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Feb. 9, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:27
Bitcoin Explained! Stefan Molyneux and John B Wells
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Stephen Molyneux is the founder and host of Free Domain, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, with more than 4,500 podcasts, 12 books, and 700 million downloads.
Stephen has spread the cause of liberty and philosophy to millions of listeners around the world.
He holds a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto.
His graduate thesis focused on the history of philosophy, detailing the relationship between the metaphysical arguments And the political ethics of major Western philosophers such as Plato, Kant, Locke, and Hegel.
Prior to launching Freedomain, Stefan built a thriving career as a software entrepreneur and executive.
In 2007, he left his work in the tech industry to devote his efforts to spreading philosophy.
Now a full-time parent and philosopher, Stephen has given speeches at Liberty-themed events all over the world.
His speeches cover subjects ranging from politics and philosophy to economics and relationships, Bitcoin, parenting, and how to achieve real freedom in your life.
He traveled to Australia for a sold-out speaking tour where he addressed the future of freedom, the future of freedom, and the necessity for philosophy.
Other live appearances have included presentations at the New Hampshire Library, or pardon me, Liberty Forum, Libertopia, 2010 and 2011, Students for Liberty, 2010, 11, and 13, Freedom Fest, Liberty Now, which included a speech and a Q&A session, Capitalism and Morality, Parts 1 and 2, Liberty Fest West, the Brazilian Nises Institutes, EDS, and Movimento.
C, Parts 1 and 2, Freedom Summit, and the next Web Europe Conference.
He also stars in the media documentary, Hoaxed.
And you can check it out at www.hoaxedmovie.com.
H-O-A-X-E-D, movie, M-O-V-I-E.com.
Without further ado, here he is, Stephan Mollin.
Thanks for coming on the program, Stephan.
It's great to have a chance to talk to you again.
It's a great pleasure to be back.
I hope you're doing well, brother. I'm doing very well, particularly under the circumstances.
My stress levels are not really very high because I see that everybody else is way more stressed out around me than I am.
I mean, not my crew and my family, but people out there at large, they seem a little stressed and my stress levels are lower.
So, hey, I would say it's a red-letter day every day.
What are they stressed about?
What's gut their goat?
Well, I think the biggest problem is they're scared to death of each other.
They're afraid of this COVID-19.
They're afraid it's going to jump off somebody and get them.
There are some people walking around out there that don't wear their masks at all.
You're speaking with one of them. I mean, I will if it's going to cause a problem.
If I go into a place, I'll stick it on there hanging off my ear.
But I think they're afraid that their businesses are being threatened.
Places they used to go to are now closed permanently.
They can't go to the movie houses.
The concerts are done with.
At least for a while. Even David, you know, the techno, big time techno guru, DJ. He's saying, yeah, yeah, these things are okay as long as these events, these big events, you know, like Sensation in the Netherlands, 37,000 people on each or two consecutive weekends.
As long as everybody's vaccinated, then that'll be okay.
But otherwise, no, no, no.
And they're all doing virtual stuff.
So I think People just act like people who have been cut off and who have been psychologically abused.
I mean, that's my take on it.
Well, it's hard to argue that those aren't actual things that are going on.
I mean, people are being psychologically tortured.
You know, the mask was actually used at Guantanamo Bay as an instrument of torture.
You know, breathing in your own face farts for 24-7 seems like a pretty wretched way to get through life.
And people are terrified of each other, just terrified of each other.
People shaking in the middle of nowhere are scared of each other and putting on masks when it's windy.
Like this thing is some sort of demonic possession that can jump from body to body despite the laws of physics.
Here in Ontario, they've closed down skiing because apparently going down a steep icy hill with a balaclava on at 60 kilometers an hour.
Well, I don't know.
Do these little China viruses have jetpacks?
Is that how they roll down and get into your lungs?
I mean, it's lost all sense of proportion.
You'll just spread it all over the mountainside.
Just spread it all over the mountainside, of course.
Lost all spread of proportion.
And if it was so dangerous, why didn't they close the borders?
Why didn't they close the borders early last year as I and many other people were saying, hey, you got a virus.
It's in China. Well, it's not going to get across the ocean without an airline.
Shut down the borders until you figure out what's going on.
But they didn't do that. So because they didn't do their job, we're now all under house arrest.
It's ridiculous. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
And it appears that they were so lax in shutting down these borders and so forth.
You remember when... You may recall President Trump was accused of all kinds of things.
I don't think they got misogyny into this one, but they did manage to get racist and xenophobia in there because he wanted to stop the air travel coming from China.
Imagine if throughout human history, all of the various viruses and plagues that have come from China, I mean, how many hundreds of millions of billions of people would still be alive right now?
China had one job under its solemn international treaties.
It's one job. It was to tell everyone if there was any kind of possibility of a pandemic, and they failed to do that, and they're getting away with it scot-free.
You know, just because we're on over-the-air radio going out to the general public, I really like your description of the philosophy of a zeitgeist devolving into a bleep.
Geist. But it rhymes with Zeit, folks.
We're all that uphill, right?
I mean, we really are. But yes, this philosophy of Zeitgeist is devolving into a bleep Geist.
Okay. Let's take a quick break and come right back to Stephen Molyneux.
This is going to get good. This comes in waves.
And because the coronavirus comes in waves, this is why the beaches in South Africa were closed.
Seriously. I think they're going to open them again now.
When they explained to President Ramaphosa that that's not what that meant.
It's not in the surf.
It's not in the waves. It means it comes in waves.
Never mind. Open the beaches.
Okay, we're going to open them. Yes.
Stephen Maloney, a philosophical view of history repeating itself through the eyes of the history scholar.
