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March 14, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
43:29
Mathew Crawford talks with Mike Adams about CHAOS AGENTS infiltrating the freedom movement
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Welcome, everybody, to this Brighteon.com interview.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, the free speech video network.
And our guest today is a first-time guest who also exercises the freedom to speak, the freedom to think.
And he attracted my attention based on his Substack page, which is called Rounding the Earth.
So that's at roundingtheearth.substack.com, which is the way Substack works.
And his name is Matthew Crawford, and he covers finance, but also something called chaos agents that I wanted to ask him about.
He's going to join us here in just a second.
I just want you to know, some of you watching this, you may or may not agree with what Matthew has to say, and that's fine.
That's what free speech is all about.
There may be things that even I don't agree with.
Perhaps.
I don't know.
This is not edited.
Except if somebody sneezes or if we have a dropout of internet or something.
But there's no editing here.
We invited Matthew on to talk about what he wants to talk about.
And I may ask some questions.
We'll have a really nice back and forth among some intelligent people.
And hopefully we'll all learn something.
So with that said, Matthew Crawford, thank you for joining me today.
It's great to have you on.
Thanks for having me on, Mike.
Absolutely.
I just want to note to the audience, you're joining us audio only, but we'll put your picture in there in case people are wondering.
First, tell us about just a little bit about your background, Rounding the Earth.
Where does that name come from and what do you typically focus on?
Rounding the Earth is kind of, you know, it's an educational idea.
When I thought of the brand a few years ago, long before I had the Substack, I thought of something that would say education and exploration, as in go after the flat earth ideas of the world and try to reinflate them, add dimensions to them, as in go after the flat earth ideas of the world and try That's what poker players do when they try to optimize their play.
So it kind of had multiple meanings to me.
And, you know, I think in terms of education, I think in terms of finance.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
You mentioned Flat Earth.
That's interesting because, you know, Brighttown.com as a free speech platform, there's a lot of Flat Earth videos on Brighttown, which, of course, we don't censor them because we think people have the right to enjoy whatever, you know, thought simulations that they want to enjoy.
But, of course, I disagree with flat Earth, and again, that's fine.
But there's more than that that's going on out there.
So, you know, flat Earth can be a fun thought experiment, but...
There's some things that have a lot more practical effect, and that's what you get into, I think, on a lot of your sub stacks.
So tell us about what are chaos agents, because I've actually republished a couple of your articles in that area.
What are chaos agents, and how are they being used, let's say, to kind of confuse people on important issues?
Well, within any important movement, you know, there's a long history of agents infiltrating movements.
It's done so that somebody can have intelligence from inside the movement.
It's done in order to steer the movements.
There's a lot of evidence that the progression of the Bolshevik Revolution, for instance, involved the insertion of agents from Western banking empires.
And there's evidence that the Chinese Communist Revolution had agents inserted into it.
But locally, there's a long history of the FBI inserting agents in Civil rights movements, any kind of movement that might interfere with what any agency considers its task for the moment or what the deep state might want.
And as much as that term irritates me, I think it's important to have some sort of an agreed-upon term.
Are you still there?
Yeah.
Yes, I am.
I was just telling my crew to put up your Skype icon so that my editor understands to put your photo there.
Okay.
Right.
So, yeah, no, I'm listening.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I'm the mock man there.
I don't know if it's just...
No, all I see is a Skype logo, actually.
That's what I see.
But I just want to make sure my editor knows where to put your photo in.
Got it.
Okay.
So, you know, this...
Event that's going on, it's gigantic.
On September 17, 2019, the repo markets collapsed, and the amount of money backstopping those markets is now, I don't even know what it is now.
It's over $2 trillion.
It may be $2.5 trillion, $3 trillion at this point.
I haven't quite followed it lately, but it's a whole lot of money.
That used to be the entire national debt.
When that moment happened, I thought, oh, this is the beginning of the end of the banking system.
Because what it really meant was even the banks didn't trust each other.
They didn't trust each other with the M1 money supply.
Bonds that are as good as cash could no longer be overnight repo.
The interest rate went from like 2 to right around 10%.
