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April 19, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:03
2670 Shutting Down Government with Bitcoin - Stefan Molyneux and David Seaman
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All right, guys.
We are back from hiatus.
We have a great guest.
He is the Professor X or Morpheus of limited government ideology and also a philosopher and entrepreneur, joined by Stefan Molyneux.
How are you this morning?
Oh, I'm great.
How are you doing, David?
Good.
I like the intimacy of the Skype video chat.
It's pretty interesting.
We are in the future right now.
We're in the Really, a time that's more advanced than what was imagined by 2001, a space odyssey, aside from the space station.
I think we're heading in that direction, too.
I think eventually we'll have consumer space.
Yeah, well, it's also unusual because I run a donation-based podcast.
It's unusual for me to be on webcam with my shirt on because normally I'm shaking my money makers to get some money.
So this is good.
It's a nice exception, unless you'd like me to.
No, I'm kidding.
Don't worry.
Don't panic.
The listeners appreciate you for your brains as well.
I think that's a very nice way of complimenting my 47-year-old boy.
Yeah, it's incredible that we're able to have this conversation.
It's so easy.
Technology is so good now.
I don't remember the last time that my desktop has crashed.
Which is an interesting thing to think about because it used to be all the time, you know, Windows would crash, you'd have to restart it, you'd have to save your document every few minutes because you were paranoid about losing it.
And now those things are just kind of wiped off the map and we're focused on things like Bitcoin and things like the NSA. People are trying to struggle with how much authority is enough, how much is too much.
That's one of the areas where you have been a really important voice in making people realize how much power we have as individuals and how little it makes sense to give that power away without thinking about it.
Yeah, well, the word authority is a real challenge.
And there's a famous anarchist named Bakunin who said, people think I'm anti-authority, perish the thought.
When it comes to shoes, the cobbler is my authority.
And authority, I think, is a good thing.
You know, my dentist knows how to deal with my teeth.
I don't.
And nutritionists will tell you what to eat, although they never seem to agree on anything.
But I think authority is fine.
And I'm certainly not anti-authoritarian.
My fundamental problem is with coercion, right?
So the state as an institution relies on the initiation of force in a sort of given geographical area.
Authority, yay!
I hope that I'm an authority on a few things, but when it comes to force, I think that's where the real issue lies.
Yeah, that's an important distinction.
And, you know, if somebody thousands of miles away from me wearing a pantsuit wants to decide how many more dollars get printed, I don't have any problem with that, but I don't see why I have to be conscripted into it and why that person has to influence what I'm doing with digital bits that have nothing to do with the thing that they created.
Well, I like your distinction about the pantsuit because it seems to indicate that if they weren't wearing a pantsuit, you'd be fine with it.
It's the pantsuit!
That's the problem.
It is the pantsuit.
Well, I mean, if you think about it, you're dealing with people that you don't know.
People who are, as my friend Abby Martin likes to say, these people are strangers.
We've never met them.
And they have this undue influence over not only our own personal lives, but really the direction that the country takes.
And it's not efficient.
I think that I have no problem with regulation, to go into the thing I've been talking about for the past few days.
No problem with regulation.
I think when you're trying to protect consumers' deposits from loss or from theft, that's actually a good thing to some extent.
What I have a problem with is that regulators are not even thinking about the consumer, and they're just regulating to regulate.
And you see that with law enforcement agencies now, where they're not interested in protecting civilians.
They just want to Well, you have this thing about public service.
Generally, service doesn't come at gunpoint.
You know, I don't go to very rough restaurants, but generally, you know, maybe the odd slingshots, some finger lasers, but for the most part, service doesn't come at a gunpoint.
If you have a gun pointed at me, I don't think service is the word you're looking for.
But they think, you know, well, I serve my cattle.
Because I give them food, and it's like, yes, but you own your cattle, and they are confined within your pen.
So this recent Nevada standoff, they had a little First Amendment zone where you could go into literally a cattle pen and bleach your complaints to the powers that be while they ignored you and reloaded them.
So it is strange, and I hope to make the present incomprehensible to the future.
You go back in time to when there was slavery, and how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 or 300 years ago.
I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future.
Like, how could they get out of bed, not put their face into the wall, and tie their shoes not together and go out and do their day when they believed all these crazy things?
Well, there is this, we all remember recently when the government shut down, Congress came to an impasse, and there were two weeks where it was like the twilight zone, and there was, aside from critical services, no government in the United States, really no functioning government at the federal level, even national parks were closed down, public access, and it was supposed to be this apocalyptic thing that would scare us into Demanding of our congressmen that they resolve this right away.
And instead, it kind of backfired on the people in D.C. because a lot of us woke up and realized, we don't really need you then, do we?
If I'm paying 40% of my income for all these services, and the services were turned off for two weeks, I looked up, planes were still flying, and highways were still moving, freight and passengers.
And life went on as usual.
Unless you worked for a federal agency, those two weeks were business as usual and life as usual.
And it got me thinking, well, how many of these agencies do we actually need if so little changed after this shutdown that was supposed to be the end of the world?
Well, but of course, a lot of people did feel anxious about the possibility of not being audited.
That, I think, is really important to remember.
If you don't get audited, it's tough to have a great day.
The fact that the audits were being cut back on was a tragic waste of human potential.
The other thing, too, is they shut down The parks, and this is supposed to be an argument why we need government, but it's like if you all didn't have the parks to begin with, if you hadn't just staked this arbitrary claim on vast tracts of land, we wouldn't need your permission to go in there anyway.
So it's the presence of government that makes that the problem, not the absence of government.
