Latest / UK Column Radio / The Greatest Theft in Human History | Jerm Warfare
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: Thank you.
- 0:30Speaker 2: My name is Jerm. This is Jerm Warfare, the battle
- 0:33Speaker 2: of ideas. I hope it clears up, but we'll just
- 0:36Speaker 2: push through. It's like a second or second and a
- 0:38Speaker 2: half delay.
- 0:39Speaker 1: Because I'm in Thailand, man, and you're in South Africa,
- 0:44Speaker 1: and that's like an internet apart.
- 0:49Speaker 2: The cables that connect us are all under the ocean.
- 0:52Speaker 2: Isn't that a crazy thought?
- 0:55Speaker 1: It is. It is. And, you know, years ago, we
- 0:58Speaker 1: did a little mini documentary on a cable landing station.
- 1:04Speaker 1: And I used to have a little, you know, kind
- 1:06Speaker 1: of publishing company. And I didn't get to go. I
- 1:09Speaker 1: could have gone, but I didn't get to go to
- 1:11Speaker 1: the cable landing station. But one of my employees did.
- 1:13Speaker 1: And I saw all the footage and helped edit it
- 1:16Speaker 1: and things like that. But it's like we learned all about, like,
- 1:20Speaker 1: how to lay subsea cable and what's involved and how
- 1:23Speaker 1: they– The ship that does it and how they splice it,
- 1:26Speaker 1: how they pull it out of the water, put a
- 1:27Speaker 1: splice in it, you know, drop it back down, how
- 1:29Speaker 1: they repair them, where they land, how many come across
- 1:33Speaker 1: the northern Atlantic versus the mid-Atlantic versus the lower Atlantic.
- 1:37Speaker 1: So they have diversity, you know, so that there's not
- 1:40Speaker 1: just one, you know, one path across the Atlantic. And
- 1:43Speaker 1: it was just, it was absolutely fascinating.
- 1:45Speaker 2: How does it actually work? I mean, I've thought about
- 1:47Speaker 2: this quite a lot. So you're in Thailand right now.
- 1:50Speaker 2: I'm in South Africa. So the cable, I'm guessing, well, cables,
- 1:55Speaker 2: I'm guessing more than one runs, what, along the coastline
- 2:00Speaker 2: or just direct as the crow flies?
- 2:02Speaker 1: It runs direct, like it runs direct, as direct as
- 2:05Speaker 1: they can get it. There's parts of the ocean where
- 2:09Speaker 1: it's too deep for them to lay cable and things
- 2:11Speaker 1: like that. But the whole ocean is crisscrossed with transatlantic cables.
- 2:19Speaker 1: And when I used to live outside of Washington, D.C.,
- 2:21Speaker 1: and we'd go to Baltimore, you'd actually get to see
- 2:23Speaker 1: the ships that laid the cable. And you could actually
- 2:27Speaker 1: see the giant spools of the cable being loaded onto
- 2:30Speaker 1: the ships and everything like that. And it's fascinating. And
- 2:35Speaker 1: then it comes out, you know, it's multiple strands of
- 2:38Speaker 1: fiber and they have like little repeating stations on the
- 2:42Speaker 1: ocean floor, you know, in different places that, you know,
- 2:46Speaker 1: pick up the light and then reamplify it and, you know,
- 2:49Speaker 1: send it on as a different pulse. You know, they
- 2:52Speaker 1: receive kind of receive the weak energy. Pulse and then then,
- 2:56Speaker 1: you know, decode it and then rescind it as a
- 2:59Speaker 1: stronger pulse. And there's different colors of light. And so
- 3:04Speaker 1: like one of the there's a thing called dense wave
- 3:08Speaker 1: division multiplexing. where on one strand of cable, they've got
- 3:13Speaker 1: a transmitter that's transmitting, you know, 20, 30 different colors
- 3:18Speaker 1: of light. And then, so it's receiving, you know, you're
- 3:22Speaker 1: sending 30 different, 30 times the amount of information on
- 3:26Speaker 1: the same cable because you're sending it in different colors.
- 3:29Speaker 1: And then the receiver is listening for, you know, is
- 3:32Speaker 1: decoding that color versus decoding that color versus decoding that
- 3:36Speaker 1: color versus decoding. I used to be in the business.
- 3:38Speaker 1: I was in the The internet business, I worked at
- 3:40Speaker 1: global ISPs, backbone providers. I used to live in the
- 3:47Speaker 1: data center capital of the planet, so I know a
- 3:50Speaker 1: lot about the internet.
- 3:54Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I was hoping you'd give me a
- 3:56Speaker 2: slightly better illustration. I've just looked it up while you
- 3:58Speaker 2: were talking. I'm trying to figure out. So I said cables.
- 4:01Speaker 2: So I'm guessing you and I are connected to each
- 4:03Speaker 2: other via multiple cables, not just one. And how deep,
- 4:07Speaker 2: how deep down? This isn't really what we're actually supposed
- 4:09Speaker 2: to be talking about, but I'm just really interested. How
- 4:13Speaker 2: deep down do those cables go? I've got a diagram here, actually.
- 4:16Speaker 2: I'll see if I can pull it up. But I
- 4:18Speaker 2: see here that it There is a cable that runs direct,
- 4:22Speaker 2: like you said. There's also a cable that runs along
- 4:26Speaker 2: the African coast and then around the coastline all the
- 4:29Speaker 2: way around India to where you are. And then there's
- 4:34Speaker 2: a third one that goes on the other side of
- 4:36Speaker 2: the African continent, the real long way around via the
- 4:39Speaker 2: Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal and then across. So
- 4:43Speaker 2: it looks like there are three different routes that connect
- 4:47Speaker 2: just you and I. It's absolutely fascinating. How deep down
- 4:50Speaker 2: do those cables sit?
- 4:55Speaker 1: I don't know the exact one, but I don't know
- 4:57Speaker 1: what the exact one is, but it can't be too
- 4:59Speaker 1: deep because they have to haul them back up and
- 5:02Speaker 1: splice them. And so the deeper they are, the harder
- 5:06Speaker 1: it is for them to haul it back up and
- 5:08Speaker 1: splice it. So they try not to get it, you know,
- 5:10Speaker 1: like too deep. And there's a whole, like I said,
- 5:12Speaker 1: there's a whole business. There's two different cable laying ships
- 5:16Speaker 1: in the Port of Baltimore. They're there 24-7, like when
- 5:18Speaker 1: they're not in, you know, outlaying cable and everything like that.
- 5:21Speaker 1: And so I'm sure there's, they're in other places in
- 5:24Speaker 1: the world, but like it's a, there's, there's a whole
- 5:27Speaker 1: infrastructure behind laying these cables. It's just, it's just super cool.
- 5:31Speaker 2: Yeah, it says here the light in a fiber cable
- 5:35Speaker 2: moves at around 200,000 kilometers per second, and each 1,000
- 5:40Speaker 2: kilometers costs roughly 10 milliseconds round trip. That is very fast.
- 5:49Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the speed of light. It's the speed of
- 5:53Speaker 1: multiple colors of light. Wow.
- 5:57Speaker 2: It's actually incredible, hey? Isn't it? I mean, 20 years ago,
- 6:01Speaker 2: this was still just, you know, talk.
- 6:05Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, what?
- 6:09Speaker 2: No, was it more than 20 years ago? I don't know.
- 6:11Speaker 2: I don't know when they started laying down cables.
- 6:12Speaker 1: You know, in 1972, I've got maps. And in 1972, 73, sorry,
- 6:15Speaker 1: 73 and 74, I've got maps for 73 and 74.
- 6:18Speaker 1: The ARPANET, Before DARPA, there was ARPA. And the original
- 6:30Speaker 1: ARPANET in 1973 was connected to dozens of different institutions
- 6:36Speaker 1: in the United States and the UK. I think they
- 6:40Speaker 1: connected it across the pond to London. But MIT, Harvard,
- 6:45Speaker 1: the Pentagon, Stanford, the usual suspects were all wired up for,
- 6:55Speaker 1: you know, TCP, TCP IP traffic in 1973. And they
- 7:01Speaker 1: released it to the public in kind of 1994 ish,
- 7:04Speaker 1: you know, is where people began getting private Internet connections
- 7:08Speaker 1: into different called network access points like the May East,
- 7:12Speaker 1: the May West or Sprint app, whatever, they began allowing
- 7:16Speaker 1: people to connect in, you know, privately. And then that's
- 7:19Speaker 1: where the commercial internet really, you know, started to blossom.
- 7:23Speaker 1: So they had the internet from, they had it in
- 7:26Speaker 1: the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s before they really
- 7:30Speaker 1: released it to everybody else. And I think they'd already
- 7:32Speaker 1: figured out how it was going to play out and
- 7:34Speaker 1: like what the key technologies were, and they were already
- 7:37Speaker 1: making their bets and And, you know, I've talked about
- 7:40Speaker 1: it before. I don't know if I've talked about it
- 7:42Speaker 1: with you, but like it's it's, you know, like I
- 7:45Speaker 1: think a lot of the Internet companies were were funded
- 7:49Speaker 1: by the, you know, the, you know, kind of defense
- 7:52Speaker 1: industry insiders. Yes. We're going to be important on the Internet,
- 8:06Speaker 1: knowing that all of these different things. And so they'd
- 8:09Speaker 1: already war gamed it. They'd already, you know, cultural anthropologists
- 8:12Speaker 1: and futurists and things like that had already looked at
- 8:15Speaker 1: it and they'd already placed their bets and and gave
- 8:18Speaker 1: everybody a head start.
- 8:19Speaker 2: So, well, Facebook is a good example of that. An
- 8:23Speaker 2: intelligence operation. True that still is.
- 8:27Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean.
- 8:32Speaker 2: I'm trying to find a segue because I want to
- 8:34Speaker 2: chat to you about government fraud. And I can't quite
- 8:40Speaker 2: find the link.
- 8:44Speaker 1: Well, we can talk about a great many things. I
- 8:48Speaker 1: have a new book that I'd like to talk about,
- 8:49Speaker 1: The Greatest Theft in Human History.
