Do you believe your government to be trustworthy stewards of power? Enough that you are willing to give them absolute power over you? This is the dangerous and dystopian pathway that is being paved with Vaccine passports. In this podcast we talk about the slippery slope from global adoption of vaccine passports to digital IDs and ultimately central bank digital currencies. Nick Corbishley is the author of the bookScanned, which warns of a dystopian future that could become reality if we continue to give governments the power to implement these technologies into our daily lives. 

AUBREY: Nick, good to have you on the show.

NICK: Thanks for having me, Aubrey. It's a pleasure to be on.

AUBREY: Ideally, it would be under better circumstances and, potentially, maybe we would never even be talking. You would be living a lovely life in Barcelona, I would be living my life here in Austin, and we would have nothing to talk about. But here we are. And there's something very important to talk about. At the start of the pandemic, there were certain people who were worried about a scenario in which vaccine passports would be created and then many different things would be layered on top of these vaccine passports and then they would become digital IDs and this would be a part of a process that leads to a real dystopia, a real dystopia, a dystopia that we've seen happen in places like China, where your social credit score is linked. Now we're starting to see initial steps that are dangerously familiar to that narrative. This is what your book, "Scanned" is all about, is about how the steps that we're starting to see can lead to a real dystopian future. So let's start to go back to the beginning where probably you and I know many other people had an idea like, "Uh-oh, this is not what it seems. This can lead; even if the intentions are good, let's just assume that potentially they are, the intentions are good; it can lead to something that's very, very dangerous.

NICK: Yeah. I think that the pandemic opened opportunities, opened up possibilities to use technologies that were already ready for use. We have seen some very good examples in Italy and France, Germany, across the European Union, where vaccine passports have been rolled out, they've been put into force in ways that nobody really anticipated, when the vaccine passports themselves were launched. We did not think, for example, that in Italy, at this stage, if you were unvaccinated and over the age of 50, you would not be able to work, you would not be able to earn a living, you would be essentially sidelined, banished, to the fringes of society, for not having taken a vaccine that is not showing any potential of stopping the spread of this virus. We are in a weird little moment, where people are being told that everything is returning to some semblance of normality. We are going back to the life we lived before. Whereas I would argue that we are doing the exact opposite. We're going to a world that is markedly different from the world we lived in before. It's a world where these technologies are only just being rolled out. We're just beginning to see a glimpse of what these technologies can achieve, what kind of effect they could have. We are about to see, I think, as you said, a very dark dystopian future if we don't begin to take action to try to stop it.

AUBREY: The argument about vaccine efficacy, it's a whole other argument. It's almost tangential to this primary argument, because really, even if the vaccines were effective, the utilization of a vaccine passport and vaccine apartheid, unless you created the most intense situation where you could possibly imagine, this is the very last option that there was possibly on the table, I suppose you could create some hypothetical scenario. It's clear that we're not in that hypothetical scenario where we would be willing to make all of the sacrifices of freedom and create this vaccine apartheid, create the separation and segregation of classes of people based on medical decisions, which were always supposed to be through the Nuremberg Code and a variety of things, a personal choice, ultimately. We've really collapsed in many different places. This idea of it'll just be convenient, you'll have this thing that will show whether you're vaccinated or not, this is just the seed of a potential road. This is laying the initial tracks for a potential road and I'm not as familiar as you with how that's being deployed in different countries. But to hear that that's already the case in Italy, this is starting to get into that scary territory where you're really being absolutely forced to do something, whether you want to or not. There's no sovereignty of choice anymore.

NICK: No. It's a truly terrifying reality when you think about it. I think that if we were to go down that hypothetical, if we were to talk about the hypothetical, then you would be talking about maybe something like smallpox, as I mentioned in my book which, going back 150-200 years, had a mortality rate of around about 30%-40%. You had a vaccine that was exceptionally effective and well-understood and very safe. We don't have that right now. So we have--

AUBREY: And you would also have to suppose, the reason to create, everybody wanted to take the smallpox vaccine because it made sense. It intuitively made sense, it worked, it prevented you from getting smallpox, and you had a really good chance of dying, whether you were healthy or not.

NICK: The cost-benefit ratio was very different.

AUBREY: Very different. To impose mandates and passports, like we were talking, you would have to have a group of people that just were completely unwilling and were actually a hazard or danger. However, at the same time, because of how effective the smallpox vaccine was, there's also an argument to say, "Well, if everybody who's afraid of getting smallpox, they're going to get the vaccine, and they're not going to get smallpox anyways, because the vaccine works." There still might not even have been a reason to mandate it in the way that it is now, right? It's a very strange thing.

NICK: It was mandated in certain places, but it was never mandated in the way that we are seeing the COVID-19 vaccines being mandated. This is the dark thing. We've never seen the idea of essentially telling people you cannot earn a living, you cannot get on a bus and go across town, you cannot get on a metro, go across town. These are completely disproportionate to the risk and the benefits that the virus represents and the vaccine represents. Probably one of the most terrifying aspects of what we've lived through so far in Europe, for example, over the last eight to nine years, is the fact that people have been conditioned to this idea of having to present the identity, present the vaccine status in order to access the most basic of amenities, basic of services, basic of venues. It's the normalization of this checkpoint, digital-checkpoint society that we should be extremely concerned about. The vaccine passport, I would say, has achieved two things. It has set up, to a certain extent, the infrastructure needed to create a digital identity system, not just nationwide, but you would say regionwide and eventually worldwide. But also it has conditioned people to this idea of having to show their identity at any given turn, in order to access most basic things. Many people have accepted this and that, I think is truly worrying. It's just a small sacrifice. People think it's not that big an issue.

AUBREY: Once you've established this digital identity, if it was siloed to just the vaccine, then that would be one thing and troublesome, as it is, to segregate people based on their vaccination choices, particularly in this instance, that's worrisome. The big worry is that once you've established this digital ID system, then all of the elements of what we've seen in the CCP's social credit score can be then also linked in, so measurement of what food we're eating, what we're driving in our car, let's say there's environmental causes that are pushed into this or even what we're posting on social media, there's so many different ways that there's mechanisms of control now available to governments that have shown that immediately when they are given control, they will use it. That is the paradigm, that's the myth that they live in is that if they have the ability to control more, they will control more. Every government has proven that time and time again, whether it's the Patriot Act or whether it's the Emergency Use Authorization Acts or whatever these things are. As soon as a government has power, they use it. This is what's really scary about this, right?

