Taking Down the Federal Reserve – Cinematically

7006505403_3008c86a22Jason Hartman is joined on this episode by Pasha Roberts, creator of the upcoming movie, “Silver Circle.” Pasha Roberts is the founder of an animation studio outside of Boston, Lineplot Productions. He is currently Director of its major production underway, Silver Circle. Lineplot began as an animation studio that provided 3D graphics to explain complicated economic situations to their corporate clients. Then they decided to take the creative route, creating an animated movie set in the future of hyperinflation and the collapse of the Central Banks. Pasha and Jason discuss several of the facets of the movie, including government seizure of commodities, such as precious metals and property, and freezing accounts. Pasha explains that once trust in the system is lost, there is no regaining it, and one likely scenario is a rebellion, with citizens taking matters into their own hands.

Silver Circle is a film set in 2019 after a severe economic collapse. A group of Rebels are devising a plan to take down the culprit of this economic calamity, the Federal Reserve. One way they fight the Fed is through competition…they mint their own silver underground to disperse in the community in hopes to make the dollar obsolete. It is all wrapped into a love story that unfolds as an investigator from the Fed meets a Rebel and has to choose which side he is on. Their mission is to entertain and educate, and no, you don’t have to be well-versed in economics to enjoy the film.

Pasha holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Russian Studies from The College of William and Mary, and a Masters of Science in Financial Engineering from the MIT Sloan School of Management. In addition to his MIT degree, his background includes twenty years of software development and successful entrepreneurship experience.

As a person who loves mathematics, graphic design, and liberty, Pasha’s corporate experience has molded him into a creative machine who believes using media and art to convey messages of social change can succeed.

Narrator: 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 for you 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.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site, so make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.

Start of Interview with Pasha Roberts

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Pasha Roberts to the show. He is the creator of an upcoming movie entitled Silver Circle. This movie is about the federal reserve and our monetary system, and really some interesting topics. It’s set in the future and he’ll give you the exact date of when it’s set. And he’s coming to us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pasha, how are you?

Pasha Roberts: Well hello, how are you Jason? Good, thanks for having us on.

Jason Hartman: Well my pleasure. So tell us about Silver Circle and what inspired you to make a movie. I guess you’re not in the movie business as your background, right?

Pasha Roberts: No, but I run an animation studio that we started in around 2002, something like that, to describe complicated financial information. And really when the 2008 Lehman brothers crash happened, when that little mini crash happened in 2008, we decided that we could make a really interesting fictional story going out into the future. We also decided that there’s plenty of documentaries out there if you want to tell people about the risks of fiat money or the history of what happens in inflation or hyperinflation. There’s plenty of factual information out there.

But it was more interesting and more broad based and more fun actually to make this a fictional story, make it a thriller romance with the car chases and the explosions, and the romance and the intrigue. And so that’s what we did. It really is the only movie I know of where the Federal Reserve is the bad guy, and there’s a group of rebels that are making their money out of silver and fighting the Federal Reserve during this heavy dollar crash kind of era in 2019.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, very interesting. Well, its set in 2019, and without spoiling it for everybody, tell people basically, maybe first what your thesis is behind the movie and what happens. A basic outline of what happens, not too much detail.

Pasha Roberts: Sure. Basically in the movie it’s heavy economic crash. We don’t do hyperinflation; the screenwriter that I worked with, Steven Schwartz, he actually lived in Argentina during hyperinflation, so he’s familiar with going out and changing the peso midday and what’s really involved with that. The dynamics of hyperinflation are too strange for most people to even entertain. We only made prices 20 times what they are now.

Jason Hartman: And that’s interesting. I want to just stop you there for a moment. There’s no actual academic definition of hyperinflation, which I find kind of odd that there isn’t one. But if you say 20 times multiple on prices, in other words whatever costs you 5 bucks today; you go to a bar and a beer costs you 5 bucks, well there’s not even many of those around. Most bars are 8 bucks for a beer.

