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July 3, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
57:14
The return of STEFAN MOLYNEUX! Mike Adams interviews modern philosophy's most articulate communicato
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Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
And I am just really honored and pleased to bring back, I think, one of the most important voices of our time.
He is a philosopher, a teacher, just an incredibly inspiring figure.
And he has been, he's sort of disengaged from large parts of the internet for a number of years.
And he's back.
It's Stéphane Molyneux, and he joins us right now.
His website is freedomain.com.
And there you go, freedomainjustlikeitsounds.com.
Welcome, Stefan or Stefan.
Excuse me.
Everybody pronounces your name differently.
Welcome to the show.
It's great to have you on.
Thanks.
It's great to be here.
We haven't chatted in a while.
It's been a number of years.
And honestly, I've missed your voice.
I've been a big fan of your work for a long time.
And then I saw a video of you recently talking about how you are focused on, what do you call it, peaceful parenting.
And so you're not beating the kids?
Is that where that begins?
Well, not my own, obviously, because they can fight back.
Yeah, so I took some of time in the hiatus.
I wrote three books, and one of the books I wrote was called Peaceful Parenting, which is the application of sort of the libertarian values of the non-aggression principle, respect for persons and property, applied to parenting.
Because, you know, one of the things that's kind of troubled me in the history of philosophy, and I created a narrated a 22-part history of philosopher series on my site, is that philosophers don't really talk about parenting.
Oh, true.
The abstract questions of metaphysics and epistemology, oh, politics, oh, relationships between the sexes and so on.
But they don't go to the core furnace of the human experience, what shapes us in irrevocable ways, which is parenting.
Ayn Rand didn't talk about it.
Plato barely touched on it.
Aristotle really, not at all.
The church fathers did, but really from a mere biblical, not purely philosophical perspective.
And I've just always had the idea or the goal that philosophy should be actionable in your life.
Now, I don't like the Federal Reserve, but there's really not much I can do about it except maybe pee on their building at 2 o'clock in the morning and risk arrest.
However, when it comes to the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about, well, that would be parenting.
And I've been a stay-at-home dad.
My daughter turns 17 this year.
So we're almost done, at least for the time being, until grandparents' stuff slides into the interview.
And it works beautifully.
Of course, I have a lot of friends who are peaceful parents and sibling conflicts are virtually non-existent and everyone gets along really famously and there's not a lot of fighting, if anything, really.
And it just works beautifully.
And so it becomes a lab.
We want people to take on the non-aggression principle for society as a whole.
Why don't we show how it works so well in our own families?
And of course, we don't beat our spouses.
So why hit your children?
Why yell at your children?
Why call them names?
If you wouldn't do it to your boss or your coworker, don't to your own flesh and blood.
Yeah, you know, for everything that we see on the world stage right now, there's a microcosm of that in the household, like economic sanctions.
It's like I'm suspending your allowance, you know?
Right?
Or canceling trade routes.
You're grounded.
So, you know, I mean, here we are as a world where right now, especially in the Trump presidency, and I know your focus isn't politics right now.
I'm not going to take it there, but rather in an abstract way, everything that we see in the world was so much conflict and war and sort of separation, a lot of separation.
It's mine, not yours.
I win, you lose, that kind of thing.
If we can't conquer that in our own homes, how do we expect to, and even, I'm sorry, to even use the word conquer.
That's even the wrong word.
That's an imperialistic term.
But if we can't navigate that locally, how do we navigate it globally, right?
Yeah.
And I would even push back on the idea of taking away a kid's allowance and granting them and so on.
These you wouldn't do to your coworkers and you wouldn't do it to your friend who bothered you.
And so there's just great ways to reason with children and to respect children.
Children will listen to and emulate who they most respect.
And the best way to get respect from children is not to be wildly hypocritical, as in, you know, the extreme example of the parent yelling at the child, telling the child not to yell at people, or the parent hitting the child, saying, how dare you hit someone, you know, you bad kid.
So if you have a kind of base consistency in your life as a parent, then kids will just emulate that.
Kids are, you know, copy-paste machines, especially when they're young.
You know, when if you go around kids, spend time around kids when they're learning language, it's mind-blowing.
Just how quickly, like 20 words a day, 30 words a day, without even, I can't remember where the coffee is in my household after eight years, but kids are just absorbing like sponges all of this language.
And they also absorb your behavior.
And the more consistent and rational and friendly and positive and enthusiastic and affectionate your behavior is, the more they're going to import that into their sort of operating system, so to speak.
And then with a strong bond with the parents, they are shielded against some of the most pernicious influences, right?
Bad schools, bad media, bad online stuff, and bad peers.
What's going on among the young with peers these days is kind of shocking, you know, very high body counts for the girls and lots of drugs and vaping and smoking.
Not so much smoking, but it's rough.
And the closer the bond to the parents, the more they are going to resist the sort of siren smash your head on the rocks lure of their peers.
And I mean, almost all parenting is gearing up for the teenage years when they start to get that independence and that skepticism and all of that.
And if you have a great bond, it works out well.
And if you don't have a great bond, all the time you saved by having sort of lazy or aggressive or indifferent or absent parenting, all the time you saved from taking the shortcuts when you're younger gets burned up, burned up, I say, by all of the stress and problems of the teenage years.
So, I mean, parenting is always pay me now or pay me later.
And if you put your deposits in early, the payoff is beautiful.
Well, you used the term operating system there.
And it's really fascinating because even though I don't have children, I've spent the last 20 months training, in essence, a digital child, which is an AI language model.
