 Hello, everybody. Today, we have with us Mr. Yaren Brooke. He is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer and activist, an objectivist and the current chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute where he's been executive director from 2000 to 2017. Also the founder of BHZ Capital Management LP. How are you doing this afternoon, Mr. Brooke? I'm doing well. Thank you. Call me Yaron. I've had several people sort of in the libertarian circles and beyond on my channel for interviews. I felt like I had an objectivist on and I feel like you're the leading objectivist today. Well, I appreciate that. I'm glad to be on. Looking forward to our discussion. Glad to have you. Do you think you could start by telling me a little bit about your background, what you do, and the history of the Ayn Rand Institute? Sure. I was born and raised in Israel, served in Israeli military, got my undergraduate at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. In engineering, went on to get an MBA and PhD in finance at the University of Texas. I was a finance professor from 1993 to 2000, then joined the Ayn Rand Institute in 2000 and I think you told the rest of that story. I first read Ayn Rand when I was 16 in Israel. I read Atlas Shrugged and at the time when I read it, I was pretty much opposed to every idea that was in the book or almost every idea in the book. You were raised a socialist originally, correct? Pretty much. My parents, when they originally came to Israel, had the dream of living on a kibbutz. They never actually made it. Israel was very socialist back then. Everybody was a socialist. I didn't know anybody who was not a socialist, basically. It was very unusual, at least among my friends, for anybody to express a different point of view. When did that change? I know right now there's been a sort of, they say, a rightward swing with Nihonyahu. Israel was an interesting country. In 1977, actually the same year I read Atlas Shrugged, it was the first year a non-labor party won an election. That was Begin. For those of you who might remember, he was part of what today is that he could, the same party that Nihonyahu is at the head of. That was the first election Israel was founded in 1948. This was the first election that a non-labor party, non-social democratic party was voted in. That was the beginning of the change. Israel today basically has no left. There is no left in Israel, certainly not socialist left. Everybody in Israel pretty much is a centrist. There's center left, there's center right, and there's far right. The far right is primarily religious, dominated by religious parties. I say the Likudnitanyahu Party is a center-right party, even though it sometimes wants to play on the far right. It's basically a center-right party. Its vote is a center-right. The opposition is center-left, but the center-left opposition parties are pretty center. The more radical leftist ideas have very little representation in Israeli politics today. Almost everything is tilted to the right. By right, I mean here, just to be clear, I don't consider myself right. I don't consider myself left. Right to me is nationalist, usually religious, powerful central government, particularly interfering in our social lives. Usually right today means a government that interferes in our economics as well. You see that in the US, and you certainly see that elsewhere. I don't consider myself anywhere on that political spectrum. I think we need to reconceive the spectrum. I 100% agree with that. If I go back to the story, I read out the shrug that same year, 1977, as it happened. Again, Israel is a very nationalistic country, almost by definition, because of the way it was founded. I was raised very collectivist, very nationalist, very socialist. I read, of course, rejects all that. I was already an atheist at that point, so that wasn't a big deal. I read as an atheist, so that was no big deal for me, but everything else was shattering. After that book tried to consume everything she'd written, and it dedicated the rest of my life to understanding it, applying it, studying it. As part of that, I got involved with the INRAN movement, if you will, in the United States when I moved here. That's how I got ultimately to be CEO and now Chairman of the Board of the Institute. I took classes from the leading philosophers in INRAN's thinking in the 1990s, and ran a conference business around that. That's my story. The Institute was founded in 1985, three years after INRAN had died. She died in 1982. It basically dedicated to preserving and promoting her ideas, to keep them alive. A lot of that the Institute did through promoting her novels and trying to get her novels read by young people. The Institute runs today the largest high school essay contest in the world. It provides free books to teachers who want to teach INRAN, Fountainhead, Alashwagd, Anthem, predominantly in high schools. We provide them books for free. We provide curricula. We try to get people exposure to their ideas. Then we also have today something called the INRAN University, which is within the INRAN Institute. It is dedicated to really training people in the philosophy, primarily future intellectuals, primarily people who will then teach, or become speakers, or do media, write up ads, write articles, books, whatever. You are, of course, leading proponent of the philosophy of Objectivism, which, of course, devised by Russian-American author and philosopher Ida Rand. Firstly, do you think you could explain what exactly Objectivism is, its moral foundations, and what distinguishes it from Libertarians? Because