NICK: Yeah. We've seen countless examples of this. The Canadian government said they would not use contact-tracing technologies to track people's locations, et cetera, et cetera. They did exactly that. You've got a case in Germany, where they actually use the contact-tracing app to try to solve a crime. Again, a complete overreach of what that technology was supposed to be used for. If we had the most trustworthy government, and we had these kinds of technologies in place, then there would still be risks because that government could change at any moment, in a democratic society. The problem is we don't have governments that have shown themselves to be trustworthy with this level of power. The best example would be the UK. So the British government, while it was telling people that they had to stay at home, was telling people they couldn't hug their family members, was telling people that they couldn't meet with members of other households, they were having parties at 10 Downing Street. It's like rules for them and not for us. We have to be able to trust our government if we're going to give them this much power. There's no way that we can trust our government, in most cases, given their performance over the last two years, and I would say going back long before that. You're absolutely right, it's a huge amount of control and influence to have in the hands of, whether it's representative government, whether it's companies, because it's not just governments, it's the companies that are going to be the third parties that are going to be managing these systems, whether that's Microsoft, whether that is a company like Palantir, which is managing a lot of health data in the UK. Palantir is a company that was set up by the CIA in 2003. Its main area of focus has been military, industrial, intelligence complex, and now it's working more and more in the healthcare industries in the US and the UK. It goes beyond just the government.

AUBREY: If you were going to say all right, if this is the first step, do you have a hypothesis as to where the second step might go? How does this go from where it is in the worst case, and then let's talk about the best case of how we can resist this potential reality. So what's the worst-case scenario as you see it played out?

NICK: Rather than maybe talking about the worst-case scenarios, we should talk about what's really actually happening. 

AUBREY: Sure.

NICK: On the one hand, with the vaccine passport, they're moving to the background right now. They've been consigned to the back burner, but they're not going away. In all the countries where we're being told they're withdrawing the vaccine passport rules, what's happening is they're suspending them. They're not canceling them. At the same time, you've got the World Health Organisation talking about adopting the vaccine vaccine passport recommendations for all of its 193 signatory states. If this were to happen, this would basically mean that not only would these vaccine passports become a permanent feature of our reality, especially when it comes to travel and tourism, they will also become a universal feature of the world, the legal landscape in the world. That is terrifying because there are a lot of countries in the world that haven't adopted vaccine passports. On the one hand, we're being told one narrative, which is that we're seeing this drift away. In reality, the most likely outcome is that we're going to see it become a permanent, universal feature of our lives. That's one element that we should be very concerned about. Secondly, governments are pushing hard with digital identity. So wherever you look, whether it's the European Union, whether it's the UK, whether it's Canada, whether it's Australia, whether it's New Zealand, governments are developing digital identity programs that, as you mentioned earlier, have far broader applications for our daily lives. Just looking at the European Union digital identity wallet, which is likely to come into function in the next 10 to 12 months, this is going to include things like your health records, vaccine status, it will allow you to access public services across the European Union Territory, it will also include your social media passwords. Everything is like you said, everything is linked together. That is something that we're likely to see come online in the next year to two years. At the same time, what probably scares me most, if you ask me what is the worst-case scenario, I would say it's central bank digital currencies. That is a fundamental element of what is happening right now. China has already launched a central bank digital currency, the digital Yuan is already live and is being used in more than 10 regions and cities in China. It's not universal yet. They are rolling it out bit by bit, but it's definitely--

AUBREY: Let's back up one second, let's explain. It seems like money is already digital. I very rarely touch cash. Sometimes I do. Usually, I'm having a lot of fun when I do. I'm not usually handling cash. It's on a credit card somewhere, it's numbers on a screen, and the numbers go up and down and things move. It could feel to me like well, fuck, we already have digital currency and the central banks have the freedom to print as much as they want. They just can't take mine yet at all. I know a little bit, but what is the difference between a central bank digital currency and just normal fiat currency expressed digitally?

NICK: A fiat currency expressed digitally, which is what we have right now, this is money that we will have through the private banking system. So we have a bank account with our bank and when money shifts, money moves, it is constantly having to be debited and credited within the various banking institutions. Then, eventually, those banking institutions have to settle those payments with the central bank. Ironically, it's a very decentralized system, which has become more and more consolidated. We've seen banks, large banks, grow larger and larger and have more and more power. If you're looking at, for example, the United States, you've got companies like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have a huge amount of influence over the Federal Reserve but it is a largely decentralized system. In the case of the central bank digital currencies, you would essentially have a much simpler system. We would all have an account with the central bank. Rather than having it through various banks that we might have accounts with, we would have an account with the central bank, and this would apparently be a lot safer. You're less likely to have bank runs. There would be other benefits but, in my view, the benefits are massively, massively outweighed by the risks and the dangers. Those risks and dangers include the fact that the central bank would be able to control just about everything. They would be able to track and trace how we use money, how we spend money--

AUBREY: Which is just the ultimate mechanism of control, right? If they can stop us from buying groceries or going to the gas station or using our money. If they can stop that, then they really have absolute control, they control everything about our lives.

NICK: When we are using digital fiat currency, that money is very traceable. But cash provides this, what should we say? This anonymity, this privacy, that probably would not exist in a central bank digital currency world. It's unlikely the central banks will permit competition in that way once they have the CBDCs launched. The president of the Bank of International Settlements, which is the central bank of central banks, Agustín Carstens, says something along the lines of we must distinguish, I'm paraphrasing here, we must distinguish between cash and central bank digital currency. When somebody spends $100 or 1000 pesos in cash, we have no idea where that money goes. But when we do it with a central bank digital currency, we will have complete clarity and complete control over all of that transaction. It's a terrifying idea, just the fact that everything will be transparent. It'll be great for governments because they will be able to tax us and they will even possibly be able to just go into your account and take your money. If you have a parking fine, they'll be able to go into your account to take your money. The scary thing is if they decide to increase taxes, they will just be able to go into an account and take your money. It's an incredible arbitrary power that they will have. At the same time, there is this other element, which is the programmable element of the currency, which would mean that central banks could, if they wanted to, choose what we should be allowed to spend our money on. The Bank of England has been talking about this reasonably openly, it was reported in The Daily Telegraph. It's the idea that maybe there are certain things, if you're buying a bit too much alcohol on a weekly basis, there will come a moment when you will no longer be able to get alcohol on a Friday night or a Saturday night or if you are maybe having weight issues. Also this could come in--

AUBREY: If you're having weight issues or alcohol issues, then you can buy more alcohol is probably how the actual government would work. That's all you can buy. If you're having weight issues, then you can only buy fast food just to accelerate. I'm just joking, of course. But of course, there would be these guises of humanitarian. This will be good for us. We'll be able to help you but it's all in this overstepping, devouring mother, Big Brother, you can't figure this out for yourself. So we're going to help you be your parent for the rest of your life.