I know it traded 8%, but can't remember what the high was.
Wow.
Wow.
And that's happening today.
Right now, interbank liquidity is falling off a cliff as we speak.
Yeah, it's happening again, but this time it is probably much larger.
Right.
And the fire was set in Silicon Valley, which should make people think, right, with all these smart people, how is it that they had such a horrific liability mismatch going into an era of rising interest rates and rising inflation?
and was the combination of those two set up intentionally.
So much money was pushed out during the planned ammonium.
That's my preferred term.
So much money was pushed out, what, $13 trillion when you count it all up, $4.5 trillion, and this was kept secret for two years.
$4.5 trillion was given to three banks, Citibank, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs each got $1.5 trillion after the repo crisis and that information wasn't even released until the end of March.
Wait, wait, hold on a second.
So what you just said, I mean, this is stunning.
I've never heard that 13 trillion figure before.
But you're talking about what a combination of the public stimulus money plus the private liquid capital injections into the banks, or not private, but Fed injections into the banks?
That's right.
If you add it all up together, you have $13 trillion new dollars in the system.
Wow.
Well, there's inflation for you.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry to interrupt, but go ahead.
So, you know, when the pandemonium started up, I began to have questions very early on.
My wife designs PCR assays.
So I had someone that I could just, you know, go on a walk with and ask, why is it that the FDA and the CDC are holding up Um, these assays for two months and, and she says, I don't really see a good reason because we have 8,000 PCR labs and this is no longer bleeding edge technology.
There are lots of people who could be creating this locally.
It wouldn't be the same assay, but so what?
You know, if, if this is some sort of an emergency, then you just need to have some sort of a general ability to, to detect what's, um, what might be passed around.
So, you know, there were a lot of questions and immediately I started posting on my Facebook.
I was like, guys, you know, think about buying gold.
And at the time, it was like early March when I posted that gold was like $1,500 something dollars.
And I said, you know, people are going to start repatriating gold.
In fact, gold is already being repatriated.
Russia had dumped treasuries in 2018 and started buying gold.
Texas has a bullion depository now.
I'm aware of that.
That started in 2017, and lots of gold has been repatriated there.
But, you know, countries in Eastern Europe have been repatriating gold.
Lots of people are repatriating gold.
And so there's some point at which the paper gold system will be recognized as fractional.
And it is just like the banks are fractional reserve.
There's much more paper gold out there than there is actual physical supply to meet it.
Right.
And just as when people want their money out of the banks and then, hey, it's not there.
Which is what happened with Silicon Valley Bank.
You're saying that when enough people demand physical delivery of their gold options or the gold paper, boom, the gold paper market collapses with kind of a gold run, basically.
Yeah.
And I think that gold prices have been suppressed for years in order to hide the banking troubles, but also to create a kind of Ponzi scheme.
Because ultimately, if that Ponzi scheme falls apart, the day of the banking system falls apart, then nobody pays for it.
Uh-huh.
Right.
So the chaos, the financial chaos could be a cover for a lot of the financial shenanigans that have been taking place by, shall we say, the powers that be?
Or how would you describe it?
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the military banking complex or the corporate military banking complex pretty much runs the world economy.
And they've been playing games for so long that, and some of that's coming home to roost.
So You asked me about chaos agents, and when I started to detect some bad faith actors, I very quickly thought about it and I said, you know what, why shouldn't we expect infiltration by agents?
We absolutely should.
In fact, it would be pure stupidity not to think that there would be people inserted into the conversations in order to steer them in certain directions.
Sure.
And the areas that have been targeted for that, do you think it's like the Trump movement, the Liberty movement?
I know you've written about sort of the vaccine or the vaccine skepticism movement or health freedom movement, whatever.
Like what areas do you think have been targeted?
Yeah, you asked about the trucker movement.
The U.S., the Patriot Convoy, I think that's what it was called, or the People's Convoy, excuse me.
Oh, okay, yeah, the U.S. version, right.
Yeah, the People's Convoy did not get the popularity...
And news coverage that the Canadian one did.
And I talked to a couple of the leaders of that.
