Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 102 – The Global Liberty Movement with Brad Lips

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: It’s easy for us in the United States to focus on the challenges to liberty that are right in front of us. But the fight for liberty is a global phenomenon and accomplishing what may seem like a small win or maybe something we take for granted here in the United States can be a major milestone for liberty in many countries around the world. The ongoing quest for liberty means we have to strive to bring freedom to all people. And that is certainly the goal of our guest today, Brad Lips.

Brad is the CEO of Atlas Network, which works in the United States and around the world to help liberty-minded think tanks do the work of freedom in a more effective way. Atlas helps to train social entrepreneurs and think tank leaders how to lead, how to do this work for freedom, how to be strong defenders of the ideas of liberty in their communities and in their countries. Brad has led Atlas since 2009 and has overseen significant growth, really turning Atlas Network into a behemoth in the liberty space. Today we’re going to unpack more about the work that Atlas does, why this global liberty movement is so important, even for those of us who may be a little bit more US-centric in how we think about these things, and then how donors can support what is sometimes a challenging thing to support, just on a technical level. So Brad, so good to have you with us.

Brad Lips: Thanks so much for the invitation, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: So I know you just got back last week from Costa Rica and I think soon you’ll be off to Lima for the Liberty Forum that’s down there. There’s another one in Berlin. You have a wonderful job in that you get to go all over the world, talk about liberty. But you had a trip not too long ago that I wanted to start with as we set all this up, where you went to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize event. Tell us about that. Why was that important for Atlas?

Brad Lips: Yeah. I mean, that was really a career highlight, Peter, to be invited by the recipient María Corina Machado to participate in what really felt like an award that went to the entire movement that has been refusing to normalize tyranny. María Corina Machado, the great Venezuelan activist turned presidential candidate. She was very explicit in saying this prize was really for the Venezuelan freedom movement that had worked so diligently to reject the authoritarian regime that Nicolas Maduro represented. But in some ways, I think all of us who have been involved with that community for some years felt this incredible sense of vindication. And I hope that lots of DonorsTrust clients who have been involved with Atlas Network for a while are also feeling a sense of vindication that what María Corina Machado was able to do is really mobilize a community by telling them that you’re not alone in wanting to stand up for freedom. And that’s really what Atlas Network exists to do. We were proud to get to know María Corina when she first got involved with Sumate, her organization that did mobilization of voters and volunteers. They got involved with the think tank that we’ve been investing in going all the way back to the 1980s and first put her on our radar screen in the mid-1980s.

Peter Lipsett: So you’ve obviously known her for a long time. I mean, this is not, she’s not an overnight success. This is a long time coming.

Brad Lips: Yeah, it was fun to look back and we first put her on the cover of Atlas Network’s in-house magazine back in 2004 when her organization, Sumate, began collaborating with Cedice Libertad, which is a pro-liberty public policy think tank, which was founded with Atlas Network’s help in the 1980s. So it’s been a long collaboration. She spoke for us back in 2009. I think that’s when I met her for the first time when we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and seeing her go on to do such huge things for Venezuela and really to become an inspiration for the entire hemisphere has been really a fantastic experience.

Peter Lipsett: So, you know, we talked Venezuela, Venezuela is an interesting case, one that I’ve been stressed about for many, many years here, but if we back up, you have this unique lens to see the liberty movement all around the world. How would you assess the state of liberty in the world? And I guess part and parcel of that, how would you assess the state of the liberty movement in the world?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I think it’s always easy to be pessimistic because the challenges to freedom are growing. They seem more aggressive than maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago. But at the same time, I think it’s important that our community not lose sight of the countervailing truth, which is that never in human history have we had an organized movement for liberty that is as big, as strong, and as connected. And it gives me a lot of hope for the direction of history that we’re all helping to forge. It’s certainly a glass that can be looked at as either half full or half empty because there’s places where we think that we’ve been moving backwards. Freedom House and others have documented that there are fewer liberal democracies that protect free societies than there were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. But we also see enormous resilience, even in some of the toughest places. And what’s happened in Venezuela is a great vindication of that.

Peter Lipsett: You’re right. Half full, half empty. And it can almost change by the day. As we record this, the announcement came earlier today that Jimmy Lai, the great freedom activist in Hong Kong, was going to be sentenced to 20 years. And so that’s a disaster. And yet on the flip side, we should almost celebrate that it is in the news, right? That people know that this is wrong. They know this is something worth fighting for. I imagine that’s a tension in all of your stuff is you hear about these disastrous things and yet the fact that we’re talking about them in the first place is almost a little bit of a win.

