Why YouTube Deleted My 1m Subscriber Channel - Stefan Molyneux - #195

Stefan Molyneux is a philosopher & (ex)YouTuber. Stefan is the creator of one of the longest running channels on YouTube with hundreds of millions of views, last Monday it was deleted without warning. I wanted to find out why he thinks this happened, what his thoughts are on the future of free expression on the internet, his predictions for the rest of 2020 and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Check out Stefan's website - https://www.freedomain.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I logged into my channel and well, there was nothing there. Just a message that says you've been bad thinking guy and your 14 or 15 year history, 3,700 videos and billions of comments, 300 million views plus almost a million subscribers. I mean, as far as I understand it, outside of Alex Jones, it's the second biggest erasure in YouTube history. So it's, I guess I got, I got the silver.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  Stefan, this is a welcome return to YouTube for you. Welcome back to YouTube.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, I feel I should, I should be incognito. Let me try another accent. Yes, I guess I am, I'm treading the dark horse of those who no longer wish to grace their platform with my presence. So, hi.

• 0:47Chris Williamson?

  Hi, mate. Yeah, this is a Trojan horse. We've delivered you in the guise of someone else and now you're back on. So tell us what's happened.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  And that's weird too, because I'm currently wearing a Trojan. Anyway, never mind, go on.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  Nice. Tell us, tell us what's happened over the last week.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Well, so there's been sort of a successive

• 1:09Speaker 00

  deplatforming ish kind of stuff that's been going on with me and YouTube. It goes back to a year ago, February, right after I criticized censorship at the European Union. I ended up being vanished out of, I think, suggested videos, promoted videos. They took my most popular video, the story of your enslavement and made it like adult content. So it couldn't show up in the searches and you had to be logged in and all that. And that cut traffic quite a bit. But I'm the kind of guy like-

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  Go into there. What did you say? You just criticized, yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I was, I was just criticizing the, the sort of ongoing censorship issues that were occurring on social media platforms. This was in a speech I gave in Brussels at the European Union. And probably coincidentally, but right after that, they didn't seem to be such a fan. And look, that, that's, that's a real challenge. Like that is, that is a real challenge, which is how much do online platforms allow for criticism of online platforms? You know, I mean, if it's your baby, you kind of take it personally. So that's a real challenge. So I got vanished, as I said, from suggested videos and so on. But I'm the kind of guy, I do well when cornered. I guess you could refer to me as a rat, you know, like. So, so when I'm kind of up against the wall.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  I mean, it's funny because I don't want to say I do my best work like I'm not always trying to do my best work, but suddenly when you're in a corner, you really do summon additional resources you didn't know that you had. And so my views went down significantly, like 80%, but I kind of managed to wrestle them back up over time. And then the next big issue was in September of last year, I went to Hong Kong and I did a documentary, marched with the protesters, took faceful after faceful of tear gas, stood and stared down the fascist barrels of the proto-communist security police out there and did a very long, detailed and brutal history of China and its illegitimate claims on certain aspects of Hong Kong. And

• 3:11Speaker 00

  boy, you put that out and you know, the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in the forest, but no one hears, did it actually fall or did it make a sound? Well, you put out a video and you put the exact title in, you can't find it. And so I think that was another big issue. Then shortly after that, I vanished from the autocomplete. So you type my name and my name is like, it's like the Welsh nickname for an Aztec god, as far as spelling goes, as you probably know. So that made it progressively harder. Then I sort of heard rumors that even video titles of mine were vanishing and all of that. And then on Monday, and but my account was in good standing. I didn't have any issues or strikes or problems or anything like that. But then Monday, I got a message saying,

• 3:54Speaker 00

  I can't find you on YouTube. And I thought it was just people saying like the type ahead thing, the autocomplete wasn't working. But yeah, I logged into my channel and well, there was nothing there. Just a message that says, you've been a bad thinking guy and your 14 or 15 year history, 3,700 videos and billions of comments, 300 million views plus almost a million subscribers. Oh, and that was another thing too. Like I used to be getting 10,000 new subscribers a month. And then the beginning of last year, that all just stopped. Like you'd see a subscriber count go up and then it would just get clawed back. I mean, I get it. They don't wanna, if they don't like me, right? They don't want to send the plaque of, hey, you've got a million subscribers. I kind of get all of that. So.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's now I do have on on L B R Y dot com, that's library dot com on on Bitshoot and and other places. There are still, you know, copies of the videos and I I'm going to continue to publish to Bitshoot and Library and other places. So the catalog remains, which is, I guess, the important thing. But yeah, the YouTube presence is certainly gone.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  No warning, no community strikes, no three

• 5:07Speaker 00

  No, no, nothing like that.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  beforehand.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  Nearly a million subs, three and a half thousand videos, couple of billion comments, few hundred million plays.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And then, well, so, yeah, I mean, as far as I understand it, outside of Alex Jones, it's the second biggest erasure in YouTube history. So it's, I guess, I got I got the silver.

• 5:30Chris Williamson?

  Well played. That's actually something bizarrely to be quite proud of. It wasn't just you that got taken, though, wasn't there? There was a couple of other prominent channels that got swiped on the same day.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  I haven't really kept track of all of that, but I certainly do understand that. I mean, there was the, ah, R the Donald has gone from Reddit. There was a bunch of other stuff. I think I think thousands or it was the tens of thousands of Reddit stuff all got.

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  Was it Richard Spencer taken off YouTube as well?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  I believe, yeah, Richard Spencer was taken off YouTube, a bunch of other people as well. And yeah, people that I really don't have anything in common with, the guys are complete socialists. And let's get into whole other other topic.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  We don't need to go down that hole. So what I mean, what happens? You said you log on, you've been wrong thinking. But what actually do you see? Was there an email from YouTube saying?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, eventually I did get an email from YouTube saying that, you know, violations of incitement to violence or promotion of hatred or whatever, you know, the stuff.

• 6:30Chris Williamson?

  But what was the specific? Can you remember what the actual specific reasoning was that they gave? Because presumably-

• 6:36Speaker 00

  No, no, that's just the general, just the general statement. I didn't get any details about what I had said or what video it was. And, you know, I mean, yeah, who knows? It's a it's a it's a black box.

• 6:51Chris Williamson?

  So let's steal man YouTube's position for me. Why could they have removed your channel?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, if you do try and put yourself into other people's shoes, it's a basic empathy thing. So when it comes to YouTube, so I've been on YouTube, I was like user number four because it was pretty clear to me what a powerful platform that was going to be. And from 2006 to 2016, man, that was one glorious Wild West decade, I'm telling you. For you young kids there, you come listen to Grandpa.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  You'll never know.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Come, come listen to Grandpa as he whittles a log on the back of the porch and tells you about the good old days of making moonshine and banging mules and also back when you could actually say stuff on social media. It really was. I, I mean, I've been under attack by the mainstream media by, you know, for what's going on. I mean, I think that the slander against me in various forms has, it's almost old enough to drive now if it was a human being. So, but yeah, those 10 years, you could, you could post, you could make cases that were very much against general social narratives. And it was like you no more think, oh, man, you know, I'm not going to be able to use YouTube because they disagree with

• 8:08Speaker 00

  me any more than you'd think. Well, I'm not going to be able to drive on the road because the maker of the road doesn't like me, or I can't have a cellphone because the cellphone manufacturer doesn't like me. And so that, when it really was, as I would perceive it, a genuinely neutral platform, that was, that was pretty glorious times, pretty glorious times. And it was a, it was a slugfest, which is, I think, what intellectual rigor should be. It should be kind of like a Fight Club, so to speak, like all verbal, nothing physical, of course, but it really was like, you know, people would hammer you hard, you'd fight back with them, you'd have debates. And I think that some really important truths were being hammered out on that platform. And then, well, oh, yeah, there was another aspect.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  I used to, I'd never monetized my videos, like I never took ads on my videos. I work on a donation model, which people can obviously help out at my website, freedomain.com/donate.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  LinkedIn show notes below.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I didn't take ads. I always wanted to be...

