Canceled Freedom Fighter: "I'm Not Sure How Many Will Make It To Bitcoin Raft" | Stefan Molyneux

With regards to Bitcoin, I'm in triage mode and I have been really since the beginning. And you know, triage mode is what? So, I started my show in 2005. That's 21 years now. You know, I'm reaching 10 million [music] people a month. And generally, you get cancelled when you make a difference. You get cancelled when you move [music] the needle. If you're just, oh, the Federal Reserve is terrible. Boy, wouldn't it be great if we [music] had the Okay, that's fine. You you can say all of that cuz you're not changing anything. And so when 2020 came around, I don't think they wanted me doing much in the public square. In the past, of course, what happened was when you had a large disposable biomass in in particular when government [music] couldn't pay its bills, just went to war. So what Iran is most likely to do is to attack the value of the US dollar. And one of the ways they do that, of course, is through getting people used to transacting in Bitcoin through this straight of Hormuz thing. So the fact that they are shifting people's perceptions of a valid payment platform from US fiat to Bitcoin, I think it's seismic. Now the tables have turned now completely in that manual labor will be replaced by robotics and not thinking will be replaced by AI. Now AI still has a hallucination problem and that's sort of baked into the architecture. But it's funny how people say, you know, the problem is is that AI hallucinates. [music] I'm like, have you talked to the average voter? So, it's like, you know, force-feeding someone LSD up the ass and then saying, you know, they're not really good at gymnastics. It's like, yeah, cuz they're in another dimension that you put them there. Those aren't actual actors in the little box. They're not there for real. It's all digital. You get that, right? You listen to music, it's digital. It's not real. They're not musicians, tiny musicians playing in your ears. And so, they're not actually evaluating Bitcoin or anything like that. What they're doing is they're saying, "Well, hang on. Bitcoiners are bad. So, if I become a [music] Bitcoiner, people will think I'm bad. Well, I don't want people to think I'm bad. Therefore, Bitcoin must be wrong. And it's like I just that's you can't help people like that. I honestly don't know how many people are going to make it across the finish line. Why do certain voices get erased while others get promoted everywhere? Today's guest is someone who built one of the largest philosophy platforms online only to be completely removed from the mainstream. Stefan Molyneu, founder of Free Domain, has spent decades breaking down power, control, and human behavior from first principles. His ideas overlap heavily with the same questions that led many to Bitcoin. So today, we're asking what's broken in society and why are certain people not allowed to talk about it. Stefan, it is wonderful to have you here today. >> Thank you very much. I appreciate the invite. >> So, you have been doing this for decades. I'm not totally sure, can never be too sure, how much of my audience uh knows who you are. And you're one of the first people really out there to be talking, I'll say, at a grand scale about this um online over the internet. Where where did this come from in your life? And and how has this led you to the Bitcoin space? And I would love for you to just kind of give some of your story a little bit. Um and then we'll get into today and what's happening and and how to fix these things from first principles and and where we're at in society right now. Yeah, I got very interested in economics as a kid. Somebody gave me a big book of like all the great disasters of the 20th century. You know, there was the Hindenburg, there was the Titanic and so on. And then there was the Great Depression, which was uh 1929 to basically a 14-year thing until the start of the Second World War, basically. And I remember I saw these pictures. I was real little, maybe maybe seven or eight. I don't want to sound overly precocious. I was a nerd in lots of ways, but I remember seeing these pictures of like it's 25% unemployment and and it's like I remember thinking, well, there's always something to do around the house. Like there's the list is never done around the house. There's always things to do. So, how is it possible that people couldn't get work? That doesn't make any sense to me. It's not like, you know, we we finished everything that needs to be done in the country. You know, we can teleport. We can uh go to the moon and back uh in a blink. you can uh live forever. It's like so I just remember thinking that kind of puzzling like okay I understand why the Titanic sank. Okay, there were people who uh were opposing the Federal Reserve and the iceberg and then I understood why the Hindenburg is the fire and all of that but I just didn't understand why so many people couldn't get work. That didn't really make any sense to me. And I remember sort of puzzling over that and trying to trying to sort of figure that out. And then a friend of mine who was into the Canadian rock band Rush gave me a copy of the Fountain Head. And through that I got into Austrian economics, von Mises and Rothbart and Hayek and and uh so on and it was like ah it's all about the money. It's all about the money. Now in the personal history of my father's side um there was an enormous catastrophe for the world as a whole for the British Empire for England and for my father's family where four of the young men were killed in World War I and I remember started started reading the history of World War I and I was like okay so everyone was like gee I hope it's not over by Christmas right they enlisted in in the fall and they thought it's going to be a two or three month war now why did they think it was going to be a two a three-month war ended end up in a 4-year plus absolute catastrophe that really marked the decline of the West in ways that seem very hard to reverse. And so when I put these sort of two things together, sort of family history of World War I and then understanding Austrian or free market economics, I'm like, they're not printing money, they're printing death certificates. That's what they're printing. They're not printing fiat. They are releasing demons to eviscerate human beings. And I'll sort of give you a very brief example of that and then I'll let you get back to your questions. It's been a while since I've been interviewed, so I've got a lot to say. But in World War I, one of the reasons they thought it was only going to last a couple of months was that's all the money they had. Even by late 1914, you know, 8 weeks, what 10, 10 weeks after the war started, they were running low on just about everything. and the war would have ended 3 months, 6 months at the outside because what happens is one country runs out of money and then has to sue for peace and then you get peace. That's the way it generally works. But with central banking, with fiat currency, with money printing, and with going off the gold standard, and with borrowing, they were able to extend this war from a couple of months to four plus years, raising the death count from about 800,000 people to over 22 million allin. Now, that didn't happen because people wanted to fight. That didn't happen because they had the money. That didn't happen because they were full of hatred. that happened for one reason and one reason only. Why were 21 million plus people murdered and why was Western Europe destroyed and the economies destroyed and so on and which of course as you know World War I as uh one of the French generals famously said uh with the treaty of Versail said this is not armistice this is not the end of the war this is peace for 20 years and he turned out to be correct almost down to the month so without World War I you don't get world war II World War II 50 million killed and the end of the empire and uh and so on. I'm not an imperialist, don't get me wrong. I'm not a big fan of the British Empire, but uh it definitely was catastrophic for the British people as a whole and the Western people as a whole. And so all of this was set in motion by one thing and one thing only. Now, I'm not a single cause explanation, but this one is pretty clear. Without the ability to create their own money, war can't continue. And offensive wars can't continue. Because if you actually have to go to the population and say, "Hey, um, there's this country on the other side of the world." This is not particularly theoretical at the moment, right? There's this country on the other side of the world or there's this mean guys. We really don't like them. I want you to send me a check for $20,000 to start this war and sign your kids up voluntarily. People won't do it. Now, if Genghask Khan is thundering over the horizon, then you're going to fight and you won't have any shortage of volunteers or people willing to sacrifice to defend the homeland, their families, and so on. But offensive wars absolutely require fear currency. And the extension of war requires drugging the population with deferred debt. If you have to go people and beg for money every single day to continue a war, people are like, "No, I'm not doing that. Stop this war and the war will wind down." But if you can create your own money and you can, it's like PCP, like I can take on 10 cops, you lose reality completely. And so fiat currency is foundational to civilization. Fiat currency is foundational to peace. And fiat currency is far too powerful, an instrument to put in the hands of anyone. Imagine what it would be like if you took immature people, which politicians tend to be, and you said, "Hey, you can type whatever you want into your own bank account. Whatever you want, anything you want." Boom, boom, boom, boom. What is it? Musk was talking about this with Ted Cruz not too long ago that they found 14 magic money computers in the government. Just create money, send it out. Create money, send it out. That ability to just create money at a whim, at a will. It's sort of like that old Sorcerer Apprentice Mickey Mouse cartoon where he can't control the power. People cannot handle that kind of power. It corrupts everyone it touches. It corrupts entire societies. It destroys the birth rate which can we can get into as well. And so I was like, oh gold standard basket of commodities, oil and you know we we need some way to restrain what the government does and it doesn't really work because any constraint you put on the government will be undone by the government. Like it took America less than 80 years after its founding to break the bonds of the constitution irrevocably. So we need a solution that comes outside of government, outside of political power. So then when I first heard about Bitcoin and I wasn't involved in any the early discussion, somebody just told me about it. Um I think this was back in 2010, 2011, I started talking about it because I was like, ooh, really a currency that is immune to political control. I mean, we can see this in the moment with the round in the straight of Kamuz, right? that they are requiring Bitcoin because they've been locked out of Swift and the uh stable coins are on the Ethereum network are easy to block and so on. So a currency that is free of political control, a currency that removes relatively gently without, you know, some sort of mass French revolution style beheading, some of which of course has been tempting for people throughout history, >> but a way to take the power of creating money, which is creating death and preventing life, out of the hands of people and put it into the hands of the free market. [sighs] I mean, once you took the means of production from the government and slave owners and you put it into the hands of the people, we got the incredible wealth of the industrial revolution and everything that's followed after that. All of this technology allows you and I to chat where we never would have met each other in the past. And if we can do to currency what was done to the means of production through the industrial revolution or what was done to the land through