Peak Prosperity - Stablecoins and the Unstable Truth Behind Them (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Guest Aaron Day focuses on digital technocracy, focusing on stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Genius Act, highlighting financial surveillance, tokenization, and the erosion of free will under centralized control.

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. We're taking stable coins, which are digital programmable money, tied to the price of the dollar. We're putting them under control of Congress with all of the financial surveillance. We're requiring them to do monthly audits with the financial reserve, and we're doing it so that we can sell treasuries because China and other companies. countries no longer want to buy our debt. Our debt's been downgraded, and we're now running $2.5 trillion annual deficits as far as the eye can see, and there's no way to fund that,

but they found this stable coin hype as a way to do it. So we end up getting a backdoor CBDC, and we fund the expansion of U.S. government tyranny around the world. The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video. and to find other insightful content, such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. There's been a lot of discussion about CBDCs, you know, central bank digital currencies. What are they? Oh, no, they're going to control our lives. It's part of this encroaching digital technocracy.

And good news, Trump has said no CBDCs, but is it? it possible that we have something that's coming in Trojan horse style that's a CBDC by any other name? And we're going to look at that. We're going to talk about the Genius Act, which is going through U.S. Congress at this particular moment in time at the time of this recording. But we're going to have to map that into the larger context of what money is and what the people pushing this technocracy, because that's really what this is about. What are they really after its power, it's control, it's the usual stuff. So, Aaron, so good to be talking with you further about. this and carrying on the conversation yeah happy to continue the dialogue so last

time you know we got into some of the the technocracy you talked about the PayPal Mafia but maybe we could go wider than that in the sense that what I experienced now in the digital revolution is it just feels like some other version of control like we're just getting captured in this system in some way shape or form. And I know this because I find doom scrolling particularly easy to do. I know this because everything is tracked. I know this because YouTube censors my accounts with very subtle shadow banning now. I know this because Evie and I went to a no Kings rally and we also went to a we hate Elon rally. And we saw that some people now have tunable emotional states. And that

That's real power and that brought us to the concept of so-called fifth generation warfare. You know, it's just a way in which people are being controlled in increasingly sophisticated ways with nudge units and programming and who even knows how sophisticated these tools are. But I kind of feel like this conversation of money has to sort of fit into that larger universe of control. And I know you explore these topics as well. So just anything you want to sort of start riffing on around that, like, where are we in the story and what's really at stake? Yeah, and I apologize for the brief background noise. I was trying to pull up a video because, you know, on my podcast tonight, I'm actually going to be talking about, you know, one of the aspects of this, which is how if you go back to Edward Bernays and the beginning of propaganda, which started out of World War II.

And the idea at the time was, well, hey, you know, we need to defeat communism. So we need to somehow convince people by targeting their subconscious belief systems. We need to basically trick people into buying things. And this is the way that the West in America will defeat communism. And the interesting thing is that you can actually track that as kind of the basis for now the modern version of that, which is social media itself. And I'm still trying to find this Elon Musk clip where he describes social media as being. designed to manipulate your limbic systems, designed intentionally, algorithmically, to manipulate your reward systems, to manipulate your emotions, to manipulate dopamine, and it's being done largely to sell ads or to drive more traffic to make money, but then more recently, and I think we've certainly seen this post-COVID era, to push specific narratives. And you mentioned the doom-scrolling aspect of this, and I've found this as well.

And I think you and I have discussed before, if you're talking about the Federal Reserve or you're talking about CBDCs, there seems to be an instant shadow ban on those related topics that's ongoing, that hasn't really changed. I've found it interesting, and something that's, I think, important to keep in mind is Musk is a technocrat. I mean, Musk has explicitly stated that he wants Mars to be a. a technocracy. He's tweeted about this three times. His grandfather was the head of the Canadian technocracy party. So this is largely ideological, and it is largely about a belief that scientists and engineers have to make decisions for people. It really is about we're unnecessary. Human beings, you know, as just average run-of-the-mill people, we're not all that important

in the grand scheme of things. We're optional. possibly even unnecessary because the world that we're living in is this deterministic world where there's no free will at all and essentially we're just kind of in a way to look at it and meet puppets and so

the people that are pushing technocracy are saying that given this worldview we need to basically apply science and technology to ensure that humans don't wipe out you know civilization and you know all these other things based on manufactured

energy scarcity that they've come up with around carbon credits and everything else and so what I'm looking at is kind of what they're doing now with these algorithms and to that point and this is a little bit off topic

but you did mention the doom scrolling piece so I post stuff on on X all the time and I've noticed I've had two really small tweets that have gone viral and I look at this and I'm like okay I put out all this content and I do it in different format some of it's short

some of its long some of its videos some of its memes, you know, but I, the post that actually went viral was society will collapse if they release the files. And then I wrote, I've got news for you. Society has already collapsed because of this kind of thinking. And that went viral. So, you know, we're talking 8,300 likes on only 47,000 views, which is actually a huge ratio. And I'm looking at that. I'm saying, why is that post popular? Well, Musk is forming this America party. And the America party is I mean, there's what he's describing it as being, but when you look at the description of what it is, the top two things for the America Party are the application of AI to the military and the application of

the AI to government itself to make it more efficient. These are the top two components of this. The America Party is a technocracy party, and so I find it interesting that the posts that I have that have gone viral are posts that actually conform to and help augment that narrative that he's pushing. So I completely think he must clearly understands the power of the algorithms. He understands from a first principles perspective, from a biological perspective, how you can twist the algorithms and use this technology to control people's emotions and to get them to do what you want. And I think he's actively doing it right now to promote technocracy, where the end game of this is, and it's not just a Klaus Schwab or W.E.F. thing. It's also the PayPal

mafia. I think as we discussed last time, we're not dealing with a situation where there's even any opposition. There are just a couple, there are different people fighting over or positioning themselves for control of the technocracy, but there's nothing actually opposing technocracy. The AI and surveillance systems and control is moving in regardless of the administration, regardless of, or in part because of the conflicts that are, you know, either real or created, you know, between nation states. So, so we are, so this is a spiritual battle. It is a battle over, over free will.

And I think that's the most important thing to understand. And I really, I'm going to do a deep dive into exactly. So we know when you watch this, the Century of the Self documentary, I think it might have been a BBC documentary. It was a four-part thing. And it kind of talks about the history of propaganda leading up to, I think modern times, I think it was maybe done in the 80s, so it's not even modern times. And so I watched that, and I thought, well, gee, I wonder what they've done from there.

Because if they had psychologists meeting in New York City on Madison Avenue, right, with the formation of advertising companies, and people are there trying to figure out, well, how do we apply psychology to manipulate people to buy our product? What is that, what are those conversations like today based on our increasing knowledge of how you can manipulate people using this technology? And I've actually started to do some of the cursory research, and it's absolutely outright horrifying. And I'm just trying to figure out how to package it together. So once people realize that these people at Facebook and Google and others, I mean, they're literally sitting down and trying to figure out, well, how do we manipulate people's dopamine systems?

How do we essentially get people hooked and keep people hooked? I mean, they're doing it in a very analytical way, just as Bernays was doing post-World War II to try to convince women that, you know, smoking. They originally tried to convince women that, you know, cigarettes were freedom torches and it was all about liberty and empowerment. I mean, it was a successful campaign. But, well, if you understood what they're doing now with these algorithms, it's horrifying. And I actually think it also, there are a lot of conversations that people are having about informed consent. And this happens often in the realm of health care, right? You know, are you, do you know enough to even be able to take these medical procedures or drugs or whatever they happen to be?

But we don't have any real informed consent with respect to these social media tools. And when I say that, well, yeah, we have these long contracts that we sign these click wrap agreements. So I guess in a sense we've actually given our consent, but we haven't given our consent because we've also been kind of programmed to just blindly accept without reading these long agreements. So anyway, I think if we start digging into this and people start digging into and trying to figure out easy ways to describe what's actually going on with big tech, what's going on with these algorithms, people will realize that this is absolutely a sinister endgame. And the end game is ultimately about control and power by a small group of elites. It's not about saving the planet. It's not about saving humanity. it doesn't even consider consciousness or free will

as a fundamental first principle in any way, shape, or form. And so getting that message out is key, but there's a lot to dig through and a lot to try to figure out how to explain in a way that's not overly technical so that people truly begin to understand how manipulated they are. Well, a lot of great points in there.

I mean, this is, so I've been searching for the big toe, right, which is the grand theory of everything, T-O-E. So the big toe for me has gone a lot of places. I had to look at the symbology that they use and the mechanisms of control. But it's actually, it's fairly simple in one level, which is that if you put people into a state of anxiety or fear, they're much more programmable. And so I look now at our news and how we present things. And, you know, remember we had the danger alerts. Is it orange today or yellow?