• 9:09Speaker 00

  If you take ads, right, you know, the basic business model kind of changes. For me, like for other people, it's perfectly fine, I have no issue with it whatsoever. But for me, I want to be in the business of delivering truth directly to the audience, not in the business of delivering the audience to advertisers, which is kind of a subtle difference and can have you be a little like, ooh, what if the advertisers... Also, when you have advertisements, you have a sort of single point, a choke point, like a single choke point where people can kind of hammer you, where decentralized donations give you a certain amount of more stiffness in your spine, I guess, when it comes to that. So they also did demonetize me. I used to do, when I livestream on YouTube, there was some super chats, like, you know, you get a couple of bucks and it kind of rolls it out more prominently.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  But they demonetized that sometime last year, I can't exactly remember when. It wasn't like a big source of income for me, but that definitely occurred. So from their standpoint, I think the case is pretty easy. And it's a twofold case. Number one, I was very expensive, right? I mean, I got a lot of videos and there's a lot of bandwidth they have to serve. There's a lot of management, there's storage costs and all that. So I'm expensive. Now, of course, in business, cost benefit, right? So in business, you say, okay, well, this customer is demanding, but he spends a lot of money, right? So you could say, well, I am, you know, I did high-def videos, there's a lot of storage, a lot of bandwidth and so on.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  So from their standpoint, it's like, okay, well, he's expensive and he's not making us any money because we've demonetized him, right? So that's why demonetization is often a prequel to these kinds of things because once somebody is demonetized, the business case for keeping them on becomes progressively more tenuous, right? So that, I think, is the first round. I'm expensive, they're not making any money from me, and some people really don't like me. And so there's negative PR around all of that kind of stuff. So it becomes, I think, progressively more difficult to make that kind of case. Now, if you're standing on principle, right, then it's like, no, man, free speech, you know? Everything he says is legal, you know, he's got experts on, he's got data, he's got sources, he's got science, he's got facts.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  And so this is a free speech issue now. So if you're kind of principled from that standpoint, then the cost benefit is important, but it's not the final deciding factor. But if, for whatever reason, and I obviously don't know what deliberations occurred, but if there is...

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Something that occurs to that free speech principle, which is kind of happening all over the place these days, you know, that that suddenly apparently real weapons are just freedom of expression, but words are somehow assault in this kind of crazy upside down world we got at the moment. So I can certainly see, okay, bad, you know, it could be bad publicity. He's very expensive, doesn't make any money. So, you know, I can certainly, again, if you kind of detach that sort of free speech issue, then you get consequentialist arguments and those are harder to, well, you can't really stand on principles when you've got consequentialist because you can just invent outcomes that can have you do just about anything.

• 12:12Chris Williamson?

  I get it, yeah. From a video standpoint, is there anything you've uploaded over the last couple of weeks that you think has would have warranted this return? Is there something that when you put it up, you're like, not really too sure how that's going to land?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Well, certainly nothing. I mean, I've always, I've always tried to tell, I've always explicitly and directly told people, you know, use your words, not your fists, you know, reason with people and peaceful solutions to these kinds of challenges. So, I mean, certainly nothing like that. I did have a conversation, had a great conversation with Tommy Sotomayor about policing and he's this black commentator on YouTube and other places. He's also got a lot of hits over the years and we've done a couple of shows together that was really great. And, you know, maybe because this whole racism thing gets thrown around that me having a really productive and enjoyable conversation and a debate and disagreements and so on with a black fellow, maybe that had something

• 13:11Speaker 00

  to do with it. The video that was waiting in queue was me having a really productive conversation about policing in America with two ex cops. One was black, one was white, and we were having lots of conversations about some of the strengths and weaknesses of policing in America, coming up with a lot of solutions and all that kind of stuff. Because there is a lot of, there are a lot of people, not speaking about YouTube, of course, because I don't know, but there are a lot of people out there that kind of want to just burn it down. Like everything that's going on in the West, they're just like, you know, raise it down and start again because the whole damn thing is rotten from top to bottom, they believe. And maybe, just maybe, the idea that there could be glimmers of productive solutions. I don't know. It's almost, it's almost like if you're some callous, cold-hearted guy and your grandmother's dying and she's going to leave you a lot of money

• 13:56Speaker 00

  and you're really heavily in debt and so on. And, and the doctor comes along and says, I think she's making a recovery. And you're like, oh. Ah.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Is there a plug we can pull?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, oops, tripped over the cord. And so, you know, if people really do want the system to, to burn to the ground, then people of every race or ethnicity having productive conversations about how to improve things, it may not be first on your shopping list of, of snacks to have.

• 14:28Chris Williamson?

  There's so many layers going on at the moment. When you think about the level of complexity that you need to be able to hold in your mind to just exist in 2020.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  It's like, if you started this year, you, you have to have gained a couple of IQ points just to have been able to move through the year. You know what I mean? You get to July and everyone's had this real multifaceted, like 10th dimension workout to just be able to get into the nuance of what's happening. It would appear that, I don't know, I'm trying to think, because your, your content, for the most part, was philosophy, right? It's a philosophy channel. Now, obviously, philosophy covers a broad range of sins.

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  But I'm trying to work out what, what the reason is. You know, I woke up on Monday, saw that your channel and a bunch of others had been removed. I'm thinking like, I haven't seen anything from you that would have warranted that. You know, with Alex Jones, there's just, he's screaming and shouting and talking about turning the frogs gay and stuff. And you think, Alex, man, like, it's a matter of time before this is going to happen. But I hadn't seen anything from you. And that was why I was interested in hearing you sort of try and steel man YouTube's position in terms of the, the rhetoric that you're putting across. But it would appear that you're kind of at a little bit of a loss as to what that could be.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Well, so the big question, the big question that occurs in society is.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  To some degree economic, it's to some degree educational. The big question is, why do some people do well and why do some people do badly? Right? Like you know how it goes in sports, in music, other disciplines, like 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people. You know, like for every queen or Rolling Stones or insert modern artist here that I'm not aware of, you know, there are, you know, a thousand garage bands who never seem to get out of the pub circuit, right? And it's a big, it's a big question. And people from the days of priests, the pre-socratic onwards have been wrestling with this question of like, okay, why, why, why do East Asians make more than whites? Why do, uh, you know, why do some basketball players do really well and others don't?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Like, it's, it's a huge, huge question. Now, the Marxists have an answer, the leftists have an answer, which is it's exploitation. You know, the, the reason that the capitalist makes more money than his workers is because their work is worth 15 bucks an hour, but he only pays them 14 bucks an hour. So he pockets that, pockets that extra, extra dollar and he gets rich by stealing from them. He's not necessary. They're the ones doing the actual work. He's just sitting in the office in his bathrobe, counting his money that he's stolen from the workers. And so their answer as to why some people do better and why some people do worse is exploitation. It's, it's basically theft. It's called the labor theory of value and you're probably aware of all this kind of stuff. Now, is there exploitation? Of course there is, absolutely.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Um, you know, I pay my taxes every year, don't seem to get a whole lot in return, but there, there really is exploitation, but there are other answers. Now, one of the big competing answers is IQ. You know, in that the higher someone's sort of raw IQ scores, the closer it correlates with success, particularly economic success. It doesn't actually correlate with happiness, which is interesting because the goal of philosophy is happiness, not wealth. In fact, wealth can sometimes take you in the opposite direction. You know, everybody who wins the lottery regrets it a year later when all the extended relatives feast on their bones, right? So. The answer around IQ is an important part of the equation, but if you raise the answer