- 8:52Speaker 2: That's what I was trying to segue into.
- 8:54Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the hot topic right now. And inflation's hot, too,
- 8:59Speaker 1: around the world, so the timing is perfect. What is
- 9:04Speaker 1: the inflation currently in the U.S.? Well, that depends on...
- 9:09Speaker 1: Are we on? Are we recording?
- 9:12Speaker 2: We are recording.
- 9:12Speaker 1: Oh, my God, that's so funny. Okay, well... So, you know,
- 9:18Speaker 1: it depends on who you ask and how they calculate it.
- 9:22Speaker 1: But officially, the inflation rate in the United States is
- 9:26Speaker 1: calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And I want
- 9:29Speaker 1: to say they say it's at 3.4% right now. And
- 9:34Speaker 1: I think it just like ticked up another, it might
- 9:36Speaker 1: be 3.5, something like that. And so that's the official
- 9:41Speaker 1: inflation rate. Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for quite
- 9:46Speaker 1: some time, has been accused of many, many, many shenanigans
- 9:51Speaker 1: with respect to how they're misrepresenting the inflation rate. And
- 9:57Speaker 1: there's 50 billion reasons why they want to misrepresent the
- 10:02Speaker 1: inflation rate, because if they told the truth about the
- 10:05Speaker 1: inflation rate, they would have to pay more in Social
- 10:08Speaker 1: Security benefits They would have to pay more in pension
- 10:15Speaker 1: benefits to veterans and railroad pensions and pension systems that
- 10:19Speaker 1: they manage. And they would have to pay more to
- 10:22Speaker 1: holders of treasury securities called TIPS bonds. And a TIPS
- 10:28Speaker 1: bond is a treasury investment protected security, I think. And
- 10:37Speaker 1: it's a form of government debt that is indexed to
- 10:40Speaker 1: the inflation rate. And so if they told the truth
- 10:43Speaker 1: about the inflation rate, it would be an extra 50
- 10:46Speaker 1: billion plus a year that they would be paying out.
- 10:51Speaker 1: And so for years, they've done a number of shenanigans
- 10:54Speaker 1: to misrepresent what the inflation rate is. Some of the
- 10:58Speaker 1: famous ones, the most famous ones, is one's called hedonic adjustment,
- 11:02Speaker 1: where they say, OK, last year, a television set was
- 11:07Speaker 1: a thousand dollars this year the television set is eleven
- 11:12Speaker 1: hundred dollars but because the television set has picture and
- 11:17Speaker 1: picture and it's cable ready and it connects to hulu
- 11:20Speaker 1: and whatever and whatever new you know bells and whistles
- 11:23Speaker 1: it has you're going to get more enjoyment hedonic You know,
- 11:28Speaker 1: hedonism is the word of Donna. You get more enjoyment
- 11:31Speaker 1: out of it. And so we're going to adjust the
- 11:34Speaker 1: price of the television down from eleven hundred dollars to
- 11:37Speaker 1: a thousand dollars. We're going to say there wasn't any inflation.
- 11:40Speaker 1: And so that like it's just that's as crazy as
- 11:43Speaker 1: that seems. That's what's going on at the Bureau of
- 11:46Speaker 1: Labor Statistics. And so there's a number of different alternative indexes,
- 11:52Speaker 1: some of which, one of which that we use in
- 11:55Speaker 1: our new report, in our new book, The Greatest Theft
- 11:59Speaker 1: in Human History, how the banks and the government will
- 12:04Speaker 1: steal $ 1. 4 million for the typical American worker legally. So
- 12:13Speaker 1: we used something called the Reality Index, and the Reality
- 12:17Speaker 1: Index uses the exact same weights and measures that the
- 12:20Speaker 1: BLS does, but they pull out the hedonic adjustment. They
- 12:24Speaker 1: pull out something called substitution. Substitution is like when the
- 12:27Speaker 1: cost of steak goes up, they just assume that you're
- 12:32Speaker 1: going to substitute with chicken, and they'll measure chicken and
- 12:36Speaker 1: not steak. As crazy as that sounds, that's the kind
- 12:41Speaker 1: of shenanigans going on at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- 12:44Speaker 1: So if you include the Bureau of Labor Statistics counting,
- 12:52Speaker 1: it's another point, almost another full percentage point higher. I
- 12:58Speaker 1: think it's higher than that because I think that they're
- 13:00Speaker 1: skewing the specific things that they're measuring. One of the
- 13:05Speaker 1: things they measure is they don't actually measure what the
- 13:08Speaker 1: cost of housing is. They do something called a homeowner
- 13:11Speaker 1: survey where they call homeowners and they say, so if
- 13:14Speaker 1: you were going to rent your house. What would you
- 13:17Speaker 1: rent it for? There's all these great data sets, Zillow,
- 13:23Speaker 1: the company Zillow that does all the house prices and
- 13:28Speaker 1: the house information. If you wanted to buy a house,
- 13:31Speaker 1: they have a rental index. They know exactly how much
- 13:34Speaker 1: rents are. When they call a homeowner out of the
- 13:37Speaker 1: blue that's never really thought about what they would rent
- 13:39Speaker 1: their home for, they're notorious for saying what they would rent.
- 13:46Speaker 1: They have no idea what the market is. They haven't
- 13:48Speaker 1: really thought about it. They tend to lowball it, and
- 13:50Speaker 1: so it's notoriously, notoriously wrong to So there's other alternatives,
- 14:01Speaker 1: indexes that have it as two or three points higher
- 14:06Speaker 1: than what the BLS says. Now, it's funny because in
- 14:12Speaker 1: this $ 1. 4 million, what we did is we were the book,
- 14:17Speaker 1: The Greatest Theft in Human History at greatest-theft.com was really
- 14:23Speaker 1: the first to calculate what is the total theft of inflation,
- 14:30Speaker 1: confiscatory taxation, and Social Security underpayment. And so because they're
- 14:37Speaker 1: lying to you about what the total Social Security, they're
- 14:44Speaker 1: lying to you about what the inflation rate is, they
- 14:45Speaker 1: don't pay you the COLAs that you really do. If
- 14:48Speaker 1: they actually paid you the COLAs that you really do,
- 14:51Speaker 1: you'd get a lot more. And so in that case,
- 14:55Speaker 1: in that particular component, when we measured how much they're
- 14:59Speaker 1: ripping off your grandmother and your parents on their Social Security,
- 15:03Speaker 1: The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually admits that their CPI-W,
- 15:09Speaker 1: which they use to calculate the CPI, doesn't really measure
- 15:14Speaker 1: the things that the elderly buy. And so they actually
- 15:18Speaker 1: have another CPI called the CPI-E that says, yeah, E
- 15:22Speaker 1: for elderly. Yeah, you know. okay, elderly buy different things.
- 15:27Speaker 1: And if we calculated it for what they really bought,
- 15:29Speaker 1: we'd owe them $ 16, 000. Now, they don't say that. We
- 15:32Speaker 1: calculated that off of the COLA that you would get
- 15:35Speaker 1: if they used the CPIE, which they admit is more
- 15:39Speaker 1: accurate for the elderly than the one that they're using.
- 15:43Speaker 1: And so on the low end of the scale, they're
- 15:45Speaker 1: going to steal in 20 years of retirement the they're
- 15:49Speaker 1: going to steal $ 16, 000 from the elderly in Social Security underpayment.
- 15:55Speaker 1: If you use the reality index, it would be $ 70, 000.
- 16:00Speaker 1: And so that $ 1. 4 million, that $ 1. 4 million for a
- 16:04Speaker 1: typical American worker that makes $ 60, 000 a year, if you
- 16:07Speaker 1: make $ 60, 000 every single year for 40 years... you're going
- 16:12Speaker 1: to make about $ 2. 4 million. The government's going to steal $ 1. 4 million.
- 16:16Speaker 1: They're going to steal between... So we use the more
- 16:18Speaker 1: conservative $ 16, 000 in Social Security underpayment. They're going to steal $ 595, 000
- 16:21Speaker 1: in inflation. So when the money is losing 3.4%, 3.5%, 4.5,
- 16:42Speaker 1: it's been as high as 8% in the COVID years.
- 16:47Speaker 1: When it's losing 8% of the money, all that money
- 16:49Speaker 1: that you earn and save, you're losing that purchasing power,
- 16:52Speaker 1: and that's like a hidden tax. They're stealing the value
- 16:57Speaker 1: out of the money that you earn and save. The
- 16:59Speaker 1: same way as if they stuck their hand in your
- 17:02Speaker 1: pocket and stole it, they're just doing it in a
- 17:04Speaker 1: tricky way that most people don't understand. Now, that $ 595, 000,
- 17:10Speaker 1: there's three components of that. There's the pure inflation piece
- 17:15Speaker 1: of it, and then there's something called the compound trap. Now,
- 17:19Speaker 1: the compound trap is, so it's the banks and the
- 17:24Speaker 1: government working together, okay? So, I think, you know, and
- 17:29Speaker 1: this is an opinion, okay? Everything I've told you is
- 17:32Speaker 1: kind of a way of measuring it, and we explain
- 17:35Speaker 1: the math, and we use official government data, and we
- 17:38Speaker 1: use official government, you know, treasury, you know, money supply data,
- 17:42Speaker 1: and everything like that, and you can see all of
- 17:44Speaker 1: our calculations, and we got four different AI models to
- 17:47Speaker 1: agree on, and I'm going to speculate here. and say,
- 17:49Speaker 1: I think that at the top of government, you know,
- 17:51Speaker 1: we think government's a technique for robbing and controlling populations.
- 17:55Speaker 1: And at the top, we think it's the banks, because
- 17:58Speaker 1: the banks are the ones that are making the most
- 18:00Speaker 1: money out of the government system. And so the banks
- 18:04Speaker 1: are creating the inflation. So when you go to a
- 18:07Speaker 1: bank and you get a consumer loan, or you get
- 18:09Speaker 1: a mortgage, or you use the bank's credit card, they're
- 18:13Speaker 1: not loaning you another depositor's money. OK, they're just crediting
- 18:18Speaker 1: your account with digital dollars that they create out of
- 18:21Speaker 1: thin air, even though that's inflationary and even though that
- 18:25Speaker 1: reduces the purchasing power of all of the dollars in circulation.
