to rethink everything about my life. And I did that. But in the meantime, you're an Israel. You're a kid. And part of what you have to do is serve in the military. At age 18, you have no choice. And at age 18, I joined the military, landed up in military intelligence, and served there for three years, and met my wife in the same, she was in the same unit as I was in military intelligence during the 1982 war in Lebanon. So I got to experience a little bit of what a war looks like from the side of at least an intelligence soldier. And so that was an interesting experience. We can talk about that if you want. And then went on from there to get an undergraduate degree in Israel in engineering. I know you're an engineer. I'm a civil engineer. You're much more sophisticated than I am mechanical and nuclear. At least the title is. Oh, I know the material. You had to study to get there. So it's quite an achievement. And then after I went out to shrug, really, one of the decisions I made, one of the value decisions I made was that I wanted to live in the United States. And one of the first things I asked my wife when we were dating was, hey, I want to leave Israel and move to the US. And she said, who responds was, when do we leave? So I knew this was going to go well. And so I landed up moving to the US after I finished my undergraduate degree and after she finished hers. I came and got an MBA, landed up getting a PhD in finance, becoming a finance professor out at Santa Clara University for seven years, and then was recruited by the Andrew Institute to become the CEO of the executive director in 2000, serving in that role for 17 years. That's painful to say, but for 17 years, I really am that old. And then have been chairman of the board since and continue to speak worldwide on Iron Man's ideas, continue to have my own podcast, the Iran Book Show, YouTube channel, the Iran Book Show channel, and try to get who ideas to the widest and broadest audience possible. And that's really what I do today. Now, on the side, I have to add, on the side since 1998, I've also been a partner in a hedge fund. And so that's where the income has come from primarily. So from 1998 through today, I'm a partner in a hedge fund. OK, understood. What is your hedge fund? Is there a niche that it's investing in? Just like you asked me. There's a very, very, very niche fund based on research my partner and I did when we were finance professors at Santa Clara University. So it's published research in the top journals in finance. But at some point, we were approached by a large hedge fund and asked whether we could take that research and turn it into a trading opportunity. We did that for them for 10 years. And then went our own way and created our own fund in 2010. And that's the fund we have today. So the niche is small community banks. So we basically buy and sell long and short small community banks. And we're very good at it and have done well. Fascinating. I can go so many directions with that question. No, for the challenge, there's only so much I can say as well. Given SEC, we're heavily, heavily regulated. We can talk about that. All the foundations, anybody who does finance in a kind of institutional way has to go through and the pain and the headache that those regulations entail. But part of it is I have to be very careful in how I speak publicly about the fund. And nothing I do can be construed as marketing the fund. So I have to. Got it. You don't ask me where I took my submarine. I won't ask you anymore about that. I'm not going to ask you where you took your submarine. Now I'm curious. Although I could probably guess, given that I could probably tell you some stories about where Israeli special forces did their training and which desert they happened to be dropped into and picked up. And I mean, I'm sure you know more than I do. But I can just imagine where you took your submarine. So well, I certainly am excited to go and listen to your podcast. I'm definitely a podcast junkie. And I learned a lot. So I would push the audience that way as well. So we got a lot of people who are in government service uniform, active duty, or are veterans. And some of this might rub them the wrong way. Some of the stuff that I say might do that. So maybe not. Maybe they've already long ago given up this show. But I also see a distinct parallel with firefighters, police officers. We all just kind of think the same. And I think it's because of the way in which we come to our job and stay with this kind of painful sometimes job and dangerous job out of service. And so one of the things that as I started to transition from even as an officer, you're a follower for a period that you're always following someone, right? There's always someone above you. But you kind of become this decision maker and leader. And certainly when you have the opportunity the true blessing to have command at some point, you're a leader on your own making the kind of the final decision sometimes. But nonetheless, I've kind of felt like there's two things that you make a decision about when you're in the military or in a position of service, public servant. One is just the pure ideal of serving others and serving your fellow man and protecting those that you love. And I think that's a very easy decision. And I think at just about every level, that's honorable. And then you get to a point where do you want to lead and further the political ideals of your country? And that's a completely different discussion, right? So I guess one of the things I would say is we all have to make that decision as we go through life. And I believe that everyone who decides