And it absorbs everything that I, what I train it on, a specific data set.
It absorbs that and then it regurgitates that.
And that seems simple.
I'm not saying that AI is human, obviously, but there are language models and there are behavior models.
And there's a digital neural network in the AI systems.
And in humans, it's a biological neural network.
And that biological neural network, as you say, learns very rapidly.
And it's not just listening to words, as you say, expanding her vocabulary every day, but she or he is also greatly expanding their behavior modeling, as you said.
And that's something that I think a lot of parents don't notice.
As you said, there's so much hypocritical behavior that gets picked up.
And then parents are like, why?
Like, you know, like a cigarette smoking, drug-using parent, like, don't use drugs, you know?
Like, that happens all the time, right?
Well, children are relentlessly and beautifully empirical.
So if you ever want to really annoy a child, say, hey, I'm going to give you some candy.
And they say, ooh, ooh, I like candy.
I want some candy.
And then you write down the word candy on a piece of paper and you give it to them and you say, there you go.
I disguised you from candy.
Well, the kids are going to be like, well, we do it with rights all the time, right?
So it's okay.
It's written in some books.
So you got it.
But so kids are empirical.
They care about what is, not what is conceived of.
And they are, especially when they get to their teenage years, they are relentless sniffers out of hypocrisy.
And this is one of the reasons I, the main reason I ended up going back on Twitter.
My account was restored, I don't know, a year or two ago or something like that.
But I had these sort of standards for returning on Twitter.
And my daughter, you know, just sort of sat me down and said, all right, let's step through this big guy.
And she made an irrefutable case.
So I'm back on Twitter.
And kids who know that you're going to listen to them, that reason and evidence are going to win the day, and that your behavior, actions speak louder than words, your behavior is in line with your values.
Really, that's the best you can do in any relationship, but the most important thing you can do with kids.
May I ask you, and I apologize if this is too sensitive, but why did you leave the internet space for a number of years?
And I mean, what's behind that?
Whatever you can share with us.
Oh, sure.
I mean, it's not a secret because it was very public at the time.
So basically, an election year, remind me, was it an election year?
Yeah, probably.
I do believe it was.
Divide by four, leap year and election year.
So I was unceremoniously with no negotiation and barely any reports on what I might have violated.
I was deplatformed, you know, the old phrase, right?
And so I was kicked off most of the major video and social media platforms as a whole.
And where I was retained, it is my genuine belief.
It's hard to prove that there was a huge amount of suppression given what's happened since I got back on Twitter.
It's easy to see how suppressed I was on other platforms.
So, of course, I went to your lovely platform, which I was already on.
And I went to other platforms that were willing to accept the heretic or whatever it is, you know, just take shelter wherever you can.
And I basically went from playing stadiums to playing a jazz club.
So I would do live streams to a smaller number of people.
We'd have sort of intimate conversations, chatty conversations.
And as to why I was deplatformed, I mean, boy, pick your reasons.
Just about everything that I touched was a third rail.
And I knew that ahead of time.
I knew the risks going in, but I felt it was worth talking about difficult truths with the world.
But some of that was about gender.
No, gender stuff.
There was race stuff.
There was political stuff.
There was anti-Chinese stuff, anti-communist, not anti-Chinese, like the Chinese people.
I did a whole documentary in Hong Kong and visited China before.
Lovely people.
But yeah, it was that and skepticism about COVID.
And I did a whole presentation called the case against China as to how we're pretty sure that it came out of the Chinese lab.
Oh, what else?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, if you remember, George Floyd, I had a black cop and a white cop on my show talking about George Floyd and how sometimes people get what's called excited delirium and they just kind of faint and have medical problems when getting arrested.
So I think there was just a whole narrative that wanted to be pushed forward that people didn't want push forward.
And rather than, you know, I do shows where people can call in and argue and debate with me all the time, but rather than do that, well, they proved to be rather intolerant of tolerance.
And that's sort of the paradox.
So I think that was it as a whole.
But that's the gig, right?
I mean, as a philosopher, you're supposed to promote virtue and truth.
And that interferes with the goals and plans of the corrupt and the false.
So, I mean, that's the gig.
And I will say, too, I will say this with great gratitude.
It's a way better gig than most philosophers in history have ever, ever gotten.
True.
Because, you know, I get to largely work from home and I don't have to drink any hemlock.
I'm not tortured.
I'm not set fire to and so on.
I'm not driven into exile.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good gig.
Not yet, yeah.
I think we'll stay on the sunny side of that street.
Okay, excellent.
During this time, I would say that I think mainstream awareness of the importance of philosophical underpinnings of our actions has only increased.
And I've seen like Thomas Sowell fan clubs and things like that, right?
And people really talking about core philosophies more and more.
And even myself, I've been influenced by your work.
And I've said publicly many times, like, I don't worship any man or woman.
I'm not pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
I have a system of values.
And when Trump is aligned with those values, I will applaud his work.
When he contradicts those values, I criticize him.
End of story.
And I'm actually seeing that that kind of philosophy is catching on more.
And your voice, I dearly miss your voice, by the way.
I'm so glad that you're back.
And do you think that humanity right now as a whole, I know there's still, you know, there's still the whole annoying like mainstream Twitter crowd that doesn't think there are NPCs, whatever.
But as a whole, do you think people are actually being, I don't want to say quite red-pilled, but more amenable to the idea of the importance of philosophical underpinnings?
Well, I think so.
