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Nov. 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:24
1795 Freedomain Radio on the Micro Effect Show

Originally recorded March 29, 2010.

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And what else do we have? Man, it started off to be a beautiful day here in the wonderful downtown metropolis of Idaho here.
I was actually standing outside in my t-shirt and thinking, oh, this is really nice.
And then the weather came.
But you've heard it said before, if you don't like the weather, give it a few minutes, it'll change.
And it did. Tonight, we're going to have a great program.
I just got this... Feeling here, but before I bring up my guest here tonight, I want to share with you, I know all of you that listen to my program, I've brought some different kind of things to the airway in the past, you know, we're talking about this new line of thinking, okay? And, you know, sometimes, you know, when you're trying to get people to understand freedom and, you know, liberty and this kind of thing, you always...
Run into those individuals that want to drag you right back into the social part of everything.
How are we going to flush our toilets and who's going to build the highway and take care of the kids and provide the schools and all these things?
It's like everybody's afraid to leave the farm along those lines.
As you all know, obviously, I kind of think along a different line.
And magically, I found somebody who thinks along some pretty and very similar lines, such as myself.
And that's why they're here as my guest here tonight.
Because... I think the struggle is, you know, from all the brainwashing we've had from the time we were little tykes, I don't know, sitting on a playground and riding a seesaw or whatever, we just can't shun that off.
And it's hard to reach out.
And grab something that you've never seen before, for example.
What was it? Last week I was trying to give an example of, you know, how about if we just saw America in half?
And we'll go with the two-party system.
You have the non-voters in the West and the voters in the East.
And for all those who chose to vote and accept the, you know, the high-dollar sewer systems and the highways and the parks and all the wonderful things that...
They could provide for you on the east side.
And of course, it all requires taxes and so on and so forth.
Versus, you know, the west side where everybody's sitting there.
You know, I'll be fair about it.
I'll take all the highways.
I'll take everything out of the west and we'll just start from scratch.
And, you know, I just got this vision in my mind that, you know, okay, yeah, we're going to have to dig a hole somewhere to put our outhouse, for example.
And then some tree-hugging individual, I suppose, oh, you're going to contaminate the planet.
But what he doesn't realize is, you know, they're also contaminating the planet with the very same substance over on the east side, you know.
Now, whether we put paint on it or Blow it apart with chemicals.
Whatever we're going to do with it, ultimately it's still a toxicant situation.
So what are we trying to accomplish?
I suppose would be the question.
Or why is it that we can't identify with just simple things?
A lot of times I have a simple answer for a very complicated question.
At least I think it's simple, but when you try to get people to understand those kind of things, I don't know, it's the deer in the headlights situation.
But I hope, I really do, that we get to wander all over the page here somewhat tonight.
I have, like I said, a very special guest.
His name is Stephan Molyneux, and he has something called freedomainradio.com.
And if you haven't been to FreeDomainRadio.com, I want you to go there and dig into some of Stefan's stuff because some of the things he's bringing to the table I think is some great material.
One of the things I want to share with you, I kind of stumbled across Stefan a couple of years ago.
I don't know. You know, life is strange sometimes.
He got lost in the shuffle and disappeared.
And here, I don't know, just as recently as last week, for some reason, I went to somebody's website for some unknown reason.
And here's Stephan.
So I thought, oh, wow, man, I forgot about this guy.
So I started digging into some more of his material.
Of course, it's been a little while, and he's made a few advancements here that I think is great.
And so I just think we're going to have a lot to bring to the table tonight.
So I'll quit rambling here and welcome Stephan to the program.
Good evening, sir, and thank you for joining me tonight.
Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm very happy to be here and thank you so much for the kind words about the show.
It is the biggest philosophy show in the world at the moment.
I'm sure any special genius of mine just due to the technology that is available that allows us to have these amazing conversations about ideas around the world without the impediments of the mainstream media.
Traditional status academia and so on.
So it's a real privilege to have this technology and to be able to have these kinds of conversations.
So thank you so much for the invite.
Yeah. Well, you know, I spent a lot of time playing with philosophy right here on the air, as I know you do.
And some of the things that I witnessed, you know, it happens very quickly.