It's like give the parks back, privatize the parks, let people who actually know what they're doing run the parks.
Disney seems to have a pretty good idea of how to do it.
There's not massive brush fires on their parks.
Let the people who know what they're doing own the parks.
And then if you shut down the government, we can still get to the parks.
Well, that's a little bit unfair, though, because I personally prefer the pristine beauty of a national park to the corporatized, you know, we have to maximize the amount of revenue per square foot, which is actually the way that, I didn't realize this until fairly recently, retail stores in the mall, that's one of their key indicators is, you know, revenue per square foot.
So you are literally a piece of livestock when you walk into their store, and their store is nothing more than an expense.
They don't care about any aspect of it.
Except for how much revenue can it bring us with each square foot we're leasing or renting?
Oh, David, did I just see the shadow of Karl Marx peering over your shoulder?
Livestock is coercive, right?
I mean, you can choose to walk into a store or not, but I don't think that puts you in the same category as people who are fenced in with electric fences, like having to pay taxes whether you choose or not.
I don't mind it's a metric that stores want to use.
If you want to go to the store or you don't want to go to the store, I think either one of those is fine.
Again, that doesn't fall into the violence It's voluntary as far as that goes.
My point, though, is that I like the fact that I think national parks are one of the few good things the government has done where you're protecting a certain portion of land from the petty development that would happen otherwise.
I personally like having an area of the country that's not just strip malls and...
Wait, wait, wait.
If you want that, you can have that, right?
I mean, if enough people want a park, Then they'll pay for a park, right?
I mean, I like parks myself.
I love hiking in the wilderness and I think it's great.
I actually spent a year and a half gold panning and prospecting in the far north and loved it.
But 97% of America is uninhabited.
I don't think there's going to be strip malls everywhere anytime soon.
I mean, if you want a park, then, you know, you pay for the entrance fees and people will, and you want it pristine, then you'll pay for the parks where they don't build those things.
And I think lots of people want that.
Yeah, but I think we all acknowledge that there are a lot of people who would not come together and do that, and that's one of the original reasons for government.
And then what you see happening is that it's gotten so far from whatever its initial founding beliefs were that the National Park, which is supposed to be this service for all of us, is now something that, you know, you're being arrested if you trespass while the government is shut down.
And you're like, why don't you just let me do my own thing?
I don't need to be supervised while I'm in the National Park.
It's the same thing with the NSA, where they were so good at manipulating the narrative.
When I say they, I mean just the security industry, surveillance industry.
So good at bringing their talking heads onto the right cable networks, getting the right op-eds out there and stuff.
That you had a big percentage of this country actually saying that Snowden is a traitor for telling us that some people within the government are spying on us illegally.
I mean, if you think about that, that still blows my mind when I think about it in the shower.
You have 40% of Americans think this guy they've never met before, except for what they hear about him on their TV screens, that he's a traitor for showing us that people are basically committing treason.
Well, I think a lot of Americans fall for this.
If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide.
Which, to me, would mean that cops should never mind being filmed.
Because they're not doing anything wrong, so they have nothing to hide.
But you try filming cops sometimes, and they'll take your ass downtown with a whole bunch of phone books around your head and some pretty heavy elbow pounding.
Or transparency in Congress.
You have to pass the bill to see what's in it.
Or the fact that governments are allowed to lie to you.
Cops are allowed to lie to you.
Agents are allowed to lie to you.
But if you lie to the government, it's a crime.
If you've done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, then there should be no resistance ever to Freedom of Information Acts.
But of course there is huge resistance to it, to Freedom of Information Acts on the part of the government.
So it's the usual story of the rules are for them and not Liberation from the rules is for them, and enforcement of the rules is for us.
The government is above the law, but we're supposed to obey the law.
The whole point of government is to create this null zone where you can do whatever you want while claiming moral legitimacy for imposing the opposite rules on your lifestyle.
Yeah.
There was an article earlier today in the Financial Times because I have Bitcoin as one of the keywords on my news alerts.
And it was an article in the Financial Times that had already been published the day before.
I guess they're good at Google News spamming because they got it back up at the top.
But the article was saying that Bitcoin is going the way of gold and gun nuts.
Of course, the article doesn't actually prove that.
They have no data that links gold and gun ownership to Bitcoin ownership, which would have been, I think, a more responsible article.
But they came out with this headline, and I clicked on it because it's, you know, incendiary, and you click on it.
And so I'm thinking to myself, if you're villainizing Bitcoin by saying that gun nuts own it, What's wrong with a gun nut?
What's wrong with somebody who is exercising their Second Amendment rights?
It makes me wonder how long will it be before you see an article where it's, you know, free speech nuts?
Because, I mean, we're talking about the Second Amendment is now something that we consider you to be crazy if you exercise it.
How long before we see op-eds where it's just like...
There are people out there criticizing Obama in these dangerous times.
These free speech nuts need to be reined in.
Free speech and their Bitcoins, what comes next?
And it's like they're creating characters of people that don't actually exist or exist in such small numbers that it's not representative.
Because I know a lot of Bitcoin users and they're just people.
They're investors in Silicon Valley.
they're store owners here in LA they're just random people on the internet who want to play with something new and they're not gun nuts, they're not gold nuts so if you have a big outlet like the Financial Times promoting this nonsense, I see it as kind of like a modern reefer madness almost, where you're dismissing the facts because the facts don't agree with what you're saying, and the only way you can get people is based on emotion, based on a lowest common denominator appeal to these kinds of characters
well, I mean the moment you put the word nuts in, you've excluded yourself from any rational discourse But the people who are in the finance industry love the government.
