606: Liberty Under Attack, Ben Swann, Orwell's 1984, Thought Police, Sovren.Media, Censorship & Surveillance, Amazon Cloud

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It is my pleasure to welcome a returning guest back to the show. It's been a few years and it's great to have Ben Swan. He's an investigative reporter, investigative journalist. He covers some awesome content. Great stories not being covered by the thought police media, the mainstream media. Ben, it's just a pleasure to have you back, coming to us from Atlanta. How are you?

I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me on. I love how you call them the thought police. That's really what they are, right?

They are the thought police. We are living in 1984, my friend.

Really amazing.

We didn't realize that 1984 was a playbook.

Yeah.

All this time you thought it was a warning. Instead, it became a blueprint.

It's an instruction manual. Yeah. For the. For the totalitarian dictators. And, you know, recent events over the past year and a half or so have really, as I've been saying, Ben, they've checked all the boxes for tyrannical dictators. I mean, control of where you go dehumanize by covering your face, you know, medical control, control over our bodies. All that sovereignty is being lost. Of course, SPE has been extremely limited. Tell us what you're working on. You've got a new social network, right?

Yeah, we are. We're launching a new social network. It's called Sovereign. You use the term sovereign, Right? So S o V R e n. So Sovereign is a premium video streaming video, live streams as well as social media platform. And the idea here is just we got to put some sanity back into our culture. We've got to return the ability of people to speak for themselves. But you know, it's interesting. It's not just the thought police, right? It's the belief police. It's this idea that big tech overlords have decided they're going to control how everyone believes and how they think and the thoughts that are allowed to enter their head before they even get there. Right. This whole concept is really about completely manipulating and controlling the population. And it's insane. We all know it's insane. I think what has shocked people, it's shocked me certainly, is that, you know, some of us have been warning about this kind of thing for 30 years, right? 20 years, since 9, 11. And we said, hey, listen, this is what's happening. They're trying to control your travel. They're trying to restrict how you think about civil liberties, how you think about your rights as an individual. But we didn't realize, at least I didn't, that it was all going to move so fast. I mean, it's like rolling down a hill, right? It picks up speed as it goes. In the last four years, last three years, two years, and then the last, you know, 18 months to one year, we've seen this rapid acceleration taking place in this space, not of. Only of controlling the way people think, but what they believe, as I said, and you know, every aspect of our lives. And I think there's, at least because it's picked up so much speed, some people are starting to push back.

One concept that is part of this whole playbook is the idea of a memory hole. And they are creating quite literally a hole in the memory of our entire culture, the entire world. You know, it goes from all. All the crazies taking down statues, right. And, you know, revising history in the textbooks. That's been going on for decades. But it's just, you can't think a thought if you don't know something happened.

That's right.

Right. I mean, there's just no way to even consider it. You know, one of the things I talk about a lot, Ben, is the saying, you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. And it might be more dangerous. The things people never see or hear. And we don't know why we might never see or hear it because nobody knows what the algorithms are doing. Nobody knows why certain things show up on a Google search result or they don't show up and in a newsfeed on a, on a platform or suggestions for YouTube videos or whatever. Right. Like, it's just what's not there is maybe the biggest concern. Right?

Yeah, that's such a great point. We don't think about what we don't see.

Right.

You don't know what you don't know. And I think there is a. An absolute concerted effort. You're talking about the memory hole is so interesting because this past summer, I was in Europe for a month. We went to several different countries. We went to Greece, Spain, Italy and France. And I was kind of documenting protests in those countries. And there are a lot of protests happening, a lot of people in the streets in those countries, which, as an American headed over there. I didn't know, because we don't see it on TV here, we don't see it on the Internet here. It's really been scrubbed. And it's so interesting because a lot of times when I got back and I posted videos while I was there, and I posted stuff when I got back, a lot of them were removed because they were considered to be violent, which is fascinating. We've had a whole series of violent protests that took place across this country last year, and none of those were deleted by tech overlords.

They were glorified as peaceful protests, which nothing could be further from. The how is burning down a building and breaking windows and beating people up, which literally happened quite a few times, how is that considered peaceful? Yeah, Insane.