Brad Lips: Yeah, I think maybe the best way to pay tribute to a hero like Jimmy Lai is to make sure that more of the world comes to acknowledge the truth that he was trying to share, that Hong Kong, which had been such an important beacon for freedom, is no longer what we loved it for and that some people, including Jimmy himself, were willing to sacrifice to make sure that that was well known and that they didn’t just acquiesce to a status quo that could have operated safely within, but which would have been sort of suffocating to their definition of freedom. So yeah, there are really poignant stories there that you have to feel, you have to recognize our big losses. But the flip side is that we also have some incredible roller coaster rides that are going in a positive direction, like in Argentina. If you told me a few years ago that I’d be bragging about what the freedom movement was accomplishing in Argentina, I don’t know that I would have believed you because for a long time it seemed that that was headed backwards as well. And maybe they had to hit a little bit of an absolute bottom before the general population would be willing to listen to radical answers about how you could create a freer society. But that’s what we see today. Javier Milei has been influenced by a lot of the scholars in our circles and has been operating according to playbooks that our think tank partners have helped to write. And of course, he’s brought his own unique leadership to it all that shouldn’t be discounted. But there’s lots of examples around the world of worrisome signs, but also some real seeds of hope that keep us motivated.

Peter Lipsett: Well, let’s talk about those value adds. Let’s talk about Atlas Network a little bit and the work that you do. It’s more than great trips to great locations, sometimes mildly dangerous locations depending on the year, but you’re training, you’re talking to these groups. What is the core essence of Atlas?

Brad Lips: Yeah, we’ve always had this tagline about strengthening a worldwide freedom movement. Other times we talked about, we are bringing freedom to the world because we work in more than 100 different countries. But we’ve made big strides over the last 10 years or so by getting really disciplined at answering the question, how can you accelerate achievement and ambition among public policy think tanks that operate independently, they don’t take any orders from us, but how can we inspire them to think bigger and to do bigger things? Atlas Network is really the hub of a community of more than 500 organizations spread across more than 100 countries, including a large number, about 170 partners in the United States that want to take inspiration from one another. What Atlas Network does is sort of three categories of activities which we call Coach, Compete, and Celebrate. The Coach component has us providing world-class professional development opportunities for the staff of our partner organizations. The key element there is sort of the peer-to-peer learning that we facilitate, believing that it’s not up to us to dictate, well, what are the best practices that all of you need to bring back to your organization and your community. But we like to facilitate conversations where our partners can discover sort of the best fit. What are the strategies that are going to be able to help advance the ball for those organizations, knowing that those local contexts are going to be really diverse. The second leg of this stool is what we call Compete, which is where we offer grants and prizes for our partners and get them to compete vigorously for them. And that, of course, is made possible thanks to our donors, because Atlas is not an endowed foundation. We have to hustle and raise the funds that we use to sustain our own programs, but then also to give away to our partners. And we’re grateful that there’s a good segment that looks at us kind of like a mutual fund that you can invest in, knowing that we’re going to be really identifying the most exciting, most innovative work that’s being done by our partners. And what we’ve come to recognize is that this has a galvanizing effect where lots of people who work for liberty in the world look at our stage as something they aspire to be on as sort of a career defining moment. They want to be recognized in front of this peer group because this is the community that really understands why they sacrifice so much in order to stand up for liberty. And those things tend to have a sort of flywheel effect because when you see another organization being recognized, winning one of our regional Liberty Awards or our global prize, the Templeton Freedom Award, you start to ask yourself, you know, hey, how am I going to get to that pinnacle achievement? Maybe it’s by going through those professional development training programs and getting my staff on board. Once we come out of those, maybe we can compete for, you know, one of the grants that will then fuel more accomplishment.

Peter Lipsett: Hmm.

