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July 31, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:30
1118 Philanthropy

host of Freedomain Radio, talks about the benevolence of Bill Gates.

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. It's the 31st of July 2008, and I wanted to share an article with you that I thought was actually quite moving.
I found it quite moving. Perhaps you will as well.
It's called The Gospel According to Bill, and it is from the Maclean's Magazine, July 21st edition.
So it says, The Gospel According to Bill.
Underneath it, it says...
In business, Bill Gates ruthlessly crushed his opponents.
Now he's taking the same approach to saving lives.
When the historians go looking for the moment when the world changed for Bill Gates, they might want to consider a visit the founder and then CEO of Microsoft took to South Africa in 1997.
Like many corporations, Microsoft's modest offerings to charity at the time were mostly gifts of their own products.
In this case, the company had provided a computer and software to a new community center in Soweto, and Gates was there to take part in the grand opening.
It was all smiling children and glad-handling dignitaries, but the center had no electricity.
They had run an extension cord to a generator more than 200 yards away to ensure the computer would be up and running when their VIP guest arrived.
Of course, Gates knew that it would be unplugged as soon as he left, and the generator would be put back to some more pressing need.
They go back to worrying about the very basic challenges they face in their lives, problems that a computer was not going to fix, Gates said in a speech a couple of years ago.
That frustrating day seems to have provided a spark that ignited the biggest and most important philanthropic effort in modern history.
Last week Gates walked away from the software juggernaut he helped create to dedicate himself full-time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he began with his wife eight years ago, with the goal of bringing billions of dollars in aid to some of the most intractable problems in global health and education.
From now on, he plans to spend about 15 hours per week offering guidance and insight to Microsoft and the rest of his time figuring out how to spend more than a billion dollars a year in the service of humanity.
It's harder than it sounds.
For all his amazing successes in the world of business, Bill Gates is still rarely considered a giant transformative figure.
To his many critics, Gates is a guy who tripped across one important idea in the 1970s and then spent three decades exploiting it and ruthlessly defending his monopoly at all costs.
The fact is, Gates planted the seed of the world's first and still biggest software megacorporation 30 years ago when he famously envisioned a world in which there would be a computer on every desk, in every office, and every home.
When he convinced IBM to let his little company create an operating system for their personal computers and to let him license that system to other manufacturers, he triggered what would become the personal computer revolution.
Suddenly, computers were standardized.
Suddenly, whether you bought your machine from IBM or HP or Casio, they all worked the same.
They could even communicate with each other.
Even now, despite Rising competition, quality problems, copyright challenges, and rampant piracy, Microsoft still reeled in $51 billion in sales last year.
That alone should qualify Gates among the all-time greats of corporate success.
But people still sneer at Bill.
The Google guys are smarter, they say.
Eh, he's nothing but a bully.
And besides, he's a geek.
With his glasses, his skinny frame, and his affinity for rumpled khakis and button-down dress shirts, it's easy to underestimate him.
See him alongside Bill Clinton, or Bono, or any of the philanthropic glitterati who have become his closest allies, and he always looks like somebody's awkward little brother.
But take a closer look at the mission he's embarked upon, and you may look at him differently.
Over the next 50 years or so, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give away close to $60 billion on projects as complex, as vaccine discovery, and as simple as the distribution of mosquito nets.
If Gates can be half as successful in this as he was in reshaping the world of computers, then he will bring the world of aid and philanthropy into the era of globalization and omega-wealth.
The question is, can a cutthroat businessman, admittedly short on personal charm, who spent the first two-thirds of his life dedicated to smiting business rivals and thumbing his nose at dim-witted regulators, transform himself into a selfless beacon of generosity?
Well, it's happened before.
At the turn of the last century, John D. Rockefeller was the most feared businessman in the world.
He had built Standard Oil into an unassailable monopoly and all but created the modern fuel industry.
According to legend, he would invite recalcitrant rivals into his Cleveland office to show them his books so they could see what they were up against.
Once they were suitably intimidated, he would calmly explain that they could sell their refineries to him or be driven out of business, at which point he'd buy their assets at auction.
In 1904, muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell published her exposé of Standard Oil, painting Rockefeller as a cruel and ruthless bully.