I know INRAN did not consider herself a Libertarian, called them the hippies of the right, quote-unquote. Yeah, let me start with the distinguishing, because that is relatively easy at that kind of big picture level. And then as Objectivism is the philosophy. It has positions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and in politics, and in even aesthetics. Libertarianism, at best, is a political philosophy. But it's not even really an integrated, coherent political philosophy, because there's a whole variety of different views within it. But Libertarianism has no philosophical foundation. It has no metaphysics. No true Libertarians are going to agree on metaphysics, or epistemology, or morality. You can be a Christian. You can be pretty fundamentalist. You can be an atheist. You can be a subjectivist. You can be an intrinsicist. You can be pretty much anything, and then have political views that somehow are, quote, Libertarian. Objectivism is an integrated philosophy. It has clear views on every aspect, every big branch in philosophy. And while it doesn't have answers to every question in philosophy, it tries to have answers to all the big questions in philosophy. And again, Libertarianism is more eclectic and not really philosophical, primarily focused on politics and economics, almost exclusively, I'd say. It's like, do you think you could define Objectivism? Yeah, so Objectivism, first, is a philosophy of Ayn Rand. So it's a name for philosophy. It's a name for a particular set of ideas as defined by their author, who is Ayn Rand. But what is it? So now this is going to be superficial and quick and kind of Objectivism philosophy on one leg or on a few toes. In metaphysics, Rand holds that reality is what it is. It isn't created by consciousness. It isn't created by emotions. It facts a fact. Reality is what it is. A is A, and the laws of causality apply to reality. You know, we have, in epistemology, we have the tool to know reality, to discover it, to understand it, and that is our faculty of reason. We don't gain knowledge through our emotions. We don't gain knowledge through revelation. Knowledge doesn't just imprint itself on us. Our emotions and our tools are cognition. The only way to discover knowledge is to use our rational faculty to observe reality, facts, and integrate those facts logically by the use of logic. Only individuals can reason. Groups don't reason. There's no group consciousness. Nobody can reason for you any more than anybody can eat for you. We can contribute to one another's cognitive development by stimulating and asking questions and conveying information, which you can't do somebody else's thinking for them. So the unit of thinking is the individual, and in morality, Rand advocates for, you know, the individual is the unit that is alive. The individual is the unit that must act. The individual is the unit that must live and think. Was she the one who said civilization is the process of setting man free from men? Yeah, civilization. I think that was something like that, yeah. Yes, and basically it's not free from men in the sense of other men are not of value to you. Of course they are, but free from them in the sense of various levels and forms of enslavement, right? So throughout history, man have been subjugated in one way or another to other men, and civilization is the process of freeing the individual from that subjugation and only dealing with other men in a voluntary process, a voluntary process of trade. So in morality, your moral responsibility in life is to survive, to thrive, to flourish, and ultimately to be happy. That is your moral purpose, and you are not there to sacrifice your life for other people. Other people are not the standard of morality, so you don't give up your life for them and your values for them. But you don't also expect them to give up their values and their life for you. So you're not sacrificed to them or you don't expect them to sacrifice to you. And sacrifice here means giving up something important without expectation of anything in return or something less valuable in return. So her morality is an egoistic morality. It's a morality of self-interest. It's a morality of individuals pursuing their own rational, long-term self-interest. The tool by which we do that is our mind, is our reasoning faculty. So if you had a boiled-down Rand's morality to one word, I'd say think. Think before you act, act based on thought. So individuals need the ability to think in order to pursue their happiness. The enemy of thought is force, coercion. And therefore when we're in a society with other people, the one rule needs to be no coercion, no force. The concept that captures that is the concept of individual rights. The idea that every individual has an inalienable right to live his life free of coercion based on his own judgment in pursuit of his own values. And the political system that manifests rights is capitalism. It's the system that basically leaves people free to pursue their judgment in pursuit of their values. Free of coercion. She rejects all forms of statism. But she also rejects, and this is a difference with libertarianism. She also rejects anarchism of all forms. She believes in a government, a strong government that does one thing and one thing only. And that is protect you. Protect you from others who would curse you, whether those others live outside of your borders or inside your borders. It's there to protect you. We can get into the aesthetics if you're interested. Yeah, maybe if we have time towards the end, perhaps we can do that. So objectivism has faced both controversy