NICK: It's exceptionally paternalistic, it opens that door to that level of paternalism. It's like in the Chinese social credit system, certain behaviors, most people would say, are undesirable. So if somebody is throwing litter in the street or if somebody's not cleaning up their dog's excrement on the street, then probably most people will say that that is undesirable, and maybe a little slap on the wrist is not a bad thing. The danger is that when you get to the point where the government is able to decide what all thought and behavior is desirable and undesirable. That includes what political ideas, what political statements, what political behavior people do. That is where it gets really scary. We've already seen a glimpse of that in Canada in the last three or four weeks.

AUBREY: With them able to just freeze people's accounts because of the protests that they've been doing. So they've already exercised some of these. Obviously, it's in the courts and it's getting sorted out. How would this transition work? How would they get people to buy into this? Would they say, "Alright, you can change $1 of fiat US dollars, gets you $1 of central bank digital currency? Presumably, they could force us to do that, at some point? Or would they say, "We're only accepting tax payments in central bank digital currency," so you have to, at the very least, convert some of your money into central bank digital currency to even pay us. It just starts that way and then they use the wheels of convenience and all of these things before exerting the control that scares the shit out of everybody? 

NICK: Yeah. I think, from my personal feeling, having seen what's happened over the past two years, in order to get people to accept such a massive change, they will probably need another crisis. This is what I fear. They need everybody to be involved, a little bit like with the vaccine passports. You need, at least, the vast majority of people on board. Literally just telling people, "Look, we've got this new money system, it's going to have certain applications that could benefit you," I don't think you're going to get that much of a buy-in. We've been hearing for the last five, six, seven years from organizations like the International Monetary Fund that we need a monetary reset and many other organizations. The CEO of BlackRock has been quite vocal in talking about how we need a complete change of system. This is an important part of the so-called great reset. We've reached a stage where the financial system is in, I think, pretty dire straits.

AUBREY: I talked about that on my podcast with Fabio Vighi, how we're playing a game of musical chairs, where we had to make an extraordinarily bold move in the creation of vast amounts of money and the distribution of that money, direct to the consumer in an unprecedented way. This was recommended by BlackRock before the pandemic. We needed to produce an extraordinary amount of money, distribute it directly to the consumer and also freeze the movement of that money like the middle class, small business sector. We needed to freeze that to prevent hyperinflation, which would be a natural consequence. Magically, all of those conditions appeared in the creation of all of the stimulus money, the slowdown of the economy preventing the circulation of the money except towards those higher, bigger, larger corporate institutions, which could absorb that amount of money, which is why all the billionaires got more billionairy after this thing is because they could actually absorb the wealth and prevent some of the hyperinflation, which, of course, we're seeing some of that high level of inflation now. It felt like, after talking to Fabio, we were actually in a very difficult position with our existing monetary system. Some pretty strong moves needed to be made. Otherwise, there was going to be a systemic upheaval and collapse which, obviously, those people who are in the citadels that would have collapsed, want to fight more than anybody. Of course, there would be some trickling-down disaster if the tall citadels of financial capital fell, of course.

NICK: It's not something that we want to really see. In Europe, in North America, we've not seen the sort of financial collapse that a country like Argentina has seen over the last 20 years. Argentina saw real bank runs in the Corralitos of 2001, 2002. It decimated the middle class, it totally destroyed the middle class. That country is absolutely dependent on generosity, I put that in inverted commas, of the International Monetary Fund. You have an economy which is one of the strongest in Latin America and you've seen this spiral downwards. So we've not been through a crisis like that. We should be grateful for that but I fear that it is a matter of time. Like you said, we've not seen the hyperinflation that many people were warning about with the huge amount of money creation that kicked in in the first few months of the pandemic but we are seeing rapidly rising inflation. In the US, I think it's almost 8%, which is actually higher than it is in Mexico. In Spain, where I'm living, it's around 7.5%. These are the highest levels of inflation going back four decades. That should scare us. The war in Russia between Russia and Ukraine is also unleashing huge destabilizing forces. Energy is going up enormously and if that continues. Energy is a component in everything we consume, it's in everything that is produced. If you begin to see these spiraling energy prices, then we could be seeing a very, very destructive economic scenario at the same time that the central banks are trying to bring inflation under control by raising interest rates. And that is just squeezing the life out of the economy. It's debatable to what extent central banks will be able to actually bring this inflation under control because so much of it is beyond simple monetary causes. One of the fundamental things that happened in 2020 is we unleashed an unprecedented amount of money at the same time as economic activity ground to a standstill. Like you said, most of the money went up to the institutions closely connected to the central banks. Even then, given just how little movement was happening in the economy, we already began to see some serious inflation. If they try to bring this under control by increasing interest rates, which is already happening with certain central banks, then it won't take much for us to begin to see this stagflationary scenario, where you have an economy that's not growing. At the same time, the inflation is dangerously high. That is not a good place to be.

AUBREY: It felt very much, after talking to Fabian and looking at some of the macroeconomic conditions, there were very few moves left on the board to keep the system running. You don't even have to presuppose absolute tyrannical villainy to just say all right, the system itself is trying to preserve itself and there are not a lot of moves left to be made. The dying system is in its final spasms. In this great reset, there actually is a reason for something to change. Now, the solution that they have for that thing to change is particularly dangerous because it opens up all of the vectors of control like we talked about, but there are massive problems with our monetary system. It seems as though that those people with large amounts of money. who really seem to be the driving force behind, they call BlackRock the fourth branch of government, and they might be the first branch of government, to be honest. It seems like money really is calling the shots here. It seems like the wealthy are not going to be willing to not be wealthy. So somehow, whatever happens, the wealthy you're going to stay wealthy. We can bet on that. That's the general idea unless some fundamental other thing happens. The banks are still going to have a place at the table. It's going to be very interesting how they make these moves to transfer over into this, and then also how they deal with this alternate parallel structure, which may very well have the solution already built-in, which is a cryptocurrency. There's this alternate parallel structure that's already been developing that is, potentially, an element of the solution that obviously, the governments don't like because they can't use it to control. It's the opposite of control, it's radical freedom and sovereignty in the ability to use money and maintain your privacy and that use. That becomes a real threat to this system. But also, if the governments can get out of their own delusion and distortion of control, they can realize, actually, a new system is already developing. If we can just help get out of the way, people's own creativity and our own ability to find solutions will ultimately take over.

