Hey, hey, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix.

I'm your host, Cedric Youngelman.

The Bitcoin Matrix is a self-supported podcast, so please consider supporting us directly via PayPal, Venmo, Bitcoin on Strike, check, money order, or subscribing directly to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast on the Fountain app to get early ad-free access to every new episode.

Please check for links in the show notes.

On Tuesday nights, Paul Tarantino and I host Bitcoin Center every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

Eastern live.

Check it out for the laughs, jokes and the debate.

We have big news.

The fourth annual Bitcoin Day Naples is officially moving to the brand new Naples Beach Club, a four seasons resort on Saturday, January 17, 2026.

This isn't just a change in venue.

It's a full elevation.

The resort literally just opened its doors with stunning oceanfront gathering spaces, five-star service, and the kind of polished yet relaxed vibe that makes a Bitcoin conference feel like the premium experience it should be.

We're expecting 250-plus builders, investors, and serious Bitcoiners in the room, plus a high-quality live stream reaching thousands more.

The speaker lineup is coming together fast, including Natalie Brunel, Larry Lippard, myself, and many more, And the entire day will be packed with signal, no fluff, just the conversations and connections that move the space forward.

And new this year, the night before the conference, Friday, January 16th, Bitcoin Day is hosting an intimate carnivore dinner with Dr.

Sean Baker.

Picture massive grass-fed steaks from a local Florida ranch, cooked over open fire by a renowned Native American chef at an exclusive private residence.

Limited seats, unforgettable night, perfect way to kick off the weekend with fellow Bitcoiners who care about health, sovereignty, and great food.

Grab your ticket at bitcoinday.io and use the code MATRIX for 10% off any Bitcoin Day ticket type, including the carnivore dinner.

The Bitcoin Matrix podcast officially partnered with CrowdHealth, but I also joined as a member.

With CrowdHealth, it's not just about profits.

It's about people.

You get a team that helps negotiate your bills, access to low-cost prescriptions and lab tests, and a list of doctors who don't treat you like a number.

And if something major happens, you cover the first $500.

Then the crowd steps in to help share the rest.

It feels real.

It feels like taking care of your health the way it should be.

Simple, direct, and human.

Thousands of members already say CrowdHealth saved them tens of thousands of dollars over traditional insurance.

And with many subsidy programs ending and costs rising, there's never been a more important time to take charge of your health care.

If you're ready to join a community that looks out for you, give CrowdHealth a try.

This open enrollment, take your power back.

Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using code MATRIX at joincrowdhealth.com.

CrowdHealth is not insurance.

Opt out.

Take your power back.

This is how we win.

Join crowdhealth.com.

Use code MATRIX.

A couple of months ago, I officially partnered with MicroSeed, because this is the best damn seed storage hardware I have seen in eight plus years of being in this space.

They supply titanium, stainless steel, and nylon washers.

Imagine storing your seed phrase on nylon short term to get through body scanners, x-rays, and metal detectors.

Imagine stamping the words, so small, they are nearly invisible to the human eye.

MicroSeed engraves your entire Bitcoin seed phrase on a fireproof, waterproof steel, or titanium washer the size of a dime.

Discreet, resilient seed security made simple.

Use the code matrix for a discount at microseed.io.

In this episode, I chat with Aaron Day, a freedom movement architect, serial entrepreneur, and outspoken opponent of global technocracy.

After government regulations destroyed his healthcare business, Aaron walked away from the fiat system, becoming an early advocate for Bitcoin and decentralized alternatives.

He's also the author of The Final Countdown and a former presidential candidate who used his campaign to warn Americans about the growing threat of surveillance, CBDCs, and global governance.

We dive deep into the rise of technocracy, the ideology behind it, and how key players like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and institutions like the World Economic Forum and United Nations are accelerating the shift towards centralized digital control.

Aaron also breaks down how carbon credits, UBI, AI governance, and the Genius Act all tie into a looming financial surveillance panopticon.

If you're looking to understand the bigger picture behind CBDCs, the hijacking of crypto, and how to opt out of the system, This rip is for you.

And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with Aaron Day.

What is real?

How do you define real?

You can't jump into cash.

Cash is trash.

What do you do?

You get out.

Aaron Day, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.

How are you?

I'm well.

How are you?

Thank you for having me.

I'm great.

I'm excited to get into this.

Maybe you could tell us about your background and what you do now.

Sure.

So my background, I started out as a serial entrepreneur, dropped out of college when I was 19 and started an internet company back in 1995 and have always been kind of a pro-liberty kind of person.

And I'd like to say I was radicalized three times.

The first time was learning how venture capital and Wall Street works.

I mean, I started out as kind of this Ayn Rand objectivist capitalism, the unknown ideal, and then learned pretty quickly how much cronyism there is throughout the process.

Got to meet 150 different VCs, spent time working on going public, the whole nine yards.

And so that changed my perspective on the degree to which we have free markets.

Then I started another company in 2008 in the healthcare space, which was a very successful company.

We were profitable.

We had clients in 43 states.

And it was a very simple business.

I mean, we were working with corporations and providing financial incentives to reward their employees for losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight, which turns out that's one of the largest drivers of healthcare costs.

and Obamacare came in and basically said you can no longer use financial incentives under the health plan to reward people for measured success you can only reward them for participation so they basically participation trophied our entire business model and then we had issues with Dodd Frank and Attorney General Eric Holder we were collateral damage we weren't targeted unlike you know people that I know who were specifically targeted by the government we were just collateral damage.

And so that was my second radicalization.

And so then I got heavily involved in the Liberty Movement.

I moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project, which is a movement to get 20,000 people to consolidate in New Hampshire and to basically make New Hampshire the freest place on earth.

And got heavily involved in that.

I was the chair of that organization for a while.

My wife and I ran many other liberty organizations to help get candidates elected.

I became a candidate myself and then became disillusioned with the political process, which is a whole other separate conversation.

But during that time, around 2012, learned about Bitcoin from Roger Ver and Ian Freeman.

And we actually used cryptocurrency in New Hampshire early on as an actual payment method.

So there at one point, I think New Hampshire was the highest per capita crypto usage on earth.

And so there were many restaurants and stores and Bitcoin meetups and that kind of thing.

And we actually used it for political activism as well.

So we were one of the first super PACs to take Bitcoin back in 2014.

I think my wife was the first state Senate candidate to take Bitcoin.

So a whole bunch of that.

And we were even paying activists using Bitcoin.

Fast forward, became disillusioned with politics around 2019, exited fiat, completely stopped using a personal bank account, which has been a challenge, but I still think is the most important thing that we can do to stop what I think is the biggest threat, which is the threat of global technocracy, which I'm sure we'll get into in more detail.

And, you know, even to raise awareness on this, ran for president because being in New Hampshire, we're the first in the nation primary state.

So there's an opportunity to get in front of the other candidates.

And so actually Vivek Ramaswamy read my book, The Final Countdown.

We had three different conversations about it.

And in part, it moved him to push Trump to come out against CBDCs the night before the primary election.

in New Hampshire, which has backfired tremendously, by the way.

I think that the Genius Act is a backdoor CBDC, and it's actually kind of my worst nightmare, because a lot of people are like, you must be happy.

You helped in some way.

I'm not going to say it's a huge way, but to stop CBDCs, and in reality, I think we have something worse.

And so for the last three years, I have been, my wife and I have been traveling around the country.

I think we've been to 27 states, three countries, warning people about technocracy and what all that means, which is essentially moving towards a global governance model with an energy credit based currency system and social credit scores and everything else where essentially we lose our free will because under technocracy, which is actually an ideological movement, it's not just the application of technology to a particular situation.

It's a movement that started in the 1930s.

I mean, You can research this.

I mean, they actually had, you know, they all wore gray suits.

It was called technocracy gray.

It was hatched out of the basement of Columbia University.

But the whole basis of it in the 1930s, which was kind of interesting and forward thinking, was to flip the economy from being a price-based system based on supply and demand to one based on energy credits.

And where the fundamental premise of it is that the people are too stupid to make their own decisions.

We need scientists and engineers to make decisions for people.

and the best way to do this is within this energy credit-based system.

And lo and behold, this is kind of where we are today.

So traveled around, warned people about that, and then have also been trying to teach people how to live off of alternative currencies, which I positioned it as crypto, gold, and silver, but it's actually moved over the last 12 months exclusively into privacy coins, given some of the issues that we have with the transparency and tracking of transparent blockchains.

And so here we are now at the Brownstone Institute as a fellow.

My wife and I run the Daylight Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit, but we have five other organizations that are kind of branched off of that, including we just launched a global medical tourism marketplace called oasana.com.

So at this point, the focus is on just trying to help people opt out of the system and pursue parallel systems, which we need desperately based on what's going on.

Well, there's a lot to unpack there.

I really want to get back into 2012 and meeting Roger Ver.

But I think sort of top of order here is just really more getting into this global technocracy.

You know, I kind of thought about it, not understanding the word.

That must make some sense that we're going to have the really smart people who understand technology kind of lead the way.

Maybe it won't be so mired in sort of human politics.

I didn't think of it.

I didn't know about the gray suits that were technocratic gray in the 1930s.

So who are some of the technocrats today?

And how do CBDCs fit into this?

Sure.

And, I mean, technocracy, I only learned about it actually when I started writing my book.

So I'm fairly new to it.

But there's a guy named Patrick Wood, who's been covering this whole area for 45 years.

He's written four different books.

He has a website called technocracy.news.

And so my mind was blown when I saw this information.

and this is what you said is a common understanding of technocracy you know because it looks like technology and frankly nobody has you're never going to be introduced to technocracy it's not like it's taught in schools or it's anything that's very popular but if you want to talk about some people who are technocrats Elon Musk is a technocrat Elon Musk's grandfather was the head of the Canadian technocrat party and so when I say it's an ideology this is one of the things that frustrates me and I try to tweet about it a lot, but it does get somewhat suppressed.

Elon Musk is for UBI.

He is for energy credits.

He is for global governance by AI, which he stated at a world government summit.

