BTC Sessions - The Solution to Your Enslavement: 3 Steps to Completely Change Society | Stefan Molyneux

Starting point is 00:00:00 This system doesn't work. You've got these unfunded liabilities and you've got these catastrophic debts and deficits. So when that money runs out, it's going to be a complete catastrophe. Why is it that people think that coercion is necessary for the organization of society? Can you imagine staring at the future without Bitcoin as the salvation, without the sky hook that gets you out of this inferno? Most widespread violations of the non-aggression principle that we have the most control over is if you're not angering anyone, you're not doing any good. You can't guarantee things, but I think it's our best shot. Have you ever wondered what happens to a peaceful philosopher when they actually threaten the status quo? Stefan Moline knew from Free to Maine with almost a billion views and downloads.

Starting point is 00:00:39 The guy who's been evangelizing Bitcoin since 2011, didn't have to drink Hamlock like Socrates, but was famously deep platformed in 2020. And now he's back, back on X and back in the spotlight. In this interview, we dive into what the government will look like in a hyper-bitquinized world, the three keys to truly changing society. the surprising link between Christianity and Bitcoin and way more. If you're fed up with the existing system, stick around.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Stefan reveals exactly how we can win. Going beyond Bitcoin to bring you the skills and insights you need to escape the Fiat matrix, this is Mentor Sessions. Good morning, Stephen. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited for this conversation and glad to see you back on X. I want to have you on because we really want to touch on Anarchy versus Minerka. And in particular, you know, in Bitcoin, there is a lot of conversations around like what is the role of the state

Starting point is 00:01:29 and particularly what will the role of the state be in a hyper-bitcoinized world? A lot of times I'll hear the idea of smaller city-states or minarchy, that kind of knight watchman type setup. And even some people referencing Hoppa's work will talk about the benefits of monarchy versus democracy. And so I'm curious in your view, I mean, you've been evangelizing Bitcoin, I think, since 2011. In a hyper-bitonized world, how do you envision the role of the state? What is government like at that point in time? And can it even exist if it doesn't have control over the currency?

Starting point is 00:01:56 So great question. It's good to start me off this morning with the easy stuff. So the question of statism is really around two things for me. Number one is the universalization of the non-aggression principle. The non-aggression principle is you cannot morally initiate the use of force against others. It's kind of something we get and we understand, you know, like when you're in, I worked in a daycare for many years. So whenever there was a fight between the kids, you know, when you say, hey, what's going on? did the kids say? He started it. No, she, he started it, right? So whoever started it is in the wrong. And we kind of get that instinctively, and there were really good moral reasons as to, like, philosophical moral reasons as to why the initiation of the use of force is wrong and why self-defense

Starting point is 00:02:41 is good. So the initiation of the use of force, now, statism as a philosophy states says, probably states should probably be wrong with you putting it. It says that there's a certain group of people who are so angelic and wonderful that they should be given the almost universal power to initiate the use of force in a geographical area, and they'll be just fine with that. And they won't corrupt them, and they won't be greedy, and power won't go to their heads. So it is the idea that there are human angels and human devils among us. And the human angels need to be given the awesome power of the state, and the human devils are restrained by the angels with the power of the state. Of course, logically, when you break it down, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? So

Starting point is 00:03:22 if everyone is good, we don't need the state. If the majority of people, people are bad, then democracy will make sure that bad things, bad people end up running the state because they want their own team to win. If everyone is evil, then it's just a state of nature, and there's no conversation to be had about morality, and that's obviously not true. And if the majority of people are good and a minority of people are evil, which is my particular viewpoint, then the minority of people will take control of the state and use it to impose evil things on the good majority. So there's no situation in which it works. So if you take a central principle, and this has been true in physics for the last 500 years and biology since Darwin,

Starting point is 00:04:08 if you'd sort of take a central principle, so E equals MC squared, or the speed of light is constant, or something like that, and you just say, okay, that's absolutely true everywhere across time, across the universe, no matter who. I mean, mind-bending, but accurate things happen to your mind. Like you understand the nature of matter and energy, you can do nuclear power and unfortunately some nuclear weaponry. So when you take central principles and universalize them, like in the past, of course, before people like Taiko Brahe and Copernicus and so on, people generally thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, not just of the solar system, but of the universe. And if you just say, okay, so rocks fall to Earth, what if everything falls? What if

Starting point is 00:04:55 everything is falling? Right? What if the moon is falling around the sun and is only kept, sorry, the moon is falling around the earth and is only kept from falling into the earth by centrifugal forces? What if the earth is falling around the sun? What if the sun is falling around the center of the galaxy? What if you just take this principle that everything falls, that gravity is a universal constant and just apply it. Then you end up with a radically different but accurate view of the universe and suddenly you can send probes past Jupiter and do incredible stuff. So when you take a central principle and you just universalize it, you get amazing things out of physics and out of biology and out of morality. So if you just take the non-aggression principle and the other side of the coin,

Starting point is 00:05:38 which is respect for persons and property rights, you end up with a wild and remarkable system and way of understanding the world. So if you say, well, we're just going to say the ethics that we teach to kindergartners, we're going to just take as absolute and universal, thou shalt not initiate the use of force and thou shalt respect property and in that way respect contract rights, which is just a form of deferred property rights. So we're just going to say what is right for a five-year-old is right for everyone. No one gets to initiate the use of force. And then also if we understand that all power corrupts, then there aren't these angels who are immune from power. You know, you often hear people say, it's like, well, the government should do this.

Starting point is 00:06:20 And it's like, that's a lovely magic wand. And what you're doing is as someone who is not corrupted by that level of power, you're thinking, well, I would be fine with that. People I know would be fine with that. They try and do the right thing. You know, if government took over health care, they'd just try to make everyone healthier. if government took over a charity through the welfare state, they'd just try and help the poor so, so much. And pensions, you know, would never be used to buy votes. That would be wrong. And they'd always save up.

Starting point is 00:06:49 They'd tax everyone since the 1930s. They've been taxing everyone for retirement benefits in the U.S. There's nothing there. Nothing. Nothing. Just a bunch of dusty treasury IOUs and a couple of crossed fingers from dead economists. So the idea that, well, I've got this great idea. I mean, I see if the government did X, Y, and Z, it's more magical thinking than praying to Zeus. It really is because you're looking at a system of power and saying, well, I wanted to do this good thing, right? And then next thing you know, Jeffrey Epstein has video of you and you can't do that good thing anymore. Right. So once you get into the realm of power, you get corrupted and people thinking they have this magic one to just make this very powerful and, you know, quite coercive agency, just follow the wing trails of the angels as they

Starting point is 00:07:37 flap across the dusty lakes of virtue is really a fantasy and the society has progressed to the degree with which we have replaced coercion with volunteerism and that's where we should still be going and Bitcoin of course is central to that. Beautiful. Can you expand on that? And so in terms of, I guess the question would be, is it sufficient that if we fix the incentives by changing the currency that we would eventually get to that sort of state or is that alone not enough to actually make the transition? Is it sufficient to basically remove currency from the government? Does that result than in the downfall, or is there more that needs to be done as well? Well, here's where I would advise everyone to put on their crash helmets and assume the

Starting point is 00:08:16 position of whiplash, because here's where the conversation is going to go a little bit sideways. Some of your listeners, but give me just a minute or two to make the case, and hopefully it will make sense. So, yeah, without a doubt, the power to create currency corrupts everyone who touches it. It's like the ultimate ring, a Sorin's ring, is the power to create currency. I'm sure everybody knows this, so I'll just touch on it. briefly, if you can counterfeit, if you can create money through central banking, then you hand it out to all of your friends who get to spend it at full value, and then it gets diluted as it moves through the economy. And those at the very tail end of the economy, those furthest from the

Starting point is 00:08:51 centers of power, end up with double-digit inflation, which is what I think is hitting the US at the moment somewhere between 10 and 11 percent. And in some urban centers, 30, 25, 30 percent. So that level of power can't be handled by anyone. So when you take the human element out of the creation of currency and you put it into a mechanical situation where you have to trade electrical impulses for Bitcoin, as of course is in the case of Bitcoin, that's fantastic. When you take the transfer of value out of human hands, which is what Bitcoin does with the decentralized network, then you just take giantly. is a power that corrupt everyone who touch it out of circulation. And that's to the relief of everyone in the long run. Even the evil guys don't end up benefiting from it because the more evil you do, the less you can actually be loved and be happy. So we're sort of taking, it's like taking

Starting point is 00:09:46 away a gun from a toddler. It's like they're not going to do any good with it and you really got to work with that. So certainly taking the power to create currency out of the government's hands and the power to control interest rates and all of that sort of stuff is great. The other thing that we need to do, of course, is, and this was a big puzzle for me for, like, I've been doing this for over 40 years. It was a big puzzle to me, like, why is it that people think that coercion is necessary for the organization of society? And after a certain amount of really hardened thinking and trying lots of different approaches, I sort of finally kicked over the reason and the reason in general is that as children,

Starting point is 00:10:25 we are taught that violence is essential to the maintenance of order within the family. and in school. And so all of our early childhood experiences, and there are some exceptions, of course, but for the most part, you know, most parents hit their kids. Most parents yell at their kids. Most parents jam their kids, you know, coercively down on the stairs for timeouts. Most parents send their kids to bed without dinner. Most parents neglect, right? They will emotionally cut their kids off if the kids do something they won't. There's a storm around, not talk to their kids, slammed doors. And that's really scary for kids, you know. I mean, I mean, I can neglect some guy across the world, and I'm not doing him any harm, but if I lock a guy in my basement and neglect him, well, suddenly a very different matter, right?

