I'm Tambilio, and this is Impact Theory. In a world fraught with complexities and unseen power struggles, understanding the motivation and actions of the invisible elite that are moving, the world financial system can be very difficult. I want you to imagine a future where economic policies are not dictated by elected representatives, but steered by mega corporations and financial giants like BlackRock, where digital currencies and AI surveillance create an Orwellian hellscape that infringes on our freedoms. The stakes could not be higher, and understanding the looming threats and ways that we are all manipulated is going to be critical to navigating this moment well.
And to help us do exactly that, I bring you the incomparable journalist who pulls no punches, Whitney Webb. Whitney is an investigative journalist and author who has dedicated her career to exposing the intricacies of power structures and their hidden influence on our lives. She sheds light on the dark underbelly of economic policies, the influence of companies like BlackRock, and the potential dangers of central bank digital currencies. If you're ready to learn who's really pulling the strings and what it means for our future, buckle up.
Please help me in welcoming Whitney Webb. It's pretty clear that whoever is the next president is going to have to deal with some sort of US government debt crisis, and I'm concerned about how that response is going to be regardless of which candidate wins. So for example, Trump in his case, when there was a major economic crisis in the form of what happened economically as a result of lockdown policy, and because of COVID-19, the person that he and his administration reached out to was Larry Think of BlackRock, who implemented something we can get into later that some researchers have called the going direct reset, which was basically a way to put money from QE directly in the hands of the private sector, instead of public entities, sort of like it had been done before. And arguably that resulted in a massive wealth transfer, and BlackRock didn't really use that money to help me street it all, they used it to buy shares in their own ETFs, among other things.
And then Kamala, in her case, her entire economic team is essentially led by Black former BlackRock executives, and that was also true for the Biden administration, so essentially BlackRock, which was also played a major role in sort of developing the bailouts in the 2008 economic crisis, which was under Obama, right, will likely be developing the response for whatever this coming economic crisis is, regardless of who gets in office. If we look at the policy actions of the people running who they turn to when a time of crisis or who is running their economic team, that seems increasingly likely. So that is why I'm very concerned, I guess I would say, about BlackRock in particular, because they seem to be the people that the government turns to, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in office. And they have sort of a history of really affecting wealth transfers during these crises at a time when there's supposedly developing or helping develop policy meant to bail out Main Street, they end up sort of affecting massive bailouts for Wall Street, and of course the people that BlackRock are trying to generate profits and profits for ultimately.
And the other thing that I'm really concerned about as it relates to a coming economic crisis is that I think we're going to see a major effort to saddle American consumers with programmable, surveilable money and feasible money. And so of course, a lot of people for years now have been very concerned about central bank digital currencies or CBDCs, but there are also things from the issue by the private sector like stablecoins, for example, that are just as programmable and surveilable and seeable as CBDCs are. So I think it's very likely in the event of a major debt crisis or some sort of crisis that damages significantly regular Americans purchasing power. There will be an effort to onboard Americans onto one of those two versions of programmable, surveilable money.
And so it's possible if Kamala wins, we can see a CBDC or something like that. But in the case of Trump, he sort of come out in favor of stablecoins. He did that recently at his speech at the Bitcoin Conference earlier this year. And stablecoins are just as programmable and surveilable and seeable as CBDCs in theory are.
And I think those, as people have rightly pointed out, are threat to our financial privacy and ultimately our financial freedom. So I think people should be focusing not just on CBDCs, but also these other, I guess, digital currencies that have the potential to offer those same Orwellian functionalities to the people issuing them and producing them. And some of those prominent stablecoins, like Circle for example, have major alliances with BlackRock and BlackRock has a minority stake in them and have set in their SEC filings that the stablecoins can be used to manipulate the price of Bitcoin, for example. All right, we've already here in the opening minutes, we put a lot of things on the table.
I want to start now piecing them together into a worldview that somebody that doesn't have your depth of knowledge where they can begin to understand how this all pieces together. So me as somebody on the outside of this, I look at it, I'm way more worried about whether Republicans or Democrats get into office based entirely on what their economic policy is. You're really the first person that's been clear in saying, no, no, no, you're looking at the wrong level of analysis. You need to understand that they're both going to the same people to come up with their policies.
So whatever promises you hear, that's ultimately not going to matter. So what I want to understand is if BlackRock is really where we should be paying attention, if Larry Fink is who they're both basically going to go to or Larry Fink affiliated entities or people, what is BlackRock's agenda? What do they want? Yeah, so I think there's things that we can look at as far as BlackRock is concerned that sort of give us clues as to what their agenda may be.
And the most concerning thing to me about that as it relates to people like Larry Fink is that Larry Fink is on record saying things like markets don't really like democracies because they're messy. Markets like totalitarian governments. And Larry Fink is someone who's been very obsessed with risk management most of his career and sees essentially, you know, free democracies and arguably also a free market in some senses as, you know, as generating more risk than perhaps he would like to handle. So when you're able to sort of control and centralize both markets and governments, you're able to control the amount of risk that's there.
