Are we already in WWIII? Is it happening in space, under the oceans, and in the economy and we haven’t noticed? Former presidential advisor Pippa Malmgren, has aggregated all of the data points to paint a coherent picture of what is going on right now. In addition she has her finger on the pulse of a historic moment where the overt government is pressing against the covert government to give up what they know about UFO/UAP space crafts and biologics. And also what the heck they have been doing with all that money they can’t account for? Dr. Pippa Malmgren has been an advisor to Presidents and Prime Ministers, co-founded an award-winning tech firm, worked in finance and asset management, and served as a judge in The Queen’s Enterprise Awards competition and as a regulator of technology standards. She has lectured at Sandhurst, Duke Fuqua GEMBA, INSEAD, UT Austin and Tsinghua University in Beijing. More of her incredible body of work can be found at: https://pippamalmgren.co.uk

AUBREY: All right, for the good of all.
PIPPA: It's so nice to see you.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's so good to see you, Pippa. Yeah. So, we had a chance to meet on a boat that had a crazy wild trip through Egypt. And we're not going to be telling stories about Egypt this time. At least that's not the plan. Because you have an incredibly interesting background that involves politics and economics, and aliens, even going to come into the conversation. So if you're not interested in politics, and economics and geopolitics, and what's happening in the world there, maybe you're interested in what's going on with all these UFO sightings and disclosures. So, we got a lot of stuff to talk about here. But I guess, for people who don't really know, and I'll share a little bit in the intro, but how did you get into this, into the places that you've been in as advisors to different presidential campaigns? It's actually a family lineage. Your father was a senior aide for JFK.
PIPPA: Yeah, exactly. Looking back, I realized I literally had a childhood apprenticeship in how to see the world as if you worked in the Oval Office. Because my dad had been an advisor to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. And in fact, because my dad was a mathematician, he was literally the guy they put in charge of double checking that the missile trajectories during the Cuban Missile Crisis would actually work. And so, he was part of that inner circle. And, I learned so much from him about, this is what people are when they're really under pressure, right? When you really face a nuclear event. And then, I didn't think I was going to get into politics. I did an internship in the White House when I was in college for Ronald Reagan. And then I thought, okay, I'm going to go understand the world economy, because people in politics don't usually understand how markets and the economy works. So, I moved to London, went to London School of Economics, and then worked in the city in finance, and I lived around the world, in Asia. And then I realized, I actually had learned two languages along the way. I learned to speak the language of financial markets, and the language of politics. So, it's like Klingon and Federation. And I could literally be an interpreter translator. And so, I started spending a lot of time with policymakers and politicians, explaining, this is what's going on in the economy and the markets that you need to know about. And as a result, I started getting phone calls from people who woke up one day saying, "I might end up as the head of state of my country, and I need to understand this world economy." And so, I have always said yes to those phone calls. And one of them came from President George W. Bush. So I came here to Austin when he was governor, briefed him. We hit it off like a house on fire. And then he said, "Do you want to be part of the campaign?" I was like, "Yeah, absolutely." Then he won. And he said, "Do you want to come be on the National Economic Council and work in the White House?" Absolutely. And then when I was there, we had a lot of history happen. First, we had seven of the nine largest bankruptcies in American history all in one year. Everybody forgets that now. But it was Enron and Tyco and it felt like the world was going to end. And then we had 9/11, and I was the only person with a background in strategic security. So they said, you, you're in charge of terrorism, rest of the domestic economy on the National Economic Council. So I did that. But then I went back to London, and ever since, I've basically had a career where I'm looking at the world holistically, trying to understand what's coming in the future. What does the economy of tomorrow look like? But that means including geopolitics, strategic security, what's happening in technology and innovation. So I took a big picture view, and I'm very grateful to my dad for teaching me how to do that at an early age.
AUBREY: Yeah. So, there's not many people I know who have an inside view of what George W. Bush is really like. Now, from the outside, it looks like he'd be a fun person to have a beer with actually. That's what I kind of get.
PIPPA: I think he would be, although he doesn't drink. But yeah, totally.
AUBREY: You know the idea, right? Like if you're playing horseshoes or something, and drinking iced tea, he seems like a guy that would be fun to do that. Now, of course, there's a lot of, probably, projections and ideas with maybe, I don't know where the truth lies. But there's a lot of truth about the deep kind of entrenchment of the Bush family into the political landscape. A lot of association with what some people would call deep state. And that's not particularly the place that I like to go in that. But I'm just wondering, like from you on the inside of knowing him and knowing what's going on, what's your view and what are your optics of what's actually happening with the Bush family and what's actually happening with George W. and what was really going on there?
PIPPA: Sure. Well, I do have a view on him, not so much the whole family. But I will say this. From my perspective, I could see this is a person, he's our only president who worked in the White House as a staffer before becoming president of the United States. And that's because his father was president. And so, he got to see up close what happens, and I witnessed this myself. People change when they come into the Oval Office. I know it sounds a little crazy, but you know the character Gollum, J. R. R. Tolkien's character?
AUBREY: "My precious."
PIPPA: Exactly. Well, I know that Gollum lives above the door of the Oval Office, and he jumps on the shoulder of every person who walks in there and says, "Don't tell him what you want to tell him. Tell him what he wants to hear." I think this is a problem all leaders have, by the way. But the Oval Office is a particularly powerful space. Just for background, my mom worked very closely with J. R. R. Tolkien. And so I grew up with all these stories. And I realized sitting there one day, I had a chief executive of a major corporation came into my office. He said, the President's policies suck, he should fire the Secretary of the Treasury, “blah, blah, blah, blah.” I said, "Great. Let's go over and tell the president because he needs to hear what you think," blah, blah, blah, the whole way over. Then he gets to the door, walks in, he's like, "Oh, Mr. President, I'm so delighted to meet you." I'm like, “what happened to you sunshine? Come back to me. Come back!” And I realized the Oval Office is round, in that moment. And why does this matter? Round buildings are very rare, right? Cupolas of churches are round, parliaments are round. It's meant to convey power--
AUBREY: Ayahuasca maloca is round also, yeah.
PIPPA: So, it's the ring. And that's when I realized, oh, my gosh, it's Gollum and it's the ring. So, I give you that background, because he knew that. He could see that every day working as a staffer for his dad. So, he cultivated what is a very Texan thing. And my dad says Lyndon Baines Johnson did exactly the same thing. Is this, "Oh, shucks, it's awful complicated, Aubrey. I don't understand this thing. Why don't you explain it to me?" And now if you go explain it, fine. But your wallet's already gone. He already understands the issue completely. What he's trying to do is get a sense of who are you? And are you telling me the truth--
AUBREY: Kind of create a field of comfort, and a field of safety so that people can actually share their opinions.
PIPPA: Indeed, and I think it's a very wise and clever strategy. Now, as a person who lived in Europe most of my adult life, in London and Paris, this does not play well. They're like, the guy's a complete idiot. But they're not understanding that it's a style that's meant to evoke more truth than you would get otherwise, especially if you carry a family name as heavy as Bush.
AUBREY: Well, anytime there's power, there's a distortion field created around the power. I mean, I spent so much time with Joe Rogan, before he was even the Joe Rogan that he was now, but he was still very powerful. And I would watch people approach him and the distortion field of power that he had, some people would just completely crumble. I'd be like, "What the fuck happened to you?" And it actually got to the point where I was like, I don't trust anybody to bring around him, other than the people who were my closest inner family. Because I watch people who are really solid, then get near him and just--
PIPPA: "Oh, my God!".
AUBREY: Spaz out.
PIPPA: Yeah. It’s a real thing.
AUBREY: And then he would look at them and look at me, like, what's wrong with your friend? It's like, I don't know. I'm sorry, I didn't expect that.
PIPPA: It's a character test.
AUBREY: It is a character test.
PIPPA: It's literally a character test to be around that much power. And I don't know why, but maybe because I grew up in Washington, DC. One neighbor is literally a senator, and what I see as a kid is he doesn't know how to start the lawnmower. So to me, all these folks are just people.
AUBREY: And that's I think, when you have some exposure to it, and you also don't have, deeply, unaddressed, unregulated kind of character desires and shadow desires and kind of issues with power yourself, then it's just like, "Hey, what's up?"
PIPPA: Exactly
AUBREY: And so, there were also those examples of people, again, the most powerful person I was around was Rogan. But I also have many other powerful friends. And you'll see, the people who are actually really solid, they thrive in those conditions, and it's just laughs and a good time. And, then there's other people who have issues with it that just start to get destabilized.
PIPPA: Well, and humor is a really important tool when you're in these super high pressure environments. The White House by nature is the most high pressure environment that I think can exist other than a warzone. Every single decision that the President has to make is, by nature, incredibly difficult and will be incredibly consequential. Because otherwise it would have been addressed at a lower level of government. It only rises to that level because it's so heavy. So, everybody's--
AUBREY: I understand. It's like the CEO role magnified to its ultimate potential, right? I've been the executive of Onnit, which is a big, huge company that I found, and we had 300 employees and whatever. You start to learn how everything gets handled. And then when you need to handle something, you handle it, and when you handle the big picture stuff. But imagining a 340-million-person country, that's actually the leading country in many of the West, and pretty much for most of the western world, we're leading economic policy, we're leading social policy, and in a lot of different ways. That's a whole other ballgame.
PIPPA: And that's why, for me, it was so impressive, I have to tell you. He read every word that I ever wrote for him. Certainly before 9/11, I had the wonderful opportunity to actually sit with him and do the briefings really frequently. And he used to open the meeting with, "Pippa, why is there a typo in this memo to me?" And I'd be like, "Oh, shoot, darn. He's found the typo." And the honest answer is because well, we're all exhausted, and want to go to sleep, and everything's urgent. But what's important is he read everything, and he was in my experience completely on it. I never once saw him not prepared. NAnd I do think at the time, the media, they just disliked him for a whole bunch of reasons. Although these days, it's hilarious, because all those people who hated him then, they're like, could you bring him back now because he's like the last reasonable Republican that we've seen? And he always said that, he said, history will judge this presidency, and none of us will know how it's really going to go until years from now, or maybe after we're dead. So we have to be sure about the steps we're taking and confident in our thought process and sure of the convictions. And we'll still have an error rate. And he was well aware that there would still be an error rate. And I think there is. I'll just say one last thing about him, which I think is relevant today. And that is, there's a kind of spectrum of types of presidents. Again, I've talked to my dad for many hours about this, because he worked for so many of them. And I've been an adviser to the British cabinet and been around, and to some other nation's prime ministers. So I've seen a lot of them from different perspectives. And bottom line, you have at one end of that spectrum, your academic intellectual type, that's Jimmy Carter. I would argue Obama fell at that end of the spectrum. And at the other end, you have your CEO decision maker type, they're very different. The academic intellectual says I need to read everything on this subject myself. So their inbox is massive, and their outbox is small, and the whole system slows down. Because what's the point of writing memos and stuff if you know that nobody's going to make a decision, except ultimately, the president, but they've got to spend all the time reading everything. So, everybody stops working, basically. The other end, the CEO approach is Ronald Reagan, George W. and their inbox is very small, and their outbox is very big. And they say, look, I don't have time to read all this stuff, but I trust you, my staff. And I trust that you've done all the work, because the future depends on you doing this work. So tell me you've done this. And by the way, you wouldn't even be here, if he didn't have full confidence that you were doing all the necessary work. So he's going to say, I trust you guys, and bring me the core things that we really need to decide about, and at least three positive options for every difficult decision. And I think that the error rate for the two types is actually the same, their output is very different. But all of them make errors. And by the way, I put Bill Clinton in the middle, he was kind of both. He could make executive decisions, but he also quite liked getting into the details. So it's not that one is right or wrong. It's just the styles are very different. And because he was a CEO type, he got a lot of criticism from the media for not being a thinker. I don't think that was the case at all. And I don't think that being a thinker necessarily gets you that much further ahead, given how much it slows the system down. So the question is, what are the core values that you really represent? Because that's the driving force. And in the end, you elect the president--
AUBREY: That's the superstructure. The superstructure is based in, are you based in a field of value? And do you have that moral compass? Looking back at that, I think one of the things that we can see now is post 9/11, there was a lot of measures that opened up the surveillance state on our own people. And that's something that we're seeing now, at least many people are seeing. It's quite dangerous, because we see that the government doesn't appear to always have our best interests in mind. They want to know too much and they don't do things based on a field of value with the information that they know. And so, that happened under George W. We'll move on from this subject pretty soon, but what are your thoughts on that? Because that was a big blow to actually the sovereignty and kind of privacy of people when those acts were pushed through after 9/11.