Starting point is 00:11:10 So kids want to please their parents, and kids want to, what they need, their parents' resources and affection. You know, we evolved where there were a lot of predators and a lot of scarcity of food, and so you didn't want to be the least favorite kid among your parents. so you tend to want to align with that. And so in, and when I was a kid, it's less now, although still there in the U.S. When I was a kid, I was in boarding school. And if you did the wrong thing, you got caned. And so when we grow up with this level of coercion, it's pretty rough. And of course, the entire school system is funded through property taxes and other aggressive measures.

Starting point is 00:11:48 And so as children, it's like really almost directly beaten into us that coercion is necessary. for social order, that the kids who aren't coerced against are brady and resistant and angry and won't respect any rules and chaotic and criminal. And so it's in the same way that if you grew up speaking English, say, then that's just the language. And you speak English and you don't understand other languages. And if children are raised speaking or having the language coercion inflicted upon them, they have to say, and it kind of gets ground into your bone marrow, but you need coercive force to run any group of people.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And it's in the household, it's in the schools. And then when you grew up, when people say, well, we need a centralized coercive institution to run society, people are like, well, yeah, I mean, in the same way that you speak to me in English, I can't fail to understand it. You speak to me in Japanese. I don't know what you're doing,

Starting point is 00:12:49 but I do start looking around for Godzilla Monstrous. So there is that balance as well, which is why I wrote the book, Peaceful Parenting, which is free. And I hate to pitch on your show, but peacefulparenting.com. It's a free book, audio book. There's a long version. There's a short version. There is e-books. And there's also an AI that you can use to ask questions about parenting, which is trained not just on that book, but on a whole bunch of things that I've done in the realm of parenting. And I myself, I've been a stay-at-home dad. My daughter is going to be shockingly 17 this year. and I've been a stay-at-home dad with her doing, of course, this show from the beginning.

Starting point is 00:13:24 So I can tell you it really works. And so we've got to really work on parenting. I think a combo of parenting, philosophical education, and decentralized currency, you can't guarantee things because of that old free will variable, but I think it's our best shot. It's very interesting. And I'm glad that you brought that up to because I do see it's funny in my past, we'll say, fiat life and those kind of other friends from beforehand, not a lot of optimism, A lot of, what's what I'm looking for, natalism.

Starting point is 00:13:52 They're not getting married. They're not having kids. They're not very interested in it. And they're very dark kind of. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But on the Bitcoin side, I'm glad you brought that up. I see a ton of babies being born, family formation, the same sort of thing.

Starting point is 00:14:02 It's almost like being able to take care of the currency. They're able to then focus more on what's more meaningful and what's more important. And I see a lot more going on there too. So for anyone that's not familiar with the idea of peaceful parenting, right? My understanding is it's basically an extraction. It's just taking, again, the non-aggression principle, applied to parenting and brought to its logical conclusions. But could you give us a quick overview on maybe sort of like the main tenants?

Starting point is 00:14:23 And then the other question I want to tag on to the back of it is, how do we spread the ideas of something like peaceful parenting and even Bitcoin as well too? Because the people are so tied up in their day-to-day lives that if it only comes from educational pressures, I feel like it's a very slow moving train to get the job done. Does that kind of make sense? Tell me a bit more, what you mean? Meaning that in a sense that if we want people to, if we think that people to, if we think that peaceful parenting, along with decentralized currency, is an important component of moving to a

Starting point is 00:14:51 better place in a freer society, how do we accelerate those ideas? I find it very hard to convince people even through logic and reason these days. Well, that is a challenge. That's the big challenge. And how do you convince people to take a better path? Well, I think the first thing to do is to understand just how costly it is to improve your morals in the world. Oh, my gosh. It's really rough. It's really rough. And the reason for that, of course, is that most people's relationships are based on conformity rather than virtue. And if you start thinking for yourself, you start questioning things, you start trying to live a life of virtue, honesty, integrity.

Starting point is 00:15:38 It's not long before people are like, ooh, I don't like that very much. You're making me uneasy. My false self is troubled by your bluntness. and directness, and there's this anxiety. And of course, the whole purpose of propaganda in our society is to make people, it's almost like physically allergic to the truth. I'm sure you've seen that woman with the tight bun, you know, triggered. You know, she's really upset.

Starting point is 00:16:02 People, it's almost like you're waving a bag of bees about someone who's allergic to bees. They're terrified. And so if you start speaking the truth and you start talking about inconvenient things, the question is, are you loved for you as? an individual who thinks, who reasons, who questions, who is yourself through the action of original thought, are you loved for who you are, or are you loved for the comfort and familiarity that you bring to people? And the comfort and familiarity that you bring to the propagandized is always at the expense of your true self, your authentic self, your honest, curious, individual

Starting point is 00:16:41 self. And so people get trapped in this horrible paradox, which is, I get comfort and connection with people by not being who I am, but I really, really want to be loved. And it's like, hmm, I'm afraid you're going to have to choose a lane there because they kind of both go in opposite directions. The more you conform to the unthinking, the less you can be loved. Nobody really falls in love with a photocopy or a picture of someone. You fall in love with the original. And so the degree to which you are willing to be yourself to think and reason for yourself is the degree to which you can be loved. But of course, that's the everything in life is a trade-off. And the degree to which you are loved or can be loved through thinking for yourself and being

Starting point is 00:17:25 honest with people is also the degree to which you're going to be kind of hated. Because when you are authentic and you speak to truth, you reveal to people that they're really not very good. They're just conformists. They don't really think for themselves. They don't even know what virtue is. They just go along with the herd and the crowd and they have no more individual. than a couple of, you know, back of the 19th century watercolor painting thumbnails of people are watching a horse race. And people don't want to find out that they're NPCs. They don't want to find out that they don't think for themselves because that takes away their special snowflake status of individuality that everyone clings to because they think that's going to give them the

Starting point is 00:18:03 passage to being loved. But the passage to being loved is forged through thinking for yourself and asking the difficult questions and trying to understand the world as best you can. And that's really tough. how do we communicate that? I mean, it's always a big challenge. The only thing that I can say is be robust in your presentation of reason and evidence, be willing to be corrected. And as best you can, and some of these variables, of course, are not under our control. I happen to have met a wonderful woman that'd be married for 23 years, and it's better and better every year. And, but I could only control the state of mind that I was in when I met her. I cannot control directly whether I meet her or not.

Starting point is 00:18:47 But what you do want to do is if you're in a world of fat people and you want to try and convince them to lose some weight, well, the first thing you have to do, of course, is lose weight yourself. And then you have to not hide the benefits of weight loss. Like, hey, I can run up the stairs. Hey, I can do jumping jacks. Hey, I can walk without leaning over adult Disney style and, you know, getting shape marks on my inner thighs and gasping out, you know, clots of bloody matter from my lungs. So you want to show

Starting point is 00:19:18 people, look, here's the benefits. We know the cost. The cost of thinking for yourself is to be loved. Well, the cost is to be loved. The cost is to be hated. The benefit is to be loved. And show people what is positive about thinking for yourself so that some people, like, you don't need everyone, man. You know this from Bitcoin. You need like, maybe. Maybe. three to four percent of people who are really committed to change because most people would just go along. We know this from the Milgram experiments, might. Most people would just go along. They're like water skiers, you know, they can go a little bit, but basically they're going to follow the boat no matter what. So you only need a couple of people. So if you show people, look, this is a good life to think for

Starting point is 00:20:02 yourself. And also get people not to be afraid of battle, but to love it, to love battle, to fight of virtue to thwart evil is the most foundational, positive meaning to life. And so don't be afraid of battle. Yeah, people are going to like you. They're going to love you. They're going to hate you. You shouldn't let either affect you too much, except for those you're really close to. But go out there. And, you know, it's funny because we all love these superhero movies. We all love like battling the robots and battling the aliens and battling Agent Smith and we love kung fu movies. And then when it comes to just disagree with people in your life, I feel like, oh, we get all this fainting couch and, oh, I'm going to need my smelling salts.