That would be yourself.
We've got censorship going.
We've got travel restrictions and divisiveness, lockdowns, attempted gun grabs by How does the enablement of amnesia and myopia exist within the descendants of some of history's harshest lessons?
How's that for question? Easy peasy.
Nice and easy. So it's a devilish bargain that the powers that be are for the population when it has enough freedom that it breeds some kind of economic success, some kind of plenty, this feeling of limitless resources that comes from the free market.
Then what happens is you get a free market, you get differences in outcome.
Some people get very rich.
There's a big chunk of the middle class.
Some people remain relatively poor, although still better off than they were in feudalism or Under the slavery empire of the Romans or something like that.
So there's this belief that, you know, we're so wealthy, man.
We've got so much money.
How can there possibly be poor people left in our society?
So here's what we're going to do.
What we're going to do, we're just going to take a little bit, a little bit from the rich who can afford so much and we're just going to hand that out to the poor and we're going to eliminate poverty and, you know, the income tax in Canada was a temporary measure.
In 1917, just for the war, and it was like 3% on the 1%.
It's a tiny little thing.
How could you possibly object to taking a little bit from the rich and giving it to the poor so that people don't die in the streets?
And this idea that you can violate people's property rights in the pursuit of egalitarian virtues is the great devilish bargain.
It's a smoky hand at the state that reaches out and says, hey man, I can give you something for nothing.
I can give you something for nothing.
And the moment that people start grabbing at that something for nothing, get you something for nothing, then the whole tilt of the playing field of the economy, of society, of politics begins to just really begin to keel over.
And people just, more and more people want stuff for free.
More and more people don't want to work.
More and more people want to consume without producing.
And the producers start to act defensively and they start to move their money offshore and they start to say, well, forget it.
If I'm being taxed that high, I'm not going to produce any more cool stuff.
And right now, we're seeing that incredible snowball effect.
You know, every avalanche starts with one snowflake.
And every collapse of a society starts with liberal snowflakes.
And right now, we've got way too many beaks looking for way too few worms in the bird's nest.
Way too many people haven't grown up.
Way too many people have way too much power to move trillions of dollars around a funny made-up money.
And the system can't last.
I mean, it could have lasted probably another 10, 15 years, but COVID came along and that kind of hit the gas on the Thelma and Louise acceleration off the cliff.
And if the system can't last and it can't be reversed, I say, yeah, let's let it go down.
Let's find and build something new and out of the ashes of...
The made-up monopoly money, the type whatever you want into your own bank account, numerical fetish of the overlords is coming, something like Bitcoin, something like cryptocurrencies, money for the people, by the people, for the people.
Because if you can control the currency, you control the people.
If you can control the interest rates, you can control the people.
If you lose control of the currency, you lose control of the people.
And we have Finally, a people's currency.
You don't have to have gold.
You don't have to have the money printing press, monopoly, violent power of the state to protect your made-up money.
You have money for the people.
And you can see now, today, Bitcoin up 20%, goes up $10,000.
Elon Musk just bought a billion and a half dollars through Tesla.
I think Apple's going to drop another billion.
You got institutional investors like after I've been talking about this stuff for six years, seven years, eight years.
And finally, it's beginning to break into the mainstream because people are looking at the dollar and saying, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not going to last.
What else are we going to do? We're going to go to gold?
No. Real estate?
Good Lord, no. You got leftists in power.
Real estate isn't going to last.
People are looking to store their value in something that you can walk from one end of this earth to another.
With a 12-word phrase in your head and have access to your money wherever you are and the government can't control it.
It's an incredible time in history, John.
Unbelievable. I'm so glad to be alive as we stand.
Well, I admire your enthusiasm about this.
Let me ask you a couple of things, though.
This person over here has, well, if you got one Bitcoin today, they're worth over $30,000, but this one has, I don't know, a tenth of a Bitcoin.
This one over here has a pocket full of Bitcoin.
So everybody's not going to have the same amount of money.
So when we talk about money for the people, is Bitcoin any less fiat than a regular paper currency?
In some ways, it seems to me, it's more of a fiat than other currencies.
Talk me out of this. Oh, yeah.
Listen, that's a great question.
I really appreciate that.
Totally understand where you're coming from.
No, because...
You can't ever create more than 21 million of these things.
Now, they can be sliced and diced into atoms.
You can buy penny candy with a tiny, tiny bit of a Bitcoin called a Satoshi after one of the founders.
But no, you can't grow this thing.
It's mathematically impossible for there to be 21, more than 21 million of these things.
And people have been out there mining them.
You use a computer to generate new Bitcoins by solving mathematical problems.
And it's an amazing thing.
It's not centrally controlled.
It's not centrally empowered.
You can transfer value from one end of the earth to another for virtually nothing.
And you can print money, you can borrow money, you can create money as you know out of thin air.
And this is not a new thing.
The Roman Empire was doing it for the last couple of hundred years of its disintegration.
And it's one of the main reasons why it disintegrated is they started throwing all kinds of garbage into their currency.
They put copper in their gold, they put tin in their silver, nickel.
I mean, it was garbage by the time the Roman Empire fell.
Only 1% of the gold coin was actually gold.
They garbage the whole thing.
Same thing happened, of course, with the French Revolution.
They just printed the Franks like crazy.
Same thing happened, as you know, in the Weimar Republic when they printed like crazy to escape the debts from World War I. Governments can create whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want, and if they don't create it directly by just typing whatever they want into their own bank account, they just borrow or sell bonds.
Sometimes you've got bonds up here, 75-year bonds.
I mean, come on. Or they'll throw the can down the road by giving massive pension benefits to government unions so they don't have to give raises and the next generation has to deal with the mess.