You know, you're trying to come across, you know, if we were to wipe the slate clean, but you can't get anybody to wipe the slate clean so they get some of that fog out of the way, the cotton or whatever's in the way to grasp, you know, some of the philosophies that you and I share.
And one of the things I'm saying that happens very quickly is people want to drag you out into go sell, you know, the society's problem.
Okay? Well, how are we going to deal with this and how are we going to deal with that?
To me, I just want to throw this out on the table here.
I think the only problem that needs to be solved is the individual trying to secure his freedom, his liberty, and his home, his pursuit of happiness, before they can go out and try to solve society's problems.
What's your thoughts? Well, I agree.
And that's probably why I'm here.
But no, I think you're entirely right.
If I had a dollar for every time somebody said, but what about the roads?
You know, I would have, well, quite a lot of fiat currency under my bed.
So I think you're right.
The way that I try to analogize it is something like this.
If you and I were sitting around in the 17th century, even the 18th century, and we were saying, let's get rid of slavery, and everyone said, well, how will this slave get a job, and how will this slave get a job, and we'd sit there and say, well, I don't know how society will look.
I don't know how each individual problem within society is going to be solved in 50 years in the absence of slavery.
I do know that slavery is wrong, that slavery is immoral, and that's what we should be basing our decisions on, not the minutiae of how I think?
But the initiation of violence is a bad way to solve problems, and the government is fundamentally based upon the principle that a bunch of people with guns, waving them around long enough and screaming loud enough, will solve every social problem under sun and moon, from crime to healthcare to education to the suckering of the old and all of that.
I mean, and we all understand in our individual lives that the initiation of force It's a bad thing.
Weird short circuit that occurs when we go from our lives to these abstract lives of the nations is a really, really bad thing.
So I agree with you. We don't have to solve all of the future problems.
We have to make our decisions based on what is fundamental and moral in the world.
Yeah. Well, that's something we're in desperate need of is some morality where we can, you know, some common sense, something, man, needs to start feeding in.
But, you know... If we were to try to put our thumb on, for example, the reasons for people, your refusal to, say, step outside the box, why they would be so quickly to start worrying about, you know, look, I want to tell you what freedom is.
And it's right here in this box that I'm handing you, but I'm going to explain to you before I let you open it.
And this is what it's going to amount to.
And then immediately they go to, well, who's going to take care of of this guy and that guy, like you were just saying.
What do you suppose brings them to that?
You think that's ingrained I don't know, from a belief system or some sort of inheritance of man or something?
What's your thoughts on that, Stephen?
Well, no, I think it's very basic and it's very primitive, but I don't think it's innate.
If you're a farmer and you have a bunch of cows that are very expensive to keep fenced in, the most efficient way that you can keep your livestock contained is to train your livestock to attack each other if they approach...
The boundaries of the field, right?
Then you don't have to build any fences because you get this cow-on-cow violence that is your fence, right?
And this slave-on-slave violence is, or slave-on-slave aggression is a better way of putting it, is the way that we are entrapped.
So when people hear the truth, the simple truth, right?
Violence is a bad way to solve social problems.
Everybody understands that.
And then you extrapolate it to the government that the initiation of force is a very bad way to solve social problems.
And we can see that these social problems just keep getting worse and worse.
So the theory gets confirmed more and more every day.
What people say is they say deep down, right, in their souls, they say, oh, man!
I am going to be so unpopular with those around me if I accept this truth.
And it makes them feel very anxious because they know that if they bring this truth to other people or they accept it themselves, their lives are going to be very different.
Their lives are going to get kind of exciting and kind of difficult at the same time.
So they don't want to.
Maybe they know somebody who works for the government.
Maybe they know somebody who's doing some not-so-great things in the police or the military.
And they just don't want to go there because they know that no government agents are going to come crashing in through their windows if they accept the non-aggression principle.
But they do know, or at least they fear, that those around them are going to get very upset with them for bringing this up.
And that is the fence that we have and what the government fundamentally is.
It's not a building and it's not a bunch of laws and it's not even a bunch of guys with guns.
What the government fundamentally is...
It's the willingness that we have as citizens to attack each other for bringing simple moral truths to light.
That's the fundamental reason the government has any power whatsoever.
And there's no easy way to change that, but that's what I believe happens.