And because I was, and, you know, I sort of hate to use the phrase like in the wilderness or exiled because, you know, the places that took me in were very valuable and I hugely appreciated.
But I will say that having been away from really mainstream idea talk, mainstream reasoning talk, boy, things have changed in the last half decade since I was in the fray on a regular basis.
I mean, things have changed a lot.
Stuff that used to be controversial is now largely accepted.
And it's actually because people are telling me, and it's an interesting thing to hear, because I always used to be, I don't know, cutting edge, bleeding edge, self-mutilation edge, something like that.
But people are now telling me, you know, hey, old timer, you know, you've been out of the game for half a decade.
Don't come back as if time hasn't moved on in your absence or people's thoughts haven't moved on in your absence.
So I'm obviously, it's been like two weeks since I've been back on X. And thanks, Elon.
Really, really mean that.
And people are like, I'm sniffing out where things are.
They've moved on a lot, which is great.
I mean, I think that's wonderful.
So, I mean, boy, I think that COVID, man, did that ever do a number on people's trust in authority?
Like now the new occult leaders, the nerds in white pocket protectors and lab coats are all telling everyone, trust the science, as if science isn't about foundational skepticism in the wisdom of your elders and rigid empiricism for nature and reason.
So I think for a lot of people, they're like, okay, well, it's clear that we got a lot of lies about that.
If they're lying about that, and that was some pretty important stuff, then what else are they lying about?
That's number one.
And number two, I've sort of been asking people about this on Twitter to get the lay of the land because I really don't know what people are thinking en masse post-COVID because I was deplatformed near the beginning.
And it's like, what are people doing with the fact that there was so much turning on each other over COVID?
Because I think we all saw that.
People snarling at each other to wear their masks.
A lot of the Democrats said children should be taken away from parents who won't vaccinate their kids or people should put in internment camps or we should go full Australia.
Like I know it started as a penal economy, but why would you want to revisit that under COVID?
That's weird.
And so the number of people who just went kind of evil and corrupt over COVID, and now everyone is just, move on.
Let's, you know, like you hit something in that car, but dump it down.
It's like, keep driving, man.
Keep, don't turn back.
And then you pretend nothing happened five minutes later.
And I think that's weird.
I think that's destabilized a lot of people's relationships.
And so, I mean, and all the people who were like, oh, well, you know, you can't separate families.
I mean, what about the illegals?
And it's like, well, you know, you all wanted Granny to die on her own because the coldness was ravaging the people who already had three or four more comorbidities.
So it's, I think that the hypocrisy, I think the falsehood, and I think the absolute five seconds later, Will Smith pen in the face amnesia is just wild for people.
And I'm, I'm trying to understand how people are processing that because, of course, I didn't really spend time around people who bought into a lot of the COVID stuff.
And seeing how that's shaping out post-COVID is wild.
I mean, I think that people are just erasing the past, but in erasing the past, it's really making the relationships weak as well.
Because if people won't even admit the fault that's really in front of their faces, which they did a year or two ago or three, what really is there?
So yeah, just trying to get the lay of the land, having been away from the mainstream alternative media for so long is really fascinating.
I'm getting some really good advice on that, which I appreciate.
Oh, I'm sure.
I'm sure.
Let me ask your reaction to something that I experienced in the last year along these very lines.
And I'll try to keep your feet out of the fire on this by not making it too controversial.
But last year, I studied the Bible, and I taught 104 Bible sermons.
I stopped teaching Bible sermons because the minute I started asking questions about the Bible and why there are different versions of the Bible and what about these missing books that are in the Ethiopian Bible, and what about the translations and the Roman Catholic Church and the counterfeit 2 Peter book, and these kinds of questions annoyed the hell out of Christians.
And then I found out, based on other world events and certain things I'm not going to specify, I found out that a great many Christians absolutely do not believe anything that Christ taught, such as peace or nonviolence.
Even Christ himself was opposed to animal sacrifice, for example, freeing the animals in the temples, etc.
And for me, that was a big disappointment to realize that here's a large group of sort of mainstream, let's say mega-church so-called Christians who actually behave like just a cult, not with any philosophical underpinnings that they claim to follow.
And then I connected with some other people who actually know the history, study the history of Jesus of Nazareth and actually follow the teachings of peace and so on.
And I was really shocked by that.
So I experienced this mass disillusionment among a group that I thought was fighting for truth and freedom of speech all these years as Trump was being persecuted.
And then when it came time for them to persecute this other group somewhere else, they were like all for it, like bomb them, kill them, whatever.
That blew my mind, Stefan.
I mean, how do we make sense of this?
I mean, the big challenge of a belief system is when it commands you to do something you really, really don't want to do.
And one of the things that happens in the Bible, of course, is, and I have been going to church and I have been studying this stuff and I did a whole series on Bible verses this last year.
Not that I'm any kind of expert, just please understand that, but I've certainly been thinking about it.
And one of the things that happens in the Bible, Of course, is that if you are a you know, like an angry, judgmental person, you can find justification for that.
If you're a meat, forgive everyone person, you can find justification for that.
The real challenge is when you are commanded to do something that goes against the grain, otherwise, it's like a buffet: hey, just eat what you want, eat what tastes good, you never have to restrict your diet, and that's not healthy in life or in a belief system.
And so, for me, when somebody hits or gets a counter-argument to what they feel like doing, that's when you really test whether you believe in it or not.
So, I mean, for instance, the non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force, I mean, when applied to child raising, it's very clear.