and scrutiny over the years from both people on the religious right, mainstream Democrats, most notably. And even other libertarians like Robert Nozick, who argued that it doesn't explain why people couldn't rationally prefer having no values as a means of furthering a particular principle or set of values. It's been accused of promoting selfishness. What would you have to say in response to this? Do you believe that this is primarily a misinterpretation of Rand's ideas? And additionally, what criticisms of objectivism would you theoretically find the most valid, if any? Well, I think most of the criticism, sadly, and I wish this wasn't true, but most of the criticisms of Rand, a strong man who positioned, you know, a lot of the people critical, if I never read her, or at least if they've read her, they didn't understand. And a lot of that, you know, some of that, and we'll get to kind of Nozick, but a lot of that has to do with, you know, the emotionalist gut response reaction to a philosophy that's egoistic, that's selfish. People can think about selfishness as meaning exploiting other people, as meaning being a line-cheating SOB and doing whatever it takes to get your way and your way meaning whatever you feel like. And Ayn Rand is clearly not for that. She calls her philosophy selfish, her morality selfish, but she doesn't mean that by the word. What she means by selfish is pursuing what is objectively good for you in the long run and doing so rationally. And I've not seen a critique of that. It just seems that people always fall back on the straw manning anywhere from Ben Shapiro arguing that, you know, what's the stop somebody from just hitting on the girl at the bar? You know, he's married. He's got kids at home that there's an effort involved in maintaining a marriage and taking care of kids. Why not just go sleep with a woman at the bar? What the hell? And the reality is that if you're rational and if you think long term, there are lots of reasons not to sleep with a woman at the bar. Part of them is that you're just not attracted to her as good-looking she may be because you have a, you know, a more wholesome perspective on what is attractive. And that comes from being rational and having a long-term perspective on life. And you love your wife and your kids. So it would actually be a sacrifice to sleep with some random woman at the bar and put in jeopardy your relationship with your wife and your kids and put in jeopardy just the integrity of your own soul. So that kind of understanding of what self-interest means and linking it to reason and rationality is something people really resist. It's interesting just to think about why that is, but people really do resist it. So I think those criticisms are either ignorant or evasive of what she actually is talking about or what she actually says. I think there are other criticisms, Nozick, who try to deal with Rand, but I think it's just wrong. I just think Nozick is wrong. I think he, to some extent, he doesn't understand it, but I think more deeply, I think he just makes logical mistakes in trying to refute her. You know, and for example, the way you phrased it before illustrates one, have no values in order to achieve a value. Well, but that's a contradiction in terms right there. You know, if you have no values, you have no value to achieve. If you have no values, why even live? There's nothing. You're just a nothing. So you're not striving towards anything. As soon as you're striving towards something, you are a value. And then the question is, is the value good for you? Or isn't it a good for you? And you want to avoid things that are bad for you because they're bad for you. And life is the standard. And if life is not the standard, then what is? So I think there's just some logical mistakes there. Look, when it comes to the philosophy itself, the philosophy, I have not found any critique that is convincing. I've not found any critique that is, that really is deeply challenging, you know, to Rand. You know, at best on a bad day, you could get me to say, given how people behave, it's hard to conceive of man as the rational being, because there's so much irrationality out there. But then, you know, you find the things that man has created and man has done, and you see the glimpses of that rationality, and you know what's possible. And I think that's what's Ayn Rand is arguing, is she's not arguing that people all like this, it's what people can be, and what we should be, and what we should strive to be, and what it means to be a moral human being. And that I think every human being has the potential to do. It's sad that very few people choose to do it. So moving on to religion, Rand was highly critical of it, believing that organized religion and even belief in God itself was actually an insult to man. Do you think you could elaborate further on what she meant by this, and is there a direct link between this idea in Nietzsche's notion of slave morality? And moreover, did she ever draw a direct link between this and communism? Okay, a lot there. Alright, let's break it down. So first with regard to religion, or let's start with just the belief in God. I mean, the problem with the belief in God is that it's based on, by definition, faith. There is no evidence for God, there are no logical arguments for God, in spite of the attempts of some people to present some. They're not real arguments and philosophers have refuted them over and over again. And at that of the day, nobody believes in God because there's a logical argument for God. At the end of the day, people believe in God because they believe in