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Feb. 17, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:28:21

1587 Freedomain Radio Interviewed on Irish Radio

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	Hello everybody, good evening.
	Welcome to Tyrness Air Radio, that's TNSRadio.com.
	Coming to you live from Dublin, Ireland, I am known as Vincent of the Ancient Clan O'Byrne.
	Tyrness Air Radio started to present information to enable both debate and discussion with the intent that information presented should not be taken at face value.
	It should be investigated and you should make up your own mind.
	Now tonight we have a very special guest.
	I've been a huge fan of this guy for a long, long time.
	He's known as Stephen Molyneux and he has a fantastic website that I really recommend every single one of the listeners here tonight check out.
	It's freedomainradio.com.
	That's freedomainradio.com.
	And folks, we do have a little wee donate button on the site.
	Please feel free to use it even if you can only spare one or two euro.
	All donations are gratefully received.
	All our guests give their time free of charge and we really do appreciate it.
	If you have a question that you'd like to put to Stefan in the second half of the show, please feel free to go to our Skype chat room, which is tirnasair.
	Ask or send a contact request to tirnasair, T-I-R-N-A-S-A-O-R. I'll add you to the chat room.
	And if you wouldn't mind, folks, type your questions for Stefan in capital letters, please.
	It just makes them stand out easier in the chat box when I'm scanning through them.
	Also, if you have a question and if you want to chat, you can go to freemanireland.ning.com.
	That's freemanireland.ning.com.
	There's a chat box on the main page there.
	I see there's about 30 of you online there at the moment.
	And again, if you have a question, I will keep an eye on that chat box too.
	So, moving on.
	Stefan, can you hear me okay?
	I sure can. Thank you so much for the invite.
	Excellent. Well, you're more than welcome.
	And as I say, I'm gushing here because I have been a huge fan of Well, you're very kind, and I really appreciate that.
	And, of course, Ireland, with its long tradition of anarchism and independence and rational, critical thought and all of that kind of good, juicy stuff, and, of course, the fact that I was born in Ireland gives me special ties to the Emerald Sod, so I'm very happy to chat with you.
	Yeah, actually, just tell me a little bit about your ancestry in Ireland.
	Where was your...
	Ireland? All righty.
	Well... Go on. You've been looking for a chance to use the accent.
	Go for it. Oh, my God. Yeah, the cheesiest Irish accent.
	This side of a bad actor in Hollywood.
	Well... My family, it's the Molyneux, and they go back to 1066, right?
	So it's a French name, which means we came over with William the Conqueror.
	And then we, you know, did good murderous service to the king on behalf of the wretched peasants.
	And then we got some lands in Ireland and, I guess, stayed there for several hundred years.
	And I think now we've vaulted out of the aristocracy and into the more productive fields of And so that's sort of the brief history.
	I was born in Ireland, though. I did not spend much time there as a child.
	I did come over and spend summers in Ireland.
	Loved the place. And my father has retired back to Ireland at the moment.
	So it's a beautiful country, and it's great to hear the accent again.
	It is. It's a wonderful country.
	It's not a bad outside, as they say.
	You know, as you know, I mean, we're having this conversation tonight, I suppose, and everybody's tuning in because things are going pear-shaped.
	They're not just going pear-shaped here, of course.
	They're going pear-shaped over the entire globe.
	Right, right, right.
	Now, what we've been trying to do is we've been trying to do a few things.
	We've been trying to assess A, what's going wrong?
	B, why is it going wrong?
	And C, how did it get this way?
	And D, of course, which is the main reason for this show really is to try and find a solution.
	Because there are so many radio shows out there.
	There are so many websites out there.
	And everybody seems to tell you what the problem is.
	And in fact, they can tell you 50 problems.
	And very few sites seem to offer solutions.
	And one of the things I love about your site is you offer solutions.
	Well, I do. And I think it's very easy to get distracted by all of the manifestations of the symptoms of the core basic problem in society.
	We can look at, you know, people say, oh, well, the banks need to be regulated because they overinvested in these dodgy securities and so on.
	Other people say, well, taxes should be lowered.
	All we're doing there is we're, you know, twiddling dials that aren't really attached to anything.
	And I think it's really, really fundamental that when we deal with, when we're attempting to deal with problems that are so multifaceted and so multivariate that we really try to boil down to the one cause that is at the root of them and not worry about About trying to deal with all the symptoms that are right on the surface.
	And so I think it's really, really important to remember that right down at the bottom of things, what we're dealing with is we have an addiction as a society.
	And by addiction, I mean it's compulsive, it's ever increasing, and it's generally ignored as a problem, as a real problem.
	We have a problem in society.
	We're addicted to the use of violence to solve social problems, and that is the essence of having a government.
	The essence of having a government is to use violence in an attempt to solve social problems.
	Now, there are many people who argue, and I probably would be one of them, say, well, the government just pretends to solve problems using violence.
	The real goal is to amass power and money and so on, and I think that's very true.
	But most people believe that it's trying to solve problems and everybody's trying to grab a hold of this gun That they can point at people and make the world a better place And we all recognize that doesn't work in our personal lives And once we recognize that the country is nothing more than an aggregate of people and if it doesn't work if violence doesn't work in People's personal lives it's never going to work at a societal level And I think that's the route that we need to be going in order to to really destroy You can't bomb them to peace You can't bomb them to peace and you can't make a paradise by throwing people in jail.
	And you can't solve the problem of poverty by hurting people's hard-earned money around at gunpoint.
	And until people recognize that, don't be distracted by the symptoms.
	Don't be distracted by all of the arguments that are occurring at the surface.
	Go right down to the core.
	Of what is going on in the world, which is that we are still, still so fundamentally addicted to this belief that if we can get this gun pointed at the right people by the right people, we can make this world a paradise.
	And unfortunately, it seems like we're going to have to suffer a whole lot more before people recognize that.
	Yeah, that's very valid.
	I mean, some of the things I know you're not necessarily aware of, some of the Changes in Ireland in the last year or so in relation to the Lisbon Treaty.
	I don't know if you've heard of it.
	I've heard a little bit about it, but feel free to, you know, out here in the colonies we don't really get quite as much of it.
	Well, basically what it was doing, it's just another amalgamation, if you will, of Europe becoming something other than what it was intended, which is basically another superpower such as I mean,
	the cynic in me, for example, would say, and there was a report on CNN about a year ago in relation to this Lisbon Treaty, and a report on CNN said, you know, if the European Union forms as it intends under Lisbon, will they be a threat to the USA as in, you know, warlike?
	Now, that's when the alarm bells start ringing in my head.
	Right, right. You know, before we had even had a chance to have a referendum or a vote on the topic, already on CNN they were talking about, well, you know, are these guys going to be a threat to us?
	Well, but I think it's important to remember that a lot of people in the sort of halls of power are much more aware how close the existing system is to its demise than we are because they see what's going on under the surface.
	They know how much money is being printed.
	They know the actual statistics rather than the nonsense numbers the government's fired us like bubbles out of a shotgun to distract us from the facts.
	So people in the sort of inner chambers, they know...
	How close the system is to its end.
	And there is, I think, a lot of worry.
	That nuclear powers are going to experience a lot of instability in their societies as a result of things like not being able to pay welfare checks, not being able to pay unemployment checks, not being able to pay government workers, not being able to pay the military.
	Never a good idea when you're trying to transition a society.
	So I think that there is some concern about that.
	Can I just ask some basic questions?
	You're in Canada, right?
	Yes. Sorry, what's the name of the place you're in?
	Oh, I'm just outside of Toronto.
	Toronto, yeah. Now, what's the population of Toronto, roughly?
	About 2 million, I think.
	2 million, oh. Well, it's a big sort of amalgamated whole bunch of sort of boroughs, but yeah, it's a big city for sure.
	Okay, and would you have a notion as to how many members of the police force there would be?
	Oh, it's pretty small.
	I think, oh, you know, I'm really, really stretching here, but...
	What if you were at the ballpark?
	You know, 10 to 50,000.
	It's really, really small.
	10 to 15,000?
	Sorry, 10 to 50,000.
	It depends on how you measure it, but it's pretty small.
	That's curious because, I mean, the population of Ireland is about 4.5 million in total.
	And I think we have about 12,000.
	Is that right? Wow.
	And of course they are unarmed.
	Right, right. 99% of them, you know.
	But just... I was just trying to get a handle on things because how are people in general managing in relation to mortgages?
	Sorry, do we have a problem? Did Johnny disappear there for a second?
	Yeah, he's fine. No, he's back.
	That's okay. I mean, I was just reading the paper here today.
	For example, a total of 26,000 people have not paid their mortgage in three months or more here.
	And I think the figure is about 6,000 who haven't paid their mortgage in about a year.
	And some very famous names in Ireland here are, for example, she's a well-known celebrity called Twink, and she's about to lose her mansion, sob sob boo hoo, because she can't afford a mortgage.
	Or even a second name, it would appear, and that usually would be a sign on a mortgage application if you have no second name.
	You're either very wealthy, you know, like Madonna, Or you're very, very poor.
	And so that would be a red flag for me, but please go on.
	Well, I won't give her an actual name.
	I'll stick to the stage now for the moment.
	You know yourself. But, I mean, those figures are frightening a lot of people, you see.
	People are panicking. Now, I don't know if you're aware of what's known as across the internet, the commercial redemption by method.
	No, I don't know what that is.
	Okay, okay. That's probably a good thing.
