BTC Sessions - Exposed: How CPS Steals Kids for Profit – Bitcoin's Role in Stopping It | Spike Cohen

Starting point is 00:00:00 We'll call it the child abduction industrial complex gets their funding every time they accuse someone of abuse. State child protective services are intentionally ignoring their medical conditions and accusing them of abuse, taking their children from them, instead thinking, chiching, this is the most money I can get. They're taking you through the family courts. And then when you show up to the family court judge, they simply refuse to admit the medical documentation. Actual abusers are getting away scot-free. Trying to use a political party primarily for your activism and education as. like trying to use a main battle tank to take the kids to school. We don't want to democratize everything.

Starting point is 00:00:34 We want to decentralize it. And that's why I do less and less politics. The real problem is that the government has the ability to decide what money is. Yeah, we can't be free if government controls the medium for exchange. And it's just as simple as that. I'm a big believer in Bitcoin. This internet funny money is worth $100 per coin. And it's like, no, I actually think it's worth millions.

Starting point is 00:00:53 And they laugh then. I don't know how much you're laughing now. What if government agencies were actually profiting from ripping families apart. Welcome. In this episode, founder and president of You Are the Power, former libertarian VP candidate Spike Cohen exposes the child abduction industrial complex, reveals why Bitcoin is the ultimate freedom tool, dives into libertarian strategies, corrupt city councils, and the power of grassroots activism. Stick around. This one is absolutely shocking. All right. We are joined by 2020 American vice president,

Starting point is 00:01:28 bronze medalist Spike Cohen. Spike right off the bat. A couple of quick questions. A couple of questions for you, a two-parter. Number one, are you still in control of the Jewish space laser? And two, what do I need to do to protect my family? Do I need to put a star of David on my roof? No, just paint the roof blue. That's all you got to do. But the, that was Nathan's idea. It's very simple. It's very simple. We don't need iconography or anything like that, just blue roof. And that actually renders it unable to use. So here, I'm actually, I'll show you right now. I do still have the laser, but you're correct that I'm in a bit of an ideological conundrum and that I'm not Jewish.

Starting point is 00:02:08 I am a Christian and I gave my life to Christ last year. But I do still have it. And so what I've settled on right now, Christian space laser sounds, well, I guess Jewish Space Laser didn't sound great, but Christian Space Laser seems a little passe. So I think I'm going to rename it Deuce Volt. And so it's still just as powerful as it is, but my motivations are. They're entirely different now. Oh, wonderful.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Okay. So, I mean, I don't know. I'm, I just need to know that me and my family are in the clear because I'm an atheist myself, but, you know, dad's side Muslim, mom's side hebe, you know. Blue roof. Okay. And then it's out of my control because it's not, again, it's not like I'm looking and going, it's not like a Passover thing where I'm like, oh, they got a blue roof.

Starting point is 00:02:53 So now they're fine. It's, this doesn't work on blue roofs. We've established that before. Okay. Gary, I told you. I told you. You told me. Nathan wanting me to ask like what shade of blue should I paint the roof?

Starting point is 00:03:04 It's pretty forgiven. It's pretty forgiven. Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much. It's a close one. I actually, I do want to get into that a little bit later because doing a bit of research on you.

Starting point is 00:03:16 I looked up, you know, Messianic Judaism. And that took me down a whole rabbit hole of stuff that I didn't know about. So all interesting stuff. And even on your wiki, it says, you know, Messianic Jew at the top. And then it says Christian on the bottom. So, you know, all sorts of stuff in there. But I do want to get to that. But first of all, you know, you were the 2020 Libertarian Vice Presidential nominee for those listening who may not know.

Starting point is 00:03:38 And I think I got to ask the question that pretty much every libertarian asks, and it's been a battle within the Libertarian Party, I think, since its inception. What is the purpose of the party? Is it to win elections or is it to change minds? Trying to use a political party primarily for your activism and education is like trying to use a main battle tank to take the kids to school. You can do it. And it's actually pretty fun. But you're also going to tear up the roads and your neighbors are all going to be horrified and scared

Starting point is 00:04:06 of you. It's not a good vehicle for that. Like when you have a political party, you're having to worry about things like FEC compliance, FEC compliance. You're having to worry about local election board, state election board compliance. You're having to worry about the internal politics of choosing your chair and your vice chair and secretary and all of that. Then you're having to decide who to pick as your candidate.

Starting point is 00:04:28 And so there can potentially be an educational effect that comes from a good campaign, especially if it's a third party campaign where the likelihood of them winning isn't that high to begin with. So there's still that that can happen there. But if you're saying I want my primary function that I want to do, my primary gift to the Liberty movement that I want to do is educating people. I would argue that the best way to do that is with something that isn't having to worry about all these other things that have nothing to do with education. I think that the primary purpose, and not just the primary purpose, but the overwhelming purpose of a political party should be running candidates for office, getting ballot access for your party, all of the functions necessary to have a successful political party. And by successful, I mean actually getting candidates elected. I think that if you want to do actual activism and education, again, you can do that as a candidate. You can do that as a political party, but that shouldn't be the primary function of that. And if that's what you want to devote your life, life to, which is essentially what I'm doing in my little niche that I've carved out in the Liberty world, the best way to do that is through an organization that primarily and solely does education and activism. And that's actually what I do with you or the power. That's fantastic.

Starting point is 00:05:43 So is there, I guess the fall would be given that it is incredibly difficult for a third party to make inroads under our current system. You know, we don't have ranked choice voting. It's very difficult on the state in all 50 ballots, at least when it comes to national election. elections. What would you say is the purpose of the Libertarian Party? Yeah, the purpose of the Libertarian Party is or at least should be to run candidates for office. And we've gotten many candidates elected. They've just been at the local level. They've been these often nonpartisan races where libertarian party members have been running for city councils, county councils, zoning boards, school boards, sheriffs, all sorts of things. And they get elected.

Starting point is 00:06:22 We've also gotten some state level legislators elected, but that's where we start to have a lot more difficulty and at the federal level we've never won anything. So there is definitely a road for us to achieve more. I would argue that that road is to start at the local level, to build up your stable of proven candidates, not just proven that they can win, because that's a powerful way of challenging that narrative that you can't win is to say, but I won. I have one and I keep winning and I keep getting reelected. Not only that, but when I win, you win too. It's not just team sports. You actually do better as a result of my winning and here's what I've done to show that. That allows me to then work my way up the ranks in running for offices that here tofore would have been considered

Starting point is 00:06:59 unwinnable for me. But taking a bigger step back, I would ask the question, what is the purpose of politics? And we see this very often in the liberty movement, whether it's through the Libertarian party, whether it's through trying to like the RLC, the Republican Liberty Caucus, or any efforts to to try to make the two major parties more libertarian. And Godspeed to everyone trying all these different paths. But one of the problems is you got to keep doing politics. And politics is, by its very nature, a conflict machine. So if the three of us are running for the same thing, whether it's president, whether it's mayor, or whether it's some internal race within our party, let's say we're all running to be vice secretary of the such and such county libertarian party,

Starting point is 00:07:44 before we can do the first thing, before we can get the first signature for ballot access, before we can run the first ad for a candidate, first of all, we've got a pickup candidate, before we even vote for who we want to pick for candidate, we got to decide who's, you know, keeping the lights on and getting the bills paid and all of that. And so the three of us who probably agree on like 99.8% of stuff if we're all in the Libertarian Party, we got to decide who's going to be the one that does it.

Starting point is 00:08:10 And it's not the three of us picking it. It's not be going, hey, you know what, Gary, let's have Gary do it this year. Nathan, you can do it next year. And I'll do it the following year. Unless one of you really runs away with it, then we'll just let you do it moving forward. We've got to go to other people to decide who to do it.

Starting point is 00:08:23 it, which means we've got to engage in a competition. So now, not only do we not have, are we not able to focus on that 99.8% that we agree on, we have to focus on that 0.2% we disagree on and convince people that that 0.2% is the difference and that you have to vote for me because these two guys are so wrong about that point two percent that they essentially pose a threat to the party if they get in and not me. And even if we start off in a congenial and magnanimous way, given enough cycles of doing that over and over again. And now we're not doing it anymore. It's the people coming after us that do it

Starting point is 00:08:59 and all of the resentment that we've built up over time. You end up having a bunch of libertarians at a room viscerally hating each other and treating each other. Again, this is all hypothetical. It's not like this has ever happened every single cycle. But what ends up happening is you have a bunch of people who ideologically agree almost 100%. And certainly compared to the rest of the world,

Starting point is 00:09:18 you know, you look at the whole spectrum of politics. We're all pretty much like right in this one spot of libertarianism. And yet we are treating each other like our worst enemies because we are conditioned and incentivized to do so. That's politics. The duopoly is just politics. The lesser evil voting is just politics. The, oh, well, you got to break eggs to make omelets. All of that is just politics. And that's why I do less and less politics and more and more encouraging people to find people who are actually being harmed by this system. And by this system, I mean other individual people, finding those individual people and saying back off. and do the right thing. And it's that approach. With that approach, we have won 100% of the time for the last two years. That's fantastic. And I want to let you jump in just a second, Nate, but I think, yeah, you make a great point in that politics. It creates division. You wrote it yourself. I've seen you right how just democracy in and of itself, you're immediately creating unnecessary

Starting point is 00:10:11 losers, as you put it, if you democratize every little different thing. And of course, with libertarians who are all very kind of naturally contrarian thinkers often. I mean, it goes back to that old joke, like, who hate that. It's libertarians the most. Other libertarians. We're the worst. We are not good because we don't want that. That's the other thing. We don't want to do it by consensus. We want where I do my thing. And Nathan, if you agree with it, then, you know, you'll join me. And Gary, I don't know if I'm going to be in the middle when this is cut. This might end up looking terrible. I'm pointing. No, you're right. You're good. Oh, is this where it's good. Oh, great. You're right. Yeah, you're good. Nathan, everyone's going to be impressed now. That's good. You know, if Nathan agrees with me, he can come and join me. He can come and join me. If he agrees with Gary, then him and Gary can go and do their own thing, and I'll do this thing over here. That's actually how we want it.