Well, let's do an example.
Let's try to solve a problem here.
Let me see. You can pick one.
We'll save the kids, build some highways...
Well, you want to do the drug war?
That's a fairly easy one to bite off.
I mean, the drug war is very easy, right?
I mean, to solve the drug war, you simply need to stop throwing people in jail for putting things into their own bodies.
I mean, that's crazy.
I mean, that's so fundamentally nutty.
It didn't work with prohibition and alcohol.
It doesn't work with drugs.
They can't even keep drugs out of prisons.
So even if they turn all of society into a prison, which sometimes feels as if it's their goal...
They simply can't get rid of drugs.
So you legalize them and immediately you have much less crime.
Addicts can actually get the help that they need and people who are just using it for mild recreational purposes.
I mean, who really cares?
And so you just legalize it and then children are safe because at the moment children are not safe from drugs because it's so profitable to get someone hooked that drug dealers will offer lots of free samples and try and get people when they're young and not so wise to get involved in drugs because then they can profit off them for many years before they waste away and die.
And so you immediately get a safety for children, much less crime, much less expense and help for the addicts.
And you leave the people who are recreational drug users alone, which is exactly as it should be, could solve the problem tomorrow.
But the government really likes having that power over us.
And it also likes the fact that because there are crazed drug dealers who steal, that we then feel we need even more government protection.
Okay, that was a lot of weird sounds.
Sorry, I'm back. I got kicked off.
Are we back here, Seven? Yeah, I'm back.
Sorry, I got kicked off for some reason.
Okay. Well, I tend to agree with you only because, for example, I've been over to Europe.
And in Europe, when I was over there, I was a teenager, and there's no limit for, you know, any age limit for drinking.
And things I couldn't help but notice, you know, while I was in Germany, that, you know, everywhere you went, I don't care if it was a construction site or whatever, you'd see cases of beer bottles sitting around.
And, you know, if you were at a guest house somewhere, some kid would walk in with a little bag, and he'd get three or four bottles of them flip-top beers, you know.
And take them home.
Well, alcoholism in Europe is nothing compared to what we have here in America.
Yeah, like here's a good rule of thumb in the world.
There are not many rules that you can follow very easily or pretty much blindfolded, but here's one great rule of thumb in the world.
If you have more laws than Germany, you're not doing something right as a country.
That would be my suggestion.
Absolutely. I've never looked at it that way, but I suppose that would cover it.
It's like if you have worse food than Europe and if you're later than a Frenchman and you have more rules than Germany, you're definitely not doing something right.
Yeah. Well...
So how do we get, you know, I've listened to a lot of your philosophy, and I don't know that I've heard a lot of your answers.
I've listened to a lot of your philosophy.
When I go to answer, I try to paint this picture of, you know, some pure world, you know, like there is nobody there but you, okay?
And you were born into the world, and you have a right to your life.
And then all of a sudden you reach a certain age where somebody else has a right to your life and you didn't really know what that meant until you got a little bit older and realized they had some serious power over your life.
And the things that you get invited to, I don't know, driver's licenses and contracts and banking and all these things.
And at some point, if an individual, like myself or yourself, we made the discovery that, man, this is really...
Not working out for me, you know, and wanting to separate.
How would you yourself go about explaining to you two, what would that mission be for you?
How would you, what direction would you take your first step and say, I am leaving the world and I'm going to go do this?
Oh, I mean, that's not a theoretical question for me.
That's been a project of mine for many years.
So I'll give you a brief answer, or at least as brief as I am humanly capable of, which some people say is not too brief.
But You can't talk about freedom with people fundamentally.
At least that's been my experience.
Because all you do is you end up getting in these useless, circular, knotted-up debates where nobody ever changes their mind.
I have not found it productive to talk with people about freedom.
And so I've done a fair amount of research into, you know, what makes for effective communication.
And of course, about 90% of communication is nonverbal.
And you have to find ways not to talk to people about freedom but to show them freedom and to show them integrity and to show them commitment in your own life.
The first freedom is you.
The first freedom has to be you.
Then what you become is you become instead of somebody who's grabbing people's lapels in the marketplace saying, you've got to listen to me.