Brad Lips: So it’s really fun to think that we’ve built an ecosystem at Atlas Network that really does accelerate achievement.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, it’s a real pipeline, pipeline for achievement, as you say. Let’s talk brass tacks for a second. Like it’s got to be hard dealing with folks in a hundred different countries. So that’s umpteen different languages. And not to mention that those think tanks are at different stages of development. They’re obviously always getting new people and fundraising alone looks very different in the United States than it does pretty much anywhere else in the world. How do you as a team, and you have a big team, but compared to the reach, it’s not that big. How do you as a team overcome just those logistical obstacles?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I guess it’s by making sure that baked into our DNA is a ton of humility and a ton of recognition that we don’t know all of the challenges that our partners are going through. And we shouldn’t have the hubris to think that we’re going to come up with the ideal answer for what they should be doing in their context. So it’s liberating to realize that what we need to get really good at is being 100% honest brokers so that they know they can trust us, that our heart’s exactly where we say it is. And then to really think of our role as figuring out how can we convene the conversations that will be most powerful for these communities. I was just talking with a couple of my colleagues who are back from a training program that we did in Kenya with mostly think tank leaders from other countries in Africa, a couple from Latin America, a couple from Asia. And one of the things that was really powerful was that we often organize our trainings around studying case studies from other think tanks. And sometimes those are case studies of successful groups in the US. And then you kind of try to figure out what applies to our situation, what doesn’t. In this case, we had a case study about a wonderful think tank in Burundi, one of the poorest, most difficult countries in the world. And then had that think tank leader actually there as part of the faculty at this program and being able to turn attention to how did you make it work in Burundi? And as I understand it, my colleague said it was fun to see the eyes light up among the attendees there when they asked, well, how many of your funders are local? Because I think they often get into this pessimistic mindset where the US is the only source of funds. They need to appeal to what they considered funds from abroad. And to hear Amab, the leader of this group CDE Great Lakes in Burundi, to hear him say, no, like more than 90% of our funders are local in Burundi, we’re getting a lot of significant money there. That was sort of shocking and a big source of inspiration. If you can do it there, why can’t we do it here? We’ve got to learn. But we love that we can try to make all these conversations really authentically peer-to-peer because we know that’s where you’re going to take the most inspiration.

Peter Lipsett: So the US piece of it, obviously very important. You mentioned the funding aspect of it. A lot of US groups are farther along in some cases. There’s certainly not all of them. Once you become slightly international, you become an international organization, just in people’s shorthand. But you do a lot in the US. So how do you talk about that US work, but how does it not get overshadowed? Or is it okay that it gets overshadowed by the international piece?

Brad Lips: Yeah, you’re right. It’s sort of a double edged sword. I think that our particular expertise in working with groups all around the world sometimes means that in the mental models of our supporters, we’re just known as like that international group as though we are not interested in the US liberty movement. And nothing could be further from the truth. What I’ve observed through the years is there’s a ton of inspiration and it goes both ways. You know, the US groups, because of the philanthropic culture here, are often more advanced. They become sort of standard bearers and have so much that they can offer in terms of learning and resources to our international partners that that’s amazing to see. But also, they love some of the fresh thinking and innovative thinking we see from partners abroad. And they’re continually telling me about how much inspiration they take from just being reminded that while things seem hard here when you’re working for freedom, we take a lot for granted. And seeing others that put themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis in order to do the kind of work a lot of us carry out in the US as a career, can be really inspiring. I also think that one of the things that we’ve invested a lot in in recent years that isn’t known to many of our donors is that the training programs that I was alluding to earlier have become really sophisticated and are treasured by a lot of the US think tank community. Charles Mitchell, who until very recently was heading up the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania, they’ve done such an amazing job in that state at bringing public opinion around to the ideas that we favor. He mentioned to me a couple of years ago that he was now using our online training classes as the way that he would onboard all of the new staff at Commonwealth Foundation. I thought that was just like a great piece of evidence that sophisticated think tank leaders trust us to be part of how people get to understand what a think tank is trying to accomplish. What are the guardrails about you staying true to the ideas of liberty and functionally, how do you start to think about becoming a learning organization and adapting your work in ways that make you more efficient? Having Charles and others say, we’re waiting to put some of our top people into your leadership development programs. That’s pretty inspiring to us. And the one other thing I’ll mention here, Peter, if you don’t mind, is that we’ve also pioneered in recent years an organizational consulting practice.

Peter Lipsett: Hmm.

