From there I followed a pretty common path. I read Ayn Rand, and then

The most common questions I receive when first talking about this film is, “How did you find these people?” So these two blog entries are here to answer that question and help everyone understand where I am coming from. Stateless, is not an advocacy film. While I don’t think there even is a completely unifying ideology which encompasses the people who appear in this movie, I want to make it clear that I am not espousing any specific worldview. My intention here is to cast a light on and humanize a movement which is frequently underrepresented or misunderstood. And as with any film I make, I want the people I feature to not simply be elevated, but also put in a position to defend their decisions and positions. All that being said, I sincerely value the lineage which brought all of these people together, as it overlaps with so much of my early intellectual development. I admire anyone who is willing to question institutions on an existential level, and especially those who are willing to change their lives based on the analyses. THE VERY BEGINNING Like most people, my first political influences came from my parents. In my home, this was mostly shaped by my father. This took the form of a sort of Bill Buckley/National Review conservatism. My father was the first to present me the notion that taxation is a form a theft. To him, it was a necessary evil which should be minimized. And this was understandable from his perspective. He was born into poverty, the youngest of eleven kids in a Michigan farm town. After relocating to the small city of Saginaw at age five, he spent most of his life from then on working his way into the middle class, allowing him to raise a family more comfortably. We were never wealthy by most Americans’ standards. While my family’s income may have gone pretty far in depressed Saginaw, it placed us only in the middle-middle class of New Jersey where I grew up. It was understandable that my father felt exploited with more than half of his money going to fund the various levels of government, while getting very little in return for that. My father’s main political concern was on taxation, with a minor post-Catholic emphasis on social opposition to things like abortion and drug-legalization. I passively agreed with his stances on these things until in middle school when I fell into the world of punk rock. My favorite bands, like Rise Against and NOFX, seemed completely opposed to my dad’s opinions, taking persistent protests against against the G.W. Bush era G.O.P. This put my in a state of liminality in which I abandoned all concern for politics. One of the first song lyrics I wrote for my band at age 14: I don’t care about politics I don’t care who’s a hypocrite I don’t care, I can’t even vote My mind won’t change by a song you wrote Every day I hear the same old shit Every song, they’re all about it Our world sucks, I can see But whatever happened to “Fuck Authority?” By my teenage years, I hated everything about school. It felt like a prison or an indoctrination camp — a sentiment I would regularly share with my peers whom never really seemed to care. While I still respected my father’s anti-government inclinations, his Republican conclusion didn’t seem all too rational to me. And though I respected the anti-Bush messages of my punk rock heroes, their conclusion to get out and vote Democrat still seemed like an all too authoritarian solution. So, I was nothing. THE SENSE OF BELONGING That feeling lasted until the 2008 presidential election when the character, Ron Paul, showed up along with my first exposure to the idea of libertarianism. This was the most consistently anti-authoritarian movement I had seen, and it finally felt like I had a political home. the Austrian economists. I debated with my left-leaning peers in college feeling like I had the answers to everything. I had basically taken what my father had taught me, and applied it to what I saw as the most conclusive application of his principles. The following year, I downloaded an .mp3 after searching “libertarian podcast.” The first episode of the first search result was titled, “The Stateless Society – An Examination of Alternatives.” In it, a man with an ambiguous accent, maybe Irish or English, outlined in less than 30 minutes a series of ideas in which all of the functions of the government — military, police, contracts, social security, firefighting — could be provided without taxation or “the initiation of force.” My mind had never been so suddenly changed. I was an anarchist. And while the vision of anarchy that converted me was of a rather different flavor than the teenage anarcho-punk ideologies I was exposed to, the word in itself felt right. It was sort of familiar. The same distaste my father felt against taxes, and the same distaste my musical influences felt toward authority could finally be consolidated. The podcast was called Freedomain Radio, and it was hosted by Stefan Molyneux, an Irish-born former software entrepreneur who lived in Toronto. Fans of the show, or “Freedomainers” as I they called themselves, would simply refer to him as “Stef.” He started recording the episodes in 2005. His earliest episodes were recorded while driving in his car during his