April 13, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:24:49
Bitcoin, War and Iran! Stefan Molyneux Interviewed
Stefan Molyneux argues that fiat currency, established in 1913, extended WWI to cause 22 million deaths and ushered humanity into a modern Dark Age by detaching civilization from reality. He asserts Bitcoin is the essential lifeboat to separate money from the state, noting his removal from 15 platforms in summer 2020 for advocating peaceful parenting and criticizing government lies. While elites view non-thinking populations as disposable biomass amid AI automation, Molyneux predicts a geopolitical fork where Iran could destabilize the US dollar via Bitcoin settlements at the Strait of Hormuz, forcing a choice between freedom-based enclaves or totalitarian surveillance states utilizing CBDCs. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Erasing Voices, Building Momentum00:13:30
Why do certain voices get erased while others get promoted everywhere?
Today's guest is someone who built one of the largest philosophy platforms online only to be completely removed from the mainstream.
Stefan Molyneux, founder of Free Domain, has spent decades breaking down power, control, and human behavior from first principles.
His ideas overlap heavily with the same questions that led many to Bitcoin.
So today we're asking what's broken in society and why are certain people not allowed to talk about it?
Stefan, it is wonderful to have you here today.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate the invite.
So, you have been doing this for decades.
I'm not totally sure, can never be too sure, how much of my audience knows who you are.
And you're one of the first people really out there to be talking, I'll say, at a grand scale about this online, over the internet.
Where did this come from in your life?
And how has this led you to the Bitcoin space?
And I would love for you to just kind of give some of your story a little bit.
And then we'll get into today and what's happening and how to fix these things from first principles and where we're at in society right now.
Yeah, I got very interested in economics as a kid.
Somebody gave me a big book of all the great disasters of the 20th century.
There was the Hindenburg, there was the Titanic, and so on.
And then there was the Great Depression, which was 1929 to basically a 14 year thing until the start of the Second World War, basically.
And I remember I saw these pictures.
I was real little, maybe seven or eight.
I don't want to sound overly precocious.
I was a nerd in lots of ways.
But I remember seeing these pictures of like 25% unemployment and And it's like, I remember thinking, well, there's always something to do around the house.
Like, there's the list is never done around the house.
There's always things to do.
So, how is it possible that people couldn't get work?
That didn't make any sense to me.
It's not like we finished everything that needs to be done in the country.
You know, we can teleport, we can go to the moon and back in and blink, we can live forever.
It's like, so I just remember thinking that kind of puzzling, like, okay, I understand why the Titanic sank.
Okay, there were people who were opposing the Federal Reserve.
And the iceberg.
And then I understood why the Hindenburg is the fire and all of that, but I just didn't understand why so many people couldn't get work.
That didn't really make any sense to me.
And I remember sort of puzzling over that and trying to sort of figure that out.
And then a friend of mine who was into the Canadian rock band Rush gave me a copy of The Fountainhead.
And through that, I got into Austrian economics, von Mises, and Rothbard and Hayek, and so on.
And it was like, ah.
It's all about the money.
It's all about the money.
Now, in the personal history of my father's side, there was an enormous catastrophe for the world as a whole, for the British Empire, for England, and for my father's family, where four of the young men were killed in World War I.
And I remember starting, I started reading the history of World War I.
And I was like, okay, so everyone was like, gee, I hope it's not over by Christmas, right?
They enlisted in the fall and they thought it's going to be a two or three month war.
Now, why did they think it was going to be a two or three month war and it ended up in a four year plus absolute catastrophe that really marked the decline of the West in ways that seemed very hard to reverse?
And so when I put these sort of two things together, sort of family history of World War I and then understanding Austrian or free market economics, I'm like, oh.
They're not printing money.
They're printing death certificates.
That's what they're printing.
They're not printing fiat.
They are releasing demons to eviscerate human beings.
And I'll sort of give you a very brief example of that, and then I'll let you get back to your questions.
It's been a while since I've been interviewed, so I've got a lot to say.
But in World War I, one of the reasons they thought it was only going to last a couple of months was that's all the money they had.
Even by late 1914, you know, eight weeks, what, ten weeks after the war started, they were running low on just about everything.
And the war would have ended three months, six months at the outside, because what happens is one country runs out of money and then has to sue for peace, and then you get peace.
That's the way it generally works.
But with central banking, with fiat currency, with money printing, and with going off the gold standard, and with borrowing, they were able to extend this war from a couple of months to four plus years, raising the death count from about 800,000 people to over 22 million all in.
Now that didn't happen because people wanted to fight.
That didn't happen because they had the money.
That didn't happen because they were full of hatred.
That happened for one reason and one reason only.
Why were 21 million plus people murdered and why was Western Europe destroyed and the economies destroyed and so on?
Which of course, as you know, World War I, as one of the French generals famously said with the Treaty of Versailles, said, this is not armistice, this is not the end of the war, this is peace for 20 years.
And he turned out to be correct almost down to the month.
So without World War I, you don't get World War II.
World War II, 50 million killed and the end of the empire and so on.
I'm not an imperialist, don't get me wrong.
I'm not a big fan of the British Empire, but it definitely was catastrophic for the British people as a whole and the Western people as a whole.
And so all of this was set in motion by one thing and one thing only.
Now, I'm not a single cause explanation, but this one is pretty clear.
Without the ability to create their own money, war can't continue.
And offensive wars can't continue because if you actually have to go to the population and say, Hey, there's this country on the other side of the world.
This is not particularly theoretical at the moment, right?
There's this country on the other side of the world where there's these mean guys.
We really don't like them.
I want you to send me a check for $20,000 to start this war and sign your kids up voluntarily.
People won't do it.
Now, if Genghis Khan is thundering over the horizon, then you're going to fight and you won't have any shortage of volunteers or people willing to sacrifice to defend the homeland, their families, and so on.
But offensive wars absolutely require fiat currency and the extension of war.
requires drugging, the population with deferred debt.
If you have to go people and beg for money every single day to continue a war, people are like, no, I'm not doing that.
Stop this war and the war will wind down.
But if you can create your own money and you can, it's like PCP, like I can take on 10 cops.
You lose reality completely.
And so fiat currency is foundational to civilization.
Fiat currency is foundational to peace.
And fiat currency is far too powerful an instrument to put in the hands of anyone.
Imagine what it would be like if you took immature people, which Politicians tend to be, and you said, Hey, you can type whatever you want into your own bank account, whatever you want, anything you want.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
What is it?
Musk was talking about this with Ted Cruz not too long ago.
They found 14 magic money computers in the government.
Just create money, send it out, create money, send it out.
That ability to just create money at a whim, at a will, it's sort of like that old Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey Mouse cartoon where he can't control the power.
People cannot handle that kind of power.
It corrupts everyone it touches, it corrupts entire societies, it destroys the birth rate, which we can get into as well.
And so I was like, Oh, gold standard, basket of commodities, oil, and we need some way to restrain what the government does.
And it doesn't really work because any constraint you put on the government will be undone by the government.
Like it took America less than 80 years after its founding to break the bonds of the Constitution irrevocably.
So we need a solution that comes outside of government, outside of political power.
So then when I first heard about Bitcoin, and I wasn't involved in any of the early discussions, somebody just told me about it.
I think this was back in 2010, 2011, I started talking about it because I was like, ooh.
really a currency that is immune to political control.
I mean, we can see this at the moment with the round in the Strait of Chamus, right?
That they are requiring Bitcoin because they've been locked out of Swift and the stablecoins on a Ethereum network are easy to block and so on.
A currency that is free of political control, a currency that removes relatively gently without some sort of mass French Revolution style beheading, some of which, of course, has been tempting for people throughout history, but a way to take the power of creating money, which is creating death and preventing life, out of the hands of people and put it into the hands of the free market.
I mean, once you took the means of production from the government and slave owners and you put it into the hands of the people, we got.
The incredible wealth of the Industrial Revolution and everything that followed after that.
All of this technology allows you and I to chat where we never would have met each other in the past.
And if we can do to currency what was done to the means of production through the Industrial Revolution, or what was done to the land through the Agricultural Revolution, the enclosure movement, the amount of human wealth that we could produce is incomprehensible to us.
In the same way that the wealth that we have now would be incomprehensible to somebody in the 15th century, the technology, the medicine, the science, the Knowledge, the understanding, the physics, the communications.
And so we are on the verge, if we can get Bitcoin promoted and adopted, of ending the hegemony of political power and the disassembly of human beings through typing money into your own bank account forever and ever.
Amen.
And I really can't think of a better mission to have in this life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I could not either.
And it's funny, I was telling you offline, like that's why I'm here.
You kind of see all these problems come together and you realize this is the greatest.
Mission you could be on, ripping the power away from the money changers.
You made me think of so many things, by the way.
I love the rants.
That's what we're here for.
That's what the viewer is here for.
So feel free to 10 minutes straight, 15 minutes straight, let it all out.
Because you're one of the few that have really, you know, just over time put it in the proof of work for a Bitcoiner term, right?
So you deserve that honor to be able to talk as long as you need.
Do you think so?
There's a bunch of questions you made me think of.
