Episode Details

If you had told me in the late 1990s that I’d be standing on a stage at G. Edward Griffin’s Red Pill Expo talking about trauma, consciousness, and energy, I would have laughed you out of the room. 

Back then, I was a total “normie” embedded deep inside the financial system, running a massive stock marketing firm with a $240 million market cap. We were on track to go public on the NASDAQ.

Then, September 11th happened.

Almost overnight, the world changed, and my business reality shattered. The calls from investment bankers like Lehman Brothers completely stopped. Within weeks, my board told me we had to declare bankruptcy. We went from a potential billion-dollar company to nothing.

While I tried to put on a brave face, the weight of the collapse hit me hard, and I turned to alcohol to numb the pain. My business partner took it even worse… he survived a severe suicide attempt that left him broken physically and emotionally. Months later, he hobbled up to my apartment door on crutches, handed me a book without saying a single word, and left.

That book was The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin.

Reading that book was my first major awakening. A lot of people get deeply depressed when they first look into how the central banking system works, but I felt inspired. I realized I had just received a more profound education on the global monetary system from a single book than most people get from four years of standard university economics.

I eventually salvaged and sold what was left of my tech company, bought a catamaran with zero prior sailing experience, and set off to see the world. Exactly one year to the day after buying it, I survived a massive shipwreck off the coast of El Salvador. Washing ashore with nothing but my passport and credit cards gave me a profound sense of material detachment. For years, I traveled completely spontaneously, chasing freedom.

By 2006, as early video platforms emerged, I hit my second major milestone: watching the documentary 9/11: Loose Change. The pieces began connecting back to what I always felt as a child… that something was fundamentally upside-down with the institutional systems around us. This path led me to launch The Dollar Vigilante, start the Anarchast podcast, and co-found Anarchapulco to bring together people who value personal liberty.

By 2015, I noticed a dark pattern. A lot of us in the liberty movement were running on pure rage. We would get together, drink heavily, look at PowerPoint slides about how corrupt the system was, and get angry.

I eventually realized that my anger at the system was a way to avoid dealing with intense, unhealed childhood traumas. I was destroying my health, my peace, and deeply impacting my family. I had to make a choice: fix myself or lose everything.

I stopped looking outward at the enemies “out there” and started looking inward using intense personal work, meditation, and traditional plant medicines like Ayahuasca and Iboga. Iboga, in particular, forces you into a deep internal space where you cannot run from your past. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it allowed me to face and clear generations of personal and family trauma.

Through this journey, my perspective on activism shifted completely. I used to think that to fix the world, we had to dismantle the governments and smash the central banks.

The reality is simpler: The external world is a projection of what is happening inside us.

Think of this reality like a complex 3D video game. Part of the game is leveling up enough to realize you are playing it. When you focus entirely on fighting the external system, you feed it your energy. But when you resolve your internal traumas, your external experience changes automatically.

Almost everyone carries unresolved traumas from youth… moments where our conscious mind buried a painf