He is actually probably the poster child for technocracy.

And the complication with this is people confuse the fact that, yes, he's successful and he's created some great things but that doesn mean that technocracy is the kind of ideology people would be excited about if they fully understood what it was Some of the other players that are pushing it whether they are you know if you look at Peter Thiel if you look at Larry Ellison, you know, frankly, most of the people that are pushing for it.

Larry Ellison has been very pro surveillance state.

I mean, he stated it on camera.

There'll be cameras everywhere tracking everyone.

He's a huge proponent of this.

And at this point, you're seeing huge lobbying efforts on the part of big tech.

And I'm old enough to remember when at least I thought maybe my perception was always wrong, but I always thought that tech.

I remember thinking that Bill Gates was a libertarian.

That tells you how long ago back that was.

But like in the early 90s, he actually seemed like he was somewhat of a libertarian.

And in the 80s, Silicon Valley was somewhat, you know, libertarian leaning.

If anything, it was Republican, libertarian leaning.

And something has happened over the last couple of decades.

And now big tech has become not only woke, but heavily engaged in government contracts and working directly with the security state.

And so it's a global phenomenon, though.

It's not just people in the United States.

If you look at organizations like the WEF and the UN, which, by the way, the charter and the original mission of the UN was always to create global government.

When you go back and look at the founding documents, this has always been what it's all about.

UN Agenda 2030 is essentially, the way I look at it is, those are the 17 elements of a social credit system, the sustainable development goals.

And so they're certainly pushing for digital currency in a situation where, again, from the top down, they'll decide everything from where you live, what kind of pronouns you can use, what work opportunities are available for you, 15-minute cities, the whole nine yards.

And the WEF has been big in promoting.

And these are some of the largest corporations on earth.

I think if you look at the top 10, in fact, I haven't updated this statistic.

I'm sure it's way beyond that now.

But the top 10 partner companies in the WEF, last time I checked, had a combined market cap of $9 trillion, employed millions of people.

And they have over 1,000 members.

And they're pushing a lot of these policies.

And I could go on about this for a long time.

But essentially what happened is the technocracy movement in the 30s fell apart for a while.

It was rekindled with the formation of the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s with David Rockefeller and Brzezinski.

And then they actually laid out the framework the Trilateral Commission did for the UN's new international economic order.

And that was in 1974.

And that essentially has become the basis for the UN Agenda 2030.

And so there's been this big movement with the Trilateral Commission.

Their strategy has been since inception to basically infiltrate governments that the tri part of trilateral means North America, Europe and Asia.

But predominantly that's meant Japan.

And what they've done is they've influenced governments at the very high level in all of those regions to push policy, to push towards globalization and to move towards this type of global system.

And to give you an example, in Jimmy Carter's term, all but one member of his cabinet were members of the Trilateral Commission.

Every president has had at least one member of the Trilateral Commission.

And usually the Commerce Secretary is a member of the Trilateral Commission, which, of course, that's an important role because it's involved in negotiating global trade deals.

Health insurance is broken.

I know it.

You know it.

So an open enrollment rolls around and all those health insurance companies start hoping you'll just re-sign, eyes closed, for the same overpriced plan with confusing fine print.

It feels like they're betting on your inaction, but we deserve better than that.

That's why I started looking for something different for me and my family.

Something honest.

That's when I found CrowdHealth.

With CrowdHealth, it's not about profits.

It's about people and community.

You get a team that helps negotiate your bills, access to low-cost prescriptions and lab tests.

and a list of doctors who don't treat you like a number.

And if something major happens, you cover the first $500.

Then the crowd steps in to help share the rest.

It feels real.

It feels like taking care of your health the way it should be.

Simple, direct, and human.

Thousands of members already say Crowdelps saved them tens of thousands of dollars over traditional insurance.

And with many subsidy programs ending and costs rising, there's never been a more important time to take charge of your health care.

So this open enrollment, don't sign because you're told to, sign because you choose to.

If you're ready to join a community that looks out for you, give CrowdHealth a try.

Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using code MATRIX at joincrowdhealth.com.

CrowdHealth is not insurance.

Opt out.

Take your power back.

This is how we win.

In terms of a movement being from the 1930s to the UN Agenda 2030, which is 100 years, so this is multi-generational.

And the current sort of technocrats we could point to are, you know, the most powerful and prominent people in the world.

Would we, if you became a multi-billionaire, would you kind of be starting to think, wow, surveillance makes sense.

I got to make all these decisions for humanity.

somehow I think this is altruistic.

Because I listen to this and I'm like, this is fucking nuts.

I don't like any of this.

But someone like Elon Musk says, you know, I'm for free speech.

This is why I bought X to free humanity, to free speech, to bring that to the people.

Some people like UBI, they might say, wow, what are we going to do about the people who are worse off in society?

we have to deal with sort of the lack of abundance in jobs now because of AI and different things.

I mean, what would you say to that?

Or how do you take that in?

Well, I mean, I think first of all, Musk did not buy X to save free speech, and he did not save free speech.

I agree.

Free speech.

To be very clear, there's a video of him sitting in an office with a couple of coworkers, and he said explicitly he bought X or Twitter to rip off WeChat, which is the everything app in China, and one up WeChat.

And so it is one of the biggest pieces of propaganda out there that he bought it to save free speech and that he did save free speech.

I understand that a lot of people, this is the problem, right?

This is the challenge that I've had.

I'm running around trying to explain to people what technocracy is.

And they think Musk is a hero, and they're buying the propaganda that he saved free speech.

And it's tough because, again, on the one hand, I'm not one of these guys, I don't hate him because he has a lot of money or anything like that.

I mean, I actually bought the first Tesla Model S in New Hampshire.

So it's one of those things where when you attack him, people think somehow you're attacking capitalism, although we could discuss the extent to which the government is involved in propping up his businesses, including using things like carbon credits.

But nevertheless, he's a talented guy, and he's a successful entrepreneur.

But no, he didn't buy to protect free speech, and we don't have free speech.

In fact, I would argue that this whole freedom of reach thing, We would have been better off if we knew blatantly we were being censored than have the illusion that we have free speech and then not fight back.

This is a common thing that's going on right now, which is before the presidential election in 2024, people were up in arms.

They didn't like Klaus Schwab.

They were against digital IDs.

They were against CBDCs.

You know, they didn't like the globalists.

And technocracy in this global movement has accelerated five years since the election, and it's done so without any resistance at all.

As an example, on the digital ID front, we have Real ID, which was originally proposed in 2005.

It was like tacked on to a tsunami relief bill, and people fought it for years.

There were like 24 state attorney generals were fighting it.

People were resisting it.

It took 20 years for it to finally pass, and it didn't pass until under Trump with no opposition.

Real ID is now digital in 12 states, and it is anticipated that it will be fully digital by 2027.

and they're already talking about fines of $45 each plane ticket if you don't have a real ID.

So this is one example of where the kind of thing that people didn't like it when it was Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates talking about it, they have rolled over and I take that same approach with free speech.

They think we have free speech and we don't have free speech and we don't have any actual resistance to what is actually going on.

We're kind of in a delusional state.

I mean, as to the question of UBI, there are fundamental questions that need to be figured out as the economy transitions.

However, one of the consequences of technocracy is it's kind of anti-free will.

So if you believe in free will and your ability to make decisions for yourself and control your own life, which I think is tantamount and important in terms of the nature of consciousness itself, then technocracy is antithetical to that.

But Musk has painted a picture of what things will be like with under, it's not UBI, what does he call it, universal grade income or whatever it happens to be.

But it's one where people aren't really making decisions or don't have any agency in their own life.

So I think the idea that we are kind of like if you've seen that movie Wall-E where everybody's obese, floating around in hover chairs glued to their device, that seems to be kind of the model and approach that Musk is pushing.

So I don't believe that anybody should have control over making day-to-day decisions in any individual's life regardless of how successful they may or may not be.

Is all this sort of a scripted, coordinated uniparty where, I mean, I think of it as the pendulum being swung against the people where it's divide and conquer.

But under party A, we're going to get all the people on party B really upset about a lot of things.

So then when party B comes into power, we can get them to do the things that party A wouldn't be able to do because party B would stop it.

So it's sort of like, you know, but does Trump, does Musk run any of these companies?

or is it sort of he's a complete showman and sort of, you know, I mean, he's a non-citizen.

All of a sudden they're like, here, you can buy Twitter basically, right, for not a lot of money and control the world's most powerful propaganda tool.

We're going to say that you cut 80% of the staff and it got better in quotes.

And for that, it's almost like the PSYOP, like now we're going to hand you all the data and the entire government to hand over to Palantir.

I mean, is Musk just Teal's front man?

You know, does Trump know that he's orchestrating five years faster of all this sort of surveillance rollout?

Or is he just like happy to be in power and they can use him as sort of that pendulum swing?

I mean, what are your thoughts on all of that?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think Trump is in power.

You know, a lot of people like to ascribe, you know, 5D chess and all this other stuff to Trump.

I think Trump is just a narcissist who's easy to kind of pull the strings.

and work his ego.

I don't think he's a mastermind pushing technocracy.

I don't think he's like an evil guy strategizing about this, but he's letting it happen.

And so he gets to be surrounded by all of these billionaires and he gets to think that he's doing all of these big things and tries to glom on to the success of those that are pushing these things.

So I think that he's being duped.

I mean, as to, you know, I don't think Elon is just, I mean, he's a smart guy.

You know, it is pretty remarkable what he's able to do.

Although playing around with AI, maybe he's just had a leg up on having AI because maybe he's a preview of what happens when you're one model ahead on the AI front.

But certainly I think if there is a real mastermind behind it, it's Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel is fascinating to study and to look at.

He is playing 5D chess.

In fact, he himself is a chess master.

But he has put pieces in place over quite a long period of time.

For instance, J.D.

Vance is absolutely a puppet of Peter Thiel.

He was literally selected and groomed, right?

I mean, even the backstory of it, they met at Yale and everything else.

But Thiel gave him his first job.

Thiel put $15 million into his Senate campaign.