Exactly Right. And yet the algorithms that are used. Right. Actually promoted that content, pushed it out to as many people as possible. And so one thing I thought was interesting when we were in Europe, though, is talking to people there, because Europe is not that far removed in terms of time from totalitarian governments. Right. And so if you go to France, they remember a time when they had a dictator in the form of Mussolini, who was a fascist and had designs for how to completely rewrite right next door in Italy.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

So in Italy, you know, people feel that way. In France, they remember, you know, a guy named Adolf Hitler who rolled over their country and was a totalitarian. Right. And so when you talk to people in those countries, they know what totalitarianism looks like. They know what it smells like. They've seen it before. And so there's a very different response when you go to those countries, when you go to Eastern Europe countries. I've been talking with a number of people from Eastern Europe, right, Who as recently as, what, 30, 40 years ago, we're still under communism and now come and say, listen, we know exactly what it looks like because we lived under it, and that's where we're headed. But Americans don't understand that because we've never lived under that. Right. So we keep giving the benefit of the doubt and saying, well, they're not really totalitarians. They don't really want to control everything. They just want to make Things better? No, they don't. And I think that if you don't believe that, listen to people who lived under it because they will tell you this is exactly what it looks like.

You know, that's hopeful to hear that, Ben. But I tell you, the younger people, especially in Western Europe, they're a disaster. I mean, they just don't get it. They're so lost, you know, because their system has been completely manipulated like our system. So let's hope the older people in Europe who live through those disasters are really telling those stories to their kids. Well, they're hardly having any kids, so when they die off, they'll, you know, they'll take the memories with them.

And what's interesting about that is, you know, when you think about how the governments in those countries have utterly failed their populations, right. They've created these austerity programs. They've created basically from cradle to grave government programs to take care of you. And they've left their societies with no real hope of this idea of self determination. So if you go to a country like Greece, and Greece is a really interesting place, if you go to Athens, there's the touristy part. And then of course, I went to the non touristy part. Right. And going into these areas, I've never seen so much graffiti in my life, I got to tell you. And I grew up in a community that was full of graffiti. Nothing like this. It's every square inch of every building. They have 40%.

Same with Spain. I mean, Spain is terrible like that too.

It looks like that too. Yeah. 40% joblessness among. And that's among the entire population of people under 30. 40% of them are unemployed. But what's crazy is a lot of them don't want to be unemployed. We have this American idea that, oh, well, they're just lazy and they don't want to work. When you talk to people there, they want to work. The problem is there's no jobs there. There's no economy there. Nothing's been built. And so the expectation is you're just going to take whatever we give you. And it creates a horrific set of circumstances.

Yeah. It makes people dependent on the government because they've eviscerated the businesses. You know, the governments are just in massive amounts of debt. You know, whether it could be Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece. I mean, all of them, they're all bankrupt, essentially. Right? Absolutely. So it is a terrible thing for sure. Talk to us about some of the stuff you've been covering that's gotten you into some trouble.

Yeah.

Well, we don't want to mention certain words here.

Right. We'll skip over certain words. We'll self censor on these particular platforms. We won't have to on mine, but on these platforms. So, you know, as recently as just a month ago, in fact it was literally one month ago, YouTube actually, you know, yanked me for the. Finally happened. And I've had a channel for over 10 years, hundreds of millions of views on my videos and was finally yanked. And of course I got yanked for just.

Essentially sharing government numbers, government data.

Right. And from, from the government's. We. I don't even want to mention the name of that agency. The three letter agency starts with C, right?

That's right.

You were sharing their data, the data published by the cd, you know, and they, they told you that was the reason that they kicked you out.

So what they did was they removed, they removed the video in one email and then the next email I got said, your channel has been deleted. And so you're allowed to appeal that deletion. They didn't say specifically why. They just said that you have violated our community guidelines and you know, two words with M. Right. That one of them is misinformation. And so, you know, after I received that I was like, okay, so there's a chance to appeal. So I appealed and within 30min minutes had an automated response. Your repeal appeal has been denied. Your channel has been deleted. You're not allowed to recreate it and you're not allowed to ever create another channel on YouTube again. It's not just a sentence for this channel, it's your ban for all time.

So the idea of due process and trial by a jury of your peers is completely out the window. There is no due process. They are acting as judge, jury and executioner.

Yeah, absolutely. And listen, it's their platform. So you could make the argument, well, they're a private company, but no, you.

Can'T, you can't make that argument anymore.