• 18:08Speaker 00

  called IQ, you know, IQ is statistically, for success in a complex job, your IQ score is eighty percent correlative. It's a correlation of point eight, more or less. So it's, it's way better than a college degree. It's way better than interviews. It's why. So just, you know, have an IQ test and they get into the point where you can literally spit into a jar and they can get your IQ from that. It's becoming quite wild because like eighty percent genetic by your teens, right? So the IQ answer is really, really interesting and it's really fascinated me and I've talked about that. And that is offensive to some people for, I think, pretty obvious reasons, but it's particularly offensive to the Marxists because it's a highly competing theory. Because the more you start looking into the IQ argument,

• 18:50Speaker 00

  the more the theft and exploitation argument appears weaker. And Marxists use the theft and exploitation argument to create division, to cause problems, and then eventually to, you know, salami slice society and gain power of the whole sausage fest, so to speak. And so, I know, I know.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  That's a term I didn't think I was gonna hear today, Stefan. This is what happens when you get kicked off YouTube. You start throwing words like sausage fest around.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  So, I know, also break my rule, which is to never do a interview with people who've got cooler glasses than me. But anyway, um, see, look at the, I even brought my ones down that have tape on them. That's my, that's my professionalism. They're not on my face. So good. So yeah, so the more you focus on the IQ argument, again, exploitation exists, but IQ is a really, really important part of the discussion, but it weakens. The Marxists, the capitalists is stealing from the poor workers and exploiting them and creating all of this resentment and rage, you know, because, I mean, we've all, we've all been there, you know, you, I grew up poor. I don't know about your history in particular, but you know, you, you see, there were kids in my high school, I remember these two, two guys, they were brothers. They got brand new Corvettes for their sixteenth birthday

• 19:59Speaker 00

  and they drove them to school and they parked. And of course, you know, everybody was going crazy and the girls were like, oh, you know, and, and I'm sitting here with my dirt bike of seven colors, you know, and it's like, they gotta get it all from the garbage dump. It's like, I am not getting any babes with this multi-colored.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Adam Sanders kind of dirt bike. So we all have that now. And I remember, you know, going to people's houses, you know, like I they're wealthy and and they got pools. And you know, that old speech, there's lots of people out there. They're happy and they have noodle salads, just nobody in this car, right? And and so we have that kind of resentment. Now, for me, it was kind of like, well, I'm glad that's out there. I got something to shoot for. You know, I got something to aim for. I got something where I can get out of this hell hole of poverty and dysfunction. Because, you know, the poorer you are, often more dysfunctional, the systems and situations are. I I had something, you know, like if you're down a well and it's totally black, that's pretty bad. If you can see one pinpoint a light up there, woo hoo, you know, you've got, you know, it may take you a long time, but you can climb the hell out of that thing, right?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  So for me, I did kind of resent it, but I used the resentment as I resent that I don't have that. Right? So I, you know, I worked very hard. I co-founded.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to the system which permitted that to emerge?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, because if I had, if I had thought to myself, oh, well, you know, because you're born poor, you lack the contacts and you lack the social skills and you lack the blah blah work ethic. And you got a you got dysfunctional parents, which you have to take care of. That bleeds you out of the marketplace and the rich will never let you get ahead. All of this stuff, I, you know, I had to drill upwards, you know, it's you think, think of a guy who falls through. I live in Canada, so these things are like you. You think about these things occasionally, you fall through the ice, right? And there's a swift flow and current. And then you're under the ice. What the hell do you do? Your your body heat is like leaching away, Leo DiCaprio style. And you've got this, you know, half a foot thick ice.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  And everybody thinks, okay, I could try and swim back up current and find the hole where I came from. But that's pretty risky. Or maybe I can grab a rock from the bottom of the river and I can smash it upwards and get through this ice. And I have maybe 30 seconds or I'm gonna die, right? Because it's and then, of course, even if you get through the ice, you then got to get out because it's kind of broken. Well, you did it. So the reason I'm saying all of that is looking up, it was like this layer of ice, like this layer of ice. It's like, okay, I know on the others like down here is horrible, right? Down here in this, the dregs of society, that's pretty wretched, right? But I gotta pound my way up through there and it's a really, really uncomfortable situation because you really do feel out of place. Like I remember giving business presentations. I don't know whether I'm supposed to stand or sit and, and being invited to country clubs and, and let's go golfing is like, I don't even know which end of the golf club to hold.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  And, and like it's, it's, it's a big, difficult challenge, but I never thought that there was, now, some people say, oh, well, it's my privilege and so on, but fun, because I know a lot of my friends who didn't make it out and, uh, you know, they were just as white as me, if not wider. And so to me, that class question, I never thought it was fixed. Now, I like the Dickens novels. I like Russian novels where there's kind of churn of classes, you know, like the Great Expectations style, the David Copperfield style, even the Oliver Twist style, right? So I think I, I never really bought into this argument or this idea that you were just trapped, you know, like that old Everlast song, like where you end is usually where you start. And it's like, no, I, I don't, I don't believe that. And I think the more they can get you

• 23:29Speaker 00

  to believe that, the more you just die under the ice because you think like that can't get out of here, right? There's no, the ice is like a glacier, like I can't get out. And I really, really dislike that, which is why, you know, I focus on free will and fight back against determinism and so on, particularly economic determinism. If you can provide value to people, they don't care whether you're black or white or green or bold or blue eyed, or you have one of those David Bowie rolling casino eyeballs, like what mix and match and all. If you can provide value, then people will, you know, build a better mousetrap and people will be the path to you. I always believed that. And I was able to find a place of, of providing value through philosophy to people, both by talking about

• 24:11Speaker 00

  things that other people were kind of too chicken to talk about, Douglas Murray accepted. And also, you know, just by, I have these call in shows, which I've been doing for like 15 years. I've talked to thousands and thousands of people, you know, people who say, I've got this problem in my life. Okay, let's see what philosophy can say, because I really want it to be a rubber on the road discipline, not some abstract thing in a book or a university.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting hearing about the problems that a meritocratic society brings up. And Alanda Botan, who I went to go and see twice last year, actually, and was fantastic both times, the most calming, beautiful British voice ever. And he's got this story where he talks about the ancient Greeks. And he says that the, back then, the beggars on the street were referred to as the unfortunate that Lady Fortuna had not blessed them. And he says, if you roll the clock forward now to the 21st century, the equivalent of an unfortunate in our modern society is a loser, someone that's a loser, right?