And so maybe that's good for asset managers, like Larry Fink, who are obsessed with this kind of stuff, but for, you know, regular people ultimately it reduces the amount of freedom that we would have. So I sort of see Larry Fink as someone who's looking to centralize power and centralize wealth and obviously that has major impacts on, you know, regular Americans and the people that aren't necessarily in the oligarch class or in the top 1% that would benefit from those types of policies. Whoa, okay, that is extremely direct. Okay, so you have somebody who understands this is about risk mitigation.
That a democratic government is going to have a lot more volatility. I mean, even as I think about America having this moral standing in the world, sort of being the world's cop, but every four years we have this sort of violent whiplash from one policy direction to the other. I've often thought about how jarring that must be to other world leaders. And so for better or worse, I can actually see what you mean if somebody is investing in the marketplace and they want to make sure that they have a predictable level of risk so that they can not completely control the outcomes, but that they can narrow the band of outcomes so that they don't have this gigantic potential downside.
And the way that we get that is totalitarian top down control. Okay, that's a very clear thesis. Now the question becomes how are they going about doing it? What are the mechanisms?
Well, you know, I think this is something that's much larger than just BlackRock specifically, but in terms of looking at what BlackRock has done in terms of like, you know, US fiscal policy, I think it's important to sort of look at their role and, you know, the OA crisis, you know, which began the policy of quantitative easing, you know, and later on they were called upon by the Trump administration to help develop COVID fiscal response, but actually it began before then. So in the fall of 2019 at Jackson Hall, and this is also, should point out, this is based on the very excellent research of John Titus of the YouTube channel, Best Evidence. Essentially, this document was presented by BlackRock to central bankers at Jackson Hall. It was called going about going direct is what they called it.
And basically the idea was to have, you know, what was generated via quantitative easing, not just go to like public sector affiliated entities, but also directly into the hands of the private sector, i.e. Wall Street, and that was essentially what was proposed. And this began, it begins to be implemented well before COVID, when the repo market goes a bit haywire at the end of 2019 and sort of continues through up until COVID was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, at which point, you know, there's a lot of calls between Larry Fink and Steve Mnuchin and other top figures and the economic team of the Trump administration. And then they begin to basically affect this policy or really supercharge this policy and go direct even more.
So there's a lot of, you know, things that are happening in terms of economic policy that ultimately resulted in what we're dealing with now, I guess, the basement of US American consumer purchasing power. But a lot of this money at a time when there were lockdowns and there was really like no very little economic activity going on. They're being given all of this, you know, people like BlackRock asset managers are being given all of this money. And then they go and instead of helping out Main Street, they go up and buy up all the assets.
They buy shares in their own ETFs, for example. And basically what happened during COVID was a massive wealth transfer. And if you look at the statistics of it, you know, the top 1% in the United States benefited hugely during COVID, but the rest of us did not. Maybe some people got stimulus in that, but a lot of the consequences downstream of those policies have resulted in this, you know, inflationary situation.
We're in a lot of other, you know, economic issues that people are dealing with. And so BlackRock sort of, I would argue, oversaw, you know, these, these wealth transfer sort of, you know, to the benefit of Wall Street and not Main Street. And it seems like, you know, if there is another crisis coming down the pike, which it seems there is, BlackRock is likely to do essentially the same thing, whatever policy that helped design. And it really should be a point of public discussion why BlackRock has so much influence over what the Treasury Department does or what the Federal Reserve does.
And really, you know, as far as U.S. COVID fiscal policy is concerned, which by the way, even though that was started under Trump, a lot of this continued through into the Biden administration, who again, Biden's top economic people are former BlackRock executives. You know, why is this particular asset manager on Wall Street so embedded with the development of U.S. fiscal policy, which at times when that fiscal policy is meant to help regular Americans, it has not been doing that when BlackRock is involved.
And really, this is something that most Americans don't even know happened, you know. All right, so this is begging a really interesting question, which is the idea of going direct sounds awesome. Like, if I'm an individual person and you're going to do quantitative easing, which for anybody watching this that doesn't know that, it's printing money, you're injecting money into the system, yay, which is actually terrible. I'll hold thing on that, we'll get to that later.
But just for now, so the Fed is printing money, it's putting it into the system. Now, putting it into the system via Treasuries or bonds, that's lame because ultimately that the people that hold those assets, they get rich or the average person does not hold those assets. And therefore, you're bypassing the middle class, let's call it the average person. So I always thought, oh man, that's a terrible way to do it.
So I would probably have fallen for, let's go direct, let's just give the people the money. So how is it that by going direct, if I'm understanding the mechanism there where we're giving you a stimmy check, it's going directly to you, it's in your name, you get a check up to you. How does that facilitate the wealth transfer more rapidly? Maybe I didn't explain that exactly well, but the idea of the direct is so much that, no, no, not at all.
And it's also, again, this is the work of John Titus. And so I'm sort of giving it, you know, describing his work. So I may not be doing the best job in explaining it either. But as I understand it was about putting the money, not just in public sector linked entities, but also to the private sector, I E Wall Street banks directly.
So instead of Wall Street banks trying to get some of this, you know, QE generated money or funds or whatever, having to go to a public sector entity to obtain them, they just receive it directly. Okay. So it's not necessarily going to regular Americans directly. It's not going directly from money creation to regular Americans.