But the governments can create whatever they want, debase their currency.
It cannot happen with Bitcoin.
It cannot happen with Bitcoin.
And the governments can't control it.
They can try and regulate it, all these kinds of things and all that, but they cannot control the mechanism itself.
And that's what I mean by the currency for the people.
I get you. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this.
I'm not trying to be obstinate here or argumentative.
Be obstinate. Be argumentative.
That's what we're here for. Tell me all the ways in which it's wrong, and I'll see if I can help.
Well, I was just perusing the bulletin.org, the bulletin of the so-called atomic scientists, and they were decidedly leftist organization, but they did yield one good thing, and that is...
A question, which was, why does the United States need a new $100 billion nuclear missile?
Now, I don't know if it's a missile program, but the wording in the article is simply, a missile.
So maybe it's the mother of all missiles.
Stephen, what I'm getting at is this.
Doesn't this economy have to be this way so that we can buy these huge ticket items like, wait a minute, we don't have enough Bitcoin to buy what would have been back in the old days before Bitcoin, a $100 billion missile.
We need five of them. What are we going to do about this?
We don't have that much Bitcoin.
There's a limited amount of Bitcoin in the entire world.
We can't buy this thing. But, John, you can't be saying to me that Bitcoin is a problem because you can't use Bitcoin.
Well, I agree with you, but you know, some of those bastards are going to figure out a way to get that $100 billion missile.
What I'm getting at is this. The question really is this, Seth, is being able to inflate your money, and just to use the time-worn phrase, print more money.
Isn't that It's necessary as the economies expand and more and more tech is required with more and more specialties.
What are we going to do if we want to leave the planet and build a glorious giant spaceship to transport the humans off of the planet, which is in decline because of global warming or whatever, you know, whatever the threat is.
I'm just saying, isn't this necessary to be able to keep going?
I mean, I'm right there with you.
I see a stock market of around 30,000.
Maybe it's over by now. I didn't look at it today.
Oh, are you kidding me? That's why we're talking about this today.
I'll give you the current...
It went over $60,000 Canadian today.
It's gone up $10,000 Canadian in 24 hours.
This thing is going through the roof.
It's going through the roof. And it should.
And I think it's going to go a hell of a lot higher.
Hell of a lot higher. But here's the thing.
Can you imagine? Imagine what this would be like.
And you and I have never lived in this universe.
But imagine, John, what this would be like.
That your money... It gets more valuable every day and you don't have to do a thing.
You don't have to invest it.
You don't have to buy things with it.
You can just not do anything with it and your money gets more valuable.
Can you imagine what kind of economy we would have if our money either stabilized in value, there was no inflation, just eating.
Inflation is a regressive tax, right?
It hits the poor the hardest.
If your money was not being constantly diluted by these God-forsaken central bankers, if your money was not being constantly diluted every single day, in other words, think of it like computer money.
You've got a budget, you're a technical guy, you run a radio station, so you've got a budget.
And every year or two or three, you've got to buy a new board, you've got to buy new computers, you've got to buy whatever, right?
Now, you know for a fact that next year, whatever you buy is going to be way better.
And the year after that is going to be even better.
It's going to be, look at the cell phones you can buy, the computers you can buy now.
So think if your computer dollar gets more valuable every year because you can buy more stuff and cooler stuff and better stuff with it every single year, every single year.
Now, what if that wasn't just computers but everything?
Houses. Cars, food, clothing, everything got better every single year.
Your money became more valuable every single year.
That's crypto.
That's the opposite of fear.
It's hard to even imagine living in that kind of universe, but it's coming.
Look, I like the way this sounds, but let me ask you this.
Would this not provide the license for the powers that be?
The ones whose names we'll probably never know.
To thin the population quite a bit.
In other words, Jack and Jill are in the can.
They have a dollar. A little baby is born, says, where's my dollar?
So they tear off a piece of the dollar and give it to the kid.
That sort of thing. To maintain the integrity of that dollar, it needs to remain just Jack and Jill, because if they get the kid, it immediately starts getting diluted.
You have to tear off a little piece of it.
So I'm just wondering if this, um...
We've got a break here in just a minute.
But, um... But what about that?
Can you address that kind of quickly?
Yeah, so money is relative to productivity, right?
And so if money is stable or gains in value, productivity is going to get even higher.
So it doesn't matter if you have less money if it can buy more things.
So we don't have a declining amount of money relative to the population.
Understood. We'll be right back to the body.
Top of the hour break. This is Caravan.
Stand by. I've covered different components under the same topic, basically.
I do have one last thing, and that is, we see communism, at least I do, and many other people do, communism on the rise and the influence of the communist Chinese.
So I'm thinking, okay, Bitcoin's fine, but two-part question.
Number one, is anonymity gone, then, if Bitcoin or something like it were to be just all over the globe?
And that became the standard currency.
And the second part is, So the first part is anonymity gone.
The second part is, how do you keep the government from just deciding, well, you know, Mr.
Smith down the block there, he has offended the establishment, so your wallet doesn't work anymore.
And what about that?
Yeah, again, very, very good question.
So as far as the anonymity goes, you've probably heard of these ransomware attacks where a virus gets into your computer, locks all of your files.
Yeah.
Yeah. Where that Bitcoin wallet is.
They don't know who's behind it.
So yeah, you can create a wallet.
You can receive value into it.
Nobody knows where you are.
You can be behind firewalls.
You can be behind virtual private networks.
You can use Tor. There's lots of different things that you can do.
You can, of course, even if you are running a business, you can mask Bitcoin transactions and you can get good anonymity.
There are other cryptocurrencies that are specifically devoted to anonymity that are untraceable, and so there's lots of options there.