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Like the incel slur, right? Yeah, yeah.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  It's a loser, it's because, and the reason was, he postulates that back in ancient Greece, people understood that a significant amount of what was good in life could be achieved through hard work with luck. And yet, as you start to ramp up the amount of meritocracy that you have, if the winners, the people, the millionaires, the Elon Musks, the Bill Gates of this world, if their successes are theirs to bear, then the people who fail, who fail in society, their failures must be theirs to bear, right? You can't have it that the people who do well do well because they do well and they've worked hard, but the people who fail, fail purely because of luck.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  And when you have Douglas Murray on the show, talked about the collapse of grand narratives as someone who has an interesting view on religion from his side, he took a really nuanced position about how us no longer having an attachment to these grand narratives and that's trickled down into a lack of community, both like sort of hyper locally, as in you and your street and the couple of neighborhoods around you. All of these different things is this lack of connection to the outside world, that sense of perspective that you get when you look up at the night sky, the fact that you have super normal levels of dopamine coming in from a high stimulus devices, which again kind of makes nature just feel a bit dumb, like I can go and shoot people on Call of Duty, this feels a bit shit.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  You kind of wrap all these things together and it does, you know, meritocracy, someone not doing too good in life and feeling like it's a bit unfair, like I can see why someone might. Scrabble around for a reason to kind of work that out. And yet I can hold in truth at the same time that I can see with all of these different structures and how they're going on as to how this could have emerged. Does that all make sense?

• 27:06Speaker 00

  It really does. And, you know, one of the great gifts that Christianity gave to the West was a powerful way of dealing with the resentment of people who don't succeed. I mean, it's a powerful force in society and of course it's complicated. I mean, it's hugely complicated, as you point out, you know, I mean, someone born with spina bifida is going to have a bit more of a challenge in life than than say you or I, and I have great sympathy for that. And there are people who try and fail through no particular fault of their own. And so, you know, life is a hurly burly, but you know, material success is only one part of life, once you've got your bare minimum taken care of. So the question of why people succeed or why they fail is really, really fascinating. But every time we try to answer that using structure, we destroy free will. That's the problem I have.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Every time we make an excuse, so to speak, oh, so and so failed because like I have a friend, oh man, let's get all kinds of personal, right? So I had a friend, he's like five foot four, right? And he never had much confidence with women. Now, why? Because he's like, hey Steph, you can have all the confident you want, you tall, square jawed, blue eyed, almost six foot tall guy, you're above average in height and you've got a cool accent and all that kind of stuff, right? And he's like, you know, I'm a five foot four and you know, not not particularly striking looking or anything like that. And he would bring up these things. He'd say, oh, I saw this show where women were offered a short guy who was a doctor or a tall guy who was unemployed and they chose the tall guy who was unemployed.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  And then they finally said, okay, he's a doctor, he writes children's books, he's musical and he's a millionaire. And finally they were like, okay, fine, I'll go out with the short guy, right? So he said, like, the amount of, like, the amount of accomplishments you have to stand on to just make up for height.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Mechanism has to be significantly greater.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Now, I get all of that. I get all of that. And I could have gone that same route when I was like 13 and started losing my hair. I'm just saying it wasn't 13, but it's pretty damn early, right? And I had a real nice, you know, aha style shock of hair and all that. But, you know, genetics kicked in, thanks mom. And next thing you know, I'm reflecting more sunlight than I'm absorbing, right?

• 29:15Speaker 00

  So I could have sat there and said, oh, you know, but bald guys, they don't, all right. But, but if it's the kind of thing, if you believe it, it becomes true. If you don't believe it, you'll find out how true it is. And that's what I want to get across to people. Do not cut off your own future by assuming that there's a structure or you have a deficiency or an issue that is going to prevent you from reaching your potential. Pretend that there's no barriers to what you want to do. You will absolutely be astounded because in life, you're competing with people who are erecting their own barriers all the time. And if you're just one of these insane people who are like, hey, what if they're

• 29:58Speaker 00

  just, what if there weren't any barriers? Now, sure, barriers will come up, but what if you're like, okay, well, this is just temporary. This is a barrier, like you're driving along and you see a fog bank, you don't crash, you just slow down, right? You navigate the barrier and you just keep moving forward. And if you look at life that way, that's the complete opposite of what the Marxist worldview is. And that's empowering. The Marxist worldview is like the satanic temptation to externalize all the issues in your life to other structural blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Oh, the class or the race or the gender or whatever it is. Go ahead.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  I, I think that, um, this is why I've had to do so much work to get myself up to the level where I can even hold a conversation with someone like Douglas Murray or Andrew Doyle. Because for me, I'm an only child and therefore sort of personal sovereignty, individual agency, like that's been everything, playtime required individual agency from me, you know, because there's no momentum to overcome the inertia of someone else, of you not playing. It's like, I want to play. Okay. Well, looks like you're going to have to start playing. And it takes a lot of work for me to get myself into the mindset of

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  someone who does externalize in that way, who does want to rely on the structures. And yet I have a level of empathy which is so crippling that I don't want to see people in our society that are struggling, not cared for. And holding those two things in reality at the same time is challenging.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  And that's, that's really the, the key point. Our, our capacity to

• 31:44Speaker 00

  To empathize with suffering without relieving it for our own sake. Because empathy is what's good for the other person. I take a silly example, right? You got your brother's an alcoholic. He asked you to go and pick him up at two four, right? Well, empathy is my brother really wants to drink, right? And you're empathizing with your brother's needs. But real empathy for your brother is dude, you drink too much. Like, let's have a conversation about cutting back, right? So when it comes to sympathy in society, are we actually helping people? Or are we managing our own discomfort about them being unhappy? That's the fundamental question because it's very selfish to say, I don't like that this person is suffering.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna, I don't walk up and give them money or whatever because I feel uncomfortable. That's a fundamentally selfish act and so open to manipulation and so open to being preyed upon and so open to having the opposite effect of what you want.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, what is this strategy there? Because if you go up to someone and you just say, hey, man, like there's that, uh, I can't remember what the comedy show is that's a sketch. It might be Family Guy and there's a homeless person on the side of the road and Peter Griffin goes up and he puts like an empty hand in there. They said, but dad, you didn't give him anything. And he says, hope, I put hope in there. And you're like, well, maybe, you know.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Well, let me ask you this. So have you in your life? I mean, I know you have, obviously, right? But so Chris, what has your experience been of trying to help someone? Because we all do. We all have people in our lives who have problems and we try to help them with those problems just as they try to help us with our problems. What has your experience been in helping people? Like directly in your life, not just, you know, money or taxes or charity, but in your life, you know, sitting down and really trying to help people fix their stuff.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the young guys that work for me in my events company, between 18 and 21, very turbulent time. A lot of them have relationships, challenges, you know, people have more, more relationships than they do lectures sometimes at university. And assisting them to navigate that is a very common way that I deal one to one with someone who is in some form of emotional distress.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  And how does it play out? What would you say your success rate is? I know that's kind of off the cuff, but I'm just curious.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, pretty good, I'd say, at least. Well, it depends on how you, what the quantifiable metric of success is. But at the very least, I think the boys get some clarity. I think they're given clarity because I'm able to say, look, man, here's some of the archetypes that you're going through. Here are some of the existing examples I can give you from my own life or from other people's anonymously lives that have come before you, this weird heritage thing that's going on of different club promoters. And this is, this is just par for the course. It's totally normal. It's totally normal. How can we normalize this? How do you feel? What's good? What's bad? And then hopefully they go away with a little bit more clarity. I think it's successful in that they leave in a better position than

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  when they arrived. But even my wisdom-making powers can't fix a bad relationship, you know?

