All Episodes
Previous Next
July 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:26
1697 Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux Magazine Interview

Stefan Molyneux interviewed for a Canadian magazine on a variety of philosophical topics.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Oh, hi Dan. How are you doing?
I'm good. Thanks for your time today.
It's great to speak to you finally.
Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation and the interest, I suppose.
Yeah, sure. Whereabouts are you based, first of all, Stephen?
I'm just outside of Toronto in Mississauga.
Ah, yeah, I think I believe I do that already.
And how long have you been doing the free domain radio website?
I started in 2005 when I was still working.
At that time I was the Chief Technical Officer at a software company and I continued doing that as a sort of part-time venture and then about three years ago I quit my career to work at it full-time, if I can call it work, which it really doesn't feel like, but that's the technical term I suppose.
Yeah, I know that feeling.
It's great to have a vocation, I think, rather than a job.
You know, they've always said, do what you love and the money will follow.
I didn't quite accept that, but I certainly think that I do now.
I don't think it's true in every case, but where it is true, it's about the best life you can get, I think.
I was just saying to my wife this morning, because I have a daughter who's Who's 18 months old.
And what that means, of course, is that she's beginning to socialize with other children, which means that we're beginning to, I guess, pseudo-interview other parents for potential playdates.
You know, playdates are, you have to sort of, you have to like the parents, and I guess they have to like you as well.
And so, eventually, when we're meeting people, you know, at the playground or whatever, and we start talking about playdates, you know, eventually people say, what do you do?
I really don't know.
I really don't know how to answer that too well.
So I was actually just saying, you know, I think I'm just going to say, I'm retired.
I think they're going to say, well, if my wife said, well, what was that?
I'm not going to answer anything.
I said, well, they kind of will, because if I won the lottery or if I'd made $5 million in the software field, then this is exactly what I would be doing.
So in a very real sense, I am retired.
And so we're thinking of going with that because it's just a little easier to explain than I do philosophical podcasts over the internet which leads to all kinds of complicated questions which aren't particularly relevant to play date.
It's funny. You remind me of a little bit when I used to meet girls at university and I was a software undergrad.
But I quickly started telling them I studied philosophy because they would almost turn on their heels and run when they heard that I was computer programming.
You probably feel for me there.
Oh, I do. Yeah, no, I didn't study computers in school.
I'm just sort of a hobbyist, which sort of became my career for about 15 years or so.
But yeah, I mean, it was always complicated to explain.
And yeah, I'm a leper, and you get better response than I'm in IT sometimes, right?
Yeah, I don't miss it, I have to say.
I've been out of it for a good four or five years now.
Yeah, I might use that retirement one myself, although I don't have any kids yet, so I don't have that whole thing to go through.
The challenge, of course, is that people, like I say, I run a philosophy show that people kind of want to know what sort of philosophy, what's your approach, and that sort of stuff.
I'm not sure that I particularly want to lay out Atheist, anarchist, you know, all of that kind of stuff is like, Anne, send your children to my house!
So I just don't, I think I just go with retired for now because I have no problem with, you know, standing up for my beliefs in a general social and public section, but this is more just around having my daughter have people to fool around with, and I think that's, it's not quite the place to stand on principle for her, so. I racialite between, when people ask me what I do, a gardening magazine.
It's one level.
And sometimes I say an anarchist magazine disguised as a gardening magazine.
Right, right, right.
If it's one of my advertisers, I stick with the former.
Right, I think I can see that for sure.
And the thing is too is that, I'm sure this is the case for you as well, but I really resist At a very fundamental level, I really resist terms like anarchist and atheist because those are conclusions.
They're not philosophy.
Philosophy is the process of arriving at conclusions that are valid, supported by reason and evidence.
To say that you're wedded to the conclusions is to turn the conclusions into a kind of bias, right?
So, you know, if people ask, I say, well, I'm a philosopher.
I accept that there is no God, but I'm not an atheist because that's to define yourself by a conclusion.
Like a mathematician is not wed to any particular answer in mathematics.
He is wed to the process.
of reasoning with numbers.
And that's sort of the way that I try to approach it.
So I won't introduce myself as an atheist or an anarchist.
I'll certainly say, if people say, well, this is what you accept, or this is what you believe, I'll say yes.
But it's really to put the cart before the horse, to introduce yourself by your conclusions rather than by your process.
Like, we don't say that a biologist is an evolutionist, right?
We just say, because that's to turn evolutionism into kind of creationism, just a kind of unfounded bias.
And so A biologist will say, well, I'm a scientist.
I'm a biologist. And then if people say, do you accept evolution?
Hopefully they will say yes.
And that's kind of the approach that I take.
I say I'm a philosopher.
And then if they ask about the specifics of what I have accepted, then I will talk about that.
But I will try and focus more on the process rather than the conclusions.
I'm totally with you there.
I find that I've read a bit of philosophy in my time as well.
People sometimes mistake their language, their words for data, their concepts for data, their words for actual things.
I'm probably heavily influenced by Wittgenstein there and one of his students, Morris O'Connor Drury.
He wrote The Danger of Words and he was very much involved in the field of psychiatry and psychology.
And he really wanted to question kind of, you know, what is a schizophrenic?
You know, what do we mean by that?
You know, is it...
Because often...
How can I say?
People sometimes will lend...
Lend the words they use, perhaps even in an everyday context, more concrete than they really deserve, especially when we're talking about the nature of the mind or the nature of the cosmos.
We need to be careful with words that they don't...
I think Aldous Huxley described it as, you know, we're the benefactors and the victims of the linguistic tradition into which we're born.
Well, I mean, that's right.
At the same time, words need to be approached tentatively.
Otherwise, we can get ourselves into all sorts of pickles.
I think it was Wittgenheim who said that philosophy is all about asking the right questions.
The process, as you put it, is more important than the conclusion.
Yeah, and that's very much like science.
Science is a process, not a set of conclusions.
The moment that it hardens into an orthodoxy, it is no longer a living thing.
And language is constantly in the process of being killed off and resurrected, right?
So the word anarchist has been killed off and is owned by the state.
And that's why it's a very tough word to use.
I generally use it just because I don't want to say, well, I'm a voluntarist or whatever.
And then people say, well, what's that relationship to anarchism?
And I say, well, it's kind of the same.
They say, well, why didn't you use the word anarchism?
Do you have something to hide? So I just like to come out front and say it.