Starting point is 00:20:44 I have to lie down. It's like, come on, be a hero, be a superhero. Speak up for the truth. Yeah, you're getting to a little trouble. Yeah, people will get mad at you and all of that. But you go, stop watching all of these fantasy heroes. Ah, Aragon, so brave, you know, for Frodo. And it's like, can you do the same for the truth?

Starting point is 00:21:02 No, I'm going to join the Ork Army and step on the faces of Hobbits. And it's like, stop watching noble verbal. Well, I mean, of course, I want to keep it verbal and peaceful, but stop watching Noble Combat and thinking you can ever participate in it. Embrace it. There's a reason why we love those guys on the screen, and you can look in the mirror and love that too. Imagine mining Bitcoin, cheaper than buying on an exchange with direct payouts hitting your

Starting point is 00:21:25 wallet like clockwork. Saz mining makes it real. You own the rig. No gimmicks. It's your asset pumping out Bitcoin every single day. No markup on hardware or electricity. They get paid when you get paid. Fully aligning incentives.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Mining Bitcoin below exchange cost is a great. to DCA your stack. It's so simple, anyone can do it. No tech skills required. You get white glove support and education, a rig performance 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. Are you sick at the Fiat-funded fast fashion that falls apart quicker than the dollar? You know, the cheap stuff made to drain your wallet one inferior product at a time? Stop it. There's a better way. Panties for Bitcoin is a family-oriented company

Starting point is 00:22:11 built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners and held to that unbreakable Bitcoin standard. Certified made-in-Italy underwear that lasts as long as your metal backups. Guys, grab a couple pairs of those lightning boxers for yourself, the softest, most comfortable, durable pair you'll ever own. And surprise your lady with luxurious panties, bras and thongs. No better way to spark those all-too-important Bitcoin conversations and spread adoption than attractive people in their underwear. Naturally, you can pay with Bitcoin supporting the circular economy and building that parallel system. Simply scan the QR code or click the link in the description down below at hand to panties for Bitcoin.com and use promo code BTC sessions to save 10%.

Starting point is 00:22:44 Snag yours and share your love for Bitcoin in a new peer-to-peer way. That's beautiful. I drew an immediate connection to the idea of toxic Bitcoin Maximilist, the guys on Twitter that are going hard. But it's the same thing. It's a, what do you call it, like a fearlent adherence to the truth regarding Bitcoin and just no fear to get out on Twitter and just debate with anyone and everyone. You'll see, you know, these well, respect to kind of New York Times economist getting taken down in the comments by Annon accounts with, you know, laser eyes coming right at them. I want to jump back for one second because even with people that are deep into kind of these ideas, they've gone down, maybe the Rothbard and the

Starting point is 00:23:18 measles rabbit hole, but they're still really struggling to see it actually get to completion, like the full anarchist state. It's kind of that like, well, it would be nice, but it's only possible in theory. You've done a lot of work historically with everyday and was it every day anarchy and I'm missing the other way. Practical energy. Thank you. Just to give people, people a bit of something to grab onto, because I think a lot of times it's just a lack of imagination. And again, being kind of growing up in a coercive system, you can't really see anything outside of it. The big ones that come up would be military police and conflict resolution, dispute resolution. Can you give us even a rough idea? We're in that hyper-bitquinized world.

Starting point is 00:23:54 There's no state maybe at this point. Peaceful parenting has done its thing. How are those things going to be organized? Could you possibly do involuntarily, Steph? Well, the first thing that I would say is anybody who thinks that the state is necessary to resolve disputes has never tried to resolve disputes using the state apparatus. Because if you've ever touched the legal system or you've ever touched dispute resolution using the state, it's crazy. But was it, Candace Owens currently, I think, is being sued by Emmanuel Macron and his wife for their claims. And to me, it's just, I mean, obviously I'm not a lawyer, but to me, it's like, well, I mean, just get a DNA test and see, right, it's easy to solve. But she's talking about this thing's going to cost $5 million to defend against these defamation claims, right? I mean, that is not a practical

Starting point is 00:24:46 system for people to resolve disputes. So I would say, don't have, don't start from the premise. Well, we have something that works and you want to replace it with something that's untried. And it's like, it's not really that's not really the thing so does it work at the moment well let's look at does dispute resolution work well no it's unaffordable for most people and you got lawyers charging 500,000 1,500 bucks an hour you've got Byzantine law books I've got a scene on this in my novel the future where a lawyer from the future says that he left a state of society went to a free society because he's looking at these walls of law books and saying how can we expect the ignorant if the law is no excuse. It's like, sure, if it's the common law and you've got three rules,

Starting point is 00:25:33 respect property, don't initiate force, keep your word. Okay, I can understand that. A kid can understand that. But when you've got like, here's your 400 books of legal rules, some of which contradict each other, you cannot possibly expect people. Nobody knows, right? This is, is it a Tom Lorenzo book, like three felon, everybody commits three felonies a day. They don't even know it. And that's not, that's just the laws. You've also got the tax rules. You've got the federal register, like, it's impossible. So we don't have a system that works for dispute resolution at the moment. So let's not pretend that, well, you know, there's this other boat we should go to. It's like, but this is the lovely boat. It's like, yes, but it's the Titanic. So you might

Starting point is 00:26:11 want to think about some other place because this one is not working. So with dispute resolution, one of the, so the way that you work, let's say you and I enter into a contract, right? you're going to pay me $1,000, I'm going to ship you a widget, right? So in a state of society, how do we deal with that if you don't do it? Well, it's pretty tough to use the court. I mean, especially if you're over small claims, it's pretty tough to use the court system. So what's happened is things have evolved like on various sites where you get a reputation, right? Like you get a reputation rating. Reputation ratings are really important because then you get rewarded for keeping your word and shipping the widgets if somebody pays you the $1,000,

Starting point is 00:26:52 So that's certainly very helpful. So the way that it works is that you and I would have, I call them DROs, dispute resolution organizations. And what they do is they insure our contract. So we pay one percentage point, right? So $10 on a thou. We pay one percentage point to these organization. And they guarantee the contract, which means if I ship you the widget, but you don't ship me

Starting point is 00:27:17 the $1,000, they go to you and say, hey, man, you've got to pay the $1,000. dollars and they even have access to get the money from you if you don't agree, right? Because you would have signed that right away. Now, of course, you could decide to save the 10 bucks on a thou and then you're going to be uninsured, but that's obviously a choice. Like people choose not to get life insurance, get hit by a bus and then their whole family cries, but that's just, you know, part of the risk and reward of living. So we have an agency that resolves our disputes. Now, that agency wants a fewer set of disputes as possible, right? So they're going to try and make sure that we have good reputations, that we trust each other, that we have the resources to do what we need.