PIPPA: Yeah, and I've personally written a lot about surveillance capitalism, and my concerns about it. This is a big subject for me. And I personally did work on some of that, some of the Patriot Act legislation, for example. So, let's back up a little bit too, because going into 9/11, we'd had 10 years of confusion about what were the real priorities on strategic security for the United States. Because the Soviet Union had gone away. And so, the question, where should we have tanks? Where should we have troops? Where should we deploy resources, was all up in the air. And I remember, there was a paper put out by, remember Gary Hart who was a presidential candidate for a brief period? There was something called the Rudman Hart Report. Senator Rudman and Senator Hart of two different parties. And they wrote this paper where they outlined every possible risk to the United States. And for 10 years, everybody had the list, but no one knew how to prioritize it. Then 9/11 happened and suddenly, everybody just agreed. Terrorism, that's the priority, and it jumped to the top of the list. Also, in my view, the decision about the location of the fight. And what everyone agreed on, left, right, young old was, if there's going to be a fight, it should not occur inside the United States, it should occur somewhere else. And then decisions were made to make sure that happened somewhere else, and we're going to have a big discussion about whether the right location was chosen or not. But that was the impetus behind it. And so, this line of thinking, naturally then gets you into surveillance, because you're looking for terrorists. And you're not assuming necessarily it's state-backed, you're looking for individuals. And so, it opened the door at a time when the technology also permitted greater surveillance. And the private sector was coming up with ways to profit from this as well, which of course, has only accelerated since that time. But the fundamental question of the human rights involved, still hasn't been addressed. And I think the deeper we go into this, the more we're going to need a kind of a digital bill, let's say a bill of human rights or a bill of digital human rights, maybe is the way to put it. Because you're right, there are sovereign issues involved. And most people say to me, well, I have nothing to hide. And I'm like, well, this isn't about whether you've broken laws. This is literally about what you consume and where you live, your zip code.
AUBREY: Yeah, they're probably saying that as they've microdosed LSD, and like, "Really, you got nothing to hide? What's going on?"
PIPPA: I hear you, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about somebody who's not even crossing any of those lines. But they don't realize that the algorithms are all about finding correlations. So, for example, and I won't stand by this as a case. But I'm told by people who are doing polling and surveys, that apparently, if you eat blueberry; blueberry ice cream, blueberry yogurt, this tends to indicate you lean Republican. But this is crazy. Eating blueberries has nothing to do with my political opinion. Yes, but it seems it's statistically more--
AUBREY: There's a correlation?
PIPPA: There's a correlation. So decisions start to get made about you--
AUBREY: That's a real thing? This blueberry thing is real?
PIPPA: I'm told that it is. I'm told that it is. I'll give you a better example actually. Let's talk about ice cream. Now, I know this from talking to some of the biggest banks in the world, their chief technology officers. So, they now because of the deal between Google and MasterCard, and because of the ability to see into your social media profiles, if banks want to, they can start to assess all your behaviors. So, how many people have ordered Uber Eats Ben and Jerry's ice cream at midnight? Probably a lot. You do that and what it correlates to is emotional instability. And so, the bank can start to see when a divorce is coming in a family before you know you're going to get divorced, because one of the partners is ordering Uber Eats ice cream at midnight, and the other one keeps being on business trips, for example. So what do they do? Some of them have decided not to use this data, but some of them start to draw down the credit limit of the lower earning partner in anticipation of a divorce that they don't know is coming. Then that lower earning partner, which usually is the woman, she realizes I am getting divorced, I need to get a job. She goes to apply. The HR departments are also looking at this profile and seeing Ubers Eats, ice cream midnight, mentally maybe not so stable. You never hear from them. It's not that they tell you you're rejected, you just never hear back.
AUBREY: I mean, this is like a very mild version of the Minority Report reality dystopia that we're talking about?
PIPPA: It's super dangerous. It's super dangerous. And so this is the thing–
AUBREY: Digital dictatorship is.
PIPPA: Yeah. So, I think there should be a way to say that everyone should have a right to see the lens through which organizations are viewing you and making decisions about you.
AUBREY: Yeah, open up transparency through all the optics, which then becomes like a value. It's like actually going back to the values. And we were talking earlier about RFK, and I liked that you brought in Tolkien, and that's part of your, because what I see him as, I see him as Return of The King. I mean, I feel like he's The Return of the King of Gondor. And what is Gondor? Gondor is the kingdom of the humans that has, because of politics and power, been split and been corrupted by different forces, the forces of Saruman. Very close to the name Ahriman. But just, there's so many interesting Tolkien was dialed. Tolkien was fucking--
PIPPA: Tolkien was totally dialed.
AUBREY: He was dialed in. But then there's the Return of the King, and what is the king stand for? He stands for the good, the true, the beautiful, the right. And it's not that he's the only king. It's just that he stands for the king returning, which is the king, meaning value, meaning truth, meaning transparency, meaning trust, meaning honor, meaning all of these different things. And so, we're in this interesting place now, where a lot of things have started sliding and drifting in areas that are disturbing at the very least. I mean, your discussion about ice cream and credit scores, it's disturbing.
PIPPA: It is.
AUBREY: But without truth and transparency, and something to set ablaze all of these different clandestine programs that are running and just allow sunlight in on them, we're going to start to get manipulated without our awareness.
PIPPA: Totally. So, you know Frank Zappa, the musician. So, he had a lovely thing he said. He said, progress comes from deviating from the norm. We can't get progress if we don't deviate from the norm. So, what we have today is a whole bunch of algorithms and observation systems that basically penalize us for deviating from the norm. As an example, I have never been a morning person my whole life. I have what they call a late chronotype.
AUBREY: High five!
PIPPA: Oh, good. I didn't know that. How amazing. See, now I would not have guessed that given your focus on health and everything.
AUBREY: Well, here we are.
PIPPA: Well, here we are. Exactly. So, but the algorithms and the correlations basically deem a woman of my age who is not doing a run in the morning, is indicative of someone whose health won't be great. Now, the fact that I like to do my exercise in the afternoon is such an outlier. It doesn't fall into the normal behavior--
AUBREY: Yeah, I was playing pickleball with my wife at 11:30pm last night.
PIPPA: There you go. See, I would love that.
AUBREY: That's great. It was great.
PIPPA: After dinner...
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. It was cooler, we had the lights on.
PIPPA: I hear you, I love that. But, we live in a world where I think of these algorithms as, they're like sheepdogs, and they're literally corralling you into ever smaller pens of what is in your newsfeed because you will only get to see the news on the subjects that you've clicked on. If you haven't clicked on subjects, it assumes you're not interested and it moves it away. And that creates its own problems with what is going on in the world. So many people are clueless about the whole subject matter. Space is my favorite at the moment.
AUBREY: It creates bubbles.
PIPPA: Bubbles. So, I think this is another piece of this puzzle about the digital world is that you need to keep breaking your own norms. You need to click on things you don't usually click on, widen out what comes into you. But also, how are you ever going to test becoming a new person and coming into a new better self, if you don't do things you haven't done before? And if the system starts to penalize you for nonconventional behavior, then we lose that capacity for, the lack of deviating from the norm means lack of capacity for progress.
AUBREY: Yeah, the forces that we're talking about, I think a lot of people externalize them, but really they're internal. Every decision that you're making is either allowing you to break free from your own patterns, allowing you to claim freedom and sovereignty within yourself, or actually enslaving you into a system that wants to enslave you. The battle is fought not in some place somewhere, and this is what we were also referencing earlier. We are now in another world war. And the war is not the wars of the trenches, and the tanks, and the planes. And while there may be certain little bursts of kinetic warfare that occur, we're in a war of ideas, this is Ragnarök. This is the war of the gods. The gods being the ideas, the stories, understandings of how we want to live in this world, what is the world we want to create, and live and abide in.
PIPPA: Exactly. And I love this whole concept. One of the things you and I kind of met over and talked about was an idea that I've been playing with, which I've called cosmopoiesis. And cosmopoiesis is a word I found in a dictionary. I'm such a nerd girl. Like as a kid, I was rifling through the dictionary looking for interesting words. And I found this word. And because of my mom working so closely with Tolkien, I recognized it immediately. What it is, is the act of world building. And actually, that is what we as humans do in our greatest. So, what is the world that we're creating, either for ourselves in our own individual lives and with our families and our communities, but also for the country? What's the vision? So, I'm working on a book on the subject, and I'm using a few examples. Some are ones that people know. Steve Jobs said, we don't make computers. We're building a world where bright people don't have to think about their computers. We're creating a world. You can tell the difference between an Apple person and an Android person in a heartbeat, right? Because they're wearing it, they're in it, their whole life is occupied in that space. I like the story about Phil Knight. He envisaged a world where running was a thing at a time when it wasn't. And it wasn't just that he wanted people to be able to run. And so, he literally was pouring rubber into the waffle iron in the kitchen, and then putting it on the bottom of a shoe to see if he could create a physical something. Actually--
AUBREY: Phil Knight, founder of Nike?
PIPPA: He and his colleague. Yes, the founder of Nike. He and his colleagues were both doing this together. But what he really did was, he said, I want to create a world where a person can be a weekend warrior, where somebody doesn't get rewarded because they won the race, but because they've entered, right? I mean, in a way that's an origin story of your whole world in the health and fitness space. He created a new kind of human. This world creation is about, it's not so much about imposing your view. It's about creating a space where others can bring their imagination. And even today, I think Nike excels at, it's a space where other people design shoes, right? Nike doesn't design all those shoes. They just bought a digital shoe company to bring further ideas in about what kind of shoes do people want. They're designing them online all the time.
AUBREY: Yeah, the idea of building this world, you can expand it to actually the literal, what is the world we want to build. But we actually get to live in the world based on the ethics and the value. The scaffolding of the world we build are the processes, the initiations, the practices, the rules of which that world abides by. So, if you create a fantastical world, you set the rules of the world like Tolkien. In this world, there are dragons and these dragons have these particular powers. In this world, there's these wizards and the wizards have this particular power, and Balrogs have this particular power. You just create the field, you create the field, and then you create a story based upon that field. And I think we're also able to create a field, like what's the world we want to live in, even amongst, even in this real world. It's actually a big part of, we throw a festival called Arkadia. It's a festival for a more beautiful world. And what we're trying to do there and what we successfully did last year, is actually create an ethos similar to Burning Man actually, but different in that, this is a world that you step into that has different inter relational dynamics. It has a different way in which you're really celebrating life, communication, vulnerability, expression, joy, ecstasis. But doing it all bound not within this kind of internal hedonistic loop, but also like, I'm screaming in pleasure to the cosmos as gratitude for this world that the cosmos has given us. And also my ecstatic joy is a battle hymn to make sure that this world is a place where we can scream in ecstatic joy. And so, you start to build in this world and it really sets in Arkadia. Arkadia had like an energy in Las Vegas where it was like, whoa. Everybody who was in there was like, if you were in Arkadia, you were in Arkadia. You weren't in Las Vegas, you were in Arkadia. And for a little while, you got to step into a new world. It was a cosmo poiesis of Arkadia that we got to build. And it's really fucking cool. And you can do that with your family, you can do that with a festival, you can do that. And then eventually we do that with the whole world.
PIPPA: Absolutely. And this is, again, why I think Robert F. Kennedy is very interesting to watch. Some of the power he's expressing is he has a cosmo poetic view. So for example, Donald Trump talked about Make America Great Again. Robert F. Kennedy is, Let's Make Americans Great. It's a big difference. And it is resonating. And you're right. I got invited to Burning Man. I went for the first time last year. And part of the reason I went is that I understood, they have created a world. And that particular world is also from an economist's point of view, really fascinating, because there's no money. It's not based on that. It's based on ancient principles of sharing and giving. And I was like, I need to see this live, how does this actually work? And I came away feeling like some of the constructs of how the modern world economy works or choices we've made, we don't have to do it that way. We could do it in some other, it helped inspire my creativity around, what would the world economy look like?
AUBREY: And again, it's also part of stepping out of the pattern. If you want to actually learn things and break out of the patterns of Your ordinary life, go to Burning Man, go to Arkadia, step out of the pattern of your normal--
PIPPA: I want to come to Arkadia.
AUBREY: Yeah, come on.
PIPPA: Oh, I'm in. 100%.
AUBREY: Let's go, let's go. But step out of this ordinary kind of pattern that you're in, and step into something new, learn what you can from that. And then adapt and evolve and transform your existing world with the findings that you have, that you've gathered from these new worlds.