It's going, instead of being just, you know, the money generated is going to these public sector entities to be distributed, it's going directly to the private sector. So they don't have to get it from the public sector entities. It just goes straight to them. So it facilities, so they don't really have to do the public private partnership thing to get their hands on it anymore.
They just receive it directly. They take out the middleman, I guess, from their perspective. Let's talk about what is going on in your closet. This time of year, most people realize half of what they own isn't even worth keeping.
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This is a paid advertisement. Okay, and what is that mechanism? So I understand when the Fed is buying bonds, that's very clear. It's an easy way to get things into the system.
But if they're just giving the money to the banks, how is that explained or recognized on a P&L? Like, I don't understand how that makes its way. Yeah, to describe the exact mechanism, again, I would refer you to John Titus or his work, his article on going direct on the Solari Report, which you can be for free. It's very well documented and describes all of that in detail.
And he is, you know, I'm just sort of pointing out his research because I think it's very important as it relates to BlackRock and what their impact on COVID fiscal policy responses. But again, for those very in-depth explanations of what the mechanisms are and how going direct has happened, I would definitely encourage you to either have him on or read his work because it's forensic very detailed. And he makes just a completely airtight case for what happened as it relates to BlackRock and going direct in COVID fiscal response. Got it.
Okay, so I will make my best guess right now. But if going direct means that I'm giving, I'm the Fed and I'm giving money directly to banks, banks still, even if they want to do fractional reserves, they are going to have to get the money into somebody's hands somewhere. Now, you mentioned earlier that they were buying their own ETFs. Yeah.
But it's my understanding that banks don't have ETFs. A company like BlackRock obviously would have ETFs. They do, yeah. So would somewhere in the going direct philosophy is money ending up getting sent directly to BlackRock or they borrowing money from the banks who are getting it directly from the Fed?
Well, in BlackRock's case, there was a funding facility set up. There were several set up during COVID, but there were a couple of them, I think, too, that were essentially given to BlackRock to manage. And again, this is a policy that BlackRock wrote well before COVID about what the Fed should do during the next downturn. And then the Fed implements that plan exactly well before COVID-19.
And then when COVID-19 happens, they sort of supercharge the policy and then develop these funding facilities allegedly for bailing out Main Street as a result of lockdown policy. And then BlackRock is directly managing a lot of those funds. Ooh. Okay.
So I'm going to lay out my understanding of BlackRock. How they work tie that to what I've just heard you say. Yeah. This is all very distressing.
Okay. So here's my understanding of the way that BlackRock works. BlackRock says, Hey, boys and girls, invest your money with us. And we are going to do things like ESG investing.
So we're going to, because when you, dear person, invest in your 401k with us, you actually will get voting rights in some of these companies that you now own things in. But what we're going to do is we're going to aggregate all of those rights. And we're going to go in on your behalf and we're going to push for ESG is an easy one. And so they're they themselves, it's not like they had the money and they're investing their own money.
They're actually aggregating the capital of people that are investing with them. And they're then aggregating their voting rights. Cool. That was already distressing enough.
Now what I hear you saying is that through this going direct policy, the Fed is going, Hey, BlackRock, you guys know how to invest money. So as a way to get this stimulus into the economy in a way that will really stimulate Main Street, we're going to give it to you. You guys will know where to invest that money. You'll know how to aggregate the voting shares and really be able to do something wonderful for this country.
Now, if BlackRock were doing something wonderful for this country, we'd be in great shape. But if BlackRock is doing something that isn't wonderful, we're now in a really bad spot. Do I have the gist of this correct? Yeah, I would say that's fair.
And I think now it's perhaps different than in times past where you have, you know, in the case of Trump, Larry Fink used to be, you know, Trump's personal money manager. And, you know, Trump is on record saying that Larry Fink made him a very large amount of money as a result of that partnership. And then in the case of Biden and Kamala, you have, you know, basically their economic policy, Bidenomics or what will become Kamala-nomics or whatever, you know, essentially being designed by former BlackRock executives as well. So, you know, if this is what they did during COVID and we can look at, you know, the other things that BlackRock has done as it relates to U.S.
fiscal policy in the past, it seems like that's what we can expect regardless of who wins in November. If the next four years brings us some sort of economic crisis, which it seems likely that there will be some sort of economic event. You know, you have people like the former Speaker at the House, you know, Paul Ryan saying that it's very likely the next president is going to deal with the U.S. government debt crisis, for example.
So, you know, this isn't something I'm just speculating on. There's like major politicians that say we should very much expect a major, some sort of economic crisis to come on the scene over the next, you know, four to five years. And with, you know, either with Trump having a policy record of putting BlackRock at the helm when there is a economic crisis and then Kamala and Biden, you know, having BlackRock run their economic policy. You know, either way, this is an entity that we should be looking at and scrutinizing because it's very likely they will be developing the fiscal response once again to whatever that crisis is.
And they don't have our best interests at heart. Yeah. All right. So, if you had to look at the outcome of the system that's being used right now, which again, even for my own site, just a recap, a crisis happens.
There's a debate to be had as to whether there should be a response or not, but right now the MO is a crisis happens. The Fed steps in to stabilize the market. The way given previous administrations have handled this, the way that they've started now getting that money into the hands of quote unquote Main Street is by using BlackRock to quote unquote know how to best direct that money. And they are, again, just judging it by the outputs of the system, what they're actually doing is facilitating a massive wealth transfer from the average American.
