I'm Tom bill you and this is impact theory welcome back to part two with investigative journalist Whitney web let me ask do you think that the tokenization of the natural world helps or hinders with this what you call the neo feudal where I've heard you refer to it is like a new form of slavery where we have these two very divergent classes classes because when you first started describing it, it sounded kind of awesome. And then by the end, I thought, oh, like, maybe this actually creates something really terrible. Well, okay, let's take the case of, you know, the green plus program, which claims to sort of tokenize and in turn into carbon credits protected areas throughout Latin America. So in those cases, the carbon credits aren't given to the locals or the local governments to trade and make money off of and put back into their communities.
It's going through third parties that are not based on those countries. And the money for the people there go into a particular fund that isn't managed by any people that live there it's managed by. Well, they haven't really been open about it but a guy from one of the biggest insurance companies in the world locked in is ostensibly the head of it. And they would decide when there would be certain allotments of that money and that money has can only be spent on projects that this particular group running green plus that again isn't based in Latin America approves of.
So in that case you're sort of choosing how the money can be spent you're framing it publicly as for the benefit of the environment and for the benefit of these local people. But in reality, you're deciding what they can and can't fund. And some of the stuff that their partners and whatever are tied to a lot of the same foreign oligarchs like the Rockefeller Foundation or the Gates Foundation or entities like that that go back to some of these very wealthy families ultimately it's initiatives run by NGOs that those organizations fund, which ultimately doesn't necessarily work in the best interest of these local people who are poised to surrender these protected areas supposedly to protect them by generating carbon credits. But the carbon credits are going to be traded by people abroad and the decisions about how that money is spent is being made by people who are abroad, not about the locals.
So it sort of seems to me like a way to frame a project that's going to make certain people a lot of money under very different terms than what is actually going to happen. It seems more likely to disenfranchise rather than empower locals but as being framed sort of as a planetary necessity because of the whole climate change thing, right? So we have to act now to do this stuff. And so there's this pressure being placed through that rhetoric on people to comply with these types of things, particularly in Latin America is a big focus of that now.
But I think as it's been played out in practice, that really isn't the case. In the particular group that I mentioned earlier, that's doing this in Amazon, which is called One Amazon, entered into contractual agreements with this indigenous community called the Shui, I believe, that live in the Amazon. And it was framed to them as being great. And then they actually went and like read the contract after they signed it and realized that it dramatically favored one Amazon over their interests and then voted to cancel the agreement, right?
So these guys kind of have a history, at least these actors that I've mentioned, of sort of going in and framing their stuff, making a sales pitch to locals that it's going to be great for them. And then when it's not in practice, the locals are trying to get out of it. So that should really tell you a lot about what's going on here, I think. Okay.
Do you, by any chance, know the Kosen theorem? No. It's very interesting. I'm just beginning to explore it.
But one of what I'm trying to figure out is the thing you're talking about, is it the necessary outcome? So when I think about the take Africa and the natural resources that they have, and does that have to be a point of exploitation? Or could that be a point where they're able to grow their industries from the ground up? So for instance, if you're just selling off your cobalt or whatever, yeah, you're going to be in a really bad position because you're going to get effectively taken advantage of the real money is in building the products, the batteries, whatever, that are downstream of mining that element.
If, however, you build the industry in your own country and you say that we're a tremendous source of cobalt or in the example of what we're talking about, you have this Amazon rainforest. Is it necessary? Just a fact of the way the economic system is set up that you will end up getting exploited if you do this? Or if they were smart, could they put in legislation that says, okay, we're actually going to assign a value to all of these different items, the rainforest, whatever.
And now according to the coast, and if I'm saying that correctly, theorem, it says basically the reason that we end up with these imbalances where like people pollute into a river and now you have a company that's able to make a ton of money because they can force us all to pay a cost for the pollution. But they get to reap all the benefits. If instead you assign an owner to the river, now all of a sudden the owner of that river knows exactly how much damage is being done and they can go to the company and say you owe me this much money because you were injuring this asset that I own that has a cost. So it becomes this, it's basically a statement of without clear property rights, then people get away with things like the tragedy of the commons where they're able to push their pollution downstream and reap economic benefits from it.
So as I was hearing you say the story, that was what came to mind was like, well, hold on a second. If you actually assign a value to this stuff to the rainforest, just stick with one example, now suddenly the rainforest has clear property rights. And if the property rights are clear as long as those people have not signed a stupid deal, as long as the property rights are clear and use a terrible word right now. Just, I don't have a better word in this moment.