Starting point is 00:27:58 And so they'll try and reduce the amount of conflicts as much as possible. Now, if for whatever reason, you owe me a thousand bucks, I shipped you the widget, you owe me a thousand bucks, then the DRO will pay me the thousand. And then it will say, you don't keep your word. And then when you say, I want to do another contract, what's the DRO going to say? And no, we're not going to insure that. Like, no, because you screwed the last guy, so we're not going to insure you for the next guy unless you, you know, whatever hoops you have to jump through to do that. Sort of like a, I mean, they have credit scores and all of that, but it would be like a contract

Starting point is 00:28:31 rating a score and this works. And by the way, you know, this also works beautifully with Bitcoin. The people who are like, well, you can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. It's like, well, technically you can if you're willing to wait around a bit. But the B2B economy, the business to business economy, which I worked in for many years, as an entrepreneur, they don't care if it takes 10 minutes to settle something. Most of these contracts are 30, 60, 90 day payments. So that's not a, so even if only Bitcoin takes over only the B2B system, that's a massive economic win as a whole. And, you know, Lightning Network or other things

Starting point is 00:29:03 could deal with smaller ones. So yeah, you have ways of resolving disputes where you have efficiency processes, you get rewarded or being good. And then the question is, of course, well, and with regards to policing? Well, what if somebody does something violent? What if somebody, you know, rape, theft, assault, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, first of all, of course, right now, the government has no incentive to prevent people from growing into criminals. Criminals aren't born, I mean, maybe a few exceptions, you know, some weird mutation in the brain. But for the most part, and this is very clearly demonstrated in a wide variety of studies, a crime is provoked through child abuse. Right now, what incentive does the state have to prevent people? And it's

Starting point is 00:29:43 from growing up to be criminals. Well, none because they're in a two to four year election cycle and they're gone by the time the people grow up. So it's pretty easy to do, though. You simply would, when you have kids, you know, at the age of two and ten or whatever, you just give them a brain scan, non-invasive. And if they're being neglected or abused, that would show up very clearly in brain scans. Really? Yeah, so you simply, yeah, because you can see the normal healthy brain development and you can see where the brain development is going awry from neglect and abuse. And neglect in many ways is even worse than abuse. So you would simply do a scan and if the parents are neglecting or abusing their child, they'll show up on the scan and then you say, you got to fix this.

Starting point is 00:30:34 You got to fix this. Or we got to take the kid away. And so peaceful parenting means that there'll be almost no crime. It's sort of like, how much do we worry about smallpox these days? Well, it's kind of been dealt with. But in the middle of a smallpox epidemic, you're like, we're going to worry about smallpox forever and ever. It's like, well, when you have peaceful parenting, you'll have virtually no crime. Again, there may be some people with brain tumors or something like that, but you'll have virtually no crime. And the crime that is dealt with, let's say that a guy named Bob just goes and for whatever reason beats the hell out of his neighbor. and somehow he escaped all of this filtering for child abuse,

Starting point is 00:31:09 and he just went kind of crazy for whatever reason. So solar radiation, demonic possession, whatever's going on. Well, then the DROs come and say to Bob, you need to pay restitution and you need to be out of society for a while. Now, let's say that Bob doesn't want to do that. Well, first of all, they'd have the right to initiate force against him because he would assign a contract in order to participate economically in a society, he would sign a contract that says, if I, if I'm found to be

Starting point is 00:31:40 initiating the use of force of violating property rights or contract, I can receive sanctions, right? In the same way that, you know, we know when we sign a contract with a cell phone company or a car company or a credit card company that they can apply sanctions against this, right? If they can repossess the car, they can take us to court, they can do or so we have sanctions. Now, let's say that Bob resists all of these sanctions and so on, well, if you think about the number of contracts, both real and implicit, that you kind of have to go through in order to economically participate in society. It's hundreds a day, at least. And like, you go into a restaurant. You don't sign a contract saying, I'm going to pay. There's just an

Starting point is 00:32:20 implicit contract that you're going to pay. You don't sign a contract in the library saying, I'm not going to yodel or set fire to the library, but it's just kind of implicit. So a lot of implicit contracts. So the way that you deal with truly recalcitrant people, people who simply want to obey social rules, as you work with them as much as possible and try and get them to obey social rules, but then you simply cut off their economic access to society. And what does that mean? No electricity, no water. And you can't use anyone's roads because the roads are all private. You can't use the sidewalk. You can't use the cell phones because that requires everyone else's network. You can't use a computer that's connected to anything useful because that requires

Starting point is 00:33:01 other people's property. So what you do is you simply cut people off from economic access to society until they come around. So there's lots and lots of options. But the point is that you have people who want to prevent problems rather than profit from curing problems. It's like healthcare, right? You want insurance companies that are going to make money when you're healthy. Like there was an old practice in China before the communist revolution that you paid your doctor every month. You're until you got sick. And then you didn't pay him, but he had to treat you. And so he had every incentive to keep you as healthy as possible. And that's just not the way that certainly socialized medicine works at all. So with regards to contracts, you've got your DROs. With regards to the police,

Starting point is 00:33:43 you've got DROs and you've got economic ostracism and the initiation of the use of force. You can always do third party self-defense, right? And with regards to the military, well, how well is the military in America say how well is all that the taxes pay in America? How well is that securing the borders? And the answer is, well, certainly under Biden, maybe a little bit better under Trump, but under Biden, it was pretty bad. And under Obama, it wasn't great either. In Europe, it's not particularly great at all. So first of all, again, you don't want to say, well, we have a system that works. Why do you want to try a system that doesn't work? It's like, no, this system doesn't work. I mean, helping the poor. There are more poor now than before

Starting point is 00:34:24 the welfare estate started and they're poorer because we in America there and in most of the West, you've got these unfunded liabilities and you've got these catastrophic debts and deficits. So when that money runs out and you've got three generations of people who've never had a job, it's going to be a complete catastrophe. One of those unbelievably cruel things that's going on in the world right now. So with regards to the military, well, you have a traditional sense of military, which was throwing massive amounts of soldiers against each other. of the most part. But wars are not started by the soldiers. Wars are started by the leaders.

Starting point is 00:35:00 And so I would imagine, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that what would happen is you'd simply target the leaders of the other country if they were threatening you and target them and whoever supports them in concentric circles relative to the center of power. And the other thing, too, is if you have to invade a particular area, let's just say, whatever, right? And one of it is just a wild jungle with with no organization, maybe a couple of indigenous people with blowdarts and poison frog tips and stuff like that. That's going to be pretty chaotic and tough to invade. On the other hand, if it's a fully functioning farm with livestock and feed and planted crops, well, taking that over is really profitable because it's really organized. You have a central organization

Starting point is 00:35:44 which you can use to take it. You just replace the farmer with yourself and you've taken over the whole farm. So taking over a country is in fact taking over the state. It's taking over the existing tax system. If there is no existing tax system, if there is no existing state, then you're going into a state of nature. With all these DROs, which have incredible free market incentives to prevent or resist that, let's say that you do somehow manage to displace all of those. You've got an incredibly well-armed population that doesn't want you there at all,

Starting point is 00:36:14 and you have no tax system to take over. You know, when the Nazis took over France in May of 1940, they took over the tax system. So people continue to play taxes, and then they were taking over the tax system, the existing functional farm, not a wild jungle of people with incredible intelligence and resistance. And of course, you can see, the last thing I mentioned, you can see what's happened when you have a giant, statist armies trying to deal with insurgents. it's not easy in the same way that when the Nazis were in France, they had to deal with the French resistance, which was very cunning.

Starting point is 00:36:50 I mean, the French resistance was like, well, we're not going to kill the soldier. We're just going to really, really wound him because that is going to be more expensive for the government to maintain. And so, you know, dealing with guys with shoulder-fired missiles in the back of pickup trucks and flip-flops is pretty tough. And so the argument would be that you'll get actually effective, geographical, I can't really say national if it's a free society, but you'll get really effective geographical defense and preemptive stuff. If anything's coming up, you would simply try and, you know, take care. And the same way,

Starting point is 00:37:20 you don't have to wait for someone to stab you in order to exercise self-defense. If there's storm clouds on the horizon, you can take proactive action to take out the leaders who are threatening you. And of course, because there's no one of the reasons that leaders don't do this is they don't want to get into this escalating war of who's going to kill who. But of course, with a free society, there's no central leader to take out. So it's a much better. I would feel much more comfortable with that. And the last thing I'd say is if you look at what the free market has done with regards to just keeping you safe from crime, it was not the government that invented security cameras. It was not the government that invented all of these things that you can put in your house.

Starting point is 00:37:57 Somebody opens a window with that and they call the cops immediately. This didn't come from the government. This didn't come from the police force. The car alarms did not come. from the government, the thumbprint on your phone, which makes it less valuable to steal. That didn't come from the government. It is the free market that has introduced security and protection from crime, not the government. And if you allow that process to continue, we could live, you know, we could live like I lived as a kid, man. It was wild.

Starting point is 00:38:26 Like I grew up in London before all of the stuff that's been going on since. Age of three, four, five, six years old, I got on the bus with friends. I wandered all over the town. I'd go swimming. I'd go to the Imperial War Museum. I'd go to the Natural History Museum and look at the giant blue whale that they had in there at the time. Perfectly safe. Never any violence, never any problems.