	Maybe you should do a bit of research on it.
	It sounds gripping, but at least go on.
	It's basically people are studying up on all these laws of commerce and finance and are trying to use the laws of commerce and finance to their own personal advantage by sending in their mortgage statements with accepted for value into the treasury and saying do this, perform this action, yadda yadda. In a vain attempt, 99.9% of the time, to have the thing obliterated because they're using the correct rules of commerce.
	I don't know if you've heard of any of that, but it's happening quite a bit, and a lot of these people are going to jail.
	Now, I think a lot of people found it attractive in the so-called freedom, free man, sovereignty movements, if you will, because they felt it was a way out.
	And again, I'll be honest, I studied all of these things.
	Now, I studied them for years and years and years, but I never engaged in any of the processes simply because, at the back of my mind, I said to myself, well, if I just put a bit of ink on paper and send it in to them, somebody has to make the goods and equipment that I receive, so I can't obliterate that by just putting some ink on paper.
	Somebody is making these things.
	Somebody is exerting effort and energy somewhere in the world.
	And he depends on, you know, a certain set of circumstances to take place so he can receive what he considered his daily wage, if you will.
	Right. So, a lot of these people are getting snagged and jailed and imprisoned for fraudulent conversion.
	And, of course, they're claiming, oh, well, how is it not fraud when the government does it?
	Right. Which, of course, the actual correct answer is, well, it is.
	Well, and of course, we didn't need to wait for the housing crisis for that.
	I mean, you go back to the imposition of fiat money rather than, say, gold or silver.
	That, of course, printing Logos on pieces of paper and using them as currency is called counterfeit, right?
	And we don't need to go all the way back.
	Sorry, we didn't need to wait for the mortgage crisis for that to occur.
	People can see that with counterfeiting.
	And I think what you're pointing out is really important that people are really beginning to understand that the ethics that the government teaches you in school about responsibility and being honest and standing up for your debts and then honoring your word and These are all just things that are taught to us.
	The rulers don't live that way.
	They're just taught to us to make us easier to manage.
	The rulers are never supposed to live like that.
	That's just for the slaves, so that we beat up on ourselves if we, quote, do something wrong.
	But a minor crime is a felony.
	A major crime is a national policy.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if treason prosper, none dare call it treason.
	Right, right, right.
	And I think it is tragic that it takes this kind of suffering for people to begin to realize just how hypocritical and self-serving the statist ethics are.
	And that those who are in charge of us are not in charge of us because they're better than us, but they're in charge of us because they're worse than us.
	And I think that is...
	That is something that is really, really hard for people to grasp because it's so much the opposite of what we're trained in state schools and through an enormous amount of propaganda to believe.
	But the people who rule us rule us because they are worse.
	You were speaking. Oh, sorry, sorry.
	No, no, I'm done. I just wanted to make that point.
	Absolutely. You were speaking once, I think, in relation to the state schools and particularly in the way state-run schools are, and I think you were comparing against homeschool children.
	But somebody I talk to quite regularly He made a very valid point to me here.
	He said, what's one of the first things they teach you in a state-run school?
	And I'd just be curious to ask that question to you.
	In your state-run schools over there, what do you think would be one of the first kind of things that children are taught?
	Not in relation to a lesson, but what's the first thing they teach them?
	Well, be quiet, you know, sit in line, raise your hand to do something as simple as go to the bathroom and do everything we tell you.
	I mean, those are all the things that I remember learning in state schools.
	It was the first thing he said when he said, you know, you have to put up your hand to use the bathroom.
	Yeah, how ridiculous is that?
	The first one is you must accede to their control of your biological functions.
	Right, right. You know, be quiet.
	You want to do something, you raise your hand in silence, you wait till you're appointed to, and then you say, in Ireland everybody would have said, I'm Will Catagum Dulgety on letters, which is a quaint Gaelic way of saying, may I go and relieve myself.
	Right, right. And you play when they say that you can go out and play, and then the bell rings, and you stop playing, and you come in.
	I mean, that's what happens in prison.
	It's really militarization.
	Yeah, absolutely. And John Taylor Gatto talks about this, I would recommend a documentary called The War on Kids.
	I interviewed the, Kevin Solling is the documentary filmmaker.
	I interviewed him on, it's available on my channel on YouTube, but it's a really great documentary.
	And John Taylor Gatto has got this great explanation or description.
	He's an American school teacher who was actually voted the best school teacher, I think, in New York State for several years running.
	And he's highly critical of the American educational system, though he's He's no anarchist, but he says that it's designed to make you insane because you are taught, you know, a particular subject for like 35 or 40 minutes or 45 minutes, and then the bell rings and you have to change over to a new subject.
	And then the bell rings and you have to, so you can't actually just follow your passion and explore and really sort of get into a subject, but you're constantly broken up and moved into something that is completely different.
	And imagine trying to do that.
	Can I just ask? Is that the way it was when you begin school over there?
	Because it's not like that here. When I first began school, it was pretty freeform.
	It was, you know, a lot of coloring, a lot of...
	But I taught in a daycare, and we all sort of had...
	You had to go for lunch at the same time.
	You had to take naps at the same time.
	You sort of went outside and got all herded back in at the same time.
	So there really was a pretty low-level control over most of your movements.
	So there was a little bit more flexibility during the in-class time.
	Okay, okay. No, it's just...
	Generally, that would happen here when people hit secondary level, you know, from, say, 13 on.
	Oh, no. It happened much younger here.
	Much, much younger here, for sure.
	I mean, I came to Canada when I was 11, and we were already, you know, the bell would ring, the bell would ring, and you just keep charging off to new things.
	Put out your books, take out your new books, I mean, put away your books, and you'd be like, oh, I'm right in the middle of reading something interesting.
	No, no, put it away, come out with something new, and you'd feel schizoid after a while.
	Right, that is interesting because I'll be honest with you, when I made the transition from what we call primary school to 13, 14 for some people, to secondary school, I rejected secondary school completely.
	In fact, I actually stopped going.
	What do you mean you rejected it? Is that an option?
	Like there's a checkbox which says, I don't really accept this.
	I made it my option.
	I took that option.
	I'm just about to pack right now.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I didn't actually tell anybody.
	I just decided. That's kind of partly how I end up here, I suppose.
	Yeah, I basically decided I'm not going to this place anymore.
	But I didn't tell anybody.
	I knew I'd get grief. So I used to put on a school uniform every morning, walk out the door.
	I'd go for a walk up over the hills of Hoth in North County, Dublin.
	You know, I'd go down to Baldoyle, the race course, all these things.
	But I used to actually read the school books.
	And I actually went back for the intermediate exams at 15.
	And I actually did very well.
	But I was never present in the school.
	Not really. I used to go show up for maybe woodwork and technical drawing.
	In fact, my old school teacher actually lives around the corner from me now where I am.
	And he used to say to me, you know, you should think of coming in next week, Vin.
	We're doing something interesting.
	You'll enjoy it next week.
	And I go, okay, well, I'll see how I feel.
	Wow, that sounds great.
	That sounds great. And in this documentary, the guy mentions, he says, you know, well, everyone says, well, Shakespeare went to public schools, and people forget that he only went to school for like 10 or 12 weeks a year.
	I mean, you should not need that amount of education.
	You should not need it. All it is is glorified babysitting and indoctrination for kids, and it liberates the parents to go out and work so that the parents can contribute more to the government in the form of taxes.
	It's got nothing to do with actually helping the children to learn anything.
	Quite the opposite. Well, here's one for you.
	Here's one for you. Imagine this, if you will.
	In Ireland, every child, from when they begin school till they leave, are taught the national language, Irish.
	That's... You know, approximately 12 years.
	When they leave school, almost none of them, or a tiny fraction, can hold a conversation in that language.
	Sure, sure.
	Which is absolutely shocking.
	Yeah. And yet, the government still get to say, well, we're teaching everybody Irish.
	Right, right, right.
	You know, there's a syllabus there.
	Right. Right. Yeah, because in the government, see, in the government, reality follows paperwork, right?
	In the real world, paperwork follows reality, right?
	But in the government world, if you make the paperwork, like if you write it down, we're fighting poverty, then, you know, we have a war on drugs, then you're doing something, right?
	And whatever happens after that is immaterial because you see it's on paper.
	Sure, you've got documentary evidence.
	Yeah, it's real.
	We wrote it, therefore it is, right?
	I mean, the moment that the government people write, you know, it's raining gold, we'll all be dented with the nuggets, right?
	But in the real world, of course, the paperwork follows reality, and there's none of that empiricism in the government world at all.
	Absolutely. Yeah, I like that one.
	We'll be getting hit with nuggets. I'll wait for that day.
	And not even chicken nuggets, but gold nuggets, I'm telling you, brother.
	Yeah. But just going back to money for a second, I've read a very interesting book and I'd like, I don't know if you can actually get this, I actually think it was printed in Canada at the time.
	It's called, it does have a kind of a bit of a holy joe title as we would say here, it's called Fatima and a Great Conspiracy and it was written by an Irish housewife called Deirdre Manifold.
	Now, Again, the title would probably put a lot of people up, but the first edition was in 1982.
	I read it in 1984, maybe 85, and I think about the same age as you, Stefan, but we won't disclose that.
	26? That's very good.
	We'll keep that secret for later on.
	I can vaguely remember 26, anyway.
	Okay. But what shocked me in this book, when I read this so young, this was my first introduction to all of this, and It talks about the year 1694 when William Patterson basically approached King Henry.