But if they are clear and just now all of a sudden it's like, we should be able to get into a position where the local people or whomever are able to capture an accurate amount of value to know who is deleteriously impacting their, their ownership. And so if the cosine theory is correct, that that may actually have a positive benefit. I am barely beginning to understand this theorem. So for anybody that knows it better, by all means, drop something in the comments about what I'm not understanding very early in the journey of getting knowledgeable about that.
But anyway, to really be succinct with the question, do you think it is a fundamental nature of our economic system that that will become a point of exploitation? Or could that, if structured correctly, be a boon for any local region that has a natural asset? Yeah, so I think a lot of the powers that are affecting sort of this natural capital agenda right now are inherently predatory institutions. And so I think their interest is in exploiting, which has been historically what has happened to Latin America in the colonial and post-colonial era.
And I think this perhaps may be a more creative way of sort of dressing up the same game to make it look different. What is the game? Well, I think what the goal here is is to sort of financialize and monetize what previously have been the global commons. So for example, there was this effort that was spearheaded by a Rockefeller Foundation connected group called the Intridsic Exchange Group.
They partnered with the New York Stock Exchange to create this new asset class and asset vehicle called the Natural Asset Corporation. And basically how these NACs are said to work, at least as far as the architects of it have said, is that this group goes and identifies a natural asset that nobody owns. And then they sort of have an ICO and sell shares in that and then work on generating profit for their shareholders. And then allegedly we'll use that money towards conserving the asset and all of that.
But conserving the asset, for example, could mean not letting anyone or any locals go near it. And these natural asset corporations could go and, I don't know, claim on a lake in Chile, for example, and say no one can use it. But what if a bunch of local people fish in it and aren't necessarily damaging the lake, at least in Chile and Argentina and maybe other Latin American countries. Water, even if it's a lake or a river that touches a privately on property, that's part of the commons.
So the Intridsic Exchange Group frames this natural asset corporation as creating a whole new asset class that dwarfs the existing asset classes we use today. And they refer to that as nature's economy and as the opportunity and unlocking nature's economy. So really it's a way to create this huge, in my opinion, massive asset class that will allow them to continue really what is the Wall Street Casino. Allow them to continue their bad behavior into the new era, but are just going to be sort of taking ownership of natural features and making these corporations around them.
And then using them really essentially however they like. Because in theory, you can have a natural asset corporation through all these carbon markets and all these other mechanisms that are being created. You can buy offsets or other things to sort of justify whatever you want to do to any sort of land you take ownership of ownership of and sort of frame this whole system is benefiting the environment. But really I don't really think it is that because a lot of these natural capital things have been developed by JP Morgan or people like Mark Carney, who was a former banker of the head of the Bank of England, head of the Bank of Canada, and also helped cover up the HSBC drug cartel money laundering scandal among other things.
And these are the kind of people that are sort of designing these supposedly sustainable development systems, but a lot of it involves debt politics as it relates to global South economies, this idea in the sustainable development goals of having sustainable debt levels and all of this stuff, and how debt is an important part of financing the sustainable development goals and how a lot of these ideas of financializing nature, they say it'll give nature monetary value, but it also allows nature to be turned into financial instruments that in the hands of these predatory financial institutions could just essentially become fodder for their, for their casino at the end of the day. And I think that's not really a good thing. So I think we should look at the history of these institutions and not necessarily, you know, believe at face value, what they say of, you know, this is good for the environment and whatever. I don't really think that's necessarily the case.
If you look at, you know, groups like the nature conservancy, for example, that are sort of a pioneer in this field. They've been intimately connected with Wall Street for a very, very long time. Henry Paulson, who I mentioned earlier, the former Goldman Sachs guy that was head of the treasury department when the 0708 crash started was chairman of the nature conservancy for a long time. And they're very, they have a lot of involvement with JP Morgan people.
They're pioneering this whole idea of the debt for nature swap on that if countries implement plans, the nature current conservancy designs for land management, for example, they'll be able to restructure part of their debt and all of this. It's sort of, I would argue, a way to use the huge debt load that Latin America has been salad with through their relationships with entities like the IMF in the World Bank, a way to sort of offer them an out quote unquote, but it's not necessarily an out it's sort of a way into this, this a new game, I guess you could say. So I'm sort of concerned about it in that sense. And I'm also concerned that, you know, his, a lot of these same entities too, you know, if you're going to turn like the natural world into into a commodity, you know, a lot of these banks that are involved, like JP Morgan, for example, I have a track record of manipulating commodities and engaging in a lot of, you know, financial criminality that they've never really been held accountable for aside from, you know, maybe some multi million dollar fines.