We've got to be free, which just makes you look like some crazy guy shouting at a street corner.
What you want to be is somebody who's free, who goes up like a flare or a lighthouse in a dark and stormy night.
And you say, this is a life that I have constructed for myself that is free and beautiful and wonderful.
And then those people who are far out at sea who were lost and looking for shore can see a lighthouse and they can see it over the Internet in a way that was never possible before.
They can see that and then they can head towards you and they can say, how did you do it?
How did you do it?
What you have is great.
I want some of that.
Right.
So it's like if you live in a nation of everybody's overweight, you can yell at everyone to lose weight.
It's not going to make any difference.
But if you lose weight yourself, then the other people who are interested in that will find you and find out how you did it.
That's the way that I know how to do it, and no other way has worked.
Well, that's exactly what I've done, and I've now realized that's exactly what you have done, because I'm certainly living a different kind of life than I was, say, 15 years ago.
But, you know, sometimes when I'm sitting here at the microphone talking about, you know, how to conduct, you know, living your life, staying out of the banking system, stay out of debt, only take or purchase what you can absolutely pay for.
You know, it's an absolute.
You gave you money, it's done, no payments.
Medical industry, you know, ways to deal with all the elements that are actually causing the problem.
I could throw out there a remedy saying, okay, tomorrow we could cut the head off the snake by getting rid of the Federal Reserve.
The first question that's going to come down the pipe is, what do we use for money?
Right, right. Like if there's no government agency, we're just going to sit there sitting on our hands and starve to death.
Exactly. And if I were to say back, well, have you got any goats?
If you've got any skills, can you babysit?
Right. Yeah, there you go.
And so it's getting people to think along those lines that just because this system exists, and it's possibly the only one you're aware of, what do you think they used before this one came along?
And the other amazing thing about that is how much people don't know.
About the system that they use today, their medium of exchange, fiat money and banking and how it all works.
I get totally upset when people are worried about their credit rating.
I've always told them, What does credit look like?
Can you show me what it is?
It's an opinion. Yeah.
Well, that's all it is.
And, you know, the thing of it is, is people walking around, you know, what are you worth?
I don't know, but I got a credit rating, you know, given by somebody else based on somebody else's line of thinking.
Their program, their process is determining your worth.
Your value, okay?
And while you're doing all these things, you know, the only value you have is when you go to the bank and that banker tells you, well, we can give you $10,000, but we can't give you $15,000.
So right away you know your worth is only $10,000.
And so now you're operating on a system.
If somebody were to ask you, what's your worth?
$10,000. Oh, well, our stuff costs, you know, $20,000.
And people don't realize if they just took all that into their own hand and created some self-worth, you know, their word versus the bank's word.
I don't want to go from town to town or store to store saying that, you know, I bank with such and such a bank.
And if everybody thinks that that's a good bank, well, then, I don't know, they'll take one of their checks or their debit card or what have you.
But how about if I just walk through the door and say, you know, my name is Joe McNeil.
And I want to conduct business here today.
And I've actually done this.
I've lived this. I've mentioned this before in my program.
You know, I have people here where I live that know me well enough.
You know, I'm not walking around with a pocket full of money, but when I walk in and I tell somebody something, I need this, and I might need it today, and I'll be able to cover this by such and such time.
That's how I live my life now.
And if I could get other people to do the same, and if you could get the other people to do the same, get them to leave the banking and the financial institutions, just those two entities right there, and start conducting their daily lives without those institutions.
That in and of itself would cause A change in the way people perceive things and how things work.
Then all of a sudden, instead of the banks being worth something, now everybody is worth something as an individual.
Their word is worth something.
And when they walk in someplace, there's actually some respect for the individual and not just for his credit card or his checkbook, if you follow what I'm saying.
Yeah, I mean, I think a key ingredient to freedom is just stop buying stuff.
I mean, just stop.
I mean, as much as possible, you know, I have to buy food for my kid and, you know, things like that.
But just, you know, stop buying stuff.
I mean, my car is 12 years old.
You know, I just like to not buy stuff.
And I think that's really important to the degree to which people can get out of that consumerism.
There's a reason that objects are called possessions because they possess you like a devil and they keep you working.
And I think it's really important to not get possessed by objects and to retain the integrity of your own being and have your value in...