PIPPA: Exactly. And this is also the same thing that ultimately has to happen in geopolitics. And we're at a very stressed moment in that realm. Without any doubt, we have the superpowers effectively, in my opinion, at war. I've argued that, I think I wrote my first Substack column in, yeah, let's see, it was in 2021, January, February. And I said, we're already in World War III. But people don't recognize that we are because this is, you say, it's not going to be a traditional kinetic battle, although it is in Ukraine. But it's much bigger than that. And we're now able to see how much bigger, although I'd love to talk to you a little bit about what this thing does look like. But to resolve it, there's only one way and that is to have a cosmo poetic vision of the future. And I don't see how you can get resolution unless you have one that makes a space for China, and a space for Russia, and a space for Ukraine, and a space for the United States. Because this business of saying, well, just cancel a country, that's not working. Because you can't just cancel China, right? A billion people are not going to just go away. We have to find a way that--
AUBREY: It's interesting that you're using that language because it is kind of the same thing, right?
PIPPA: It's totally the same thing.
AUBREY: Like cancel China. What? Good luck. Good luck.
PIPPA: So, all of these people need to have a future where they believe they will have a better life. We have to find a way to deliver a better life to all of them. So, how can we do that? And the thing is, we have done it before. We've repeatedly done it before. My dad, by the way, he and I have had these wonderful conversations about this subject. I'm like, "Dad, how did you resolve the Cold War? How did the Cuban missile crisis..." And when Nixon sent Kissinger to Beijing, he sent my dad to Moscow to open the dialogue with the Russians then. So he's really been at the heart of this a long time. And he said, "It always ends the same way. It always ends in a hug." I'm like, what do you mean, it always ends in a hug? He said, "Look at the pictures. There you see Nixon and Brezhnev hugging in the photograph. You see Reagan and Gorbachev, they're hugging in the photograph." Now, I'm not saying that President Biden and President Putin are going to hug, but I would put money that their successors will. I would put money that their successors will, because whatever the resolution is, in a way, you have to have that hug. Because it's a visual expression of it's over.
AUBREY: Yeah, hug it out.
PIPPA: Hug it out.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's the coming together. So, when you say that we're already in World War III, you said you wanted to talk about that more and expand. So, let's take the time to double-click on that. We know that the resolution of World War III is a lot of hugging it out. A lot of hugging it out. So we got the end of the story. The end of the story is we're hugging it out. The other end of the story is not a story we want to talk about, like the end of the story is we're hugging it out. But in the meantime, here we are, World War III, what's going on?
PIPPA: So I would back up prior to the Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine. Roughly 50 days before that, there was a very important incident that happened inside the Arctic Circle that most people have not clocked. And basically, there's the fastest internet connection in the world is on this tiny little island that belongs to Norway called Svalbard. And people are like, why do you have the fastest internet connection in this obscure remote place? And the answer is, because virtually every high altitude satellite, whether commercial or military, connects to Earth at Svalbard. And so, by cutting that cable, and somebody did cut the cable and took away about, I don't know exactly, but more than five miles of it. Okay, so it wasn't like hit it in one place, and no, maybe it was a rock. No, they cut it in two places and took five miles of it away.
AUBREY: These are underground underwater cables?
PIPPA: Yeah. Which is what the global internet really operates are underwater cables. And by the way, we've been in nothing but underwater internet cable warfare since, with cables being cut all over the place. But this one was really important because it was a signal. And it was assumed that it was the Russians. And it was a signal that they could cut off not only our missile guidance, because all missile guidance operates through satellites. So without your satellite connection, you can hit the button, but nothing's going to happen. So this is of great strategic importance. But also frankly, it's kind of well, no more Uber Eats either, right?
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PIPPA: I mean, people are like, well, I don't care about missile guidance. Yeah, but you care about Uber Eats, right? GPS, this is all satellite based. It still has to connect to Earth somehow or another. So this event already to me signaled this is much bigger than what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. Ukraine is a symptom of a much larger problem. It's also a problem that we see Russia and China aligned. The US had never really thought too deeply about the possibility that we'd face both superpowers simultaneously. That changed everything. And then I started to see the landscape of this thing. So just to flesh it out. If we look at it, if we step back, and we understand it's not just Ukraine, the reason the media writes about Ukraine, and I've talked to a lot of the editors of the major newspapers around the world about this. They say we report Ukraine because it's the old rule. If it bleeds, it leads. If there are dead or displaced humans, that's a story. Internet cables in the Arctic Circle, show me, there's no dead person, there's no human interest, there's no body. That's not a story. And it's technology. People think electricity comes out of the plug in the wall, and they think the internet is just there. So, the idea that it's connected to a cable somewhere, this is already too technically complicated to explain to anyone. I'm like, okay. But this is crazy, right? So, what I began to understand is, okay, how is this fight really occurring outside of Ukraine, which is getting all the time, all the airtime and all the focus? Well, for example, Russia and China have been very aligned in Africa. And much of the fighting that's happening in the Sahara, they call it the Sahel conflict, is the Wagner group, which we now know more about, but we didn't so much then. But it was effectively President Putin's private army. And when we assess, by the way, the Russian economy, and what's its capacity to remain in the war in Ukraine, everybody always looks at the Russian economy. And I'm like, that's not the economy to look at. It's the President Putin economy, and his private army, and they're gathering assets from Africa. Gold, minerals, controlling the Libyan oil fields pretty much. And you see countries starting to give them assets. Like recently, the Sudan gave the Russians a military capable port on the Red Sea. These are all strategically very important events. In addition, we see China, very focused on the Pacific. There's basically a contest for who will have the most influence with all these tiny little Pacific Islands. And you may say, well, who cares about these tiny little Pacific islands? Well, China's done a deal with the Solomon Islands to put a military base. And that is kind of in between Australia, and China. So, of tremendous strategic value and importance. The US is now building a second military base on Guam, which is considered kind of our forward military positioning in the Pacific. If there were ever to be a conflict over Taiwan, Guam would be where it happens from. So now we're building a second Guam on a little island called Tinian, just south of it, which will be much more sophisticated, much bigger, much more capable. And that means two. So, this jockeying in the Pacific and Africa, these are never reported as part of what's happening. But when I look at it that way, I'm like, we have more countries involved in this fight between the superpowers than we did at the start of World War II. But the way it's happening is through more subtle mechanisms that the press doesn't report for various reasons. And the final frontier of this is definitely space. And in my judgment, we have been at war in space amongst the superpowers for quite a while, at least five or six years. And maybe that was the run up to what happened in Ukraine. Maybe our space warfare basically spilled over into a land conflict as well. So just a couple of examples of that. NWe've had several incidents where the Russians destroyed their own satellites in space. Now, you can't really get upset with them for this because it's their own. But by blowing up and destroying a 4000-pound satellite, you create a massive debris field. They refer to it as the Kessler effect, which some people describe as razor blades in a washing machine. It's what has caused the International Space Station to be nearly evacuated a couple of times was because of this Russian debris field. Now, what was the purpose of that? The purpose is at least in part, to deny us the ability to use those orbits. It's a denial of use strategy in a world where we are in a proper race now as to who gets to the moon first, and who builds the most powerful infrastructure in space. And so, this space warfare--
AUBREY: Who gets to the moon first? I mean, we've played that game before. What are your thoughts on that game?
PIPPA: Well, okay, so to be really crystal clear, we are at a once-in-a-species moment, where we are not going back to step on the moon, we're going back to stay and to build, and to build launch pads, and to move from the moon into the further reaches of space. Right now, there is a massive race between the United States and China as to who builds the first military base on the moon. Both sides keep bringing the target date forward. It was like 2036, then it's like 2032, and now it's in the late 2020s. The militarization of space is definitely underway. And in fact, I'm working on a documentary right now on the subject. And it's important to understand why this is happening. It's, in my opinion, largely because we can solve so many of our earthbound problems with space-based solutions. And there are three specifically. Number one is space-based solar power, which is basically putting mirrors on satellites that catch the sun's rays, you convert them into radio waves, and then ship it to, basically arrives at Earth, and you can have unlimited electricity in the power grid anytime, anywhere. And this is no longer hypothetical. Caltech has proven it works, Airbus has proven it works. It is happening. And I think we are probably only three or four years away from seeing live prototypes.
AUBREY: Yeah, because on a terrestrial solar system, you have clouds, you have weather patterns, you have all kinds of different things. But out there in space, you can just plant something in direct sunlight, unobstructed by any ozone layers, or anything else. Pure power from the sun. And if you can find a way to store that and transmit that, of course.
PIPPA: No brainer. But unlimited power, whoever gets there first is so far ahead of everyone else. So, there's a race to see who will get to space-based solar power first. So, the Saudis are backing a big project with the British over the North Sea right now. The US is going full flight into this. China's going fast as they can. So that's one. Number two is, and it sounds more science fiction, but I assure you it's in play, is the mining of asteroids. So, think about it as access to all of the things we need to make an MRI scanner, or an iPhone or a fighter jet.
AUBREY: You're talking about lithium and different minerals.
PIPPA: Cobalt, lithium, silicon. Much higher grade than you find on Earth as well, it seems. And, gold and iron and other things. In fact, there's a really fascinating asteroid called Psyche. You've got to look at Psyche and the Psyche mission from NASA, which is going to launch in October. They think the value of the assets on Psyche is literally so valuable that if you distributed the proceeds to every human being, every human on Earth would be a billionaire.
AUBREY: So, this was the premise of Don't Look Up, right? They were like, this is too valuable, it's going to strike the Earth, but we're going to mine it first. And then we're going to, obviously, they had a dystopian view of how that was going to work out. It didn't work out. But there was some grain of truth in that fiction, art mirroring reality, and that there are actually mineral rich and asset rich asteroids.
PIPPA: There are. So, recently, NASA had its DART mission, where the headline was super Hollywood. The headline was, “NASA can save Earth from asteroids, because it can break it up into pieces”. But I think the real underlying story is--
AUBREY: Wait, what happened? We can now--
PIPPA: We can break up asteroids.
AUBREY: We can do the Armageddon? We can be Bruce Willis and fucking blow that shit up? We can do that now?
PIPPA: It depends on the size, but yeah.
AUBREY: All right! Hurray!
PIPPA: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
AUBREY: Hurray!
PIPPA: But I think the real issue is that means they can break an asteroid into smaller pieces to harvest the mineral content.
AUBREY: Oh, okay. No, that makes more sense.
PIPPA: And in fact, the first transaction of space mining--
AUBREY: Like saving humanity or getting some money? Definitely I trust that people if they can get money first, and then save humanity as a side effect, they'll--
PIPPA: Well, hopefully we can do both at once. But, what's important is, what if we didn't have to rip Earth up anymore for stuff in the ground? Because after all, space-based solar power means you won't need hydrocarbons. You won't need gas and oil in the way that we have needed in the past. Asteroid mining means you won't have to depend on child labor for the cobalt that's in your iPhone. So, these are huge game changers for Earth, and very positive. The third piece, by the way, is interplanetary internet, which I know sounds just so crazy. But there's a company right now already building the first truly interplanetary internet between here and the moon, what they call cislunar space. It's called Auria, and it's a Google spinoff. So, that infrastructure is already being created. And why does it matter for Earth? It means we're going to have world class internet, anywhere, anytime, which means not only can you work from anywhere, but you can monitor assets from anywhere. So, the value of the world economy goes up. But also it means we can monitor Earth as a whole with much more precision and clarity to understanding what's going right or what's going wrong. Now, these three things together, whoever gets there first will be so far ahead of any other nation that I think it will dramatically change the geopolitics here on Earth. And so, this space race, and it's spilling over into earthbound events like the Svalbard cable cut, this is telling us that this World War III is, it is in motion, even if we don't see it. Because space, there are no journalists in space. It's all classified most of the time. But you get these dribs and drabs of stories that appear in the media and you begin to realize there's a fight, there's a race. And so, what I'm trying to do is explain this in this documentary and say, how ironic that just as we are reaching, and may get the abundance we need to save Earth, this could be what triggers a hell of a fight between the superpowers. And how do we get the abundance without the fight? And after all, if we have all these resources, what are we fighting over?
AUBREY: Well, this is the genesis of what this kind of Empire mindset is, which comes from a place of fear. Fear of pain, fear of lack, fear of scarcity. And so, you can see it, and it's actually quite innocent at the beginning. It's like, I'm afraid. But if I have more power, if I have more money, I'll be safe. And if I can control the situation, I can control the variables, I'll be safe. Of course, we do that when we go down, that's buckling your seatbelt, you're controlling variables to try and make yourself safe. But then fear starts to propagate and starts to get momentum and more momentum and more momentum. You never actually feel safe until you have absolute control, because you have absolute fear, fear starts to escalate. So your fear gets out of control. I'll never be safe unless I have absolute control. And so you just keep ramping this thing up. And what's missing, then, is actually shifting over cosmo poetically, to a different world, a different world where there's actually a faith. Like, no, actually, we're held, and we have support, and are loved--
PIPPA: And we have enough.
