Visit BTC Sessions' website
Follow BTC Sessions on YouTube!
0:01 - Anarchy vs. Minarchy
0:37 - The Role of the State
6:29 - Currency and Corruption
12:11 - Peaceful Parenting Explained
13:26 - Spreading New Ideas
20:28 - Anarchism in Practice
31:04 - Dispute Resolution in Anarchy
36:09 - The Coming Catastrophe
43:07 - Child Abuse and the Non-Aggression Principle
44:35 - The Nature of Good and Evil
51:10 - Bitcoin and Freedom
58:01 - Christian Ethics and Free Will
1:03:40 - The Anxiety of Inflation
1:08:29 - The Future of Storytelling with AI
The interview begins with Nathan Fitzsimmons introducing Stefan Molyneux as they delve into a significant discussion about the dichotomy of anarchy versus minarchy, particularly in the context of Bitcoin and the role of the state in a hyper Bitcoinized world. Fitzsimmons poses thought-provoking questions about the possible structures of governance and the implications of Bitcoin on state power, especially when the traditional control over currency is diminished.
Stefan Molyneux articulates his belief that the core of statism revolves around the acceptance of the non-aggression principle, which underlines that initiating force against others is inherently immoral. He critiques the concept that a select group of people (the government) can wield the power to use force without it corrupting their nature. Molyneux argues that if individuals are viewed as inherently flawed, then vesting power in a government only enables the corrupt to run the system, perpetuating a cycle of evil and oppression. He draws parallels between various philosophical concepts in physics and morality, suggesting that universal principles can lead to a more ethical society if applied consistently across human interactions.
The conversation shifts towards the potential impacts of removing the state's control over currency, with Fitzsimmons asking whether adjusting incentives through currency change would be sufficient to transition towards a more peaceful society. Molyneux points out that while decentralizing currency like Bitcoin would reduce corruption associated with currency creation, the issue of coercion ingrained in societal structures, such as family and education systems, remains a crucial factor. He asserts that eliminating coercion from the upbringing of children, through the practice of peaceful parenting, could significantly contribute to a more virtuous society, fostering respect for individual rights and autonomy.
Fitzsimmons highlights a generational shift towards family formation within the Bitcoin community, contrasting with a prevailing anti-natalist sentiment in traditional societal circles. Molyneux elaborates on the fundamental principles of peaceful parenting as extending the non-aggression principle to parenting techniques, emphasizing the importance of nurturing children without coercion.
As the discussion progresses, Fitzsimmons raises the challenge of spreading the philosophies of peaceful parenting and Bitcoin amidst societal apathy and resistance to change. Molyneux acknowledges the difficulty of convincing people to adopt these ideals, stressing the need for individuals to engage in difficult conversations regarding virtue and morality. He emphasizes authentic living and self-consistent reasoning as central to persuading others, advocating for individuals to embody the virtues they wish to promote.
The conversation further explores practical anarchic models for resolving conflict, contrasting them against the state’s bureaucratic mechanisms. Molyneux presents a vision of alternative dispute resolution organizations (DROs) that operate under free market principles, emphasizing reputation and accountability rather than coercion, which could efficiently manage disputes without state intervention. He argues that much of the current legal system fails to serve the populace effectively, proposing that private entities could provide superior outcomes in managing conflict.
On the topic of state militarization and policing, Molyneux shares his perspective on how a society without centralized coercive institutions could still maintain order. He argues that a decentralized private defense model would emerge naturally, responding dynamically to threats without the same bureaucratic pitfalls seen in current government systems.
Addressing the looming economic crisis symbolized by unfunded liabilities, Fitzsimmons and Molyneux discuss whether society must face a catastrophic reckoning to pave the way for reform. Molyneux expresses skepticism about the possibility of a smooth transition, indicating that the debt situation is likely unsustainable and that societal upheaval may be necessary for transformation.
