Hello and welcome to Giving Ventures, a show to help you grow your giving and change the world for the better.

Our conversations with social entrepreneurs and generous philanthropists highlight innovative charitable efforts and smart ways to have more impact with your giving.

I'm your host, Peter Lipset, Vice President at Donors

Trust. This show is a production of Donors Trust, the oldest and largest donor advised fund

focused on serving conservative and libertarian donors of all capacities to simplify, protect,

and grow their giving. My colleagues and I talk with a lot of groups doing great work.

With Giving Ventures, we can share a bit of what we learn with you.

We often credit American Enterprise Institute as being the oldest think tank on the right.

But there is an organization that has been around even longer that we would certainly put in the think tank category, at least today,

and that is the American Institute for Economic Research, or AER. That was founded in 1933 in the teeth of

the Great Depression and the New Deal. Those times and those progressive era ideas of the day really

molded the ethos of AIER and the free market alternatives

that it would put out into the ideas at marketplace.

And here we are nearly 100 years later, and its influence continues to carry on.

As an organization, it's ebbed and flowed, it's shrunk, it's grown, it's gone all over,

but it has really hit a resurgence in the last few years, first under President Will Ruger

and now under its new president, Sam Gregg.

And I am so happy to have Sam with me today.

He formally took the reins of AIER earlier this year and came over in 2022 after a more

than 21 year tenure at Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And of course, we've had

Acton on the show before as well. Pam is a scholar who has written 17 books and has another one

coming out. I don't know how he gets it all done.

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