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Sept. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:53
871 FDR Bidness!
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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's 3.20 in the afternoon on the 27th of September, 2007.
I hope you're doing most excellently.
This is a dull podcast of mere business.
Time to get up to date or up to speed on Free Domain Radio Business.
But it may, in fact, have a few things that are of interest, or may be of interest to you.
So, first item of business, thank you to those who have purchased the Free Domain Radio Book Numerator, which is the On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, and I'm going to reissue it in a couple of weeks.
There was two typos in it, which I'm going to fix.
I also wanted to have bought an...
I'm sorry, I'm going to buy an ISBN number for it so that I can sell it through more, I guess...
More conventional outlets, so if you want to pick up the first edition, now would be the time to do it.
I'm going to make one, I guess, minor addition to it as well, which is the criticism that love is the involuntary response to virtue.
Somebody was talking about, I had some criticisms on a review, and some people were confused because they...
I looked at the issue or the question of maternal love or parental love for an infant.
An infant is scarcely virtuous, but I would not call that love.
I would call that attachment, which is nothing wrong with it.
It's just not technically the case.
Love is a specifically human attribute, and of course we know.
That creatures can imprint or attach with other creatures.
You may have seen those sort of famous pictures of the ducks, the ducklings walking behind a balloon.
If that's what they happen to see, that's what they imprint on and follow around.
And I don't think that we'd want to equate that biologically useful attachment with adult, mature, virtuous human love.
So I just sort of wanted to make a couple of edits about that.
If we end up being as big as I think we're going to be, in fact, or on our way to being, then, you know, as I appeal to your greed, this may be something you'll want to get a hold of before I take it off the shelf and put out a second edition.
You can buy on Truth, the Tyrion of Illusion at lulu.com.
Just do a search for the title, or you can go to freedomainradio.com and pick it up from there.
It's $20. I think it's $19.
$18. $18. $19.
$19. With shipping, it's still over 20 bucks.
That's sort of first and foremost.
Secondly, to those who have requested for sort of bulk copy discounts, you can't do it much through Lulu, which only starts giving you discounts on 27 books or more, which may be a little much to ask.
But for $150, I will ship you 12 copies, and that includes the shipping.
So that's a little over 40% off the price, including shipping.
So if you wanted to buy copies for those The next order of business is the Miami Symposium.
This is the first.
We tried to get one going in Chicago, but there were scheduling difficulties and attendance was a challenge, so...
We are going to have one for sure in Miami in January 18th and 19th of January 2008.
Look at that. I got the year right and everything.
And this is going to be a two-parter.
First of all, we're going to get together for dinner the night before.
More of an informal sort of meet and greet, sort of similar to the FDR barbecue.
And then we are going to have a full day philosophical discussion, which is I'm going to lead the morning session, which I'm going to talk about my new book.
Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which should be out in about a week or two.
And we'll be going through that.
Christine is developing a logic tree so that we can keep the arguments fully supported all the way through.
And also it'll be a good reference to people who come in challenging, as of course they should, the UPB topic.
So that, hopefully, will be out in a week or two and we'll have a seminar on that where you can ask questions or we can discuss further issues with regards to that.
That'll be the morning and in the afternoon, Christina is, as you know, a psychotherapist and is well-schooled and well-trained with lots of experience and she's going to be talking about the cognitive approach to self-knowledge, self-understanding and relating to others.
Which I think will be very, very helpful in many, many areas or ways or sections of your life.
So I hope that you can join us.
The fee for the low, low price.
Yes, I say, the low, low price of $125.
You can come along and I will give out free copies of Revolutions.
Of course, happy to sign any books, foreheads or upper chests that you like, Greg.
So I hope that you will join us in Miami in January of 2008, the 18th.
It will be the dinner.
We will do the seminar on the 19th, and then perhaps in the evening we can go out for a good old dose of regular FDR karaoke side.
So I hope that you will join us for that too.
It should be a lot of fun. And then you can wend your way back tired and hoarse on Sunday to your lair, your original demons, so to speak.
The Free Domain Radio BBQ Tapes, which was the...
We had Greg and Ricky came up on Friday night and stayed through till...
Ricky stayed through till Sunday and Greg till Monday.
And we had some just wonderful conversations, some very, very funny conversations, and some very intimate and powerful conversations.
Topics ranged from everything to...
