Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch. The show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. The current date is Tuesday, 05/12/2026 at seventeen hundred UTC. Bitcoin terms, we are at block height. What block height are we at? Nine four nine one zero six. Sats per dollar is one two four nine, and the Bitcoin price is $80,000. And
and this Bitcoin is looking strong right now. Feeling strong. We'll see. We'll see what happens next. I got a great show lined up for you freaks. You're probably listening to this an hour or so from now. I like to publish them right away. But before we get started as always Bitcoin is supported by viewers like you who donate Bitcoin to the show. We have no ads. We have no sponsors.
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two serious Matt speak on sovereignty and self hosted software stacks. Hypothetically, who would be the stricter parent if you're raising a kid? I imagine Matt Hill had the most stern face throughout the recording. When you guys didn't hear it on air, but me and Matt have great fatherly conversations. Some of the best fatherly conversations I've had have been offline with Matt. Anyway, freaks,
if you parted with your stats, I appreciate you. Thank you for sending Bitcoin to the show. It keeps me going. I know stats are scarce. If you can't spare any, the second best way of supporting the show is sharing with your friends and family. Well, dispatch is available on all major podcast apps by searching civil dispatch. All relevant links are civildispatch.com. Okay, freaks. Tuesday morning, ready to rip. Let's go. I have someone on the show who has become a good friend through shared pain
of trying to bring this all together. I'm very excited to talk to you all about it and bring you into the story. We have Eugene Jerrecki here. He is a documentarian who has been following the life of Julian Assange for quite some time. He's got a great film about to come out called The 6,000,000,000 Dollar Man. How's it going, Eugene? It's going very well. And I'm really, really pleased to be here with you and your your crowd of freaks.
You just you just find out that I called my audience freaks? Yes, I didn't know that I'm trying to be cool. So I want to fit right in. If you freaks didn't realize Eugene's quite perceptive. Eugene, how long were you filming this documentary? Over most of the past seven years, I was following the Assange story of Julian Assange's efforts to share information with the public that he thought
whistleblowers wanted the public to know. And so I learned early on many, many years ago, as a lot of people did, that Assange had created WikiLeaks, which was really a safe place for whistleblowers to anonymously,
in the digital age, upload stuff that they thought the public needed to know. In previous years, you know, a whistleblower had to go into a dark parking garage and risk their lives, you know, sliding a briefcase across the asphalt. And the digital age brought so many possibilities, evil and good, and I think Assange saw the chance for good in the public being able to learn what the public has the right to know. So as many as fifteen years ago,
like many people, I began to learn about WikiLeaks. But it was in the past seven years that I started tracing the sort of international spy thriller of what the US government had sought to do to destroy Julian Assange. Yeah. I mean, it's first of all, Freaks, I did watch the film. It's a great film. It's it's the first it's the first film that has Julian's blessing.
It's also the first film that's being released after Julian has been freed, which I think caught a lot of us surprised last year when that happened. I guess two years ago, like a year and a half. I I mean, WikiLeaks to me has always been an incredibly important aspect of my
growth as a man. First from WikiLeaks being created in the first place. I mean, to Eugene's point, one of the crazy parts as a as a young man to me was realizing that all the thriller movies where 95% of the movie was the protagonist trying to get the truth out to the world were just made redundant, because all they had to do is open up a computer and upload the documents to WikiLeaks instead of, you know, doing high speed car chases and traveling around the world trying to get the truth out,
which is I think a profound realization, especially as a younger person. And then the second piece obviously was Bitcoin was key to WikiLeaks early on when WikiLeaks got debanked. I mean, it was one of the first times, I think the first real case studies where people were shown, particularly in the Western world, why you might need a money that didn't require permission from the state to use,
and whether you're saving or whether you're spending it. So Visa and Mastercard and PayPal all cut off WikiLeaks, but they were able to accept Bitcoin donations, which was real proof that Bitcoin was freedom money. So all of this is incredibly important to me, it's part of the reason why I've been helping Eugene bring this to the world in a way that hopefully
as many people can watch it as possible. Because I do think a lot of people, particularly young people nowadays, don't know what WikiLeaks is, don't know what Julian stood for, stands for today. Let's I think an interesting place to start here, Eugene is you won Cannes. You won a Golden Globe. Yeah. I didn't know Golden Globes or do documentaries. It's the first time they've ever given one to a documentary. Congratulations. But at the same time, you've been having issues with distribution.
What have you been facing? That's a very gentle way of saying it. Other than winning the Cannes Film Festival and winning a Golden Globe, the movie is basically banned everywhere else. Mainstream media won't touch it. Legacy media, none of the streamers, none of that. And I kinda saw that coming. I mean, the mainstream media system in America is to those of us who make movies the way the financial system is to Bitcoiners. We are locked out.
If you wanna make movies that challenge state power or that challenge the narrative that the US government and its allies run on, they have an enormous amount of power over and increasing every day over the mainstream legacy broadcasters and streamers and all of that. So we were we were really quite stuck. And that's how I met you was that faced with that difficulty, I tried to figure out how I could distribute the movie myself. And that led me to Jack Dorsey, and Jack Dorsey introduced us.