But when you look at, you know, how much money these banks have, I mean, that really those fines are nothing to them, especially when, you know, the financial criminality being prosecuted creates a, you know, profits 10 times the amount of the fine. I mean, it was worth it for them at the end of the day. They have no incentive to change their behavior. So I think for us to believe that they're all of a sudden altruistically concerned about people in the global South and the planet and the environment, I think is honestly kind of naive of us.
And I think we should consider that perhaps this is a, there's different motives at work here. Right. I want to drill into this idea of organized crime, intelligence agencies getting together, financial, criminal activity. Help me understand what's going on.
Where does the, the conjoining of organized crime and politics sit exactly. And what do intelligence agencies have to do with it? Yeah. So I wrote a whole book about this called One Nation Under Black Meal.
It's divided into two volumes. So originally the story, I started writing the book trying to make sense of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, because I was reporting on that at the time of his arrest in 2019. And was trying to figure out what was going on there because I realized very quickly that Epstein obviously had a lot of support behind him in order to be able to do what he was doing and not really face any meaningful consequences. And so I started looking sort of at this, this network behind him and his affiliations and focus a lot of my work, not so much on Epstein after his first arrest in 2007 or so.
But really what he was doing in the 90s and the 80s and the 70s. And in going back far enough, I sort of fleshed out what became volume one of the book, which was sort of tracing this particular network that he inhabited back to these events that happened in the first in World War II and later the immediate post World War II era. In World War II, I guess you could say it started with something called Operation Underworld, which is where I believe the Office of Naval Intelligence made a covert alliance with organized crime, specifically the National Crime Syndicate. So the National Crime Syndicate was really a combination of Charles Lucky Luciano of the Italian Mafia in May or Lansky of the Jewish mob.
They sort of came together and created what they called the National Crime Syndicate in Murder, Inc. and all of this years prior in a New York City specifically made major inroads and essentially taking over the Democratic Party. Luciano in particular, and they did this by taking over the unions in New York first, which was the historical base of the Democratic Party. And then a few threatening threats were made to certain choice people in order for them to secure sort of control over that particular party in New York City.
And obviously, it seems like this model was replicated and expanded in other mob hotspots throughout the country with people allied with these two particular figures. So those particular figures teamed up with the Office of Naval Intelligence in World War II, ostensibly to protect US docs from would-be German saboteurs and things like that. And so essentially that's this is a documented thing. And so I use that as a starting point, but from that point on, you see all these other affiliations of the intelligence complex as it was developing because the CIA, for example, was created in the late 40s after World War II.
But you see a lot of overlap with organized crime there too, like a lot of people from the National Crime Syndicate, for example, were used as CIA assassins abroad, among other things. And you have a lot of, it's sort of the symbiotic relationship it seemed, sort of developed between these organized crime figures and then what would become the modern US intelligence apparatus. And so you see sort of the CIA after its formation, sort of getting into what had traditionally been mob rackets, like drug trafficking, arms trafficking, for example, and also things like sex blackmail, which is something that the mob had perfected previously in the CIA. And of course, other intelligence agencies as well, which on to, you know, use to their benefit for a very long time.
And I think honestly why they would develop this relationship makes sense when you look at the fact that a lot of the people in the early CIA and its precursor in World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, were very intimately connected to Wall Street. So very much interested in markets and new markets and specifically protected markets, which I guess you could argue a sort of racket ultimately is at the end of the day. So I think that's sort of where it really started. And I think this particular Alliance, as I point out in my book, and I just have a lot of detail and go over a lot of different scandals and administrations as something that has been a pretty consistent theme in US history from that point on.
And I think it's very much has influenced where we are today in very significant ways. The people who win, they're not smarter. They just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now in business, psychology, leadership, books that have already changed how the best operators think.
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What does it reveal about that underworld that's just out of sight from the average person? Yeah, I think what it reveals is that the way we think power operates or the way we've been taught power operates in the United States and really around the world is very different than how it actually works. A lot of it is about behind-door deal-making, and it's about markets. It's creating markets.