AUBREY: We have enough and we're loved in the cosmos. And yeah, there may be some hardship, but it's just, that's the real war that I see. It's a war of scarcity, there's never going to be enough, we have to control everything. There's only going to be one winner, we have to dominate, we have to hold all the power, we have to do all that. Or, actually, there's plenty. Infinity of power is God and it already exists, and we're all participating in that anyways. And if everybody just relaxes, we're going to make it through this thing together.
PIPPA: So there's a project that I'm working on, it's super interesting. It was an idea that originated in NASA. And there's a small group of people, some former NASA folks. And I know this again, sounds a little crazy. But the idea is to answer this question, in this once-in-a-species moment, should the first institution that humanity creates off this planet, should it be A) A military base? B) A mining company? Or C) something else? I think we all know the answer. So, we're working on the creation of a lunar university that will lead with our most universal language, which is art. And some people are like, that's really corny, art. And I'm like, you know what won the Cold War? Rock'n'roll and Levi's. Culture is always what we come together over. So, we've got a project, which I will be announcing where we want every human being on Earth to go to our website, and literally put an artwork that either you have made or one that you deem is the way we should show up, and upload it. And it's going to go up on the first Artemis, the first manned mission to the moon in 50 years, the Artemis mission. And why? Because this old idea of I got there first and put my flag there, so it's mine, you're like, didn't we just try to start fixing that whole approach that we took for the last few 100 years here on earth? Why are we exporting that into space? Is this really the right way to progress? Or is this something that all of humanity should have a voice in? And I'm especially interested in indigenous communities that have always had stories about humanity's relationship with celestial bodies. And it's fascinating when I sit down with people from those communities, you know what they asked me? First thing, they'll say, "Has anyone asked the moon's permission?" I'm like, "That's such an interesting thought process." But also, given how much this planet depends on that object, the moon, do we really want to be hacking into it? How are we thinking about this? And what are we bringing back? And what are we doing? But on the other hand, I see the technology. And I will go so far as to say that one of the things we're going to see in the next few years is the development of manufacturing in space, on the moon and in orbit. And in fact, the first space factory went up a few weeks ago, from a company called Varta, which is making pharmaceuticals in space. Basically, drugs in space. Why? Because there are lots of things you can do in zero gravity that you can't do in gravity. Manufacturing of fiber optics, very high grade fiber optics is one of them. Turns out a lot of pharmaceuticals and drugs, they won't meld in gravity, but they will in zero gravity. And I see a whole bunch more. So, I can see this universe we're in, suddenly, this is a whole new economy that is being built, the infrastructure is being put in place. And on the other hand, I see the danger, that this becomes something we'll fight over, and something where we're not thinking in this holistic way, in a sort of more spiritual way that ancient human civilization says, is the way we should be thinking about this.
AUBREY: And our hearts know that we should be thinking about this. So, it's almost a race to see if we can get our consciousness, and our love, and our communitas to actually meet our technological capacity. And so, these efforts that everybody's here. So, if everybody's listening, like, what the fuck do we do? We have to elevate our ability to love, forgive, see each other, at the same pace and dramatic escalation that the technological advances are coming. And that's why if you feel pressure right now, I know so many people around me are like really feeling an intense, transformational crucible that they're in, in spiritual communities, in lots of different communities, it's because what is being asked of us now, is we're being asked to meet the external advancements in technology and what's happening with the existential universe of both risk and opportunity, with internal transformation that can be equally as big and vast. And I think that's part of the psychedelic renaissance, I think it's part of so many things that are converging to help us to just maybe barely make it if we give it our best.
PIPPA: So beautifully put. So beautifully put, yeah.
AUBREY: All right, so then there's another whole, so there's two areas I want to double-click on. One is on economics in general. But since we've already been talking about space, we've got to talk about aliens. Because this is going to become a part of our world. This is happening. This is not, I wonder if in our lifetime, there'll be, no, we're entering a time where there's going to be actually acknowledged, and this is going to be a real fucking factor. It feels like we're just getting warmed up. We're getting warmed up for the moment where everybody just says, "Hey, by the way, we're not alone."
PIPPA: I think this has already happened. It's amazing that it has already happened. So, let me back up on the subject. Just to be clear, I literally would have laughed out loud if you told me that I would be talking about this subject five years ago. Even three years ago, when people started coming to me, people from my network and the public policy world, I guess because I'm a former presidential advisor. And they started to say, you've got to watch this. Something big is going on. I was like, what? And then I started to look at it and realize something very, very big is going on. So, let's go back and understand kind of how did this happened. And the angle or the lens that I'm taking is one of leadership issues. My last two books were on leadership failures, and why they're happening so frequently and across multiple domains. Not just in politics, but the corporate world and communities. We have so many leadership failures occurring. How and why was my question. So, when I looked at this, I'm like, oh, this is potentially a real leadership challenge and room for a massive failure. Because if government's known about something and not told us, this is going to be hard to navigate out of while retaining trust. And who has the highest trust of all institutions? It is the military. So that's a pretty big thing to damage. That's kind of how I began to look at it. There are many starting points. Some people want to go back to Roswell, there's a whole bunch of starting points. For me, the starting point is when Navy pilots started to say we're seeing these things all the time, like daily. And they knew that if they went to their bosses and said, we're seeing crazy stuff, they'd literally just yank their pilot's license and they would lose their careers. So, a number of them, and some of them are actually testifying in Congress certainly. David Fravor, Ryan Graves. They basically started to say, okay, let's triangulate on the stuff with our most sophisticated sensors. And let's face it, the sensors have become ever, cameras and sensors have become ever more sophisticated. So they use things like infrared, FLIR cameras, radar, plus very respected pilot eyes. And when all the data converged, that yes, indeed, there is something there and yes, indeed, it's moving at speeds that are inexplicable in modern physics. And they're seeing it. Now it's no longer in imagination, this is definitely a thing. But then if they take that to the Pentagon and say, look, here's the thing, the Pentagon's still going to yank their pilot's license. So they go, let's take it to them, and I think Ryan Graves was the person who really led this, he went, let's take it to them and say it's a health and safety issue. That it's dangerous for our pilots, because then they can't ignore it, which is true. And that led to five years of private hearings in Congress. That's when I started to really notice the issue. I should have double checked myself, because Congress is not going to hold five years of hearings on a subject unless there's something there. But I was still saying, "Oh, really?" So five years of private hearings, followed by one session of public hearings, followed by legislation. This is where it starts to really get sticky, legislation. And the legislation basically says Congress is demanding that all arms of the US government hand over whatever they've got on the subject. They have to appoint groups of very acclaimed scientists to study what the heck is this thing. And then they did a whistleblower protection. Because of course, if you're in the military, and you have non-disclosure agreements up to here, you come forward and reveal anything, they're going to put you in a military tribunal, and you're going to be thrown in the clink for like 20 years. No one will ever even hear your name. So they had to make a whistleblower protection so that these people could come forward. And more recently, they've realized--
AUBREY: And that passed? That legislation passed. The Whistler Protection?
PIPPA: Yeah, the Whistleblower Protection went into play last year. And that's why suddenly, surprise, surprise, we have whistleblowers, which I'll come to in a second. And then they realized actually, we have to get protections to the government contractors. So they're not officially government employees, but they're contracted to the US government and get them protection as well. And then most recently and wildly, Senator Schumer has put forward a piece of legislation amendment, which uses the phrase non-human intelligence 22 times. 22 times. So when you asked me, when are they going to tell us? I'm like, okay, so, given that whole background, here's what's happened. We've had a White House press conference with Admiral Kirby, just in the last few weeks where one of the press corps, and this is just not anybody. This is the White House press corps. One of them asked him and said, there's kind of this crazy thing, people are talking about UAPs over at the Pentagon, isn't that sort of a little nuts?

AUBREY: What's a UAP?
PIPPA: Unidentified anomalous phenomena these days. It used to be unidentified aerial phenomena, which is the new version of a UFO. And Admiral Kirby responds, saying, why would we be creating a whole new division of the Pentagon, and deeply looking into this issue if we thought it was nothing? So, you go from a world where the reaction of government is, don't be ridiculous, to a world where the media says, of course, this is ridiculous. And the White House says, "You don't be ridiculous. This is real." We've also had, and I can't remember his name right off the top of my head. But we've had someone senior from the Air Force do a pentagon briefing where he said, UAPs are real and they are worldwide. I mean, basically, NASA, which gave a really long press conference where they actually hemmed and hawed and said very little, but they did acknowledge UAPs are real. So, virtually every part of government has now acknowledged. Avril Haines, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, has repeatedly said, this is real. So I'll finish by saying this, I'm with Senator Gillibrand who's really been leading the charge on this legislation. And by the way, it's one of the only pieces, only areas of legislation which is truly bipartisan, which I find just fascinating. Senator Rubio and Senator Gillibrand have really been at the forefront of this. So I'm with her and Richard Feynman, who's probably our most brilliant physicist of the last 100 years in the United States. He's no longer with us. But Senator Gillibrand basically said, look, we are in this World War III environment. She didn't phrase it this way. I'm paraphrasing her. But she's like, here we are with nuclear weapons being threatened by a superpower. We've got Chinese balloons coming over the United States. You guys cannot tell me. I don't know what it is. That answer is simply not good enough in this new environment. So get me an answer--
AUBREY: About the UAPs.
PIPPA: About the UAPs. She says, bring science to the subject. And I agree with her. And then Richard Feynman, he had that wonderful way of turning a phrase. And he says, I want to live in a world where science is not a body of knowledge. It's a way of asking questions.
AUBREY: Amen.
PIPPA: And I would rather have a world where I have, see if I can get it just exactly right. He said, I don't want to be in a world where there are questions I can't ask, and have bad answers. I'd rather have good questions and bad answers, than bad questions and good answers. So, this is that moment where we're being tested on our openness and our curiosity. And right now, because the mainstream media hasn't really reported on this very much, they did one article in 2017 which really cracked the whole subject open, but they're kind of avoiding it. And the real issue is, how many people from government have to tell you this is true? 22 times from Senator Schumer in one amendment. The White House, the Pentagon, the Director of National Intelligence, Congress, and NASA, have all said, this is real. And still everybody's going, "You don't think it's real deal, do you?
AUBREY: Well, the problem is there's a vacuum of trust from everybody who's in power. Nobody really trusts anybody anymore. And that's why I think RFK represents something different and could be woven into this piece and actually be the one to, so, I could hypothesize that if he's in Oval Office and he's the president, I know him, I know this man, I know his heart, I know his values, I know his commitment to truth. And if he knows about UAPs, and he looks at all the data, he gets the information, he will come out and say what he knows. And people will trust him because he's always telling the truth to the best of his ability. And it doesn't mean that he's 100% right all the time. Of course not. But he's the type of person who will admit when he's wrong. He's honest. It's an honest leader. And that's what we need to cut through this incredibly chaotic and confusing time. Honesty. Trust, honesty will work. Don't coddle us and imagine that we're so stupid, and we're so incapable of thinking for ourselves and making appropriate decisions that you have to tell us a lie just to control us. Trust us, tell us the truth. We can handle way more than you fucking think we can. We'll figure it out. But I think that attitude of honesty, that could kind of come through, if in that scenario that works out, I mean, it's a big deal. So, I think that's what needs to happen. Because right now, who knows who to trust anymore, because everybody seems to be captured and bought. People trust personalities, I think. Imagine the people listening on this podcast now, they trust me. The people who listen to Joe Rogan all the time, they probably trust him. And that's why the people probably trust Bobby like they do, Bobby Kennedy, because they've listened to him talk for hours with people.
PIPPA: Well, this comes into a whole subject I want to talk to you about which is the podcast presidency, which I think we're in. And every presidential election has a technology that underpins it. So, Bill Clinton won on TV, on Saturday Night Live playing the saxophone. That was the moment. President Obama was a YouTube president. President Trump was a Twitter president. And I think the next president is definitely going to be a podcast president. And I could see that clearly when I watched Joe Rogan's interview with RFK. And I realized, oh, boy, this changes everything. Because it's that old idea of Marshall McLuhan had back in the 60s, which is, the medium is the message. And so, the medium you're working in does define what the message is. So, in a podcast, first, because you have a long form, like what we're doing now, which is such a privilege to be able to talk at length and go into nuance and detail. And suddenly there's no pressure to have, what was the one line, that's the strap line for who this person is. It allows a candidate to show their breadth and depth of knowledge and which inculcates trust. And it's going to catch mainstream media completely wrong footed, because they think they have the control over the access to the public. But in fact, more people are listening to podcasts than they are watching traditional mainstream media.