And in 1911, the government ruled that Standard Oil had illegally abused its monopoly position and split it into 34 separate companies, including the firms that would become Chevron, Mobile, Exxon, and Conoco.
Rockefeller would have seen a kindred spirit in Gates.
For one thing, both men practically invented an industry from scratch, says Ron Chernow, a business historian and author of Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller Senior.
They both also held a deep belief that the success of their corporations had substantially enriched and helped the people of the world.
Rockefeller, by providing affordable fuel to expand the economy, Gates by ushering in the communications revolution.
But by the late 1990s, Microsoft's astonishing growth was rapidly cooling.
The Internet was proving to be a more difficult business to dominate than software.
The complaints about its soft and buggy software and its vicious suppression of rivals was getting louder.
Gates was more famous for his personal wealth and for his legendary mansion on the shores of Lake Washington than for his role as a tech visionary.
Finally, just like Standard Oil, governments began to hound Microsoft for being a predatory monopoly.
Like Rockefeller, Gates felt unfairly maligned.
To some, it was only a matter of time before Gates began to ask, what's it all for?
Through luck and smarts, he stumbled into the greatest fortune in modern times, says Howard Means, author of Money and Power, The History of Business.
But that's not a legacy.
The legacy is what he does with it.
Rockefeller had been through an antitrust battle and a lot of controversy for, and he wanted to do something that was inarguably good, Chernow says.
That's why he focused on health and education, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Gates is focusing on health and education.
You know, nobody's going to fault you for coming up with a malaria vaccine.
Specifically, Rockefeller found direction by emulating his contemporary, Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie had built his phenomenal fortune in the steel business.
By 1889, with his empire at its apex, he began turning his attention to the moral implications of his prodigious wealth.
He published an essay, now known as the Gospel of Wealth, which produced the memorable quote, There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.
He argued that the greatest danger of extreme success is that large fortunes will be frittered away On extravagances, and passed down to children who are ill-equipped to handle the responsibility.
To prove the point he alluded to the great families of Europe, which had been mismanaged by a succession of greedy, dim-witted heirs.
In monarchical countries the estates and the greatest portion of the wealth are left to the first son.
That the vanity of the parent may be gratified by the thought that his name and title are to descend to succeeding generations unimpaired.
The condition of this class in Europe today teaches the futility of such hopes or ambitions.
Carnegie challenged his fellow industrialists to dedicate their later years to serving the public good.
That way, he said, the benefactor could enjoy the fruits of his generosity and wield some personal control over the use of his assets.
Carnegie gave away almost his entire fortune, the modern-day equivalent of roughly four billion dollars, to found thousands of free libraries around the world, to establish the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and to endow the Carnegie Hero Fund to reward acts of selfless heroism.
By doing so, he built a legacy that stood far apart from the tactics that created his fortune, and Rockefeller sought to do the same.
Rockefeller was certainly aware and very much influenced by Carnegie's precedent, Chernow says.
Rockefeller felt, because of the sheer size of his fortune, he had to pioneer what he called wholesale philanthropy.
He wanted something that could provide universal impact rather than just social welfare.
The extent of Rockefeller's largesse is still astounding even today.
71 years after his death, Just 20 years after the end of the Civil War, he funded a college for black women in Atlanta that would become Spelman College.
He provided $80 million to start the University of Chicago and continued to pay much of its operating budget for years thereafter.
In 1902, he created the General Education Board, which was active in the building and support of black schools in the South.
And in 1901, he founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, a revolutionary approach at a time when medicine was still largely a pseudoscience.
Rockefeller's efforts went beyond funding for research.
At the turn of the century, hookworm infection was an epidemic throughout the southern U.S., The parasite was contracted by walking barefoot in muddy fields, causing anemia and chronic fatigue.
Many historians believe more than half of southern children were infected, and that it was largely responsible for the stereotype of the lazy southerner, so common in the lore and literature of the day.
Rockefeller's charities launched a massive treatment and prevention program, including Giving shoes to thousands of poor farm families, and virtually eradicated the plague within a generation.
If Rockefeller was looking to polish away the tarnish of a rough-and-tumble business career, it worked.