- 18:30Speaker 1: And that has been the biggest theft in all of
- 18:33Speaker 1: human history. And that is why the banks is typically
- 18:37Speaker 1: the largest building in every major city on the planet.
- 18:41Speaker 1: In fact, it's generally like the top two or three
- 18:44Speaker 1: or four or five buildings. in every major city or
- 18:47Speaker 1: banks because they're stealing it, okay? And so part of
- 18:52Speaker 1: the way they steal it is just, you know, it's inflationary.
- 18:55Speaker 1: They create it out of thin air. If you get
- 18:57Speaker 1: a mortgage at 7% for, you know, the typical American
- 19:02Speaker 1: house right now is like 400,000 bucks. And so if
- 19:05Speaker 1: you finance, let's say, $ 350, 000, you're going to pay $ 400, 000
- 19:09Speaker 1: plus in interest on a loan that they created out
- 19:13Speaker 1: of thin air. And that's where they get the money
- 19:15Speaker 1: to afford those giant buildings. It's incredibly, incredibly profitable, even
- 19:22Speaker 1: though it's inflationary. It's not fair to everybody else. Not
- 19:25Speaker 1: everybody gets a banking license. I don't get to make
- 19:28Speaker 1: up money out of thin air. You don't get to
- 19:30Speaker 1: make up money out of thin air. Most people don't
- 19:32Speaker 1: get to create money out of thin air. And And
- 19:34Speaker 1: steal the value out of everybody else's money. So that's
- 19:39Speaker 1: one point of it, one part of it. One of
- 19:41Speaker 1: the other parts of it is called the compound trap.
- 19:43Speaker 1: And so now the banks, this inflationary money system, this crooked,
- 19:48Speaker 1: dishonest inflation. money system jacks up the price of houses.
- 19:53Speaker 1: And so now the average person has to borrow or
- 19:58Speaker 1: borrow more from the same banks that created this problem
- 20:06Speaker 1: in the first place. And so, you know, in 1971,
- 20:08Speaker 1: a house was like $ 25, 000. You know, that's gone up
- 20:10Speaker 1: 16 times. The house isn't 16 times better. OK, it's
- 20:19Speaker 1: that you're you know, it's there. They're make their this
- 20:22Speaker 1: inflationary money system is making it unaffordable. And so they
- 20:26Speaker 1: force you to borrow. And so you say part of
- 20:29Speaker 1: that five hundred ninety five thousand dollars is compound trap
- 20:32Speaker 1: where you've got to borrow three hundred, you know, and
- 20:36Speaker 1: fifty thousand bucks and you've got to pay a certain
- 20:38Speaker 1: amount of interest to the bank that created the problem
- 20:41Speaker 1: in the first place. And then there's a final one
- 20:44Speaker 1: called the cotillion effect, which is when this money comes
- 20:47Speaker 1: into circulation, because sometimes it comes into circulation when the
- 20:51Speaker 1: bank's created. Sometimes it comes into circulation when the government's created.
- 20:54Speaker 1: When the government creates it and it hands out hundreds
- 20:58Speaker 1: of billions to defense contractors and beltway bandits and banks
- 21:05Speaker 1: and treasury investors and things like that, the people that
- 21:09Speaker 1: get that money first and spend it into the economy,
- 21:13Speaker 1: they spend at today's prices. And then by the time
- 21:17Speaker 1: that that money circulates through the economy down to the
- 21:20Speaker 1: wage earner, it's now caused inflation. And then the wage earner,
- 21:26Speaker 1: by the time it gets to him, he's paying inflated prices.
- 21:30Speaker 1: Whereas the original person, like in a case that we
- 21:35Speaker 1: use in the book, In 2012, the banks sold hundreds
- 21:41Speaker 1: of thousands of houses at bulk auction to people that
- 21:46Speaker 1: were in probably nine times out of 10 got it
- 21:50Speaker 1: from the, you know, from the government, from the banking
- 21:52Speaker 1: system created out of thin air. You know, this this
- 21:55Speaker 1: process that we're talking about. So they got to buy
- 22:01Speaker 1: the houses at full market price. That bit up the
- 22:04Speaker 1: cost of houses so that by the time that the
- 22:08Speaker 1: money rolled through the average person and they went to
- 22:11Speaker 1: either buy a house or rent a house, they've got
- 22:14Speaker 1: to buy the house for tens of thousands of dollars
- 22:17Speaker 1: or more. They've got to rent the house for hundreds
- 22:21Speaker 1: of dollars more each month. And that process is partially
- 22:25Speaker 1: the cotillion effect and partially this compound trap. Add them
- 22:29Speaker 1: all together, it's $ 595, 000 over a 40-year career and a
- 22:31Speaker 1: 20-year retirement. That's the typical... American worker. If you're above
- 22:43Speaker 1: average and you make, let's say, $ 120, 000 a year, they're
- 22:47Speaker 1: going to steal $ 3 million. If you make a quarter
- 22:50Speaker 1: of a million a year, they're going to steal $ 6 million,
- 22:53Speaker 1: and it just keeps on going up. The final component...
- 22:57Speaker 1: is the confiscatory taxes. And so the typical American worker
- 23:02Speaker 1: at 60K, they're going to pay about $ 785, 000 over that
- 23:04Speaker 1: 40-year career, 20-year retirement. You're going to get some services. OK,
- 23:15Speaker 1: it's going to it's going to it's going to pay
- 23:16Speaker 1: for some roads and things like that. But number one,
- 23:20Speaker 1: there's a thing called the deadweight cost of taxation where
- 23:23Speaker 1: when the government steals it from you and you don't
- 23:25Speaker 1: spend it yourself as efficiently as you would have spent it.
- 23:29Speaker 1: and it's going to destroy economic activity, a certain amount
- 23:34Speaker 1: of economic activity in the country. Number two, the government
- 23:38Speaker 1: alone admits that out of that 785,000, somewhere around 20,000
- 23:44Speaker 1: is admitted waste, fraud, and abuse. So the general accounting office,
- 23:49Speaker 1: I want to say it's almost like $ 500 billion a
- 23:51Speaker 1: year go to improper payments. What they admit is just
- 23:55Speaker 1: being burned and set on fire. And so that's a
- 23:57Speaker 1: significant amount of your $ 700 billion. If they're going to
- 24:00Speaker 1: take $ 150, 000, $ 200, 000 of your money and just set it
- 24:02Speaker 1: on fire, that's just crazy in and of itself. Then
- 24:08Speaker 1: the final thing is you're going to overpay for everything
- 24:12Speaker 1: that you're going to buy versus what you would have
- 24:15Speaker 1: bought it in the free market. You would have bought
- 24:18Speaker 1: education for your child typically cheaper than you're going to
- 24:22Speaker 1: get it, than you're going to ultimately pay through the government.
- 24:24Speaker 1: You're going to buy postal services cheaper. cheaper than you
- 24:28Speaker 1: would have got it for the government. You're going to buy,
- 24:30Speaker 1: you know, the roads would be cheaper and better if
- 24:33Speaker 1: the government wasn't, you know, in charge of the roads.
- 24:36Speaker 1: There's a gazillion things that would be cheaper. An example
- 24:40Speaker 1: in Canada, they've got NAV Canada. They privatized their air
- 24:43Speaker 1: traffic control. Their air traffic control is cheaper than it
- 24:47Speaker 1: is on a per capita basis here in the United
- 24:50Speaker 1: States as just one example. So you're going to overpay.
- 24:53Speaker 1: So you're going to get, you know, $ 350, 000, $ 400, 000 worth
- 24:55Speaker 1: of services for $ 785, 000. The whole thing is a ripoff.
- 24:56Speaker 1: The whole thing is a scam. It's the greatest theft ever.
- 25:07Speaker 1: in human history, if you added it all together starting
- 25:11Speaker 1: in 1913 when the Federal Reserve came along and through today,
- 25:17Speaker 1: it's over $ 182 trillion. And out of that $ 182 trillion,
- 25:19Speaker 1: the banks have made in the exact same time $ 15
- 25:21Speaker 1: to $ 25 trillion. Because it's not dollar for dollar. It's
- 25:24Speaker 1: not at $ 1 that they create, you know, out of
- 25:35Speaker 1: thin air equals a dollar of profit for them. So it's,
- 25:38Speaker 1: but it's an incredible, incredible, you know, amount. And we
- 25:43Speaker 1: think they get away with it because they've bought up
- 25:45Speaker 1: the media and they've bought up the social, you know,
- 25:47Speaker 1: and they're not going to tell the media and the social,
- 25:51Speaker 1: you know, social media and things like that. They're not
- 25:54Speaker 1: going to tell you how you're getting ripped off. They're
- 25:57Speaker 1: not going to tell you the whole system is illegitimate.
- 25:59Speaker 1: They're They're not going to tell you that you'd be
- 26:03Speaker 1: crazy wealthier if there wasn't government. And so anyway, that's
- 26:07Speaker 1: the new book. That's the summary of it all. And
- 26:10Speaker 1: it has been the greatest theft in all of human history.
- 26:14Speaker 1: It dwarfs the transatlantic slave trade. It dwarfs the Mongols
- 26:20Speaker 1: raping Europe. It dwarfs the British extraction of India. It
- 26:25Speaker 1: dwarfs every other theft in human history. Because it's so mechanistic,
- 26:30Speaker 1: because it comes out of your paycheck without, you know,
- 26:33Speaker 1: you're thinking about it. You never, like, it's been, it's impressive.
- 26:39Speaker 1: But that's, yes, that's exactly it. It's a theft that
- 26:44Speaker 1: you aren't aware of.
- 26:45Speaker 2: Inflation. It's a very polite kind of expropriation because you
- 26:50Speaker 2: don't even know about it. So, here in South Africa,
- 26:54Speaker 2: our inflation currently, I think, is around 4.5%. So in
- 26:58Speaker 2: other words, that means you have to, whatever you are doing, earning-wise,
- 27:04Speaker 2: go above 4.5% just to not have that stolen from you.
