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Nov. 2, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:41
901 Stef on FDR (An Interview)
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Hello? Hi, how's it going?
Oh, good, thank you.
How is everything with you? Just great, just great.
Thank you for agreeing to do this with me.
I really appreciate it. Oh, my absolute pleasure.
My absolute pleasure. Just to let you know what's going on...
Because of the places which I'm actually looking at to pitch this as an article for, one of them might be philosophy orientated and the other one is more internet culture type stuff which would be more interested in how you manage to get a successful podcast show going on a topic that doesn't grab everyone's attention immediately.
Is that okay with you if I focus on those two areas?
Of course, yeah. Okay, just quickly, if you can give me a brief summary of FDR. Well, sure.
FDR was one of the presidents in the United States.
FDR is a hijacking acronym for Free Domain Radio, which is, I dare say, the premier philosophy podcast on the Internet between 200,000 and 250,000 It downloads a month 15,000 to 30,000 listeners and it was a top 10 in the 2007 podcast awards for quality and number of shows.
We actually, I think in terms of number of shows, we are the biggest because we're actually almost at 900 shows in just under two years.
So that is the general topic of the conversation and the specific content is the application of rational philosophical principles From sort of reasoning from first principles using the good old Aristotelian slash Socratic method to just about every section or area of life that you could imagine.
And it's taken us all the way from metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, psychology, family relations, romantic relations, work relations, work optimization.
And the real goal, of course, is that the old ancient Greek The holy trinity of reasoning or of philosophy is that rationality equals virtue equals happiness.
That's sort of the triple domino effect of a philosophical life, that if you are rational, Then that is the same as being virtuous and if you are virtuous that results in happiness and not a perpetual feeling of bliss but in the same way that if you sort of eat well and exercise you're generally healthy though that doesn't mean you never get a cold but it gives you great strength and fortitude in life's challenges and it also helps to keep you away from people who are difficult and problematic in your life and The basic principle is it's highly materialistic,
highly logical. We do not make appeal to abstract entities that do not exist, like God's countries, governments, and even the virtue of the family is something which is not taken as an axiom, but rather virtue is something that has to be earned by each individual and is not claimed by being voted into office, by donning particularly funny hats and claiming to worship an invisible God.
Or by having sex and giving birth to children.
This does not make you virtuous and to detach virtue from abstract concepts like gods and governments and parents is really key to understanding and being productive and happy in your life.
So that's the general approach that we take and the contents of the shows are usually We do podcasts or I do podcasts, a bunch of them every week.
Sometimes they're videos and sometimes they're not.
And then I do individual listener conversations with people who have particular issues or questions so that we can see how philosophy gets its traction in the real world with real world problems.
And last but not least, we have a call-in show every Sunday where it's just a sort of mash...
It's a mosh pit of philosophy with me as the occasional wrangler, and that's the approach we take with that.
And then, of course, there's a flourishing board community with over 1,500 members where we exchange ideas.
And we also have get-togethers.
We had a barbecue that I threw for listeners this last September, and there is...
A symposium in Miami in January.
And last but not least, I've used the time since I started this about two years ago, went full time about six months ago.
I've used that time to write three books.
Well, to write two books, but to get three books published.
It's called On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion and it's really designed to help take these abstract philosophical principles and work them into specific conversations you can have with your family about virtue with the goal of getting to a real, valid, honest and place of integrity with your family.
Which I think is absolutely key for freeing us from other kinds of fantasies.
The second book is Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, where I've taken from the sort of human premise that you can't get an ought from an is.
Can we establish a rational system of ethics without governments and without gods and without appeals to authority?
And that's a fairly, I guess it's a fairly meaty tome, but it's meeting with some very significant and positive response.
And last but not least, since I actually started my communications career in the art world, is the modern drama slash comedy novel, The God of Atheists, which is recently just out and has been, again, getting some very positive feedback.
So that's the general gist behind the show.
Was that sort of what you were looking for?
Yes, that's perfect.
Just a few more questions.
Why is FDR popular?
I mean, you've said that it's a very successful show, but it deals with some issues which can be quite tough for people to get hold of, especially in their personal life.
So why do you think FDR has suddenly kind of caught on?
Well, I think that one of the major reasons is that I have an accent.
And that's not something to take lightly.
The other reason could also be I think that philosophy is very often discussed in the abstract.
So, for instance, I'm part of a list of fairly prominent libertarians.
I'm not sure I'd count myself in that number, but I'm on the list anyway.
Perhaps out of charity, who knows?
And they were debating recently about whether or not in a stateless society, in a future sort of anarcho-capitalist society or a society without a government, Whether there would be vending machines dispensing cocaine.
And while that is a form of intellectual Sudoku that can be interesting, discussing the property rights of future society seems to me intellectually equivalent to translating Hamlet into Klingon.
Interesting intellectual exercise but nothing that is going to hit people where they live in terms of real freedom In their life, right?
And so I think because we go from the very abstract principles right down to the nitty-gritty of do you go to a difficult family Thanksgiving reunion?
I mean, that is the real, I think, value of philosophy that I'm tying it from the abstract to the personal.
And last but not least, I think it's because I don't put forward any principles that I have not put into practice myself.
When I say to people that you are not obligated to your families, I have taken that very same approach with my own family and no longer in contact with them because I was not able to make a real conversation with them and of course because I don't believe in heaven, there is nothing for me after death but, you know, being a food source for worms.
And so, you know, if I can't get good relationships with people, then I move on so that I can free up space for good relationships.
I think that's key. And last but not least, my wife, who practices psychology and is a professional in that area, has really helped me to tie the most sort of windy abstractions to the very personal life.
And it was her who gave me, sort of first put me hard on the trail of the idea that the state is a sort of power structure, is in effect of the family, which is the power structure that we all inhabit very early in life and which conditions all of our responses to power throughout our lives in an unconscious manner or conscious if you really learn about yourself.
So I think that the fact that we are actually giving people Not just nutrition in the abstract, but sort of meals that they can eat that will make them healthy.
I think that is the real traction that makes the philosophy conversation very exciting because you get a theory, you can apply it in your life, you can check the results, and you can validate what's going on.
