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April 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

15:20

2128 Where I Get My Information

Stefan Molyneux discusses his sources for information. .

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	Alrighty, so most of these questions just have to do with your work.
	They're pretty simple.
	I only have five, so it shouldn't take too long.
	I do simple, actually.
	Alright, so the first one is, what kinds of professional materials do you read?
	Oh, this is the Sarah Palin question.
	I can't see Alaska from my house, unless there's a really mirrored set of cumulus clouds.
	So, which professional materials do I read for my show?
	Yeah. Or just for fun?
	Well, I grit my teeth and read the New York Times.
	I grit my teeth. Particularly, I'm very interested in contemporary justifications or rather obfuscations of monetary policy.
	So I will read the sort of mainstream economic arguments to find out whether people are actually talking about currency and the Fed and all of that sort of stuff.
	So I do grit my teeth and do that.
	I also check out the Huffington Post online.
	I think they have a pretty good A pretty well-rounded view of culture, which is not to say, of course, everything or anything that I approve of, but they do have very interesting articles that I think give a sense of the mood and also give a sense of what's not being talked about.
	I subscribe to a Canadian magazine called Maclean's, and for fun I read hardcore computer magazines.
	I also get the Economics Institute has a daily or weekly email message that comes out.
	You can also get these kinds of things from Mises.ca or Mises.com as well.
	But, you know, I'm a big, monstrous, huge audiobook fan, and I have been I guess I'm in my 11th year of my account at audible.com, which I highly recommend.
	And so I really, really like audiobooks.
	I can listen to them while I'm dozing off.
	I can listen to them while I'm exercising.
	I can listen to them in a variety of places.
	I find it very hard to sit down and Especially as a stay-at-home dad to find the time to sort of read from top to bottom a book, although I'm getting a bit more into ebooks now, but you can listen to audiobooks, car, anywhere, so I'm a big fan of those with the minor problem that you can't make very good notes.
	Oh, that's a great point!
	I should reference that. But those are the major sources of information.
	And of course, last but not least, certainly not least, the Free Domain Radio Message Board has a variety of very prolific posters who scour the internet for the true gems among the sand and post them there.
	And I've based a large number of shows from those.
	I'm also a big fan of Casey Research, CaseyResearch.com.
	They've got very good economic stuff.
	And the Dollar Vigilante as well also I think has very good economic stuff.
	So, yep, it's just a wide variety of sources.
	Cool, thanks. Second question is, how much writing do you do and what kind, like fiction, non-fiction, opinion, stuff like that?
	I wrote a lot of books.
	I've written a lot of books in my life, some of which I've never seen in the light of day.
	I first started writing, I wrote a novel called, well, actually I started a novel, did about half of it when I was 12, called By the Light of an Alien Sun, a science fiction book, which was actually read out.
	In it, there was a zero gravity kissing scene between me and a very thinly disguised girl in my class that I liked.
	My English teacher was very excited that a 12-year-old was writing a novel, so she read it out in the class.
	And there was quite a bit of hysteria on everybody's part when they got to the kissing scene in Zero Gravity.
	And, of course, the girl blushed quite fiercely, and the teacher complained that she was not sure if she could legally continue to read the book at everyone.
	So, yeah, I did that, and I wrote some short stories of my teens.
	And then I went to the National Theatre School, and I studied playwriting and acting, and I wrote a lot of plays.
	I produced one in Toronto, which was an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons called Seduction.
	And then I wrote a novel called Revolutions, which is actually available on my website at freedomainradio.com.
	And a novel called The God of Atheists, a comedy novel, really an expose of modern culture.
	And then I wrote a long, which I've sort of got to go back and do one more revision of.
	A novel about a family, two families really, a German family and a British family between World War I and World War II, including both wars, which kind of comes from my own family background, which is English-Irish and German-German.
	And that's called Almost.
	And anyway, then I won't go into each book, but then I've written a bunch of philosophical books that are available mostly for free.
	I mean, all of the electronic copies, the EPUBs, the PDFs, the MP3s, and the HTML are all available for free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	There are books on ethics and atheism, agnosticism, politics, and all that kind of stuff.
	And my writing is...
	I used to type, but that's hard.