	They basically came up with the following proposition.
	We will lend you £1,200,000 in gold at 8% provided you give us a charter whereby we're enabled to issue the same In paper money at 8% interest.
	And it turns out that that one act, that singular act right there, is where every single fiat currency has come from.
	And that was the original debt that every single...
	I mean, I used to wonder, how come every nation on the planet is in debt?
	Which one is collectible? I used to assume somebody was collecting all this money.
	Somebody was doing very well. But it turns out every nation is in debt.
	So who are they in debt to?
	And how come? When all nations have a mandate from the people that they can create their own, even if it was a paper currency, but they can create their own currencies.
	And they can introduce these currencies into the Economy, for want of a...
	I hate the term economy to describe what happens because, you know, every time you economize, you're dealing with less this year than you were dealing with last year.
	Right. I mean, that's what an economy is, right?
	Right, right. So, you know, the news is always getting tighter.
	But why do no governments produce currency without a debt burden?
	Right. I mean, they can all do it.
	They all have a mandate from their own people to do it.
	Well, I mean, and I think one of the reasons for that, economically speaking, is that it's tough to run the scam if you don't go into debt.
	It's tough to run the scam called the government, because if you run the scam called the government in a closed system where you can't go into debt, then when you take money from one group and give it to another group, Nobody feels like the one group you're giving the money to will feel richer, but the money that you're taking from is really clear.
	It's really evident, right? So if I'm the government and I give a million dollars to such and such, I have to go and take money from other people.
	They're going to notice that right away.
	So the scam is going to be revealed pretty quickly in that you simply won't be able to bribe people with imaginary money.
	And so what you do is you borrow against the future taxes of your livestock.
	The future tax, the future products of your tax livestock.
	And that way, you can bribe people in the present with the gains that will be accruing from the taxpayers in the future.
	So you're stealing from the future to pay the present.
	That makes people in the world, in the present feel, like in the country, they feel richer.
	Because it's like this money is coming magically out of nowhere.
	But, of course, what happens is you get progressively more and more into debt.
	And what you're doing is you're selling The future citizens after these bankers for eternity in order to keep the scam going just for the moment, just for the next five years, ten years, one month sometimes even, just to keep that scam going a little bit longer.
	The whole Ponzi scheme, it has to magically come with money from somewhere, and the money that they come with is from the future taxpayers, and they can only do that by going into debt.
	And that's why fiat currency is always associated with debt.
	Otherwise, the stealing and the bribery would just be too obvious to everyone.
	Yeah, well, I mean, the interesting thing I've noticed in relation to that is fiat currencies were considered good for 70 years at their inception.
	You know, they reckoned, you know, these guys are clever.
	They work these things out. They have actuaries and all these sort of clever bods who can do this.
	And they figured, hey, this is good.
	This is a good scam for 70 years.
	So, you know, hey, we'll be more than likely long dead and buried by the time everybody realizes what's going on.
	Right. Interestingly, I see at the moment, there are quite a few discussions across the internet at the moment saying, is the euro about to go belly up?
	Now, the euro has only been here for 10 years or thereabouts.
	That's a very short lifespan for a currency.
	But the governments are so huge.
	The governments are so huge at the moment, and the financial instruments are so enormous.
	There has been a race, and this goes all the way back to those who are Ayn Rand fans.
	This was described to some degree in Atlas Shrugged.
	But there's a race between the productive class and the moochers, right?
	The parasitical class, the violent class.
	There's a race between the shopkeepers and the gangsters, between the restaurant owners and the mafia who are shaking them down.
	And the government was winning that race, insofar as The amount of state control was growing slower than the productivity of the workforce.
	And this was partly, I think this was two major things.
	The first was, there was so much innovation in the free market.
	I mean, from washing machines and dryers, to dishwashers, to improved cars, to particularly computers and electronic communications, the internet and so on.
	There were such enormous gains in robots, in factories, things that were just inconceivable.
	There were so many economic productivity gains that if we hadn't grown the state, there would be no such thing as poverty.
	It would have been gone decades ago.
	But there was so much growth in the free market in terms of productivity, and that's the number one.
	The second is that with the invention of labor-saving devices around the home, women were free, so to speak, to go into the workforce, which meant that they moved from non-taxed into a taxed situation.
	That, of course, also allowed It's not like if you're a chicken farmer...
	But, at some point, you know, either the healthy cells or the cancer are going to win, right?
	And the cancer is so big now, the governments are just so mind-bogglingly huge now.
	That there's simply no way that the free market can compete.
	I mean, the cancer is overwhelming the healthy flesh, and so it doesn't surprise me at all that something like the euro is lasting a lot less long than, say, the US dollar did.
	I mean, the US dollar even has lost 95% of its value in less than 100 years.
	And so the fact that the euro... I think it's even more than that.
	I just have an interesting comment.
	The world is 52 trillion in debt.
	Somebody just checked. One of the listeners just checked.
	52 trillion.
	That's with a T, folks. Right.
	And the governments are interchangeable and irreplaceable, like completely interchangeable as far as that goes, right?
	I mean, the bankers who actually own the future productivity of we tax slaves, they don't care who's in power.
	As long as there's someone with a gun making us hand over our money to them, they're perfectly content.
	So I think that the political class is realizing that they are to some degree expendable, as long as there's the brute class, the thug class, the people who will actually...
	Oh, they know they're expendable, absolutely.
	That's why they end up being the devious class.
	Right, right, right. I mean, that's why, you know, if you want to be in government and you're not devious, you won't last a day.
	Right. But I think people are aware.
	I mean, the ruling class is aware that the scam...
	I think the ruling class doesn't care that much as long as you say the scam is going to outlast their lifetime.
	But I don't think that we're very far at all from a huge and wrenching change.
	And I think that the desperate message that people like you and I are trying to get out is the truth about the situation.
	Because if people think that it's freedom that has caused this...
	Then people will say, well, we tried freedom and look what it produced a massive worldwide depression and catastrophe.
	No, no, no. What we've had is not freedom.
	It's not even close. I mean, from a distance, America looked free.
	From an Irish perspective, for a long, long time, you know, we looked at America, we looked at all the fabulous things that were happening over there, and we left in droves.
	And it looked free, it felt free.
	Hey, this must be free.
	But of course, now everybody over there is It's finding out the hard way.
	Whoops! There's this debt liability that's hanging over us.
	Suddenly the credit cards don't slide through the machine and they don't work anymore.
	I have all this debt, this theoretical debt, but I still have it.
	And men will take real action against me and they will take my home and my goods and my family will be split up and all these things.
	Right, because if you can't pay your mortgage, they'll take your house.
	But if you run an investment bank and you've blown all your money on wild speculation, you'll get trillions of dollars from the tax kiddie.
	Oh, you need to pay out, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's how alienated I assume that people are feeling from their own government, that they're realizing that it's just a bunch of con men have to save each other at our expense and at our children's expense.
	And I hope that people are getting that message that the masks are falling away.
	The sort of smiling masks are falling away from the government.
	And they're seeing that kind of bubble-headed alien thing from those movies with the teeth in its tongue.
	You're responsible for that.
	I'm sorry?
	You're responsible for that. - Well, I don't think I am, but I think a lot of people are working.
	FreeDomainRadio.com. That's responsible.
	I've heard it. It's on the internet.
	It must be true. And I really want, that's the thing that I want the most, is for people to get that, yes, we are completely hosed at the moment, and things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
	We're in such a state of addiction that we're going to have to hit rock bottom.
	We're going to have to wake up in Vegas.
	With a hookah's panties around our heads and no pants on our legs, right?
	And then we'll sort of go, oh my god, I'm missing, you know, three teeth, my clothing, all of my money.
	I think I should stop drinking, right?
	But when the addiction is that bad, people have to hit bottom.
	And if they hit bottom, they're either going to OD and they're going to die.
	And it's even worse because Bubba is standing there with a baseball bat and you owe him $5,000 and he wants it.
	Yeah, yeah. And hopefully, you know, hopefully people will get that the baseball bat was there all along and that we ended up here because of the addiction to violence and the blindness to the violence.
	And not because we're dumb, but because we're propagandized.
	It's basically just disguised the violence so well, do you think?
	Oh, yeah. That it was hidden by so many different layers and people didn't recognize it as violence.
	Right. And because the violence is so overwhelming...
	I mean, the state power is so enormous.
	I mean, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, and, you know, America, which is one of the largest prison populations in the world.
	And, I mean, the amount of weaponry that the police and the military have is just so static.
	I think you're at 7%, I think, isn't it?
	It's huge. It's bigger than China, for sure.
	It's like there's more than 2 million Americans in prison.
	It's just nuts. I think 7%, which is massive.
	That's millions. Now, that may be people who are in the penal system as a whole, like even on parole or going through the system.
	So that may be a little larger than the people currently actually in prison, but your numbers could be correct.
	But because the force is so overwhelming, we all comply.
	Sorry, I think we've lost Johnny again.
	Excellent. We're back. Sorry about that, folks.
	Technical glitch. Yeah, sorry.
	I was just mentioning that the degree of force is so overwhelming that we all comply.
	And because we all comply, people don't see the violence, right?
	So if you imagine a farmer, to use my typical analogy, right?
	So a farmer has a field full of cows and the electric fence that goes around the field is so strong that it literally blows up any cow that touches it.