It's actually broader than that, but we'll just keep it simple. The average American to the what people call the elites that word is sort of getting weird. A lot of those words have gotten weird recently, but yeah, the 1% of the 1% to go back to sort of occupy Wall Street lingo or something like that. The very top.
Okay. So, if you judge a system by its outputs and say a system is designed to do what it actually does, then we have created a system that is designed to leverage a crisis to transfer wealth. Very interesting. How are they doing this in plain sight?
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, how is BlackRock? How did BlackRock get away with that during COVID? How did they get away with it during COVID?
How is it that I think your expectation would be that when the next crisis happens, that it's going to happen again? Yeah. Well, I think when a crisis is happening, people tend to have emotional responses and tend to be coming from a place of fear. And that tends to prevent people from thinking critically or calmly or rationally about situations or about policies.
And so a lot of, you know, during COVID, obviously a lot of focus was on COVID-19 itself and the biosecurity situation, not just so much financial situation. But for example, if there was, you know, a major crisis going forward that would greatly impact American's ability to engage in economic activity or have their purchasing power, you know, close to wipeout or something. I think you would see a lot of people really beg for any policy response, solve this crisis now. We need something and not really have people think about what is the best policy response to this kind of crisis.
People aren't going to think calmly and bring everything to the table. And there isn't, it's very unlikely there will be some sort of calm open public debate about it. Generally, what happens is that the government says that people are scared and emotional. They clamor for some sort of solution from the government and the government offers some sort of solution.
And, you know, like with COVID-19, BlackRock anticipated the next downturn about a month before the repo market started going haywire and presented to central bankers. This is the policy policy you should implement during the next downturn. And it's very possible that BlackRock is working on policy papers, you know, for central bankers or other people in, you know, the US government about what policy should be implemented if, you know, this type of crisis happens or that type of crisis happens. It seems like they seem to be designing the policies, I guess, and they've had, you know, in the Biden administration over the past four years, you know, they've been leading his former BlackRock executives have been leading his economic team, bringing us to where we are now and likely what will happen over the next couple of years whenever or up until this crisis emerges.
So it seems, you know, very likely that they'll be, you know, dominating, you know, fiscal response again and then people because they're not really aware of how this is developed or really, you know, there's just not a lot of media coverage about, you know, for example, the role of BlackRock in the Biden administration or in, you know, on Kamala's economic team specifically, I've seen very little coverage, if any of that recently, maybe a few blips here and there when those people are appointed, but nothing significant beyond that. And then, of course, there was very little scrutiny of US COVID fiscal response, I think, as well. And it's just sort of written off is this is what the government had to do to respond to the crisis in a lot of situations, but I don't think that's necessarily true because again, you know, that fiscal response began well before, you know, COVID was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization proceeding several months, right. So, I don't know.
I think it's a complicated situation. It's complicated to anticipate what will exactly happen. But again, history tends to repeat itself in these cases and the fact that you have BlackRock so embedded with the Democrat specifically and also have this historical precedent with Trump when he was in office last time. It seems very likely that they'll be doing this again.
So I guess my role in this is to try and generate awareness so we can have a discussion before that time of crisis when people are emotional and afraid and concerned about their money about whether we should be having BlackRock at the helm of this when the next crisis emerges. I would say no. Yeah. Okay.
So let's ask the obvious question. Who should be in charge in that moment? Who do we put in charge of fiscal policy in times or otherwise? I don't necessarily have the best answer to that, I guess, because I think our current system specifically as it relates to US Treasury Department has consistently been a revolving door for the last several decades with Wall Street.
Goldman Sachs, for example, has had very significant former Goldman Sachs executives have held very prominent roles at the Treasury when crises have emerged. So as an example, you have one of the top guys at Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, being a key figure in the Clinton administration's economic policy as Treasury Secretary and helping engineer the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which creates arguably the 2008 financial crisis when George W. Bush is Secretary Treasury. At the time the crisis happens as Henry Paulson, another former top guy from Goldman Sachs that allegedly told members of Congress that they didn't bail out the banks that martial law may be declared in the United States.
For example, and then when the COVID fiscal response happens, Steve Mnuchin is a former top Goldman Sachs executive as well. So as far as the big parties, Democrat and Republican, they tend to appoint people to Treasury that come from these top Wall Street banks that have a history of predatory and arguably criminal behavior. And so I think there needs to be a much larger structural change, I guess, to prevent that type of revolving door policy. If we're going to see any sort of meaningful fiscal response to a crisis that actually does take the needs of regular Americans into account, because historically that is not what has happened.
And the people that come to Treasury tend to have the best interest of Wall Street at heart and not the best interest of regular Americans at heart. And I think, again, that's sort of a phenomenon that's not exclusive to Treasury either. You have this type of revolving door phenomenon and really most aspects, if not all, of the U.S. government where you sort of have regulatory capture of the people supposedly regulating those industries.
The industries themselves tend to have put their top people at least these days into those major regulatory positions through this revolving door phenomenon. So I think we need to find a meaningful way to stop that before we can expect that major government fiscal response. Would be designed with the interest of regular Americans of heart, with mainstream that heart and not Wall Street at heart. Okay.