NICK: It's an interesting one. The place of cryptocurrencies in a new reality, where you have central bank digital currencies, I would be surprised if they allow that degree of competition, just as I'd be surprised if they allow cash to last much longer. That's not to say that cryptocurrencies would not exist, it's just that they're more likely to be pushed to the fringes, even more so than they are today. Again, it's not easy to know because there are so many suppositions we have to make. I think one thing that is clear, like you said, the wealthy, or should I say, the super wealthy, are determined to hold on to what they have, this idea, as the French said, plus les choses changent plus les choses, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We're going through one of these huge inflection points where it seems that everything is changing but the goal is to keep things in place, at least for those who have power. And not just keep them in place. The only way they can keep things in place for themselves is by expanding their power. I think so many people, if we go through the economic crisis that we've been forestalling with every burst bubble, if we go through that mother of all economic crises, then there's going to be, potentially, billions of people who are going to suddenly find that their standard of living is is not what it was and in a big way. People who are already struggling to make ends meet are going to find themselves not making ends meet. So how do you maintain control in a scenario like that? The only way is with the control systems that digital technologies allow. Whether or not they're going to pull it off, I do think that it is not guaranteed by any means. If we go back in time six, seven years to 2014, 2015, the trade agreements like the TPP, TTIP and TiSA, these three huge trade agreements were going to radically reconfigure the global economy, the way corporations function vis a vis governments, et cetera, et cetera and something happened, which wasn't remotely part of the script, Donald Trump won the US elections and with a stroke of a pen, he basically canceled years and years of coordinated work among the largest corporations on the planet. It's not like they win every time and I don't think that is, by any means, guaranteed. You're going to have your best-laid plans, but we are going through an exceptionally turbulent time. So whether or not--

AUBREY: If they come for crypto, let's say, they're going to reach some serious opposition. There's a lot of people who are deeply invested, not only financially, but emotionally into this and also starting to build infrastructure on the backs of these currencies. The longer that these things have traction, the harder they are to stop, the more difficult it is to make these moves.

NICK: If you look at a lot of the largest banks, the tech firms, the credit card companies, these giant corporations, they've made it very clear over the last 10 years that their biggest enemy is cash. If they're able to get rid of cash, then cryptocurrencies could have a purpose even for the governments and intelligence agencies, because it's a way of maybe continuing the black ops, continuing ways of avoiding the control grid. That is what the super wealthy always try to do. Keeping an eye on taxes and making sure everybody's paying taxes is all well and good for the 98% of the population but those 2% that have their money in tax havens, perhaps the cryptocurrencies will allow that to continue. So it's hard to tell.

AUBREY: The danger would be, let's say they got rid of fiat and somehow pulled that, nobody really is a champion of fiat other than the fact that it's dangerous to get rid of it, obviously. If they got rid of that and then they prevented the exchange between Bitcoin, let's say, and central bank digital currency, then you would create two entirely alternate economies, except one of those alternates was the only way that you could pay taxes, and if you didn't pay taxes, then you go to jail.

NICK: That's an option. That's a possibility. Basically, you have a dual system. There have been writers that have imagined this world where you have different means. It would almost be like a barter system for those on the very edge of society. It would be a precarious existence because you would have a government that has incredible powers of surveillance and control. You would be on the fringes of that using cryptocurrency. That is one possibility but, at least, it gives an option or at least it would give an option.

AUBREY: It seems like this vaccine passport is the gateway to this digital ID system, which is the gateway to the central bank digital currency, which is the gateway to all of these mechanisms of control. Albeit, granted, on the other side, there are solutions that are helpful. There are plausible reasons; if you suppose good actors, in the government; that they were actually acting with integrity and for our best interests, which has certainly come into question recently, more than ever, but likely has been always the case. I think our founders of, at least, the United States, we were aware of that. We built in as many protections as we could against what was seen as the inevitable lust for power that governments always have. Many of our amendments to our Bill of Rights are really based upon these premises of trying to protect us against our government, as much as anything. They tried to build in enough rights for protections against this moment. It's an interesting thing but it seems like the first point of resistance is now. The strongest point of resistance we can make is to prevent step one, because if we all adopt step one, it gets really slippery and harder to prevent subsequent steps from happening beyond that. I think that's a big part of the point that you're making that now is the time to stand in resistance to the vaccine passport itself, not necessarily because of the vaccine passport, which has its own fucking problems, we know that but because it is the gateway to all of these other dystopic realities.

NICK: Absolutely. The US is, in a certain way, in a privileged position because, like you said, it has probably the best-designed constitution on the planet. The founders had the wisdom to realize the importance of putting those checks and balances on power, which I would argue we don't have, to the same extent in most European countries and, to be fair, in Europe, the European Union has taken so much of the sovereignty of countries in Europe. It will be very difficult for a member state of the European Union to oppose the direction of travel. In the US, you've had some serious pushback from within the courts, which is something we've not really seen in Europe. There have only been, as far as I'm aware, two cases where national high courts or supreme courts have said, "Look, this is anti-constitutional." And in both cases, within three or four weeks, those rulings were overturned by some other judge. I have a lot more faith in the US when it comes trying to push back. You also have a much more decentralized system of government so--

AUBREY: Yeah, states have reasonable rights. The two-party system is a fucking problem. The way that things have gone. Actually, everything has been so politicized that we have one of the two major parties in opposition to a lot of the moves being made by the other party, which in some ways, creates this stalemate, which is a big problem and also creates all of the dark side of the politics that we see. Assuming that elections are fair, which is an assumption that we have to say potentially, with the digitization of everything, that there are mechanisms of control that are actually undermining the nature of democracy, I don't have nearly enough information to know that, but I know that it has to be at least a credible hypothesis that there is a possibility that elections are not fair, but assuming that they are, and assuming that that won't go down without a fight. Ultimately, if one side is being suppressed, it's an interesting time, where there's legitimate conflict. This isn't a slippery slope into this path, without, at least, from the US perspective, an ample amount of resistance. It's already built-in and also continuing to strengthen.