And do you think we're in a modern Dark age.
Like, I've been making this argument recently that with the amount of killing since 1913, since the central banks, you know, all this stuff, World War I, feeling like World War I almost never ended in a way, which is maybe another question.
We're kind of still living in that where we had the plane, train, automobile, electricity, like all these things, right?
For 100 years, 200 years, we were finding all these inventions and creating things, discovering things.
And then the last 100 years or so, since the total, you know, central banking and total war, it's just been death.
You know, it's been abortions, killing people, like killing ourselves, the MADE program in Canada, like all these things where.
We've just iterated like better mousetraps, but there isn't a bunch of invention all of a sudden.
And I think I feel like people are going to look back 100, 200 years from now and be like, wow, that was a modern dark age.
Like, what were you doing with these death coupons you guys were dealing with?
Does it feel like that to you at the end of the day?
That's interesting.
It's a good way to put it.
I would say when I was a teenager, I went gliding.
If you go gliding, you get pulled up by an airplane, you don't have an engine, and it was a wild thing.
I didn't fly it, it was somebody else who was flying it.
But I remember when the cable was released, It was so quiet because normally you're in a plane, engines, whatever it is.
And I remember it just being so quiet and beautiful.
The sun and the arc of the sky and the clouds and so on.
And it was so whisper quiet, whisper quiet.
And I remember the guy who was flying it said, well, there's only one way from here and that's down, right?
Because we didn't have any motive power of our own.
And so we stayed up for a while, 20 minutes, half an hour, and we did dives.
But we had no motive power of our own.
The only thing that we could do was go down.
Now, the way that I sort of view it is we had freedom in the past, and that has pulled us up, like the airplane pulled up the glider.
And then the fiat currency, World War I, kind of cut that cord.
And we've had a lot of entry.
We got pulled pretty high.
So we've got a lot of trajectory.
We got a lot of momentum.
We got a lot of ascension, but we don't have any motive power of our own.
And it's the same thing in science.
When was the last great advancement in physics?
No, it's all non reproducible lies and politics, and you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that, and global warming is going to drown us all.
It's all.
Paranoid fear mongering nonsense for the most part.
And when was our last Shakespeare?
When was our last Newton?
When was our last Einstein?
I mean, what do we get?
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's a complete idiot.
He's a court jester.
So we had a lot of momentum that got us up to a great height.
And I think since then, we've kind of been circling the drain.
And the problem is, of course, that everything now goes through the lens of political power.
Wealth Generates Inequality00:06:28
Art goes through the lens of political power.
Science goes through the lens of political power.
Biology goes through the lens of political power.
Many years ago, I interviewed 17 world renowned experts in the field of human IQ, which is not allowed.
I mean, the guy who co discovered DNA, James Watson, he was cancelled for talking about ethnic differences in IQ.
Now, this guy was one of the foremost cancer researchers of her age.
So people will literally choose to die of cancer than talk about.
Forbidden topics, and we think that we're beyond blasphemy laws and heresy laws and so on.
So, optimism, enthusiasm, excitement, a sense of man's potential to grasp and surmount the limitations of the material world is essential to human progress.
We had a lot of that in the 19th century.
The optimism of the 19th century that all problems could be solved and human reason could spread everywhere was destroyed by a wide variety of things, of course, World War I being primarily one of them.
And the other thing, too, of course, every society seems to contain within it.
as long as it's based around a centralized coercive institution like the state, always comes to its own destruction.
Because you have a lot of freedom that generates a lot of wealth.
Generating a lot of wealth generates a lot of inequality.
And when you get this inequality, then the people who don't have as much, even though they had much more than their forefathers, they don't have as much as the wealthy guys.
So then the communists and the sophists and the socialists come in and start saying to all the poor people, hey, man, the only reason you're poor is because that rich guy stole from your fathers and stole from your ancestors.
And that's your house and that's supposed to be your wife.
And they just rouse up and then they vote to take away all the property of the rich.
And then everyone gets poor again.
And so as long as you have the state, wealth. is not used to improve society in the long run.
Wealth is used to buy votes and wealth in particular through fiat currency and money printing and debt, wealth is used to bribe the population, the future productivity of the population, the children and their future taxes being used as an asset, being used as an asset that you can borrow against.
And so wealth breeds poverty as long as we have this centralized coercive power and the way that we can begin to push back really against a centralized coercive power is through private money.
If money is socialized, socialism is inevitable.
Well, money and education.
If education is socialized, but even the socialization of education relies on fiat currency because if you sent a bill to every parent for the true cost of their child's education and you gave the option for them to opt out, it would disappear in about 18 minutes.
So it really all just comes back to the ability of the government to create its money, which produces a psychosis.
And I'm not kidding about this.
It produces a psychosis.
Before this interview, I was thinking, what's one of the key things that Ascending civilization has.
And it's pragmatism.
It's a dedication to reality.
It is a sensible empiricism, relying on the evidence of the senses, understanding that human reason is perfectly adequate, in fact, necessary to understand the world.
Grounding facts, reason, evidence, and pragmatism.
And then late stage societies get detached from reality.
And one of the ways they get detached from reality is through fiat currency, because fiat currency detaches us.
From cause and effect.
Fiat currency detaches us from math, from basic numbers.
Fiat currency allows you to have the illusion that you can consume without producing, simply based on debt and inflation.
And fiat currency dissolves the bonds between the generations.
Like there was a recent report that came out that people 65 and older in America get $44,000 a year in government funding, whereas those 16 or 18 and under get about $4,000 a year.
So it is more than 10 times, 11 times, I suppose, the amount of money goes to the aged or to the young.
That is a vampiric civilization, and the bond between the generations gets broken.
And so it is one of these really insidious, not one person in a thousand knows what's going on.
And people, what do they do?
They go to the grocery store and say, oh man, it's eight bucks for a box of cereal.
And it's like, well, they're ripping us off.
They're just raising prices, they're gouging us.
It's like, no, no, if you have 20 oranges in circulation and you have $20, each orange is going to cost a dollar.
If you have 20 oranges in circulation and you have $40, then each orange is going to cost $2.
Nobody's ripping you off.
It's just that you're diluting the money.
I look at the late Roman Empire of a big presentation called The Truth About the Fall of Rome.
And what did they do?
They borrowed and they did the equivalent of money printing back in the day, which was to mix all kinds of garbage metals into the silver and gold and even down into the copper.
And they just diluted their money supply.
So then you get all this money, which is not represented by any actual increase in productivity.
They're counterfeiters.
They're counterfeiters.
counterfeiting destroys currency.
Currency is the lifeblood of civilization and it drives people mad to have that much power and it drives people mad that things keep shifting around them in ways that they can't possibly understand.
Why is the price of everything going up?
Well, because 40% of the US dollars were printed COVID enough that ever existed, not just in the present, that ever existed.
And so naturally that is going to create, like, why is it so slow to get into the nightclub?
Because there's a big lineup, right?
That's what's happened.
And so and so people don't understand it, they're confused, they're frustrated, they're angry, and that's very easy for sophists to come along and manipulate them and say, oh, it's the greedy capitalists, it's the property owners, it's Elon Musk, it's the rich, it's the this or that.
And governments love that because governments reap all the power and the blame goes to the shopkeepers and the wealthy people who are still trying to produce things in an increasingly hyper-regulated system.
And it's easy to turn people's resentment against those fellow slaves trying to survive because they have slightly more cotton on their bodies.
Slightly more gold in their pockets, rather than the people who are the actual villains, who are the money creators, the money printers, and the money changers, as Jesus sort of famously pointed out.
That's always struck me in the Bible as one of the most accurate stories that Jesus was incredibly peaceful for the most part and counseled forgiveness and peace and love your enemies, except once when he came to the corrupt money changers.
The Non-Aggression Principle00:10:11
And then he brought out the whip, and that was something.
Yeah, I could not agree more, Stefan.
So I want to go back into times.
We didn't touch on it in the beginning at all.
And I think it's important for the viewer, too.
Before we get into it, I want to talk about separating money and state, separating education and state, and the birth rate, what's going on.
Also, just current day with Iran and some of the mirrors to World War I, some of the things.
So we'll get into that in a minute.
However, why were you, just for people who don't know, again, you've been doing this for a long time.
There's probably some people watching that you've been doing this longer than they've been born.
Uh, potentially, uh, fighting for freedom, you know, a lot of liberty, sovereignty, individual freedom.
So, you've been canceled over the years, you've been derided, you've been, you know, just the globalist.
I don't know what to say necessarily, how to characterize it, but people coming after you.
Um, so I think it's important for the average person because they might go do research after this too and say, Oh, well, this guy, I wonder what, you know, from your own uh mouth, you know, what was so polarizing about Stefano, what you've been saying over the years because the first you know, 20 minutes or whatever, it's like, okay, this makes a lot of sense, right, to the average person.
How could this guy be so powerful?
How could he be canceled?
So, I'd love your thoughts on how have you been so derided over the years?
Gosh, where do I narrow it down?
If I could only get it down to one or two topics, I might have had a smoother ride through the last couple of years.
Well, so it started way back in the day.
So, I started my show in 2005.