He was just about the most hated person on earth in 1903, when Eider Turnbull's book came out, explains John Steele Gordon, author of six books of U.S. business history.
But people don't really remember the Rockefeller of Standard Oil.
They remember Rockefeller University, the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Fund, and all the good works.
He did. Hundreds of charitable foundations have been set up over the past century, many taking their inspiration from Rockefeller and Carnegie.
But none has approached their level of public impact.
But Bill Gates may be about to eclipse them both.
Let's be honest. If Gates was looking for good press, the obvious and easy thing would have been to carve off a few billion, make some big donations, and get his name on the side of a few hospitals.
Those who know Bill and Melinda Gates say it's simply not in their character.
Instead, they seem to have poured themselves into the monumental task of changing the seemingly unchangeable.
But then no one, not even Rockefeller or Carnegie, has ever had this kind of cash technology and expertise at their disposal.
By the time he died in 1937, Rockefeller had given away 540 million dollars, the modern equivalent of more than six billion dollars.
A conservative forecast suggests the Gates Foundation will easily give away ten times that much At least $30 billion of Gates' own money and another $30 billion pledged by Warren Buffett.
And so the Gates Foundation has a chance to redefine philanthropy for the modern age of globalized trade and spectacular individual wealth, Means says.
He is rewriting Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth to deal with a world in which people can and do Weal personal bank accounts larger than Guatemala's economy.
A world in which ten times more money is spent trying to find a cure for baldness than a cure for malaria.
I think he's performing an enormously useful function in a time of highly concentrated wealth, Means says.
He is modeling how to deal with being richer than any human being can imagine.
But ambition and best intentions are one thing Actually making the Gospel of Bill yield results worthy of his endowment will be far more difficult than it sounds.
A few years ago, Bill and Melinda were trying to educate their kids, Jennifer now twelve, Rory nine, and Phoebe six, about some of the causes they were working for, when one of the kids began pressing them on why they weren't out in poor countries more, ministering to the sick and dying.
They showed the older kids a documentary about polio and Africa, and one of the children pointed to a boy on the screen asking whether they had helped him and whether they knew his name.
Melinda explained that they were trying to help kids like him, but they didn't know him personally.
As Melinda tried to explain that there were different ways to help beyond working in a hospital, Bill had a typically blunt explanation.
I'm in wholesale, not retail.
That surely didn't mean much to the kids, but his echo of Rockefeller's wholesale philanthropy concept gives a telling insight into the principles that Gates is aiming to bring to the world of global health outreach.
By all accounts, Melinda was the driving force behind the creation of the Foundation, driven in part by a message she received from Bill's mother.
Mary... I'm sorry...
Driven in part by a message she received from Bill's mother, Mary, at her 1993 bridal shower.
Mary Gates had been a lifelong volunteer and campaigner with the United Way, and she told Melinda that marrying into the Gates' fortune would bring with it hefty responsibilities.
With an MBA from Duke University and a natural ease with people, Melinda was a natural at philanthropic work from the start.
Early on, she and Bill settled on the two key questions that would guide their giving.
Which problems affect the most people?
And which of those problems have been largely ignored in the past?
That's why they don't give to big, well-known charities like the Cancer Society or the Heart Association.
From the beginning, their focus has been on things like acute diarrheal infections, tuberculosis, AIDS, and of course malaria.
Things that kill poor people by the millions.
We want the world to allocate resources knowing that the death of a child in a poor country is every bit as tragic as the death of a child in a rich country, Bill explained in a speech last year.
The specifics of their grants reflect Bill and Melinda's differing priorities.
Bill is fascinated with technological and systemic advances that might strike at the heart of a disease.
He pushes for deep science projects like research into a malaria vaccine and the use of technology to reform Elementary education in the U.S. Melinda, meanwhile, focuses on so-called intervention techniques that provide immediate relief bed nets to protect people from the mosquitoes that spread malaria,
condoms and microbicides that prevent the spread of AIDS. The Foundation receives roughly 6,000 requests each year and the founders personally evaluate applications seeking more than 40 million dollars.
This Is really the antithesis of checkbook philanthropy, Chernow says.
They're not just giving money.
They're involved.