to join is taking on the risk of putting themselves at risk to serve others that they love and believe in. And sometimes it's ideals as well. But I think bottom line, I'm very proud of everyone who serves. I'm sure you are as well. But sometimes eventually it's hard on you. I think why people serve is important. I think the motivation for why they serve is important. And I think too many people get caught up in a couple of things. One is to get caught up too much in the service for the sake of service. So I'm going to challenge you here a little bit. At the end of the day, your highest moral responsibility in my view as an individual is to live. To live a good life, to make the most of the one life you have on this planet, and to really flourish and to follow the values that are going to make you the best human being you can be. For some people, that involves the kind of dangerous activities that the military engages, the firefighting engages, and others engage in. But for others, it doesn't. For others, it involves a different path. And I don't think any particular path is more honorable than the other path. It really depends on your values as an individual. I also think that a lot of people go into the military for the wrong reasons. They go into the military because they think it's going to be cool to shoot big guns. And I don't think there are many like that, but I think there are some. They go into the military because they think that their highest moral duty is to serve their country. It's to serve a goal bigger than themselves. I don't think that's good. I don't think there is a goal in the end, at the end of the day, bigger than you. I think you are the highest goal. Now, that doesn't mean you don't risk your life sometimes for the sake of people you love, for the sake of people you care for, ideas that you think are incredibly valuable that are necessary for human survival. But I think that if your goal is the nation, the state, that that's probably not good, right? That's not good. That's problematic. So I think a lot of our terminology, when we talk about this, when we talk about service, when we talk about what that means is tricky because that service could be motivated by what I ran called altruism, what the culture calls altruism, which is the self-negation and the willingness to sacrifice for something outside, whether it's mystical or whether it's collectivistic or something like that. Or service can just mean in pursuit of one's own values and those values certainly include other people. So you're serving other people, but not as a contradiction to your values, not for something greater than yourself, but for yourself. Because it's in your self-interest to serve others because service to others supports your values in your life. You know, there's a lot of people, obviously, during Ayn Rand's life, there were a lot of people that were very outspoken against this idea of, you know, of objectivist, not so much that, but also serving your own needs in that it was selfish, right? And selfish, she believes it's selfish and this has a purity. And that really came out in the answer. It's the term selfish, right? She embraced it from selfish. And so selfish means taking care of self, simple definition, selfish is taking care of self. And then the question is, and she says, this is the question of morality. This is the question that ethics must solve. The science of ethics has to solve this question. What does it mean to take care of yourself? What are the actions you must take? What are the values you must pursue to take care of yourself in the deepest, most meaningful, most substantial way, not in the superficial way of, I need food, I need some money, whatever. But in the deep spiritual and material way, what are the things that you must value in order to take care of yourself? So she embraced the idea of selfishness when it meant the values and virtues that truly objectively, based on reality and the nature of man, truly make us happy, successful individual human beings. And it's not easy to figure out what those are. I was going to say, you want to just listen to us? One of us as individuals, yeah. This is why we need philosophical guidance. This is why having a philosophy, having a way of thinking about the world is so crucial. And what Ayn Rand does is she gives us a map, a guide to living our lives, to going out there and executing on living the best selfish life possible, pursuing the right kind of values and the right kind of virtues. Yeah, and I think it would be unreasonable to believe that every person who enters military, for example, or service to others would stay aligned perfectly forever, just like anyone who starts working at Procter & Gamble is not going to stay aligned with the company forever. There's a period of time where their personal interests are being served. Maybe that's growing their family because that's important to them selfishly again, right? Part of their philosophy is to raise other beings and impart on them, give them a good opportunity to grow. So the company pays them or the military pays them, but there's a point where things are not going to be perfectly aligned. And then you have to, I believe, I mean, I'd love to hear your side, but that's when having the philosophy of understanding what's truly important to you gives you the signal of, hey, it's time for me to move on. Yeah, so I definitely think that's correct, that once you have a clear set of values, if you know what you believe is good for you, what you know where you want to take your life, then at a regular intervals, once you'd evaluate one's own life to figure out, am I on