The conversation delves into the intersection of Bitcoin and Christianity, with Molyneux articulating why Bitcoin resonates with the spiritual principles of free will. He draws connections between the historical rejection of corrupt money in Christianity and the decentralizing nature of Bitcoin that empowers individuals with financial sovereignty.
As the interview concludes, Fitzsimmons invites Molyneux to consider the potential of AI-generated media to bring his literary works to life visually, presenting both the promise and the challenges of adapting storytelling in the modern technological landscape. Molyneux expresses openness to the possibilities that AI presents for narrative creation while emphasizing the importance of preserving quality and artistic integrity.
In summary, this conversation stretches across deep philosophical insights regarding governance, morality, parenting, and the transformative potential of Bitcoin in society. Molyneux’s perspectives challenge listeners to rethink conventional assumptions about authority, choices, and the fabric of interpersonal relationships in the pursuit of a more liberated and ethical society.
[0:00] Good morning, Stefan. Thank you so much for joining me today.
[0:02] Very excited for this conversation and glad to see you back on X. I want to have you on because I really want to touch on anarchy versus minarchy. And in particular, you know, in Bitcoin, there is a lot of conversations around like what is the role of the state and particularly what would the role of the state be in a hyper Bitcoinized world? A lot of times we'll hear the idea kind of smaller city states or minarchy, that kind of night watchman type setup. And even some people referencing Hoppe'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-Bitcoinized world, how do you envision the role of the state?
[0:35] What is government like at that point in time?
[0:37] And can it even exist if it doesn't have control over the currency?
[0:41] 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? What 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 is good. So the initiation of the use of force. Now, statism as a philosophy states.
[1:31] Says, probably states should probably be the wrong way of 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, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? So if everyone is good, we don't need the state. If the majority of 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.
[2:27] 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, if you 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.
[3:22] Before people like Tycho 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 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, 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.
[4:47] 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. 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.
[5:12] 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 just try to make everyone healthier. If government took over charity through the welfare state, they 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. They tax everyone since the 1930s. They've been taxing everyone for retirement benefits in the US. 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. It'd be nice 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 wand to just make this very powerful and, you know, quite coercive agency just follow the wing trails of the angels as they flap across the dusty lakes of virtue is really a fantasy.
[6:24] And society has progressed to the degree with which we have replaced coercion with voluntarism.
[6:29] And that's where we should still be going. And Bitcoin, of course, is central to that.
[6:34] Beautiful. Can you expand on that? And so 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 then in the downfall? Or is there more that needs to be done as well?
[6:54] Well, here's where I would advise everyone to put on their crash helmets and assume the position of whiplash, because here's where the conversation is going to go a little bit sideways to 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 Soren'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 centers of power, end up with double-digit inflation, which is what I think is hitting the U.S. At the moment, somewhere between 10 and 11 percent, and in some urban centers, 30, 25, 30 percent.
[7:46] 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 giant levers of 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 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.
[8:58] After a certain amount of really hard and thinking and trying lots of different approaches.
[9:03] I sort of finally kicked over the reason and the reason in general is that as children, 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. They'll just storm around, not talk to their kids, slam doors. And that's really scary for kids. You know, 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 it's suddenly a very different matter right then so so kids want to please their parents and kids want to um uh what they need their parents resources and affection you know we we evolved where there were a lot of predators and a lot of uh a scarcity of food and so you didn't want to be the least favorite kid among your parents 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.
[10:31] 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.
[10:44] Coerced against are bratty 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 grow 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 in the same way that if you grow up speaking English, then that's just the language.
[11:04] Speaking or having the language coercion inflicted upon them, they have to say, and it kind of gets ground into your bone marrow, that you need coercive force to run any group of people. And it's in the household, it's in the schools. And then when you grow 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 can be in Japanese, I don't know what you're doing, but I do start looking around for Godzilla monsters. 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 eBooks, 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 have 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
[12:07] beginning. So I can tell you it really works. And so we've got to really work on parenting.
[12:11] 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.
