Kris Borer on AnCap Ethics and Radical Life Extension | Hn 257

**Adam Haman** (0:07)
Hello, and welcome to Haman Nature. I am Adam Haman, and I'm pleased to be joined by one of my favorite authors, Kris Borer.
It's weird, the book that I love you so much for, I'll add it to the stage, it's called The Ethics of Anarcho-Capitalism. And I want to ask you about that book that came out in 2020, and one you wrote this year that is about not the same topic in the slightest, but rather radical life extension. But before we get there, Kris, welcome to the show.

**Kris Borer** (0:44)
Oh, great to be with you. Thank you for inviting me.

**Adam Haman** (0:47)
So, tell me, your book knocked my socks off. I thought it was so clear.
It explains the ethics of anarcho-capitalism, and also you go through praxeology, economics, some epistemology, property rights. And so, I definitely want you to talk about that. Before we get there, who the heck are you? What caused you to write a book like this? And why did it come out so good based on everything else that was out there?

**Kris Borer** (1:25)
Who am I? I guess I'm a tech guy by background. Studied robotics in school. Done a bit of entrepreneurship, building companies, hardware, software, things like that.
But as an adult, got interested in economics, specifically the Austrian School of Economics. And that led to libertarianism, which got me very curious about all things ethical. And that's how I got into writing the book.
Specifically, I guess, super excited about libertarianism and all the things going on. I read everything that was out there, but it never really clicked to me about how it should work. As an engineer, I want to know how things work. Like, what are the steps? How do the pieces fit together? And it was all a bit fuzzy and like handwavy. It was still good, but like not crystal clear to me for my engineering brain. So that was the main motivation for the book. How do I make sure that each step of the process is crystal clear? And I mainly did it for my own understanding, and I'm glad that there are people like you who also enjoyed it.

**Adam Haman** (2:34)
Yeah, I really did.
I've read everything just like you have. And while political philosophy treatises and step-by-step formations about where rights come from and what property rights are and why, and the non-aggression principle, these are all great. But it really helps to embed these principles to illustrate them by setting them in the real world, or at least as real a world as we can imagine. And you do that. You start right off with your protagonist on a desert island, and then talk about scarcity and action, and then add a person to cooperate with, and then another person to have fights with, because that's what we humans do. And by the end of it, you've got yourself on a more or less fully functioning libertarian anarchic society on like a seasteading platform. So kudos for, I mean, you said you wrote it to flesh out the principles, but you did that by embedding it in something like the real world to try and make sure you weren't just, this wasn't some floating abstraction. And I just thought you really did a good job with that.

**Kris Borer** (3:48)
Thanks, Ian. Ethics could be super dull and boring, so I thought a little story would help, you know, help it go down smoother.
And I needed all the characters because I didn't realize this at first, but you can't really explain ethics with only two people. I mean, you definitely can't do it with one. And two, you can get kind of the way there, but you really need three to make it clear what's going on from an ethical perspective. So that was kind of the motivation for the characters. And the sea studying was kind of just a fun way to like, you know, spice things up and get people off the island, but still keep it contained.

**Adam Haman** (4:23)
People who follow what I do on Substack will know I recently wrote an article called, what the hell did I call it? A day in the life of Alex in Ancapville.
Because the day before I'd bitched and moaned about some police excesses over in Europe. And by the end of it, as I normally do, I'm like, that's why you don't want monopoly provision of services that are so crucially important. And we should abolish all of this stuff. And then the next day I woke up with that, you know, that's just not how people absorb information. We as a species think in narrative structures. That's how we absorb concepts. So I decided to write a little thing and it got a little bit of traction. So again, that's why I liked yours so well.