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April 26, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
52:51
Stefan Molyneux interviewed by the Health Ranger on censorship, philosophy and the freedom to THINK
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Welcome to another important episode of Brighteon Conversations.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of brighteon.com.
Today we have joining us Stephan Molyneux, who is, of course, well, I believe one of the most important philosophical voices of our time.
He has been just enormously popular.
His videos have been viewed over 300 million times, generating over a billion comments.
He's a very thoughtful, rational person.
That's probably his sin against the establishment today.
He has been censored and completely blacklisted by YouTube.
Same thing that happened to me and many others.
And he's now using various alternative platforms, including Brighteon, to be able to continue to have a voice.
He joins us today to talk about culture, censorship, rationality, and the future of human civilization, if there is one.
So thank you, Stephan.
No pressure.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for the invitation.
Well, it's great to have you on.
I'm a fan of your work.
Many of our viewers are fans of you as well.
Can you give us an overview of what happened to you recently with the censorship?
Did they ever give a reason why they censored you?
Or what do you suspect is the cause?
Well, I don't know.
It's all theorizing, I suppose, because I didn't get any actual, you said this, you did this, this was bad, that was bad.
It was just, you know, no strikes, no warnings, just whole channel vanished.
And so, you know, it does, of course, have you...
Thinking about what could I have done or what could I have done differently, I did sort of review that because, you know, whenever something like this happens, you do want to make sure that you didn't do an unforced error, as they used to say in my tennis days.
So I did sort of review.
I haven't really done much on the election this year.
I did do a lot of work on the U.S. election 2015-2016 back in the halcyon days of the meme wars, but I hadn't really done much for the simple reason that...
The left was kind of doing the work for me.
I did these PowerPoint presentations, the untruths about Donald Trump and all that kind of stuff.
I wasn't really sure how any graphs or PowerPoint presentations that I could do could match the grisly footage coming out of the medieval land of Chaz.
So I wasn't doing that much work on the election, IQ differences across races and ethnicities and genders and so on.
I had done that work a couple of years ago.
But, you know, like most topics, I'm not exactly like squirrel, you know, Mr.
Toddler who loses interest.
But after a certain amount of time, you know, you've interviewed the experts, you've had the conversations, you've talked about the objections, and then you move on to a new topic.
topic.
So I had moved on to various new topics.
It's hard to say.
I mean, you can theorize from here to eternity that the fact that it happens a couple of months before the US election, I don't know that that's entirely a coincidence.
And I guess we can guess maybe information will come out over time, but that's as far as I can get it from where I sit.
What about the hypersensitive nature of corporate America now where you have the L'Oreal Cosmetics Company pulling all of these skin whitening products from store shelves because whitening is apparently a sin.
Even though that's the function of the product, it actually does whitening.
What's next?
Will dentists ban teeth whitening because it's racist?
The sensitivity, though, seems to have somehow ensnared you even though you may not have used the trigger words that typically set them off.
What do you think?
Well, the racism, it's funny, you know, because when you study history and you look at various moral panics throughout history, they look crazy to us now.
It's like tulip mania back in the 18th century in Amsterdam where people just went insane for tulips and you could charge hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern money for a particular kind of tulip or the Salem witch trials or the Inquisition as a whole and so on.
You look at these things and you say, wow, people really are kind of susceptible to moral hysterias, but...
But we're much more rational now.
And the challenge with, are there racists?
Absolutely, there are racists.
And, you know, one racist term would be something like white privilege.
Pretty racist term.
You know, saying that you and I have achieved what we've achieved simply because of the color of our skin and we never had to overcome any other obstacles.
And me being born to a poor single mother household gives me more advantages than some black or Hispanic guy being born in the upper middle class and so on.
So...
I mean, the goal, of course, let's go back to Martin Luther King Jr., right?
The goal was to judge people by the content of the character rather than the color of their skin.
And that, of course, is a noble goal.
That's something we should still be in hot pursuit of.
But the pendulum of judging blacks negatively by the color of their skin, which is a terrible thing to do, now has swung to the other extreme where it's now judge whites negatively by the color of their skin.
I don't think we've really solved the problem.
And trying to find a way to get that historical pendulum to sort of slow down in the middle so that we achieve some sort of equanimity or balance.
It's really tough.
You know, did the peasants in the French Revolution had something to complain about with regards to the aristocracy?
They sure did.
And then they killed a whole bunch of priests, nuns, artists, intellectuals, anyone who read a book, anybody who'd seen spectacles, anybody who'd seen the moon through a telescope, anybody who'd uttered the wrong words of a certain kind, any intellectuals.
You know, the whole communist and Nazi tactic of shoot everyone with glasses kind of took play there.
And it's like, can we have something between massive oppression from the aristocracy and killing everybody who's ever read a book?
You know, trying to find a way.
It's like environmentalism.
Sure, we want a clean world.
I don't know, about $93 trillion bills for a clean world.
That seems sort of counterproductive with the sort of Green New Deal.
Can we just find a way to have a revolution not overreach itself and turn into the mirror image of everything it's trying to fix and turn into its own particular tyrannies?
You know, were there problems with structural inequalities in Russia at the turn of the last century?
Sure!
You know, it had only been a couple of decades since the end of the serfdom, the end of serfdom.
The Romanovs were not the most benevolent dictators in the known universe.
Does that mean that you have to kill tens of millions of people in the mad goal towards equality?
