Yaron Brook

Yaron Brook (ירון ברוק; born May 23, 1961 ) is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer, and public intellectual.

After graduating from high school, he served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence (1979–1982) and then earned a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering in 1986 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Brook became an associate of leading Objectivist intellectuals, such as philosopher Leonard Peikoff, and in 1994, he co-founded Lyceum International, a company that organized Objectivist conferences and offered distance-learning courses.

In 1998, he co-founded BH Equity Research with Robert Hendershott.

BH Equity Management was a financial advisory firm.

He is an Objectivist, a former finance professor at Santa Clara University, and the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, where he was executive director from 2000 to 2017.

He is also the co-founder of BHZ Capital Management LP.

Brook is co-author, with Don Watkins, of the book Equal is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.

“What we care about is whether individuals are able to rise by merit—and the fact is that many of the policies the inequality critics say will improve mobility actually make rising by merit much harder,” they argue in the book.

Brook supports the work of Alex Epstein (Author of Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) and his approach to climate change and human flourishing.

Brook argues that free markets and capitalism have the potential to produce real solutions to the negative impacts of a changing climate and that the ESG movement and net zero government policies will have a disastrous impact on human beings.

Brook's activism has been described as "anti-progressive" and he has been criticized by activists for targeting Black Lives Matter and feminist activists.

In 2000, he left Santa Clara University to succeed Michael Berliner as President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, which was then located in Marina del Rey, California.

In 2002, ARI relocated to Irvine, California.

Brook speaks and debates at numerous American universities, delivering seminars for businesses and corporations in the United States and abroad, and writing opinion editorials for leading newspapers and websites.

Speaking venues include conferences, professional organizations, and community groups.

His subjects span a wide range of current events and philosophical issues, including the causes of the financial crisis, the morality of capitalism, and ending the growth of the state, each discussed with Objectivism at its foundation.

In recent years, he has spoken to audiences throughout the world, including those in China, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Iceland, Bulgaria, Israel, Guatemala, and England.

Brook's articles have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, and many other publications.

A frequent guest on a variety of radio and national television programs, he is the co-author of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea and Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government, and contributing author of Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. His newest book is In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance, co-authored with Don Watkins.

On January 19, 2021, Brook, along with Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins, launched Ingenuism on Substack.

To introduce themselves, the title of their first post was, "Progress at the speed of thought".

In a January 7, 2007, editorial in USA Today, he defended multimillion-dollar CEO pay packages against the attempt by the government to regulate them.

In a 2010 interview, Brook called the efforts of Democrats to raise taxes on multi-millionaires "totally immoral."

He criticized George W. Bush for signing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which regulates corporate accounting practices.

He has also argued that antitrust laws are "unjust and make no sense ethically or economically."

On gun rights, Brook has stated, "The government certainly has a role in regulating ownership of weapons", but he states that it is a "complex" issue to do with the philosophy of law.

On January 7, 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Brook made his first-ever podcast and premiered The Yaron Brook Show.

As of June 2022, sixteen podcasts have been produced for this series.

On September 27, 2017, at the Yale Student Chapter of The Federalist Society, Brook participated in an event named, "Income Inequality: Is It Fair or Unfair?".

Brook promotes the Objectivist ethical position that rational selfishness is a moral virtue and that altruism is evil.

Yaron Lectures: The Morality of Selfishness a talk for Cheongshim International Academy and Yaron Debates: Selfishness is a Virtue, Brook vs Epstein; Moderated by Judge Napolitano are two recent presentations of this ethical position.

Brook is an outspoken proponent of laissez-faire capitalism.

In appearances on CNBC and several articles and speeches, he has defended the rights of corporations and businessmen and upheld the virtues of capitalism.

In 2018, a public event featuring Brook and Carl Benjamin as speakers was protested by Antifa activists.

Brook has argued that Islamic ideology is contrary to the moral values of contemporary Western societies.

Yaron Brook was born and raised in Israel.

His parents were Jewish socialists from South Africa.

When he was sixteen, a friend lent him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, leading him to abandon the socialism taught to him by his parents and to embrace Objectivism.

In 2019, BH Equity dissolved and BHZ Capital Management LP became the new entity.