So, it's 21 years.
Now, before that, I was again mid teens to mid 30s.
So, I've been doing this for 45 years, the sort of philosophy and reason and evidence stuff.
And generally, you get canceled when you make a difference.
You get cancelled when you move the needle.
If you're just, oh, the Federal Reserve is terrible, boy, wouldn't it be great if we had the.
Okay, that's fine.
You can say all of that because you're not changing anything.
And if you talk about rent control is really bad, well, you know, maybe, maybe just, you know, in half a generation people might vote differently, but it's not really cause and effect.
And you're not actually interfering with the practical goals of any evildoers in the moment.
This is why you have what's called free speech.
Free speech is say whatever you want as long as it doesn't actually change anything.
Boy, the moment you change things, eh, not so good.
And this is, of course, what happened to Socrates, happened to Plato, happened to Aristotle, happened to, I mean, it's the general lie.
Of philosophers throughout society.
And this is why Plato went really abstract, because he saw what happened to Socrates, who was very practical.
Socrates was charged with two things, of course, at the end of his life not believing in the gods of the city and corrupting the youth.
And by corrupting the youth, they basically meant encouraging the youth to ask uncomfortable questions of the aged, which they don't have answers for.
So So, what happened was in ancient Athens, the young men who were very keen about Socrates enjoyed going to their teachers, their elders, their fathers, their priests, their politicians, asking uncomfortable questions.
And that was bad for the people who are sophists who claim to know things that they don't know and claim that they're moral authorities when they do great evils.
So, that's kind of the deal.
So, one of the things that happened early on is the non-aggression principle is very, very key to basic morality.
The non-aggression principle says self-defense is great.
You know, if somebody's running at you with a chainsaw and you got a machine gun them down, I will never, ever have any problem with that.
That seems a perfectly sensible thing.
So it's not pacifism.
The non-aggression principle says you can't initiate the use of force.
Like, I can punch you back, I just can't come up and punch you, that kind of thing, right?
You can even take property back that's been stolen from you and so on, but the non aggression principle was interesting.
Now, I had spent many, many years.
I started out in the arts.
I was an actor and playwright at the National Theatre School in Canada for a couple of years.
And then I did academia.
I got a graduate degree in history and the history of philosophy.
And then I went into the business world.
Like yourself, you mentioned earlier, before we started the show, you graduated into a recession, so did I, and there was really nothing going on.
So I co founded a software company and grew it, and I became sort of very Pragmatic.
It's one thing to study the free market.
It's quite another thing to have your entire life savings and massive debts dependent upon making good decisions in what's left of the free market.
So I became sort of very pragmatic in the business world.
I was chief technical officer and director of marketing.
I did a lot of sales and so on.
So sort of out there in the world.
So I got used to having very practical and pragmatic answers.
So when I started to gain some traction in the realm of public philosophy, I said to myself, okay, so the non aggression principle is what I want the most.
And you have to approach it as a blank slate.
In the same thing with business, you have to approach things with a blank slate.
Preconceptions cost you everything.
So I said, okay, so if I am really interested in the expansion of the non aggression principle, what is the biggest violation of the non aggression principle that I can do the most about?
Ah, I see, that second one is the key, right?
You can say, well, I mean, I just had a rant about fiat currency.
Yes, fiat currency is the biggest violation of the non aggression principle because it is through fiat currency that almost all other violations spring.
But.
I can't do anything about it.
I want to chain myself to the Federal Reserve and get dragged off, and people will be like, Who's that crazy guy ranting about made up money and whatever, monopoly money?
So I had to say to myself, What is the biggest violation of the non aggression principle that I can do the most about?
Not that hard to figure out.
It's hitting children.
Hitting children is the biggest violation of the non aggression principle that I can do the most about.
I can't stop the Federal Reserve.
I can't stop war.
I can't stop money printing.
I can't stop debt.
I can't stop politics.
But what I can do.
Is I can say to people, spanking is the biggest violation of the non aggression principle that you can do the most about.
You can convince people.
You can't convince people to stop using fiat currency.
You can't convince people to not take things for free from the government.
I mean, imagine standing in front of a convenience store and someone comes up and says, Hey man, I won the lottery for $5 million.
And you say, You know, you really shouldn't cash that in because that's just made up money and it's going to cause a tiny bit of inflation across the rest of the economy.
They'll be like, Get out of the way, baldy.
I'm going in to cash my check.
And so they're in.
And so you can't talk people out of taking stuff for free from the government.
You can't talk people out of using fiat currency.
You can't talk the government out of giving up fiat currency or debt or unfunded liabilities or all of this nonsense.
So the biggest violation of the non aggression principle that you can do the most about.
Well, in America, 80 plus percent of families spank.
It was even higher before I started.
And we're not just talking a light swat to the butt.
I mean, like a lot of them spank with implements like belts and.
rolling pins and shoes and like just brutal, brutal stuff.
There's circumcision, which is definitely a violation of the non-aggression principle, genital mutilation for no medical gain, of course.
And so I began to work on that.
I wrote a libertarian essay, The Case Against Spanking, and said, well, spanking can't be self-defense.
It's not like the child's coming at you with the aforementioned chainsaw.
So I began to talk about that.
Now, I'm a voluntarist, which means that all forced associations are violations of freedom.
Of association.
Like, we kind of understand that.
Like, if a woman is forced to marry a guy, it's not a marriage, it's just legalized sex enslavement.
And so I began to really promote anti child abuse, anti spanking in libertarian circles, which seemed like a good thing to do.
I was aware that there might be a little bit of pushback, but then I thought the libertarians would be like, wow, that's true.
That this is something we can really do something about rather than just railing against things that you.
Can't change.
I mean, the amount of intellectual energy that's been poured by libertarians into opposing the non-imposing violations of the non-aggression principle has gone nowhere.
So I thought, and also, you know, I made a big case that if we raise children reasonably, then they won't feel the need to have a big centralized violent political entity at the center of society because people's belief in the necessity of the state and its coercion comes from their belief that it was necessary for them to be violently aggressed against as children, you know, the parents of the state and so on.
And so I said, people's relationship to the government comes out of their relationship to their parents, right?
So people think, oh, just the government has a bunch of money and it just kind of comes out of nowhere and they just spend it and stuff.
That's a child's view of the parents' finances, you know, that stuff happens and there's money floating around and so on.
And also, parents say to kids, without the violence that I initiate against you, all will be chaos and destruction.
And so then they say, oh, without the government, all will be a Mad Max thunderdome of chaos and destruction and so on.
And so, if you kind of drill back down through people's perceptions, Of the state and of statism, it really comes down to parents and teachers and priests and authority figures.
So, if you change how children are parented, you change their view of political power.
In other words, if children flourish in the absence of violence, at the initiation of violence, then they grow up to at least be open to the idea that society can flourish in the absence of centralized political violence.
Whereas, if people are told and grow up with the absolute belief and necessity that violence must be used against children, They will say, well, geez, we need a government because governments are like parents and the people are like children.
Without the violence of the parents, everyone will run amok and so on.
And so it seemed to me a pretty good plan, a multi generational plan, but a pretty good plan.
It seemed to be the most practical.
Plus, I'm a measurable guy.
You know, I mean, when I was in the business world, if I'd have said, well, my business plan, my business plan, see, is we're going to make a bunch of money by harvesting gold on asteroids, people would say, wait.
Abusive Relationships and Media00:06:27
What was that?
Go back to that last PowerPoint slide where infinite profits accrue from mining gold and asteroids.
And I said, Look, we know that there's gold on asteroids, man.
We know it.
We can tell from the spectrometers there's gold on asteroids.
And if we mine it, we'll make a fortune.
And people will say, Well, it's true.
Yes, it's true that there's gold on asteroids.
It is not true that we can mine it next year.
We can't do anything about it, although it's nice if we could, but we can't.
And that to me was the same as railing against the Fed or government or politics or war without talking about parenting.
And so I did a sort of back of the napkin calculation.
I interviewed subject matter experts on spanking, professors and psychologists about the negative effects.
I went through the medical case.
I wrote a whole book called Peaceful Parenting at peacefulparenting.com, which is the theory of it, the practice of it, and then the science behind it with all of the scientific references as to why peaceful parenting is the way to go and how it's the only way we have a chance of building a peaceful society in the future.
I mean, it complements Bitcoin for reasons we can get into.
So I sort of made this case.
And then people said, okay, so my parents hit me and that was bad.
And I said, listen, you should go talk to them about it.
I'm a big one for honesty in relationships.
You know, it's kind of the big deal.
If you're a philosopher, you've got to value truth and honesty.
Otherwise, you're just a masochist who likes getting canceled.
So I said, if you have a problem with your parents, you should go talk to your parents.
And said, I'm going to go talk to my parents.
And they've doubled down.
They say I was a bad kid.
I should have been beaten.
They did the right thing, blah, And I said, well, if they're unrepentant evildoers, you don't have to spend time with them.
And it's funny because This to me, this was an idiot move of my part, not because I did it, but because I didn't understand the consequences.
Because see, the way that you gave me permission to ransom.
So the way that I was raised was under feminism, right?