commute. They included a range of topics around anarcho-capitalism, atheism, and philosophy. Though what was most captivating about his rants and writings were not his criticisms, but his call to action. Behind Stef’s messages there was no call to arms. His listeners were not encouraged to take to the streets, and voting was laughed at or even framed as a form of state-aggression in itself. The community — through Stef’s words — instead saw the task of eliminating the state to be most likely impossible within our lifetime. So instead, the necessary work was to focus on future generations. So, I became a broke 20-year-old musician, who read books about peaceful parenting. THE SOLUTION The government, according to Stef, would only ever cease to exist if enough humans no longer perceived violence as an appropriate measure for solving social problems. The reason most citizens so willingly support taxation and other forms of law based outside of property rights (e.g. drug control laws) is because most people are raised as children through authoritarian parenting and education structures. Almost all mainstream child-rearing systems were scrutinized, from infancy through adolescence. Bottle-feeding or early breast milk weaning were viewed as some of the earliest forms of trauma, along with the “cry it out” conditioning tactics often associated with bedroom-separation. Toddlers and small children were seen as the most brutal victims of statist parenting. Stef argued that children were the only category of humans against whom physical assault was not only legal, but encouraged, spanking being the most common form of this. Schooling was of course a popular subject, one on which I was especially easy to sway considering my miserable experience in a government-run school system. Yet simply talking about a paradigm-shift in child-rearing was not enough, nor was it enough to simply assume that once people were exposed to these ideas they would be willing to completely adopt them. And even committed devoted Freedomainers were not likely to be capable of immediate change. It was more or less believed that we were all victims of childhood trauma, which could only be resolved through therapy. This is where I first noticed things were problematic. THE COMMUNITY Much of my experience of Freedomain Radio (FDR) wasn’t shaped as much by Stef as it was the community which built itself around him. The online discussion forums became one of my go-to internet distractions. There was a built-in hierarchy in the FDR community. Stef opted to publish all of his books and podcasts for free and without advertising support. So instead, all of the work and overhead was funded by direct pay-what-you-want contributions from the community. Members who chose to subscribe would get a certain “status” labeled next to their image on the message boards: bronze, silver, gold, diamond, or “Philosopher King.” While there was no strong discrimination against non-subscribers, there was a lot of social pressure to put up some money. I eventually did, paying $10 a month over a year, which was considerable for my pathetic college budget. The more I got to personally know some of the other FDR enthusiasts, the more I realized I was a bit of an anomaly in the group. First night in Spain The first meetup I attended took place in Spain. In 2010, several Freedomainers decided to organize a week-long meetup in Málaga, a small resort city on the southern Spanish coast. The meetup happened to fall a week before my sister’s wedding in Germany. I took a leap of faith; I bought a plane ticket to Spain to meet the Freedomainers in the flesh. It was my first time traveling out of North America, and my first time flying on a plane alone. I didn’t speak any Spanish– I felt intimidated. After a ten hour layover in Dublin, I landed in Spain on a warm June evening, with an international flip-phone that I couldn’t get to work. Feeling exhausted, I made my way via taxi to a hostel where I was sharing a room with a few others in the group. Only a few minutes after arriving, two of the members showed up looking for me. We walked up a hill in the dim city center toward the Alcazaba de Málaga, a palatial fortification dated to the 11th century. Near the summit under an amber street light within the old stone architecture, a dozen men ranging from ages 20 to 60 stood around talking, laughing, drinking wine, and playing music together. They warmly welcomed me, some of the them having been there a few days already. I had never experienced such a deep and genuine connection with so many new people at once (though many of them I had connected with on the forums for a while). I was intoxicated. Though there was a surprising pattern I recognized. The most common point of conversation which was repeated about ten times in my first couple days in Spain was “How did you find FDR?” It seemed the path which I followed — through the old libertarian political chain — was a deep minority. Most of the people at this meetup found the podcast not at all through the politics, but through the self-improvement component of Stef’s work. This made me feel like a bit of an outsider, but I still felt totally engaged. There was a lot of “opening up” which happened over the week. I expected more conversations about ethics and