But of course, the associations of anarchism are with, you know, bomb throwing and, you know, mohawks and tattoos and so on, which is all a bunch of nonsense propaganda.
And the word atheist is currently in the process of attempting to be owned by religious fundamentalists.
So you get militant atheism, right?
So you put the word militant, or extreme atheist, or angry atheist.
So you use this argument from adjective rather than actually addressing The core of the argument and there's this civil war over language because most people can't think.
They simply react emotionally to whatever metaphors have been plunged like a stake into a vampire's heart, into the center of a particular word.
So like, anarchist, oh that's bad.
Those are the people who set fire to the police cars in Toronto, that's terrible.
Or atheist. If atheist can be portrayed as angry and bitter and intolerant and Hostile and so on, then people can dismiss that without actually having to examine the arguments, because examining the arguments can be a very terrifying thing, because then you may have to accept conclusions that you're not comfortable with, which a lot of people don't really want to do.
So yeah, I think you're right.
There's this terrific war Over language and people who oppose particular perspectives are always trying to kill the word and turn it into a dead prejudicial, emotionally charged thing that people just want to avoid, like some sort of landmine of syntax.
And I think that's a real tragedy.
And philosophers are continually trying to, or thinkers, are continually trying to bring life back to the word by having it be the last domino in a series of dominoes that falls, right?
is the consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
Anarchism is the last domino that falls when you consistently say that the initiation of force is immoral.
And same thing with atheism.
If you consistently say that that which exists is defined by matter and energy or the effects thereof, then gods and leprechauns and goblins, they don't exist.
Unicorns and so on. And so philosophers are constantly trying to resurrect words by having the words Derive from an argument, whereas those who are against thinking are constantly trying to kill off those words by isolating them from the argument and infusing them with negative emotional material so that people will just avoid them.
Like, there's a shark in the water called anarchism.
Do you want to swim? Well, no.
And that, I think, is a constant back-and-forth war that sometimes philosophers win, not very often, and more often culturally prejudicial people win.
Yeah, it seems to me that we have...
The problem with language is that many people, they don't...
As you say, they are taking borrowed, second-hand concepts.
They are being given through this very powerful technology that's being widely used, the television, so much...
I was born in the mid-70s.
I'm 35 years old and I was brought up in a house where the television was on for the majority of the waking 24-hour clock.
So much of my childhood was spent accumulating Words.
I became a word freak.
I was, you know, I read the dictionary and silly things like that.
And I know to accumulate words as if they were tokens of kind of wealth.
But as you say, people, there seems to be, I mean, at least in my own experience, and perhaps that's the safest domain in which to speak, words have kind of revolted against me.
I used to love words.
I used to be one of those precocious teenagers that would use a far longer word than was necessary just to display it to everyone.
This coffee is splendiferous!
I'm sorry. Did you do the YouTube video called The Story of Your Enslavement?
Because your voice sounds quite familiar.
Oh yeah, I did that one, yeah.
Oh, that was awesome, Stefan.
Oh, thank you. That was really...
Oh, kudos to you.
I've shared that link.
I only found it a few weeks ago.
It seems to me that words are used to kind of control and manipulate people.
I mean, I don't have a television, but sometimes when I'm staying in a hotel as a guilty pleasure, I put it on.
I put on Fox News, actually, just to really make things difficult for myself.
Wow, you've got a whole hog, right?
Oh, no.
It seems that words are used to control and manipulate people, and really, people aren't...
A lot of people, it seems, are quite stupid, and they don't really think things through for themselves, and they're told what to think.
But is this a natural process that's just made kind of...
The television, obviously, is a bit of a beef of mine.
I think it's an amazingly powerful thing, and it's being horrendously abused.
I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts on elitism and what you think that is, and if elitism is a natural thing, is it that...
There's always going to be people who have a better grasp of language, that have more self-knowledge.
And there's going to be people that would use that to their advantage, to manipulate others.
Is this just...
I hate to say it's a natural thing, but what are your thoughts on elitism?
And is it that...
I mean, what's the alternative to the few...
Kind of keeping the many in line.
What would they do without that?
I would definitely make the argument that elitism is not natural.
I would make the argument that the avoidance of thinking which I think is partly what you're talking about.
The avoidance of thinking and the resulting dependence upon propaganda.
Propaganda is not the natural state of humanity.
Propaganda It's like if you dig a hole when it's raining, the water fills it in.
The water just flows in. And if you actively oppose the child's natural desire to think, to reason, to explore, then you dig a hole in the child's mind.
And then the child needs propaganda to have a sense of self, to have a sense of community, to have a sense of identity.
And so if you oppose, prevent and, all too tragically in some cases, destroy the child's natural, scientific, philosophical, empirical, curious self, then you create a great whole and that vacuum pulls in propaganda.
And the reason that I would say that it is an unnatural process Is that you and I didn't need to go to school for 10 years in order to go through puberty, right?
So puberty is just a natural phase that occurs at a particular age where, you know, the naughty bits grow up and the voice deepens and all that sort of stuff.
And that, to me, is a natural.
You don't need propaganda.
You don't need to cajole people.
You don't need to indoctrinate children in order to have them go through puberty or develop the teenage interest or sometimes more than an interest in sex.
You don't need propaganda for that.
And so, to me, that is a natural process.
That is a natural state. If human beings, if children, let's say, were not...
Rational and egalitarian and empirical and scientific and philosophical, if they weren't naturally that way, then governments and religions would not need to take them over for 12 years of indoctrination.
So the decade or more of indoctrination that occurs in religions and in cultures and particularly in government-run or government-controlled schools, that's there for a reason.
If children were naturally adherent to culture, if children were naturally believers in Yahweh or Jesus or Seth or whoever, if they were naturally religious, if they were naturally adherent to a hierarchy called the state, then they wouldn't need all of this indoctrination.
And so if you look at the amount of indoctrination that children are subjected to, I think it's easy to understand or easier to understand just how free and rational children really are.
And I say this with some mild authority.
I mean, I taught in a daycare for a number of years.
I was an assistant teacher in a gifted kids program.
I am a father.
My daughter is relentlessly curious and relentlessly empirical.
I can't give her an empty box and say there's an ice cream in it, but you just can't see it.
I mean, all she says is there's no ice cream and she's upset.
She is relentlessly empirical.
She is relentlessly rational.
She's always exploring cause and effect.
She's not fooled easily.
She is a naturally empirical and perfectly philosophical human being.