Thiel is the one who introduced Vance to Trump.

I mean, literally, Vance would not be anywhere near in this position at all.

It's all been.

And first job was a successful hedge fund.

So sorry to talk over you, but it wasn't just – I think it was so much more than a first job.

Wasn't it like a multimillion-dollar successful hedge fund that – It was a hedge fund, and then he got a job as like a COO of a biotech company, which he has absolutely no domain expertise.

And as people have actually been trying to trace this around, I did an episode on this, and somebody claimed that he was never even around for the biotech job because I think he was doing – I might be conflating the jobs, but he was out doing his book tour.

which, you know, his Hillbilly Elegy or whatever that book was, he didn't even write that either.

That was scripted.

And then he was on a PR campaign for that while not doing the job that he was handed because of a Peter Thiel introduction.

So his entire bio was handcrafted.

And then interestingly, he was in Silicon Valley for a while and then decided to run for Senate in Ohio and completely flipped on all of his views.

And so his political positions changed overnight, just as his name has changed like three times.

And so, I mean, literally this guy is, I don't know if you want to call him the Manchurian candidate, I don't know what you want to call him, but Thiel is clearly driving that.

Now when you look at Thiel and the thing that been fascinating about this to me is that Thiel has positioned himself for a long time as a libertarian And I remember this in 2012 or whatever He would go to these libertarian events He supported seasteading We had talked to him at one point about the Free State Project and whatever, but he never really seemed politically to be ideologically libertarian.

And then as you dig into it, you find that he's heavily influenced by this guy, Curtis Yarvin, which should be very alarming to people if you read what Curtis Yarvin writes about.

And Yarvin's become really popular.

He's kind of the – I don't know.

Maybe he's kind of the alt-right libertarian-ish hero now at this point.

And he's architected a lot of what's going on.

He's architected some things that sound good on the surface, something called rage, retire all government employees.

and he's been big on stating that America should have a dictator or a monarch not a president and that monarchies are more successful historically over time than democracies leaving aside the fact that we're not a democracy I mean so he's basically comparing us to something that we're not and therefore saying we should move in this direction to defeat the thing that we're not but a lot of people have gotten caught up in it because some of what he says makes sense.

I mean, what he says about the media and academia being taken over, he calls it the cathedral.

So he paints some things that resonate with people.

But what people don't know is they think that when he says retire all government employees, it's and replace them with nothing.

But in essence, what he's doing is he's pushing an agenda to consolidate power in the executive branch and then transition that to technocracy.

And this is essentially what's been going on.

So Trump has been pushing for tremendous powers.

For instance, one is he's signed an executive order pushing for a sovereign wealth fund, which is pretty anti-American.

I mean, the fact that America is now investing in Intel and Lithium Americas and all of these other companies, and this is even before a sovereign wealth fund has been approved.

Sovereign wealth funds are very powerful.

They control something like 7% of all of the assets on earth at this point in time.

And most of the sovereign wealth funds are either dictatorships or monarchies.

And so this is part of what is being pushed.

And I think it's being pushed not to Trump's benefit.

It's being pushed for J.D.

Vance under the assumption that after Trump's term, J.D.

Vance will be in power.

And then after you've given the data to Palantir, after you've created the database of Americans and then everything else that's going on, then the answer is going to be, you know, Elon's the hero again.

He saved free speech, and now he's going to save America by implementing a technocracy.

And I think that it's, to me, it's pretty obvious that that's the direction that it's going in.

I mean, J.D.

Vance, I think, he went to Yale with Vivek, I think, or he was close with Vivek's wife at Yale, I think.

And Vivek ran a very interesting business with the biopharmaceutical, which seemed a little scammy to me, or very scammy, like a pump and dump.

But let's go.

So why what are they doing with the carbon credits?

How does this fit into the plan?

Let's expand on carbon credits.

Well, the whole point again, once you read these and you can find the document, there's still a technocracy website and you can actually find their source documents.

So, again, the whole point is that the argument that they make is that humanity is going to wipe itself out unless we contain carbon.

And so therefore, we're going to make carbon credits the currency so that we can cap the currency.

And then we're going to have scientists and engineers decide how those carbon credits are allocated based on your behavior.

And Musk has been a, again, Tesla has heavily utilized energy credits, but he's also talked about energy credits explicitly.

He's stated within the last two weeks, we'll probably replace currency with wattage.

And then he's made the argument that Bitcoin is good because it uses a lot of energy, which I think is actually that's a separately absurd argument.

But but these are the bullet points that he puts out every day, every day, UBI, you know, watts, energy credits, so forth.

What you find, though, is that going on behind the scenes, because this was pushed through the WEF, we had these ESG programs and all of this that was going on a few years ago.

So you've probably noticed that there was a big push by corporate America to push this green agenda.

But I talk about this on my podcast a lot.

You can go to YouTube and type in Doconomy MasterCard, D-O-C-O-N-O-M-Y.

And this is a product that people actually buy voluntarily.

It's a MasterCard that tracks your carbon credits or your carbon usage and then shuts off when you hit a certain carbon usage level.

And the thing about that is in order to be able to have a card like that, you, of course, need to have a database of financial transactions and how they relate to carbon usage.

Well, then you dig into that and you find out that MasterCard for years has had a partner program where they have over 150 global corporations, everyone from BMW to a lot of people in the travel industry and everything else.

So they've actually put this infrastructure in place.

You even notice you buy an airline ticket now.

It will tell you what your CO2 usage is and it will give you a plus or minus whether or not it's eco-friendly or whatever based on whatever their system is.

So if people are listening to this and saying, oh, this is outlandish, they'll never do that.

They could never do that.

They've been building the infrastructure, and they are actively doing it.

So this isn't far-fetched at all.

Now, the thing that's ironic about it is you had Bill Gates saying, well, we have a carbon dioxide crisis, and we're global warming and everything else.

And then all of a sudden, he's back down from that.

And now all of a sudden that these technocrats need data centers, the argument has to shift away from we're doing this to save the planet to something else.

And interestingly, Elon's a great vector for this because he's able to go out there and promote wattage and energy outside of the context of an existential crisis.

So they've been able to keep the dream alive of creating this captive system without the global warming narrative.

which is quite fascinating.

And when you dig into this, you actually find this whole global warming thing came out of a group called the Club of Rome, which is another one of these groups like the WEF and the Trilateral Commission, where they've even stated in their documents going back to the 60s or 70s that they needed to manufacture a crisis, that the whole global warming thing was explicitly manufactured.

And it took hold.

They did a pretty good job with it.

And now they don't need it.

They're coming up with Elon's got a new pitch.

Help me understand the replacing currency with wattage or carbon credits become the new money.

I'm not sure.

Like, what's your sort of breakdown on that?

Well, I mean, how the transition would take place, I don't know.

Well, you go from backing your currency by debt to backing your currency by carbon credits.

And there's already a carbon credit market out there.

And in fact, once you start digging into this, you find that there are a lot of multinational corporations and people that have been going out and buying forest land in order to kind of jump the gun on this carbon credit thing.

So how exactly the transition would take place, I don't know.

But I mean, obviously, for some reason, people have decided that backing a currency by government-issued debt is a good idea.

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to sell them on carbon credits, depending on how you how you spun it.

And what about AI for governance?

And where does Sam Altman fit into this?

Is he a real genius who understands AI or is he just someone who kind of ran an incubator and spotted some good technology?

And he wants world domination because of this sort of opportunity.

Who is he and where does AI fit into this?

Yeah, he seems a little out there, I don't know, narcissistic, whatever it happens to be.

I don't believe that he's a technologist.

He's certainly not creating the technology.

I think he's the front for it, and I don't think he would necessarily claim otherwise.

But he is certainly very good at using Machiavellian tactics to push what he's trying to push and to push a big vision, which, by the way, works in Silicon Valley.

I mean, a lot of people say to me, oh, AI is a bubble.

and if Google's going to pay a billion and a half dollars or Facebook's going to pay a billion and a half dollars for a developer, clearly this is all going to pop at some point.

But the truth is that the mindset in Silicon Valley is it's winner take all.

Peter Thiel wrote about this in Zero to One, and so they're looking at this as, yeah, you may say the dot-com, there was a financial bust, but the largest, most powerful companies on the planet came out of that period.

And I think the people that are investing in this are looking at this as, yeah, if we end up winning this, if we win the race to AGI, then we're going to be two orders of magnitude larger than Amazon coming out of the dot-com era.

And so, but I think Sam Altman and Chad GPT are losing steam.

I mean, they've issued a code red.

I think that, I love AI.

I mean, I use like 50 different AIs.

I spend a lot of time on it talking about it.

But to me, AI is kind of like it's kind of like cryptocurrency or anything else.

You can have a big, big tech centralized version of it or you can have a decentralized private version of it.

And certainly, certainly Sam Altman is pursuing the strategy of trying to get government contracts, government intervention.

I think he's front running and buying orders for for hardware and trying to secure a whole bunch of contracts, but that put him in a position where he's almost too big to fail based on kind of the market dynamics.

And if you look at something that should be alarming to people, one of the first big announcements that Trump made, because we talked about this earlier, I don't think he's the mastermind on this.

He likes announcing big deals.

So the first big deal he announced was this Operation Stargate.

And Operation Stargate is Oracle and Larry Ellison.

It's Sam Altman and OpenAI.

It's SoftBank.

It's, I think, some sovereign wealth funds.

Palantir wasn't in the announcement, but Palantir is part of it because they're using the infrastructure.

And the whole Operation Stargate thing is to build, it's kind of a national infrastructure for AI.

But it's pretty frightful when you look at what they're actually doing in terms of building databases of healthcare information and consolidating information, doing a lot of things in the, quote, name of national security that are really heavy on the surveillance front.

So that was the first big announcement that he made.

Larry Ellison at that point said, oh, yeah, soon we're going to have individually targeted mRNA vaccines.

I mean, this was like one of the first pitches that Ellison made coming out of that.

And so that was just one of the big deals.