And then COVID was just this master course and like, oh, my God, you're going to kill your grandma. And it's all psychological manipulation because it's about. keeping us, uh, in line and, and under their control. Okay. So I understand why they're wanting to do that. The important part is to wake people up to that, because if you participate in it, it's going to degrade the quality of your life. You will not be as happy. You know, these people who fall in victim for this gender ideology stuff, they say they're doing it because gender affirming somehow affirming, you know, makes, makes them feel affirmed and all of that. But when you look at the base data in terms of how they actually respond to life thereafter, um, you know, with suicide

and other sort of markers of severe distress. You could I say, objectively, this doesn't look affirming at all. So they do this because they want to sell us things. It used to be cigarettes, but now it's narratives. You know, it used to be soap, but now it's political platforms and ideas. And so that bothers me a lot. And the second thing is, well, at least back in Bernays Day, in 1928, I think, his seminal work came out. And then they, you know, did some stuff on Madison Avenue, smoking cigarettes in Rome.

in the 40s, 50-60s. But now, Aaron, Facebook has been caught, they've admitted to, running mass experiments to see, this is 2012. They ran a mass experiment, which I'm sure has only gotten better, right? To show how they could section people off, figure out what they sort of responded, to use the algorithm to herd them off into little areas, serve this set of memes and ideas to these people and different ones to these people, and show that they could create negative states of emotion across broad swaths no informed consent they signed you up for a social engineering or even what

I would call a psychological torture experiment and it's only been ever run I mean they should have been disbanded as a company and scattered to the four winds at that moment they only got rewarded for that so that's what it feels like we're in I just want people to be aware that this isn't organic it's learning at light speed now and with AI this is only going to get more aggressive and powerful yeah and And actually, when I add something from my political experience that people are unaware of, this is why, you know, I often talk about how we can't vote our way out, which I truly believe, and that actually the most important thing that we can do, looking at all of these different things and all these different threats and everything else, the most important thing we can do

is reclaim our free will and actually recognize that we're programmed, then try to understand, okay, from an individual basis, how have I been programmed? And this is a very humbling experience because most people, first of all, you don't want to think that you're programmed. And then once you realize that you're going to be surprised in the ways that you've been programmed. And then, you know, then you know, now hopefully you're in a place where you can start exercising your free will on a normal basis moving forward. But you're always seeing these external threats that are trying to program you. But I think that that is that is the most important thing hands down that we can do. But on the political side, part of the reason that I don't believe in voting is, you know, you can apply this informed consent process as well.

But I actually ran a super PAC in New Hampshire to, and we were able to get 100 plus people elected. And my wife has run some organizations as well that have been very successful getting people elected. But what I learned going through the process is you can buy databases on voters in the United States. I mean, there's a company called Labels and Lists. I think it's called L2 Political or whatever. You can Google this. I think it was $14,000 or something. I can't remember, $14,000, $18,000 that I paid this was 10 years ago.

And I got a voter file on everyone in the state of New Hampshire. And it told me it had 500 different pieces of information on these voters. It told me, you know, their estimated net worth, where they live, how many kids they have, all that basic stuff. But then it gave me a rating on, from on a scale. from zero to 100 as to where they likely land on various political issues. It tells me about magazine subscriptions. It tells me about sports and entertainment and activities. And they're pooling all of this data from multiple sources.

They're getting it from credit card transactions. They're getting it from voter files, and they're just pulling all of this together. But it continues to accumulate over time so they don't stop. So the next, you know, since I haven't looked at the database in 10 years, maybe they have a thousand data points right now. And so the way most elections are actually run is using AI and using targeting. So they're very specific about it. The Democrats had a huge advantage in using these techniques, starting, you know, kind of in Obama's era.

And in fact, this is one of the main reasons I think that the Democrats had a structural advantage. It wasn't over ideology. It was over the better harvesting and use of data and AI to target voters and to target get out the vote. And interestingly, I think one of the reasons that Trump won in 2016 is there was still this disadvantage that the Republicans had relative to the Democrats, but Palantir actually came in, as I understand it, and provided some assistance to Trump to kind of up his game and level the game there. But if you realize how much the messaging is being targeted, even down to the point of, okay, we're going to go after people that are in assisted living facilities or nursing

homes. And we know that these are older people, so we're not going to obviously send them text messages. We're going to send them a flyer that says, you know, basically, if you don't vote for our candidate, you're going to be out in the street and homeless. And so they're going to, they're going to bomb this nursing home with this physical literature. And then they're going to set up and coordinate buses and vans to take people to the polling station. So this is actually even the battleground for the political process. And so this is why I'm like, you're not going to win because the system is so overwhelmingly rigged and actually controlled by basically two parties that have this huge information set and database at their, right at their disposal that

they can use to try to get out the vote. And so this is why third parties don't work or can't work, although Elon might have some success because he can actually, maybe he works with Palantir and, you know, can actually jump in and take advantage of that system as well. So I think most people don't know this about politics. Most people still have some idea that, you know, these candidates are actually selected by the people, and these votes, and these elections are actually based on some sort of honest public debate about real issues, and it's not. The primary force determining these issues, is the same propaganda that Bernays did just weaponized through databases and AI, through political parties?

Well, part of the big tell for me, just to finish up the idea of voting, was, and I'm an equal opportunity critic, right? And I've been this way for years. I first noticed that there was something deeply wrong with the 2004 election, and I quickly surmised talking to some IT experts that the machines we were using even then as tabulators were completely hackable and corrupt. Therefore, they had been. But the tell for me, even then, Aaron, was that neither party said anything about it.

And it just got worse and worse and worse. So when they say, oh, was the 2020 election stolen? I'm like, no, it was just as fraudulently conducted as any prior election. And neither party says anything about it, which tells me they've got some backroom deals. They just divvy the pie up, and it doesn't actually matter who wins to whoever's organizing it at that level. Well, it does seem like the political system is hijacked by this kind of, mutual black male, mutually assured destruction model. I mean, whether it's something like Epstein or something like this, it's like, yeah, well, you can talk about these issues, but only really on the periphery, but the fundamental, the fact that we have a taxpayer-funded slush fund for Congress to fight off these sexual harassment lawsuits is pretty incredible as well. And so, yeah, there's really, so there isn't real choice. You're not even given real, the candidates are already kind of pre-selected within parameters that work for the parties. Obviously, you can see this with RFK and Bernie Sanders on the on the Democrat side,

but it goes on with the Republicans as well. Maybe not so much with Trump, although I think we could probably argue that, but it definitely happens. And I know I've experienced in New Hampshire at the state level where the party, which claims to be neutral in primaries, is anything but primary. I mean, excuse me, anything but neutral. They end up bringing in resources and really help out the establishment candidate that they want to see brought forward. And so trying to, you know, again, bring all of this information out is critically important. And because, again, if people can recognize, hey, I have been programmed, and then you forgive yourself for being programmed,

because that's actually probably the biggest part of this whole process is really, wow, I was fooled at that level. And in fact, to some degree, I think this is why, if you look at what's going on with Trump, you know if you've invested so much in this idea that it's 5D chess and it's gone on for so long then your willingness to confront the fact that maybe you were wrong about all of it because it's a reflection of your own judgment that's that's actually the biggest obstacle and i think that they know that and they actually kind of use demoralization to further take control because it's kind of like well i exercise my free will and look at how it came out maybe i should

maybe i should just stop making decisions altogether it's not working out very well Well, it was fascinating watching this most recent interview, whatever, on the tarmac. He got Trump there, but just to his left, screen right is Howard Lutnik, you know? And if you know, Howard, yeah, part of Cantor Fitzgerald, he's a big Wall Street guy. And then yesterday I read that, oh, you know, they're going to buy executive order, Aaron. They're going to open up 401Ks to private equity, right? And it's like, oh, okay, all right. This is just, I know it's a bad idea because Wall Street wants it, right?

they never do anything for our benefit, you know, ever. They have a bunch of private equity schlock on the shelves, and they got to push it off to some bagholders. That's how I read it. Maybe there's some deals in there. I don't know. But I just look at this, and I'm like, if that had been proposed under Biden, people I know would have said, this is the worst idea ever.

But now it's Trump, so it's okay. And I'm a little bit worried that, you know, you get, first this candidate advances the ball, then it's this one that advances the ball, and then it's this one advances the ball. and each time you sort of argue because it's the other guy advancing the ball but the ball is always advancing down the field

well it is always advancing down the field and I you know again I spent a lot of time researching this even when it comes to and we'll talk about obviously these stable coin bills and everything that's going on but just studying government financial surveillance in the United States in general it never goes back the other way it's only one way we only get more surveillance there's never a period of time

where you know find the election where it's like oh now they're not collecting this data on my financial transactions. It is definitely a one-way ticket. And, you know, again, I'm not pushing—I have not voted since 2018, and historically I've only voted Republican or libertarian or independent. So if I ever try to come off, if I come off as supporting a Democrat, that's not the case.

But it is absolutely true that what is going on right now within the Trump administration, with respect to this technocracy, with respect to pushing surveillance and pushing more centralized control to both the government and to technology, it is advanced more under Trump in six months than it did under Biden in four years, and probably more than it would have than eight years under Harris. And it's for the reason that you just described, which is that people are now complacent about it. And they've been very effective at using propaganda and marketing.

to basically, I mean, you can say something like, well, hey, here's a stable coin. This is going to make America strong and we're going to be the crypto, you know, leader of the world and the dollar is going to remain the global reserve currency. You know, these are the main talking points. When you actually look into the bill, it's, well, what's it doing? It's adding CBDC level surveillance, digital surveillance, more digital surveillance, to the dollar. And every American is negatively impacted by it. but they're effective because they use the talking points, and people trust because Trump said he wasn't going to do a CBDC, so they're not doing that deeper dive, and it requires a deeper dive because it's actually more technologically nuanced.