[12:23] It's very interesting, and I'm glad that you brought that up too, because I do see, it's funny, in my past, we'll say fiat life and those kind of other friends and from beforehand, not a lot of optimism, a lot of, what's the word I'm looking for, natalism. They're not getting married, they're not having kids, they're not very interested in it.
[12:37] Oh, like an anti-natalism thing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
[12:40] But on the Bitcoin side, I'm glad you brought that up. I see a ton of like babies being born, family formation, the same sort of thing. 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, 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 tenets? 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?
[13:26] Tell me a bit more what you mean.
[13:28] Meaning that in a sense that if we want people to if we think that peaceful parenting, along with decentralized currency, is an important component of moving to a 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.
[13:45] 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. 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 at 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?
[15:00] 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 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.
[16:03] And the degree to which you are loved or can be loved through thinking for yourself and being 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 the 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 individuality than a couple of, you know, back of the 19th century watercolor painting thumbnails of people 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 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. So 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. I've been married for 23 years, and it's better and better every year.
[17:23] 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. 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 chaff marks on my inner thighs and gasping out, you know, clots of bloody matter from my lungs. So you want to show 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 benefit, 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 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. Most people would just go along. They just, they don't, 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 yourself.
[18:46] And also get people not to be afraid of battle, but to love it, to love battle, to fight for virtue, to thwart evil is...
[18:56] The most foundational, positive meaning to life. And so don't be afraid of battle. Yeah, people are going to like, 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 disagreeing with people in your life, you're like, oh, we get all this fainting couch and, oh, I'm going to need my smelling salts. I have to lie down. It's like, come on, be a hero, be a superhero, speak up for the truth. Yeah. You'll get into a little trouble. Yeah. People will get mad at you and, and all of that. But you go, stop watching all of these fantasy heroes. Oh, Aragorn, so brave, you know, for Frodo. And it's like, can you, can you do the same for the truth? No, I'm going to join the Orc army and step on the faces of hobbits. And it's like, stop watching, uh, uh, noble, uh, verbal. Well, I mean, of course I want to keep it verbal and peaceful, but stop watching Noble Combat and thinking you can never 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.
[20:04] That's beautiful. I drew an immediate connection to the idea of toxic Bitcoin maximalists, the guys on Twitter that are going hard. But it's the same thing. It's a virulent 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 these well-respected the kind of New York Times economist getting
[20:24] taken down in the comments by anon accounts with, you know, laser eyes coming right at them.
[20:28] 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 Mises rabbit hole, but they're still really struggling to see it actually get to completion, like the full anarchist state that 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 Anarchy and was it Everyday Anarchy?
[20:48] Practical Anarchy, yeah.
[20:49] Practical Anarchy, thank you. Just to give 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-Bitcoinized world. 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 them voluntarily, Stef?
[21:18] 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 we said 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, get a get a dna test and see yeah right it's easy to solve but she's talking about this thing's going to cost five million dollars uh to to defend against these defamation claims right i mean that is not a practical 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, that'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.
[22:24] And you've got lawyers charging 500,000, 1500 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 to stay to society, went to a free society, because he's looking at these walls of law books and saying, how can we expect the ignorance of the law is no excuse? It's like, sure, if it's the common law and you've got three rules, 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 a Tom Lorenzo book, like three felonies. 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, uh, well, you know, there's this other boat we should go to. It's like, but this is a lovely boat. It's like, yes, but it's the Titanic. So you might want to think about some other place because this one is, is not working. So, uh, with dispute resolution, . One of the, so the way that you work it, let's say you and I enter into a contract, right? You're going to pay me a thousand dollars. 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.
[23:53] 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 thousand dollars. 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.
[24:17] And what they do is they insure our contract. So we pay one percentage point, right? So 10 bucks 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 the thousand dollars, they go to you and say, Hey man, you've got to pay the thousand dollars. And they even have access to get the money from you. If you don't agree, right? Cause 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, a part of the risk and reward of living. So we have an agency that resolves our disputes. Now that agency wants as few as a few a 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. And so they'll try and reduce the amount of conflict 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 DRL 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? Ah, 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.