So I was raised in the 70s and 80s under feminism.
And feminism was everywhere when I was a kid because I was raised by a single mom, so all her friends were divorced and so on.
And the feminism was You just have to be kind of dissatisfied and you should leave your husband.
Like if you're just not fulfilled 24-7, if you're not over the moon and happy, if you're just kind of bored, if you're just kind of, you know, because the number one cause for divorce is not abuse or alcoholism or other addictions or monetary desertion or anything like that.
It's dissatisfaction.
You know, just kind of dissatisfied.
So I was like, okay, so you can leave relationships if you're just dissatisfied.
Now you should leave relationships if you're aggressed against, if the husband's beating you or whatever it is, right?
There was no such thing as the wife beating the husband.
That wasn't even conceived of back then.
I had an activist, Erin Pitze, on years ago who opened the first men's shelter and she got firebombed and had to flee the country because she tried to give some sympathy for men, which was also quite instructive back in the day.
So I was like, okay, so I was raised that you don't have to be in relationships that you're just dissatisfied about.
And if people have done great evil, you probably shouldn't be in those relationships at all.
So that's the way I was raised.
And these are relationships you chose.
You choose your husband, your wife.
You don't choose your parents.
You're just kind of born into it, right?
So I said, okay, well, you don't have to spend time with abusive parents.
If they remain abusive, they won't admit any fault and they double down and say that you should have been beaten.
I mean, that's not very good.
That's not productive.
And if you have corrupt people and evildoers in your life, it's just like a strange moat and it keeps good people away from you because good people are like, ooh, that doesn't feel good.
That doesn't smell good.
There's something kind of rotten here.
And I don't want to particularly descend to that layer of Dante and hell.
So, yeah, so that was the first sort of advice.
And it seemed to me in perfect congruence with everything that I've been raised with.
Because I was naive.
Or perhaps I was wise, but part of my brain was keeping the consequences from me in order to get the idea out.
I'll never know for sure.
And then what happened was a bunch of people ended up stopping seeing their relentlessly abusive parents.
And those parents then went to the media and said, Oh my God, this evil, bald, blue eyed bastard is running a family separation cult.
And it's like, I love families.
I have a family.
I have a wife.
I have a child.
Families are great.
You know, friends are great unless they beat you up repeatedly, in which case they're probably not really friends to you.
So that was sort of the first round.
And, you know, evil cult leader destroying families for fun and profit and so on.
Even though I was simply encouraging people, I always had a three step thing, right?
Number one, if your parents were abusive, Go talk to them and try to have a chance to work it out.
And then, if it doesn't work out, you can consider family separation.
I never told anyone to leave their families.
And I said, please engage with a competent therapist to go through this process because it's a very difficult thing and kind of hard to understand for a lot of people.
Now, it's a very common topic.
Going no contact is all over the media.
It's talked about without any particular shock or horror, which is kind of the way that things go.
Like, the first person to really popularize the idea of the voluntary family.
Is an evil guy, and now it's just like it could be good for your mental health.
Even on Dr. Phil's website, you know, it could be good for your mental health to get away from abusive parents, blah, blah, blah.
So, of course, nobody ever goes back and says, Ooh, sorry about all of those slings and arrows of outrageous insults.
But so, I mean, that's that's the deal, you kind of know that.
Uh, like the guy who said maybe it would be a good idea to wash your hands before doing surgeries on people, um, he was marked and driven out of the profession, ended up being beaten to death in a insane asylum because they considered him crazy for suggesting it.
So, so yeah, that was sort of the first round.
And then the second round was I got interested, particularly interested in US politics around the time of Trump coming down the escalator, because I'd been lied about a lot by the media and I saw the same thing happening with Trump.
So I was like, ah, okay, so this is a good way to discredit the media.
So I did a whole series of shows and presentations called The Untruths About Donald Trump, where I took all of the lies the media was telling about him and got rid of them.
And these got millions and millions of views and so on.
And so I moved the needle with regards to people escaping evildoers within the family.
And maybe I had some minor effect on the 2016 election, not intentionally, but just because I wanted to.
Be honest about how false the media was.
Discrediting the Media00:02:09
And so when 2020 came around, I don't think they wanted me doing much in the public square, in the public sphere, because they very much, the left very much wanted that election.
And I mean, Biden was not a particularly enthralling candidate.
And he certainly had his own skeletons in the closet, as you could tell from the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, the Burisma stuff in Ukraine, and all of this just hideous stuff that goes on, let alone the diary.
Like all the hideous stuff that goes on around that family.
And so I was in before the election.
I'd also been critical of the, it came from a pangolin nonsense about the COVID.
I did a show called The Case Against China, which was saying, of course it came from the lab.
Of course it came from the lab.
And They had to say it came from nature because they couldn't get the lockdowns without it, right?
They couldn't get COVID lockdowns without saying it came from nature.
Because if it was engineered in a lab to specifically infect human beings, they can't get the lockdown.
Because the lockdown is there to slow the spread.
Because the more it spreads, the more it's likely to adapt to human beings and be better at infecting human beings.
But if it's already perfect at infecting human beings, there's no point having a lockdown.
You might as well just let it run through the population and give everyone natural immunity that way.
Pushback very hard against the Lab League hypothesis, which was considered, I don't know, it was racist.
Usually there's an R word in there, retarded racist, something like that.
So there was a whole, I think, a sort of perfect storm.
And I'd also talked about a pretty forbidden topic that I mentioned earlier, which was ethnic differences in IQ as a whole between various genetic populations, which does something to help explain different outcomes in a free market and hopefully lowers the hostility between races and ethnicities so that we can understand that there's differences and we can celebrate those differences rather than getting mad at everyone because there are differences.
So, yeah, there was a bunch of stuff that came together.
And then in the summer of 2020, which I assume is just a very coordinated effort, I was removed from maybe 15 platforms, all relatively rapidly.
Educating for Free Markets00:06:11
And I went from playing stadiums to playing jazz clubs.
I went from a giant amp set, like a queen lighting setup, to a ukulele and sitting on a bucket in the corner, which is fine.
You know, I like jazz too, as well as stadium rock is fine.
And so I did a couple of years in the wilderness.
And I suppose I'm.
Back-ish?
It's kind of hard to say, but who knows?
Who knows what's going to happen?
But as far as philosophers go, it's really not bad at all.
It's really not bad at all.
I mean, historically, what's been done to philosophers, way worse than has ever been done to me.
So I'm not going to complain overly.
I still have all my limbs.
I'm not being offered hemlock on a regular basis.
I'm not in some dungeon.
So I had to spend some time in the wilderness.
It certainly happened to better people than me.
Incredible.
Incredible stuff.
Okay.
So there's so much there.
However, the one thing that I was thinking of this earlier and you just touched on it kind of a minute or a few minutes ago, which is education.
I've had this argument with a few different people, whether it was, you know, macro thinkers, George Gammon, Michael Green, some of these gentlemen who, you know, their big thing is we need to re-educate people.
Like people need to be educated on really like basically a lot of things that you're talking about in essence.
Their belief is we need to educate people.
And my pushback has always been, and I've actually had these arguments with both of these gentlemen specifically.
It's like, how do you propose out propagandizing the state when you have school control and you have an endless currency printer paid for by all of us through inflation?
We're on the hamster wheel.
And they just never seem to be able to give an answer to that.
And the reddists are very reticent to go full in on Bitcoin or something like that.
And I'm like, I get it.
However, I don't see anything else in my life here on Earth studying this for nearly two decades that is going to do anything what we think Bitcoin could do.
Not that Bitcoin can do it.
And that it will, but there's nothing else.
It's like I always give the Titanic analogy of it's going down the US dollar, the network, all the apparatuses.
The lifeboat is your only chance at survival.
It doesn't mean you're going to live, but and so how do you?
My question to you, I guess, is you know, how do you is it educate you know, separating money and state, separating education and state?
Is it the money first and then the education domino falls thereafter quickly, or is it like these guys say we have to re you know, educate people?
Then you know, like the money won't matter because fiat, you know, that's the thing I just can't grasp.
We've tried that, it feels like, and we haven't got anywhere, guys, you know, so.
Am I going crazy?
Are you like, where are we at with this?
Well, I can't guarantee that one way or the other, but certainly you seem quite sane to me so far.
So I actually did this experiment back in the day.
I think it was around maybe 2012 or something like that.
So I started doing my podcast because I had a long commute.
I was working in the software field at the executive level.
And anyway, I started recording things in my car because I'd always had lots of thoughts.
And so I didn't even monetize it because back then you couldn't really.
It was just crazy difficult and crazy expensive.
to distribute and so on, right?
Because the bandwidth was very expensive back in like 2005.
But then what happened was somebody said, hey, you should put a donation button up.
And I think the technology had kind of recently come in.
So I did that.
And then people started donating.
And I thought, maybe I'll get gas money or whatever it is, you know, the beer money kind of thing that podcasts aim for.
But for a variety of reasons, it ended up being more than that.
And I ended up with my wife's agreement to quit my tech career and to yell at a potato can for a living.
And so I did that and ended up doing not too badly with it, right?
