Tomasz Kaye designing effective pro-liberty propaganda.mp4

Uh, so thanks for tuning in, everyone. Um, my name is Thomas K. I'm based in the Netherlands, and last year I made the short animated film George Ought to Help, which you can see here, I believe. Um, in case you didn't see the film before, you can find it at GeorgeAEL.com.

My presentation today has the title, Designing Effective Pro-Liberty Propaganda, and it'll be a loosely structured collection of thoughts about what I learned from doing the George project and what I would have liked to have known before I started it. Really, uh, so because it will be in the form of advice that I would have liked to have given to myself, it will perhaps sound kind of opinionated.

But I hope it goes without saying that there's plenty of room for rational disagreement with pretty much anything I'm going to be saying. Um, I think it will be most relevant to people who are independently creating text-to-visual audio-visual propaganda themselves, and especially videos like this one. Um, but many of the ideas, as well as being relevant to promoting liberty-based stuff, I think are also more generally applicable to any attempt at persuasion.

If you have any questions that come to mind while I'm talking, feel free to, uh, put them straight into the chat, and then when I've finished, I'll go back through that and try and track them back and answer as best as I can. Uh, and if anyone has just joined chat, be sure to uncheck the "post to Facebook" checkbox unless you want your comments to appear on your Facebook wall and confuse your friends. Uh, the presentation I've prepared will last about 20 minutes; at the end of that, I'll look at the chat window and answer questions and so on.

Okay, uh, it may sound obvious, but I think it's worth making explicit that when you're working on a video piece like this, uh, your script is the most crucial part of what you're doing. Um, so it's really important that you take the time to get this part right. Uh, I think you should plan to spend much longer on your script than you anticipate needing.

Um, you should be prepared to write and rewrite your script. Uh, ideally, you should have your script looked over by friends, and ideally, friends who aren't already, uh, aligned with you completely ideologically. Um, so I'm lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who are interested in hearing the case for liberty, even though I think most wouldn't, uh, count themselves as libertarians.

An important thing to bear in mind as you're doing all this is you should be careful not to get attached to what you've created, uh, in terms of the early versions of the script. Um, because you're very likely to need to change it several times based on the feedback you're going to get from those who look over the early drafts.

Uh, just as a quick practical note, I used Google Documents to share the script among friends and then arranged a couple of meetings where friends would come over and we would talk face to face about what they thought was working, um, what ideas were being expressed clearly, uh, which things needed more fleshing out, and which things were just not really working at all.

Uh, if it turns out that you don't know people in real life who can help you with this, um, you could consider posting the script online on a forum like Mises.org. I know of a friend of mine who's doing just that to get feedback on a web video project that he's working on.

Um, when you have feedback on your project, uh, if it's not working, if your script needs too many qualifiers or it's too confusing or you don't know how to make it interesting, uh, you shouldn't be afraid to scrap the whole thing.

Uh, in general, you shouldn't be precious about your ideas, and you should especially be wary of committing the sunk cost fallacy, where just because you've invested a lot of time and energy into your idea, uh, that's no reason to continue investing in it if it's not working.

And if you do, um, scrap an idea you've been working on, don't think that you need to come up with a replacement either. Uh, the best ideas can come to you while you're not trying to think of them, or at least that's what I found, so be prepared to let that process happen and don't think that you need to force it.

Uh, the next item is maybe a bit confusingly titled. Obviously, it's nice to have beautifully designed things with great audio and visuals, and you want to make something aesthetically very pleasing, perhaps, but seduction at the cognitive level is much more important, I think.

And it's probably not straightforward to explain what I mean by seduction in this context, but, uh, it should feel a bit like having your brain tickled. Uh, you should feel, uh, flattered somehow, and, uh, it should be a kind of game almost. In general, um, people aren't stupid, I think, or at least if they are, then those people aren't your target audience.

Your audience, the people who matter, will quickly understand if you're trying to persuade them about something, and I think it's the job of the propagandist to, uh, accept that situation as a given and try to then make the experience as pleasant as possible for the person watching.

Um, so I have a view on making propaganda that's kind of in stark contrast to maybe a more traditional framing of propaganda in terms of an attack or deception or some other kind of abuse of the person watching it. I don't think it needs to be that way.

So, uh, to make this a bit more concrete, how do you make something seductive in the way that I've been trying and maybe failing to explain very clearly? Uh, so say you have the first draft of your script. I think you should read it through and anticipate the objections and concerns that your target audience is going to, uh, reply with.