I mean, they love the government, particularly the big finance industries, right?
I mean, the Goldman Sachs.
I mean, they love the government because the government gives them bailouts.
The government uses taxpayer money for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The government gives them preferential legislation.
This is why they donated the most amount to Obama than anyone else has ever received, and this is why Obama continued and expanded the tarp rollout.
They love big government, and also because too big to fail, is well understood in the financial circles It means that if you're a small company, you can't compete with a big company because a small company is not too big to fail.
This is why there's been this huge consolidation in the finance industry.
Big companies swallowing up smaller companies for pennies on the dollar because they're not too big.
You have to be big in order to get the government money.
So they love the government and they hate anything which limits the power of the state.
The finance industry loathes everything which limits the power of the state, which is why they gave money to Obama, who is fundamentally a socialist.
And this is very easy to see and to understand.
What does gold do?
If we had a gold-based system, that would enormously limit the power of the state.
If the money had to be backed by gold, they couldn't print all of this ass-white bubble nonsense paper money.
They couldn't just manufacture their own tea bells and sell them to themselves at a profit.
They couldn't pay banks to deposit money back at the government.
They couldn't jiggle with interest rates the way they do.
Gold is a massive limit.
If gold replaced fiat currency tomorrow, government would shrink by about 80%.
It would have to.
Which is why I don't think gold adoption will ever happen because there's so much against it.
Even the big banks.
I mean, there are rumors of JPMorgan having manipulated metals prices because they don't want to see a world where everybody's using gold and they can't deposit their phony dollars into JPMorgan Chase and give them an exaggerated market capitalization as a result.
So they don't want that either, and there are so many institutions, I think, that are just against individual power of any kind at this point.
And you can't point the finger and blame any one person.
You can't even blame Obama.
But there are so many powerful organizations where their needs interlock, and the needs are pretty much keep individuals from doing their own finances, keep individuals from understanding how the laws are actually written, just keep everybody in a state of fear, everybody afraid of being audited, afraid of standing out from the The herd or the pack and distract people with celebrity news stories that don't affect our lives at all.
Whereas things like the Affordable Care Act, things like shifts in tax rates, these things really do matter, especially when you go to the grocery store or when you think about how much money you're going to have in 10 years when you want to quit your job and move somewhere else.
And we're distracted from these very basic issues.
Yeah, I mean, the financial industry as a whole has adapted itself to fiat money parasitism.
They used to be like they used to take your money, put some of it in the bank vault, lend some of it out to promising entrepreneurs to make more money.
And I think that is really what banks used to do.
Now, banks kind of fundamentally exist now for two reasons.
One is there's inflation, which means that if you put your money under your mattress, it's going to lose value.
And so that is one reason that people put money in the banks as a defensive measure.
That's sort of one reason.
The second reason, of course, is that Governments can't protect your stuff, right?
So you can't keep your stuff at home, particularly in the disarmed countries.
But guns and gold limit government power.
We just saw this in Nevada, where the government had to back off from a well-armed group of people.
Governments are limited by guns and by gold, which is why the Financial Times is calling anybody who wants gold and guns nuts, because that limits the host that they're currently using to feed off the general population.
Yeah, that's basically the heart of it right there.
And you said it's parasitic.
It really is.
I mean, right now, government and banks are two sides of the same coin.
Where the bank makes mistakes, gets bailed out by the government, and in turn, the banks bail out that crop of politicians by, in some form, contributing to their campaigns.
And it keeps this whole cycle going, and every time that cycle moves around, You get further and further away from the truth and also just further and further away from market efficiency.
I mean, what you see now with, I hate to keep saying Bitcoin, but when you watch the live transaction feed on the blockchain, it's beautiful.
You're seeing like finally a financial language that resembles what we have in every other area of our life, where we have the real-time Twitter feed and we have the Facebook feed, but we're using bank accounts that Or from 50 years ago.
You walk into your bank, they ask you for your state-issued ID. They're behind a bulletproof pane of glass.
You have to be friendly and polite to access your own money, and it has to be done on their terms, between the hours of 9 and 4, not on their lunch break.
And you start to realize, like, wait a second, I'm the depositor.
This is my money.
Like, literally my money.
And I'm having to suck up to you and show my ID and go through this whole little game and dance just to get the funds that are mine that I received in exchange for trading my time and labor.
It's really kind of bizarre.
Well, and I think the finance industry is heavily involved in war profiteering.
America is the biggest arms seller in the world, and so many companies and corporations are orbiting this black-hearted sun of the military-industrial complex.
The one thing that most excites me about Bitcoin, and I just did a speech on this, but I'll keep it short, is its capacity or its potential to end war, as we know it.
So we've got to research it to run some numbers.
The war on terror In total, is being touted about $9 trillion, booked and unfunded liabilities.
Now, converted to gold, that's 291,000 tons of gold.
174,000 tons of gold is all that has ever been mined in human history, mined and refined.
So just the war on terror...
It costs almost twice the amount of gold that has ever been refined in human history.
Now, if you had a gold-back currency or you had a Bitcoin currency, it would be impossible.
To do this kind of deficit financing, to do this kind of inflation, to do this kind of national debt economic rape of the next generation and the next generation's next generation.
So one thing that really excites me about Bitcoin is its direct democracy, which of course a pseudo-democracy like statism really hates and fears.
But the degree to which if, let's say, every government tomorrow adopted Bitcoin, they won't.
But if they did, we would say goodbye to war as we know it.
It would be absolutely impossible to do the kind of deficit financing, hyperinflation, interest rate jiggering that currently goes on that shields the population from the true costs of war.