God, because they've taken it on faith. And Rand would say anything taken on faith is bad. You know, the standard for human cognition, the standard for discovering the truth, the standard by which one should live, is reason, facts, evidence, logic. That's what we should pursue in order to achieve success at living. That's what human life means. That's what progresses human life. Faith in God is the negation of that, whether some people want to say, well, it's a negation only as one little part of me. It's almost never just one little part, because that faith has implications, particularly when you get to organize religion. But beyond that, if reason is really our means of survival, whose reason is really our tool, why have an exclusion clause? Why have some parts of your life not guided by reason? So she rejects the whole idea of faith in God, leprechauns, many of the conspiracy theories going on right now. Anything that's based on faith and not evidence and facts. I mean, QAnon, you could argue is basically a Gnostic religion. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of religions out there in some form or another that basically take a lot of the principles of Christianity and just change them and morph them into something different. But it's all based on faith, and she rejects faith. So that's, and then once you get into organized religion, I would say particularly Christianity, I know the supplies to Islam as well and to some extent to Judaism, but I think Christianity is the model in the West. She then has a lot of critique of Christianity as a philosophy, if you will. Generally, she viewed religion as a primitive form of philosophy. You know, man has a real need for answers. Answers kind of the big questions about life. Where did this world come from? What is the nature of reality? What's the nature of my consciousness? How do I know reality? What is right and what is wrong? And religion provided some primitive answers to it, because everything else science and everything else was pretty primitive back then. So religion was as good as it got. As a philosophy, she was very critical, particularly Christianity because of its altruism, because of its morality. I mean, obviously the epistemology is an epistemology of revelation. You know things because somebody, it was revealed to somebody and then they told you about it, that revelation is to the prophets or to the Pope or to Jesus or whoever. So she rejects that epistemology and she rejects the whole metaphysics of a world created by a God. But I think a lot of the criticism is around the morality. Christianity basically says, you know, your life, the purpose of your life should be to sacrifice. The purpose of your life is some higher goal and indeed in another life, in another dimension, in another world. Your purpose in life is God. You need a sacrifice to God or to the religion or to other people. But you cannot live your own life for your own sake. You know, the symbol of Christianity being Jesus on a cross, suffering the most horrific death possible, not for his sins, not for anything he did, but for sins other people committed. Talk about a massive injustice. And Rand would view it as a massive injustice for somebody to die for other people's sins. Tying into collectivism, I assume. Definitely into collectivism here, sacrificing the individual for the sake of the group, even though the individual is a hero. You know, within the context of Christianity, certainly a hero. So she rejects the morality and the whole system that religion builds in order to justify knowledge, but also to justify what's right and wrong. And her philosophy is a real challenge to conventional philosophy and to religion in terms of all the metaphysics and epistemology, but more than anything in ethics, which is how people live, because it says, no, your purpose in life is not to suffer. It's not to sacrifice. It's not to do what the group demands or what God demands or somebody else demands. Your purpose in life is to pursue your happiness. That's a major revolution in ethics. And, you know, it's not completely out of nowhere because this builds an Aristotle. Aristotle, ethics, is an egoistic ethics. It's an ethics of self-fulfillment, of flourishing, of individual human flourishing. That's the essence. You mentioned communism. Communism, they're very strong parallels between communism, I think, and Christianity. You can replace God or Jesus with the Paulitarian. And they're the elect. I mean, remember I had this conversation with, I don't know if you know Michael Rectonwald, but former Marxist professor became a libertarian. I asked him what he thought about the idea. It was just something that came to mind about how, if you think about it, Marxian eschatology is very similar. Especially when you think of pre-millennial interpretation of the idea that, okay, there's going to be this great time of horror. You're going to have a, eventually, Christ will return. There'll be the reign of a thousand years. It'll pass away. Old heaven and old earth. You'll have a new heaven on earth. Same with that. You'll have a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat. The old, or the state will wither away. And it reminds me of the, there's an old obstacle. What you will need will be taken care of magically. No explanation how, and you'll be able to live in heaven according to communism. And of course, truth is revealed to the dictatorship. The dictator knows what the truth is. He represents the proletariat. The proletariat doesn't know what's good for it. He has to dictate to them just like in Christianity. And of course, the