And sometimes it's about generating artificial or fake demand for the products of those markets, maybe if no one wants them, or allowing the state to engage in clandestine or illegal illicit markets. And so they're participating in making all the money, but no one else is involved in those rackets because it's otherwise illegal. And I think a lot of it, I think we've sort of been fed a fairytale version of American history for those that are interested. And looking into, there's lots of authors over the years.
I'm only really following in their footsteps. I have pointed out that there are a lot of times there's been deeper things going on to events that maybe when we learn about certain major events in American history in schools, perhaps there's a lot more, they've been able to show, and I hope to show in my book too, that there have been these other corollaries going on as well, that explain a lot more effectively what we have experienced in the past 100 or so years of American history and what it means for the now. And I think as far as it relates to Jeffrey Epstein, I think the sex blackmail and sex trafficking thing is really one of the one of several things that he was involved with doing, and I think keeping the focus on those specifically has intentionally distracted from other things he was involved in, like currency speculation. It seems like he was involved in sort of financial hit man activity and sort of collapsing and pumping foreign currencies around the world.
He was involved in efforts to manipulate the tax system, setting up major non-profits in ways that were in this gray area illegal and not legal in the 1980s. He claimed to be hiding and finding looted money, i.e. stolen money, for the most powerful people in the world. It obviously refers to someone who is very intimately aware of the shadow banking system, money laundering, where financial criminals would hide their assets, people that worked with him in the 1980s have alleged that he had a relationship with BCCI, which was a very controversial bank of that era that later sort of collapsed in the early 1990s, but wasn't only a bank that had intelligence agencies and drug cartels and all sorts of other people as clients, but it was also according to the US Senate report on BCCI was sex trafficking pre-pubescent children to elites of the United Arab Emirates, and that was never properly investigated either.
So there is a lot of very brazen criminality that goes on in the upper echelons of power, and I think we've been led to believe that it doesn't. And a lot of that is because these powerful people have a lot of money to pump into public relations and have also, for a really long time, tried to manipulate the information people see and don't see. And I think that continues now into the modern era. And I think there hasn't really been a lot of scrutiny about these other aspects of what Epstein was up to.
And there also hasn't been really any scrutiny at all of the person who we know is his main patron, which is Leslie Wexner. I believe who I believe is still the richest man in Ohio in a major retail billionaire in the United States and sort of the framing we've been given is that, well, Epstein is dead and Helene Maxwell is in prison, and so this type of activity now stops. I don't necessarily think that's true. I think, as I've labored to show in my work on the Epstein case that Epstein was not an anomaly and was really, if anything, really middle management for this particular network I'm referring to that has for a long time in connection with intelligence agencies and other intelligence agencies and other groups engaged in things like illegal arms trafficking, illegal technology transfer to us sensible US adversary states and all sorts of other scandalous things that have been pushed under the rug for a very long time.
But if you go and look for the sources, including from congressional records and things that are completely irrefutable, it's very clear that this type of criminality has gone on for a very, very long time. And I think more people need to be aware of it, so we're a little more aware of what we're actually dealing with as it relates to the government and some of these other institutions. What mental paradigm do you use to make sense of all of this? Is this will to power?
Is this humans or just animals and they can't transcend their urges? And so governments and shadow agencies leverage people's sexual deviancy to get control of them? What mental model? Because you talk about part of the world I have no interface with.
And so it makes me feel like I'm sort of skimming across the surface of the matrix. What mental model do you use to make this all make sense? As far as it relates to humans, I think honestly what it says more than anything else is that most humans are good people, but they're also very trusting. And they've been too trusting in people who we have enough information on books by now to know that a lot of the people with extreme amounts of power in our world today are not trustworthy at all, but we continue trusting them.
And I think that's very problematic and I think the fact that these a lot of these actors are very historically have done very dark things. I think a lot of people prefer not to think about it and prefer to sort of have a block on it and just not interact with it all and continue living their lives that are completely divorced from that world. But unfortunately that world is having now more than ever an increased effect on our actual livelihoods and potentially seeking to lead us into sort of this new neo-futal paradigm that I mentioned earlier. And so I think people need to be a lot less trusting of these particular people and of the fronts or the politicians that are rolled out to sell these agendas to us and that we need to rely more on the people in our communities, our friend groups and our families that we know are good and build resilient local communities with them, because if you, like yourself and myself, are concerned about an economic crisis coming down the road, it's very unlikely if you look at historical precedent that the government is going to actually do anything to save you or that Wall Street will do anything to save you.