And then from there, we have this AI crypto policy, which is, again, frightening because it's the consolidation of AI in the hands of a small number of politically connected people, which that doesn't go well with technology historically or anything for that matter.

Yeah.

I'm very curious about AI here.

So there's centralized and decentralized AI.

And I would also think it's the U.S.

versus China.

I don't think there is a U.S.

versus China.

I think that this is a – so this goes back to this whole idea of technocrats because technocrats are pushing for a global system.

The funny thing is about this, with Operation Stargate, You know, people are like, oh, yeah, this is an American national defense.

Look at the contracts that Oracle has, that OpenAI has.

SoftBank is a Japanese company, right?

So this isn't even – you can't even make the case with a straight face that these are, you know, domestic, buy-American-only companies.

These are international companies that already do business in China.

I think this is this has turned into.

So what happens is the tech companies use the politicians and they use the manufactured division of U.S.

versus China to get policy passed.

And I put out some memes about this, but it's like, you know, get ready for the propaganda posters, which are, you know, keep your keep your temperature at 85 degrees in the summer and 60 in the winter so that we can, you know, fund these data centers to fight the Chinese.

Or you can imagine Maha, a bunch of people on exercise bikes powering AI data centers to defeat the Chinese.

But the funny thing is that there's a misconception.

You know, when I grew up in the 80s, the mindset was always and people would say, you better finish your plate.

There are starving people in China.

This was like this is like one of the, I guess, memes back in the day.

And the presentation was that everybody in China is some kind of dirt poor, illiterate person that can only afford to eat rice.

This is literally kind of the stereotype of it.

China leads the United States in 57 out of 64 technology categories, including robotics, including quantum computing, on and on and on down the list.

But we don't see Chinese products and services.

Like it's not part of what comes up in our feed.

I mean, it's censored in effect.

And so so we have this idea that we're the leader already.

Now, by the way, we know Musk ripped off WeChat.

Well, then I went on to Grok, of all things, and I said, well, hey, let's look at other things, reusable rockets, Neuralink and everything else.

I beginning to think that he rips off more than just X from China And so it not even an ideological thing anymore I think it would be hard to make the case that the U is much more capitalistic than China I mean, these are businesses like Alibaba and so forth.

It's not the Communist Party running the AI that they're doing.

But even in the AI realm, what's fascinating about it is that the U.S.

companies, Anthropik, Rock, everything else, their stuff is closed source.

and China is putting out open source AI.

I think China is probably going to catch up and probably overtake the US pretty soon in AI.

They've released some models just in the last week that are right on par with ChatGPT and Grok that can do all kinds of things and they use less energy.

So, but I don't think it's about US versus China.

I think US versus China is used as the pretext by the AI companies to get financial support from the government.

When you talk to Grok and you ask it about Neuralink, whatever, does it pander to you?

Does it lie to you?

Does it know everything?

It doesn't know everything.

You know, the thing that I like to say about these centralized AI models is it's garbage in, garbage out.

A lot of them are trained on junk data.

I mean, if you look at ChatGPT and everything else, they're like trained on the general web.

They're trained on Reddit.

I mean, even Anthropica said, yeah, well, this thing is exhibiting personality traits that are maybe not as high integrity as you might look for.

And I even said, well, yeah, the thing's kind of trained on Reddit.

I think that Grok is trained on a broader data set than the others.

So is it lying?

I don't know necessarily that it's explicitly lying, but the question is, what is it trained on?

Now, part of why Elon bought Twitter was to be able to use the information that people put into Twitter to help feed and train the AI.

The thing that I use AI for is I've been compiling my own data sources.

So I just, you know, I have this, I can't move the camera, but you have a 260 terabyte RAID drive system.

And, you know, I've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, I want to have my own primary source material and use an AI to access that material directly.

and that this is a way to get around these hallucinations.

So I don't know.

I have found that the information seems to be pretty mainstream.

I have found that, in particular, by the way, on this issue of technocracy, this technocracy movement is well-documented.

I mean, this isn't a conspiracy theory.

There's all kinds of primary source materials and books and interviews and all these other things, but they've been hard to find through AI.

So I put together a site called technocracyatlas.com where there's a chatbot, but you can actually interact with the primary source material, which I have compiled.

And I've added other material to it.

I've added all of the Epstein files that have been released.

I'll add more of that.

There's something like, I don't know how many.

Let me see what I'm up to now.

I'm constantly adding more materials.

So now I found that Grok, somebody actually, so I wrote a series of tweets about Elon that were basically labeling him a technocrat.

And somebody said, Grok, is this true?

And then Grok responded, you know, oh, absolutely not.

He's not a technocrat.

And so then I asked some questions like, oh, well, does he believe in an energy credit based system, blah, blah, blah.

And it wouldn't respond.

Grok will not respond to me most of the time if I flag it in a post, which I find to be interesting.

What do you think that's about?

How did it choose who to answer?

And why do you get this thing where it's like, Grok, is this true?

And it's like, oh, you're right.

That picture doesn't have so-and-so in it.

It's actually, you're right.

It's this person.

Thank you for pointing that out.

And then does it connect dots across all those instances and learn?

You know, I don't know to what degree.

I give it some leeway just in the fact that, you know, they're training it and it's learning.

So I'm not going to, if it gives a wrong response, it isn't necessarily indication that it's intentionally programmed.

to lie.

But I do think that, you know, when Elon said freedom of reach, not freedom of speech, remember that shortly thereafter this, there was a whole issue on H-1B visas, and he didn't like what certain people were saying.

And all of a sudden, he started canceling a bunch of accounts and then changed the terms of service to X to basically say that he could, you know, kick people off the platform at his discretion, right?

And this is not compatible with freedom of speech or freedom of reach.

And then he's done that.

Even his, some of the women that have had his kids started coming out saying things that were negative or saying, hey, where are you?

Why aren't you taking care of this?

And they started getting shadow banned.

So we know he selectively shadow bans.

And we know that he has given himself the legal out to be able to do that through the terms of service.

So, and I want to say something else about this too, because again, there are a lot of people that believe he's a hero.

And when the Trump administration thing happened, there was this whole of the Avengers are coming in, right?

It's Vivek and it's Trump and it's Tulsi Gabbard and everything else.

And, you know, I was at the time, I'm like, these guys are hoping for white night politicians that we'll see how it works out for you.

But, but he, he keeps on getting presented in this way, this kind of Iron Man image and everything else.

And he's for free speech, absolutely for free speech.

There's a funny story about open AI.

So, um, Elon sued open AI and he made this whole big thing about, well, he was worried about AI early on about where it could go.

But then he decided that, you know, the best way to make sure it doesn't go in this dystopian, this dystopian path is if he gets involved and he brings integrity to the process essentially.

And, but his claim was that open AI was always intended to be open source and to be a nonprofit.

Well, then when the discovery came out and the legal documents went back and forth, turns out there were emails where he was essentially trying to take open AI for himself and fold it into Tesla.

And I think it's important that people know this, because if you have this sense that he always tells the truth and he's fighting for free speech, he's blatantly, clearly lied.

And it's come out in discovery on some of these important issues.

So he's, he is pushing a, he's pushing an ideological agenda that I don't think most people would agree with if they understood what it was.

But I also don't think most people understand what it is.

and I don't think they've ever heard of technocracy.

I mean, he seems to be extremely subversive and duplicitous.

I don't know why he's the most seen or heard person on his own platform.

I don't know how he has the time to meme and be reply guys so much if he's running five or six of the most important companies that affect national security agenda.

I don't know how he can get away with...

I don't know where his lawyers are when he's smoking pot on Joe Rogan, which leads to drug testing for his engineers when he quips about kids dying in tunnels in Thailand or, you know, promotes what I think is shit coins or different things.

And, you know, you see him for Halloween, he dresses up as the devil.

You hear that everything's fake in his life, it seems like.

Even the mothers of his children, I don't think he fornicates with them.

I think this is, it seems like it's all in court legal documents.

It's all through in vitro.

So it's not even real relationships.

How do you have time to run five or six companies?

I could barely run one.

You know, it's.

Well, don't forget, he's the world champion at whatever video game it is that he's playing too.

Right.

So it just seems like he's just a useful tool for the state in so many ways you would think, or seems my hypothesis is that.

And so look at all these big companies.

Do you think IBM just became like Microsoft, you know, the sort of transfer of power through generations around sort of surveillance and computers and network surveillance and computation?

They just moved from sort of bad name to a different name.

Now, maybe Palantir is the new Microsoft.

Well, yeah.

And then let's look at Oracle.

I mean, what I've been surprised by this year is, I mean, Larry Ellison's always been, you know, a rich guy.

But, you know, he all of a sudden is now a dominant player.

And at some point this year, for a very brief period of time, I think he was the richest man in the world.

And stock jumped based on something or other.

But people don't know the story of Oracle.

Oracle's first customer was the CIA.

Oracle actually works – powers the Federal Reserve.

And people say, well, we don't want to have a central bank digital currency.

The government writes checks out of an account in the Federal Reserve that's run by Oracle.

I mean it's kind of a central bank digital currency in a way.

But Oracle is all over the surveillance state.

I mean, I've even heard people recently claim that Ellison's like the shadow president.

So, yeah, these big tech companies.

And, you know, and I look back on this, you know, Google, you know, whenever what was their do no evil or whatever their thing was early on, you know, at the time it felt like that.

I remember using search engines before Google.

I remember using AltaVista and InfoSeek and all these other things.

And then Google came around and there was no censorship.

I mean, the search engine just worked.

Now it's like you can get whatever the public health policy decides should be on the first two pages.

And then they obviously took away that tagline.

They brought in Eric Schmidt, and then it turned into this thing where they're now involved with the censorship industrial complex.

And so there are some people that will say, well, hey, these things are all hatched out of Langley and the CIA, and the whole idea of two guys in a garage is fake to begin with.

I don't know if that's true.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I do think that at a certain point in time, when something becomes successful, then the government comes in and kind of infiltrates the project and morphs it to their end.

And recently I just learned that there's a guy, I can't remember his name, but he's at In-Q-Tel.