It's much better than anything you're going to get.
I mean, you heard this thing, there's this allegation out there that the Bank of America scoured up customer data, For the capital riots and turned it over, right?
So trust me, whatever's going on with Bitcoin, that's not happening.
That's not going to be happening as far as all of that goes.
So anonymity, yeah, there's a lot that you can do it.
And yeah, criminals, and they say, you know, what do they say?
Oh, well, we've got a crypto is dangerous because criminals use it.
And it's like, well, first of all, you have to assume that the government is not doing criminal things with fiat currency, which it is.
Secondly, you have to assume that things like war aren't criminal, which it is or they are.
And thirdly, you have to assume that even criminals are somehow using crypto a whole lot more than they're using fiat currency, which is completely false.
So they'll sort of shake this, oh no, bad people are using crypto.
That means all crypto is bad.
That's like the media complaining about disinformation.
When the media keeps lying Americans into wars and other countries into wars over and over and over again.
I can't believe they're going after Trump for inciting violence.
Do none of them remember what it was like in 2002, 2003 in the lead-up to the Iraq War or back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident or back to the Korean War or you name it?
So, yeah, you can do things to stay anonymous.
You can do things to maintain your privacy.
It's not too complicated.
So I think that's, I think, a fairly simple thing.
You had a second thing, which has completely escaped me.
I do apologize if you can rewind and remind.
That would be excellent. No, it's all right.
It was just the first part of the anonymity, and then it's the government insisting that every purchase they're used to now, with credit cards and so forth, being able to see virtually everything that you do with a card.
And you remember under the Obama administration that discussed a little AG of his saying that, well, you know, if anybody were to take out as much as $5,000 in cash, we would want a report sent by the bank so that we could seize those funds or at least start an investigation.
And I don't see the investigating getting any lighter as this Democrat nonsense takes hold of the country.
So there's going to be people who want to, you know, there's people who want to be free and there's people who just won't leave us alone, right?
So this is like the human desire for freedom is very bottomless, right?
I mean, you see this with I mean, they just want to be free and put them in a room.
The first thing they want to do is get out.
When I put my daughter into those little strollers, the first thing she wants to do is get out.
People want to be free. So in the battle between monitoring and controlling and people yearning to be free, then there's two lines on this battle, right?
On the one line, on the one side...
Are people highly motivated to be free, incredibly brilliant, cloud-minded, the hive of brilliant people, people always derided as being in their mom's basement and so on.
It's the Wall Street bets versus the hedge funds.
It's highly motivated, collective, free market intelligence versus a bunch of government workers.
Right now, you know, sometimes it's not always 100 to 1, you know, in terms of who wins.
But in general, I will put my money on the highly motivated, incredibly intelligent, yearning for freedom group of people who have the capacity to organize, which can't be taken away because of the internet, versus a bunch of government bureaucrats, a bunch of people who get paid whether they succeed or not, who are basically just there to punch their clock and get their pension.
And in that battle between Can we do our thing?
Can we have a life? Can we buy and sell and trade without people monitoring our every move and breath?
Well, those people are pretty highly motivated.
They're really, really smart. Versus a bunch of other people who are kind of half lazy, unmotivated, paid whether they succeed or fail.
It's the free market versus the socialism.
Of the state.
And, you know, this is why the state needs so many guns.
That's why they need their guns, because they're not very good at what they do.
So when it comes to can we live and trade relatively privately, I'm going to put my money on the people who are more motivated and smarter to get that job done.
All right, I'm liking this a lot.
We're going to stop for two minutes, by the way, folks.
The last remaining seconds before, boom, boom, boom.
I want to tell you we highly anticipate shipping New Eden out to you this week.
So go to ctnstore.com and get some New Eden immediately, if not sooner.
Stand back. That is the voice of Tom.
And there are a couple of pastors in this song that will get us kicked off the ears.
And fade it out before we get there.
Stephen Molyneux, you are a scholar of Hegel's works.
Now we know the internet is correct about everything, right?
But Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which can be summed up by the dictum that the rationale alone is real.
The smacks of the medium is the message in some way.
Anyway, which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories.
So his goal was to reduce reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism.
Are you observing some of his ideas become manifest, particularly under this COVID-19 worldwide lockdown nonsense, or not?
That's a big question, man.
Let me just get a little coffee injection to the frontal lobes here.
It's late at night for Hegel, but let's do it.
Let's saddle up and write down the Hegelian dialectic.
So the first thing to remember about the history of philosophy is it's not organic and it's not run by the people.
The philosophers that we remember, the philosophers we know about, the philosophers who are promoted, at least up until the modern era, the internet era, the philosophers who are promoted are the philosophers who served the needs of the powerful.
So you had theologians who said, oh, the king is put there by God and to disobey, the king is to disobey God.
So they were promoted by, of course, the aristocracy because they...
The aristocracy's metaphysical and moral claims to own human beings like tax livestock, right?
When you had the rise of the more secular states, sort of starting 18th, 19th centuries, the rise of the more secular states, they had a problem because people weren't believing the divine right of kings as much anymore.
And once the French Revolution happened, people really began to sort of freak out and they began to panic, right?
And so leaders and rulers needed new philosophers to justify their existence, to justify their rule.
The state needed new morals to justify its power over people because, you know, the king is just a man.
And Barack Obama and Donald Trump and George Bush and Joe Biden.
They're all just men. Why on earth should they rule over you and I? You and I can't rule over each other.
I can't go and take half your income and say, oh, no, no, no, John.
It's for a good cause, man.
So if you disagree with me, I'm afraid I'm going to throw you in jail.