Your relationship with yourself, your relationship to truth, your relationship to virtue, and your relationship to those around you who you can love.
That is where the real treasure is, in my opinion.
People run after stuff and they buy it, and that's just putting you deeper and deeper into the debt of the tax farmer at the top of things.
Well, Stephan, I want you to hang on.
We're down here at the bottom of the hour.
We're going to take a four-minute break, and we'll be right back.
Folks, you're listening to Who's Next.
I'm your host, Joe McNeil, here on the Microfact.
It's 26 minutes before, depending on which way your clock is running.
If you're listening to Who's Next, I'm your host, Joe McNeil, here on the Microfact Broadcast Network.
And, uh... I have a guest with me here tonight, in case you missed the first part of the program, a philosopher, if you will, by the name of Stephan Molyneux, who has something called freedomainradio.com.
I want you to go there and pay a visit with Stephan and check into some of his material.
Man, there is so much stuff I wanted to cover here tonight, Stephan, that I realize now we're not going to make it.
No, that's why I have such a ridiculous number of podcasts.
Sorry, go on. But, you know, I wanted to throw a little something out there, you know, because your philosophy is pretty much the same as mine.
We can't solve problems by beating the hell out of everybody and blowing stuff up and cannibalizing families for the sake of saving them.
We've seen a lot of those kind of things take place in our lifetime.
So we have to change Our line of thinking and how we look at things.
But, you know, people are struggling, I think, to...
They want to go somewhere, but I don't think they really know where to go because as soon as you say, the answer is over here, they want to look away.
Well, can I bring this basket with me?
Well, that basket is part of your problem.
Well, I don't want to separate with it.
They just don't want to peel away or...
Give anything a chance because they've been so comfortable with, you know, with what they've done with their life or what they've done or had done to their life at this point for the sake of slaves.
Because, I mean, basically that's all we ever really were.
I'm not sure of your age, but mine, you know, I'm 58.
I've been a slave all my life unknowingly until one day I discovered, wow, that makes me a slave.
So what do I do now?
You know, um...
Different things that come along, you know, I don't know if you've witnessed any of this, but, you know, people are desperately trying to become, you know, their own personal lawyers and exercising different codes and, you know, UCC codes, you know, blah, blah, blah, and claiming the straw man and all this.
And all they're doing is really throwing themselves on the altar to be the next one slaughtered.
We have to have a clearer line of thinking than that.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
I do think that there's a very growing and significant unease in the world these days now.
I mean, you can't pick up the newspaper or read anything on the internet that has anything to do with government.
That has any smell of success anymore, other than, you know, hey, we passed a bill, and so before the inevitable catastrophes begin to occur, there's short periods of jubilation, like when a cocaine addict gets another hit, he's happy until the hangover hits, right?
And so when you read about what's going on in Europe and you have Greece is catastrophically in debt, Japan has one of the largest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, the socialist countries that have always been the The sort of Valhalla of the socialist crowds are facing significant problems.
The euro is beginning to crumble.
What's happening in South America is a complete mess.
India and China are doing relatively well, but only by selling to us, at least so far.
And the only way that we're able to keep doing it is if they keep buying up US dollars so that they can give them back to us to buy their stuff.
So the whole system doesn't work, and it really is very evidently not working.
And when you look at someplace...
In the United States, women only got the vote in the 1920s, and so universal suffrage, like true democracy, really only came along in the 1930s, and then really only began after the Second World War.
And after the Second World War, from like 1946, let's say, until...
1970 was only 24 years.
And after 1970, you started to get stagflation, rising national debts, you had the two-thirds increase in federal government spending under Reagan.
It really didn't take very long.
For the wealth created by the freest economic system in human history to feed the state to the point where it became a Leviathan that began to eat up the entire body politic, it really was a very short period of time that it took for this to go so badly wrong.
And I think you could ignore it for a while when governments were getting more and more into debt and there wasn't these perpetual wars.
But now people are really beginning to see this system does not work.
And you're right. I think they are looking for something.
I think that in the past they would have gone to a more totalitarian system.
That was the rise of the fascistic states in Europe in sort of the 1920s, 1930s.
But people can't buy that ideology anymore.
