Episode Details

We all have moments that divide our lives into a distinct before and after. For me, that moment arrived wrapped in a massive, 600-page book handed to me by a friend who had just barely survived a horrific tragedy.

I was sitting in my apartment, watching my tech empire disintegrate after the dot-com bubble burst. My partner had just jumped out of an eighth-story window, shattering his body and our illusions of success. It was in this moment of absolute rock bottom that a knock on the door changed everything… and led me to G. Edward Griffin.

This isn’t a story about money. Money is fake anyway, as I would soon learn. This is a story about the difference between living in a hallucination and waking up in the real world. In the late 90s, I was deep in the hallucination. I was a “tech entrepreneur.” I had a company that, on paper, was worth $240 million.

Back then, that felt like real money. It felt like power. We were riding the wave of the dot-com mania, and like the AI chasers today, everyone thought we were geniuses. We were going to be billionaires. The world was our oyster, and the economy was going to expand forever.

Then, reality intervened.

It really ended, for me, on September 11, but I’m not talking about 2001. I’m talking about the momentum shift that had been happening. The valuations were insane. The market was a fraud. And eventually, gravity always wins. The bubble burst.

My $240 million empire didn’t just shrink. It evaporated. It went to almost zero. Poof.

I was trying to salvage the wreckage, picking through the debris of a business model that was built on nothing but hot air and Federal Reserve funny money. But the psychological toll on my partners was too much.

One of them, a guy I had built this dream with, couldn't handle the crash. He couldn't handle the shame. He couldn't handle seeing the “billion dollar” future dissolve into bankruptcy. So, he decided to check out.

He jumped out of the eighth-story window of his apartment building.

By some sheer, twisted miracle of physics, he didn't die. He landed in a small fountain below. The water broke his fall, but it didn't save him from the horror. He shattered his back. He shattered his legs. He survived, but his life as he knew it was over.

I was left in the ruins, alone, staring at the walls, wondering what the hell just happened. I was a victim. I felt cheated by the market, by the economy, by bad luck. I was waiting for the world to make sense again.

A few weeks later, while I was marinating in this despair, there was a knock at my apartment door.

I opened it, and there was my partner. He had literally hobbled up to my door on crutches. Without saying a single word, he reached out and handed me a giant book.

“Read this,” he said.

With our business in ruins, I suddenly had nothing but time. I dove into the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, and tore through it in less than a week.

When I finally closed the back cover, my entire worldview had permanently shifted. I remember asking myself in sheer disbelief: Why didn't anyone tell me this is how the financial system actually works?

That single book became the catalyst for everything I have built over the last 25 years. It woke me up to Austrian economics, libertarian principles, and anarcho-capitalist ideas. Without that reading experience, there would be no Dollar Vigilante newsletter, no Anarchapulco conference, and none of the freedom centered work I do today. It is incredible what can happen decades down the road when someone takes action and puts a piece of truth out into the world.

I recently had the incredible honor of sitting down for an interview with the man himself, G. Edward Griffin, founder of

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