And it's that very natural state of humanity that must be so violently and repressively opposed By institutions that require subjugation, by institutions that require the suspension and opposition of rational judgment.
The state and the church are the two ones that are most forefront in my mind.
But since the state and the church are based on false premises, the state that the initiation of violence is moral for the state and immoral for the citizen, as if the state is some opposing rational entity, that is a false dichotomy.
And in religion, there are two fundamental false dichotomies.
The first is that existence equals non-existence.
The priest will say to the parishioner, God exists even though there's no physical or scientific or empirical evidence for God.
And you owe me money for telling you that.
And if you say, I gave you the money yesterday, and they say, no, you didn't, and I say, well, yes, I did, but there's no evidence of it, they would say, well, then you didn't.
So when it comes to their own personal profit, empiricism and reality and evidence is the key, but when it comes to that which they're, quote, selling...
It's quite the opposite. So that's the one.
The other, of course, is that there are about 10,000 gods that human beings believe in and every religion says, my god is real, all the other gods are false.
Though, of course, it's exactly the same standard for all of the gods.
So there's just a bunch of nonsense at the roots of statism and at the roots of religiosity.
And in order to get children to believe that nonsense, you have to vehemently and sometimes coercively undermine and, in some cases, destroy the capacity For the rational integration of reason and evidence.
That is tragic.
The reason that I know that it's not natural is because it takes so much effort to get children to let go of empiricism and rationality and evidence and all those good philosophical things which we're all born with.
It takes an enormous amount of effort.
Look at how much you have to threaten children with to get them to believe in God.
You have to fill them with guilt By toppling the dusty body of Jesus down into their crib and saying, you killed him with original sin.
You have to threaten them with hell.
You have to guilt them. That's a huge amount of emotional pressure.
And if children were naturally religious, you wouldn't need it.
I don't need to guilt my child into eating foods that she likes because she likes them and it's natural for her to want to do that.
I don't have to say, you better learn how to climb those stairs or you're going to burn in hell forever because she will keep climbing the stairs until she's mastered it because she wants to master things because that's her natural state of mind.
And the same thing is true for the state, of course.
I don't think we need to go into too much detail.
I would say that no, human beings are not naturally hierarchical.
Human beings are not naturally violent.
And we know that because we have this vast machinery called the state which outsources violence.
If everybody had a strong desire for violence, there'd be no such thing as a government.
But people don't like to use force, which is why they like other people to do it for them under the guise Of passing laws, right?
So the average person on welfare wouldn't want to go out and steal the money that he's getting through the government doing it for him.
So he doesn't like violence.
He likes the proceeds of violence in welfare payments and so on.
And please understand I'm not calling everybody who's on welfare immoral or anything.
I'm just saying that the reality is they wouldn't go and steal.
They don't want to become violent.
But they're more than happy to take the fruits of violence if somebody else does it in a way that they can't see.
And so all of these ways of avoiding the reality of the system, all these ways of indoctrinating children, the amount of effort and energy, hundreds of billions of dollars around the world are poured into propagandizing children.
That must be because they don't believe this stuff naturally.
Therefore it has to be inflicted on them.
Overall then we're talking about, it seems that Some humans, at least, have this tendency to want to control others.
I mean, what's the big idea here?
Why is there so much money put into propaganda?
It's to keep us all in line.
But why?
Why is it that some humans have this tendency?
I mean, some people Who, you know, might read a heavily kind of edited and concise version of what we're talking about now, might be a little bit...
They might think that the concept of them being slaves is ridiculous.
I mean, I'm obviously reminded of that famous quote from Goethe.
Is it Goethe? Goethe.
I don't know who I'm talking about, the quote I'm talking about.
They'll say, you know, I'm not enslaved.
I've not been propagandarized.
You know, I make up my own mind about things.
Right, right. But that's very easy to counter, right?
So if people say, well, I'm not enslaved, I would say, well, that's a testable theory, right?
I mean, I'm not going to say to somebody, you're enslaved because I say that you are.
I mean, who the hell would care about my opinion?
I like ice cream too.
That doesn't mean everybody must or should or...
Anything like that. So I would just say to somebody, look, if you don't believe that you're enslaved, then that's fine.
Then what you need to do is you need to choose for yourself how you're going to help the poor and not pay your taxes.
You need to choose for yourself how your children are going to be educated and not pay the taxes to support the public school system.
You need to choose for yourself who you're going to hire and under what terms and conditions You are going to hire them.
You need to choose for yourself how you are going to save for your old age.
You need to choose for yourself whether you're going to support the unjust imperialistic wars overseas that your government may be engaged in and therefore not pay taxes to support the military industrial complex.
You need to choose for yourself how your life is going to be, who you're going to interact with, and how you're going to apply your resources that you have justly earned in this world.
They wouldn't be able to do any of those things because if they tried to do even one of those things they would receive a sternly worded letter from their local tax farmers and if they ignored that letter they would receive another letter or two then they would receive a court date and then their money would be taken at source if that were possible or if that weren't possible police would come to collect it and if they resisted they would be shot.
So even in the basics of how is it I'm going to help the poor?
How is it my children are going to be educated?
How is my money to be spent to do things in the world?
How am I going to voluntarily interact with other people?
I mean, there's this huge confusion about why there's such high unemployment in the United States.
It's a ridiculous question.
And the fact that there are so many answers only shows the degree to which people are propagandized.
In a book which is, I think, well worth reading called Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell is writing about, like, he spent a couple of years rolling around the countryside with tramps in Paris and London, of course.
And he said, it's so funny, you know, if you spend some time with these homeless people, you'll read all of these treatises about, you know, why do they continue to move from one town to another?
Why don't they settle down in one place and blah, blah, blah?
And these sociologists, they're all like, oh, because they have this wanderlust, because they have this gypsy blood, because they have this psychological desire for a constant motion and so on.
And he said, but it's all nonsense.
The reason that they move from town to town is that if they stay for more than two consecutive nights in any town, they get thrown in jail.
And people come up with all this nonsense to explain these basic things which people are prevented from doing by force.
So why is there such high unemployment in the United States?
Because if people get a job under terms that they're willing to work under, which the government disapproves of, they'll get thrown in jail.
They're forcibly prevented from working.
So if somebody says, well, I'm willing to accept below the minimum wage, no luck.
The government will throw them and certainly the employer in jail after fining them and stealing money.
Or if they say, well, I really want to have a job, But I'm happy to take care of my own retirement plans, thank you very much, because I'm an adult and who's allowed to vote and therefore I'm not going to pay my social security tax and that's how I'm going to get a job.