economics, but things were more focused on child abuse and psychotherapy. These sensitive topics created an intense feeling of bonding. Like waking from a peculiar dream, I felt strange shifting from that close-knit and vulnerable group to a bubbly wedding crowd. I left Spain feeling even more engaged with the FDR world, and more detached than ever from my family. I was indoctrinated. DOUBT Despite my envelopment in FDR, I remember feeling skeptical through it all. There was a nearly absolute reverence for everything Stef said, and I found that unsettling. Much of his work, especially his system of ethics which he coined “Universally Preferable Behavior” (UPB) didn’t make sense to me, though I resolved to assume I had not put in enough effort to understand it. Against my reservations, I still longed to be a deeper part of this community. Once I made my way back home, I needed more. Every year up until 2010, Stef would host a listener appreciation barbeque around the end of the Summer at his home in a Toronto suburb. The community was small enough at the time that it was feasible. (Where as now his Youtube channel has 700,000+ subscribers, and over 200 million views.) But back then, he opened his home to anyone who was a member on the message board and willing to make the trip. People traveled from as far as London (a couple I met in Spain), but most were from the eastern U.S. and Canada. The barbeque was the first time I felt off-base about the community. Not long after discovering FDR, I stumbled upon an article detailing accusations of the group being an “internet cult,” but that did not deter me. The group clearly had many typical characteristics of a cult (charismatic leader, unique phrases and terminologies, in-group + out-group dynamics), but none of these things seemed to be inherently wrong to me. I viewed them as common components of many communities which helped them bond and organize ideas. Lingering behind with Kevin during a Stef-centered discussion. The first high profile media coverage for FDR was in 2008 appeared in England, about a mother placing the cult allegation against Stef after her 18-year-old son cut off contact with her after becoming a fan of the podcast. The consensus explanation within the community was that she was an abusive mother — who also happened to be a politician — who wouldn’t own up to the fact that she had destroyed her relationship with her son. I don’t know what was true about the story. But the fact that the community even had a specific word for the process of cutting off contact with one’s family for whatever fucking reason didn’t strike me as a problem. “DeFOO” is what they called it (“FOO” meaning “family of origin”), and all the coolest Freedomainers were doing it. I recall watching the 2012 film, The Master, some time after that picnic. The movie was a fictionalized version of the early days of Scientology. A scene in the film struck me as oddly familiar. It is set in a living room at the residence/headquarters of an L. Ron Hubbard inspired character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The scene plays out: He is conducting a talk therapy session, in which one of the devotees of the movement allows the leader to extract revealing information from him regarding early-life trauma in front of dozens of other followers. A similar scenario happened at the picnic I attended, at the Molyneux house in 2010. Several lauded members of FDR took a seat on the couch near Stef and went through the same extraction process. I remember distinctly feeling uncomfortable about it. I don’t think my discomfort was about the fact that people were talking publicly about very vulnerable subjects. In fact, I think it is positive and healthy. What truly made me feel unsettled was that in those moments, it became extremely apparent that these people were putting absolute trust into one person. During that part of the picnic, I found ways to be outside of it but still appear engaged; either lurking out in the kitchen, or outside chatting with others who were equally uninterested in the talk show happening inside. In 2016, I reconnected with one of those people, Kevin, when I started planning this film. A SLOW & RELUCTANT DEPARTURE The more time one devotes to a cause, movement, or group, the harder it becomes to distance oneself from it. Despite the very apparent problems within the community, I would continue to give money and reach out for many more months. I met some of the closest “inner-circle” Freedomainers at the barbeque who had set up their own sub-community in Philadelphia. There were maybe a dozen people mostly in their early 20’s (though a few a bit older), of varying degrees of involvement who almost all at this time deFOOed and were exclusively engaging socially with other Freedomainers. I met with these folks in Philly a few times before finally realizing that the FDR wasn’t for me. FDR Thanksgiving gathering. I sat listening to an organized discussion after our Thanksgiving meal, in which they made a conscious decision to ostracize a woman from the group who had a disagreement about one of Stef’s opinions. This moment influenced me in a pretty significant way, but that is another story for another time. Shortly after my experience with the Philadelphia community, I stopped sending