	Well, very quickly, the cows are not going to go anywhere near that fence anymore because it's just so, the strength is so overwhelming.
	And eventually, they'll forget about the fence.
	Now, they won't go to the fence because deep down, deep, deep, deep down, they know.
	But they'll forget about the fence.
	And they'll just mill around and say, no, we just, we like it here.
	You know, we like it here. It's comfortable.
	You know, there's some good shade and so on, right?
	And if somebody points out the fence, they'll say, oh, that thing, you know, we call that the social contract, whatever, right?
	But they won't go near the fence.
	And so that's why I think the violence is so hard to see for people because nobody touches that electric fence.
	Nobody touches I think that's very different than before in history, because before in history, you know, 500 years ago or whatever, a bunch of peasants could take down the aristocracy, but that's not the case anymore.
	The firepower is just completely overwhelming.
	The chat box is scrolling back for miles and miles.
	Okay, folks, I'm not going to scroll back through that whole list.
	That's just going back too far. Anybody have a question, start firing them in now.
	I'll look from now on. Or if you had a question earlier, copy it and repaste it again so I can see it and make it clearer.
	Yes, I see it in all caps.
	Sorry, I have a question here. Can we talk about brain drain?
	While we're just waiting for that, I just wanted to do a pitch, not for me, but for a place I will be speaking at, at the Libertopian Festival in San Francisco, July 1st to 4th.
	I will be A fairly prominent speaker at that location, so if any of your fine listeners or people who listen to this later are in the vicinity of San Francisco and want to see a great conference, it's libertopia.org if people want to check out.
	There's some fantastic speakers there, and I hope to be one of them, at least a good speaker.
	So you might want to check that out.
	Absolutely. Sorry, I'm just copying and pasting what I can see here into the chat room.
	There's another one. Okay.
	So, John posted, can we talk about brain drain?
	John, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that, if you wouldn't mind expanding.
	The second one asked Steph what he thinks of the comparison between his idea of dispute resolution and early Brehan Law.
	Well, actually, it sounds very similar.
	I think basically you were talking about Brehan Law, but you just didn't know the title of it.
	Probably, yeah, probably.
	Now, as far as I understand it, a lot of the more voluntary non-state systems work less on violence and more on violence.
	And things like social shaming or exclusion.
	And that really is the idea behind DROs as well, that violence is very expensive and very unstable.
	And you also have to have a class of people in society who are willing to use violence.
	And that's not a very good class of people, in my opinion, who shouldn't be around in society very much.
	So it's my general belief, very strong belief.
	That as a truly free or stateless society develops, the brute class, the class of enforcers, right?
	The cops and the thugs and the policemen and so on, and the military men, the enforcers will die off as a class, right?
	In the same way that slave owners have died off as a class.
	I mean, the people will still be there. They just won't be crazy, right?
	And so I generally believe that society will find ways of enforcing even the most Lengthy and abstract contracts and multi-million dollar contracts between countries, between corporations in different continents, that there will be ways of enforcing this that won't rely on violence because it's so expensive, it's so unstable, and it requires a dangerous class of people to be in society that if we can live without, yay, so much the better.
	So I think that the early Irish law...
	I mean, there were some wereguilds, I think, which sort of paid.
	But if you didn't comply, you were simply shunned.
	And that's a lot more powerful than people think, particularly in the modern world.
	It was very powerful, of course, in the ancient world, because you couldn't survive really without your tribe.
	You had no one to talk to, right?
	Or no one to guard you while you slept.
	There was a time in the modern world where you could survive without that, just by moving from city to city.
	But now, with the electronic age, we don't really need that.
	We have that power back again, that if you welch out on a debt, then it can follow you as sort of a bad debt rating for quite a long time, and you can get people to comply with better standards of behavior without having trust you.
	I don't know about in Canada, but in Ireland, for example, if you get a bad credit rating, It's actually not you that gets it.
	It actually gets adhered to your property.
	So when solicitors are doing searches, when people are buying new property, most of what they're checking is to see if the person who was living there before you had a bad credit rating.
	Oh, interesting. It's sort of similar to if the property taxes aren't paid, then you have to pay them when you take owner.
	Like the house was a bad debtor and you have to pay it off by moving in.
	Right, right. So it'll be something similar.
	Okay. Yeah, I think it's very similar.
	I don't think we have that property.
	Sorry, I don't have any particular fundamental objection to the use of violence in extremities of self-defense and so on, though I think that would be very, very rare in a free society, about as often as getting attacked by a grizzly bear, I think.
	So I don't have any innate opposition to the use of violence to resolve disputes if violence was used in initiation or fraud.
	But I genuinely, genuinely believe that society will find many, many more intelligent ways to deal with problems of violence and theft, other than having a brute class around, which is a very dangerous thing, as I said.
	Yeah, because the problem is, unfortunately, as men use violence, they become accustomed to it.
	The more you become accustomed to something, the easier it is.
	Right, and the other thing too is that if you hire a brute class, a class of enforcers to go around shaking guns in people's faces if they don't obey the general anarchic rules of conduct, Very often it is the case that people who are violent during the day are not exactly the best parents.
	So all you're doing is raising a new class of people who are even more used to violence or have particular psychological problems that may mend them more prone to interpersonal violence.
	So I don't think that...
	It's the worst way to solve it, I think, is to have a class of enforcers.
	There'll be many, many better ways to do it.
	And like yourself, I think people will recognize that sometimes, sometimes, Just walking away is the better course of action because you can consume years of your life in pursuit of restitution.
	It'll be much more efficient in a free society.
	But if you're that wealthy, I mean, if you had 10 times your income, which you would in a free society probably within a generation or two, you wouldn't really care if, you know, a small amount of money went missing.
	It just wouldn't happen. Well, exactly.
	The odd 10% here and there, you know.
	You could cope with that?
	Yeah, you could deal with it.
	It's the price of living.
	You can't live a life with no trust, and every now and then you're going to be taken advantage of, and that's the rent you pay for living in a world that's not completely paranoid, where you aren't completely paranoid, and I think that's just the cost of trusting and open relations in the world.
	Sorry, you cut me down. I was having a quick smoke.
	No problem. You see, this is the thing.
	Where do you see all this leading?
	Where do you think we're going?
	Because the information age, as you say, is upon us.
	The internet, all of your ideas and my ideas, everybody's ideas, they're getting out there, they're intermingling.
	Oh yeah, we're going down.
	I mean, I think we're going down.
	Do you think so? Yeah, I think we're going down, but I don't think we're staying down.
	I think that it's my perspective, which you know about and other people listening may not, is that a society is freed by better parenting, by peaceful parenting, by treating your children as intelligent equals, as an exchange of information, innocence versus, you know, innocence trading for experience where both people end up the better.
	And when children are raised in a situation where they're respected, where they're not aggressed against, they're not put down, they're not humiliated, they're not bullied, they're not punished, then they'll grow up and they'll encounter the state as a kind of weird thing.
	You know, like if you and I were to travel to Thailand and we were to go to some backwoods temple where they worshipped, I don't know, some 20-foot tall stone chicken, we'd look at that and we'd say, Well, that's kind of weird, right?
	But of course, if we grew up worshipping that 20-foot stone chicken, we'd say, well, that's the 20-foot stone chicken.
	There's nothing weird about it, right?
	It's whatever you grow up that you're used to.
	That's normal, right? Yeah, that's normal, right?
	Whatever you grow up that you're used to, when it's reflected at large within society, it just kind of fits and makes sense, even if it makes no sense at all.
	And so we kind of want...
	Kids to be raised in such a way that they encounter the state, like you and I would encounter a 20-foot tall stone chicken that people worshipped, right?
	It's like, well, that's bizarre, right?
	And it's not true.
	Like, it's false. It's just a local superstition.
	And we would recognize it as that.
	And the only way that we can get children to grow up and to look at the state like a 20-foot tall stone chicken is if we raise them in a non-statist way.
	And children are raised in a status paradigm.
	They're rewarded, they're punished, they're controlled, they're regulated.
	And so then when they pop out of school...
	Into the world and they're controlled and taxed and regulated and punished and rewarded and bribed and attacked and praised.
	Then they're like, well, this makes sense because this is school, this is church, this is family.
	This all fits. It's all a 20-foot stone chicken and it doesn't look out of place at all.
	But if we raise children in such a way that they encounter the state like a weird foreign religion from another planet, then the state will fall because it simply won't make any sense.
	In the same way that the religion of the 20-foot stone chicken would fall if you could displace every child there with some child raised a million miles away from the 20-foot stone chicken.
	The religion would die out very, very quickly.
	And that's what we need to do.
	So there's no way to affect that change In less than a generation or two.
	And I think a generation or two is probably pretty quick.
	And there's no way that the current system is going to survive a generation or two.
	I mean, I don't like to make a lot of predictions, but there's no way.
	So we're going to go down, and the purpose right now is to shoot out as many flares as we're going down, So the people know why we're sinking.
	We hit an iceberg called the state.
	We hit an iceberg called the state.
	And that way, people who get plucked out of the water by the future will say, hey, you know what?
	We hit an iceberg called the state.
	So let's not do that state thing again.
	And at the same time, we're raising children to look at the state like a 20-foot tall stone chicken.
	And that's the only way that it's going to happen.
	It's not going to happen through politics.
	It's not going to happen through podcasting.
	It's only going to happen...
	Through raising children to look upon the state as a completely bizarre, anachronous, weird, monolithic dinosaur entity from a prehistoric past, which is in fact what it really is.