Well, not only deficit spending, but also create a new form of unity.
It would be the real version of what the EU was trying to do, where instead of imposing a currency on all these different cultures and peoples, this would just be naturally accepted as the standard, which is happening already if you look at the growth curve.
But it's being adopted in the same way that the email protocol was adopted 25 years ago or 30 years ago.
And no government was pushing that down people's throats.
It was just the standard that seemed to work pretty well.
So everybody starts to use it and then that's it.
You know, then anybody can create their own email service.
And in the same way, Bitcoin is just the standard and anybody can build on top of it or innovate around it.
And I think that once we have that, Then the whole world, even if you're Chinese and you don't speak a word of English, even if you're in Pakistan and you're supposed to hate the people in India and they're supposed to hate you, we're all using the same currency and we all speak the same financial language now.
So we're not going to attack each other because for you to attack somebody in India would be to damage the value of your own currency and damage the value of your own trade network.
I don't want to say it's going to be.
It could be, if it works out, a golden age of global, not only e-commerce, but peer-to-peer finance in a way that I think is really empowering.
Just cut these vampire banks out of the mix.
I don't need to go to Chase if I can get money from my neighbor.
That's what it comes down to.
And this will allow that to happen in a way that probably hasn't since The ancient merchants of Mesopotamia and societies like that, where it used to be agreements were made just between merchants and between buyers and sellers.
We didn't always have big banks there to hold our hand.
This has really only been over the last few years.
Even in America's history, we used to have far more banks and far more diversity than we have today.
Now if you look around any city, it's Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, and maybe one credit union, and that is it.
Wouldn't it be great to eliminate the middleman, remove financial transactions, remove the The inflationary aspect of human labor from these kind of transactions.
Yeah, I had to go send money the other day, line up, give your name, address, DNA, eye sample, blood sample, name of firstborn, fingernail clippings, and $35.
And then, oh, six days later, they might get their money, or it might bounce back.
We don't know.
As opposed to, beep, it's there, and it's done.
Oh, the idea of taking...
The financial parasites of the jugular of the human economy is fantastic.
If you shrink the financial powers, you automatically shrink the state.
That's inevitable because the state relies on the financial powers to give it legitimacy, to create the money for it.
And also, you end up in a great situation where you don't have currency wars, right?
I mean, a lot of conflict has to do with currency wars, making this currency look better, making this currency look worse, so that people will come to your currency and so on.
But if we're all of the same currency or it's all based on the same general protocol, it's all win-win.
And I think that's just fantastic.
I mean, think of the amount of war that's been started because, I mean, according to some sources, both Hussein and Gaddafi in Iraq and Libya, respectively, were on the verge of switching off the U.S. dollar for their oil purchases.
You know, that's about currency.
Yeah.
By the way, I want to fact check myself.
I brought up the Financial Times article.
The headline is Bitcoin bound for, quote, guns and gold crowd.
Not nuts.
I assume that because I've seen that link so often.
And I think that's what's implied here.
Why would you say that otherwise?
They're saying it's for the guns and gold crowd.
So they're telling people...
They didn't use the word investors, right?
True.
It's a crowd, like just a mob of idiots.
And so I just want to fact check myself because that's the actual headline.
But...
Yeah, and I think also what bothers them about Bitcoin is that they keep saying, well, we don't know who created it.
Somebody could come in in the middle of the night and steal the Bitcoins off your computer, some hacker.
And all these things, they're trying to cast all these doubts on it.
And I think what really scares them is when consumers start to look into this technology, It actually is more transparent than any bank.
What other currency in the world allows you to see every single transaction that has ever occurred using it?
What other currency is decentralized across hundreds of thousands of servers?
If Chase gets hacked Your bank account balance is gone in some cases, you know, until they find a suitable backup.
But with Bitcoin, you're buying into a network where to create one false transaction or to hack it would cost about $600 million in processing power and then would immediately be revealed to the rest of the community and in some form would be immediately fixed and dealt with.
And I think that what really scares the banks and the kind of shills we see on cable networks Is that this really is efficient and once people read about it as opposed to listening to the Financial Times, they're going to go, holy shit, this is like Napster for my money.
This makes so much more sense than going to the record store.
And I'm not endorsing illegal downloads, I'm just saying that The MP3. Where banks are at right now is kind of like telling people, who's going to ever want MP3s?
We have perfectly good CDs.
They're in the shelves.
They cost $16 each.
Nobody's ever going to want MP3s.
Nobody's ever going to want a smartphone.
And even the iPad, when it first came out, people made fun of Steve Jobs.
They thought the name was stupid.
They thought it sounded like a female hygienic product.
Remember that?
Oh, yeah.
They were really ripping into him and they were like, there's no market need for the tablet.
He's telling people that they need this.
They don't need it.
Now the iPad is not a controversial thing at all.
It's what I use to watch Netflix.
It's what everybody uses.
And it's a major way that people consume media.
And I think the same thing is going to happen with Bitcoin where What people are labeling as ridiculous today within a couple years is going to be so obvious to us.
Like, oh, of course you don't want government to be the one issuing your currency.
That's silly.
That's like, you know, the casino having their finger on the roulette wheel.
You don't want that.
And I think all these things will just become self-evident over time.
Well, I mean, people care about Satoshi's identity because they don't want to do the research to find out what Bitcoin is all around.
It's a lot easier to talk about a mystery man than it is to actually figure out how Bitcoin works and what its potential is.
It's just nonsense, distraction.
I don't know the name of the guy who wrote Mozilla.
Does that mean I can't use a browser?
And also, how many Americans know who was actually behind the creation of the Federal Reserve?