Yeah. So I mean, think there's two pieces here. Yeah. First of all, I am also not surprised that distribution has been difficult to say the least. I mean, I think there's there's and correct me if I'm wrong. When people think of film distribution, which is obviously not my expertise. There's there's two goals that I think a filmmaker has. Right? First off, obviously
these things cost significant amount of money to to put together and set up. The second piece is you want as many people to see, particularly with the documentary, which I assume most documentarians like yourself, there's a message that one of the reasons you're doing it is out of a passion to spread this message is to get in front of as many people as possible. And in a lot of times that can kind of be worrying priorities, right? Recouping costs, hopefully making some kind of
profit on it as well because you know, this is not a charity operation, but then also getting in front of a lot of people. And so I mean, on that note, I'm kind of curious, like, just bring us into the into the backroom a little bit, like seven years filming. And to my point, like, I think the distribution part from a technology point of view, can be it maybe is a little bit more of a technical problem than is relatively
easily to solve. I mean, you can distribute an MP4 as a torrent and get it in front of a lot of people. The cost problem and recouping costs and being able to make more films that are important is a much more difficult problem to solve while trying to also have scale distribution in this type of situation. So, seven years doing this film, what kind of cost does that look like? I mean, obviously your time.
The movie costs, it's funny because the movie's called The 6,000,000,000 Dollar Man, but it might as well be called The 6,000,000 Dollar Film. The movie was filmed in 15 countries over about six years under highly securitized conditions. We filmed with Edward Snowden in Moscow running from the now FSB, used to be KGB all the time. We filmed among spies and torturers and people who were operatives within The US operations
against Julian Assange. And so all of that had to be done where all of our machines were air gapped, our media never crossed borders, we had to securitize all of even the internal sharing that we were doing with each other. So it was a very cloak and dagger kind of operation because we knew remember, for most of the time that we were making the film, Julian Assange was in prison in The UK,
and there was a case against him in The UK to extradite him to to America where he would face a possible hundred and seventy five years in jail in America. So we had evidence in our possession
that we could not possibly let get into the wrong hands. Even talking to you today, there are things I can talk about, and there are things that I can't. And I even can't talk about things that are in the film that we're hoping people will see and in some of the special features that we're gonna be sharing, actually, initially only with Bitcoiners.
That stuff is material that was shocking to us. It will be shocking to the world when they see it. And actually, the intelligence agencies don't know that we have some of this material.
So all of that had a big cost in production and a lot of care taken in production. Now comes the world of getting it out to the world. Pretty simply put, when you don't have a mainstream legacy media studio or a giant corporation on your side, you are trying to compete with, you know, Marvel movies to reach the public imagination,
to get people to watch your stuff, and that takes a cost. It doesn't have to have the stupid wastes that Hollywood has in it, but if you're smart, and that's where I think the brilliant idea of Jack Dorsey, which led us here, came into play, it was really, what if you trust the public? In this case, we're reaching out to Bitcoiners as a kind of a crowdfunding community
to help us get the movie out, to say, Listen, forget Hollywood, forget everything that's wrong with the movie business that is centralized, intermediated information. Let's lean on our own selves, our own friends, our own community to get this thing out there. So the funds that we will raise through the work that we're doing that we'll talk about today from Bitcoiners and others, the goal of that is to self release and basically say to the mainstream system,
we don't need you. We don't need you standing in the way. We don't need you pocketing gigantic amounts of money and keeping the public stupid.
We want and trust that the public wants to know what's going on, and we wanna serve that. And we're asking for a community of people around us to join us, frankly, as producers on the film, and we can talk about that in a few moments. But that's really what this Bitcoin positioning of the film is about. It's an outreach to the Bitcoin community to join us on this journey of self releasing and showing the mainstream system that it's obsolete.
Yeah. I mean, I think that was very well said. The basic concept is, and I call it a concept because it's yet to be proven out in reality, is the basic concept here is, is there a group of people around the world that believe in WikiLeaks and what Julian has done that are willing to step up as Bitcoin producers and fund the wide release of the film and get certain perks as a result of it. But ultimately,
the goal here is probably similar to what what would amount to a crowd fund with Bitcoin. Right? Yep. Can I give you can I just reflect briefly on how the whole conversation started with Jack? Because that really, really put things so to be honest with your audience, I came to Jack Dorsey because I was desperate
that my film was an award winning film. I believe in the film. I think the public needs to see the film. And I could see that the system was going to bury the film and ban the film. And I had heard from a lot of people that Jack Dorsey was very committed to freedom, freedom of expression,
freedom of speech. I had seen talks with him where he spoke about this in a very powerful way. And I literally was just coming to him as a kindred spirit who I hoped would like the film. And if he did, I basically wanted him to say to the world, this is the film they don't want you to see,
but I do. And I thought he had the power and the trust from people, which I think he does, that if he says it's an important thing, people are gonna listen. I didn't expect his answer. His answer was kind of amazing and it made my head spin, and I've been trying to mount it ever since and that's why we're here. But what Jack said was, Well, there's a built in audience for your film,
and it's that audience that you should look to. He said, if I just pay for the release of the film, that's not fixing the system. That's just one film and one person who has the means to do it. What you want to do is get an army of support behind this film because of what it's about, and the army that is built in for this film are Bitcoiners.
And he then really reflected very poetically on the shared origins of WikiLeaks and Bitcoin, That in 2011, when the US government was blocking WikiLeaks from receiving donations from the public via Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and other fiat instruments, so called, At that moment, WikiLeaks said, we will accept Bitcoin.