the agricultural revolution, the enclosure movement, the amount of human wealth that we could produce is incomprehensible to us in in the same way that the wealth that we have now would be incomprehensible to somebody in the 15th century. The technology, the medicine, the science, the knowledge, the understanding, the physics, the you know communications. And so we are on the verge, if we can get Bitcoin promoted and adopted, of ending the hegemony of political power and the disassembly of human beings through typing uh money into your own bank account forever and ever. Amen. And I really can't think of a better mission to have in this life. Yeah. Yeah. I I could not either. And it's it's why I was telling you offline like that's why I'm here. you kind of see all these problems come together and you realize this is the greatest mission you could be on. Uh ripping the power away from the money changers. Uh you made me think of so many things. By the way, I love the rants. That's that's what we're here for. That's what the viewers here for. So feel free to to 10 minutes straight, 15 minutes straight, let it all out. Um because you're one of the few that have uh have really um you know, just over time put in the proof of work for a Bitcoiner term, right? Uh and so uh you you deserve that honor to be able to talk as long as you need. Do you think so there's a bunch of questions you may think of and do you think we're in a modern dark age like I've been making this argument recently that with the amount of killing since 1913 since the central banks you know all this stuff world war I feeling like world war I almost never ended in a way which is maybe another question uh where we're kind of still living in that where we had the plane train automobile electricity like all these things right for 100 years 200 years we were finding all these inventions and creating things discovering things and then the last h 100red years or so since the total, you know, central banking and total war. It's just been death, you know, it's been abortions, killing people, like killing ourselves, the maid program in Canada, like all these things where we've just iterated like better mousetraps, but there there isn't a bunch of invention all of a sudden. And I think I feel like people are going to look back 100, 200 years from now and be like, "Wow, that was a modern dark age." Like, "What were you doing with these these death coupons you guys were dealing with these, you know, did does it feel like that to you at the end of the day?" >> It's interesting. It's a good way to it's a good way to put it. I would say when I was a teenager, I went gliding. You know, you you if you go gliding, you get pulled up by an airplane. You you don't have an engine. And it was a wild thing. I didn't fly it. It was somebody else who was flying it. But I remember when the cable was released, it was so quiet cuz normally you're in a plane, boom, engines, whatever it is. I remember it just being so quiet and beautiful. The sun and the, you know, the the the arc of the sky and the clouds and so on. And it was so whisper quiet. Whisper quiet. And I remember the guy who was flying it said, "Well, there's only one way from here and that's down." Right? Because we didn't have any motive power of our own. And so, you know, we stayed up for a while, 20 minutes, half an hour, and you know, we did dives and but but it was we had no motive power of our own. The only thing that we could do was go down. Now, the way that I sort of view it is we had freedom in the past and that has pulled us up like the airplane pulled up the glider and then the fiat currency World War I kind of cut that cord and we've had a lot of we got pulled pretty high. So, we've got a lot of trajectory, we got a lot of momentum, we got a lot of ascension, but we don't have any motive power of our own. And it's the same thing in science. When was the last great advancement in physics? No, it's all non-reproducible lies and polit politics and you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that and global warming is going to drown us all. It's all paranoid fear-mongering nonsense for the most part. And you know, when was our last Shakespeare? When was our last um Newton? When was our last Einstein? I mean it what do we get? Um Neil deGrasse Tyson. [laughter] He's a complete idiot as a court jester. So, we had a lot of momentum that got us up to a great height. And I think since then, we've kind of been circling the drain. And the problem is, of course, that everything now goes through the lens of political power. Uh, art goes through the lens of political power. Science goes through the lens of political power. Biology goes through the lens of political power. Many years ago, I interviewed 17 worldrenowned experts in the field of human IQ, which is not allowed. I mean, the guy who co-discovered DNA, James Watson, he uh was cancelled for talking about ethnic differences in IQ. Now, this guy was one of the foremost cancer researchers of her age. So, people will literally choose to die of cancer, then talk about forbidden topics, and we think that we're beyond blasphemy laws, heresy laws, and so on. So optimism, enthusiasm, excitement, a sense of man's potential to grasp and surmount the limitations of the material world is essential to human progress. We had a lot of that in the 19th century. The optimism of the 19th century that all problems could be solved and human reason could spread everywhere was destroyed by a wide variety of things. Of course, World War I being primarily one of them. And the other thing too, of course, every society seems to contain within it. As long as it's based around a centralized coercive institution like the state always comes to its own destruction because you have a lot of freedom that generates a lot of wealth, generating a lot of wealth generates a lot of inequality. And when you get this inequality, then the people who don't have as much even though they had much more than their forefathers, they don't have as much as the wealthy guys. So then the communists and the sophists and the socialists come in and start saying to all the poor people, "Hey man, the only reason you're poor is because that rich guy stole from your fathers and stole from your ancestors and that's your house and that's supposed to be your wife." And they just rouse up and then they vote to take away all the property of the rich and then everyone gets poor again. And so as long as you have the state, wealth is not used to improve society in the long run. Wealth is used to buy votes and wealth in particular through fiat currency and money printing and debt. Wealth is used to bribe the population, the future productivity of the population, the children and their future taxes being used as an asset, being used as a a an asset that you can borrow against. And so wealth breeds poverty as long as we have this centralized coercive power. And the way that we can begin to push back really against a centralized coercive power is through private money. If money is socialized, socialism is inevitable. Well, money and education if education is socialized. But even the socialization of education relies on fiat currency because if you sent a bill to every parent for the true cost of their child's education and you gave the option to for them to opt out, it would, you know, disappear in about 18 minutes. So uh it really all just comes back to the ability of the government to create its money which produces a a psychosis and I'm not kidding about this. It produces a psychosis. You know before this interview I was thinking you know what's one of the sort of the key things that ascending civilization have and it's pragmatism. It's a dedication to reality. It is a sensible empiricism relying on the evidence of the senses. Understanding that human reason is perfectly adequate in fact necessary to understand the world. Grounding facts, reason, evidence and pragmatism. And then latestage societies get detached from reality. And one of the ways they get detached from reality is through fiat currency. Because fiat currency detaches us from cause and effect. Fiat currency detaches us from math, from basic numbers. Fiat currency allows you to have the illusion that you can consume without producing simply based on debt and inflation. And fiat currency dissolves the bonds between the generations. Like there was a recent report that came out that people 65 and older in America get $44,000 a year in government funding, whereas those 16 or 18 and under get about 4,000 a year. So it is more than 10 times 11 times I suppose the amount of money goes to the age it is to the young that is a vampiric civilization and the bond between the generations gets broken and so it is one of these really insidious not one person in a thousand knows what's going on and people what do they do they go to the grocery store say oh man it's eight bucks for a box of cereal and it's like well they're ripping us off they're just raising prices they're gouging us it's like no no if you have 20 oranges in circulation and you have $20, each orange is going to cost a dollar. If you have 20 oranges in circulation and each and you have and you have $40, then each orange is going to cost $2. Nobody's ripping you off. It's just that you're diluting the money. I look at the late Roman Empire of a big presentation called the truth about the fall of Rome. And what did they do? They borrowed and they did the equivalent of money printing back in the day, which was to mix all kinds of garbage metals into the silver and gold and even down into the copper. And they just diluted their money supply. So then you get all this money which is not represented by any actual increase in productivity. They're counterfeits. They're counterfeits. Counterfeiting destroys currency. Currency is the lifeblood of civilization. And it drives people mad to have that much power. And it drives people mad that things keep shifting around them in ways that they can't possibly understand. Why is the price of everything going up? Well, because 40% of the US dollars were printed cover that ever existed. not just in the present that ever existed. And so naturally that is going to create like why is it so slow to get into the nightclub because there's a big lineup, right? That's what's happened. And so and so people don't understand it. They're confused. They're frustrated. They're angry. And that's very easy for Sophist to come along and manipulate them and say, "Oh, it's the greedy capitalists. It's the property owners. It's Elon Musk. It's the rich. It's the this or that." And governments love that because governments reap all the power and the blame goes to the shopkeepers and the wealthy people who are still trying to produce things in an increasingly hyperregulated system. And it's easy to turn people's resentment against those fellow slaves trying to survive because they have slightly more cotton on their bodies and slightly more gold in their pockets rather than the people who are the actual villains who are the money creators, the money printers and you know the money changers as Jesus sort of famously pointed out that's always struck me in the Bible as one of the most accurate stories that Jesus was incredibly peaceful for the most part and cancelceled forgiveness and peace and love your enemies except once. when he came to the corrupt money changers and then he brought out the whip and that was something. All right, real talk for a second. We all know health insurance is basically a fiat system of healthcare. It's the biggest debauchery there is. It's expensive, confusing. Somehow you still end up paying hundreds of dollars for a band-aid. We moved to crowd sharing almost 5 years ago. It's the best decision we ever made. 