NICK: There have been a few cases that concern me a little bit, a few moments that have concerned me. For example, there was a vote; I think it was on a vaccine mandate, one of Biden's vaccine mandates; and two or three Republican senators didn't bother to turn up for the vote so it was more or less a foregone conclusion for the Republican side that they were going to vote it down. One of them was Mitt Romney, surprisingly, but you have an example there, if you've just got a few corrupt or corrupted individuals who will actually want to see this system put in place, then you just need those few people to not turn up to vote. That said, when you see Republican governors, like DeSantis in Florida who are completely opposing the direction of travel, then that sort of thing does, at least, show that there are alternative options. And there's a lot of support--

AUBREY: For people who don't know what you're talking about, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, is suing the, what is it, the FAA? Or suing the CDC for the imposition of masks and restrictions on domestic travel. So we have large players who are entering into litigation against governmental or at least pseudo-governmental agencies. It's an interesting time where it feels like fate is not yet determined and we have a substantial opportunity to make a stand with our votes and make a stand with our voices and make a stand here. That is important. Now, we might also be in the process and I say we, I don't have all of the data and I'm not saying I know exactly everything because I can also see, I can't steelman the options for central bank digital currency, I don't have the awareness to steelman that and say like, potentially, they're seeing something that is so fucking catastrophic, that we're just focused on we have to prevent this, maintain sovereignty, maintain freedom, but we actually aren't privy, we don't have the purview of what those people are actually looking at and being like, "Yeah, y'all can stand in resistance and if you win, be prepared for the consequences of that, quote, victory of resisting this, and watch the economy itself collapse." What does that mean? It's easy to straw man there, and assume that there's some powerful group of elites that only wants power and they're fucking reptilians or something. I have a hard time believing that. I think there is some steelman argument for some of these moves that are being made, that I think we may not even be aware of. And that's the other side to this argument.

NICK: Certainly, one argument for that is the energy situation. I've heard lots of people, well-respected economists, argue that one of the reasons we're living through, is because we don't have so much easily accessible sources of carbon-based energy. This is one of the reasons we're pushing into the new green transition, which is going to be a bumpy ride, especially for, as we're already seeing, for truck companies, small trucking companies, and for people who just need to depend on their car to get to and from work, which, in the US, is a lot of people. There's possibly an argument for that. It's not an area that I know much about. I think that the energy crisis we are living through, I presume, as you say, the people at the very top know the real situation. For me, the most important issue is the extent to which, if we supposedly live in reasonably free democratic societies, is the extent to which things are just happening to us and the extent to which we have a certain degree of agency over our lives going forward. I think that that is the fundamental issue right now. I think most people are not even aware of what is happening to them. It's happening so quickly, it's happening from so many different angles. People are just trying to get by on a day-to-day basis. It's like with the vaccine passports, they just want to go back to whatever normality may be, and not have to think about things, and not have to worry about the virus, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we are at risk of sleepwalking into a very dark tyranny. It's being designed by those at the very top, who've shown, let's face it, not much regard for the rest of us, over the last 20, 30, 40 years, and have been gobbling up the planet's resources and gobbling up the wealth and sucking it upwards. The idea of these people assigning themselves the job of creating the world of the future, I'm not sure if they're qualified.

AUBREY: That's an understatement for sure. The other concern is, alright, let's say that we are in a crisis of carbon-based energy and everybody is like, "No worries. There's Tesla and there's electrical cars and all that." That's still relying on rare earth minerals to create batteries. We still haven't transcended the resource crisis. We've just shifted the resource crisis to okay, well, we're out of oil. Now we still gotta mine lithium, and we gotta mine all of these other rare earth minerals. That could become the next crisis until we transcend those mechanisms of energy. The other options, obviously, there's nuclear energy, but that, as we've seen with Fukushima, that's a fucking hazardous energy, especially in a cataclysmic planet, a planet where tsunamis occur, and fucking earthquakes occur, and all kinds of crazy shit happens and always has, and always has. There's a lot of difficult options that are being made but what we would want would be a government that would say, "Hey, we're facing some gnarly shit and there are a lot of bad options here. We're trying to choose the best of the bad options. This is what it plays out if we don't do this. This is how it could play out if we do do this," and just continue to make the case and open-source their own thinking and their own mindset. The fact that they aren't doing that is, at the very least, egregiously condescending to our own intelligence and also very likely, there's a hidden agenda, a hidden drive to power, and a desire to maintain power, which is preventing them from the transparency which we could actually get everybody on the same page here.

NICK: Exactly. In this sort of existential crisis that we may be facing, if you have a government whose primary interests; for example, in the US, congressmen and women, whose primary concern; is their stock holdings and where they're invested, they clearly aren't thinking about their voters. The same goes if you're a minister who is just waiting for payday when you get a nice little board position with BlackRock or a nice board position with Goldman Sachs. This is--

AUBREY: Or an FDA representative that gets a big cushy, consultancy job with the pharmaceuticals. We're entangled. People are being captured. And even if they're not captured by their own personal financial resources, if you're a career politician, you're beholden to the contributions that allow you to spend the money that allows you to win the election. As I was talking to Bret Weinstein recently, I was saying, "What is the meta-crisis that we're facing?" And he says, "The meta-crisis we're facing is capture," that people are captured by economic incentives and incentives that can drive whether you win the election or don't win the election or potentially even your own personal wealth and your own personal allocation of wealth. This problem of capture, which is another way of saying corruption... it doesn't even have to be all the way there. It could just be the self-serving bias, their ability to see things in a way that serves their ability to win and justifies their ability to win. "Well, I'm the best-qualified. I got to make some compromises. You got to break a couple eggs, you got to make some compromises.This is the nature of politics," this "House of Cards" show that was really popular for a while, understanding how the system itself is captured. It's captured and with that, is elements of corruption and, at the very least, bias.