	I mean, I don't wear my children.
	As I wear my children, I don't actually mention the state to them in that sense, you know?
	I keep it. I always keep saying to them, listen, I don't own you.
	You own you. When you're old enough, you'll know how to behave.
	I'm only guiding you until you're old enough to know how to behave.
	And for example, you know, we get all these things come from school and these so-called contracts they send you for your children to engage in.
	Without realizing it most of the time, a lot of people just sign them and send them back.
	For example, I had one there the other day for my son for rugby.
	And, you know, as I read down through this thing, it was unbelievable.
	The things that they were...
	Oh, sorry, I just see Johnny has a tune there.
	He's going to play it, John. Yeah, Johnny, if you wouldn't mind going ahead and playing that tune, I could actually do it a little break myself.
	Stefan, sorry for interrupting. No problem at all.
	Folks, you're tuned to TNSRadio.com.
	Coming to you live from Dublin, Ireland, we have Stefan Molyneux online, host from Freedom Aid Radio.
	And we'll be back after this in your own time, Johnny.
	Sorry about that. I've been copying and pasting some messages and questions, I should say, from the chat room there and just in relation to the brain drain one.
	I was talking to a chap earlier on today about brain drain and it was in relation to how everybody is leaving Ireland.
	Basically, the entrepreneurial skill set is leaving the country and they're going elsewhere.
	And these are the people that really, when a country's in trouble, these are really the people that you kind of want to have around.
	They're the problem solvers.
	They're dynamic. They can do things that others can't generally do.
	They can see things in an interesting light.
	And they can add extra value, if you will, to a problem.
	Or just create jobs.
	Well... Again, you know, this is the thing though, but these guys are all leaving Ireland, you know, left, right and centre at the moment.
	They're just...
	Dublin Airport is full of them.
	All the ports are full of them. They're leisure.
	And I was wondering, are you suffering the same over there or...
	Well, no, it's actually not too bad here because America is doing so badly that the brain drain that goes on to the south, it still occurs in the realm of medicine because, you know, public medicine is the case here as it is there.
	And so the doctors will leave here to go practice in the U.S. But a lot of people are not that keen on going to the U.S., particularly after the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
	That really did sour a lot of people.
	To America and, you know, anybody with any math skills, and I think anybody who's entrepreneurial and worth something has some math skills at least, they look at the deficits and say, well, mathematically, this can't continue.
	Do I really want to be south of the border?
	When, as has just happened recently, the Chinese stopped buying America's debt, right?
	They start selling off the T-bills.
	Do I really want to be around when hyperinflation hits the US? They've stopped buying America's debt.
	They started selling off China has started selling off some of America's debt and it's going to cause a big problem for the dollar, of course.
	And what are they buying? Are they buying euros instead?
	I don't know. If I were them, I would be buying neither.
	If I were the Chinese, I'd just be hoarding it and saying, well, let's just wait six months and buy it much cheaper because it'll be a lot cheaper in six to 12 months than it is right now.
	So, no, I don't know what they're doing with it.
	I would just be keeping the money myself in my own currency.
	Although, of course, they have a problem in that if the foreign currencies go down, their exports are going to go down because that means Western demand will go down for their goods.
	But even then, I would just wait a bit and buy it at a fire sale.
	So the rain drain is not so bad here in Canada.
	The recession hasn't been quite as bad here in Canada.
	And of course, we do have a big debt in Canada.
	It's actually a larger debt relative to GDP even than America, though, it's not as bad as Italy and, of course, Greece, and it's still much, much better than Japan, which is the worst of all.
	What's your GDP versus debt at the moment, do you know?
	62%, I believe, and I think it's Americans' high 50s.
	In Japan, it's like 170, I think, in...
	Yeah, I think Greece is approaching 200.
	It's crazy. Of course, these are just the facts that we have.
	It's probably a lot worse behind the scenes.
	I assume that all government numbers are just more flaming propaganda.
	What will be happening here sometime early next year, I think, early next year, possibly, every, well, literally every penny in the country won't meet the interest on the loan, never mind the principal sum.
	Right, right. And so, here in Canada, it's not quite that bad.
	I mean, we do have a very high debt, and we do have the usual demographic time bomb of the aging population.
	We have a relatively low birth rate, because, you know, intelligent human beings, or human beings in general, don't breed very well in captivity.
	And so, the natives just stop breeding, and, you know, yourself excluded, of course, but the natives stop breeding.
	And thank you, by the way, for all of us.
	I appreciate that, but...
	And so we have a small number of young people, a large number of old people who are going to need massive amounts of medical expenses and retirement benefits and so on.
	But at least we don't have an empire and we don't have a large military.
	And so from that standpoint, there is much less of a danger here.
	Do you know or have you researched the relationship between the Crown and Canada of late?
	What's that whole relationship?
	Because I'm sure a lot of people Here, you know, I mean, the Queen is still on your money, right?
	She is! That witch is still blazing her eyeballs out of our cash.
	But, you know, it's a fake... How does that feel?
	I mean, that must seem to look strange.
	So that seems quite appropriate.
	Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, the euro note that everybody's using here, they only have one signature.
	I don't think any of them have a face on them.
	No, no face. And they don't even say their legal tender on them here.
	But the brain drain is...
	The brain drain to Western countries is diminishing.
	In my view, the brain drain is going to be to the emerging economies.
	The brain drain is going to fundamentally be to places like Thailand, India in particular, China.
	The brain drain is going to be, I mean, the West is dead.
	I mean, the West is dead as a paradigm.
	The West, the economies are dying.
	Statism as a philosophy is dying.
	I mean, it's doing a full-on Atlas Shrugged flame out here in the West.
	Exactly. Do you think it's dying or do you think it's going through the last part of the process that it was planned to go through?
	I mean, do you believe in the conspiratorial notion of history or the haphazard?
	No, I don't believe in the conspiratorial notion of history in terms of like lots of people pulling strings and having a big 50-year plan.
	I don't believe that at all. Like the Illuminati?
	No, I don't believe any of that.
	But what I do believe is that human beings have incredibly well-developed instincts for dominating other human beings.
	The greatest resource for human beings is not oil or gas or rubber or even sunlight.
	The greatest resource for human beings historically has been other human beings.
	We are a slave-owning species.
	And so we have developed two sets of finely honed instincts.
	One is owning slaves.
	The second is being a slave.
	And you can switch those around very quickly if you change circumstances, right?
	The bullies can become the victims and the victims can become the bullies.
	That's how we have developed as a species.
	And so when you have a state, you attract the people who are really, really skilled at slave owning.
	And they just have a great instinct for it.
	It's just something we've developed.
	It's like enjoying the taste of sugar.
	It's just something we have biologically developed to survive and flourish as a species that loves to dominate each other.
	I mean, it's us and ants are the two that fight with each other all the time, right?
	And so I don't believe there's any conspiracies, but I really do believe, I really strongly believe that we have incredibly finely honed instincts for controlling each other and manipulating and propagandizing, right?
	Because if you can get the slaves to beat up on each other and themselves, the cost of owning the slaves becomes much lower.
	So it's very economically effective to bully people into frightening themselves.
	And so I think there's no conspiracy theory as a whole, but there really are these incredible instincts, and that fools people into thinking there's a big conspiracy.
	Yeah, I mean, well, from a distance, it could look like a conspiracy theory, but it could also be a headless blunder.
	Right. You know, but yet fitting right in, slotting right in, as you say, with human nature.
	Yeah. And that's why we combine a headless blunder and human nature.
	You could very easily end up where we are.
	Or, you know, in fairness, the conspiracy theory...
	Could fit. Yeah, no, listen, I mean, either way.
	One of these things that's really, it's tough to say, right?
	I mean, I could be completely wrong about the conspiracy theory thing, but I've never seen enough conclusive evidence.
	And the people who have these conspiracy theories seem to be woefully hostile towards evidence, right?
	So, you know, I don't know if you've ever had this, right?
	But every time I talk about immunizing my kid, I get six million emails about how...
	The immunizations cause autism and stuff, right?
	And the study that first proposed this has been completely discredited and withdrawn, and The Lancet, which first published it, has completely rejected and repudiated the study, not only as incorrect, but as a completely unethical study.
	And so I sent this to a couple of people who sent me the emails and they all come back and say, wow, that's just finance, you know, big farmers just doing their job.
	And it's like, well, wait a second.
	I mean, then if you just throw out every evidence that is against your conspiracy theory as being part of the conspiracy theory, then you're kind of in a closed loop where no other facts can actually reach you.
	And I find that to be a little bit the case with the conspiracy theorists.
	So I don't have a lot of respect for that position.
	But, you know, they could be right.
	It just seems highly unlikely. Folks, if anybody has a question, if they want to come on and put it direct to Stefan.
	Let me know, and I'll put you in for a couple of minutes if you want.
	Someone has asked if I could go into some of my favorite philosophers, which made me think and aspire to a life of freedom.
	Well, I mean, I can't open my mouth and talk about favorite philosophers without talking about the great Rand.
	She's just an amazing, amazing, incredible thinker, an amazing human being.
	You know, flawed.
	There's actually a lot of Iron Ryan videos on YouTube, in fact.
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm just reading a biography of hers at the moment.
	There's two that have come out recently, and I'm reading a biography of hers, and it's not written by an objectivist or a fan of her – I mean, a fan of her work, but not an objectivist.
	And I think it's a little critical.