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We didn't touch on it in the beginning at all. And I think this is important for the viewer too before we get into I want to talk about you know separating money and state separating education and state um and the birth rate what's going on also just current day with Iran and some of the you know the mirrors to World War I and some of the things. So we'll get into that in a minute. Why were you just for people who don't know um again you've been doing this for a long time uh there's probably some people watching that you've been doing this longer than they've been born uh potentially uh fighting for freedom you know liberty individual freedom. So you you've been cancelled over the years. You've been derided. You've been you know you know just the globalist I don't know what to say necessarily how to characterize it but people coming after you. Um so I think it's important for the average person because they might go do research after this too and say oh this guy whatever what you know from your own uh mouth you know what was so polarizing about Stfan what you've been saying over the years cuz the first you know 20 minutes whatever it's like okay this makes a lot of sense right to the average person. So how could this guy be so polar how could he be canceled? So, I'd love your thoughts on how have you been so divided over the years? Gosh, where do I how do I narrow it down? If I could only get it down to one or two topics, I'm had a smoother ride through the last couple years. Well, so it started way back in the day. So, I started my show in 2005. That's 21 years now. Before that, I was again mid- teens to mid-30s. So, I've been doing this for 45 years, sort of philosophy and reason and stuff. And generally you get cancelled when you make a difference. You get cancelled when you move the needle. If you're just, oh, the Federal Reserve is terrible. Boy, wouldn't it be great if we had the D, okay, that's fine. You you can say all of that because you're not changing anything. And if you talk about rent control is really bad, and you well, you know, maybe maybe just, you know, in half a generation people might vote differently, but but it's not really cause and effect. and you're not actually interfering with the practical goals of any evildoers in the moment. This is why you have what's called free speech. Free speech is say whatever you want as long as it doesn't actually change anything. Boy, the moment you change things, not so good. And uh this is of course what happened to Socrates, happened to Plato, happened to Aristotle, happened to I mean it's the general lot of philosophers throughout society. And this is why Plato went really abstract because he saw what happened to Socrates who was very practical. Socrates was charged with two things of course at the end of his life not believing in the gods of the city and corrupting the youth and by corrupting the youth they basically meant encouraging the youth to ask uncomfortable questions of the age at which they don't have answers for. So, so what happened was in ancient Athens, the young men who were very keen about Socrates enjoyed going to their teachers, their elders, their fathers, their priests, their politicians asking uncomfortable questions and that was bad for the people who are who claim to know things that they don't know and claim that they're moral authorities when they do great evils. So, that's kind of the deal. So, one of the things that happened early on is the non-aggression principle uh is very very key to basic morality. And non-aggression principle says self-defense is great. You know, if somebody's running at you with a chainsaw and you got a machine gun them down, I will uh I will uh never ever have any problem with that. That seems a perfectly sensible thing. So, it's not pacifism. The non-aggression principle says you can't initiate the use of force. Like I I can punch you back, I just can't come up and punch you. that kind of thing, right? You can even take property back that's been stolen from you and so on, but the non-aggression principle was interesting. Now, I had spent many, many years I I went I started out in the arts. I was an actor and playwright at the National Theater School in Canada for a couple of years and then I did academia. I got a graduate degree in history uh and the history of philosophy and then I went into the business world like yourself. You mentioned earlier before we started the show, you graduated into a recession. So did I. and there was really nothing going on. So I co-founded a software company and and grew it and I became sort of very pragmatic. It's one thing to study the free market. It's quite another thing to have your entire life savings and massive debts dependent upon making good decisions in what's uh left of the free market. So I became sort of very pragmatic in the business world. I was chief technical officer and director of marketing and did a lot of sales and so on. So sort of out there in the world. So I got used to having very practical and pragmatic answers. So when I started to gain some traction in the realm of public philosophy, I said to myself, okay, so the non-aggression principle is what I want the most. And you have to approach it as a blank slate. In the same thing with business, you have to approach things with a blank slate. Preconceptions cost you everything. So I said, "Okay, so if I am really interested in the expansion of the non-aggression principle, what is the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle that I can do the most about?" Ah, I see that second one is the key, right? You say, "Well, I just had a rant about fiat currency." Yes, fiat currency is the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle because it is through fiat currency that almost all other violations spring. But I can't do anything about it. I mean, chain myself to the Federal Reserve and get dragged off and and people would be like, who's that crazy guy ranting about madeup money and whatever monopoly money? So, I had to say to myself, what is the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle that I can do the most about? Not that hard to figure out. It's hitting children. Hitting children is the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle that I can do the most about. I can't stop the Federal Reserve. I can't stop war. I can't stop money printing. I can't stop debt. I can't stop politics. I But what I can do is I can say to people spanking is the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle that you can do the most about. You can convince people. You can't convince people to stop using fiat currency. You can't convince people to not take things for free from the government. I mean, imagine standing in front of a convenience store and someone comes up and says, "Hey man, I won the lottery for $5 million." and you say, you know, you really shouldn't cash that in because that's just made up money and it's going to cause a tiny bit of inflation across the rest of the economy. They'll be like, GET OUT OF THE WAY, BALDI. I'm going in to cash my check. And so they're in. And so you can't talk people out of taking stuff for free from the government. You can't talk people out of using fiat currency. You can't talk the government out of giving up fiat currency or debt or unfunded liabilities or all of this nonsense. So the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle that you can do the most about well in America 80 plus% of families spank it was even higher before I started. And we're not just talking a light swat to the butt. I mean like a lot of them spank with implements like belts and and uh rolling pins and shoes and and like just brutal brutal stuff. Uh there's circumcision which is definitely a violation of the non-aggression principle. genital mutilation for no medical gain, of course. And so I began to work on that. I wrote a libertarian essay, the case against spanking, and said, "Well, spanking can't be self-defense. It's not like the child's coming at you with the aforementioned chainsaw." So, I began to talk about that. Now, I'm a voluntarist, which means that all forced associations are violations of freedom of association. Like, we kind of understand that like if a woman is forced to marry a guy, it's not a marriage. it's just legalized sex enslavement. And so I began to really promote anti-child abuse, anti- spanking in libertarian circles, which seemed like a good thing to do. I was aware that there might be a little bit of push back, but then I thought I thought the libertarians would be like, "Wow, that's true. That this is something we can really do something about rather than just railing against things that you can't change." I mean the amount of intellectual energy that's been poured by libertarians into opposing the non imposing violations of the non-aggression principles gone nowhere. So I thought this and also you know I made a big case that if we raise children reasonably then they won't feel the need to have a big centralized violent political entity at the center of society because people's belief in the necessity of the state and its coercion comes from their belief that it was necessary for them to be violently aggressed against as children. you know, the the parents of the state and and so on. And so I said, people's relationship to the government comes out of their relationship to their parents, right? So people think, oh, just the government has a bunch of money and it just kind of comes out of nowhere and they just spend it and stuff. And that's a child's view of the parents finances, you know, stuff happens, there's money floating around and so on. And also parents say to kids, without the violence that I initiate against you, all will be chaos and destruction. And so then it's oh without the government all will be a mad max thunderdome of chaos and destruction and so on. And so if you kind of drill back down through people's perceptions of the state and the statism it really comes down to parents and teachers and priests and authority figures. So if you change how children are parented, you change their view of political power. In other words, if children flourish in the absence of violence, the initiation of violence, then they grow up to to at least be open to the idea that society can flourish in the absence of centralized political violence. Whereas if people are told and grow up with the absolute belief and necessity that violence must be used against children, they will say, "Well, geez, we need a government because governments are like parents and the people are like children. Without the violence of the parents, everyone will run a muck and so on." And so it seemed to me a pretty good plan, a multigenerational plan, but a pretty good plan. It seemed to be the most practical. Plus, I'm a measurable guy, you know? I mean, when I was in the business world, if I'd have said, uh, um, well, my business plan, my business plan, see, is we're going to make a bunch of money by harvesting gold on asteroids, people would say, wait, what was that? So, go back to that last PowerPoint slide where infinite profits grew from mining gold and asteroids. And I said, "Look, we know that there's gold on asteroids, man. We know it. We can tell from the spectrometers. There's gold on asteroids. And if we mine it, we'll make a fortune." And people will say, "Well, it's true. Yes, it's true that there's gold on asteroids. It is not true that we can mine it next year. We can't do anything about it. Although it's nice if we could, but we can't." And that to me was uh the same as railing against the Fed or government of politics or war without talking about parenting. And so I did a sort of back of the napkin calculation. I start I interviewed subject matter experts on spanking um professors and psychologists about the negative effects. I went through the medical case. I wrote a whole book called peaceful parenting at peacefulparenting.com which is the theory of it, the practice of it and then the science behind it with all of the scientific references as to why peaceful parenting is the way to go and how it's the only way we have a chance of building a peaceful society in the future. I mean it complements Bitcoin for reasons we can get into. So, I sort of made this case and then people said, "Okay, so my parents hit me and that was bad." And I said, "Listen, you you should go talk to them about it. I'm I'm a big one for honesty and relationships. You know, it's kind