They can't buy totalitarianism as an ideology.
There is this kind of drift towards this soft kind of touchy-feely socialism, the sort of turn-and-cough socialism of Barack Obama, but people don't really believe in that stuff anymore either.
And so they really are backed into a corner looking for something new, and the only thing that is really going to work is a return to core principles, morality.
And, you know, people will try six different ways from Sunday to get away from that.
But eventually, you just have to look yourself in the mirror and say, are we doing right and good as a society?
People are really beginning to see the system doesn't work now.
And they really are looking for alternatives.
And that's why I think what we're doing is so important.
Well, again, you know, I needed to bite into somebody else on the show because we're agreeing just too much here.
I just... I don't know that what we're bringing to the table is really something new as maybe something that just hasn't surfaced in so long that we have a hard time going back to it.
I always try to deal with simplicity just to keep things simple.
We can create Humongous problems all by ourselves when the answer was just, you know, really simple.
I can give you an example.
You know, one weekend I watched a gentleman work on a truck all weekend.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, he kept working on that truck and he finally came over and he sat down next to me.
And he says, man, I just can't figure it out.
And I said, well, what's the problem?
And what he shared with me was, he said, I'll put this new engine in my truck, and I did this, and I did that.
And he says, but now I've got this condenser up there in the front, and the thing costs $2,500, and the grill is rubbing against this condenser.
And... So what he did was he shimmed the hood out farther, separating it from the cowling.
And I said, well, let's go over and take a look.
So I went over and I looked at the problem there for a second.
And I asked him, I said, you do have a three-quarter inch wrench?
He said, yeah. I said, well, if you have one, all you need to do is get up there.
You see that bar up there on the top?
You just lean your radiator back away from the grill and you'll be good to go.
Wow. Now, I must tell you that these metaphors are entirely too macho for me.
I am a philosopher, which means that occasionally I will dust my bookshelf, and once I clean the lint out from inside a computer mouse.
This hardware stuff that you're talking about, I can feel chest hair growing as we speak, and I think I'm thinking a little heavier, so that's good to know.
Well, these are...
The point being, the simplicity of his problem, he was so far into the problem, he couldn't see the problem, and...
It was a lot simpler than what he thought.
So what we're dealing with today, I think there's a lot of simple answers, you know, like voting.
I know you've talked about voting and what you think about voting.
You know, how would we sit here and convince people, just don't vote.
Just don't do it. I would like to create an entire society of just, you know, just don't vote anymore.
And, you know, I'd even go so far as to say, well, if you don't vote, because there's no law requiring you to vote, so I would suppose that there would be no law requiring you to do whoever got voted into office, you know, along those lines or something.
Asking or begging the question, okay, well, how did we get here?
Why would I have to be responsible for somebody who got into office that I didn't agree with or any of those things, and now all of a sudden he's sending me a bill for healthcare?
Yeah, but the democracy thing, it's genius.
I mean, it's genius because it makes people feel that there's some sort of social contract.
And to me, it's like, look, if voting is such a great idea that we should run an entirely massively complex and individualistic modern economy by voting, if we should distribute monopoly power to people with guns by voting, then clearly it's the best system.
If it can work in the most complex scenarios, surely it can work in a more simple scenario.
And that's the way things should work.
So if you want to get married, what should happen is everyone in a 10 block radius should vote on who you get married to.
And you should, of course, as an individual, have a vote to do that.
And then you have to get married to that person and you have to stay married to that person.
And maybe once every 10 years you can vote to change your partner if you can get everyone else to get interested in your problems.
And that's how we should run it.
And the same thing if you want to get a job.
If you want to have a career or you want to go to school and figure out what you want to do with your life, you shouldn't get to decide for yourself.
What you should do is you should get your whole extended family out to your 16th cousins to sit down and vote about What it is that you should do, whether you should be a doctor or a lawyer or a garbage man or whatever, a plum picker, I don't know, whatever.
And everybody should vote and then you should have to do that.
And then maybe you can petition them once every five years if you want to change your career.
And if you propose that to people and said this is how decisions should be made in your life, in your personal life.
People would just be like, they'd say, that's insane.
That would be completely a terrible way to tell people to get who to marry and whether to have, you know, if you want to have kids, you should, your whole block should get together and vote on whether you should have kids.