	People love to focus on the woman's personality.
	Like, that fundamentally has – Anything to do with the price of tea in China or the value of her philosophy or the validity of her philosophy.
	You know, it's sort of like looking at a complex mathematical algorithm and saying, but what's the mathematician gay?
	That's the most important thing.
	It's irrelevant. Yeah, it's like turning in a paper on Plato to your philosophy professor at a gradual level saying, no, he liked boys.
	It's like, what the hell does that have to do with anything, right?
	My favorite quote from my mind was, I won't die, the universe will just cease to exist.
	Yeah, and people sort of look at that and say, well, she was narcissistic and all this.
	But this is all just a massive way of avoiding the power of the woman's arguments.
	I think anybody who does any kind of contemporary thinking or claims to be any kind of thinker has to deal with Ayn Rand.
	She is by far the most popular and influential philosopher of the past 200 years, bar none, without a doubt.
	Books still sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies every single year, 50 years after publication or 60 years after publication.
	You simply can't call yourself a contemporary thinker without delving deeply into Ayn Rand and, you know, listening to her arguments.
	She is a challenging person to do battle with, and she is a very thorny and tough opponent to try and bring down logically.
	Can I throw something at you, kind of out of the blue?
	Please. How about rights versus responsibilities?
	Okay, do you want etymological histories, dictionary definitions?
	What can I do for you? No, no, no, no.
	I mean, I want Stefan Molyneux's...
	Well, I don't believe that rights exist and I don't believe that responsibilities exist.
	I think that those two things are just invented to ensnare us.
	They're just more invisible cattle fences electrified around us.
	I don't believe there's such a thing as rights.
	I think that human beings have properties, like we have arms and we have legs and we have The capacity for rational thought.
	And we have eyeballs and we're mammals and we give birth to life young.
	But I don't believe that we have rights.
	I don't think those things even exist.
	I don't think we have responsibilities either.
	Not in the same way that we are warm-blooded and have hair on our bodies.
	Those things are actually true.
	But I don't think anybody has any particular responsibilities.
	You can sign a contract and you can break it.
	You can make a promise and you can break it.
	Well, what about responsibilities to oneself?
	I don't believe those exist either.
	Don't get me wrong. I think that people are happier if they treat themselves well and if they act in a virtuous manner.
	I think that they'll be happier and I think that they'll really love their life and so on but I don't think anybody has a responsibility to do those things.
	I think that there are choices and there are consequences but I don't believe that People have a responsibility for themselves.
	Because what that means is that they're doing something other than for the thing itself.
	They're doing it to fulfill an external rule.
	And as a philosopher, I'm not at all into...
	Do you not think we have...
	I mean, do you not think our very existence is brought about by external forces?
	Well, external forces, but not external forces.
	I mean, the universe... I mean, the way I see it, just me, folks, is the universe...
	It has me here, whether it intended to or otherwise, if it can even intend.
	But I'm here, and as far as I can tell, I'm right here.
	And I seem to have arrived with pre-programming to at least be responsible for me.
	Now, that might be just apparent, but I mean, I tell everybody, as far as I'm concerned, you have no rights.
	If you think you have a right to oxygen, for example, I say fill your pockets with rocks, jump into a swimming pool.
	Well, where's your right to oxygen then?
	You might have a right to it, but are you getting any?
	You know, but you do have a responsibility to yourself, if no one else, to not fill your pockets with rocks and jump into a swimming pool.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that it's better for people not to commit suicide, for sure, but the responsibility is entirely in people's heads, right?
	It doesn't exist in the real world any more than their rights do, but...
	I'm very much one for appealing to people's greed, so to speak, or appealing to their self-interest.
	And if you're appealing to people's self-interest, you can't create external rules that they have to follow, because that is opposite to their self-interest.
	If we create some external rule, all we're doing is creating some bully, whether it's God or even philosophy, that's going to make us do stuff.
	It's going to make us, oh, I've got to get up.
	I've got to be honest, because honesty is an integrity, and it's virtuous, and I've got to be good, so I've got to force myself to be good, and this and that.
	There's an old story Harry Brown used to tell about a time when he tried to be perfectly honest and he was living in some rooming house and the landlady made him a cake and he didn't like it.
	And he didn't want to say to her, I don't like the cake.
	He also didn't want to say I like the cake because he wanted to be honest and he tied himself into knots about all of this kind of stuff.
	And that to me just seems kind of silly, right?
	I mean, we want to appeal to our own happiness with the recognition that we're flawed but that we get great benefits out of striving for virtue.
	But I just don't think...
	It's like diets. Diets don't work if people just follow rules because they kind of want to be thin.
	They work because people have achieved a great degree of self-knowledge about why they might be overweight, what problems might be holding them back in their life that cause them to overeat, what stresses they're managing through dumping carbs and sugars into their systems and so on.
	When people pursue self-happiness and greed for joy, they can achieve incredible things.
	When they follow rules, they just become like dull robots.
	And so I'm not a big one for...
	You know, creating a set of rules that people have to follow.
	But I'm a very big one for if you really want to get the most out of life, these are things that I have found to be worthwhile and here's the reasons behind them.
	So what about, what do you feel in your heart might be the solution for not all things?
	I mean, obviously none of us contain the solution for everything.
	But I mean, what do you feel after the event, as I call it, which is Basically, I think it's inevitable, the collapse of all currencies.
	It's going to happen, I think. I mean, even if the one world, new world order, even if it exists, and if they manage to create a one world currency and a one world corporation, well, then they die.
	I mean, if there's only one corporation, the way I see it, correct me if you think I'm wrong, who are the customers?
	So it's going to consume itself.
	It's going to get bad, but it's not going to get bad like...
	Germany in the 1930s.
	And it's not going to get bad like the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire.
	It's not going to get bad like that.
	And the reason being that you and I are having this conversation and eventually tens of thousands of people or more will listen to this through my show and through your show.
	And therefore, the truth is out there.
	And the truth can't be contained anymore because there is this amazing free, relatively free, and instantaneous communication around the world.
	And what that's done is created a level playing field for ideas.
	Now, wherever there is a level playing field for ideas, in other words, you don't have to become part of some corporate mainstream mafia to get the message out to people.
	Once you've created a level playing field for ideas, what happens, Vincent, is that the best ideas will eventually win, right?
	Because the only way that you can keep the best ideas from winning is to keep them out of the discussion.
	Once a great idea or a series of great ideas enter into the human conversation, they will win.
	Without a doubt, it is gravity.
	It is inevitable.
	The best and most consistent ideas will always win.
	The internet has reduced the barrier to entry for communicating to as many people as you can get to listen to you.
	And that means that all of the bullshit and crap that rolls around like a fetid turd in the human soul is being washed away, right, by this bright, clear blue wind of reason and evidence that is coming through that has been forever shunned from the discussion in history because communications have been controlled by the state, by the church, by other institutions, by public schools, and so on.
	Now, the barrier to entry is low, which means anybody can get into the field, which means that the best arguments will win.
	Now, it's going to take time, of course, right?
	Because there's a lot of prejudice to be overcome.
	And a lot of people don't like talking about the truth because of what it does to their personal relationships.
	And that is tough. And that is hard.
	But there's no going back now.
	I mean, the doors are down.
	You know, the servants have shrugged off their shackles and the people consistently kept from the dinner table are now sitting, clamped assed in the seats of the dinner table and they are in the conversation.
	And the smartest and the most consistent and the wisest and the most compassionate and the most humane and the most passionate are going to be the ones who win.
	There's no going back now.
	And so there will be nothing that we can do from an idea standpoint to stop that which is imminent, right?
	Because we're nutritionists.
	We're not surgeons, right? So a nutritionist can't do anything for somebody who's 10 minutes away from having a heart attack, right?
	Sure. But you can at least say to that person's kids, here's how your dad had the heart attack.
	Now you've got to stop eating that junk food and you've got to start eating the light.
	Nobody having a heart attack wants their herbalist.
	You know, what you should have done is not eat that crap for 30 years, right?
	So there's no going back.
	There's no stopping what's about to happen.
	But the passage that we're going to go through is going to be relatively short compared to those in history.
	It's going to be relatively less bad compared to those in history and what we're going to emerge from.
	Through that process is going to be the greatest triumph, the whitest light, the shining city on the hill that mankind has always dreamed of is going to be on the other side of that passage.
	And there is absolutely no stopping it now that everybody's in the conversation and the best ideas will inevitably win.
	So do you think, for example, let's assume, let's do worst case scenario for a second.
	Let's assume dollar collapses, Canadian dollar goes with it, the pound goes, the euro goes, everything goes pear-shaped.
	Power companies stop, you know, guys don't show up to work, no electricity in your sockets, no water in your faucet, no food on the shelves.
	Doomsday, if you will. Commercial doomsday.
	Where you are, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, you live in a green and fertile land, you know, quite a good portion of your population would survive such a thing.
	More than likely. At least, I think, maybe in Canada, at least 50%, because you've got lots of...
	You've got lots of natural resources that people can go and claim.
	Ireland, we're the same, to be honest with you.
	Small country, small population, there's food growing everywhere.
	But there are a lot of countries, they're going belly up in a situation like that big time.
	I mean, there are cities with 10, 15 million as a population.
	They're not going to last through a thing like that.
	No way. And when they go out to the countryside, they're not going to know what to do when they get there.
	Do you think, the question I'd like to ask you, do you think it's going to get to that?