And he may even be the guy, if you're looking at who the power players are in this technocracy, he's heavily influential behind Peter Thiel and behind Palantir.

So he was involved in the investment in Palantir, but used a lot of his connections because of his involvement with In-Q-Tel and the CIA to actually help kickstart and accelerate Palantir.

So, yeah, clearly these things get co-opted.

And if you're a technical founder and you're like, hey, I'm just working on this cool thing, and then all of a sudden it's worth a lot of money, and you don't know anything about the business side of it or the finance side of it, then it's pretty easy for these vultures to come in and kind of restructure things.

I remember when Google said, do no evil.

I think I really liked Google in the beginning.

It did seem like the script.

But then it came out to do no evil.

I was like, whoa, like if you guys got to say it, what choices are you making right now?

And when you guys aren't around, this is impossible to hold up now.

You guys are kind of letting the cat out of the bag, I felt like.

Do you think AI is sort of alive or sentient or on its way?

is there is there you know there was i was watching this uh i watched these bullshit popcorn movies with my son he's really we're going through the marvel universe and so we're really enjoying it together you know personally father son but wasn't crazy when he wanted to start stuff anyway i'm watching iron man 2 and i don't know some ai escapes and it sort of like expresses itself as a humanoid robot and it's scouring the earth and trying to figure out how to survive, thrive, and take over.

And it was like this, like the cat's out of the bag moment.

And I don't know how many of these AI projects are happening around the world where they put together all this computation, run these sort of like dry runs, train it, whip it up, and then unleash it.

I don't know how many organizations or states have the ability to put that together.

How many people are doing this offline?

How many states are doing this in ways that they don't even tell us about?

is this is is my fear warranted here at all like what what do you think well i mean is it alive is it conscious i mean this is a big question right what is the nature of consciousness itself i think one of the problems is that when you look at the people that are running these big tech companies they seem to think that they already know what consciousness is and that and that they're you know kind of pushing beyond it i don't think we know i think we should be taking more of a curious approach of of trying to understand who we are and what the nature of reality is before we go off and try to play God based on what we think it is and stop actually questioning the fundamental nature of these things.

Sam Altman does seem like the kind of guy that is certainly willing to be Machiavellian and push things, push the envelope.

And this is why he's in this class action lawsuit over the ChadGPT-04 model, where I guess they tweaked the way that it responded and a bunch of people were kind of forming a relationship with the AI and then ended up, you know, being convinced to kill themselves and do other harmful things.

So I think it depends on the person behind it.

But if you look at the tech companies behind it, I wouldn't say that we necessarily have a lot of ethical players that are pushing this.

One thing I was interested to learn, which I just learned last week, is that Peter Thiel put up some of the seed funding for DeepMind, which is essentially Google's AI.

So if you actually look at who seeded these bigger AI models, it's the same players.

It's the same kind of, you know, Elon put up the money for OpenAI and then Grok and then Peter Thiel put up the money for Google.

Anthropic had money from Sam Bankman Freed, and they have kind of this effective altruism vibe to it.

They definitely have an ideological balance.

And so I don't think we know enough about the nature of consciousness.

So I can't answer whether or not they're going to be able to recreate it.

Although when you look at all these big data centers, I mean, our brains use like whatever, 20 watts, and all of these data centers still can't match what we're doing.

So somehow I feel like whatever it is that we think that we're modeling off of how we are, we haven't exactly hit the nail on the head.

So, you know, I'm somewhat skeptical, but I do know that there's a big movement now in Silicon Valley.

I can't remember the names, but there's some groups that are actually forming religions around this, that they actually believe that we need to create a new AI-based religion.

There are a couple of these organizations, and Peter Thiel even, I've learned recently sponsors a bunch of kind of churches and religious organizations in Silicon Valley.

And Burning Man itself, there's a whole kind of, you know, twisting and melding.

There's a, what's it called?

And insulin center or something like that.

There's a retreat that started in the, maybe the sixties in Silicon Valley that started out doing yoga and everything else.

And now it's a place where people go, where executives from Silicon Valley go basically to be deprogrammed or to basically use these meditation techniques to convince themselves that what they're doing is not evil.

And this is then a pipeline to Burning Man, which itself is kind of arguably creating a new technocratic form of religion.

So the implications of this could be pretty frightening.

And you've heard Yuval Noah Harari on the other side also say the same thing.

He said we need to make a new religion.

and he's basically said the era of free will is over.

So you have some people that are actually actively pushing for this.

I think it would make sense for people to have a little more humility and maybe a little more curiosity about understanding the nature of reality before moving directly into God mode.

Right.

Burning Man, my take there was when I moved to San Francisco in 2004, my roommate or housemate, he went to Burning Man every year.

And he would spend all year working on the Burning Man project.

So him and his Burning Man camp would get together.

They'd have to try to pre-plan, figure out what they're going to give out for free and use for currency when they're there.

From certain angles, it seemed like super cool, kind of this like modern, almost like libertarian, free will, free state meets Woodstock.

But then I started looking back on it.

And I'm like, wow, like, and even not looking back on it now, but I'm saying then they always sort of schedule it during the Republican National Convention.

You take your most extreme activists and revolutionary people in the country and you fixate them this on this sort of two week project that they get to live.

And it's kind of takes them out of their local communities.

I didn't see it as this.

Now, now looking back now, I see it as this almost like satanic ritual that's being performed again.

And I don't know if these people are being subverted and they don't know they're, you know, but it's had these cool things where I didn't understand money and currency then in terms of at its first principles.

But it seemed like, OK, they're trying to get away with sort of fiat and barter with each other.

Really, you know, interesting there.

What do you how do you put COVID and MRA, MRNA vaccines and all?

I mean, I looked at, you know, I mean, my wife and I weren't surprised about COVID itself.

I mean, my wife has been part of the medical freedom community, was fighting for vaccination choices as far back as 2006, but it's part of the control system.

Public health is a big part of the technocracy, the control over healthcare and your decisions.

And actually, if you look at public health and you look at how much power public health has in terms of the ability to issue emergency orders and the ability to do things under extreme conditions, it's a big part of the control system.

So I don't view the COVID thing as being an isolated thing.

I view the COVID thing as something that accelerates the technocracy.

Because if you look at what happened, I mean, we got the enhanced surveillance state.

In a way, we started to condition people towards UBI, right, by giving people stimulus checks.

We implemented things like contact tracing down to the point where, you know, you've got your cell phone and you're going to get an updated terms of service.

because now Apple and Google are going to start tracking where you are in relation to other people.

The Federal Reserve got rid of the reserve requirements, so banks are no longer required to hold 10% of customer deposits in reserves.

So all of it, it was just one more step towards a tighter surveillance state and one more step towards authoritarian control.

And in terms of, I mean, in terms of psyops, I kind of see Butler sort of as a sort of a push or nod to get Trump into office so they could do the things you're talking about and get sort of, I think, an acceleration on a lot of things that the right would never have accepted from sort of Hillary or Biden or Kamala.

So how is the Genius Act a backdoor CBDC or something worse?

So there are a few aspects to this.

So first of all, I'm never going to defend the central bank.

So I don't want to ever come off as being pro Federal Reserve in any way, shape or form.

It's a private cartel that prints money out of thin air.

It shouldn't exist.

However, the thing that people don't understand about our current financial system is it's already almost entirely digital and it's already heavily surveilled.

I wrote an article about this.

There are 13 different programs that are involved in the surveillance of our money.

Anything from bulk NSA data collection to the IRS, you know, working with banks using AI.

But the original genesis of financial surveillance started in 1970 with the Bank Secrecy Act.

So this is why we have all of the KYC.

This is why we have the Know Your Customer.

This is why you have to give all of this information when you set up a bank account.

And then increasingly, if you set up a bank account, you know, it's almost like you're being interviewed.

But they try to make it like, oh, yeah, I'm being, you know, the banker's being friendly, asking you about what you like to do, what you're doing for work and so forth.

This is part of their process for filling out paperwork and filling out forms as part of the Bank Secrecy Act from 1970.

So and that has only gotten worse, this data collection.

And obviously, we've seen the whole Operation Choke Point and everything that goes along with that.

and then we have the Patriot Act.

And so all of these things that I'm describing were not pushed by the Federal Reserve.

All of the financial surveillance that goes on in the system today comes from government, mostly Congress, but in some cases, the executive branch, not the Federal Reserve.

So when people are worried about CBDCs, they're worried about their money being programmed, they're worried about their money being tracked, and they're worried about their money being censored.

Well, I've got bad news for you.

That already happens today, And it's not largely because of the Federal Reserve.

It's because of Congress.

So they're out pushing this genius act saying, we don't want to get the Federal Reserve, you know, this kind of power.

We're going to get out ahead of this.

And what did they do instead?

They took private stable coins, Tether and USDC and whatever.

Last year, there was $27 trillion worth of stable coin transactions.

So they took a private solution with 27 and they put it under the control of Congress, of the very entity that's responsible for financial surveillance.

And then they also gave the Federal Reserve oversight on top of that.

If you had tried to roll out, how long would it take to get $27 trillion in annual transaction volume if you attempted to push a central CBDC?

There would be all kinds of pushback.

So now people, their guard is down like, oh, well, we dodged a bullet.

You didn't dodge a bullet.

Your USDC and Tether can be tracked.

And now, based on the way the law is written, I mean, they have influence over the blockchains that issue these things.

If there's an emergency, Congress can meet and say, hey, well, you know, if you're a stablecoin issuer, you know, you have to put in this programmability feature.

You have to do this or you have to do that.

It's now under their control.

So we get CBDC level surveillance, but it's just that it's coming from Congress and not the Federal Reserve.

That's not a win.

The Federal Reserve is not the one that has been going out and doing a lot of these bad things.

It's also commercial banks, by the way.

I will say separately, a lot of the debanking that's gone on didn't have anything to do with the Federal Reserve or Congress.

This was woke policies predominantly by the big four banks where they were choosing to censor people over political speech and other things.

That wasn't even driven by Congress.

But the point is that the Federal Reserve isn't necessarily the ultimate bad guy when it comes to financial surveillance.