Starting point is 00:10:57 We don't want to do it through democracy. We don't want to democratize everything. We want to decentralize it. But if we're going to do politics, we've got to do democracy because this is something that we don't get to opt out of. And so if all of us, again, hypothetically, all 350 million of us are forced into this forced association with each other, that we better darn well be able to have some say in who's in charge of it.

Starting point is 00:11:20 So democracy in that type of situation, is sort of this necessary evil, quote unquote, but that's politics. And it sucks. And it certainly sucks at trying to spread a message that isn't about democracy in politics. It's about allowing people to make their own decisions with the exact opposite of what we're having to engage in to try to spread it. So that's another reason why politics isn't a great way to do education is actually we, I say, you know, we prove that democracy and politics is not a good way of doing things every time we get together for a meeting because it just isn't a good way of doing it. Fair. Nathan, I'm sorry, I've been hogging the mic.

Starting point is 00:11:52 No, no, no, I was good. The only question I want to jump in and they're immediately following up that is, should libertarians do politics? I don't think, go, no, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, it sounds like you may be a little bit jaded from your time in 2020. Slightly. I think that, uh, I will say this. I don't think that we necessarily need to walk away from politics entirely. What I'm saying is overwhelmingly I hear libertarians correctly identify the problem that the vast majority of, people, whether they will admit so or not, are progressives. And overwhelmingly so to the point where it doesn't matter which Republicans got elected and which side of the party, which party they get elected from. They're just going to do progressivism because that's what people want.

Starting point is 00:12:36 How many people have you meant to go, I'm a dad in the will, hardcore, conservative. I want a small, limited government. And you better keep big government away from my social security and Medicare. Like it's so baked in, right? And we get frustrated because we think we have these fellow travelers in the Liberty movement. And then when, again, this is all hypothetical. None of this actually ever happened. But let's say someone from their party gets elected and rapidly grows the government and completely backtracks on everything that they said they would do and runs up more

Starting point is 00:13:02 debt than any president before them and protects all the Epstein clients. Again, this is all completely, you know, I'm just making this up. But if that were to ever happen, then what you would see is that those people that you thought were your fellow travelers are immediately going to start saying stuff like, well, we got to hold on to Congress. So we got to spend as much as the guy that we hate who was in, office last time and run up as much debt as him and protect the Epstein clients. That's just necessary. You just got to do it. And so that's just the reality of what's going on here is that

Starting point is 00:13:28 they're progressives. They call themselves whatever. I'm anti-woke. I'm going to know, you're a progressive. You think the government is a solution, if not the solution. And you want more of it. You just want the right person in charge. You are Bernie Sanders mirror image. That's literally your surney banders. It's the same thing. You're just the two of you are, one of you is wrapping it around an American flag and one of you is wrapping it around a rainbow flag, but you're both doing the same thing. You're growing the same state that inevitably is used to harm all of us. And so if we're all correctly understanding that the problem isn't who's getting elected, it's that the people overwhelmingly demand progressivism, well,

Starting point is 00:14:08 then the solution is to show them why that's a bad idea. And again, that's why I started you were the power. Instead of getting into arguments on the internet, which is this fun and, you know, cathartic is one of the, as just about anything out there, but it's not very useful in spreading the idea. Instead, what I do is I give them something they can't argue with. I say, here's a family who's having their children taken from them and everyone involved knows that they didn't do anything wrong, but they're doing it anyway because that's how they get funded. Let's stop that. Here's the specific people doing it to them. We have 100% success rate of getting families reunited. In two minutes of your time or less, you can help us to get this family reunited. And I do things like that over and over and

Starting point is 00:14:44 over again instead of arguing with them about politics. And they may walk away from that still saying, I'm a progressive and I love progressive. Fine, fantastic. Help us get this family back. Help us keep this family from losing their home to eminent domain. Help us get this person's charges dropped that they didn't, and when we can show on body cam that they didn't do anything wrong. Help us to get these corrupt officials to resign and we don't care what political party there in. We didn't even check. That's what we do to grow the liberty movement, not just by spreading ideas, but actually getting people to act now even before they necessarily believe in what we believe in. Okay, we got to tease that out a little bit. Because I only recently learned that

Starting point is 00:15:16 basically the U.S. government, and I'm not talking about the border, is in the business of separating children from their families. There's actually incentives aligning on that. I think it's a key example of the corruption that comes in with the existing systems, the problems with the Fiat system. So for anyone that's not been not familiar with the work that you're doing, could you tease apart particularly what's going on child protective services? And then you mentioned a few other things like Eminent Domain as well, too. I think these are really critical examples to understand why we have a problem with the way things are. Yeah. So at you with the power, what we do is we find people who are having their lives completely destroyed and

Starting point is 00:15:46 upended by out-of-control government officials. And then we rally the public around targeting those specific officials, not the government or that agency, but those specific human beings who are doing this thing to these specific human beings. And we call for them to back off and do the right thing. And I know that sounds like something an eight-year-old would come up with. Well, why don't we just go to them and tell them to stop? Turns out it works. We've been doing this for many years, since 2022. We've been doing it for just over three years. We've had a 90% success, more than 90% success rate during that time. And in the last two years, we've had a 100% success rate in doing that. An example of that, one of the biggest examples of that is we have discovered way too many families

Starting point is 00:16:26 across the country and with many more coming out of the woodwork where they were parents of children with chronic health conditions. Ellers Danlo's syndrome, metabolic bone disease, osteogenesis, imperfecta, fully documented and proven health conditions that cause their injuries. They have broken bones and bruising and all sorts of other things. And what is happening is the state child protective services are intentionally ignoring their medical conditions and accusing them of abuse, taking their children from them, sometimes not even allowing the parents to speak to one another. So not only are you losing your children overnight, including the ones that don't even

Starting point is 00:17:04 that don't even have any injuries, they take all your kids from you. So not only are your kids being taken from you, but sometimes they don't allow you to talk with your spouse anymore either, indefinitely. How or why? Sorry. What's that? How are they doing that or why? Sorry, that one just blew my mind. It's doing it through the family courts. They're taking you through the family courts. And then when you show up to the family court judge, who does not have to use the same standard as a criminal court, it's very often their arbitrary decision, they simply refuse to admit the medical documentation. They look at it and they go, well, I don't like that. I like this so-called child abuse pediatrician who brought no evidence and said that you were abusing your child. And so I'm ordering non-reunification, you'll never see your children again. And if you plead down, then we won't also try to hit you in criminal court. And you know, you're young enough. You might have more kids. Now, some people, People that are hearing this are probably thinking, well, this has to be one-offs. We're finding them in essentially every state. And when we came forward with the first family, the Hernandez family, we were able to get them, get them their children back.

Starting point is 00:18:00 The other thing that happened was we had just countless families coming from out of the woodwork with the exact same story. I had a kid with a health condition. They refused to acknowledge it. I've lost my kids forever. Or I'm fighting to keep my kids and not lose them. And then we found out why it's happening. under Title IVE of the Social Security Act, the federal government for the past few decades, has been paying state CPS agencies every single time they accuse a parent of abuse.