Brad Lips: Which a lot of our US partners have begun to utilize. And what’s I think really innovative about this is that we’re again not trying to be McKinsey and telling you like hire us, we’ll tell you what your organization is doing wrong. We take this approach that is known as process consulting where we want to understand why it is that you guys around the table, the executive team at the client think tank, why you guys haven’t solved the problem that in one-on-one interviews, you’re all kind of saying, yeah, the nagging question is X. Let’s help you guys figure out how you solve that together and use that as a model for how you’re going to troubleshoot the next problems that are never really going to go away. So again, it’s sort of a peer-to-peer approach to how organizations can get better. And that’s another thing that I think is sort of unique that the US community has been excited to find at Atlas Network.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, I think that that’s all true. I hear lots of rave reviews about the substance of the conversations. I’ve been a part of some of them. It’s really good. And of course, if anybody listening has not been to the Liberty Forum and Freedom Dinner in November up in New York, I mean, that’s always a wonderful event. And you’re right. It’s very humbling to hear these folks from around the world who are taking on huge tasks, sometimes in war zones and sometimes in just places that you think you could never have a Phoenix rise from the ashes and it’s just really, really remarkable. Okay, so you talk about the grant making side because I think this is really interesting. You do kind of serve as a clearinghouse to move some money from people who care about these issues and want to see liberty kind of seeded globally. How do you… I mean, it’s so hard to get money internationally. I mean, here at Donors Trust, we do some international giving, but very limited because it’s so challenging. You’re doing it to all kinds of places. So talk us through, how do you overcome those challenges and what are the burdens to it?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I think that supporting liberty internationally is hard in ways that are not obvious until you’ve tried to do it and do it well, because there are legal challenges and compliance issues and so on. But I’d say the biggest thing is that it takes a lot of trust and a lot of time to spend sort of knowing the community and what you’re getting into. So I feel like part of the reason why we can be pretty sophisticated and have a high degree of confidence that we’re using funds well is that we know our partners intimately. They are applying for our grants, but they’re also participating in these training programs. They’re doing the consultations with us. And you learn a lot about groups through all of those interactions. And because Atlas Network has been around for going on almost five decades now, we have a pretty remarkable community of people that have affection for the organization. So if we’re meeting a new group from a country where we don’t have a great footprint, we invariably are able to find others, just academics that have done work in a community that will then know how do we get extra eyes on the work that’s being done and how do we structure these relationships so that we can sometimes do some very small pilot grants to see if there’s real entrepreneurial fervor and sense of responsibility behind these younger organizations. So I think that we’ve learned some things through the years about how to mitigate risk and how to build trust and once groups really get engaged in the liberty movement and are making it an annual tradition to come to the Liberty Forum that we hold on their continent or as you say, the global Liberty Forum that we hold in New York City in November annually, you start to see who the high performers are and the ones you can really trust to do bigger projects. And that’s sort of the model that we’ve followed.

Peter Lipsett: The due diligence is hard when it’s around the world like that. But you’re right, you are interfacing with them a lot. You’re seeing them. You can probably figure out, and I’m sure there’s some you don’t support in that way because you can’t quite trust it, right?

Brad Lips: There are plenty, yes.

Peter Lipsett: So, okay, so the very first episode of Giving Ventures featured your now former colleague, Matt Warner, on here talking about a program that you have called Doing Development Differently. I think that’s still the name. I know it’s changed names a couple different times, but the essence of it is wonderful, which is essentially we don’t need to, you USAID, you know, God rest its soul and other organizations like that, that so poorly put money into these low income, economically struggling areas that actually free markets and think tanks can actually play a role in doing development differently as it says. So update us on where that, correct me wherever I mess that up. But also update us on how that program is doing and how it’s evolving.

Brad Lips: Yeah, as I said, this is almost 10 years ago now that we were inaugurating a program that looked at economic development, poverty alleviation as a challenge that was kind of owned by the left. And I’ll say that when we started to talk about pivoting into this direction hard, some of our own board members were saying like, poverty, like that’s a little outside our scope, you know, that sounds like it’s a lefty program. And I think that just underscores how little imagination a lot of people have had when you assume that poverty alleviation needs to be some form of handouts, some kind of redistribution. So what we were trying to do in that moment was to take the existing model of us working with local partners, but then challenging them to look at ways they were being scored in some of these indices that measure economic freedom. Is it really tough to establish a business? Is it really tough to get contract disputes resolved in your country? Look at the places where you believe you can make a difference in the legislative code, in the regulatory code, and let’s see if we can make it easier to do business, easier for people to become entrepreneurs and job creators, because we know that downstream that’s going to have positive effects on lifting people out of poverty. And we commissioned some research that showed that there is that correlation. When countries move in a direction of economic freedom, poverty rates tend to fall in their wake. So part of that project, Peter, was about helping our community, challenging our community to think about like, are you in the poverty alleviation business? And for some of our partners, you know, that’s not their focus at all, they don’t want to think about that. But others, I think that was kind of eye opening for them to realize, you know what, like, if we succeed in a bigger way, we win more hearts and minds, when people realize that we’re fighting not just for capital gains tax reductions, but we’re talking about people’s livelihoods, their ability to trade on the street without being abused by police authorities that know because they’re in the informal economy, they can be shaken down for bribes. Those are the types of things that we do care about, our partners care about, and we’ve been able to make a good difference on.