The question becomes, how do we do that? So walk me through just so that we're not talking abstract stuff or really bringing it down to earth. What are the interests of Main Street or the average American? Well, I think regular Americans would like to stop having their money stolen from them or being misused on things where it's basically being sent to enrich multinational corporations, particularly in the war industry, where you have a lot of, you know, there's been a lot set over the past several years, decades really about the military industrial complex and how a lot of the wars that U.S.
empire goes to start in other countries. I'm going to stop you really fast just because you know this stuff so well that you'll fractal into 10 more extremely valid issues. But I want to start with, you just said regular Americans want to stop their money being stolen from them. I will say, I don't think the average American realizes that their money is being stolen.
Whenever I bring that up, I feel like I'm streaming into the void. So how exactly are Americans dollars being stolen from them? Okay, I would say it's going to things that are not actually building necessary infrastructure or providing Americans' needs. So money's been taken from them via tax and just missed.
Yeah, I think taxpayer money has been people taxpayer wealth and the money brought in through taxes has been misused and essentially stolen for a very long time. If you look at the work of Katherine Austin Feds and Mark Skidmore, for example, they noted that like $21 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money essentially was stolen and they can't really explain what happened to it. So, you know, that alone is very significant.
Let me ask, is taxation in and of itself theft? I mean, I think under the current system, because, you know, if anyone's familiar with my work in my books, for example, I sort of argue that our government has been overtaken by this network of organized crime and intelligence agencies that have essentially fused their operations and did so in the immediate post-World War II era. And I think financing their operations when they're at the helm is not good and that the fact that our money is being taken from us ostensibly to provide services to us. And if you believe in the development agenda abroad, the rest of the world, but we know if you look into it, that's not actually what is happening.
This money is being used to benefit this particular group that has taken control of our institutions and is very corrupt. I think in that case, yes, it's not good at all. Well, let's talk about who's profiting from your personal information. Someone is making money from your data every single day.
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So I think, you know, in this situation, we need to really look at how our tax payer money is being spent and a lot of it is spent on weapons, a lot of it is being sent to other countries with no stipulations on how that money is used, no oversight. An insane amount of money was spent on quote unquote nation building during the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, with really nothing to show for it and arguably, and some people have really effectively argued that it was really a money laundering operation at the end of the day. A way to sort of take tax payer money and then have it, you know, go to the hands of these contractors and other entities and it ends up elsewhere with nothing to show for it in these particular situations. And I think there's plenty of ways and plenty of examples also in the US domestically where contractors have been given taxpayer money to do things and they don't actually do the things that they're supposed to do and there's really very little accountability for those things when they happen, because a lot of people aren't really aware or really follow up on where their taxpayer money is going.
And there's a lot of trust that I think people have placed in congressional representatives that they're going to do that do diligence for them, but most people in Congress are multi-millionaires who are funded by billionaires and multi-billionaires and tend to have the interest of those people, and not exactly, you know, the regular Americans who were in a very different economic situation than them at heart. And so I think also, you know, over the past several decades, we've also had the situation of outsourcing our industry, you know, to other countries beginning during or really not exactly sure what a pinpoint it, but you know, several decades ago. And that has also obviously had a major impact on the United States as well. And I think there's a major effort from the Silicon Valley crowd, oligarchs of which fund both parties to sort of on board.
I guess you could say the American people into sort of this new system that's coming into place where it's sort of very focused on, or this basic, I guess sort of this coming together of digital IDs, digital wallets, UBI, a lot of these things are sort of being slowly developed and sort of like promoted to people. But I think ultimately, you know, you would only have that type of situation where UBI is necessary. I just want to make sure that we go point by point right now. Okay, so all of that makes sense to me.
But I want to go back, because when I think about what the interests of the average American are, it's I want to be able to take care of my family. I want things to come in at a reasonable cost. I want to be able to save for the future. I want to leave something for my kids, and I want to make sure that my kids have a better future than I have.
I feel like if you have that for the vast majority of any nation, I literally think it's completely agnostic. I think that's just what humans crave. If you have that for people, you will have a healthy, thriving society. Assuming we're in agreement with all of that, even if you're Black Rock and you're super greedy, it does not make sense to hollow out the middle class, because eventually, as history teaches us, they come for you.
And when they come for you, they come with pitchforks and guillotines, and it's not a good look. So what is it about this moment where the elite are so deranged that they are from where I'm sitting playing with fire? Do they just think that we're so stupid that we'll never rebel? Are they counting on this time will be different?
I don't understand why they would do this. Yeah, it's hard to know exactly why, but I think it's important to say that at least in my opinion, I think where the powers that be, however you want to define that, are taking people is essentially leading us to some sort of two tier society where there is really no need for middle class. And it's really more accurately described as like a neo-futile style society, where you have a large underclass managed by sort of this more elite group that would do the managing. And I think it really falls under what some people have referred to as technocracy, a sort of this idea of more of like a scientific dictatorship.