Starting point is 00:18:26 And so this leads to two, this now creates a perverse funding incentive where all you got to do is just accuse as many people as you can, at least a little credibly of abuse. You can't just go around and say, you abuse that kid, you abuse that kid. There has to be like a thing, like fractures or bruising, even if it's being caused by a completely explainable condition and there's zero evidence of trauma or anything that would actually show real physical abuse, they just, all they got to do is make the accusation. And if your kid gets put in foster care, then they get even more money. And if the kid gets placed permanently in adoption, they get even more money. And if it turns out the kid has a chronic health condition,

Starting point is 00:19:02 they get money forever. And not just the CPS agency, but the child abuse pediatrics at the children's hospital, the family courts, the foster care systems, the foster families, that's how they're getting their funding from CPS is through this. And very often the foster families don't even know that they don't know the conditions of where the kid came from. They just know that they got a kid. And the visitation centers, the entire will call it the child abduction industrial complex, gets their funding every time they accuse someone of abuse. So the two things that happen is a bunch of people who didn't do anything wrong are being accused of abuse. The second thing that happens is they're not looking for abused kids. They're not looking for abusers anymore. They're looking for anyone they can

Starting point is 00:19:42 kind of credibly accused of abuse, even if it turns out that there was an abuse that caused their injuries, which means a lot of actual abusers who actually try to cover their tracks aren't being investigated because it's way easier to camp out at the children's hospital and just accuse everyone who brings a kid with the medical fragility of being an abuser. So actual abusers are getting away scot-free. They're not even being investigated. And people who literally did nothing wrong, who fearfully took their children to hospital at 2 in the morning because their newborn is fussy and has bruises on their legs, never sees their kids again, and sometimes doesn't see their spouse for quite some time either. Wow. Spike, it sounds like you're suggesting that people respond to

Starting point is 00:20:24 incentives. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, we are, we are essentially governed by incentives. And the problem with government in general is that by its very nature, it's a monopoly. And it enforces itself with violence and it funds itself through theft. It's not optional. Not only is it not optional, that you have to use their services or at least not seek their services elsewhere, but you have to fund it whether or not you use the services. So they're like the worst kind of monopoly. And the reason a monopoly is bad isn't just because we were told the monopoly is bad. The reason they monopoly is bad is because it removes the negative consequences of when they do a bad job. You can't opt out. You can't say, I don't want to pay you. You can't say I want to

Starting point is 00:21:05 get competition. You have to go with them. You have to fund them. You have to comply with them. So it removes all the negative feedback that would punish their bad actions. And it also removes all the positive feedback or it adds positive feedback that comes from bad actions. Because the worst they can make things, the easier it is to convince you that there's a crisis and that they need more of your money. And so everything in government feeds itself towards making bad decisions. And if you boil it down, what they're doing is at scale, they're refusing to treat you like a human being. they treat you like a political opportunity or a political opponent. They treat you like a funding opportunity or just an obstacle that's in their way.

Starting point is 00:21:44 They treat you like something that isn't a human being. If you think of the mindset of a child abuse pediatrician looking at a child, sometimes a newborn child, some of these children are days and weeks old when they're taken from their parents, looking at a newborn child or a toddler or any other child and knowing that they have like a serious chronic health condition. And instead of saying, wow, this, man, I'm glad I'm glad we spotted this this early. We're going to get this kid the treatment that they need so that they can live a long, healthy life. Instead thinking, chiching, this is the most money I can get because we already know they have a chronic health condition.

Starting point is 00:22:18 This is how we get our real funding. All I got to do is tear this family apart. There is no way that that child abuse pediatrician, that caseworker, that family court judge is looking at that child and its parents and seeing them as human beings. There's no way that they are. They know their human beings, but they're looking deep down, they're looking at them as abstractions. They're looking at them as this thing that they need to get in order to do their funding. And they tell themselves that these are just the eggs they have to break to make an omelette or necessary evil or whatever they tell themselves. Because these are not people that wake up and say, what evil can I inflict on the world today?

Starting point is 00:22:52 They wake up and they're probably not even thinking much about this. They're worried about, you know, how their kids are doing in school or, you know, they're going to have to vote on the next church council meeting about whether or not to add the portico outside or whatever the mundane things in their life, very often at these cases, they're drinking coffee just to stay awake. Like, this is not some, they aren't intentionally trying to inflict evil. At some point, they've convinced themselves this is good. And the only way they can do that is if deep down, they don't see these people as people. That's actually what we do at you with power. One of the primary things that we do when we reach out to these folks is we aren't saying, hey, you better do this, or we're going to make your life terrible, or we're going to replace you or we're going to vote you out

Starting point is 00:23:30 or we don't even get involved in that. We say, hey, imagine if this was you or someone you cared about because it is. It's someone like you and someone that many people care about and look what you're doing to them. You have the agency to stop this. If you do stop this, we'll thank you. If you don't stop this, we're going to keep contacting you about it, but either way you're going to hear from us. And that's why it works. We're not being, we actually try to reach them with an intention of reconciliation. Now, if they choose to resign, fine. If they choose to just back off for political expediency, fine. But we would prefer that they actually recognize that they did something wrong and do the right thing.

Starting point is 00:24:07 But at its core, government feeds this kind of behavior because it's a monopoly. And so it actually incentivizes people treating other people like something other than a human being. Attention all freedom-loving Alberta bitcoins. Tired of the big six banks freezing funds, blocking transactions, or slamming your account shut without warning or explanation just for dipping into Bitcoin. Remember the Freedom Convoy? banking nightmare? Federal government has invoked the emergencies act. But don't let them control your money or raise your financial life. Join the pioneers over at Bow Valley Credit Union, a place run by

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Starting point is 00:26:10 No one thinks that they're evil, right? No one thinks that they're the bad guy. One thing that I heard that just stuck with me was somebody interviewing Christopher Waltz regarding his performance in Inglorious Bastards. And they asked him like, hey, how did you portray evil so well? And he was kind of stumped by it. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, well, how did you do such a good job of playing an evil character? And his response was, he wasn't evil.

Starting point is 00:26:32 He thought he was doing the right thing. And that's where, like, the terrifying nature came from it. Yeah. So that just really blew me away. But I want to, I want to get to some of the other examples of the work that you've done. I think, again, it's a, they're unbelievably powerful examples of the issue here. But I want to know specifically with the Hernandez families, what was, like, how did you guys win that one? Was it really just, it was the calling?

Starting point is 00:26:52 It was the humanizing? Was there more to it? Like, how are these tactics so powerful? They're powerful because out of nowhere, people who are used to never hearing from the public ever. Because I'm not talking about, like, we'll go after an elected official. We went after Brian Kemp with great effect and got him to sign legislation that ultimately fixes most of this in one fell swoop. But primarily we target people that are like CPS caseworkers or family court judges or someone on a zoning board or a local city council or something like that. These people aren't used to getting dozens of emails, much less thousand.

Starting point is 00:27:24 thousands and tens of thousands. They're not used to becoming viral for all the wrong reasons. They're not used to that. They aren't wired for that. And then when we reach them, and not only are we reaching them for a negative reason, something that they are dead to rights as being, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:39 we're dead to rights on telling them they did the wrong thing. But we don't really try to, like, be mean to them. Like we reach out to them and say, hey, look, I bet you didn't realize that, that, you know, or I bet you didn't really think this through. This is the wrong thing. we actually give people wording templates on our website. So we don't, I mean, you can go and send your own email if you want.

Starting point is 00:28:00 You can use whatever language or wording you think will be helpful, but you can actually go to our website for these different causes and click on the name of the official we're targeting. And it literally just pulls up in whatever your default app is for email. It puts their email address. It puts the subject. It even puts the body of the text there. All you really have to do is add your name at the bottom if you want to.

Starting point is 00:28:21 You can change it if you want. But we make it where you literally can. just click, add your name at the bottom, and press send. And in that wording, we're basically driving home the same thing. You're a human being. You have agency. These are human beings. You should treat them like that. You would want to be treated like that. So do that. And it turns out that's actually very effective. Now, in some of these cases, like in the Hernandez case, the system, quote, unquote, was very unhappy about the Hernandez family because they were kind of the beginning of all this. And by the time the Hernandez family were getting their kids back,

Starting point is 00:28:52 we had also passed Ridge's law, which like I said in Georgia fixed most of these things. And they knew that their grift was over soon. And so they tried to still put them in jail for 40 years. So the Hernandez family, the DA and Forsythe County actually took them to trial. Now, this had already happened three other times. And the judge and jury laughed them out every single time. The attorneys that we partner with in Georgia, Catherine Bernard and her associates, they completely just wrecked shop on those trials. It was nuts that they even brought it to trial. In this one, the judge decided to just work directly with the DA and not allow any of the exonerating evidence to be presented during trial. The jury was not allowed to see the mountains of medical evidence,

Starting point is 00:29:37 or at least the vast majority of the mountains of medical evidence, showing that Emma Hernandez had a chronic health condition. They weren't allowed to hear that from the de-fax agency, the CPS agency, or the family courts that they had closed it out due to lack of evidence. They weren't allowed to hear. Have you ever heard of a prosecutor not wanting the arresting officer to testify? Because the arresting officer didn't think from day one that they did anything wrong. That wasn't allowed.