And I think this is by design. We could have a whole talk about Howard Lutnik and his conflict of interests. I will argue probably if we have time to do it today, when you dig into the stable coin bill and the stable. legislation and you look at the ties between the Trump family and the Trump administration to the companies that are involved in this it worked it looks much worse than anything that Biden did it truly it's a profoundly different and it's profoundly in my opinion more corrupt but no one's talking about it and and I don't even know if people would if if presented with the

information would be willing to accept it no matter how you lay out the facts, which are numerous and pretty easy to document, but I certainly look forward to talking about that topic in detail at some point. Well, we'll get to that very soon. I just want to round this out and talk about what I consider, maybe there's more pieces, but one more piece I want to add to this is about the idea of nudge units, right? So Cass Sondstein and all these people, and there's a lot of psychologists who've been working on, like, how do you get people to do this versus that?

And there's individual nudging. They could nudge me personally, or you can nudge whole groups of people. And when groups start going this way, it tends to sort of drag other people along. So what's a nudge? As I understand it, Aaron, a nudge is not like somebody pulls up to me and says, Chris, we're going to put you in a camp with razor wire because that's too much too soon, too fast, right? So they did this during COVID, right? They would just nudge.

They would just nudge. You would see all these articles with the same little nudges in them, right? And all these different things come out in NPR and New York Times all at once, right? oh my gosh, if you don't take the COVID vaccine, you're going to kill Grandma. You'll pass it on. Think how you'll feel. So they use shame and fear and ostracization and abandonment and all these sort of core like limbic system, amygdala, emotional states. And after you read enough of those, somehow it sort of comes in and your brain is nudged.

And you're like, you know, maybe I should get one of these shots. I would not want to be one of those people, you know, who's shamed and ostracized and all that. The power of digital money to nudge is extraordinary, as far as I'm concerned, and could be very finely tuned. What are your thoughts? Well, it can be used to nudge, but it can also be used to even define the choices that are available to you to begin with. So it's kind of like we live in this world where it's Republican versus Democrat, Coke versus Pepsi. You know, do you, is your favorite, you know, do you like Andrew Tate or Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, everything gets put into this situation where you have to pick between two different choices.

And so once you have digital money, you have the ability to program what you can even buy. And you can see this today already with health savings accounts where this is a card that you can use. You get it through, well, the biggest provider of this is Optum Bank. They're the biggest provider of HSAs. I think they have five million customers. But what is it? Well, it's a debit card, and you can only use the card for certain health care purchases. And the idea is you put pre-tax money into a health savings account, and then you can spend that money,

but only on the things that are determined to be actual legitimate health care products, according to the different rules that are passed by Congress and whichever, you know, what your corporation says and everything else. And so now you've got this card, and, you know, maybe you can only buy this type of medication from Walgreens. You can't use CVS. It's literally digital programmable money. So, but think about how it's been sold. So people actually think, oh, wow, I have an HSA. You know, I've got private insurance. I've got choice. Well, basically, you took your own money, put it into a bank account. Yes, it's pre-tax, but that it has all of these restrictions on how you can spend

the money. But people believe they have choice right now. So I guess I'd start this by saying, we already have this digital programmable money, and it gets so much worse with CBDCs and stable coins because, very simply, they're easier to program. The system right now is, it's a little bit clunky. It can be programmed, but making changes to it. So, for instance, when RFK says, hey, we don't want Medicaid to be used for sugary soft drinks. And so in order to do that, the change is made at the state level because the EBT cards are effectively like a debit card and they're issued at the state level. So now you have to go

and program and change all of that and do this in all the 50 states. There's a little bit of administration to it. It can be done. But with CBDCs and tokens, that program programming can happen immediately and can happen in a centralized format. So several years ago, the country of Cyprus had a bank bail-in. So the country was in a distressed situation financially, and I believe they just basically took 50% of everybody's deposits and said, hey, you don't have this anymore. We're bailing out the government. Well, this is something that you would be able to do with the click of a button. And I know you actually introduced me to the concept of the great taking, which I've done a ton of research on.

And so your audience is probably familiar with this idea that we don't own our stocks or publicly traded bonds or ETFs that, you know, it's this real convoluted set of control. contractual relationships, and over the years, our rights have been diminished in favor of the banks. Well, once you apply tokens to stocks, bonds, and ETFs, which is the same thing that they're doing with CBDCs and stable coins, once you add this programmable element to stocks, bonds, and ETFs, the great taking can happen with a click of a mouse button. So that's what's actually at stake here, and that's why it's critical to understand tokenization and understand that what's what's on the line here. And so as I've said before, and I'm going to keep on repeating it,

this whole battle is technocracy versus freedom. And at the core of that, free will is at stake. Because once you can program the money at this level, then you add social credit system. So in your idea of this nudge idea, the way that I view it, and I'm actually working on a presentation for this right now, is you take the UN Agenda 2030

and the 17 Sustainable Development, goals. And you look at those and you say, okay, if I'm a technocrat, well, I'm going to play the role of a technocrat, and I want to create a global government, and we want to regulate all the assets on the planet, and we want to tie it to a single currency that's based on energy credits. As I go through and I look at each of these 17 goals, what behavior would I reward and what behavior would I punish? And that's what the social credit system looks like. So now you're in an app and how much water you use, where you travel, the types of products that you buy, if you travel at all, what your speech is, whether or not you're paying the government,

their perceived fair share, all of those things. Now that's your whole decision space. What you're able to express as your free will is determined from the top down by the people that are creating these social credit systems and apps. And so just like today, yes, you can have a health savings account, but can I buy, can I buy, you know, supplements? Can I buy organic food using my HSA? Because, you know, I would think, hey, these are things that are health promoting. Can I buy peptides? Can I buy, you know, a red light? No. Probably none of those things fit within the HSA. So already today we're conditioned to believe that we have health freedom

using an HSA and we don't. There's already been this, you know, predefined window of what's possible. We'll now imagine that what we do with HSA is applied to literally everything that you make, every decision you may be able to make and every product or service you may be able to buy. That's what's on the line and that's the direction that this is going in. well now this ties in for me with this whole idea of misinformation malinformation you know i got youtube strikes uh that that's when it was overt the covert you know i find that when i tweet something out about the fed um i i had one erin i tweeted it out to all 220 000 alleged followers and it had like 400 views after a day right i was like ooh cool so what would happen

if i tweeted out some mean tweet about the fed and all that stuff and then i find out when i go on Amazon that 62 companies have declined to do business with me for some reason, right? And I might go, is that because of my mean tweet about the Fed or what was it? I don't know. And that's the point of the communist struggle sessions misinformation architecture is. If I don't know where the line is, then I'm nudged and I'll take two steps back from what I think the line is. And then, because it's better than just saying, Chris, here's a bright red line because I can

know it's just like toe right up to it. So the point of all this is that it is nebulous and you don't know and you have to have this social credit score and it's going to be really kind of vague what adds and subtracts from that whole thing. And the point is that then you're self-censoring because that's the ultimate power. You are self-censoring. And when I wrote my book, The Final Countdown, when I was doing research for it, I was studying a lot about the system in China. And there are some interesting YouTube videos about this where they show different people being interviewed in China about the Chinese social credit system. And I remember a lot of this broke down on

the basis of age, but they showed one guy who is a journalist in China who had spoken out against the government. And his social credit system, excuse me, his social credit score was dropped to the lowest bucket. They have some system where it's like, and it varies a little bit from province to province, but let's say you'd go from an A to an E. Well, he was in this lowest category. Well, what did that mean for his life?

So now as a journalist who spoke out against the government, it restricts where he can live. He can only get housing within a certain tier. His travel is restricted. Literally his internet speed and internet access is restricted. So it's at that granular level of detail. And of course, with AI and AI surveillance, they can get to the point where they can say, and they can do this in China, where you know, you went to the grocery store and let's say you put two bottles of vodka in the shopping cart. But then you decided to put one back and you only bought. one well they'll actually penalize you for even the initial intent of wanting to put two in to begin with i mean it's actually it's pretty pretty horrifying where that goes but then contrast that

there was another there was this young woman who is who was interviewed and you know she was basically promoting this idea well if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear and was talking about how she literally looks for mates and how the young population and China is starting to become accustomed to the idea of, well, your social credit score is going to be a major criteria for whether I'll even consider dating you. That's like an initial threshold. So we know what the model looks like. We know where it's headed. And I think we talked last time about the fact that, look, there's no U.S. versus China conflict, really.

I mean, if there was, we wouldn't be funding biological research with China. We wouldn't be getting half of our AI surveillance technology from China. That's not something that you do with your mortal ideological enemy. China is the test case for what this looks like, but it is, at the end of the day, it's a global system. So you can look at what China has, and I think, well, your audience will probably be horrified, but I actually bet that a lot of the young people in this country will also say, oh, well, you know, I have nothing to hide. So I have nothing to fear. This has been actually the biggest challenge that I've faced in promoting decentralized technology and privacy technology as a solution to all of this, which is that a lot of

the older people understand the need for privacy and decentralization but aren't as up to speed on the technical side. And the young people know the tech, they're digital natives, but they don't have a clue about why they would need privacy. So this is actually one of the biggest challenges that I think that we have. Hello, Dr. Chris Martinson here, and I just want to say we're at the peak. Peak oil, peak debt, peak denial. The systems we've leaned on are buckling, and most folks are sleepwalking through it. But not me.