And in particular, I've talked to Brian Brase multiple times.
And he was telling me, yeah, you know, other people kind of inserted themselves into it.
And they kind of wanted to run it.
Somebody who was not a trucker ran the finances, and the truckers have never been able to even see the balance sheets.
They don't know if money was embezzled.
One of them got a message from the account saying that Russian ammo, like three pallets of ammo or something like that, were attempted to be purchased using the account.
Russian ammo?
What?
Yeah.
Like 7-6-2 rounds.
People don't know this story.
People don't know what happened with the People's Convoy.
But there was a woman who goes by Carolina Bonita, which is not her real name.
She uses multiple aliases, but she had gotten into the trucker convoy, said she would help with it.
Everyone I talked to said that she was constantly screwing things up from You know, which towns they were going to stop in to where it was they were going to sleep at night.
So they eventually kicked her out.
Imagine rolling through a town and somebody, unbeknownst to you, has called ahead and said, you're stopping there, but you had no plans to stop there and everybody shut down the town and came out and they were angry that you just rolled through.
Wow.
Right.
So they kicked her out, I was told, multiple times.
And I was told that she kept following anyway and that she was in a vehicle and That wound up getting pulled over and there was a pile of guns in the vehicle.
So, you know, it's an interesting question.
Yeah.
Was there, you know, the possibility of a false flag event?
Or could it have been like in Canada, where in Canada, the government trotted out like a table full of guns?
Yes, I remember that.
They pulled them out of a vehicle.
But there's no video of them pulling them out of the vehicle.
There's no evidence that the event ever took place.
Yeah.
So, well, and what about J6? Because, you know, a lot has come out on January 6th recently.
I don't know how much you cover J6 or if at all, but Tucker Carlson has been running a lot of these videos that were, I guess, suppressed until now that seem to show.
Again, I'm not an expert on J6, but they seem to show that the narrative that we were told for the last...
You know, two years is bogus that, like, the Q Shaman guy was, I guess, kind of led into...
Escorted around.
Yeah, right.
So how come we couldn't see that video?
I mean, that dude looks innocent at this point, right?
So do you think J6 was also, you know, infiltrated?
I do.
And in fact, there was somebody there who was part of the medical freedom movement other than Simone Gold.
Of course, we know that Simone Gold was arrested and she was there with her boyfriend who was acting as her security detail, or at least that's my understanding of it, John Strand.
But there was a woman there named Lee Dundas.
And Lee Dundas is the attorney who sat next to Thomas Rintz Yeah, I've interviewed Lee before.
Of course, I've interviewed Tom Renz several times.
But yeah, I've interviewed Lee once or twice as well.
Yeah, I know who she is.
So she was at the Capitol, and she was giving fiery speeches.
I saw a video and I don't know what she said word for word, but hers sounded like the most violent of all the speeches that I heard.
Really?
As she was saying something like, you know, we would be within our rights to grab the lawmakers, you know, drag them out back, hang them and shoot them.
What?
No.
Wait, she said something like that?
Are you sure?
Yeah, I can send you the video later.
It's in one of my Chaos Agents articles.
Okay, okay.
See, that surprises me.
It's the first time I've ever heard that.
But if you're sure of that, go ahead.
I know that Lee can be fiery, right?
I think she's seen by a lot of people as a pretty amped up verbal fighter.
But what you're saying is kind of shocking to me.
Right.
And, you know, I can't say that she is an agent, necessarily, but she has the type of pedigree that would make someone, you know, a target for inclusion in that sort of operation.
Her father was DOD, her husband was military, and she was somebody who, she was bright enough to skip high school, go straight to college, go to law school, and practice as an attorney at the age of 19.
Wow, that's something.
Yeah, she's very, very smart, clearly.
Her speech in 2019 on the floor in Sacramento during Bill SB, I don't know if it was 274, 275, something like that, that would end vaccine...
Excuses not to take one.
Oh, the exemptions.
Exemptions, thank you.
It was an excellent, excellent speech.
And she is fiery.
But I've heard so many things from people who work with her.