Starting point is 00:30:04 They weren't even allowed. The jury wasn't even allowed to hear that Emma and Aria Hernandez loved their parents. All they were allowed to hear during the entire trial was an x-ray with no explanation that just owed a bunch of fractures. and the opinion of the so-called child abuse pediatrician that this looked like abuse. And so based on that, based on that, that was all the jury got to see. Thankfully, the jury saw that the fix was in

Starting point is 00:30:32 and they voted not guilty on all four counts. But if it had been up to that judge, right now, the Hernandez family, Matt and Tucky Hernandez, would be facing up to 40 years in prison. And they'd already be in prison. There was no appeal. They would be able to appeal, but it would be from prison. their children would spend at least the next 20 to 30 years

Starting point is 00:30:52 thinking that they were being abused and having no means of being able to communicate with their parents who, let's face it, they wouldn't want to. And instead, I'm going to be having lunch again with them soon. Beautiful. There's two things that really stand out to me there. First and foremost, it's like anyone who thinks that we need, like the court systems, like we're talking about living in voluntary society, the idea that we need the government for dispute resolution is absolutely ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:31:14 And if you have any time actually spent in the courts, you'll see just how horrendous it really is. So that really stood out to me there. And then the second one was the idea that in terms of like effective change, we're talking about politics earlier, social ostracism really works. Like it seems like you just getting on the horn and putting pressure on people who are not used to be in the public spotlight can really, really move the needle. Gary, I will let you jump in there in just a second, but I do want to tease out. You hinted at some other cases.

Starting point is 00:31:38 Can you tell us about another example of one of your guys's wins? Yeah. So besides all of the families that we've been able to get reunited and legislation that is getting passed across the country, starting in Georgia. We've also worked, again, this isn't the only thing we do. We find people who are having their lives upended in all sorts of ways. And unfortunately, that's a target-rich environment. The government is very good at finding all sorts of ways to ruin your life for no reason. Another example is a lady named Rebecca Massey, who lives in Surprise, Arizona, which is, I guess, a suburb of Phoenix. And she was seeing some very corrupt habits coming from her city council.

Starting point is 00:32:14 They were doing all sorts of spending increases without their own bylaws required them to have a certain level of public debate and comment. They'd skip that part and just introduce it casually during a meeting without any kind of forewarning or anything. And the most recent one was a increase to salaries. And so she, yeah, oddly enough. And why tell anyone you're going to give everyone a raise? And so she showed up and asked the mayor and the city council about it. And the mayor said, you're not allowed to mention any of us by name or title. And she said, well, that's a violation of the First Amendment.

Starting point is 00:32:49 I can say whatever I want during my three minutes. So they arrested her. They had the police assault and arrest her in front of their 11-year-old, in front of her 11-year-old daughter, who they then left in a parking lot by herself late at night and didn't allow the mother or anyone else to contact anyone. Thankfully, the father, her husband found out about it and came and picked the daughter up. But yeah, they arrested the mother. For no reason.

Starting point is 00:33:14 And the whole time, if you watch the footage of the arrest, she's on the ground, not resisting, saying, why are you doing this? I have the right to speak here. And they're responding by going, stop resisting, stop resisting. Of course, they were to say that. She's about this tall. And she's not one resisting anything. She was saying, hey, you're not supposed to be doing this.

Starting point is 00:33:36 Then when she got arrested, they took her to the jailhouse. And this is all on the body camp footage as well. She said, I'd like to speak with my attorney. And they said, that's not a thing. That very much is a thing. That very much is a thing. But anyway, so they wouldn't let her talk with an attorney. While she's in there, the chief of police put out a video saying how good of an arrest this was.

Starting point is 00:33:58 This was actually a prototype for good arrest and telling and encouraging the police not to listen to all the naysayers out there, the people that we found, who said that this was a bad arrest. And the mayor had his friends put out op-ed hit pieces about her. This is a mother, a married mother who is not even that politically active, who just wanted to ask why this thing was happening, and they're putting out hip pieces. They're not only arresting her on all these bogus charges and trying to get her to plea down with the agreement that she'll never speak again, but they're ruining her reputation in her own community while she's in jail not being allowed to speak with an attorney. Now, clearly this mayor, Skip Hall had done this many other times or certainly felt like he could and thought that this would go away. But then we found out about it. And after it went viral all on multiple platforms and many, many people reached out to these officials and said as kindly or not kindly as they could muster back off and do the right thing here,

Starting point is 00:34:53 not only were all of Rebecca's charges dropped, not only did that mayor resign, not only did the chief of police resign, not only did the city attorney resign. and not only is now Rebecca pursuing a lawsuit against the city and all the individual officials involved, but Rebecca Massey is now the Western regional organizer for you or the power. That's wonderful. That's fantastic. You know, you mentioned she's pursuing a lawsuit. Of course, that immediately makes me thinking, good.

Starting point is 00:35:23 I'm glad she is on one hand, but on the other hand, well, they're not going to pay for the lawsuit. It's going to be the taxpayers that pay for the lawsuit. Aha, that brings us to the next thing. Qualifying. So not only are we effective with our actions of getting these officials to back off and do the right thing, but we lay the groundwork for their own undoing because they try to defend against it and in doing so they wreck their own case. And so I'll give it another example of that. In Gastonia, North Carolina, two police officers wrongfully arrested and assaulted a at the time homeless veteran. He's no longer homeless anymore. Thank God. But he was homeless at the time. His name's

Starting point is 00:36:02 Joshua Roar, not only did they wrongfully arrest and assault him, but they also tased his PTSD service dog Sunshine, who had done nothing, was just standing there trying to get to Joshua. She later died. And the, they, again, homeless guy, they threw a bunch of charges at him, a ridiculous bail at him. He was, you know, the whole idea was get him to plea down, put him in jail for a month or two to show him who's in charge, and then that goes away. We found out about it. And instead we created a movement around justice for Joshua and Sunshine. We routinely had people showing up sometimes by the hundreds to their city council meetings calling for justice for not just Joshua and Sunshine, but for many people in the community, including a pastor there named Moses Colbert,

Starting point is 00:36:47 who was actually trying to use his church to help homeless people get back on their feet and was being threatened with fines and closure and having his church seized by the city for doing it. We could get into why that was going on later. Spike, church isn't a place to help people. Every time I hear someone go, why doesn't the church step in? Because they often are not allowed to. They literally are not allowed to because it messes with the city government trying to create taxpayer-funded relationships with big NGOs and never actually solving the problem and just wasting a bunch of your money while the problem gets worse.

Starting point is 00:37:17 And if someone was out there actually getting homeless people back on their feet at zero cost to the taxpayer, that suddenly wouldn't look like a good arrangement. Anyway, the bottom line is that the city refused to release the body cam footage. but insisted that they were in the right. Well, once we got involved, not only was the body cam footage released, not only was Joshua wore all of his charges dropped almost immediately afterward, very coincidental.

Starting point is 00:37:43 Not only did that happen, not only did the mayor announce he wasn't running for re-election, not only did the, what else happened there? Not only did the, was Joshua suing, did he pursue a lawsuit against the city and the individual offer? officers involved. But as a result of all of, oh, not only did their social media manager resign because they kept slandering Joshua on social media as the Gastonia Police Department. So there

Starting point is 00:38:11 was an individual responsibility there. And now he's being sued individually as well. But just a couple weeks ago, the federal courts denied qualified immunity to the cops who assaulted him. Their names are Maurice Taylor, the third in Sierra Brooks. And part of the reason was because we got the entire body cam footage released and it demonstrated very clearly that they knew what they were doing was wrong. So they couldn't argue that they couldn't have possibly known they were violating someone's rights. Now, I also think the courts are getting sick of qualified immunity in general. But we, in getting all the evidence out there and in getting these officials to back off and do the right thing, what they're also doing is acknowledging that they did the wrong thing.

Starting point is 00:38:53 And it's a lot harder for them to get qualified immunity. Now, elected officials get absolute immunity. So there's not much we can do there. But the ones who aren't elected, it turns out we can sue them if we can demonstrate that they knew they were doing the wrong thing. And part of the evidence of that is when they back off and do the right thing. So we're actually been effective in getting qualified immunity repealed. If you get enough of those cases in court, that becomes case law. And that becomes the new precedent. I wonder, is that an incentive for them not to back off and do the right thing knowing that. Which is why, which is why sometimes they just resign and let someone else do it. Okay. Which is fine. Yeah. I mean, you're firing me up, man. I want to donate to you are the power.

Starting point is 00:39:27 So help me help you. Can we help you set up a Bitcoin wallet so you can receive sats at You Are the Power? I would actually very much love that help because it turns out when you run a nonprofit, it's not as easy as just getting a ledger wallet or whatever because at some point you've got to report it or else you can end up losing it entirely, not just paying taxes on it by having it completely confiscated. that's part of the fun of being a nonprofit is you can't just have a wallet. But we would absolutely love your help in doing that because we've been trying for years now to be able to do that. Sweet, man. Yeah. I'm just going to put that on Nathan.