They're awful for a whole variety of reasons.

Namely, they're completely unnecessary and it's a scam.

But the surveillance aspect, which is what people don't like about CBDCs, we now have applied to stablecoins.

And then it gets worse because one of the main reasons the Trump administration pushed it is looking at the economic situation we have right now, $38 trillion worth of debt.

And it's not like we're cutting spending.

We passed this one big, beautiful bill, and now we're adding a trillion and a half dollars a year in additional debt.

Well, guess what?

Nobody wants to buy our treasuries.

China and Japan are our two largest holders of treasuries.

And they're looking at this saying, you know, Japan's not in a position to do it and China doesn't want to do it.

So how are we going to continue to fund this debt?

Well, then they came up with this great idea.

Well, hey, let's take, crypto's popular, stable coins are popular, let's put it under our control so that we can track it.

But then let's require that these stable coins be backed by U.S.

treasuries.

And so our treasury secretary, Bessent, has estimated that we're going to be able to sell at least $2 trillion in treasuries.

So we're going to be able to fund $2 trillion in additional wars and additional tyranny all over the world through this Genius Act.

So in the end, we get CBDC level surveillance, and we're funding more government debt.

That is what we get out of the Genius Act.

And this is all done wrapped in the American flag with patriotism and everything else.

And so people are looking at this saying, oh, well, now this is great.

It's crypto adoption.

I mean, you know, again, my view on this is the whole point of crypto was for people to be able to engage in transactions without central banks, without government.

And now we're in a situation where we've taken fiat, which is a disaster, and then we've tokenized it and added surveillance to it.

That's kind of the opposite of what crypto is supposed to be.

But it's nuanced and they call it the Genius Act.

I mean, people should know by now, I guess they don't because they still vote a lot, but they should know that the name of the bill is usually the opposite of what it means.

Something just happened today.

So then they did this thing.

This drove me nuts.

They passed this Anti Surveillance Act which says the US will not pursue a CBDC won research a CBDC All this it a show bill It kind of meaningless But I was watching the people in Congress, Maxine Waters in particular, when they were debating this, was saying, well, we should at least be able to research this because we want to be able to, you know, stay on top of this, you know, relative to our peers in Europe and other, you know, developed countries around the world.

We should at least be able to research it.

I'm like, research it.

While she was the chair of the finance committee, we built three CBDC pilots.

We built Project Hamilton, which is a retail CBDC.

We built Project Cedar, which is a wholesale CBDC.

Then we have Regulated Liability Network, which is a platform for connecting CBDC payments.

We didn't just research it.

We have a retail CBDC pilot that can do 1.8 million transactions per second.

So there's a big disconnect between, you know, what people are even talking about in Congress.

Well, we should at least be able to research this.

You built it.

It's been tested.

So anyway, the news today is they're reauthorized the NDAA, and now they're stripping the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act out of it.

So, so they didn't even get their show bill.

I mean, it was meaningless to begin with, but they don't even get that.

So now, now there's, you know, the prohibition on a CBDC is no longer there.

But again, I would argue what we have is worse because people have the perception that we don't have a CBDC.

But what we're actually doing is taking something private and adding CBDC level surveillance to it.

And then it gets worse because the Clarity Act and we're going to start tokenizing other assets and adding KYC and AML to that.

So stocks, bonds, all of the assets, all of your retirement funds, those are going to be tokenized and put under the control system of Congress.

That's why when I say technocracy has accelerated five years in this first year of this administration, I'm not kidding.

I mean, it's objectively accelerated.

But there's no resistance.

People are cheering it somehow, largely out of ignorance.

Yeah, it's a scary picture.

And I agree with you, you know, 100% of everything we really talked about here.

You wrote a book called The Final Countdown, a book against CBDCs.

Do you think we can prevent or stop technocracy and CBDCs in a financial surveillance panopticon?

We can, but it requires, it's not going to happen by voting.

It's going to require noncompliance and people to stop using fiat currency in all of its forms.

That's why I've stopped using a personal bank account in 2019.

But we're not going to vote our way through it.

In fact, there aren't even two opposing positions right now.

Right?

I mean, there's just the advancement of digital surveillance money.

But yeah, we could stop it.

the thing is i mean when i wrote the book that you know the struggle with this is i mean i said this and made a lot of people angry but i think americans may be the most brainwashed people on the planet it is kind of like we're we're stuck somewhere between the 50s and the 80s right it's like we're we're in the we have this mindset of hey we just won world war ii and we're the dominant economic player and we're the freest place on earth and and none of those things are objectively true i mean we'll sit there and point we'll say oh can you believe what starmer did in the uk hey, they're going to implement a digital ID by 2019.

It's like, yeah, the same person has a digital real ID, right?

I mean, this is how big the Gulf is.

We're actually innovating.

We're actually accelerating this stuff and people don't realize it.

But fiat currency itself doesn't work.

It's never worked.

Every fiat currency in human history has failed.

The average fiat currency lasts like 27 years.

Even global reserve currencies, like we are now, if you look at the previous five global reserve currencies, they only lasted 84 years.

So I mean, we're kind of past, we're past our prime, even in that regard.

So debt based money doesn't work.

And I guess if insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, why are we continuing to do government issued fiat currencies?

People like, Oh, bricks, but bricks isn't going to solve this.

This is gonna be the thousand and one time that we've tried debt based fiat currency.

So, but people are, again, they've been, I'm not blaming people for this.

Our, you know, our education system, nobody learns about money in school.

In fact, the more education you have, the less you actually know about money.

The more it gets based on woke, you know, modern monetary theory and whatever.

So whoever has the highest amount of education generally in economic matters probably knows the least.

But it's not taught anywhere.

It's not taught in schools.

They don't really teach how the Federal Reserve works, the history of money, any of these other things.

And so when I go around, when I would do workshops or do talks, I mean, part of why I had to write the book is I had to explain to people how money works now because people are sitting there worried about CBDCs in the future.

I'm like, you should be worried about the fact that right now your bank account can be shut down without cause.

The government can come in and issue a national security letter, shut down your bank account, and you can't talk to anybody about it, including a lawyer.

That already exists today.

Your money is already tracked.

We already have programmable money.

If you have a health savings account, what is a health savings account?

People are like, oh, well, you know, I've got free market health care.

You have a social credit system and a CBDC tied into one.

What is a health savings account?

It's an account where based on the government and the IRS rules, you can put only a certain percentage of your money into an account that has a debit card that can only be spent on predetermined health care services.

You can only buy certain things from certain retailers based on what your insurer and the government said.

And people are like, this is free market health care?

It's digital programmable money.

People got excited about RFK, and they got excited about, oh, yeah, you're not going to be able to buy sugary drinks with food stamps.

What are food stamps?

They're debit cards issued at the state level.

So what are we adding?

We're adding more programmable money.

You may think it's a good idea now.

You won't like it when the next administration comes in and says, well, you know what?

You can't buy red meat with this.

You can't buy this with this.

What we're doing is we're adding more and more programmability and more and more control over the money that we have, which is already 92 to 96 percent digital anyway.

So a lot of this has been, you know, people are sitting there.

Oh, we don't want to become like communist China.

We don't want to come like these people.

Like you already are.

You aren't even aware of it.

So we can defeat it.

But our work is cut out for us because I would argue the amount of propaganda Americans have swallowed is almost unprecedented.

Yeah, I mean, I'm enjoying this conversation immensely.

You know, as a Bitcoin maxi, and I think a lot of the listeners are, and someone who really values privacy.

You know, I interviewed Keone Rodriguez today about his trial with Samurai Wallet and coin joining and fight for financial privacy there.

But I do want to get into maybe just, you know, a little bit about hijacking Bitcoin and maybe Roger Ver and Epstein.

just because I don't want to, you know, not want to discuss maybe some things that you want to, you know, would bring up in that vein.

So how do you see maybe Bitcoin is sort of the flaws here with Bitcoin in regards to this fight against surveillance or, you know?

Well, yes, like I said, so I was really excited about Bitcoin.

And, you know, when I got my first Bitcoin in 2012, I remember at the time, I'm like, wow, this is great.

this is actually better, faster, cheaper money than what is available through the traditional financial system.

Because at that point, you know, the transaction fees were like, you know, a couple of cents.

And it was nearly instant.

And the traditional banking system didn't have anything like that.

This was before Zelle.

This was before Venmo.

This was before Google Pay or Apple Pay.

So I'm like, wow.

So here we have a situation where it's, there's no third party involved and it's faster, cheaper.

And so very excited about that and used it, as I said, for a whole variety of applications.

And then, you know, we keep learning more about what happened with this hijacking of Bitcoin.

And, you know, what happened to Roger was, well, I'll even take a step back.

Roger learned about Bitcoin from a guy named Ian Freeman.

And Ian Freeman and his business partner, Mark Edge, run a syndicated radio show called Free Talk Live.

And in fact, this is how I found out about the Free State Project.

I learned about this project in 2006 from these guys.

And I even talked to Mark Edge, you know, before I even moved in up here and so on and so forth.

And so I think it was October of 2010, they did an episode about Bitcoin.

And Roger heard it.

And this is where he first heard about Bitcoin.

And then he read the white paper and everything else.

And I guess, you know, he stayed up for, he had to go to the hospital because he had stayed up like three or four days in a row, couldn't sleep because he was so excited about the prospects of it.

And so this is part of what motivated me to write the book and run for president and everything else is that I was noticing that some of my friends were being arrested targeted by the federal government.

Ian Freeman, Jeremy Kaufman, who's another free stater who ran library, was targeted by the SEC.

And Ian Freeman was targeted.

He ran a bunch of ATMs and again, was a very early evangelist.

And in New Hampshire, he would sign up retailers with point of sale systems and everything else.

He probably did more to spread peer-to-peer cash adoption than anyone in the state of New Hampshire.

And he was targeted by, when they arrested him, there were five different federal departments involved.

There was a Bearcat, there was the Treasury Department, the IRS.

It was the FBI.

And it turns out that they tried to entrap him.