money to Stef, and stopped regularly listening to the show. I stayed connected to many of the people on Facebook, and witnessed most of them fall away too. I still value some of the knowledge and insights I gathered from this youthful leap of consciousness. I still strongly hold on to Stef’s views about peaceful parenting. This is a topic I explore in Stateless, through a couple who also had a falling out with Stef. I also hold dearly the notion that the most productive way toward broad social change is through collective improvement of our closest relationships (like parents/children). Now, in 2017, I am embarrassed to say that I once associated with and gave money to this guy. I’m also pretty sad to see that he has exploded in popularity since dropping an emphasize in non-violent relationships, and opting to build a network with race-oriented “Alt-Right” personalities. Though it is also not surprising, as racial and ethnic prejudice is historically easier to package and sell than philosophical rigour. I was forgiving of Stef for the cultish mishaps, as they were largely self-imposed by his followers. But now I feel more removed than ever. I AM NOTHING AGAIN The dream-like qualities of my time in Freedomain Radio felt more real when I reunited with two people I met in Ontario, Kevin and Juan, on our first shoot in Acapulco. They introduced me to several people in the Anarchapulco community who experienced a similar distancing from FDR. As for my present political identity: If anything I am back where I started in high school. I have long since given up on finding my tribe. However, I do know that I am entirely dissatisfied with the way our social institutions seem to have lagged so far behind our technologies. I see no reason to fear radical change to any of our long-established systems. Education, work, the nuclear family, and the state — they are all fair game to me. I think in the long term, these shifts will be necessary, and hopefully they can be executed with thought and intent rather than fear and randomness. And I’m not just interested in change for the sake of change, but for a healthier more secure human species. The intersection of new technology and social structures is where these revolutions will emerge, and I plan on being there with a camera — or maybe one day some other tool which has yet to be imagined. Here is a confession: This was project was not initially supposed to take this long. Actually, this was not even supposed to be a feature film. And to be completely honest, when I first started rolling my camera from the balcony of an AirBnB in the middle of Acapulco’s “Golden” zone, I wasn’t even sure that this was a story worth telling. But here I am two years later still telling this story, and now blurring this lines with my own life’s tale. The original trip to Acapulco in 2016 was only partially a production trip. I was feeling exhausted by the constantly inflating cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and facing being priced out of my home. It was something that felt like I could not escape anywhere in the United States, so I started fantasizing about getting out of the country. I didn’t have a plan or immediate desire to move away, but I wanted a break. My personality has a hard time traveling for leisure, so my vocation as a filmmaker/video producer combined with a chance story of my past led me to book a trip down to Acapulco. The goal was to maybe gather enough footage with this emerging community to put together a short film, and at the very least open up my social circle to some folks who managed to drop out of the American way of life. I was immediately impressed by how open and welcoming everyone was in the community. Me and my associate producer were invited dinners and private meetups, driven around, and just generally treated like one of their own. But I had only booked that trip for 6 days, and spent most of it just building a rapport with everyone and filtering through the amazingly unique collection of personalities. I didn’t really know for sure upon my departure what would come of it. I spent the end of 2016 wrapping up a prior large project, and when I finally got around to digging through that first batch of footage, I felt madly inspired to keep going with this. I could see from afar on social media how rapidly the community and the Anarchapulco conference were evolving. And when I saw in mid-2017 that two of the people I spent the most time with on that first trip were forking the conference, I knew I had to be there. So I spent the rest of the year eagerly waiting, promoting, fundraising, and building a team to turn this incidental maybe-a-short-film into a full feature production. Everything was going to come together in this second trip. There would be excitement, energy, and drama. We had behind-the-scenes access granted to both conferences. And unlike that first trip, there were plans, questions, and relationships all in place. The footage we gathered on this trip was dynamic, interesting, and spontaneous. Yet I had a feeling on my way back to California that something was going to happen that would draw me back one more time. That thing did happen (though I’m not gonna spoil anything) and now we are planning on going back one more time to tie this story up.