No luck, right?
I want to get a job in a particular sector but I don't want to join this union because I don't happen to think that I need a thuggish gang to negotiate on my behalf.
Nope, you are not allowed to and you will be thrown in jail if you take that job.
The reason that people are unemployed is because they'll be thrown in jail for taking jobs.
It's really very simple.
All of these complex economic arguments are just fluff.
They're like smoke hiding the bodies on the battlefield.
It's all just the result of violence.
If you don't see the violence that is at the root of the system, people's behavior becomes completely incomprehensible.
It's like looking at, if you've ever seen those just chilling videos of school shootings.
There's one, I think, of Columbine where all of these All of these teenagers are running around the school screaming.
If you don't know that there's a person with a gun, then you're like, I don't know why this is hysterical.
Why are they playing this incredibly intense game of tag?
It makes no sense. You know, did they drink something?
Are they all on drugs? It makes no sense until you see that there's a gun in the equation.
And until people see that there's a gun in the equation in the state of society, people's behavior will just be incomprehensible to them.
And I think purposefully so.
It'll be very difficult for some people, perhaps as a result of the sense of the propaganda, to imagine a world without states, a world without national administrators, authoritarian regimes, just as it's very difficult for people to imagine a world without money.
For instance, I was speaking with Jacques Fresco.
I had the pleasure of speaking with that chap a few months ago, and it's a question I put to him.
It's like, you know, it'd be very difficult to imagine a world without money for people.
I mean, we live in, I think, very interesting and perhaps worrying times where you mentioned the military-industrial complex, and we have a huge...
We've allowed, through being...
I'm told that there's the boogeyman out there, whether it's the Russians, or now it's Al-Qaeda, or whatever threat is out there, and we've been hoodwinked into allowing this huge military force to grow.
A lot of people are going to be feeling quite impotent in the shadow of that.
How do we change things when the people in control are so desperate to keep hold of that control?
What's the nature of it?
Is it the fact that things will naturally fall away when people, as you say, they see the elephant in the room?
Let me see if I can formulate a decent question out of this.
Basically, I'm kind of, perhaps I'm wondering how we get from here to there.
How do we rebel in a lawful way, in a peaceful way?
Because I don't want, you know, more violence isn't going to solve anything.
It seems to me, anyway, that it's a problem of cognizance that, as you said, I think In one of your lectures that I was listening to.
The problem isn't the fight against evil, it's the recognition of it.
You mentioned, I think, the example you gave in the talk that I listened to was that people don't believe, that people don't see that statism is an evil thing.
And therefore, you know, once they see it, Then the penny drops and there's no longer a fight against evil because it kind of falls away upon recognition because no one wants to embrace something that they obviously know is evil.
How will we get from here to there?
Is it just the case of will we have to stop paying our taxes when more people realize what they're going to fund and they realize that the premises of war are complete B.S. I found the question finally, Stefan. You really had me on tenterhooks.
I'm like, it's coming. I'm feeling it.
I'm feeling it, baby. No problem at all.
I'm enjoying the conversation, so take your time.
Oh, good. I like to see where we go and stuff.
What is the... People are going to say, oh, it's no use.
I meet with a lot of apathy, whether it's the fluoride in the water they're drinking or it's just the propaganda on the TV or a mixture of both.
What can we do?
We see that the state is an evil thing.
I don't support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably soon Iran and who knows where else.
I don't. But what can I do?
That's a perfectly valid question.
And the answer in the short run is you can't do anything.
I mean, the governments are so powerful.
The governments have such overwhelming military force and the governments have the traumatized PTSD Stockholm Syndrome support of the majority of the population.
So no, there's nothing that can be done in the moment.
I mean, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, or at least Iraq in particular, that was the largest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the planet.
Tens of millions of people around the world violently opposed, or vehemently, I should say, opposed to these wars.
And these wars, of course, went on and continued and so on.
People don't allow this to happen.
People don't allow this to happen any more than people in jail Seems to mysteriously suffer from agoraphobia.
I mean, they're forced.
They're forced, and human beings submit to violence.
That's why violence is so popular among certain kinds of nasty people, is that it works really, really well.
Human beings, biologically, we are programmed to survive.
We are programmed to reproduce.
We're not programmed to die for our principles, because any human being who had that as his The obedience genes are present, and the threat of violence works incredibly well.
Against a general population.
And it's rational. Because no individual human people has the right to be and say, well, if we all stop paying our taxes, then the system will collapse.
And it's like, that's true.
But it's never going to happen.
Because human beings make a rational calculation.
And they say, well, if I can't do anything about it, I'm going to focus on that which I can control.
And that, to me, is a perfectly rational and healthy thing to do.
To obsess about trying to change that which you cannot change is, I think, a sign of morbidity in the personality and is not empirical to the situation.
Now, that having been said, the examples of change within society are very clear, at least to me, about what needs to be done, and I'll give you my very short outline of what needs to be done.
You can look at two of the major changes in human society since the Enlightenment.
The first, of course, is the abolition of legal slavery, of formal slavery, and the second is the egalitarianism of women.
Now, it was, you could say, the 18th century or even the 17th century when the first murmurings of slavery as immoral began to be mentioned, and it really was about 200 years, between 150 and 200 years, until it came to pass that More people began to accept it and the government began to stop enforcing slavery.
Slavery was not a free market institution.
Slavery was something that was enforced and paid for by governments.
It could never work in a free market.
You couldn't have it because it's too expensive to go and catch all these slaves.
You have to have the government do it for you so everybody pays.
And so it took 150 to 200 years and even then slavery was only indifferently eliminated.
Now we have free-range tax livestock farming as I talk about.
And you could look at Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's original writing, Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was one of the first cases for equal treatment for women in English, which was, I think, the early 18th century.
And you could look at the 1960s with the advent of the pill and labor-saving devices around the home and a strong Sociopolitical or philosophical movement that it began to be achieved in the mindset.
And now, of course, it's taken as a given that women are equal to men, which is, of course, quite right.
And so it takes a long time.
It takes a long time.
And the reason that it takes a long time is that human beings, very few human beings, have the capacity to change their core beliefs.
I mean, the physical...
And I've got a video called The Bomb and the Brain Part 4 which talks about the physiology behind this and I won't bore you with the details now.
But the vast majority of human beings are physically incapable of changing their core beliefs.
All they will do is make up whatever ex post facto judgment Or reasoning that they want to in order to justify their core beliefs.