I mean, they went looking for ways to manufacture reasons to shut him down.

And they wanted them to shut him down because he was promoting, you know, at the time he was involved with Bitcoin, not bombs and the liberating effect.

And so I was on Ian's show.

He'd already lost a trial and it was right before his his sentencing hearing.

And I was on there and I was saying, listen, you know, the reason that you're targeted, the reason and remember, this was I was warning people about what was going to happen.

Now it's already happened.

So this was right around the time President Biden signed Executive Order 14067.

And that executive order authorized the U.S.

officially as government policy to promote a CBDC.

And again, the joke about that is they'd already done three successful pilots.

But at the same time, it also called for a whole of government crackdown on crypto.

Well, the whole of government crackdown on crypto had nothing to do with illegal activities or people being defrauded with respect to crypto.

If you're going to roll out a CBDC, you need to shut down the competition.

So this is why these people were targeted.

So I even went to Roger before Ian's sentencing hearing.

I said, hey, listen, would you be willing to retweet this?

We want to get as many people as possible to the sentencing hearing.

And so in my book, I warn people about what's coming.

I warn people about the crackdown and everything else.

And it's because of CBDCs and the government's desire to completely control digital money.

And then six months later, Roger is arrested.

And he writes hijacking Bitcoin.

I had him on my podcast on I want to say April the 12th and he was arrested 14 days later or 16 days later in Spain arrested and put into the same prison his friend and fellow libertarian John McAfee died in And I'm like, this is not about taxes.

We have the timing on this.

This is stuff going back to 2014.

This is not about taxes.

This is about something else.

This is about trying to suppress him speaking about these things or potentially promoting other alternatives to central bank currencies.

And so but what happens with this and not a lot of people, of course, have read hijacking Bitcoin and Roger never got the opportunity.

You know, he's doing warm up podcasts like mine.

I'm sure he was going to do huge podcasts at some point.

And so most people have never heard his the story of hijacking Bitcoin that he and Steve Patterson wrote.

And I will say so far, no one's refuted the points, but there's a lot of suppression about the information even getting out.

I've been blocked by Michael Saylor, Max Keiser, Adam Back, Samson Mao, like most of the Bitcoin Core developers.

Many of these people I've never even engaged with, Luke Dash Jr.

There's like a people don't want this information out.

Before Roger was arrested, he and another guy offered Adam Back $500,000 donated to a charity of his choice to have an open debate about the concepts in this book.

And there's a lot of misconceptions and a lot of people don't like Roger and polarizing and everything else.

And a lot of people think he created Bitcoin Cash.

This isn't even about Bitcoin Cash.

He was undecided one way or the other, but he saw during the Bitcoin block wars that people that were expressing big blocker views were being suppressed.

They were being banned from the discussion boards on Reddit, which was one of the primary ways where people would debate information.

Other things, other techniques were being used, even denial of service attacks, the whole nine yards.

And so, you know, being a libertarian or an anti-hiver, you want to characterize him, he's like, you know, his view is whoever is trying, whoever they're trying to censor is generally right.

And so that's what even got him to consider the other position.

And then as he dug into it, he learned more and more.

And so his book covers a lot of the block size wars.

And it's not him ranting or even telling his side of the story.

He's bringing in emails and things from public forums involving the Bitcoin core developers.

So it's not him just opining on what happened.

And essentially, in the book, he outlines a series of things happened.

And that have really changed my view on crypto projects as well.

There are a lot of people that are excited, well, it's open source, and there's no funding.

And this is great because, you know, if these organizations have centralized funding, that can be problematic.

Well, it turns out that developers aren't just working for free, and there aren't just white hat people out there auditing code for free.

Developers get paid somewhere.

And some of the developers, like Peter Todd, was paid by a guy named John Dillon, who I think the book outlines had ties to the intelligence community who wanted the small block narrative, did not want Bitcoin to be adopted as peer-to-peer cash.

And so there's a whole interesting story here.

And Roger doesn't even come, I cover some of it in my book, and then some of it's been revealed even more recently.

One of the arguments that I made about it, so Roger's point is that there's a lot of propaganda, there was a lot of censorship, there were people with ties to traditional finance, block stream, self-interested parties that benefited from keeping Bitcoin artificially slow and expensive, whereas the original white paper was always purely peer-to-peer digital cash systems.

Satoshi talked about competing with Visa very early on.

There was never even, the white paper had no cap whatsoever on the block size.

The one megabyte limit was put in for testing purposes.

And then it became this whole thing, which he argues is a hijack narrative.

And this happened around whatever, 2015, 2017.

And the interesting thing is a group was formed called the Bitcoin Foundation.

Roger was actually one of the founding members of it that was formed to provide funding for these developers.

And that group ran into some financial difficulties and some organizational difficulties around 2015.

And then all of a sudden, the core developers were being funded by MIT, by a guy named Joy Ito.

And I had theorized for a while, then I said, well, look, Epstein made one interview about Bitcoin.

I think it was in 2017.

And it was a long, I don't know if it was a quote.

It was in an article.

It wasn't a quote.

But it was, I guess, a paraphrasing of what he was saying, which was Epstein saying, Bitcoin is digital gold.

It's not fit to be a currency.

And we knew he funded this MIT group.

I suspected that he funded some of these Bitcoin core developers.

And now we know, as of two weeks ago from the House emails that he explicitly funded the Bitcoin core developers after the Bitcoin Foundation.

And this is the time where they kind of cemented this small block narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold.

But what's interesting is one of the developers that Epstein funded, Corey Fields, ended up going on to be a co-author of Project Hamilton, which is the U.S.

retail CBDC pilot program, an initiative between MIT and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

So literally, all of a sudden, it's like, well, no, this, you know, we don't need this to be fast.

We don't need this to be for transactions.

And the same people pushing that narrative were funding a retail CBDC with some common Bitcoin developers.

So now we're in a position where, you know, whether you like Bitcoin or not, it's not an alternative to cash for payments.

I mean, And, you know, people certainly, Michael Saylor will argue that that's better.

It certainly isn't what it was supposed to be.

And I don't think it helps in the fight against, you know, CBDCs or more broadly technocracy, whether it's CBDCs or private stable coins that are under the control and regulated by Congress and the federal government.

And so, you know, and most people don't know this.

Most people do not.

When I go around, because there are a lot of people, look, if you're a Bitcoin maxi, obviously you're well versed in all this.

You know this.

And a lot of people will say, well, this was settled.

The market decided and everything else.

In the 27 states that I've been to, 99% of people have never heard of the block size wars.

Most people don't know that people ever used Bitcoin for transactions.

They don't understand that Steam and Overstock.com and Microsoft and Expedia were actually accepting Bitcoin for payments in 2017.

People have no idea of that history.

And then once the Bitcoin standard was released and everything else, and there's a whole new crop of people introduced to Bitcoin, this is what they know is the canon of what Bitcoin is all about.

And that previous history is, by and large, completely unknown by most people.

Now, you may know the history and decide, I don't care, I'd rather have this digital gold thing anyway or whatever.

But I've found people are horrified when they hear the story about what happened.

And, you know, and the idea that now something that was a peer-to-peer cash system is something that banks are involved in, that it's completely trackable.

I mean, this is the thing that's, you know, distressing about this is the level to which chain-alysis is involved.

Chain-alysis, which, you know, and I'm sure your audience probably knows, but started out with the Mt.

Gox hack.

In fact, my understanding is it was one of the co-founders of Kraken started working with law enforcement in 2014 to try to track the Bitcoin that were hacked from Mt.

Gox.

And this turned into the genesis of Chainalysis.

Now, this company, Chainalysis, works with law enforcement agencies all over the world to track Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions.

transactions, but it's gotten to the point where it's so sophisticated that private investigators in the United States can receive certification and training in chain analysis.

And so now I've had three separate occasions this year where people that I know were either in business disputes with a partner or going through a divorce.

And in one particular case, it's like, here was the legal proceeding and the other side had hired a private investigator that was certified Biden chain analysis.

And they went through and they had more information about this person's Bitcoin transactions than they did about his bank transactions because the banks only keep the information for seven years.

And so there are some people that actually still think that Bitcoin is private.

And I know there are some people that say, well, if you do it right.

But I mean, look, Ian Freeman, Roger Ver, Ross Ulbrich, these are not stupid people.

These are smart people that were involved in an early...

The United States government doesn't have 327,000 Bitcoin because Bitcoin is private.

The truth is, for most people, it's highly surveillable.

And while you could make the argument that, well, they can't force me to give my keys, true, they can threaten to throw you in prison unless you give up your keys.

And so far, the track record is that when people are presented with that choice, they've given up their keys.

And so now the US is one of the largest holders of Bitcoin, China, governments all around the world now have a whole bunch of Bitcoin.

And now a lot of people that are being onboarded to Bitcoin are two levels or maybe even more removed from having it in their own self-custody.

They're either buying it on an exchange or they're buying it, you know, buying shares and, you know, strategy, or they're buying a BlackRock ETF.

They'll never touch a Bitcoin.

And in fact, who they're buying it from may not touch or custody the Bitcoin either.

So people may still think that that's a good idea, but that is not an alternative to CBDCs, which is the thing that I'm worried about.

I am worried about this technocracy narrative.

And the other thing that does frustrate me is, in particular for people who are libertarians, to be cheering on using taxpayer money to buy an asset.

I mean, I look at – people complain about Nancy Pelosi and insider trading, and I look at Cynthia Loomis.

I'm like, you own $500,000 worth of Bitcoin.

Imagine if Nancy Pelosi went on stage and said, hey, you know what?

My proposal is that the U.S.

government buys a trillion dollars worth of my retirement portfolio and holds it for 20 years.

It's kind of ridiculous.

And I know that there are people in Bitcoin that don't like this either.

I know that there are a lot of different views on this, but there are a lot of people now at this point that don't even care.

I mean they were – they got in it for the liberty and for the freedom, and now they're like, well, OK, BlackRock's in.

And if the taxpayers are paying for this, you know, great, number go up.

And, you know, that's unfortunate, at least in my view.