It's much more likely that you'll be in a better spot to face that crisis if you build something local that can provide resilience for you and your family and your friends and your community in the face of that crisis. So I think we a lot of times Americans and other countries as well are sort of told that as long as we get the right guy in the White House, he'll magically fix everything or all we need to do to ensure our country goes in the right direction is vote once every four years. I think it should be clear to people now more than ever that that is really very mistaken, especially now that we have two people running for office in the main parties that have both been in power before, that have been in the executive branch before, and we've seen what they've done. And I think people should focus a lot more on policy agendas rather than just rhetoric, because at the end of the day, most politicians, when they campaign, it's a sales pitch, and a lot of those people don't keep their promises once they get into office, and that's true of both Trump and the Biden-Kamalik crowd.
And I think people need to take more individual responsibility for their lives and stop waiting for some sort of savior to magically get in the White House to make everything better. So I think we've been led to believe, again, by being very trusting that we don't have any agency to make things better. I think we absolutely do, and there are a lot more of us, and there are of them, and there's power in numbers, and if people would organize on the local level, starting with making sure your friends and family are taken care of because especially if you anticipate things are just going to get very crazy, which seems increasingly likely, whether it's an economic sense or a social sense, making sure you have some sort of stability or network to fall back on, I think is very, very, very important. Okay, so if we know that people are being too trusting and if we know that this stuff is happening right before us, what specifically do we need to be vigilant for, vote against whatever, however you want to think about it, that if we remain blind to, we'll lead to this new slave class.
So I think we should focus on specific policy agendas that are meant to take us there, and I think the cornerstone of those is the effort to create an all-encompassing digital ID that will determine what you can and can't access in your life. I would argue, and I wrote reports of at the time during COVID-19 and others did as well, that sort of the vaccine passport was a trial run for this digital ID vision that's being implemented essentially globally and going to be rolled out over the next two years or so at the global level. And the idea of having a lot of the surveillance sucked up on you being linked to the digital ID, having it determined, having your medical records in there, having your telecom in there, your social media account, really all of your aspect of life in the centralized digital ID is very problematic, especially if we saw during COVID, you know, if you didn't have the right, if you didn't get the vaccine, for example, you weren't allowed into places restricted your freedom of movement. Digital ID has the ability to restrict not just your freedom of movement, but really your access to everything, including information based on the blueprints that are out there by the public private partnerships and associations that are developing it, like ID 2020, for example.
And then there's the whole idea of linking this intimately with a digital wallet that, again, would have some sort of programmable, surveyable and sizable currency, where, you know, which again, as I said earlier, has major implications for financial freedom and financial privacy. I think we need to focus a lot on those in particular, because a lot of consciousness was generated about those policy agendas during the COVID era and the risks of them. And, you know, unfortunately, we're in a situation now globally where you have people both on the left and the right, marketing these policy agendas under very different metrics that they think their base will be most receptive to. So in the case of, you know, Donald Trump, for example, he's calling for a biometric entry exit system as a way to tackle illegal immigration.
A campaign lawyer of his went on a podcast a few months ago saying that biometric facial recognition would be a way to stomp out the voter ID or the voter fraud issue and, you know, institute voter ID. And you can support voter ID, but why can't we just have physical driver's license or the type of, you know, IDs people have always had? Why does it have to be, you know, a biometric facial recognition thing? And unfortunately, Trump's vice-presidential candidate, J.D.
Vance, is very intimately connected to a man named Peter Teal, who funds a lot of companies that are, for example, building the virtual border wall or building facial recognition systems that are being sent to law enforcement, some of which were ag about, you know, having it been used to send people that were at the Capitol in January 6, 2021 to prison, among other things. And it's very likely that these type of policies would also be implemented, you know, if Kamala wins, for example, too, but it's going to be sold under different metrics as well to her base. But a lot of the same backers behind her, like Reid Hoffman, for example, envision the same type of policy coming to fruition. And I think we should focus on stopping those policy agendas in particular.
And it's important to keep in mind, too, as far as programmable, surveyable money goes, as I said earlier, it's not just CBDCs. This can also be, that same regime can be implemented with stablecoins. And I think if we focus on these policy agendas, which are central to this larger agenda, and say we don't want these things and we plan, you know, with our friends and family who are like-minded, how we're going to opt out of those systems, I think that could be really powerful in effect real change. Let's talk about who's profiting from your personal information.