She was working, one, with Carolina Bonita, who was kicked out of the trucker's movement.
And apparently she was close with the person running the accounts.
But, you know, she was at January 6th giving what sounded like violent speeches, never questioned by the FBI or arrested when so many other people were.
And then later on she was in something called the Arise USA tour.
And the other leadership kicked her out because they felt like they were on an educational tour and that she was fomenting violence.
So is one of the patterns...
I think you did an article where you gave like four or five signs that people should watch out for.
And you can explain it in more detail.
But my question is, is one of the signs that you've written about is that when people seem to be instigating violence...
Or calls for violence, but then they themselves are never really prosecuted or investigated or visited by FBI. Is that one of the classic signs?
Yeah, that seems perfectly reasonable.
Somebody who might take a movement and propel it in that direction.
And one of my early articles in the Chaos Agents was about action potential.
There was a study done by an investigator named Labette.
Or Libet.
I'm not sure how to say it.
But Libet tested...
If you were to stop...
Say you had a dial going around a circle and you're trying to stop it when it's pointing straight up.
One of those type games.
And you prepare yourself to punch the button.
Because it's a timing game.
Well, your physical stats, heart rate, things like that can be studied.
and they can show like rising action potential up to the moment you're going to press the button.
Okay.
And that makes sense, right?
You have neuronal activity going on.
You have your heart rate under control.
So that can be seen.
But if you were to interrupt that action potential, then you don't get something like a well-timed hit.
So I think that there's very much the possibility that this is done intentionally, like have people sort of push toward excessive heights, right?
In order to keep the mass of people who might reach that point, who might reach that level of, what else can I do about this?
And then stifle that by having an event that sort of pushes them out there too early.
And that could include protests with guns at a Capitol.
That could include something like January 6th.
And I think that it's very possible that there are chaos agents participating in that.
So again, I certainly have no direct knowledge of who is or who isn't a chaos agent, but those are the things that might be worth looking for.
It's not necessarily that they are trying to create real violence, but very possibly trying to get the people who would be early on that to make moves before the rest of the crowd would make them, and then that separates those people from the crowd.
Yeah.
I see.
And then it also gives, of course, then the government a reactionary, you know, clamping down to say something like, for example, anti-vaccine people are terrorists or something like that, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So they can take preemptive measures, heighten the security state, all that kind of stuff.
Right.
And this is why I've always said, I don't know if you've ever heard any of my podcasts, but I've always said, if you protest...
100% peaceful.
Exercise freedom of speech.
Leave your weapons at home, folks.
I've always said this repeatedly.
Don't bring your guns.
Don't bring your knives.
Don't bring any of that stuff.
If you have all that stuff, leave it at home because you don't want to be trapped in a scenario where some other section of the crowd rushes, let's say, rushes a clinic and shoots up some innocent people because those are the provocateurs, and then you get charged for being part of a mob and having a weapon, right?
Yeah, that's probably usually really good advice.
I mean, I can see the possibility of a protest that includes guns, but if you're going to go and be in something like that, you should probably know the people well and know that it's a situation under control, right?
I know who my friends are who are the most responsible gun owners, for instance.
Right.
I'm talking about like a vaccine protest, not a Second Amendment open carry protest.
Sorry, I should clarify.
Sure.
But, you know, at some point, it all melds together, because it's all about, you know, the tyranny of the government.
And if people are concerned at some point with, you know, whatever the issue is, that it is an existential tyranny, then protests, you know, have the potential to escalate.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
But especially when there are instigators there.
And, you know, I have become aware for sure.
I've seen takeovers.
I've seen good people displaced in certain movements over the years.
I remember years ago, I joined what was called a March Against Monsanto.
And then a couple months later, I don't know where that movement is now, but the movement as it was formulated at the time got taken over by some really bad people that clearly weren't on board with like a non-GMO type of stance.
And I was like, wow, that happened quickly.
I was like, totally infiltrated, right?
Now, maybe it's changed since then.
I don't know.
But I've seen that myself.
Yeah, and one of the lessons that I try to insert into the chaos agents is Ultimately, there's a certain amount for which it just doesn't matter if somebody's trying to infiltrate, right?