• 34:48Speaker 00

  No, there's no magic that way. And it's funny, because I've actually had a lot more success helping people in the world than helping people in my personal life, which is causal in ways that are probably quite complex. Because of course, the people who want to get advice from me or want to get advice from you, there's already some kind of respect that's kind of baked into the situation. So you have some weight, perhaps, that otherwise a stranger wouldn't. But it is really, is really tough to help people. You want to help people, but helping them will often weaken them. You know, like some guy's struggling with lifting weights, you don't go over and say, here, I'll lift those for you. You know, it doesn't, it makes him weaker, right? And you've got to let him struggle. If he's not struggling, he's not strengthening. And if he's, you know, struggling too much, he's going to injure himself, finding that sweet spot. You know, helping people is really,

• 35:33Speaker 00

  really complicated. And, you know, one of the issues I have with the welfare state or sort of government redistribution of, it's just like, take money from these people, fire money at these people. Look, problem solved, as they say in England, done and dusted. And that doesn't work. I mean, that seriously, seriously does not work. And it really just turns into pay people not to get upset, not riot and buy votes. And, you know, it turns into this complete cluster frac of incompetence and corruption. But because it's not voluntary, because it's coercive, it's based on debt and taxes and so on, you know, you can't really fix it. And so that, that question of how we help people, it's really complicated. And when you have an overly simple and coercive, quote,

• 36:18Speaker 00

  solution to a highly complicated problem, People stop looking for answers. You know, how do you help people who are poor? Do you mentor them? Do you give them a better education? Do you reform schools? Do you try to remind people that staying together for your children is probably a good idea? If it's not an outright toxic relationship? Do you like? What do you do to solve the problem of underperformance by individuals or groups within a society? That's a big question. Now, to me, the simplest answers are always the worst answers. Always the worst answers. And it's like saying, well, what song should you play? Chopsticks forever. It's really not learning very much, right?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  And so when it comes to helping people in society, I want as many, you know, smart people and creative people. I want lots of different experiments occurring, so to speak, lots of different options and ways of doing things so that we can figure out what works the best. Because I'm not even convinced that pouring a lot of resources into helping people. I mean, outside perhaps of direct medical issues, like, is actually helping them or not? Because, you know, a lot of people are kind of...

• 37:27Chris Williamson?

  Given with the current pathways of help at the moment is what you mean.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so a lot of people, you know, they're kind of starved for attention. You know, I say this as the guy who's got 300 million views. Maybe I'm one of them, right? But a lot of people are kind of starved for attention. And the more attention and resources you give to people who are failing, so to speak, they may then be succeeding because they're getting a lot of attention. And they know that as soon as they actually succeed, all the attention will be withdrawn. So it's really, really complicated to, to help people. And, you know, we just have this one size fits all income redistribution stuff that goes on. I mean, I know it buys a lot of votes and I know it disrupts a lot of families. And I know it creates multi-generations of people who've never really seen a job application. But, you know, and of course, to even raise that, you know, even raise that. And people have this other simplistic thing.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  It's like, well, you know, if the government doesn't do it, it just isn't going to get done. Which is kind of like saying, "Well, if we free the slaves, we're all going to starve to death because no one's going to pick the food. No one's going to pick the cotton. We'll be frozen and hungry in a wilderness."

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Society naturally finds a new level point, right? I think it's Goethe that talks about that swing from one extreme to the other that happens with societies.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Sorry, I didn't interrupt, but this is something, I don't mean to shoehorn this in here, but I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, and I'll keep this short. I mean, so, you know, for those of you who don't know, I want to state the society, right? I'm not chipping away at the edge of the world. I want a purely voluntary, free-market society. I think that governments are like slaves, slave owners, and it's just an historical anachronism that we've inherited. And the reason I'm saying all of that is that whenever I say to people, "Oh, you know, we should fundamentally change things in society", people are like, "Oh, but there's no way we could adapt. There's no way we could change it." We just had this absolutely mind-boggling experiment that just occurred over the last couple of months, Chris. Truly insane. Like, imagine, imagine, you go back to what everyone prefers as their safe game year, 2019, right? Let's say you go back to 2019, right?

• 39:25Speaker 00

  And I say to you, like, we're having this conversation a year ago. Hey, it might even have been on my YouTube channel, who knows? But we're having this conversation, and I say, "You know what's going to happen next year? And people will adapt to it pretty well. Half the population's going to be thrown out of work, and all the schools are going to be closed for six months." And you'd sit there thinking, "Oh, my God. What an, like, what an unbelievably wrenching, chaotic, insane thing to happen in society. Borders will be closed, immigration's put to a stop, schools are shut down, malls are shut down, half the businesses closed down."

• 40:04Speaker 00

  And you'd sit there and think, "Oh, that's like an unbelievably wrenching change, second only, perhaps, to the declaration of a national war."

• 40:12Speaker 00

  And yet, look how adaptable we are. And of course, I mean, there has been a lot of suffering, there's been a lot of loss of income and all of that.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  But we can do amazing things. Like if they shut down government schools tomorrow, there'd be back a week of chaos. People would be teaching other people in their garage and then we'd find a solution that would be, you know, very, it's like taking the government away and thinking there's no more solutions is bank, not much sense is, you know, you cross a river, you take out a giant rock and you think that the water is just still going to go around the hole. Like, no, you know, where there's, where there's a need and the government is not providing, you get a much better solution because it's voluntary. You know, like, again, let's, let's go back even further. Let's go back to like 1850, you and I having a debate, right? And you say to me, you know what? Slavery is a moral institution. And I said, well, come on, man. Every society's had slaves. Slavery is a permanent human institution. We've always had it. We always