Obviously, it's not self-defense against your children.
And if there are alternatives to violence, we should take them.
And the non-aggression principle says the initiation of force is wrong.
So can you apply that in your own life?
And right, there's tension because it's like, okay, well, now I can do something about these values that I claim to hold.
And in the same way, you know, I'm criticized for saying that people should be free to criticize their own parents.
I mean, how are we going to progress?
How are we going to progress as a society if we can't criticize those who came before us?
I mean, it happens in science, in math, in business, it happens, and it should happen in the family.
And then people say, oh, well, honor thy mother and thy father.
And I'm like, but you don't honor people by lying to them and pretending things aren't true.
Like if you have a family that went kind of crazy over COVID, you should sit down and talk with them about it.
And if it's your parents, same.
You got to sit down and talk because the important one for me is thou shalt not bear false witness, which means in important matters of morality in society, you must tell the truth.
And so if people are just like, well, honor their mother and their father and forgive everyone so I don't have to say anything about anything negative that anyone's ever done to me, I don't really think that's the point.
But it goes in line with, you know, confronting corrupt people and confronting people who did you wrong can be kind of alarming.
I mean, they can get really angry.
They can escalate.
They can spread rumors about you.
I mean, maybe hopefully it'll go well, but it might go badly.
And so, and that's just in your family confronting, I mean, this is kind of what my whole gig was for 20 years.
So confronting people who've done wrong is a very volatile situation.
It's easier to sit back and just say, well, I'm commanded to forgive, so I don't need to be honest.
I don't need to confront.
It's not what the Bible says.
The Bible says if someone wrongs you, there's a three-step process.
Number one, talk to them individually.
If they don't listen, number two, gather them together with a small group of the congregation.
Number three, talk to them in front of the whole congregation.
If they still don't listen or provide any apologies or amends, then ostracize them from the church.
I mean, that's very clear.
It's not just, you know, no matter what you do.
I mean, the turn the other cheek thing, I think, is like, you know, if somebody hits you, it could be by accident.
Turn the other cheek, if they hit you again, now it's not by accident.
You've got a more clear moral situation on your hands.
So when people want to not confront evil because it's scaring to confront evil or corruption or just bad behavior, then they say, oh, big forgiveness.
It's like, well, if I make this argument, suddenly they look at the Bible and the Bible says, you know, here's what you do.
And you kind of have to confront people who do wrong.
And then they don't like it anymore because it is not in accordance with what they kind of want to do or what feels more comfortable to do, if that makes sense.
And yeah, along those lines, I'm seeing just a tremendous amount of real tribalism now, sort of a philosophical tribalism.
And most people choose a tribe.
It's really like prison gangs.
If you're in prison, you know, you choose a gang or you die, right?
So, you know, you go in, somebody chooses the skinhead gang or the Latino Narco gang or whatever or the Asian gang.
Everybody's choosing a gang right now.
And there are a few prominent gangs.
Some of them are, you know, politically affiliated or religious affiliated or what have you, or a technocracy-affiliated gang, like the technocrat gang, right?
But everybody's choosing a gang.
And the thing is, or most people, the thing is, or a tribe, those tribes, at least in my observation, those tribes, none of the prominent tribes that I see, I just named some examples, have any core philosophical underpinnings that are sustainable in the long run for human civilization to live in prosperity and peace at all.
So that's why I'm not joining any tribe or gang because none of them make any sense to me.
What do you say?
I mean, it's the fundamental choice that we have is to align ourselves with reason and evidence or to align ourselves with the agreement of others.
And it's very tough going it alone, especially as society generally becomes more collectivist and as there is a lot of, as you say, breakup into these kinds of tribes.
And this is very important politically because the government shovels trillions of dollars around based upon tribalism and special interest groups and so on.
So going it alone is tough.
And the choice of do I want to reason according to facts and evidence or do I want my existing beliefs reinforced by other people who believe the same thing?
That's the fundamental question in life.
And I've certainly tried it both ways.
And the problem is, of course, that if you end up focusing on what other people agree with you about, the great price you pay is individuality, integrity, and love.
Because, you know, there's this funny meme on the internet, which is, and it's a bit unfair, but it is a guy's driving past a frat, right?
And all the women look the same.
And they're remarking them, oh, you'll never find another woman like me.
And it's like, if you're just kind of the same as everyone else in the group, you can't be loved as an individual.
You know, it's like seeing a bunch of Canada geese flying overhead and saying, oh, I really love that one, but the rest of them, no.
It's like they kind of look the same, they kind of act the same.
And so you have to individuate in order to love and be loved.
You have to have virtue, which means a relationship with reason and integrity, rather than just the approval of the brute mob.
The approval of the brute mob may further the survival of your body, but as far as your soul and your virtues and your intellect and your consciousness goes, it's a really bad deal.
You dissolve everything that is unique about you into the vat of approval and you emerge as just as an NPC that people will put up with, but never really love.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
But it's so much more convenient.
It's easy to have the buffet handed to you.
Like, you're going to believe this.
You're going to cheer this.
Well, sorry to interrupt, but and the chance for it happening and you being able to survive is very new.
Very new.
I mean, certainly earlier than the internet, but not much, right?
Because in the past, you had to go along with the tribe because you couldn't survive on your own.
You couldn't reproduce.
You couldn't, you know, somebody's got to guard you while you sleep.
You can't build a barn by yourself.
So the opportunity to actually think for yourself is so new.
I mean, we really haven't adapted to it.