If somebody doesn't influence you too much, if your trust is kept close, if it's kept to the people you know personally, if it's kept to your community, and you have lesser and lesser trust the farther you go out, the less you know about people, and if your philosophy of action and living is less...
of your trust space, then it doesn't matter too much who the chaos agents might actually be.
Or if you consider each thing that they're telling you and don't necessarily trust them, but trust and review the messaging, then you've created kind of a shield for yourself.
So what I always say is, kind of like in literature, be willing to kill your heroes.
Be willing to discard them and think through every issue on your own as much as you can.
I know that's difficult for people because people want to make a living.
They want to raise their family.
There's only a limited amount of time.
But Really, there's only a limited amount of time, so people have to up their games, their education on how civil society works, how and why the banking system works, and everything that would feed into the important events.
Well, let me ask you this kind of personal question.
People in my position, you know, I'm, quote, an influencer.
I interview a lot of people.
And over the years, I've learned there are people I interviewed that I wish I had not, right?
It's happened.
It happens to everybody.
There are people I've interviewed that later on something came out or they changed or they did something or I learned something about them.
I'm like, whoa, man, I wish I had known that in advance.
But it's hard to know, isn't it?
Because...
It's hard to live in a society where you're going to run background checks on every person you talk to.
And there are some people in the health freedom movement right now that I've seen some background checks and there's some pretty shocking felony charges and all kinds of things like that.
I'm like, whoa, I didn't know that.
But it's true.
It's out there.
So how do you navigate this?
I think we're made to worry about that too much.
We're made to feel like we have to over-filter who it is we have a conversation with.
over filter who you have a conversation with the vast majority of the time, because it's not meaningful.
You can sit next to a gangster at the bar at a restaurant.
And this is something that has happened to me before is I, for whatever, you know, I, I'm a, an introvert, but who likes to, I enjoy conversations with strangers once in a while.
It doesn't take so much of my energy that I don't do it.
So, you know, sometimes my wife and I'll sit up in the bar or if I go to a restaurant alone.
If I'm traveling, I'll sit up at the bar and I'm happy to talk to people.
I like to hear people's stories.
But I've, you know, I've had a conversation with a guy who was a large scale drug dealer.
And he admitted this to me openly.
He admitted to me that he started doing it while he was in the military.
And it was just a random thing that happened.
And you know what?
Who cares that I talked to him?
I mean, what is it that you do?
Just everyone in the world isolate from each other?
No, that's not the way to go about life.
No, but I don't want to prop up somebody if they're a bad faith actor.
That's kind of what I was meaning.
There are people I've interviewed and then later on found out that they were bad people.
And...
Then I feel bad because, you know, I didn't know that, obviously.
I would never interview somebody that I thought was a bad faith actor.
And I know that even at public speaking events, I've seen this with events, even events I've spoken at, then the event organizer later on would kick somebody out from the speaking roster after they found out something about that person.
And I know they have the same feeling that I have.
It's like, whoa, you know, you kind of gave that person a platform, made them more influential, and they were bad actors.
Like, that happens.
Yeah, I guess the larger the platform, I think that's a personal judgment issue.
The larger your platform, the more you want to do research about people that you have on.
I have my own small podcast.
My larger focus is my newsletter, but I have my own podcast.
Maybe I get 2,000, 3,000 views per interview or something like that across platforms.
Bigger ones may be five, but I don't worry too much about propping somebody up, but I guess as the platform gets larger, sure, there's a due diligence issue, and do that diligence to your level of conscientiousness, right?
Like, however much you think it matters.
I think it's a judgment call.
But one way or another, I don't think that an interview really props somebody up too much.
I think that the message is probably more important, and you get to hear that real time.
But also, you know what?
You also get to think about it.
You get to hear what comes out of their mouth, and that's important.
That's good documentation.
I actually disliked it when Lex Friedman took down his interview with William McCaskill after the FTX disaster because it was found that Sam Bankman-Fried was part of this effective altruism circle.
I thought, you know what, I really want to go listen to that interview.
Sure, yeah.