Who actually started the crap currency that people are forced to use now?
Nobody knows.
Does that mean they say, well, I can't use these dollars because I don't know who created the Federal Reserve?
No, it's just nonsense, just distraction here.
It's a picture of Kim Kardashian's butt and I go back to yourself spanking and don't worry about these big issues.
Do you think that people will start to care about the big issues, or do we stay in this kind of haze of Kim Kardashian?
I'm sure you've heard this before, the theory that we have in our minds, the capability to...
Joe Rogan's talked about it, a lot of people have.
We're designed basically to deal with 150 relationships.
And now, I'm drawing on an idea right here that's actually from an Owen Cook video.
But he talks about how today, instead of, you know, when you think of food, you think of the local chef in your village, and maybe he can help you out and give you advice.
Instead, you think of Wolfgang Puck.
And when there's something wrong with you, instead of thinking of the local healer or the local doctor, you think, Dr.
Oz.
And so it's created all these relationships that you don't really have, and it's maybe crowding out the local networking and just kind of local wisdom that you'd be able to gain on your own if you weren't relying on these mass media figures to be your financial expert or your health expert or your political expert.
And I think that stuff is cool in some ways because it gives us one national culture, but it's really detrimental in other ways because we all kind of have useless relationships, you know?
Well, they're not even relationships.
I mean, the TV is, you know, until Winston Smith's nightmare comes true, it's still one way.
Yeah.
And it's sort of a young person's game to have pseudo relationships.
When you get older, like you have a parent and you have kids or you get sick or...
I mean, you need people.
You need people to help you with your kids, take care of them.
You need people if you're sick to bring you some chicken soup and stuff.
You can get away with a lot of stuff and a lot of pseudo nonsense when you're young.
But yeah, when you get older, you just need people.
And if you haven't layered those relationships in and you don't have those relationships...
It's kind of late in the game.
You know, it's like, well, I missed my fertility window, I'll get nine cats.
You know, not quite the same thing.
And so, yeah, I would encourage people, don't settle for pseudo-relationships.
I mean, go for the real thing where there's back-and-forth interaction.
You kind of get erased by looking at media and thinking you're talking to friends.
Yeah, that's...
That's a deep way of putting it.
If we watch one of these shows in the morning, like Fox and Friends or something, we just assume they're on our side.
We don't know what their motivations are, and that's somebody reading a teleprompter.
People forget that.
People honestly, I think, forget that when they watch a show at night, it's an opinion show, not a news show.
And by labeling as an opinion show, they can fill your living room with bullshit for an hour.
And the news network doesn't have any liability because they go, oh, Rachel Maddow, that's opinion.
Bill O'Reilly, that's just opinion.
But you're forming – you're influencing the way people view the world and dismissing it as entertainment and opinion.
And I think that's how they've been able to get away with it for so long.
Well, you know, when I invite friends over, I don't invite somebody to pitch them a timeshare or sell them crockery or Tupperware or anything like that.
The reality is that the people in the media are not in the business of delivering information to you.
They are in the business of delivering you to their advertisers.
That is their business.
Anybody who thinks it's about information to you does not understand even the basics of how the market works.
You are fodder for their advertisers.
They're trying to get your eyeballs up against their advertisers' message.
That's their job.
Now, whatever they'll do to get you to watch, they'll do.
But it has nothing to do with any responsibility to bring true information to you.
In fact, the best way to get you to watch their channel is to appeal to and amplify your existing unconscious prejudices.
And this is why it tends to be an increasing balkanization of society because, you know, Fox talks to a certain number of people.
The Huffington Post talks to a different kind of person.
MSNBC, ABC, NBC, they all talk to different kinds of people.
And they keep those people glued to their sets by not challenging them with contrary information.
And so, yeah, I mean, all you are is Canon Foto for their advertising dollars.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just the way that it is.
Yeah, and I think one of the things that happens that's very Orwellian with the consolidation of media over the last couple decades is that we're seeing less and less diversity in thought.
So if you turn on one of these networks or if you want to be booked on one of these networks, you pretty much have to talk the way that they talk.
You have to be an Ann Coulter or you have to be a character that they can instantly describe as, oh, She's a big government and culture.
And then somebody's like, oh great, I'll book her.
It's got to be this very simple thing.
And I think that what's happening over time is we're caving into very weird classifications of people and Turning really legitimate stuff into, like, fringe stories.
Like, just one example.
I found it amusing that 9-11 truthers are called 9-11 truthers.
You know, because I'm personally not really, I'm not a truther, but I think you should try to seek the truth in any subject, no matter what it is.
And this word was turned into Almost a slander or a pejorative term.
Oh, truthers.
Oh, birthers.
Well, it's like, well, shouldn't you want to know where somebody's actually born?
Shouldn't you want to know what the truth is behind one of the most influential moments in human history, or at least in American history?
Aren't those good things to have going for you?
No.
You don't want to be a truther.
You don't want to be a birther.
You don't want to be a teabagger.
And so it's really shut down forms of discourse that I think had been there in America for most of our history.
And only recently is it coming back because it went away with the sort of corporate media zombie network we have where people are just being fed bullshit that's not relevant to their lives.
Now we're seeing the response to that, which is super intimate podcasts and YouTube videos that can go on for as long as they need to and newsletters and Twitter.
So we're starting to get real communication again.
And I think part of that process is looking back at what we were fed before and being able to point out that it is propaganda.
It might not be the same kind of propaganda as Soviet-era stuff where a state is directly issuing it.
But would you agree with me that we see a lot of actual propaganda on TV? I think we see nothing but propaganda on TV and this is across all the networks.