of the big deal. If you're a philosopher, you've got to value truth and honesty. Otherwise, you're just a massochist. You like get getting cancelled." So, I said, "If you have a problem with your parents, you should go talk to your parents." And said, "I'm going to go talk to my parents." And they they've doubled down. They say I was a bad kid. I should have been beaten. They did the right thing. Blah blah blah blah blah. And I said, "Well, if they're unrepentant evildoers, you don't have to spend time with them." And it's funny because this to me, this is this was an idiot move of my part, not not because I did it, but because I didn't understand the consequences cuz see the way that you gave me permission to ransom. So, the way that I was raised under feminism, right? So, I was raised in 70s and 80s under feminism and feminism was everywhere when I was a kid because I was raised by a single mom. So I, you know, all her friends were divorced and so on. And the feminism was you just have to be kind of dissatisfied and you should leave your husband. Like if you're just not fulfilled 24/7, if you're not over the moon and happy, if you're just kind of bored, if you're just kind of, you know, because the number one cause for divorce is not abuse or alcoholism or other addictions or or monetary desertion or anything like that. It's dissatisfaction, you know, just kind of dissatisfied. So I was like, "Okay, so so you can leave relationships if you're just dissatisfied." Now you should leave relationships if you're aggressed against. If you the husband's beating you or whatever it is, right? There was no such thing as the wife beating the husband. That wasn't even conceived of back then. I had an activist Aaron Pittzy on uh years ago who opened the first men's shelter and she got firebombed and had to flee the country because she tried to give some sympathy for men, which was also quite instructive back in the day. So I was like, "Okay, so I was raised that you don't have to be in relationships that you're just dissatisfied about. And if they're people have done great evil, you probably shouldn't be in those relationships at all." So that's the way I was raised. And these are relationships you chose. You choose your husband, your wife. You don't choose your parents. Just kind of born into it, right? So I said, "Okay, well, you don't have to you have to spend time with abusive parents. If if they remain abusive, they won't admit any fault and they double down and say that you should have been beaten. I mean, that's not very good. That's not productive. And if you have corrupt people and evildoers in your life, it's just like a strange moat. And it keeps good people away from you because good people are like, "Oo, that doesn't feel good. That doesn't smell good. There's something kind of rotten here." And I don't want to particularly descend to that layer of danty and hell. So yeah, so that was the first sort of advice. And it seemed to me in perfect congruence with everything that I've been raised with cuz I was naive. Or perhaps I was wise, but part of my brain was keeping the consequences from me in order to get the idea out. I'll never know for sure. And then what happened was a bunch of people ended up stopping seeing their relentlessly abusive parents. And those parents then went to the media and said, "Oh my god, this evil bald blue-eyed bastard is running a family separation cult." And it's like, I love families. I have a family. I have a wife. I have a child. families are great. You know, friends are great unless they beat you up repeatedly, in which case they're probably not really friends to you. So, that was sort of the first round. And, you know, evil cult leader, destroying families for fun and profit and so on. Um, even though I was simply encouraging people, well, I always had a three-step thing, right? Number one, uh, if your parents were abusive, go talk to them. Uh, and have try to have a chance to work it out. And then if it doesn't work out, you can consider family separation. I never told anyone to leave their families and I said, "Please engage with a competent therapist to go through this process because it's a very difficult thing and kind of hard to understand for a lot of people." Now, it's a very common topic. Going no contact is all over the media. It's talked about without any particular shock or horror, which is kind of the way that things go. Like the first person to really popularize the idea of the voluntary family is an evil guy. And now it's just like it could be good for your mental health. Even Dr. Phil's website, you know, it could be good for your mental health to get away from abusive parents. blah blah blah. So, of course, nobody ever goes back and says, "Oo, sorry about all of those slings and arrows of outrageous insult." >> So, I mean, that's that's the deal. You kind of know that. The guy who said maybe it would be a good idea to wash your hands before doing surgeries on people, um, he was marked and driven out of the profession, ended up being beaten to death in a insane asylum because they considered him crazy for suggesting it. So, so yeah, that was sort of the first round. And then the second round was I got interested, particularly interested in US politics around the time of Trump coming down the escalator because I'd been lied about a lot by the media and I saw the same thing happening with Trump. >> So I was like, "Ah, okay. So >> this is a good way to discredit the media." So I did a whole series of shows and presentations called the untruths about Donald Trump where I took all of the lies the media was telling about him and got rid of them. these got millions and millions of views and and so on. And so I moved the needle with regards to people escaping evildoers within the family and maybe I had some minor effect on the 2016 election. Not intentionally, but just because I wanted to be honest about how false the media was. And so when 2020 came around, I don't think they wanted me doing much in the public square, in the public sphere, because they very much, the left very much wanted that election. And I mean, Biden was not a particularly enthralling candidate. And he certainly had his own skeletons in the closet as you could tell from the, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, the Burisma stuff in Ukraine, and, you know, all of this just just hideous stuff that goes on, let alone the diary, like all the hideous stuff that goes on around their family. And so I was uh in before the election, I'd also been critical of the uh it came from a panggalin nonsense about the co I did a show called the case against China, which was saying, "Of course it came from the lab. Of course, it came from the lab and >> they had to say it came from nature because they couldn't get the lockdowns without it, right? They couldn't get co lockdowns without saying it came from nature because if it was engineered in a lab to specifically infect human beings, they can't get the lockdown because the lockdown is there to slow the spread. Because the more it spreads, the more it's likely to adapt to human beings and be better at infecting human beings. But if it's already perfect at infecting human beings, there's no point having a lockdown. and you might as well just let it run through the population and give everyone natural immunity that way. So they they had to go push back very hard against the lab league hypothesis which was considered I was racist or usually there's an R word in there [ __ ] racist something like that. So there was a whole I think a sort of perfect storm and it also talked about a pretty forbidden topic that I mentioned earlier which was ethnic differences in IQ as a whole between various genetic populations which does something to help explain different outcomes in a free market and hopefully lowers the hostility between races and ethnicities so that we can understand that there's differences uh and and we can celebrate those differences rather than getting mad at everyone because there are differences. So yeah, there was a bunch of stuff that came together. Then in the summer of 2020, which I assume is just a very coordinated uh effort. Uh I was removed from maybe 15 platforms, >> all relatively uh rapidly. And I went from playing stadiums to playing jazz clubs. I went from a giant amp set, like a queen lighting setup to a ukulele and sitting on a bucket in the corner, which is fine. You know, I like jazz, too, as well as stadium rock is fine. And so I did a couple of years in the wilderness and I suppose I'm backish. It's kind of hard to say, but you know, who who knows? Who knows what's what's going to happen, but you know, as far as philosophers go, it's really not bad at all. It's really not bad at all. I mean, historically, what's been done to philosophers, way worse than has ever been done to me. So, I'm not going to complain overly. I still have all my limbs. I'm not being offered hemlock on a regular basis. I'm not in some uh dungeon. So, uh you know, I had to spend some time in the wilderness. It certainly happened to better people than me. Incredible. Incredible stuff. Okay. So, there there's so much there. However, the one thing that I I was thinking of this earlier and and you just touched on it kind of a minute a few minutes ago, which is education. I' I've had this argument with a few different people whether it was uh you know macro thinkers George Gammon uh Michael Green some of these gentlemen who you know their their big thing is we need to re-educate people like people need to be educated on really like basically a lot of things that you're talking about in essence their belief is we need to educate people and my push back has always been and I've actually had these arguments with both of these gentlemen spec specifically like how do you propose out propagandizing the state when you have school control and you you have an endless currency printer paid for by all of us through inflation. We're all on the hamster wheel and they just never seem to be able to give an answer to that and and I and I you know the retent very reticent to go full in on Bitcoin or something like that and I'm like I get it. However, I don't see anything else in my life here on earth studying this for you know nearly two decades that is going to do anything what we think Bitcoin could do. Not that Bitcoin can do it and that it will but there's nothing else. It's like I always get the Titanic analogy of it's going down. the US dollar, the network, all the the apparatuses, the lifeboat is your only chance at survival. doesn't mean you're going to live but and so how do you my question to you I guess is you know how do you is it educa you know separating money and state separating education state is it the money first and then the education domino falls thereafter quickly or is it like these guys say we have to re you know educate people then you know like the money won't matter because fiat you know that's the thing I just I can't grasp we've tried that it feels like and it we haven't got anywhere guys you know so am I going crazy are you like where are we at with this >> I can't guarantee that moment one way or the other, but certainly you seem right thing to me so far. So, I actually did this experiment back in the day. I think it was around maybe 2012 or something like that. So, I started doing my podcast because I had a long commute. I was working in the software field at the executive level. And anyway, I started recording things in my car because I'd always had lots of thoughts. And so, I didn't even monetize it because back then you couldn't really. It was just none of >> and crazy expensive to to distribute and so on, right? Because the band blitz is very expensive back in like 2005. >> But then what happened was somebody said, "Hey, you should uh put a donation button up and I think the technology had kind of recently come in." So I did that and then people started donating and I thought maybe I'll get gas money or whatever it is, you know, the beer money kind of thing that podcasters aim for. For a variety of reasons, it ended up being more than that. And I ended up