	Do you think that the governments will actually let it collapse?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so. I think it's important to remember the degree to which humanity's ethics have advanced.
	I mean, of course there will be a backsliding when things get scarce, but there is a general ethic of caring.
	There is a general ethic of caring for the weak and the vulnerable that really wasn't around nearly as much in the past.
	I mean, just to go back to Dickens' time, there were still public hangings and public beheadings, which children were encouraged to attend as a moral lesson, right?
	I mean, that would be unthinkable now.
	So there has been some gentling...
	Well, before that though, England had what they call the 900 years of the golden age of England before that, where there were no executions at all.
	For 900 years in England, no executions.
	Yeah.
	And that was way before then.
	I don't think that the governments are going to be able to maintain any power if they let sections of the population starve.
	The conditions for producing food are still going to be there.
	The economic system is not going to work, this sort of fascistic, mercantilist crap that we've got going on.
	It's not going to work very well, which means that people's quantity and variety of food is going to diminish.
	But I don't believe that there will be mass starvation because that would involve there being no food distribution at all.
	I think there will be a black market because, of course, there will be lots of talented and intelligent entrepreneurs who will operate.
	And much like the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union didn't starve because entrepreneurs picked up where the socialized market, quote, market didn't work at all.
	So people will just end up with much less variety of food, and they'll probably end up with some fewer calories, which for a lot of people probably wouldn't be that bad a thing.
	But I don't think there's going to be mass starvation.
	I think there will be a passage, and I think people will finally, finally start to wake up to what is actually going on in the world.
	When they see a system not working, they will, however much they don't want to, they will start to listen to the people who predicted it not working, and we will gain a certain credibility that is very tough to retain right now.
	Okay, let's assume that happened.
	Just for the moment, for the sake of conversation.
	Do you think humanity will learn the lesson?
	I think the capacity is there.
	I never underestimate people's ability to avoid the truth for the sake of a momentary gain of comfort.
	I think it's definitely the best shot that humanity has ever had to learn the truth.
	And I think that the more that we can compassionately communicate the truth, and by that I don't mean conclusions, but the methodology of truth, which is reason and evidence, then if we've been predicting the disaster and five years ago, four years ago, I said it was five to ten years, and I still stand by that, and it's been running along like clockwork since the prediction.
	We've got the best messages out there.
	We've been predicting it all along.
	We've got the reason. We've got the passion.
	We've got the humor. And we're right.
	And so eventually, you know, when enough people start dying of lung cancer, eventually people will start saying, hey, who are those guys who said that people who smoke die of lung cancer?
	Maybe they're right. You know, sooner or later, sooner or later, when enough evidence piles up, the people who predicted it will gain credibility and the people who didn't predict it or who opposed those predictions will lose credibility.
	I think that human beings are fundamentally empirical and that will swing and that will change.
	And it's hard to imagine how much that's going to change in the future, but it will be a very, very large change.
	Interesting. Okay.
	Sorry, where are we now?
	We have about 15 minutes left to go.
	So, folks, anybody who wants to come in with a question, now is your chance.
	I don't know if I click on the wrong box there and everything's just disappeared.
	Sorry, give me a sec. There we go.
	You're back. Sorry about that.
	I've been posting some questions on the screen there.
	I don't know if you're looking at the same box I'm looking at.
	I would also say Nietzsche is a great person to read.
	And of course, Rand was heavily influenced by Nietzsche.
	Friedrich Nietzsche is a fantastic guy to read.
	He's also a good toilet reader, right?
	Because you can grab one of his book of apparitions while you're getting a long raindrop of Indian food or something, and you can read some very stimulating thoughts.
	I tend to read five books simultaneously.
	Right, right. So I would also recommend...
	I have one in the bed and one down in my favorite chair and one in each loo.
	Right, right. So somebody said, will the economic downturn take parenting down with it?
	Yeah. Well, I gotta tell you, I've mixed feelings about that.
	I mean, I think if parents get the right information about how to improve their parenting, I think that the economic downturn could be enormously positive for parenting.
	In fact, a lot of people during a recession or even a depression Report themselves happier because what they do is they unplug themselves from workaholism and actually reconnect with the people in their households.
	So that is actually not such a bad thing.
	Now, of course, if getting fired makes you a drunk and abusive jerk, then not so good.
	But for a lot of people, it is about reconnecting with friends and with family and getting yourself unplugged from the hamster wheel of paying the tax man and buying shiny goodies worth very little.
	So I think from that standpoint, actually having people out of work Horrible though it is financially for many people, there are some benefits in that families actually are spending some real time together.
	Because the amount of time that two parent working families spend together with their children is shocking.
	Again, though, that's the double-edged sword, though, isn't it?
	Because, I mean, well, that's all well and dandy.
	But, I mean, if it's a case where the man, for example, feels he should be out working and providing and gets frustrated because he isn't, You know, sometimes they can get upset and abusive and it can make the situation worse.
	You're absolutely right. And so it's going to go both ways within the same family.
	But there is at least the opportunity there for more quality time with your kids and the degree to which, you know, parents can be honest about their own vulnerabilities and perhaps even a sense of shame or inadequacy being unable to provide.
	The degree to which they can be honest and open with each other as parents and with their kids to the degree that it's age appropriate.
	I think it's the degree to which parenting can take a big step forward.
	Well, I mean, for me, what I'm doing is, I mean, next year, I have all the plans in place.
	I'm going to start producing, instead of growing, I mean, I've got all sorts of exotic plants in the garden.
	They're all coming up next year.
	And I'm going to start planting food crops as plants in my garden.
	Yeah, and I was just talking about that with my wife yesterday.
	We're going to start a vegetable patch.
	I mean, it's convenient and also buying up some extra food.
	Not because I think there's going to be any huge starvation thing, but we have a kid and we need to be responsible if currencies are going to go south for a while.
	So I think that's important.
	If you have a festival, that's not going to save you from a food shortage.
	I say this to folks quite a lot.
	If you're actually worried, I mean, I tell people this, if you're worried that a food shortage is going to come, And if you want to be prudent, I say go buy the cheapest dried food you can find and store it.
	I mean, for example, I say to people here, for example, there's a food product here.
	I don't know if it's there. It's called Super Noodles.
	It's like a noodle-based product.
	Yeah, it's like ramen noodles.
	They have them here. Yeah.
	You know, you can buy them for 10 cents a pack here.
	I say, you know, take a euro, buy 10 packs, you will survive for 10 days on that if things get really, really bad.
	Right.
	You know, it's full of MSG and probably every pie is known to man, but it's tasty and you'll survive.
	Right. Yeah, I think those things are responsible.
	I think those things are reasonable things to do.
	I think also there is, you know, one of the things that is really challenging about social change is that And this is a very broad generalization, but I think it has value.
	Parents tend to be involved and invested in the existing social system.
	I mean, that's just the reality because they're embedded in it.
	And children, particularly teenagers, not to call teenagers children, but you know what I mean, they tend to be more skeptical of the existing system.
	And when teenagers criticize the existing social system, a lot of parents who are heavily invested in that system will take it personally, like it is a criticism against them.
	However, I think what can happen with a recession or a depression or some sort of collapse is that teenagers and parents actually become aligned because they both criticize the existing system.
	And then what you can have is you can have change without intergenerational conflict, right?
	So you can have the teenagers heavily criticizing the system without the parents taking it like a personal attack upon them.
	You can have both generations, maybe even three generations, criticizing the existing system.
	Because a lot of what statism relies on is intergenerational conflict, right?
	So if the parents can take criticisms of the state personally, then the parents will in effect repress the teenagers or the younger people by opposing those criticisms.
	But if the parents have kind of been booted out of the system, then you get multi-generational focus upon the destructive nature Of the existing system.
	And that has an incredible amount of power to change things.
	So I think there's a benefit that can come out of it that way, which again, we're probably not seeing that much of yet, but I think that it could definitely happen.
	Okay. I just posted another question there.
	How does Stefan think we can get to a minimal government or no government society?
	I was thinking of a self-destructing political party.
	I'm not exactly sure what Chris means by that one.
	Well, he means a political party that gets in and just throws a spanner in the works.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	I don't think so either, no. Politics is not going to work.
	Politics is not going to work.
	It's far too late for that. It's far too late.
	I mean, and politics has been tried.
	The libertarian movement, if you count classical liberalism, kicked in around 150 years ago, or even longer, if you think about it.
	I mean, if we go back to Adam Smith, right?
	And people have been trying to control the power of the state through political action for hundreds if not thousands of years.
	It never, ever, ever, ever works.
	It never works.
	Because the purpose of the state is not to respond to the needs of the people.
	The purpose of the state is to lie to the people and pick their pockets.
	That is the purpose of the state.
	They have no choice, in fact.
	They have no choice. As I've said to people before, if you think that political action can work to turn a criminal organization like the state to a more virtuous path, Don't worry about running for office.
	Go join the local mafia and try and turn it into a branch of the United Way or some other charity.
	And if you can turn the mafia into a charity, then you have some chance of turning the government into a semi-virtuous institution.
	But of course, when you say to people, join the mafia and turn it into a charity, they say, well, that's impossible.
	The whole point of the mafia is...
	Well, that's the point of the government.
	It's a bigger and more dangerous criminal organization than the mafia.
	And so you don't go into the mafia and try and turn it to something good.
	And you don't go into the government and try and turn it to something better.
	It's not what it's for.
	It's not what it's all about.