You know, let's just try and find some rational way to change society without going way too far.
It's like, can we get somewhere between anorexia and obesity?
Somewhere in between there.
Maybe halfway between your hairdo and my hairdo.
Something like that.
Something in the middle.
This speaks, though, to the grave mistake of banning you in particular, because I believe that your voice has been one of those moderating voices of reason to really inspire people to think about history and think about culture and think about where we are.
You've never been one to just go off and say that all people of a certain race are bad, or to say that people should take to the streets and tear down history and kill each other.
But those voices, those types of voices, are really given priority now.
and Facebook and Twitter.
So at some point, you have to realize, and I'm speaking to the viewer here, that the establishment wants to silence voices of reason, like Stephan here, and the establishment wants to hype up voices of insanity.
But why would that be, Stephan?
Because you know more history than most.
Why would that be?
Why would they want chaos and destruction at this point in history?
Well, through chaos, you get revolution.
And through revolution, you can overturn the Constitution and the Republican Party.
I mean, things can change in a society so quickly.
It's, I mean, look at, you know, Hitler tried the Munich Putsch in the late 1920s, spent some time in prison, wrote his horrible book, and then worked his way up through the electoral process and then transferred Germany virtually overnight.
If you look at the change after 10 years of war in China up until the late 1940s, the nationalists versus the communists, when the communists took over with the aid of the communist spies in the United States, directly sent from Moscow, or at least influenced by Moscow, that society changed like that. or at least influenced by Moscow, that society changed like You look at the communist revolution in Cambodia, you have a massive transformation, but you can't transform a society while it still has stability.
And therefore, if you want to push someone overboard, a stable cruise ship ain't the place you want to do it.
A rowboat that's churning through the waves is what you want to do.
So through the sowing of chaos, you can get the kind of overturning of society that would serve the needs of those who want to create a new and tyrannical system.
And the reason why, I mean, another reason why I'm deplatformed is you have to understand that we have, and we all know this, right?
There's big disparities in outcome.
There's big disparities in outcome between individuals in terms of wages, between various ethnicities, between men, between women, and so on.
And that's a big question.
And we are, to some degree, tortured as a species by that question.
And there have been various belief systems, from religion to Marxism to socialism to capitalism to other systems as well, which we'll talk about in a sec, that try to go to some way.
To explain these disparities, because these disparities are pretty volatile.
It's so strange.
I sort of thought about this, like if our entrepreneurial skills could change the size of our heads, then some people would have these heads the size of Mars and other people would have their heads the size of pins, so to speak.
Right.
And then if some guy with a head the size of Mars had a hundred million dollars or more, you'd say, oh, yeah, but, you know, look at the size of the guy's head.
Whereas if some guy didn't have much money, but he had a tiny little Bill O'Reilly style pinhead, we'd say, OK, well, but that's not the way the world works.
We all are about the same height, you know, give or take.
And we're all bipeds, give or take.
And we're all hairless apes, give or take.
And so when you look at someone like, I don't know, you pick your Jeff Bezos, your Steve Jobs, your Tim Cook, your Bill Gates, you look at those guys, you say, whoa, are you kidding me?
A hundred billion dollars or more?
Like, how is that possible?
They're not working 10 billion times harder than their workers in the factories or the warehouses, right?
Like the guy coding...
At a little cubicle in Microsoft, he's working his eight hours.
Bill Gates is working his eight hours.
Maybe Bill Gates is a better programmer or he's more efficient or whatever, but not 10 million times more efficient.
Do you know what I mean?
So we have this whole question, how can some people...
Achieve so much economic success while other people are just kind of grinding along.
And, of course, the poor have remained constant in America.
And, in fact, the prevalence of poverty has maintained or increased itself since the 1960s.
The wealth disparity gaps are increasing.
CEOs used to make dozens of times what line workers make.
Now it's hundreds or sometimes thousands of times.
So it's kind of weird, right?
I mean, it's kind of weird.
How can some people make so much money and other people can't?
The combination of things that I talk about very briefly is, okay, there's a market meritocracy, and when there's a market meritocracy, some people are just crazy productive.
I mean, one example everyone's familiar with, John Paul, George, and Ringo.
Look at the Beatles, man.
I wrote a couple of songs when I was a teenager, and I tried singing in a band, and I ain't no John Lennon, I ain't no Paul McCartney.
And so...
They're just incredibly productive.
They just sat down.
And maybe it had something to do with playing eight hours a day, two years straight in Hamburg.
I don't know.
But they just were wildly productive.
They produced amazing songs.
And they were great singers and great musicians and so on.
And they're just like number one or number two in the world.
Or it's Elvis, like one dude.
One dude with that great Hawaii 5-0 hair and the cheesy mansions and all that.
So incredibly productive.
And...
So we understand, or sports figures, you know, you understand.
Some people are just movie stars, right?
They're just incredibly productive relative to other people, and we don't know the magic source, but the Marxist answers, and we have to have an answer for this.
Like, we have to have an answer for this, because A, it drives us crazy, and B, the Marxists are giving us an answer.
And the answer the Marxists give to us is that, well, why does so-and-so have $100 million and you have $100?
Well, because he stole from you.
He exploited your labor.
He paid you less than you were worth.
He skimmed off the excess value of your labor.
And he stole from you.
And that creates a lot of rage and a lot of resentment.