• 41:03Speaker 00

  will have it. And by the way, you know, we can't get any cotton or can't have any possible food for the cities if there's no slavery. And I said to you, no, no, man. See, what you need to get is this. We're gonna eliminate slavery, right? And then you know what's gonna happen?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  These giant robots are gonna sweep back and forth across the fields. And they're gonna be powered by crushed dinosaur juice.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  And there's going to be this incredible swath. And right now, 90% of people are involved in farming. But you know what, Chris? In a hundred years, it's only going to be 3% because giant robots with ancient tree juice in their veins will be sweeping all of the crops. And, and you say, well, what about the grapes? We'll have robots for them too. And tomatoes and strawberries. And you'd say, okay, first of all, I'm never smoking what you're smoking. And secondly, robots is just a magic term that you use so that you don't actually have to answer how things are going to be done in the absence of slaves. And then I'm gonna say, you know, when we get rid of slaves, the most amazing thing is gonna happen, because labor is now expensive.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  People are gonna start investing in labor-saving devices, the likes of which you've never seen before. Because right now, everybody, you need something done, buy a slave. You don't want labor-saving devices, because it lowers the value of your slaves. It's like buying a car, just to wreck it, you know? Or park it in Paris, which is kind of the same thing. But, um, so, we don't know what's on the other side of a free society of true liberty. I mean, that's why you gotta make the case based on principle. Like, the people who wanted to get rid of slavery just said, "Look, slavery is immoral. Only human beings is immoral," which it bloody well is. And those of us who are looking for voluntary solutions to social problems, we don't have to provide blueprints of exactly how society works in the absence of coercion.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  You know, if, if some woman is getting beaten up, we don't have to sit there and say, "Oh, yeah? Well, who's she gonna date if she leaves this guy?" No, no, no, no, that's, that's not the point. The point is, we gotta have some principles about how we approach these things. And for me, the non-aggression principle, like, do not initiate force against others, self-defense is perfectly fine, I think, not morally required, but certainly morally legitimate. I mean, that's the juicy stuff. That's the good stuff. That's where human progress is, when we continue to expand the moral law. We expanded it to knock down aristocracy, we expanded it to knock down slavery, we gotta just keep whittling away at it, and there's a lot of people wanna go the other way, and say, "We gotta give the state more power, and now the state can solve all inequalities, and now we gotta get rid of the family, and we gotta get rid of structural this and everything that."

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And the only way you can do that is giving the state more and more and more power. I'm willing to live with economic, quote, "inequality," that's totally fine, uh, for me. What I don't want to live with is the massive political inequality, where some people in the government can point guns at everyone and try to create a utopia, one bullet at a time.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Long rambling speech, but there you go. Good luck.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  I've had a lot of evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists on the show recently, and it got more to come. And upon reading and exposing myself and the audience to more of that, what I'm struck by is our ability to adapt, right? We're the most adaptable creature that's ever existed.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  We're the only creature on all seven continents, right?

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I worry that the increased convenience of the modern world and the detachment from having to do things and an increasing rhetoric of being told that we don't have agency or sovereignty over what we do or what we achieve, whilst still holding in our minds that there are some people who do require help, the person with spina biter and the disabled ramps need making and such and so forth. It makes me worried that we are becoming less us, less human, less of who we are as a species. And I said this at the beginning of the pandemic, that it's very rare that there's something which

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  happens across the globe at the same time, like World Club, the Olympic opening ceremony, and that's pretty much it. Like, it doesn't even rain everywhere on the planet at the same time. Like, I now know what it feels like to be scared in my house of a pandemic going outside and scared for my family, the same way as you do, the same way as someone in China does, the same way as someone in Russia does. You know, there's that quote from an ex-president that talks about how united we would be as a species and forget all of our differences if we were invaded by an alien threat.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, Paul Krugman, I think, had that as an argument as well.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. So my point there is like, that kind of, it felt like there was some good stuff being done and we were kind of being reminded a little bit. But that was contrasted and framed against such a lack of that, such a lack of understanding that we have sort of control and that we have agency and And stuff like that. And again, the amount of complexity that you need to hold in your mind at one time to be able to get all of these, it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult and it's challenging. But as you mentioned earlier on, there's some pretty smart minds in this world. If they were applying their thoughts to the correct problems and reading, just about

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  to finish Toby Ord's The Precipice on existential risk. And that again, just highlights like the best minds on the planet right now are working out how to get people to click on ads. They're not, they're not working out how to-

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Or, you know, the, instead of building bridges or coming up with ways to get us all as paid passengers to Mars, they're trying to figure out how to milk one more derivative dollar out of the Fed's manipulation of interest rates and they've been completely parasitical off central banking. And it's like-

• 46:58Chris Williamson?

  Deleting your YouTube channel, Stefan. That's what they're spending their time doing. But yeah, it just, all of this, all of this stuff, it, it, there's complexity, there's this detachment from who we are, there's this hyper normal stimuli that's going on. And again, it's easy for me to see how a conspiracy theory, and there'll be some, some degree of unfortunate situation and malign intent and perverse incentives and all of this sort of stuff that's going on. But there has to be some sort of unifying life principles that people can rely on. There has to be something that people can fall back to. And as far as I can see, that is kind of sovereignty and an agency. So we got sort of 10 minutes or so left. We've highlighted-

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Oh, can I do one little thing on that? Just one little thing?

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  I'll keep it brief.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  Hit me.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  So yeah, to me, to me, the great advantages in human life is when we realize that the personal is the universal. Like, you know, you get a, you get a rock, you open your hand, it drops to the ground, right? And then when you see, okay, that's gravity. Well, gravity is universal. And, you know, lickety split, we can send a man to the moon and we can send a probe to Mars, right? Because we get that the personal is the universal. Now, this is, I mean, you know, some people think I'm a smart guy. Maybe that, maybe there's some that to it. But, but what I am is somebody who takes the personal and makes it the universal. So when I was a kid, and when you were a kid, what would be told? Use your words, not your fists. What would be told in the kindergarten? Don't push kids, don't take their stuff, don't, you know, use force or whatever, right? And when you have a conflict with another kid, you end up in a fight.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  You each point at each other and say, he started it because, you know, it was considered legitimate to use some force in self-defense, right? Some kid comes running at you with your rock, you can trip them up, right? You got your self-defense. So you've got your, you know, and don't take other kids' stuff, right? You've got your own little cubby hole, your name on it, and that's your stuff. You shouldn't take other people's stuff. So what do you got there? You've got the non-initiation of force, non-aggression principle, you got property rights, you got self-defense. Now-

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  Kindergarten, it's a microcosm for the real world.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Right. The same way that exactly the same force that has your rock dropped to the ground can keep a satellite in geosynchronous orbit around the world. Now, so for me, like, what if everything's just a whole lot simpler than we think it is? And what if complication is a way of having us succumb to power? Oh, it's such a complicated rat's nest of syllogisms. I guess I'll just obey, right? Like, we all understand that if, you know, you and me and someone else go out for dinner and we vote that you pay, that's not fair. Say, well, that's, but it's democracy, man. We outnumber you and we get, you know, if two men want to rape a woman

• 49:40Speaker 00

  and they all vote on it, you know, we get that the majority does not equal ethics. So, but, and what if all of these principles that we teach to four-year-olds, that we learn as children, what if we just take them like Newton did with the apple? Everything's falling. Everything, the sun is falling around the Adromeda Galaxy, the, or the Milky Way, that the earth is falling around the sun, the moon is falling around the earth. Like, what if everything is falling? What if the personal is the universal? Oh, well, that's the birth of the modern world. And what if the same is true with ethics as it is with physics? Okay, that's, that's my big thing.