You're right.
I mean, the time slice that you have jammed in between these commercial breaks means that you cannot introduce anything novel to the audience.
Because novelty requires explanation.
It requires context.
It requires history.
I mean, if you get...
I like Ann Poulter a lot.
She's a great researcher and a great writer and an entertaining person.
But she's not going to challenge the Fox audience, right?
She goes on some other shows.
And when I see her, I watch her on The View.
She didn't really challenge anyone.
So, I mean, I do six hours of call-in shows every week, and I'll have conversations with someone for two hours straight, no breaks, when we're talking about a new idea.
I need to get their perspective, we need to talk about the history, we need to run through the arguments, we need to make sure it matches with the evidence.
Philosophy or the true extension of knowledge is a very challenging and deep thing to do, It ain't going to fit between a commercial for a tampon and some oatmeal.
It's just not with things scrolling along the bottom.
You know, there's no bit in the Socratic dialogues where it's like, we now pause for a message from Cicero.
Right?
I mean, this didn't...
Okay, that's the wrong culture.
But you know what I'm saying.
You have to have in-depth, lengthy conversations to really teach someone something new or to learn something new.
And so these time slices, it's just like, hey, what do you believe?
We'll help you turn it up.
Good.
Now you feel like more certain, right?
And then you get addicted to it because when you get addicted to a narrative rather than exploring reason and truth and reality, when you get addicted to a narrative, you're never satisfied because reality keeps blowing bullshit over.
So you have to keep going back to prop it up.
Oh, I've got to go back to Fox because, you know, I've got to go back to MSNBC. I've got to go back and watch some Obama speeches because my bullshit is falling over.
You're propping it up all the time.
You don't build your house on sand when you build it on amplified opinions.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's very easy to see the propaganda that comes out of MSNBC. But then when I switch over to Fox...
It's a little bit harder to see, but it's still there.
And what it is there is that I would normally identify more with conservatives, but with these TV conservatives, they hang on to these values that are, I think, really extremely evil values.
You know, the drug war for some reason has become co-opted by conservatives.
And they think they're being, you know, good Americans by wanting to put other Americans in cages for smoking a plant that the colonists smoked and didn't even think about writing down and talking about because it was such a simple part of life.
And so to me, I'm like, if you're limited government, then why do you believe in putting people in prisons for crimes where there's no victim?
These victimless crimes of smoking something the state tells you not to smoke.
And they don't have a good answer to that.
And so that to me is propaganda as well.
And the whole thing needs to die out.
I think that that's already happening.
And I think Bitcoin is just the financial extension of what we're seeing in media and what we're seeing in politics and discourse and everything else, which is that people want something that's actually accurate and that is instantly disseminated.
And that's all we want and need.
And once we come across something that does that, we're like, you know what?
I'm good.
I'm good with my Twitter account.
I don't need to read CNN anymore.
And I really think that that technology is going to have an insanely bright future and it'll probably seep into everything else.
We'll probably have secure voting systems within the next 10 years based on cryptography.
And it's going to be something that you just can't hack because you can't in the same way that Bitcoin You can't create a fake Bitcoin because you can't do it, you know?
And the number of possible Bitcoin addresses is more than the number of atoms in the galaxy.
When you're talking about this kind of complexity, how can people even, for a single second, say that the Federal Reserve is better, which is running on the Janet Yellen algorithm, you know?
Like, you're putting the, really, the fate of the whole world in one person's mind.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's completely ridiculous.
And I think we're starting...
Well, no, no, hang on.
But David, it makes a huge amount of sense to Janice Yellen.
I mean, the concentration of power into a four-pound mass of brain tissue is very heavy.
I mean, we are actually drawn to political power biochemically.
We get a high out of the exercise of coercive power over other human beings because human beings are a great resource to own.
And so for Janet Yellen and for her power-addicted endocrinological system, it makes great sense to her.
It's just that hunting gazelle doesn't make sense to the gazelle, but for the lion, it's fantastic.
Yeah.
And I don't have anything against Janet Yellen.
I think I'd be saying the same thing if it was David Seaman.
Nobody should have that level of power.
And if I were to go out on the sidewalk and say that I should issue and control your currency, if I were to just say this to a bunch of strangers, they'd be like, this is a crazy person.
Who the fuck are you?
You're going to control my currency?
But suddenly you get somebody in that position of power.
They're selected by the right people.
And there you are.
They actually have that authority.
That to me is very strange, especially now that we have something better.
And I think...
I keep talking about Bitcoin in particular because it seems like one of those black swan events where we really, if we all pitch into this, if we all make it happen, if we all buy a little bit of Bitcoin or accept it at our business, make it a real thing at our storefront, we could really change the course of history in terms of starving governments of the ability to, as you said, initiate war.
Implement expensive surveillance programs that would not be possible under the free market.
There's no built-in consumer demand for a huge spy grid.
It's just not there.
There's no real consumer demand for militarized drones.
That would go away.
I think we could actually make the jump.
This is kind of a one-time shot.
I think if we allow this to fail, if we allow the media to spew lies about it, we allow bankers at Chase to scare their customers into not trying it out, not using it, what will happen is that we're stuck with this system for God knows how long.
This zombie bank system could be with us for the next 50 years, and it's going to drive my generation deep into debt.
We're already there.
It's going to keep your generation from having the kinds of retirements that you were looking forward to.
And it's not going to improve anybody's well-being except for this artificial class of banking executives and lobbyists in DC that has really emerged only fairly recently in our history.
And so that's why I'm optimistic that if we just raise awareness and do the right things, support the right kinds of financial instruments, it can all go away because it's unnatural to begin with.