So involved, in fact, that the Foundation has developed a reputation as a demanding benefactor, insisting on firm targets and conducting its extensive audits to ensure objectives are not only met, but rigorously tracked and measured.
To Gates, this is about bringing professionalism and accountability to charity work, but it has created controversy.
One of the Foundation's earliest beneficiaries was the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, known as GAVI. Gates gave $750 million over five years to vaccinate children against things like polio, measles, and tuberculosis.
But when the program was getting off the ground, several countries were shocked to find their applications were rejected because they failed to provide enough detail or plans for oversight.
Others were surprised when GAVI auditors later showed up to review paperwork verifying exactly when and where vaccinations had taken place.
Those who were sloppy with the records faced the prospect of being suspended from the program.
There were plenty who said Gabby was too stringent, but Gates made no apologies and eventually recipient nations complied.
The tension, however, highlighted an aspect of Gates' personal style that inevitably colours his charitable work.
To put it bluntly, Gates can be a real jerk.
He can be sarcastic, short-tempered, and excitable.
And he has difficulty hiding his contempt for those of lesser intelligence, which...
Is a problem when you're almost always the smartest guy in the room.
Melinda's natural social grace has helped smooth her husband's roughest edges.
Still, Bill can't always hold back.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last year, Gates took part in a panel discussion with William Easterly, a New York University economics professor and prominent critic of inefficient foreign aid.
Easterly was complaining about the lack of economic development in Africa despite trillions of dollars in aid spending over the past 50 years.
And Gates snapped. I don't promise that when a kid lives it will cause a GMP increase.
I think life has value.
Uncomfortable silence ensued.
Gates tends to leave bruised egos in his wake, but he makes his points.
He believes governments, charities and corporations need to work together to create projects in the developing world where profit margins might be small, but the opportunity is nonetheless vast.
Microsoft, for example, has spent millions developing a tax-free computer interface that would allow illiterate people to operate a computer.
That has the potential to open profitable new markets, but it also directly targets a poor population that normally doesn't get on the radar of big companies because they don't have enough money.
He has dubbed This his call for creative capitalism, and it has attracted its share of sneering from both the left and the right.
But there is no doubt Gates has put his money where his mouth is.
Perhaps the greatest endorsement came in 2006, when Gates' long-time friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett announced he would give $30 billion to the Gates Foundation, effectively doubling its endowment.
If your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don't have a commensurate funding base, he said at the time, what could you find that's better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright, whose ideas have been proven, who already have shown an ability to scale it up and do it right?
Young, ungodly bright, well-funded and ferociously determined.
Well, they'll have to be.
Malaria alone kills a child every 30 seconds in Africa.
Tuberculosis claims another 2 million lives annually, and that number is growing.
AIDS claims 6,000 a day.
Rotavirus kills half a million infants annually.
Hundreds of charities and government agencies and NGOs have been fighting at the edges of these wildfires for a generation.
Billions have been spent, but the plagues are still raging.
In short, putting a computer on every desk in North America was child's play, compared to the challenge Gates has set for his final act.
But that, Cherno says, is as it should be.
Rockefeller believed that the very wealthy must have philanthropic ambition worthy of the size of their bankroll.
Gates built an unprecedented fortune and now has taken on an overwhelming set of challenges.
Incurable disease, systemic poverty, the state of basic education in America, and even the course of modern capitalism.
It's an undeniably noble endeavor, but Gates doesn't want to talk about any of that.
Asked once about how he'd like to be remembered, he cut off the interviewer.
I don't think about how I'll be remembered.
Perhaps that's just as well.
Gates does not put his name on hospitals.
They're never going to build statues of him on the Washington Mall.
They'll probably never make movies about him or name any holidays after him.
A hundred years from now, if he's celebrated at all, it'll likely be a few modest plaques in tiny places in Africa and Asia where his efforts might as yet save thousands of lives.
But he won't be forgotten either.
Making fifty billion dollars before you're fifty is a good way To become a legend, Gordon says.
He'll be remembered for having made a phenomenal fortune and then having done an enormous amount of good with it.
There are worse legacies to leave behind.
I found that quite a lovely article in many ways and I have been sort of thinking about it because I think it has a lot to do with Certainly the way that I've lived my life.