And there's actually this prominent figure from the club of Rome named Dennis Meadows and the club of Rome is an entity that has a very intertwined entity with groups that have become infamous over the past several years, like the World Economic Forum, for example. But Dennis Meadows essentially said something to the effect that, you know, for the good of people and the planet and the economy and his words, that it was going to be necessary to either reduce the world's population so that people could have freedom and use resources the way they want, or that there would have to be a scientific dictatorship imposed on 8 billion or 7 billion people in order to ensure accurate allocation of resources and all of this stuff by a educated technocratic scientific elite. And there are some thinkers in Silicon Valley, like Eric Schmidt, for example, who wrote a book on AI with Henry Kissinger that essentially say that there's going to be this sort of future brought to us by AI, where there will be the class of people that understand how AI works that program and maintain it. And then there will be this underclass really they don't say underclass but I would say that of people who AI acts upon who can't understand what AI is doing to them.
And eventually, because of their dependence on AI will become cognitively diminished and mentally unable essentially to make decisions for themselves without AI's help. And there's a lot of other indications, I would argue whether it's UBI, which again is going to be for, not, I don't think, you know, the top oligarchs in Silicon Valley, like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman and Peter Teal are going to be receiving UBI. I think it's intended to be for other people that aren't necessarily in that economic tier. I think it's very likely you're going to see if these people succeed in their designs really more of a two tier society without any sort of need for a middle class.
And so I think that's part of why it's been happening. And I think, you know, as to why they might be playing with fire, I think perhaps they're confident that they have a lot more that there's it's much easier to manipulate people now than perhaps in times past. For example, there was a 2014 research study that was funded by the US Air Force that was about trying using social studying how to use social media to control people like drones, which I think is a very disturbing research proposal in and of itself. Basically, this idea that you could use social media networks by tailoring what information people see and don't see down to the individual based on data mined about them off of the internet and then analyzed by by various algorithms to basically, you know, essentially mind control people in the world in the world in the words, I guess, of that Air Force proposal and, you know, other militaries around the world have spent millions upon millions of dollars over the past decade plus researching how to manipulate people on social media platforms.
So I think it's very possible that they think they can manage it since a lot of, you know, discourse has become increasingly online and that, you know, they can really alter how people perceive reality to unprecedented degrees. And another thing that's brought up in this book by Schmitt and Kissinger talks about, you know, eventually people won't be able to know what's real and what's not, you know, pointing to things like AI deep fakes and things like that. But, you know, what if these deep fakes are wielded by the state to manipulate people and what if we're led to believe that things happen when they didn't happen, you know, this can be the lot of the fear mongering about deep fakes is when it's in the hands of, you know, an alleged cyber criminal or someone like that. You know, there's states around the world that have an arsenal of these digital weapons that are meant to manipulate us in our perception of reality and what's real.
And if you can, you know, use AI or other means to control how people perceive reality, you can control their behavior and a lot of other things. So I think, I think they're confident in that and obviously there's probably other things that I'm leaving out, but that's, you know, sort of what comes to mind at least at first for me in regards to that question. Is that all one of my notes is this is dark. This is very dark.
Let me so that I can get a barometer on your worldview. Let me ask you, which of the following scenarios would be better AI comes into existence. It has what from our perspective is God like intellect. It really does know where best to allocate resources to people to maximize human flourishing, but you have to completely submit to the algorithm.
Okay, so human flourishing maximized. Yay. But you have no autonomy. You do what the algorithm tells you to do or the sort of messiness of the human experience, freedom first, you have every right to make stupid and self destructive decisions.
But you don't get to take advantage, obviously, of the algorithm's brilliance. Which of those two would be better? Yeah, I'm definitely human first in that when you put it like in these two, you know, specific situations. I think it's kind of dangerous for all of us to all of us, a lot of us to outsource our creative ability to AI have AI create for us.
Because essentially, when you're not performing those activities yourselves, it sort of falls under if you don't use it, you lose it paradigm. So like a lot of us don't really do mental math anymore because we all, most people have a calculator in their smartphone, for example. And so, you know, you don't use that ability, eventually you lose it. So what happens if AI becomes, you know, the main generator of creative content and people forget how to make art because they haven't done it in so long and things like that.
I think it's possible. I know there's people I've talked into who I think are very intelligent that argue for sort of a middle scenario between the two of you pointed out. I personally tend to fall in a more sort of like I prefer for the analog future to a purely digital future. Personally, but I think there's a way to do it where we don't really have this situation where the AI algorithm is running our lives and we don't have any agency anymore.
I think that's very dangerous. And I think also there's been a lot of hype about AI and its ability to reach that sort of God-like intellect level. I think it's very possible that you could have that essentially faked by some entity and they could claim that which has happened in the past. You had a Google engineer or perhaps ex-Google engineer a few years ago attempt to say that a chatbot that he was working with was sentient and it was not.
So there's the possibility that someone could come out with that story and if it was widely adopted enough people said it was, it could be believed to be so. And when it actually be that and in that type of scenario, I think that's dangerous because it sort of gives this Wizard of Oz functionality. For example, to the government, we made this policy. You hate it and we but the computer said so.
So that's why we did it. You know, it's the computer's fault. It's not our fault. It's a way to sort of our short responsibility onto the algorithm and away from the people at the top.
And I don't really think that's the way to go personally. But I'm not trying to say, like, eliminate AI and don't use it. I personally am not into it, but I have a lot of friends that are. And so I'm not trying to be like that negative about it in that sense.