Peter Lipsett: I think it’s a hugely important program. And frankly, even in the US, some of the more successful think tanks here have pivoted a little bit in that direction and been thinking about poverty because it is downstream of so much. And if you lift people up, then they have the opportunity to start a business and they understand the problems of corruption. They understand the problems of tax rates, right? The boring stuff of the think tank world. But you’re really changing lives in that process.

Brad Lips: Yeah, and I think that at the same time, you help to change the way that our ideas are perceived. And here I’ll say that my friend John Kramer at IJ is one of the people who I think pioneered this. IJ’s done such a great job at fighting for normal people who have been oppressed by government in different ways, saying this hairdresser should be able to earn a livelihood…

Peter Lipsett: Mm-hmm.

Brad Lips: But she can’t because of ridiculous state level regulatory, occupational licensing rules and so on. And Kramer kind of pioneered this idea of personalize these stories and from that move to the abstracts or the principles you’re fighting for. If we start with the abstract, people aren’t going to care. But once they know that our heart is in the right place, it’s with normal people and the challenges they face, you win them over from the beginning. So I think that’s been a nice pivot point for a lot of organizations in the freedom movement. And we can all get better at that. And I think that the great thing about Atlas Network is that we have these tentacles that reach in so many places. And it’s amazing to see the creativity that our very decentralized network is able to bring to that challenge.

Peter Lipsett: Is there a particular example from the doing development differently, you know, ethos and the history of it, I mean, 10 years worth, that you feel really has just been a monumental change to people’s lives for the better?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I guess the thing that comes to mind is I want to tell a story about a group called Center for Civil Society, which is in New Delhi, India. And in some ways, you know, they inspired this more than we inspired them. I remember the founder of that organization, Parth Shah, told me at one point that their early work, they were using terms like economic freedom and trying to convince people of the merit of the free enterprise economy. And people started to say, hey, economic freedom, I guess you’re working for people with economic means. And in India, that’s a small fraction of the overall population. But when they sort of re-christened this work as working for livelihood freedom, the ability of street vendors to do their work without being harassed by authorities, it really was a nice pivot point for them where people started to realize, you know, you’re for everyone, not just for the liberties of some sort of elite, which was the initial suspicion that was out there. And in the intervening years, this group in India, Center for Civil Society, was able to essentially legalize the work of street vendors so that they have actual legal protection, they then created an association of street vendors so that they would be able to help one another get the right legal assistance if they were being abused by police that didn’t respect their right to be entrepreneurial, even if it’s on the streets, which is the case for hundreds of millions of people in India. So that was a great stride. The same group was able to get rid of a minimum capital requirement. It used to be that you had to go down and it wasn’t up to you to decide if you could open your business legally. You had to be able to show that you had X number of rupees in a bank account, which often was more than what the typical Indian earned in a year. So all these clunky rules that really just moved discretion to bureaucrats. CCS has been able to unwind some of that and make normal people’s lives easier, easier for them to create value for their families, to hire workers. And that’s, as everybody who listens in your audience, I’m sure recognizes, that as a virtuous cycle that leads to uplift.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, it’s a phenomenal story what they’ve done. I’m curious, I mean, in the three-legged stool of money, time, and kind of the Overton window, the political possible, for a transformation like that in India, for one of those, you know, the street vendor regulation or something, is it, you pump enough dollars into it and it gets changed? Or it just, it takes time? Is it just, you can do all you want, but you have to have the right political moment? How do you, as you look at the landscape and thinking about in terms of donors, how do they best leverage their dollars? Is it just waiting for the right moment and then put the dollars in? Is it time? Is it just putting enough capital in?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because a lot of this is unpredictable. And I guess for that reason, we have to be the bearer of bad news and tell our supporters that we really appreciate when they sort of think of their philanthropy as being part of this like patient capital for freedom. The story of how that minimum capital requirement was lifted really was one about the political opportunity suddenly opening. That’s when Modi first came into power in India. And he’s not a figure that we speak warmly of in many contexts. But when he first was elected, he was really strong on wanting to cut down on regulations. And our partner, this back in 2015, went to some regulatory bodies to say like the minimum capital requirement in the United States is zero, in Canada it’s zero. And here’s what it is in India. And he sought him out for a meeting and they put wheels in motion to get rid of that. So that was a matter of timing and political opportunity. But I guess that if you actually untangle that, you go back to, well, that was almost 20 years after Atlas Network started to invest in Parth Shah’s dream of creating the Cato Institute of India. So for many years, that money may have looked like it was poorly spent, but at the end of the day, it was vindicated in a big way. Just as we see with our Argentine partners today, the investments that we’ve made in Iran over the last 15 years may have an opportunity to bear fruit. I think that the main lesson is that you need to be there in advance and that’s why you have to be patient. And then we obviously have the stewardship responsibility of being really scrupulous and placing bets on the right people. So I think that that’s the philanthropic equation we’re trying to always bring together. It takes a lot of trust. I hope we keep doing our best to earn that.