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but man, I like it, but the increasing complexity from rock from hand to ground to-

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  Spaceship from Earth to Moon is the equivalent of kindergarten, keep your stuff in your locker, don't punch Billy to let's try and run a country.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  It's the same principles. That's what I'm saying. It's the same.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  When you scale them.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Once you say that the rock falling is everything and everyone and it's universal, then you get all the complexity, but the complexity is based upon simple principles. In other words, if you get your basic principles, like, you know, Darwin's evolution, you talk to these evolutionary biologists, right? You get a couple of basic principles. Ah, if this is this random mutation better adapts you to your environment, it's more likely to replicate, blah, blah, blah, right? That's a simple principle. It's been called one of the greatest ideas in the history of the world. Now, from that simple principle, you get, well, an inordinate number of beetles as we know, but you get a massive complexity of life, but just from kind of simple principles. And in the same way, some basic, you know, speed of light is constant, boom. Oh, my God. Speed of light is constant. We get Hiroshima, nuclear power, Chernobyl.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  We get like a complete understanding of how the universe functions at an atomic level. I mean, that's incredible stuff. So you take a couple of simple principles, you get complexity, but you actually don't get complexity if you don't have those simple principles. If you look back when people thought, oh, the world is flat and the sun and the moon and stars all roll around the earth and they believed all of that stuff. And it got really, really complicated, right? They couldn't figure out why Mars would swing backwards if the earth was the center of the universe.

• 51:45Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the old aerial diagram of how the ancient astronomers presumed that the planets moved to account for that? Have you seen this? And it looks like a Etch A Sketch, yeah, with the.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  It's called the Ptolemaic system, like all these circles within circles. And then boom, you put the sun at the center and it all falls into place, right? And so when things get too complex, it's usually because we've forgotten our simple principles or we've said they only go so far, you know? Not stealing, not using force. Well, that's fine for kindergarten, but when it comes to foreign policy, things are completely different. You know, I can't go and buy a car in your name. But when it comes to signing up generations of future unborn children to international banter slavery, oh yeah, we can totally sign promissory notes and treasury notes, which they have to pay off. Like, what if the personal was the universal and all the simple ethics we learned,

• 52:40Speaker 00

  like that old little everything I learned, I learned in kindergarten. But what if that was the case? That would be morally, it would rewrite our entire society to say, no initiation of the use of force, property rights, don't steal, like my big ethical system, university preferable behavior. You are not allowed. And this is proven within the system. No theft, no rape, no assault, no murder. Right? Those are the basic things that the moral system bans. What if that's like Newton, the apple falls on him, he's like, oh, my God, we're all falling and we get to go to Mars. Because we keep it from simple principles, you can get great complexity. From simple rules of spelling and grammar, you can get Shakespeare. But if you can keep the rules simple, you get great positive complexity. But the more complex the rules

• 53:24Speaker 00

  become, as you're pointing out now, we're all just burning up our brains here, trying to figure out how not to get deplatformed. Some of us more successful than others, right?

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, let's wait until this goes live.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Because we don't have any simple rules. The simple rule should be if your speech is legal, shut up, I'm here. You know, if you're not doing death threats or bomb threats or direct incitements to violence, speech is legal. That should be as simple as it is, right? But now it's like, oh, yes, but this group and that group and this. And it's like, then we lose. We lose all of the joyful complexity of our conversations, because we're not going with simple, legal speech is fine.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  It adds, as you increase that complexity, and that's, what was the name of the map again that I was talking about?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  The Ptolemaic?

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  Ptolemaic.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Circles within circles.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Ptolemaic map, if you just Google that, you'll see this hilarious image of how ancient astronomers, before they understood that the sun was at the center of the solar system, they had this increasingly complex answer, right, for how everything worked.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  And, um, Well, the tax code.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, what I'm thinking is whether or not a company, to loop it right back, but foreshadowing in the beginning, a company like YouTube, who is going to

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Increase the complexity in their system by involving themselves in defining the messages that are permitted and are not permitted. I think the analogy is between the difference of being a utility like a water, a water company, or being a broadcaster like a TV company, whether or not you're culpable for what goes on your site and then how much you should step over that line outside of just law, et cetera, et cetera. I'm wondering whether or not that doesn't scale for very long. I'm wondering whether or not that becomes the snake that eats itself type thing because they've got to increasingly infringe on more and more. As soon as you say, there's this Facebook thing at the moment,

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  boycott Facebook and advertisers pulling their work.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  500 companies lining up at Facebook's door to demand them to crack down on what's called hate speech or whatever, right? I mean, that's not good, man. That's not good.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  And I think Mark Zuckerberg's got until the 10th of July or the 13th of July to deliver, deliver some promise to, I don't know, all of this stuff, like all of this, the extra layers of complexity. First off, anyone that's ever run a business understands what a diseconomy of scale is. At the very, very least, they need to pay the person that presses the delete Stefan Molyneux's channel button. And if you're then going to scale that over time, there's probably going to be some meetings about is it this, is it that? That's a lot of wasted talent, money, time, resources, all this sorts of stuff.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  And I think, I wonder what the shelf life is for an increasingly sort of autocratic, parentally, top-down approach to what was originally the beautiful utopia that was free information online.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Well, and who can handle that kind of power? I couldn't.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  I doubt you could. Who could handle that kind of power to say what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to be said in society? Because it's funny, because they seem to be going after conservatives and they will often misidentify me as a conservative, and I'm not. But they say, "Oh, that's so conservative." But you understand that thinking that you know that we've reached the end of our moral progress as a species, and we absolutely know what is evil and what is good, and we know who the bad actors are, we know what all the terrible ideas are, and there's no capacity for debate at the fringes, that is megalomaniacal and narcissistic to the degree that you'd be thrown into an asylum in a sane society if you had that perspective. Look, their ideas out there, I consider absolutely revolting, repulsive, and reprehensible.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  If you're gonna say, "Oh, well, incitement to violence is bad," what about all the people in the media and the political system who started goddamn wars over false information? Weapons of mass destruction and sarin gas and chemical attacks in Syria and all of this kind of garbage, right? Those people all have their social media accounts. You know what I've never done? I may have made a couple of mistakes in my 15-year public career: never started any wars. Never started any wars that got half a million innocent people killed in Iraq and used depleted uranium weapons that have virtually genetically destroyed entire cities like Fallujah. I've never done any of that stuff.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Now, those people can have all of the social media accounts that they want, but if I stop bringing up IQ, "Ooh, that apparently is worse than a war crime," for people. So you can't ever apply this stuff from a philosophical point consistently. I loathe communism. I loathe socialism. I loathe fascism. But you can have commun-- there are thousands of communists, open communists, teaching in American universities and Canadian universities and Western universities. They're taking people's tax dollars, and they are preaching a doctrine that is highly toxic, highly dangerous, has led to the deaths of 100 million people. Philosophy, rational philosophy, has led to the deaths of zero people. But Marxists can perfectly, they're perfectly comfortable, right? Even though they profess an ideology-- I'm debating one later tonight at 8:00 PM in

• 58:54Speaker 00

  case anybody wants to drop by at freedomain.com. But ideas that are provably a slaughterhouse of human history. Two and a half times more people killed by communists than by Nazis, who were national socialists, by the way, and not even on the right. So communists can not only have their Twitter accounts and they can spew a toxic ideology that's resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, but they can be gainfully employed in universities and nobody's protesting them. And as you point out, or as people have pointed out, no Karl Marx statues are getting torn down these days. It's only Christians, right? Which kind of tells you where these people are coming from. But you can't ever apply this stuff consistently and in a rational format, which means you're going to end up having to pick and choose who you ban.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  And we all know that bias is very strong and very powerful. So there are ideas out there I find reprehensible, and the best cure for them is to have them go out and speak their stuff, engage in debate, and have their ideas disproven. But if people are afraid of ideas coming out, what they're not afraid, they're not actually afraid of the speakers. They're afraid that their fellow citizens, or maybe even they themselves, will have no intellectual ammunition with which to rebut these ideas. And that's a problem of education. You can't solve it by playing whack-a-mole with people who do actually think.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  What's the shelf life that you think for this current iteration of what's going on if you were to put your money where your mouth is, walk into the bookies?