the right path? And what Rand teaches us is the guide to determining all that is using our reason, is using our rational faculties, thinking is taking in all the evidence that we have, plotting out where we want to go and figuring out what the right path is, figuring out rationally, not going based on our emotions, not going on based on what our mother wants or what the group wants or what our friends wants or what our family wants, but really figuring out what is the right course for me to take at this point in my life and based on one's values. And I think one should do that on a regular basis. I think I often say that one of the advantages of kind of the holiday season, between Christmas and New Year is to really take some time off and to really think about, okay, what do I want to do next year? Well, am I on the right path? And if I am great, then I just continue, but can I tweak it or do I want to make dramatic changes? Is this the right direction? Every day you live, you're never going to get back. Every moment you live, you're never going to get back. This is a one journey, it's one directional and taking full advantage of it is what I think the real challenge in life is and figuring out how to do that is not easy. Yeah, that is absolutely true. And I completely agree with you on that week. That's just an amazing period of time at the end of a year, the beginning of the next year. It just kind of gets your intellectual juices flowing, I guess. I mean, it's when I picked up Anthem and read it. I mean, I'm glad that Anthem was not my first book that I read from I and Ran because that one can be a bit like in your face and I remember I loved her comments that about the history of publishing it and the first American publisher sent back a note that says the author does not understand socialism and holy cow, I can see if you were not open-minded this one, that one was a bit in your face, but Atlas Shrugs, such a wonderful weaving of a novel and messages and I love your story about reading it at age 16. Wish I had it. You should read the book. It's one of those books that it's an American classic. Every American should read it. And that and The Fountainhead are two books that I think every college student, every 20-year-old, in your case, maybe a little even older, everybody should read it because it is, whether you agree with it or not at the end of the day, it's gonna challenge you, it's gonna push you, it's gonna force you to better understand your own values and your own perspective on life and to really make sure that kind of, you know what you're doing with your life and nothing is more important than that. Nothing is more important than really that self-reflection and figuring out is this the right direction? Am I pursuing the right values? What should be my values? And really focusing on what is good for me. Again, we live, we spend 90, 100 years, maybe if you're younger, 120 years on this planet, hopefully if biomedicine continues at the pace it's going. Figuring out how to make the most of it, that's the bottom line. How to, you know, to steal something from the army, you know, how to be the best that you can be, right? How to really be the best that you can be at living, not in any particular profession, but just at living. And I think Atlas Shrug pushes you in that direction and challenges you to really think that through. Yeah, and there's a lot of other great messages in there about no entitlements and everyone. Political message that is about that, right? Because if we take personal responsibility for ourselves, if our life is the most important thing to us and the people we love, right, the people around us, because we love them are crucially important to our life, then what kind of world do we wanna live in? If we have the capacity to understand the world, if we have the capacity to live our world, if we have the capacity to make the best of our life, what kind of political world do we wanna live in? Well, every individual like that who is striving to make their life the best life that it can be, wants to be free, right? You wanna be able to make decisions for yourself. You don't want mother government sitting on your shoulder, oh, don't eat that, don't drink that, don't start that business, don't pay your employees that much. You wanna be free to make decisions for yourself and that's capitalism. Capitalism, all it is, is a system of freedom. It's a system that leaves individuals free to make decisions about their life for themselves. And as long as you're not hurting somebody else, as long as you're not violating other people's rights, as long as you're pursuing your values rationally, free of coercion, you should be left alone. It's nobody's business. And that's the bottom line of Ayn Rand's politics, it's freedom. Yeah, Ron, do you think we're making progress? Do you think we are getting to a permanent, peaceful world out there? It's been a while since World War II, and there's little conflicts around the world, but what do you think, is it catching on? Is the internet and freedom of information and all that, are we helping? So it's definitely catching on. There's no question it's catching on, but it's catching on slowly and it's catching on among individuals. I wouldn't say that it's catching on to a point where it's having big political impacts. Now, I think Ayn Rand's already had political impacts. I don't think Ronald Reagan could have been elected if not for Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand. I don't think that the world would have moved so far towards freedom and liberty. And if you look around the world, we've moved a long way towards