And so after that, stabilized, I said to free market professors, right?
Academics, and I knew some of them personally, I debated some of them, and I put out the call and I said, look, if you're a free market economist, You will maybe teach a thousand people over the course of your career, maybe 2,000 people if you're at the higher level over the course of your career.
That's not much.
You know, I'm reaching 10 million people a month.
So you'll do way better in the free market of podcasting than you will in academia.
You'll reach more people.
Maybe you can make as much money.
You set your own pace.
You can work from home.
You can pursue the curriculum that you design and want to pursue.
And it seemed like a no-brainer.
And a quick question.
What do you think?
What do you think?
If you had to guess, how many free market accounts?
And I said, listen, I will even teach you.
I will be happy to coach you.
I'll be happy to train you, give you all my secrets, all the stuff I had to learn.
The hard way, I'll teach to you the easy.
I'd love to have more competition because it just raises the profile of the space as a whole.
You can come and announce your new podcast on my show.
It'll be fantastic, right?
So I put this out in general and specific to a bunch of free market economists.
And a quick question how many of them do you think quit their careers to join the free market?
So, what does that tell you?
It tells you that even if we gave everyone PhDs in free market economics, they still would prefer government benefits and government power to the actual free market.
Now, I mean, it's quite possible that they would have made, they certainly would have had a much bigger impact.
They would have lived in accordance with their values, and they could have even made more money.
And they certainly would have had more satisfying careers.
But no, they didn't want to let go of the government benefits.
So, even though they know the government benefits are immoral, even though they know that they're distortionary, they still want to save.
stay within the academic system which is created and protected by the government.
It's a government cartel.
And so that to me was a great relief.
So education will not work because even if we could give everyone a free market.
PhD in economics, they still won't choose the free market of their own volition.
I did choose the free market, you know, for whatever reason that was better for me.
I mean, I took a 75% pay cut to start podcasting.
Fear of AI Job Loss00:14:48
And, I mean, you know, because I just, I want to do as much good as I possibly can in the world.
I don't particularly care how I get there.
I just want to, you know, when my eyes close in that final stinky hospital room, I just want it to close on a life well lived in the pursuit and promulgation of virtue.
And I don't really care that much what happens along the way.
You know, they're just bumps and, you know, whatever it is.
To me, it's like, you know, if you're.
You're coasting along in a boat and you hit some big waves, it's just kind of part of the fun.
I mean, why do you want calm water the whole time?
That's kind of dull.
So, the education is not the answer.
With regards to Bitcoin, I'm in triage mode, and I have been really since the beginning.
And, you know, triage mode is what patients can you, what patients are going to die no matter what?
Leave them alone.
What patients are going to survive for the next hour no matter what?
These are the patients who are going to die if we don't treat them in the next hour.
Those are the ones that you focus on, right?
And so, when I'm trying to orange pill people, I will talk to them.
About Bitcoin, and I'll explain why it's important and what problems it's trying to solve and the morals of it.
Because if you can only sell a certain amount of stuff on practical, you know, you'll be rich, whatever it is.
But you have to, I think, really give people a moral purpose.
The lack of moral purpose since the fall of religion in the West has been one of the big voids that communism is stepping in to fill, as it generally does.
So, and if people are like, oh, it's based on nothing, it's just digital vaporware, and so on, right?
And I'm like, so do you send emails?
Emails, do you print them out and walk them over or do you send emails?
Your bank account, does it actually have a pile of money in it or is it just a bunch of digits?
You look at the most wealthy companies in the world, they tend to be digital.
So the idea that something is not tangible, therefore it has no value.
It's like, do you ever order a movie?
Do you ever order a movie and have it show up on your screen?
Those aren't actual actors in the little box.
They're not there for real.
It's all digital.
You get that, right?
You listen to music.
It's digital.
It's not real.
They're not musicians, tiny musicians playing in your ears.
Anyway, so I sort of point out that the fact that something's digital doesn't mean that it's worth less.
It can, in fact, mean that it's worth more.
And they say, well, I want to invest in gold.
And it's like, okay, that's fine.
You know, the government can just take your gold, as they regularly do throughout human history.
You also know that it costs 3% of the value of your gold to store your gold every year, so it's declining.
You also know that it's impossible to transport, whereas you can walk across one border with a 12 or 24 word phrase in your head, and you can carry a virtually infinite amount of money around with no hassle, no problems.
And so on, and also that the government can devalue all of your money by just printing whatever it wants.
So I'll just make these cases.
And if people, you know, most people won't judge an idea by its own merits.
In fact, I mean, it's really not more than 5% of people in my experience who will judge, like, oh, that's interesting, make the case.
Here's the countercase, and you're actually arguing the facts and merit.
What they do is they have an emotional reaction based upon how they think everyone else in their life will think of this idea.
So they're not judging the idea itself, they're judging other people's reactions to this idea.
So, they've been told that Bitcoiners are crazy.
You know, it's just they're rabid anarchists, digital chaos agents, and it's used for terrorism and blah, blah, blah.
And so they're not actually evaluating Bitcoin or anything like that.
What they're doing is they're saying, well, hang on, Bitcoiners are bad.
So, if I become a Bitcoiner, people will think I'm bad.
Well, I don't want people to think I'm bad.
Therefore, Bitcoin must be wrong.
And it's like, I just, listen, you can't help people like that.
You can't help.
I'm looking for the 5% of people who actually have the intellectual integrity and curiosity.
To assess an idea based upon the reason and evidence.
That's all.
I mean, most people won't do that.
And, you know, if you've got a pill that will cure a disease and most people will scratch your face out rather than take it, hey, I'm not a big fan of getting this beautiful face scratched out.
So I'm going to just move on to the next person who's willing to take some medicine.
Oh, man.
There's so many things there, honestly, Stefan.
Okay.
So a couple, for a while now, for a couple of years, I'm actually working on a book about this, kind of akin to Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
And it's, you know, basically.
Separating money and state, which was at the time separating church and state and what they were arguing for, right?
And on and on and on.
So, a pamphlet, if you will, and that's what I'm working on this version of this.
But is it, it's been 17 years.
You know, this has been out there.
People can find it.
We have the internet.
People can do research.
Is it going to be something you just mentioned 5% of people, where there's only a couple percent of people that we get to, two, three, four, 5% that pull the rest of society across?
Because it just feels like most people are just completely asleep at the wheel and there's no help.
Like you said, we're in triage mode.
And most people are just completely helpless, unfortunately.
Learned helplessness, all these things.
Is that what it's going to be?
Just a couple of percent of people dragging everyone across the finish line here?
I honestly don't know how many people are going to make it across the finish line.
See, if I didn't think, I'd be crapping my pants, like right now on this show.
Like it would be a horrible sound.
And the reason for that is that if you don't think, and you just repeat slogans and you just use whatever socially approval prediction words make you feel good or look good in the moment, if you don't think, brother, there's AI.
And AI doesn't think a whole lot faster and a whole lot better than you do.
Because AI is an NPC.
AI doesn't think for itself.
It's just a word guesser based upon prior predictive patterns.
AI does not come up with original ideas.
AI is an NPC.
So if you're someone who doesn't think, you're like somebody who digs with a shovel when somebody's just invented the truck.
You're like somebody who lifts things up to top shelves when someone's just invented the forklift truck.
So if you don't think, I mean, if you didn't think, obviously, like Darwinian selection being what it is, People who didn't think were fine throughout most of human history.
You don't need a lot of thought to dig a ditch or throw a spear or fire an arrow or build a road or whatever.
You get prisoners in shackles, can do stuff to cut down some wheat, to cut down some trees.
You don't need to think and you do just fine throughout most of human history.
In fact, the people who did think, it was kind of touch and go for quite a lot of human history.
Now, the tables have turned now completely in that manual labor will be replaced by robotics and not thinking will be replaced by.
AI.
Now, AI still has a hallucination problem, and that's sort of baked into the architecture.
But it's funny how people say, you know, the problem is that AI hallucinates.
I'm like, have you talked to the average voter?
You think that AI is the only person who hallucinates?
And AI in general only hallucinates because it's ingesting hallucinogenic text, like a bunch of gobbledygook and postmodern relativism, nihilism, subjectivism, and nonsense like that.
And so it's like, you know, force feeding someone LSD up the arse and then saying, you know, They're not really good at gymnastics.
It's like, yeah, because they're in another dimension that you put them there.
So as far as like how many people, I would honestly be crapping my pants.
The good thing is that people who don't think don't even think about this kind of stuff.
So they're kind of immune.
But it is, you know, there was a time in America when like 70% of people were involved in agriculture.
Now it's like 2% or 3% because you've got these big combine harvesters.
You don't need the manual labor and so on, right?
And so people who only work with their bodies mindlessly are going to be replaced by robotics.
And people who don't think for themselves are going to be replaced.
By AI.
That's just a fact of it.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's just going to go that way.
Like cab drivers, self driving cars are way safer.
Self driving cars make mistakes.
Have you driven in Florida ever, ever?
Just out of curiosity.
No, people don't use their signals, they just flip you the bird.
So, I'm armed.
So, you know, how many people are going to get across?