It rescued Bitcoin. And as I've learned more and more from Jack and now others, it was at that moment that WikiLeaks helped prove how Bitcoin could promote freedom because it tangibly was allowing that organization to continue to inform the public in the way that the gatekeepers didn't want. So Jack said, based on that shared history, Bitcoiners have a shared destiny with the goals of WikiLeaks. The decentralization of finance, sovereignty of finance,
is hand in glove with the freedom of information that Bitcoin is about. It's all about making an end run around corrupt systems of centralized power.
And he said, so the community you wanna reach out to, essentially in a crowdfunding way, are Bitcoiners. And it was at that moment that this idea was born. And then, Matt, you and I and some others who've been helping us have started to develop what we really believe deeply in, I think, which is we are looking for Bitcoiners to become Bitcoin producers on the movie. It's never been done before. It's basically saying to the movie business, forget you and all of your corruption
and producers who even knows what that means in movie terms. You don't even know what a producer does. Well, I'm gonna show you what it does. It's real people in the world who want a movie to get in front of people. And in the Bitcoin space,
there's a lot of messaging here that means a lot. Bitcoin is in the movie, of course, but the larger message about fighting the system that is, as far as I understand, a very Bitcoin friendly message, and it's therefore the Bitcoin community that we are reaching out to. We're having a private launch party, a kind of a private watch party at the June, only Bitcoiners
and we only accept Bitcoin at the watch party. But really what we're doing is having Bitcoiners pay an amount of Bitcoin to become a producer on the film, join us on this journey. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of pieces here. First of all, on the history piece, two things I find interesting about WikiLeaks accepting Bitcoin in 2011 was first off, Satoshi did not think Bitcoin was ready.
He was concerned. I think the exact quote was that it would be kicking the hornet's nest and bringing too much attention to Bitcoin. Negative attention. Fortunately, he was wrong. Bitcoin was ready, which was, I think, a big wake up call for a lot of people. I mean, I didn't get into Bitcoin until after that. But it was obvious proof when
I was introduced to Bitcoin, that Bitcoin worked and that it fulfilled its mission and mandate as freedom money. The second piece that's really interesting is WikiLeaks was the first large organization that effectively had a Bitcoin endowment, which is something that I'm very familiar with with my work at OpenSachs, which is incredibly empowering from the
other side of financial freedom. There's two pieces of financial freedom. Right? This ability to transact without permission, but also the financial independence that comes with the money that you've received as donations increasing in value over time. So WikiLeaks ended up with a significant war chest as Bitcoin accrued value that was probably even more substantial than original dollar amount of donations they got.
So when structuring this concept, and I keep calling it a concept because once again, it hasn't been proven out. There's no there's no guidebook to how to do something like this. So I've seen a lot of questions. Okay. Like, how was the price determined? Well, the price is a million sats is 0.01 Bitcoin is priced in Bitcoin.
I don't know, it felt right. We don't have a we don't have a good answer for people who are thinking about it. I know it can be thought of as it's a big purchase, you know, right now, is it say $100 I think the message and the movement is well worth it. That's why I've been volunteering my time to help Eugene with this. But it's interesting, right? And to the Noster folks that are listening, I mean, part of the reason I'm so excited about Noster is
from that same core belief that information needs to be free and that society flourishes when it is free. But with Noster, we have zaps and we've really proven out the concept of social funding of causes, but on a much smaller level. If when you guys see this film, after hearing Eugene talk about it for seven years, working on this for seven years, like this is not something that can be funded with a 20¢ zap. This has serious financial costs.
And the goal here is to prove out a concept that people will effectively be willing to zap something significantly more than maybe the norm has been. And then the second piece is the more money that Bitcoin producers step up to do this gives Eugene and his team a lot more flexibility with distribution going forward. Right? If if we see lackluster support, then
Eugene needs to be very deliberate about what his next steps are in terms of trying to recoup a lot of the financial costs. If there's significant support, and we see thousands of Bitcoiners come out and say, we want to see Julian's message and movement and life be honored, then Eugene will have significant flexibility in the further distribution of the film where he doesn't necessarily need to further recoup costs because he already has on this first step. So it's very much
an experiment. Like, I just wanna be clear to the freaks. Like, this is an experiment. We love your feedback on what we've done right and what we've done wrong so far. Eugene, his team, myself, we're kinda just figuring it out as we go along. The dream here Building the plane while flying it. Yeah. And the dream here is if if this works if this works, then we could start to see global distribution of other films like this that are incredibly important,
that are funded by a distributed set of producers paid with Bitcoin, which is a wild concept to me. Yeah. I mean, it's also I I I'm in love with the concept. And what I think happened was that Jack put this seed in our minds, and it was really the beautiful step where he'd said, if you get a community of people into your film,
you have an army that is trying to get this story out there in front of people. And we don't just you know, it's not just like, hey. Thanks for the money, and now we run with it. The whole idea was to bring Bitcoiners
actually onto the film. When you are a Bitcoin producer of the film, you end up in the credits of the film. You get an official credit in the film. You also get secret material that no one else gets to see, two hours of material that didn't even make it in the film because it's unbelievably sensitive stuff, but it was already a two hour film, so you get two additional hours of completely explosive stuff, including the real story of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg's last
interview on Earth when he talked all about the power of what Julian Assange had done. But you also get amazing material from the people who were involved in, yes, torturing Julian Assange and the people involved in, yes, illegally spying on him and giving what they were spying to the US government who was about to try to put him in jail. They were eavesdropping on his lawyer meetings. We have the tapes. There's other stuff we have that, again, I I don't talk about, but you'll see in the film. And you'll also if you're a Bitcoiner and you join us as a producer, you actually get not only all that video material, we give you a giant document
archive, this kind of dossier, primary source documents from the entire Assange saga, totally staggering stuff, including people's private tweet messages about him and the inner workings of the system in England and America and other countries to conspire to hurt him and to conspire to block the public from learning the truth. It's like a real anatomy
of so much that is wrong with the world that we all wanna see fixed. So we bring Bitcoiners in as producers really into our team in a way that the public will not get to be. And by doing that, of course, the money we raise and Matt is right that I just knew I wanted a round number in Bitcoin. I didn't wanna tell Bitcoiners a price in dollars. I've been learning from all you Bitcoiners to think in Bitcoin. And so point o one, which at the time was like $737
and whatever, and congrats to you guys, it's now I think $8 or so, $80, whatever, it's gone up to 8. At that time, point o one seemed like a good round number. And it also meant that the movie was gonna take the destiny of Bitcoin,
that whatever was gonna come in, if Bitcoin went way down, we were gonna be there for that ride. If Bitcoin went up, we were gonna be there for that ride. And either way, all this money gets used to get this movie in front of the public. The costs involved with the production of that, and the distribution of that, we're just trying to do everything we can to compete with the studios and all the other malefactors.