And if the theory is correct, which I think these theories that we talk about are, then you get amazing, amazing, though painful at the beginning, forms of liberation within your own life.
Would you be able to give me a specific abstraction and a specific kind of way you personalise it?
Sure, I'd be more than happy to.
So one of the abstractions that I work with is that there are no unchosen positive obligations in life.
That the mere act of existence does not obligate you to do anything.
And being born in a country does not obligate you at a moral level to pay taxes to a group of thugs who will throw you in jail otherwise.
And being born into a family does not create moral virtue in your parents.
Your parents' moral virtue is determined by how they act towards you and particularly how they acted towards you when you were young and helpless.
Lots of people's parents are sort of mean when they're younger but then become magically nicer as soon as the kids get bigger and can fight back.
So, given that there's no unchosen positive obligations in life, Why would you go to a family reunion?
Why would you return the phone calls of your mother or your father or your siblings?
Well, I would say that you should return those phone calls if it gives you pleasure to do so.
I'm not just talking sort of rank hedonism.
Nobody wants to go to the dentist, but we go to avoid more problems down the road.
But when it comes to your personal relationships, the fact that your parents chose to have a child and fed and clothed you and gave you shelter when you were a child does not put together or create any reciprocal or permanent obligation in your life.
If your family is good to you and you're good to them and you enjoy their company and they're curious and they're wise and they're warm and they're fun, which doesn't mean that you never have any problems, but if it's generally A positive relationship, then it seems to me that nobody needs to tell you to spend time with people that you like.
But the problem arises when you end up in a situation which I sometimes call negative economics.
In other words, if you don't particularly like your mother, let's say, and if you have reasonable reasons for not liking her, The reason that you call her back when she leaves a message is because you're afraid of the guilt or the attack from other family members or the negative character assassinations that are going to occur if you don't call your mother back.
And it's my goal as a philosopher to help people not to be pain avoidance devices, right?
Not to be sort of pain avoidance robots.
But rather to live with integrity and to recognize that they have a right to positive, happy and productive relationships in their life.
And if there are relationships in their life which are not positive, happy and productive and rational and virtuous and so on, then you need to work to make those relationships better.
And if you can't make them better, then you have to ditch them.
This view of yours and theory, it's not always successful on the people you've talked to about it.
There's been some quite strong adverse reactions to it.
Why would you say that's happened?
I would be happy to talk about some of the adverse reactions.
If you've seen any or have any idea, maybe what we could do is talk about the ones that you've seen in the abstract and we won't use any names and then we can talk about possible reasons for that.
Oh, of course. Well, there's recently been this alternative board that's kind of stalking you at the moment.
And they're very harshly critical.
And they're made up of members of former members of Freedom Main and even some former donators.
And I was wondering why you think that this philosophy has had such a profoundly negative reaction in them?
Well, I mean, I think that's a very good question and it is a real challenge for people.
It is my very strong and basic belief that everybody wants to be a good human being.
I mean, nobody wants to look in the mirror and say, me equals bad guy.
Like, they just don't want to do that.
They would rather feel, you know, like they're a good human being, that they're doing good in the world, that they're doing the right things in the world and so on.
That is something that everybody likes to believe in the abstract.
The problem, of course, comes when people who believe that they are a good person, or let's say, when this guy named Bob, who has for his whole life studied wisdom, perhaps studied philosophy, studied learning, and believes that he is a good person, Suddenly comes up against a definition of virtue that he does not meet.
And I know for my own self that I thought that I was a really good person and I studied the works of most of the major philosophers on ethics and other topics.
And I really thought, you know, that I was a good guy.
Why? Because I knew virtue in the abstract.
I knew the definitions of virtue and I believed that I lived in many ways.
Try to live a good life and be a good person and so on.
But there came a time in my life, and this was in the business world.
I was an entrepreneur, co-founded a software company that grew to a fairly decent, I guess, and respectable size and success and profitability.
And what happened was I found that I had a not inconsiderable capacity for corruption, for greed, for, you know, the kind of abstract quasi-theft that occurs in the investment world and so on.
And that was a pretty bleak look in the mirror, right?
I thought I was a good guy. I thought I had it all down.
And, you know, after years of studying ethics and so on, I thought, you know, because I was against violence and against fraud and against the government.
But there was a huge disconnect in me between the values or the virtues that I professed in the abstract and how I actually lived my life.
So I was in business with people who I did not respect, who did not hold the same ethical or even metaphysical or epistemological views that I did.
In fact, held completely opposite ones.
But that didn't matter to me because there was, you know, coin in the darkness, right?
So I was sort of living in there and pretending I was living in the light.
And so when you think that you're a really good person and you understand philosophy in the abstract sense, and then you kind of look in the mirror and you say, I'm not limiting these values, then you face a fork in the road, right? And what happens is you either say, well, My actions and my values do not coincide.
In fact, my actions and my values in many ways are opposites.
And that's particularly a sensitive subject when it comes to virtue, right?
Because nobody wants to feel like a bad guy.
And you either then change your actions to conform to your values or you change your values to conform to your actions.
But of course it's very hard To do the latter.
It's very hard to change your values and say, okay, well, corruption is now good, right?
Evil be thou my good, right?
As I think Edmund says in King Lear.
So nobody wants to do that.
And so when you face this gap, what is it that you're going to do?
And for some people, that gap is more than their ego structure sort of psychologically can handle.
And so what happens is If I'm a bad, like if I thought I was a good guy, it turns out that in some areas I'm not a good guy, then that causes me great pain and great anxiety.
It certainly did for me and engendered a long period of sleeplessness and therapy and, you know, self-examination and really a brutal transition to actually living my values.
And so if you think you're a good guy, it turns out that you're not such a good guy when somebody says, well, if you want to live your values according to you, right, here's what it would look like and this is what you need to do, causes people a lot of anxiety.
And if they're not mature and they don't make the right choice in that moment, What they do is they feel like if I say to Bob, you're not living your values, and this causes anxiety within Bob or anger or sadness or depression or whatever, then what he may feel is that I, Steph, have caused this in him.
I have caused him to feel bad.