ethic of sacrifice. You must sacrifice yourself to this noble cause, to this proletarian God, and to this mystical future. So yes, I think Christianity is the secularization of Christianity. It's, sorry, communism is the secularization of Christianity. And it's why it's so popular. It's so popular because it's not that radical. It's just taking your Christianity seriously, but rejecting God. And that's why I think it latched on, you know, it's not surprising, it latched on in Russia. It latched on where people were more mystical, took the Christianity more seriously. But what was really important to them in the Christianity was not God. What was really important to them in the Christianity was the sacrifice and the revelation and this story of achieving paradise sometime in the distant future. Yeah. Reminds me that there's an old Oswald Spangler quote, which is, it was Christianity as the grandfather of Bolshevism, I remember. Yep. I think that's absolutely right. And then you talked about the slave morality. And while I don't think Einren has ever referred to the morality of altruism or the morality of Christianity as a slave morality, she wouldn't have used those terms. But yes, altruism in the essence is a slave morality, right? It's a morality that says, your life doesn't belong to you. You must sacrifice it to others, you know, to God, to the proletarian, to the group, to the collective in some form, to the weak, to the poor, to the meek in some form. And that, that is I think a slave morality and I think that is certainly Einren rejects that whole idea. I think where Einren disagrees with Nietzsche really, really fundamentally is on the positive, not so much on his critique, but on the positive on what should replace the slave morality and how does one think about it, the world of reason versus emotion. All of that is very different, differentiates Rand from Nietzsche quite dramatically. It's like the Enlightenment versus Romanticism debate that you had. Yes, absolutely. So I consider Einren as a continuation of the Enlightenment in all important philosophical senses. Okay. So although she promoted secular values, Rand was heavily inspired by the writings of philosophies of people like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, one of whom was the basis of Christianity's metaphysical framework and the other, of course, being a Christian saint. Many would argue that it's impossible to detach the spiritual from their philosophies. So how does Rand, and by extension yourself, also being a secularist, square this with your religion? Well, so first, you know, I don't think Aristotle was certainly not religious and I certainly don't think his metaphysics or his morality aligned necessarily with religion. It is Thomas Aquinas that kind of forced Christianity to embrace Aristotle and kind of created this fusion that I think was unnatural and is unnatural and kind of broke apart with the Reformation, right? I mean, the Reformation rejects all that and is much more based on pure emotion, evangelical movement today rejects that. So I think that fusion of Aristotle with Christianity was never completely natural. It was always unnatural and had to dissolve and it starts dissolving in the Renaissance and it gets more fully dissolved in the Enlightenment. She admired Thomas Aquinas because of his deep respect for reason and because he is the one who brings reason back into Western civilization. In a sense of the fall of Rome and the disappearance of the libraries, the ancient libraries, many of them. Aristotle is lost, the whole idea of reason is lost and we go into what I think was the Dark Ages and the Dark Ages of mysticism and irrationalism. Aquinas brings civilization out of that and he basically sets the conditions for the Renaissance that happens about 100 years after he dies. But without Aquinas, there's no Renaissance and that's why she's such an admirer of Aquinas. Aristotle admires the arguments, specific arguments. She admires what he does to Western civilization and where he takes it. I mean, I consider, you know, I have no problem with the idea that I have a spirit. I just don't consider that spirit mystical. I have a consciousness. I have spiritual experiences when I contemplate art, when I listen to music, when I, you know, see a, you know, look at the Sistine Chapel or Michelangelo. But they have nothing to do with religion. They have nothing to do with God. They have nothing to do with something mystical. They have something to do with the soul, the consciousness that I have, that to some extent I control or I have helped, you know, work to create. So I, you know, Rand also talked about separating religious concept from religion. That is that a lot of these concepts shouldn't have just a religious connotation and it's a shame that they do. So I think spirit is one of those. I don't think one should necessarily view the human spirit as something that is mystical. It is about a character. It's about our mind. It's about, you know, our values. So you are obviously an advocate for secularism. Yourself, I believe. Would you consider yourself agnostic? Is that your, I don't know. No, I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist since the age of six. So this is, this was the easy part. Why do you believe that a secular society is preferable to one that is religious, particularly when religion, regardless of whether or not God exists, that's a completely different conversation, has actually provided a certain amount of efficacy over the course of civilization. Again, when we go back to the idea of finding meaning. So I challenge all of