Pasha Roberts: In our world, beer is $110.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, so there you go. So it becomes $100. A $5 item becomes $100. Now most people might consider that hyperinflation, but I’ve got to ask you since you don’t, what do you call hyperinflation? Do you have a name for it?

Pasha Roberts: I think it has to do with the rate. Hyperinflation is what we see in something like Zimbabwe or Argentina where every day there’s a different set of prices. Prices might double in a day. We have a pretty interesting interview with a really cool guy from Zimbabwe on our website, where he talks about what it’s like, both going on the grand black market, getting money, but also how they did marketing and how they did prices and how everything worked when things are so unpredictable with prices. If you go out every morning and have no idea where things are and you have to talk around, so you get rates of a thousand percent a year or a million times a year of inflation and that. In this case we really could have a much smaller but yet still historically significant amount between 20-50 percent inflation every year. We easily got us to this 20 times that we talked about in the movie.

Jason Hartman: So what happens to people in their life when that latte at Starbucks goes from, it’s a little more than 4 bucks I guess, they call it 4 bucks…

Pasha Roberts: I haven’t bought one for a long time.

Jason Hartman: But when that becomes $100, what happens to people? That must just be an amazing…that’s just hard for most people to comprehend, really what the meaning of that is, what the real meaning is.

Pasha Roberts: Yeah, well people’s wages go up too but it never keeps up. You get raises, I’m sure your reviews would half every month or something in hyperinflation. But it never really keeps up. If inflation was always equal, where every price went up everywhere at the exact same time, it wouldn’t really matter.

Where it does matter, Rothfard goes through this, is that timing. The first people to use and access and get the money is the people who print it, which is the government and the banks. So they get the full benefit of this new money, and by the time prices adjust months later, that’s when we kind of get shafted. So what happened in the movie, people who had been saving up their entire life, we try to humanize this, our hero’s father basically loses his whole life’s savings because he saved up money, he’s ready to retire and it’s all gone. So we really try to make it a human thing. And also there’s heavy unemployment during situations like this, because businesses have extreme volatility and can’t hire people reliably.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s just amazing. The stories from history about hyperinflation are how people would rush out to spend their money before it loses value. So when they get paid they would instantly leave work and go and try to buy things with it. And one of my thesis’s has always been that things have real meaning, they have intrinsic value, whereas paper fiat currencies don’t. so I’m a commodities hard asset kind of thinker when it comes to my own investment portfolio. I always say, denominate your assets and things and denominate your liabilities in fiat currencies that are being debased by inflation. It’s pretty interesting. I don’t think people really comprehend, and like any experience in human life, how bad it is and how demoralizing it can be until you’re in it. Yet, like you said, the first people that have access to the benefit of these things are the elites. The inner circle that basically runs the game or at least knows how to game the system and play the game.

Pasha Roberts: That’s kind of the way it works, and is designed to work. We try to make a human thing and try to make it interesting and fun. Fun is maybe a relative word, but the rebels are kind of a fun group for people in there. The reason silver is involved because we like the idea of competing currencies, where the rebels make their own illegal currency out of silver to compete against the dollar. But it could be Walmart could have their dollars, or Chinese one could be running around, all kinds of different things. And if they are allowed to float against the dollar, legally or illegally it can start to bring some reason to people’s lives in terms of having a currency that makes sense instead of a runaway fiat currency.

What always happens in these situations though is that the central bank really has to crack down against the competing currencies because they can’t have that. Any competition will basically crush their own currency. They know they’ll lose in a competition of currencies. So that’s the nature of the conflict between the rebels with their silver money and the other. I don’t have a strong opinion of gold versus silver, it’s just silver is a…

Jason Hartman: Well it’s more tradable because it’s less expensive, yeah.

Pasha Roberts: It’s more tradable. You can buy a cup of coffee with it.

Jason Hartman: Right. Exactly.

Pasha Roberts: In fact they have whole economies in New Hampshire where there are silver backed currencies and events where, I’ve been to events where they didn’t accept Federal Reserve notes, they only took silver as money.