NICK: Very large elements of corruption. Conflicts of interest are like the business model of politics. We are not changing that. We are giving the keys of government to the likes of BlackRock. BlackRock is choosing which assets the Federal Reserve buys, despite the fact that BlackRock is the largest manager of assets on the planet. That is the most insane conflict of interest imaginable, based on doing exactly the same with the European Central Bank. We've reached that stage where it's really difficult to see where a central bank, big ends and Black Rock begins or to see where the FDA ends and Pfizer begins. I don't see any sign in any government of any movement towards rectifying this or even pausing it. That, to me, tells me if we are coming towards a major, major crisis, our government is not on our side in any shape or form. It's like they've got a big agenda, Fundamentally, they are not being honest to us. And they are clearly in the pockets of companies that have very different interests. Just looking at the World Economic Forum, an organization whose founder is proud to have infiltrated governments of democratic countries around the world, that organization, if you look at the top 10 largest market cap firms in the United States, eight of them are sponsors of the World Economic Forum. In Europe, it's like 18 out of 20. All of the major, major, too-big-to-fail banks are putting money into the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum has spent decades subverting the government.

AUBREY: This reality that we're facing is scary on a lot of fronts, for sure. It seems that now, because of the pollution of what you could call the epistemic commons, the ability to access information, it's very difficult for people to make sense of anything that's going on. In that confusion is opportunity, opportunity for moves to be made, unconscious to what we're actually aware of. That's scary. It's now falling on the impetus of people to try and sort the truth themselves, which we're not even really equipped to sort. I'm not fucking equipped to understand macroeconomic conditions. I don't know. I'm equipped to understand spiritual issues and philosophical issues. This is what I've dedicated the last 23 years of my life to exploring and trying to understand. But, of course, when you learn how to think about something, you can start to apply it. And as soon as you do that, you start to see all of the different cracks in the system and you start just putting your mind in the potential chessboard of what's happening in the world, things start to be concerning. We have one problem, is that now the onus is on us to figure some shit out, first of all, which a lot of us are realizing. There's a lot of biases that we're going to have. There's a lot of emotions that we're going to have. There are a lot of ways that we can fall into the same traps of the things that we're fighting against like don't dehumanize us! Don't be a sheep. You're like, "What do you mean?" You can't be fighting against dehumanization and calling the people on the other side of sheep. It's literally dehumanization. There are traps that we can fall in that are actually supporting the system itself, even though we think we're in resistance. We have to be really mindful of the plays that we make, and also the suppositions that we have. I think that's important. One thing that I wanted to mention is that before the pandemic happened, coincidence or not, there was a simulation that was made, simulating what would happen if a pandemic actually happened. That simulation was carried out, and then the pandemic happened. It could be a coincidence, I don't know. There was, recently, another simulation for a large-scale cyber-terror attack. If you play this, let's say that you do suppose and just adopt the hypothesis that the simulation is somehow linked to the event actually happening. If the cyber attack simulation is now pointing in the direction of what the next thing would be, this could also play into this central bank digital currency move by... Imagine, let's say all of a sudden, all of our banks, all of our banks got hacked, attacked and all of our assets, through all of the banks, through all of the credit card companies got frozen, literally nothing worked, our credit cards didn't work, the banking system couldn't register how much money we had, it just happened for a week. Let's say all of that was down for a week, absolute chaos in that point. In the absolute chaos of that, then comes, you know what, the only solution to this is to bring the entire power of our government behind the protection of your money. This is just a hypothetical, I'm not saying it's going to fucking happen but who knows? You have to play these scenarios out, in which, okay, let's say this thing happens, all of our banks, all of the credit cards, our Amxes, our Visas, none of this shit fucking works for a long time, the chaos that ensues when that happens, then a solution is provided as a remedy for that chaos. The solution being listen, listen, we got this shit on lock, we got all of the top cybersecurity experts in our government, the entire government, and all of its protection and all of its military and intelligence might protect your money. That's a pretty fucking strong play. If that's the play, if that's the play and they're not being honest, that's a pretty strong play. That's also scary. And again, no suppositions that this will and I'm not presupposing the entity that is deciding that this will. It's something to just be mindful of that we've seen an event occur, I think it's Event 201, it was called, which then was an antecedent to the pandemic. Now they're doing these cyber-terror things. You could see how another crisis like that could then lead to a stronger play.

NICK: I think they've done two. We talk about the World Economic Forum here and it was a Cyber Polygon, I think, was the name of the simulation. The first one was last year. No, the first one was in 2020. The second one was in 2021. Ironically, I think the one in 2021 involved a Russian bank, Sberbank. Although it might have been in 2020, I don't remember very clearly. I do mention it in my book. But yes, there have been two large simulations of a serious cyber attack, causing serious problems for the global economy. One of those, I think, was related to the financial system. For me, one of the terrifying things, we're speculating here, we have no idea if this is possible or if this can happen, or if this will happen, but there are two things that I would mention, one, last year saw an absurd number of bank IT outages. It wasn't recorded, it wasn't reported on very much. If you look at, for example, Latin America, I write a lot about Latin America. On about three or four occasions, the biggest bank in Mexico went down on a Sunday, completely. The IT system went down. In Venezuela, the biggest bank went down for about four or five days. In Ecuador, the biggest bank went down for a few days. One of the biggest banks in Japan, which I think is called Mizuho, has suffered nine or 10 IT outages over the last year. It suffered so many problems that its CEO and its chairman were forced to resign. And in the UK, it's crazy, the UK like every month, there will be an outage of at least three or four of the major banks. This is happening all over the world. It's showing a serious fragility within the system, at the very least. It's showing a very serious fragility within the commercial banking system. That should worry us. Secondly, the other thing I would say is that the beauty of having, if something like this were to happen, if we were to have a cyber attack that brought down; it probably wouldn't need to be all the banks, it would just need to be a few of the banks, the major banks; the sort of chaos that would ensue, the beauty of that for the banks and the Wall Street investors who've been running the show for the last, however many decades, is that the narrative, when it came to actually writing the history of why the system went down, it wouldn't be due to a cyberattack. It wouldn't be due to all the systemic flaws and problems that existed long before. It would be due to the fact that we had accumulated absurdly unsustainable levels of debt, whether private debt or public debt. It would be simply one event. Whether or not they could play the Russians or whatever, it is a very disturbing thought because what that would mean is that that could usher in the kind of new reality, the monetary reset they're talking about. And they'll be able to do it in a very quick way and it would be a shock, it would be a crisis. They would be able to write it in such a way that they didn't come out as responsible in any way.