Is earring piercing self-mutilation to how to survive breakups to the psychology of child abusers to personal revelations to is casual sex good or bad in the sort of philosophical framework or neutral and just had some wonderful, wonderful discussions. The majority of those are recorded and recorded I have kept them in very high quality audio, 320kps if that means anything to you.
And they've been sort of volume normalized and background hiss is removed to at least to a good degree.
And they're available now.
The bandwidth is pretty large.
It's almost 700 megs of files and some fine karaoke performances too from the hidden gems of talent in the free domain radio community.
And me doing Britney Spears.
So, that is available for $17.
Just PayPal it and you will be directed to the download site.
And that's partly, of course, for the time to edit and so on and to pay for Thanks again to everyone who attended and know you're not going to get any royalties.
So, That is the next sort of order of business that is clicking along.
And sorry, just to mention with regards to that as well, if you don't want to download ye olde 700 megs of audio files, then you can, I'm just trying to figure out, Lulu seems to have a technical problem with the creation of data CDs, which I'm trying to work out with them, but it's also going to be available for a couple of bucks more from Lulu on CD. And I'm sort of mulling over whether it would be a four-DVD collection, which is free-domain radio, audio, and video.
I think four DVDs, perhaps, if I include the video, depending on the quality that people would look for.
So, I'm mulling that over.
Just let me know if you think it would be a good or bad idea.
And also, if you are interested in coming to the Miami Symposium in January 2008, just give me a shout.
There is a form on the website, on the main page.
There's something on the top left, which is attend the seminar, and you can click an email.
Link to send me requests for information or that about the seminar.
But I think it's going to be a great deal of fun.
And I'm certainly looking forward to meeting people just as I did when they came off of the barbecue.
Other orders of business, as you may or may not have heard, I've engaged an editor to work on The God of Atheists, not because I believe it needs a massive amount of editing or anything, but really just because I can't proofread it yet again, and I want to make sure that it's a final copy.
It's impossible to proofread your own work because you just know it so well that you skip over stuff, whether you like it or not.
And so that, of course, when you book them, it takes a little while.
They're not sitting around with nothing to do, so they should be starting within a week or two, and it should be another couple of weeks to do that.
And then that book will be out.
Naturally, it will be out in time for the Christmas season of massive and extravagant gift-giving.
So I hope that you will consider giving a copy of The God of Atheists to loved ones and enemies alike, and to people you care nothing either way about.
And I think it's a good way to introduce people to certain kinds of ideas, or at least to give credibility to perhaps me as a communicator, without having to deluge them with unsettling and scary and technically challenging podcasts.
So I hope that you will consider giving that out to people that you know.
I'm going to try and keep the price reasonable, given that the Velociper has to eat.
It won't be free, but I hope that you will...
That you will avail yourself of a copy in time.
I'm not going to release the audiobook.
I'm keeping that as my gift to donators, $100 or more.
You get the full audiobook of The God of Atheists, all 79,000 million chapters.
So I hope that you will enjoy that.
And thank you, of course, to the people who have complimented me on my reading.
It was a lot of fun to read.
I had forgotten just how much...
I enjoyed the characters in that novel and really felt that they were sort of real people, so thank you so much to those who've been enjoying the reading, and it was nice to do some acting again, I guess you could say, after so many years.
Other than that, I wanted to sort of update people on where we are in terms of advertising.
This is particularly true to the donators.
I advertised on StumbleUpon for quite a while and spent about $3,000 over the summer.
And that did get a whole bunch of people to the site.
Originally, there was sort of a bounce rate.
Bounce rate is people who come on one page and then they go away.
That doesn't mean that they never come back.
I mean, maybe they bookmark or whatever, but it means that they're not very likely to be people that you would put down as seriously invested listeners or anything.
And through StumbleUpon, the bounce rate was very high.
9 out of 10 people just sort of hit the site and vanished.
Originally, then I created the landing pages, which were more specific to people's interests, and that got about 2 out of 10 people to stay.
So it sort of doubled the landing rate.
But then it sort of went back to its original, where it wasn't that great.
So I've stopped advertising.
And it's low-hanging fruit, right?
The people who are interested. It's not like 10 million new people join the Internet every day.
So, I've changed the advertising approach.
Now what I'm doing is I'm doing a mixture.
And that mixture is sort of...
I'm using some bidvertiser stuff, which puts ads on relevant sort of philosophical libertarian economics psychology sites.
And I'm also doing some Google AdWords.
And Google AdWords I have is a pretty low...
Because Google AdWords are just ferociously expensive.
And the bounce rate is still very high.