freedom, not in the United States, the rest of the world, without kind of the guiding light of an Ayn Rand and the spirit that is projected in Atlas Shrugged. I think we're losing the battle in the United States. I think we're moving towards more statism, more authoritarianism, more collectivism or tribalism, less reason, more emotions. So I think we're losing the battle. But even in the US, more people are reading our books, more people engage in the ideas, more people are interested than ever before. It's just not big enough to have an impact yet on the culture, on the broader culture. I think we will. I think in the end we will win. The end might be decades in our future, but at the end we will win. I do think in a broader sense, you mentioned the world being peaceful. I do think the world is more peaceful. I think in the broader sense, the ideas of the enlightenment, the ideas that view individual human life as a value, as the prime value, those ideas really dominate the world out there in profound ways, not at a deep level, not as far as I would like them to go. 50 years ago, if you traveled around the world and asked people, well, let's start with 300 years ago. 300 years ago, if you'd asked anywhere in the world, who does your life belong to? People would have said the king, the state, the country, the nation, the tribe. Nobody would have conceived of the idea that your life belongs to you. 50 years ago, in the West, everybody would have said, oh, my life belongs to me. Even in Europe, people say, my life belongs to me. They have a misconception of what that actually means politically, but they identify their own life as a crucial value today. But if you'd gone then to the Soviet Union or to China or to much of Asia, they would have said, my life belongs to the party, to the states. Today, if you go to China and ask people, who does your life belong to, they will say me. Wow, seriously. But if you go to Vietnam and ask people, who does your life belong to, they would say me. If you go to Russia and you ask them, who does your life belong to, they will say me. Again, they don't fully understand what that means. They don't fully understand the political implications that they don't fully understand what freedom implies, but they get the fundamental notion of the sanctity of their own life. And now we have to work on, okay, where do you take that? What does that mean? And that's true almost everywhere in the world. There is the entrenched collectivism, that idea that your life belongs to this other entity. That has been rooted out to a large extent. Now, unfortunately, it's coming back and like in the United States, there's trends towards collectivism and so on. But it's nowhere near what it was even 50 years ago and it's certainly nowhere near where it was 300 years ago. So the enlightenment has changed that. It's fundamentally changed that. And then if you go, think that there's more people free today than ever in human history, free to make their own decisions about work, about marriage, about their life, politics. We still got a way to go in places like China, but certainly in China, people are a thousand, so much more free than they were, when they were real communists 50 years ago. With the exception of Iran and North Korea and Venezuela and maybe Cuba, people are freer than they used to be in significant ways. So there's definitely been a movement towards that, which I think is quite positive. The world keeps getting richer. We keep getting fancier technologies. Life becomes easier from a material perspective, but there are big challenges in front of us, particularly I think in the West. There are big challenges. There's real opposition to our way of life, and we're gonna have to fight for this. We're not gonna be able to preserve what we have and keep expanding the realm of freedom without a real fight on our hands. You know what I believe, this is probably a stretch in my opinion, is that as long as information remains available, that people can read things like Iran. They can read works other than what's just in the newspaper, right? Then we have the ability to personally think and the freedom to make our own kind of decisions and speak, freedom of speech and of being able to read, I think we have a fighting chance. Absolutely, this is why freedom of speech is probably the most important issue of our time. That availability of information is probably the most important issue of our time. Because once you, freedom of speech goes, then the only means for change is war, right? The only means change is revolution, armed revolution. I'd rather have an intellectual revolution than an armed revolution. We both know that battle is, that war is a very, very nasty business. It's a very, very, very unpleasant business. Sometimes you have to do it, but you never want to be an advocate for it, unless it's absolutely necessary. So I would much rather we win this at the intellectual fund, but once you lose free speech, there's nothing left. But I agree with you as long as ideas can keep circulating. And this is what I'm seeing outside the US. What I'm seeing outside the US is that Ein Rand over the last 20 years has been translated into almost every language on the planet, right? She's in Chinese, she's in Vietnamese, she's in Mongolian, she's in every Eastern European language. And what you're seeing as a rise and interest in Ein Rand in all these countries, every single one of these countries, you're seeing a dramatic rise and interest in Ein Rand's ideas. Whereas in the United States, it's kind of flat. Everywhere else, it's exploding. And that I think is going to be the continued