Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly recurring donation or by making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donateGet more from Stefan Molyneux and Freedomain Radio including books, podcasts and other info at: http://www.freedomainradio.com
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Every single time, my friends, every single time. | |
| Every time some amazing new piece of communications technology comes to the forefront of human communications, unites us all together, gives us access to information, to arguments, to personalities, to perspectives that stretch and broaden and deepen and enrich our minds. | |
| Every single time technology brings us closer together. | |
| The powers that be want to crush it, drive it underground, and divide us. | |
| This goes back all the way to ancient Athens. | |
| Socrates invents a verbal form of philosophy called the Socratic method. | |
| It spreads like wildfire, allowing people to examine the claims of sophists, liars, and politicians, exposing them for the fools and manipulators that they are. | |
| And it seems like they scatter and philosophy and reason and communication are going to win! | |
| Win! | |
| Finally! | |
| God let us win! | |
| But like a child running through a cloud of seagulls, they scatter and then they return to continue their feast after he passes. | |
| And this is happening now. | |
| It happened with the printing press. | |
| The invention of the printing press Caused a massive explosion in literature and literacy and gave the common people access to religious texts, sometimes for the first time. | |
| Wow! | |
| Fantastic! | |
| Look at all the things we can read, all the arguments we can be exposed to. | |
| Sorry, now you have to have a license to run a printing press. | |
| Sorry, now you have to have the king's official stamp on every book. | |
| Same thing with radio, television. | |
| Oh, now you need a license. | |
| Now you need to be regulated and controlled. | |
| Every single time we build horizontal structures of communication, the vertical towers of power, try to bring them down. | |
| And now it's happening here. | |
| In this space, in this glorious space of communication. | |
| The mainstream media and other activists are finding ads from major corporations that are playing next to questionable, objectionable, or unpleasant content and saying, ooh, that's really bad. | |
| This is bad for your brand. | |
| Look, it looks like you're advocating all of this. | |
| Ooh, that's terrible. | |
| Ooh, you should stop. | |
| And... | |
| They are. | |
| Major advertisers have pulled out of YouTube's AdSense and other AdSense programs. | |
| And as a result, somewhat understandably, the money losing YouTube is not wanting to bid a fond adieu to hundreds of millions of dollars potentially in ad revenue. | |
| So they're demonetizing content on YouTube. | |
| Is this being done fairly, even-handedly, equally to the left and the right and other political perspectives? | |
| Let's just say there are some questions about that. | |
| And this is what they do. | |
| This is what they do. | |
| If they can't counter your arguments, if they're not as good at something as you are, if you're on the ascendancy and they're going down, what do they do? | |
| Well, first, of course, they try to attack your character, your personality, using the classic ad hominem to create a toxic cloud of negativity and hysteria around you so that people don't listen to you. | |
| Oh, we can dismiss that person with the wave of our hand because we heard they were bad. | |
| Now, that's... | |
| Weapon has become somewhat blunted of late. | |
| The boy who cries racist wolf has gotten just a little bit hoarse. | |
| People aren't listening to that. | |
| So now, of course, it's plan B, which is to attempt to destroy the source of your income. | |
| This has an effect. | |
| You know, you're sitting there. | |
| If you don't make YouTube content or you don't make content for the web, you don't make podcasts, you don't know, oh my God, it is so much work. | |
| It is so much work. | |
| Paul Joseph Watson tweeted the other day. | |
| He said, you know, mainstream media, you guys write an article a week. | |
| I work every day until I feel nauseous. | |
| It is a lot of work to create this content. | |
| When you are creating it and you're dependent on AdSense revenue or you're dependent on advertising revenue, part of you says, well, you know, I could do this topic or I could do this topic, but this topic might get me demonetized. | |
| This topic probably won't be so... | |
| People got to eat. | |
| People got to live. | |
| People got bills to pay. | |
| So it has a soft kind of insidious, noxious, deep kind of alteration in the patterns of topics that people are willing to approach. | |
| And this is why, for me, I've never wanted to focus on ad revenue. | |
| You know, I get emails all the time. | |
| Oh, Steph, did you ever think of doing ads? | |
| No! | |
| Because if you're doing controversial content... | |
| In other words, if you're doing philosophy, real philosophy is always controversial, otherwise it's tradition or culture, real philosophy is always controversial, why on earth would I want to expose myself to specific targets by which my funding can be cut? | |
| No, I want decentralized, you-based guerrilla funding. | |
| That's the only way that I can be honorable and have clear intent and focus on what it is that I'm doing. | |
| So listen, we all know what's happening. | |
| I need your help to do what I'm doing. | |
| I need your help to do what I'm doing. | |
| Some voices are going to go dark. | |
| Some voices are going to go silent. | |
| Other voices are going to be altered. | |
| Other voices will make the transition, hopefully, to a listener-supported model. | |
| But right now, we don't have a lot of time. | |
| We've got to get things done now. | |
| It comes down to the next year or two. | |
| I really believe all of human history, like an inverted pyramid, has just come down to the next year or two. | |
| Is compulsion going to win or is freedom going to win? | |
| Is integrity going to win or is sophistry going to win? | |
| Are lies or the truth going to win? | |
| Are you going to be free in the future? | |
| Free to speak your mind. | |
| Free to make arguments. | |
| Free to disagree with others in society. | |
| Free to disagree with the state. | |
| Entrenched interests. | |
| Political correctness. | |
| Are you going to be free to think and to reason and to speak? | |
| Or are you going to be cautious and afraid and nervous and bowed down and cowed down and crumbled underneath the soft weight of disincentives? | |
| None of which individually are so bad, but together? | |
| It's like regulations. | |
| You're going to start a competing business? | |
| Too much paperwork. | |
| Are you going to voice an unpopular opinion? | |
| Could be... | |
| Demonetized. | |
| So I need your help. | |
| I need your help now more than ever. | |
| It's so, so, so important. | |
| I get this view. | |
| I get the satellite view. | |
| I have the knowledge. | |
| I have the experience. | |
| I've been doing philosophy for 34 years now. | |
| 10 years publicly. | |
| Well-educated, well-versed, well-experienced, well-practiced. | |
| I need your help. | |
| Please, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show. | |
| You can set up a recurring donation, a one-time donation. | |
| You don't have to have a PayPal account. | |
| You can just do a credit card visa. | |
| Please, please. | |
| This is not the time to leave anything behind. | |
| This is not the time to leave anything. | |
| No gas left in the cylinder after this fight. | |
| Nothing should be left behind. | |
| Everything must be committed now. | |
| I'm committed now. | |
| I'm committed. | |
| I'm not asking you to be as committed as I am. | |
| But please, please help me out. | |
| Help us out to make this push. | |
| It comes down to now. | |
| It comes down to me. | |
| Most of all, it comes down to you. | |
| Please help us to do what needs to be done in the world. | |
| I genuinely, genuinely believe. | |
| If we win now, we may very well win forever. | |
| But if we lose now, It's very possible. |