And that's when you get people rampaging through richer neighborhoods, burning things down, threatening people, pulling down, snatling.
You get a lot of rage when the Marxist Iago whispers into the ear of the body politic, that guy has more because he stole from you and you're going to steal it back.
You know, next thing you know, everything's on fire and you can't enter Seattle.
And now there are other answers as well.
And there's lots of complicated answers.
There certainly is environment.
Bill Gates' dad happened to be a patent lawyer when he was negotiating with IBM. Yeah, that's pretty handy.
I sure wish my dad had been a patent lawyer when I was starting out in the software industry.
That would have been pretty damn helpful.
And So there are, you know, environmental things, there are class things and so on.
And there's IQ. IQ is very predictive of economic success.
Success in a complex job, you can predict 80% accurately by IQ. Now, 20% is still a lot to work with.
And that's why I do a show that, you know, there's free will, there's choice, there's ambition, there's motivation, there's a lot of soft skills.
I'd rather have less IQ and more wisdom and more, you know, get up and go.
But we've got to have an answer to this wealth disparity and simply retreating from the arena and saying to the Marxists, hey man, it's all yours.
Let's just turn everyone against each other and make everyone...
Mad at anybody who's more successful than them, because we know where that leads, right?
We know where that leads.
That leads to economic decay and collapse.
That leads to mass murder.
That leads to the slaughter of literally tens of millions of people.
So I'm not willing to concede that answer as to income disparity to the Marxists, because, I mean, that provokes war and despotism.
Sorry for the long answer, Ben.
No, that's quite all right.
I just wanted to add another thought to it and ask for your reaction, and that is that as much as you and I probably agree on the merits of a meritocracy, what we have today in terms of success, even of people in music and people in Hollywood and people in In the business world is really that institutions pick the winners and losers.
For example, you being deplatformed takes away your opportunity to compete in the world of ideas.
So even if you're the highest IQ person, you have just been diminished in your reach unfairly.
So you cannot compete against someone who's flashing their ass on the YouTube screen and getting a billion views.
This is going to take a little bit of movement here.
No, listen, it doesn't destroy my ability to compete.
You know, setbacks are just opportunities sideways, right?
So, using your platform, Brighteon, and other platforms, you know, I can come back.
I've already recovered about 25% of my views just in a couple days, right?
So, as mainstream social media becomes more restrictive, more ideological, and less inviting to people who are interesting, right?
You know, because there are some people in life who love repetition.
You know, if you've been a dad or a mom, you know that your kids, when they're young, they can watch the same things over and over again.
And they love the same stories over and over again.
It's a sort of function of an immature mind to love repetition.
You know, the whole point of growing up is you get kind of bored of stuff and you want to explore new things, right?
You don't homestead a house and then continue to explore it.
You go find something new to explore.
And so as social media companies get rid of or suppress or restrict people who are interested and interesting and curious and challenging and so on, then what will happen is, and, you know, it's not a fortunate situation because I love that one big public square where you could talk to people who would oppose you significantly, right?
I mean, so my podcasts, which are actually more than my videos, there's 300 million videos, but almost 400 million podcast downloads and so on, right?
So that is a little bit more like it's not a public square kind of situation.
People can go to fdrpodcast.com to get the list of the podcasts.
But the nice thing about YouTube and places like that is...
You bring ideas to people who are going to have strong disagreements with you, and sometimes they're right, and sometimes you're right, and you polish and you hone your arguments and your evidence better that way.
My concern, of course, is that when we start to hive off these platforms, and people who are interesting or challenging or maybe upset some people, well, they're not welcome on the mainstream social media, so they go to other places, and then the people who want to...
Follow them there, and then you got these two worlds.
And the further that these worlds divide, the more fractious and volatile social relations become.
Absolutely.
Let's talk about your website, freedomain.com, the window into your work.
You're using multiple platforms now.
You just mentioned something extraordinary, that you've already recovered about 25% of your viewership.
I would imagine most of your viewers would follow you to whatever platform you go to.
And if you don't mind me announcing...
I like to think that typing in a new URL is not the massive barrier to pursuit of philosophy.
Oh no, it's more typing!
I can't do it.
I can't do it.
That is, I've discovered that is contingent on explaining to people that Facebook is not the internet.
Right, right, right.
So first, you have to make them aware that there is an address bar at the top of a browser, and then that there is a keyboard to use for that purpose.
But I hope it's okay if we announce this, but we're working with you and people cooperating with you to bring all of your videos to brighteon.com.
Thank you for allowing us to do that.
So what I created, and this was a creation, sometimes solo shows, a lot of times it's conversations with listeners about how philosophy can help their lives.
I've been doing a call-in show for like 15 years.
A lot of it with interviews, a lot of it with debates with people who really strongly disagreed with me.
I just did another one with a professor, a Marxist professor, just two nights ago.
So even if you really, really disagree, it is an important snapshot of where a lot of people are intellectually in the early part of the 21st century.
And we need those snapshots.
Like we really, really do want to maintain these snapshots.
If I've made mistakes, which I'm sure I have, I know I have, because I've changed my mind on a whole bunch of things since I started.
It would be kind of weird if I didn't.
15 years, no new ideas.
That would be kind of sad.
But it is really, really important to have this archive so that people can learn from mistakes that I've made, They can hear arguments against me.
I'm always happy and willing to engage with people who strongly disagree with me.