And there's this real tension, right?
Yeah, societies want this conformity because that way you get cohesion and the phalanx and all the army marches in the same direction.
So you want this cohesion.
But at the same time, if the society is too quote cohesive, then you don't get any particular progress.
I sort of talked about this in my Hong Kong documentary that one of the reasons why China lost out to Europe is that Europe has valued, I mean, really since the Greeks and certainly through Christianity, they valued a lot of independent thought and challenging thought and the Socratic reasoning and so on, and the ability to use faith to go against the mob, to have a relationship that is different than approval.
And so because in the West, we accepted and killed, you know, a few percent fewer of our individual thinkers, we ended up with a lot of technological progress and economic progress, which allowed us to overtake and overcome the sort of very, not primitive, but very stagnant, a sort of 6,000 year stagnant Chinese society.
So there's this tension in human life.
We want the individuals, but at the same time, we need the cohesion for war and defense and so on.
And that tension has really swung towards more the individual side of things at the moment, which I think is a very sort of positive thing.
But of course, as you get more individuals, you get people recoiling from that and further joining groups.
So there's this sort of hollowing out in the middle.
Which brings us to the point.
I just read this in the news this morning.
In Germany, a woman was arrested and fined for posting a thumbs-up emoji.
Actually, it was a triple thumbs-up, which apparently is a serious crime in Germany, based on the comment that she was giving the thumbs up to.
So emojis are thought crimes now in Europe.
And in the UK, the police spend more time raiding their own citizens' homes over social media posts than they do arresting illegals who have crossed the border illegally and are increasingly occupying cities like London.
So Europe, I mean, the description you just gave about the history of relative free thought in Europe, I think was right on.
But has that now been sacrificed in the authoritarianism and the thought control that we're witnessing today?
Oh, it's heartbreaking, really.
I mean, when you think of John Milton wrote back in the day a tract called Areo Pegitica, which was one of the first robust full-throated defenses of free speech.
Thomas More, of course, worked in a similar vein.
And it took hundreds of years to build up a respect for free speech in the West.
And it's collapsing everywhere.
And you could say, ah, well, America, but don't worry, we have the First Amendment in America.
And it's like, well, sure, but that's why there's deplatforming, right?
So it's not like you have that either in sort of a practical sense, right?
So it is things that our forefathers bled and died by the millions to hand to us, which was robust free speech and free inquiry and the willingness to accept that you can't think without the risk of offending someone.
And that is within a very short period of time.
Really, it is half a generation.
Within a very short period of time, that has largely collapsed because the ideas that are reigning roughshod over Europe are indefensible.
And that which is indefensible is oppressive.
It has to silence the questioner because there are no answers.
And so censorship is the tool of the fool.
Censorship is an admission of defeat.
And it is very, very sad to see what was struggled for for hundreds and hundreds of years over the course of European history just vanishing in a flurry of hysteria within a decade or two.
Oh, yeah.
And a really good, relatively recent example of that is this musician that was just performing, I think, in the UK.
I think his name is Violin or Villain.
I don't know how it's pronounced, but he was, maybe it's villain.
But he was chanting death to the IDF, right?
This has been big news.
And he and his band have been denied visas to the United States based on his speech, which, of course, is right there on the edge of what most people would consider to be tolerable speech.
But in U.S. Supreme Court case history, that is clearly First Amendment protected speech.
But the thing that I find shocking about it is that we have senators like Lindsey Graham that are constantly shouting essentially death to Iran.
So, you know, it's like with the politics aside, we live in a country where it's okay for our elected officials to call for the death or the bombing of other countries.
But if somebody else calls for the death of someone that we consider ourselves to be allies with, then that's not allowable.
So we don't really have a First Amendment that is a universal philosophy.
And if it's not universal, then it's not really a philosophy, is it?
So we have the selective enforcement.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the natures of corruption and power is rules for thee, but not for me.
And I always feel that if somebody is not like, debate me, bro, come on, come in in the ring, debate me, debate me.
If somebody's not doing that, if somebody's not willing to be questioned and criticized and hopefully unraveled, and if you're wrong, someone's doing you a favor.
It's like when you're driving in your car, if you make a wrong turn, your GPS says recalculating, and you're happy about that because you want your GPS to get you to the right destination.
The destination is truth, virtue, and integrity.
And this is why for me, I've always, every time I open up my live stream, it's like questions, comments, issues, criticisms, and people who've got criticisms go to the front of the line.
And if people are criticizing me on social media, it's like, hey, come on in, debate me, set me straight, tell me where I've gone wrong because I don't want to be wrong.
Who wants to keep blindly driving into the desert because you're not listening to your GPS?
This way to go out there and die among the cactuses and the, I don't know, woolly mammoth bones or whatever the hell's out there.
You said something really profound about this on Twitter.
You said, this was just, I think maybe yesterday, you said, when you are debating or arguing with somebody, ask them to explain your position from your point of view.
And usually they can't.
And you've also said something that I've taken to heart for many years, which is that the first time you meet someone, you treat them by default with respect and politeness.
The second time you meet them, you treat them the way they treated you the first time you met them.
I've taken that to heart.
It served me well.
So thank you for that.
Well, it's mathematically the best winning strategy.
And the thing is, that doesn't mean that you end up, let's say you meet someone the first time you're nice and then they're nasty, right?
For whatever reason.
That doesn't mean that their relationship is now stuck in nice, nasty for the rest of time.
Because if they say, ooh, you know, I'm really sorry, I really overreacted to that.