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Okay, so I want to get to how we opt out, but first I want to better understand, do you think the government has too much power right now? Oh, yeah, I absolutely do. I mean, there's so many aspects of that. I don't even know what is the best detail to drill down on.
But I guess I would say that when Bill Barr was attorney general under Trump, he implemented a program called Deep, which essentially created this framework for the DOJ to begin pre-crime prosecutions. And this whole idea that you can prosecute people or arrest them for social media posts. And that's happened a few times in the US since then, but also more recently in the UK, you have that same policy being rolled out. There as well, where people are being handed down 20-month prison sentences for social media posts and things like that.
And that's very problematic. And so around that same time that Bill Barr did that, after the El Paso Walmart shooting, Trump called on social media platforms to profile their users and try and pick out potential shooters before they could act. So sort of calling on tech giants to develop some sort of pre-crime functionality. And even though that didn't end up happening, that's very problematic.
Maybe you could argue that Trump did it because it was a crisis and that was his response, but that's not good. And that's very bad for freedom. And it's very Orwellian. And this is policy that is also being promoted by aspects of the Democrats in the United States.
And also, as I mentioned, labor in Britain with Keir Starmer is sending people to prison for social media posts. And there's actually this broader effort that involves US intelligence agencies in the FBI and the Secret Service, Britain and Israeli intelligence as well. It's housed in the World Economic Forum. It's called the Partnership Against Cybercrime.
And they're attempting to label speech as a form of cybercrime. So if you publish alleged misinformation online, you could be considered a cyber criminal under some of the policy papers that they have published in the past, which I think is very concerning. And they're arguing that digital ID should be a requisite for internet access also, because that way everything you read and consume online and everything you post online would be tied to your government issued digital ID. So that's really creating a framework for unprecedented surveillance of our online lives and online activity.
And then when you add the whole push into pre-crime that has been going on for a very long time and both parties have advanced, then it doesn't really matter if you have done something wrong or not. If the algorithm determines that you may commit a crime in the future because of what you've posted or said or how you've reacted online, you know, that leads us into a very, very, very dark and problematic place. And there really isn't a lot of understanding or consensus about these issues, but a lot of it comes down to, again, us being so trusting with thinking that the data that we put out online isn't going to be used against us or isn't going to be misused by some of these entities who access it. And that includes, you know, government contractors, like Palantir, for example, which gets a lot of contracts regardless of who's in office.
And, you know, they have profiled people on behalf of the CIA, regular Americans based on their online activity for decades now. And there's really not a lot of discussion about it. And I think, I don't know, people should be aware of the stuff and aware of what the government's doing and look for things that we can do to opt out of these systems as much as possible. All right, talk to me about that.
How do we weaken the government's power over us? Well, I think at this point, a lot of it has to do with Silicon Valley and our dependence on products of certain Silicon Valley behemus. So a lot of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley also double as military and intelligence contractors and give our data quite freely to them when they should not. And again, if we become so dependent on a suite of products, all of which, you know, all of those companies have these same ties.
You know, for example, maybe we can use some Google and some Microsoft products, whatever. But if they're all intelligence military contractors at the end of the day and we can't live our lives without them, then we can be manipulated to do things to maintain access to those products in ways that might be very damaging to human freedom, among other things. So I think it's important to look for open source or different alternatives and look for companies or operating systems or whatever that don't have those types of relationships with the military and intelligence communities. I think people should also consider spending less time online and maybe a little more time offline, remembering what it's like to hang out with real people and build community in the real world, because I think specifically in the COVID era when a lot of us were forced to be online a lot more than before, because of lockdowns and other things that may have been a little easier to have forgotten what that's like at the end of the day.
But I think if you can be as self-sufficient as possible, not in, of course, you know, from the tech perspective, that's hard because not everyone can develop their own software. But there are things you can use that, you know, if you're upset about Google censorship or something like that on YouTube, but you're continuing to use Google products all the time. You're not really providing an incentive for the company to change, and you're freely giving it, giving your data up to it. And it's a contractor with these aspects of the US military and things like that, at least historically has, but I believe they still do have contracts.
But really, you know, Silicon Valley and in the military and intelligence really have fused operations in a lot of significant ways. And you can argue also that a lot of, you know, intelligence agencies had early involvement in some of the biggest Silicon Valley companies as well. You know, there's an alleged CI involvement with the origins of Google oracle and some other significant companies as well. And then, of course, you have the involvement of people like Jeffrey Epstein with Microsoft in the 1990s and some other things that haven't really been, you know, reported on significantly, but probably should be.