People who think I'm a totally bad guy, I'm really happy to engage with them because, hey, look, the last thing I want to do is be a bad guy.
I mean, the whole point of, like, what differentiates philosophy from everything else?
It's morality.
It's the ethical examination of life that is the one sole thing that philosophy does that no other discipline really comes close to.
I mean, there's metaphysics or the study of the nature of reality, but that is informed by philosophy, but really is the realm of physics, right?
There's evolutionary stuff that's important to examine from a philosophical standpoint, but that really is the realm of We're good to go.
And I want to be a good guy.
It's really important that they make their case to me because to persist in moral error is just about the worst thing that you can do.
You know, if you build a house and you build it wrong, that's a real drag, but it doesn't tarnish your soul.
It just frustrates you quite a bit, right?
But if you do evil when you're trying to do good, that's very, very harmful to you.
And so I'm always welcoming people to come along and disagree with me.
And that's, of course, the big problem, too, with being silenced means that people can't come and correct me.
And that either indicates I'm completely beyond help or hope, which of course is not the case since I have continued to evolve in my thinking over the years, or they just don't have an answer for what I'm saying, in which case it's pretty egregious.
But that's really what much of our culture has come to today, is that what I would call the radical left is not interested in debate because many of their positions are indefensible, of course.
And more importantly, they really want to burn the books, i.e.
silence the viewpoints of those with whom they disagree.
And for example, even on your site, freedomain.com, I saw you had listed a couple of YouTube videos of people that were defending you against the slander that's happened.
Both of those videos have been pulled by YouTube.
So not only does YouTube censor you, they then silence the videos that defend you against the mob whose voices are never censored.
And by the way, since you were terminated without notice, you didn't even have the right to tell your audience, hey, I'm moving over to this other platform.
So it's really a malicious, fascist type of intellectual book burning at every level.
It is, I think, a function of civilization to doubt.
You know, doubt is progress.
At some point, people had to doubt that owning slaves was a good thing, even though every human society across the globe for over 100,000 years of human history had accepted slavery as the just spoils of war and had owned slaves, bought and sold slaves.
At some point, that little wormwood of doubt had to crawl itself into people's brain and people had to say, hmm...
Maybe we're wrong about this.
Maybe blasphemy laws are bad.
Maybe having the unity of church and state just creates an endless fertile ground for bloody centuries of civil war, as we found out after the Reformation in Europe.
Maybe aristocracy is not the way to organize society.
Maybe we should turn more to science than theology when it comes to understanding the physical nature of matter and energy.
So doubt to me is...
Civilization.
And it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, right?
The people who tend to be the least intelligent tend to be the most certain about things, and they're just this way, period.
There's no debate.
But I think that debate is absolutely essential.
I have a theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior, which I put out about, I don't know, 12 or 13 years ago.
Actually, it was one of my very earliest essays that I put out online, even back in 2006.
Sorry, a decade and a half coming up on now.
And the reason I wrote all of that was because I was no longer certain that I knew what was good.
Like, you know, nobody sits there and says, rape is great, right?
That's not the way that we go.
We have to try and find...
But I didn't know why.
And the answer, generally, for people who are Christians or Muslims or Jews or others, they say, well, it's written in the book.
And so philosophy doesn't have that kind of book.
It doesn't have that kind of theological underpinning.
So as a philosopher, you have to sit there and say, okay, well, instinctively, I know that these things are wrong, rape, theft, assault, and murder, but I'm not sure I can prove why without appeal to consequences or that's the law or it'll make you feel unhappy, which doesn't really work for sadists and so on.
You know, not even knowing why murder is immoral, that's a pretty big admission to make.
And that's civilization, though, when everything that you think you know, you question.
And this goes all the way back to Socrates, of course, who said that he knew very little, if anything, but at least he knew that.
And therefore, there was some place...
To build.
Like, you know, if you're looking for a place to pitch your tent and you keep hallucinating tents everywhere, you've got no place to pitch your tent.
If you think there's something there when it's not, you never get a place to settle and get some rest.
Well, I thought I was hallucinating tents.
It turned out to just be Chaz.
But what we might call this unified field theory of morality, then, that you introduced.
I think I saw this reflected.
You put out a recent video, rather short, that was just a statement of your principles.
I forgot exactly what the title was of that video.
No, my manifesto.
Your manifesto.
Would you be kind enough to just review the bullet points of that for our audience here?
Because I thought it was brilliant and concise and really nailed it.
No, thank you.
So, when it comes to what is real, that's the very first question we need to answer.
What is real?
Now, please understand, these are my statements.
These are not full arguments.
I've got a whole book called Essential Philosophy where I go through all of these arguments as to why, but the short, digestible, tic-tac version of the full, sumptuous meal is this way.
So, what is real?
What is real?
Is the evidence of the material objective universe we get through our senses.
That's what's real.
What is true?
Well, truth is the correct relationship between concepts in our mind and things out there in the real world.
And when the concepts in our mind match the empirical evidence of the real world, then we can claim that something is true.
So that's what is real and what is true.
What is good?
What is good is universally preferable behavior and the non-initiation of the use of force and a respect for property rights.
And I can feel myself being pulled into saying why these are true, but I'm going to stick with the manifesto side of things.