So you need, you need, you need, you need the moral justifications, almost the metaphysical justifications as to why people get to rule over.
Now, Hegel served that pretty well because he said, ah, you know, the world spirit.
They had to say the world spirit or other sorts of magical collectivist notions because the Christian God was not quite enough To bring over the majority of people in the new scientific age.
So he had to say, well, there's this world spirit that manifests itself in particular races and peoples and countries and unites them in a world mission to civilize and all of this.
Now, all of this was a lot of cover just for the massive land grabbing that was occurring during the colonial period of Western history.
But Hegel has as much relationship to philosophy as A particularly house-bred cat has to a tiger, right?
The cat is just around, it's kind of cute, it's kind of cuddly, maybe it'll catch a mouse or two, but it's not in its natural state.
Philosophy in its natural state is a pretty modern, very new phenomenon, I would say sort of post-internet phenomenon, where the people can actually choose who they want to listen to, despite the fact that philosophers like myself and others are saying things that go very much against the powers that be, and we're kind of Pulling back the curtain.
So Hegel was very useful to the powers that be because he provided these collective notions.
And he also, you know, was talking about the state of nature was a very common theme.
Oh, you know, if you don't have the government, man.
Oh, if you don't have the government, we'll just be at each other's throats.
We're a bunch of savages and we have to be restrained from killing each other because of the benevolent and wonderful power of the state keeps us all...
In civilization and if you take away the state, nature will be red in tooth and claw and we will just be shredding each other from end to end and eating each other and this chaos that will come without the state.
So I like Hegel's very interesting, very thought-provoking, I think fundamentally wrong in just about everything, but if you look at the philosophers, they serve the powers that be.
They serve either the political or the economic forces.
is when you had the rise of the middle class, suddenly you see people like John Locke coming up because he served the interests of the new economic class which in turn fed the coffers of the state through taxation in particular trade tariffs, taxes on the transportation of goods.
So when I look at the history of philosophy, and sorry, I won't go on too long because it's kind of my thing in a way, right?
If I look at the history of philosophy, it's not a market.
It's not a free market where the best philosophers got to have the most influence The philosophers that served the powers, well, they were given – they were allowed to publish.
In most places, you couldn't publish without approval from the king.
So why would the king allow you to publish if you questioned the value of the king or the morals of the king?
So it's not a free market.
It's a stage play.
It's a kabuki theater. Ah, Hegel was a great philosopher.
It's like, well, we don't know that because he was promoted and universities which are paid for by the state and university professors who are protected in a cartel by the state, they tend to like philosophers that promote the power of the state or at least...
Don't talk that much about the evils and violence of taxation because most professors and universities are paid for through that power.
So the history of philosophy is the history of complicated people who are useful to power.
It is not a natural, organic, free market state.
I think that's much more And it really has jolted the powers that be that the internet has allowed there to be a meritocracy, an actual meritocracy in who gets to talk to the people.
Now, I say this, of course, as you say, three-quarters of a billion views and downloads.
People kind of like what I have to say, and I was in university, and they didn't like me much at all.
They didn't like me much at all when I was in university, but I get to actually talk to the people, and it's a whole different kind of story.
You know, every time I say, oh boy, this is a signal, ladies and gentlemen, that means I really would like to say this, but I really don't think that I should just because...
Welcome to my every waking moment.
Right. You just have to kind of put the brakes on so we're here to go.
That just means not now, later, but this is not the time for this exactly.
A couple of things here. The growing tech censorship...
I made a note that Parler, in this big investigation of the people who were at the Capitol's swarming by the terrorists or whatever it's supposed to be, and all this ridiculous display of military force up there and everything, the tech censorship combined with the censorship in public school primarily, the charter schools and private schools not so much, but even there, there's some of it.
But I'm just wondering, this censorship thing seems all the rage, not just the social media platforms, but actually censoring thought and expression in public schools.
What do you make of this? Oh, it's brutal.
Human brains, childhood brains are being disassembled.
By this corrosive collectivism and leftist hysteria and endless accusations of racism and fascism and Nazism and you're a white supremacist and you're...
Oh, it's monstrous.
It's absolutely... We look back at the Salem witch trials and we say, oh my gosh, how could people could have just imagined that there were witches everywhere and hounded people down and drove them out of town and destroyed their businesses and, well, that's happening.
We've got this ghost.
Everybody's a racist. Everybody's...
We're not sympathetic enough to the poor or not woke enough or whatever it is.
We've got this demon.
It's a cult. It's not a rational philosophy.
It's not a religion because a religion comes with obligations.
And this just comes with endless, bottomless, venom-spewing hatred, with no restraint and no obligation to find the better angels of your nature and forgive and forget and elevate and love your enemies.
No! This is just a tsunami of mass hatred on anybody who opposes your lust of power and domination, and we have now.
Two generations of people raised this way who live in fear, if you think for yourself, or who are addicted to the instant dopamine hit of destruction.
Destruction is deeply pleasurable for some people.
You know, some people just want to watch the world burn.
That's quite a lot of people these days, a lot of people.
And now that we've got people addicted to controlling other human beings, well...
We know what addicts do.
They're emotional terrorists. They abuse.
They lie. They manipulate.
They will do anything to get their hands on their drug, this drug happening to be control over others.
This is common throughout the animal kingdom.
As Jordan Peterson pointed out, all the way from lobsters to bonobos, we get a deep pleasure out of domination.
And religion and philosophy stand, Christianity in particular, even more so than philosophy, I think, stands between our desire to dominate and the demands for love, the demands for equality of opportunity and an acceptance of an inequality of outcome, as is always the case when you have equality of opportunity, you have inequality of outcome.