But it can be more than a buck a visitor.
Sorry, a buck a visit. Whereas StumbleUpon is only five cents a visitor.
But what is great about Google, the AdWords, is that you get the impressions out there, right?
So people see the ad, and so the ad's been seen hundreds of thousands of times, even though, of course, a much smaller percentage of people have actually clicked through.
But I do like the idea that the information is out there, and it is free advertising if you keep your cost per click low.
Sorry, your maximum amount of spending per day low, so I think that's useful, and that's true of both Bitvertiser and Google, that your ad gets displayed, but you only pay for the click-throughs.
And the Bitvertiser click-throughs are, I guess, only about 60 or 65% of the cost of the Google click-throughs.
So I have both of those going, and I just want to get people to, and I have sort of two flavors, right?
One is philosophy, a philosophy ad, and one is a libertarian ad, and I'm pumping the top 10 Finalist thing that we got through the 2007 Podcast Awards, so that seems to be helping and working out well.
The other thing that I'm doing in terms of advertising is, of course, I'm still writing for Lou Rockwell and Strike the Root.
Actually, Wilt and I put an article together on immigration and libertarianism, which I've submitted to Reason Magazine.
I just submitted the query letter, and hopefully they will get back to us.
And last but not least, I've spent some money advertising on targeted blogs, so blogs that would be close to what it is that we talk about.
I have put ads in there.
And that's a flat rate for a certain amount of time, like $50 for two months or whatever.
And that seems to be generating some good traffic too.
So we're up to about 500 hits a day, which is great.
And there's not a huge number of additional podcast downloads per month, but that to me is fine because, of course, about 30% to 40% of my output now is premium podcasts, which are for So, I think that's quite reasonable.
As long as the numbers stay the same, we know that we're still growing, right?
Because as people catch up, they're not going to download as many podcasts.
So, as long as the numbers keep steady and they're sort of going between 200,000 and 250,000 podcast downloads a month...
Sorry, video views a month.
That includes podcasts and videos and so on.
That is... I'm happy with that, though of course I'm still looking to have things escalated.
I also, I guess last sort of item of business for those who are interested, I hope this is somewhat of interest to you, I have upgraded the server bandwidth from 10 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second, so you should be getting faster response times on the site.
Now for other items or matters of business, the other thing which I have Had suggested to numerous occasions, both friends of mine who are more sort of in the media and so on, professors, they have said, dude, get on the speaking circuit.
I'm part of a libertarian intellectuals list, and people were pretty shocked, you know, when they found out that I was making not too horrible living doing podcasting And I'm sort of shocked and appalled.
I said, well, you've got to take this show on the road because it's so successful and you've got to go and do speaking tours and so on and so on.
And I must tell you, I don't think so.
I don't. And you can let me know what you think.
That's the next thing that people do, right?
They get a book, they get a... Speaking tours, they get agents, they get publicitists, and they spend their time on the road.
I was saying to Christina yesterday that we're sort of discussing this thing, right?
The next step is always a challenge because this is obviously the road less traveled when it comes to talking about ideas with people.
And I was talking about it with Christina, and I was saying, I remember reading a story years ago about a guy who, the guy who invented Ethernet, which for those who remember the years and Before TCPIP was a networking standard.
And I forget the details of the story, but it went, in general, something like this.
So this guy called, of course, Bob.
Not Bob, but we'll call him Bob.
He was very rich.
He started off as a professor, I think, and then he invented Ethernet, and then he...
Ended up going into business with the Ethernet Standard and, of course, got licensed, sold a whole bunch of stuff with those evil IP laws.
And then he became sort of fabulously wealthy, went back to teaching, and he would have his students over to his house for, you know, get-togethers and this and that.
And, of course, he's got one of these big, beautiful, impressive houses or mansions or whatever.
And so one of his students said, oh, he came in and he said, my God, this place is beautiful!
Man, I wish I had invented Ethernet.
And Bob turned to him and said, Do you really think I became rich by inventing Ethernet?
And he's like, yeah, I mean, that's what you made all this money from, right?
And he's like, good heavens, no.
I didn't make the money from inventing Ethernet.
I made the money from spending year after year after year on the road and at conferences and giving speeches and at trade shows, pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing Ethernet until it became a standard.
And I did not get rich for inventing Ethernet because that would have just sat...
In my basement or wherever you invent these things and they sit.
But I got rich because I knuckled down and spent years upon years traveling, never seeing my family, and being in everybody's face about how it was the best standard and proving it.