But at that price point, enough viewership will get us an amazing war chest to be able to bring this to the world. Yeah, Freaks. Eugene has gotten a crash course on Bitcoin and Noster over the last few months. Threw him right into the deep end. I'm drinking the Kool Aid as fast as I can. And it's interesting because I'm a complete
normie newbie in the Bitcoin space, but what I am learning really is what I think the public doesn't know. And I think this movie is a vehicle and the way we wanna do it is a vehicle to really give the public correct PR about Bitcoin. Because what we will be doing once again is using Bitcoin to promote freedom.
Because this movie is being blocked just as WikiLeaks was blocked in 2011, and then Bitcoiners are coming to the rescue, putting their money where their mouth is about sovereignty, about independence, and about disintermediation, decentralization. And if we can win with that, what an amazingly poetic moment that a movie about what the gatekeepers tried to do whatever years ago comes out in a way that shows that gatekeepers are no longer necessary. Damn right.
Mean, Eugene, I gave you a crash course on Bitcoin and Nostrad. Why don't you give us just a quick crash course on how many documentaries have you made? About 10 major ones. Forget what we're doing for a second. Give us a synopsis on what the current state of film distribution is. You weren't doing it this way. Right. If it wasn't banned, let's say if it wasn't banned, if it wasn't this topic, if it was maybe a more friendly US state friendly topic, was more normal, what does that look like?
Well, there had always been throughout American history a belief, as Justice Brandeis, the Supreme Court once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And so there was always the idea that we were made better by shining light in dark spaces and revealing things that the public should know about. And there's a proud history of that. It goes back to Edward R. Murrow.
We know about it from how we used to think of the tough investigative journalist who goes into dangerous places and interviews, you know, terrorists
and hostage takers and criminals at the front lines of the chemical or pharma industry, all that stuff. Karen Silkwood died because of trying to share nuclear secrets with The New York Times. She was killed. And we know so many stories. Gary Webb trying to teach the world about what The US and the CIA were doing in the war on drugs, and Webb lost his life. So we know that it's a courageous fight that truth seekers are engaged in. People like Chelsea Manning, who leaked all this material to WikiLeaks.
Chelsea Manning downloaded millions of documents from the US government that showed what a crime the war on terror was. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a bloodbath based on nothing, and Chelsea Manning had the courage to risk her life to upload that stuff through WikiLeaks. So in a world where
we had the standards and practices that we used to have, not that they were perfect, by the way. The world has always been complicated, and there's no joke to say that, you know, we are living in a world that we are still fixing. We're always a work in progress. But the truth is there was a better time where we think of all the president's men in Woodward and Bernstein,
and we all put that on a pedestal that the public should know, and great journalism does that. Well, the problem is corporate power made very handshake arrangements with political power over the last decades, and it has eroded the capacity of the media to do the real work, the real investigative work. Their hands are tied. Even really well meaning journalists, they take a paycheck from a major news organization,
and so they are compromised. They're captured. The good news about a documentary filmmaker like me is I don't have a job. I don't have anyone paying my bills. I'm not you can't fuck me. Am I not the curse? You can't call the run This is not the radio.
Good. You can't try to stop me. All you do is squeeze my funding. Well, they're doing that. The one way they're stopping those of us who do this work is what's happening right now. And so I'm turning to fellow citizens, fellow humans, and saying, we all wanna live in a world that is based on truth and freedom rather than lies, war, and nonfreedom. And so this outreach came out of that, but generally speaking, this should be the way the system does work, but it doesn't.
You want to take a moment and put your phone on do disturb? Yeah. It's a stupid thing that's happening. I'll explain someday. I have a stalker, and this stalker rings the phone. It's okay. You don't have a job, but you have a stalker. Got it. Exactly. Truth is the Okay. But to that point, I'm just curious. So like, you did a film on Elvis. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Not controversial.