And what now stands between our mammal desire to control others And totalitarianism, which is the final manifestation of that.
We're better at controlling each other than any other animal because we have mass surveillance.
We have gulags.
We have concentration camps.
We have wars. We have mass starvations and famines.
We have political punishments from here to eternity.
We're so good at controlling each other.
What stands between our mammal lust to dominate each other?
And the manifestation of that in totalitarianism, whether if the left or the right, it doesn't really matter in the end.
They end up just fighting each other.
It's like, which mafia gang do you want to join?
I don't care! Can I not be in a mafia gang?
No! I'm sorry, that's the way it has to be.
So right now, we've got this, everything is just a justification for domination.
You find someone who has said something you don't like.
And instead of saying, oh, I guess I just won't peruse that person, I won't read that person.
Oh, if I want, I can engage in an argument or debate against them.
No, no, no. Now, if you hear or see something you don't like, there's no restraint in the ferocity of the mob.
There's no shame. There's no guilt.
There's no conscience. There's no, well, you know, I better not be part of a mob attacking someone else because one day that mob is going to turn on me and I will have only fed it and bred it to be stronger and meaner.
There's no sense of empathy to someone else.
Well, okay, maybe someone says something I disagree with, but I'm saying things they disagree with, so why don't we just have a live-and-let-live and debate like civilized human beings rather than attack each other like barely-shaven apes?
No, no, no, we've lost the better angels of our nature, and now it's the rule of the jungle.
That certainly is what it appears to be headed for, rather rapidly.
Seriously. And all it takes is a couple of people who really want to, people in positions of supreme power in their nations, all it takes is a couple here on the face of the planet Earth to really desire to see the world burn, and we have a real problem.
I just tell you what, we're going to, that's how it is here in Radio Land, we're going to take a break here, but when we come back, we're going to get into some of Stefan Molyneux's Maybe different optics, now that this COVID-19 thing has descended upon us and sat here for a while on us, and just see how his thought process has shifted over the course of the so-called pandemic.
And then, of course, the danger signs of emerging communist tyranny, which is clearly to be seen everywhere we look, right here in the good old USA. This is Caravan to Midnight.
I am John B. Wells, and we shall return in just a moment.
Thank you for coming on the program tonight.
It's great to be able to talk to you because he's just one of those guys who gets it.
And the philosophy is the basis, as far as I'm concerned, other than the atomic particles and water and air and stuff like that and the human body and natural reality, consciousness of a reality, without which one cannot, well, you can't have one without the other, right? It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I do want to ask you about this.
What can actually be done?
We know what the problems are.
We see what they are doing.
But I'm not sure we ever covered the part about what can we do to fight against tech censorship other than just abandon it and feel all that anxiety from being disconnected from our social media platforms.
Well, I suppose I've got some empirical evidence of my own to share.
I mean, as you may or may not know, I got kicked off most major social media platforms last year, last summer in particular, not too long before the election, which I suppose wasn't too much of a shock.
And I have...
The experience of, you know, I built almost a million people up on YouTube, got kicked off that.
I had half a million people close to it on Twitter, got kicked off that, and a variety of other places.
And, you know, you're still who you are.
You know, I had a life before social media.
You have a life after social media.
There are tons of alternatives out there.
And when you're off the social media platforms, you begin to see some truly revolting stuff that is going on.
I mean, Twitter is...
There are allegations from a family against Twitter that they left up horrible images of a child, and even after it was proved to them that the child was underage, they wouldn't take it down.
These are the allegations. I don't know if they're true or not, of course, but...
Apparently, Department of Homeland Security had to finally intervene.
Facebook has left up stuff that is absolutely appalling, horrible and horrifying.
These companies, you know, power corrupts.
And now you could say, ah, yes, well, they're in the free market.
It's like, no, they're not.
They're not in the free market for two reasons.
Number one, they have immunity from content, right?
As you know, this Section 230, right?
So they're not in the free market.
If you run a newspaper and you print something or you allow something to be printed in your newspaper that's false, libelous, slanderous, destructive, well, you're liable.
But they have this immunity.
That's not the free market. Free market doesn't mean that you're not liable for content.
You say, ah, yes, well. But they're like the roads.
You don't charge the road company if somebody drives too fast or is it getaway cars.
Yes, but... But they're not the road company, because in my particular view, and I think it's pretty clear, they have their fingers on the scale.
They have a particular ideology, tends to be very much on the left, because, you know, tech is young people as a whole, and young people tend to be more indoctrinated and less prone to actually having to deal with harsh reality.
And of course, a lot of the people in tech, they come from pretty wealthy families, and they I get the sense from you, you've had a real job.
You've had a real job at some point where you actually moved something, you lifted something, it was heavy, it was unpleasant, it was difficult, it was dangerous.
If you never had a job like that in your life, I very rarely find that people who have anything to value Anything of value to add if you haven't actually worked a real job.
In other words, if you've gone from school to a couple of summer internships in an office and then daddy or your degree got you a job type in a way and you've never actually had to deal with reality.
It's all virtual. It's all typey.
It's all on a screen and it's all context and it's all how well you can write an essay.
It's never something tangible where there are serious consequences for getting something done.
Wrong. You know, I worked as a gold panner and a prospector up in the middle of nowhere, way beyond the end of the highway, a flight out in a tent in the middle of nowhere with dangerous machinery, man.
If you made a mistake out there, you might be two days from a hospital.
I mean, you could easily...
And so people have had...
In these tech companies, they've never had any real-world consequences.
Everything's malleable.
Everything's virtual. And they don't...
Have the grounding that you have when you work with actual things in the real world where you can't talk your way in and out of things.
You can't just make a phone call and get the problem solved.
