Silver Circle: The Independent Film and Graphic Novel

0:00That's the head slide, but I'm the producer and the director of the film. We're a tiny little studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is right outside of Boston by Harvard and by MIT. And I also want to thank Jeremy Davis for helping to fund this particular event. So let's flip it. So I'm gonna talk quickly about some of the ideas that are inside of it. I'm gonna talk really about this Haslip book, which I recently read and it led to some interesting insights. I'm sure it'll be on sale here. Talk a little bit about why we're going out through this from the cultural angle as opposed to electing candidates and spreading leaflets around. I'll talk about the story, I'll talk about the economics, and I'll talk about some of our audiences.

0:48And I'll let you know how to keep in touch with what we're doing. The interesting thing about this Haslip book, What You Should Know About Inflation, He wrote it in 1960, it was re-released in 1965, and at first when I saw some of the numbers I said, oh this is quaint, you know, this is cute, I mean, the population of the US is 160 million people, that's half of what we have now, you know, and he's complaining about debt, that's 286 billion, I mean, we breathe out that much, or I could be more and more crude, but it's, there's just, you know, that's nothing in terms of what we speak about in debt now, where we're, you know, $14 trillion in debt, not even counting all of the entitlements.

1:34And the gold window, he talked about it being closed, but it was still partially open. It was finally closed in 1971, where foreign, you know, so at that point, foreigners could still exchange, you know, could redeem U.S. dollars for gold. that went away years after, a decade after he wrote this thing. So at one level it's quaint but it's very pressing. It's the same warnings as we hear today in the press and what's interesting is that nobody really listened. Nobody really followed along with that. And what's kind of happened, I put the little book on the graph right about where he wrote it and Things have gotten a lot worse since then, it's kind of his nightmare. Our debt has stayed relatively flat in absolute terms and went down coming from World War II spending in terms of GDP. The major inflection points in terms of where debt has gone is in 1971 when the gold window was finally closed and we started fighting more heavily, and then

2:44in various crises in 1980 and then the whole Bush-Obama explosion of debt happened starting in 2000. So it's much worse as well as we have twice as many people to deal with. The only reason it's even more muted is that we did get more GDP. So it's a terrible outcome as far as this book, so it's not really quaint at all. And let's go to the next slide. The interesting thing, other than the numbers, that comes from this book is that he talks about sound money as a gold standard or as something that really enforces a balanced budget and enforces small government.

3:32It really creates an environment where technically you really can't go outside of your bounds. It's like being a person or a family, you can't spend outside of your own boundaries for long because you'll go bankrupt and bad things will start happening. The gold standard kind of enforces that and fiat money, the Federal Reserve enables us to do weird debt financing things that we really shouldn't be able to do. are the basis for imperialistic war, they're the basis for welfare, all these things that are expanding government come from fiat money, come from dishonest money.

4:17And in a sense that's fine, if people want that, you know, it's not sustainable, but in a sense, you know, there are two different mindsets. And he makes a very good point several times in the book that if we actually implemented, say Ron Paul won and implemented sound money now, it would be voted off in a few years because people in the body politic aren't ready for it. If you look at the complaining that goes on in policy right now, just to reduce the budget by a small amount, you know, people raise the hue and cry about cutting the smallest thing. is the smallest thing, they talk about severe budget cuts to get rid of the things that shouldn't be on there in the first place. So there's really a mindset change that has to happen in terms of people being ready for something that's responsible, because clearly the fiat money fueled type of government is not sustainable.

5:13And it's always entertaining to me that people that are interested in environmental sustainability never pay attention to financial sustainability. It's always very interesting. So basically, this is maybe a bold statement, but I'll make it because here I'm a filmmaker and not an economist, but I think at some level people really aren't ready for the kind of Society that's implied by actually having sound money and having to have a government that's small enough to have that. And that leads me away from electing the right people and leafleting people and trying to pass this bill or that bill. All that's on the path of it. But the part that excites me the most as an entrepreneur and as a storyteller is is to actually start to change the culture and start to change people's minds and to open their minds into what sorts of other worlds are possible. What is it like to live in this sort of thing? Or what is the bad side of inflation? What happens? What is the

6:25personal cost of inflation when it finally runs its course? And movies are a great way to do that. I happen to own an animation studio, so it's easier to Do. It's a very technical craft, but you're not going to get your friend to read this book or to read Rothbard, who's very entertaining, or the small print version of Human Action. Your friend's not going to do that first. They're going to want to see something that attaches to their heart and attaches to their storytelling side more than to their mind at First. So, in my sense, a cool movie is kind of the ticket. The left has discovered this years ago. Almost every film you see has some sort of leftward tint. Look at Wall-E.

7:12You know, it's a post-apocalyptic trash everywhere, and there's robots going around, and the only people you see are these big fatties that are completely irresponsible. Day After Tomorrow. There's millions of films about bad corporations and evil corruption by corporations. There's When we wrote this, I'm very clear. The bad guy is going to be the Federal Reserve, who, yes, they're a private bank, but the bad guys are going to be the government. It's not going to be some evil corporation, some Citibank kind of figure, some Gordon Gekko kind of figure. So it's a different, the way that you tell the story directs people's minds. And people want to fight the bad guy. They want to fight the man, so to speak. In this case, we're directing them towards A much more interesting man, quote-unquote, to fight.