Jason Hartman: Right. And interestingly, some of those groups like that have been raided and people have been arrested for violating what is known as the legal tender laws, where you have to accept the fake money. The law requires you to accept the fake money. It says right on the dollar bill that this is valid for all debts public and private. And if you were to open a store and say that you don’t accept dollars, you only accept silver and gold, you can go to jail for that. That’s pretty scary.

Pasha Roberts: Yeah, since we started Bernard Von Nothaus with the Liberty Dollar has gone to prison and I think he’s still there. So many aspects of the movie really have been real in the process of trying to get this thing done.

Jason Hartman: What happens to the rebels in the movie? Do they go to jail? Central banks like the Federal Reserve, they hate gold and silver. It’s competition for their fake currencies. They don’t want people trading in that.

Pasha Roberts: No they don’t. We have the coin out to 2016, which makes that illegal. Owning gold as a citizen used to be, well it was illegal in my lifetime in 1971. It only became legal. So this is not unheard of at all.

Jason Hartman: So when you say the coin act of 2016 now, of course 2016 hasn’t occurred yet.

Pasha Roberts: Right.

Jason Hartman: So what is the coin act of 2016 in the future, this future act?

Pasha Roberts: It’s basically makes trading in, you know, only the government is allowed to make coins or make money out of gold and silver. So it makes alternative currencies out of precious metals illegal.

Jason Hartman: Why would the government ever make that legal though? Because they’re in bed with the Federal Reserve, they wouldn’t want to ever see that legal, would they?

Pasha Roberts: Well it currently is legal. I can go out and buy something or basically barter with a piece of silver. It’s difficult because of capital gains. All these other laws come in.

Jason Hartman: And I just want to make the distinction there. It is legal to trade with gold and silver, however if you’re a business you have to accept dollars as well.

Pasha Roberts: For pre-existing debt. But if you’re a store, if you’re selling somebody a hamburger, it doesn’t exist until they grab the hamburger.

Jason Hartman: Oh now that’s an interesting distinction. So you think that would actually hold up; because I heard about raids on these groups. I wonder how they attacked that.

Pasha Roberts: Because of credit cards are not legal tender either. Because the debt doesn’t exist until you complete the transaction. But I do think that there are some interesting electronic age things. If you sort of cross bitcoin with silver of gold, electronic money with hard backing is pretty interesting. It’s an interesting kind of thing. I also think that if we get the heavy inflation it’s going to be probably faster and more well communicated because of the internet. We can have prices updated across the country kind of like we have with GasBuddy.com or something with gas prices instantaneously across the world.

Jason Hartman: Sure.

Pasha Roberts: One thing that may be of interest to real estate people, is we do have this thing in the movie called the Strategic Housing Reserve, which is from the department of housing stability.

Jason Hartman: Which is a new department now…

Pasha Roberts: It’s a new department we made up. Although the federal reserve in reality are fast on our tail. Apparently people in Ireland have tried it with very bad results and there’s minor versions of it going on in Detroit now. But basically we have the Federal Reserve, in order to protect the economy, hold up housing prices, and create jobs, they basically buy up entire neighborhoods with fake money or use eminent domain with their own police to push people out. And that’s the opening scene in the movie, is an eviction. Where they take over whole neighborhoods and expand and contract the supply of houses in different neighborhoods to prop up housing prices across the country. Because as you know, housing prices are so essential to many people’s wealth that that’s the primary growth point, it’s just like gas.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s interesting. So tell us more about the department of housing stability. So they basically come in and they seize people’s houses in order to reduce supply then?

Pasha Roberts: Right, it’s like paying farmers to burn their crops. So they had these ghost towns of these ghost neighborhoods of houses that they maintain and if housing prices start going up or down, they sell houses out of that neighborhood to increase the supply and drive that price down. Or vice versa, if housing prices need to go the other way. But it’s an interesting way, and also as you pointed out , they’re holding on to all of those commodities and the assets, the nails and the wood and everything else that are in the houses.