that. So first, I, you know, I start with the question, is it true or is it false? That to me is what's important and God doesn't exist. So, oh, that's it. So why would I advocate for God? Because people have advocated for him for 2,000 years. Why would I believe in something just because other people do it? I see no evidence for it. I see no reason for it. Therefore, so what's important is the truth. What's important is reality, not what works. And then I challenge if it works, right? To the extent religion is practiced consistently. It is destructive. It is harmful. It leads to dark ages. Dark ages is what Christianity is. Anything better than the dark ages is the victory of secularization over Christianity or over religion. The Renaissance is the rediscovery of ancient ideas, ancient sculpture. I mean, you cannot make Michelangelo's David. You cannot sculpt Michelangelo's David in the dark ages. First of all, you'd be stoned to death. The sculpture would be destroyed. The religionists tried to do that in Florence anyway. They tried to destroy David. And even though Michelangelo was religious and became more and more religious as he aged, that spirit of the David is a secular spirit. That is an individual who is competent, who is able to deal with reality. If you look at the sculpture, there's no God there. There's no religiosity there. There is a David standing up to Goliath by himself alone with his own strength, his own determination. It's all in that sculpture. That is the spirit of enlightenment. The spirit of enlightenment is the beginning of the shrugging off of religion, the beginning of man standing up for himself. They called it humanism, which was the beginning of a secular philosophy. And that is the beginning of the rejection of religion, the beginning of the rejection of Christianity. And I think that only intensifies with the scientific revolution and the enlightenment where men are starting to see that they can understand reality without a God, without a revelation. The Bible actually contradicts science. The things in the Bible that don't make sense. Science can explain the world. Yes, it can explain everything yet, but it can explain more and more and more. And we have the tool for understanding the world. So what do I need religion? And I think the enlightenment is a period in which people start relegating religion even more, shrugging religion off even more and making kind of a personal thing in everything else, science, understanding the world, politics were secular, but only in private life are we religious. And it's trying to shrug off the remnants, the last remnant of it. Morality, right and wrong, undermined by religion, not promoted by it, because they teach a wrong morality. So I think a properly construed secular society, a secular society built on rational principles on the role of reason is a far superior society than a religious society. And the more secular the society has become over time, the better it's become, both materially and I think in every other regard, the life expectancy, material success, but also aesthetics and aesthetic creation, I think to a large extent that the spirit that created all that over the last 250 years is a consequence of the enlightenment, it's a consequence of rejecting religion, not embracing it. So you're Israeli and consider yourself a Zionist, on which you've written extensively. So many libertarians, pardon? Not really. Oh, you don't? I don't consider myself as Zionist unless you're anti-Zionist and then I'll fight you. But I'm neither here nor... I think Zionism is a necessary evil, if you will. So many libertarians being non-interventionists having critical of Israel, with some even considering themselves to be full on anti-Zionists or against the existence of an Israeli state itself, what is your argument as to why you believe it is important to support Israel? How would you approach that if you were trying to convince somebody who is anti-Israel to kind of come over to that perspective? Well, first time you say, I don't know what you mean by support Israel because I want to be clear. I don't think the United States government should be sending Israel money. I don't think American troops should be sent to the Middle East to fight for Israel, you know, any of that. I think what Israel deserves is our moral support and to some extent our military working with Israel as an ally, not giving them, but trading with them as an ally. And why do I think Israel deserves our moral support? Because it's a good country. It's fundamentally a country that is basically free. You know, it's not as free as I would like it to be, but neither is America. But it's basically free. It's a country that basically respect individual rights, the property rights, the religious rights, the individual rights of its citizens. Again, is it perfect? No, it's got flaws, it's got problems, particularly in giving too much respect for Jewish fundamentalists. But it's basically a rights-respecting, free, good, moral country. And as such, it deserves our support, particularly given that it is attacked by everybody. It's been attacked since its founding by its Muslim and Arab neighbors who represent the exact opposite civilization and culture than Israel does. Israel represents a culture and civilization of individualism, of relative free markets, of freedom of speech, of all the things that we associate, I think, with Western civilization. In the Middle East, of course, at its dark ages, essentially. The Middle East isn't the dark age. Especially if you analyze it in the context of civilizational cycles, like after the end of the Ottomans, after that, that lights out. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting... I mean, we can get into the history of that because I think it's interesting. But the reality is that civilization marches with Aristotle. Whoever adopts Aristotle is civilized, and whoever rejects him is not. The Arabs were civilized when they embraced Aristotle, which was from about 900 AD to about 1200 AD. They did phenomenally well. The biggest libraries in the world were in Baghdad and later in places like Córdoba and Toledo in southern Spain. They had scientists, they had mathematicians. They made real progress in the scientists while Europe was still mired in mysticism and witch-burning and craziness. The Muslim world, because of the respect for Aristotle, were doing amazing things. And then a famous Muslim philosopher by the name of Agar-Zali, one of the things that they were trying to do in the Muslim world was trying to reconcile faith with reason. Same thing Thomas Aquinas would later do, right? Christianity. And they couldn't, right? Trying and battling, but they tilted towards reason and that's where they flourished. And then Agar-Zali came it was the greatest philosopher of his time and he went into the desert to contemplate this question of faith versus reason. And he came back one day and he said, I've got the solution. We must abandon reason. Faith isn't. You cannot have both. And literally within 50 years every library is burnt in the photo crescent area between Baghdad and really Egypt. That civilization disappears by the time the Mongols arrive and completely destroy Baghdad. There's no libraries there anymore and there's no science and there's no... The only remnants of that survive in Spain. And those are taken over by the Christians and it's those books that they take when the Christians take some of these cities in Spain. Those are the books that travel to the University of Paris where Thomas Aquinas reads them. He reads the Arabic translations of the original Greek, right? He doesn't read them in Greek. Only later are they translated to Latin and so on. So that's the path. The Arab saved civilization because they saved Aristotle. But Aristotle, the respect for the individual respect for reason that is the civilization of force that moves us forward. And if you think about Israel going back to Israel Israel represents individualism it has a generally individualistic culture and reason. It's a culture that respects science, respects thinking, respects argumentation. Again, not consistently. It's too religious, way too religious for my taste. But it's westernized and the Arab world is a world dominated by mysticism and faith and is still in the dark as retreated into the dark ages as a consequence of kind of El Ghazali's teachings. So yes, we should support Israel because of bastion of civilization. Just like I think we should support Taiwan relative to China just like we should support Ukraine relative to Russia. That's a whole other issue I disagree with many libertarians on, right? You know, whenever barbarism raises its head we should support the civilized and because that's who we are and anybody who threatens another civilized country is a threat to us. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people, especially the people who are critical of Israel, forget what is the country where Arabs have the most rights? That'll shut them up. That'll basically, it's like, don't you care about rights? It's like fine, criticism of the Israel government completely understand that as you and I both discussed earlier. But I mean, if you support the creation of like giving it back to Palestine not only does that completely revert all that progress, but then also you risk it becoming a vassal state of Iran. I mean, absolutely. And look, the Palestinian authority has some autonomy on the West Bank. They have Gaza. Gaza is completely independent and yet Gaza is a religious theocracy. It is brutal. It is horrible. They throw gaze off of buildings. They execute people with no rule of law. It is barbaric and primitive and it is a vassal of you on to a large extent. The West Bank is terrible. There's no free speech on the West Bank. Try criticizing Mahmoud Abbas who is the president. Last elections were, I don't know, 20 years ago, yet he's still president. This term expired a long time ago. Doesn't matter. Nobody cares. There's no democracy or semblance of elections. So absolutely I used to, when I lived in Israel, I actually worked as a construction manager and all of my contractors were Arabs. And they was to tell me and I think this has changed because of them becoming more religious unfortunately over the last 20 years. But this is back in the 80s they would say thank Allah that I was, every morning I think Allah that I was born in Israel. They say I go see my relatives in Syria and Jordan or in Egypt. Life here is so much better than over there. And it is. They're richer, they're freer, they're right to more respected and many of them, or at least I think most of them understood and knew that. Okay, so final question. You will be hosted by the Soho forum for debate between you and Brian Kaplan regarding Minarchism versus Anarchism. You argue in favor of the former, of course, I assume that goes back to the hands of criticism of Anarchism and pro-Minarchism. But so that said, what is your specific argument in favor of Minarchism? How does that differ from other Minarchist libertarians such as Robert Nozick? And moreover what are your criticisms of Anarchism itself specifically? Do you want to give us a little sample of what your argument is going