8:04So, let's go on from there. Obviously, the story and the characters are primary. It's the kind of thing that we, if it's not a good story, if it's not a good thriller romance, people are just not going to be interested in watching it. We don't want to make a bad movie. And in fact, we want to make a movie that people who know nothing about the Federal Reserve would be excited to see and know really nothing about, they don't have to learn monetary policy out of it. I'm going to go a little farther more quickly just to preserve time. The basic idea with the movie though is basically it's 2019, there's a severe economic collapse, the dollar collapse, it's not as bad as it could be, we only have prices ten times what they are now in nine years, and gosh, eight years now.

8:57And the Federal Reserve has vastly expanded its powers and there's a group of rebels that are fighting the Federal Reserve as both in terms of their policies but also in terms of personal motivations and primarily for the right to make their own money out of silver. So it's kind of a, that's where the name comes from, but they basically make an alternative currency, this is real silver, you have one of them in the 10th ounce version, but they're They're basically trying to create their own currency, much like Von Notthaus was recently convicted of. So I already talked about some of the economic factors in there, but the dollars lost what's called the World Reserve currency status, which has given us the ability to do many of the bad things the Fed has done.

9:45And we create this new innovation that I hope they don't do, called the Department of Housing Stability. So they kick people out of entire neighborhoods of houses, thousands of houses across the nation, and they guard them to be empty, and they expand and contract that supply of houses to control housing prices across the United States. Just in terms of supply and demand, it would actually work. It's like paying farmers to burn their crops after they burn it to control crop prices. So it's not far-fetched at all, but I hope nobody gets that idea. So and as I said, they fight back by making their own silver currency. We create the Coin Act of 2016 where it's illegal to barter using these things and as many of you have seen, there was a legal case that came through in the last couple of weeks for Bernard von Nothaus was convicted, I think he'll get up to 25 years for making silver coins and trying to pass them off as dollars. The way that our rebels do it is slightly different, but if you're an economist geek like I am, it's the reverse Gresham's law, where good money drives out the bad. Gresham's law is where bad money drives out the good when there's a fixed dollar value to it. This

11:11This had to be one dollar or you had a paper dollar bill, you'd always give me the paper dollar bill and hold on to the thing that has value. Reverse question is loud, there's no direct tie between them that says one dollar. This is an ounce of silver, that's all it is and they float against each other. There's some good scholarship on this by Selgin and White that you can find I think out in the bookstores or in similar sites. We're basically We're really planning to release the film this fall into the heat of the presidential debates. I mean, there should be a lot of talk about debt, there should be a lot of talk about responsibility, and much to our benefit, the Federal Reserve has come to the fore during all that time. I can talk more about distribution later if you're interested in that, but we're hoping you get at least a limited theater release and then get out onto online DVD.

12:04We have three different major audiences, the Liberty folks, which were here. There's silver and precious metal people, which are a world unto themselves, but there's a lot of intersection in with Liberty people. They'll talk the way that we talk, but they have a lot more gold and silver. And as an animated film, we work a great deal in the comics world, which are not necessarily libertarian, but they're awesome. I mean, a lot of you are probably, our comics are animation fans, but we go to a lot of comic conventions and they're huge. A Liberty convention will have a thousand people at it maybe. A comic convention will have a thousand people in skimpy costumes waiting in line to get in the door. You know, I mean New York Comic Con had 90,000 people. I was just at San Francisco last weekend with 50,000 fans and 30,000 fans the week before in Orlando. Big, big enthusiastic base of people who want and a lot of them are already down with being against the Fed.

13:08So, towards that end, we're actually also releasing a online graphic novel. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we put a new page up on our website. It goes through the same story and is separately drawn. So you can actually get a sense of what's going on in our movie before you see it this fall. So, let's move up there. So I encourage you all to follow that way. There's already a pretty healthy online following. There's lots going on online for us. We go to silvercirclemovie.com, it's the main website. There's a Facebook pan with 11,000 Facebook fans on it. Very diverse Facebook group, some are into the comics, some are into for other things, for the politics, healthy discussions there all the time. There's a political blog called Silver Underground and there's a thing called Refinery where where we go through how we do the actual production, which is innovative and unique in itself.

14:05So it has some flyers out front and stickers that you can pick up all the URLs out there. And to us this is really just the beginning, I mean I see this as I'm really interested in the way of doing storytelling and in terms of injecting into the culture this way there's This was far too much coming from the other direction and I see this as a really interesting way and a powerful way to kind of reach people's minds. And then they can go on and read the fine print copy of Human Action soon after that. But at least this is a way to get ideas of liberty into the broad, broad culture. So talk with me all you want. I'm here to chat We're also looking for an intern this summer, in Boston, so talk with me about that.

14:55I think we're above the minimum wage, although I'd love to, but never mind. So I think the last one is just a thank you slide, so I'm going to go on to show some clips. I know I'm telling this on set.

15:20Alright, these are performance clips. This is basically the capture of everything on your green screen with live actors, and then we turn the animation base, we do the animation base on the actors. So this will go through a lot of those scenes cut together in kind of a fun way. So you get a sense of some of the story and also what the actors and what happens behind the scenes. And then we'll show you a clip from the real thing.

15:51You don't know it.

15:59Can you make it louder? I'd like to. There's, uh, this girl. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:24Are you kidding me?

16:30When I was the official who led the seizure on the Federal Reserve. I have a plan, but I need someone with security knowledge of the Fed. That's you. That's what you see. Look, you need to understand something.

16:57What's this? It's all a setup. She was dead this morning. That's good on its own. That's an ounce of silver.

17:32I told you before, I didn't know she was here. She is my wife.

18:02The Theory of Money and Credit

18:10Get it!

18:32And just to show you what it looks like, it's only 30 seconds, I know we can get off the next speaker, so this is what the actual output looks like when you take this adapter and turn it into this.

19:02The Theory of Money and Credit