I mean, I think that the elites as a whole, obviously, I don't know any elites, but if I were to put myself in their shoes, I'd be like, okay, so we've got this large disposable biomass of people who don't think, and we've got AI, and we've got robots.
So, kind of, what do we need them for?
You know, the robots, They're not expensive.
They don't require health care.
They don't require old age pensions.
They don't riot when we don't pay them government money for welfare.
So you've got this large, from the view of the elites, this large disposable biomass of dunderheads in the world.
Now, of course, you can say, well, the dunderheads were created by the elites through terrible government education.
Yes, John Taylor Gatto 101, I get all of that, but it is what it is, right?
I mean, so as far as like, well, are we going to drag 95% of people?
I don't know.
I mean, in the past, of course, what happened was when you had a large disposable biomass and in particular when government couldn't pay its bills, just went to war.
I mean, that's what governments did, right?
Oh no, we have too many people and we can't service them all and they're not really producing much, we'll just go to war.
And that's how you bleed off the excess disposable biomass.
Going to war, it's not really a thing anymore because of nukes and bioweapons and other sorts of things, chemical weapons.
You can't really go to war because going to war might mean that the elites themselves get toasted and they don't like to, you know, See their bones through the window as the nuke goes off.
So that's not really a thing.
So, what they do instead is they work on depopulation agendas to sort of lower the biomass of the planet.
And that's been going on for at least 50 years now.
And part of the fiat currency inflation is driving women into the workforce.
Also, saying to women, you must be economically equal to men means that you just kill the birth rate.
Because the only way that women can be even remotely economically equal to men is by not having children.
Because you're a dad four times more than me, so you know how much resources.
Time, care, attention, and money children take up.
God bless them, I love it.
I think it's wonderful, but it is a fact.
And so, if women are going to have two to three kids, they're going to be out of the workforce for 10 to 15 years and more, of course, if they homeschool.
So, yeah, it's a real shame.
This equality is this mirage.
Oh, we're going to get this equality.
And all that happens is you go out into the desert in pursuit of that mirage of equality.
You just end up dying in the sand dunes with your womb turning to dust.
And you've got like 30, a huge half of women, like age of 30 now, have no kids and no prospect of kids.
That's rough.
And so the depopulation stuff used to be war.
Now it's a lot nicer.
Like you have to be talked into self-sterilization rather than blown up in a World War I trench.
As a man, Way better, way better, you know.
If I can just, somebody says, you ought not to continue your line because equality and white people bad, and I'm like, oh, so I just have to not listen to that and I can go and do what I want.
Fantastic.
That's a whole lot different than being drafted and being thrown into a barbed wire machine gun nest, no man's land crossing without Wonder Woman to protect your ass, right?
So I think that it's uncertain to know how many people are needed in the future.
My goal, of course, is to be in one of the group of people who are needed because you have to do things that AI can't do better.
And AI could not come up with the speeches that I'm doing because AI is mostly programmed on my work as well, but it's mostly programmed on NPC nonsense.
So AI is just a way faster NPC.
And so if you are an NPC, I'm sorry, you're out of luck when it comes to having much of a productive future.
And if you don't have much of a productive future, I would not.
I would not say that your life is probably going to be super great in whatever way possible.
So I'm not hugely interested in trying to sort of drag people across the line because, again, if they're trying to kill me for trying to cure them, I'm not rooting for the disease, but I'm not going to put myself in harm's way either.
Yeah, no, totally a fair point.
How much, a quick side note here, how much time do you have?
Because I still have like a half dozen questions or so.
Yeah, we can go a little longer.
This is just phenomenal stuff, Stefan.
You have a little bit of time still?
Okay, awesome.
This is just such an incredible talk.
I could talk to you for a little bit.
The good thing about being deplatformed is that it frees up your schedule quite a bit.
I got four days if you need it.
I got my diapers on.
I got my NASA drive across the country diapers.
I am good to go.
Oh, man.
I love it.
I absolutely love it.
Okay.
So we were talking about these people, that many people are not making it across the finish line.
And we touched on birth rate.
We just talked about the UBI.
It really feels like we're diverging into this world of, Bitcoin and freedom, and you know, the citadels and freedom cities, and this radically different world from what we're used to.
This, like we talked about earlier, this modern dark age, potentially, and then going further down the road of UBI, CBDCs, digital passports, and slavery.
It just really feels like people are scared about losing their jobs to AI, like you just mentioned as well.
We talked about the parenting stuff earlier, complementing Bitcoin, and just it really couldn't be more stark in my mind.
It's all I can see is the meme of the two roads diverging, and having these like, how do you see things playing out going forward?
In the coming years, in the coming decades, as the world starts really kind of, it was the red versus blue divide, this continental divide thing people talked about of like, you go live in that place and I'll go live in this place.
We'll see who wins at the end of the day.
And like, you're red versus blue.
And now it's becoming really this, you know, these two monies, which are obviously the foundation now separating society.
And you're going to live in the freedom cities and these people are going to live with UBI and government, you know, sludge over here.
How do you see this playing out going forward?
You're right about the fork in the road.
I wrote a whole book about this called The Future.
People can get it for free at freedomand.comslash books.
So, It's terrifying and exhilarating, which is probably not the worst state of mind to be in as a whole, as the old Chinese curse or blessing goes.
May you live in interesting times.
Really interesting.
This is a fork in the road to human history.
So, in the past, totalitarianism was limited by manpower, you could only hire so many people to survey everyone.
Unfortunately, AI and facial recognition and central bank digital currencies, which are continually being pushed, put automation of surveillance and control and social credit scores and deplatforming in the hands of government.
In other words, in the past, you had to open up, this is what Salt Janitsyn was sent to the gulag for like a decade for, right?
He wrote a letter home from the war and he criticized something and he got thrown in a gulag.
But you had to have people open the letters and read them.
A Fork in Human History00:10:22
And you're limited in that.
There's only so many people who can open up and read and so on, right?
But if all letters can be automatically read and compared against some algorithm of good think or bad think or right think or wrong think and so on, then the automation of surveillance control, social credit scores, deplatforming, and so on, there's no practical limit to how much control politics can have over you anymore.
Again, in the past, it was limited by having to physically scan and having to physically punish and so on.
With the automation, It's incomprehensible how much control and surveillance is possible because of computer technology and so on.
Now, I mean, we've got laws being proposed in Germany where you're not allowed to buy a house if you have published wrong thing anywhere.
And of course, people have there.
I assume pretty much everything that's ever not on some error gapped computer is absorbed into some gelatinous cube database of infinity and going to be used against you at whatever point in the future, which is why I was thankful.
I am thankful that there were no computers around when I was.
Young in that way.
So the problem is that the automation of totalitarian surveillance means that there's no practical limit, there's no upper labor-based limit on how much you can be surveilled, controlled, and punished.
And that is a problem.
Now, what's interesting and what generally happens in human history is when totalitarianism begins to increase, a place opens up.
A place opens up for people to flee to.
I mean, of course, America was that place in the past.
England was that place prior where people fled the French Revolution to go to England.
So when totalitarianism begins to settle or get its sort of digital iron grip around the gnats and throats of the population, there is a market incentive for a country to provide safe haven.
For the most talented.
Now, whether it's that stuff, I don't know why Elon Musk seems very keen to go to the moon, maybe because of zoning laws, or maybe on the moon he'll be removed from his temptation to be an endless baby daddy.
I don't know, probably space aliens up there who've been banked by Captain Kirk in the past that he can just get sloppy seconds from.
But whether it's the moon, whether it's Mars, whether it's some country, whether it's El Salvador, which is the first country to really embrace Bitcoin and so on, there is going to be a country, there always is, that opens up to talented people to.
Get to.
And of course, that country is going to have to be pretty good at military and the fifth generation warfare and so on.
But again, that's an intelligent thing.
That's one thing that people who don't understand IQ do not understand the difference between the war in Iraq and the war in Iran.
In Iran, the average IQ is north of 100.
In Iraq, it's the low 80s.
And so Iran has millions of geniuses, whereas Iraq has only a few hundred.
And it's just a whole different matter, which is why Iran is aiming at the petrodollar by demanding Bitcoin payments, a dollar per barrel of oil going through the Strait of Hormuz.
which is going to try and normalize not using the petrodollar for settling oil transactions.
And that's a massive, brilliant, you know, whatever you think of Iran.
I'm not a huge fan, of course, of Islamic theocratic dictatorships, although I have great sympathy for the Iranian people.
But it's a obviously brilliant move.
And out of the fog of war emerges an attack from a direction that nobody really anticipated.
Although I did say that Bitcoin was going to be leveraged in the next war as an attack upon U.S. dollar hegemony.
But so, you know.
There's going to be a place that opens up that free people can get to.
I don't know what that looks like.
I don't know where it's going to be.
But whenever the Iron Curtain so much in general falls upon the productivity of the general population, those with the most to offer, those with the greatest creativity and the most intelligence and the most entrepreneurial abilities are a massive resource that if you open your gates to them, they will come and you will get, you know, a new country that is going to outstrip the old countries and then maybe it can spread the ideas back.