It's like a cancer.
And if you take away the source of nutrients for the cancer, maybe that will dry up and die itself, you know?
Yeah, there's six words.
Six words for human liberation and six words for the end of our experiment in democracy, of the slow suicide of culture, through political corruption.
Six words.
You can't buy votes with Bitcoin.
You can't buy votes with Bitcoin.
That's all that people need to know about our current system.
You can't bribe people with the leftovers of their own stolen money.
I can't be a politician and say, vote for me, and I will give you 50 bucks, but I'm going to tax you $100 to do that.
People would say, forget this, right?
Or as my daughter, we were playing Monopoly with some friends and my daughter who's five yesterday.
And she said, I want to be the banker because I want to be in charge of the money.
I want to be like the Fed.
And then she said, and vote for me and I'll give you 50 bucks because of my made up money, Monopoly money.
I'm like, damn, young lady, you just encapsulated my entire life's work at the age of five in about 12 seconds.
Yeah, you can't buy votes with Bitcoin.
What does the political system look like without bribery?
What is Obamacare?
It's just bribery, that is.
It's just taking money from the young and the healthy and giving it to single moms, sick, old people.
It's just bribery.
That's all it is.
What is fiat currency other than the capacity to give people the illusion that you're giving them more than you're taking?
You can't buy votes with Bitcoin.
That's all people...
Hey, you trust in the political system?
Well, then let's replace fiat currency with Bitcoin.
Now, if people don't want to do that, then they're implicitly saying that we need to buy votes.
We need to bribe voters.
If you don't want a self-limiting currency, then you want to bribe people.
And then you've just revealed every goddamn piece of shitty thing about our existing political system.
A vote against Bitcoin is a confession of a lust for corruption that has truly blackened the human soul.
Well said.
Yeah, when I read one of these articles by somebody like Paul Krugman talking about how Bitcoin is dangerous and how it could lead to a dangerous deflationary state, I start to think to myself, wait a second, if it's deflationary as somebody who's saving for the future, isn't that what I want?
Wouldn't it be nice for the first time in my life to actually have more tomorrow than I do today?
Well, it's called the computer industry.
I mean, does he dislike the fact that a computer dollar It's worth more next year than it is this year.
I mean, he probably has a laptop and a cell phone.
He's got big, giant cameras, satellites, and the guy relies on technology, and he's like, well, deflation is bad.
It's like, you evil little Ewok, do you know that, in fact, the only reason you're able to talk to anyone is because of the deflationary aspect of software and hardware and technology?
But, you know, he's just a furry-faced little shill asshole.
What's he got to do with anything real or truthful or good?
Yeah.
Well, I actually hear from people that when they buy Bitcoin, it feels like the first time they really own something.
And it's sad and pathetic to me that the first time you feel like you own something is when you see, you know, a little representation of ones and zeros on your computer screen.
But that's where we've gotten to because when you hold dollars, if you actually look into the Federal Reserve System, It starts to sound more and more crazy to the point where if you were to explain it in an honest way to somebody else at a diner, they would think you're schizophrenic or something.
You're talking about liability on the Federal Reserve's books.
You don't own something.
You own basically, at best, you own a debt.
And with Bitcoin, you actually own something that's not debt-based in any form and is a new social construct.
And that makes people really excited.
It's probably the way that people felt 100 years ago or 20 years ago with gold, where they had finally this kind of alternative that was not It's going to be slowly destroyed over time.
The government regularly does and can take your gold.
They can force you to trade it in below market value.
It's happened in US history in the 30s.
They can just go take your gold.
They really can't take your Bitcoin.
It can exist right in here and nobody has to know you have it.
That's another, I think, brain wallets.
That's another subtle sign to me that we are living in the future right now.
You can store your money only with a brain wallet, with a 12-word seed.
And if you're in some repressive regime in the Middle East or in Asia, You can be imprisoned for the next 10 years, and when they finally set you free, when your government is reformed or whatever, there's new leadership, you'll have access to your money again, because you remember that 12-word key.
And that's really new in the history of human existence, at least as long as we know of.
It's exciting stuff.
It's hard to describe it in any other way.
Yeah, I mean, governments say, well, we have problems with you taking bitcoins across borders, which simply shows It shows the enormous limitation of their thinking or non-thinking.
I mean, I don't need to take any bitcoins with me anywhere.
I mean, I can just know what the address is and anywhere I go, there are my bitcoins.
I mean, does that mean that you have to behead someone and leave the head behind in order to not take bitcoins across?
I mean, it's mad.
But I mean, they simply don't understand.
And they're so wedded to the old paradigm.
And the old paradigm has worked so well for so long for the ruling classes at the expense of everyone else that they'll be completely blind to it.
They'll try and control it.
They'll try and tax it.
And it'll keep propagating.
And then they'll try and tax it more.
And people will say, well, wait a minute.
I can just vanish.
I can just take myself off the radar.
You can live in a city off the grid with Bitcoin, and people would just have to do that, I'm sure.
So, yeah, it's fantastic.
It's the most exciting thing, other than our shows, that has ever happened.
Well, I'm glad you feel the same way.
I'm glad I'm not just a crazy person, because what I keep asking myself is, well, is there anything bigger happening right now?
If you're a person out there who's not politically connected and you're not like Koch Brothers Rich or, you know, what's his name?
The equivalent on the left.
Soros.
Soros, yeah.
If you're not one of those people, what can you really do to impact the future?
And I honestly believe one of the biggest things you can do is just to research Bitcoin, understand digital currency, because it is a paradigm shift.