Starting point is 00:38:48 And boy, that was a pretty sweet life. And I don't see any reason why we can't aim for that in the future. Beautiful. In terms of, I want to touch on the idea of the coming catastrophe, particularly with like the unfunded liabilities and the way that things have been kind of accelerating in the last couple of years. I'm curious if you think, if I remember back, the show started somewhere around 2007. I think that's when Free domain launched, around there. 05 was my first option, but I sort of got into the podcasting. I went full time at

Starting point is 00:39:12 07, yeah. Okay, beautiful. With that, since that time, in terms of freedom and kind of, we'll just kind of general society overall, have things been continuing to get worse or was COVID potentially the peak? And regardless of that, do we have to kind of have the coming catastrophe in order to reset? Meaning, is there any way out of it or no, we got to go through the storm and we're going to build something better on the other side? Yeah, I don't see any particular. way that, you know, the unfunded liabilities in the U.S. and north of $200 trillion on an economy less than 20 trills, so you really can't get out of that particularly easily. But I don't see any particular way for a soft landing. Of course, I was working for that for many years. And the soft landing

Starting point is 00:39:55 scenario was my ideal. And so to a large degree, I blame libertarians and minarchists for not embracing peaceful parenting, because if they had done that back in the day, I was talking about that even before my daughter was born, you know, we'd have an entire cohort of millions of young people who would be living demonstrations of the value of the non-aggression principle. Because with regards to libertarianism, you know, they're against violations of the non-aggression principle. Now, I don't know if it's because I was a business owner for so many years, but in a business owner scenario, you have to figure out which are the variables most under my control that are going to have the most beneficial effect.

Starting point is 00:40:38 Right. So, of course, you know, if you're a business owner, if they lower taxes, that's a plus. But if you pour all of your energy into trying to get taxes lowered and don't actually produce any goods and services for the economy, then you're not going to make it as a business. So you have to figure out what variables are under your control. Now with, and this is all prior to Bitcoin, of course. So my case of the libertarians was, based upon sort of my business sorting algorithm, what are the violations of, what are the most common violations of the non-aggression principle that we have the most control over?

Starting point is 00:41:09 Well, it's not foreign policy. It's not the federal reserve. It's not the control of the interest rates. It's not inflation. The most widespread violations of the non-aggression principle that we have the most control over is child abuse. And I got these, I don't know exactly how, I don't exactly know how to reproduce it. like a thousand yards down like bro this is a conference in england in english why are you

Starting point is 00:41:37 break in into fluent clingon mixed with some african clicking language i don't know what you're doing like no elvish here like it was somehow completely bizarre like no no no i want to argue about the laffer curve and i want to argue about a commodity backed currency and it's like you can't affect any of that you can't affect any of that and i always have a bit of a problem and when people want to fight a battle, they're never going to participate in. And they know they're not. They know. My contribution to world peace is to reenact using my chessboard, the Napoleonic battles.

Starting point is 00:42:10 And it's like, you know, that's all done. It doesn't do anything. You can't change anything. Or like all the people who were like, well, if I was in charge, it's like, well, you're not. You're not in charge. So what is the biggest violations of the non-aggression principle that you can do the most about? And that's child abuse. For sure.

Starting point is 00:42:23 It's, you know, even if you were to do something illegal to oppose the state, that's a bad thing and you're going to go to jail, right? But saying to people, don't hit your kids, that's legal. I mean, nobody's going to go to jail for not hitting their kids. And nobody's going to go to jail for saying you shouldn't hit your kids. And so it's the safest, the most effective, one where you can record the biggest change. I did a sort of back at the napkin calculation. And my show, because I've had almost a billion views and downloads by now,

Starting point is 00:42:54 my show has prevented a billion and a half assaults upon children. That's a big change of the world, right? And I would compare that to all the libertarians and say, well, here's my measurable reduction in violations of the non-aggression principle. I got a billion and a half reductions in violations of the non-aggression principle against the most helpless and dependent members of society, which is children. That's my record, and I stand by it enormously proudly. What have you got?

Starting point is 00:43:22 Well, I wrote some articles. and I advocated for this, and I donated money to, I don't know, Harry Brown back of the day, Michael Badenarick and whoever is the latest. And it's like, okay, what actual reductions in violence has your actions over the past couple of decades caused? And if the answer is nothing measurable, well, I mean, I'm an empiricist. I don't care about what actually changes in the world and not what people talk about. So I hope that I can't remember your original question, man. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:44:00 No, no, no, it's wonderful. And again, this beautiful parallel again, because I feel that in the same vein that your advocacy for peaceful parenting is a very effective and practical way of making change. I find Bitcoin very much the same. Like these paths actually work. They both fall perfectly in line with the non-aggression principle. I think this helps spread the ideas. And the one thing, the thousand yards stare, it's funny. Because I think it goes back to even just why people have a problem seeing a world without.

Starting point is 00:44:25 the state in the sense that it's again this is mind reading so i can show i'm going off the dangerous territory but i imagine for a lot of people um that would have any sort of resistance to the idea of peaceful parenting it's because there's probably an uncomfortable truth that there may have been somebody who they do even may potentially love that was an abuser in their life and it's not a conversation that they want to have it's that cognitive dissonance to be if i if i accept that idea or go with it that that may put me in a spot where i may need to talk to some people of what what happened when i was a kid well i think that's true because of course, if you're advocating for less foreign aid, you're not in a position. No libertarian

Starting point is 00:45:03 is in a position where they can affect that change. I mean, I guess it took Elon Musk and his team to shut down USAID. But if you are constantly shouting your barbarically brave phrases to the wind when no one can hear you and you can't change anything, it's kind of tough to look at you as heroic. It's like saying, I'm a great driver when your wheels are constantly six inches off the ground. And you're just, you know, hanging from a crane and slowly spinning. It's like, you're just playing. This is like a kid's game. You know, you do actually want to have traction in your promotion of virtue. When you have traction in your promotion of virtue, then you engender risk. Because when, I mean, I went through this in promotion of peaceful parenting, I was called like an

Starting point is 00:45:47 evil cult leader and then all of that sort of stuff. And it's like, well, I'm someone's got to stand up for the kids. And when you stand up for the kids, people who exploit and abuse kids, well, they don't like you very much. Of course, come not between the dragon and his prey, as the old saying goes. So if no one's bothered by what you're doing, you're not doing any good. Because if no evil-doer is at all bothered by anything that you do or say, I mean, it's nice that you're making a lot of sounds with your mouth hole, I suppose, and carving some syllables into the indifferent air that get blown away with the next puff of wind. But I don't want to pass by this life leaving merely a trail of useless syllables in my wake. I actually want to do good because the feeling

Starting point is 00:46:32 that you get from doing good is so great. They say heroin's greater than your best orgasm. And I would argue that doing good is a thousand times better than heroin. And so I don't want any fake, fake virtue happiness, right? So people who were like, well, I published this article and I spoke about about this and I did that and it's like, but what's measurable that you did? How many evil people have you inconvenience? Like if I'm a drug researcher and I want to cure cancer and my, at the end of my life, I have disturbed or thwarted the growth and reproduction of not one cancer cell, my life's been a complete waste. It's been worse than waste because the money that could have gone to me in doing my cancer research, well, the money that did go to me could have got to someone who actually

Starting point is 00:47:17 thwarts the progress of cancer. And so if you're not doing anything to actually thwart the progress of evil-doers, it is just a greedy, vainglorious waste. And people love to feel good. They don't want to do good, obviously, right? But the reason why nature has implanted into such an overwhelming joy at the achievement of virtue is because it's really freaking dangerous. right because you know i mean we can look through history and even across the world right now people who are doing good are regularly cut down and deplatformed and attacked and slandered and you know their lives are made complicated and difficult in a wide variety of ways and so that difficulty is baked into doing good which is why the happiness on the other side of doing good is so great and so what i don't want

Starting point is 00:48:04 is for people to think that they're doing good when they're not because they're drug addicts right so a a drug will make you feel good without actually fixing your problems or you having to do good in the world, right? And so I don't like drug addiction. I don't like people who lie to themselves about the good that they're doing when there's no measurable achievement to the good that they're doing. And so I want to stand between them and their drug. And the reason I do that is that if you stop thinking that you're good and you actually stop measuring the good that you can do and can achieve, then the happiness that you get is earned. And that's good.