This is well known in the sciences.
In the sciences it is said that the believers in an old paradigm never change their minds.
They just die off eventually and they're replaced by people who can think more clearly.
And so social change of the magnitude that we're talking about and you know statism is a very large thing to change.
It's a very large and very deep thing to change.
It is at least as old as slavery but affects more people than slavery and of course at least in the US more than a third of people are dependent upon the state for their income directly or indirectly and so it is a very very large thing to change and the vast majority of people We're unreachable by reason and evidence.
This is just psychologically and scientifically true.
And so the only thing that you can do is look at it as a multigenerational change.
And the way that...
If you want to change English into some other language, let's say you had this mad...
You want to make everyone speak Esperanto.
Well, how many people are going to drop English and start speaking Esperanto?
Well, nobody fundamentally except for a few people who are probably also learning Klingon.
So the way that you do it is you simply speak, you teach your children Esperanto and you don't teach them English.
That's the only way that you, because then a generation will grow up speaking Esperanto and not speaking English and that's how you'll replace English with Esperanto.
And so it's the same thing when it comes to volunteerism and peace within the world.
What you do is you raise your children in a non-aggressive manner.
You raise your children as equals.
And with the recognition that they have limited cognitive faculties and limited abilities to process the consequences of their actions and so on, but you raise them without the imposition of aggression or the threat of the withdrawal of affection, which to a child is equally aggressive.
You raise them as equals.
You raise them in a non-hierarchical, non-abusive, non-aggressive, non-violent manner.
You don't spank, you don't raise your voice, you don't intimidate, you don't bully, you don't threaten, you don't You don't do these things that are entirely dependent upon you as the parent being bigger and stronger and more powerful.
And what happens then is that your children do not grow up speaking the language of hierarchy, of power, of authority, of submission.
And when children do not grow up speaking that language, they won't speak statism.
They won't speak So when they go out into the world, they'll look upon the state as a weird anachronism.
Like if you and I went to the doctor complaining of a toothache and they started applying leeches to us, you'd be like, what the hell are you doing?
You crazy guy. That's a medieval treatment.
And so when children who are raised In non-hierarchical, non-violent, non-aggressive, non-authoritarian environments, when they grow up and people say, well, we need the government to force people to do X, Y, and Z because that's the only way they'll be good, people will look at them like they're crazy, like they're saying that the Earth is flat and that the sun goes around the Earth.
They'll be like, no, it doesn't.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't.
And so when people want to suggest data solutions to social problems, children who are raised in a peaceful manner when they're adults, they'll just say, that's not how it works.
That's not going to work. And they simply won't support it because they just don't speak that language.
I hope that that's a fairly lengthy answer, but I hope it makes some sense.
No, it does. And thanks for that.
I think that really does elucidate because how important it is that people are having children Which is something that I haven't ruled in or ruled out with my wife, to be honest.
Do it! Do it!
Do it! I shouldn't say that.
Do it if you want, of course, but it's a fantastic thing.
But anyway. Thank you.
I've had a lot of friends You guys don't have kids and people like you don't have kids.
I wouldn't do it for the survival of the ideology, but I would definitely do.
I mean, it's a wonderful thing, but of course, if you have doubts, it's better to hold off because it's a huge, huge time commitment.
I mean, that's the majority of my day is parenting.
So it's a huge time commitment, at least for the first couple of years.
So yeah, if you have doubts, I would hold off.
But it is a beautiful thing.
If you can throw yourself in it, heart and soul, then there's nothing better.
Well, I mean, I think about it a lot and I have a sneaky feeling we probably will, but we're still pretty young and so there's plenty of time for that.
No, you're not. No?
No, empirically, I don't know how old.
If your wife is roughly your age, then time's ticking away.
She's 30, yeah.
Yeah, okay, you've got a bit of time.
But, I mean, I wish I'd had kids a little bit younger.
I mean, I'm not quite as spry as I was when I was 35, now that I'm 43 or whatever.
And, of course, she is a massive energy child.
Anyway, but you have time if your wife's younger.
Does your daughter have nightmares?
Is she afraid of it?
She's not afraid of the dark.
In fact, she's not afraid of anything.
I'm just going to bore you with a kid story now, but we took her to her first gymnastics class on Saturday, and she was running along beams, she was bouncing, she was throwing herself into the big soft block pit.
She is absolutely fearless, but not foolhardy.
She's cautious, so if she's trying to go down a step that's too big for her, she will stop and she will hold up her hand for help.
But if I try to help her on something that she can do, then she will vehemently reject my help and I can do it on my own and she doesn't want her help.
But she's not, what else, she's not afraid.
She's comfortable with dogs.
She can occasionally be a little bit shy if she gets swarmed by kids.
I took her to the park today.
There happened to be a school trip out and the kids all, you know, oh, she's so cute and fawned all over her and she did eventually want to be picked up because it's a bit overwhelming, all these people reaching and sort of reaching for her.
But no, she's not afraid.
She's at this park near where we live where there's this big slide that goes, this sort of curvy slide, it goes round and round.
And it was just yesterday, I've been going down the slide with her, and then just yesterday she pushed me away and she said, no, and I can do it, basically, she was saying to me.
And she was right. She sat down, she went down the slide, and she did it just fine on her own for the first time.
So she's not... She will occasionally wake up crying, but I don't think that's because of a nightmare.
I think she just wakes up and she happens to notice that her beloved parents aren't around, and so she wants her company.
But no, she doesn't have night terrors.
She doesn't have fears.
She's relentlessly and enjoyably positive and optimistic and happy.
And of course, I think that's partly her nature, but it has a lot to do with the fact that she's never heard a raised voice.
She's never felt any aggression in the home.
She's never felt any aggression outside the home.
So I think that she's got nothing to be afraid of, if that makes any sense.
Well, it does.
I mean, there will be some parents who say, you know, how is she going to cope in the big wide world?
You know, it's Some people have a very thin view of the world is what I'm getting at now.
I'm not questioning your particular parenting tactic here, but I guess what I want to talk about a little bit is that there seems to be, certainly from a lot of the emails I receive from the readers of our magazine, quite a lot of fear that's kind of in the mental environment at the moment.
There's fear of endless war, There's fear of poverty, fear of, well, what am I going to do if I don't have a job or I don't have money?
I'm always being pulled aside by my more belt-and-braces friends who have gone down the career path and stuff like this.
They say, Dan, you're publishing all these pretty, what they would call, eggy articles.