And you should aim to preempt those concerns, or even better, uh, wherever possible, you should concede them. If there is a legitimate complaint about an idea or something worth mentioning, then concede that. This is, uh, a perfect chance to establish, uh, your goodwill, to show that as a creator of the propaganda, you're also a reasonable person and, um, you're not out to trick them.

So, um, you should take care with how you're framing your argument. Uh, in particular, I strongly believe that you should avoid stacking the deck in your favor. By that, I mean you should avoid making the surrounding conditions artificially favorable to the conclusion that you want to reach. Uh, if you stack—by that, I mean the surrounding conditions of, for instance, the story you're telling.

So, if you stack the deck in your favor, the intelligent audience who you're wanting to reach will quickly see that you've cheated somehow, and they're not going to listen to whatever else you have to say. Where you can get away with it, I'd recommend even stacking the deck against yourself.

Um, and this probably begins to sound all a bit too abstract, so, uh, to give a concrete example, in the new animation I'm working on, one of the main characters is a business owner, and he's the stereotypical ruthless capitalist that you might find in a piece of Marxist propaganda.

Um, even though the animation is advocating a position that ends up meaning increased freedom for business owners and for this evil capitalist, it doesn't hurt the argument in the film to depict this character in this completely unsympathetic way, so that's what I'm going to do.

Um, even though the argument for freedom and freedom of association ends up benefiting the bad guy, if we accept it in the story that I'm planning, the argument is still solid, I hope. Uh, so, uh, that's how I'm going to approach it.

Another example was with the George Ought to Help film. Uh, Oliver is the character who asks George for help, uh, and he's trying to fund the education for his kids, uh, which I thought many people would agree was a pretty important goal as far as goals go, and the George character refuses, uh, to help Oliver without giving any reason for having refused.

So George ends up looking pretty cold and heartless, and this is perfect for the kind of situation I wanted to set up. Uh, essentially, the scene is set for what I hope is the realization that even though Oliver's cause is worthy and George has no good reason to refuse him, it's still not acceptable to threaten George.

So the general idea is that even—sorry, the general idea is you show that your argument works even when it favors unsympathetic characters. For instance, uh, if you can do that, then you've gone a long way to demonstrating that your argument is robust, and I think reasonable people are going to notice that.

There's a second benefit to, uh, playing off stereotypes that are typically, um, perpetuated by your ideological opponents or those whom you expect or stereotypes that you expect your target audience might be harboring at some level.

Um, if your propaganda aligns with the target audience's prejudices, if it reflects those somehow, uh, on the more trivial points, I think that there's a better chance that your audience will be receptive to the core of your message, which is the important part.

And playing with, uh, these kind of expectations has a third function too. Uh, I think it makes it harder to quickly pigeonhole the propaganda, um, which will mean that the people you're trying to reach won't quickly—uh, they won't switch it off so quickly.

Uh, for instance, if I had to guess, uh, the name George Ought to Help, to me, sounds more like it's going to be, uh, an apology for collectivism than a defense of individual rights.

And there is, of course, uh, an element of balancing act here because the idea is to, um, the idea is to entice people and keep them guessing and to help them maintain an open mind for as long as possible, but not to leave them feeling deceived.

Uh, just briefly, I'm going to mention narration, which was important in my film. Uh, if you're making a film with a narrator, consider whether, um, a male or a female voice would be most appropriate to your goal.

Uh, think about the accent too. Uh, what associations will your target audience have when they hear it? Can you choose a narrator whose accent and way of speaking can help, uh, delay the moment of cognitive withdrawal or that moment of pigeonholing? Because anything you can do to delay or avoid that, uh, is a good thing.

And if possible, don't do the narration yourself. Um, even though you might be tempted to do it and even though it might make sense for budget reasons, I think getting someone else to speak has some very important advantages.

Um, as a relative outsider to the project, the narrator may have valuable input about what they think is working and what's not. Um, and also the extra emotional distance they have from the script may be useful in helping them deliver the text in a more relaxed, uh, and natural way, or sympathetic way even.

Be sure to share the script with your narrator before it's finalized and talk with them about anything they would like changing. Uh, it's especially important that you take care to be sure that the narrator or anyone else who's speaking or being involved in the project, you need to make sure that they're all happy to be involved in spreading the kind of message that you want to put out there.