[25:39] 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 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.
[26:09] So even if only Bitcoin takes over only the B2B system, that's a massive economic win as a whole. And Lightning Network or other things could deal with smaller ones. So yeah, you have ways of resolving disputes where you have efficiency processes, you get rewarded for 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, crime is provoked through child abuse. Right now, what incentive does the state have to prevent people 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.
[27:16] Two and 10 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 skin and then you say you got to fix this 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 so we don't like but in the middle of a smallpox epidemic you're like we're gonna have forever we're gonna 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 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. And he just went kind of crazy for whatever reason. So solar radiation, demonic possession, whatever's going on.
[28:32] 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 have signed a contract in order to participate economically in a society. He would sign a contract that says, if I'm found to be 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 us, right? If they can repossess the car, they can take us to court, they can do also be set of 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.
[29:31] And like you go into a restaurant, you don't sign a contract saying, I'm gonna pay, there's just an 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 won't obey social rules, is 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.
[30:09] 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 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 health care, 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 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 got your DROs, with regards to the police,
[30:59] you've got DROs and you've got economic ostracism and the initiation of the use of force.
[31:04] You can always do third party self-defense, right?
[31:08] And with regards to the military, well, how well is the military in America, say, how well is all 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. And 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 the welfare state 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 the most unbelievably cruel things that's going on in the world right now.
[31:58] So with regards to the military, well, you have a traditional sense of military, which was throwing massive amounts of soldiers against each other. That's sort of the most part. But wars are not started by the soldiers. Wars are started by the leaders. 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.
[32:30] 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 no organization, maybe a couple of indigenous people with blow darts 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 which you can use to take, 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. 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 pay taxes. And then that 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 giant statist armies trying to deal with insurgents.
[33:58] 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. 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.
[34:20] 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 it. And the same way, 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, 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. I mean, 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. 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.
[35:19] 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. 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. 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.
[36:09] 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 over 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 Freedomain launched, somewhere around there.
[36:23] 05 was my first article production, but I sort of got into the podcasting and went full time at 07. Yeah.
[36:28] Okay, beautiful. With that, since that time, in terms of freedom and kind of, well, 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?
[36:50] 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 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, 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.
[38:09] Now with, and this is all prior to Bitcoin, of course. So my case of 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 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 violation to the non-aggression principle that we have the most control over is child abuse.
[38:39] And i got these i don't know exactly how i don't exactly know how to reproduce it, A thousand yards, like a thousand yards there. Like, bro, this is a conference in England and in English, why are you breaking into fluent Klingon 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 when people want to fight a battle they're never going to participate in. And they know they're not.
[39:17] They know my contribution to world peace is to reenact, using my chessboard, the Napoleonic battles. 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. 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, my show has prevented a billion and a half assaults upon children. That's a big change in 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. Well...
[40:40] Well, I wrote some articles and I advocated for this and I donated money to, I don't know, Harry Brown back in the day, Michael Battenerich 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 have, I'm an empiricist. I don't, I 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, I went too far. I got lost in my own brain fog.
[41:18] I've seen this beautiful paraleigh 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-yard stare, it's funny, because I think it goes back to even just why people have a problem seeing a world without the state in the sense that it's, again, this is mind-reading, so I'm going off the dangerous territory, but I imagine for a lot of people 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 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 accept that idea or go with it, that may put me in a spot where I may need to talk to some people about what happened when I was a kid.
[42:09] 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 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 evil cult leader and all of that sort of stuff.
[43:05] And it's like, well, someone's got to stand up for the kids.
[43:07] And when you stand up for the kids, people who exploit and abuse kids, well, they don't like you very much. Of.
[43:18] If no one's bothered by what you're doing, you're not doing any good. Because if no evildoer is at all bothered by anything that you do or say, I mean, it's nice that you're making a lot of.