At peak prosperity, I'm wide awake, scouring the globe for the signals, web data, news, firsthand accounts, piecing together, what's next? I've been wrong before, and I'll admit it, but I'm relentless about getting it right. This is your wake-up call. The future's not waiting. Subscribe now to get the insights that thousands of others already enjoy. Join the prepared. And let's turn uncertainty into opportunity. Peak Prosperities, where it starts. So interesting.

You mentioned something before, tokenization. Can you explain that so that somebody like me even could understand that? I hear it bandied about a lot, but I'm kind of a Missouri. guy. Like, if I was going to tokenize something, what are the steps and what does that actually mean? Yeah, and this is why I'm writing a book about it because I realize it is complicated. And so there's a part of it is like, well, you know, people are going to just, you know, check out. But on the other hand, it's so important once you understand that it's going to happen whether you like it or not. And so now you just have to pick this freedom versus tyranny

aspect. So I'll start by, before I talk about tokenization, talk about, you know, how most of the economy runs today. Most of the economy today runs on databases. and money itself is in a database. The Federal Reserve operates on an Oracle database. Your bank account is in a database. Your local bank is using a common, popular, centralized database. That's either by Oracle or Microsoft or something along those lines. And so it's important for people to understand that commerce globally runs on databases.

Because the first barrier to having this conversation about tokenization is like, well, you know, this is just technology. you know we don't need this or this is this is an overly complicated way of solving a problem you have to first understand that everything's running on these databases anyway and that these databases have significant problems with them because they're centralized databases so an oracle database or a microsoft database somebody can go in and change the entries in the database they can go in and manipulate your account information they can move money around hackers can come in and steal the database the databases can be technically corrupted And there's, there's trillions of dollars of years of economic damage caused by cyber attacks and things related to these centralized databases. But, but to understand, money runs on a database, this whole stock market runs on a database. As you go into each category, what you're going to find is that the statement of truth, the statement of records about who owns what and who's trading what exists in a database. So that's, that's the important point to understand about that before we. going to tokenization. The idea behind tokenization is, and there are different ways you can tokenize things, but I'll take the simplest example. The simplest example is you create a digital

token that represents an asset. Let's say a token could represent a dollar, a token could represent your mortgage, it could represent a share in a company, and the general idea is that these things use blockchain technology. And the easiest way I can describe blockchain is that it's a, It's a better form of database than the centralized database because the way it works, and I'll use Bitcoin as an example just to explain how it works, although there are separate problems that we can discuss with Bitcoin. But the way that Bitcoin works is every 10 minutes, there are computers all over the world trying to solve complicated math puzzles. And the computer that solves it first adds the next batch, all of the transactions that have happened in that 10 minute period, that person that won that computer adds those. transactions to the blockchain so every 10 minutes new blocks are being added to this chain and the big benefit of this is that unlike a centralized

database it's immutable meaning you can't change this database so every 10 minutes tens of thousands of people are getting copies of this database with the new transactions nobody can come in and centrally corrupt it nobody can come in and edit the files or manipulate any of the information and that may not sound like much. You're like, oh, okay, you have computers competing or whatever, and it's, it's decentralized, but it's a huge victory over this centralized model where, you know, one guy, one rogue person comes in and all of a sudden, you know, your entire financial history and all of your records are gone. And that happens. And that happens with increasing

frequency. And so, so tokenization doesn't have to be a bad thing. However, there are different ways that you can create tokens. I could create a token that represents your house or your dollar or your car that centralized the government and other third parties like Black Rock have the ability to program and have the ability to track and have the ability to censor. So in other words, let's say we create a token that represents a mortgage, your mortgage, and now all of a sudden you've said something on social media that, you know, the bank doesn't like, you know, they can now freeze your ability to even transfer your property, to even sell your house. Or you could get even more sophisticated with this.

You know, let's say you've got an electric vehicle now with a GPS and tracking system installed. Now you've said something on social media. So it's a tokenized system. And it's, you know, the transportation department. and your bank and Tesla all have access the ability to kind of set rules and program these tokens. Now you say something unwanted on social media. Now they shut off access to your car. So this is the dystopian version of tokenization.

And by the way, it's the default position of what's happening with tokenization. So just so I'm clear, if I was going to look at a token, in essence, I'm looking at it on a computer screen. Is it code or is it, is it actual the information, like one share of GM stock belonging to Chris Martinson purchased on this date and here's some metadata associated with that and then maybe encrypted, I don't care what. But is that a token? Yeah, I mean, there are different ways you can create tokens. So, for instance, I like, you know, Xano is one of the things that I like. So I can go into a wallet.

And let's say I start a company called Daylight and I create. 100 shares and I create so I go into the wallet and I create a hundred tokens called daylight and then I as the issuer can send you a token called daylight and that daylight token represents a share in my company daylight there's a lot of nuance to how this works and how to make it work don't need all that but yeah but this is this that's the most basic example of it so so whereas right now you know if I want to start a company, to hire lawyers, spend $25,000, $50,000 on a securities lawyer, and you end up getting these, you know, paper certificates, and they're registered with the SEC, and, you know, at the end of the day, there's still a database somewhere, but it's a centralized database that I don't have

any control over, and that third parties can come in and seize and block. In this case, I've created a token that represents a share. I've sent that token to you. You now have that token in your wallet. That is yours. It's like a bearer share, a bearer financial instrument that people used to have in the old days where it's like, hey, you know, 60 years ago, if you had an IBM share certificate, it didn't have your name on it, you could actually trade it with somebody else. And it was, you know, completely in your self-custody, completely within your own ownership. This is what you can do with tokenization on the other side of it. But you mentioned, well, so what is it? So unfortunately, it's a more complex answer because there are different ways

you can tokenize things. It is code. And the code can be, okay, now I've written what's called a smart contract and the smart contract has all of these different rules and regulations regarding this token so this token represents an asset but now you can write code that says yes it represents this asset but these three organizations have the ability to censor that transaction and can watch that transaction and can program how that token can be used and how that token can be traded with other people and so that's that's really where this you know becomes an interesting the debate, this is where this becomes the whole technocracy versus freedom aspect.

If the digital token representing your assets, like in the case of the great taking, if all of a sudden your Vanguard and Black Rock shares are tokenized, then when the financial collapse happens, it's like, okay, well,

financial collapse happens. J.P. Morgan Chase now owns, you know, all of Vanguard's assets. And we've written into this code that they can just simply programmatically transfer those assets. that's over. That's what happens through this, you know, centralized version of it, whereas the freedom element of this would be one. And by the way, Vanguard and big companies aren't going to sign up for what I'm discussing. What I'm talking about is creating a parallel

system, but, you know, let's say a small business creates a token and of representing their shares, and now you have those in your wallet, and now those are yours. No one can take those away. No third party can intervene or censor those. Those are something, it's like the difference between having physical gold in your own possession or, you know, being in the 1930s and having physical gold in a vault

right before FDR comes in and seizes it. So we're basically, it's that level of ownership versus really non-ownership, which is how we get to this Klaus Schwab, you will own nothing,

which is by creating tokens that third parties can control for every asset on earth and then you know as you mentioned you mentioned the nudge comment you made earlier uh you know often what happens is it's less subtle nudges at this point usually what happens is we have some kind of emergency whether it's real or manufactured and then that fear reaction happens and then boom then they then they put in the solution and then you know, bad things happen. Well, tokenization in this centralized form will allow things like the great taking to happen in a much faster way, but now it's even worse than the great taking. So your money is going to be programmable and censorable, but then money only represents

5% of global assets. So stocks, bonds, everything else makes up the other 95%. That will also be tokenized. So this even goes beyond stocks, bonds, money. it will get down to the level of every asset on earth. And when you look at what the UN Agenda 2030 is about, it is about regulating the land, the air, and the sea. And you've even seen Trump and Black Rock and others talk about tokenizing U.S. assets, our assets, our natural assets, our land. Natural assets, yeah.

So this is the direction that this is moving in. And it's not a cause for celebration. Many, even in crypto, view this as, hey, yeah, they're adopting technology. Well, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, cameras are great. Technology is great. Surveillance cameras aren't great. So people are cheering on the surveillance aspect of this because it's the surveillance part of this that's actually gaining real traction in the marketplace, not the alternative.

Or, as, you know, I know hopefully we'll get to the Stablecoin and Genius Act soon, but what they're doing is they're taking something that was private and that was popular, and now they're putting it under the control of the federal government, under control of the Federal Reserve, and they're turning it into something that is a tyranny and part of this technocratic agenda. All right, so let me just see if I've got this, because this is really important, I think, to getting this.

So let's imagine I have seven tokens in a line up and down. They share something in common. Each one of them has some asset or thing that it's representing. so that they share that in common all the tokens are representing something a share in a company a mortgage an acre of land whatever there's an asset on the back end of that thing but one at the top one might be like zano where there's there's been created with an algorithm where no other hooks and feeds are allowed in like it's like you create it's the they're not it depends how the token was created I'm guessing algorithmically so the one all the way in the bottom might say oh by the way the

Treasury has full access to this thing, and by the way, this has an API feed that allows this company to like harvest all the data out of it or whatever. But so you're telling me the tokens have a common element. There's an asset on the back end, but it depends how it was created in terms of what it's allowed to do and who can sort of gain access to it. Yeah, that's a great way of summarizing it. And I would say, so again, most of the tokens that have been created so far, I don't want to get too technical, but use Ethereum, use something called smart contracts where it's actually a pretty expensive and long process to create tokens historically using something like Ethereum.