I think the term that bothers me, and this is why I think there's even an issue of liability on their part, is if they want to say, hey, this is our policy and we're a bunch of jerks and this is what we want to push on society. Just say that. But don't say you as the content creator Ben Swan, are spreading misinformation. Right. When you use that term, you're actually defaming me. That's liable to say that. I am, I am spreading misinformation because I can make the argument that, hey, show me, show Me, data that proves that what I'm saying is misinforming people. If I'm sharing government. Government numbers. Because if I am, then that government agency is misinforming people, not me.

And guess what? That agency. Guess what? That agency has a channel.

Right? That's right.

Yep. I've been to it. So there's a lot of layers to this. So maybe it's really a defamation lawsuit and that's the way to. To get at them. You know, the Communications Decency act is such a complete fraud that is so misused, it's unbelievable. You know, Ben, for maybe 10 years now, I've been saying on this channel that what needs to happen here is we need to use our antitrust laws to break up these giant monopolies. Or, and, or we need to regulate them like utility companies with common carrier laws. You know, if we're talking on the phone and paying our phone bills and the phone company doesn't like what we say, they don't get to yank our phone. Okay? And they don't yet. I. Believe me, that's where it's going. We all know that. And. Or the algorithms need to be made public so that all the computer geeks in the world can see why we see what we see and don't see what we don't see and what's going on with these algorithms. Right. Because this is all just a big secret. This is like a star chamber. It's like a North Korean court. It's absolutely scary what is going on right now. And I have said that I think this, you know, forget about, you know, what's been going on in the last year and a half. I think this is the biggest problem facing humanity. I really do.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think it touches everything. Like you said, set aside what's been going on for the last year and a half. Like. Like, let's just talk about the political part of it. Right? We have a lot of laws in this country that restrict how you are able to influence an election, how you're able to influence who people vote for. Big tech companies. There's all this talk about, you know, the last election and what no one's talking about.

Be careful using that word because several of my pieces have been removed for using that word.

Right, right. Because you can't even say anything. Right. You can't say anything about it.

And you know what's one of the big offenders, too? It's one nobody even talks about. It's Vimeo. That. That's another big one. They're disgusting. I mean, they just remove everything. It's unbelievable.

Oh, they absolutely do. Or how about another company that a lot of people don't know is doing this is Dropbox.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Literally go into your private Dropbox and delete files out if they disagree with the files that you have. I mean, it's, it's, it's.

That is unbelievable.

Yeah.

So soon, so soon Google Drive is going to do the same thing. They're going to, they're, they're reading your private stuff and they're going to just delete files. So your files will be in a memory hole.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I give you another one.

I bet, yeah, Apple's going to do that too, because they have their drive, their cloud drive. Icloud.

Absolutely. Cloud. Well, Apple's already, remember Apple was said they were going to start going through everyone's icloud drives looking for child pornography. Right. They were setting up algorithms to look for that. But of course, once you're in, you can look for anything you want. Right? Because you've now set the precedent that we're here for the public good. And one thing that people don't ever seem to recognize, and I don't know how they don't see this, is that when you hear a tech company say, hey, we're going after child pornography, that is a red flag. Because what it tells you is, number one, they're all terrible at it. Actual child pornography. They're terrible at actually finding that. But what they do is they pick the thing that's the most outrageous to the population so that people will say, oh, yeah, that's totally.

Of course, we need that. Right, yeah. So we'll give up our freedoms for that. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. And imagine, I mean, think about that on, on that subject, right, with, with Apple doing that. Right? So basically what you're going to have is you're going to have some guy at Apple probably in a foreign country in the Philippines or something. You know, they're, they're paying them six bucks an hour and you're going to have some guy. They're looking at.

Photos. Yes, the photos of your kids. I mean, who knows what's going to go on with that? And let's take it back, by the way, to the beginning of this conversation, Ben, and you mentioned it. You know, I want to just remind people how quickly people forget. Before 9, 11, 20 years ago, there was big talk about the government using something called Carnivore, and they were going to put this Carnivore Device. It was like a server rack device into all the Internet service providers, AOL, etc, all the companies of the day. Right. You know, and they were going to put this in there and there was outrage against it. People were outraged. I remember reading so many articles about this, you know, 21 years ago, okay, about Carnivore. And we've got to stop Carnivore. It's ridiculous that the government should monitor these communications and censor them. Then 9, 11 happened. Nobody talked about Carnivore. Nobody was opposed to it anymore. Okay? Now think about it. We move forward a little bit and we've got the current events. Right. Well, remember 10 years ago? No, don't even go that forward 10 years ago. Remember all the outrage against the NSA?