with my wife's agreement to to quit my tech career and to yell at a potato cam for a living. And so I did that and ended up doing not too badly with it, right? And so so after that stabilized, I said to free market professors, right, academics, and I knew some of them personally. I debated some of them, and I put out the call and I said, "Look, if you're a free market economist, you will maybe teach a thousand people over the course of your career, maybe 2,000 people if you're at the higher level over the course of your career. That's not much. You know, I'm reaching 10 million people a month. So, you'll do way better in the free market of podcasting than you will in academia. You'll reach more people. Maybe you can make as much money. You set your own pace. You can work from home. You can pursue the curriculum that you design and want to pursue. And it seemed like a no-brainer. And uh quick question, what do you think? What do you think if you had to guess? How many free market? And I said, "Listen, I will even teach you. I will be happy to coach you. I'll be happy to train you, give you all my secrets, all the stuff I had to learn the hard way. I'll teach to you the easy I'd love to have more competition because it just raises the profile of the space as a whole. Uh you can come and announce your new podcast on my show. You like it'll be fantastic, right? I I put this out in general and in spec and specific to a bunch of free market economists. Uh quick quick question. How many of them do you think quit their careers to join the free market? Zero. Right? So what does that tell you? It tells you that even if we gave everyone PhDs in free market e economics, they still would prefer government benefits and government power to the actual free market. Now I mean it's quite possible that they would have made they certainly would have had a much bigger impact. They would have lived in accordance with their values and they could have even made more money and they certainly would have had more satisfying careers. But no, they didn't want to let go of the government benefits. So even though they know the government benefits are immoral, even though they know that they're distortionary, they still want to say stay within the academic system which is created and protected by the government. It's a government cartel. And so that to me was a great relief. So education will not work because even if we could give everyone a free market PhD in economics, they still won't choose the free market of their own valition. I did choose the free market, you know, for whatever reason that was better for me. I mean, I took a 75% pay cut to start podcasting. And I mean, you know, because I just I want to do as much good as I possibly can in the world. I don't particularly care how I get there. I just want to, you know, when my eyes close in that final stinky hospital room, I just want it to close on a life well-lived in the pursuit and promulgation of virtue. And I don't really care that much what happens along the way. You know, they're just bumps and, you know, whatever it is. To me, it's like, you know, if you're you're coasting along in a boat and you hit some big waves, it's just kind of part of the fun. I mean, why do you want calm water the whole time? That's kind of dull. So, the education is not uh is not the answer. Uh with regards to Bitcoin, I'm in triage mode and I have been really since the beginning. And you know, triage mode is what patients can you what patients are going to die no matter what? Leave them alone. What patients are going to survive for the next hour no matter what? These are the patients who are going to die if we don't treat them in the next hour. Those are the ones that you focus on, right? And so when I'm trying to orange pill people, I will talk to them about uh Bitcoin and I'll explain why it's important and what problems it's trying to solve and the morals of it. Because if you you can only sell a certain amount of stuff on practical, you know, you'll be rich, whatever it is. But you have to, I think, really give people a moral purpose. The lack of moral purpose since the fall of religion in the west has been one of the big voids that communism is stepping in to fill as it generally does. So I and if people are like, "Oh, it's uh it's it's it's based on nothing. It's just digital vaporware and I'm so on, right?" I'm like, "Well, so do you send emails?" Emails, do they do you print them out and walk them over or do you you send emails? So your bank your bank account, does it actually have a pile of money in it or is it just a bunch of digits? You know, like you look at the most wealthy companies in the world, they tend to be digital. Uh, so the idea that something is not tangible, therefore it has, you know, no value. It's like, do you ever order a movie? You ever order a movie and have it show up on your screen? You know, those aren't actual actors in the little box. They're not there for real. It's all digital. You get that, right? You listen to music. It's digital. It's not real. They're not musicians. Tiny musicians playing in your ears. Anyway, so so I sort of point out that it's not dig the fact that something's digital doesn't mean that it's worth less. It can in fact mean that it's worth more. and they say, 'Well, I want to invest in gold. And it's like, okay, that's fine. You know, the government can just take your gold as they regularly do throughout human history. Uh, you also know that it costs 3% of the value of your gold to store your gold every year, so it's declining. You also know that it's impossible to transport, whereas you can walk across one border with a 12 or 24word phrase in your head and you can carry a virtually infinite amount of money around uh with no no hassle, no problems, and so on. And also that the government can devalue all of your money by just printing whatever it wants. So, I'll just make these cases and if people, you know, most people won't judge an idea by its own merits. In fact, I mean, it's really not more than 5% of people in my experience who will judge like, oh, that's interesting. Make the case. Here's the counter case, and you're actually arguing the facts and merit. What they do is they have an emotional reaction based upon how they think everyone else in their life will think of this idea. So, they're not judging the idea itself. They're judging other people's reactions to this idea. So they've been told that Bitcoiners are crazy. You know, it's just they're rapid anarchists digital chaos agents and it's used for terrorism and blah blah blah. And so they're not actually evaluating Bitcoin or anything like that. What they're doing is they're saying, "Well, hang on. Bitcoiners are bad. So if I become a Bitcoiner, people will think I'm bad." Well, I don't want people to think I'm bad. Therefore, Bitcoin must be wrong. And it's like I just That's You can't help people like that. You can't help. I'm looking for the 5% of people who actually have the intellectual integrity and curiosity to assess an idea based upon the reason and evidence. That's all. I mean, and most people won't do that. And you know, if you've got a pill that will cure a disease and most people will scratch your face out rather than take it, hey, I'm not a big fan of getting this beautiful face scratched out. So, I'm going to just move on to the next person who's willing to take some some medicine. There's one thing more important than Bitcoin. The time you have and the people and relationships you build. In a world full of noise, the real signal is meeting with other Bitcoiners IRL, finding Bitcoin only events, connecting face toface, and supporting the circular economy through Bitcoin friendly merchants around the world. That's exactly what Club Orange is built for. Build your circle, support Bitcoin only companies. The only place in the world you can find all that in one spot is the Club Orange app on iOS or Android. Go to Clubor.org, what used to be the OrangeP app, or scan the code here. Everything you were learning in this episode is completely moot and does not matter if you hold Bitcoin and are still leaving it on an exchange or sharing keys and your KYC information with a third party. This is your wakeup call now. You are only self- sovereign if you alone hold the keys to your wealth. 100% self- custody sounds daunting at first. Believe me, I lost two years of massive gains over a decade ago because I was worried about taking the few minutes it took to understand self-custody. And that's exactly why you need to talk to my friends Tony Asbeck and his team at the Bitcoin way. just interviewed Tony recently, has over 80,000 views, an overwhelming response. People love his story and the simplicity he shares of of how easy it is to custody and take ownership of the greatest money we've ever seen. They will train you to do it right the first time. Head on over to the bitcoinway.com/brandon to schedule a free 30inut consultation today. Their fivestar rated service is exactly what you need. Quit sitting on your hands like I did and get started today. Again, that's the bitcoinway.com/b rd d o n. >> Oh man, there's there's so many things there honestly, Stefan. Okay, so a couple I I for a while now, for a couple years, I'm actually working on a book about this uh kind of aching to Thomas uh Payne's Common Sense uh and it's, you know, basically separating money and state uh and which was at the time separating church and state and in what they were arguing for, right? And on and on and on. a pamphlet if you will and that's what I'm working on this version of this but is it it's been 17 years you know this has been out there people can find it that we have the internet people can do research is it going to be something you just mentioned 5% of people where there's there's only a couple percent of people that we get to 2 3 4 5% that pull the rest of society across because it just feels like most people are just completely asleep at the wheel and there's no help like you said we're in triage mode and most people are just completely helpless unfortunately learned helplessness all these things Is that what it's going to be? Just a couple percent of people dragging everyone across the finish line here? I honestly don't know how many people are going to make it across the finish line. If if I if I didn't think, I'd be crapping my pants like right now on this show. Like, it would be it would be a horrible sound. And the reason for that is that if you don't think and you just repeat slogans and you just use whatever socially approval prediction words that make you feel good or look good in the moment, if you don't think, brother, there's AI and AI doesn't think a whole lot faster and a whole lot better than you do because AI is an NPC. AI doesn't think for itself. It's just a word guesser based upon prime predictive patterns. AI does not come up with original ideas. AI is an NPC. So if you're someone who doesn't think, you're like somebody who digs with a shovel when somebody's just invented the truck. You're like somebody who lifts things up to top shelves when someone's just invented the forklift truck. So if you don't think I mean if you didn't think obviously like Darwinian selection being what it is, people who didn't think were fine throughout most of human history. don't need a lot of thought to dig a ditch or throw a spear off an arrow or you know build a road or I mean you get prisoners in shackles can do stuff to cut down some wheat to cut down some trees you don't need to think and you do just fine throughout most of human history in fact the people who did think it was kind of touch and go for for quite a lot of human history now the tables have turned now completely in that manual labor will be replaced by robotics and not thinking will be replaced by AI AI still has It's a hallucination problem and that's sort of baked into the architecture. But it's funny how people say, you know, the problem is is that AI hallucinates. I'm like, have you talked to the average voter? You think that AI is the only person who hallucinates? And AI in general only hallucinates because it's ingesting hallucin