But I also think this whole idea that we should surrender ourselves to the algorithm because it's so much more intelligent than us, which is sort of implicit in that Eric Schmitt Kissinger book. Yeah, I definitely don't agree with that at all because I think humans should not surrender their agency. And I think it's sort of in that scenario, I sort of just laid out if it's overhyped and it's claimed that it reached that. People could surrender their agency to something that isn't actually possessing this God-like super intelligence, but have just been told it is.
And I think that potentially could be very dangerous. Yeah, so I'm definitely a techno optimist. There's no doubt about that. But I fully acknowledge all of the risk there.
Okay, before we totally go over to the future and where all this stuff is going, I want to re-anchor background debt. So I'm one of the people that is extremely worried about an economic event. We don't have to call it collapse, but certainly I look at the debt and I say this is just completely unsustainable. You cannot add a trillion dollars of debt every 100 days.
That's ridiculous. And the fact that people are acting like we can do this forever is every alarm bell I have is going off. I don't know how to get people to take this seriously, but I would love to know, do you think the debt is a real problem? And is it something that people should really stop and address?
Yeah, I think that is a very real and serious issue. And the amount of debt the US government has accrued, I think, is a testament to the poor fiscal management of the US government. And not just the executive branch, but Congress as well. It's been going on for a very, very long time and not a lot has been done about it.
And really, in the post-9-11 era, the amount of debt that the US government has taken on has just absolutely ballooned when you compare it to previous decades. And I think a lot of that has to do with the foreign wars that the US government has engaged in, including ones that aren't formally declared. And this sort of effort to expand the military empire abroad and sort of maintain that hegemony and dominance. And historically, a lot of that was also directly related to dollar hegemony, the petro dollar system, which now we know has essentially been on the way out.
But a colleague of mine, Mark Goodwin, put out a book a few years ago about this idea of the Bitcoin dollar system and this idea that the US government would sort of use Bitcoin and create the system that's like an analog to the petro dollar system. Where because most people, you know, when Bitcoin is purchased, usually it's done with, you know, buying dollars first in order to purchase Bitcoin, for example. And in that type of situation, you'd be just like in the case of, you know, the petro dollar where, you know, the price of oil isn't, it's priced in dollars. You're generating artificial demand for dollars to buy some sort of energy commodity or energy asset and Bitcoin sort of is an energy asset at the end of the day.
It's moving essentially attempting to create the same system, but instead of with oil, with Bitcoin and most of the Bitcoin holdings in the world are concentrated in the US government itself as one of the biggest holders of Bitcoin in the world. So I think there's sort of this effort there to do that. And this was actually implicit in Trump's speech that he gave at the Bitcoin conference a few months ago, sort of saying that's what he sort of saw utility in Bitcoin for, in a sense. And, but I think also that has a lot of causes, a lot of complications when it relates to the ethos of Bitcoin, which was originally about stopping your responsible central bank policy and fiscal policy, the idea that you would yoke Bitcoin to the US dollar instead of using it to challenge the US dollar or challenge fiat or challenge that base currency or a debt based monetary system.
Obviously, if you join, you know, the US dollar to Bitcoin, having Bitcoin be a challenge to those things essentially kind of has to stop. And really in that situation, you could have Bitcoin enable that type of irresponsible fiscal policy, because you could, I mean, you would essentially be using it as a sink for hyperinflation at the end of the day. It is a really interesting frame to think of Bitcoin as a sink for hyperinflation of the US dollar, but I don't know that a lot of people are going to understand what that means. So if you had to say that same thing, but from a different angle, how would you explain to somebody how one, why is the hyperinflation going to come about?
And two, how is it Bitcoin that becomes the sink for that to stop that from becoming a runaway problem? So essentially, if you were to like hyperinflate the dollar in this type of system, obviously the price of Bitcoin would appreciate as price in US dollars, but it's not, but Bitcoin itself isn't subject to inflation. So the people that hold Bitcoin in that case would really benefit in that type of scenario, but people that hold, you know, dollars, for example, would not necessarily, but there's also this effort to sort of resolve this. That aspect of it by bringing stable coins into the equation, which are, you know, digital dollars, but they're kind of gobbling up US treasuries.
And, you know, are buying sort of like a nation state level amount of US government debt and servicing the debt at the same time. So sort of the Bitcoin dollar system, as I understand it. And again, this is Mark Goodwin's work. So again, he can probably explain it a lot better than me and the detailed mechanisms and all of that.
But as I understand it, you would have to have sort of these dollar stable coins in the mix as well as a way to sort of absorb government debt. And even, you know, these things may not be enough to absorb all of the debt that we have. And so there's these efforts right now, this idea of real world asset tokenization. There's this push into tokenizing what is referred to as natural capital or aspects.
I guess major, like even entire ecosystems, essentially, and tokenizing them and using that as sort of like, you know, a store of wealth of finite supply. So there's this one effort, for example, that seeking to tokenize each hectare of the Amazon rainforest, and there's 750 million hectares. So there's a finite supply of this digital asset security that's tied to each hectare of the rainforest. So then you have something else that, you know, could in theory be used as a sink for this stuff too, because when it's a finite supply, it's, you know, it's not.