And I think several people pulled down some interviews.
And I think that's historical documentation.
I think you want to hear as many words as possible and to know what the mindset of that person is or to be able to evaluate the way they talk about things so that maybe you can detect a lie.
Maybe you can detect a deception.
Maybe you can detect just, I don't know, sort of points of ignorance or brainwashing even, right?
You want to understand people as much as possible.
So I think it's actually...
A public service to interview people.
But it is true that you don't want to promote their interests if their interests are in the wrong direction.
But they're even bad people with good interests, and they're good people with bad interests.
So it's a game.
Everybody should be discerning.
Play it as well as we can.
Well, one of the other signs I think you mentioned, I'm just going from memory off one of your articles, was to look at where people get their money.
And I've seen, since the rise of COVID and the whole vaccine issue, you know, a lot of new faces on the scene.
Most of them, you know, great people trying to do the right thing, a lot of courageous voices and so on.
But then a few people have suddenly come up with tons of money, apparently out of nowhere, And even I'm like, where do these people get all this money to do all this promotion and everything when they don't have really a business model that's evident?
You know what I mean?
Isn't that also potentially a red flag?
Yeah, absolutely.
But that's very difficult.
These days, money laundering is easier and easier, and it is probably just extraordinarily difficult, especially if it was planned out before.
Anybody who might have been paid before all this this got going, like in 2019 or early 2020, it may be difficult to impossible to detect who paid them and how much.
Right.
Right.
The trail has gone cold.
But we know the CDC has a kind of a propaganda budget.
I mean, I know from sources, and frankly, this came out of Tom Fitton's public document request, the FOIA request, but the CDC was paying scriptwriters.
You know, paying comedians to insert pro-vaccine messages into Hollywood films and movies and TV shows.
That all came out.
And it's like, well, if they're doing that, of course they're going to pay people to go in and try to change the messaging inside the health freedom movement as well, right?
Yeah, Congress passed a billion-dollar budget for propaganda related to the pandemic, and that's just obscene.
Yeah, absolutely.
And We should absolutely be paying attention to that.
And when it is that we see it, we should, you know, like I said, with everything we should be discerning, right?
And that's one more thing that we add to the way that we judge the information that we hear.
Yeah, I mean, that's great advice.
We should be discerning, but then I have a feeling you and I can have a whole hour of conversation about what that process is.
How do we be discerning?
Do we check with other people we trust?
Do we believe in second-hand trust, right?
Mechanisms of trust.
I mean, how would you say that we even venture down that road of discernment?
Sure.
It's a total education.
Are you familiar with Gelman Amnesia?
No, I guess not.
Gelman Amnesia is the concept that when everybody reads the newspaper and they read within their specialization, they come across articles and they go, well, that's horseshit.
Right, now I know what you're talking about, yeah.
And then they go on reading the rest of the newspaper as if their trust isn't broken, as if they assume that the experts in all the other areas aren't trying to fool everyone.
Right, right.
But if enough people got together and talked about what they saw in their area, different experts, then everybody would kind of understand it and get it.
But what happens is everybody just goes on trusting.
And that way it's a blind trust.
What people should do is get together with people Outside their personality types, outside their areas of expertise, and listen to what they say is the BS in their sphere.
And once you realize that the whole maze is just piled high, that we're in the labyrinth and the minotaur is out there and we're just knee-deep in feces, that's what makes people grow more discerning and look for ways to To route around it.
And one of those ways, I think, is for everyone to participate to some degree in public conversations and for more people to participate in media, even though it's not the highest profit career most of the time.
No, I like what you're saying because more speech is part of the answer here, even if each individual engaged in speech may not be the expert in every area, but more speech in the aggregate.
Connects more ideas and allows for more discernment in the bigger picture, right?
Right.
Absolutely.
It's one of the reasons why in the chaos agents, I try to poke holes in the 800-pound gorillas.
There are about a half dozen people in the medical freedom movement, and I have completely different levels of trust for each of them.
Some of them, I'm pretty sure are good guys.
Some of them, there's at least one that I'm pretty sure is not.