Starting point is 00:48:43 We don't want socialism or communism when it comes to happiness. We want to earn our daily bread and we want to earn our daily happiness from virtue. But of course, that's the thousand yards dear, is when you go to people who think they're doing good and uses the old Socratic argument versus this office, right? Oh, you think you know justice. Let me ask you about justice. Oh, you think you know truth. You think you know virtue.

Starting point is 00:49:05 Let me ask you about these things. And so for me, it's like, oh, so you think you're doing good. What measurable good have you done? well, I've done this, that, and the other. It's like, okay, but how many evil people's plans have you thwarted and how many people have you inspired to practical virtue? Practical virtue, this is my old Anglo-Saxon, half-Irish, half-German roots of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, nicey, nicey talk, talk, how about some actual, you know, if I had an engineer who's constantly talking about, well, you know, I'm going to produce this great widget, it's going to be fantastic, and it's like,

Starting point is 00:49:32 can I see the widget at some point? Is that too much to ask? And can I see things manifest in the real world? or are you just platonically creating sky scenes and saying, you know, that cloud looks a lot like von Meezus. Well, that cloud looks a lot like freedom. It's like, great, can we actually achieve some freedom on the ground? No, I'd rather describe clouds. So, of course, when you come between drug addicts and their drug, they get kind of mad at you. And this is sort of what happened to libertarians where I was saying, you're going to need some measurable

Starting point is 00:50:01 virtue in the world. And the best thing that we can do is focus on parenting. And I talk to conferences about this. And of course, I have a whole theory of ethics. that has been largely ignored, even though it's absolutely robust. And I've debated it with, it's funny. I've debated more my theory of property rights and then on an aggression principle, more with non-libertarians than with libertarians, even though libertarians, it justifies everything

Starting point is 00:50:23 that libertarianism has. But I think it is, it's the old thing from a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy when the computer comes up, but the answer to life is 42. And the philosophers get really mad because they want to be able to keep debating it. And they can't if the answer is constrained to 42. So, yeah, people would rather talk about stuff than take on risks. I get that. People would rather daydream than inconvenience evildoers who are going to give them some blowback.

Starting point is 00:50:48 And I just, I don't like that. I think if you're not going to engage in the practical actions of promoting virtue and are willing to accept the inevitable blowback from people whose evil intentions you're thwarting, then you should not pretend to be a hero or champion of. virtue. If you're not angering anyone, you're not doing any good. And I just don't want people who provide the benefit of virtue without the actual achievement of virtue. And they, I mean, it's funny because I'm being back on X, I'm like, it's not my business plan. It just kind of happens. Who can I alienate and annoy today? And it's the constant flow of like outraged feminists and The atheist, you know, I had this tweet that did like, I don't know, eight plus million views

Starting point is 00:51:43 where I basically just said, hey, atheist, why don't you lie? I mean, religious people have an answer. Thou shall not bear false witness commanded by the almighty God. And atheists, what reason do you have? And, you know, all the atheists are like, oh, it's obvious, man. I get social benefits and I don't like to lie. And it's like, that's just hedonism. How's that different from heaven and hell?

Starting point is 00:52:03 That's just hedonism. Well, I get social benefits, so you're bribed. And what if you get social benefits from lying, which a lot of people do? And what if you like lying, which a lot of people do? Your argument doesn't work. It's hedonistic. So, you know, now I'm annoyed the atheist. So it is sort of a constant thing.

Starting point is 00:52:21 But a philosopher, of course, my job is to attempt to provoke thought by any means necessary, short of crucifixion. And that does cause a lot of problems. But of course, the thing is the people, I'm sure you've had this in your life, where someone says something, they're like, no, that's not it. Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it kind of, it sits like a splinter in the mind's eye.

Starting point is 00:52:43 It sits there, sits there. And eventually you're like, oh, fine, I guess it is a legitimate question. And it might be some months or even years down the road. I mean, when I first got into philosophy, you know, I got into Aristotle, I got into Iron Rand and other people. And they all had this, well, here's the good. Here's the virtue. Here's the right.

Starting point is 00:52:59 Here's the, you know, and I was like, yeah, that's really convincing. Yeah, yeah. the pursuit of excellence and the moral virtues that's the best life and ein rans the whatever serves man's life's best is the rational is the good and i'm like yeah that's really good but there was sort of part of me it's like yeah there seems to be some holes there seems to be like yours most moralists like they're preaching to they're preaching diets to thin people like well if you're already good then then here's your justification it's like yeah but what about the people who who aren't good you know how do we how do we not necessarily convince them but how do we know for certain

Starting point is 00:53:32 that they're absolutely wrong. Like Iron Rann says, that which serves man's life is the good, but lying in violence serves man's life a lot. I mean, I mean, I got deplanformed on lies. So it actually, you know, served the people who wanted my audience very, very well. Thank you very much. So that's why it took me like 20 years of puzzling around this stuff before I'm like, I remember sitting down just one day in my kitchen saying, I'm not getting up from this table. I drank a big giant coffee and I'm like, I know I'm going to have to pee, but I'm not getting out from this table till I solve this problem. So it's a bladder-fueled philosophical breakthrough. No, I got lost that I want to tease out. And I also want to point out that idea of just like

Starting point is 00:54:08 leaving an idea and what it can grow into later. I feel compelled to point out that you were my introduction to Bitcoin. And so that and what it grew into, it took time, was incredibly impactful on my life as a whole. I want to kind of pause on the idea of both the atheist measurable good and doing what's actually practical. I was listening to your conversation with Dr. Bob Murphy, reflecting on now and you're even going to church, I believe right now as well, too. And the thing that said out to me, and I don't really have a question here. It's more if I kind of want to get your intake, your thoughts on it, because I'm not sure what to make of it. So I saw a recent, not a great scientific analysis, but it was basically a personality breakdown of

Starting point is 00:54:42 Bitcoiners. And Bitcoiners, I think it's the Myers-Briggs, were hugely overrepresented in INTPs, which is thinkers and logicians, and hugely overrepresented in INTJs, which are roughly 5.4% of the population, but for Bitcoiners, it's more than 50%. percent. What I found particularly interesting about that. You said the first one was sort of rational logical. INTJ. Yes, the I NTJ is your thinkers and logicians.

Starting point is 00:55:07 And then I, sorry, that's I NTP. My apologies, I NTP. And then I NTJs was the architects. And what I found particularly interesting about that observation is I wasn't surprised that those were overrepresented in Bitcoin. But what it did surprise me is that in Bitcoin in the, based on Twitter and a lot of people that I interact with and talk to regularly, there is a strong undercurrent of Christianity and kind of spirituality within the Bitcoin community.

Starting point is 00:55:31 And from a personality standpoint, these stats on thinkers and logicians in particular are the lowest religious group. They report the lowest strong religious beliefs. And I found that there was some sort of parallel, but I couldn't quite put my finger on and maybe what's happening there, seeing you who wrote, I believe it was against the gods, seeing you coming from the atheist position and then now attending church and then having these logician bitcoiners also have, invested, it seems, in Christianity. I don't know if perhaps it's a rejection of the state and that also being a little bit kind of an atheist organization or if it's just purely empirical data. I just really want to get your thoughts on if you have any idea why Bitcoiners

Starting point is 00:56:09 might also be kind of converging on that same conclusion, at least that's what it looks like. Well, I'm sure you remember the story of Jesus and the money changers. Oh, yeah. I did a, I did an AI. Give me a, give me an image of Jesus flipping the tables. And of course, it was Jesus doing a somersault over the tables because it's AI, right? So it's not going to necessarily get my intention. But yeah, for sure. So the skepticism of corrupt money is foundational to modern Christianity. Now, I say modern Christianity because this is going back to Martin Luther.

Starting point is 00:56:45 Of course, I was raised in the Protestant tradition and the Anglican tradition, which looks at the Catholic Church as got too big, got too powerful, and got kind of corrupt. So Martin Luther came out of a rebellion against some of the more financially corrupt practices of the Catholic Church. And so there were these indulgences. Indulgences were the idea you'd go to limbo and you'd spend 10,000 years in limbo before getting to heaven. And if you sin, it's going to be 12,000 years. But if you give a certain amount of money to the church, they can take the excess virtues of Jesus and the saints and then get you down to 8,000 years. So they were selling, you know, 4,000 years less in limbo.