Starting point is 00:40:09 Nathan, you'll take care of that, right? 100%. I will make sure they are absolutely taking care of. Speaking of that, too, I do want to dive into your thoughts kind of then on Bitcoin because the parallels that I'm seeing is getting a lot of kind of these human rights groups. So specifically like the Oslo Freedom Forum and the Human Rights Foundation very much solely. Now, they're dealing with kind of people in authoritarian regimes, which I guess in this sort of circumstances also does fit the case. But people who don't have access or cut off from the banking infrastructure as well, too.

Starting point is 00:40:31 I'm just curious on your perspective, your perspective, we have this grassroots kind of organization and really putting on a lot of pressure on specific individual. I think that's a really key point that it's not going to the government. It's targeting people. Yeah. I just want to know your thoughts in and around Bitcoin as a tool for human sovereignty as well. Yeah, we can't be free of government controls the medium for exchange. and it's just as simple as that. You know, we beat up on the Federal Reserve and for good reason.

Starting point is 00:40:59 But if we were able to snap our fingers and make the Federal Reserve go away, and now it's just Congress directly deciding how much money exists and what the value of a dollar is, I can assure you that's not going to be all that much better. If anything, in retrospect, the Federal Reserve might be a bit of a, a bit of a coaster that the teapots sitting on that cools the flames. A perfect example. If it were up to Donald Trump right now, our rates would be way lower than the Federal Reserve. I mean, how is it? I mean, how bad does it get, guys, when often the Federal Reserve is the voice of reason in the government banking conglomerate there of saying, no, if you lower rates, we're going to go back to double-digit inflation.

Starting point is 00:41:41 It's bad when the Federal Reserve is the voice of reason, but that doesn't mean they should exist. And it actually underscores the reality that the Federal Reserve is the symptom right now or one of the main symptoms. the real problem is that the government has the ability to decide what money is. And I think that that should have always been an economic phenomenon that's determined by the market. And again, the market's an abstraction. It's just people. People should be deciding what their medium for exchanges. And yes, that means there will be multiple mediums for exchange. And that's fine. But it also means there's going to be main ones too. Like we tend to build around a consensus. And I think the market consensus, as much as it's been allowed, has been around Bitcoin for the most

Starting point is 00:42:21 part. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on crypto. I have a good 30,000 foot view understanding of the blockchain and how all of that works and having a trustless ledger system and all of that. I think there's probably good use cases for other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and things like that. I think a lot of it's a great way to pump and dump and make some money and then put it back into Bitcoin. But the bottom line is I think that Bitcoin is the one. It's certainly the first one. And it's been the best proven test case. You know, there were, was the time. I remember when, you know, people were comparing it to the tulip phenomenon back when it reached triple digits. And that just seems like such a, just such an innocent time of like,

Starting point is 00:43:01 oh, you think this internet funny money's worth $100 per coin? And it's like, no, I actually think it's worth millions. And, uh, and they, they laugh then on it. I don't know how much you're laughing now. But no, I mean, it's, it's proven, even despite the fact that up until recently, the government kind of didn't want it to exist and all but punish people for using it, it's still skyrocketed in value for two reasons. Number one, what it's compared to, the US dollar is a, well, someone would call it a shit coin. It really just keeps going down. It's actually designed to go up in supply and go down in value. But also, like, people are realizing this is a scarce thing. It has this ledger, this trustless ledger, and it's already being used. And so it's incredible to watch it happen. I'm a big believer in

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Starting point is 00:44:28 guarantee. Plus, it's powered by 100% carbon-free energy prioritizing renewables. Ready to take control of your Bitcoin future, visit SaaSmining.com by scanning the QR code or clicking the link in the description down below to book a free consult and start mining today. I want to jump back for a second because I'm kind of curious. I know that we've kind of moved on to more, which is higher return on investment time pursuits for these kind of liberty movement items versus the party politics specifically. But I'm curious from your view,

Starting point is 00:44:56 I imagine you're still at least somewhat connected to the libertarian party. Oh, yeah. What is their current view or stance on Bitcoin? And where do you think it should be if it's not in a place that you agree with? And the thing, let me just throw out an idea. And I'm having a hard time articulating it, but hopefully it'll kind of make sense. So the idea is that there is a lot of profit to be made with lobbying government.

Starting point is 00:45:16 In terms of if you're a large corporation or particular industry, you can throw funding towards politicians because in terms of subsidies or even favorable regulation, that is going to have a return on profit at the end of it. There's actually a benefit to the money that you're donating to these causes, which seems to me like a very, very difficult thing for the Libertarian Party to ever compete with. That if you're throwing money at a very, like, it's a tall order trying, it's a very, almost insurmountable mission you're trying to pass. and there's no direct financial incentive.

Starting point is 00:45:44 And the idea that I was thinking about is basically, and again, I have all my incentives for why I want this anyways, is that the idea of the Libertarian Party going all in kind of on Bitcoin is a way for donor funding to then get kicked back and actually have a profitable result to hopefully encourage more finances and more people coming in. The idea being that if they were to push for no cap gains on de minimis amounts or something along those lines,

Starting point is 00:46:04 or favorable conditions for subsidies for Bitcoin miners that are supporting electrical infrastructure, or, you know, tax incentives to do hardware mining stuff kind of in the U.S. Like basically, it's a way to have libertarians, people with a libertarian beliefs and mindset and at least fellow travelers now have an incentive where they could power the libertarian party because they'd actually have a financial reward on the other side for them if they got favorable Bitcoin legislation through. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Lot there. Just kind of wanted to throw out the idea and see your thoughts on it. So nice, simple question. So bottom line. obviously every libertarian party candidate might be slightly different on different issues. Overwhelmingly, the party and just about everyone running for any office believes that Bitcoin is an incredible thing. They support no capital gains taxes on anything. And they also support little to no regulation on anything, especially when it comes to money. The market should be

Starting point is 00:46:59 deciding money, not the government. In fact, many libertarians such as myself don't even believe the government should be involved in the question of money. So if we were pro-Bitcoin before Bitcoin existed. We were gold bugs. Like we, we have always supported the market deciding money, not the government. In fact, the Libertarian Party was originally founded by disgruntled Republicans. Their final straw wasn't the war in Vietnam. Their final straw was Nixon taking us off the gold standard. They didn't like the war in Vietnam, but they realized that the much longer tale was, they, they warned about the stuff that is happening now, including tens of trillions of dollars in debt and hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded libel. They were worrying about that in the 70s, when the idea of a

Starting point is 00:47:40 trillion anything was an absolute joke, but they saw what was going to happen. So we've, we've always been, for as long as Bitcoin has existed, we've been pro Bitcoin. We were pro Bitcoin when it wasn't popular to be pro Bitcoin. And we're pro Bitcoin for the right reason. Yes, we see it as an incredible tool for storing of wealth, but we also see it as an incredible tool for freedom, financial freedom and the social freedom that comes from economic freedom. So we are as pro-Bitcoin as it gets. I think, I'm spitballing here. And the Libertarian Party does accept Bitcoin. I think that the challenge has been less of a question of how pro-bitcoin we are, because you couldn't get more pro-bitcoin and still be a political party. The question is

Starting point is 00:48:19 effectiveness. So how much can donating to this party actually affect things and actually change things? And again, my answer is that we're going to have to start as a party. We're going to have to focus where we've been winning sometimes despite ourselves. In 2020, I was one of the primary people that they were talking about, which I get it, because I'm at the top of the ticket or part of the top of the ticket. I was running for vice president. We knew I was going to lose. So who are we putting up as our champion? The known loser, the guaranteed guy who's going to, even if we do the best, we got the second best vote we've ever gotten. We've gotten, I think about two million votes. It was like 1.3% of the population that we got. We didn't call for a

Starting point is 00:49:04 recount, right? Like it was obvious that we were going to lose and it was a question of like, you know, how well were we going to do in terms of vote count? Why was I the guy that we were focused on? Why weren't we focusing on people who actually won their races? There's a guy named Jim Turney down in Altamont Springs, Florida. He has been an incumbent for, I want to say 10 years now. And he not only has reached a point where they very often don't run against him because who wants to lose to a libertarian and he keeps beating them. But as a result of him being on that council, Altamont Springs is the only census designated metropolitan area in the U.S. with no debt. This is what libertarians and all. And he's one libertarian in the city council. This is what

Starting point is 00:49:51 libertarians in office look like. We get so focused on on which team wins. How do you like to win for a change? And so my, you know, my overwhelming idea of why people should support the, uh, the, the, the party is that they're the only party that if they win, you win too. Your freedom wins, your ability to make choices for yourself wins, your autonomy wins, your your your your, your your your your your insistence to be treated like a human being wins. And no, we're not, I doubt that we're going to get elected president in 28. Okay. I'll make that very bold hot take prediction right now on the show. We'll see what happened. Hope I'm wrong. But it's likely that we won't win. It's likely that we won't win for Senate. It's likely that we won't win for

Starting point is 00:50:32 governor. We should run candidates in those races because sometimes you have to run them just to get ballot access. So you definitely need to run all those candidates. But our focus needs to be where you can actually win, which is at the local level. Case and point, I'm not even doing elections, but you were the power started with small towns where we knew that if we got a few hundred people to contact them, that we'd be able to get them to change their mind. We didn't start with like going after governors or Congress. We started with local city councils. And in three years time, we've not. We've gotten statewide legislation passed as a direct natural outgrowth of our localized activism. And we get so localized, we're focusing on individual people, not just local government,

Starting point is 00:51:13 the specific person involved in that. And that has grown into movements that is getting legislation passed at the state level. We will soon reach a critical mass where we can get legislation passed at the federal level, because the ultimate fix here with child separation, or at least one of the main fixes, is for the federal government to stop funding it that way. we wouldn't have been able to do that if we started at the federal level. We'd have a bunch of people look at us and go, ah, I don't know about that. And then they'd roll their eyes or go, ah, you can't fight the system. And we'd get nowhere.