But One way or another, having so much information coming through six people, so much attention on six people means that you're giving the other people who should be part of the conversation less attention and you need to hear what they have to say from their corner, from their perspective and their vectors of approach to different problems and pieces of information.
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that.
That's a really good point.
And there's a lot to navigate, even for someone like me behind the scenes.
You know, I get a lot of private messages from people and sometimes cross accusations against each other.
Oh, this person is a liar.
This person is a tension hound.
You know, whatever.
I mean, we get all that stuff and we try to navigate it.
I have one more question for you, but it's about FTX and crypto, too.
But I want to give you a chance to give out your website, or where do you do your podcast?
Where can people find your interviews?
Yeah, my substack is roundingtheearth.
It's the URL. It's all one word,.substack.com, I think.
And then the podcast.
I think the podcast is distributed to Brighteon.
I have one employee that I let handle that.
It's on, I think, Brighteon, Rumble, Rockfin, and a few other places.
And we have a Locals channel, a Rounding the Earth Locals channel.
And that one's a little bit more like a community.
There are other people sort of active in the conversation.
So on Substack, it's all my articles or occasionally, once every couple of months, a guest article.
But it's a little bit more of a conversation on Locals.
Okay, all right, cool.
Yeah, thanks for that.
We'll put some of those URLs on screen when my editor also inserts your photo for this.
Yeah, thank you.
Let me ask you about FTX, because here's what's interesting, and we may be going slightly over time.
Are you still okay for another five minutes or so?
Yeah, I'm fine.
Okay.
One of the things that we just saw over the last week, you know, you and I are talking on, what is it, March 13th, but over the last week we saw panic withdrawals from these banks, or maybe they were rational withdrawals, but anyway, a lot of Russia withdrawals from Silicon Valley Bank and then Silvergate before that, and then I think Signature Bank out of New York.
But Signature and Silvergate were, I believe, the two most heavily integrated crypto banks In America where you could convert from crypto to dollars.
And the FTX collapse, in my opinion, but I like your response.
In my opinion, it taught people to hurry up and head for the exits as soon as you hear any whisper that something's wrong.
Because if you don't, if you're not the first one out, you lose everything.
So I believe that the rush in Silicon Valley for everybody to hurry up and get your money out of SVB was, in fact, set up by the FTX collapse that taught people that lesson.
What do you think about that?
In a sense, it's definitely true that the last three years have been just a shower of anxiety and fear, or FUD, a fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right?
I don't think that was the purpose of FTX, though.
I think that FTX had sort of multiple tiers of purpose.
Tier one, I believe, was to see if they could set up a global central digital bank.
Right, right.
If they had succeeded with that, then that was their first primary goal.
And Sam was just the front man.
I believe so.
I think that there were probably a lot of people behind that.
Now, second would be, oh, now, you know, I mean, if Sam's doing it himself, he's saying, oh, it looks like the crypto industry needs more regulation because of the things that I did, which is sort of nonsense.
I mean, half the reason of the crypto industry is that the regulators haven't been managing the financial sector well, and that without management, you have stuff go bust.
And you know what?
That's fine.
People should begin to learn and live with the risks of banks going bust when they make poor decisions.
It forces the banks to make good decisions and it forces people to study their banks.
And that is the best way to build a good banking network.
And the banks can be smaller because of that.
And in the future, it won't necessarily be banks.
It may be algorithms that don't even need a person operating it, and their judgment can't get in the way.
I'm saying that because I am a believer that there is, you know, it's not cryptocurrency versus paper.
It's decentralized cryptocurrency versus centralized cryptocurrency.
I'm right there with you on that point.
Yes.
I prefer the decentralized version.
So I am a Bitcoiner just for anybody who wants to know.
I do hold some.
But I think that...
Largely, this blow-up in Silicon Valley Bank is askew from it.
I mean, sure, everybody's already anxious.
But you know what?
There were people on Twitter in January who were pointing out the liability mismatch at Silicon Valley Bank in particular.
And we have rumors, and I believe them currently, that Peter Thiel shorted SVB. Whoa.
Well, that's the first time I'm hearing that.
