Cyrus Ferdowsi was born and lived most of his life in Iran. As a child, he experienced the upheavals of the 1979 revolution and the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war. In school he felt the urge to resist the brainwashing of the religious state propaganda by reading alternative ideas, and by studying math. The latter has now turned into a profession. The former included whatever was there to find; at first, other (mostly leftist) leftover propaganda from the revolution; then, after discovering some local and home libraries, the writings of a string of irrational philosophers (Hegel, Marx, Nieztche); and finally, in late teenage years, the works of the more rational ones: Kant, Descartes, Michiavelli, Mach, Popper, Arendt, Hayek, Friedman, ... . Even when spending time on the leftist literature, Cyrus' central issue was "freedom." It was only the meaning of the word that had to be clarified later by rational thinkers and rational thinking.