Yes, right.

You know, remember. Remember seeing the memes on social media that said, hey, I don't have to back up my hard drive anymore because the NSA has a backup?

Yep.

Who's talking about the NSA anymore? We've all accepted that. We've accepted Carnivore, we've accepted nsa, we've accepted surveillance of every type. And now we're accepting it from all these companies who are acting maybe as proxies for the government doing what the government is not allowed to do. If the government censors your speech, then, you know, they, they're violating your civil rights. But if a private company that is getting favors from the government, because of course they have lobbyists, armies of them, that exchange favors that, you know, you can't do anything.

That's right. No, think about something you said though, about the nsa, which is really interesting too, because this also goes back to the part of what's happened in media is that 10 years ago, one of the reasons that people were angry at the NSA and upset about this was because the NSA was still seen as a government agency that was intruding into our lives, was breaking the law, was completely defiant of Congress. And then there were these crazy people at the time, conspiracy theorists, who would talk about the deep state and there's this bureaucratic state that's actually running the government and it's a shadow government. It doesn't matter who's in office. And then you flash forward 10 years and all of that is not only proven to be true, but something else has happened, which is that the former heads of the CIA and the NSA and all these spook agencies are now all regular faces on cable news. And they spend every night telling you how they are justified in violating your rights. They are justified in carrying out whatever orders they Carry out and doing whatever they're doing because it's for your own good. And that's one thing that has shifted. Ten years ago, you would never see a former head of the CIA like John Brennan as a contributor on cnn. CNN would be expected even as short time ago as 10 years ago to challenge the NSA not to bring on James Clapper to sit there and tell you how the agency is justified in anything it does.

Yeah, they're giving them free pr. I mean, basically the mainstream media has become a PR agency for the agenda.

Yeah, yeah, it's really incredible. And the idea that those agencies and the heads of those agencies can come on and say whatever they want to say and as I said, justify it and no one pushes back. And so what we find is we have this kind of unholy alliance of.

These government agencies, unaccountable to voters completely, that just run over our civil rights, run over the law anytime they want. No one challenges them. A completely incompetent and impotent Congress that does nothing and has completely abdicated any responsibility of governing. And then you have a media, it used to be just mainstream media that was a part of this, but now you have the social media aspect of it where they are completely carrying water for these groups. And so all of these things together, it paints a pretty bleak picture moving forward.

Yeah, you know, these big companies are proxies for the government. Maybe that's the way it is because of course they're all exchanging favors. They've got armies of lobbyists. Like I said, folks, if you are not really worked up about this and really concerned about it, just wait five years. This is moving so fast. I was going to say wait 10 years or 20, but it's not even going to take that long. This is almost checkmate. And you know what's going to be, what's going to ultimately be checkmate? Above this is the digital currency. When, when there is a government sponsored digital dollar or, or central bank digital currency and they can control, you know, through, through your phone where, where you can spend what you can buy. Maybe, maybe if they don't like what you say in your social score, they won't allow you to buy Internet access.

Right.

Or phone service. You know, who knows?

And the funny thing is, even as you say that, I mean, does that even sound outlandish to anyone listening to this? Does anyone out there hear you saying that and say, nah, come on, that's never gonna happen. In fact, I think at this point everyone thinks, well, it's absolutely gonna happen. Remember A year ago, people said that the V passports weren't going to happen. Yeah, it was crazy. And it's like. And now they're saying it's insane to not think we would have.

Yeah. Yep. If you want to go and do a restaurant in Los Angeles, I mean, you can't, you can't do it. I. A friend of mine went on vacation to Palm Springs and she said, you can't go in a restaurant anymore without showing your. I mean, this is like Nazi Germany. Where are your papers? You know, this is insane. It's medical apartheid.