I called you a mean word.
I'm really sorry.
Let's reboot and so on, right?
Well, now they're treating you nice.
So now you can treat them nicely, right?
It's not a one.
Everyone thinks it like hardens like concrete into this opposition.
It's like, no, no, I've had people in my life and I've had to do this to people in my life.
Like, ah, I went too far.
I'm really sorry.
That was unfair.
That was over the top.
And I let my emotions get away with me.
I'm going to work on that.
And here's how.
And all of that, you know, you make your apologies, you make your restitution and some reasonable commitment about how it's less likely to happen again.
So yeah, that is an absolutely winning strategy in life, but it's tough because a lot of people want to feel virtuous with this one-waving forgiveness stuff.
And yeah, when it comes to, there's a lot of people who cannot handle other people's viewpoints.
They can't really conceive of other people's viewpoints.
And it certainly is more the case on the left than the right.
If you go to the average conservative and you say, why do the leftists care about this right or that right or this group or the poor or the sick?
And they say, oh, well, because of X, Y, and Z. And I don't agree with their solution, but this is their approach.
And this is, you know, government spending will, they don't want people to get sick.
Government spending doesn't really hurt the rich that much and it really helps the poor.
And you can make this case from a leftist standpoint.
And most conservatives can do that with regards to leftists.
While they don't agree with it, they can do it.
But leftists, not so much the same way.
Leftists almost cannot conceive of the rightist position or the conservative position.
They can't conceive of it.
And I don't know if that's cause or effect.
But then what happens is they basically just scream, you know, racist, Nazi, Home of whatever it is, right?
And so when it comes to debating, if the other person can't even articulate your position, then it's not a debate.
Now, you may do it publicly to educate people as I do, but I wouldn't ever engage in a debate with somebody who couldn't articulate my position because they're just talking to, it's like watching a bird attack a mirror.
Like they're not talking to anyone other than their own prejudices.
And all they're going to do is straw man and project.
So yeah, definitely on the left, especially if you're debating with a leftist.
Just say, okay, give me just 30 seconds.
Give me 30 seconds on why the conservative position on X is important to conservatives.
I'm not asking you to agree with it, but it's like almost like if they let the ideas in their brain, it's an infection that they're going to wake up as Pat Buchanan or something, right?
So yeah, they really can't.
And it's one of the reasons why debates tend to escalate pretty seriously.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And I'm finding there's a lot of cognitive, I don't know if illiteracy is the right word, or let me call it functional stupidity.
And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.
I mean it in a descriptive way.
A functional stupidity or an inability to function cognitively as adults, right?
And that's a great example of what you just said.
For example, I can articulate the left-wing view on abortion, right?
I don't agree with it, but I can certainly articulate it or on gun control or on climate change or anything, right?
I absolutely understand their points, but I can refute those points with other points, right?
But or any issue for that matter, at least I can understand the other side.
But we live in a time, like you said, when it's just, it's an emotive, reactionary, in-your-face, just your speech is violence.
I mean, that's what the left, especially during the years where you were banned, the things you said, I bet you got a lot of reactions where people said, your speech is a violent assault.
Did you hear that from people?
I saw it more acted out than spoken about.
Like people would react to data that I presented or arguments that I presented or experts that I interviewed as if I was attempting to set fire to their baby crib.
And it is, so it wasn't usually spoken because to say that is really tough.
But definitely people acted in that kind of way.
And it's very tough.
And of course, a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are a lot of people who survive off moral corruption, right?
So the people who like military industrial complex for the rich, the welfare state for the poor, and so on.
It's all the unjust transfer of money against people's choice and willpower.
And so consistency in moral virtues would completely reshape resource.
I wouldn't say allocation because that sounds like somebody shuffling stuff around who's got godlike powers.
But who would have what resources would massively change if we focused, say, on the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights?
Because you'd actually have to go and ask people for money rather than getting the government to threaten them to jail in order to get your steady diet of government cheese in a van down by the river.
So when people rely on false moral principles, then moral integrity becomes a predator that is going to steal from them.
And so they react in the same way, like if you're out there and it's been a lean year and you're going to set fire to the farmer's fields and he's not going to make it through the winter in his perception, he's going to get pretty aggressive with you because you burning down his fields is endangering his entire family.
And so when we start talking about moral integrity and property rights and limited small or no government and free market allocations and all of that, well, then a lot of people feel like the tax benefits that they are receiving are going to be threatened and they react as aggressively as a farmer when you're about to burn down his crops.
And I understand that, but it still doesn't make it violent.
It just makes it, you know.
I mean, the people who owned and traded slaves were really mad when slaves were freed.
So, you know, even the people who bred horses were mad when the horseless carriage came along because people didn't need horses as much.
Or the people who shoveled horse poop in the cities, they didn't have a job.
I mean, progress is all about some people losing out and the majority of people gaining.
And so, yeah, I mean, I understand why they're mad, but, you know, maybe you shouldn't be dependent on a corrupt system in the first place.
And it's not friendly to let people stay on welfare because welfare is mathematically going to end and not even that long from now.
So it's really, you know, you want to wean people off an addiction.
You don't want them just to crash out when the monies and the checks, the checks stop coming.
So we're actually trying to help people by telling them that the system can't continue and they need to make some alternate arrangements.
Really good point.
Yeah.
We're not doomers to state the obvious.
It's really helping people prepare.
But that brings me, I wanted to ask you, and this is a question for you to queue up because I want to plug your website and talk about your site first.