It's not subject to inflation, and so you can sort of mitigate the impacts of inflation by having this anti-inflationary thing because of its finite supply as a sink, you know, for the thing that you're creating more of in the case of dollars. Okay, that is really, really interesting. I want to walk people through that. In my words, let me know if I go astray.
In fact, one thing, I'm going to lay out how I think the dollar hyperinflates. But if you think I get that wrong, please definitely challenge my thinking. So here's what I'm taking away from this. Right now, because of the debt going up like crazy, we are already in a position where the U.S.
government is going to spend more just on the interest in the debt than they spend on military spending. Next year, it's projected to be more than Medicare, Medicaid, all of our social programs. And so what's going to end up happening is they will inevitably find themselves in a position where they're going to have to lower rates in order to be able to make good on that debt or default, defaulting, I think, would be way worse. And so what they'll end up doing is printing money.
Now, the problem is printing money in my words, in my words. Printing money is straight theft. They are making more of the money so that they can socialize effectively the losses. The losses.
Yeah. Exactly. So everybody has to deal with the losses, but then they can funnel that money into making good on the debt that they've accrued. Okay, so to do that, then you're going to get into this just death spiral of hyperinflating the dollar because you have to keep printing more of it in order to service the debt and deal with all your obligations so that you don't default.
So that will effectively drive the worth of the dollar closer and closer to zero. Every global reserve currency has had this problem. Even if you look at the British pound, it's lost something like 98% of its value over the last 150 years or something. It's absolutely insane.
So this is the nature of currencies. And what you need in order to avoid getting clobbered by that, if you're paying attention, is you need an asset that you can go into, that you can store the value of your money. It's why they call it a store value that cannot be inflated. And the one that has a lot of cultural attention and energy right now is Bitcoin.
That's certainly why I have invested in Bitcoin. I do not trust the government not to just keep printing and printing and printing. But what you're saying is, hey, there's this process called tokenization that we can use to assign ownership to every physical thing of value, such as a business. And if you own a given hector of Amazon rainforest, you know that they aren't going to be making any more of it.
So you have something that is a finite supply. You're able to put your value into that. And as long as people value that part of the rainforest, you are good. You have a companion store of wealth to Bitcoin or whatever.
But the side part of this is that in order to ensure the integrity of the hectare on which each unit of token is based, you must surveil the forest. And so there's this whole idea of now creating the internet of forests, putting sensors on every tree in every hectare of the Amazon in order to ensure that. No one's messing with it. And this may also at some point include the indigenous people that live there.
Because if one hectare has an indigenous tribe in less trees, as compared to another hectare that isn't inhabited, which one is more valuable in the eyes of investors. Particularly if there's this effort to impose a global carbon market, which some people like Mark Carney and other prominent central bankers have discussed at length. This is alleged solution to environmental issues in the world. I think that is something that should be talked about as well.
And also the idea is to also use satellite surveillance. And so this particular effort to tokenize the Amazon specifically is teamed up with a satellite company called Satellogic. And Satellogic, the chair of the board is Steve Mnuchin, the former treasury secretary. And also on the board is a man named Howard Lutnik, who was recently named to be co-chair of Trump's transition team.
And he's the long time head of King Torpitz Gerald, which is one of the main dealers of US Treasuries and also very intimately connected to the stablecoin tether, which is also infested in Satellogic. So it'll be interesting to see exactly what goes on there as it relates to the satellite firm, which is also in previous reporting I did with. When I mentioned earlier for Bitcoin magazine, they've been involved in sort of this effort to create a carbon market in Latin America that was built on the Bitcoin blockchain specifically, which is something that I think a lot of older school Bitcoiners who are not into the idea of carbon markets or any of these things would be quite against. But I think it's something that should definitely be talked about, the idea of using satellite surveillance to back all of the stuff up, especially with a company like Satellogic that has the people I mentioned on the board, but also vying for US intelligence and military contracts and the people that created that company are longtime contractors for DARPA and the NSA and US intelligence.
So you're going to have this satellite firm surveilling large swaths of Latin America. If these efforts, one of which is called Green Plus and the other one called One Amazon, go through. You'll essentially have a company that's tied to important people that as it relates to the US government, former officials and also people that have historically been US government and intelligence contractors surveilling your environment from the sky without a national government really having any say in the matter. I think that's quite problematic.
And also, Tether is behaving rather, you know, making some interesting choices for a stablecoin issue where I think as well, they've started investing, for example, in brain machine interfaces, you know, brain chips and that sort of thing, and have also, you know, onboarded the FBI in secret service onto their platform and have been, you know, shutting down people's wallets on behalf of, you know, the Treasury's OFAC and entities like that. So, you know, I think, you know, some of these stablecoin issuers, the prominent ones anyway, are sort of anticipating this kind of system that I discussed earlier and are sort of anticipating. embedding themselves with powerful actors that I think ultimately mitigate their ability to be what some people have argued are human rights tools. You know, some people have said that about stablecoins in the past.
But if you're onboarding, you know, one particular government, which very much has a political agenda as it relates to Latin America and other parts of the world, onto your stablecoin and are freezing, you know, taking people's money essentially at the behest of that government and also getting, you know, invested with people that are, at least in the case of a future Trump administration, are likely to have some political connections there as well. You know, I think that's pretty significant. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do.
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