It's not his own actions and me pointing out the discrepancy, but it's me saying...
I have caused that person to feel bad, right?
Like the guy who tells you you have lung cancer doesn't create the lung cancer in you, right?
But if you're not mature, you may feel that way or react that way.
And so if I cause...
Unhappiness or anger or frustration or guilt or shame or something in people simply by pointing out the discrepancy between their values and their actions.
It's entirely possible and it seems to happen not frequently but not completely infrequently either that people then get angry at me, right?
Because they have their values, they're not living their values and they're fine with that until I point it out.
And then what happens is they feel that I am attacking them.
Now, of course, if I'm attacking them and I'm making them feel bad, then I must be some kind of crazy or megalomaniacal sadist, right?
Because I'm just out of the blue making them feel bad when before they felt okay.
And so people then get angry at me, and they then set themselves down on that particular thing where it's like, well, Steph is making me feel bad, therefore Steph is a bad guy, and therefore I'm going to warn other people about him, I'm going to call him crazy, I'm going to dig up whatever sludge I can and throw it at him, and so on. And there's nothing you can do about that particular choice.
When somebody makes that choice, they don't come back, right?
I mean, if these people knew what kind of future they were creating based on the choices that they were making, the actions, if they knew the cost to them, they'd never do it.
Because people don't come back from those kinds of choices, at least I've never seen it.
So I think if that makes sense, like there's a gap between their virtues or their values and their actions, I point it out, causing them anxiety, they then get mad at me and attack me because they feel that I'm attacking them and making them feel bad when all I'm doing If you hand in a test and the test is wrong and I mark it mad, I'm not creating error in you.
I'm simply pointing out the error.
If I get an F back, the teacher doesn't make me stupid.
It's just that I didn't do a good job on the assignment.
I think that is the way that it goes.
And we all face that particular dark night of the soul and react to it in different ways.
Does that sort of make sense?
It does. Just to clear up one thing, you previously said that you can't be happy unless you follow, basically, unless you're virtuous.
Is that correct? Yes, in the long run, right?
Oh, okay. Because you mentioned that they felt okay until you pointed this out and then they became angry.
Well, I certainly would not say that the people who have reacted in this kind of way, I would not say that, based on my knowledge of their lives, that they would be called successful by any stretch of the imagination.
But there's a difference between a diluted kind of dysthymia or depression or sadness or ennui or something like that, of course a lot of which is self-medicated or managed through Through drugs or through alcohol or through, you know, compulsive sexuality or something like that.
And through a sort of series of relationships that start in an exciting manner and then trail off to something horrible or negative or boring.
So people can kind of stagger through life with a kind of ennui and a kind of depression, but they have a lot of mechanisms in place to manage those, right?
And I'm very focused on having people not manage their anxiety through intellectual defenses, like just making up stories about how people who make you feel bad are just bad, or through drugs or through, you know, sort of promiscuity or through dissociation or through, you know, like I'm trying to sort of peel back the layers of the defenses within people.
So people can kind of stagger through not feeling too, too bad, but then when I point this sort of stuff out, Then they get kind of mad, right?
So I had a guy recently whose fiance and I had a conversation on the phone and she sort of called me up to ask me my opinion of stuff and she didn't like the answer.
She got sort of really mad at me.
And before that, was she unhappy?
Well, I wouldn't say that she was particularly happy, but what happens is it tends to focus or crystallize it.
So if I look back at the time before I I had the long look into the mirror at my own dark side.
It wasn't that I was unhappy.
I was kind of getting by.
But compared to where I am now, it was a dark continent compared to the sunny side of the street that I'm on now.
But it didn't feel that way until it crystallized.
Was there any instance, any specific thing that happened which made you take that look in the mirror?
Well, I think so, yeah.
And again, I sort of talk about this a little bit more in my novel, The God of Atheists, which is pretty autobiographical in that sense.
But one of the things that happened was I was involved with people in the business context.
And I sort of had found out that they hadn't told the truth about some pretty important business transactions.
And I continued to profit from my association with them through both salary and stock options, despite the fact that I knew that they hadn't told the truth about particular business transactions, which were important, right?
Not just like the slightly exaggerated products capacities or whatever.
Unfortunately, I didn't make any conscious association with that at the time.
All that happened was I stopped being able to sleep, and that continued pretty much unbroken for about a year and a half.
And after about a couple of months of this, I went into therapy, and I went for sort of three hours a week, and I kept a dream journal, and I kept a psychological journal, and I started to really work off philosophy and start to build my values from the core up, right?
If you end up, you know, wanting to go east and you end up about as far west as you can get, you need to not just blindly drive east again but figure out your map and where you went wrong.
And where I went wrong every time was by professing philosophy and professing my values rather than actually living them.
And that was really terrifying to put into practice.
Really dizzying, disorienting, scary, but it certainly did create an amazing life for me through that process.
Were your previous morals unlivable and then you replaced them with ones that were livable when you rebuilt it all or was it just a case of you not living them?
They were livable. I just wasn't living them because it's costly.
So it's very costly to really live your values.
I mean, especially when I was embedded in a romantic relationship that was not even close to my actual values.
A lot of my friendships were friendships of convenience or professionalism and so on or, you know, hey, we both like going to concerts or whatever.
I was dating women without sort of evaluating them from a philosophical standpoint.
You know, are they good people?
Do they have good values and good virtues?
Are they curious? Are they mature?
And so on. It's like, hmm, she's pretty, right?
That was sort of my approach.
And the same thing in business. It was like, you know, who will give me a job for the best salary, not who are the people that I wish to associate with based on ethics.
So my ethics have not changed an enormous amount, certainly working through this The universally preferable behavior process of defining ethics from the ground up has smoothed out a lot, but all it is really fundamentally is just believe.
Believe it. Believe what you're saying.
You know, like if lying is bad, Then don't profit from those lies, right?
I mean, or say lying is good, right?
But where I was and where I think a lot of people get stuck is it's a lot easier to, you know, words are cheap.
It's a lot easier to talk about virtue and to study virtue and to read about virtue and to write about virtue than it is to even put some of the basics in place, right?