But the question to queue up is about the concept of the UBI as AI tends to replace at first more desk jobs and white-collar jobs.
So before we get to your answer on that, tell us about freedomain.com and what you offer, how people can interact with you.
You can share your social media accounts, video channels, whatever is important.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Yes, it's freedomain.com.
I would really point people towards freedomain.com slash books.
All of my books are free with the exception of The Art of the Argument.
And I really got some great books there.
I hope you'll check it out.
You can go to freedomain.com slash connect, which has a list of all of the social media sites that I'm on now, including X. And so I really, really do appreciate that.
I do interact with people.
I live stream a lot.
I take questions a lot.
I'm not an ivory tower kind of guy.
And so I hope that people will come and check it out.
It's a great set of resources for learning how to think, how to reason.
And, you know, at its best, my work will absolutely shake you to the core in terms of challenging things that you believe to be true, but aren't necessarily true.
So I hope people will check that out.
And I appreciate that.
That's a rough one.
Is it a quote from Mark Twain?
It's not what you think is true that gets you.
It's what you think is true that just ain't so.
Is that a Twain quote?
I think it's, I mean, it's hard to know because every pithy saying goes through the Twain colon at some point.
Well, Twain said it.
Well, it's fine, but I'm going to say Mark Twain because he was really funny.
So it's a great statement no matter what it is.
And the assumptions that people have are very dangerous and easy to manipulate.
If you live in other people's ideas rather than connecting to sort of raw empirical sensual reality, if you live in other people's ideas and arguments, you are just a leaf in the wind.
It's like the concept of hate speech.
There is no such thing.
Speech you hate is not hate speech and it's not evil and it's not bad.
They're just words.
But if you live in other people's words, you are not your own person.
You are being whacked around by the dictionary and you are bonding with other people's prejudices like a duckling on the most evil duck that you can imagine.
My daughter's going to hate that analogy because she loves ducks.
But yeah, so you have to find a way to connect your brain, not through other people's language.
That's Plato's cave.
That is living in delusion.
Not through other people's language, but redefine what is true, building from the ground up reason and evidence.
I've got a 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series I did in 2006.
Oh, lordy, lordy.
No kidding.
Which you can find on the website under playlists.
And I've got a couple of documentaries.
And yeah, I hope people will check it out.
It's a great set of resources and get involved with the community.
There's a lot of great people who want to talk philosophy.
Well, I strongly encourage people to interact with you and your content, your website.
I think that doing so will make you a better person.
It will make you, because it will encourage you to engage in that introspection, that let's call it the self-checksum, the error correcting code of the self, which is a normal process of maturity.
And we all go through that, and sometimes we can benefit from more of that.
So thank you so much, Stéphane, for all that you bring to the world.
I really appreciate you.
Now, if I could encourage you to answer my last point about the UBIs.
Now, let me just preface that by saying that as someone who has worked now in AI for about two years and with a background in computer science and running software and so on, I am absolutely convinced, and you may or may not agree with me,
which is, of course, is fine, but I'm absolutely convinced that agentic AI will, within the next six to 24 months, be capable of replacing a very significant percentage of typical desk jobs.
I call it KVM, keyboard video, mouse.
So any job where you have a keyboard, a screen, and a mouse, where the computer doesn't even know you're human, right?
But the computer doesn't know you're human.
The computer is just, you're inputting into the system through the keyboard and the mouse, and you're getting, you know, feedback visually or audibly.
KVM jobs can be replaced quite competently by reasoning AI engines, I believe, like I said, in that timeframe.
What do you think are the implications for society?
And how will humanity, that is, if you agree with what I'm saying, how will humanity be able to adapt to that, in your view?
Yeah, I share your background.
I ran a computer software company for many years.
I was chief technical officer and lead programmer and so on.
So I understand that stuff fairly well.
I've done entire presentations on AI.
So the way that I sort of view AI at the moment is the forest is burning down and the animals are fleeing through the undergrowth.
It's coming for you, it's coming for me, and there's really only one thing you can do to escape the forest fire of AI.
And of course, forest fires are damaging in the short run, but healthy for the forest in the long run.
And we really haven't had something like this in society.
I really could think twice before.
One is the introduction of computers as a whole, but before that, it was the introduction of labor-saving machinery on farms.
At the turn of the 20th century, like 125 years ago, 90% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now it's like 2% or 3%.
So these kinds of revolutions, these kinds of changes happen not infrequently, but certainly it's been a while.
And there's really only one way that you can deal with the challenge of AI, which is don't be an NPC.
You have to think for yourself.
It's one thing that AIs can't do is think creatively because they are just word-guessing machines, very sophisticated and complicated word-guessing machines that are nosing their way through the existing undergrowth of human thought and then assembling things.
But it's like a Lego set.
You can only build what the Lego set can build.
And so the only way, and it's not, you don't have to be a super high IQ guy or woman, but you just have to reason from first principles and think for yourself.
That's something that AI will probably never be able to do any more than it will be able to get insights about its own life from dreaming at night, all the other things that the human brain is capable of.
But if all you are is an assemblage and a pastiche of other people's thoughts and fragments of things you've read and a little bit of fear because this guy disapproved you of you and a little bit of lust because this girl will go out with you if you say you are big into X, Y, or Z leftist cause.
So if all you are is kind of like a fallen from an airplane jigsaw puzzle of chaotic sentiments programmed by the media and fear and lust, you're going to be replaced by AI.
Absolutely.
Now is the time.