So I think, you know, that's one way we could opt out and not be so dependent on particular companies that have those ties. But I think also, like, there's a lot of other ways to be resilient, learning a skill that other people don't have that might be useful in a time of crisis, building a store of knowledge because of Internet censorship gets worse. If you have offline knowledge that will be useful to you in a time of crisis, stored on hard drives when you can't access the Internet, that seems like it might be helpful. Learning to grow your food or investing in someone in your community that can grow food and will grow food for you.
You know, also, there's a lot of different things that people can do to try and make themselves more self-sufficient because the more dependent we are either on these companies or on the government, we do have less agency in those cases. And I think we really need to remember that we do have agency. We've been outsourcing it. We've been giving it away to other people who don't have our best interests apart.
And we as a society need to learn to take that back as much as possible. All right. When people tell me, I need to start thinking about making my own food. And then I'm like, whoa, we are planning for a catastrophe here at this point.
So in a near term timeline, let's say the next three to five years, how bad do you expect it to get on a scale of, I can keep going to the grocery store to, I better have my own farm. And how far are you going in your own life to plan for wherever you think we are going to be on that spectrum? Well, I feel a little weird making these kinds of predictions because obviously no one knows exactly what's going to happen. But I think it's better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.
That's just my personal opinion. And I know how everyone feels that way. But at the very least, as someone that lives in South America, I've talked to a decent amount of people from Argentina that lived through the economic collapse there in 2001. And a lot of what I've heard is that mental preparedness is very, very important.
So maybe you don't have the resources to really wrap or prepare for some sort of major crisis. But you can think through at least what you would do and have some sort of plan if things do get bad. Because when people don't have any sort of plan at all or any sort of framework with how to deal with any significant crisis, they panic. And people tend to make poor decisions when they are in fear and panicking.
So I think there's a whole spectrum of how much you could prepare or how little. And really regardless of your economic means, there's something everyone could do to be a little more prepared. But at the end of the day, whatever crisis comes, however bad it is, the solution from the government or its private sector partners is going to be increased surveillance and increased control over our lives. And if you do not want that, you should become as self-sufficient as you possibly can with you in your community because it's very likely that whatever the next crisis is, the solution that will be offered is going to come with a lot of caveats to it.
Whether it's, you know, programmable, survivable money that you'll be onboarded to to not lose all the access to the dollars that were previously in your banking account or any other, you know, number of things. Oh, we have to regulate the internet because of cyber crime. Now you need a digital ID to access the internet and stuff like that. You know, there's a lot of things that could potentially happen and a lot of solutions could potentially be sold.
But at the end of the day, if you look at what's happened in the post-9-11 era with nearly every crisis, it's usually more control for them, less freedom for us. And I think we need to be vigilant about that and think about how in the face of any crisis that comes forward, how can we be more sufficient and not so dependent on, you know, maybe a solution that the government would offer. But what come with us being forced to surrender more of our freedom and, you know, more of our actual security, because a lot of times when we've been offered that, you know, that trade off, we haven't really received increased security. It hasn't increased regular American wealth.
It hasn't benefited the little person, but it has, you know, benefited, you know, the surveillance panopticon and a lot of other of these things that have been, you know, built out in the post-9-11 era. And so I think, you know, maybe it will get really bad. Maybe it will be a little less bad, more of a blip. Who knows?
It seems like it's gearing up, at least economically, to be quite bad, but these guys, too, have a lot of ways of rigging markets, rigging market responses. So I think they'll try and mitigate or have it play out, however they think it will benefit them the most once that crisis emerges, right? Let me ask, do you think it? I mean, it could get really bad, and I'm, again, prefer to be over-prepared, so like in my own personal life, I'm gearing up to be food self-sufficient and have some sort of, you know, form of off-grid power.
Where I live, I also, there was a storm a few weeks ago, and I lost power for 13 days. So, you know, sometimes stuff like that can happen. And so even if it's not a major economic crisis or some other, you know, government-produced crisis, you know, it's always good to be prepared. And in the sort of landscape that's developing, I think the more self-sufficient you are, the more you will have agency and be in more control of your life.
And I think that really could benefit everybody, personally. Now, this may just be the sort of arrogance that seeps into you when you were born and raised in America, but I think of South America as being less governmentally stable than the US. Would you say that you have more or less freedom in South America than we have here in the US? Well, it's interesting because really a lot of South American governments have been unstable at times, but a lot of that has, you could arguably trace back to really, you know, perhaps US government involvement historically in the continent.