Starting point is 00:57:29 And that did not seem quite the most elevated application of price-like morality. And then it got to the point where you could even buy it ahead of time. So if you were going to go and spend the weekend with your mistress in Calais, then you could pay ahead of time to have that sin not accumulate upon you. And you were buying absolution even ahead of time. It's like a fine. It's legal for a fee. it got really it got really kind of kind of nuts right so the skepticism of the corrupting power

Starting point is 00:58:02 of money is certainly originated in jesus i mean it's one of the few violent acts that jesus and that's really important i mean jesus got nailed to a cross and said forgive them father for they know not what they so he could he could forgive guys pounding railway spikes through his hands and feet. But he used a whip on the money changers. Now, that's really, really powerful when you sort of drill down into the essence of it. So he saw people lying, cheating, stealing. He forgave thieves. He forgave adulterers. And he forgave those who murdered him. But he could not forgive those who profited of people's thirst for salvation and virtue. That was the greatest evil, according to Jesus' use of force, the greatest evil were the money changers in the temples

Starting point is 00:59:05 who charged you serious rates of interest or conversion rates for people who wanted to give their devotionals in the local currency. It's pretty wild. And certainly the idea that the modern central bankers are financially corrupt. And I don't even blame the individuals that much. The system is so corrupt that either only the corrupt want to run it or it corrupts those who go in even with the greatest ideals. And it keeps out those who wouldn't be corrupted like Ron Paul would not have been corrupted and so he's kept out. And they certainly tried to keep Trump out. His level of corruption, I would say, is maybe a smitch higher than Dr. Paul's, but certainly lower than others who are in that environment.

Starting point is 00:59:52 So I think for Bitcoiners, you cannot have freedom if you are constantly being stolen from. You don't have property rights if people take 10% of your crops every year and it escalates. You don't have freedom if people can go into debt using your signature. I mean, can you plan for your finances every time you're up on, oh, somebody bought a computer using my signature. Oh, somebody bought a car. Somebody bought a house. Somebody borrowed $10,000. You can't plan anything if you don't have control over your property.

Starting point is 01:00:31 And so the beautiful thing about Christianity is, well, one of the beautiful things about Christianity is the focus on free will. A coerced choice is not a choice. And so to maximize free will is essential in the Christian conception of virtue. It's one of the reasons why it was the Christians, and really the Christians alone, who worked so hard for many decades to end slavery around the world and did a very good job of that. And because if you're coerced, you can't make free will choices. If you can't make free will choices, you can't get to heaven. And so the more choice, the better.

Starting point is 01:01:08 And I was posting about this on X the other day. I've talked about it for years. Most people don't want to be in the stock market. Most people don't want to be buying bonds and other financial instruments of weird conceptual voodoo, right? They don't want to. The stock market was originally designed for people who had some knowledge of the industries, had some knowledge of the companies who were investing and knew what they were doing.

Starting point is 01:01:34 Most people don't want to be in the stock market. They don't want to be in the bond market. They just want to put the money at the bank and have it there when they get back. That's all. But when you've got inflation running it, even at a couple of percentage points a year, you're going to lose it all by the time you retire. So you don't even have the choice to hang on to your own savings. Like you work for, you know, you get taxed at 40%. You work for 50 years. 20 years have just been stolen. You were just a surf, a slave for 20 years, working for others. You know that in various places in the West, your tax freedom day is past the middle of the year. First six months,

Starting point is 01:02:08 you work for the government. Last six months, you get the table scraps for yourself. So we need more free will in the world. And this is why I focus on peaceful parenting. Children who are raised peacefully have choices. Children who are raised violently have mostly just reactions. They've got this trauma, this stress, this problem. This is why there's promiscuity and drug addiction and alcoholism and a lot of social conformity and so on because people are unhappy in themselves. So they self-medicate through the dopamine of conformity or drugs or alcohol or sex or something, or gambling, some things like that. So all they're doing is reacting to managing the pain of their childhood.

Starting point is 01:02:44 Children who are raised peacefully, they have a 360 view. They can do whatever they want. They're not running from pain and trauma and loneliness and so on. So they can actually make choices rather than just react to really negative internal stimuli. You know, you don't have much free will if you're hiking in the woods and you suddenly notice a bear chasing you. I mean, you can't be like, hey, I wonder what song I want to listen to next. I wonder if I want to go this way or this way or maybe I'll sit here for a bit and have some snacks

Starting point is 01:03:12 as long as I'm not in places in Canada, well, they'll find you $25,000 if you're not. Oh, my God, yeah. Oh, yeah, it's crazy. So if you're being chased by a bear, you have fight or flight. Like your entire existence has been reduced to fight or flight. And you have about the same liberties as someone in a prison. Actually, you have more liberties in a prison because you can do some things other than fight or flight. And so to maximize choice means to minimize the amount of predation and coercion in our lives.

Starting point is 01:03:42 So I want people to choose if they want to go into the stock market, not to be forced into there because otherwise inflation steals their money. And to maximize choice is one of the goals of Christianity. And it certainly is one of the goals of Bitcoin. You know, as you know, Bitcoin has outperformed gold, gold for since 20 years. 11. It's on pace with gold at the moment, even when the vast majority of people are still fairly unfamiliar with the orange pill. But I think the Christian goal of maximizing freedom, which means reducing compulsion, and the Bitcoin goal of maximizing freedom by reducing reactionary financial strategies that you're compelled into performing because

Starting point is 01:04:29 inflation steals your money. You know, if you've got a good that is decaying, it's a use it or lose it. And if you have a good that is appreciating in value, you know, it's funny. When I first, I was first brought to Canada in 1977 and a candy bar was a dime, a dime. And now it's a buck 50, buck 30, whatever it is, right? And that's just straight up theft. The money that is taken from you, I mean, if you put gold bars in the bank account, you come back in 10 years, and they're 30, 30 percent of them are gone, that's straight up theft. But if you put cash in your safety deposit box, your bank account, you come back 10 years later and 30% of it is gone, we've somehow become normalized to that. But it is straight up theft.

Starting point is 01:05:17 Counterfeiting is the thief of value. And I would love for people to make decisions about their lives, not in hysterical, panicked, fight or flight reaction because the bearer of inflation is chasing them and their wallets through the woods. And when you put your money in some other place, some fixed place, I obviously, I prefer Bitcoin to just about anything else, then you suddenly have choices because your money's just not being pilfered while you sleep. And, you know, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you think you hear a thump and a crash from downstairs, you don't have the choice to go back to sleep, right? You've got to get up and do something with it because you're in a situation of fight

Starting point is 01:05:56 or flight. And the general levels of anxiety, like, you know, mental health is getting worse. And, you know, there's lots of reasons for that. But I think one of the reasons is people just have this general anxiety that their lives are being stolen minute by minute through inflation. And, you know, we've yet to see the COVID stuff hit for real in terms of 40% of the US dollars ever were printed after 2020. And I think a lot of people's generalized anxiety is, you know, there's a bear. There's a bear around. There's a predator around who keeps stealing.

Starting point is 01:06:26 I mean, if you woke up in your house every morning something was stolen, you'd be pretty nervous. You'd have a tough time sleeping and you wouldn't feel comfortable or secure in your own home. You wake up, well, the blender's gone. You wake up, well, some milk is gone from the fridge. Oh, the box is gone from the basement. So somebody's coming in and stealing from you in your house every day, every night. You'd be really nervous and anxious. And I think that Bitcoin is also not only to give people back their free will and their choice because they're not being hunted by the bears of central banking, but it also gives them some peace and secure. and some mental health. You know, there was this old thing, but you'd take a million dollars or be hunted by a creature for the rest of your life, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, but we are hunted by a creature

Starting point is 01:07:11 every waking moment. I mean, during the time of this conversation, whatever money we have in fear, has diminished in value. And the US dollars lost like over 98% of its value since 1913, since the creation of the Fed. I mean, that's straight up theft and money transfer.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And, you know, I would have some respect for socialists if they talked about Bitcoin and ending central banking, but they don't because they want the ring. They don't want to end the ring. So I think that the coincidence of the maximization of free will is common to both the Christian mission and the bitcoins. And I think that's probably where those two circles overlap, if that makes sense. No, that's wonderful.