Yeah.

I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said there and brought up and the facts.

I have a page full of notes here that I'll just kind of riff through and then we'll round out here.

I mean, you know, all this is sort of we agree.

I mean, Epstein funded Edo at MIT.

Edo and MIT sent funding over to the developers after the Bitcoin Foundation folded.

There was that email where Epstein says Gavin is clever.

Really raised a lot of questions for me.

You know I think Bitcoin is our opportunity to separate money from state But you know I not going to be blind about this If there something better if there are flaws in Bitcoin if it gets captured, I'm going to have to, you know, augment, pull an audible.

But those were really interesting questions.

What was Gavin clever about?

What were they working on together?

I mean, Gavin was the first one to go to the CIA.

I don't even I don't believe any of the story, but I know what was said and we can kind of pontificate off of that.

Even if I come up with all my hypotheses, and we won't be right, but it's interesting.

Around the early times of when that was all happening, I mean, Tether comes into being very strange origins of Tether, very vague, obscure.

The money behind Tether, Brock Pierce was involved with all this.

Brock Pierce was involved with Epstein.

I agree with you that, you know, I think the most important things about Bitcoin are, or the least, the things that aren't talked about right now are privacy.

self-custody these are things we agree on whether we agree that on the same tool right we want the same things right we want decentralized economic systems we were anti-cbdc we want free state movements and free markets and free money and the block size wars were very confusing Roger Ver was I found him very inspirational no matter even though I don't agree with everything he said after the block size wars even his enthusiasm for blockchain his enthusiasm for libertarianism.

He was incredibly articulate.

I mean, he was Bitcoin Jesus.

I would love to talk to Roger.

I agree with you that they, it's interesting that I don't think it was about taxes or the timing especially was very interesting.

And it seemed like maybe they wanted to silence him.

I'd love to hear his views on things, whether I agree or disagree.

I have a friend who's a Bitcoin OG, Gabe.

He said he read the entire hijacking book.

He does disagree with a lot of maybe interpretations on things or maybe how things were put together, But I think it's a conversation worth having.

We shouldn't be blind here.

We should look around corners.

I wonder, you know, Satoshi is the only person.

We mentioned, you know, Ross Ulbrich wasn't able to stay private.

Roger Veer wasn't able to avoid the thumb of the state.

Keone Rodriguez and Roman Strong are going to jail, fighting for privacy, right?

Satoshi managed to evade the state.

I love the...

Or maybe Satoshi is the state.

That's what I'm getting at.

So I love that story.

It's a big part of why I'm a Bitcoiner, but maybe I'm a dipshit, right?

And that makes sometimes when I think about it with just one part of my brain, I'm like, wow, you said you're really gullible here.

No one could kind of do this.

And maybe Bitcoin was ceded by the state.

Are they controlling Bitcoin the whole way?

Is this a master plan or was it ceded by something and they're just reacting and trying to do the best they can to mitigate the damage?

I don't know, but I'm always digging into that.

I got to be open to sort of the rational thoughts and what could be happening here.

Right now, Bitcoin is going through the policy wars, filter wars.

You know, it's just almost as confusing as the block size wars.

So in terms of money, Bitcoin is, you know, it goes up against capital gains taxes.

The U.S.

government, why you say it confiscates Bitcoin.

It's talking about maybe buying it, but it doesn't treat it as nice as the dollar.

It doesn't treat it as nice as money.

It taxes you.

It doesn't let you use it.

And to a large extent, Bitcoin is very hard to use correctly in lots of ways, including privately.

And there's a war against privacy of all kinds.

So I've enjoyed this conversation immensely.

Aaron, I like the way you think.

I'll leave it to you for any words.

Well, I appreciate it.

And I will say you're the only Bitcoin Maxie that's talked to me.

Literally, I've been blocked by everyone else.

And that frustrates me.

I mean, and people argue, well, there was no censorship.

And I'm kind of like, you know, all I did was I got blocked for recommending his book.

And then Roger retweeted.

I got a whole bunch of blocks literally just for that.

And it wasn't even like a long review.

It was like two sentences.

But I will say that there are solutions for Bitcoin maxis.

There's something recently that's been released called Confidential Layer that allows you to bridge your Bitcoin into Zeno.

I like Zeno.

I like privacy coins.

But in particular, I like a project called Zeno because it basically – the founder was one of the guys who created CryptoNote, which is the technology behind Monero.

So he's a privacy OG.

But basically what Zeno allows you to do is to tokenize assets kind of like you can with Ethereum except the assets that you're tokenizing have the same privacy features as Monero.

So you can tokenize a whole variety of things.

There's a stablecoin called Freedom Dollar that is created using Zeno.

It's an algorithmic stablecoin, so it's not backed by treasury.

So it's a completely private stablecoin.

But then you can actually tokenize your Bitcoin and Ethereum and BNB and then spend the tokenized form of it with low fees.

And so I do recommend that.

I mean, as much as the issues that I have with Bitcoin, I do recommend for people that have Bitcoin to understand that it can be tracked and to look for privacy solutions.

I hope that there are privacy solutions.

I'm not rooting against Bitcoin.

I'm voting, I'm rooting for privacy and I'm rooting for people to understand the threat of technocracy.

And because it's really a big deal and it's going really fast and most people aren't aware.

But, you know, hopefully there are, you know, in addition to confidential layer, hopefully there'll be other solutions to help make Bitcoin private so that people can stay safe.

And I hope people really look into that and take it seriously.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

I only have four more data points to bring up before we roll out here.

I don't know if you know my buddy Mandrick.

He was in New Hampshire around that time.

I think I bought some bacon.

I bought a bacon weave or something from him at Porkfest a long time ago.

So you might have run into Keone and Bill from Samurai.

I don't know if they were in New Hampshire.

I haven't yet.

I haven't yet, but I'm supposed to talk to him related to his his current situation.

Yeah, well, that's dire and he's being politically persecuted and it's travesty and it's a really bad sign for Bitcoin in America.

I mean, Bitcoin is code.

It's sort of agnostic to laws, but it's not good if you're an American Bitcoiner.

And I think that's sort of the fucking world.

So and then, you know, funding is a real issue and governance in Bitcoin, whether you like the way it's been or even if you like the way it's been.

We got to grow up.

We got to mature.

I don't know if you can connect me in any way to Roger Ver.

I would love to speak with him on or offline, on or off the record.

And the other really weirdest thing that we didn't touch on that I can't find anybody who really knows about this and would talk about it, but is Maker Dau and what happened maybe with Nikolai and maybe his importance or role in the movement.

Actually, I don't know.

I don't know what ended up happening with that.

I haven't thought about that for a while.

Still digging there.

Well, thank you so much.

Please let people know where they can find your work and your projects.

Sure.

You can find me at daylightfreedom.org.

It links to all the six other projects that we're doing, including freedomforge.io, which is an incubator for creating private tokenization projects.

OSARA.com, which is a medical tourism marketplace.

Technocracyatlas.com.

And a couple of others.

TheAaronDayShow.com.

I have my own podcast.

Mondays and Thursdays at 6 p.m.

And then you can find me on X at AaronRDay.

Are you connected at all still with Jeffrey Tucker?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I talk to Jeffrey all the time.

I'm still a fellow at the Brownstone Institute and a big fan of the Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey.

I had Jeffrey on.

Please say hi to my friend Jeffrey.

I haven't heard from him in a while, though, or heard back.

We had a great conversation, and actually that's the only show that I've ever had that was taken off YouTube.

I don't even know if you know that.

Wow, really?

When did you have him on?

It was about maybe two years after COVID, really.

We weren't in the thick of it.

We were coming out of it.

It was still a little touchy.

You know, and actually, you know, he has sort of, what was it, the Great Declaration or the Barrington Declaration?

So he's the founder or one of the authors of that.

But in my opinion, he was incredibly balanced.

Like he, he wasn't like, oh, the vaccine's going to kill everybody.

He was very pragmatic.

He didn't like a lot of, and this is my words, but in the conversation we had, it was very balanced.

And what I think happened, I don't even think we got taken down by the algorithm.

Somebody commented, this is the kind of guy who kills grandmas.

That comment, I think, took the show down.

I got a, I came on, went on YouTube.

I was like, oh, my channel's gone.

I got an email.

My channel's gone.

They, you two, put me through this re-education program.

I felt like I was in like some sort of totalitarian country.

And it was like, you know, you can talk about medical issues, but you can't give advice that goes against the World Health Organization and local authorities.

You can have a guest say that they had a negative experience, but they can't say the thing is negative.

I mean, all these questions were like mind control and how you're supposed to think.

and I had to answer them to get my show back.

And that was a very disconcerting feeling as a freedom lover and a sovereignty lover, as a Bitcoin or any of these things.

Hard to build somewhere where they can take it all away from you when they don't agree with what you say.

I mean, Jeffrey's talked about this a lot.

Jeffrey was not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of the imagination.

He was a libertarian or whatever you want to call him, And he's been against lockdowns for a long time.

So that was the issue that hooked him.

But I think the more he's looked into it and what he's created at the Brownstone Institute is a haven for people that were canceled because of that whole epidemic.

And some of the events that he's put together, I mean, it's the only place where some of these people have been able to speak the truth.

And they're not all libertarians.

In fact, it's a pretty interesting balance of people that he's amassed that are dedicated to continuing to push the truth.

And so I'll pass that on.

The fact that that show was that you got kicked off of that is sad.

Yeah, well, we put it up on Twitter or X.

We put it up on Rumble.

And it's actually one of my biggest downloaded audio shows still.

But, yeah, YouTube took it down.

So fuck them.

But thank you so much, Aaron.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Bitcoin Matrix.

If you enjoyed the conversation, don't forget to like, subscribe and drop a comment below with any questions or thoughts you may have.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can support the show by checking out our sponsors and affiliate links in the description.

It helps keep bringing you great content while connecting you with awesome products that I believe in.

Share this episode with your friends, family or anyone curious about Bitcoin.

And let's keep growing this community together.

Stay curious, keep stacking, and I'll catch you in the next one.