Starting point is 00:51:39 We'd just get angry and we get black pilled and jaded. And then we'd fight each other over it, right? We'd start nesting and attacking ourselves. Instead, we focused on the family that was being harmed by this caseworker, this child abuse pediatrician, and this family court judge. And then from there, we worked our way up to eventually, we're already at the state level for effectiveness. I'm actually later this on this weekend, I'm going to be traveling to a summit of lawmakers in New Hampshire to tell them what they need to do to fix their problem because New Hampshire

Starting point is 00:52:05 somehow is worse than Georgia. We could do an entire episode on that. But the bottom line is we did it by starting where we could actually win and then building up from there. And I think the Libertarian Party needs to do the same thing. Focus where we're already winning, often despite ourselves, and build up from there. Build the credibility, show that it works, use it as an actual proof of concept and then build up from there. that's very interesting. Gary, I want to jump in with two quick things and then I promise I'll stop hugging the mic. Of course. First and foremost, I largely agree, Spike. And one of the things I kind of have in my mind,

Starting point is 00:52:36 and I don't know if this is a poor framing, is the idea that, one, I think that things are going to get worse. I think there's kind of no way out of that in terms of the fiat and the corrupt system and the incentives. And that one of the most important things for the Libertarian Party kind of at the national level is to exist. Because there may come a point in time where you have that kind of cultural cascade. And it is, if it already has ballot access, if there is somebody with a lot of popular momentum that isn't able to run in either of the two parties, they could actually make a strong kind of independent run

Starting point is 00:53:01 using the mechanisms of the libertarian party. That could be very effective. Again, it's waiting for an opportunity to present itself. It's almost like the idea of focused local for now, but be ready in case something shows up that you could actually take advantage of the momentum. And then the quick question I wanted to ask, maybe it's not quick, is you're right.

Starting point is 00:53:17 You were the number two performing libertarian candidates, if I'm not mistaken, in terms of voters, votes and percentage. And I believe Gary Johnson, 2016, was the number one. So 2016, 2000, sorry, 2020, that's number one and two. 2024 did not fare very well. Comparatively, it was less than half in the votes from what I was able to find. I'm curious if you have any thoughts as to why that was.

Starting point is 00:53:42 Was it a cultural shift? Was it just exhaustion from the previous cycle? I just want to know, it seems like it kind of went in the wrong direction and I wanted to get your take on it. Yeah, so I'll start with that one first and we'll go back to your first question after that. what we've learned in the last few election cycles is the vote count that we get has very little to do with anything having to do with us. Now, I will say in 2024, there was a lot of infighting within the Libertarian party as to whether or not to support the candidate Chase Oliver or to support Trump, for example, and to try to get him to be more libertarian. He made a lot of overtures to us. He actually came to our convention and spoke. But that actually speaks to the fact that it has very little to do with us.

Starting point is 00:54:24 because the reason they were saying we should vote for Trump isn't necessarily that he was more libertarian than the libertarian candidate. It was that they felt like he couldn't win. And so here's what ends up happening. In 2016, the reason that Gary Johnson has the highest vote count is because there wasn't an incumbent running for re-election that year. Everyone was picking between, you know, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. So not only are the, and people will say, yeah, well, you know, people hate politicians. Yeah. but no one was defending or fighting against an incumbent.

Starting point is 00:54:56 They were going, I don't know about that. I don't know about that either. And now, yes, the vast majority of people still voted for one or the other of the so-called lesser evils. But there was at least a little bit more room for people to go, I don't like either of these people. Come around to 2020. A lot of other people went, yeah, I still don't like these people, but we have to do everything we can to stop Joe Biden from getting into office. or we got to do everything we can to get Donald Trump out of office. I mean, I know people who, and this is going to sound insane,

Starting point is 00:55:29 they were so frustrated with the way that Donald Trump embraced lockdowns and embraced, literally gave a medal to Anthony Fauci, that they voted for Joe Biden because they wanted him out. And I'm like, guys, Joe Biden arguably would do worse. Like, he's still supporting the lockdowns even after Trump realized that that was a stupid thing a few months in. or at least, you know, that it wasn't helping the economy or whatever, but they saw that as the lesser evil. They saw that as the only viable path.

Starting point is 00:55:59 There's a very powerful thing that happens when there's at least one incumbent running for re-election because the people on that side of the boat are like, well, we got to keep them in because this guy's going to be way worse. Or the other people go, well, no, this guy was terrible. Look at what he's done. We can't let him have four more years. America can't survive four more years of insert name a person who's currently in office. How many times have we heard that? Turns out it's not true, but that's what we hear all the time. America can't thrive more year.

Starting point is 00:56:26 Yeah, or this is the most important election of our lifetime. And the thing is, they're not wrong. Stop voting in a way that makes it so that things keep getting more dire every cycle. Anyway, and then by 2024, you had two incumbents running for re-election. You had two people that had already been in office, first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, and Trump. And so both sides were able to correctly say America's going to suffer with four more years of that guy. And so that made it even harder as a result of that to the point where you even had libertarians saying, I'm not voting libertarian.

Starting point is 00:57:02 I got to vote for this guy because he's going to be better than this guy was. These last four years were terrible. America can't survive four more years of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whatever. And then Donald Trump comes in and literally introduces a bill that spends almost exactly as much, actually a little bit more than Joe Biden did. And instead of calling it BBB build back better, he called it BBB Big Beautiful Bill. Totally different. And so it's just insane.

Starting point is 00:57:28 And so what my takeaway from 2020 and definitely from 2024 and for that matter from every election cycle is our success need not be dependent on things that we have no control over. We don't have a control over incumbents running for reelection. Like a lot of times within the libertarian movement, people will think that something I said or that something my running mate said helped or hurt us. And yeah, it might with a very small sliver of voters. But for the vast majority of people, a lot of people voted for us just because we were the only other option on the ballot and they weren't going to vote Republican or Democrat. They didn't even necessarily know who we were. And that's wildly frustrating. And so what I say is, yeah, we need to primarily focus on getting people off-boarded from progressivism, whether it's Republican progressivism or Democrat progressivism or swing voter progressivism or whatever, or apathetic non-voter progressivism and get them into the idea that they need to be treated like an individual human being.

Starting point is 00:58:27 And if they want to do that, a good first step is to help individual human beings who are having their lives wrecked. Now, you are the power is a completely, a completely nonpartisan organization. We literally do not care who gets elected. We don't care about parties, politics, campaigns, any of that. What we care about is whoever is sitting in that seat, do the right thing. Treat the people under your presumed jurisdiction like people, bottom line. But what will naturally happen as a result of that was there will be more people who will think as libertarians, small L, the ideology, not necessarily the party. What will naturally come from that, if we reach enough of a question,

Starting point is 00:59:02 critical mass is now the reality will be, it doesn't matter who gets elected because everyone's going to demand libertarianism from them. Republicans, Democrats, the Libertarian Party rises, the Green Party rises, some new party that we never even heard of rises. Whatever happens, people are going to, instead of demanding more government, they're going to demand that government just leave them alone and let them act like human, treat them like human beings and let them do their own thing. And so that's the real sign of winning is when maybe we don't even need a libertarian party. Maybe we don't need any of this. We just have people, in the same way that progressivism is the default with the vast majority of people,

Starting point is 00:59:36 we can make libertarianism the default. It all sounds so great. By the way, that answered your first question, too. Yes, it did. And it is great. I love what you're doing there. And I love that you're taking real issues that real people are dealing with having to, you know, to battle the government and, you know, get them out of their lives.

Starting point is 00:59:53 And I'm sure that changes some minds, probably much more so with people than any thousands of speeches libertarians can give, you know, every election year, you know, nobody really cares about that. I guess I just wonder, I'm sorry, I'm going to be the cold water guy here. Like, how big of a fix is this? Like, yes, you're getting to some people where you show them the error of big government and how they've had to battle it. And like, oh, my gosh, maybe I will rethink some of these things from a larger perspective. But then I feel like we still come back to at the end of the day, you know, what's going to be beneficial for me, my immediate benefit for me or my family. Like I want small government to stay, like you said, to stay out of my social security because it's going to benefit me. Like how do it seems almost like, and I don't, I would never dream of putting you in the same camp here, but the idea of like the communists thought of like creating, you know, the new communist man to change human nature and human incentives.