Aren't you afraid that you're gonna get the men in black coming to visit you or something like that?
Have you been afraid in your life and how have you coped with that fear if you have?
Oh yeah, I mean of course there is always fear about standing up to the social norms.
I think that's natural and I think it would be unhealthy to not have that fear but It really comes down to a decision that I made many years ago when I first became interested in philosophy in my mid-teens.
One of the things that's kind of impossible to miss when you study philosophy is how philosophy has regularly gotten its ass kicked for the past 2500 years.
Philosophy is still A discipline that is widely misunderstood by people.
Most of the questions that Socrates asked, what is truth, what is justice, what is virtue, remain completely unanswered in the field of philosophy in any comprehensive way, in any way that is generally accepted.
If you look at the progress that science, or even if you just look at medicine or physics, any discipline of science, if you look at the progress that science has made just in the last 200 years, It's staggering if you look at the progress that computer science has made over the past 40 years.
It's staggering if you look at the progress that philosophy has made over the past 2500 years.
It's absolutely pitiful and wretched.
It is the least successful human discipline that can conceivably be imagined.
Even the most tiny, pitiful religion is more successful.
Than philosophy has been as a whole.
And so when I first became interested in philosophy, I remember saying to myself, I said to myself, okay, I'm going to go into philosophy, but I'm not going to go into philosophy halfway.
I'm not going to go into philosophy unless I feel I can grab this sorry, wretched, and pitiful discipline by the scruff of its neck and yank it up somewhere positive.
And that's going to require stuff that I can't even think about now.
But if I'm going to go into philosophy, it's with the express intention of pulling its ass forward from its squatting primitive beaten down 98 pound weakling in a field full of wrestlers stature.
And so for me, I mean, I think that I've done that and obviously there's lots of participation and I've leaned on philosophers far smarter than I am in many ways, but I think that I've done that.
I have brought philosophy some vitality.
I brought philosophy some, you know, particularly with my theory on ethics, universally preferable behavior.
I've brought some real progress in determinism, in atheism, in the primary Socratic virtue of self-knowledge and so on, and in ethics.
And so for me, it's like I would not want to be in philosophy and expose myself to the general opposition of the general population if I wasn't at least giving philosophy a bit of a workout to beef it up so that it could go out and kick the asses of disciplines that aren't even disciplines, like statism, like religiosity, like other forms of social fantasies.
Unless I could bulk up philosophy and have it go out and kick some sand in the faces of other stupid disciplines, I wasn't even going to do it at all.
And so I'm willing to take on the risk.
I'm willing to take on the opposition of lots and lots of people if I'm moving philosophy forward.
And I think if people are able to do that, then that's a good thing.
I think if you're into philosophy and you're taking on all the risk and the opposition of the general population and special interests, And you're not actually moving the discipline forward.
That to me wasn't, that's a lose-lose.
You don't actually have the pride of moving stuff forward but you have all of the risk and danger of general opposition.
So that was really my focus and approach and that's really what has driven me for these many years.
I'm deeply interested in philosophy and have been for, you know, since I was able to afford to buy a book.
What To you, I mean, what is your central aim, if indeed you have one, what is your central interest in your philosophical pursuits?
I guess, I mean, obviously I alluded earlier to Descartes and Lucico, ergo sum, the famous thing.
So he pinned it down to, well, the only thing I can really be sure of as a fact is that I'm thinking.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between the organic, biological brain, that lump of flesh inside your skull, and the process of thinking or consciousness?
I mean, you'll probably be aware of the...
I'm aware of two divergent schools of thought on this, that the brain is...
one is the brain produces consciousness, and then secondly, I think Alas Hooksy alluded to it, but, I forget, broad, I think it was, the Cambridge philosopher that says that he suggested the primary function of the brain is to eliminate consciousness.
I'm sure you're more than familiar with what I'm pointing at.
Is that something of interest to you?
Do you think it's a question worth asking of the origins of consciousness?
Can we actually ask any meaningful questions about it or is it the kind of putting yourself up by your own bootstraps, kind of disappear up your own backside?
I think those are interesting questions.
I think that they will eventually not be answered by philosophy, but rather by science, by physics and chemistry and medicine and fMRIs and all that kind of stuff.
I think that consciousness is an effect of matter, of brain matter.
Consciousness is an effect of the brain in the same way that gravity is an effect of mass.
There's no such thing as consciousness without matter, at least that we know of, and there's no such thing as a brain that is active and working in a healthy manner that does not produce consciousness at some level.
So without a doubt, consciousness is an effect of matter.
The nature of it is not going to be discovered by philosophical reasoning.
It is going to be discovered by scientific theories and validation and so on.
There's no philosophy that can reveal to you the theory of relativity.
That is a scientific matter.
There's no philosophy that is going to prove the theory of evolution.
That is a matter for empirical examination and examination of the fossil records and examination of changes in Living beings with short life spans according to different conditions in the real world.
So I don't think that philosophy is going to explain consciousness any more than philosophy can explain quantum physics.
That is just that that is a matter for science.
I do think that philosophy counsels patience and honesty in the realm of ignorance, right?
Philosophy says, if I don't know, the honest statement is to say, I don't know.
And the dishonest statement is to say, God did it, or it doesn't matter, or whatever, or it is known when it's not.
So where did the universe come from?
I don't know. And nobody knows.
I don't accept any kind of answer like, God did it.
I mean, that's just nonsense.
It's like putting a band-aid on thin air and calling it a healing.
And so I think the questions of consciousness are interesting.
But I will say this. I will say that philosophy...
And I've used this metaphor before, so I'll keep it brief, but I view people interested in philosophy as battlefield surgeons in a very intense and bloody conflict.
And as battlefield surgeons, people are constantly being wheeled in front of us and we're running from hospital bed to stretcher to hospital bed and we're doing triage.
And we're saying, okay, this guy, his chest has been blown out, and he's going to be dead in two minutes, so I'm going to have to keep moving.
This guy, I can cut his leg off because it's been shattered, but he'll live for an hour until I can do that, so I'm going to move on to someone else until I come across that guy who, if I don't deal with him in the next five minutes, he's going to die, but if I do deal with him in the next five minutes,
he's going to live. Now, it's an extreme way of looking at it, but Given the amount of violence and economic and political instability around the world, the prison population which is constantly increasing, the selling off of our children, the auctioning off using the unborn as collateral,
which is really what national debts are, all of this stuff is so desperately catastrophic to the flourishing and peace of the future, that to me, if you're a philosopher, then get your ass in the trenches.