And if they vote yes, you can have them.
And if they vote no, then you can't have them.
Everybody says, well, that would be insane.
That would be dictatorial.
It's like, well, why is it any different with your money than it is with your career?
Why is it any different with the military?
Why is it any different with laws?
If it doesn't even work in something as simple and basic as what career you should choose, how on earth could it work with a 350 million strong, incredibly complex economy?
And that's what people just – you put these things together and you can see, you know, little sparks going between their eyeballs as they try to get away from the implications of that kind of simplicity.
Yeah, and simplicity to me is where it's at, like I stated earlier.
Well, so here we are, 2010.
2010s, we're in hot water, clean up to the bottom of our bottom lip.
The world is, at best, shifting sands.
You're not sure What you want to do, there's people, you know, talking survival, there's, you know, wars coming into view, rebellions, what have you.
So, where do we start, Stephen?
Do we go out and start a community somewhere?
Or, I don't know, just go from community to community and say, look, we think we have an answer.
Why don't you see if you don't agree with us?
What would be your idea if you had one?
Well, I hope that what I'm doing is my idea, because if I had a better idea, I should be doing something else.
I don't think living in the woods, I don't think starting communities, I don't think that we can abandon society.
You know, like, we're the first people who've noticed that the Titanic has hit the iceberg, so we just like...
We sidle over to the lifeboats and we slowly get in.
It's like, no, no, we're just checking.
I think I dropped something in here.
And I cut the cords and go sailing away.
I don't think that we can abandon society.
The way that I look at it is in a time of plague, if you are a doctor...
You can leave, but it's kind of more honorable to stay and fight and play, I think.
I don't think we can honorably leave because most people, they don't know, they don't really understand, and they can't solve these problems themselves.
So they need help.
I don't think moving is the answer.
Some people say go to New Hampshire, and if you like him, if you go there for social reasons, I think that's great, but it's not going to change anything politically.
But I think that the way that we do it is we use this incredible medium.
You know, communication trumps monopoly every single time.
I mean, why do we have more than one denomination of Christianity?
Because of the printing press, right?
The printing press broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church.
And we have now the second Gutenberg revolution in terms of the dissemination of information.
We have this incredible medium called the internet.
And that allows for the free flow of information, the free flow of alternate opinions.
I mean, you can log in.
As an American, you never had access to foreign newspapers until the internet, really.
I mean, you could go to the library, but who cared, right?
But now you can go to a website and see, hey, I wonder how Germany views what we're doing here.
And just that kind of perspective, it breaks people.
It wakes up the Matrix babies and pops them out of the pot.
That kind of stuff, I think we just have to keep passionately pumping as much exciting and powerful information into people's heads until they just...
are wired in a different way.
And they look at what seems like physics, you know, what seems like gravity, which is culture in the absence of alternative information or arguments, they begin to see that what they think of as gravity is all just a bunch of opinions.
And that can be changed.
You and I don't sit there and say, let's repeal gravity.
But for most people, their culture is like physics.
It's like gravity. Until they get a sequence of passionately argued opposing positions.
And that begins to crack the physics of culture and turn it into, or reveal it for what it is.
Which is just a bunch of opinions that have hardened over time into what seems like absolutes.
And I think that's what we have to keep doing.
Well, you know, I think people are probably, I've mentioned this before during my program, you know, we accomplished something here recently without any leaders or anything, anybody shouting to lead the way during the vaccine program, okay? Everybody just basically said no.
And that was it. And it just started evaporating and it went away and it went away.
And they tried to resurface it, you know, once or twice.
I think I even saw something here the other day and somebody posted, yeah, there's a possibility it might come back.
Well, I hated to tell them I never got here.
As long as people keep seeking the answers, the ideas, I think the most important part is not just to know that they exist or know where to find the answers, but have those things that they found actually act upon, change their life. That's what happened to myself.
I realized at one point in my life that Well, I was asking myself, you know, who are all these people involved in my life?
You know, I owned a trucking company and I'm conducting business with, you know, all these different states.
And, you know, I was accomplishing all that, but I didn't realize all the things that I didn't know or I wasn't aware of until I reached the point that I basically was, well, why am I paying these people and those people?