AUBREY: This is what I was just going to mention, and you arrived at a very similar spot. Especially now, many of us have heard Putin's speech about how he's going to meet any aggression with aggression. We are pushing different kinds of monetary sanctions and restrictions against Russia. We have somebody who's said, "Okay, you fuck with us, I fuck with you back." Putin's pretty clear on that. We already have the easiest layup of somebody to blame. It certainly could be him. I don't know. We don't know what any of this is going to happen. As a CEO, this is the thing, people say fucking conspiracy theory. I was a CEO of a company called Onnit for, and many people who are listening know this, for 10 years. And part of being a CEO is looking at all of the different potential areas of risk that good actors or bad actors or incompetence or designed malice, how they could actually affect you, what litigation pathways are available, what ways could you make a mistake, honestly, what ways could somebody attack you, dishonestly? You look at that, you just look at all of that. It's part of premeditation, it's stoic philosophy. It's trying to figure out what might happen. The negation of our ability to think about that, because you get labeled as something and then outcast, and then used as a term of denigration, that's crazy. In a crisis situation, we have to look at all possible areas of threat. This is not a conspiracy theorising. This is just looking at the gameboard of possible threats. And in this gameboard, one possible threat could be that Russia has not only the motive to actually do it if they wanted to do it, and also, arguably, potentially the capability to do it, because our system is inherently fragile, which is also the argument for a blockchain-based internet system, the new internet 3.0, which would actually be a lot safer. But nonetheless, even if it wasn't Russia, who did it and there was another agency, I'm not saying there are, just looking at the whole game board, if there was another agency, who was behind it, they could just go, "Fucking Russia did it. They told us they were going to do it. Russia did it." That actually makes it really easy to push this. Then they could rally national support against Russia, creating this conflict type of situation. And then in the nationalists, if you don't support central bank digital currency, you are supporting Russia, and they tap into our patriotism, and then our patriotism rallies and our nationalism rallies and everybody's like, "Come on. Don't be a Russian supporter!" Support this whole thing. You can see how all of these intricate narratives could play out. It's important to look at all of these potential options before they happen. So we're aware of the moves that can be made.

NICK: Imagine a scenario where there was no internet for four days. It's almost impossible to imagine. Just about nothing works. Most of us can't work, most of us can't earn a living. We can't access our money. It would be chaos. It is essentially unimaginable. If you think about how willing people were to do what seemed to be the right thing in terms of getting the vaccine, getting the vaccine passport, doing all the things that there was laid out that this is the right thing to do, imagine how desperate they would be to do the right thing in a crisis of that magnitude. I really don't think this is what's going to happen but it's completely within the realms of possibility. Like I said, the scary thing for me, as somebody who's been watching the economy for the last 15 years or so, since the global financial crisis, is the ability to control the narrative of blame. If you are at the very top, and you have benefited from these multiple crises and after each of these crises, you get stronger, you get wealthier, at the end of all this, there's the mother of all wealth destructions, which is going to be the crisis, this reckoning of debt and you're able to say, "Well, it was this guy's fault," or, "It's this organization's fault, this shady organization's fault," it provides the perfect alibi. That's it. Lord knows. It's very hard to tell what could happen. The last time we went through a monetary reset was in the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon, all of a sudden, from one moment to the next, took the dollar off to gold peg. He did this, I think it was largely unexpected from his allies but because of the fact that the US, at that moment, was militarily-dominant and because we had this bipolar world system between the US and the Soviet Union, US allies went along with it. It wasn't an issue. Now we're facing a very different geopolitical reality. We're facing a moment where, I would argue that, the US still has the support of, for example, its European allies. But Europe is a declining force on the global stage. The countries that are increasing in terms of wealth and have better demographics are all in Asia. How they would be able to engineer a shift of such a huge magnitude without doing something absolutely huge, I can't see it happening. I don't think that Joe Biden is going to sit down and say, "Look, by the way, from now on, we are going to have central bank digital currencies. We would like you all to get one, et cetera, et cetera." I don't think that's going to work.

AUBREY: You might know this better than me. Ukraine is in the midst of a very chaotic war right now and quietly, they rolled out a variety of different conditions. Doesn't it include a central bank digital currency or, at least, a full digital ID?

NICK: They are at the leading edge. I've seen the government documents in English. They've launched a universal basic income program, which is tied into the vaccine passport so it's really interesting. It's a really interesting case study of how a country could link these things up. It's pushing ahead with central bank digital currency as is Russia. The number of countries that are pushing ahead with central bank digital currencies or, at least, experimenting in a big way, you're talking about roughly 110 countries, around 90 central banks and 110 countries. Those countries represent something like 90% of GDP, global GDP.

AUBREY: There seem to be two ways to manipulate people. One is through fear and one is through our natural desire to serve our brothers and sisters, our compassion, our love for each other. Both of those strategies were a big part of the vaccine narrative, which was be afraid, be very afraid. We're going to show you this death count, and exaggerate it at every opportunity that we can, not that the deaths aren't real and not that COVID isn't scary but certainly, the fear is a powerful way to move people. Another powerful way, we want to naturally play our part, we do love each other, we're tribal creatures, that at the base of it, we do love each other and do want to come together. The scary thing about war is that heightens both of those things to the maximum. As soon as we got attacked, think of 9/11 for us. We get attacked, the whole country rallies together minus some scapegoating to just peaceful Islamic churches and mosques. It wasn't all perfect, I'm not going to say that but we rallied together in a really strong and patriotic way. I'm not also saying that the decisions made afterward and the legislation, I'm not saying that, but in wartime situations, people come together, and they accept whole different understandings of what they're acceptable to. It's scary to think that we're now entering a realm in which kinetic war, which was off the table for a long time, world powers were not going to fight each other anymore, because of mutually assured destruction. It seems like there's now a room where we can actually engage in kinetic war that doesn't involve nukes, those are off the table. And then under the guise of kinetic war, a lot of these things can pass and happen, that normally wouldn't happen. The other benefits of kinetic war is, it actually is an intensely stimulating force for the economy, because you're having labor and effort and technology, building things that actually explode. And those things actually explode. So the way that it actually allows us to stimulate and put labor and effort towards the creation of something and then the destruction of that thing, it's a strong economic stimulus. Even if people aren't choosing this because no one would choose war, there are hidden, latent reasons why war could be used in a way, whether subconsciously or consciously for a variety of different agendas, some being economic, and some being to push these mechanisms of control, which may also have economic backing. It's a very interesting gameboard that's now available. Again, I just want to reiterate I'm not saying that I know what moves are being made. I'm not saying that any of this is going to happen or I'm supposing that there's any group that's fucking doing anything. It could be that just all of these things are happening. I think we have to look at the game board, we have to understand the pieces that are at play and just be mindful, because it really is on us, it really is on us to try and figure this shit out.