- 27:09Speaker 2: And even then, it's going to get stolen from you.
- 27:13Speaker 2: Because everything else, I mean, everything else is taxed. Also, everything,
- 27:16Speaker 2: just about. Almost breathing comes with a tax.
- 27:23Speaker 1: And that 4% and the $ 1. 4 million that we talked about,
- 27:29Speaker 1: that's against a neutral monetary system. But if we had
- 27:34Speaker 1: an honest monetary system based on gold, so when South Africa, huge,
- 27:40Speaker 1: there's not a reason in the world why South Africa
- 27:41Speaker 1: couldn't have a gold-based currency, right? So measured against the
- 27:46Speaker 1: gold standard, which we had in the United States for
- 27:50Speaker 1: decades and decades and decades, and we had good economic
- 27:54Speaker 1: measurement against it, prices were benignly deflationary. So the magic
- 28:04Speaker 1: of gold is that gold can't be created digitally by
- 28:08Speaker 1: a bank. It can't be created on a printing press.
- 28:12Speaker 1: There's very, very little inflation. Now, some banks cheat. Back
- 28:16Speaker 1: in the days where every bank was issuing their own money, yes,
- 28:19Speaker 1: some banks would issue more dollars than others, but they
- 28:22Speaker 1: would get caught. They would get busted. It wasn't industrial
- 28:25Speaker 1: across the entire economy, across every single bank, across everything
- 28:29Speaker 1: like that. So prices tended to go down. So your
- 28:35Speaker 1: dollar would buy more and more and more every single
- 28:40Speaker 1: year as productivity improvements and innovations increased. As those reduced
- 28:50Speaker 1: the cost of either creating something or distributing it, people
- 28:54Speaker 1: were getting dramatically wealthier. In the book, The Greatest Theft
- 28:58Speaker 1: in Human History, we actually calculated against a gold standard,
- 29:01Speaker 1: and that $ 1. 4 million really is $ 1. 96 million. But we
- 29:08Speaker 1: didn't use that headline number because a lot of people,
- 29:10Speaker 1: they can't wrap their head around that. They don't understand, like,
- 29:13Speaker 1: you know, they can't just in the back of their
- 29:16Speaker 1: head do the math on, okay, well, if I was
- 29:18Speaker 1: getting 1% more purchasing power a year, how much would that,
- 29:23Speaker 1: you know, calculate to? Well, it calculates to $ 1. 96 million
- 29:27Speaker 1: for a guy making $ 60, 000 a year. They're really stealing $ 1. 96
- 29:29Speaker 1: million from the average person. And what kind of world
- 29:39Speaker 1: germ would we have if the average guy had $ 1. 96
- 29:45Speaker 1: million more to spend. How many more vacations could he
- 29:49Speaker 1: go on? What kind of education could he get for
- 29:51Speaker 1: his kids? What could he give to charity? What would
- 29:55Speaker 1: the automotive industry look like if everybody could afford whatever
- 29:59Speaker 1: car they wanted? It would create this huge, huge economic boom.
- 30:07Speaker 1: But we have this parasite of government and this banking
- 30:10Speaker 1: system that's sucking the lifeblood out of the population.
- 30:15Speaker 2: You also alluded earlier to the fact that because the
- 30:18Speaker 2: government has got a monopoly on currency, it also wastes
- 30:22Speaker 2: a lot. I think it was Milton Friedman who said
- 30:26Speaker 2: that if the government took over the Sahara Desert, there
- 30:28Speaker 2: would be a shortage of sand in the next five years.
- 30:35Speaker 1: That goes back to that deadweight cost that I mentioned.
- 30:37Speaker 1: And so the $ 785, 000, if you were spending it, okay,
- 30:39Speaker 1: and you were buying the exact kind of education that
- 30:41Speaker 1: you wanted for your kid, in a free market, in
- 30:44Speaker 1: a voluntarist world, do you want Montessori? Do you want Waldorf?
- 30:59Speaker 1: Do you want vocational education? Do you want some kind
- 31:04Speaker 1: of self-directed learning? Whatever it is you want, you're going
- 31:08Speaker 1: to be way more price conscious and you're going to
- 31:11Speaker 1: invest in only the charities that you know that are
- 31:12Speaker 1: going to give you the biggest bang for the buck.
- 31:14Speaker 1: You're going to invest... So you're going to spend that
- 31:23Speaker 1: way more effectively than the government does, and then that's
- 31:27Speaker 1: going to have economic benefits that are lost because the
- 31:34Speaker 1: government has all this waste, fraud, and abuse. The government
- 31:38Speaker 1: overpays for a great many things. I'll just give you
- 31:43Speaker 1: one example. We had a conference in Sedona, Arizona. A
- 31:49Speaker 1: couple of years ago, Liberty on the Rock, Sedona, we
- 31:53Speaker 1: did some advertising in the local paper. I, you know, like, like,
- 31:59Speaker 1: you know, they're including their email blast. I subscribe to it.
- 32:02Speaker 1: The first email I get is announcing that the local
- 32:07Speaker 1: government in Sedona, Arizona is just opened eight pickleball courts
- 32:13Speaker 1: that they spent $ 1. 6 million building. We may have talked
- 32:17Speaker 1: about this in the past. And I mean, I was shocked.
- 32:21Speaker 1: I'm like, how do you spend $ 1. 8 million on eight
- 32:25Speaker 1: pickleball courts? And so I knew a guy in Memphis,
- 32:29Speaker 1: Tennessee that owned a pickleball business called pickleball paradise in
- 32:35Speaker 1: uh at willow grove willow grove pickleball paradise and i
- 32:40Speaker 1: so i call him up on the phone and i
- 32:42Speaker 1: tell him that he starts laughing hysterically and i'm like
- 32:44Speaker 1: well how much do you spend for his he has
- 32:47Speaker 1: six outdoor courts that he with bathrooms sedona doesn't have
- 32:51Speaker 1: bathrooms but has the he's got the same chain link
- 32:54Speaker 1: fence he's got the same lighting he's got the same
- 32:57Speaker 1: you know like they're just as good courts and everything
- 32:59Speaker 1: like that he spent less than a hundred thousand dollars
- 33:02Speaker 1: on six courts. He was in the process of building
- 33:06Speaker 1: five more courts that were indoors. And he was going
- 33:10Speaker 1: to build five indoor courts, again, with more bathrooms and
- 33:14Speaker 1: with a little party room and some other accoutrement. He
- 33:18Speaker 1: was going to pay $ 350, 000 for that. So now we're
- 33:19Speaker 1: at $ 450, 000 for 11 courts versus the eight that Sedona
- 33:30Speaker 1: has that are only outdoor courts. And he's providing essentially
- 33:35Speaker 1: the exact same service that Sedona is providing. He charges
- 33:38Speaker 1: five bucks to play all day. It's cheaper if you
- 33:41Speaker 1: buy a monthly membership. It's cheaper if you buy even
- 33:44Speaker 1: a yearly membership. But you know what? If you don't
- 33:46Speaker 1: have money and you can't afford to play, he's going
- 33:48Speaker 1: to let you play anyway. He'll let you play for free.
- 33:51Speaker 1: So he's providing the exact same service for the community,
- 33:56Speaker 1: but he's doing it without a gun and he's not
- 33:59Speaker 1: going to waste $ 1. 2 million. That went to waste, fraud
- 34:05Speaker 1: and abuse and people's salaries getting padded and government contractors
- 34:10Speaker 1: making a fortune. And the whole thing is just a
- 34:12Speaker 1: giant friggin scam. And to your point, that's the other
- 34:18Speaker 1: cost of government is that everybody is just getting just
- 34:22Speaker 1: reamed by these government contractors. Four hundred thousand dollar helmets
- 34:27Speaker 1: for the F-35s. $ 10, 000 toilet seats. The government of San
- 34:32Speaker 1: Francisco spent $ 1. 3 million on a single toilet in a park.
- 34:39Speaker 1: It's ridiculous, and it's just the dumbest way to organize society.
- 34:46Speaker 2: Can the government-central bank partnership exist without inflation?
- 34:58Speaker 1: Yes. The government could have a monetary system that was
- 35:03Speaker 1: not inflationary, and we did it in the United States
- 35:06Speaker 1: when we were on the gold standard. I don't believe
- 35:09Speaker 1: in the Constitution, but even the quote-unquote founding fathers At
- 35:16Speaker 1: the Art of Liberty Foundation, we're voluntarist. We don't believe
- 35:19Speaker 1: in the legitimacy, the necessity, or the desirability of having
- 35:23Speaker 1: a government at all. It's impossible to have a moral,
- 35:27Speaker 1: legitimate government. It's impossible to delegate rights you don't have
- 35:30Speaker 1: yourself to a representative to represent you doing something you
- 35:34Speaker 1: don't have the ability to do yourself. I don't have
- 35:36Speaker 1: the ability to take Germ's money and give it to
- 35:39Speaker 1: charity or make up rules for Germ myself. I can't
- 35:42Speaker 1: delegate a right that I don't have to a representative
- 35:45Speaker 1: to represent me doing something that I don't have the
- 35:47Speaker 1: right to do. You can't be bound by a social
- 35:50Speaker 1: contract that you didn't sign. If my fiance and I
- 35:53Speaker 1: can't vote that Germ's got to give us all his
- 35:55Speaker 1: money because there's two of us and one of him,
- 35:58Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if there's three of us, 10 of us,
- 36:01Speaker 1: 300 million of us. The whole thing is a scam.
- 36:04Speaker 1: And so it was either a scam from the beginning
- 36:08Speaker 1: where the banks got together and imposed this easily rigged
- 36:14Speaker 1: system on the population using the media of the time,
- 36:19Speaker 1: the newspapers and their control and domination of the media
- 36:22Speaker 1: at the time, or they It was the dumbest idea
- 36:26Speaker 1: in all of human history. The idea that you could
- 36:28Speaker 1: give a monopoly on violence and an exemption from morality
- 36:34Speaker 1: to a ruling class and expect that that ruling class
- 36:38Speaker 1: would be disciplined by a piece of paper. It's been
- 36:43Speaker 1: an abject failure in the United States. The Constitution did
- 36:47Speaker 1: not limit the government at all. It does not even
- 36:50Speaker 1: protect the basic human rights outlined in the Bill of Rights.