Because it—that's, yeah, you shouldn't take that for granted. Let me see. Yeah, you should set yourself modest goals, I think.

Um, you shouldn't try to sell the entire, uh, libertarian package deal if there is such a thing in five minutes. You don't have the average person's attention for long enough, uh, to do a good job of that anyway.

So instead, try to deal with one issue that you think you can kind of, uh, isolate and treat and deal with in a solid way. If you can do that well, then I think your audience will be more receptive to the next piece of libertarian speech that they come across.

Uh, so if you're making a short video, then get used to the idea that you're contributing to the cumulative case for freedom and don't feel as though you need to do it all alone. Connected with this idea of a modest goal, um, don't make controversial assertions.

I think, uh, phrases like "taxation is theft," uh, they might resonate very powerfully with you and with people who are already convinced of the non-legitimacy of the state, but I think that these kinds of, uh, sound bites are a barrier to persuading those who aren't already aligned with you in that way.

Uh, I think, for instance, with taxation is theft, people may quite reasonably ask, or ask to themselves since they can't ask you perhaps, "How are you defining theft?" And they might think that they might realize that theft carries the implication of illegitimate taking, not just taking in general, uh, which ends up being question begging until there's already an agreement on the non-legitimacy of the state.

I think, um, I think you should err on the side of understating rather than overstating a message. This also has to do with the modest goal idea.

Um, so you should, I think, stick to those claims that you're convinced are irrefutable by reasonable people. You may—uh, you might know of more exciting arguments that you would prefer to use, uh, but until you know an argument, and more importantly, its counterarguments inside out, I'd strongly avoid—sorry, I’d strongly advise against using it.

Uh, the risk you want to avoid is you don't want to undermine the strength of your piece by including an argument that your critics can dismantle as soon as the thing has been released. Uh, that will be used as an excuse to dismiss the entire thing.

So for me, getting, uh, feedback on the script early on, as I mentioned earlier, was a really useful technique in order to, um, test whether I really knew an idea well enough to be able to express it in a solid enough way.

And sometimes I—I couldn't do that, and those parts or those whole scripts sometimes, uh, were scrapped. Where possible, uh, frame controversial ideas as questions rather than as assertions.

I think you should trust that by suggesting the right questions, the goodwill and reasonableness of your audience, uh, will make them receptive to your message. And I'm going to reinforce the point that I'm assuming that your target audience are reasonable and curious people.

Often your real audience won't meet these, uh, criteria, but the important viewers always will. Uh, the next point is research.

Um, what I mean by that is that as well as talking with people directly about your scripts, your ongoing preparatory work should be debating the topics you're interested in with people who disagree with you. Ideally, by doing this, you'll learn what the common objections are to certain claims that you might want to make in your propaganda.

And knowing what these objections are means that you'll be in a position to either preemptively answer them in in the script or avoid those chains of reasoning altogether. Because some arguments are just weaker and more difficult to express than others. Or you'll be able to acknowledge the objection and concede it.

So as far as practicing with debate, I think YouTube is a very good place to do this. Uh, I use YouTube for this kind of reason; I have a channel there. I think if you go to youtube.com/bitsbutter, you'll get to it.

Um, and of course, there are plenty of blogs and forums where you can discuss things in comments. The next item: emulate.

So you know yourself very well, of course, which means that you have an automatic head start if you decide that your target audience is made up of people similar to yourself, and I think that it should be so.

Although I went through most of my life, uh, without giving a great deal of thought to questions about political or economic systems, uh, my political opinions were left-leaning pretty much by default because of the cultural environments I'd spent most of my life in.

So when I was making the George animation, the target audience I had in mind were people from a similar background to me. Uh, that is, reasonably open-minded left-leaning types who hadn't yet given serious thought to what it means, for instance, to be an advocate of the welfare state.

Uh, and I think the result would have been a good deal less successful if I had decided to try and persuade, uh, conservatives about the non-legitimacy of anti-drug laws, uh, for the simple reason that it's a group that I have no, uh, connection with, or I've never been in that situation myself.

So I'd have a great deal more trouble empathizing with that, uh, target group. I think one approach that is very useful, uh, in planning this kind of thing is to cast your mind back to the time that you started to become interested in the ideas of libertarianism.

And think about what kind of thing you would have found persuasive to hear and what arguments wouldn't have worked then. And it could well be that you can even remember specific pieces of media that were pivotal in changing your mind about the validity of statism.