to be? Sure, well I don't want to give Brian heads up here but I think he knows. First, I don't consider myself a Minarchist. I don't like that term. I consider myself an advocate for limited government, limited to the protection of individual rights. That's its own thing. Not classical liberal, is that a term you do? Maybe, but again, I consider myself I think I like the term capitalist because I think that captures it. But at the end of the day, limited government limited by the principle of individual rights. I don't like I don't think Minarchism I find the whole construct of that word problematic. But the essence of my argument is that individuals as I said earlier in order to be able to pursue their reason and pursue their own values and pursue their own happiness, to pursue their life, must be free to use their mind and free of coercion. Coercion fundamentally is the enemy of society. So in order to create a civilized society, the first step one must make is eliminate coercion from society. And the only way to do that is by creating some kind of monopoly over the use of force. Limiting that monopoly over the use of force to only use it as retaliation in defense, but extracting force for society so we can all start interacting with one another knowing force is not allowed. Force is not an option. Force is off the table because we have this entity that is basically outlawed. It is eradicated and is maintaining the peace maintaining that that is followed. And then I believe that there are objective rules that need to be determined in terms of both what are the laws, what are the ways in which we restrict force, and then what are the procedures by which we go about enforcing it, right? I mean, how do we know somebody is a criminal? How do we know somebody initiated force? Rules of evidence. I mean, there's a massive amount of things that one has to determine in order to figure out how to objectively have a justice system that enforces laws that are properly defending individual rights. All of that requires real thinking and that needs to be done by, in a sense, a centralized authority where they you know people can really think it through and figure this out. Anarchy is in my view the legitimization of force. He says look, force is just one other thing we human beings do. Let's have a market in it. Let's negotiate around it. Let's compete over it. And some you know different agencies will have different laws, different rules. It will all be in the same geographic area. You might have your system of government in a sense running you and I have my system of government and will somehow negotiate and all these security forces, all these private governments, private militaries, private police forces will all negotiate deals between them. And I said first that's a rejection of the objectivity of law. The fact that there are objective values, there are objective laws, there's an objective good law and objective bad law. It leaves it up to you know socially determined in a sense marketplace determined. And second that it basically reverts to violence. It basically reverts to if what we're trading on is force then if I can build the strongest of those militaries I'm going to do a hostile takeover of my competitors and that hostile takeover will always engage in force will always involve violence. Why not? I mean there's no authority that says that's not okay. It's already being legitimized by the very acceptance of anarchy. So I think anarchy by definition has to evolve to some form of authoritarianism some form of might makes rights and with one dominant security agency creates a government and rules over that territory. But now I agree this is actually when I was the first time I had Walter block on I asked him in the absence of the state what is to stop another state from forming particularly one that's like undemocratic. It has to. Over any particular geographic area you cannot have multiple legal systems. You cannot have multiple police authorities. That only devolves into violence and ultimately of one over the others. It's not a stable equilibrium. We have competition of governance. The competition of governance is different geographic area having different governments and they can offer different things and therefore people can move from one to the other and that's where you get the competition. But over a particular geographic area it's just a recipe for violence. Okay so to that end thank you so much for coming on before we go. Are there any particular books or writings of yours that you would like to share for the audience? Well first I'd like people to go to the INRAN Institute website INRAN.org You can find a lot of information there. You can also hopefully those of you have not read INRAN pick up a copy of Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I think you'll really enjoy those books whether they change your mind or not the books that are worth engaging with ideas worth engaging with and then for me I would say you know I've got a channel on YouTube INRAN book I'm on Twitter so look me up. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel. That'll be fantastic and just google my name and everything is right there available. I've also got a few books Equal is Unfair that deals with inequality and free market revolution that deals with kind of the capitalism and free markets and then finally a book in a model defense of finance and you can find all those books on Amazon. Again thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Fantastic rest of your summer and good luck on the Soho debate. Thank you. I'm looking forward to that. Bye.