- 36:55Speaker 1: They're just, they're routinely disregarded. They're, you know, like if
- 36:59Speaker 1: you think you have a second amendment, you know, go
- 37:02Speaker 1: to Maryland. Maryland's got things called the red flag laws
- 37:05Speaker 1: where they're just going to come get your guns. Like
- 37:07Speaker 1: they just say, you know, somebody testifies to a judge,
- 37:11Speaker 1: they think you're a danger and they'll come and they'll
- 37:13Speaker 1: take your, and it can be a police officer. It
- 37:15Speaker 1: can be a, you know, like, like, you know, somebody
- 37:17Speaker 1: just has to say that they think you're a danger
- 37:20Speaker 1: for having a gun and Maryland's going to come and
- 37:22Speaker 1: take your guns. And the first person that they pulled
- 37:25Speaker 1: this red flag law, they've done it thousands of times over,
- 37:28Speaker 1: you know, over, over, I think it's like around a
- 37:30Speaker 1: decade that it's been in place. And the first guy
- 37:33Speaker 1: that they went to, you know, to, to take his guns,
- 37:36Speaker 1: he thought he had a second amendment and he kind
- 37:39Speaker 1: of protested a little bit and they killed him dead.
- 37:42Speaker 1: And so there's, you know, so the constitution didn't work.
- 37:45Speaker 1: It's a dumb idea. Didn't, you know, sounds good on,
- 37:49Speaker 1: looks good on paper, but it doesn't really deliver the goods.
- 37:54Speaker 1: And look at the, you know, we've got never-ending warfare.
- 37:56Speaker 1: We've got ridiculous inflation. We've got money being stolen openly. D.C.
- 38:02Speaker 1: 's openly being run as a criminal enterprise. So it
- 38:06Speaker 1: was either a dumb idea or a scam from the beginning.
- 38:09Speaker 1: But even if you believe the mythology of the founding fathers,
- 38:13Speaker 1: the founding fathers said only gold and silver. No paper money,
- 38:18Speaker 1: because they knew the dangers of paper money, because they'd
- 38:21Speaker 1: had paper money since the time of Voltaire. Voltaire said,
- 38:25Speaker 1: you know, paper money always returns to its intrinsic value
- 38:29Speaker 1: of zero. Very famous Voltaire quote. And so the government
- 38:34Speaker 1: actually ran... a honest monetary system in the United States
- 38:40Speaker 1: for over a century, and it went boom. Part of
- 38:44Speaker 1: the reason that the United States produced as much wealth
- 38:48Speaker 1: as it did was because they weren't stealing the value
- 38:51Speaker 1: out of everybody's money. We had hard money. We had
- 38:54Speaker 1: hard money essentially until the government stole it in 1933.
- 38:57Speaker 1: Then the And so we started to abandon it once
- 39:06Speaker 1: the Federal Reserve came in and legalized this counterfeiting and
- 39:09Speaker 1: began printing more money than they had. And then when
- 39:12Speaker 1: they ran out and they issued way more certificates they
- 39:16Speaker 1: had for gold and realized that they would be subject
- 39:20Speaker 1: to people coming in. And back then, a $ 20 bill
- 39:23Speaker 1: was a warehouse receipt for a $ 20 gold piece. And
- 39:30Speaker 1: you could go to the bank and you could put
- 39:31Speaker 1: your $ 20 bill on the counter and they would give
- 39:34Speaker 1: you a $ 20, you know, one ounce gold coin called
- 39:38Speaker 1: a St. Gaudens gold piece. And so the Federal Reserve
- 39:43Speaker 1: had printed so many of those that they were in,
- 39:45Speaker 1: they were, you know, they were up for like the
- 39:48Speaker 1: bank run from, you know, it's a wonderful life to
- 39:51Speaker 1: And and so they just had FDR steal everybody's gold.
- 39:55Speaker 1: And then we've been untethered from gold since then. And
- 39:58Speaker 1: then that's what's caused that's then it's just Katie bar
- 40:02Speaker 1: the door. We're stealing everything. We're going to print a
- 40:05Speaker 1: gazillion dollars. The banks are going to present because are
- 40:07Speaker 1: going to print a gazillion dollars. The government's going to
- 40:10Speaker 1: print a gazillion dollars. And it doesn't matter how much
- 40:14Speaker 1: we steal it out of the average person's money that
- 40:18Speaker 1: they earn and save. We're robbing society. And that's where
- 40:23Speaker 1: we are today. But yes, the government could run a
- 40:28Speaker 1: monetary system without inflation. And they did for over 100
- 40:33Speaker 1: years here in the United States. Well over 100. The issue.
- 40:37Speaker 2: fundamentally is the fact that it's fiat, isn't it? Or
- 40:41Speaker 2: is it not? Because there's been this ongoing debate in
- 40:47Speaker 2: the sort of free market space for years and years
- 40:50Speaker 2: and years about fiat.
- 40:54Speaker 1: And when we say fiat, what do you mean is
- 40:56Speaker 1: that the only reason that the money has value is
- 40:59Speaker 1: by government fiat, by government decree, because the government says,
- 41:03Speaker 1: and so the government says that a $ 100 bill is
- 41:08Speaker 1: worth more than a $ 1 bill, even though they're the
- 41:11Speaker 1: exact same piece of paper and the ink is just
- 41:14Speaker 1: a little different and the design's a little different. But
- 41:16Speaker 1: there is nothing... intrinsically different than a $ 100 bill and
- 41:23Speaker 1: a $ 1 bill. Now, in the days of the gold standard,
- 41:27Speaker 1: it was intrinsically different because you could get five one-ounce
- 41:30Speaker 1: gold pieces for a $ 100 bill, and you could get
- 41:35Speaker 1: one ounce gold piece for a $ 20 bill. And so
- 41:39Speaker 1: that was real money. That was hard money. You can't
- 41:42Speaker 1: print on a printing press. It's intrinsically valuable. It's valuable
- 41:48Speaker 1: in dentistry. It's valuable in jewelry. It's valuable in electronics.
- 41:54Speaker 1: There's a market for it. People would be using gold
- 41:58Speaker 1: for other things, can use gold for other things besides money.
- 42:02Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of reasons why gold became money.
- 42:07Speaker 1: And it's held its value for thousands of years. And
- 42:10Speaker 1: one of the examples that we have in the book,
- 42:12Speaker 1: The Greatest Theft in Human History, is back in Roman times,
- 42:18Speaker 1: a one-ounce gold Aurelius, which was a little bit less
- 42:22Speaker 1: than a one-ounce gold coin, but it would buy a
- 42:25Speaker 1: finely tailored toga. It would buy a belt and it
- 42:29Speaker 1: would buy a pair of sandals. Okay. And so that's
- 42:33Speaker 1: one ounce of gold in, you know, in year zero.
- 42:37Speaker 1: And then flash forward to 1913 before the Federal Reserve.
- 42:42Speaker 1: And if you had a one ounce St. Gaudens gold piece,
- 42:45Speaker 1: you could get a finely tailored man's suit. a belt
- 42:49Speaker 1: and a fancy straw hat that was popular at the time. Okay.
- 42:54Speaker 1: And so, and so fast forward to today. So now
- 42:58Speaker 1: take a $ 20 bill, and a $ 20 gold piece and
- 43:03Speaker 1: bury them in the ground, okay, and then dig them
- 43:05Speaker 1: up today and forgetting the numismatic value of the gold
- 43:09Speaker 1: piece or the whatever, the $ 20 bill is not going
- 43:13Speaker 1: to buy anything and the one ounce gold piece is
- 43:16Speaker 1: worth north of, you know, $ 4, 500, you know, because you
- 43:22Speaker 1: got to pay a premium for, you know, gold for,
- 43:25Speaker 1: you know, for the gold piece. So you're going to get,
- 43:27Speaker 1: you know, over the spot price. The spot price is,
- 43:30Speaker 1: That you see on CNBC or, you know, in the
- 43:33Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, that's if you buy, you know, a 2,000-ounce
- 43:38Speaker 1: good delivery bar in London, okay, you pay more retail.
- 43:41Speaker 1: So let's say $ 4, 500. So $ 4, 500 is still going to
- 43:46Speaker 1: get you a finely tailored man suit and a belt
- 43:49Speaker 1: and a really, really, really nice pair of shoes, right?
- 43:52Speaker 1: And so what happened to that $ 20 bill? The government
- 43:55Speaker 1: stole all the value out of it. The government robbed you.
- 44:00Speaker 1: The government, literally your great grandparents, they stole your great
- 44:04Speaker 1: grandparents' gold and then they replaced them with these rapidly
- 44:09Speaker 1: depreciating fiat paper tickets. And then in 1965, they stole
- 44:15Speaker 1: all the coins. And so then a coin, so the,
- 44:19Speaker 1: you know, what we use in the United States, I'm
- 44:21Speaker 1: sure it's the exact same in South Africa, is we
- 44:24Speaker 1: use these coins that aren't, you know, a coin is
- 44:30Speaker 1: a disk of precious metal that has intrinsic value to it.
- 44:34Speaker 1: The coins that we use aren't even coins. They're actually
- 44:37Speaker 1: technically known as tokens. It's like a token in an
- 44:40Speaker 1: arcade kind of a thing. It's a representation of value,
- 44:44Speaker 1: but there's only one U.S. coin. The nickel is the
- 44:48Speaker 1: only U.S. coin that is actually worth its weight. So
- 44:53Speaker 1: a nickel is actually worth about six or seven cents
- 44:57Speaker 1: in metal. And every other coin is not even like,
- 45:01Speaker 1: there's only maybe, you know, eight, nine cents of metallic
- 45:07Speaker 1: value in a U.S. quarter. There's only maybe $ 0. 12 of
- 45:10Speaker 1: metallic value in a $ 1 coin. There's only $ 0. 05 of
- 45:11Speaker 1: metallic value in a dime. So they stole everybody's gold
- 45:14Speaker 1: and silver coins in 1964. Sorry, they stole all the
- 45:32Speaker 1: silver coins in 1964 and they replaced those with these tokens.