And as far as, you know, some of the accusations of racial supremacy and so on, absolutely, completely and totally against my belief system and what is good and true, philosophically speaking, because I reject the initiation of the use of force in all contexts, whether it's the state, whether it's rape, theft, because I reject the initiation of the use of force in all contexts, whether it's the state, whether it's rape, theft, assault and murder, whether it's some form of
And this, of course, is most important in how we treat children, who are the least free and have the least chosen relationships in society.
You know, you and I are choosing to have this conversation.
I chose my wife.
I chose my friends.
I chose my occupation.
Sometimes it seems to unchoose me back.
But my daughter, she did not choose to have me as a father.
And so to me, where the choice is the least, the ethics have to be the greatest.
And so because our children do not choose our families, they do not choose us as parents, we have to have the highest standards with regards to our children.
If I mistreat my wife, she can walk out tomorrow.
She could be leaving now as we speak.
I don't know, right?
I may have left a coffee cup on the table, right?
But she has choice.
I have choice.
My daughter or your kids, they don't have that choice.
And so the philosophy to me, and this is where I got into trouble very early on in my career, was saying philosophy and morality applies first and foremost to children.
And to me, this was not that controversial because everyone says, oh, I believe the children of...
Like everyone has this sentimental view of children and we all love kids and we want the best for them and so on.
So then for me...
I just looked around and I want philosophy to be practical.
I don't want it to be some abstract discipline that you debate whether we are the dream of the dolphin or whatever stuff passes for philosophy these days.
So I said, okay, well, if the initiation of the use of force is a moral evil, and I don't blame people who, because I'm going to get into some thorny ground here, and I just want to say ahead of time, before people hear moral arguments, they're in a state of nature.
So the people who owned slaves back in the 16th, 17th century, I can't call them evil because they simply were unaware of the moral arguments against it.
And they had theological arguments or other arguments for it.
It's sort of like saying, well, you know, any doctor who didn't prescribe antibiotics before they were antibiotics was a terrible doctor.
It's like, well, no, but there weren't antibiotics.
And so I don't, you can't just spin stuff back through in history and say, well, because the ancient Greeks thought that the world was flat and every four-year-old knows that the world is a sphere, the ancient Greeks were less intelligent than any four-year-old.
It's like, come on, that's not, you know, there's a certain technology even to morality.
I don't- I thought that since George Washington didn't believe in transgenderism, we should tear down all his statues today.
That does seem to be the case, although I got to tell you, he had a pretty fey way of dressing at times and he did wear a wig.
So I just wanted to mention this part.
So when you look at violations of the non-aggression principle, that you can act on, right, that you can act on.
I don't like foreign policy.
I don't like taxation.
I don't like fiat currency.
I don't like foreign aid.
I don't like the endless wars and so on.
But I can't, you know, I can't snap my fingers and change that.
But what we have to do with philosophy is say, where is the most common violation of the non-aggression principle in our lives and what can we do about it?
Well, as it turns out, that the most common violation of the non-aggression principle is spanking.
Hitting your children, circumcision, and even confining your children, and so on.
These are violations of the non-aggression principle that occur commonly.
The vast majority of parents still hit their children, even up into their junior high school years.
So here's something we can do.
And oh, by the by, if you don't hit your children, they will grow up better and happier and more free, and you'll have a great relationship with them, and they won't become...
Drug abusers, criminals.
I'm not saying everyone who's spanked does become those things, but the more negative stimuli and coercion a child experiences, the more that normalizes coercion.
And then when they grow up, they say, well, of course, we need a government because you can't run anything without coercion.
I mean, I couldn't even be a kid without coercion, and they don't want to overturn that moral doctrine.
So...
That's where I first began really getting flack, was saying, hmm, what can we do about this non-aggression principle that's actionable?
And it turns out the better treatment of children is something, but here's the other thing, too.
The moment you start talking about that, I get so many emails from people who are like, oh, you know, my relationship with my kids are better and I decided to stop spanking.
Or people who haven't even had kids yet who said it's one of the first things I talked about with my fiancé was let's not hit kids and so on.
But some of the older people who have already raised their kids, they don't like that topic coming up and they don't like people saying, hmm.
Was this good?
And, you know, those people can, I guess, be kind of in control of certain media organs and they were not particularly pleased with this topic coming up, which surprised me a bit at the time.
I get it a little bit more in hindsight.
Well, that's all very interesting, especially in the context of today.
We have female genital mutilation, and then we have the transgender indoctrination of children, which at some levels involves the chemical castration of young boys, but now it's celebrated.
It's almost like a trophy child that a progressive would take to a party and say, Former boy is transitioning to a girl now, and everybody cheers.
But isn't it a form of chemical violence against a child?
Or would you disagree with that?
What's your take?
Well, so, I mean, this is a big challenging concept as a whole, because what we're told is that gender is a social construct, that there's no difference between male and female brains, that the only difference is, you know, you give girls dolls and you give boys trucks.
So, of course, girls grow up being nurturing and boys grow up being rough and tumble and so on.
And if that's the case, then transgenderism shouldn't really be an issue because there is no particular difference.
But then what you hear, of course, is that, oh, well, you see, but this is a boy who was born with a girl's brain.
And a girl who was born with a boy's brain, well, then it can't just be neuroplasticity.
And, like, there has to be then something fundamental that you can't talk people in and out of.
That contradiction to me is so that the more you dial up the male and female brain stuff, then the more you're going to go towards explaining things like wage disparities between men and women and the fact that women prefer more occupations that involve people, whereas men are more comfortable often with occupations that involve things and calculations and computers and so on.