I mean, this is completely ridiculous, right?
Bill Gates and me, not in the same planet, obviously, in terms of finances, but it is, to me, very interesting, this transition point, which occurs around the middle of your life.
And it generally occurs When you've got the basics of your life sorted out, who you're going to marry, whether you're going to have kids, having the kids and so on, along with having some degree of financial stability.
And this is something I talked about many podcasts ago with regards to...
Jung talked about this at the first half of your life.
It's about fighting to establish who you are, what it is you're going to do with your life, with a kind of selfish focus on your own needs and your own gratifications.
And I think that's a very important part of life.
That's a very essential aspect of life, and it's healthy.
But then, he said, there is a fulcrum, right?
You think the arc of a projectile or a bell curve.
There's a fulcrum and what you do is after a time you begin to focus on consolidation and on passing along something of value to the future or to the world as a whole.
And recently we talked about that aspect of life.
Where, because I had sort of made it to, I mean, I'm young for that kind of thing, I'm 41, but I had made it to that point where I was willing and more than willing,
highly desirous of taking the gifts that I have and putting them to the service of the world rather than to the service of my preferences, my bank account, my I guess needs purely for myself and of course there's a disparity when you are young I sort of think of myself as middle-aged now but when you're young you will focus on your life and your career and getting yourself started in life and dating and and all that kind of stuff and I think that's entirely right but there is a kind of disparity in what I understand to be happiness now and what most of the listeners most you right there what you think of as happiness now and it sort of struck me that when you understand that second half of life and I understood it theoretically really before I started understanding it pragmatically I was very struck by that passage in Jung that I read Oh,
I guess it had to be 12 or 14 years ago now.
I was very struck by that passage in Jung when I read it about the phases in life.
And I sort of understood it.
I have never seen anybody do it up close.
Certainly in the business world, I didn't see that kind of thing.
I didn't see people in the business world.
You know, this is really true.
I didn't see people in the business world, and I think that's one of the things that turned me off to the business world.
I didn't see people in the business world who would be older and had enough money to be pretty comfortable.
You know, people who had, I don't know, a million dollar house and were making $350,000 or $400,000 a year.
I mean, it called me crazy.
But at some point, isn't that enough?
I mean, my threshold for enough was much lower than most people's in terms of feeling, being able to live comfortably, thanks again to your wonderful donations, but being able to live comfortably and Being able to sort of give to the world as best as I can.
But I didn't see people really taking that course.
Maybe it's more of an American phenomenon than a Canadian phenomenon.
Although I do know that there is Tom Thompson and people up here who've done similar kinds of philanthropic or charitable things.
But I didn't really see that as part of the business philosophy, this idea of giving back.
People would always talk about It's pretty crass, but people were acquisitive, right?
They would want things and want more things.
So they'd get their million-dollar homes, and they'd have their car leases for expensive cars renewed every two years, and they'd go to Switzerland to ski and so on, and they'd do all of these wonderful expensive things, and they would buy their cottages, and they would always talk about these things.
I mean, people would always slip what they've got into the equation.
And so when I was in the business world, I couldn't really see how that was part of the culture.
And again, maybe it's more common in other cultures, or maybe we just see the people like the Gates, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, who've made so much money that, of course, it's completely lunatic in terms of how much they have.
But I think that phase where you have enough for a comfortable life, And you now want to think about what it is you're going to contribute to the world.
You know, the zero footprint life seems to be all too common.
And this is not an argument for anybody to take this up.
It's just something for you to mull over for later on in life if you're younger.
You know, it's very common that people live these zero footprint lives where they...
Don't produce things that have larger benefit to the world as a whole.
And the people who don't understand that this is not uncommon.
The second half of the life focusing on generosity, and you think of silly things like the Shriners and their little cars, but they do a lot of good in the world, right?
They raise a lot of money for children's hospitals and the charities and so on.
But when you're young, If you haven't seen this kind of benevolence, this kind of approach to charity in action in your family, in other words, if your parents grew up to be middle-aged or old selfish bastards, right, then you're not going to trust in the benevolence of the species, really.