Starting point is 01:07:50 I never considered it from that standpoint and that does make sense. I'd also never consider that the story of the money changers in the whip was really the biggest example of violence compared to even being put on the cross. I got to think on that one a little bit more because that really... You can fight back against, like a thief, you can fight back against him. Like a thief, you know, puts a knife and you can jujitsu him or you can run or you can, and you can choose to surrender your wallet or whatever it is, but there's something. But when your money is stolen by sort of shadowy status or quasi-statist entities and there's nothing,

Starting point is 01:08:19 you can't fight back against that. And I think that's why Jesus got the most angry at the people who had the least choice. So, and why he forgave the people nailing him up was, because they didn't accept that he was the son of God. And so they didn't have the choice to treat him as anything other than a common criminal. And they believed that it was important to obey the state no matter what. So he said they don't know what they're doing. They don't understand that they have a choice.

Starting point is 01:08:42 But the money changers were feasting and profiting of people's desire for salvation and virtue and communion with God. And that's pretty terrible. No, it's a very, very good observation. I'm curious, just quickly even to, with looking at nation state adoption, of Bitcoin, do you have concerns about that basically co-opting or centralizing it in any sort of meaningful way? Or do you think it can basically, it'll just, it'll change them in the same way it may have changed other people? Oh, God, above, please let nation states start adopting Bitcoin. Please, God, let's get as many bitcoins into the wallets of politicians as humanly possible

Starting point is 01:09:19 because then they're invested in it and people tend not to shoot themselves in the foot. So I would love for nation states to adopt Bitcoin. In fact, I sort of put out this argument some time ago that the only chance that, say, America has to pay off its debt and unfunded liabilities is to get as many Bitcoin as possible so that people will take that in exchange for the devalued dollar when the bills finally come due and can't be wriggled out of or escaped. So, no, I, you know, I'd gift politicians Bitcoin if I could. I would love for nation states to start adopting Bitcoin. I would love for nation states to start accepting tax payments in Bitcoin because, of course,

Starting point is 01:09:56 that's the foundational driver behind fiat currency, fiat, of course, meaning compelled, is that the government requires it for your tax settlements. So no, gosh, if there are any nation states listening to this, Bitcoin is the greatest. Bitcoin is, you know, that old story of the woman who opened the little girl who opened the crate and all of these demons flew out and the world was infested with negative, horrible things.

Starting point is 01:10:20 But then at the very bottom was this fairy called hope. And that was what was like. So at the bottom of all of the, this predation and counterfeiting and central banking shenanigans, to put it mildly, is the orange fairy of hope. And without that, honestly, I don't know. I mean, one of the reasons I love Bitcoin is I don't know how I have hope without it. I haven't been over 40 years trying to get people to be rational. And it's worked in some ways, for sure. I mean, I've certainly changed a lot of people's minds, changed my own mind for the better. But without Bitcoin, can you imagine staring at the future?

Starting point is 01:10:54 without Bitcoin as the salvation, without the sky hook that gets you out of this inferno, I don't even know what it would be like. And this is why, for me, when I'm dealing with people in the world who don't understand Bitcoin, I'm like, oh, so you're a despairing nihilist because you've got no reason for help. It's a really tragic state of mind and a really sad state of mind. And to orange pill people, excuse me, in this way, is to return to them hope. and with hope comes free will because you're not doomed. That's beautiful.

Starting point is 01:11:28 Stephen, I do want to be respectful of your time, but I had two things I wanted to slip in quick if I could. First and foremost, have you come across, have you played around with Nostri yet? Because I couldn't find you on there, and that seemed like a wonderful place that you might want to consider spending some time. I've looked into it.

Starting point is 01:11:42 I have not looked into it enough. I hugely appreciate the reminder. I will look into it more. Okay, beautiful, wonderful. And then lastly, we kind of touched on it a little bit earlier on when you're talking about for peaceful parenting, you have the new AI generation. I found myself thinking last night,

Starting point is 01:11:55 it's really a shame. And this is going to be rude, so please feel free to tell me off. I was thinking about the works that you've done in terms of your books, and particularly the works of fiction. And I found myself wondering if a fiction book can have the cultural impact

Starting point is 01:12:08 that it once did, or because it's kind of a, I'm wondering if it's a medium of art that's kind of moving into the realm of cursive. And the idea that I had is I was wondering if you'd ever been giving some consideration to taking some of your works of fiction in particular, and turning them into full-on videos through AI generation.

Starting point is 01:12:24 I've actually, I was talking about this some months ago, I have a novel, it's a huge novel called Almost, which takes a German family and a British family from World War I to World War II. It would be at least 200 million plus to make as a miniseries. I genuinely believe that certainly over the next, whatever, a couple of years, maybe half a decade, that you will be able to feed a book into an AI and get a movie. Now, of course, you'll tweak it and you'll say you want this, that, or the other.

Starting point is 01:12:52 I think it would be fantastic and wild. I would rather, I'm a big one for waiting until the technology is ripe for that. And of course, I was a computer programmer for many decades. When the technology is in its sweet spot, then, you know, when it's not so easy that everyone can do it, but not so difficult that only a few specialists can do it, that's when I will certainly think of doing something like that. Because it's going to be just wild. I mean, they're really closing this uncanny valley with uncanny accuracy. And so I do think that it is possible.

Starting point is 01:13:25 And I agree with you. I think I certainly think that sitting down and reading a physical book, my wife is just going through Anna Karenina at the moment. And I'm like, oh, quaint paper. And so this is why I do record them as audiobooks and I'm a trained actor. So I have some experience and sort of bringing this stuff to life. But I do think that sort of sitting there in a hammock reading a paper book is kind of going the way of the dodo.

Starting point is 01:13:46 And I would love to see what AI. can do in terms of bringing. And novels are going to be better for this than screenplays because novels have the descriptions that the AI can interpret. You know, it's a windy parking lot, whereas scripts generally don't have those. It would be tough to feed Hamlet and get a movie out of Hamlet

Starting point is 01:14:05 because there's very little description of the environment. But a novel, of course, contains descriptions of the environment, contains descriptions of the characters, their hair color, their height, and their age and so on. And so I think AI is going to do just in general a fantastic job of bringing the stuff to life. And then when the barriers of transmission are removed, in other words, the very best stories, they don't have to go through a studio situation. They don't have to go through like one of the reasons I left the art world was because

Starting point is 01:14:36 it was just so relentlessly socialist and communist. Once that barrier is down, well, then it's like you and I. You know, you and I in another universe would just be chatting on the phone and, you know, shooting the shite and enjoying each other's thoughts, but now we get to do this, and it's broadcast to the world for eternity because the barriers are down. We don't have to convince some TV executive to let us have a show or something. So I think that I write some great stories, and they also have been strongly resisted by a very leftist. You know, I wrote a novel before I became a podcaster called The God of Atheists, which was about corruption in the business world

Starting point is 01:15:11 and the innocence of children. And it was reviewed. by, because I was in a very famous writing program and had a great teacher, and it was reviewed by a guy with a PhD in English literature who said, oh, finally, we have the great Canadian novel. I'd be waiting my whole life for someone to actually write the great Canadian novel, and he just praised it to the skies. And then when my agent tried to take it to publishers, they hated it with a virulence and a passion normally reserved for a drunk driver that runs over your favorite pet. And that's sort of hostility is something that as an artist, I've sort of encountered over the course of my career, both in, I mean, it happened in academia. It happened in the theater, in the theater world,

Starting point is 01:15:57 in writing, in playwriting. And it happened to a lesser degree in the business world because I was just so productive that people kind of had to find value in me because I did really good coding. So I think that if the barriers fall between the artists with the best and most compelling and interesting vision and an audience that wants to see things on the screen rather than read them in a paper book. I mean, if it becomes just a raw meritocracy without any intervening gatekeepers between the artists and the audience, I think I've got a real shot. That's awesome. And with that stuff, where can people go to get the books, check out the podcast, join the live streams back on Twitter. Give us all that information. Well, thanks. I appreciate that.

Starting point is 01:16:40 So peacefulparenting.com is the place to go for that. I have. a introduction to philosophy, essential philosophy.com. And to connect with me, you can just go to freedomain.com slash connect and all of my socials are there. And I really, really do appreciate the time today. It was a really, really enjoyable conversation. Thank you. Hey, you. Yes, you are 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.com. slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know,

Starting point is 01:17:21 plus full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like. 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 the 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 Stefan Maloney, please do hit that like button.

Starting point is 01:17:52 Subscribe so you don't miss future podcasts and check out the previous episode with Roland Bewick from Get Albi on Lightning AI and Noster.

BTC Sessions - The Solution to Your Enslavement: 3 Steps to Completely Change Society | Stefan Molyneux

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.