So, the more you dial up the defense of transgenderism, the more you're going to dial up explanations that explain other differences between men and women, and that square circle has never really been identified.
The more you dial down and say, well, you know, it's not male-female brains and so on, then if it is simply a matter of changing your mind about stuff and it's all neuroplasticity and it's all environment and all programming, then giving kids some very powerful drugs, For basically a state of mind is really to me not very defensible, right?
So yeah, it's a big challenging complexity that we're not having much of a conversation about.
Well, and the contradictions in their arguments are so evident, it's almost laughable.
So, for example, they say there's such a thing as same-sex marriage, but even J.K. Rowling was making this argument.
How can there be same-sex marriage unless sex is something that is absolute?
You can't have same-sex marriage if everybody just invents their sex.
It doesn't even exist then.
Well, it's also when you say things like race is a social construct, but we need affirmative action, or race is a social construct, but there's such a thing as white privilege.
It's like, yeah, you can't muck it all up and then say the water's perfectly clear.
This is fascinating.
I tell you, I would love to have more conversations with you about all kinds of topics that are on my mind.
But I want to ask you, especially for your sake, about your success as a voice.
What are your plans, in addition to having your videos on Brighteon and BitChute and other platforms, what are you doing with freedomain.com and your podcast?
How are you going to maintain your viability or just circulation among viewers?
Well, I think that the key is cleavage.
So let me just...
It seems to be that that's the way you've got to go.
And, you know, honestly, in my 50s, the moves are coming along nicely, so that may be my way forward.
Well, it's interesting, right?
So one of the things that...
Suppression or deplatforming tries to encourage you to do is to change what you do.
Oh, well, something bad happened, therefore I should change what I do.
And that is a temptation to be resisted.
So the deplatforming and the success...
They're kind of one and the same.
Because if you hadn't succeeded, you wouldn't be worth targeting.
So the success in the past is the challenge now.
They are the same thing.
And trying to get the yin without the yang is a little bit troublesome because then you want all the green pastures and none of the manure, so to speak.
So...
For me, I want to keep doing what it is that I'm doing because it was working very well.
I like to travel.
When we get back into that, hopefully, which we will at some point, I do like to go and do documentaries.
I just released a video that was recorded of a workshop I did in Orlando last year.
It really feels like quite a lifetime ago.
And this was before PayPal and YouTube kicked me off.
And so, to me, and I loved working with the audience, it was a multiracial audience, and we talked about challenges of racism and getting along, and it was really, really a great, great conversation, and I loved everybody who was there.
It was really wonderful, so people can go and check that out.
I'm going to throw that on Brighton as well.
So, for me, I don't want to be tempted into changing the basic formula of talking about things that I think are important with...
Some of the greatest people around you and the listeners and the people I interview and so on.
So I don't want to change things too much because, again, they want me to change things so that I'll be less successful and I have to kind of resist that urge.
That having been said, you know, there is some rebuilding to do.
There are going to be some strategy changes to get the word out and that is...
I really want to go and do a history of philosophy, like walking the places where it actually happened.
To me, that would be really, really fascinating.
Lots of plans in the works.
Your commitment to your message and your philosophy is one of the reasons why I really admire your work.
I've seen many, many people alter their message to try to conform to the increasingly insane obedience demands of platforms like YouTube.
And I keep trying to explain to them, when does this end?
I mean, how many words do you have to delete from your narrative before you're just saying nothing but gobbledygook?
You know, you're just the, it, and, and, but, and it's like...
They'll take out all the letters and you'll only be left with punctuation, question, apostrophe.
No vowels.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
But you've stuck with your message.
And in fact, you even did a video right after you were banned that said, I think, no regrets that you are committed to your message.
I really admire that.
Thank you for doing that.
Well, it's my pleasure.
And I'd like to say that, I mean, look, there's times when it's tough.
Don't get me wrong.
There's times when it's just like, oh, another one.
And it's a challenge for sure.
But, you know, to me, this little camera thing that I'm looking at here, that's not a machine.
That's not a little robot eye.
I mean, that's millions of people out there in the world over time.
And if I'm going to ask people to listen to what it is that I have to say, look, nobody cares about me.
I'm just some guy in a studio.
And what they care about is the truth.
And that's what I care about too.
And that's what we have in common.
If I'm going to ask people to listen to me, then I represent philosophy and I represent a particular methodology of thinking that is subjective and rational and really the essence of how we can all get along.
We abandon reason.
We abandon evidence.
All we have left is coercion.
All we have left is violence.
We've got to resolve.
We're either going to agree like scientists to agree on an objective methodology like the scientific method, or it's going to be skateboards to the head on a regular basis.
There's no third way when it comes to resolving our disputes.
So for me, you know, this kind of stuff where I'm talking to the world and they're going to listen to me as I want them to do, I have to be like a pane of glass.
You know, I want, again, people get interested in me or they get mad at me or...
I'm not important.
I'm as important as the camera is here.
It doesn't matter.
You make a pane of glass to give people a view, you don't want them to say, hey, that's really good glass.
Because the better the glass, the less you notice it.
And I just want people to forget about me, forget about my life or my motivations or my thought crimes or whatever.
Just focus on the reason.
Focus on the evidence.
And I mean, it's pretty easy to lie for a living.
I mean, the vast majority of human beings do that.