AUBREY: Yeah, Joe Rogan's ratings blow away any other fucking every news channel in the world.
PIPPA: Everything. Plus, you get to choose your interviewer. So you no longer have this hostile interviewer situation unless you choose to have that. And I think that this is totally transformational. And maybe just to link it back, because I want to get a little deeper into the Are We Alone issue.
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure.
PIPPA: So I'll come back onto that. This is also a podcast moment where people are learning about this whole crazy subject through podcasts, rather than through the mainstream media. So, does it actually matter if mainstream media isn't really reporting it? I would argue, no, people are getting to it anyway. And so, to come back to the witnesses who are now coming forward, and the whistleblowers. Just to be clear on that, what I've been struck by, and I've met some of them personally, and talked to them. What I'm struck by is, these people, they're so highly regarded, they have such high security clearances, they are so deeply experienced in the subject matter. So for example, David Grusch, and I was astonished when he first came out, and there was all this conversation of, is this guy for real? Is he making it up? And I'm like, are you out of your mind, you want to go in front of Congress and testify on something that you're lying on? Because, again, you're going to be in the slammer for decades. You'd have to be out of your mind. But what's important is who was his lawyer as well. The first person to head up the internal reviews within the intelligence communities appointed by President Obama. I'm like, that guy isn't going to back him unless he's for real. And also, he's not whistleblowing against the Pentagon. He's whistleblowing with and for the Pentagon. Because Congress has said, Pentagon's got to handle over what they have on the subject, and the leaders in the Pentagon are going, "I don't know, we don't have anything." And Grusch is saying the institution does. But people further down, they have it and they're not giving it to the bosses. And so, that is what he's whistleblowing. Now this is where Robert Kennedy comes in, because the issue here could be viewed in a completely different lens, which is, this is about breaking open the black budgets of the Pentagon. Leaving aside the aliens' life, beyond humans. This is about bringing transparency to an institution that Congress has said should be, must be audited every year, they haven't been able to audit it for five years, because they can't track the money flows. Now, is it in the Pentagon's own best interest to do this? Yeah.
AUBREY: And then, one of the planes that crashed into the Pentagon happened to crash into the accounting department of that, which was also, I mean, a lot of conspiracy theories about that. But that was like, oh, we lost all the records. And maybe that was chance, or maybe that was who the fuck knows. But there's a lot of rabbit holes that you can go down with that. But yeah, this is a fucking issue. There is money that is going somewhere, that you can actually, if you put a little pressure into the system, you could actually unearth what is actually happening. Because I think you're probably right. I think a lot of the people are honest when they're being like, "I don't know anything about this." Because there's a deeper deep structure there that's kind of hidden, but that deep structure is still being fed by money. Which actually then speaks to, well, if there's a deep structure, then there is a deep state. And then who's a part of the deep structure and the deep hierarchy of the deep structure? So this gets really fucking interesting. It's not necessarily where I like to go and spend my time.
PIPPA: Me neither, me neither.
AUBREY: But there's something happening here that we're not aware of. And I think we all get the sense of that.
PIPPA: And it also ties into the ‘we're on World War III’, and everybody wants a technological advantage over the others. And if, well, it's not even ‘if’ anymore. We are being told that there are, I can't believe I'm saying this, it's so incredible, but that there are retrieved crafts that have been re-engineered, that we do have technologies that are a function of this. So, there's one group that clearly seems focused on getting this out, not because it's in humanity's interest to know that there's intelligence or non-human intelligence, as they're saying officially. But they want a technological edge over the Russians and the Chinese. Okay, that's one reason why you might want to do this. But is that the best reason? We can talk about that. Who wants to get at this because of the humanitarian question. Is that the right word? Because of the humanity question, which is the bigger question at hand. But at least this process is beginning to bring some transparency. And what's been fascinating is watching these super serious people spell it out, and have the general public go, "Oh, but no." And you're like, okay, what is it about all of us that we can't accept that something is happening here? They call it an ontological problem, it means a framework crisis. And one way--
AUBREY: One thing you've got to address is there's, last I looked, 2.2 billion people who identify as Christian or Catholic. So you have world religions that this would be an issue. This would be an issue for the text.
PIPPA: But it's already happened. The Catholic Church held the Ignatius Forums. The Ignatius Forum was literally held at the National Cathedral. And they invited Dr. Avi Loeb, who's the head of the Astronomy Department at Harvard. The longest serving chairman of any department at Harvard, and kind of the most respected scientist on this subject. And Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, to speak about this possibility that there was life beyond humans, and our biological life here on Earth. And they all agreed that yes, and the Catholic church made a statement. And the statement basically says, It's okay if there are aliens because they are God's children, too. So the Catholic Church has weighed out, weighed forth on this already, but again, no one notices. Interesting.
AUBREY: It's interesting, yeah. And I think it's obviously very intelligent from them to get ahead of this so that they're actually ready for it. And I think, ultimately, the real strong move would be like, hey, y'all, I know that we've said that everything that we've said has already been said. And we knew everything all along from the start, but actually, we're learning along the way too. And we're actually trying to understand who God is and what God wants all the time. So, everything we've said about just only following this book that's like 1800 years old, let's just ease up on that. And let's work with the idea that we're understanding the evolution of God, God is real. If they started saying stuff like that, I'd be yes, fucking God is real. Let's work together, let's figure this out. I'm studying with a Hebrew mystic, Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, and like, let's figure it out. Let's figure it out together. It has to be evolving. And it has to be this kind of cosmic picture of what it is. It's encouraging to see that a lot of people think religion will never change, or Walmart will never change, or Amazon, no, of course, it will change. It could adapt, because there's people who will generate the adaptation that's necessary. And so all of the structures that are built could actually be the scaffolding. So, if we're talking about moving from, I'm writing a book right now, From Empire to Kingdom. If we're talking about moving from Empire to kingdom, then the scaffolding that empire built is all the same scaffolding that kingdom can use to actually serve the world in a more beautiful way. And that's, I think, something people don't really realize. Even all the talk about a one-world government, it's very scary right now, because of the dystopian top down control digital dictatorship. And we've seen, they're not connected to a field of value. But in a world where everybody was connected to a field of value, and a field of value is just another way of saying God. Like, field of value, God, love, truth, beauty, this other thing. We're all connected to a field of value, then of course, then we should have Earth represented as one node in a galactic federation, communicating in our intergalactic organism. And I think maybe that's the transition that we're making. And these are kind of the growing pains and this is where the fight is. This is the Ragnarök that's happening right now. Can we step forward in a golden age, golden being that loving, abundant energy? Or is it going to be an age of the cold silicon technology that wipes out the life, solar light that comes from our soul, comes from the sun, comes from who we really are, comes from our love. It's just in this most beautiful and interesting time. And so much is fucking happening.
PIPPA: Yeah. One of the things that fascinates me about this subject is, there are two things. One is physics, and the other is soul. So on the physics side, we say we understand physics. There are certain laws of physics. They're in every child's school book. But the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded last year to three scientists who have proved that quantum physics is real, and what they call non-local phenomena. This is something that Niels Bohr and Einstein, and particularly David Bohm realized in the 1920s. David Bohm was the one who went furthest out with this. And they basically not just ran them out of town, they ran them out of the country. He was totally sidelined. And he was the one who said, what we describe as the quantum field in physics is very similar to the oldest story humanity has, which is found in the Rig Veda. And that's the story of Indra's Net. I don't know if you know the story. It's such a beautiful story, which is the god Indra cast a net out over all reality, and connected all things and all people. And at the point of connection of each person, place or thing, there's a beautiful jewel, or a beautiful and unique pearl. And our universe shines in the reflected glory of each unique gemstone.
AUBREY: How beautiful.
PIPPA: I mean, it's such a beautiful image. And then here, these guys came along last year, they're like, that is actually how the quantum field works in science. And so suddenly, the two merge. Our most ancient story and our most modern physics come together. I find it interesting when scientists say, well, we don't understand anything about dark matter, and that's 95% of the universe. Oh, but we completely understand physics. I'm like, "Wait." So I suspect part of this whole UAP story is that we are on the brink of discovery of new elements of physics that were not observable or possible to be understood before. And that is partly a function. And I give this as a “why now”, because everybody says, "Why now?" We have ever better sensors, ever better cameras and vastly more computational power than we've ever had in history. I mean, look at Google's Sycamore computer. It can solve a problem that used to take an NVIDIA computer, literally 10,000 years, hypothetically, to solve. It can do it in 200 seconds. So our problem-solving capacity has gone exponential, and our capacity to retrieve data. Look at the James Webb telescope out at the outer reaches of the universe. You put all that together, and suddenly, oh, my gosh, we're discovering new things about physics. So it's not that it's magic, or that it's crazy. It's that there are some things we just didn't understand before where we can understand now.
AUBREY: And the same with the, I'm deep in the field of psychonautics. If there's a field that I would say, alright, I've gotten my doctorate in this field, it's been 24 years of diligent work in the field of psychonautics, using both psychedelic medicines and other experiential practices like breathwork, darkness retreats, ecstatic practices of all different varieties, sweat lodges, ecstatic dances, all of the different things, and all of the different medicines, and all the different medicine journeys. And this technology actually allows for a restructuring of your consciousness and an opening of the spirit that actually can understand the cosmos in a different way. And feel life and feel a force of life that extends beyond what we just would normally understand, and feel the life that exists in a mountain, or in of course, the trees and the plants and the rocks and the waters. You start to feel energy in a different way, and start to see the universe in a different way. So it's both technology, technology. And it's also the spiritual technology of the psychedelic renaissance, where all of the information, and this has come because all of the information has been able to be shared, rules have been kind of lax. And then indigenous communities have brought their wisdom. And all of these things from our own modern medical advancements to indigenous wisdoms, to traditions that are being brought together and learning from each other and evolving. There's so much happening in so many different fields. This is the great convergence.
PIPPA: I agree with you on all of that. There is something profound occurring because of this psychonautic space, being open to exploration and discovery in a way that it hasn't been for, well, since the early 1970s. Maybe even before that.
AUBREY: And that was like a first burst of, let's understand it. But like now, there's this real kind of “baahh”, I wasn't alive then, I don't know exactly what it was like. But it seemed like this kind of, it was like a release of a pressure valve of the 50s was so constricted and then the 60s was, let's go swing the other way. But now it's different, the way that I'm experiencing this. I'm a businessman, I'm a podcaster. I'm not trying to drop out of society, like tune in, drop out. That was the old message--
PIPPA: You're trying to drop in.
AUBREY: Drop in, I'm trying to plug in. I'm trying to plug in, plug in to what God has to say, plug into what the universe has to say. That's the new kind of idea.
PIPPA: Well, I 100% agree with that. And let me make a leap. I think that this moment is about the end of the Cartesian period of history. Now by that, what I mean is, when Rene Descartes said let's split the mind from the body
AUBREY: Substance dualism.
PIPPA: That's it. And science is only that which we can test and analyze and anything you feel, basically that belongs in church or religion or somewhere else, but it's not truth. It's just your personal interpretation. And I remember Arthur Kessler, who was a marvelous philosopher, who was hanging out with Hemingway, during the wars. He called it the Cartesian catastrophe, because it was our loss of our ability to speak of things which you can't prove. And so, one thing I personally find super interesting is that in most of the people that I've spoken to who are having direct experience with UAPs, often government officials, military people, they are also having mystical, numinous, inexplicable, spiritual experiences. They're having extraordinary Jungian-like dreams. They are experiencing, they'll say, I had a dream out of nowhere. And suddenly, I knew how to build something that I never knew how to build before. And so I just did it and it worked. They can't explain. And I'm fascinated by their inability to talk about any of that unless you kind of get them down to the bar, and you have a drink or two, and you get them in a safe space. And then they'll start unloading this, and you're like, can we not bring some science to this too? So, I'm actually working with Nick Cook, who wrote The Hunt for Zero Point, and who really is the hero for having brought the world's attention to the possibility that there were crafts not of this world that were gathered and studied and re-engineered. He wrote that in, I mean, more than 20 years ago. He had been the editor of Jane's Defense weekly. So that's the most important, even to this day, defense publication in the world. So he brought immense credibility and wrote this book. That was kind of the beginning of this becoming a serious subject, as opposed to all the UFO-ologists, who were always considered in the sort of crazy camp. So, Nick and I have been talking about, what the heck is happening here? How do we understand all this? And realized a lot of it does happen on this we can't talk about it side. And there is a lot of work being done now on, is it a consciousness phenomena? And by that, I don't mean, are you imagining it? I mean, is consciousness a way in which the phenomena interacts with humans. And this is where I've become very interested in Gary Nolan's work, who is the key medical doctor working on this issue for the government. He's a very highly regarded scientist at Stanford University. And he's done a super deep dive into the physiology of the human brain amongst those who've been around the phenomena. Fundamentally, I think we're going to find that consciousness itself, which by the way, is like dark matter. We have almost no understanding of consciousness, how it works. We're going to be digging into that subject. and I suspect we're going to learn a lot in the coming years. So, this issue, this phenomena, it's at best reported in the media, as it's about these flying objects that are, “in our airspace”. And I'm like, by the way, why do we think of it as our airspace? Maybe we're in somebody else's airspace, right? What's our definition of mine? But also, it's an invitation to understand that this may be something vastly larger than any physical phenomena, and we just haven't given ourselves permission to even discuss this other piece. I go even deeper into that whole subject, but I just think the breadth of this phenomena is so vast, and we're getting dribs and drabs of this from these officials, whose opinion frankly, I'm inclined to completely put my trust in. A guy like Dave Grusch, I'm all in. Ryan Graves, Commander Fravor. There is no reason that this caliber of people are going to be making stuff up. None.
AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, and for me, again, 24 years in psychonautics, I've encountered extra dimensional beings all the time. And I know, in my body, anthro-ontologically, what I feel in my body to be true, I know that this is a real experience. And of course, sometimes I soften and say, I could just be imagining. I know I'm not imagining it. But of course, it's possible. I'm aware that that's possible. This is all just an imaginal game. But then you have to say, how separate is the mind from Mind? But you don't need to go there. But extra dimensional beings, for sure, all the way in. And then it's okay, but are these beings physical? Do they actually have stuff? But then all of the reports of if they were only extra dimensions, they wouldn't be showing up on radar. They wouldn't be getting picked up by these different other cameras and different other recording devices because that's something that would be pertaining to our consciousness, and to the ability of a conscious mind to do it, not for something that it is actually anchored in three-dimensional, light refraction optics, sound reverberation, etc. So, it appears that not only is this for sure an extra dimensional situation, it's also a physical situation. And that's what’s really interesting about this. And there's a relation between the two. And then there's probably a blurred line of the interdimensional reality of some of these different crafts.
PIPPA: Yeah, there's a really interesting book, which is incredibly obscure, but it's worth looking at. It's called Stalking the Wild Pendulum. And it's by a guy called Itzhak Nentov, who was Israel's first rocket scientist. Very highly regarded engineer, physicist. But also Richard Feynman's best friend. And very few people are brave enough to attempt a general theory of anything. But he attempted a general theory of consciousness itself. And it's a place to start with this conversation about what is the nature of this thing. And because he was so tied into physical reality and engineering of physics, he can't go woo woo. You can tell as he writes. But he roots it in physical reality. When I hear these officials using the word ‘interdimensionality’, which they are more and more. I think David Grusch said, he was asked, where is this phenomena? And he said, "It's co-located with us." And everybody kind of went, "What does that mean?" But we can prove, I mean, at least 11 dimensions mathematically, some say 19. So, is it possible? It's a bit like that wonderful moment that Carl Sagan did the explanation on YouTube of the fourth dimension. I don't know if you ever saw that. But it's a wonderful little clip where he talks about if you live in a two-dimensional world, you can't comprehend what an apple is. You just see as it moves through your space. You just see the line of an apple getting smaller and larger. And so, maybe are we three-dimensional people that can't comprehend a four-dimensional space? He holds up a double-nested cube and shows the shadow of this Perspex cube and he says, the Shadow, this is a tesseract, and a tesseract can exist in the fourth dimension. So we can imagine it, but we can't actually touch or feel it. And it just feels, like, look, all of this is exciting. All of this opening up of the questioning, what are the questions we're permitted to ask? We don't know the answers. But gosh, how exciting that you can start to ask these questions.
AUBREY: As long as we have an environment and a world where we're allowed to ask questions, where we're not censored, and where we can speak freely, and we're not fucking monitored and controlled into what we say.
PIPPA: Well, I mean, I have to admit, even for me, as I'm trying to understand this subject, every time I google something, I'm like, "Oh, my God, what does my Google History look like?" And actually, back to Robert F. Kennedy, even when I went to read his book, I was like Joe Rogan. I hadn't read it. And I assumed because of what I'd read in the media. Then after watching that podcast, I'm like, I better read this. And then I went deep into it. I'm okay--
AUBREY: The Real Anthony Fauci?
PIPPA: Yeah. And I began to understand, maybe this isn't about the vaccine. This is about corruption. It's about corporate corruption--
AUBREY: And collusion.
PIPPA: And collusion. And that is a different way of understanding the issue. But there I'm feeling fear of ordering the Kindle version of the book. There's a record that I've ordered the book, and I'm like, “Pippa, this is nuts!”
AUBREY: And look, I even felt a little hesitation in your energy field. My perception, even saying the book, you're like, but this is the reality. I actually saw something from Ice Cube on a social media post that he was talking about the freedom of speech, and he was like, look, there may be consequences, and I'm not going to try to do Ice Cube's, I'm not trying to do an impersonation. But he's like, there may be consequences of speaking freely about what you believe in, what you think. But that is the courage that's required from everybody. And that's the invitation for everybody to just say, fuck it. I'm going to speak my truth, I'm going to say what's going on, no matter what people say. Because actually, we're a lot safer than we think. Even the idea of being "canceled", what does that even mean?
PIPPA: Yeah.
AUBREY: Exactly. Does that mean that when you post on social media, you have a bunch of people who say a bunch of shit about you? What does it mean? Does it mean sometimes you can get kicked off a platform? Maybe in most extreme cases, you can get fired from your job or lose sponsors, but nobody's coming with, they're not coming with pitchforks and ropes and torches. This is not the pogroms in Russia. It's not that. You're going to be okay. This is how we participate in spreading the truth, is just having the courage to just speak your mind. And also and also the humility to listen to other perspectives, to not be so fucking certain that you got it all right.
PIPPA: 100%. For me, this is the key, is that how do I know I'm right? I have to go listen to people who have totally different perspectives from my own. By the way, I have to say, when I realized something was up with this whole “UAP, we're not alone” issue, and by the way, I do find it quite interesting that this coincides exactly with the moment that we're returning to space after 50 years. So, like, “hmm, okay”. So, really digging into this. I went to my daughter, who is now still a teenager, but only just. I said to her, "Look, something is going on in the subject." This is about a year ago when I wrote my first piece on this, an article on Substack, called Anomalous Phenomena. And I said, this could be the end of my career, this could be suicide to jump into this space. And she said, "Mom, everybody already knows." I'm like, "They do?" Shit, yeah, everybody in my generation. I mean, come on, it is statistically likely, the size of the universe, the James Webb telescope. I mean, come on. Just only your generation that doesn't get it. And then I was like, okay, I have permission to proceed. Because she would feel the consequences of my doing this. And she encouraged me to be brave. And similarly, during lockdown, I had time. I decided to spend a lot of that time going on to platforms that were full of people who are like the opposite end of the intellectual, philosophical spectrum from myself. I ended up on a couple of them. I had a bunch of the founders of the Extinction Rebellion movement. I found people like, I don't know if you know the philosopher, Daniel Schmachtenberger, who I think is totally brilliant.
AUBREY: Of course, Daniel is a friend.
PIPPA: And I would never have found him and these ideas any other way. I really spent time and listened, and it deeply informed my sense of where truth is. It's important. And I watched the interview that Robert Kennedy did with Piers Morgan. That was so interesting. Piers basically says, Why are you talking to Republicans? Why are you going on to media with Republicans? And he's like, "Well, because if you want to persuade someone to change their opinion, you have to actually speak to them." And I think one of the things that's most attractive about him is he is calling for old-fashioned, not only bipartisanship in politics, but a conversation that currently that the whole sort of atmosphere is either you agree with me, or you must be either evil, or stupid. This is no way to have a conversation.
AUBREY: No.
PIPPA: It just isn't.
AUBREY: And it's not true.
PIPPA: And it's not true. And so, you're right. It comes down to why are we so darn certain that we're right? And if we could loosen up on that front, and open the ears, and open the heart to hear other people's stories. And for me, it all comes down to stories. Maybe that's actually a point I'd like to make is that back to J.R.R. Tolkien and storytelling, humanity has, throughout the course of human history, we've had two technologies for imposing order on chaos. One is numbers, and one is stories. And in the Cartesian error, we moved into numbers because we were assessing everything as a fact that you could measure. And you know the saying, if we can't measure it, it's not real. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I'm like, okay, what do you do with love? Because good luck was weighing and measuring that thing. And you still have to manage it, right? That's maybe the most important thing in your whole life, you're going to manage. So, as all of this is happening, I think we're going back to stories, being the mechanism that allows us to put order over the chaos of all of this information. Stories are our most ancient technology and stories move people vastly more than numbers do. So are we going to basically, that's why I say, I think this may be the end of the Cartesian era. And we're entering something new, where both narrative and numbers can come together holistically. And I think we may end up with a better understanding of reality.
AUBREY: It's a new story for a new humanity.
PIPPA: It is, yeah.
AUBREY: Alright, so we're talking about a new story for a new humanity. And one of your expertise is economics. So, I want to talk about this vision for the future of, and also the crises that are happening in current economics and then a vision for the future for a global economics that actually starts to make sense. And I think how crypto and Bitcoin could potentially play a role in this, and actually have something to show you as well, which I think might play a significant role. I don't know if you're familiar with it yet. I better not bury the lead here and show you as well. So there's a company called Valaurum. They are making actually printed gold, making fully assayable, recoverable, printed gold that a company called Goldback is making. And you can't make a currency, but you can actually, you can share trade gold, right? So it's not a currency. I want to be clear that officially it's not a currency. However, there's a direct amount of gold that's on each of these printed bills that have beautiful art, that actually have intrinsic value. They're not backed by gold, they are gold, or silver or platinum. And this technology would be able to print bills in precious metals, that you can take this stack right here, and instead of just going on the face value of what's printed on it, I could go to a jeweler in New York City in the Jewish quarters. I'm Jewish, so I could go in there and see my hereditary ancestors and say, "Hey, y'all melt this down, give me a nugget. And then, tell me the value of that." And I think it's an interesting idea for how, actually, economics could start to really make sense instead of the fiat currencies, and the inflationary pressures, and the central banks, and then exchange rates, and then be kind of a universal valuation. Gold spot price is the same, every country you go. And these currencies would be the same value, every country you go. You wouldn't need to go change out your dollars for Euros, lose 15% at the teller, I mean, at the window, or 3% at the ATM or whatever. It's always also hack, it's better to get it out of the ATM than it is out of the fucking window, because they're taking a big cut, everybody. But ultimately, there's interesting both technology like this and ideas that could come out in the economic space. But I think first we've got to talk about, before we talk about the new story of how it could be beautiful, about the current story, and how many of the big moves that are being made are related to economics, crisis of economics, and cashflow, and banking system, and how much power that whole banking structure actually has. And if we talk about the deep structures, money is involved in all of this. So yeah, let's just unpack this however you like, eventually winding our way back to a story, a vision of a more beautiful, sacred economics. That's Charles Eisenstein who said it.
PIPPA: Yes, yes, I love his work. My first big book on economics, it was called Signals back in about 2016. And I argued, inflation is coming back, and geopolitics is coming back. And remember, this is a time when everyone's like, inflation is dead, we never have to worry about that again. And now we're in a peace dividend, because we won and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. So who are we going to have a fight with? It's all good. So people are like, have you lost your marbles? It's fine. For me, I was like, okay, let's just be clear. With the bailout of the banking system from the financial crisis, we have sown the seeds for inflation to return. And once inflation comes back, geopolitics will come with it. Because it's about access to resources. If they're rising in value or price, then that's going to create pain, particularly in emerging markets, which inflation always hits emerging markets harder than it hits industrialized countries. So, maybe one way to think about this is, central bankers, they always talk about price stability. And what that really means is that they're supposed to hold the currency steady in a way that neither benefits the savers, nor the speculators. It's supposed to hold it even handed between the two. But when the financial crisis happened, and the banking system took a whole bunch of massive bets that ended in failure, instead of allowing the failures to happen, and I agree, look at the time, everybody was in a panic that the whole world economy was going to come to a stop tomorrow. When Lehman Brothers failed, it felt like there wasn't even going to be an economy tomorrow. And I think, I can't remember if it was Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke actually said that to Congress, like, we need to do a bailout right now or we are not going to have an economy. It's that bad. So there was a lot of fear at the time. And so, decisions were made to basically bail out the financial system. But what that really meant was that not only did the banking system take a whole bunch of bets that went wrong, but then government gave them a check--
AUBREY: A free pass.