[43:30] 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 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 virtue happiness, right? So people who were like, well, I published this article and I spoke about this and I did that. And it's like, but what's measurable that you did? How many evil people have you inconvenienced? Like if I'm a drug researcher and I wanna cure cancer and 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 a 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 gone to someone who actually thwarts the progress of cancer.
[44:36] And so if you're not doing anything to actually thwart the progress of evildoers, it is just a greedy, vainglorious waste.
[44:49] And people love to feel good. They don't want to do good, obviously, right? But the reason why nature has implanted and is 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 is for people to think that they're doing good when they're not because they're drug addicts, right? So 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 start measuring the good that you can do and can achieve.
[45:55] Then the happiness that you get is earned. And that's good, don't we? 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 yard stare, is when you go to people who think they're doing good and uses the old Socratic argument versus the sophists, right? Oh, you think you know justice? Let me ask you about justice. Oh, you think you know truth? You think you know virtue? 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, 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 Mises. Well, that cloud looks a lot like freedom. It's like, great. Can we actually achieve some freedom on the ground? No, I would rather describe clouds. So, of course, when you come between drug addicts and they're drunk, they get kind of mad at you. And this is sort of what happened to libertarians when I was saying.
[47:15] You're going to need some measurable virtue in the world. And the best thing that we can do is focus on parenting. and I talked at 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. It's funny, I've debated more my theory of property rights and the non-aggression principle more with non-libertarians than with libertarians even though libertarians, it justifies everything that libertarianism has. But I think it's the old thing from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the computer comes up and 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. 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 I mean, it's funny because.
[48:42] 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 just a constant flow of like outraged feminists and the atheists. I had this tweet that did like, I don't know, eight plus million views where I basically just said, hey, atheists, 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? Well, 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?
[49:25] 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. But a philosopher, of course, my job is to attempt to provoke thought by any means necessary, short of crucifixion. And, um, that does cause a lot of problems. But of course, the thing is that people, I'm sure you've had this in your life where someone says something, you'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 or sits there, 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 Ayn Rand and other people. And they all had this, well, here's the good. Here's the virtue. Here's the right. 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 Ayn Rand's the whatever serves man's life's best is the rational, is the good. And I'm like, yeah, that's really good.
[50:27] But there was a lot of part of me is like, yeah, there seems to be some holes. There seems to be like, you almost, most moralists, like they're preaching to, they're preaching dyes to thin people like uh 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 that they're absolutely wrong like Ayn Rand says that which serves man's life is the good but lying and violence serves man's life a lot I mean we I mean I got deplatformed on 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,
[51:10] I'm not getting out from this table.
[51:11] 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, uh, it's, it's a bladder fueled philosophical breakthrough. Sorry, I've led you on a real journey here. So I hope that makes sense.
[51:24] No, I got lots that I want to tease out. And I also want to point out that idea of just like leaving an idea and what it can grow into later. I just 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 that you're even going to church, I believe, right now as well, too. And the thing that stood 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 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%. What I found particularly.
[52:17] Interesting about that- You said the first one was sort of rational, logical INTJ.
[52:22] Yes, the INTJ is your thinkers and logicians. And then I, sorry, that's INTP. My apologies, INTP. And then INTJs 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, at least 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. And from a personality standpoint, the 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 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 heavily 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 might also be kind of converging on that same conclusion, at least what it looks like.
[53:32] Well, I'm sure you remember the story of Jesus and the money changers. Oh, yeah. I did an AI. Give me an image of Jesus flipping the tables.
[53:43] 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. 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, you know, 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, excuse me, 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. And that did not seem quite the most elevated application of Christ-like morality. And then of 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. Now that's fine.
[55:11] It's legal for a fee.
[55:12] It got really, it got really kind of nuts, right? So the skepticism of the corrupting power of money is certainly originated in Jesus. I mean, it's one of the few violent acts that Jesus did. Now, 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 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 off 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 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.