Get your ass in the trenches.
I don't mean you, right? In general, right?
Stop worrying about the mind-body dichotomy.
That's like a battlefield surgeon saying, it would be very interesting to see what I could see with an fMRI if I could build it right now.
Well, there's no time. You know, we hope in the future that we will be able to worry about the mind-body dichotomy because that means that we've dealt with all this other stuff.
That is pressing down upon us.
I'd love to live in a world where the most pressing problem with philosophy was the nature of identity, the mind-body dichotomy, and the origin of concepts.
I think that would be fantastic.
But wouldn't it be great if philosophy could at least be used to help people understand that the initiation of force is immoral, whether you have a blue-green costume on or not?
That's how basic a level philosophy has to work with, which is the propagation of the non-aggression principle, the delineation of ethics, the standing up for virtue in the face of universal scorn and hostility to integrity and reason, standing up against the fantasy superstitions of religiosity, standing up against collectivism, standing up against all the accumulated errors of thinking we call culture.
That's the battlefield immediacy of what philosophy needs to do and people who spend all of their time, like I was just reading the other day, a bunch of academic philosophers have put together a large number of essays on a television show called Lost.
I mean, talk about an apt title for philosophers.
Is the most pressing thing in the world for philosophers to deal with right now in a time of universal war, debts, global collapse, is the most important thing an analysis.
Of a freaking television show.
That, to me, is truly fiddling while Rome burns.
And that's worrying about whether you should repaint the lower deck of the Titanic that's three inches above the water.
That is astounding and inevitable because they're all a bunch of state-paid intellectual whores, frankly.
But I think philosophers need to get out of the ivory tower, get into the trenches and start mucking it up with the general population so that we can get some kind of agreement on what virtue, truth and ethics really are.
And the challenge is not to come up with the theories of ethics because we can say to a three-year-old child, don't hit, don't steal, don't push, don't lie.
And a three-year-old child can understand that.
Ethics can be understood by a child as young as 14 to 18 months old.
And so that's the level that we need to be communicating with people at.
It's like, hey, remember what you were told when you were two?
It's true and it's universal and what follows from that?
Well, No governments, no indoctrination, no violence, no war, no taxation.
This is all that follows from the stuff that we all accept at the age of two.
So it really is about intensity and repetition and focus and consistency and integrity and courage.
It is not about the exploration of arcana.
I can't wait till such a time exists, but the time is not now.
You can probably tell I live on a very quiet, spewed little island in Yeah, well I think I'm the same way,
so I agree with that. Yeah, I've been lucky enough to travel and see how other people live and yeah, they don't have the luxury of ponding over the The mind-body dichotomy,
as you put it. We started off talking about how we talked about anarchism and how people, if you call yourself an anarchist, people have a preconceived idea about that.
What preconceived ideas do you think people have on philosophy and philosophers?
Oh, it's tragic.
Oh, it's tragic. You know, we need to philosophize in the trenches.
It might be a difficult concept.
They might be thinking that you're there, you know, and people kind of think about philosophers as quite bookish people.
They see it as the intellectual discipline.
I think the term you're looking for is pussies.
I think philosophers are generally regarded as pussies.
I don't know if you've ever seen, this is a film called Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Yes. Well, in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, they go back in time to Socrates.
And Socrates is portrayed as a doddering, half-blind old guy jabbering away.
And, I mean, to me it's pretty funny because I think, I can't remember who's who, but one of the Keanu Reeves guys is like, All we are, dude, is dust in the wind.
You know, like that song, Dust in the Wind.
And Socrates is like, ooh, that's really cool.
And that is the popular perception.
It makes you sound, you know, whilst you stroke your beat, left or right.
Yeah, like it's all esoteric nonsense.
It's all arguing for argument's sake.
It's never resolved. It's too abstract.
It's too obtuse. There are these different schools of thought.
I mean, how could there be different schools of thought in a reason and evidence-based discipline?
Unless there's some frontier of knowledge.
Like there's no different schools of thought about whether the world is round or flat in physics.
There's not a lot of disagreement about it.
There's no different schools of thought about whether the speed of light is constant or whether gases expand when they're heated.
The basics of science do not shatter into different schools of thoughts.
The basis of religion does, because religion is completely anti-empirical and anti-rational.
And so the fact that there are different schools of thought in philosophy about the basics, like truth, like the development of concepts, like virtue, like integrity, even honesty, has different schools of thought because it relies upon whether there's such a thing as truth.
And so philosophy has not made it out of the paddock of religion as yet.
And I think that is just shameful.
It is shameful that philosophy is in such a decrepit and pitiful state where it doesn't even have the crazy certainty of religion.
All philosophy seems to want to do or has seemed to want to do is find a certainty and puncture it.
It is a form of paralytic.
It is like It's like sucking down a man of war and getting paralyzed.
That's what philosophy does. Philosophy takes the most intelligent and curious and intellectually assertive people and it injects them with a paralytic called doubt.
And whether that's Cartesian or Buddhist Or Schopenhauerian or even doubt about the virtue of man's nature through Hobbes or the most famous of all is the Platonic or Kantian new or mean or higher realms.
It just gets whatever certainty you have and screws it up completely.
It is a form of paralytic.
It is actually against the progress of truth, reason and virtue, the most of philosophy.
And so I think that the popular conception of philosophers that there are otherworldly doubt infectors of everyone and that you better steer clear of them if you want to have even certainty as to whether or not you have toes or hands.
You better stay away from these parasitical venom creatures who only inject uncertainty into everything that you believe and never, ever lead you back towards certainty.
And that, of course, is partly the result of the most influential philosopher Socrates who asked many more questions than he answered.
And when he did answer questions, at least according to Plato, his answers were just relentlessly anti-rational, and I've got a video on the trial and death of Socrates, a series of videos if you want more on that.
But yeah, I think that philosophers are lampooned, resented, opposed, and avoided, as they rightly should be, as servers of the status quo by injecting a kind of paralytic venom into any curious mind they find.
So it seems like the philosophy has been corrupted into, it's almost eating itself.
As you say, Descartes was kind of, he kind of ate his own mind, he became uncertain of anything other than that he was uncertain really.
And doubt is healthy, I mean doubt is healthy and I think that's great.
Science, of course, starts with doubt, right?
I mean, the original Earth-centered model of the solar system seemed to make sense because it didn't feel like we were moving and it sure looked like the Sun and the Moon went around us.