trend. I think that I don't know where the revolution's gonna happen. I don't know who, from what country, the next genius philosopher, the next genius economist, the next genius promoter of ideas is gonna come from. We live in a very international world. One of my fears about this attack on immigration and attack on trade is a fear that we become isolationist, that we drop the global perspective that I think is so beneficial to America and so beneficial to the world. This idea that ideas can come from anywhere, innovation can come from anywhere that interacting with people across the world doesn't mean all cultures are equal. They're not. Some cultures are much better than others. We happen to have the best. We should be proud of that and we should be advocating for that. But it does mean that there's value everywhere in the world and we should recognize that and we don't know where the next great idea is going to come from. So I'm inspired by the fact that the internet has no borders and has this international global reach and that people all over the world are being inspired by these ideas and are making their lives better and by making their own lives better, they're making the world around them better as well and thus making the world for us better. Yeah, this is not a comment about objectivism or individualism. It is simply because it's a comment about social pressure, right? And I believe that social pressure is having a good impact whether that's where we really want people to go or not meaning that people are being held accountable because everything they do is visual or is visible, it's being recorded, it's not private anymore. You can't beat your spouse in private anymore and get away with it, right? And you can't be North Korea and think that you can just lie to your country and that no one's ever gonna figure it out, right? It's just not reasonable anymore and I believe that's getting us towards a much better world, a much more peaceful world. I mean, I think that's right. You know, I worry about what is it in China now they have a social score, their technology to monitor all of your behavior, everything you do online, offline, they've got cameras with facial recognition and they track you a week ago and then you get a score and based on that social score, how well you've behaved based on the criteria of the ruling party that you get a loan or you don't get a loan, you start a business or you can't start a business and so on. That's scary. So technology can be flipped and used against us for the most part. I agree with you. Technology is enabling us to have a freer, better, more peaceful, more individualistic world out there. And I hope and I believe that that trend will continue. And what we need to do is fight and enable the people in China to fight that trend. So I'm hoping to be in Shanghai later this year to talk against it. We'll see what happens. Fascinating, fascinating. Well, Yaron Brooke, this has been amazing. We have just scratched the surface on a dozen topics that I want to cover, but I probably led you down a bunch of rabbit holes. Is there anything that a message you absolutely wanted to get out to this audience that I didn't ask? Well, I think the bottom line is, you know, it's something we've said already. I mean, your life is yours. It's your responsibility, moral responsibility. Take the best care that you can of your life. Make the most of it. Live the best life that you can be doing. And that means in every realm, that means in the financial realm, take responsibility over your own finances and figure out and have a plan and figure out what you want to do. It means philosophically figure out what your values are, what your virtues are, what kind of life you want to live in the spiritual dimension, if you will. It means politically figure out in politics, you know, what kind of environment, what kind of world you think will benefit you the most, will give you the most opportunities. I happen to think that's capitalism and that's freedom, but you have to come to those decisions for yourself. So, you know, and it means at the end of the day, cherish your mind, use your mind, think. Think about every issue you face in life. Don't be tempted by emotions. Don't be tempted by what other people think. Don't be tempted by what leaders tell you. You have to figure it out for yourself. No matter what profession you are at the end of the day, you're responsible for your own actions, even in the military. At the end of the day, you're responsible for your own actions. You're responsible for the orders you follow. You're responsible for who you challenge and who you don't. You're responsible for staying or not staying, right? So, always challenge, at least in your head, always challenge the assumptions that you grew up with, always challenge the ideas that surround you. Make your philosophy your own. I think that's the real message of INRAN. Make it your own. Make your ideas, your own ideas, not just something you absorbed from those around you. Check your premise. Yeah, always check your premise. Awesome. Thank you so much, Iran, for spending time with our audience. Can't wait to remain connected and learn a ton more from you and to see what happens in China with you. Excellent, excellent. Yes, if you follow me on my show, the Runbook show, I will be reporting on all my international adventures. Thank you, sir. Take care. You too. So, Iran, you'll cut it off there. I do have to run and I know you do as well. I greatly, greatly appreciated it and I'm gonna continue personally connected with the Institute. Thanks so much. Wonderful. Anytime. Thanks. Bye, Patrick.