I mean, and some of them are pretty well paid for that.
So it's pretty easy to lie for a living.
But if you want to carve out a new market called the truth or honesty or integrity, it's pretty wide open these days.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, even as the founder of this platform, Brighteon, just recorded a podcast last night about this very topic, how any platform could be approached by Google or Apple, like, you know, here's a billion dollars, sell out, sell us your platform.
And I think that a lot of people who are building these alternative ecosystem platforms would take the money.
And I will not.
I will not take the money.
And the reason, which I think you will appreciate, is that what the hell use is a billion dollars in a world where I have no liberty?
The money's worthless.
You either draw a line in the sand and you stand for the right for people to speak and for the right for ideas to be shared, or you've sold out everything, even your own future.
What's the point of fake fiat currency in a world where you're a slave to a system that tells you what to think?
It's fucking pointless.
Quite right.
Quite right.
And for those of you who haven't had this kind of experience, it may sound a little abstract.
You can just go look up what happens to people who win the lottery.
And it's almost universally a complete disaster.
And they wish they never had and they lose their motivation.
Everybody approaches them wanting something and they can't ever relax with people.
So I had a friend of mine, a friend of mine for many decades, Was not particularly happy with his life.
He couldn't find a girl to settle down with.
He couldn't really find a very satisfying career and so on.
And then, kind of out of nowhere, like out of a Dickens level, like out of great expectations or something, he just got a windfall of money.
Like, you know, some pretty serious coin there.
And I remember thinking at the time and talking about him at the time saying, this is a really dangerous moment for you.
Because why will you get up and go to a job that you're kind of indifferent to?
You don't have a family.
What is going to happen when you don't have anything to do?
What is going to happen?
And lo and behold, and as it kind of played out, he got the money and was not motivated in his job, and it didn't make him any happier.
And we all want this relief from resistance, relief from problems, relief from...
But it's basically like going into orbit.
You know what happens?
People who go into orbit on the space station and so on, their calcium decays, their bones get brittle.
Without resistance, without gravity, we fall apart.
And so this idea that it's worth selling your purpose for money, you know, that's a long time.
to just be alone with your money, man.
And it's really, and you can't give it back and you can't turn back the clock and you can't recreate it very easily.
Now, some people will maybe take that money, go start a new business and so on, but usually there's a whole lot of non-competes and golden handcuffs and all that kind of stuff with that.
So, I mean, yeah, I've been offered some stuff over the years and I've always resisted sponsors and advertisers and so on.
And listen, advertising is a perfectly functional and fine model, and I have no problem with it whatsoever.
With a platform like yours, it makes perfect sense because you are a platform, not a publisher.
But for me, first of all, it would create a single choke point for people who oppose me.
And secondly, it does subtly shift The business model so that I'm now delivering eyeballs to advertisers rather than the truth to the people.
So again, I think it's a wonderful business model as a whole.
For me, it was just something like I gotta resist it.
And if somebody came along and said, you know, I'm going to give you X amount of dollars and you're going to be able to build some giant studio and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, you know, there's always that Greedo from Star Wars thing.
There's always something under the table during the business deal and I don't want to end up with a smoking crutch, at least not yet.
Well, yeah, and remember, Han shot first, so we know how that turned out.
I think that's established.
Yes, but it does seem it would be odd to hear you say, you know, hello, welcome to my show, and please buy this storable food made out of soy protein.
You know, it just wouldn't fit at all.
I have these very deep and meaningful conversations with people about their lives.
Hold on.
Hold that thought.
If you could just stop crying for a moment, I really have to tell you about this bunker program I got going in New Zealand.
It's not right for my medium.
And again, no hating on advertising.
It's a great way of getting services to people who have more time than money.
Well, absolutely.
But along those lines, and I'll cut this if you want me to, but I hope we can have a conversation at some point where you might consider allowing Brighttown to sponsor some of your upcoming travel to do documentary episodes.
I mean, I think that would be appropriate.
We're a platform.
We want to give you a voice.
Please think about that, if that might be appropriate.
Look, that's wonderfully kind, and it moves me enormously that you would make that offer.
The way that I've done it in the past is talk to people who listen to my show and say, if you want to donate, let me know, because that gauges people's level of interest in the final product.
So again, that's super kind, and I really, really honor.
The generosity of that.
But let me go to the well that's worked so well in the past and make sure that people are bound in, too.
Because then what also happens is, you know, I may meet people who can help me out with the documentary.
All kinds of good stuff can come.
So again, super kind.
I really appreciate it.
But so far, it's worked pretty well this way.
And what I'd like to do, of course, is then upload it to your platform and get you guys some eyeballs that way.
And we are introducing a tipping system.
It's a token tip system, so viewers can tip you for any of your videos.
It doesn't have to be live streams.
Let's hope that we can all help Brighton hit the tipping point.
Oh, there's a little business joke for you there.
It's a stand-up comedian.
I make a mediocre philosopher.
Anyway.
Alright, last question for you today, and I greatly appreciate your time.
It's really a joy to be able to speak with you and to be able to help you reach more audience.
Because you are quite a student of history, I believe, what does history say we are headed into when you see This revolt, this tearing down of statues, this cultural attack, and also the destruction of rationality, the rise of language lunacy, the attacks on linguistics and so on.
What's the lesson that history tells us about that?