Like, unless you've seen how wonderfully kind and generous people can be and how they do focus On spending their time and their efforts and their energies to really create and do some good in the world.
If you've not seen that, then I think it's very hard to trust anarchism.
It's very hard to trust voluntarism if you say, well, everybody's mean and everybody's stingy and everybody's greedy and so on.
I think what happens is people haven't seen that spirit of generosity in the world and so they view everyone as predatory and they view people and you can see this of course in a number of economic and psychological mistakes in this article is ridiculous like his fortune is now good because he's giving it away to charity as if The good that he has created through his business is somehow tainted by profit.
It's terrible, right? But this, I think, is a very important thing that I just kind of wanted to mention.
I've mentioned it before, but I just sort of wanted to reinforce the point.
You may not be at a situation in life or in a place in life or have a desire to Make do with less in order to give more to the world.
But if you can provide examples of a kind of radiant generosity...
I mean, I'm not putting myself up on any frescoes here, right?
I mean, I strive and I fail.
But if you can...
Provide an example in your interactions with people, not of suspicion, not of fear, not of hostility, not of discomfort, not of unease, not of manipulation, not of pettiness.
But if you can, in every interaction that you have, provide an example of a relaxed spirit of generosity, And good humor and positivity.
What you're doing is you're reminding people of the benevolence of the species.
When people say, without a government the poor will starve, what they're saying is, everyone I know is a selfish bastard.
Which is, of course, why it's so hard to penetrate this logically, why we have so little luck.
And people don't come to their conclusions about the world because they reason from first principles, as we all know.
They come to their conclusions from the world as trauma inflicted upon them.
Do you think that Bill Gates' kids are going to grow up thinking that all businessmen are selfish and exploitive?
Of course not. But this is, you know, into your interactions on the board, into your interactions in the chatroom, into your interactions through emails, in conversations, in your life.
The more positivity and generosity and good humor that you can bring to your interactions with people, the more you will help undo the damage of selfishness that they have experienced hitherto.
So if a good proportion of people that other people meet are, you know, positive and generous and kind and curious and so on,
then the idea that we need a state to restrain the evil nature of human beings and that without the welfare state there will be no charity and kindness to the poor that idea will just begin to fall or fade away if that makes any sense we as intellectuals we want to bring our mental acuity our mental abilities our education our rhetoric our debating skills our logic our intellectualism to bear on the problem but just as my therapist many years ago said the problems created by solitude cannot be solved with solitude I believe that it is equally true that problems that are not created by reason cannot be solved by reason A belief that a man has not been reasoned into cannot be reasoned out of him.
You can't talk someone out of something that they never were talked into in the first place.
People's fear of freedom, people's fear of reason, people's fear of voluntarism is not logical.
It's not derived from historical facts.
It's not statistical. It is experiential.
What people feel...
Let me rephrase that.
What people experience when you talk about no government, no God...
What they experience is not...
The emotional states that we associate with error, like a little baffled, a little curious, a little like, huh, well, that's interesting, even if it feels counterintuitive.
What they feel is anxiety.
What they feel is fear.
What they feel is stress.
What they feel is fight or flight.
That's why I focus so much on the emotional, the barriers.
to the truth are not intellectual particularly not the truth about anarchism or even the existence the non-existence of God the barriers to this are not emotional the barriers to this sorry the barriers to this are not intellectual they are emotional it is people's emotional responses to these topics that cause us to have so little progress in Expanding and extending this new enlightenment.
People get fucked up by the truth.
Emotionally. And the reason they get emotionally fucked up by the truth is that they have experienced the opposite in their life.
So as I talk about non-truth, the reason people get fucked up about the simplicity of ethics is because they've been lied to.
by their families, their preachers, their teachers, their politicians their whole lives, and that's painful to examine.
So attempting to reason people out of beliefs that they have not been reasoned into is irrational, and of course it actually puts us into their category, right?
As I've said before, free marketers in particular, egregiously guilty of this, that they get angry because people don't act in a rational and empirical manner, but then the free marketers keep making the same stupid arguments for hundreds of years and make no progress whatsoever, and then get mad at other people for being non-empirical, non-experiential, and refusing to learn from the facts.
Well, that's just lunatic.