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Well, it really depends what happens in America in November.

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  What's your prediction there?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Tough call, man. It's, I was, I was, I was very confident about Trump, even in 2015, but the social media plus demographic plus the deaths of older people who tend to be more conservative has really changed. You know, Trump only won by 70,000 votes, right? I mean, it was, I mean, I get from an electoral college standpoint, it was a landslide, but from a headcount standpoint, it's very narrow. But I think that the far left erupting into the kind of violence that you saw, you know, in CHAZ and what is called CHOP and so on, where you had like murders and all forms of like terrible things going on and statues coming down and these riots, that

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  is really scaring the hell out of people and there's very little that persuades more than fear, which is why people use media, the media uses fear so much. So I haven't really done that much work on the election. I did on the last one, I did for the Canadian election, but I almost don't need to because people are gonna look at something like CHAZ, right? So CHAZ is incredible because you had a little lab experiment, a little inoculation, because this is, they wanna take, they wanna steal property, they want to enable criminals and it's going to be a complete disaster. So you have this little, like, you know, you get a little smallpox injection, cures you from smallpox forever. So here we've

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  had, for the first time in human history, a live stream of the revolution, a little microcosm of the revolution and people can see what kind of sick shit goes on in these situations.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  What's the implication of that for voters?

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Well, the implication of that is people are gonna be pretty scared because, you know, the one thing that, why is Trump so hated? Because he's anti-communist, because his major mentor was a fervent anti-communist and the guy understands how dangerous communism. I mean, his wife survived a communist country. You don't think she's talking about what the hell's going on at the moment? Of course she is. In the same way that all of the people who fled to America from like Romanians and Yugoslavians, they're all terrified at the moment because they're all like, man, this is like, it's like Romania, 1946, it's two years before they took over. Scared shitless and, sorry, here I am swearing on your show, but, and there's no place to run, right? Where are you gonna run? England? Come on. That's not gonna help you, right?

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  So I think that people are, the communications technology which is showing what happens when you get communism. Is going to scare people into we have to go really hard in in getting this stuff under control like I don't know what I mean I'd love for the universities to be defunded I think it shall be voluntary all that kind of stuff right but we have a big indoctrination and education problem in the West you know this long march through the institutions that the communists did starting in the 1960s I mean they they control most of the major organs of communication outside of you know this wilderness out here so to speak and they are you know pretty ruthlessly shutting down dissenting voices I mean are people mad

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  you know me because I had a couple of conversations with Noam Chomsky well of course not it's because I am relentlessly focused on exposing the evils of communism and there are a lot of lefties in these organizations and I think it's much more to do with that than anything else so people are going to face a pretty pretty stark choice and people of course across the West should look at jazz should look at America and say it's not just there you know it's it's all over and we gotta be robust you know the long summer of relaxation is kind of over and we gotta get on some snowshoes and get get moving

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah well it does definitely just feel a little bit like winter's coming and it'll be such an inflection point toward the end of this year and the mad thing is kind of doesn't really matter what what happens if Trump does get reelected it is going to be crazy I I have no idea what happens if Biden gets gets elected I I feel like Trump is rip the Band-Aid off Biden is slow dissent intercepts this

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Yeah well it may not be that slow and you know the consequences of 70 million Trump supporters who are all heavily armed being told what to do by a bunch of jackbooted thugs from the state You know, we've seen that before in American history and world history, and it's not a pretty place to go. We saw that before, of course, in Germany in the 1920s, so where you had this very strong right wing response to an incipient communist takeover of the German parliament. And, you know, we're going to try and keep the conversation going as long as humanly possible, because I don't look particularly good in a helmet.

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good point that I'd quite like to finish off and finish on. It's a call back to the episode I did with Andrew Doyle. And what he was talking about there was the reason that he mocks the far left as much as he does is because he fears the far right. He has a real, genuine fear of the far right. And inevitably, like throwing a ball against a wall, the harder that you throw it, the harder it bounces back. And that often tends to kind of be the sensation that's going on. And Douglas Murray's quote, his famous quote that says, "When the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are."

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know, that is the blowback that occurs if we can't have conversations. You know, like, I mean, we've had some jokes and some laughs, but in all seriousness, of course, the loss of something like my channel, unfortunately, is going to radicalize people because I was a voice for reason and peace and negotiation. And I still am a voice for reason and peace and negotiation. But there are people who are going to inevitably take that despite what I say, despite, right? And say, well, you know, we gave it a shot, man. With 15 years of philosophy wiped out, these guys are playing for keeps. And it is, it is an unfortunate, really unfortunate situation. I mean, the left always goes too far. I mean, look, they had their nice little setup in Chaz. It could have turned into

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  a Copenhagen style little enclave that could have gone on for decades. But no, what do they do? They go and threaten the mayor.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  The person who was on their side, who controls the police, they go and threaten Jenny. And then boom, you know, they're done, right? Because they don't know when to stop. I mean, far more money is being sent to the poor than ever existed when socialism was developed. Like 10 to 20 times more money is being sent to the poor than existed in the world when socialism was developed because of the rise in GDP in the 20th century. Still not enough. They still need more. Like, they simply don't have any clue when to stop. There is no enough for the left. Now, when people are looking for, you know, you got free speech, you get your free speech, you stop. Because you got what you wanted. Like, you're driving home, you get home, you get out of your car because you're home, right?

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  You've got an endpoint. If you want a free market, okay, once the government is out of your way and you're allowed to trade legally and freely, okay, you stop, right? But when you're looking to control other human beings to create a utopia, there is no endpoint. There is no, this is enough, right? It's the old, you know, picture, we're only one more bullet away from perfection. And that lack of an endpoint is what is particularly chilling. Now, conservatives do have an endpoint, which is just kind of leave us alone. But in the battle between those who want to be left alone and those who just bloody well won't leave them alone, it can get pretty ugly. Once people understand that there is no endpoint where they're going to be satisfied and say, well, you know, we've achieved everything we want to achieve, so now we can leave you in peace.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Like, historically, that never happens.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  I, uh, I want to see, I'm both fascinated and terrified to see how the rest of 2020 plays out. It's gonna be, I mean-

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  Been quite a year. Not even half done, baby.

• 1:08:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, as of yesterday, yeah, we're halfway through. And it's, uh, that quote, "History doesn't crawl, it leaps." And it's definitely one of the, one of the years where it's leapt for 2020. So, finishing up, where can people find you? Where should they go if they want to consume your content or check out what you do?

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Sure. Um, I'm, uh, best place to go is freedomain.com. You can click on the video links, you can get notified from Library or Bitshoot. You can donate at freedomain.com/donate. I've got my podcasts up there. You can get those at- FDRpodcast.com and I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing because if it ain't words, it's going to be fists and I'm better with the words. So I hope people will drop by and thank you so much for a great chat today.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Good man. Thank you.