And it's one of those things where, especially if it's deflationary in nature, which it appears to be, early adopters are going to do much better than late adopters.
And that's one of the reasons why I get so angry when the Financial Times Or one of these kind of old stream outlets is misleading their readers because eventually their readers are going to use Bitcoin, but they're going to be using it relatively later than everybody else.
And that does a real disservice to you.
It lowers your purchasing power relative to others.
No, see, you and I have different sides of the fence about that.
It's not a moral issue.
It's just that if the readers of the Financial Times end up getting shafted...
Well...
They're kind of embedded in the old paradigm.
They've probably got a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of investments in pretty parasitical financial instruments.
They're probably making profits over the two-millisecond advantage that Foster Fiber Optics gives, this sort of computer-based trading that costs the system hundreds of millions of dollars a year, where you see someone's trade and you immediately buy and sell before the next trade order comes in.
There's a lot of parasitism going on in the financial sector, and a lot of those readers are readers of the Financial Times.
I say to the readers of the Financial Times, Bitcoin is a bubble.
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin is a scam.
Stay as far away as humanly possible from this digital theft-in-the-night nonsense.
Oh yes, go buy some T-Bills, why don't you?
I think that would be great!
Yeah, go buy some Enron stock or some MCI WorldCom.
Go load up on that.
No, they've taken enough from your generation that I think it's time your generation took something back.
I like that.
Yeah, I think that I've been covering so many negative stories for so long that when I looked into this one, I finally saw something that cannot be corrupted by ad hominem attacks, cannot be destroyed by going after the creators or the executives.
You know, basically what was done with WikiLeaks, where The dissemination of knowledge was turned into a thought crime.
We have a guy who's trapped in an embassy right now.
And I don't know Julian Assange.
I've never talked to him.
But I know he's not rifling through my emails and text messages.
I know he's not logging my metadata.
And I can't say the same for my own government.
So between the two, is he really a threat to me?
I don't think so.
I don't want to say just my generation because it's really anybody who's internet savvy.
We are pulling back the curtain in almost every area of life.
We're pulling it back on the military industrial complex.
That's what WikiLeaks did.
And I think Bitcoin is pulling it back on the financial sector.
We're seeing all these creepy crawlers under the rocks trying to scurry away from the sunlight.
And I think that's what we're focused on is the acclimation of kind of the old to these new technologies.
And we don't Even need to focus on them, because it's not our concern to bring them into the modern age, you know what I mean?
Like, it's one thing if we want to be polite, but...
Yeah, I think, David, I think these attacks, it's the last thing I really can say, I got another interview, but I think that these attacks are completely backfiring now, for the majority of people.
I think that if you want to know where the good people are, follow the lasers from the bad people.
Whoever the bad people are targeting, most likely that's where you'll find the good people.
So I think what they think is they're pouring negative calumnies and slander and libel on the good people.
And I think at some point that kind of worked like in the past where there was less information, less broad perspective, less alternate sources of information.
You could slander people and, oh, he's a traitor and a thought criminal or whatever.
And I think people would be like, well, I don't really know much about it, so fine, right?
But now the attacks...
From evil people is a mark of virtue.
I mean, if nobody whose evil hates you, you ain't doing any good.
And I think the fact, and look, I'm sorry for what these guys have to go through.
It's a horrible thing.
The Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and these guys, what they have to go through is horrendous.
But I don't think that there's a vast majority of people who think, well, they're really hated by the military-industrial complex, so they must be bad.
I think people say, wow, the powers that be really hate those guys.
I think I can't see them for the halo, right?
They think that it's some headshot, but all it does is create a halo that elevates them to the side of humanity as a whole.
So I think this stuff is really backfiring these days.
Cool.
Well, I know you have to head out in a minute, but thanks again for doing this.
And I'm glad to hear from you about the Bitcoin stuff because I just want to make sure that I'm not deluding myself.
I think a lot of people get drawn into fads and trends.
Even some of the dot-com stuff was definitely no more than a fad.
And with this, I'm seeing all the signs of The same thing that social media did to traditional media, the same thing that digital photography did to film, 35mm, is now happening with finances where we have digital fighting against analog.
In a few years, there's going to be no analog.
In the same way that I can't find a single TV within a two-mile radius that's an analog TV because it's all digital, you're not going to be able to find any kind of...
Kiosk or ATM that doesn't at least have an option to deal with digital currency.
And I think that the political impact is going to be huge for the reasons that you said.
I just want to make sure that I'm not misleading people because I really believe in it, but I also understand that people are desperate now for some kind of solutions to these problems we're seeing all around us.
Well, watch the video I'm sure will be released in the next day or two.
I did a speech called Bitcoin versus war at the Toronto Bitcoin Conference, which I think is very well worth watching.
I don't think you're deluded at all.
Or if you are, we're both deluded.
I hope that fiat currency ends up in, you know, salt, walrus tusks, seashells and other stupid shit that people used to think was money.
I hope that there's a goddamn museum where people look at this photocopied Monopoly money bullshit and say, "You know what?
Fucking walrus tusks make more sense than that.
People actually thought that was money?
I mean, that's crazy.
It's like looking at a letter, handwritten, and saying, "Wow, people really thought that was email?" Or looking at an abacus and saying, "Wow, people really thought that was a computer?
That's what we're aiming for and that's the kind of advance we want." But the other stuff is just technological and all prior technological advances have served evil as much as they've served good.
Our technological advancement gives us the cell phone and gives us the NSA. Bitcoin is the one that only serves good and that I think is why it's the most exciting.
Cool.
Thank you very much.
Thanks man.
Take care.
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