And for me, what happened was It ended up being a process wherein I stopped seeing my mother, I stopped seeing my father, I stopped seeing my brother and his wife and my nieces, who I, you know, that was a very difficult thing because I was very close to them.
And, you know, about 90% of my friendships went by the wayside because when I really started living my values, I suddenly became a...
A pariah. And I wasn't sitting there jamming them down everyone's throat or anything.
And then I ended up, so I lost my romantic relationship which was seven years old at that point and there was a proposal involved and so all of that had to go by the wayside and my career really changed and I ended up ditching the company that I founded and leaving that.
And it was just a, I'd gone so far in a sense off my original path that when I re-oriented myself There was very little left from my former life.
When reading God of the Atheist, I got the sense that you particularly blamed academia and education in not teaching people that morals should be something they should be living rather than talking about.
Is this a view that you hold or is it just something that was isolated to the book?
No, that is definitely a view that I hold as strongly, if not more strongly, than I did when I wrote it, which I guess was about five or six years ago.
And it's interesting just by the by, I mean, I don't know how far you went in the book, but this guy has, I wrote the book in 2000, long before podcasting and long before YouTube and all this, and of course the guy has an internet show.
Yes, I noticed that, yes.
Years and years before, it's funny how, you know, we write our own future sometimes, that the act of imagination is actually an act of creation of our own future, because I never would have guessed that I would have ended up in that situation, but of course, that did come to pass.
But no, very, very strongly, the fundamental issue with education, which is the one thing, if I could change one thing about the world, it would be how the children are taught.
The fundamental issue, of course, is that education, both at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, is funded through coercion.
And if you don't pay your taxes to support the schools or the universities, then you get thrown in jail.
And if you resist, that's you.
Hello? Sorry, at that last sentence, I think I got some interference there.
No problem. The fact that our educational system is founded on violence has a foundational, it creates a foundational blind spot in people's perusal of ethics, right?
Because if violence is bad, and of course every human being who you talk to who's not like a complete sociopath, and even sociopaths will probably say this, It says that violence is a bad way to solve problems.
Violence is bad. Violence is bad.
And yet the world is replete and awash in violence and coercion.
And we're blinded to it for the most part because a concentration camp doesn't look violent if everybody obeys the gods, right?
Nobody actually is getting shot, but that's only because they're obeying.
And so the foundational aspect that is warping our whole educational system is this The fact that we have to keep avoiding this contradiction, which is violence is bad, violence is good.
And we have that in socialized medicine, we have that in taxation, we have that in welfare, we have that in defense, we have that, you know, running like this sort of bloody abattoir underneath the shining cities of our supposed culture is this massive contradiction that violence is both evil and good.
And this is something that when you begin to approach it, People really, really hit the roof like it is a foundational anxiety in our culture and in our civilization and not just in ours.
We are actually better than China, better than the Islamic countries.
How does that relate back to...
That aspect, that contradiction right at the root of our culture is something that is very, very hard for people to get a handle on.
So people make up these massive, complicated superstructures of silliness, post-modernism and so on.
And it's all designed to cover up and to baffle and confuse this basic contradiction.
Violence is good, violence is bad.
And so I'm trying to sort of unravel all of that, which is emotionally volatile for a lot of people.
And why is that so emotionally volatile to people?
Well, because it goes back to the family, right?
And this is in the book that I wrote on Truth, which is, you know, you can read that book in a day, and it's non-technical, but basically the argument is that, well, whenever your parents disciplined you, they said that they did it because That you were doing bad or you were doing wrong, and they knew what goodness was, and they were correcting your behavior towards something called virtue, right?
I mean, most parents said that, right?
And so, naturally, as an adult, you should then be reasonably able to ask your parents, what is virtue?
Because that's what they used as the justification for controlling your behavior when you were a child.
And, of course, what happens is when you start asking your parents what is virtue, they don't have a clue.
And why do they not have a clue? Well, because the intellectuals have betrayed them by serving the state and by wanting tenure and by wanting an income, and so they've become sort of the historically prevalent intellectual court toadies, right?
The courtiers to power. And there's this fundamental lie that we say everything we do is for the cause of virtue.
Why do we have socialized medicine?
Because it's virtuous.
And why do we have the welfare state?
Because it's virtuous. And why do we have a military to do good around the world?
And that is our foundational approach to things.
But when you ask people Well, if we do all of these things because of virtue, then you should be able to tell me what virtue is.
The doctor gives you all this complicated stuff and says, you need to do this so that you'll be healthy.
And every time you do it, you get sicker.
At some point, you're going to say to your doctor, well, maybe you and I are talking about different things when we're talking about health.
And if you then ask him what health is and he has no idea, then that's really dizzying.
It's really disorienting.
Because if your doctor's giving you all these instructions, but he doesn't even know what health is, but he says, well, I'm doing this for health, Then fundamentally you've been lied to and exploited.
And the motivation that underlies that kind of exploitation is really sickening.
And again, I won't sort of give it away, but it's in the On Truth book.
But when people start to ask those around them who claim everything we did, we did for virtue's sake, for the sake of goodness, for the sake of truth and integrity and so on.
And then you ask them what truth and integrity and virtue is and they have no clue.
That is unbelievably dizzying and disorienting.
Is it this connection to the family and psychology that Freedom Aid offers that other libertarian sites don't?
And is there anything else?
Is there anything else?
Sorry, that didn't mean to come across that way.
That's it? You just united philosophy and psychology?
Well, this is a key aspect, right?
And I try, try, try, and it's the hardest damn thing in the world sometimes.
I really do try to work with the facts, right?
And of course, the basic fact is that libertarianism is a massive, massive failure.
It's not even a failure like it didn't achieve what it wanted, right?
What it wanted was a small government or no government and what it got was a government that grew even faster.
I'm not saying it's causal but in terms of it's worse than a failure.
There's got to be some, you know, cluster F or whatever it is that you'd want to use, right?
There's some word for failure that I don't know that indicates not just that you didn't go east but you went six million miles west.
So this basic fact is something that libertarianism has a tough time explaining.
Why are we failing?
And I've been asking people who spent 20, 30, 40 years in the field.
Why have we failed?