It may take six months. You may actually have to spend a few hundred thousand dollars having a third-party audit your smart contract to make sure that it's secure, that it can't be hacked. Because this has been a big issue. There have been a lot of hacks with tokens in the crypto space, particularly with Ethereum. And if anybody's experienced with decentralized finance or defy, I mean, these hacks go on on a regular basis. The reason that I'm excited about Zeno is the Zeno, there is no smart contract. You literally just create the token within the wallet. And the token itself has the same attributes as the Zeno crypto itself.

So from the perspective of the Zeno blockchain, if you're using Zeno as a cryptocurrency to buy and sell things, or you're using a token created on Zeno, they have all of the same security and privacy features. It's the same fundamental underlying technology, and it doesn't require programming to create and issue new tokens. Anyone can create a token, and it only costs about a dot. You could tokenize peak prosperity, and it would cost you less than a dollar to create all of the tokens

for the enterprise that you are creating. And you don't have to do any programming, and it has the fundamental privacy, and security of the Zeno blockchain itself. So that's why I'm excited about it because it's easy to use. It's cheap and it's private, whereas the other stuff that's being put together is completely centralized and can itself be hacked, but at the end of the day, it's all been designed for control, for programmability, and for censorship.

Okay, so I think all of this brings us to this idea of the stable coins that are coming out. And so I introed this by saying, are they just CBDCs by another name? So a central bank digital currency, the critiques of them have been primarily around this idea that they're programmable, time, place, in terms of location, product, you name it, right? All of that's just programmable. And even the Central Bank of England punted when they were asked to look into this, they said actually this technology is kind of worked out. This is a political question, which is how much of that programmability do you want? for a central bank to determine, right? That's more of a political question. So here we have these stable coins. Aaron, what are they? What is the Genius Act? And do they have components that look

like they're getting us into programmability and other CBDC-like characteristics? Sure. Well, to start, I want to reiterate the fact that, and I wrote a brownstone article about this called 50 Shades of Central Bank, Tyrty. And so to rehash, we already have digital money and it already is programmable to a degree with the examples that I gave with health savings accounts and food stamps. So with that as the starting point, I also want to say one other thing, which is that politicians have made central banks out to be the bad guy here. And central banks are the bad guys. They're completely unnecessary. You know, it's a private cartel of banks that just profit in the middle of this.

they're a useless third party. However, all of the surveillance that we have with the current system that we have comes from Congress or comes from the federal government. The Federal Reserve isn't out there on its own going out and saying, hey, you know, we'd really like to add all of this reporting, all these reporting requirements and all of this other stuff. That's actually not how the Federal Reserve operates. That's not their MO.

It's Congress that passed the Bank Secrecy Act. It's Congress that passed the Patriot Act and then passed the CARES Act. So all of this stuff that's going on right now with the IRS being able to see your financial transactions, with NSA bulk data collection, with the Treasury being able to do these suspicious activity reports, which we talked about last time, all of that comes from Congress. So I want to make it so that because right now there's something that is being voted on possibly today called the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act, and this relates to these other acts that we're going to talk about, and I'm going to try to frame them all together because they're all

interconnected in ways that not as they're being presented by the politicians. So what that says, so the central bank, the issue isn't about whether it's the central bank that issues the digital currency. It's about who has the ability to program, track, and censor the digital currency. because at the end of the day, if J.P. Morgan Chase and Jamie Diamond are issuing a digital token versus Jerome Powell, we don't really care from the perspective of, like, it's a distinction without a difference. It doesn't matter. As long as it can still be programmed and tracked, it has all of these other attributes, the central bank issuance of it isn't the problem. It's the actual inherent programmability and trackability within the kind of, of the law is passed by Congress. That's what the real threat is here. So, and this is what makes this tough, because you have to kind of unwind all of this

jargon so that people can understand what the real root issue is. And so, just as another quick background, the U.S. has been working on a CBDC since 2018. So Biden signed an executive order in March of 2022, which authorized officially the U.S. to pursue it, but we've been building it. four years with top programmers from MIT, even some Bitcoin developers. So if you're out there thinking, oh, well, gee, we dodged a bullet, understand they've already built something that has ten times the transactional capability of the existing financial system. They've already built a CBDC. It's called Project Hamilton and a lot of other detail that we don't need to go into now, but other than to say this technology is more advanced than people understand.

And one other point is that on the CBDC front, there are 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP at some phase of exploring or rolling out of CBDC. 11 countries have already rolled out of CBDC. China was first. They haven't fully rolled it out, but they're doing it in phases. And so this is a real – this is what drew me into this was when I did research on this in 2022, and I realized, wow, these CBDCs are – growing faster than decentralized crypto, all of it combined. And so that was alarming

and when I understood that that was happening in conjunction with all the regulation, I'm like, okay, we need to wake people up on this. Now, so stable coins, there are two main companies that private organizations that have created stable coins. And a stable coin is

as we talked about earlier, it's a digital token where that one digital token represents one U.S. dollar. So the idea behind this was, and makes sense and they're popular because things globally are still priced in U.S. dollars. That's how people are used to buying and selling things. And so if the idea in the case for Tether and USDC and creating these things was, well, hey, it's hard to work with banks. It's really hard to work with banks if you're doing international transactions and cross-border

payments. And the fees are high and everything else. And so let's use the benefits of crypto to have a token that represents a dollar. Now, these are unique companies, and they have their own specific attributes, but Tether, which is the largest stable coin provider by far, last time I checked, and it's been a while, they had a market cap of over $150 billion. I'll actually check that right now.

But when you look into these individual cases, they're kind of, yeah, it's almost $150 billion. so what backs the stable coin so what makes a tether worth one dollar right so presumably you would think that it's backed by an asset is it backed by actual dollars do they have a bank account with dollars in it somewhere do they have treasuries somewhere backing that well tethered despite their large size and success and growth rate they've never been able to pass an audit they've gone through various audit firms the big four accounting firms have so far refused to take them on so people don't even know if tether is is even backed by anything to warrant having a one dollar

a peg to the one to the u.s. dollar so so i thought i thought you're going to i just did some research and wouldn't you know if this just popped up today just today on um or just yesterday Jacob King writing, just in another one billion U.S. tethers has just been printed out of thin air to artificially prop up Bitcoin's price. That's the supposition. That's what it was used for. Now over $4 billion this week alone. So when four billion tethers come into creation, how does that happen? I would think they'd have to have $4 billion in treasuries or $4 billion in cash somewhere. That's a lot of money to move. Where does that, how does that happen? well historically there's no evidence that it is actually backed by anything and in fact tether has had multiple legal issues they had one with the state of new york and another with the cfTC and they were found in both cases to not have the assets backing their stable coin and when i say this then you know i don't want people to think well maybe maybe we need this stable coin legislation so i'm gonna i don't even know how much time we i see we're already

an hour into this this is we're going to have to do multiple parts and i don't I don't even know how we want to kind of break into this, but they haven't passed an audit. And to touch briefly on how this relates to Bitcoin, there was a report done by a university in Texas in 2017 that suggested that 70% of the price appreciation in Bitcoin was due to the printing of tether. So let me kind of rephrase this. It's conceivable that the reason that the price went up in Bitcoin is because another company, created fake tokens out of thin air not backed by dollars and used it to appreciate the price of Bitcoin. This has a lot of implications with the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and everything that everybody is doing. But I'm a little off track here, but that's Tether. USDC is owned by a company

called Circle, and they do have audits. I believe they do have quarterly audits. And there's another arc to this, which is that there is a guide who worked in President Trump's Treasury Department the first time around, and he ended up becoming the chief legal officer of a company called Coinbase, which is the largest crypto exchange, and he actually worked directly with U.S., excuse me, with Circle to create U.S.D.C. So in other words, you have somebody from Trump's Treasury Department who worked specifically with the largest exchange and the stable coin provider to construct the kind of legal structure of that stable coin but at a high level these have become very popular so people want to use these

digital tokens that represent one dollar they have low fees and again they're really popular i mean i've gone to conferences outside of the united states people in latin america people in southern america people all over the world are starting to use stable coins to the point that last year there was a total of 27 trillion dollars worth of stable coin transactions that's more than Bitcoin. That's more than any of the other blockchains by far. In fact, it's more than Visa. And based on the growth rate right now, it's estimated that by 2030, there will be $120 trillion worth of stablecoin transactions by 2030, which is more transactions than Visa, MasterCard, and direct deposit combined. So in other words, this is popular. This is something

people like to use. Now, there are different technical attributes. These stable coins are issued on different blockchain so you know there's different technology behind in fact tether's is is minted and created using multiple blockchain so they may use Ethereum for some

the most popular blockchain that tether is minted on as something called Tron and I'm trying to I'm trying to figure how to organize this as we're going through this because there's a lot of information but Tron I think your audience will like this