Starting point is 01:00:50 I mean, on a case by case basis, this seems great. But can we change the minds of 300 plus million Americans on these small case by case basis? is something bigger that needs to happen that will just kind of dovetail into human incentives. Is Bitcoin that thing? Is it something else? I don't know. Tell me why I'm bad for putting the cold water on this. Well, I'd never say that you're bad. I would say that again, the progressives did do it. It wasn't 300 million at the time. It was actually a couple billion across the planet. And what they did was they started with stories and they started with people. Ironically, in order to spread an ideology that robs us of our individual humanity, they used our predilection

Starting point is 01:01:29 to hear about individual humanity. They actually, they focused on stories of people whose lives are being ruined and they could mold it and demagogue it to say, well, this is because we didn't have a strong, robust government that was holding the greedy accountable. And then we would show up and talk about ideas. We go, you, idiots, this has nothing to do with greed.

Starting point is 01:01:50 Greed is good. What we need to have is more respect for private property rights because when we don't have respect for private property rights, they can do whatever they want for us. We're talking about ideas. They're talking about people. And so then when the person turns to us and goes, yeah, but how am I going to be able to afford my health care? Again, they're talking about people. They're talking about themselves. They're talking through the

Starting point is 01:02:08 idea about themselves. And they go, I think I have a right to health care. If I need health care, I need to be able to get it. And, and, you know, it seems like your way would make it way more expensive. What did we hear in that? I have a right to health care. We didn't hear the whole part of like, hey, show me you care about me and I should trust you so I can listen to what your idea is. We laser focused on what really mattered was that they were wrong. about the concept of property rights. And so we tell them about negative rights versus positive rights. I hear that.

Starting point is 01:02:34 I'm thinking, you call me. And yeah, you filthy commie. How dare you think, how dare you not understand the concept of rights and try desperately in your own imperfect language to tell me that you want to be able to access health care and not have it ruin you and your family financially forever? And so then we tell them about these ideas that sound completely obscure to them. We're probably at some point going to mention the invisible ham,

Starting point is 01:02:54 which means now it sounds like we're telling them we're going to take away your health care and replace it with magic. And so then they don't. And so this is what we're left. This is what people hear. They hear us wide-eyed, mildly autistic people telling them about ideas. Mildly? I mean, it varies.

Starting point is 01:03:10 It's called the spectrum for a reason. But what happens is what they hear is, I don't care about you. I just want to argue about something that you don't really understand. And I'm going to throw a bunch of obscure language at you and tell you to read a bunch of books you're never going to read. Oh, also, I'm your enemy. Like, I don't care about your health care. I don't care about your kids' education. I don't care about your roads.

Starting point is 01:03:31 We make fun of people for worrying about how they're going to be able to get places. People go, what about my roads? What about my roads? I literally just said that on the call before we talk to you, by the way. What about their roads? That's actually a legitimate question. We know the answer. It is wildly frustrating that people think that you need to have a coercive government

Starting point is 01:03:48 to put pavement on the ground. But it's a legitimate question. And instead of entry, you know, road, do you need your roads? It's like, yeah, no, they need to be able to take the kids. kids to school. They need to be able, and they need to know how school's going to work without government because no one's told them. You know, we talk so much about we need to educate everyone, but why does our education look like browbeating and making fun of people all the time? Anyway, it's a whole other subject. The bottom line is that in order to be able to get people on your side and to build a

Starting point is 01:04:14 movement, you have to start with what they care about, which is themselves and people that look like them. And I don't mean look like physically look like them necessarily. I mean, they look at a family and go, wow, that's like my family. They look at someone who's losing their house and go, wow, I can lose my house that way. They look at someone who got arrested for asking their city council why they're doing a bunch of corrupt stuff. And they go, wow, I've spoken at my city council.

Starting point is 01:04:38 I could get arrested for that. They look at someone who's being wrongfully assaulted and wrongfully arrested and the police refuse to release the footage. And they go, wow, I've been out late at night. That could have happened to me. All these things could have happened to me. I need to do something about it. And instead of immediately trying to shove an ideology down their throat,

Starting point is 01:04:58 we just give them an opportunity to reach out to those officials and using their own words. They're now adopting and endorsing it before they've ever even allowed it and transform them ideologically or intellectually. They're telling the people, treat us like human beings. And we reinforce that over and over again with cause after cause after cause, and over time, they start mimicking the same things that they're hearing. They go, you know, this is all happening because they're not treating

Starting point is 01:05:23 us like human beings. Now when they think of health care, they go, well, wait, why are all these regulations in place that, you know, prevent me from being able to get the doctor that I need to? Wait, you mean insurance? Now we can talk to them about ideas because we've already got that nice sediment of having common understanding and common nomenclature between us. Now we can say things like, yeah, you know, certificate of need laws in order for someone to open up a new hospital or a new health care facility in your area, they need to get permission from the existing providers that are already there. And instead of going, well, I'm sure there might be some reason for that, you know,

Starting point is 01:05:55 I got a bunch of greedy people and, you know, the free market just makes everything more expensive. Instead they go, wait, wait, wait a second, why are they stopping me as an individual human being from being able to choose who my medical provider is or to open up a new facility to be able to provide it to people? They think differently because we've encouraged them to join us before they've actually been transformed intellectually by it, if they ever will actually be intellectually transformed by anything in their natural life. Now, that's the only way you can make a movement.

Starting point is 01:06:19 actually no you make a movement one of two ways you can convince people or you can do it at the point of a gun and the connoisse often did that yeah turns out this one doesn't work very well because you are getting people to go against their human nature and eventually there will be mass starvation and you know political roundups and murders and the the night of long knives and all that stuff and it will it will fall apart because it's held together by threats and violence um something that's far better held together for example progressivism which was largely held uh largely put together through convincing people, persuading people that this was the right idea. So we can do the same thing. Now, is it possible that we never achieve Libertopia? And instead,

Starting point is 01:07:00 we're just playing whack-a-mole here and there? Very possibly. But that brings me back to, like, the parable of the guy who's on the beach. And he's picking up starfish that are, our strand, that are, that are beach, because the tide's gone in. And he throws the starfish in so that they'll continue living. And someone walks up and goes, what are you doing? There's like thousands of stars. tens of thousands of starfish here. And it's a long stretch of beach. It's got to be a billion or millions of starfish out there. You can't, what you're doing doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:07:29 And the guy says it matters to that starfish. So, and as a Christian, I know there are a lot of people who are never going to hear the gospel or they're not going to hear it in a way that connects with them. And I can't stop that. But I can help individual people, maybe a lot of individual people, to hear the gospel so they can make that actual decision for themselves, whether or not to give their life to Christ, I can't make everyone Christian, nor would I try to, because again, if you try to do it at gunpoint, they're not actually Christian, they're just doing it for you to leave them alone. That's not saving

Starting point is 01:08:01 faith. But if I can spread that message to even one person, then I have done something that has eternal consequences for that one person, and that will be bigger than anything I can do on this planet because everything on this planet is finite. So can I change everything? Can I create a true revival of saving faith among every person on this planet? No, definitely not. I may not even be able to do it for a lot of people. But if I can do it for one person, it mattered to that person. When we do this work, you are the power and help that one family, and then if we immediately broke down shop and never did it again, that family is reunited. The Hernandez family, for the first time in two years, three years, is able to go to the store together as a family.

Starting point is 01:08:42 They're able to watch movies together as a family. That people that we've helped keep their homes are able to live in their house, it was going to be stolen from them. They had no ability to stop it. So if nothing else, we're helping these individual people. And if it turns out that we actually believe in individualism, then that's actually what matters, is that those individual people aren't having this horrific thing done to them anymore because of our actions. So the absolute worst case scenario is that we helped a bunch of people who would have otherwise had their lives ruined, and we didn't create a movement in the process. I'm okay with that. I think that's a fantastic answer and it seems like such a great place to leave it because I don't want to take up more of your time,

Starting point is 01:09:19 but I have so many other questions that I want to ask you. I don't know. We would love to have you back on. I do have two smaller final questions. But Nathan, did you have anything before I get to those? You know, I just wanted to point out that I agree with Spike that. It's unfortunate, like I could give somebody a copy of like, man, economy of state or like

Starting point is 01:09:35 the anatomy of the state. But that will never be as powerful as just telling them about sunshine, particularly like here's a long list of dogs that the government took out. maybe you'd like to make some changes that actually it hits people it hits people go for it gary yeah it opens them up to potentially reading me in the economy of state and to be clear and this is another thing that frustrates us because it's not for nothing we tend to have a lot of cerebral people it's what allows us to spot these patterns before anyone else but it's also our stumbling block and reaching normal people who don't think that way most people either just want someone that

Starting point is 01:10:08 they feel like they can trust to convince them of it and it's they aren't going through much of a rigorous process to be convinced. They just want to know they can trust you. And what you say doesn't set off any red flags and they go, all right, I'll go with that. And then other people, they don't even care about that. They just seek consensus. They just want to see what other people are already doing and they go, yeah, okay, I'm good with that. And that's wildly frustrating to us. But it turns out that it doesn't matter how we feel about it. That's how most people are. And they may or may not ever intellectually wrestle with anything in their entire natural lives. And that's fine. We just give them something to do. and wording to add to it.