Now, he's the one who told people to take their money out.
If he shorted it, he might get a visit from the SEC on that point, huh?
Okay.
I didn't know he was the one who told people about it.
But, you know, if I knew about that level of liability mismatch and I were highly involved in Silicon Valley, I would have been making phone calls to people and saying, hey, you know, you should probably keep two weeks of payroll in another bank.
True.
Yep.
But you should do that anyway.
I mean, right?
Diversification in the banking system.
Absolutely.
It's critical.
Yeah.
You know, for any company that's large enough, having two banks just seems perfectly ordinary.
Like Roku had, what, $480 million in one bank, and that's it.
Only insured to $250K under FDIC rules.
I'm like, are you insane?
Really?
Like, that's, I mean, even our operation, which is obviously a tiny fraction of that size, we have multiple banks.
You never know when you have to move, right?
Right.
Yeah, I don't even have $250,000 in the banks, and I have two different banks.
Yeah, exactly.
It just seems ordinary.
It does to me, too.
All right, well, look, I want to say, Matthew, this has been a fascinating discussion.
I hope we get to talk again, but any final thoughts you want to leave folks with here today?
Yeah, I want to say this.
I think that when people are fearful, they are more easily led and When they're scared, when they're not sure what's going on.
I think that people should do their best to do a few simple things to protect themselves.
I'm not somebody who's like, hey, go out and be mass prepper.
I think that we're going to have troubles, but they're going to be short term.
I think that it's important for people to keep a little extra food.
I think that it's, and I'm not getting money for saying this from anybody.
I'm not selling any product or anything like that.
I'm just saying, you know, my wife and I spent, you know, maybe $1,500 on things like food and a water filter, and I think that that's a smart idea.
I think having a few, you know, one ounce silver coins is a smart idea.
I do think that The United States is an extremely strong and wealthy land and people.
And that the entire banking system could blow up and that could cause problems short term.
But I think that five years from now, I don't believe the lights are going to be off.
I think that it's a poor idea to be in a state of fear.
Try to find yourself a state of adventure.
If that's your mindset, if your mindset is a state of adventure, then you're more likely to act entrepreneurially, even if it's locally, even if it's small scale.
And you're more likely to survive relatively unscathed from whatever chaos might take place, even if the lights go out for a moment.
Be prepared.
But then again, the lights may never go out.
So just keep being productive.
Yeah.
I think that's wise advice.
I might, of course, encourage people to prepare a little longer duration, but I agree with you that we will come out of this, that the American people are very resilient, that the North American continent is, I mean, it's a miracle.
We are blessed with waterways and coastlines on two oceans and minerals and energy and food land and rainfall and all these things.
I mean, it is extraordinary.
America is blessed.
No question about it.
We can rebuild.
I think we will.
But I do think we're going to suffer a financial collapse.
I think so, too.
You think so, too?
All right.
Well, I guess we're on the same page on that.
It's fascinating to have you on.
I appreciate you and your work.
And let's just mention your website, roundingtheearth.substack.com.
And when you type that in, rounding the earth, remember, there's two E's adjacent to each other, folks.
It's not rounding.
All right.
Two E's, but then your name, Matthew, only has one T. Is that correct?
Yeah.
That's correct.
Okay, so not two T's, but definitely two E's on rounding the Earth.
Okay, I'm glad I got that correct.
Thank you for taking the time today.
It's been a lot of fun, and I hope to have you back.
All right, thanks, Mike.
All right, yep, thank you, Matthew.
All right, folks, Matthew Crawford there from, again, roundingtheearth.substack.com, and he's got a local site and does some interviews as well.
Very interesting individual to follow, and I found many of his articles intriguing and informative.
And thank you for watching today.
This is Brighteon.com, of course, free speech platform.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And, of course, my channel, HR Report, has more interviews and so on.
But I encourage you to check out other people's channels.
Get a lot of different voices, different views, different analysis.
It's a rich universe of information, just like Matthew said.
And you can access it all for free.
So thank you for your support.
Again, Mike Adams here at Brighteon.com.
Everybody, take care.
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