So Tron is a blockchain created by a Chinese nationalist named Justin Sun. And Tron doesn't work like Bitcoin. I said earlier that one of the benefits of blockchain and everything else is that every 10 minutes new transactions are being added. And the way this is happening is because you have these computers solving these various math problems. And the first one to win adds to the transactions. This makes it decentralized. this makes it a competitive system. Well, Tron, which is the most popular blockchain used to create the most popular stable coin,

is primarily controlled by a Chinese national, and there are only 26, basically, they're called nodes, that pick which transactions get added to the blockchain. So you could actually argue in a way that, you know, potentially the Chinese government has huge potential influence over the ability to block and censor tether transactions, transactions that are minted on Tron. So in any event, so this has now become very popular. People love using these things. And now the government comes in and says, well, we're not going to do a CBDC, but we're

going to pass this stable coin legislation. And they present it as, you know, people like these things and America is going to dominate and we're going to, you know, solidify ourselves as the leader in crypto. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to regulate. these stable coins in a whole variety of ways. So the stable coins are now going to have to be compliant with the Bank Secrecy Act and all of the other kind of surveillance that we've discussed that we have with the existing dollar system. That now is going to be applied to these stable coins. They are then also going to require that the stable coins must be backed one to one

by only U.S. Treasuries and only U.S. dollars. And by the way, this is one of the main reasons the Trump administration is doing this, because the implications are, you know, I just mentioned there's $150 billion worth of Tether, there's $20 billion or so worth of U.S.D.C. While Tether hasn't passed an audit, their CEO has given some talks about this, and he said that, well, you know, they have 100,000 Bitcoin, they have tons and tons of gold. So, you know, part of their argument is,

is, yes, the coin might be worth $1, but it's backed by assets that aren't necessarily the dollar, but that have more value than the dollar. So that way, there is actually something backing the one dollar, the peg to the U.S. dollar. Well, under this legislation, Tether would be required to buy a bunch of treasuries, buy a bunch of U.S. dollars. Anyone who issues a stable coin has to buy treasuries in U.S. dollars. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant came out and said, we are going to be able to sell. in very short order, two trillion dollars worth of treasuries because of the stable coin hype. So in other words, here's what's happening. We're taking stable coins, which are

digital programmable money, tied to the price of the dollar. We're putting them under control of Congress with all of the financial surveillance. We're requiring them to do monthly audits with the financial reserve, and we're doing it so that we can sell treasuries because China and other countries no longer want to buy our debt. Our debt's been downgraded and we're now running two and a half trillion dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. And there's no way to fund that. But they found this stable coin hype as a way to do it. So we end up getting a backdoor CBDC and we fund the expansion of U.S. government tyranny around the world. All right. So this has confused me. So thanks for going there

because presumably if I want to get some stable coins, right, I got to ship some dollars off to this stable coin company or they're already in my bank and my bank is one of these issuers, right? And it's complying with anti-money laundering and know your customer and all that stuff. But if I have cash in a bank, Aaron, there's a good chance those are already in treasuries, right? Because those are part of the bank's reserves at that point in time, right?

And they're probably already investing them. So I'm not clear how the stable coins creates $2 trillion of additional domain. because that's like new money is coming from somewhere when you would still have to, somebody has to buy those in the first place, right? I mean, outside of tether, which mince them at the tether treasury, right? I don't know what happens there, but I'm not clear how this creates additional demand. I've heard Bessent say that, but the mechanism baffles me because if I have money in a money market fund, it's already in treasuries.

If I have money at a bank, it's already in the bank reserves, and those reserves are very typically already housed in treasuries. Well, if they even have reserves, that's a whole other conversation for another day. But I well, right, yeah, let's use the example that you gave where you said that Tether just announced that they are creating. What did you say one or four billion dollars? One billion, but, but yeah, one billion. So, and which by the way, they may do that a couple of times in one day, right? And so as it stands today, when they issue those tokens, they may be backed by nothing.

They may be backed by gold. They may be backed by Bitcoin. Now, in order for them to even mint those tokens, they're going to be backed by. to have to actually buy treasuries in U.S. dollars to back the tokens before they're even minted. So you may be exchanging your fiat currency for, which, you know, as you said, may be in a bank account that is already backed by treasuries or whatever it happens to be. But now, but when you're buying these stable coins, the stable coins aren't necessarily backed by those assets. And so now, now you will be trading your fiat dollars for something

that is actually directly backed by treasuries and the dollar, instead of, say, for instance, backed by gold or Bitcoin. All right. I'm going to be vague on the details until I sort of see the flows of these things. But I've heard people saying that the government's excited because it means they have this new big pool of treasury demand that they can start to launch into. But I don't understand how it isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul, mostly.

But maybe there's something I'm not getting here. So I'll have to look into it more completely. So to a certain degree, so Tether has a $150 billion market cap. There's $150 billion worth of stable coins. Right now those are backed by, let's say if it's backed by anything at all, it's backed by primarily gold and Bitcoin, more weighted towards Bitcoin. Tether will have to sell those Bitcoin and sell that gold and buy U.S. treasuries and buy dollars in order to be able to even maintain the existing $150 billion worth of tether that they have

in the marketplace, let alone issuing new, new tether. So that's where the demand comes from on that side. Now, the other thing is... But just to complete it, I mean, this is the whole, there's money on the sidelines argument, which isn't true. Money comes into a market, comes out of the market. So if I sell, I'm tether, I sell a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, well, I'm trading that for somebody's fiat currency.

Where was that fiat currency before? Well, it was probably already in a money market. or in a bank account. You know, it just, it just shuffles from A to B. Just the mechanism is it's been presented as if there's, it unleashes this whole new here-to-for, untapped universe of buying demand, but when you chased it down, it probably came from somewhere else. So, I don't know.

Yeah. Well, we're going to end up issuing more debt, right? I mean, that's the basis for all of this anyway, right? That's the basis for the creation of new, of new fiat currency. I'm not saying it's a good idea, and I am saying, but in your example, your example was, well, I'm already using a bank account and I'm already using something tied to a money market, but that's not actually true. Some people actually buy an exchange for stable coins using crypto and using other assets. You don't have to just use cash. So there are, in fact, this is the most popular use of staple coins is exchanging other cryptocurrencies for stable coins. So it isn't a, one-to-one mapping of of you know we're taking

you know fiat and converting it into into stable coins I'm fine with that I'm fine with that Aaron it's just that it's just that when let's say tether suddenly has to sell a lot of bitcoin because the stable coin

acts as you have to be backed by U.S. treasuries they then have to sell a Bitcoin for cash and the question is was that cash already parked to some degree in treasuries and the answer is probably yes to some degree whether the people are aware of it or not. Right.

Yeah, I mean, too sorry. This isn't going to, just be clear, this isn't going to solve any problem. So let me make this clear. They're saying that it's going to solve a problem. They're saying that it's going to spur demand. The more important element of this is that what it's actually going to do is add financial surveillance. That is definitively what is going to happen. And that is definitively, that's the primary motive behind this, but they're using this.

Treasury demand, and you hear this from David Sacks, you hear it from Bissent, you hear it from Howard Lutnik, this is like a big push that they have on this. Now, I will add, there's another component to this. Along this lines of stable coins have been used to pump Bitcoin. I mean, I really think, imagine this scenario. Imagine we're in a scenario where the main reason that Bitcoin price appreciated is because people created stable coins backed by nothing. And now we're in a position where we have a government that's saying, Okay, well, now we want to take captive these stable coins and we want to build a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Like we're throwing one Hail Mary Ponzi on top of another.

It's a breathtakingly bad situation that's going on. Now, I also happen to think this, because it is about control. When you look at the regulations, it was just announced I saw in my feed this morning. Bank of America has announced they're going to be issuing a stable coin. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup decided that they're going to work together as a group to create a stable coin. So we're talking about a situation where the four largest banks are working together, and it looks like they're going to work individually to create a stable coin. I'm going to make a prediction here, because this is not an uncommon thing to happen. I think that this Genius Act is going to be used, that the regulatory burdens that are placed on Tether and USDC are,

going to force them to be acquired by either the consortium of banks or by the individual banks. So at the end of this, you may end up with the four largest banks owning Tether. You may end up with J.P. Morgan Chase owning USDC. And what does that mean for us as individuals? I go back to this example. It doesn't matter whether it's Jerome Powell or Jamie Diamond from J.P. Morgan issuing the digital programmable currency.

Because, by the way, those same banks are the banks that we believe own the Federal Reserve. So we end up with CBDC-level surveillance. It's not hard to track. If you have multiple banks issuing stable coins, that doesn't give you more privacy. I think we talked last time about these suspicious activity reports. If in 30 zip codes now, anybody who does a transaction of over $200, a report is automatically sent to the Treasury Department. It doesn't matter the size of the bank. It's not like with AI and the fact that this is all digital, having five-eastern.

issuers of digital tyranny money gives you more protection than if it were issued just by the central bank. So I want to drive home the point because what the politicians are doing is they're making it all about that, well, yeah, now we have an anti-CBDC surveillance act because we're protecting the financial privacy of American citizens. You have no financial privacy now, to be clear, but you certainly aren't going to have more financial privacy because J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America are issuing the digital and not just the Federal Reserve. You don't get more privacy as a result of that.

It is a complete, it's complete propaganda. And in fact, all the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act does is prop up this capturing of the stable coin market. And I mean, it is genius in the sense of if you want to be the leader in programmable surveillance currency, then yeah, let's just take the laws and apply it to something that people already use and people already like, as opposed to trying to create something from scratch that says it's a central bank, digital currency, and try to convince people to do that. People aren't largely going to pay attention, so all of a sudden they're just going to wake

up one day and realize, oh, my tether's been shut off, oh, my USDC has been shut off, which, by the way, on a separate note, tether and USDA have been working with law enforcement agencies for years the money is already freezable and it's already programmable so this is just adding more layers to that but i think it's important that people understand what what it's all about and what is what is at stake they can already freeze and they already do freeze us dc and and tether so we're in a situation where this will probably pass i have no i have no doubt they're going to pass the genius act and what that's going to mean is we're going to the arms race is on we basically have a global race now for different countries competing over who's going to own what percentage of the digital surveillance marketplace because I mentioned there were 134 countries working on CBDCs well when the EU saw what was going on with the stable coin legislation they decided to accelerate their CBDC plans so there may be a digital euro CBDC as early as October of this year.