Starting point is 01:10:43 And over time, we reinforce it with the message. And either they go, well, I trust that person. And that makes sense to me. I guess I agree with that. I'm going to go with that from now on. And they start saying it and believing it too. Or people go, wow, this is great. Man, we're helping people left them, right?

Starting point is 01:10:56 We're really doing good stuff. I like to be part of a winning movement. And yeah, I agree with this too. And that's wildly, wildly frustrating to us because we're super cerebral. And we've got to intellectually assent to everything before we ever do anything. Which, by the way, is our own downfall because we have to make sure everyone agrees on everything all the time before we take the very first action. And so we sit there and think and think and think while other people out there doing stuff. And so what I'm saying is,

Starting point is 01:11:16 all right, we've done the thinking. We've done saturation point on thinking. We've done thunk this all the way through. Let's go do some stuff now. That makes complete sense. Wow, that's great. I got to ask, do you have any intention of ever running for political office again? Is that something on your radar? I hope not. I haven't ruled it out. here's what I will say. When I ran for vice president, it was one of the most, probably the most, one of the most challenging, certainly in that short of a time frame. And, because I was everywhere. I was everywhere. Also, my running mate kind of went back to working full time around late September, so I started doing her thing too. But anyway, so I was, I was a lot of places. I visited, like,

Starting point is 01:12:01 close to 40 states in like inside of like four months, give or take, and, and did events every day. So I didn't sleep much. But I loved it. I loved every second of it. It was truly just running on fumes and loving every second of it. But to your point, it created the network of people. I kept in contact with all those different people that were involved in events all across the country. That was the beginning of what led to you or the power.

Starting point is 01:12:26 I wouldn't have been able to do you or the power if I hadn't, first of all, stumbled upon all these people that want to do stuff year round and all these people who need our help and we're not going to be able to get elected to help them. But maybe we can put some pressure on the officials doing it to them. that was what led to it in the first place. So I'm certainly not talking down on my run or telling people they shouldn't run. At this point, I think you were the power potentially got more attention than our 2024 candidate. And if we continue to grow the way that we're growing by 2028, I'm not sure it's possible for someone running for third place, because frankly that's what we're doing. Someone running for third place for president or something like that would be able to get as much attention.

Starting point is 01:13:08 as what we're doing at you or the power. I mean, we are truly reaching critical mass to make changes to federal legislation. That's a completely new thing for people in the, in the Liberty movement, to do something like that, holistically on their own from scratch. And so I'm not sure that the only reason I would run for office would either be because I thought I could win it, or because I thought I could use it to get more attention for what I'm doing during my day job. and I'm not convinced I can get more attention running in a third party. And I'm not sure what office I would want to run for that I would want to win it.

Starting point is 01:13:46 I don't actually want to tell people what to do. I don't want to be in the government. Like I really don't. I would rather, for the people who for some reason want to be in those positions, I'd rather hold them to account and say, hey, do the right thing here. Yeah, it reminds me of that great libertarian meme. You see the guy in the 1950 suit with a globe, you know, libertarians secretly running to take control over the world and leave you alone.

Starting point is 01:14:07 Leave everyone love. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I know you recently, my final question, you recently went to Ron Paul's 90th birthday barbecue bash, of which I'm incredibly jealous. Can you tell me how great it was so I feel extra super bad about myself for missing it? Oh, you missed it, Gary.

Starting point is 01:14:26 It was, listen, it was, imagine all of your libertarian heroes coming together to worship. worship, or not worship, I shouldn't say worship, to like, to just, to, to, um, celebrate the life of a living legend, like the hero of heroes within the Liberty movement. Like, we literally came together and this guy's still alive. Like it's, we talk about him almost like he's not here anymore. He still has a podcast. Like he's, he's still like out there. It's incredible that at his, you know, somewhat slowed pace in his 90s, he's still one of the people, biggest people out there spreading the ideology and spreading, spreading, spreading the ideas of freedom and liberty. It's just absolutely incredible. And so yeah, you missed it. Big fail on your part. I don't know,

Starting point is 01:15:14 maybe you can make the 100th party. I don't, you know, we'll see. But, no, it was really incredible. And it was such an honor. I remember when they first reached out to me and asked if I'd like to come. And I'm like, yeah, of course. Wait, you mean for free? And they're like, yeah. And they're like, yeah. And so then a little bit after that, they reached out to me and they're like, hey, so, you know, Would you like to help, you know, promote this? And I'm like, I was going to tell everyone anyway. What are you talking about? I'm going to crow to the world that I'm going to this thing.

Starting point is 01:15:41 And then when they were like, hey, would you like to speak for a few minutes? It's not going to be a long speech, just a little toast. And then introduce some people. And I'm like, you want me to help MC Ron Paul's birthday party? It's like, it was, I get imposter syndrome every once in a while. And one of the things I like about you or the powers is it's hard to get imposter syndrome and when you're like meeting a family that you kept together. It's like, I don't care if I'm an imposter.

Starting point is 01:16:07 I did this thing. But when you're speaking, when you're thinking about some of the memes that you've posted and then you're up there speaking at a birthday party for Ron Paul. And it was, I wasn't the keynote or anything like that. I'm just giving a little bit, you know, five minute speech about how much Ron Paul means to me and then introducing some other giants in the Liberty movement. Yeah, no, I had imposter syndrome real bad. So it was it was very cool.

Starting point is 01:16:32 I'm sure they'll have a 95th one. You should definitely go to that. And then if for some reason you miss that, I get it. But definitely get to the 100th. I would go to the 100th. That's great, Spike. I want you to tell everybody where they can find you on all the social medias and all the stuff. And if they want to donate or help, anything you want to promote, man.

Starting point is 01:16:50 Yeah. And before that, I just got to jump in quick, Spike. Because when I was looking around on the page, I just got to say, that cyber bully, the government t-shirt, wonderful. So where can people get that in particular and follow everything? If you go to Your The Powera.net, you can do all the things we're talking about. You can get your famous cyber bully the government, not just the T-shirts, but I believe we also have mugs, those stickers you can put on your laptop, festive holiday sweaters. There's all sorts of things you can get that say cyber bully the government, and I have all of them. Are there cyber bullies that we can hire to do the bullying?

Starting point is 01:17:23 Well, we are the bullies. Perfect. We are. And we use, it's a bit tongue-in-cheek. We actually don't really bully that much, but it's a nice, people like it. It gets the kids excited. But if you go to you were the power.net, you can do that. You can sign up to become a member.

Starting point is 01:17:36 You can donate. To put it in perspective, the average non-CPS cause, like Rebecca Massey's cause when she got arrested. From us finding out about it to us winning is about, it costs usually right around $5,000, give or take. Some are way less than that. Some are really good. Yeah. No, next to nothing compared to what we're actually accomplishing. Imagine $5,000 to get a corrupt sheriff who's on his way to becoming governor to resign in disgrace and never run for office.

Starting point is 01:18:02 Five grand is nothing. Our average CPS case, the family reunification cases, from when we find out about them to when they sometimes go through both family and criminal trial, about $25,000, which again is a bargain compared to what's actually being done. I mean, just the volunteer hours alone. We have a staff of eight and thousands of dedicated volunteers across the country. So $25,000 is still a bargain. But $25,000 is $25,000.

Starting point is 01:18:29 So to whatever extent anyone is able to donate, you can do that as well at you were the power.net. If you want to follow what we're doing on social media, I personally, my social media, I'm everywhere. You just look for Spike Cohen. I'm pretty easy to find. I'm a loud internet person. And you can find me on all the different platforms.

Starting point is 01:18:47 You Are The Power is currently on Instagram, Facebook, Rumble YouTube X and threads. And so you can find us on there as well. But again, all of it is based out of you were the power.net. And if you become a member, you're at the tip of the sphere of being involved. You get access to our exclusive member-only email, our social media groups. We're working. We're actually revamping our mobile app, our members-only mobile app. And you can be involved today.

Starting point is 01:19:18 So you with a power.net. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed. But the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to bTCsessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know. Plus, full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like.

Starting point is 01:19:47 And if you're ready for the ultimate fast track, scroll to the bottom and check out Bitcoin Mentor.com. For premium one-on-one experience with my team of Bitcoin experts to ensure you get it right, first time. Don't wait, secure your Bitcoin future today. Hit the link in the show notes or scan the QR code on the screen. If you enjoyed this video with Spike Cohen, please do like and subscribe and check out the previous video with Vijay Boy Party on his bullish case for Bitcoin.

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