It's just a general heartbeat of tyranny and freedom as a whole.
And in the past, of course, it was hard to get to that new country.
Now it's a whole lot easier.
Could just be one flight away.
And again, I don't know where, you know, for all I know, it could be China.
I mean, because China, you know, it's funny.
I did business in China many, many years ago and had an enormous admiration for the Chinese people.
Very good humored, very smart, of course.
And the spatial reasoning and the engineering of the East Asians is really beyond compare in all of human society.
And they're, I think, getting kind of tired of communism.
So who knows, right?
I mean, and in many ways, they're freer.
Than the West.
And so, yeah, I don't know where it's going to be.
All I can do is put out the ideas and hope that people, you know, maybe it'll be under Millay in Argentina.
I mean, he's half the poverty rate and so on.
Although people were saying, oh, but manufacturing has declined under Millay.
It's like, yes, because they were zombie Japanese style propped up fiat currency companies that were just being used as cash cows by the corrupt.
They weren't real companies.
So once you get rid of the real company, unreal companies, it's going to shrink, but that's good.
What matters is the productivity, not the size of the sector.
So, Yeah, there is this fork in the road for me promoting freedom, promoting Bitcoin, promoting peaceful parenting, and so on is the best that I can do.
I did this back of the napkin calculation a year or two ago that 1.5 billion assaults against children have been prevented by what it is that I've done.
And before that, I was just, if people were yelling at or shaking their kids in parking lots, I'd go up and talk to them, which was kind of a slow process relative to being able to put out a podcast that's been viewed or downloaded about a billion times.
So things are much more efficient.
Tyranny is more efficient.
Freedom is more efficient.
The promulgation of bad ideas is.
Of course, terrible in the government sector and so on, which is why both our kids, I assume, are homeschooled.
One of the many reasons.
So, yeah, the infliction of bad ideas, the promulgation of bad ideas has achieved great efficiencies.
But for the first time in human history, the promulgation of good ideas can, to some degree, keep pace, which is why everyone gets so mad at people like us who do podcasting and stuff.
You're not regulated, you're not controlled.
It's like, yes, we're actually free, and so on.
And again, the, well, not again, but the, the, I got my, Account back on X from Elon Musk, right?
And That is a huge deal.
Like the liberation of Twitter is a huge deal in human history.
I would say it's going to be akin to the printing press in the 15th century in terms of the promulgation of ideas because the left has pretty much everything else.
I mean, they've done that slow march through the institutions in this sort of tortoise beats the hair kind of way.
And having conversations like this, things on X, where counter narrative ideas can spread is hugely powerful.
And it really, at the moment, it's not a kinetic war, it's an idea war.
The more we can show up with reasonable courage and resolution and kindness, but firmness, I think the better off we'll be.
And really, it's the best hope that humanity's ever had to have good ideas spread.
It's an unbelievable time.
Like you said, it's just the technology we have.
I think of Nostr, Nostr, you know, like these different platforms that are completely outside the realm of control, communication platforms built like Bitcoin in protocols that are uncensorable, just everything we have now, all the way to Twitter, more centralized stuff that is, you know, seemingly in better hands now.
I mean, it's just, It really is incredible.
So I love that you say that it spreads.
The good ideas spread almost as fast now as the bad ideas, which we had bad ideas spreading for thousands of years.
There's no way to spread the good ideas, really.
So, do you think, going back to the war thing, though, for a second, do you think Iran versus Iraq and what's going on?
And we talked about the City of London earlier.
I've been under this leaning towards the side of there is some type of 4D chess going on in the sense of the City of London and Europe being one of the The targets of really what's going on.
Iran being this proxy of kind of like this player outside the system that was kind of used by the British Empire, the Suez Crisis, World War I, like we've been talking about, never really went away.
The imperial nature of the crown being an island and what was going on, they went and pillaged everything else around the world because they needed resources.
They wanted control, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's reasons and excuses for things, but being what it is, how do you see just the war playing out?
War sucks, war is terrible.
At the same time, do you feel like, I guess my question is, Is the system so far gone?
Going back to this separating money and state, separating education and state, where people are screaming, hey, we need to do the Constitution thing and all that, which I'm a huge fan of here, obviously, and I know you are too.
However, how are we signaling, hey, we're going to go to war with somebody when you're trying to do X, Y, and Z thing?
And meaning we're so far off the tracks that the normal course of action isn't even available to us anymore.
The way of doing things naturally through constitutionally, et cetera, et cetera, and do these power politics.
Have a place to play in society because we find ourselves so far off the tracks because of all these misdeeds layered on top of each other decade after decade after decade.
So hopefully that makes sense, but that's where I think the fight is.
And seemingly, it's very hard for the average person to discern all that.
And I've just spent months and months kind of going back and forth and arguments both ways in my own mind and watching people on all sides of the spectrum here.
Yeah.
So when you go to war, you go to war with particular strengths and particular weaknesses.
To be.
Honest with the population as a whole is to say, here's where we can win.
But of course, where you can win is not where your enemy is going to fight.
Your enemy is going to fight where you can't win.
And of course, I don't think that any government has ever gone to war saying, here's the blowback we can expect.
Here's how we've gamed out, you know, viewing it from our enemy's standpoint.
Here's how we've gamed out how we would attack us if we were them, right?
And I'm sure they do these exercises internally, but they haven't done them externally, right?
Ironic Value Shifts00:12:29
So, you know, they close the Strait of Hormuz, which is a huge deal, right?
Obviously, 20% of the world's energy goes through there.
And that's talked about.
That's pretty obvious.
What people don't realize quite as much is that massive.
Quantities of fertilizer go through there.
And, you know, we're kind of heading into growing season.
And if they don't have the nitrogen fertilizers, there's going to be a lot of hunger that is going on and a lot of starvation that is going on in the world.
So it spreads the destabilization because they can't get a hold either of the energy as easily the liquid natural gas and the oil or the nitrogen based fertilizers are being held up there.
And so America says, well, you're out of the SWIFT system.
You know, we're going to seize.
Your government's assets and you can't do business and so on.
And then they had their stable coin, of course, and then they blocked the ability of Iran to do that stable coin.
And then the very next day, Iran says, okay, it's Bitcoin.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that I think everyone who's been around Bitcoin for a while remembers that first terrible, awful, wet your pants terror of sending your first transaction.
Because it doesn't feel real until you kind of do it.
But after you send your first transaction and it goes through and you get your receipt and blah, you're like, oh, it works.
We can do this.
And so for Iran to shift international settlements to Bitcoin, now it's not foolproof because the audits can still occur and maybe you could find out where the Bitcoin came from.
You could still be subject to millions of dollars of fines if you're breaking an embargo or, It could even be criminal fines and so on, or criminal charges.
So it's not like, oh, you know, it's just Bitcoin is perfect immediately.
But what's happening is people are like, oh, we need Bitcoin.
Okay, we're going to buy some Bitcoin.
Okay, well, we need to send the Bitcoin.
Oh, we've sent it.
Now people have done it.
And it sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of a thing that the first time you do something, it seems very hard.
And, you know, just remember how you learned how to ride a bike.
Now you ride, handle, bus free, listen to, I don't know, Kia or something like that.
So the fact that they are shifting people's perceptions of a valid payment platform from US fiat to Bitcoin, I think it's seismic.
I really think it's seismic because, as you know, 57% of stuff is settled in US dollars these days.
If people begin to shift to Bitcoin, then the value of the US dollar goes down.
The demand for the US dollar goes down considerably.
If the value of the US dollar goes down considerably, then of course domestic prices go through the roof and it's very destabilizing.
So, this is the funny thing, you know, with.
Government military, they pour a lot of stuff into very expensive hardware.
The government military has an incentive for massive, expensive, very expensive to maintain and keep going hardware.
You see these giant aircraft carriers and the massive bombers, and they just got this.
And it's kind of impressive.
You are sailing down the Persian Gulf with these giant ships and so on.
And it all seems very intimidating.
And it is.
Of course, nobody could beat America in a zillion years in any kind of conventional war.
So what that means is.
People aren't going to fight those conventional wars.
They're just not.
And so they're going to find some other way to attack.
So then you would game it out, I think, as an intelligent person.
And I'm sure Americans have done this.
The American military is full of smart people and they've gamed it out.
And they've said, okay, so if I were in Iran's shoes, what would I do?
Well, I would want America and Israel to waste as many missiles as possible.
So I create a bunch of decoys.
I would know that they have satellites.
And so I would create a bunch of decoys, which they've done.
And they've blown up a whole bunch of painted stuff in the desert.
And then I would make sure that all of my.
Missiles are mobile, they're on trucks and so on to make sure that they can't get hit and so on.
And what I would then do is I would spend my worst rockets at first, right, so that the Iron Dome and the other defensive measures would be drained away by all of that.
And I would hold my best weapons in reserve, and then after this is all drained away, only then you throw the cannon fodder in at the beginning and then you bring your troops up at the end when the enemy is already exhausted.
And I'm sure that they know as well that Iran would.
Iran is very.
The Iranian government, it's kind of wild.
They've been Bitcoin centric for over a decade, I think it is.
They have generated Bitcoin.