And again, we got there, we got there so fast. And it's really interesting to see too, like, where are the rebels? Where are the people who are willing to push back? And it's so interesting because I think over the years, again, because of a construct of media, we would believe that they belong to kind of a certain political party or a certain political movement. The Occupy Wall street folks. Where are those folks? Where are they right now? What happened to them? And so I think that because of the speed with which it's happened, it's kind of reset everything. And so now you have new alliances forming and strange bedfellows, if you will, of people who are resisting, who in the past would never have been connected because they've always been told they have nothing in common. Suddenly people starting to find themselves having more in common because they have to push back. But again, it becomes more and more difficult to do that when you don't have any kind of method by which to communicate. All of the venues for communication and the apparatus for communication have been co opted to take away that ability for people to communicate.

Yeah. And if you think an email list is going to solve your problem, it won't because that is under their control. And you know, who knows why things end up in the promotions folder or the spam folder. Nobody knows the reason. You know, it's just completely up to the gods of tech. You better get people's physical addresses so you can mail a piece of paper to them.

Right. Because Exactly. While you can still do that too. And that's why, you know, with what we're doing. If I could just share a little bit about this. So one of the things that we're doing is we're building outside of this space. So I'm glad you mentioned emails. Right. Because emails is a big part of this. Email lists are completely co opted now where these providers who send out these lists control what they will and will not send out. You know, Amazon has just announced to AWS that it's not even going to worry about what's already out there on the Internet. They are creating an entire system with 10,000 new AWS employees. And their job is to go through and look for websites that are being created that are just starting up and to find things they disagree with because they're dangerous, and then to remove those from the Internet. Amazon controls 40% of all cloud storage in the world.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable number. And so they're able to do that. So one of the things that we're doing is we're utilizing blockchain technology. The same technology that powers cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, for those who know about it, is the financial representation of blockchain. But there are a lot of applications for blockchain. And so one of the things we're doing is building tech that is is built outside of the current Silicon Valley construct and instead moving into this other space where DNS becomes unstoppable. Right. Something called unstoppable domains because it's built on the blockchain.

I interviewed them, I interviewed the founder. Yeah, he's been on the show. The thing I worry about, though is like they're even putting pressure on. And I don't know if they've caved yet, but on Cloudflare, and if you know who Cloudflare is, they're a company that largely controls Internet traffic. They allow you to access or not access certain sites and they distribute content around the world. So it serves up quickly. And I don't know if Cloudflare has caved in yet, but they probably have, who knows? So it goes beyond who your server is and your hosting company, right?

It does, it goes, it goes beyond all those. We basically have to look at it this way. There is a well built, well constructed freeway system that runs through this country. We all know that, right. If you're going to get anywhere in this country, you have to use that system to get there efficiently. The problem is, if someone were to shut all that down and said, okay, well, you can't travel anymore, what's your response? Well, in the technical side of it, what we're saying is stop trying to get on their on ramps, stop trying to utilize the lanes they've built, stop trying to utilize their infrastructure, and instead let's build and start using a completely separate infrastructure apart from these companies. Because if you, if you go out and you say, well, I'm going to find servers that don't play, everybody plays, everybody goes along. So if you build, you contract with a server, AWS goes to those guys and says, hey, listen, we're throwing money all over the place because that's what AWS does and we'll send you business, but you need to drop this one site. You think that server hosting company that has you is going to say, yeah, I'm going to pass on the millions of dollars that Amazon is going to send me to keep your site up? They won't. And so we've got to build separate. It's got to be a complete revolution of how tech is created.

I agree with you. You know, where another revolution has to happen in the way capital formation happens in this country. You know, it's just far too consolidated. Nobody's funding in any real way, manufacturing companies or anything. You know, they're. It's a winner take all system. It's completely anti democratic where you've got, you know, 7ish big companies controlling everything because they're getting all the money, they get all the funding. They get, you know, from the start they get all. I mean, Silicon Valley is, you know, many would say controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Okay. And so, you know, who do the venture capitalists fund? Well, they fund people who agree with them, right. And then when they go to the public markets or mezzanine financing in between, it's just all along the way, the way capital is formed, it influences what companies win and which companies lose. It influences what songs get written and published because the musicians are, you know, beholden to this system too. It's like one of my favorite Rush songs. And you probably know Rush, right? One likes to believe in the freedom of music, but glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity. It's just everywhere in our world. Ben, has everything become a scam?