So this isn't a win for all of us. Basically, it's a massive acceleration globally of digital surveillance money. This is why this is a bigger threat from your event last year. I would say that the situation that we're in is 10 times more dire than people perceived it would be had Harris won. And it's not simply because of Trump, but it's because of the PayPal Mafia and the technocrats who are capable. of building things that have come in and absolutely accelerated these things. And what's being used as the justification for this is stopping illegal immigration, fixing the voting systems, you know, the golden age where America has to retain its

dominance on the world stage through the dollar. And that messaging works. The messaging of, if it were Biden or Harris saying, well, we need to become part of the global community and we need to integrate with all these other partners. We need surveillance to keep everybody safe. That model wasn't flying. But at the end, it's the exact same outcome, except it's happening faster under Trump. So in my string of seven tokens, right, and a stable coin is just a token where inside the wrapper is a dollar, right, one to one.

So we already had to go down our list of, like, you know, how invasive is it, right? Complete privacy at the top. completely insane like digital dystopian future at the bottom so you have the AML which is the anti-money laundering you got the K YC that's going to have to get wrapped in obviously the new your customer laws right oh oh we're going to have to have some program ability oh by the way this has to conform to our JPMorgan City Chase a Bank of America rules which by the way when you open an account most people don't do this but you get a stack of papers it's got a lot of dense legalese and

it basically says hey if you disappoint us in any sort of way we can just debank you we can do all kinds of things and then i fell a foul of this and i terminated our paypal use at my website when i don't know if you remember this i'm sure you do during covid they tried to implement this 2500 fine if you spread misinformation or whatever i mean it's just like get out of here it's my money you know go pound sand and and we unhooked our paypal um and went to a couple different card processors i mean i think we still have some slight hook in there but it's very very light just because we had recurrings on there. But that was just an example, Aaron, of them saying,

hey, we're going to program behavior. And that's digital money to me, right? You know, people get out of credit card. They tie in through their PayPal. PayPal issues me a digital representation of something. That flows into my account. I never see cash, right? You know, and they said, oh, by the way,

we're going to have to put some conditions on this. Now, I think they had to undo that. because it was kind of a kickback, so the ball did not go down the field. That was a zero-yard gain. But now you're saying they're about to advance this thing right over the goal line. They are, and I'll give you the quotes. Again, there's no conspiracy theory about this. This is all in their own words.

This is all explicit. Read the bills. And by the way, to your point about banks, I encourage everybody to, you know, if you don't want to read the contract fully, run it through a couple of different AIs. Watch what they say. Yeah, they can cancel you. They can change the fees. They can sell your data.

horrible. Again, we don't have real informed consent here. This has been taken over by lawyers, and this has been a long, this will tie into this thing I was talking about earlier with propaganda and how that's evolved over time, because people don't talk about it in quite that way. But David Sachs, our crypto AIsar, said

will foster stable coins, but only under strict rules. There was a similar comment from percent. So all of the language, since they started promoting this, has been about safety, it's about security, and by the way, money laundering, and terrorism are the top two ways that they justify a lot of this financial surveillance.

And there's data that shows, for instance, with the know-your-customer anti-money laundering laws, that it's caught less than 1% of the people actually engaged in those activities. All it's done is impose massive regulatory cost, regulatory burden, and made it complicated and stripped the rights away of normal citizens like us that are just trying to engage in voluntary trade on a day-to-day basis. It's been a disaster. I'll be outlining more of that as well, but it is about control. You know, I play a video clip often of Augustin Carstens, who is the head of the Bank of

International Settlements, which is essentially the central bank to the central bank. And he stated explicitly that these CBDCs are about financial control and surveillance and being able to monitor and control people's transactions. And so, again, they don't even hide this. The problem that we have right now is it's overtly right in front of our face. they're pushing digital programmable money in the United States right now today as we're recording this podcast Congress is debating this and I see you know I follow all these politicians I follow majority whip Tom Emmer and I follow all the people that write this stuff

and it is Orwellian propaganda that is so you know 180 degrees opposite what they're saying versus what is in the bill and and a few people like you know Marjorie Taylor Green and Luna have picked up on this, but they're going to be fooled. They're going to be convinced by something like this Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act that into voting for this, believing that the problem is the central bank issuance of the digital currency and not the fundamental issuance of digital programmable money that's controlled by Congress and controlled by the Federal Reserve. And that's what they're going to use as their justification for signing off on it,

because we had this nice-sounding bill that it says anti-CBDC. Trump said anti-CBDC. He reversed Biden's executive order. So this issue is dead. And then when you look at what's actually in the bill, oh, well, we have digital programmable money that can be censored. And it's going to be issued by five banks instead of one bank. That is not the actual victory that people were looking for.

Well, I don't think anybody's asking for this at all. And my model for that is, um, uh, the European Central Bank, the ECB under, um, uh, uh, the vampire lady, um, not van der Leyen, who's, uh, Christine LaGarde, right? Yeah, yeah, right. So she comes out and says, oh, you know, we're thinking of doing the CBC, public comments are briefly open. And it was just a wall of don't do this. We hate this idea, right?

And then they came out and said, so after carefully considering the feedback, we're going ahead with this and you're going to have it by October of 25, right? Like, it didn't matter at all what the people said they're going to do this thing. So they're kind of in front of us. It looks like, and if anybody's going to really bollick something up and over-regulate

and over-administrate and put social credit scores in first, could we just see what's going on in Europe? Because I think they're ahead of us. I trust their regulatory technocratic apparatus more than our own to be speedy on these things. Well, so this is the

weird thing, and I mentioned this last time, but I really, I'm going to elaborate on this further as well, which is that we have that social credit system. It's the tax code, 16 million words, 75,000 pages. We get penalized. There's incentives and penalties, and if we don't get it right, we go to prison. So in a way, are we more advanced or less advanced? I mean, Europe may be ahead of the curve in terms of implementing an app, but who has more rules? Who actually has more DeCronian rules? I'm going to start doing some comparison there. I'm going to do comparison because I started this intellectual exercise of, okay, you have these 17 sustainable development goals. What are they trying to penalize and incentivize? And then I'm like, okay, well, how does the U.S. tax code

work? How are we penalizing and incentivizing these things? And I'm going to actually put that together, and I'm going to go through each of these sustainable development goals, and I think hopefully to wake people up for the fact that we have digital surveillance, we have social credit scores, we just don't have an app and we don't have transparency. So the root issue here is actually the tax code and the existing system, which is already digital and programmable. That's what we should be addressing. We should be getting rid of and stripping away those things, or from my perspective, we should be exiting these systems and not using the dollar and not using these things at all. But instead what we're doing is now we're debating, you know, this is why I called it 50

shades of central bank tyranny. You know, I put together this little index, kind of a DefCon 5 type of index, and I'm like, well, we're kind of at three in the middle here. But once this stable coin, Genius Act and Clarity Act passes, we're at DefCon 2. And DefCon 1 is a single global digital currency backed by energy credits tied into an AI surveillance system for social credit. But we're like, we're really rapidly moving to DefCon 1. And I try to frame it in that way so that people can get a broader context of what exactly is going on here looking at the current state of tyranny versus, you know, how quickly it's ramping up. So there's a lot more to be said about this.

And I know it's complicated. and this is why I'm doing a book and I'm just going to do a much longer I don't know how many people necessarily want to listen to you know 10 15 hours on this but I'm going to do it anyway because it's actually that critical to me this whole battleground over tokenization this is the front line everything will be tokenized every asset in the world will be tokenized and so the question is is it tokenized in a way where it's completely controlled by third parties or is it tokenized in a way where we're We have control over it. It's private, and we can engage in voluntary commerce. That's actually the battleground, and I'm going to try to lay that out probably more eloquently than I did here today. Well, I mean, thank you for that. I mean, this is part of the reason, of course, that I preach resilience, you know, cows, chickens, gardens, all that other stuff, because I am humble enough to realize that we live in a complex world, and these are control freaks, and they want to control everything.

They live in this mechanistic, you know, Newtonian world where if we could just granularize everything to the, finest degree we'll be able to predict and control there's no such thing as free well this all becomes very predictive and and then we're in power so first question is well what happens if your grid goes down what happens if you've tokenized everything you've outsourced all your decision-making processes and production processes to AI it's all electronic and your grid goes down for whatever reason what happens if AI achieves AGI or super intelligence and makes some decisions we're not exactly copacetic with and does some things goes off the reservation we have to unplug

whole project if you even could. I mean, on and on, you could think this is a lot of eggs in one basket, and we're going to call it this digital architecture that is binary. It's either functioning really well, or it's not working, right? And maybe some states in between there, but what do you do? Like, wouldn't Putin adults say, you know what? It should be an and. You know, we should have some, maybe some stable coins that makes sense, and we should have physical cash, and maybe some gold. And, like, I would want ands in this story, but it feels like they're pushing us towards one conclusion yeah their system is it is centralized and it is incompatible with other other systems so it is important and hopefully we're people are

going to research this and not just you know take our words for it and kind of dig into to to this whole technocracy movement and what it's about because it is about determinism it is about uh by design they believe it and they're proud they proudly believe in kind of this Newtonian deterministic model. Again, they're not hiding it either. And I think most people, the overwhelming majority of people do not hold that worldview. They do not hold the view that we're, you know, just hereby cosmic accident and that everything can essentially be predicted, you know, like a computer algorithm.