Latin America and Central America were subjected to a ton of coups, sponsored by US intelligence, and there's a lot of US intelligence and US government manipulation of national governments down here that have tended to cause problems that sometimes sees and then explode a decade later or something. So, you know, it's very complicated to really try and explain some more governments or more stable than others, perhaps. You know, I live in Chile, which is traditionally viewed as one of the more stable governments in South America that was also subjected to a very totalitarian dictatorship that was back by US intelligence, you know, for a very long time. And, you know, a lot of complications have also come downwind of that.
And there's also political division here, just like there is in the United States. And I think, you know, regardless of who is president of Chile, they tend to, that's really about, at least at this point, balancing either, you know, is the US going to dominate their administration or is China? You know, it's really not so much about what am I going to do in charge of my sovereign nation? It's balancing the interest of two competing global superpowers at the end of the day.
As far as it goes to normal life here, I definitely like it. It's different than the US. I feel like I do have a lot of freedom. But, you know, things can be really complicated.
The COVID response here was much more draconian and freedom limiting than a lot of places in the US. And a lot of the things that I've been talking about today are really global issues. And it's really something that's being foisted on the global population. And I don't really think there's any government in the world that isn't on board with some of these policy agendas, at least in some way.
I know Chile certainly is. But as far as, you know, money goes, you know, for someone on the income I make, Chile has a lot more affordable. I have two young kids, healthcare, babysitting, school costs, all of that is much more affordable here than if I was in the US. Actually, if I was in the US instead of here because of a health issue with my two-year-old, I probably would be saddled with decades of medical debt if I was in the US.
And here, thankfully, I'm not. So, you know, I have my reasons for being here, but I don't think it's necessarily what everyone should do. Like, if you want to prepare for whatever's coming in the US or another country, it's a very individual decision. But I really recommend doing a lot of research.
And if you plan to go to another country, please visit it before you decide to move there. Because I've met people that have not really done that and have regretted it. But really, you know, I think at the end of the day, what's really important is to have people you know and care about and can trust when things get crazy around you. Like that network, whether you're in the US or South America or really anywhere is likely to be, you know, the most important thing to keep, you know, yourself in a better situation if things get really rocky externally.
Alright, let me see if I can get a barometer for just how dark you think the future is going to be. Do you think that whatever calamity crisis befalls us in the future, will it be just a thing that happened that people take advantage of? Meaning the government is a power grab or will it be an engineered crisis that they ensure we encounter so that they can grab more power? It's really hard to say, but I think, you know, as far as the economy goes, it's a mathematical inevitability that this debt monstrosity will hit a wall at some point, right?
So something has to happen there. There has to be some sort of major change for the US government to get out of that problem. And there's a lot of other issues that have been going on in the economy for some time. And that's what you've had people after a week, you know, looking at the numbers and being like economic collapse this year.
And it didn't happen because all these other, you know, all these, I mean, when you have powerful people in finance and also in the government, you know, able to make markets behave certain ways, you can sort of kick the can down the road longer than it normally would if they weren't doing those things. So I think at some point there is going to be some sort of event that happens. And I think the goal, as I said earlier, is to at least make people scared enough that they would acquiesce to this advent of programmable available money, whether it's a stablecoin or a CBDC and be like, yeah, I'll take that because the alternative is too bad, like losing all of my money and purchasing power or something like that. But, you know, the way that sort of phenomenon could play out could be a short-term thing or a protracted crisis.
It's honestly really hard to know. But if you're like me and you have a red line of no programmable, sizable money for me, thank you. It's very important to think about how you would avoid that if that type of crisis comes out and that's offered to you as the only alternative to losing all of your wealth. Whitney, this has been amazing.
I cannot thank you enough for your time. Where can people follow along with you? So my website is unlimitedhangout.com. You can find all my stuff there.
You can support my work there. And I would please encourage you to sign up for my newsletter there because I've had a lot of manipulation of past interviews and content by bots and other things. When you search my name in YouTube, it's all interviews I haven't given and people clipping out of context things. I've said, yes, it's very unfortunate.
But if you want access to what I'm actually saying and the content I'm actually producing and all of that, I would encourage you to go directly to the source to my website unlimitedhangout.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Everybody out there, if you have not already, please be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary.
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