Well, it's controversial too, because I was looking at the the death of the American dream in the body of Elvis. How did we become the fat Elvis as a country? So that's But not how did you fine. But how did you But it's not like corp maybe it's a little bit but, anyway, it's controversial in a different way. How did you distribute that film is my question? Times were better than Universal picked up that film around the world, and we still had to distribute it independently in America because
America's bandwidth has been closing down. People in my field often say that what we get to see now in the media is the full spectrum from a to b. Like, c to z are not even there anymore, unless you're making stuff that kind of confirms the kind of neoliberal vantage point of the American system, you can't get arrested. So my Elvis film was also contrary.
My films before that, they've all been contrary. They've all been a struggle, but it has never been as difficult as now. Because now, to give you an example, the movie No Other Land, which is about Israel Palestine, that movie won an Academy Award and could not get a distributor. This was two years ago. One Academy Award. Right? Yeah. One Academy Award, could not get a distributor. That was a new low.
When I saw that, it was a warning shot that we were not going to get anywhere with this. My friend Alex Gibney made a movie called The Beebe Files,
also about all the legal trouble that BB Netanyahu was facing when, oops, lo and behold, October 7 happened, and he's been running a campaign of keeping himself out of jail since then. If anybody wants to see an amazing film, The BB Files is amazing. Couldn't get anyone to release that film in America. And now Tucker Carlson has put it on the air at tuckercarlson.com.
So that's Alex thinking outside the box, let me go do that. The difference here is what I think we're doing very smart with our film is looking for a community of support, not just can I get an influencer to attach himself and get it over because that's kind of a new that's
that's a small fix? That's like it's not a real systemic fix. That's tweaking for the moment. What we want is to demonstrate that you can release a film with a community of concerned people who put the money forward, and that allows you to make an end run around the gatekeepers to just bypass them. And so when we talk about this 0.01 Bitcoin,
0.01 Bitcoin would be a lot if what we were saying is, Hey, come see the movie for 0.01 Bitcoin. You're not paying to watch the movie. No, you're paying to produce the movie and to be a producer on the movie in a credited way on the movie. And that's very important. It's not just a token for you to show your date. Hey, look, I'm in the credits. It's about actually you thinking, hey, I want to show this to my community. We will be offering Bitcoiners the ability, for example, if they love being involved and they love the movie and what we're doing, they can help help us put it in theaters in their community. So the opening night in a theater could be free to the public, sort of paid for by Bitcoin. Once again, Bitcoin promoting freedom in a movie theater, but allowing me to get the public aware of something that would otherwise really struggle to get an audience. And, of course, we want the media to hear about this. We want the mainstream media to have to report
on how Bitcoiners are making an end run around them. That is a delightful day when I open up The Wall Street Journal and read that instead of putting my movie out through the legacy system, I'm instead gonna be putting it out with the help of a community of sovereign thinking people. Yeah. I mean, to the point about the BB film being broadcast by Tucker, like, that's great. And he should deserve he deserves praise for that. Yes. But it
doesn't really fundamentally solve anything. Right? It's it's still They found a gatekeeper that was sympathetic to their cause. Sympathetic. He could still be pressured into not releasing something. He's a person. He's got things to take away. And this was the beauty of my meeting Jack. When I asked Jack for money,
Jack wasn't sidestepping giving me money. He said, yeah. I'll pay for it if you want, but that's not the way to do this. That doesn't fix the system. That would have just made him another gatekeeper, a financed gatekeeper. Right. Would have just been Jack doing what Tucker is doing. Right. And so when I saw the Tucker example with my friend, more power to Tucker, more power to Alex, but I think we have something far more visionary at work here, which is community based
film releasing. Future films can be made this way. Future films can be released this way. You have to understand that a lot of films that we might want to have on important topics like all the total corruption in the pharma industry with vaccines and everything else or all the total corruption in banking or insurance or war or anything else. I've made a lot of films about the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex.
You show me an industrial complex, I'll make a film about it, but I can't get them made now because there's no money in it. You you start thinking, well, let me make about so what do they make? A movie like Melania. So you make a movie about the leader's wife, they pay for it, she profits from it, and they have total editorial control over it. Right. It's Bezin advertisement.
Yeah. In communist Russia, how would it be any different? That's literally how they made movies under Hitler and under communist Russia. So unless we want to just make movies about the dear leader, we need community to get involved and to say, if you won't do it, movie business, we will. Yeah. It's a beautiful opportunity. Now I hope it works because if it does work, many people like me will reach out not only to Bitcoiners.
Bitcoiners will have led the way. I could have a prison movie, and I might go to the ACLU
and say, hey. Your top leadership needs to get behind this film and pay it forward. Make it so the world can see it of people who may not realize they need to see it and people where your people will lead the way. In this case, this theme, the decentralization themes in this movie, the anti establishment themes in this movie are, as I've come to understand it when Jack and I were at the Vegas conference together with you, the whole idea of it was the Bitcoin community is a community of people
that have a radical opposition to the corrupt centralization of power. That is exactly how you could describe WikiLeaks. And so a film about WikiLeaks would be already good to support. But the fact that Bitcoin rescued WikiLeaks in 2011, which is part of the storyline of the film, means this is the perfect film for Bitcoiners to be the pioneer group who lead the way into this new model of film releasing. That's why we're really sick, joining a movement.