hallucinogenic text like a bunch of gobbledegook and postmodern relativism, nihilism, subjectivism, and and nonsense like that. And so it's like, you know, force-feeding someone LSD up the ass and then saying, you know, they're not really good at gymnastics. It's like, yeah, cuz they're in another dimension that you put them there. So, as far as like how many people I would I would honestly be crap in my pants. The good thing is that people who don't think don't even think about this kind of stuff. So, they're kind of immune. But it is, you know, there was a a time in America when like 70% of people were involved in agriculture. Now, it's like 2 or 3%. Because you got these big combine harvesters, you don't need the manual labor and so on, right? And so people who only work with their bodies mindlessly are going to be replaced by robotics. And people who don't think for themselves are going to be replaced by AI. That's just that's a fact of it's you can't put the genie back in the bottle. It's just going to go that way. Like camp drivers, you know, self-driving cars are way safer. Self-driving cars make mistakes. You driven in Florida ever? Ever? Out of curiosity. >> No. Been to the villages. >> Yeah. you're the so which I guess is a kind of signal I'm armed so you know how many people are going to get across I mean I think that the elites as a whole obviously I don't know any elites but if I were to put myself in their shoes I'd be like okay so we've got this large disposable biomass of people who don't think and we've got AI and we've got robots kind of what do we need them for you know the robots they're not expensive they don't require health care uh they don't require old age pensions uh you know they're they don't riot when when we won't pay them government money for welfare. So you've got this large from the view of the elites, this large disposable biomass of dunderheads in the world. Now, of course, you can say, well, the dunderheads were created by the elites through terrible government education. Yes, John Taylor 101. I get all of that, but it is what it is, right? I mean, so as far as like, well, 90 are we going to drag 95% of people? I don't know. I mean in in the past of course what happened was when you had a large disposable biomass and in particular when government couldn't pays it couldn't pay its bills just went to war. I mean, that that's what governments did, right? Oh, no. We have we have too many people and we can't service them all and they're not really producing much. We'll just go to war. And that's how you read off the excess. Disposable biomass. Uh going to war, it's not really a thing anymore because of nukes and bioweapons and other sorts of things, chemical weapons. You can't really go to war because going to war might mean that the elites themselves get toasted and they don't like to, you know, see their bones through the window as the nuke nuke goes off. So, that's not really a thing. So what they do instead is they they work on depopulation agendas to sort of lower the biomass uh of the planet. And that's been going on for, you know, at least 50 years now. And part of the fiat currency inflation is driving women into the workforce. Also saying to women, you must be economically equal to men uh means that you just kill the birth rate because the only way that women can be even remotely economically equal to men is by not having children because you know, you're a dad four times more than me. So you know how much resources, care, attention, and money children take up. God bless them. I love I think it's wonderful that it is a fact. And so if women are going to have two to three kids, they're going to be out of the workforce for 10 to 15 years and more of course if they homeschool. >> Mhm. >> So yeah, it's it's a real it's a real shame. You know, this equality is this mirage. You know, oh, we're going to get this equality and all that happens is you go out into the desert in pursuit of that mirage of equality. you just end up dying in the sand dunes with your womb turning to dust and you got like 30 huge half of women like age of 30 now have no kids and no prospect of of kids. Uh that's rough and so the depopulation stuff used to be war. Now it's not a lot nicer like you have to be talked into self- sterilization rather than blown up in a World War I trench. as a man. Way better. Way better. You know, if I can if I can just somebody says, "You ought not to continue your line because equality and white people bad." And I'm like, "Oh, so I just have to not listen to that and I can go and do what I want." Fantastic. That's a whole lot different than being drafted and being thrown into a a barbed wire machine gun nest no man's land crossing without Wonder Woman to protect your ass, right? So I think that it's uncertain to know how many people are needed in the future and my goal of course is to be be in one of the group of people who are needed because the people you have to do things that AI can't do better and AI could not come up with the speeches that I'm doing because AI is mostly I mean it's programmed on my work as well but it's mostly programmed on NPC nonsense. uh the the AI is just a way faster NPC. And so if you're are an NPC, I'm sorry, you're out of luck when it comes to having much of a productive future. And if you don't have much of a productive future, I would not I would not say that your life is probably going to be super great in in whatever way possible. So, I'm not hugely interested in trying to sort of drag people across the line because again, if they're trying to kill me for trying to cure them, uh I I'm not rooting for the disease, but I'm not going to put myself in harm's way either. Yeah. No, totally totally a fair point. How much uh quick side note here. How much how much time do you have? Because I still have like a half dozen questions or so I would love to to go through. This is just phenomenal stuff. Stefan, you have a little bit of time still. >> Okay, awesome. This is this is just such an incredible talk. Like I could talk to you for for hours. >> It It frees up your schedule quite a bit. I got four. I got my diapers on. I got my NASA drive across country diapers. I am good to go. >> Oh man, I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay, so we were talking about, you know, the these people um that many people not making it across the finish line and and we touched on birth rate. Um where, you know, we just talked about the UBI. You know, it it really feels like we're diverging into this world of of Bitcoin and freedom and, you know, the citadels and freedom cities and this this radically different world from what we're used to. This like we talked about earlier, this modern dark age potentially. And then going further down the road of UBI, CBDC's, digital passports, and slavery. It just it really feels like people are scared about losing their jobs to AI like you just mentioned as well. We talked about the parenting stuff earlier complimenting Bitcoin. Um and just it really it it it just couldn't be more stark in my mind. It's all I can see is the meme of the two roads diverging and and like having these like how do you see things playing out going forward in in the coming years in the coming decades as as the world starts really kind of it was the red blue versus blue divide this continental divide thing people talked about of like you go live in that place and I'll go live in this place. we'll see who wins at the end of the day and like you're red versus blue. And now it's becoming really this, you know, this these two monies which are obviously the the the foundation now separating society and you're going to live in the freedom cities and these people going to live with UBI and government, you know, sludge over here. Um, how do you see this playing out going forward? You're right about the fork in the road. I wrote a whole book about this called the future. People can get it for free at freedomman.com/books. So the it's terrifying and exhilarating which is you know probably what state of mind to be in as a whole as the old Chinese curse or blessing goes may may you live in interesting times really interesting this is the road human history >> so in the past totalitarianism was limited by manpower you could only hire so many people to survey everyone unfortunately AI and facial recognition and central bank digital currencies which are continuing being pushed put automation of surveillance and control and social credit scores and deplatforming in the hands of government. In other words, in the past, you had to open up this is what Salt Chiniton was sent to the Goolag for like a decade for, right? That you had to have he a letter home from the war and he criticized something and he got thrown in a goolag. So, but you had to have people open the letters and read them and you're limited that there's only so many people who can open up and read and and and so on, right? But if all letters can be automatically read and compared against some algorithm of good think or bad thing or right think or wrong think and so on then the automation of surveillance control social credit scores deplatforming and so on. There's no practical limit to how much control politics can have over you anymore. Again in the past it was limited by having to physically scan and having to physically punish and and so on. with the automation, it's incomprehensible how much control and surveillance is possible because of computer technology and so on. Now, I mean, we've got laws being proposed in Germany where you're not allowed to buy a house if you have published wrong thing anywhere. And of course people have there, you know, I I assume pretty much everything that's ever not on some airgapped computer is absorbed into some gelatinous cube database of infinity and going to be used against you at whatever point in the future, which is why I was thankful I am thankful that there was no computers around when I was young in that way. So the problem is that the the automation of totalitarian surveillance means that there's no practical limit. There's no upper labor-based limit on how much you can be surveiled, controlled, and punished. And that is a problem. Now, what's interesting and what generally happens in human history is when totalitarianism begins to increase, a place opens up. A place opens up for people to flee to. I mean, of course, America was that place in the past. England was that place prior where people fled the French Revolution to go to England. Though when totalitarianism begins to settle or get its sort of digital iron grip around the nads and throats of the population, there is a market incentive for a country to provide safe haven for the most talented. Now whether it's that self, I don't know why Elon Musk seems very keen to go to the moon. Maybe because of zoning laws or maybe on the moon he'll be removed from his temptation to be an endless baby daddy. I don't know. probably space aliens up there who've been banked by Captain Kirk in the past that he can just get sloppy seconds from. But whether it's the moon, whether it's Mars, whether it's some country, whether it's El Salvador or which was the first country to really embrace uh Bitcoin and so on, there is going to be a country there always is uh that opens up to talented people to get to. And of course, that country is going to have to be pretty good at military and fifth generation warfare and so on. Again, that's a intelligent thing. That's one thing that people who don't understand IQ do not understand the difference between the war in Iraq and the war in Iran. In Iran, the average IQ is north of 100. In Iraq, it's the low 80s. And so, Iran has millions of geniuses, whereas Iraq has only a few hundred. And it's just a whole different matter, which is why Iran is aiming at the petro dollar by demanding Bitcoin payments. a dollar per barrel of oil going through the straight of Hormuz, which is going to try and normalize not using the petro dollar for settling oil transactions. And that's a massive brilliant, you know, whatever you think of Iran. I'm not a huge fan of course of Islamic theocratic dictatorships, although I have great sympathy for the Iranian people, but it's a obviously brilliant move. And out of the fog of war emerges an attack from a direction that nobody really anticipated. Although I did say that Bitcoin was going to be leveraged in the next war as an attack upon US dollar he hijgemony. But so you know there's going to be a place that opens up that free people can get to. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know where it's going to be. But whenever the iron curtain so much uh in general falls upon the productivity of the general population, those with the most offer, those with the greatest creativity and the most intelligence and the most entrepreneurial abilities are a massive resource that if you open your gates to them, they will come and you will get, you know, a a new country that is going to outstrip the old countries and then maybe it can spread the ideas back. It's just the general heartbeat of tyranny and freedom as a whole. And in the past, of course, it was hard to get to that new country. Now, it's a whole lot easier. Could just be one flight away. And again, I don't know where, you know, for all I know, it could be China. I mean, because China, you know, it's funny. I I did business in China uh many many years ago and had an enormous admiration for the Chinese people. Very good humored, very uh smart of course. And uh the spatial reasoning and the engineering of the East Asians is is really beyond compare in all of human society. and they're I think getting kind of tired of communism. So, who knows, right? I mean, and in many ways, they're freer than the West. And so, yeah, I don't know. I don't know where it's going to be. All I can do is put out the ideas and hope that people, you know, maybe it'll be uh under Malay and Argentina. I mean, he's half the poverty rate and and so on. Although people were saying, "Oh, but manufacturing has declined under Malay." It's like, yes, cuz they were zombie Japanese style propped up fiat currency companies that were just being used as cash cows by the corrupt. They weren't real companies. So once you get rid of the real company, unreal companies, it's going to shrink. But that's good. What matters is the productivity, not the size of the sector. So yeah, I there is this fork of the road for me. Promoting freedom, promoting Bitcoin, promoting peaceful parenting and so on is the best that I can do. I did this back of the napkin calculation a year or two ago that 1.5 billion assaults against children have been prevented by what it is that I've done. And you know, before that, I was just, you know, if people were yelling at or shaking their kids in parking lots, I'd go up and talk to them, which was kind of a slow process relative to being able to put out a podcast that's been viewed or downloaded about a billion times. Things are much more efficient. Tyranny is more efficient. Freedom is more efficient. The promulgation of bad ideas is of course terrible in the government uh sector and so on, which is why both our kids, I assume, are homeschooled. One of the many reasons. So yeah, the infliction of bad ideas, the promulgation of bad ideas has achieved great efficiencies, but for the first time in human history, the promulgation of good ideas can to some degree keep pace, which is why everyone gets so mad at people like us who do podcasting and stuff like you're not regulated, you're not controlled. It's like, yes, we're actually free and so on. So, and again, the well, not again, but the the I got my account back on on X uh from from Elon Musk, right? And that is a huge deal like the the liberation of Twitter is a huge deal uh in human history. I would say it's going to be akin to the the printing press uh in the 15th century in terms of the promagation of ideas because the left has pretty much everything else. I mean they've done that slow march through the institutions in this sort of tortoise beats the hair kind of way and having you know conversations like this the things on X where counter narrative ideas can spread is hugely powerful and it really at the moment it's not a kinetic war it's an idea war and the more we can show up with reasonable courage and resolution and kindness but firmness I think the better off we'll be and really it's the best hope the humanities he's ever had to have good ideas spread. >> It's an unbelievable time like you said. It's just the technology we have. Uh I think of Noster, Noster, you know, like these different platforms that are completely outside the realm of control communication platforms built like Bitcoin in protocols that are uncensorable. Um just everything we have now all the way to Twitter, uh more centralized stuff that is, you know, seemingly in better hands now. I mean, it's just it really is incredible. So, I love that you say that it spreads. the good ideas spread almost as fast now as the bad ideas which we we had bad ideas spreading for you know for thousands of years. Uh there's no way to spread the the good ideas really. So do you think going back to the the war thing though for a second do you think like Iran versus Iraq and what's going on and we talked about the city of London earlier um I I've been under this leaning towards the side of there is some type of 4D chess going on in the sense of the city of London in Europe being one of the the targets of really what's going on. Iran, Iran being this proxy um of kind of like this player outside the system that was kind of used by the British Empire. You know, the Suez crisis, World War I, like we've been talking about never really went away. The the you know, imperial nature of the of the crown being an island uh and what was going on, they they went and paged everything else around the world because they needed resources. They wanted control, etc., etc., right? There's reasons and excuses for things, but you know, being what it is, how do you see just the war, everything playing out, you know, war sucks, war is terrible. At the same time, do you feel like I guess my question is is is the system so far gone going back to this separating money and state, separating education state where people are screaming, hey, we need to do the constitution thing and all that, which a huge fan of here obviously and I know you are too. However, how are we signaling, hey, we're going to go to war with somebody when you're trying to do X, Y, and Z thing and meaning we've the we're so far off the tracks that the normal course of action isn't even available to us anymore. You know, the way of doing things naturally through, you know, constitutionally, etc., etc. And do these power politics have a place to play in society because we find ourselves so far off the tracks because of all these misdeeds layered on top of each other decade after decade after decade. So hopefully that makes sense. But that's where I think the fight is. Uh and and seemingly it's very hard for the average person to discern all that. And I've just spent months and months kind of going back and forth and arguments both ways in my own mind and watching people on all sides of the spectrum here. >> Yeah. So when you go to war, you go to war with particular strengths and particular weaknesses. To be honest with the population as a whole is to say, here's where we can win. But of course, where you can win is not where your enemy is going to fight. Your enemy is going to fight where you can't win. And of course, I don't think that any government has ever gone to war saying, "Here's the blowback we can expect. Here's how we've gamed out, you know, viewing it from our enemies standpoint. Here's how we've gamed out how we would attack us if we were them, right?" And and I'm sure they do these exercises internally, but they haven't done them externally, right? So, you know, they close the uh the straight of Hermuz uh which is a huge deal, right? Obviously, 20% of the world's energy goes through there and and that's talked about that's pretty obvious. What people don't realize quite as much is that massive quantities of fertilizer go through there and [clears throat] you know, we're kind of heading into growing season and if they don't have the nitrogen fertilizers, there's going to be a lot of hunger that is going on and a lot of starvation that is going on in the world. So it spreads the destabilization because they can't get a hold either of the energy is easily the liquid natural gas and the oil or the nitrogen-based fertilizers are being held up there. And so America says, "Well, you're out of the Swift system. You know, we're going to seize your government's assets and you can't do business and so on." And then they um they had their stable coin, of course, and then they blocked the ability of Iran to do that stable coin. And then the very next day, Iran says, "Okay, it's Bitcoin." Now, the interesting thing about this is that I think everyone who's been around Bitcoin for a while remembers that first terrible, awful wet your pants terror of sending your first transaction. Does it feel real until you kind of do it? But after you send your first transaction and it goes through and you get your receipt and blah blah blah blah blah, you're like, "It works. We can do this." And so for Iran to shift international settlements to Bitcoin, now it's not foolproof because, you know, the audits can still occur and um you know, maybe you could find out where the Bitcoin came from. you could still be subject to millions of dollars of fines if you're breaking an embargo or uh it could even be criminal fines and so on or criminal um uh charges. So, it's not like, oh, you know, it's just Bitcoin is is perfect immediately, but what's happening is people are like, oh, we need Bitcoin. Okay, we're going buy some Bitcoin. Okay, well, we need to send the Bitcoin. Oh, we've sent it. Now, people have done it and it's it see it sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of a thing that the first time you do something, it seems very hard. And, you know, just remember how you learned how to ride a bike now. You ride handle, pass free, listen to, I don't know, Kia or something like that. So the fact that they are shifting people's perceptions of a valid play payment platform from US fiat to Bitcoin, I think it's seismic. I I really think it's seismic because as you know um is it 57% of of stuff is settled in in US dollars these days. >> If people begin to shift to Bitcoin, then the value of the dollar goes down, the demand for the dollar goes down considerably. If the value of the US dollar goes down considerably, then of course domestic prices go through the roof and it's very destabilizing. So this is the funny thing you know with government military they pour a lot of stuff into very expensive hardware. The government military has an incentive for massive expensive very expensive to maintain and and keep going. But you see these giant aircraft carriers and the the massive bombers and you know they just got this and it's kind of impressive. You are sailing down the Persian Gulf and these giant ships and so on and it all seems very intimidating and it is. Of course, nobody could beat America in a zillion years in any kind of conventional war. So what that means is people aren't going to find those conventional wars. They're just not. And so they're going to find some other way to attack. So then you would game it out. I think as an intelligent person, and I'm sure Americans have done this, American military is full of smart people. And they've gamed it out. And they've said, "Okay, so if I were in Iran's shoes, what would I do?" Well, I would want America and Israel to waste as many missiles as possible. So I create a bunch of decoys. I would know that they have satellites and so I would create a bunch of decoys, which they've done and they've blown up a whole bunch of painted stuff in the desert. And then I would make sure that all of my missiles are mobile. They're on trucks and so on to to make sure that they can't get hit and and so on. And what I would then do is I would I would spend my worst rockets at first, right? So that the the Iron Dome and the other defensive measures would be drained away uh by by