Yeah, I think it has. I really do. It has. It's all become a scam. And as I think you just laid that out so beautifully, by the way, because it really is a consolidation of power at every level. Every lever of society is held by the same few hands, right? And everything is geared toward pushing an agenda, but it's an agenda of control and power and money. And so as you said, every aspect of our lives. But something that is so fascinating that is happening, that I noticed happening, is there is a revolution, if you will, starting to take place. A grassroots movement of independent music that's actually talking about something. I'm starting to see that coming up. Social media to some extent has been the catalyst for it and now they're cracking down. But there is a push. I see this happening with people and I hear from people who are saying the E commerce movement, I love E commerce, but I don't want to buy from Amazon anymore. I want to get away from that. Where can systems be set up? I think this concept that comes out of cryptocurrency called decentralization, where you decentralize things, we've got to have that now. Earlier you mentioned how fast we're headed down this road and you said we'll be there in five, 10 years. Can't even imagine what it will look like. And I agree with that. However, I think that we could also say on a positive note, five or ten years from now, if decentralization could really begin to get a real movement behind it, we could see some tremendous movement away from those consolidated power centers and into these other areas through decentralization. But it's going to take organization, it's going to take people working together for a common goal. And that goal is not just to make yourself wealthy. That goal has to be to break the system as it is and put it back together the right way.

Right. The problem is, at the end of the day, everybody is going to go with their own pocketbook. Right. That's just, just what people do most of the time. It's not always just about the money. Right. There's more to it than that.

Guy. You've done some great stories on cryptocurrencies and so forth. You know, let's talk about that for a minute. Because the defi dream of decentralized finance is great. You know, millennials don't really like banks and that's a good sign. We'll see how that goes. But I would love nothing more than to see like bitcoin take over the world, for example. Right, Right. But I think the governments, you know, their main product is their currency. Right. Every government, that's their main product. And they don't like competition, you know, and they're going to, they're going to try to weaken it, shut it down, create a fake crisis, a false flag. Who knows what they're going to do, Right? Sure. What do you think about the future of, you know, crypto or bitcoin specifically, or whatever?

Yeah. Well, one of the things I think they're doing right now is they're trying to discredit Bitcoin in a number of ways. And one of those ways is, is with all these so called ransomware attacks that keep happening. Right. And all of those are being promoted by the media as a way of discrediting Bitcoin. Right. As if ransomware didn't exist before bitcoin, it predates bitcoin. But they act as if this is the only reason it's happening. Right, that bitcoin is causing this. And so we see that happening over and over. And I think one of the things that is a huge negative for the crypto space, so you have to trade things off. One of the trade offs is, well, you're going to get more people involved, make it more mainstream. So you got companies like Coinbase that come along or Robinhood that comes along.

And says, make it easy or the new etf.

Yeah, and we're the etf. The problem is, and this really is the problem, is that those entities, Coinbase, I have no hatred for Coinbase. I just think Coinbase goes against the entire principle of bitcoin. Robinhood goes against the entire principle and the ETF goes entirely against the principle. Because in none of those cases do you as a crypto holder actually hold any crypto. You're paying somebody a fee to go and get crypto on your behalf and hold it on your behalf. You don't own the wallet, you don't control the finance. Imagine doing that with anything else. We do it to an extent with banks, we do, but what we don't do is walk in with a pile of money to someone and say, hey, listen, I'm going to put all of my money into your hands and I'll never be able to control it because you have the ability to lock it up and hold it with private keys. And it's a crazy system. I see that happening. I'm very anti the mainstream movement that's connected to a lot of these cryptos. The ETF I think is terrible because, yes, it's going to cause the price of bitcoin to go up, but it's also going to cause a whole lot of people to be involved in bitcoin who never actually own one. And it's also going to fuel a lot of speculation which if at some point in the future is intentionally crashed, it will then be blamed as, oh, it's a threat to the economy, it's a danger to the economy.

And let's keep in mind the very first remarks after Yellen was appointed by Biden. I mean, drug smuggling and human trafficking and all kinds of bad stuff. Stuff. Right. But guess what the biggest currency is for that? It's the US dollar.

That's right.

Right. You know, she didn't blame the US Dollar.

Did anybody see Scarface?

And this has gone up for years. Right. They'll say that, that bitcoin is the currency of criminals. As if criminals don't accept cash.

Yeah, they love cash. They have those money counters like you see in the movies, you know. Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's ridiculous. That's an interesting take you mentioned on the crypto. I mean, I don't know, I just hope people, you know, they pull it off and they get it into wallets and they guard it safely so that it really is decentralized and they pull it off the exchanges. But, you know, at least it opens it up to a broader market. Right. It increases adoption. So like, you don't think that's all bad, right?