PIPPA: A free pass, all right. And that also meant that a ton of money got into the system both through incredibly low if not zero interest rates, not only in the US, but globally, because everybody followed the US on the subject. But also this new money that got, this what we call printing of money, and we have a big argument about was it actually printed? But let's face it, a whole lot of money should show up in the system. Did it save us? Yes. But it also meant there are more pieces of paper as it were, chasing the same amount or fewer goods, and that automatically means prices are going to start to go up. So, think of it a different way. When you have a debt problem that's so huge, that even if you taxed every individual everything they owned, you still don't have enough to fill the hole. And that's the situation in the US, in Europe, frankly, in China these days, virtually every country has been spending more than it earns. And so, we got a problem. And so, how do you get out of the problem? There are different ways you can default on the problem. You can just say, we're never going to pay you back.
AUBREY: And here are our missiles, and like fuck you. I mean, that's kind of the way, right? It's always backed by force.
PIPPA: It's ultimately backed by force.
AUBREY: Because how do you collect the loan? Right now, if you default, if you can't pay the IRS, well, they will come, people with guns and handcuffs and they will take you away, and you will go, it's forced. It's force that backs debt. Not only in the government level, but even on the other level. How many mob movies have we seen, like you don't pay your debts, we're going to break your knuckles, you're going to end up in Swiss cement shoes. We understand this principle that there's force that backs debt. And I think it's also probably what's built up this military kind of mindset is that we got debt we can't pay. Well, what if someone comes to collect? Well. So, the whole thing is like, it's leading to this kind of backwards thinking.
PIPPA: There's a routing in what you're talking about. But there's more subtle options along the way. And one is, you say, I'll pay you back, but a little later and a little less. That's what the Greeks did when they announced the restructuring of their debt.
AUBREY: It's the Greek way.
PIPPA: It's the Greek way. It's basically a default. But we don't call it that, because it's a nice version. And look at what happened after that, the Greek economy came flowering back to life. Because it's a blank slate again. Detroit is another example. Detroit defaulted, and everyone went, "Well, that's the end of Detroit." And I was like, "No, that's the beginning of a new Detroit," because now it will be able to grow again. And I'm not saying default in every case is the right solution. But there are other options. One of them is inflation. And governments always love inflation, because it's invisible. And you're basically defaulting on the citizens without them really understanding--
AUBREY: It's a tax.
PIPPA: It’s a tax.
AUBREY: It’s a tax on everybody. That's what people don't understand. The taxes raised in the lockdown situation were unparalleled. I mean, we almost doubled our money supply. What does that mean? That means that your money that you have is half as valuable as it used to be. Period.
PIPPA: Exactly. And so, I was like, obviously, the choices that were being made at the time of the bailout would inevitably lead to inflation. And of course, having worked in the White House and worked with many of these people, and they were all like, "Pippa, that's not true." And I'm like, “well, but it is because the choices you've made, this is inevitably where it's going to go.” And they're like, “no, no, we can control this.” I was like, “umm…” Paul Volcker said, you couldn't control it, the previous head of the Central Bank, who had to deal with inflation the last time. And he said, "It's a wild creature. Once it's loose, you won't be able to control it." But they had an overwhelming sense of confidence, they could. In the end, turned out not to be true. And look, in the end, I'm not so famous, Ben Bernanke got a Nobel Prize for the bailout. But I think we still have the question marks about, was that really the right thing to do? Because the consequences for the public have been so severe. So the things that worried me and that I wrote about were things like food prices, and food prices definitely were rising way before events in Ukraine. Because people were like, oh, there was no inflation until the war in Ukraine. I'm like, are you kidding? We went from 0% inflation to roughly 3 between the bailout and before anything happened in Ukraine. Now, you may say, well, that's not very much. And that's well inside the Federal Reserve's boundary of the acceptable. Yeah, but if you're a poor family, zero inflation to 3% is a dramatic hit to your life.
AUBREY: And also, how they calculate inflation. They're always adjusting rules and what they're measuring. And they're like, "Well, we're going to measure it a different way now." So they're manipulating the data in a way to show something that's actually not true, which is again, not being honest.
PIPPA: Yeah, I have a whole section in that book where I got into what's in the basket and crazy things you don't think of. But they used to have lipstick, and then they swapped it out for lip gloss. Every woman knows that lip gloss is not substitutable for lipstick, and that it usually costs less. So it made the basket look like it was getting cheaper, when in fact, most women were buying both in multiple colors, right? So, your overall cost is going up. But the official number says it's going down. But I was more concerned about it happening in the world of nutrition, because the thing is, cheaper calories are always emptier calories. So, as inflation goes up, you're going to find poor people are turning toward less nutrition. And maybe this explains how obesity emerges as a symptom of poverty. A driver behind that is inflation. So then you splitting the population into those who can afford ever better nutrition and those who really can't. That has dire social consequences over time as well. So, these are the sorts of things that I was getting into in that book. Then I've realized, okay, then geopolitics is also going to come back because China cannot feed its population as it is. They don't have enough water, they don't have enough arable land, they've got a billion people, they have to reach for these assets. So that's why they buy all the, not all, but bulk of the soybeans from Brazil, and why they're buying foodstuffs from all over the world. It's behind their whole Belt and Road strategy, which is all about building bridges and roads, and railway links to parts of the world where there's food and bringing it back to China. If these prices go up, it's really going to be painful for them. And they'll have to be more aggressive in reaching into these locations. I think that part of Putin's strategy with Ukraine was definitely an economic strategy to weaponize food and energy prices, to push them up at a time when the US was already vulnerable, already had a big debt problem, already had households at the edge of their spending capability, and inflation already in play. And then knocking a ball. The ball is now going to go much further, because it's already a big problem. And frankly, from a military strategic point of view, which does more damage? A tank or rising food prices. Right, rising food prices are much more damaging to the United States and NATO than any single Russian tank. But our military doesn't think in these terms, necessarily. I lecture at Sandhurst, which is Britain's equivalent to West Point, and the Royal College of Defense. I've been very privileged to be brought in to brief the NATO generals from time to time, and they are incredibly switched on, they're very bright, but their bailiwick is not economics. And so, understanding that actually, food is a weapon and a very powerful one was like, "Wait, what?" We're thinking about tanks, we're not thinking about wheat prices. So, bottom line is, we kind of created an environment that, of course, the Federal Reserve says, we have nothing to do with the fact that inflation has occurred. This has nothing to do with us. I think there's a big question mark over that, and that the decisions we made for better for worse, did have consequences. And the public are feeling the pain of those consequences. And they can see it through things getting smaller, right? Like, you go to buy a candy bar at the checkout. The candy bar keeps getting smaller, everybody notices this. And in fact, people are very emotional about it. Like, "My chocolate bar is getting smaller." Why? Because it's a symptom of inflation. I call it shrinkflation. It's because the price of the inputs is going up. But the company is afraid to pass on the full price hike, because you might buy somebody else's chocolate bar. So they just keep making it smaller, or even apartments and houses, right? We start making micro apartments in big cities that cost more per square foot than a bigger place. These are all ways that we get hidden price hikes. So that does a lot of things. It also creates social agitation. And I think it has been a contributing factor in the breakdown of civil dialogue in America. Because when you're in pain, and you can't put food in the fridge, you are getting angry about things. And that anger I think is bubbling up into politics, presidential races. Again, I was really interested with RFK about his leading with inflation and food prices. That is a lead issue for his campaign. And that takes me back to what we talked about before the podcast presidency. I think his ability to explain the linkages far better than I just have, is going to be the key. And as Americans began to realize there is a connective tissue here between inflation and economic policy and my reality, and that doesn't have to be this way. We could figure out ways to change this. Same with do we really have to be at war with the Chinese and the Russians? Or is there a way we can come to some agreement that lets us all have a better standard of living in future which is really what everybody's after? So anyway, I can now fast forward into where we are now. And the great thing is technology and innovation are making it possible to do things that were never possible before. So, we can improve food production quite dramatically. But it means new ways of thinking, it means being open to possibilities. It means challenging the established ways. So, for me, the startup community is super critical. And it's little tiny companies that generate most of the new jobs and all of the new innovation. So for me, the numbers always get challenged, but roughly two thirds of the net new jobs in the United States, and in most industrialized economies are created by firms with less than 50 people. And most of the new technological innovation is also coming from these tiny little groups of bright people who have assembled to build something new. And so, this is all so very interesting, it's happening at a time when it's very easy for small groups of people to find each other, and to create. People are also living a kind of portfolio life now more and more. Maybe a privileged position to be in, but nonetheless, people are like, well, I'm consulting to my old company that I used to work for, and that pays some bills. I'm working on a startup that my friend has, and that may be a winner. I've got a startup idea of my own. I'm doing this other thing that generates cash. And this is the way people are working. I mean, the old one job for one life, I'm not even sure we really had that after the 1950s. And I don't know why anybody would want that. Because that sounds really boring to me. So, we're going to be working in these new creative ways. So, I think we're going to be able to solve all of these problems, it's just new ways of doing it.
AUBREY: Yeah. And that must happen. Innovation is going to be driven by necessity, as it always has. And opportunity and necessity go hand in hand. It's like, the more pressure that we start to feel, the more innovation that will naturally arise. And when you actually have faith, and you give people the structures and systems to do it, I mean, it's one of the things that Bobby Kennedy shared that he wants to do when he's president, is actually invest in creating a DC power line grid that can actually allow every individual to be an energy entrepreneur. Because right now we have mostly AC, alternating current grids. So if we're getting extra solar energy into our house, or wind energy from our farm, it's not easy to push that back into the system and actually monetize what that is, because of the way that our structure is built. And he has the numbers, it's going to be like 500 billion to do it. But at the point that that happens, then everybody can become an energy entrepreneur. You can start setting up your solar panels, and you can start doing these different things, or wind turbines and whatever you want. And then actually earning based on the energy that you're pushing back into the US energy reserves. And so there's structural things, big plays that can be made, that can solve a lot of these different problems that we have, that don't involve starting a new fucking war, or taking from somebody else, or the old way of thinking. It's like a new way of thinking. And it involves, of course, space and involves Earth and it involves. But really, it takes somebody who's able to synthesize all of this information from all of these disparate fields, and form that kind of DaVinci effect, where you're pulling the awareness of all of these different things and then making the best decision. And it seems like that's what's going to need to happen.
PIPPA: Yeah. And I think that, this is, again, where this upcoming presidential race, I think is going to be the most interesting and energetic, engaging presidential race that we will have seen for decades. Let's get into this, because this is such a major focus issue for the public. And I have some pretty out of the market ideas about how this is playing. I remember I wrote, again in about 2016 or so, that I thought Donald Trump would be able to win the presidency and really could. It wasn't a preference, it was just a prediction, again, based on my experience of following politics for a long time. And people were like, this is totally insane. There is no possibility that Donald Trump's going to be president. I'm like, there is, and then he won. I think the same thing today. I'm watching Robert Kennedy, and I'm going, oh, this guy can win. So, here's the thing. Couple of things. We Americans, we love electing somebody that seemed impossible three years before. Bill Clinton was impossible, and no one had ever even heard of him three years before. George W. Bush, most people thought that was impossible at the time. President Obama, most people had never even heard of him three years before. Donald Trump, no way. So one thing we know for sure is we're going to elect somebody that everybody thought was impossible, because that's the pattern. Second, what are we electing every darn time? We keep looking for an outsider who will challenge the establishment. That was certainly Obama, that was certainly Trump. I think that Robert Kennedy with his anti-establishment stance feeds into that hunger in America. And it's interesting that he aligns, actually, very closely with a lot of Donald Trump's policies. Interestingly, he sees that all the money has gone to the extremes. And actually, it's the middle ground that is wide open.
AUBREY: Yeah, the middle class.
PIPPA: Middle class, but also the middle ground. And so when he talks about let's bring Republicans and Democrats together. As a Democrat, he says, "But I'm in favor of entrepreneurs, so I don't want to tax them harder, because they're the future." That's actually a kind of Republican position. And then on the Republican side, he goes, I think Roe versus Wade should stand, and I think personal freedom should begin at your front door. So that makes him like an old fashioned Republican, actually. So, I think--
AUBREY: Old fashioned Democrat.
PIPPA: Sorry, old fashioned Democrat, my apologies. Yeah, old fashioned Democrat. Actually, kind of old fashioned Republicans too who used to be--
AUBREY: Values.