And if you can remember a book, video, or something like that that was important in that way for you, then this gives you another really important head start. You can, and I think you probably should, emulate the messages that worked for you.

And this is the approach I took with George Ought to Help. Uh, the first anti-state video I saw, and the one that made the most profound impact on me, was a YouTube video called, uh, if I remember correctly, it was called The State is a Death Threat, and it drew attention to the violence inherent in law, which was something I hadn't given much thought to before.

And after I'd read around the subject for a while—maybe a year or two—I wanted to create something that could trigger a similar realization of the violence inherent in the way that the state works.

Um, at the same time, uh, I wanted to do certain things differently. I wanted to make the message more seductive because a video I'd seen was pretty uncompromising, and I thought that I could reach a larger audience by offering a more gentle introduction to the problem.

And also, rather than highlighting the background of violence in general, um, I wanted to focus on those times that threats were being made against peaceful people because that's where things are the most interesting, I think, in the case for liberty.

So all this meant that before I'd even started really sketching or writing in earnest, um, I had a framework already thanks to this previous video. In general, wherever possible, build on work that others have done before you.

Uh, emulate what works well and change the things that you think could work better. Uh, recruits.

So most of what I've been saying has been about designing the propaganda, and I'm going to finish with a footnote on promoting it. One thing that I'm doing quite differently with the follow-up to, uh, George is at this time I'm crowdfunding the cost of production.

The idea is to, uh, raise enough money to allow a concentrated period of work on the next animation and to have it online before 2012. So in case anyone doesn't know already, the crowdfunding model works something like this: you make a pitch explaining what you want to achieve, and you invite people to donate, and you reward donations.

Uh, excuse me, you reward donations of different amounts with different gifts. And often these gifts are uniquely tied to the projects you're doing. Uh, so for instance, a common gift for a crowdfunded film campaign is that a contributor can get their name in the credits of the film.

So the URL you can see at the bottom of the screen is the address of the campaign page to fund the production of Edgar the Exploiter. On that page, you'll find a video of me talking again about the new projects as well as links so you can, uh, you can donate and, uh, get involved in it.

Uh, with crowdfunding, there are a few challenges. One is that you need to be able to persuade potential supporters that what you're doing is worthwhile, and of course, that's easier if you've already completed a similar project that you can point to, like, like I'm doing with George.

But there are ways to get around that even if you haven't. For instance, if you're creating an animation, you could already create and show a very short sequence, or you could play an audio clip or show preparatory illustrations, or you could even consider, uh, making your scripts public.

Another difficulty is that you need to be pretty proactive in promoting the campaign, um, and I'm certainly not a bond promoter. I don't—I don't much like doing it and I'm at the point where I'm getting a bit cautious about subjecting my friends to yet another email or Facebook post about the campaign, so I'm having to be more inventive.

And that's part of the reason I'm mentioning it here now, of course, and why you'll see an advert for the campaign in the right-hand sidebar of the Agora IO site. So one of the biggest advantages of the crowdfunding approach is that as well as, uh, allowing you to maintain independence, it means that if it works well, you have, uh, tens or possibly even hundreds of people who are invested in the success of your project before you even begin, uh, the work in earnest.

So these are the people who are also most likely to enthusiastically help spread the word about your projects once it's complete. Uh, of course, that is assuming you've done a good job of it and assuming they still want to be associated with it.

Um, you might even—you could even experiment with having supporters have some influence in how the project, uh, develops. For instance, they could, um, they could even be involved in naming characters or perhaps even voting on different plot paths, and all of these kind of things could strengthen the feeling of involvement, which can in turn make people more motivated to help spread the word about it.

Uh, that was most of what I wanted to say. Uh, if you have any questions that you haven't already posted in the chat, feel free to do that. Uh, in a moment, I'm going to look through the, uh, chat room questions.

Uh, a friend of mine messaged me a couple of questions earlier, so I'm going to start by answering those. The first one is, what is propaganda? And, um, retrospectively, this would have been a good question to start off the whole, uh, presentation with.

Um, on my understanding, propaganda is media created with the aim of, uh, changing people's opinion about something or other. Uh, and of course, usually, that's a political subject, but it doesn't have to be.

And I think Wikipedia's opening paragraph about propaganda sounds fair. It says, "Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community towards some cause or position."