NICK: No, no, without a doubt. Like you said, there are so many moving parts to what is happening right now. We've been through a pandemic, we're still in a pandemic. We don't know what's going to happen with the pandemic, exactly. The pandemic has unleashed a whole gamut of economic forces that we really are struggling to bring under control. That itself is a heck of a crisis to have to deal with. And then to have a war between a military superpower and a neighboring country that is supported by the world's largest military superpower, this is a dynamic. I wrote in my book, which I finished writing in January, I'm glad I wrote this paragraph, "By the time you read this book, probably things will have changed in a very big way." Now, there was no way I could have imagined that there was going to be a war between Ukraine and Russia, and the sort of forces that that has unleashed. We do have an important duty to at least try to understand, like you said, what is happening. It seems to be that a lot of what the US is doing and a lot of what the EU is doing is merely pushing people away from the US system of governance, US domination. When I say pushing countries away, I mean the countries that don't normally count. So when the US says, "The world is with us," they're really talking about the OECD countries, they're talking about the rich economies, basically, Europe, the US and low key places like Japan and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, et cetera. But even in Latin America, most Latin American countries are not willing to sanction Russia. There's only two or three countries that have been prepared to go there. China hasn't. India hasn't. Indonesia hasn't. Pakistan hasn't. Bangladesh, if you look at the countries with the largest populations on the planet, they are not going along with this. I think that the economic sanctions that have been leveled against Russia are just pushing people away from the dollar. That is a very dangerous force because the US Empire, the US domination of the world over the last 60 or so years, or whatever, it's been like 70 years, is really based largely on the reserve currency status. These forces are extremely erratic, you've got multiple actors working at the same time, to different ends. What is clear is, in the case of a country like Russia, in the case of a person like Putin, they will do whatever they can to defend their interests at this moment, and that could do serious harm. I live in Europe and apparently, in two days, I'm not sure what the situation is right now but apparently, in two days our governments have to pay for the gas in Rubles. And at the moment they said that's not going to happen. If this continues, and Putin says, "Okay, well, we're going to cut you off, then that is a huge amount of gas. That is basically Europe in its worst energy crisis, at least since the 1970s. It's hard to know where that is going to go.

AUBREY: As I said before, and I just want to clarify this, when I say it's on us, it doesn't mean that all of us need to become economists, all of us need to have become political strategists, all of us need to be aware of all of these things. We just need to understand that the narratives that we're being fed are captured in many cases, captured by advertisement, captured by other mechanisms of control. We have to really open our minds and look to the people who we feel we can really trust in these times because it's not as easy. You can't just turn on the news and they've sorted out the best people for you. The curation system of experts is what's really broken. It's not that there aren't experts, it's just that the curation of those experts has been captured. We just have to continue to look, continue to trust our own inner compass towards truth and continue to live in a way that brings forward, brings forward, the possibility for something more beautiful to arise. We've spent a lot of time talking about a lot of dystopia, but in every crisis is opportunity. I'm not saying that in a pessimistic way, like some other force is going to take advantage of it. This upheaval could be what creates a much more beautiful world. I think we also have to hold that strong possibility that everything is happening, as tragic as it may be, exactly as is needed to bring about a new stewardship of the earth by all humans and all people built on love and respect for each other and our planet. And this is the bumpy middle stages in between that. This is the infancy of that thing, which is really ugly right now. It's all blood and placenta and screams and but ultimately, something more beautiful is birthing. I actually really do believe that's possible. But to shepherd this baby, we need open hearts and active minds. I think that's the spot that we're in.

NICK: I agree. Number one, don't fall for divided rule. When you are being told to despise your unvaccinated brother or your unvaccinated sister, don't fall for it. Any government that is happy to spread hate toward a certain minority within the population, will be happy to shift the target of that hatred at any given moment. I think it is really important to not fall for that, to try to find, like you said, the things we have in common, the things we share and to try to have reasoned, calm conversations about the situation we're in. In my book, I say, whether it's the vaccine passports, whether it's digital identity, whether it's central bank digital currencies, these are things that are being organized around us and above us. There's no national debate. They should be happening, there should be conversations taking place in every parliament, but there should be conversations taking place around the dinner tables of every household. This is about the way our world will be in the future. It's about the way our children's world will be in the future. I think that gives us a responsibility to, at least, show an interest in what is happening right now and how that could affect us in the future, and to listen to other voices, and to listen to other opinions. Like you said before, the idea of just calling people who we think follow the dictates of government too eagerly just calling them sheeple, that sort of simplification is not helpful. It's about trying to understand each other and trying to inform each other. You can only inform other people if you're willing to listen to them first.

AUBREY: Deeply. Listen deeply. Thank you, my brother. I appreciate this conversation. Your book, "Scanned" is out and available everywhere now. I know I got an advance copy but I'm assuming that by the time this podcast releases, it will be out and available everywhere.

NICK: It is already out and available. It's available on Amazon. It's available at the publishers chelseagreen.com and lots and lots of different independent bookstores.

AUBREY: Yeah, beautiful, Chelsea Green Publishing: Mattias Desmet, Charles Eisenstein, a lot of great authors through that publishing house, so thanks to them as well. All right, my friend.

NICK: Thanks for having me, Aubrey. It's been a pleasure. 

AUBREY: Absolutely, yeah. Been a real pleasure. Have a beautiful day. I guess it's night for you. Enjoy your evening.

NICK: It is night. I'm going to have a beer. 

AUBREY: All right, go for it. I think we all need a beer after this conversation. Where's my beer?

NICK: Maybe something stronger. 

AUBREY: Maybe something stronger. Indeed. Take care, my friend.

NICK: All right. Take care, Aubrey.