	Typing is hard. I dictate my books.
	I pace around. With a latte and I have a wireless headphone set that is hooked up to Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is the best one that I've found for voice dictation.
	And I dictate my books and that is, I think, the most natural way.
	Because I've done so many podcasts now that my style of communication is more verbal, I think, than typed.
	So that's what I've been working on.
	And that's a very fast way to write a book.
	Now, whether speed equals quality, I will leave that up to the readers, but that's my approach.
	Cool. Okay, and then do you write any periodical writing?
	Is it published often?
	No, not a lot. I have a blog at freedomain.blogspot.com, which gets a fair number of hits.
	For Freedom's Phoenix, which is Ernest and Donna Hancock's libertarian e-zine, I've contributed a number of articles to that.
	But, no, I don't write for magazines.
	I don't write for, you know, philosophical arguments, particularly ones that go counter to the generally accepted tenets of philosophy, which are almost always incorrect.
	It's really hard to compress an argument into a magazine.
	Length, if you're working from first principles.
	In order to get to the point, you have to spend 20 pages defining your terms and establishing the arguments, so it's not a particularly good format, I think, for magazines.
	Cool. Do you attend seminars or conferences?
	How often? Well, I do.
	I certainly do. I go to some money conferences, libertarian conferences.
	I usually go when I get a chance to speak at the conferences.
	So I am at a bunch of conferences this year.
	I'm going to be speaking in June at the Libertarian Convention in Dallas, Texas.
	And then I'm going to be speaking at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire.
	And then I'm running a A seminar with Doug Casey and Rick Rule on capitalism and morality in Vancouver.
	I think that's July 28th.
	Libertopia, of course. I'm the master of ceremonies there, Liberty Cruise.
	And I was down and did some work last year with Doug Casey's group, When Money Dies, an uplifting conference about the imminent demise of fiat currencies.
	So I do. And whenever I go to these conferences, I try to catch as many other speakers as I can because I'm always very impressed.
	By the quality of libertarian speakers and particularly the economics and the politics that come forward.
	So I try and catch as many of those as I can.
	Do these conferences influence your ideas?
	Oh, hugely. You know, I find that what the conferences are great for, I would just sort of pick two out of the top of my head.
	So last year at Libertopia, I gave a speech and I stayed for a presenter who was talking about the role of what used to be called friendly societies, which was self-organizing charitable societies to Help people ameliorate the random vicissitudes of a risky life.
	They'd all get together and pool to get health insurance, to pool to get life insurance and so on.
	It was a really powerful way for the poor to help each other and to make sure they didn't get completely felled by some falling timber of bad circumstances or bad luck.
	He had a great presentation about all of that.
	When I was at the Freedom Summit, I spoke at the Freedom Summit in 2010.
	There was a presenter there who I've actually been meaning to get on my show who talked about the similarities between the modern times and the ancient Roman Empire in terms of, you know, the drive to empire and the destruction of the currency through inflation.
	And so I find that there's a huge amount of empirical backing behind the theories that I sort of try to work with and talk about at Freedom Aid Radio.
	So, yeah, without a doubt.
	I'm trying to think if there's been...
	Well, you know what?
	I think I will say that there's a group that I'm involved in called Psychohistory at psychohistory.com, which is sort of run by Lloyd DeMoss.
	And they talk a lot about the degree to which society, culture, the state, war, peace, imprisonment, justice, the prison system, the court system, how all of this is influenced in pretty unconscious ways by early childhood experiences.
	And I actually first got introduced to that website from somebody who was in the Freedom Aid radio chat room.
	I can't even remember when or why.
	It was a couple of years ago. And he pointed out some statistics about the treatment of children, and I was like, oh, that can't be right.
	And he's like, well, here's the source, psychohistory.com.
	And I went there, and I was like, wow, this stuff is incredible.
	I never thought about it to this degree, and I became the audiobook reader for Lloyd DeMoss' excellent work in Progress called The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
	So stuff like that just blows my gourd open.
	And I really do enjoy having my gourd regularly blown open by new and unexpected information.
	Yeah. Cool.
	Next question is, how did your master's degree prepare you for your current work?
	Oh, that's a good question.
	Not to imply that the others haven't been, but...
	Well, you know, it's funny.
	I mean, a lot of things have come together for what it is I do now.