I mean, it's not only that, right? Because it's also like Bitcoin is particularly unique for as a means of payment, and receipt and a treasury asset like holding it to fund the further distribution of the film. So even if this does prove it out at scale, there's obviously going to be more friction if you're trying to get a non Bitcoin community to donate Bitcoin.
Right now, I think this is which I think as to be clear here, I think people will find a way. WikiLeaks, the people that donated Bitcoin to WikiLeaks in 2011, yes, some of them were Bitcoiners. Right. There's no way for me to know the exact breakdown. But I bet you that a bunch of them weren't Bitcoiners. And they became Bitcoiners because they needed to donate to WikiLeaks. They saw the need to donate to WikiLeaks.
And they figured out how to obtain some Bitcoin and send it by the way, in a climate that was way more difficult to obtain Bitcoin coin than it is today. That was fifteen years ago. I think like, yeah, I mean, to the to the point to an anti war and anti military industrial complex film, a lot of the people that might find that message powerful aren't Bitcoiners. I do think that if the cause resonates with them, they will figure out a way to obtain Bitcoiners.
Matt, do most Bitcoiners who, just say most Bitcoiners, do most Bitcoiners want other people to become Bitcoiners? Yes. Okay. Well, one of the goals here is for the film to have huge Bitcoin community support, where we really celebrate existing Bitcoiners and make them part of something exciting and kind of glamorous.
It is a spy thriller. This movie pins you to your seat. I made it, and I can only say that because the story is what pins you to your seat. I just stayed out of the way. But basically, we wanna we wanna reinforce, you're a Bitcoiner. Good on you. You are doing something that is moving the world in a new direction. For other people who are not Bitcoiners,
we want them looking over the fence and going, hey. What's going on over at the Bitcoin house? How come I don't have a cool car like that? So we want to create FOMO in the non Bitcoin world where somebody opens up The Wall Street Journal and hears, why is Eugene Durecki releasing his movie to Bitcoin only first? Why is he only accepting Bitcoin at his at his private watch party? I want everyone to feel that that's the party they don't have a ticket to.
People who are not in the Bitcoin community. I'd love to generate a giant amount of envy because that will convert to people joining Bitcoin to be a producer on the film. On on basically three sides. Right? It's like the passionate audience side. It's kind of a shot across the bow over the powers that be on the film distribution side.
And then I think the third piece, might be the most important piece, is like young filmmakers who think that the only way to make a living is to sell out, seeing this, being inspired by it. And then maybe it's gonna take them seven years to make the film. Where's Bitcoin gonna be in seven years when they're ready to distribute it in '20, you know, 2033? And this could inspire the next generation of great independent filmmakers. Yes. I mean, I think of past societies
where there was like crackdowns in places like communist Russia, where people would hand each other secret stuff on the street that made them all part of a club of resistance. This happened in East Berlin, for example, before the overthrow. And I think in general, what I believe we are doing here is whispering to a group of people that we can band together and make this movie go wide, but in the process, revolutionize how movie may movie making and releasing
can happen. And look. Hollywood is destroying itself right now. One family, the Ellisons, are about to own most of the media landscape, and their main competitor is Netflix, which has an algorithm they don't reveal to the public. Filmmakers are getting kind of screwed by them left and right. So you've got, like, King Kong versus Godzilla up there cannibalizing the world, and we're just we're just the townspeople
running around on the ground. Well, let's band together. Use this movie. And it's not just because it's mine, but it's a good case study. Use this movie to see if we can't compete and give the public its voice. Have you done deals with Netflix before? Yes. What is a typical Netflix deal look like? It's very opaque. They pay you. They won't tell you how your movie is doing. They won't show you the metrics on it. So they don't let you know
whether they've underpaid you or overpaid you. And it's only that they became the only game in town through a lot of very clever corporate wrangling that everybody is stuck with them. And I'm not here to just bash Netflix. It's the whole system, and it's the way in which the system I showed the movie to Netflix over several years, and they would tell me, oh my god. It's incredible. Oh, it's so fascinating. Oh, it pins you to your seat. That was their phrase.
It's so important what you're doing. And that was the death knell. As soon as they told me how important what I was doing was, I knew what they were saying was, I'll get in trouble if I try to run this. It challenges every administration for the past fifteen or twenty years. It shows how people lie on both sides of the aisle. It shows how corrupt the system is, and it shows what happens to you when you wanna know the truth.
And they don't want that because that scares them about their, for example, their approval by the FCC. So for example, you run into all of them saying, we love your movie, but we can't take the risk of getting our license challenged or this and that. Meanwhile, the movie is crystal clean. There's not one thing in it that can be legally challenged. We're not stupid. We've got lawyered to our next. Part of the financial burden. That's part of the financial burden. So all that securitization,
that's not the problem. The problem is they're just living in a culture of fear where it's much easier for them to keep their job if they keep things pretty milquetoast. They'll do little stories that are even very dark about someone who killed their wife or some, you know, prison that's mean to its prisoners or this and that. It's just when you go wide when you say, step way back. Let's put the system itself on trial. That's like a joke in a movie. I'm gonna put the system on trial. Well, that's what we're supposed to do. The public is not supposed to fear politicians.