Von Mises started writing 80 years ago, actually 85 years ago.
Ayn Rand wrote beautiful stuff 60 years ago.
We had classical liberals going back 150 years.
Adam Smith is many more years before that.
And we fail catastrophically and incessantly.
And so the problem is that we've made intellectual arguments and we've never stopped to think, well, why don't people believe us?
Right? Why don't people believe us?
Right? So when we say violence is bad and everyone says, yes, now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and vote for this spending bill or whatever, right?
I have to go and do this, that, and the other.
Why is there this massive disconnect between values and practice?
And it can only be the family.
It can only be the family that our first initial impressions of power that is translated into a false kind of virtue, that has to be the foundational explanation as to why libertarianism, or you could say philosophy as a whole, It has failed repeatedly in its 2500 year history and barely achieved 1% of its goals in terms of having people think rationally.
Well, why is that the case?
Why is it that people believe nonsensical arguments?
This is a guy on the board right now who is saying, well, I get totally stuck on this question where people say, well, you have to pay taxes because you choose to live in a country.
And since you choose to live in that country, you are then obligated to pay its taxes.
And of course, this is an argument that goes all the way back to the Apology of Socrates.
But that question, which is, you know, why do you have to pay taxes?
People just come up with, well, if you're born in this country, you then assume this obligation.
Well, an obligation that is assumed to be moral based on the situation that you're born into must be the family.
No sane human being could really say that some guy can just come along and say, okay, these 12 streets are mine and you guys have to pay me half your income now or I'm going to shoot you.
Because that's the reality of the state.
There must be some reason why people believe this mad stuff about the government.
And it must be because there's another structure in their mind that it resonates with.
And so when people say, well, you are obligated to a social entity because you're born there, They think they're talking about the government, but they're not.
And the reason that they have these emotional difficulties believing or understanding an argument that is so clearly crazy, that you just owe some people something because you're born in a place.
That must be their family and the fact is that libertarians keep talking about the state and everybody sort of nods and nobody believes it and the reason that they don't believe it is because when talking about the state people translate that unconsciously into the family and they agree at the abstract layer but they don't act at the personal layer and that's what I'm trying to join.
If libertarianism has been a failure and FDR is a success, how do you gauge that?
Money, groupies, donations in terms of first-born kidneys, cash, undies, particularly from some of my older male listeners.
So, well, success is certainly, I mean, there's a number of different ways of measuring success, and not inconsiderably is the financial aspect, right, that I'm able to make Living, doing podcasting, which is, I think there's like me and one other guy.
And of course, I don't use any commercials.
I don't have any subscriptions.
There are, I guess, about 60 or 70 podcasts and some books and audio books that are available only to people who donate at various levels.
But, you know, still there's almost 900 shows that are completely free.
So I would say that for me, there's a couple of layers of success.
There's the financial success.
There's the simple success of numbers, right?
How many people are downloading?
How many people are participating in the conversation?
How many people are emailing me?
You know, how many other people are talking about this conversation in the world?
And I track some of that stuff fairly closely.
But then, of course, there is the...
The real success is not in the donations and the real success is not in the numbers.
The real success is in the implementation, right?
If you're an architect and you write these blueprints down, I mean, it's great if a whole bunch of people buy them, but what's even greater is if they actually build the houses, right?
I mean, that's sort of where I'd really gauge the level of success is there's a certain shock that people hit when they see reason principles coming up from the ground, right?
And they wriggle and they squirm and they try to get away from them.
I don't blame them because I did too for many years, but there is that kind of shock, there's an excitement, there is a thrill, there is like, as people write to me continually and say, it's like my brain is coming back to life, like I feel like I'm coming out of a fog and so on.
And there's that thrill and excitement and then there's the absolute giddy terror of when I start nagging people to, you know, Podcast 183 is a particularly, I guess, passionate one in this area where I say, okay, well, it's not about the government.
It's not about God.
It's about you and your family and your friends and your personal life where you actually have.
Some change, some power, some capacity to affect the situation.
We can spend the rest of our eternity talking about the state, and that's not going to change one damn statute on the books, but we can actually implement things within our own lives.
Because the only way that you change the world is through conviction.
Conviction changes the world.
And libertarians face this problem, and again, I've nagged libertarians about this for quite a while.
They say, well, do you have friends who are statists, right?
Because people who are statists want you to get shot if you disagree with them.
And if you have friends, if you say, well, I'm against violence, but I'm going to have lots of friends who approve the use of violence against me, then of course you're just playing a game.
It's like mental Sudoku.
It's nothing. It's just like it's a hobby.
It's an attitude. It's a cool thing or whatever.
But it's not a real moral that you live by because I don't have people in my life who either want God to kill me or God's followers to kill me if they believe in the Old Testament or even parts of the New Testament.
I don't have people in my life Who are willing to advocate the use of force against me in the realm of taxation or regulation.
And that has given me great passion and conviction.
And I think that's something which people get kind of confused about.
Everybody says, well, I've learned all these arguments.
I want to go ahead and change people. But they're not living those arguments.
And they're not saying to their friends, look, I'll explain it to you three times, five times, ten times, but if at the end of it you understand and still advocate the use of force against me, you're not my friend, and I'm not going to spend time with you, and I'm going to view you as a mortal enemy because you are advocating the use of force against me.
You can't call a Jew a real Jew if he's going to be friends with a Nazi.
Then he's just not taking something very seriously, and that is a real disaster, I think, for the world.
You mentioned how once you were into the podcast you eventually changed the conversation from an abstract political one to a more personal one.
Listening to them again, I get the sense that there was a lot less necessary confidence in the way you were positioning the arguments, or not necessarily confidence, but confidence in the listeners to stick with you through that conversation, whereas the more recent, well, from then onwards, you're quite verbose, shall I say, and confident in the manner of when you come out with, you know, you don't hold any punches, so to speak.
Do you feel that's a fair Or have I misread that?
Well, if I understand you correctly, and I didn't just start talking out of my armpits, so to speak, driving, I did have some idea of where it is I wanted to take the conversation at which it had to go.