Peter Lipsett: And it’s the same thing in the United States too, right? I mean, when Trump came into office in 2017, there seemed to be a lot of these things that just magically happened overnight. But really it was, you know, however many years of the Federalist Society doing its work and these other think tanks, CEI coming on with years of regulatory stuff. So these overnight successes require donors who are thinking about the long term. And that’s why I love my job, because we get to work with a lot of these donors, as do you.

Brad Lips: Exactly.

Peter Lipsett: Wrapping up here, thinking about the year ahead, 2026, what are the most pressing things for Atlas? What are people who might be interested in donating or just want to keep tabs on your work? What should they anticipate as we go into this next year?

Brad Lips: Yeah, I mean, a lot of what we talk about internally is just staying disciplined on a business strategy that we think is working and is scalable. I had a really smart donor not long ago say, well, hey, aren’t there some diminishing returns? You know, you guys are now doing more than $10 million of grants to your partners. Probably the first million you spend is, you know, the cream of the crop. So do you really, if you went to 11 or 12, wouldn’t you be falling off and you know, there’s some truth to that, but I think it speaks to that there’s a little bit of a lack of imagination about the value that comes from a network where, you know, successes become case studies for others to replicate and the more great projects we fund, the more great people we admit into our training programs, it becomes more desirable to be in those training programs. And there’s more great grant pitches because they want to take what one group has done to sort of do the AI DOGE thing and bring it to their country. So we really don’t see diminishing returns from the core activities that we do, which is the training, the consulting, the grant giving. And then I love it if people in this audience were to sign up to join us in New York in November. Our Liberty Forum and the Gala Freedom Dinner that serves as its grand finale is really a great way to see these people yourselves. And that’s, I think, that’s when people become sort of most passionate about Atlas Network is when you actually meet the people that are on the front lines, hearing them express their appreciation for donors, often American donors who fuel our work, who care enough about the liberty of others that they invest in places that they actually don’t have an intention of visiting, but that they know that when one place gets freer, it tends to have ripple effects elsewhere. If Iran becomes free, that is world changing, same thing in Venezuela. So I think that there’s a real interconnectedness to the value proposition, but it really is about bringing that patient capital to deserving organizations all around the world. And our team’s job is just to be faithful stewards of that and to do it with a lot of thoughtfulness.

Peter Lipsett: I think that’s an excellent summation and an excellent review of the promise and the reason that we do this. And it’s such important work and not to mention a cool job as we established at the beginning. And so love that, love all the work that Atlas Network does. Brad Lips, thanks so much.

Brad Lips: It is a fun job. Thank you, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Well, I think so highly of what the folks at Atlas Network are doing. And I really am jealous of the fact that they get to go around the world, not in this jet setting way, but to go to these great places and see the amazing things that are happening to advance liberty, talk to these folks, do this coach, compete, celebrate model that allows these think tanks around the world teaching this message that if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably agree with and help them be sharper, be better, grow their skills, grow their organization, actually change people’s lives, get people out of poverty, lift people up. It’s just a wonderful approach, a wonderful way of thinking about how do we live out the values that are free markets and liberty and free enterprise, and just really commend anybody listening who doesn’t know about Atlas Network to learn more and to find out more how to get involved. Seriously, if you can go to the event in New York, a phenomenal event, or heck, if you just need a good reason to go to Lima or Berlin sometime in the spring, go to one of their Liberty forums there. So lots of good opportunities. The world needs more liberty. The world needs more freedom and it needs people to understand it, not just in the US, but everywhere. So kudos to Atlas for its work and kudos to you for being a person who cares about these values and these things.

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