Jason Hartman: Let me take a brief pause. We’ll be back in just a minute.

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Jason Hartman: That’s interesting. That’s another reason that if a department of housing stability ever does come into being, and this is some group that goes around and basically just confiscates property which, the government can confiscate anything you have. There is simply no trump card. There’s no fool proof way to make sure that never happens, whether it be guns, dollars, gold, silver, houses, your business, anything.

One of my former employees group up in Burma, now Myanmar, and at the time… that’s interesting because Myanmar just opened up again and is becoming a free market economy. It’s on the way there, they say. And that’s exciting. But at the time that they became communist and the Chinese came in, I believe that was in the 70s if I’m not mistaken, he said he remembered when that happened and his parents had a business. They came in, one soldier accompanied an accountant. And they came into your business, and they wanted to see the books, and they basically started taking control of your business. They demonetized the higher pieces of currency so that people only had pocket change with them.

For example, in our world, they would demonetize the hundred dollar bill, and demonetize the fifty dollar bill. Now, this was before the days of credit cards obviously, and I doubt an economy like that even has much credit even today in a free market world. But they would just demonetize the higher bills, which people use to store their wealth. And say yeah, they’re worth nothing. They’re meaningless now, just by fiat, just by authority we’re going to decide that this is a meaningless instrument all of the sudden.
So the government can take anything away from you. But the lesson there is, don’t own your real estate with cash. Don’t own 100% equity in it. Just have 20% equity in it or as small amount as you can. Because then it’s more the bank’s risk than yours, right?

Pasha Roberts: Right. Because then the bank is taking the equity risk and the political risk and that, and you’re sort of leveraged out. So it’s an interesting approach. There’s definitely that kind of devaluation that’s happened across history. And in Zimbabwe several times they redenominated currency. They just lopped off 3 or 6 zeroes off the currency. I have like a hundred trillion dollar bill here in my office from Zimbabwe.

Jason Hartman: One of our listeners from Ireland sent me 180 trillion dollars in Zimbabwe dollars. I have it in my drawer somewhere, and I thought that was a really generous gift but they sell on EBay for about $4.

Pasha Roberts: And that’s the most it’s ever been worth. This really was worth a loaf of bread pretty much as soon as it came out. And Argentina, basically the government throws all foreign denominated accounts and revalued it at a horrible rate. So if you were smart enough, you’d keep your dollars and keep your money and US dollars instead of pesos, they would just freeze that account and change it over to their benefit. In some of these cases I don’t really know the way out unless you keep the gold under your mattress or something like that.

Jason Hartman: But even then, even then. There’s really no ultimate way out. The government can do anything they want. That’s why the government needs to be kept in check always. We need to be forever vigilant about that.

Pasha Roberts: Well that’s the kind of thing we cover in the movie. That’s the rebels; that’s their business.

Jason Hartman: So tell us, maybe just give out one or two things the rebels do to try and keep the powers that be in check.

Pasha Roberts: Well certainly a part of it is they draw attention to the strategic housing reserve and some of the insanity that’s inside of that. And really their main mission in the movie, you have to keep it pretty simple because it’s only a 90 minute movie, is in terms of making this money and putting out these silver based currency as an alternative. That’s their main thing and that’s really the worst thing you can do to the Federal Reserve. The only reason that US dollar is held up is by trust. When you lose that trust, there’s nothing left in the dollar.

Jason Hartman: What are your thoughts about the Federal Reserve? There have been so many moves now, especially with Ron Paul, to audit it. A lot more people are aware nowadays than they were even 5 years ago. When I used to talk about this stuff at real estate investing seminars I would do, even 5 years ago, it was kind of like a really abstract kind of foreign concept to people; sort of a conspiracy theory type thing. But nowadays it seems pretty mainstream. Everybody seems to know about this nowadays. So I guess that’s really good news, right?