I mean, I think that your observation is very astute, and I would say that It's a lot easier to get people's agreement on abstract philosophical principles than it is on personal relationships, particularly core ones or foundational ones like family relationships.
So, I definitely, I needed to start talking about gods and governments, because if I'd started off about family, then I wouldn't have gotten anywhere with anyone, right?
But the hook, I guess there's a hook, right?
And the bait on the hook is, hey, let's talk philosophy, let's talk the state, let's talk about God.
And so on.
And let's talk about abstract power structures and let's work out a philosophical approach that is logical and consistent with those abstract power structures.
And people love to come along with that because it's interesting, it's thrilling, it's exciting, it gives you great debating points, it wakens up your brain and so on.
And I needed to get people's confidence or trust that I had something useful to offer, something of consistency and rigor to offer in those areas to get them swept up, to get them excited, to stimulate their minds and so on.
I needed to do all of that and to get people swept up in the thrill of abstract philosophy.
And then, you know, when they're on board and we're outside of land, then I can say where we're really going, which is we're not sailing into an abstract world of futuristic societies with DROs and private defense agencies and so on.
What we're sailing towards is your family and your life and your friends.
We're not sailing into an abstract future.
That you can only guess at and talk about and theorize.
And the real question here is not whether there will be vending machines with cocaine in a free society in 200 years.
The real question is, if these are your values, what are you going to do about your relationship where you really have control and power?
If we're going to ask people to give up the state but we won't give up our friends, if we're going to ask people to give up their subsidies, like the farmers or the military, if we're going to ask people to give up their subsidies, But we hang around corrupt parents because they're paying for our university.
That's just hypocrisy.
And nobody's going to take that at all seriously.
And then you might as well not do it.
That's what I keep saying to people.
If you're going to go philosophy, go the whole hog.
Do it all. Because don't get stuck in the middle.
Stuck in the middle where you have values that are different from anyone else and you don't even get the pleasures of conformity and those pleasures are not inconsiderable.
In the same way that the pleasures of cocaine or heroin are not inconsiderable.
But don't get stuck in the middle, right?
Live the values or drop the values.
But don't just have the values and then just use them to keep people at bay and then defer decisions and then hang around corrupt people but still have these values and get into arguments all the time but never get free and find better companions.
I mean, that to me is a real torture.
That's real hell. And so that's really the focus that I'm trying to make.
So I think you're right. You know, at the beginning, I talked about abstract things and then I slowly began to turn the searchlight, which we thought was pointing into the future and pointed into the heart and soul of everybody's relationships who was listening.
And that's where the volatility began.
Sure. But what I was specifically trying to get at there was, was there any nervousness on your part when you started approaching these, I guess you could say, controversial topics, or were you kind of treating it with tenderness when you got to that area?
Which one would that be?
Oh, it was neither nervousness nor tenderness.
It was rank terror. I was terrified.
I was absolutely terrified To approach these topics.
I put it off. I would come up with something like, hey, let's talk about I put it off as long as I could handle it because I knew that it was going to be a very delicate transition point and that it was going to be...
To me, it's surgical, right?
It's a surgical precision that is needed in this transition.
And even then, I'm sure I did a million things wrong and I'm sure I lost people that I might have gained had I done something else, but at some point, you just have to, you know, start rowing down the river.
You can't spend your whole life preparing, right?
So, I was absolutely terrified to bring these personal issues up.
I was absolutely terrified to start doing dream analyses.
I was absolutely terrified in the Sunday shows to bring up questions of, you know, are we anarchists because of our relationships with our fathers and things like that.
Because you can get an enormous amount of scorn and hostility when you bring personal history into philosophical conversations, though, of course, once you get used to it, it seems perfectly obvious and a necessary thing to do.
But it was completely terrifying, and it took forever for me to be able to do it in a way that I could do it justice to, and I don't know how many podcasts I scrapped because...
I just would start down that road but not be able to do it with any kind of conviction and I had to trust my instincts on that but of course now that we're more fluent with the process and the approach I can let rip a little bit more and also I've been recently trying to I'm going to uncork my passion a little further because I need to sort of be big enough for the UPB book,
the universally preferable behavior book in particular, which was, you know, if it works, it's a real achievement and I think it does work and so I sort of need to be big enough and passionate enough to get behind that book, which of course is, if you can prove ethics without gods and governments, that's kind of the holy grail of philosophy.
So that's been sort of one of the reasons why there's been more passion and so on later as I'm trying to get people swept up into the next thing.
Just wondering, I noticed you did some business podcasts earlier, but I was wondering why did you decide to start podcasting in philosophy?
Well, what happened was, I mean, the genesis of the whole thing, so to speak, was I had an employee who was a Christian.
I had spent, I don't know, seven years as a software entrepreneur where I didn't write anything really and I barely did any philosophy.
And then I took a year and a half off and I wrote The God of Atheists and I wrote Almost.
And then my wife and I together wrote a book called Public Lives.
And then I was in a software situation again.
I was a chief technical officer at a software company and I had an employee who was a Christian.
And he began to sort of pull apart We basically engaged in philosophical debates and I felt that old motor sort of come cranking back up.
And we began talking about environmental protection and so on.
And I'd always taken the sort of blank-eyed minarchist approach of a standard objectivist, which is, you know, force is bad, we're going to have a government that's going to be funded in some way that doesn't violate that.
You're just going to kick up a whole lot of dust and noise and nonsense about that central question.
And of course I was never particularly at ease with the objective view of ethics.
And so what happened was when we were talking about pollution control, one lunch time we were munching on our sandwiches and there were two of the employees who were in there and they were very very adroit and intelligent young men and I was whiteboarding the solutions and I just realized suddenly that you could have an economically productive way of controlling pollution which was the original DRO article and I wrote that up and sent that in.
And then I just started reading those articles as a podcast because I'd heard about podcasts.
And then I was very tentative about going off book, so to speak, and starting to...
So I thought I'll just try it out in my car.
And that's sort of where it began to work.
And I've sort of realized that I did have a way of being able to talk in a manner that was fluid and entertaining and enjoyable for people through that process.
And then, of course, because I was spending an hour and a half to two hours a day in the car, it was a pretty good way for me to spend my time.