You can't just beg for an extension.
You can't just, you know, write some answers on the inside of your hand and read them off.
You can't bring a calculator to the math test.
That's reality out there.
And people have lost that reality and now everything's just manipulation and control.
I remember a job that I had to, it was just a summer job, and I had to be there at 6.30 in the morning, and it was construction.
So, yeah, I hear about people working construction.
Florida, Texas, there weren't that many opportunities for people, but the long and the short of it is, I watched those men.
You know, they are really strong, tough guys, but they're not in good shape.
They got those bellies from a bad diet.
And they're wearing their bodies out.
There's no question about it.
But the thing is, I watch those men so jealously guard their lunch pails and their tools.
Because without them, Well, they can't work, the one thing.
And the other thing is they're going to go hungry.
One of the problems with people like Dorsey and Zuckerberg and many, many others is that they've never had the opportunity to work around people and be on a level playing field with people who have far less than they do.
And they need to be respectful, and they need to understand these are people too, but they don't care about that.
They don't care about any of that.
We've got to stop again for a little two-minute break, but when we come back, let's talk about some other stuff as fast as we can.
The encroachment of communism, there's no doubt that it's coming our way.
And also, where we lost our philosophy and how to get it back.
This is Caravan. You know, I just went to hostmovie.com, and, um...
So it's right here. Everything they told us is a lie.
This is actually quite something.
But yes, actually, Stephen, I did know that you had a little bit of bother there by being deplatformed all over the place.
What is their greatest fear in your movie having been released for the public to see?
What are they afraid of?
Well, to be clear, it's not my movie.
I'm just in it a couple of times and have sort of the closing speech, movies by Mike Srinovich.
And so that's...
I want to be clear about that. You're on Caravan at Midnight, so as far as we're concerned, it's your movie.
All right. I just want to be clear about it.
I don't take any credit for something that I was only a part of.
So if you have a way of comparing things you hear With a truth standard, right?
Comparing things you hear from a truth standard with a truth standard, that's very powerful.
It's one of the most powerful things.
Way back at the beginning of philosophy 2,500 years ago with Socrates, he developed the Socratic method where you just keep asking questions to find out if somebody knows actually what they're talking about.
You know, find out what is truth, what is justice, what is virtue, what is reality, what is love.
It's a very, very important questions.
What is real? What is true?
What is good? Very powerful questions.
And we all ponder these questions on a regular basis, sometimes just in moments of crisis in our life, but we ponder these questions, and we have to, we should.
That's what makes us human. You know, the animals don't really do that as far as we know.
They suffer loss, they suffer pain, but they don't abstract and look for ideals in virtue and truth.
So there's a war Between people who want to lie to you in order to control you and the people who want to tell you or teach you how to differentiate truth from falsehood.
I don't want to tell people what to think.
That would be pointless. The whole point of philosophy is not teaching people what to think but how to think because there's always going to be new circumstances that come up, new lies that are being told you need to be able to evaluate them.
So this battle between people who want to lie to you and you don't know that they're lying, you don't know that these are lies, you don't know what the truth is, you just accept their authority, you kind of go along with the flow like a leaf on a stream.
Well, they want to have the untrammeled ability To lie to you without you being able to detect the lie.
If you're a counterfeiter, you want your money to flow around and you want to be able to use the money back when you could use actual cash.
You want to use the money.
You don't want anyone to know that it's counterfeit because the moment somebody has some little machine, some magical machine, you hold up the counterfeit bills, that's counterfeit, right?
Then your gig is up, right?
You're in jail. So if you're passing false money, if you're passing false ideas, if you're passing lies off as truth, Well, who's your natural enemy if you're a sophist?
The sophist is somebody who makes the worst argument appear the better or merely provides the appearance of truth with usually the implicit punishment if you don't, right?
So if you're a sophist, who's your natural enemy?
Not another sophist because you're both using the same weapons and one of you may win and may lose, but the game still goes on.
But your natural enemy is the philosopher.
The true philosopher, the philosopher who reasons from first principles and teaches people how to think.
Now, I, of course, taught a lot of people.
I've got a whole book called The Art of the Argument.
I've got 10 books out there that have been read 10 million times.
That's a lot of people who've learned how to think through what it is that I do.
Now, again, I'm not telling people what to think.
I'm giving the methodology of thinking.
I'm giving some examples. Now, that's the biggest boost philosophy has ever gotten.
In the history of the world. Now, this doesn't mean that I'm the best.
It just means that I happen to be in the right place with the right skill set at the right time with the right technology.
A lot of good luck.
A lot of coincidence. But what I've done, and I've done it with the help of other people.
I've interviewed hundreds of people.
I've got the 10 books. But what I've done is brought people's capacity to think right up to the surface.
Now, when people have that capacity to think, and thinking is, I know we're on radio, so I won't say the actual word, bullcrap.
Anybody says anything to you, me, you, the media, anybody says anything to you, the first thing that should come up to your mind is bullcrap.
Don't believe it. I don't believe you.
You are not telling me the truth.
You are lying. Now, you may not be conscious you're lying, but you're not telling me the truth.
America was founded on genocide and slavery.
Bullcrap! And all the people who were so concerned with genocide and slavery seem to have no problem with the 100 million dead from communism.
So anyway, but the first thing that you...
That's critical thinking, 101, man.
The first thing that anyone tells you anything, it's sunny.
Two and two make four. Bullcrap!
I don't believe you. That skepticism...
I think it's worse than that, Stephan.
I'm sorry? No, I'm sorry.
I just had to jump in there. I apologize for interrupting.
I think it's worse than that. There are too many people out there saying those white South Africans deserve to be butchered.