Politicians are supposed to fear the public. That was the point of the country. And movies like this are in keeping with the founding spirit of the country. The media system is opposed to the founding spirit of the country. We are hoping a group of us can stand in opposition to that. Love it. I mean, let's jump into Julian and WikiLeaks a little bit. Sure. I mean, so you were working on it for seven years. I mean, I assume
it's significantly like impacted your perspective on the world. Like if it's one thing, what is like the single biggest takeaway from your time focused on Julian and his and his movement and his life, life mission? I think it's in the title of the film, and people have to see the film to get more context of this. But it's called the $6,000,000,000 man, Julian Assange and the price of truth,
because I got an answer to what truth costs. $6,000,000,000 was the bounty that was put on Julian Assange's head by the US government. The country of Ecuador, whose embassy Assange took refuge in when the US government was persecuting him, That country was ultimately paid $6,000,000,000 to torture him until he would leave the embassy so he could be apprehended.
When I learned that the US government used the IMF and the World Bank, which I already knew they use in a manipulative and destructive way, what they did was secured a loan for Ecuador of $6,000,000,000 in exchange for expelling and maltreating Julian Assange, that the US government would do that, and that the IMF and the World Bank would be used as instruments for that kind of torture and crime. I really had my mind, even my mind, which was already pretty investigative
about what The US does and what other countries do wrong in the world. That was a new level of savagery, $6,000,000,000 on the life of one man who, oops, happens to represent all of our right to the truth. So I guess our right to the truth is worth $6,000,000,000 as a bounty. I mean, presumably, they kept increasing it. Right? They would they would yeah. Was like mean, this is what I think people miss on the anti Snowden side.
Bring it over to Snowden who you did interview in the film as well. Like, people give them shit for going to China and then to Russia. It's like the short list of countries that if The US wants to ruin your life that exist might just be those two countries. Like, is amazing. I mean, I thought the coverage you had on on Ecuador, I forget who was the leader who protected him at first in Ecuador? President Correa. Correa. Yeah. I mean, it was
and you you have him. You interviewed him in the film as well. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like, he doesn't he doesn't get enough credit. They're tiny tiny, not very influential, not very, you know, politically significant country that really stood up to the to The US juggernaut in a way that I think, at the time, lot of people didn't expect that to happen. I mean, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, first of it was not like a real embassy. I mean, technically was a real embassy.
But like, didn't even have like their own parking garage. It's like a tiny little flat. It's like a dental office. Basically. Yeah. Crappy one. And how long was Julian there for? Seven years. And they like they held off for maybe five, five and a half years until there was a leadership change and then the pressure really mounted. Yes. And they basically tortured him out of
the building. The new government of Lenin Moreno who took over after Correa, they made a deal, high leadership in the Trump administration, flew to Lennon Moreno in Ecuador and made a deal with him to expel Julian Assange. And after he'd been in the embassy for seven years, they took him out of the embassy,
which is a violation of diplomatic law, and they threw him in Belmarsh Prison, which is a maximum security prison in London, the Guantanamo Bay of England, and they kept him there for another five years. If we believe in the truth and we believe in someone, whether we like Julian Assange or not, by the way, I wanna tell your audience,
this is not a film about whether you like this guy. I don't care about that. I never cared about that the whole time. If I'd found that he was a criminal, well, I would have had to make that film too. But instead, we found that actually what was done to him and all of us was criminal. And the goal ultimately became, you know, tell the hardest, truest story we can because that is the one that's gonna wake the world up about the lengths
that The US was willing to go. And by the way, you know, Rafael Correa studied in Chicago. He was studying to be like a constitutional, like, classic, new world, neoliberal Democrat. This guy was a huge lover of America until he saw what America was doing to Ecuador and Peru and every other country, Venezuela,
everywhere else. And when he saw that, yeah, he had the he had the balls and the maybe poor judgment to stand up against America, which then took over. He's a wanted man now in Ecuador. They want him as a criminal even though he's the person who rescued Julian Assange. So the the stakes here could not be higher for all of us. Because remember, until further notice, America is still the place where ideas of constitutional freedom still at least have a chance.
Our enemies around the world, whether it's China, Russia, whatever, those are places that don't even have that constitutional footing. So if we lose it here, woah goes the world. So I still believe, even though I'm a critic of America, I'm a critic of America because I seek the best here, as I think so many of us do, and we lead the way. And I believe the Bitcoiners on this movie can lead the way for America, which is then supposed to lead the way because America has lost her way.
And I hope by putting this team together of all your freaks getting behind this thing and having an army of people reaching the public with these ideas and this story that we can really make a new equation here, make a new example here. Agreed. Should I tell people the date and time and all that of what we're doing? Yeah. Just real quick. I just also wanna remind people because, you know, I lived it firsthand. A lot of us did. But I think, you know, some people maybe didn't.
This entire time, the US government was gaslighting everybody, saying it was about Swedish rape allegations. And as we know today, the whole plan the entire time, like many Julian supporters said, was to extradite him to The United States for the documents he released, for the information he released. That was the whole point. And they literally gaslit people for a decade plus about And now it's just common knowledge. And people just
continue about their day. They just continue about their day. And as an American, as someone who's raising a family here, building businesses here, like we are we're supposed to be the shining city on the hill. Like we are supposed to lead by example. And this case is a clear cut case where we did the exact opposite, where we did the exact opposite. And, you know, the truth
the truth needs to be out there. Yeah. And, I mean, there's too many of them. You know? Edward Snowden is in the film for a reason. I flew to Russia to interview him, I felt like I was interviewing Batman about Superman because I was asking him all about Julian Assange. But the truth is he's another superhero who stands among us and said, I won't take it anymore.