Yeah, now is the time that you have to learn how to think.
Again, artoftheargument.com.
There's lots of resources for people.
Plato's dialogues, lots of resources for people to learn how to really think and question.
But now's the time, man.
If you stand in that forest, you're going to get burnt to the ground.
But there's a way to flee towards the sunlit upper planes of reason and evidence and creative thought.
And that will allow you to just watch the fires go by and take the slower.
You and I have reached the exact same conclusion on this.
And this is the first time we've spoken in years.
And let me just add in the medical application in our society for this.
So just like you said, Stefan, a doctor, a mainstream doctor who currently functions algorithmically, who is fed through medical school a series of symptoms that match up with a sequence of pharmaceuticals.
He is just a biological skinbag vending machine for pharmaceuticals.
He or she can be replaced just like that by an AI system.
And I have no doubt that AI doctors will soon be granted the power to write prescriptions because that, of course, today, sorry, I don't know if you saw it.
It was just today that they released a study that AI, I think it was 400% better and 20% cheaper in terms of its diagnosis of complex cases.
And I don't want somebody who's programmed by a bunch of textbooks and programmed by weird incentives.
Like, well, if I vaccinate everyone so they look like a porcupine, I get X amount of number of extra dollars.
I want objective, neutral, from the ground up reasoning.
I don't want a doctor who's just following a maze like a rat after a piece of cheese.
I want some creativity and thought.
Because AI is very good at writing code, and prescribing prescription drugs based on symptoms is just like writing code in medicine.
But to your point earlier, what you said, if you have a gifted, I'm going to call a person a healer or a naturopathic physician, a holistic thinker who can look at the entire patient, the mind, body, the soul, the lifestyle, the family interactions, the emotional everything, AI can't do that.
So a real healer will always have value in society because of being able to have that human connection and perception and that holistic point of view.
Whereas mainstream doctors will be obsolete within a couple of years, as far as I can tell.
And even the surgeons, even the surgeons will be replaced by robotic surgeons that are already very accomplished at all kinds of common procedures right now and just getting better every day.
So it's a good time to not be a human robot.
Very true.
If you run on programs, you can be replaced by AI that runs on programs.
So uncouple yourself from the programming and think for yourself.
And that's really your only shot.
Well said, Stefan.
And in wrapping up the show, I mean, I'm so glad to hear your analysis of this.
And I really look forward to tuning into more of your content and seeing more of your tweets on X. What's your handle on X, by the way?
Oh, yeah.
It shouldn't be, but it is.
It's my unspellable name.
So let me just put it out there.
At Stefan Molyneux, S-T-E-F-A-N-M-O-L-Y-N-E-U-X.
Because that's what you want is an F that should be spelled P-H and a silent X at the end of your name, because I'm all about the marketing, bro.
All about the marketing.
So unfortunately, my history gave me a name.
Bob Smith would be better, but I don't have myself a Bob Smith.
I have a Polish and French pastiche, and at least my middle name, which is British Basil, isn't sort of jammed in there somewhere.
So yeah, it's Stefan Molyneux.
I'm sure you put a link to it and you can follow me there.
We will put a link.
So it's N-E-U-X at the end.
That's right.
N-E-U-X.
And I've got to get used to calling you Stefan.
I keep saying Stefan because that's just in my mind, that's my internal voice of how I say your name.
And then you've been posting about internal voices and also the fact that so few people have an internal dialogue, which is scary.
Oh, yeah.
The 30 to 50%, depending on how you measure it, but 30 to 50%.
I've seen higher, I've seen lower, but 30 to 50% of people do not have an internal monologue or dialogue.
I don't exactly know how their brains work, but it's mostly just imagery.
It's not an IQ thing.
You can be super smart.
And, you know, engineers work with things and they don't work with language.
And it's wild, but it certainly does explain a lot in the world.
Yeah, I think you described it in your tweet as like a mishmash of images and emotions and something like that.
And I think you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These are the people like you have this is the fabled quarter second, right?
So when you have an impulse, right?
Nerves travel, I think, 240 miles an hour, nerves, emotional impulses go through your body, it slows to like 20 miles an hour in your brain.
You have about a quarter second to intercept an impulse to not act out something.
You know, if somebody's really annoying you and you want to yell at them or grab them by the shoulders, don't do that.
But if you do want to do that, you have about a quarter second and civilization lives in that quarter second because if people don't repress that, you know, that blow up, then they act out and they go to prison and bad things happen in society as a whole.
So we really do have to focus on getting people to not just act and react, which means DNPC yourself, reason from first principles, deal with emotional difficulties and recognize that all that feels good is not good.
Otherwise, we'd all be hedonists.
Well, that was a profound quote that you said that the fate of human civilization rests on that quarter second of intervention.
And I thought about that quite a lot for a little bit more than a quarter second, it turns out.
And I'm still pondering that point.
But thank you so much for your insight.
Thank you for spending time with us today.
Stefan Molyneux and the website is freedomain.com.
God bless you, Stefan.
Thank you for all that you do.
I appreciate that.
Thank you for your lovely site that hosts my videos and your friendship over the years.
It's been a real treasure for me.
And I look forward to seeing you on Twitter.
You as well.
Okay, take care now.
And thank all of you for watching.
I hope you enjoyed this interview.
Love, love this guest.
He's just a real treasure for humanity.
You will become a better person as you interact with his information, learn more, and embrace whatever parts of his philosophy resonate with you.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
Take care, everybody.
Take care.
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