Uh, the next related question was, is propaganda ethical? And this is a bit more tricky, I think it's a good question. Uh, there are different ways of interpreting it. Um, I'm a moral nihilist, which means I don't believe that moral facts exist, but like pretty much everyone else, I have a moral sense that is certain things strike me very strongly as being morally acceptable or unacceptable.

Uh, so I hope you don't mind if I recast the question in the following way: does propaganda that is media intended to influence people's attitudes towards something or other—uh, does that strike me as morally acceptable? And the answer is yes.

Um, I find—I don't find any real manipulation, uh, things like subliminal messages and other sneaky tricks like that. And with these things, um, alarm bells do start to go off for me. Uh, it doesn't strike me that these techniques are an appropriate way to relate to other people.

It's an approach that for me starts to resemble fraud. Um, so for me, as far as the design of propaganda goes, there is a morally ambiguous zone somewhere between carefully crafting the delivery of your message and the deliberate use of things like subliminal messages.

Um, just as a side note, the fact that certain practices in information design strike me as immoral or sleazy, which is a term that I prefer—it's less problematic—that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily in favor of laws prohibiting, uh, these kinds of things like subliminal messages.

Uh, but it's not a topic that I've given an awful lot of thought to, so I'm not strongly committed to a position either way. I'd be interested to hear what other people have to say about it.

Uh, the final question that my friend asked was, is there evidence that a libertarian approach works in real life? And of course, this departs from the propaganda angle, uh, but I'll give a quick shot answering anyway. Um, I think it depends again on how the question is interpreted.

If the question means something like, is there an example of a large modern and successful state or society, then the answer is no. Um, we're still working on that. Um, but it can be interpreted much more broadly, and there are historical correlations that many people believe indicate that state intervention is inversely proportional to prosperity.

Um, but it's a big topic that I don't really feel able to do justice here, and many of the other speakers, uh, in this conference will be far better qualified than I am to speak on it, so I encourage you to ask some of the other speakers about it.

Uh, before I completely leave that question though, I think that a mirrored or kind of upside-down version of the question is worth bearing in mind though, and that is the question: Is there evidence that institutionalized threats of violence against peaceful people are beneficial? Um, I'm not aware of any evidence that supports the idea that they are.

Okay, now I'm going to look at the chat room. Okay, I'm going to scroll down here. Let this—thanks, George. Uh, and oh, thanks for all the donations too; that's really, uh, that's really helpful. Thanks, you guys.

Oh, something just went wrong—I just have to get back to the page again. Slowly loading. While it's loading, uh, in case I didn't mention it already, the address of the page where I talk about the new campaign is indiegogo.com/Edgar-the-exploiter, and then you can find all kinds of information about it.

And I think if you like the George animation, then you'll like that one too. Okay, here we are. Now the Facebook chat needs to load.

Okay, I'll start at the top. Uh, do you have any examples of effective Pro-Liberty propaganda aside from your own? Asks Zach. Uh, it's a good question. I think the H—what's it called? The Philosophy of Liberty is pretty good.

Um, it's also a liberty cartoon with blue people in it, um, which is always good. Um, uh, I don't know—it's very concise. I like that a lot about it. Not to be too negative, but what I—the trouble I had with it was it depended too much on the idea of natural rights.

And for me, as—as well as for many, as well as for many people who don't consider themselves libertarians, uh, it's not a self-evident idea that natural rights exist. So I had that trouble with it. Um, but there's a bunch of stuff coming out.

Uh, I think that I don't know if it's whether I'm just more aware of it now or that there's really more stuff being made, but in the last few months there have been quite a few, I think, really good pieces of media which put the case for liberty or or talk about issues that are related to it.

For instance, of course, there's the, uh, there's a Fear the Boom and Bust rap, which, yeah, I guess that's Austrian economics, of course, but for me the two are very closely linked, you know, the Austro-libertarianism thing.

Uh, I recently saw a cartoon about the FED, which was also pretty good. I enjoyed that one. Uh, I forgot my name; I think someone in chat must know what I'm talking about, so if you know it, put a link in there.

Uh, I'm just going to scroll down a bit. Okay, I have until 55 past. Thanks, George. If success is people living in peace, liberty, and prosperity with rights respected, I have seen no evidence of a successful statist society either.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, it's—yeah, it's nice to be able to sing to the choir once in a while. Okay, uh, in spreading libertarian propaganda in peace groups, I do usually use a modest approach, bringing up relevant single issues as opportune in a friendly problem-solving manner.