[56:41] 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 smidge higher than Dr. Paul's, but certainly lower than others who are in that environment. 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 is every time you open, 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. And so the beautiful thing about Christianity is, well, one of the beautiful things about Christianity is to focus on free will. A coerced choice is not a choice.
[58:01] 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. 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. 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 in the bank and have it there when they get back. That's all. But when you've got inflation running at even 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.
[59:16] You were just a serf, 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 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 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 uh 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 and so on right 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 what's your you can't be like hey i wonder what song i want to listen to next and i wonder if i want to go this way or this way or maybe i'll sit here for a bit and and uh and have some snacks as long as i'm not in places in canada where they'll find you 25 000 if you're not indigenous for hiking in the woods oh yeah it's crazy so 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.
[1:00:46] 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. 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 since 2011. 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 inflation steals your money.
[1:01:50] You know, if you've got a good that is decaying, it's 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.
[1:02:11] 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% 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. Counterfitting 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 bear 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 is 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 got to get up and do something with it because you're in a situation of fight 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 that 40% of the U.S. dollars ever were printed after 2020. And I think a lot of people's generalized anxiety is...
[1:03:41] You know there's a bear there's a bear around there's a predator around who keeps stealing 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 So not only does it 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 security and some mental health. You know, there was this old thing, but you take a million dollars or be hunted by a creature for the rest of your life and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, but we are hunted by a creature every waking moment. I mean, during the time of this conversation, whatever money we have in fiat has diminished in value. And U.S. 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. 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 Bitcoiners. And I think that's probably where those two circles overlap, if that makes sense.
[1:05:07] No, that's wonderful. I never considered it from that standpoint. And that does make sense. I'd also never considered 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.
[1:05:19] Because you can fight back against, like a thief, you can fight back against him. Like a thief puts a knife and you can jujitsu him or you can run or you can choose to surrender or your wallet or whatever it is, but there's something. But when your money is stolen by sort of shadowy statist or quasi-statist entities and there's nothing, 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. 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 know not what they're doing. They don't understand that they have a choice, but the money changers were feasting and profiting off people's desire for salvation and virtue and communion with God. And that's pretty terrible.
[1:06:12] No, that's a very, very good observation. I'm curious, just quickly, even too, 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?
[1:06:28] 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, because then they're invested 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'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, that's the foundational driver behind fiat currency. Fiat, of course, meaning compelled, is that the government requires it for your tax settlements.
[1:07:21] 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. But then at the very bottom was this fairy called hope. And that was what was it. So at the bottom of all of 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'd have hope without it. I haven't spent 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?
[1:08:13] Without Bitcoin as the salvation, without the skyhook 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 hope.
[1:08:30] 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 uh hope and um and with hope comes free will because you're not doomed.
[1:08:44] That's beautiful stefan i do want to be respectful of your time but i had two things i want to slip in quick if i could first and foremost have you come across have you played around with nostril 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.
[1:08:59] I've looked into it. I have not looked into it enough. I hugely appreciate the reminder. I will look into it more.
[1:09:05] 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, 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 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.
[1:09:42] I've actually 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, year, 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. 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 um.
[1:10:35] 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. And I agree with you. 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 portrait.
[1:10:52] And so this is why I do record them as audiobooks, and I'm a trained actor, so I have some experience in 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. And I would love to see what AI can do in terms of bringing.
[1:11:10] I mean, 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 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 it was just so relentlessly socialist and communist. Once that barrier is down, well, then it's like you and you know, you and I in another universe would be chatting on the phone and, and, uh, you know, shooting the shite and, 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.
[1:12:23] Before I became a podcaster, called The God of Atheists, which was about corruption in the business world 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've been 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 a drunk driver that runs over your favorite pet and that 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 um the theater as in the theater world 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.
[1:13:49] 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.
[1:13:57] Well, thanks. I appreciate that. So peacefulparenting.com is the place to go for that. I have an introduction to philosophy, essentialphilosophy.com. And to connect with me, you can just go to freedomain.com/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.
[1:14:16] Very welcome. We'll talk soon. Cheers.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