all of that. And I would hold my best weapons in reserve and then after this is all drained away. Only then you throw the cannon fod in at the beginning and then you t troops up at the end when the enemy is already exhausted. >> And I'm sure that they know as well that Iran would Iran is very the Iranian government. It's kind of wild. They've been Bitcoin centric for over a decade. I think it is. Uh they have generated Bitcoin. They have transacted in Bitcoin. uh they have uh government has has subsidized energy consumption for Bitcoin miners. So they are very Bitcoin literate so they have no fear or concern or lack of knowledge regarding Bitcoin and an ironic thing might happen and this is this is really out there. So you know an ironic thing might happen. What Iran is most likely to do is to attack the value of the US dollar. And one of the ways they do that, of course, is through getting people used to transacting in uh Bitcoin through this straight of Hummus thing. And then once you've already got a payment sort of plan and process and things set up, I mean, I remember when I was in the business world, getting a getting set up as a vendor was complicated, but after that, you could just build very easily. And so, there's that aspect and approach. And of course, by withholding not just oil, but again this this fertilizer, they're going to destabilize America because if there's one thing that Americans like to do, it's it's eat and eat and eat and eat and then, you know, after a break, eat some more. And so when Americans are particularly susceptible to the price of groceries in the way that more aesthetic cultures are not. And so wherever you're weakest and least defended is where you're going to be attacked. And so I'm not sure if the governments as a whole have been honest about the kind of blowback that people can expect. Another weakness of course is that America has relatively open borders. There are hundreds of thousands of Iranians already in America. I don't know if there are right now barriers on Iranians coming to America, but they're already there. And because you've been threatening Iran. America's been threatening Iran for like 50 plus years. Well, uh, you know, they they've known that this was coming for a long time. I mean, Iran, as you know, has been two weeks away from getting nuclear weapons for the past 30 years. And so, they've known this is coming. I I would assume that they already have cells embedded in the United States. And a relatively free society with relatively open borders is very easy to attack. a closed society. A tyrannical society is very I mean who who can go and sabotage things in North Korea? Well, you can't because you can't even get into the country, right? It's really closed. An open society is very easy to sabotage, very easy to attack. And it will be, of course, where you're least defended and where things are least expected because that does two things. If you hit, you know, if you hit something like grain processing plants or trucking stations and so on, so that you stop the flow of goods, not it's not just those flow of goods. Now, everyone else has to have additional security and guards and there's a lot of overhead and so on. So, there's going to be an attack that comes back that completely bypasses the hardware power of the American military. And I think it's starting now. The ironic thing, what I said is the ironic thing and I'll stop here because this could go on forever and it it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have any empirical validation as yet. But the interesting thing is that by shifting at least the perception of the value of international payments from USD to Bitcoin, Iran is going to raise the value of Bitcoin considerably. I mean already the demands of a dollar a barrel of oil going through the straight of Hormuz is about half of the Bitcoin production on any given day about 450 Bitcoin a day are produced through miners. So half of that is being hoovered up by that. So they're going to raise the value of Bitcoin and something I said a year or two ago is that the only chance America has to pay its national debt and its unfunded liabilities is to have Bitcoin and have the value of Bitcoin go through the roof as I think it will be. And the American government I think is sitting on about 300,000 plus 340 325 uh mostly taken through police actions. So America is sitting on this massive stockpile of Bitcoin. And if if Iran by shifting people's perceptions of international settlements from USD to Bitcoin, it's going to raise the value of Bitcoin which actually raises the value of the US Bitcoin holdings to the point where they could come within a stone throw of actually being able to make a dent in the debt and unfunded liabilities. So, who knows how it's going to play out, but it's definitely not going to be any kind of conventional war cuz again, you you can't beat America and those things. So, everyone just steps around it. Does it and this goes right along with all this. I don't know how familiar you are with uh Jason Lowry's software thesis um and that book about the national strategic importance of Bitcoin. But it just feels like a lot of that's playing out. And you kind of mentioned something earlier about the connect. We we've kind of reached this crescendo of war. Like you can't just throw what what are we going to do going forward? Just throw a bunch of robots. We're gonna just manufacture robots and just throw them at each other and then like at some point someone says, "Okay, this is dumb. We're kind of there with nuclear war." Like, "Okay, well, we're going to blow each other up." It kind of stalemates itself at some point. Like we've reached this arc of society where then it goes into cyerspace. And so again, some of Jason Low's thesis, but like you said, that was in the Biden administration, that was in the Trump administration, and they know this stuff and and it's been confirmed. So what you were saying earlier with there smart people in the military thinking about these things. So where I'm going with this is you had Scott Vessent just saying I I believe it was today or in the last couple days saying we we got to pass you know the the Clarity Act and you know obviously the Genius Act all these things. You have the Lutnics these very pro- Bitcoin people in the administration. Now they haven't talked about it a ton as much as Bitcoiners would like over the last year or so. But if you look underneath the surface, there's a lot of things going on. And then you have something like this. And again, this is just complete conspiracy, you know, like this is my, you know, own like speculation, but was there a reason? There's been people saying the Navy, they weren't opening the straight purposely like they've been certain pressure points to people around the world, the US can do, you know, and where I'm going with this is would it make sense like did somebody whisper in the air? I mean, Trump, their family owns thousands of Bitcoin, you know, their American Bitcoin, like all this stuff. So, it's like you got to kind of read the tea leaves a little bit. Is there someone maybe whispering and saying, "Hey guys, you could do this. We'll squeeze it, but just ask for payment in Bitcoin." I mean, underneath the back channels, I mean, it's like to me it just like what this is wild to see what's going on. But I think people discount these things. It's like just just crazy. Again, conspiracy theories are what? They're just six months from becoming true, right? So, >> Oh, yeah. And you know, conspiracy theory was just a term invented by the CIA to discredit people connecting dots. I mean, con conspiracy is literally a term in law that is used to put people in jail. It's not some sort of abstract thing. No, I love I love love love that people are not talking up Bitcoin at the moment. So, I'm I'm sure you've heard of the famous law, the inverse Kramer law, like whatever >> Jim Kramer promotes, >> the immutable inverse Kramer law. Yeah. >> Whatever he integrates is going to go up in value. Now, I don't have any proof of any of this, but I would assume that someone like Jim Kramer, when he's saying this stock is going to go down, it's because his friends want to buy it because they think it's going to go up in value. So then the normies, the NPCs, oh Kramer says bad, so I'm going to sell it. And then his friends all buy it up. And when he says, "Oh, this stock is going to go uh to the moon and it's going to double or triple in value," it's because his friends know it's a dog and they want to dump it. So he just I think he's just out there generating demand. I don't have any proof of that. It's just a nonsense theory, but it would certainly accord with a lot of the facts and why he's still on the air despite being one of the worst predictors is the in the inverse Kramer is like inverse Nancy Kramer. >> Yeah. Nancy Palmer Pelosi. So, I love it when the government doesn't talk up Bitcoin. I love it when financial institutions don't talk up Bitcoin because it means they want to buy it. Because when they start talking up Bitcoin, it means they want to sell it. And so the fact that the government and the institutions who came into the ETFs a year or two ago, the fact that they're not talking it up, beautiful, man, I love it. Yeah. Keep keep saying that Bitcoin is a scam. Keep saying that Bitcoin is because it just means they want to depress the price so they can scoop up more of it. So that's just the inverse thing. Uh, of course you want to, you know, like if if your friend wants to date a girl that you want to date, you're going to say, "Oh, man. No, no, she's she cheated on her last boyfriend, man. She, you know, she's secretly a cocaine addict and not in the funk kind. And you know, she has four vaginas, one in her armpit. Okay, that might be a plus for some people, but you're going to talk that girl down cuz you want to date her. And so I assume that when institutions are talking up Bitcoin, it means they think it's about to go down. So yeah, the quieter they are, the better. >> Amazing. This has been an incredible talk, Stefan. I I just I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. I want to I I have to try to be respectful of your time because my time will just be lost at some point. and then I'll suck you into this quagmire. So, it's nice time to chat. It's nice to be interviewed again. >> Yes, absolutely. I like I said, I'd love to do a live stream at some point maybe in the coming, you know, weeks, you know, months here, uh, and do that. Is there anything where can people find you? Anything we missed? Anything we should touch on? You know, we we've got a wide range of things going on here. Anything we should we we need to touch on quick? And where can people find you? Yeah. So, to find me, um, just get a really tight pair of ruby red slippers. click your heels together three times. Uh so freedom domain.com is where you go to find what it is that I do and there's podcasts and videos. I've done some documentaries and I have books uh available. I think all but one of them are free and so I hope people will uh check that out. peacefulparenting.com if you've got parenting questions you can download. It's available in a couple of different languages and there's also a 60 language AI that has been programmed or developed with all of my material on parenting which has been quite considerable and you can ask it questions. It's all free and so on. So yeah, freedom.com and if people want to support what it is that I do, I don't do ads or anything like that. So uh they can go to freeomain.com/donate if they'd like to help out the show. It's very much appreciated and that's the best place to find me. >> Amazing. Amazing stuff, Stefan. I appreciate it again. Honored to have you on and look forward in doing it again in the future. Thank you, sir. >> Thanks, brother. Great chat. Take care. >> If you like that episode, then you're going to love the playlist we put together for you with our most recent podcast with the top Bitcoiners, sound money, liberty [music] advocates in the world. Go check those out here. We'll see you inside. You're going to love them.