- 45:36Speaker 1: And so now we're now untethered and everybody's got this
- 45:42Speaker 1: funding money that could lose value at any second and
- 45:45Speaker 1: is losing value, right? It's losing value somewhat slowly. It's
- 45:50Speaker 1: now starting to accelerate slowly. The government is almost at
- 45:54Speaker 1: the end of the game. That's why they're trying to
- 45:56Speaker 1: set us up for a CBDC or some kind of
- 45:59Speaker 1: programmable money, because I think they know the dollar is
- 46:02Speaker 1: going to fail because they've stolen all the value out
- 46:06Speaker 1: of it. The dollar since 1913, according to the Bureau
- 46:14Speaker 1: of Labor Statistics, which has a calculator on their website
- 46:17Speaker 1: where you can go verify what I'm about to tell you,
- 46:20Speaker 1: has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since 1913.
- 46:25Speaker 1: It's been a scam. Government's been the biggest scam in
- 46:31Speaker 1: human history. It's produced the greatest theft in human history.
- 46:35Speaker 1: And the only reason they've gotten away with it is
- 46:37Speaker 1: they bought up all the media. So the media and
- 46:39Speaker 1: the school, the government school, the mandatory government school system
- 46:42Speaker 1: is not going to explain to you why, you know,
- 46:45Speaker 1: money is losing value. The Wall Street Journal is not
- 46:47Speaker 1: going to explain to you why the money is losing.
- 46:49Speaker 1: They're going to report on it and they're going to
- 46:51Speaker 1: tell you how much it's losing. But they're all going
- 46:54Speaker 1: to pretend like they don't know why it's losing value.
- 46:58Speaker 1: We can't figure it out. And fairies come at night.
- 47:03Speaker 2: That's the important bit though. When, when they talk about
- 47:06Speaker 2: how things become more expensive or stuff has lost value,
- 47:09Speaker 2: it's the other way around. It's the fact that the
- 47:13Speaker 2: state is decreasing the value of stuff. Um, so I
- 47:18Speaker 2: was just looking up some, some stats now while you
- 47:20Speaker 2: were talking and over the last 30 years, uh, the
- 47:24Speaker 2: US dollar has lost around 53% of its value. So
- 47:26Speaker 2: in other words, $ 20, um, 30 years ago, it would
- 47:32Speaker 2: now be worth around $ 9 or 9 point something, okay?
- 47:36Speaker 2: And then, of course, you can extrapolate that. Now, in
- 47:40Speaker 2: South Africa, over the same period, we've lost over 80%
- 47:44Speaker 2: of our purchasing power of the rand. So a 20
- 47:48Speaker 2: rand would now be something like 4 or 5 rand
- 47:53Speaker 2: in terms of what it would be. It's crazy to
- 47:56Speaker 2: think how much.
- 47:59Speaker 2: Value has been lost, and that's because of the state,
- 48:02Speaker 2: not because of the market.
- 48:06Speaker 1: So I bought my first Krugerrand in.
- 48:10Speaker 2: But you got a Krugerrand.
- 48:12Speaker 1: I had many Krugerrands. I used to have many Krugerrands,
- 48:15Speaker 1: but I bought my first Krugerrand in, I think, 2005
- 48:17Speaker 1: when gold was $ 331 an ounce. I think I paid
- 48:20Speaker 1: $ 350 for that Krugerrand. And that Krugerrand today... is probably $ 4, 500.
- 48:30Speaker 1: You would pay about $ 4, 500 for that Krugerrand. So, did
- 48:36Speaker 1: the gold get more valuable in that time, or did
- 48:39Speaker 1: the dollars that it takes to buy the Krugerrand lose value?
- 48:44Speaker 1: And that's just one example. Is your retirement portfolio really
- 48:53Speaker 1: gone up that much in value, or does it take
- 48:56Speaker 1: more dollars to buy the same amount of stocks? than
- 48:59Speaker 1: it did a couple of years ago? Did your house
- 49:02Speaker 1: really go up by $ 300, 000, $ 400, 000? Is it that much better?
- 49:07Speaker 1: Or does it now take more rapidly depreciating dollars to
- 49:11Speaker 1: buy the same amount of house that it did years ago?
- 49:15Speaker 1: It's not that these assets are going up. It's the
- 49:20Speaker 1: money is losing value. It's across the board because there's
- 49:25Speaker 1: a global financial system And they don't want anybody to
- 49:31Speaker 1: have a lifeboat to jump into. And so all of
- 49:36Speaker 1: the countries are doing the exact same thing. They're all
- 49:39Speaker 1: devaluing their currency. They're all doing it so that nobody
- 49:42Speaker 1: can move their money. In the old days, the Swiss
- 49:45Speaker 1: franc was still backed by gold up until today. a
- 49:49Speaker 1: percentage of gold up until, I want to say like
- 49:52Speaker 1: a decade ago or maybe a little bit more than
- 49:54Speaker 1: a decade ago. And then they were the last one
- 49:57Speaker 1: that untethered from gold. And so now there's no lifeboat
- 50:01Speaker 1: that you can move your money easy and out of.
- 50:05Speaker 1: And so it really is, it's precious metals where they're
- 50:09Speaker 1: forcing money into the housing market as a hedge against inflation.
- 50:13Speaker 1: This is what I meant by the compound trap. So
- 50:14Speaker 1: the monetary policies, force money into houses as monetary alternatives,
- 50:23Speaker 1: as stores of value, because the money isn't a store
- 50:26Speaker 1: of value. You want to take your paper tickets and
- 50:29Speaker 1: you want to move them out of rapidly depreciating fiat
- 50:32Speaker 1: paper tickets into something that is not losing value. That's
- 50:36Speaker 1: precious metals, it's art, It's it's it's houses. It's it's
- 50:41Speaker 1: it's it's skewed the economy in these weird ways that then,
- 50:46Speaker 1: you know, force, you know, young people can't afford a
- 50:49Speaker 1: house or they end up paying, you know, a thousand
- 50:53Speaker 1: dollars more a month for their for rent than they
- 50:56Speaker 1: would have to if it, you know, absent this crooked
- 50:59Speaker 1: monetary system. It's really, really a very harmful scam to
- 51:04Speaker 1: to everybody in society.
- 51:06Speaker 2: Quickly, I don't know if you know this. Do you
- 51:08Speaker 2: know that the Krugerrand was the world's first modern gold coin?
- 51:15Speaker 2: I think it came out around 1967. I didn't know that,
- 51:19Speaker 2: but I'm not surprised. And just a bit of trivia,
- 51:23Speaker 2: do you know where it got its name from?
- 51:27Speaker 1: Kruger National Park? Kruger.
- 51:29Speaker 2: Almost, almost, almost. Yeah, you're kind of warm. Okay, so
- 51:34Speaker 2: it was named after Paul Kruger. He was the president
- 51:37Speaker 2: of the South African Republic. This was now kind of
- 51:40Speaker 2: before South Africa became a country, as it is today.
- 51:44Speaker 2: So this, I think, would have been in the late 1800s.
- 51:46Speaker 2: And the Kruger National Park was also named after Paul Kruger,
- 51:51Speaker 2: just as a matter of interest.
- 51:53Speaker 1: Excellent. Thank you. Next time, I'm going to be on...
- 51:57Speaker 1: Trivial Pursuit, I'll have no doubt that I'm going to
- 51:59Speaker 1: get that card in Trivial Pursuit and be ahead of
- 52:02Speaker 1: the game.
- 52:03Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, he's a pretty important figure in South
- 52:06Speaker 2: African history. But it's great that you have a Krugerrand.
- 52:12Speaker 2: It's still worth its value, as far as I know.
- 52:15Speaker 2: I mean, they haven't scammed the gold coin. But this
- 52:20Speaker 2: is interesting, though, because a lot of people who I've
- 52:23Speaker 2: spoken to over the years have argued that, well, it's
- 52:26Speaker 2: why would you have gold coins or gold? It's just useless.
- 52:29Speaker 2: You can't do anything with it.
- 52:33Speaker 1: So, you know, interestingly, you can do things with it
- 52:37Speaker 1: and it is a, It's a store of value. And
- 52:41Speaker 1: between gold and silver, you know, they're known as the
- 52:43Speaker 1: monetary metals. And there is in every single city on
- 52:49Speaker 1: the planet. OK, there is an alternative financial system built
- 52:53Speaker 1: around gold and silver that exists to this day, even
- 52:57Speaker 1: though it's been demonetized in essentially every country in the world.
- 53:01Speaker 1: But every single city in the world, you can go
- 53:04Speaker 1: to a gold dealer or a coin shop or whatever,
- 53:06Speaker 1: and you can take that Krugerrand and you can put
- 53:09Speaker 1: it on the desk, and the guy will take out
- 53:12Speaker 1: a stack of $ 100 bills in the United States, a
- 53:15Speaker 1: stack of euros in France, a stack of baht in Thailand,
- 53:22Speaker 1: and he'll just reel off You know, $ 4, 500 and we'll
- 53:27Speaker 1: pay you instantaneously for that Krugerrand. And the flip side
- 53:31Speaker 1: is you can go in there with cash and you
- 53:33Speaker 1: can take your rapidly depreciating tickets and you can turn
- 53:36Speaker 1: them into gold. Now they have gold backs. I don't
- 53:40Speaker 1: know if you've seen a gold back. I don't have
- 53:42Speaker 1: my wallet near me. I'll show you one. But it's flexible,
- 53:45Speaker 1: spendable gold. And now there's hundreds and hundreds of merchants
- 53:49Speaker 1: in Utah and Florida and New Hampshire that are accepting
- 53:52Speaker 1: these goldbacks for real goods and services. And so there
- 53:57Speaker 1: is an alternative monetary system, and that has value. So
- 54:01Speaker 1: that is intrinsically, that is something that's very, very valuable
- 54:07Speaker 1: for you to be able to have a monetary instrument
- 54:11Speaker 1: that can be used in every city in the world
- 54:14Speaker 1: to and that has retained its value, you know, gold
- 54:17Speaker 1: has retained its value for 5,000 plus years versus there's
- 54:22Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of currencies, paper currencies that
- 54:26Speaker 1: have failed. I want to say there's like 785 paper
- 54:30Speaker 1: currencies that have failed for one reason or another. Some
- 54:33Speaker 1: of them are hyperinflation. Some of them are monetary reform.