And a nightmare for people trying to catch up.
Absolutely a nightmare for people trying to catch up, but you know, at Free Domain Radio, quantity is quality.
What part of your life background helped you to do the podcasts?
Acting, of course, helped a lot in terms of, you know, a lot of people, when I talk to them on the phone, and you may feel this too, they sort of play it back and they say, well, Snap sounds pretty animated.
I sound like Marvin the Paranoid Android.
I speak like this.
So the fact that I took voice training for two years and I took singing lessons and so on, that all helped quite a bit in terms of flexibility of voice.
The accent doesn't hurt. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but there it is.
But I would also say that, you know, 20 years of studying philosophy gave me a lot of material to work with and economics, of course, which is another good bridge discipline.
But I think also I was – I only spent two years in a debating club, but three months into when I was in an undergraduate program in English.
I did two years of English, two years of history.
Well, two years of English, two years of theatre school, two years of history, and then I did a master's in intellectual history at U of T. But when I did a debating club, and then a couple of months after I started, I went to the Canadian finals, and I came in like six out of a thousand people for debating.
So I knew that I had a pretty good way of framing arguments verbally.
And then, of course, I did sales and so on, which is kind of a thrust and parry verbally as well.
But I think that the debating training that I took, the vocal training that I took, the immense amount of sort of reading and writing that I had done, the stage work that I'd done, which allowed me to sort of be more comfortable.
I did a little bit of stand-up, but that wasn't particularly enjoyable for either myself or the audience.
But I think that combination of things, I think, allowed it to really work out.
When did you start to notice free domain success?
I'm sorry, could you just repeat that last bit?
Sure. When did you start to notice free domain success?
Well, you know, the funny thing, it's never what you think it's going to be, right?
So I sort of thought that particularly when I published Proving Libertarian Morality, which was a way of approaching ethics without God or government, which I guess was about a year and a half ago, I thought that that was going to start to get me on the lecture circuit.
I thought that people were going to go like, wow, you know, he's found it, he's done it, you know, and there was going to be this great deal of excitement.
And of course, that didn't happen.
Other things that I published that I thought were really good articles got me some respectful attention and so on, but nothing particularly exciting and certainly no offers to speak.
I've only had one offer to speak in the whole time that I have been doing this.
I've only ever had one request to speak at a libertarian conference.
And so it didn't quite happen the way that I wanted it to.
I thought it was going to happen through articles and podcast reading of the articles but I think that my creativity really uncorked itself through the in-car podcasts and the other kinds of podcasts that I did particularly the early religious ones And I think that the way that the board took off and the way that the downloads began to increase over time really began to, and of course the feedback that I was getting was sometimes horrible and negative, but quite often very positive.
And then when I opened up the donations, which I think was about 14 months ago, and I began to be able to fund the layout that I was putting into the servers and bandwidth and so on.
Bandwidth was sort of expensive when I started.
It's much cheaper now. Of course, I always wanted to go faster.
A million downloads a month would be great and so on, but unfortunately, it's a little bit like pushing string.
All I can do is try and create the best and most vibrant conversation that I can.
It is not an I told two friends situation when it comes to free domain radio because the topics are so volatile that a lot of times people get into this conversation and lose all their friends.
I think they make new ones in time but it is a very tough It's a very tough thing to spread.
Even with all this amazing technology that is at our fingertips, our free podcasts, easy deliveries, iPads, listen to wherever you want, board software, communication software, free email, free call-in shows with free calls from around the world, even with all this amazing technology.
You know, it is still a slow process.
It's still a pushing string process to get it out.
So I'm very happy with what's happened.
I think I've done as well as I can and I've moved it as fast as I can.
But, you know, I'd always be thrilled if it went faster, but I'm certainly very pleased.
You went full time and are making a living off of that.
How is that possible as you give everything away for free?
You're not the first person to ask that question.
In fact, when I got on this libertarian forum that I'm on, people were agar, like aghast, even when I say 20 bucks a month to download, right?
Sorry, 20 bucks a month to subscribe.
And what do you get if you subscribe?
Well, nothing really. I think that...
You know, the foundational requirement for a successful conversation about philosophy is the belief that people want to do the right thing, that they want to be good.
And I think, and I'm quite sure, and I wrestled with this for a long time.
I don't even want to tell you how much time I wasted in my life and in my brain and of my wife's time talking about charging for the podcasts.
And it always came back to a matter of trust, to a matter of trust.
And I did make the argument, and I've noticed that when I make certain kinds of arguments, people do donate more.
So when I say, you know, what do you get?
You get like, you know, 30 or 30 podcasts, sorry, about 50 podcasts a month or 60 podcasts a month.
And that's like 30 or 40 hours.
And so if you're looking, let's just say it's 40 hours and you subscribe for 20 bucks, you're paying, you know, 50 cents an hour.
A therapist will charge you at least $100 an hour.
So I'm like one, two hundredth the price of a therapist.
A philosophy course, a university course will cost you X amount of dollars.
A movie is two hours and will cost you You know, 13 bucks or 12 bucks or whatever.
So making that case, you know, is philosophy worth 50 cents a day for you?
Like, is it worth half the price of a small cup of coffee and a bad cup of coffee too?
And if it's not worth that much for you to help spread the word, then don't get involved, right?
Then it's all just nonsense. And I think also the fact that I certainly don't live a lavish lifestyle and I try to plow as much money as I can back into advertising.
I spent, you know, $6,000 in the last six months on advertising FDR, not to mention, you know, three grand on a server and bandwidth and all this kind of stuff.
So I think people do recognize that I'm not, you know, buying, you know, little Greek girls to rub my feet or anything, that I'm really trying to expand the conversation as much as possible.
And so I think that people like to help.
I mean, I believe charity is a very positive thing and you can see the statistics on that.
And I think this conversation in particular, because it is unprecedented both in terms of the content, the scope and the success, I think people like the idea that they're helping resurrect the philosophical round table which really has been absent from our society except at the most rarefied intellectual levels.