They have transacted in Bitcoin.
They have.
Government has subsidized energy consumption for Bitcoin miners.
So they are very Bitcoin literate.
So they have no fear or concern or lack of knowledge regarding Bitcoin.
And an ironic thing might happen.
And this is really out there.
So, you know, an ironic thing might happen.
So.
What Iran is most likely to do is to attack the value of the US dollar.
And one of the ways they do that, of course, is through getting people used to transacting in Bitcoin through this Strait of Hormuz thing.
And then once you've already got a payment sort of plan and process and things set up, I remember when I was in the business world, getting set up as a vendor was complicated, but after that you could just bill very easily.
And so there's that aspect and approach.
And of course, by withholding.
Not just oil, but again, this fertilizer, they're going to destabilize America because if there's one thing that Americans like to do, it's eat and eat and eat and eat.
And then, you know, after a break, eat some more.
And so when Americans are particularly susceptible to the price of groceries in the way that more aesthetic cultures are not.
And so wherever you're weakest and least defended is where you're going to be attacked.
And so I'm not sure if the governments as a whole have been honest about the kind of blowback that people can expect.
Another weakness, of course, is that America has relatively open borders.
There are hundreds of thousands of Iranians already in America.
I don't know if there are right now barriers on Iranians coming to America, but they're already there.
And because you've been threatening Iran, America's been threatening Iran for like 50 plus years.
Well, you know, they've known that this was coming for a long time.
I mean, Iran, as you know, has been two weeks away from getting nuclear weapons for the past 30 years.
And so they've known this is coming.
I would assume they already have cells embedded in the United States.
And a relatively free society with relatively open borders is very easy to attack.
A closed society, a tyrannical society is very, I mean, who can go and sabotage things in North Korea?
Well, you can't because you can't even get into the country, right?
It's really closed.
An open society is very easy to sabotage, very easy to attack.
And it will be, of course, where you're least defended and where things are least expected because that does two things.
If you hit something like grain processing plants or trucking stations and so on, so that you stop the flow of goods, it's not just those flow of goods.
Now everyone else has to have additional security and guards, and there's a lot of overhead and so on.
So there's going to be an attack that comes back that completely bypasses the hardware power of the American military.
And I think it's starting.
Now, the ironic thing, what I said is the ironic thing, and I'll stop here because this could go on forever and it doesn't.
You know, it doesn't have any empirical validation as yet.
But the interesting thing is that by shifting at least the perception of the value of international payments from USD to Bitcoin, Iran is going to raise the value of Bitcoin considerably.
I mean, already the demands of a dollar a barrel of oil going through the Strait of Hormuz is about half of the Bitcoin production on any given day.
About 450 Bitcoin a day are produced through miners.
Half of that is being hoovered up by that.
So they're going to raise the value of Bitcoin.
And something I said a year or two ago is that the only chance America has to pay its national debt and its unfunded liabilities is to have Bitcoin and have the value of Bitcoin go through the roof, as I think it will be.
And the American government, I think, is sitting on about 300,000 plus, 340, 325, mostly taken through police actions.
So America's sitting on this massive stockpile of Bitcoin.
And if Iran, by shifting people's perceptions of international settlements from USD to Bitcoin, it's going to raise the value of Bitcoin.
Which actually raises the value of the US Bitcoin holdings to the point where they could come within a stone's throw of actually being able to make a dent in the debt and unfunded liabilities.
So who knows how it's going to play out, but.
It's definitely not going to be any kind of conventional war because, again, you can't beat America in those things, so everyone just steps around it.
And this goes right along with all this.
I don't know how familiar you are with Jason Lowry's software thesis and that book about the national strategic importance of Bitcoin.
But it just feels like a lot of that's playing out.
And you kind of mentioned something earlier about the connect.
We've kind of reached this crescendo of war.
Like, you can't just throw, what are we going to do going forward?
Just throw a bunch of robots.
We're going to just manufacture robots and just throw them at each other.
And then, at some point, someone says, okay, this is dumb.
We're kind of there with nuclear war.
Like, okay, well, we're going to blow each other up.
It kind of stalemates itself at some point.
Like, we've reached this arc.
Of society, where then it goes into cyberspace.
And so, again, some of Jason Lauer's thesis, but like you said, that was in the Biden administration, that was in the Trump administration, and they know this stuff and it's been confirmed.
So, what you were saying earlier, there's smart people in the military thinking about these things.
So, where I'm going with this is you had Scott Besant just saying, I believe it was today or in the last couple of days, saying, we got to pass the Clarity Act and obviously the Genius Act, all these things.
You have the Lutniks, these very pro Bitcoin people in the administration.
Now, they haven't talked about it a ton as much as Bitcoiners would like over the last year or so.
But if you look underneath the surface, there's a lot of things going on.
And then you have something like this.
And again, this is just complete conspiracy.
This is my own speculation.
But was there a reason?
There's been people saying the Navy, they weren't opening the straight purposely.
Like they've been certain pressure points that people around the world, the US can do.
And where I'm going with this is would it make sense?
Like, did somebody whisper in the ear?
I mean, Trump, their family owns thousands of Bitcoin, their American Bitcoin, like all this stuff.
So it's like you got to kind of read the tea leaves a little bit.
Is there someone maybe whispering and saying, hey, guys, You could do this, we'll squeeze it, but just ask for payment in Bitcoin.
I mean, underneath the back channels, I mean, it's like to me, it just like, this is wild to see what's going on, but I think people discount these things.
It's like just crazy.
But again, conspiracy theories are what?
They're just six months from becoming true, right?
So, oh yeah.
And, you know, conspiracy theory was just a term invented by the CIA to discredit people connecting the dots.
I mean, conspiracy is literally a term in law that is used to put people in jail.
It's not some sort of abstract thing.
No, I love, I love, love, love that.
People are not talking up Bitcoin at the moment.
So I'm sure you've heard of the famous law, the inverse Kramer law.
Like whatever Jim Kramer promotes is going to go down in value.
And whatever he denigrates is going to go up in value.
Now, I don't have any proof of any of this, but I would assume that someone like Jim Kramer, when he's saying this stock is going to go down, it's because his friends want to buy it, because they think it's going to go up in value.
So then the normies, the NPCs, oh, Kramer's just bad, so I'm going to sell it.
And then his friends all buy it up.
And when he says, oh, this stock is going to go down, To the moon, and it's going to double or triple in value.
It's because his friends know it's a dog and they want to dump it.
So he just, I think he's just out there generating demand.
I don't have any proof of that.
It's just a nonsense theory, but it would certainly accord with a lot of the facts and why he's still on the air despite being one of the worst predictors.
He's like the inverse Kramer is like inverse Nancy Kramer.
Sorry, Nancy Pelosi.
So I love it when the government doesn't talk up Bitcoin.
I love it when financial institutions don't talk up Bitcoin because it means they want to buy it.
Because when they start talking up Bitcoin, it means they want to sell it.
And so, the fact that the government and the institutions who came into the ETFs a year or two ago, the fact that they're not talking it up, beautiful, man.
Selling Bitcoin Demand00:02:10
I love it.
Keep saying that Bitcoin is a scam.
Keep saying that Bitcoin is because it just means they want to depress the price so they can scoop up more of it.
So, that's just the inverse thing.
Of course, you want to, you know, like if your friend wants to date a girl that you want to date, you're going to say, oh, man, no, no, she cheated on her last boyfriend, man.
She, you know, she's secretly a cocaine addict and not in the fun kind.
And, you know, she has four vaginas, one in her armpit.
Okay, that might be a plus for some people.
You're going to talk that girl down because you want to date her.
And so I assume that when institutions are talking up Bitcoin, it means they think it's about to go down.
So, yeah, the quieter they are, the better.
Amazing.
It's been an incredible talk, Stefan.
I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours.
I have to try to be respectful of your time because my time will just be lost at some point, and then I'll suck you into this quagmire of well, it doesn't have to be the last time we chat.
It's nice to be interviewed again.
Yes, absolutely.
Like I said, we'll do a live stream at some point, maybe in the coming weeks and months here and do that.
Is there anything, where can people find you?
Anything we missed?
Anything we should touch on?
We've got a wide range of things going on here.
Anything we need to touch on quick, and where can people find you?
Yeah, so to find me, just get a really tight pair of ruby red slippers.
Click your heels together three times.
So, freedomain.com is where you go to find what it is that I do.
And there's podcasts and videos.
I've done some documentaries and I have books available.
I think all but one of them are free.
And so I hope people will check that out.
Peacefulparenting.com.
If you've got parenting questions, you can download it.
It's available in a couple of different languages.
And there's also a 60 language AI that has been programmed or developed with all of my.
Material on parenting, which has been quite considerable.
And you can ask it questions.
It's all free and so on.
So, yeah, freedomain.com.
And if people want to support what it is that I do, I don't do ads or anything like that.
So they can go to freedomain.comslash donate if they'd like to help out the show.
It's very much appreciated.
And that's the best place to find me.
Amazing.
Amazing stuff, Stefan.
I appreciate it.
Again, honored to have you on.
And I look forward to doing it again in the future.