- 54:36Speaker 1: They're just not around anymore. Some of them, you know, war,
- 54:39Speaker 1: you Some of them, a variety of reasons. They've all
- 54:44Speaker 1: gone by the wayside, but that gold has, to use
- 54:48Speaker 1: my example of the toga to the straw hat to
- 54:53Speaker 1: the modern suit, that gold has maintained its purchasing power
- 54:59Speaker 1: for thousands and thousands of years. And so that is
- 55:03Speaker 1: intrinsically valuable. I think that's 100% intrinsically.
- 55:07Speaker 2: What about Bitcoin?
- 55:11Speaker 1: So Bitcoin has value. So money is important to society.
- 55:19Speaker 1: And so different kinds of money have, you know, there's
- 55:25Speaker 1: different aspects of money that make it valuable. The thing
- 55:28Speaker 1: that makes gold valuable is you can't print it on
- 55:32Speaker 1: a printing press. It takes a lot of money and
- 55:34Speaker 1: wealth to extract it out of the earth. So you
- 55:37Speaker 1: can't just go and get it easily. It's fungible. It's
- 55:43Speaker 1: easily divisible. It has uses outside of money. And so
- 55:48Speaker 1: there's all these different things that you want your money
- 55:50Speaker 1: to have. And Bitcoin meets a lot of those. It's
- 55:54Speaker 1: not inflationary because it comes into existence at a fixed
- 55:57Speaker 1: rate of like 2% inflation a year. And there's no
- 56:02Speaker 1: way to accelerate that. There's no way to print more Bitcoins.
- 56:05Speaker 1: There's no way to print them faster. It is easily divisible.
- 56:11Speaker 1: You can shoot it around the world. You can't counterfeit it.
- 56:15Speaker 1: There's a public blockchain where every single Bitcoin that's ever
- 56:21Speaker 1: come into existence through this mining process exists. is on
- 56:24Speaker 1: a ledger, and that ledger is replicated among thousands and
- 56:29Speaker 1: thousands of computers around the world. There's no way to
- 56:32Speaker 1: really rig that system yet. Maybe quantum computing changes that,
- 56:36Speaker 1: but right now, as long as Bitcoin remains secure, and
- 56:39Speaker 1: remains on and the internet is on, those coins are
- 56:45Speaker 1: going to have value because they're meeting the needs of money.
- 56:52Speaker 1: People say Bitcoin isn't intrinsically valuable, but it is because
- 56:56Speaker 1: in many ways it's way better money than the rapidly
- 56:59Speaker 1: depreciating fiat paper tickets that can be wiped out in
- 57:04Speaker 1: a generation by governmental policy. by governmental shenanigans or by
- 57:09Speaker 1: the people figuring out that the government is a scam
- 57:12Speaker 1: and overthrowing the government or whatever it is, that's not
- 57:18Speaker 1: going to happen to Bitcoin. And so in many ways,
- 57:21Speaker 1: it's much better money. Now, I would argue that it's
- 57:24Speaker 1: still not very good money because Bitcoin has a lot
- 57:29Speaker 1: of falls. It's very, very slow. The transaction costs are
- 57:33Speaker 1: higher than other cryptocurrencies. It has a public blockchain, so
- 57:37Speaker 1: there's no privacy. So every single Bitcoin, so if the
- 57:41Speaker 1: government is able to.
- 57:42Speaker 2: Tie- It depends. I mean, you've got Monero, that's private.
- 57:47Speaker 1: That's cryptocurrency versus Bitcoin. My point is, I would argue
- 57:53Speaker 1: that there's way better cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has
- 57:59Speaker 1: sucked all the oxygen out of those other cryptos. Monero
- 58:03Speaker 1: is still around, but there's a lot of things about
- 58:06Speaker 1: Bitcoin that are very, very positive. But there's a lot
- 58:09Speaker 1: of things about Bitcoin that are very, very negative, starting
- 58:12Speaker 1: with that public blockchain that can be taxed and traced,
- 58:16Speaker 1: and the government can do chain analysis, and the government
- 58:18Speaker 1: can figure out exactly how many Bitcoins you have, and
- 58:21Speaker 1: it can figure out exactly who you've spent your Bitcoins
- 58:24Speaker 1: with and where those Bitcoins went. And so there's a
- 58:27Speaker 1: lot of things about Bitcoin that aren't that attractive. And so,
- 58:32Speaker 1: but that is the trade-offs of money. And so, you know,
- 58:36Speaker 1: like the people at Goldbacks, they developed a way of making,
- 58:40Speaker 1: you know, gold flexible, spendable, going into your wallet in
- 58:44Speaker 1: a way that, you know, thousands and thousands of merchants
- 58:47Speaker 1: are willing to accept them in trade. And so you
- 58:50Speaker 1: would say that they created a better money. They took
- 58:53Speaker 1: gold and they made a better money out of it
- 58:56Speaker 1: than it was before. And then they make a percentage
- 58:59Speaker 1: profit from that and they make a premium and a
- 59:01Speaker 1: seniorage and they're being rewarded. The market is rewarding them
- 59:06Speaker 1: for creating a better money. And by the way, it
- 59:10Speaker 1: takes like the machine that creates a gold back, it's
- 59:13Speaker 1: like a million bucks a machine. And so to be
- 59:16Speaker 1: able to lay that gold down at that precise thinness
- 59:20Speaker 1: and weight and And, you know, be able to add
- 59:26Speaker 1: any counterfeiting technologies that they have and everything like that. Like,
- 59:30Speaker 1: it's not just that it's gold. It's got any counterfeiting.
- 59:35Speaker 1: It's got a, you know, it's got a... kind of
- 59:39Speaker 1: a system behind it where there's a one one thousandth
- 59:43Speaker 1: of an ounce bill. There's a one, you know, two
- 59:47Speaker 1: thousandth of an ounce bill. There's a one one hundredth
- 59:50Speaker 1: of an ounce bill. There's a one fiftieth of an
- 59:52Speaker 1: ounce bill. So there's all these different denominations that you
- 59:55Speaker 1: can use in currency. There's all these things that make
- 59:58Speaker 1: it a better money. And then there are the people
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: that invented this better money that They're making a fortune
- 1:00:04Speaker 1: by providing better money the same way that Satoshi, you know,
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: if there is, I think Satoshi is the NSA. But,
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: you know, like whoever invented Bitcoin ended up with those
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: initial coins and they created billions of dollars of value
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: for themselves because they created better money than was out there.
- 1:00:25Speaker 1: And so that all the cryptocurrency bros, you know, there's
- 1:00:28Speaker 1: this market of, you know, how can we create a
- 1:00:31Speaker 1: better market? something better than Bitcoin. But part of it
- 1:00:35Speaker 1: is the network effect. It's very, very hard to achieve
- 1:00:38Speaker 1: the network effect and to get people to accept new
- 1:00:41Speaker 1: cryptos and new, you know, like because you need everybody
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: like money has to be like one of the things
- 1:00:47Speaker 1: is everybody has to kind of agree on it. And
- 1:00:50Speaker 1: so Bitcoin has a huge, huge ecosystem behind it that's
- 1:00:53Speaker 1: hard for it to replicate. So even though there's all
- 1:00:56Speaker 1: these coins that are technically better, they're faster, they have
- 1:01:01Speaker 1: lower transaction costs, they've got more throughput, they can do
- 1:01:04Speaker 1: more transactions than Bitcoin can so that you can instantaneously,
- 1:01:09Speaker 1: the merchant instantaneously gets his money so you don't have
- 1:01:13Speaker 1: to sit there and wait for the transaction to process
- 1:01:17Speaker 1: before you walk away with your coffee cup. So even
- 1:01:21Speaker 1: though there's all these coins that are better than Bitcoin
- 1:01:25Speaker 1: and all of these other things, they don't have that
- 1:01:28Speaker 1: network effect that Bitcoin had being first. And that network
- 1:01:31Speaker 1: effect is really what gives Bitcoin its value.
- 1:01:33Speaker 2: And you also have whales like BlackRock.
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: Yeah. The financial system glommed onto Bitcoin. Like I said,
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: I think it's the NSA, and I think that they
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: wanted there to be a coin that did have a
- 1:01:48Speaker 1: public blockchain, that they could do chain analysis on and
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: tax and trace and be able to know what's spending. Also,
- 1:02:01Speaker 1: one of the things, the fact that Bitcoin was broken,
- 1:02:04Speaker 1: I think it was broken on purpose, and so early
- 1:02:08Speaker 1: on the core development team made a decision to you
- 1:02:11Speaker 1: know have these smaller blocks and the smaller blocks can't
- 1:02:14Speaker 1: process as many transactions and so because it was slow
- 1:02:18Speaker 1: and it was uh so expensive it turned it into
- 1:02:21Speaker 1: digital gold and it it could have like a a
- 1:02:24Speaker 1: different coin might have replaced the dollar you might have
- 1:02:28Speaker 1: the dollar might have gone away If Bitcoin had had
- 1:02:31Speaker 1: some of these other features. And so I think they
- 1:02:33Speaker 1: broke it on purpose. I think they stole the oxygen
- 1:02:36Speaker 1: out of competing coins. I think the BlackRock's and the
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: Vanguard's and the established financial system and Michael Saylor and
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: others jumped in. to ensure that Bitcoin became dominant because
- 1:02:50Speaker 1: they were front running the market. They were already in it.