So he said, that's what made me rich, not inventing Ethernet.
And that story has always sort of stuck with me, and it has helped me to understand that it's not particularly what you create, it's how you get it out there that is what can make all the difference.
All that having been said, I don't think that getting on the speaking circuit either A is going to work or B, even if it starts to work, is going to last and C will do any good to the conversation that we are discussing here.
And I'll sort of tell you why and you can tell me what you think.
First of all, it sounds sort of hard to admit, but it certainly is true.
I don't actually like the world that much.
I mean, the world as it is.
I very clearly see the world as it could be, and I love that world.
I love humanity in the abstract.
I love humanity in the future.
I guess you could say. And I love you, my dear lovely listeners, but I don't love the world as it is.
I could not love the world as it is, because the world as it is is not virtuous.
And in fact, its only relationship with virtue seems to be the relationship that a vulture has to a thirsty man in a desert, which is to circle and peck and gnaw So, I don't love the world as it is.
I love my life. I love my wife.
I love you guys. I love this conversation.
I thank you again for making this possible.
But I don't love the world.
In fact, I quite dislike most people.
Doesn't that feel good to get that off my chest?
Absolutely. But no, I don't really like the world, and I think I would have to love the world more to want to go out and sort of instruct it in that sense or engage in that conversation face-to-face.
The maintenance of my own optimism, to me, is a very, very central part of what it is that I'm doing in this show or in this conversation.
I mean, if I don't maintain my optimism, it's all over.
I mean, I'm just going to get bitter.
I'm going to get angry.
I'm going to be upset. I'm going to feel that...
You want to manage the weights that you're carrying, right?
If somebody says, can you hoist this 150 pounds?
You say, well, yeah, I think so.
Somebody says, can you hoist this supertanker?
You say, not so much, right?
And you feel despair if that is the requirement.
So I need to sort of take the world in very measured doses.
I need to take opposition and the cattiness and the undermining and the snarkiness and the bitchiness and the superiority and the insecurity and all of that kind of crap that goes on.
I need to take all of that stuff in very measured doses.
I can't look too closely at human beings as they are in the world as a whole because it's a pretty stomach-turning spectacle.
I just can't do it.
If I did that, I think I'd give up and I think that there's no reason to give up.
If you're a doctor and you love kids, you don't just want to spend your whole time dealing with kids who can't be cured, that you can do nothing for and who bite and attack you as well.
You have to maintain your own desire and happiness in this kind of conversation.
I think that's an essential thing to God.
This is why I sort of say...
That's your personal relationships.
You don't want virtue to become punishment for you, right?
And if you're in corrupt relationships, the more virtuous you become, the more you get attacked and punished, right?
Which means that virtue becomes pain, which means that you become cynical, and all this kind of stuff.
I don't have to tell you that. That's why that's so essential.
And, you know, there is a market for libertarian speak, right?
There's a market for the Ron Paulers, and there's a market and so on.
And there's even a market for, you know, the touristos from the Ancapistan of the future, right?
You can make, I guess, go around making speeches even about anarchism, and you can get...
Some listeners, I mean, relative to anarchism, the real money is in anarchism, right?
I mean, if you want to go and give speeches about the Constitution and the invalidity of the federal government and its tenfold increase over the past two decades or whatever, right?
If you want to go down that road, then there's lots of people from the John Birches to the Ron Paulers to the Free Staters to, like, there's lots of people who want to have you come and give energetic speeches about reforming government, right?
And there's even some people who will want you to come and give energetic speeches about no government.
I just don't think that there's a lot of people who are going to want you to come and give speeches about reforming yourself, right?
In fact, I'm quite sure that if I went to go and give speeches about actually implementing freedom in your own life, I think, in fact, I'm quite sure that I would be met with vast acres of stony hostility.
That would seem to me to be inevitable, and that would be highly depressing.
I mean, it really, really would.
Either, like, three people would show up, and two of those would be offended, in which case it would be like, wow, I just worked on this long speech, and I traveled all this way, and Or, you know, people would say, wow, you know, he's an anarcho-capitalist, or he's a libertarian, or it's published on New Rockwell, he's going to come and give us, you know, all the self-righteous indignation of violated citizenry that we can stomach.
And then some, or that we could desire.
But of course what I would do is come and say it's got nothing to do with the government, you know, freedom in your own personal life, what have you done lately?