Persistence is the real secret—just keep it up. It really gets the statist crazy to see you succeed and not be able to paint you as an evil right-wing libertarian, says Carol. Yeah, I agree.

Um, I think it's—uh, Gary earlier today had a really excellent talk, I think, talking about the, uh, the temptation to, um, yeah, to to pwn, uh, people as the internet slang goes, and how that can be, uh, quite destructive.

And I think that the idea of modesty in the media you create is related to that. You—it's all too easy to, uh, to set—to have this animosity happen, and you're talking with people who—with whom there's an ideological disconnect to begin with, so, uh, anything you can do to minimize, uh, that animosity is—can only help.

Uh, Alan asks, what was the one thing that convinced you again or got you thinking? Um, I was making YouTube videos about atheism; I'm an atheist. Um, and one of my subscribers asked me to look at, uh, this video, this anti-state video by the user—he was then called, uh, confederal socialist, and now he goes under Fringe Elements.

And, yeah, his video, which I believe was called The State is a Death Threat, was the single—I guess that that was my first exposure to, uh, to the case against the state. And, uh, and that kind of triggered this more or less frantic, um, period of research, which is still ongoing really.

Um, yeah, after about a year or two of that, I felt as if I wanted to replicate what, uh, what that—replicate what that video did for me so that, uh, other people would be similarly drawn into this, uh, I think fascinating conversation.

Let me see. Alan says, you're making this seem doable; I'm getting ideas. I'm glad to hear it. Okay, are there any more questions or comments or, um, observations or, um, anything of that kind?

Uh, Justin asks, do you have any thoughts on visual design? Um, yes, but the way I approach it is most 90% uh, intuitively. I just make the images that I find pleasant to look at, I guess.

And also the images that happen to be easy to animate. [Music] Um, in the—but also, of course, decisions in terms of the visuals that relate to, um, the structure of the message you want to communicate.

Um, one of my reasons for choosing—for choosing to have the characters be blue, for instance, was that I wanted to—I wanted the George animation to be simultaneously, uh, attractive that it had this, um, that kind of quality about it that it had this, yeah, this nice look, but also that, um, that it had something a bit ominous about it. And that's not—that I wanted that to remain quite subtle, but, uh, the color choice was one of the ways that I tried to create that atmosphere—this kind of vague, uh, sense of foreboding.

Um, yeah, apart from that, I'm trying to think if there's anything else sensible I can say about the design. Um, yeah, again, this may be kind of a trivial thing to say, but again, be modest and work within your means about in terms of what you—what you draw.

Uh, so I—I drew the things—I modified the story and drew the things that I knew I had a decent chance of being able to represent in a not entirely goofy way. So that's quite important.

Brian says, when I talk to peace groups, I like to bring up the subject of monetized debt in order to strike up conversations with these people that have little exposure to monetary theory.

And, yeah, uh, I have to say that, uh, monetary theory is a topic that I'm only just beginning to, uh, to research, so I can't comment very intelligently or intelligently at all on it, I'm afraid.

End of education and war—it sounds like a—sounds like a good idea. Zach asks, have you made propaganda in any mediums other than video? [Music] Um, no.

Um, no, I only—uh, no, I talk to people a lot, of course, but, uh, in terms of finished products, no, the video—in fact, the George video is the only thing that I've made that really feels like a completed product.

Um, Justin previously asked, have you done any non-video agit prop, posters, buttons, any experience with street art? Uh, again, not really. There are buttons that I've just made, um, as part of the Edgar the Exploiter project. They're rewards, so if you—I think if you donate $30, you get a button, so it's a very expensive button.

Um, but that was a lot of fun; it was nice to make those buttons. There's one of George and there's one of the cloud. Street art? No, no, I don't have any experience with that.

Uh, Lauren asks, uh, can you talk about the framework of the Edgar video? Um, framework—framework. Uh, it's similar to George in that it's a—a story. Um, it's different from George in that it's an economic argument rather than a moral one.

Um, because I think I felt as though George kind of captured the—the most important thing I wanted to say about the moral case for, uh, liberty, and I thought that the valuable, uh, complimentary work to that would be to talk about some aspects of the economic case for, uh, the economic case against state intervention.

So it's—the format is very similar to George. Uh, yeah. Any last questions? Allah says, I found wording to be very important when trying to bring ideas across to people. As an example, privatization most of the time does not work at all here, while getting the state out does.

