You ever get those moments, you know, where you go from juggling each little grain of sand, to zooming out to see the whole beach, the whole world?Yeah, I'm going to turn 50 this year, which is great – as a cancer survivor, there's no such thing as a bad birthday – but also (and this kind of crept up on me) my philosophy show Freedomain Radio just passed 100 million views on YouTube.Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
You ever get those moments, you know, where you go from juggling each little grain of sand to zooming out to see the whole beach, the whole world?
Yeah, I'm going to turn 50 this year, which is great.
As a cancer survivor, there's really no such thing as a bad birthday.
But also, and this actually kind of crept up on me, my philosophy show, Free Domain Radio, just passed 100 million views on YouTube.
Yes, that's 100 million views on YouTube.
If you add in podcast downloads, that is over 200 million views and downloads.
A fifth of a billion.
Not bad for a show that started in my car.
Back in the day, I used to record shows during my commute.
For those who don't know, in another life, I was an entrepreneur and executive in the software field.
My first YouTube video was called Understanding Concepts, released on August 14, 2006, before I lost a bunch of weight and gained a jawline.
Free Domain Radio started mostly in the realm of abstract philosophy, that's my particular passion, culminating in the 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series, which I'm still enormously proud of.
Then I branched out into interviews with subject matter experts, these are psychologists and economists, investors, academic philosophers, the odd linguist or two.
And then I really started hitting it big with the current event's Truth About series, particularly the truth about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, which brought a powerful, peaceful parenting message to over one million people on YouTube.
My first video to go over a million views was called The Story of Your Enslavement, which remains my most popular video.
Over four and a half million people have watched it and have been introduced to the power and clarity of rational philosophy.
Bringing philosophy to the questions of relationships has been some of my most powerful and influential work.
Through my peaceful parenting series of shows and interviews with psychologists and parenting experts, hundreds of thousands of parents have stopped hitting their children, stopped circumcising their boys, stopped yelling and punishing, and started actually negotiating with their children.
So, Here I stand, currently delivering around 10 million philosophy injections to a hungry world every single month.
I honestly believe that never before in the history of human thought has the hidden appetite for reason and evidence been so well served and satisfied as what we are doing here, today, together.
When I started ten years ago, I thought we had more time.
I used to talk about multi-generational change, but the sand in that hourglass has run out.
Massive escalations of government debt and power.
Endless migrations of countless people.
The crashing and washing of often hostile tribes of humanity back and forth across borders historically considered the last defense.
The rise of shockingly necessary nationalism, the escalation of hysteria and cry-bully manipulations from the hard left combined with the leapfrogging of the new right over the endless bipartisan betrayals of the old right, demographic decay in Europe, staggeringly self-destructive failures of Western leadership, captive and silenced populations, all these and more.
Bring the need for philosophy, for data, facts, reason, arguments and evidence to its highest point in human history.
Because at the end of a series of escalating falsehoods lies either the end of all we cherish and hold dear, or a new beginning, free of manipulative fantasies.
The ascendancy and totalitarianism of prejudice, bullying, hypersensitivity, the fascism of mere feelings must be challenged, opposed, and ended.
The whim-worshipping religion of the superstitious emotions, always the enemy of rational and empirical philosophy, must be brought to heel behind the twin giants of reason and evidence.
Okay, emotions have their necessary place in our personal lives, but they cannot be allowed to dominate public discourse about facts, policies, cultural compatibilities, and the role of state power.
We must tear aside the acidic fogs of satisfy-the-moment sentimentality And reorient ourselves like lost ghosts finding a sudden compass with simple facts, objective principles and basic reality.
The fantasy that our societal resources are infinite and that we can pretend to bribe and bully our way out of every conceivable social difficulty must be confronted and cast down.
All Human desires are infinite, but all human resources are very, very finite.
And we have no right to waste and squander the accumulated capital of prior generations in mad, windmill-tilting quests of endless social engineering.
What we need, what we demand, and what we shall achieve together is to be free.
Free of coercion, free of control, free of manipulation, free of the self-serving lies of those in charge, not free of consequences, merely of coercion.
We who reason demand freedom, which our forefathers created, our fathers in general squandered, and which we must secure again, now, today, once and for all.
In the past, gatekeepers constantly blocked honest and empirical conversations in society.
You know, the publishers, the academics, the media as a whole.
They determined what could be said and what must be buried.
Now that is all in the past.
Now we can finally reason directly with each other.
We can, at last, unravel the thorny lies of our manufactured histories.
There are now no obfuscating barriers to our gathering strength.
Our strength is reason and language and courage and clarity.
The simple compass of bare facts and clear arguments is all that can guide us to a free future.
I do ask for your help.
I'm only one man, one voice, one mind.
I need your support.
I need your attention.
I need you to share what I do, not because I'm right, but because I raise questions.
It doesn't matter whether you agree with me.
In fact, I would prefer that you never thought of it in those terms.
It matters that you think.
And what I do helps people to think.
Clear thinking is the only way out of this ghastly and darkening swamp.
And I do deliver that.
There is a phrase called the red pill, which comes from the movie The Matrix.
It's like Plato's allegory of the cave, or awakening from manipulative lies to see, clear-eyed and frozen-hearted, the true world that was stolen from you by those who preferred you to die in their nightmares than live in our common reality.
The world and the powers who run it prefer you to be isolated by lies rather than connect in reality.
For reality is the only place we can truly meet each other.
All else is isolating manipulation.
Free Domain Radio is a red pill.
Perhaps the greatest red pill.
A red pill so large that it seems like Mars crashing into and liberating the dungeons of modern mental manipulations.
Mars, of course, is the god of war, and I do invite you to combat, as all good souls must do in these dangerous times.
But there is still time to win through courage and language and commitment and clarity.
If we do not fight, if we do not commit, then that time will pass, and other less verbose warriors will surely have to take our place.
To avoid this, philosophy needs your support.
You can support me at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can like, subscribe, and share what I do.
You can join me on this hailstruck mountaintop and ignite the sky with facts and passion, but for God's sake, do something.
Evil triumphs through inertia, deferral, and appeasement.
It is like a black tide that can overrun anything and everything except a willed barrier.
Act with courage, and the glory of your courage will leap like electricity from pole to pole to soul.
Will you be condemned?
Will you be hated?
Will you be lied about and scorned?
I bloody well hope so!
Better to be hated by evil in the present than condemned by the last remnants of virtue in a dying future.
It has been an amazing decade, and we as a community have done great, great good in the world.
Thank you.
It all comes down to the next few years, the greatest fork In the road in history, we can rise to heights unimaginable or descend to depths from which there may be no recovery.
There is no inevitability in human affairs if you are willing to make a choice.
Blind determinism results from the avoidance of choice.
It is not wound into the nature of matter and energy.
So, make a choice.
Speak your mind.
Live passionately for rationality and leave your mark on the world.
Do not fail the future, as those in the past did not fail you.
Let the next hero you see not be on the screen or in a book, but in the mirror.
200 million views and downloads.
200 million points of blazing light in a formerly darkened sky.
Do you think that's impressive?
I certainly do.
But it's nothing compared to what can be achieved.