And so the Earth-centered model of the solar system made sense empirically.
But it was just, you know, things like the retrograde motion of Mars as we spin around the Sun made it all look kind of silly.
They started inventing more and more nonsense to make the system work if the Earth was at the center.
And it wasn't until I think it was Copernicus or Tycho Brahe or one of those guys who First came up, or Galileo, came up with the heliocentric model where everything made sense if you put the Sun at the center.
But they had to doubt the existing system in order to come up with a better system.
So I'm all for doubt. But doubt has to be followed by a relentless pursuit of a new certainty.
Otherwise all you're doing is you're corroding a rickety bridge without building anything new.
I'd like to...
I'll probably wrap up with this one actually because I'm conscious of taking up too much of your time.
But we probably wouldn't be having this conversation now if it wasn't for the internet in the first instance me finding.
Actually, I found someone posted your YouTube video, the story of your enslavement, and I went from there.
And that's how I became familiar with your website and etc.
I'm tremendously excited by the internet.
Are you, do you, what process, do you not think that we are, that the internet kind of is a catalyst for something that's been going on anyway, in that we have this evolution of ideas.
I mean, we talk about the fact that we're all, to a certain extent, philosophers.
We're all sharing our view of the world and challenging other people's view, and through that process of We have a shared worldview, or a culture, as you might refer to it.
To what extent is the internet shaping culture?
Is it exaggerating the bad as much as the good?
I mean, the fact that we have this ability now for many, many people on earth To communicate in an entirely new way, in a free way.
What implications do you think that has on this evolutionary process?
And by that I mean in terms of ideas and the wider thing, really, of people coming to recognize evils.
Are you excited by the internet, or do you feel that it's going to be something that will inevitably be controlled by the state?
Well, I think the state will attempt to control it, but it won't work.
The internet can't be controlled in that way.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I would have no particular recognition as a philosopher without the internet.
And the internet is the most extraordinary revolution in human communication that has ever happened, and the only one that would be a distant second would be, I guess, the invention of the printing press and the translation by Luther of the Bible into the vernacular, out of Latin or Greek, into the vernacular.
That is an amazing thing.
It is an amazing thing that human beings can virtually instantaneously communicate with each other at virtually no charge around the world.
It is the ultimate opening up of the channels of communication away from the powers that be.
It is a truly staggering and unprecedented achievement in human history.
In general, these improvements make things worse socially before they make things better.
For instance, the internet allows people to visit only those sites that reinforce their initial perceptions, right?
So conservatives go to conservative sites and libertarians go to libertarian sites and socialists go to socialist sites and you end up in the self-reflective bubble that actually I think intensifies social A conflict to some degree.
Of course, in the same way that when the Bible was translated into the vernacular, you had the shattering of the unity of Christendom as it was then called into these warring factions of Calvinism and Zungalianism and Lutheranism and all these other kinds of Protestant breakaway sects, which resulted in enormous religious conflicts.
I'm not saying it's going to go that far, but so the internet is an incredibly, staggeringly, mind-bendingly powerful tool of communication.
It has its risks.
It is the greatest chance that freedom and truth and reason has ever had, has ever had, in the history of the world.
And that's one of the reasons why my output tends to be so voluminous and so heart-sweatingly passionate at times, because I think that it's now or never when it comes to communicating about truth and reason.
Because, of course, good guys like you and I aren't the only people using the internet.
Lots of bad people use the internet.
To do destructive and negative things that are directly in opposition to what it is that we're trying to do.
And so, I may be out-fought, but I'm never going to be out-talked.
That's my general approach to the internet.
And that's why I've been pushing out, I guess, close to 1700 podcasts.
Six or seven free books and all of this sort of stuff because it is now or never.
This time where bandwidth costs are down, where server costs are down before any controls that may be attempted or put into place, before the retaliation occurs, Now is the time, and if it is not now, I think that it genuinely will be, or is likely to be, almost never.
So I think it is very important for us to put out our major efforts at the moment to use the internet as much as possible, to be as passionate, clear, and positive in our communications as humanly possible.
Because I do not know when a chance like this, which philosophy has waited for for 3,000 years, I do not know when it is going to come back.
And so I think that we must do everything that we can now, if not sooner.
Absolutely. I'm with you on that one.
I also think the internet could serve as an amazing Infrastructure upon which we could have a truly new and popular form of monetary exchange.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the work of Paul Grignon, Money is Debt.
Have you seen that film?
I have, and I mean, I have my criticisms of the Zeitgeist Movement.
I certainly am violently or at least vehemently opposed to statist currency, which is, it is debt.
It is selling people. It is horrible.
It's like script for cattle.
Government printed and maintained currency is just a hideous way of stealing, particularly from the poor, through inflation and national debt.
I think that if people want to use a medium of exchange in a free society, they're welcome too.
I don't think I would ever use force to prevent people from doing it, and I certainly would never use force to make people use a currency.
I think that we should allow the free choices of individuals to determine what currency will be, but it certainly won't be anything like It is now any more than education will be anything like it is now once we take the coercion out of the equation.
Yeah. Well, Seven, it's an absolute pleasure talking to you this morning.
Are we still on this morning or are we on this afternoon?
It doesn't matter. I think we just crossed over.
Thanks so much for your time.
What I'm going to do from here is I will I think we'll write up our conversation, perhaps suggest some highlights, some points, so we'll continue over a few emails, and perhaps we'll talk again.
Obviously, I'm going to look for some kind of cohesive themes in what we've spoken about, but it would be great to To kind of print an interview between us, we really do pride ourselves on the cultural aspects of our magazine and the readers really appreciate it as well.
Well, I certainly appreciate the time and the exposure.
I hope that it was interesting enough for your readers.
I'm sure it will be.
Oh, I think so.
I definitely think so. Hopefully not too interesting for your readers.
I think that's probably what I want to say.
That was cool. We have over 200,000 readers every two months and a lot of them won't be aware of, I imagine they won't be aware of the philosophical websites out there, including your own.
One thing I'd definitely like to do is represent the idea of philosophy.
So that it's not the Bill and Ted kind of version.
Yeah, to kind of encourage people to start thinking for themselves.
And there's certainly an awful lot of meat in what we've been speaking about that might help along that way.
So yeah, I'll be in touch.
Thank you very much and I appreciate your time.
Yeah, thanks very much, Stephanie.
Have a good day. Take care then.
▲
Export Selection