Those Trump supporters deserve to die.
Those Trump-supporting women deserve to be raped.
I think it comes down to good and evil.
What do you think? Yes.
Well, you know, a hard rain is coming, man.
We've seen this so often in history.
And the cover-up for the crimes of communism is the causality of For their continuation, right?
Let me say that again. The cover-up for the crimes of communism is the causality for their continuation.
Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Communism has been the greatest death machine outside of actual viruses in the history of this planet.
They killed many more times than Nazism or National Socialism.
100 million plus just in the 83 years from 1917 to 2000.
100 million bodies plus.
We don't learn about it.
We don't learn about the causes.
Everybody knows about the Holocaust.
How many people know about the Holodomor?
The deliberate mass starvation of the middle class peasants in Ukraine.
How many people know how much National Socialism was A reaction to international socialism doesn't justify either system.
Both systems were evil. We don't know our history, so it's all creeping in.
Again, how many people know that McCarthy was much more right than even McCarthy suspected about this communist infiltration?
How many people know that in the 1920s, the communists said, we are going to use racial divisions and call everyone a racist who disagrees with us in order to take down the republic?
How many people know? They openly state their goals.
A hundred years ago, openly stated their goals.
How many people know that? They don't.
They still think that McCarthyism was a fantasy.
Communists are nice, but sometimes misguided.
The next time, they'll get it right.
There weren't that many bodies, and maybe it was a necessary step, but at least Stalin advanced the economy.
They don't understand what is circling them and getting closer.
They think that Finn is a dolphin.
I'm telling you guys, it's not a dolphin.
It's not a dolphin.
It's that other thing with the fin and the teeth that looks a little like a dolphin until it takes your bloody leg off.
And by the way, they're going to their planning on, or the word is, 500,000 sharks will be harvested so that they can get its oil to go into the coronavirus vaccine.
I mean, this is absolutely insane.
You said something really genius a while ago.
What was it?
Complacency toward communism?
Is it what?
Say that again.
It was wonderful.
I want to write it down.
The cover-up of the crimes of communism is the causality for their continuation.
Is the causality for their continuation.
Got it.
The worst you'll ever hear about communism is, well, there were some excesses.
Mistakes! We're made.
Oh, oh, oh, here's the other one.
You know, it's a great system, but, you know, just the wrong people were in charge, man.
I mean, if you just had different people in charge, it would have been so much better.
Like, you and I, I tell you, man, would you ever want the power of life and death over 100 million people?
I would recoil from that like somebody was chasing me with a cattle prod and Designed to go up someplace that only a doctor should examine in my back, right?
I would steadfastly reject and refuse any...
Communism concentrates so much power into so few people, only sociopaths and psychopaths want that power.
The idea that good people would ever end up in charge of communism is completely ridiculous.
You and I wouldn't want that power.
I would recall from that power because I know that it would strip my soul of my humanity and make it It's unbearable to be alive because if you have a conscience, you don't want to point guns at people and order them what to do and shoot them if they disagree.
You don't want that power if you have a conscience.
The only people who will ever, ever, ever end up in charge of a totalitarian state.
Well, it's what they say about every rule that you design for the government.
Every rule you design for the government You have to imagine your very worst enemy, the person who hates you the most in all the world, they're the ones who are going to get that power over you.
That's the reality, and that's the way it plays, and everybody forgets.
Oh boy. Alright, who had the best crystal ball between Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Huxley?
I would go with Orwell, but he was still a socialist, of course, and was a sentimentalist in many ways.
And he didn't talk about, which very few people do talk about, the childhood roots, the origin story of the totalitarian worldview, the totalitarian impulse.
I did a whole series on this years ago.
People can find it at a website called bombinthebrain.com, which is if you suffer through significant childhood trauma, it destroys your capacity for empathy.
It has you fearful and aggressive.
You end up in a situation where you can't be equal with anyone.
You can only dominate them or be dominated by them.
You can either be at their feet or at their throat, nothing in between.
The destruction of childhood, the destruction of community, the destruction of the family, the destruction of security for children is the root cause of why everyone's growing up so anxious, so fearful, so aggressive.
Because the fight or flight mechanism, two sides of the same coin.
If you make people afraid as children, they will end up being demonically aggressive as adults when they get power and can take vengeance for the terrors of their childhood.
So I don't think that he went far enough into childhood to explain the origins.
Stephen Molyneux, tell us, we're almost out of program here for tonight, but I really would like to speak with you again in the not-too-distant future, seriously, because it's a stimulating conversation, and I think people need to hear this.
So, tell us your ideas of how to live free in our personal lives as the government continues to at least try to grow, and it appears that it's working, it appears that it is growing.
How do you live free, at least in your head?
Shall I do it now or after the music?
I'd say do it now because we're almost out of show.
Alright, alright. So, shun people who want you dead.
Reject people who succumb to propaganda in an unrecoverable format.
Have people around you who value liberty, peace and freedom.
Get away from the people who want you dead.
Ostracism is our only peaceful hope.
Don't worry about the social media platforms too much.
I'm thinking that it's creating in some ways a feedback loop and people are reinforcing the concerns they already have even more.
I think it's time for some new ideas.
But maybe that's just me.
Yeah, and look, the worse the social media companies get, the more the alternatives will swell and you always have a place to land where you can talk reason to people.
Thank you very much for your time tonight, Stephen Molyneux.
My pleasure, John. Thank you for the conversation.
I appreciate the conversation.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon. Thank you so much for delivering me to your audience.
It was a great pleasure. Very good.
Thank you, Stephen. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for keeping us going for over seven years.
Talk to you again tomorrow night.
I'm John B. Wells. This is Caravan to Midnight.
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