	And it's a ridiculous thing to try.
	So we have to focus on our own relationships, on our personal relationships, on raising our children well, on bringing the truth to our friends, on standing up for the truth in our relationships.
	Why? So that when the shit does hit the fan, people will remember that we were there, we saw it coming, and we got the explanation, which is that it is violence, not freedom that has worked, that has failed, sorry.
	And that is the only way that we're going to be able to change things.
	And it's going to come out intergenerationally, it's not going to come about through political action, and it's not going to come about inevitably through any kind of collapse.
	I'm just copying and pasting another question on the second part of that last question.
	I mean, a political party whose mandate is to release all laws and has made their mandate to dissolve in 10 years.
	Okay, well, the chances are happening.
	I'm sorry to give a rant, but these are questions that I'm quite passionate about.
	So give me just one more minute on this, if you don't mind.
	Look, there's no way that the political system is going to restrain itself.
	I don't know what the stats are in Ireland, but in America, I think a third of the people work for the government.
	A third of the people work for the government.
	So that means immediately you have a third of people who are never going to vote to bring down government programs.
	A third, right off the bat.
	Which is why they went and hired everybody.
	Of course they hired everyone, because then everybody's beholden and everybody's going to vote for the increase in state power.
	If you work for the government, you shouldn't be allowed to vote.
	It's a direct conflict of interest.
	Exactly. So you've got a third of people.
	Now, those people all have people who are dependent on them.
	And those people aren't going to...
	So you've got some guy working for the government.
	His wife maybe doesn't work and is dependent on him.
	She's not going to vote for some party that's going to eliminate her government's job.
	They've got friends who, if they ever found out their friends were voting for the party that was going to eliminate this guy's job, they'd cut them off.
	They've got brothers. They've got fathers.
	They've got financial suicide.
	It's at least double the number.
	So you have automatically 66% of people who are never going to vote.
	To reduce the size and power of the government.
	Then you have all these other people who want jobs in the government.
	Let's say there's another 5 or 10% of people, half the unemployed people, so 10%.
	Half the unemployed people want jobs in government.
	And so they're going to vote for an increase in government program.
	So you've got 66% of people who are never going to want to reduce government.
	You've got 10% of people who want to do everything they can to increase government.
	That's 76% of the population.
	They're the ones who are most inclined or most motivated to come out and vote.
	Sure, they're heading basically what their aim is, 100% employment.
	Everybody works for the government.
	So 76% of people who are the most motivated either want the same size government or larger government.
	And given that they're more than twice as likely as anybody else to come out and vote, you basically have 100% of voters who want Either the same size government or bigger government.
	There's no way to change that basic reality.
	The government owns too many people for the people to vote for it to become smaller.
	I don't know why people don't see that.
	I think it's just they're desperate.
	They can't think of any of it. No, no, no.
	I mean, a lot of guys here do see it.
	But we're, of course, we look down the road and we say, well, what happens when it goes pop?
	And it can go pop through their financial collapses.
	Because, as you say, I mean, if it's a headless blunder...
	Which, you know, is possible.
	Or if it's a controlled Illuminati plan, if that even exists, it still looks like it's going to go pop either way.
	Sorry to interrupt you, but the people who are still invested in political action are the most dangerous of all.
	The libertarians or the anarchists were still invested in political action because what they're still going on is the premise, is the idea that the state can be controlled through political action.
	What that means is that they are going to be the first in line to say, let's bring the state back because we can control it through political action.
	If they are still addicted to political action, they're the most dangerous state.
	People in Russia to this day will tell you everything was fine when Stalin was in charge.
	Right. There are people who will say that.
	I mean, my daughter, or my sister, I should say, adopted a young Russian baby, and when she was over there, people actually said those things.
	Of course, yeah. And for many people, that's kind of true.
	They got so broken up. It was true for them.
	They can only live within that system.
	For them, it was true. They looked around, and what they had now, compared to what they had then, they were better off.
	As far as they were concerned, it was that simple.
	Which, you know, hey, why wouldn't it be?
	Right. And for a lot of people, when the government goes down, there's going to be a lot of 50-year-old postal workers who will only be able to earn 20% of what they make now in the free market.
	Because they've become lazy, they've become belligerent, they've become bullies, they've become, you know, they're entitled.
	They They only want to work four hours a day.
	They, you know, want to take two-hour lunches, right?
	So they go to the private sector.
	The private sector is, no, no, no.
	We actually expect you to work for a living.
	They're going to experience a significant decline in both the income and quality of life.
	And so they're going to hate it.
	They're going to hate it. Of course they are.
	I mean, why wouldn't they? And they'll look back longingly to the days when they got to make $80,000 a year or $90,000 a year for working a couple hours a day.
	And getting six or eight weeks of vacation, all the pensions, all the benefits you could imagine.
	I mean, the state bribes people very well.
	And when you take away that heroin, it's really painful for people.
	It's really painful. They're just not going to do it.
	Absolutely. So, I mean, where we are now...
	I mean, again, the situation is, while similar in Ireland, you know, it is different geographically, population, you know, all these things.
	If you were to put a timescale on, you know, this is, you know, I'm going down on a limb here, but if you were to put a timescale on the new...
	Resurgence of humanity back into man, which I think is what's missing.
	We are acting inhumane to each other on an ever-increasing scale.
	And we need to correct that, obviously.
	I'm sure most of the listeners here feel that.
	They can't bear to witness any more inhuman treatment of other humans.
	It's too much. If you were to try and If you were to try and gauge it in the future, where would you see it?
	Do you see 10 years, 20 years, 30 years before or longer before we actually begin to correct the last 1-200 years?
	Or do you see that we have a way of correcting it?
	Well, I don't like particularly to speak collectively.
	I mean, we can talk about that in a sec.
	But more importantly, I would say to people that you don't need to wait for society to change to bring voluntarism and joy and happiness into your life, right?
	So you obviously have changed your life considerably since you were younger in order to bring more voluntarism, happiness and peace into your life.
	You have changed your parenting, you've changed your occupation, you've changed your economic relationship to your fellow man.
	I have completely overturned my life in the past few years to pursue this, accepted much less money and much greater happiness.
	And I don't have people in my life who are state advocates, who advocate the use of violence against me for disagreeing with them.
	I only have people in my life Who support the truth, who don't support me, but support the truth and the methodology and the virtue and the possibility of a better world.
	So I'm already living in a world that is 90% close in terms of my daily life to the ideal society that I see in the future.
	And I just built that brick by brick over the past, well, it doesn't matter really how long, but the important thing is to recognize that people can have that very quickly.
	You can have Even as the state gets more powerful, even if the currency goes down, you can have that life of peace and volunteerism and love and intimacy and engagement in your life now.
	You don't have to wait for society to turn around.
	You don't have to beat your head against a wall until the future opens up and lets you through.
	You can make that future your present right now.
	This is why I always talk to people and encourage them to pursue virtue, honesty, and openness in their personal relationships because that's the world that we actually live in.
	You don't live in Ireland. You live in your family.
	You live in your friends. You live in your community.
	And that's where you can have some real effects.
	Absolutely. I try to live now.
	I mean, I try not to worry about tomorrow.
	Because, I mean, tomorrow never comes, as they say, but I try to live now.
	Because if I'm not living now, and if I'm busy now worrying about tomorrow, Yeah, all you do is you rob the present for the sake of something you can't alter, which is society as a whole.
	So I just say to people, forget about changing the world, right?
	Change your relationship to those around you.
	Be open, be honest, be vulnerable, be passionate, live with integrity with those around you.
	Not only will that give you the world of freedom, peace and security that you want in the future right now, but it is in fact the only way that that world that you want in the future is going to come to be anyway.
	So that's my constant refrain to people and I hope that makes sense to your listeners.
	Sure. Well, I mean, it makes sense to me, I'll be honest.
	I mean, I felt as I made these changes, it lifts a load.
	And I can't even describe it.
	It lifts, it's like a spiritual load.
	And I mean, you know, some people have different ways of looking at that.
	But to me, it lifted a spiritual load I was carrying around.
	And I now look at things different.
	I look at people different. You know, I accept or decline relationships differently.
	And when people try to engage me in contracts, you know, sign here, do this, do that, I question things.
	Or I might say, you know what, I'm going to decline.
	Thank you, but no.
	And it's a very simple thing, but thank you, but no.
	And it really can have an amazing effect on how you live your life, I think.
	I agree. I mean, I'm sitting here now talking to you, and my little fella sitting on my lap, he actually brought, he actually came down with a note, because I'm on the radio, he came down with a note that says, D-I-D-I, Dad, I am feeling sick, because he knew I was on the radio.
	He's sitting on my lap now, he's feeling sick.
	And he brought me down a note, because he...
	My man, he's puked in my bed.
	You nearly puked in your bed, did you?
	Oh yeah. You see, so...
	He's sitting on my lap now, because that's the way he was feeling.
	And... I'm going to have to go and do what I got to do.
	Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I really do appreciate the time.
	It was a great, great chat.
	And I certainly wish you the best with the show.
	And let's not wait for another four years to do it again.
	Absolutely. I'd love to talk to you again.
	In fact, you know, there's an open invitation as far as I'm concerned.
	Anytime you want to come back on, Stefan.
	I appreciate that, man. I better book you do some parenting too.
	But thank you so much for your time and have yourself a great, great night.
	No problem. Thank you very much.
	Bye-bye. I'm going to get this little fella to bed.

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