I think if most people understood that that's essentially what they were pushing, they'd be pretty horrified by it. But all they see is, well, here's some new bell and whistle and, you know, look at this. It's, you know, pitched as convenience. and everything else. And so this is the real opportunity to get that word out, and they really do have an ideology behind it. And most people don't know about it. Most people are completely oblivious to technocracy.

As to the idea of, you know, should you hedge your bets, this is my personal worldview, so this is not investment advice at all. It may not be, it may not even be wise. But I've gotten to the point for a variety of reasons where I'm just like, you know, our time and our attention and our money, that is a representation of our energy. And we, I want to put my energy and money towards the things that I want to see in the world, not necessarily towards the things that I think are the most probable to happen. And I think we do this a lot. And I use the example of somebody that's a, you know, medical freedom person and that may be anti-vax that has a. 401k with Pfizer and Moderna in it and a lot of people

just aren't even aware of this but I mean this is so you've now worked to put your money into this retirement vehicle and so in essence your time has been converted into ownership into these big pharma companies while you're spending other time out against it so

I try to be actually somewhat of an optimist even though it may sound like most of what we've discussed is blackpilled I actually think the opposite I think that if we moved away from these centralized systems. These technologies, even AI, can be decentralized. I'm going to be talking to Mike Adams about his Enoch AI next week. You know, cryptocurrency, it can be decentralized and it can be private or it can be this other way. But if we actually move away from these

centralized organizations, then we actually have the opportunity to essentially express more free will because there are more choices available to us. So it can be a liberal thing. I happen to take the view of, yeah, you should balance out some of it. I actually don't even believe in having cash. My personal belief is that if you are holding and using the dollar in any form, you are contributing to the wars, the genocide, and the U.S. government policy tyranny around the world. That is a reflection of your energy. And so, yeah, it may work, right? It's just kind of like Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin might go up because governments are forcing their citizens to buy it with taxpayer money, but that doesn't mean it's pushing us in the right direction towards

more freedom and more decentralization. So I tend towards, you know, crypto, privacy coins, but also gold and silver as well. I mean, you know, to your point, if the grid goes down, there are examples right now. There's a community in Phoenix that Ernie Hancock is creating. I think it called, what was it called, Occupied Land or something like that, where they're building mesh networks. and there are communities that are being developed that are using mesh networks that are now connecting to one another. So it's outside of the central internet.

I think you and I have talked about this before. I mean, I don't know. I've heard it somewhere that if, you know, if the grid went down, we'd probably be resorting to cannibalism within 90 days. So I don't know how much time I want to spend on the walking dead scenario. You know, I kind of almost don't want to put any energy towards it because it seems like if I'm putting some energy towards that, I'm going to manifest it somewhat, but it doesn't make sense to have some allocated towards, you know, the grid going down is real. I just saw in Amsterdam, was it this week or late last week, that, you know, they're now having to ration access to electricity because of the environmental policies that they've adopted. So, you know, there are a lot of ways that we can have issues with the grid, some being actually running out of resources and others just being poor central planning by government.

So the combination of it is a real threat. Well, and I've been documenting this for almost a year now. The explosive growth in these data centers is being done without any concomitant increase in our grid generating capacity. And that's just going to create strain at some point. There's a collision coming. And I don't see any. The only thing that was sort of like kind of cool was Trump saying, within a year by July 4th, 2026, he wants first criticality and small modular nukes out there.

that's kind of cool because I actually think that would be a for other re lots of reasons not because I want data centers to have stable power I we should be pushing that direction anyway so I'm happy with that is a is a potential direction to go yeah no that would be great and I know there were a lot of I actually met with somebody in Boston as this woman that was working on building small nuclear reactors and I think she ended up she was out of MIT and I think she ended up having not being able to get enough funding after a certain point she had had some funding. And there are solutions out there. And I mean, again, I try to be optimistic in that because I do have the humility of I really don't know much about anything. We really don't.

The unknown unknown is really where all the magic happens. The problem is that government policies prevent us from accessing the unknown, and that increases the likelihood of us finding ourselves in a survival situation and finding ourselves in a situation where we're running out of resources. Oh, indeed. The failure to plan is planning to fail, and we're definitely headed that direction, it seems. All right. So, I mean, yes, there's much more to discuss, but I think we're going to leave it here for now. And great conversation. So again, that was daylightfreetfreedom.org. Yeah, daylightf freedom.org. I'm at brownstone.org, and I'm on X at Aaron Arday. And like I said, I am working on a full book and, you know, I don't know if it's going to be a course or how I'm going to lay it out.

But for those that are more interested, I am going to elaborate on this and break this down into more detail because I think it's truly critically important. And I know a lot of people don't have the time or necessarily the interest to sit through it. But I hope that those that do, I think it will be a great thing to onboard people to what's going on here. Well, thank you for doing it. is it's critically important and you're doing what I do in my own life, which is I synthesize complex things because people don't have time, but they need to know about them. And this is absolutely vitally important. And it really gets down to, I think, you know, the next part of this conversation is going

to be about the spirituality, the free will, the actual, what is this all about? Because people are waking up to this idea suddenly like, hey, I give half my money to the government, and you do once you get through all the permits and fees and taxes and levy's and things that happen, right, at state, municipal, and federal levels, right? And it's like, well, wait a minute, if I'm coughing up half my productive working life to the government, what are they doing with it, right? Do I have any basic accountability? Do I have any say in that?

And the answer increasingly is no, no, and no. You know, you have none of those rights, apparently, citizens. So people are waking up that this is ultimately about control and power, and the best slave, Aaron, is the slave that owns themselves and doesn't know it. Yeah, absolutely. This is why I say, you know, so the technocrats want to take away our free will, but a lot of people don't realize and aren't exercising their free will currently anyway. So it's important that we recognize this. And, you know, I guess if I had to have a tagline right now, it's, you know, don't ask for permission or forgiveness. You know, we tend to go into these things. It's like I'm done with waiting for the, I don't believe, I actually at this point don't believe there's any, you ask, well, where are they spending the money if it's 50%. I mean, the reality. is it's malicious. They're not even using it. They're not even trying to use it to benefit us.

It's no longer a scenario of, well, these guys are just being wasteful. They're actually being actively malicious. And so I try to spend as much time during the day is being conscious of everything that I'm doing and kind of trying to question, well, what's actually going on here? And how do I remove my energy, not fight it? I spent a lot of time fighting stuff. And I realize that it's really difficult to win a completely. rigged the game. So I try to spend time now, yes, educating people, but educating people

so that they can exit the system, withdraw their energy, withdraw their attention, and more importantly, recapture their free will. Well, we keep going, but Daniel Quinn wrote Ishmael, wrote another book about civilization and made a really important point exactly what you just said there. He said that there are lots of examples of big, powerful empires just crumbling, Aztec, you know, Montezuma, you know, Ottoman, et cetera. And the way it happened every time was because the people finally just said, screw this and walked away. And that's the only way. These things are all just fragile edifices of, you know, if you're in the pyramid, it looks like there's no way to claw your way

to the top. It's indestructible. But if you walk away, they just tend to fall anyway, right? So walking away is actually the most potent thing you can do. Also, again, people often become, you often become your enemy. But once you engage in their battle and their terms, you actually end up resorting to their types of tactics. I will say one thing that I don't like doing, and it's actually been something that consciously, because I think I mentioned that I'm working on three different areas right now. I mean, there's the technocratic takeover, which is, you know, explaining to people, what's going on but then there's this I call it autonomy reboot so trying to figure out how to

help people you know realize hey I have free will I can just walk away from this and a lot of that's an internal journey which you know there are a lot of different ways that people can can go through that religion meditation there a whole whole slew of things and then and then the last is building you know the new systems and the most important though is this autonomy reboot the most important is that is for people to recognize that you know every day we make 30,000 decisions. And that's where the real freedom lies. It's not, doesn't lie in waiting for a white night to come.

It's everyday decisions that you're making. And I've actually found, and this is we, this can go in a lot of different directions, but just even being conscious of my breath, before I, before I do anything, before I switch tasks, I take a, you know, a big deep breath, inhale and exhale. And then just to kind of become conscious and aware, why am I doing what I'm doing? What am I doing right now? Because our subconscious is very powerful, and we get, you know, habits stacking. We know it can be a very powerful thing, but most people's habits have been programmed by outside parties.

And so we're kind of on autopilot every day. We kind of become NPCs in a way. And so, you know, just the real wins are, you know, what did I do in my life today that I was fully conscious of? And the greater the number and percentage of people that are doing this, that's where the real, the real power is to to defeat this technocracy. Fantastic. All right. Well, that's for next time. We'll go into that more deeply. Thank you, everybody, for listening today. Aaron Day, thank you so much for your time and your valuable expertise and efforts being put into this area.

Thank you. Had a blast. Thank you.