And that caused me to start digging in a little deeper.
Of course, when you start digging in, And you don't stop, like I didn't stop.
All the things that I found and I realized, you know, I'm a person, if I have convictions, I will absolutely live by those convictions.
And so after my discovery, I decided, you know, hey, I'm not going to live my life this way.
I'm not going to do this for the rest of my life.
I was going to when I started, you know, I've done this for 20 years.
And now I realize that, you know, somebody can just walk in one day with a piece of paper from somebody that I've never met before saying, hey, you owe us this or you have to, you know, make some demand of me that would cause me, I don't know, either to lose all that I'd worked for or they would hold it, you know, on escrow or something while I went out and hired, you know.
A whole battery of attorneys and come and fought the plan, and then when it was all done, I basically would have nothing.
So if I'm going to have nothing based on what your rules are for your game, I thought, well, why don't I just live like I have nothing?
And instead of doing all this work, I mean, it sounds like maybe a little bit of a cop-out, but if you go with, I have one life to live, I'd like to enjoy a little bit of it.
Rather than feeding the machine for, you know, 20, 40, 60 years, nobody was going to hand me a gold watch or any of those things, so I didn't have that to look forward to.
Then I figured, well, by the time you reach, I don't know, 50, 60 or something, your water skiing career was over.
We wouldn't be doing too much of that.
So it was just a matter of, you know, some real realization that came over me.
And in the process of all that, you know, I... Try to convince people, you know, separate yourself from those financial institutions.
Yes, they're there...
Unfortunately, you have to deal with them to some degree, but you don't have to live on, you know, them be your livelihood.
And if everybody were to, in my theory, if you will, were to do things that way, it brought it all down to a minimum, the very minimum of your dealings with associations and banks and corporations. the very minimum of your dealings with associations and banks You know, I've said many times, you know, it's not that America is like a fuel glutton or, you know, we're just spoiled brats.
It's corporations that made us this way.
They gave us the deals.
They gave us the way to finance our happiness, you know, only to find out later the price that we were paying for all these conveniences and all these wonderful things that we have now is what I discovered.
It wasn't worth it, not to me.
And so I just basically just dove out the window, in a manner of speaking, but in a big way.
So much so that I just walked away.
You know, I said, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore.
And, you know, I've sat here on the microphone and suggested, look, people, if you are still pushing that rock up the hill to get it over the top, Why don't you consider a lawnmower shed, all insulated, you know, some sheetrock in it, this kind of thing. Whatever it takes to separate yourself from the things that are bringing an entire country to its knees.
Now, I don't know what you live like, and you do live in Canada, is that correct?
I do. Yeah.
I don't know if they allow lawnmower sheds as a home project up there.
I hope that I will never have to find out, but...
Well, you know, it's what you're willing to give, you know, what you're willing to change.
How would you go about starting over?
You know, you want to do that do-over.
Okay, I'm going to do over. I've seen a lot of times where people, you know, okay, I'm leaving the system.
And then six months, eight months go by.
Yeah, I had to go down to the bank and borrow $8,000.
Yeah, I got my driver's license back because I have to drive this U-Haul from New York to, you know, all these excuses of why they had to pour themselves back into that system.
No stamina whatsoever.
If you're going to make a decision about something and it's as big as, okay, I'm going to change my whole life, you haven't changed anything if you wander back in one piece at a time because that's how you got there to begin with.
And that's how it all worked in a nutshell.
Anyways, Stephan, I can't believe this hour went by so fast.
Like I said, I had a lot of things that I thought we could cover, but we'll have to have you back, I suppose, if you'd be willing to do that.
Well, that's very kind. I appreciate that, and I certainly do appreciate the invite, and I just wanted to say hello to your listeners, and thank you so much for Listening in to some of the non-mainstream trickles of human thought that I think will one day shortly be a flood,
let's hope, and to congratulate them on thinking outside the box because the box is getting smaller and smaller and darker and darker and the sooner we're out the better to a future of pacifism.
And nonviolence as a way of organizing society.
It is going to come. It is going to happen.
It is inevitable. But that doesn't mean that it's easy.
So I appreciate the invite and thank you so much.
All right. Thank you again, sir.
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