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: They had invented it. And it did not threaten the
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: financial system. And in fact- it has soaked up a
- 1:03:03Speaker 1: lot of the inflation that we're talking about. And so
- 1:03:07Speaker 1: like a lot of the dollars that they've, you know,
- 1:03:10Speaker 1: like in the 1970s, they had the petrodollar and they
- 1:03:14Speaker 1: forced all these countries to hold and buy dollars to
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: buy oil. And in many ways, they've forced all of
- 1:03:22Speaker 1: these countries to buy bitcoins or, you know, cryptos and,
- 1:03:26Speaker 1: you know, tether, US dollar tether, whatever. And so that's
- 1:03:29Speaker 1: soaking up the inflation. Those, you know, everybody's hodl or die.
- 1:03:35Speaker 1: And so so that so those there's a tremendous amount
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: of money that's locked into cryptos that would be sloshing
- 1:03:41Speaker 1: around and causing even more inflation if it wasn't if
- 1:03:45Speaker 1: they weren't locked down in these cryptos.
- 1:03:48Speaker 2: OK, Etienne, how can I get your book and follow
- 1:03:52Speaker 2: your work?
- 1:03:54Speaker 1: So The Greatest Theft in Human History is available at greatest-theft.com.
- 1:04:00Speaker 1: You can see all the calculations at artofliberty.org forward slash inflation.
- 1:04:06Speaker 1: My organization is the Art of Liberty Foundation. We are
- 1:04:09Speaker 1: a public policy organization exposing the illegitimacy and the criminality
- 1:04:14Speaker 1: of government. The fact that the government is being run
- 1:04:18Speaker 1: as a criminal enterprise in Washington, D.C. and Johannesburg and elsewhere.
- 1:04:23Speaker 1: We are at artofliberty.org. And my other book is Government,
- 1:04:28Speaker 1: the Biggest Scam in History. exposed how intergenerational organized crime
- 1:04:34Speaker 1: runs the government, the media, and academia, and that is
- 1:04:38Speaker 1: at government-scam.com.
- 1:04:41Speaker 2: I've got two of your books, so I'm hoping to
- 1:04:43Speaker 2: get this one. Also, I want to point out you
- 1:04:46Speaker 2: are leaving Substack.
- 1:04:49Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good way to end this out.
- 1:04:51Speaker 1: So in the book, Government, the Biggest Scam in History,
- 1:04:55Speaker 1: the subtitle is How Intergenerational Organized Crime Runs the Government,
- 1:04:58Speaker 1: the Media, and Academia. And we make the case that
- 1:05:02Speaker 1: this theft, the greatest theft in human history– has been
- 1:05:06Speaker 1: able you know has been perpetrated by the fact that
- 1:05:09Speaker 1: they bought up the media and so they bought up
- 1:05:12Speaker 1: in the old days they started with the newspapers and
- 1:05:15Speaker 1: then when radio came along they bought up the radio
- 1:05:18Speaker 1: and when internet came along they they front ran the
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: you know like we talked about kind of in the
- 1:05:24Speaker 1: beginning they you know they they bought up the they
- 1:05:27Speaker 1: knew that that that uh You know, streaming was going
- 1:05:31Speaker 1: to be dominant and retail was going to be dominant
- 1:05:34Speaker 1: and social media was going to be dominant. So they
- 1:05:36Speaker 1: started buying these platforms. And so Substack was the last
- 1:05:40Speaker 1: platform where we believe was established by the powers that
- 1:05:47Speaker 1: shouldn't be as a honeypot. A honeypot was designed to
- 1:05:50Speaker 1: lure in all the truth-tellers and all of the alternative
- 1:05:57Speaker 1: media onto a platform where they were initially allowed to
- 1:06:00Speaker 1: make money. We were killing it on Substack. We were doubling,
- 1:06:05Speaker 1: almost tripling our audience year over year until Substack gets
- 1:06:09Speaker 1: a $ 100 million investment in a group led by Bond Partners,
- 1:06:15Speaker 1: Andreessen Horowitz, the Chernin Group come in with a hundred
- 1:06:18Speaker 1: million bucks. And then not only do they turn us off,
- 1:06:21Speaker 1: but they turn off a great many other freedom or
- 1:06:24Speaker 1: truth oriented sub stacks all at the same time, like
- 1:06:28Speaker 1: a switch was flipped. I see you nodding your head.
- 1:06:32Speaker 1: I'm guessing it happened to you at the exact same time.
- 1:06:36Speaker 1: And so now we caught them censoring comments, not allowing
- 1:06:44Speaker 1: people to share our work, not allowing them to restack
- 1:06:48Speaker 1: articles of ours, not allowing them to recommend articles of ours.
- 1:06:51Speaker 1: We caught them censoring comments where people would leave a
- 1:06:56Speaker 1: comment on another– not even our Substack, on another Substack,
- 1:06:59Speaker 1: the example that we have, and we have screenshots in
- 1:07:02Speaker 1: our Leaving Loudly article. But in the Leaving Loudly article,
- 1:07:05Speaker 1: we actually show where somebody's saying, hey, go look at artofliberty.org
- 1:07:10Speaker 1: forward slash inflation, the exact same page. So somebody put that,
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: not me. Somebody put it, and then Substack literally made
- 1:07:18Speaker 1: that comment go away. And I've got the before and after,
- 1:07:22Speaker 1: you know, screenshots of the of the comment field showing
- 1:07:26Speaker 1: that they disappeared that comment. And so they began censor.
- 1:07:31Speaker 1: They began, you know, starting in kind of July of 2025.
- 1:07:34Speaker 1: They began censoring all of these, you know, a variety
- 1:07:38Speaker 1: of different ways, including not even sending out our articles online.
- 1:07:42Speaker 1: And so we had hundreds of paid subscribers on Substack
- 1:07:47Speaker 1: that were paying Substack to send them our articles. That's
- 1:07:51Speaker 1: the deal. They're like, so Substack is stealing money from
- 1:07:55Speaker 1: the people that are paying them to send us our articles.
- 1:07:59Speaker 1: And so that was the final straw. So we built
- 1:08:01Speaker 1: our own censorship-resistant platform at artofliberty.foundation and voluntarist.news, where we're
- 1:08:11Speaker 1: doing the best of the alternative media. We're doing our
- 1:08:17Speaker 1: own original writings and reportings. And now nobody can shut
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: us down. And so we just moved our audience off
- 1:08:23Speaker 1: of Substack. We left an article at artofliberty.substack.com exposing all
- 1:08:30Speaker 1: of the censorship with everything I just said backed up,
- 1:08:34Speaker 1: all the screenshots of our analytics, all the screenshots of
- 1:08:36Speaker 1: the censorship. And we just flipped Substack double birds on
- 1:08:40Speaker 1: the way out the door. And that article keeps going
- 1:08:43Speaker 1: and going and going and going and going. It's got
- 1:08:45Speaker 1: over 10... Sorry, 12,000 views. Now it's got 450 plus likes.
- 1:08:51Speaker 1: It's been reshared 225 plus times and it just keeps going.
- 1:08:56Speaker 1: And so like, like, you know, kind of like the
- 1:08:58Speaker 1: average substack article dies after like three or four days
- 1:09:02Speaker 1: and this one's like the energizer bunny man it just
- 1:09:05Speaker 1: like like people keep sharing it and and so so
- 1:09:08Speaker 1: i feel like we did some good we slapped substack
- 1:09:11Speaker 1: you know on the way out the door we made
- 1:09:13Speaker 1: hay while the sun shined we added 10 000 plus
- 1:09:17Speaker 1: subscribers to our newsletter and everything like that. So I
- 1:09:21Speaker 1: think we kind of won at the end. But now
- 1:09:24Speaker 1: what Substack is doing is Substack is demonetizing people like
- 1:09:28Speaker 1: us truth tellers at the same time that they're turning
- 1:09:31Speaker 1: up controlled opposition voices. They're turning up BS. They're doing
- 1:09:36Speaker 1: algorithmic time wasters on their audience. They're in the same
- 1:09:40Speaker 1: thing that X is doing. Like if you go through
- 1:09:43Speaker 1: your feed on X, X will waste your time for
- 1:09:45Speaker 1: hours with the most amazing videos that are curated to
- 1:09:50Speaker 1: exactly what they already know your likes are and things
- 1:09:53Speaker 1: like that. And so Substack is doing the exact same thing.
- 1:09:56Speaker 1: We think they're steering people into AI-created content that has been,
- 1:10:02Speaker 1: you know, because they already got a psychographic profile on
- 1:10:06Speaker 1: all of the users by what you like and what
- 1:10:08Speaker 1: Substacks you subscribe to and what you share and what
- 1:10:11Speaker 1: you thumbs up and what you like and things like that.
- 1:10:14Speaker 1: So now I think they're throwing that AI-generated similar content
- 1:10:18Speaker 1: into people's feed to try and get 100% of the
- 1:10:23Speaker 1: subscription revenue. And so they're running a variety of different
- 1:10:27Speaker 1: scams on their audience. And so we said, we're not
- 1:10:31Speaker 1: participating anymore. We went and it cost us $ 25, 000 to
- 1:10:34Speaker 1: build a censorship-resistant website. infrastructure. And so you can go
- 1:10:42Speaker 1: see what we built at artofliberty.foundation and voluntarist.news. And those
- 1:10:47Speaker 1: are the final two links. And thank you for bringing
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: that up. I wanted to talk about that too, because
- 1:10:53Speaker 1: I think it's important that people understand What is going on?
- 1:10:59Speaker 1: Because the magician can only fool the audience until the
- 1:11:02Speaker 1: audience understands the trick. And then once people understand, oh,
- 1:11:06Speaker 1: they're controlling the information so that I don't understand that
- 1:11:09Speaker 1: I'm getting ripped off to the tune of $ 1. 4 million
- 1:11:11Speaker 1: over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement. And that's how
- 1:11:17Speaker 1: they're doing it. Well, then it's harder for them to,
- 1:11:20Speaker 1: you know, to hide that fact. Once you know, you've
- 1:11:24Speaker 1: got to go find the alternative media. The truth isn't
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: for all people. It's only for those that seek it.
- 1:11:31Speaker 2: Etienne de la Busey-Squared, thank you for joining me in
- 1:11:33Speaker 2: the trenches.
- 1:11:36Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you for doing what you do.