I'm always a little concerned about lessons from history because it can reek of a kind of determinism that tends to come more from the Marxist side, I know, than from your side or from my side.
So the lesson of history is that if you don't do anything, there's going to be mountains of bodies.
Absolutely no question.
It's as sure as sunrise.
If you don't act, if you don't push back against this stuff, and we are still in the place where you can push back with reason, with evidence, with passion, with conviction, with communication.
So if people just let this steamroller continue over the remnants of our liberties, what's going to happen is you are going to be dragged off someplace extraordinarily unpleasant and you won't have a chance.
To do much about it.
And then you will really regret, really, really, really regret not having acted when you could.
And this is really, really important.
Regret is one of the worst curses of the human condition because, you know, the salami principle, but they just take off little slices, little slices at a time.
Next thing you know, you've got nothing left.
They're very, very good at, you know, water ways away the stone of our liberties.
And it's very, very tough for people To take a stand.
And of course, everybody that they deplatform, they simultaneously demonize, right?
So now I'm some white supremacist or racist or whatever it is, right?
Eugenicist.
They say tout eugenics.
I hate all government programs, right?
So what happens is by attaching these negative labels to What they hope is for people to step back.
Well, I want to defend that guy because he's really bad.
It's like, well, you just lost another slice of your salami, so to speak.
And this may also have a phallic imagery that's powerful to people as well.
But you do have to act.
Like, we've had a pretty lazy Sunday afternoon for a couple decades in the West.
I mean, no major wars, no major Great Depression, no pestilence, no famine.
Coronavirus is not exactly the Black Death these days, however much it may be feeling that way to people who want to have power over you.
But we've had it kind of easy in many ways.
You know, it's time to get the hell off the hammock and get out into the marketplace of ideas because if we continue to take it easy, you know, that hammock, you know, two snips and it drops into a grave and we're done.
This apathy that you're speaking of here, this is absolutely one of my concerns, but the other is that mainstream America is literally not aware of what is happening.
Often because of the censorship.
If someone's tuned into NPR or CNN, they quite literally believe that Antifa is anti-fascist and that they're protecting America from a fascist Trump regime and that therefore anything is justifiable and so on.
I mean, there is just this obliviousness.
To the masses today.
That's almost worse than apathy.
They don't even have the opportunity to be apathetic.
You know what I mean?
But you have to reach in through Plato's cave and yank people out by the hair if need be.
And again, I'm talking metaphorically.
It all needs to be peaceful.
But you really have to bring your language, your facts, your reason, and your evidence to bear on people's delusions.
Those we love, we must struggle to free from error.
Because error is physical or cultural or mental or societal suicide over time.
If you keep thinking that gravel is food and toast is poison, you won't last long in this world.
If you keep thinking that tigers are pets and cats are tigers, you're going to go entirely to the wrong place in the petting zoo and you're going to lose an arm.
So continual error is a form of either suicide or murder.
And you can, of course, support error for a long time with fiat currency and money printing and borrowing and debt and so on.
But at some point, the bill comes due, and the bill is coming due very quickly now.
This is one of the reasons why the left is panicking.
Because if the bill comes due, then there's going to be a lot of people who are going to have to change their lifestyles pretty quick.
And a lot of people dependent on the state.
And I don't just mean the poor.
I mean, the military industrial complex, the rich, the sort of all the financial institutions that live off the general inflation pillaging of the Fed and so on, they're all going to have to change and readjust and readapt.
I think the good thing with coronavirus is it's shown we can really adapt society pretty quickly and with minimum fuss.
But yeah, the price of inaction is going to be death.
And death may even be the better scenario out of what might come torture, gulags, who knows, slow starvation, all of the stuff that we've seen before in these kind of leftist revolutions.
Or facing a mob and they say, you either come with us to kill the capitalist pigs or we're going to kill you.
And then it's like murder or death.
And these kinds of situations have happened repetitively.
I'm not saying they're imminent.
But if they were imminent, we'd be having a whole other kind of conversation, maybe from the aforementioned bunkers in New Zealand.
But we do have to, while we still have the time, while we still have the voice, while we still have the technology and the communications abilities, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a video, whether it's simply you at your table pushing back against the lies that people have heard, you know.
You know, oh, Trump didn't do anything about the Russians paying a bounty to people in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers.
It's not true.
It's not true.
Hydrochloroquine is a very effective treatment.
That seems to be the case these days.
And the media, to dunk on Trump, helped trigger the death of many people by not getting the medicine to who was needed.
So you've just got to, in your personal life, maybe not in your professional life, depending on how woke your company is, but you do owe out of an act of love.
Letting people persist in an addiction to error is about as bad, if not worse, as letting them persist in an addiction to cocaine or It's not a helpful thing.
It's not a kind thing.
It's not a loving thing to serve up the drug of delusion to people on a regular basis, even though it's volatile, even though it can be painful.
Bring the truth to people or they're going to bring lies that are very well armed to you over time.
Welcome to my show!
Thank you so much, Stephan.
It's been a real joy to be able to speak with you today.
And folks, be sure to check out Stephan's work at freedomain.com.
And also coming soon, his videos will be mirrored on brighteon.com.
So thank you so much for joining us.
I really appreciate the conversation.
Thank you very much and I appreciate the platform.
This video was made possible by brighteon.com.
After being deplatformed by YouTube, I built Brighteon.com so that we can speak.
All voices of dissent are welcome.
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