Since the time of ancient Greece and since Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and I think people really like having that back in their lives and being part of that conversation and the fact that we are talking about such amazing things in terms of both the abstracts and the personal I think that people just reciprocate and yes there are times where it's like man no donations for three days I'd start eyeing my toes for my lunch or whatever but it always writes itself and you know usually when I whine and complain people are generous and help out so You've mentioned adverts in the podcasts.
Is that a possibility for you or is that something you've ruled out?
No, I've completely ruled it out.
I just can't imagine that it's ever going to happen.
And the main reason for that is that you simply can't go from abstract truth, virtue and integrity to buy my lemongrass water for curing bunions over the internet.
I mean, it could be the case conceivably that, you know, if Nike called up and said, if you put a Nike Swish sound in, we'll give you a million dollars, it'd be like, I'm in, you know, and what else do I think?
Can I give you a foot rub with that too?
But there's no large company that would want to be associated with what I'm talking about, right?
I mean, most large companies are dependent on state largesse or power or protection to some degree or another.
They're just not going to sponsor an anarchist show.
So what it's going to mean is that I'm going to get nickel and dime advertisers with products that I can't vouch for.
And so there's just a whole bunch of stuff.
And you simply can't go from truth and virtue to, you know, peddling other people's wares.
It's too jarring, it's too weird, and it would be too inconsistent, I think.
So I've definitely ruled that out, both on the website, on the message board, and in the podcast.
Where do you see the...
Do you have any future plans for FreeDomain?
Well, sure. I mean, basically the fork in the road is, you know, do I try and take it on the road?
And I don't think generally that will be something that I will do.
I certainly did enjoy meeting all the listeners who came up for the barbecue that Christina and I hosted in September.
You can't take this on the road.
I mean, I think that I'd be a good speaker to see live, and I certainly would enjoy doing that, but it's too much logistical planning, and I'm always faced with the question, do I write another article which is going to bring more people into this conversation?
Do I record... We're good to go.
Just by being able to work on it full-time.
Do I write another book and so on where people, like, can people hand The God of Atheists as a novel to people who aren't even interested in philosophy and those people say, well, this is a great book, you know, who wrote it?
And it's like, oh, it's this guy who also has this podcast on philosophy.
So there's lots of ways in which I can sort of seed the clouds, so to speak, to sort of bring the rain.
And I think that most of it is going to happen from the Red Room up here in Canada.
I don't think it's going to happen from being on the road.
Plus, you know, my wife has to stay here and I don't really want to spend time away from her, if at all possible, because she's just way too much fun.
I think that it's going to, and certainly what I'm mulling over to some degree is I think that it would be a great deal of fun, though a great challenge, to write a novel set in, a futuristic novel set in a stateless and religionless society.
I'm sort of working over some plot devices or premises that would make, that would help that work.
But that's still sort of checking around.
But if I could do that, I mean, that would be a wonderful, wonderful way of spreading the ideas about how things would work.
But you need a central premise.
Like in To Goa, it's the children's curiosity about the ethics of their family.
And you need a central premise for these things to work.
And I'm still plugging away at trying to discover one that would sustain an entire novel.
But that is a challenge.
I have a bunch of other books which I'd like to publish as well.
I have my historical trilogy almost.
I have The book I wrote with my wife is a modern drama, Public Lives.
I have another book which is a historical novel called Just Poor.
So I'll sort of release those over time.
Those are relatively easy to get out.
I just need to hire an editor and grind through it.
But I think continuing the articles, continuing the podcasts, continuing the listener conversations and continuing the books, I think that's just the best thing that I can do from up here.
All right. And your book, UPB, you've talked about its importance, or what you believe its importance is.
Would you be able to go into that a bit more just now?
I like that how you say, a bit.
That's so optimistic of you.
That's touching, really. Yeah, I mean, very briefly, of course, if ethics don't exist in reality, you can't derive what people ought to do from what is.
And, of course, that was the Randian approach.
And if you can prove ethics, the validity and value, sorry, the existence and value of ethics, the requirement of universally preferable human behavior from scratch, right, from assuming nothing.
If you can do that, then that is, I mean, it's the greatest intellectual feat in the history of philosophy and, you know, this all sounds completely ridiculous and I'm fully aware of how ridiculous it does sound and so on.
But nonetheless, I mean, if you can reason ethics up from nothing and make it incontrovertible, then it is a It is an achievement on par with the creation of the scientific method and in some ways it's even more foundational than that because you can have scientists in a dictatorship but if ethics can be universalized and proven logically then that is an incredible feat and of course it did only take me a quarter century of thinking until my brain melted pretty much but You know,
the sort of feedback that's rolling in is, you know, it seems to hold together, it seems to be a good approach, and it seems to be valid, and people sort of have been hammering at the basic premise for about 18 months now.
Lots of different people have read it and have hammered at it, both professionals and amateurs, and the structure is holding.
So I think that it is an enormous achievement and it will probably take quite some time to sort of float out into, because it's so enormously threatening, right?
I mean, it's so enormously threatening to a lot of illicit power structures in the world at the moment that, you know, you threaten a priest's, a politician's and a soldier's income, they tend not to be particularly happy also if you threaten an educator's income.
They tend not to be particularly happy.
I'll never do any better.
No question about that.
I'll never ever conceivably write a better or more important book and I'm perfectly happy with that.
I'm not going to complain.
That's my Bohemian Rhapsody of writing.
What are your hopes for the book?
I can't really say that.
I certainly will do what I can to promote it at every given opportunity and it's been selling quite well and I've created the audiobook and I've offered it for free to anybody who wants it.
They can pay me if and when they want, if they like it and if they think it's worth it.
My hopes for the book, I mean, I know for sure that it's going to change the world, whether it's going to do it in my lifetime or not.
I mean, Nietzsche or Freud were pretty unknown throughout most of their lifetimes until basically the First World War.
And so whether it's later, it doesn't really matter.
Of course, the enormous and important thing is that it's out, right?
I mean, whether it's ten copies or ten million copies, it's out.
And that's a whole world away from it sitting in my head or on my computer.
Well, that's brilliant. Thank you very much for this interview.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I don't think so. I mean, I think I've chewed up quite a lot of bandwidth as it is.
I certainly do appreciate the opportunity to talk in this way.
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