Those people have far more excuse than scientific And statistically trained economist or philosopher or libertarian.
This is why form takes precedence over function at this stage in the debate for the truth, for the future.
It is how you appear to people that will determine their receptivity to the truth.
For instance, if you express hostility towards someone, and I don't mean never, like if they call you a, I don't know, some sort of horrendous name, then sure, hostility is fine, right?
But if you express hostility towards someone because you feel anxious or irritated, And I now have slowly and painfully learned enough to know that sometimes it is the questions that are most irritating to me that are the most fruitful, because they represent new ground.
The Free Will series came up because somebody was critiquing my position on free will, and I think it's a good series, and it came about because there was a very intelligent person who was pulling apart my definition and approach to free will.
And my irritation was actually a good flag towards something that was worth pursuing and turned out to be highly worth pursuing from a truth standpoint.
My irritation at not having an answer to ethics pushed out UPB and so on.
So if you are hostile towards someone and then say that voluntarism is good, then what they see is a whole world full of hostile people.
Right? And thus they're going to be less receptive, less positive, less open, less excited by the ideas of voluntarism.
So you don't have to quit your job and devote yourself to philosophy.
I certainly would be happy if people spent an hour or two a week, if they could, posting the free books and emailing them around and generating email lists using the referral tool, which is sending out emails.
But you don't have to do any of that.
It really is just in how you interact with people.
It really comes down to how you interact with people.
That is the benevolence and the philanthropy that you can display at no cost to yourself.
In fact, I would say with great benefit to yourself, that you can display in your daily interactions.
It will make you happier. You will certainly see the amazing power of positivity in terms of shaping your interactions with people.
Not with everyone. But if you are positive and pleasant, which does not mean a sap, but if you are positive and pleasant with people and the relationships still don't work out in any way, shape, or form, at least you have the clarity of knowing that you couldn't have acted any better.
But if you snap at people and so on, and then the relationships don't work out, there's always a part of you that doesn't know.
Once you see the amazing power and clarity of positivity, of enthusiasm, of openness, of, you know, tell me more, and so on, That is how philosophy will really get spread.
That is how the truth will really get spread.
The focus, as I've strongly urged people over the last few years, the focus is to practice the real-time relationship stuff, to practice the positive approaches to people, to practice being kind and friendly and curious, even when you have to grit your teeth.
You grit your teeth when you go to the dentist, right?
But we make it, right?
Practicing that is much more important than reading another article or listening to another podcast about freedom.
Practicing that kind of relaxed positivity is so essential in the spread of freedom.
People are going to judge you, and only secondarily, are they going to judge your ideas?
And we all know this when we When we dress up to go for a job interview, right?
We shave both sides of the face.
We put on a nice tie, a nice suit.
We arrive early.
Antiperspirant sometimes is essential.
So, we know that first impressions are very important and that people are going to judge our knowledge after they judge our appearance.
Nobody's going to get into a job interview and have any luck if they show up in shorts and a muscle tee, unless it's a bouncer's job.
Because even if they have the best ideas in the world, nobody's going to know it.
So we understand all of this when we go on a first date.
We scrub, put on pants.
Oh, the horror. So we all understand the essentials of first impressions when it comes to our own personal self-interest.
If we extend and expand that to include the interest of the truth, which surely really is our own self-interest most fundamentally, then I think that we can really do a lot to be philanthropic, even if we don't have $60 billion dollars And 20 hours a week, or in my case 60, to devote towards the truth.
There's just a huge amount that we can do to make people more receptive to voluntarism, to make people more receptive to the idea of non-violence as the solution, by having a personal relaxed and positive air about us.
That begins to be a counter-current to people's direct experience of exploitation and often brutality, and that is What we can do if we have no money, it takes no time to be nicer, right? It takes no time to be nicer.
In fact, it saves you a lot of time.
So it's a plus all around. And I hope that you will take that as an approach of a philanthropy that you can bring to bear on the problems of the world.
That will be painful and unsettling to you because you're changing your own programming as well that way.
But I think it is essential.
And I think if we understand that It is always a job interview and a first date when we introduce someone to the truth.
I think we can really understand the pride that we can take in this kind of positive approach.
Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations.
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