All this, that, and the other, which would make people shocked, appalled, and hostile because it's a whole lot easier to talk about freedom in the abstract and at the state level and so on than it is to talk about freedom in the personal, right?
And of course, as long as freedom remains in the abstract and in the state, it will never exist in the personal because these illusions will continue.
So I don't think that hitting the speaking circuit is going to do me any good.
I think that I'm a great speaker.
I think that I would be a lot of fun For the writer people, and I think that if you talk to anyone who is at the barbecue, I think that may be the case.
I really do enjoy communicating about the truth with people.
I just don't think that the speaking circuit, until this show gets bigger or whatever, and I become sort of...
I fundamentally don't believe that I'm ever going to be in demand, because...
If the world wanted this stuff, the world would have been free 5,000 years ago.
Like if people actually wanted freedom in their own personal lives and would settle for nothing less and would only talk to people who went down that road and really valued that conversation, Socrates would still be alive and we would already be free, right?
So that is not something that the world wants.
It's something that you want, I think, I hope, as you've sort of come through this lengthy conversation.
It's something that you want...
Sorry. In Toronto, you absolutely almost have to take somebody's paint off to get in.
There's a lane close, right?
So we're supposed to do that zipper thing.
One car, next car, one car, next car, right?
But you almost have to just ram somebody to let you in.
But hey, it's Toronto. That's what we do.
So for me, the speaking, it would be a huge waste of time.
And more than a waste of time, it would be a...
It would be a diminishment of the pleasure in the conversation.
Because the task is so immense that I've taken on here, the task is so staggeringly immense.
Free the world, get rid of governments, reform the family, liberate the individual, respect the instincts, prove morality, get rid of the argument from effect.
The task is so staggeringly immense that when you have a staggeringly immense task, the size of the task is daunting enough.
For me, the higher that I aim, the more susceptible I feel to negativity, to hostility, to all of the immature projection mechanisms and attack mechanisms that come out when you say to somebody, Well, why don't you deal with your life, right? Why don't you deal with your personal tyrannies before you start lecturing everyone about how we should get rid of the federal government and the Federal Reserve, right?
I mean, it's all well and good to say that a currency should be better, but how about getting the corrupt people out of your life rather than out of Washington, which you'll never be able to affect personally and directly.
But that really makes people very upset, right?
In fact, a lot of people are into libertarianism because they have corrupt people in their lives and they have, through counter-transference, they have decided to be aggressively oh-so-strong and brave towards corruption in the abstract because they are so susceptible to corruption.
And when you start to point that out, people get very angry.
And I just... I have too much respect for the goal and the size of the goal to put negativity into my life, right?
Because then the goal is daunting and the people that you're talking to are hostile and so on, right?
So I think it would be actually quite negative towards the goal of what it is that we're trying to achieve here for me to go on a speaking tour.
And of course, if I went and did a speaking tour, I mean, the only thing worse than people not showing up would be, you know...
People showing up, right? Because they'd show up, and they'd get offended, right?
And they'd say, well, I don't know.
He just came here and did some weird talk about your family being the root of all evil, and, like, I mean, it's really culty, and he doesn't seem to be that interested in freedom, but he's only interested in getting people to sort of fight with their families.
Like, that's the kind of stuff, and I've seen this kind of distorted stuff floating around, independent of this, about this conversation, right?
That it's all Twisted and weird and psychological and introspective.
He's got something to do with...
He had a bad family, so he's got something to do with breaking up people's families.
All this kind of stuff, right?
So it would actually be counterproductive to what it is that we're trying to do.
I think that... That as a business approach or as an approach to raising awareness or making money would not be productive.
There's no speech other than to the choir, so to speak.
There's no speech that's going to help people with this conversation.
There's no one hour-long speech or two-hour-long speech that I could give that would help people with this conversation.
Their defenses immediately rise up when you confront people, especially in that rapid a format.
At least with this conversation, you all got to be comfortable with The DRO model before we said, okay, well, if that's the model for society, surely it is also the model for your family, which is the original content of society for you.
So that was a whole long, lengthy process, right?
I mean, it's like saying, you know, take some people who've just graduated high school and give them a PhD in two hours.
It's not going to happen, right? So, I just don't think that's going to be a particular...
I think the seminars are going to be good.
Like, people who want to come and sort of interact at a more personal level, I think that'll be good and fun.
But I just don't believe that it is something that we can...
that that would be productive for me to pursue.
I'm certainly happy to hear other thoughts on that issue.
But that's sort of the business update for Freedom and Radio.
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