	I mean, the fact that I took acting and voice training, I think, helped quite a bit to deliver not too squeaky a set of philosophical diatribes.
	And... But, yeah, my master's...
	I mean, I had a tough time getting my masters done.
	I mean, the approach that I wanted to take was very meta, you know, very, very grandiose in scope.
	I wanted to do two major trends throughout the entire history of Western philosophy.
	And a lot of what people do in their masters, or maybe even their PhD for that matter, is they really focus in on very, very small areas.
	You become the eminent master of a tiny, dare I say, insignificant domain.
	And because I wanted to do a very big picture thesis, then I had a tough time finding a supervisor, and then that supervisor was quite excited by what I was doing, didn't know exactly what to make of it, and I ended up graduating or getting my information about getting an A quite a bit later than everyone else.
	But certainly, you know, in college, The classes were good.
	I mean, there's a rigor that you get in college where you're expected to be skeptical, you're expected to cohesively and cogently build And arguments and you also do get a chance to make presentations in college.
	But I think really focusing on the big picture was very important to me.
	It also became evident to me that focusing on the big picture was not something that was very popular in academia.
	See, if you focus on a tiny section of history, you know, the history of this town in southern France for the 12 years from, you know, 1780 to 1792, You're not stepping on anyone else's toes and you're not going to upset anyone with contrary theories because nobody really knows as much about that tiny subject as you do and so you kind of split yourself into these little atoms that don't interact with each other.
	But if you do, you know, here's two major trends and opposing trends in Western philosophy and you talk, I think I used four major philosophers from each camp, basically empiricists versus mystics.
	Then, you know, if you casually mention, say, Immanuel Kant for a few pages and talk about how he fits into your larger thesis, then every Kantian scholar the world over has a pretty good opportunity to take a shark bite at your exposed dolphin belly, so to speak. Yeah. There is a tendency towards micro and away from the macro, which I think is really tragic.
	I think that the purpose of intellectuals is to serve society as a whole by illuminating the trends that help avoid disasters in the future.
	And if you're totally micro in your approach, you don't do any of that.
	So I think there's kind of a defensiveness in academia that didn't fit too well with what I wanted to do.
	Interesting. Cool.
	Okay, so my last question is how important is community networking to you and why?
	So, community networking, do you mean, I want to make sure that, so you're talking about sort of like Facebook, LinkedIn, and that kind of stuff?
	Yes and I think, for the most part, my teacher told us to ask these questions.
	I think she wants to know how you interact with the public, basically, and I think a lot of that has to do with your podcasts.
	Oh, I see, I see. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, electronics is sort of a part of that.
	I grew up in the business world, or I guess I got my entrepreneurial chops sharpened in the business world.
	And in the business world, networking is pretty important.
	But I was always quite relieved that I didn't have to do very much of it because I was a tech guy and a sales guy.
	And so I didn't really have to do a whole lot of networking.
	It's not particularly enjoyable for me.
	It always feels a bit fake. That having been said, there's two ways that networking has been very important to me.
	If we just sort of take out the 40,000 subscribers on YouTube and 10,000 members on the message board, that all helps to get new shows out.
	But I've interviewed a lot of people on my show.
	And those interviews, I think, have really helped me.
	You sort of leapfrog from one person to the next.
	Oh, I interviewed you. Do you know anyone who's good?
	And then you go and leapfrog from one person to the next.
	I think that's really, really helped.
	And so, because I've interviewed a lot of libertarians, when they hear about me, they've actually had an interaction with me and we've talked about an important topic to both of us.
	And I think that's really helped, for sure.
	The other thing, of course, is that when I do go to speak at conferences, I do...
	Go and chat with other people who were there, whether it's presenters or members of the audience.
	And I think that's really helped as well because then people said, you know, it's always important to put a face to the digits, to the binary on the internet.
	So I think actually having handshake, flesh to flesh, exchange your germs kind of meetings with people has been really, really helpful in terms of becoming a person rather than a persona, if that helps.
	All right. Well, you think that's everything I need?
	Thank you so very much.

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