And there's too many. Reality Winner is another one. Chelsea Manning is another one. Daniel Ellsberg is another one. Ralph Nader is another one. It goes on and on. The people who this system destroys because they seek the truth that the public has the right to. And we are the only people who can save us. Those in power will not. Those in power in Washington will not, and their friends in corporate America will not. They are all in a Faustian bargain at the public's expense.
And I can't stress enough that's why we are looking to put together this team. And I would be hugely honored by being joined by all of you who can afford it. And if you can't afford it, I totally understand that. There will be other things down the line, other ways to get involved in the movie. But right now, the only way to get to those other releases of the movie is to have a big successful premiere. So that's what we're doing on June 27. We have what we're calling a private watch party
at 4PM Eastern Time on Saturday, the twenty seventh. So it's a summer afternoon. We tried to make it work in California and New York and London and all these places. So to the best we can, it's a good time for everybody. But it's like a pay per view. It happens one time. And that's a celebration that only the producers get to be part of. So it's a private watch party for the Bitcoin producers of The 6,000,000,000 Dollar Man. You can learn more about it at the 6000000000dollarman.com.
Matt, can we put for the whole thing? Can we put that QR code and the and the and the web address and the whatever so people can get it? Yeah. Everything will be in the show notes. Eugene is obsessed with the QR codes. This is an audio only show, but the link will be in the show notes. But go to thesixbilliondollarman.com. That's right. Thesixbilliondollarman.com. We've tried to make everything pretty clear there so people know what they're getting themselves into,
what they're joining. And it's very much myself, Jack, and Matt, who are then kind of shepherding this thing forward. After the watch party, we're then going to start to come out wider with the help of Bitcoiners to the more normie public. But even then, we're going to be encouraging people to pay in Bitcoin and join Bitcoin to do so, even at lower price points. But this first watch party, the real vision here is a Bitcoin supported premier that can pay it forward to get it to everyone else.
By the way, we're nearing the end of our time here. Just on Bitcoin support for Julian and the movement and his movement that he championed. It's actually more recent than the 2011. Some freaks might remember, some freaks might not. It kind of flew under the radar a bit depending on your circles. When Julian was effectively freed by the Biden administration, he had to go from London and get back to Australia, his home with his family, and he needed to stop somewhere
to sign the documents with The US. Obviously, he did not wanna step foot in in The US because he didn't trust them rightfully so. And so they needed a charter, a private plane that they couldn't afford. And someone out there, some Bitcoiner out there donated $500,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for that plane. Yeah. Which is wild. Right? Like that isn't it only possible with Bitcoin. You cannot do a $500,000 a non donation any other way.
And I think that's what this concept is trying to bring to even wider group of people, right? Yeah, very much so. Somebody said when we were doing this, a movie that the gatekeepers won't touch is a perfect movie to show that gatekeepers are no longer necessary.
And I think what I'm discovering more and more when we first said that, we were like, Yeah, that's a cool thing to say. And what I've realized much more is that we're actually looking at the possibility that Bitcoiners can lead the charge into generally a different way of getting the truth to the public. Because if we can win on this one,
then movie after movie can be done this way, led by Bitcoiners and even then followed by and emulated by others. But this becomes the Woodstock of this moment. It becomes a thing that people get involved in, and they look back and say, That was when distribution changed. I think of it a little bit like when Napster suddenly emerged, and it totally radicalized
the whole way the music business worked. And that's gone in good ways and bad ways. But I remember one of the things it did was suddenly jam bands were really popular because there was no longer this, like, stranglehold of the music business on studio only bands and all that stuff. It freed up. And with that freedom came a lot of art and a lot of amazing groups that can do that and a huge explosion in live events, you know, the the sort of Lollapalooza world until now.
And we're kind of looking to do the same thing here. I wanna say, I look back and instead of making a deal with the with the corrupt system and watching them bury my film, I instead trusted fellow citizens who were introduced to me by Jack and by Matt, who I think have common cause. We are kindred spirits in wanting the world to be more truthful, more peaceful, more free, people, planet peace, those kind of things that we should all care about with children or without them. Love it.
I think that's a great place to end it. Eugene, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. Thesixbilliondollarman.com. Please visit and see Spelled out. It's not the number six. It's S I X. Thesixbilliondollarman.com. Thank you. And all the relevant links will be in the show notes. Give us your feedback.
Oh yeah, we're also gonna be running the conversation here at Primal. I wanna plug Primal because in the weeks that come, Matt, myself, Paul Keating, and others, we're gonna be having this discussion, I hope, Jack, so that we really all the issues that are implicit in this get discussed because that's one of the things you're doing. You're joining us in our inner circle to shape this. As I say, we're kinda building the plane while flying it, and we would love your feedback because it'll help us build it better.
Love it. Freaks, hope you enjoyed the show. Let us know what you think. And we want you to be a part of this financially and otherwise. All feedback is appreciated. I have a great show lined up on Friday. Well, great show. It's it's gonna it's focused on the attack on Bitcoin self custody in South Africa. So I have some South African Bitcoiners coming on Friday, think it's very timely after this conversation with Eugene. All relevant links, as always, are at cilldispatch.com.
Share with your friends and family. Love you all. Stay humble stack sets. Peace.