No, no, it's not all bad. It's not. That's what I was saying. I don't have any hatred for it. I think that there is a value in getting more exposure to it. But what's lacking right now is real education to people to say, okay, so if you've taken the first step and now you're in and this is no longer such a scary world to you, you see value in it. So let's talk about how you bring value to the ecosystem, right? And to the original mission and calling of bitcoin. Because the original mission and calling was not for banks to be the ones buying it, which is what's happening. It was not for people like Jamie Dimon who goes out one day, it says how much he hates it and then references, you know, his, his mind is going around and setting up funds for wealthy investors to own bitcoin.

Right.

It's not supposed to be compatible with banks. It's the antithesis of a bank. It is true. It's the revolution, it's the freedom from the banking system. So what I would love to see is just more people in this, in this space, as they get involved, come to the idea that hey, there is freedom in this thing and it won't bring freedom if it just becomes co opted. That's my fear about it. So I'm not totally against it and like I said, I'm not even against Coinbase. I just wanted to see Coinbase people pull your money out at some point, just take it and hold it.

And I think probably the warning there, Ben, which is good advice, is that of course they're going to put restrictions on the exchanges like Coinbase saying you can't let people pull the money off into a wallet because we don't want it to be portable and we don't want it to be private. And that's the point of Bitcoin. And the others, and some of the others.

And they don't want it to be yours. The reality is they, they want it to stay just like, just like the US dollar. Right. It's in the system, but it doesn't belong to you. You have no power over it.

Sure. Yep. Yeah, no, very good points, Ben. Where can people find you? Give out your websites, social media, of course, on Sovereign, which is you spell that again for us, please.

Yeah, so it's S O V R E N. S O V R E N Media. If you go there, by the way, before Monday, then you can sign up for a username. But after Monday, October 25, the site will be live. So I'll have my channel there. There's a whole bunch of content creators who are setting up channels there as well. And so, you know, obviously you can find me there.

And I'm there under Jason Hartman, by the way.

There you go. So you'll be able to find Jason Hartman there. And, and, and he won't have to use code words when he says.

I'll have to make two versions of every video. There will be the unrated director's cut and then there will be the, the, you know, G rated, you know, for, for the thought police.

Yeah, that's right. Here's, here's the hypersensitive cut and here's the freedom cut. This one I can actually.

Freedom cut. I like that, the freedom cut. Yeah, the First Amendment cut. Exactly. That's great. Okay, so where do they go? Just finish that. Sorry I interrupted.

Yes. So go to Sovereign Media and if you go there, you can sign up and get your username and you can begin to interact with the channel. And like I said, October 25th, everything will be live. And, you know, bear with us, obviously in the first couple of weeks that we're doing this, I'm sure there'll be some bugs in the system as we start to do it, but it is exciting to see the folks who are starting to come over and wanting people like yourself, Jason, who you're just looking for a place to be able to just speak again. Right. It's crazy that we live in this, in this moment where you are not allowed to utter anything that's not approved. And so how refreshing to be in a place where that doesn't exist.

Ben, I gotta tell you something before you go. So yesterday on my fake book, Memories, you know, that is like the best feature they have, I think. I love. I agree.

Yeah.

Well, 10 years ago I posted a thing, a list of Obama's accomplishments. And it was snarky. Of course. All the, you know, stuff that hasn't worked out that he, you know, did that were a disaster. Right. And they censored it 10 years ago. And that actually came up on my memories yesterday. So I reposted it because. Yeah, it's unbelievable. They said this content isn't available. It had that thing that we've all seen, right?

Yeah.

It wasn't the typical fact.

Cheese. I don't even want to say the word right.

Exactly.

But you know what I mean. So this has been coming, folks, and we didn't see it. We were all asleep at the wheel. This was in their master plan. So we got to take action right now to get on Ben's platform and to exchange ideas freely. You know, many say that this is one of the things that contributed to the great enlightenment and the renaissance was coffee shops where people got together and met and talked and shared ideas. We need that. Humanity needs that. This is really important stuff. So go there and it's Sovereign Media, right?

That's right. Sovereign Media.

Excellent. Ben Swan, thanks for joining us.

Jason, thanks so much.

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