The content on this site wasn't always free. I've offered these videos as paid subscriptions in the past, and I've sold paid versions of this material on Udemy.

Over the past five years I've probably made about 50,000 dollars from paid versions of this material.

I've had many marketers and business people tell me that I could make a killing licensing the video content on this site to businesses and government agencies, and even more if I created proprietary content for these audiences.

One CEO of a marketing company said confidently that I could "dominate this market" (he liked that phrase). He was eager to partner with me, build a team and pursue large corporate clients with multi-million dollar training budgets.

Instead of going that route, I made all of the content freely available and quit my tenured academic job of 16 years to make more of it, full-time.

Why did I do this?

I did it because I believe that everyone, not just those with the disposable income to pay for it, should have the opportunity to learn what philosophers and scientists have discovered over the past 2500 hundred years about how to improve the quality of our thinking and decision-making.

I did it because I believe that this information is a public good, and that making it widely available promotes the public good.

I did it because I believe that our democratic institutions work better when more people are able to critically engage in productive dialogue on the issues that matter most to them.

I did it because I believe that these critical thinking skills are in increasingly short supply, while the challenges of living in a global community in the 21st century place ever greater demands on our ability to reason and communicate together to pursue common goals.

These are my reasons for making the content free, and why I'm asking for support to help keep it free.