Pasha Roberts: Good news for us, for the movie. We’re a lot less crazy sounding than we were just a few years ago when we got this thing started. Part of it is the way that it’s talked about, and I think Ron Paul has done a good job in terms of making it more normal. I do have some of the real fringy Federal Reserve literature and some of it can look pretty strange. But at essence it’s also true.
Since we do a lot of work inside of, we try to talk outside of the choir – we go to comic book conventions and animation festivals and that kind of thing to promote our movie. It’s not just for the believers. And in many ways, the Federal Reserve is like the ultimate comic book bad guy. It’s very James Bond. It’s this secret society that’s exited for a hundred years, and I think it’ll be a hundred years a little later this month actually. And it controls the whole world’s money supply. It’s bigger than any James Bond hero and more secret.

Jason Hartman: Totally amazing. Well, where will the movie be released first?

Pasha Roberts: We’re going to do basically, it’s called a platform release; we’re starting it in March. I think the first release is going to be in New York and then we’re planning on adding Austin, Texas and Washington, DC. And somewhere up around here in Massachusetts/New Hampshire where a lot of our fans are. And we’ll just keep adding cities to it as long as we can go to theaters and convince everybody that it’s an awesome story. And part of it, it’s not just about the money or a wonky kind of thing, it’s a really fun romance, clever story that a lot of people would just enjoy for the sake of the story. It’s not really only this wonky economic stuff. We showed it at a comic convention in New Orleans a couple weeks ago, and half the audience didn’t know who it was about, all this money stuff. They just had a good time. They were laughing and crying and on the edge of their seats for the whole thing. And that’s kind of what we’re going for and those people might actually look up and see what this Federal Reserve thing really is.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s interesting that you say that because I sort of wonder if you were inspired at all to approach it this way by Ayn Rand’s novels, The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged. You could read that and not even be that concerned about the whole big government message and the free market message, but also got a great story angle.

Pasha Roberts: Yeah, I’ve definitely read her stuff and it does take some dedication to get through.

Jason Hartman: Well it’s so long. The length is one thing, but…

Pasha Roberts: My heart goes out to the people trying to make movies out of Ayn Rand just because it’s so dense. We have the benefit that we’re a screenplay first. But yeah, I really have appreciated at learned from her approach to use the narratives, use fiction as a part of that. And I think the way to somebody’s mind is through their heart.

Jason Hartman: Yup. It certainly is, and if not through their heart then through their stomach at least, right?

Pasha Roberts: Right. Well, I can’t make food for everybody, so…

Jason Hartman: That’s for sure. Well, hey Pasha give out the website if you would and tell people where they can see the trailer and get a little bit of information about the movie.

Pasha Roberts: Sure. We have a lot of material online. I know the Federal Reserve loves watching it, so your readers and listeners probably should too. It’s SilverCircleMovie.com. Just one word. And there’s a website and trailers and all kinds of information there. There’s also a mailing list that will let you know when we’re coming to what theater in your area. Eventually it should be in theaters across the whole US. And then there’s also a very active blog with some of the ideas of the movie. We cover some things that will be in the future. We’re already working on a sequel. So we cover some things that are in the sequel, like drones and that kind of a thing.

And that’s SilverUnderground.com, so if they appreciate your work I’m sure they will find some insight in Silver Underground as well. So those are our two main websites. We have a very active Facebook community, just over 15,000 people on it and a lot of Twitter, a lot of all the social media. We were just a small scrappy movie studio, so we’re just hard at work using social media any way we can.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, Pasha Roberts, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for getting the word out about the federal reserve Ponzi scheme. It’s not exactly a Ponzi scheme; it sort of is. But anyway, it’s a scheme none the less. But the Federal Reserve scheme, and I just appreciate you increasing the awareness of this very, very important subject. So thanks for joining us today!

Pasha Roberts: Okay, thank you Jason. I appreciate the excellent work that you do with all of your different sites, and all the best to your listeners.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show. Protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes.

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own, and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Image: Flickr | Silver Circle Movie)

Transcribed by Ralph

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