Yeah, privatization is a really tricky one. [Music] Um, also because what happens when—as I understand it, what happens when, uh, industries are privatized doesn't have an awful lot to do with the free market anyway.

Um, yeah, you—you have a situation where private companies are awarded contracts by the state, so it's not an awful lot better and maybe even worse in the end. Uh, Lauren asks, in hindsight, would you have changed or added anything to George?

That's a good question. Um, with hindsight, I'm the part I'm least satisfied with is the, uh, police agents. Um, they—in my mind, the effect of them, uh, entering was less comical than than people apparently, uh, experienced it.

So, uh, I would, if I were to do it again, I would do that slightly differently. Um, apart from that, I'm really happy with how it all went.

Um, yeah, there are all kinds of technical, boring technical details that, uh, that involved a lot of learning as I was doing it because this was the first time I'd used After Effects and Flash together in this way.

Um, that's—that's technical stuff which isn't so interesting. Now for the—for the most part, I'm—I was really, uh, satisfied with how it went, and I was really pleasantly surprised by how positive the response was, um, that it was seen and shared by so many people.

And what continues to, uh, surprise me, or you know, really makes me happy, is that, uh, people continue to send to volunteer translations to George Ought to Help, so I believe it's in something like seven languages right now.

Indonesia was just added the other day, and, um, yeah, it's something I never thought would happen, but it's—it’s really gratifying to notice that people are motivated to volunteer their time and effort to do that kind of thing. It's really great.

Uh, Justin says, Taran talked a bit about promotion; do you have any input on that? Did you do anything besides Facebook or YouTube promos for your first video?

Um, yeah, I did a few things, but they were also online, online things. Um, of course, I emailed everyone I knew, um, and what else did I do?

Yeah, posted on forums, um, posted notifications to blogs that I follow that I thought might be interested, and after a long delay, some of them picked it up.

But, uh, yeah, I posted it to lots of blogs. Uh, um, yeah, nothing groundbreaking or unusual, I guess. I think I have five more minutes, so if there's any last questions, please speak up.

For—okay, I guess I'm—oh, uh, Justin says, well remember normal to you might be foreign to people who have never done any online promotion before, so even trivialities count. That's very true.

Uh, so yeah, just forums, blogs, email, uh, social media, which includes Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Um, if I were to do it again, I would add these kind of bumpers that you see on the bottom of my video here. This is something that occurred to me only in the run-up to preparing for this conference, uh, but I think that can be useful too—that kind of, uh, that kind of advertising.

Uh, Lauren asks, what themes will carry over from George to Edgar?

Um, themes, themes. Um, I don't really know if there's a theme that will carry over. It's more the format that will be very similar. The cloud will still be there, I guess that's not really a theme.

Um, yeah, sorry, that's not a very good answer. Sorry.

Uh, Augustine says, did you say it was one of Fringe Element's videos that brought you to liberty? If so, what aspects of his video used effective propaganda? Yes, it was, uh, Fringe Element's video. And, um, which aspects of his video used effective propaganda?

I think his—his whole—his whole video was effective propaganda. It was very condensed, very, um, yeah, there was no extraneous stuff really. It was—it was making the ca—it was explaining how every law is in fact a death threat when—or ultimately rests on a death threat.

And, uh, for me, it was effective because I'm—I think it's just a very powerful argument. There's no—I don't think you can really, uh, argue with it. So although the rest of his—his way of presenting it wasn't very appealing to me at least, uh, the—just the—the fact that it was a really strong argument was what, uh, was what made me think, "Oh, yeah, this is probably something I need to, uh, understand a bit better than I do at the moment."

So that's what started me, uh, researching it all. Uh, Lauren asks, will you still have blue people? Yes, uh, all the people will be blue. Um, and the walk cycles will be, uh, probably a bit goofy-looking still, and the cloud will be there.

And, uh, yeah, it will have this slightly naive look with these, uh, kind semicircular hills in the background. Uh, the sky will probably be green, but I'm not sure about that yet.

Um, yeah, okay, I think I have to wrap it up to make sure that the next person has enough time. So thanks, everyone, for tuning in and asking questions.

Uh, thanks for everyone's attention. Thanks to George Dony for his initiative in setting up the conference and to everyone else working to make it a success.

Uh, please check out this URL if you didn't do it already, and thanks very much. Bye.