PIPPA: Values stop at your door, right? And so, this is going to catch everybody wrong footed that you can't pigeonhole him. He's appealing to both sides. And so, it's all about the swing vote. Who is the swing vote in this upcoming election? The swing vote is going to be middle aged women like myself. Why? I can't explain, but they just have emerged as this powerhouse. And a lot of them do lean towards Trump views and values. But interestingly, they are very uncomfortable with having to turn the television off every time he says anything, because it'll upset the kids, right? So they kind of want this anti-establishment, I'll fix it, I'll clean up Washington, but who's polite. And that would be Robert Kennedy, right?
AUBREY: Yeah. And appealing to our higher natures rather than our baser nature. I think that's the fundamental difference. And that's what RFK will say about Trump as well, is Trump's appealing to your lower natures, I'm appealing to people's higher natures, but there's something fundamentally similar about it. And it's interesting, Donald Trump, he actually, he viciously attacks fucking everybody. But then when he's asked about RFK, he's like, I think he's a common sense guy.
PIPPA: "I like that guy."

AUBREY: And then you look at actually what's happening, like when RFK went and did the congressional hearing on censorship, and then all of the Democrats tried to censor him, and eight Republicans voted for him. 20 Democrats voted against him, and it was like, whoa. Something weird and new is happening here, that I think people are waking up to. I think it's going to be interesting to see how entrenched the Democrats are in their establishment position, or whether they're going to ultimately realize, if we don't put RFK on the ballot, we're going to lose. We're going to lose to Trump.
PIPPA: This is the ultimate question that's coming. So, where are we with President Biden? Honest answer is he's just not doing very well as in, he can't read his own notes very well, he's falling down.
AUBREY: He's not fit to lead.
PIPPA: I mean, the joke in Washington is this is just elder abuse, right? Like he should be allowed to go to... But I can see what's driving it. The team around him knows they don't get to be in charge unless he's there. So it doesn't really matter what shape he's in, they want to be there. And the Democratic Party is like, we own this piece of property and we're going to keep it. We don't care whether he's dead or alive. It's mine. This is a kind of view. So, I think he's not going to make it, and not only because his age, but now there's this whole new investigation that the Republicans are going to bring into the corruption issues around the President and his family, which is super interesting that we now have two presidents, President Trump and President Biden under investigations for essentially, corruption charges. So, the country is having to face that we have two leaders that seem to be doing the same sort of thing. This is all super uncomfortable, and they start to look to who's next. So on the Republican side, everybody thought DeSantis, but that is not working. There's just no mojo. People are not empathetic with him. It's just not playing. Other candidates, like, for instance, Suarez, who I know and I've met, who does have immense energy, super bright, head of the Council of Mayors, so he knows a lot about America at the local level throughout the country. I think he's going to get a lot more airtime because he's going to bring a lot more energy. Similarly, on the Democrat side, if it's not Biden, then the whole thing opens up. They'll try to get the governor of California, Governor Newsom to be the replacement, but that's going to be like DeSantis. No energy, no drive. And then there's RFK, who's going to come along with all this energy. How interesting that both Francis Suarez and Robert F. Kennedy are both environmentalists, both green, and both are Bitcoiners. How interesting. That's going to be fair. They're so similar as well, in that they both believe in entrepreneurs, they both don't want to raise taxes on the entrepreneurs. They both believe in righting social issues, and that's the second big swing vote in America is the African American vote. Well, the African American vote, Democrats always go well, that's ours. We own that. And African Americans are always like, no, you don't. And, how are you serving me? And here, Robert F. Kennedy, he was called by Politico, the most trusted white man in black America. And I think that's true, not only because the family history, but because of his own personal commitment to these issues. And maybe--
AUBREY: Because it's true. It's because he really cares, and his family really cared too. Look at what his dad and what his uncle really stood for, and that's transferred through into his body and his blood and his bones. It's actually real. So when Ice Cube's out there talking about him on Joe Rogan's podcast, and being, yeah, like this guy, he's willing to speak his mind. The same value structure that Ice Cube has is, yeah, we've got to be able to speak our mind, we've got to be able to speak the truth, we've got to be able to trust each other, and all of these things. These are the deep structures of value that I think he's accessing, and accessing for all people.
PIPPA: So, the issue that I think is going to nail it, is going to be marijuana. And the reason is, because we have so many African Americans in prison on minor marijuana charges, and have had for decades. Now, of course, there are others as well. There are Latinos and Whites. But this has hit that community harder than any other community. And so, when he says, I think we should let everybody go on that. This is crazy. And especially now we're legalizing this in many states. And that is going to touch a lot of families, and back to kind of repair a damage that, I mean, how many kids had a spliff on their pocket when they were 16? And that was enough to put a really deep blemish on their record and make it hard for them to integrate into society. He's going to address that, is I think, important, and will carry immense weight. But I go further. And I'd love to ask you about this. So, I think it's correct that he had drug issues himself as a young man. And perhaps not surprisingly, given all the terrible things that happened to him at such a tender age, losing his father and his uncle in such a brutal way.
AUBREY: Cousin, I mean, the list of tragedies goes on and on and on.
PIPPA: But what's interesting is normally in the past, you would have said, you can't be a presidential candidate if you've had a drug issue in the past, right? It was like, we can't even go there. But now because of the psychonautics revolution, and because of a changed thought process, I think it reverses and people are going to go, this guy has street cred. He knows what it is to have a problem with substances, and he has an empathy on that subject at a time when it's increasingly being used for medicinal purposes, for improving health.
AUBREY: And he understands that at a fundamental level. He understands that, we've had discussions about psychedelic medicine, and he fucking gets it. He gets it. And he's been sober from all substances for decades. But he gets, actually, that this is a different thing, that all drugs are not the same thing. This whole DARE campaign concept of all street drugs are bad. Well, we've proven that that's not the case. There's copious amounts of studies showing the benefits of MDMA, the benefits of ketamine, the benefits of cannabis, the benefits of psilocybin, the benefits of all. And it's just going to go on and on and on, the more data is going to come out. I was just a keynote speaker at the MAP psychedelic science conference with Aaron Rodgers. And it's like, we get it, and he gets it as well. And so, this is part of the revolution. And it also involves, yeah, all of these people who are in prison for all of these, now what we realize are medicines, and also the sovereignty of our ability to choose how we want to safely alter our own consciousness. This is a new way of thinking about things that I agree. I think it's a bigger issue than people are realizing. That was one of the biggest disappointments I had, frankly, in Obama is that under Obama's terms, more people got locked up for marijuana charges than in any other president as far as the data that I've seen. I don't have the studies or references for that. But like his surgeon general really cracked down on everything and all of, maybe not surgeon general, but whatever, the deputy that was in charge of that, locked away so many people. That was the time where he could have made a choice and been, you know what, actually, this is bullshit. Let me get ahead of the curve. Let me make a bold move, and let me do something. I was bummed. I was bummed that he didn't make that choice.
PIPPA: That's probably also tied into the economics of the prison system, and who gets paid per prisoner?
AUBREY: A prison industrial complex.
PIPPA: Yeah, is that the way we really want to run our society? Or should we be asking some questions about that? So all of these things taken together are kind of, okay, I see how Robert Kennedy can emerge as the person the Democrats won't be able to say no to. I think that's how it'll go. They won't like it. Most people listening will be like, this is absurd, this is never going to happen. But I think that ultimately, just is what's going to happen. And we're going to get a new generation on both sides. And I think it's Francis, as far as Robert F. Kennedy, and they will have so much energy and so many new ideas, it's just going to blow away all the other candidates who will be like what? They won't even have an answer to the whole question on Bitcoin, for example. Because they haven't even thought about it, most of them.
AUBREY: Yeah. Well, this is all a part of this whole new story that's being woven together. And it's being woven together by a new type of Indra's Net, really. It's all of these connections that I'm seeing happen between individuals who are reaching out and sharing information and coming together and aligning themselves. Even how we got together. The reason we're here is because Radha threw out a big Indra's Net, and brought a bunch of amazing people together on a boat that went through the Nile on this crazy journey. And then people of resonance found each other that way, and then the net kind of spread, and it's just, it's beautiful. Gives me a lot of hope, even in these times that you can look out in any direction and see monsters lurking in every corner. There's also a lot of reason for optimism and hope, and also an inspiration for us to participate in the creation of this new story and living this new story, and embodying it so that it comes into reality.
PIPPA: Maybe I can give a really practical example of how we've managed to navigate change before. Because then when you start to talk about change, people just start freaking out, because everyone's like, I don't want to change. But change usually brings better stuff normally. I mean, at least gives you the possibility of upside. Whereas no change doesn't give you any possibility. So, when it comes to money, and the economy, I think that we are on the brink of introducing entirely new accounting and money systems. And what you've put on the table is one of them. And people are like, well, you can't just change the system of accounting and money. I'm like, "Well, yeah, you can." The last time we saw this was in about 1834, when the British, who of course lead the world in money and accounting, because of Empire, they had a system prior to that for 1000 years called tally sticks. And this is where we get the term to tally things up. The tally sticks were literally wooden boards that they cracked in half super roughly so that the two sides matched, but couldn't be faked. And you got to keep the shorter end of the stick, which is where we get this phrase that the guy got the short end of the stick. And the longer end of the stick went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, basically the king. Both kept a record of all your transactions, all your what do you own and tax payments and shares and everything. And people miniaturized the sticks, so they could carry them around and put them on their belt and the miniature versions were called stocks. And then they started to trade them. And that's where we get the stock market was from these little pieces of wood. You can see pictures of them, they're still on display in parliament in Britain. Well, the thing about the tally stick system is it worked beautifully. But you can't inflate with it because it takes too long for the tree to grow. It takes too long for the lifetime record to be established. And so, they'd had all these wars in Europe, and there was no way to pay off the debt. They wanted some mechanism like inflation. And so, they decided to shift from tally sticks to this new technology called paper money. And of course, we still use paper money today. And the public were like, "Are you kidding? I'm not going to give up my personalized tally stick with my own record of everything in my life for a piece of paper that doesn't have my name on it. No way." So the government said, fine, we're going to confiscate all the tally sticks. We're going to take them to Parliament, we're going to burn them. So you won't have a choice and you're going to have to use these pound notes. Paper money. Well, the burning of the tally sticks threw off so much heat. That is what burned parliament to the ground in 1834. Like literally it burned the building down.
AUBREY: Whoa.
PIPPA: Yeah, it was the destruction of the system of money and accounting that burned that building down. And it's captured beautifully in Jam W. Turner's wonderful paintings. They're called The Burning of Parliament. Yeah, because this was watching the accounting system go up in flames. Now, that sounds terrible. When you say to people, we're going to change the whole system of money and accounting, they're like, heart attack. But what happened in the aftermath, this set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. This is what allowed corporations to start issuing debt using paper money and to be able to have stocks and shares on a much grander scale than had ever existed before. So when you change the system of money and accounting, you can get incredible growth and innovation and expansion. Today, I think the new system of accounting will be something blockchain based, although blockchain for a variety of reasons. Very slow, there are other alternatives. Hedera hashgraph is faster. But it's just technology, we'll figure out a way that we can keep electronic records in such a way that we have a better accounting system than we ever had before. The new money right now is called CBDC, which is Central Bank Digital Currency. Every nation is announcing they're doing it; China, the United States, Europe, Britain. And this is where the danger is of what we talked about before, which is what happens if the system of money, the digital money, gets tied to your behaviors. And could it be used to tax you for bad behaviors, penalize you for bad behaviors, reward you for good ones? And will every politician just love being able to create money out of thin air because digital money is one keystroke, cuts the money supply in half and one keystroke doubles it. And one keystroke says, oh, you voted for me on these issues, so I'd like to put 500 bucks in your bank account. And you voted against me, so I'd like to tax you 500. The room for abuse of power here is massive.
AUBREY: This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not fiction. We saw, it's happening right now in social credit scores in China. So it's already existing in the world that we're in right now just in a different country. And then we saw it happen in Canada with the truckers where their bank accounts get frozen because they were protesting what they felt like was human rights violations. Violating the sanctity and autonomy of their own bodies and what they could do with their own bodies. So they protested and they got their bank accounts frozen. This is the danger of this totalitarian control. This is why people are so afraid of CBDCs, and why this is also another one of these wars, this is part of the World War III. This is either centralized banking, a totalization of control and surveillance. Or, radical sovereignty, where you actually have your own unique digital identity that you actually own, your own unique digitized money through blockchain, or tangible money that is really valuable universally, whichever country you go in, wherever you go. And so, there's these two different stories that are going to be competing. And again, I go back to this old story, the old story of Ragnarök, the war of the gods, the war of the ideas. And that's where we're in. I think, what's going to happen is, like in the story, Odin throws his spear, I think it's called Gungnir, and then all the warriors rise, and then they engage in the battle of the gods. And this is the time where now the warriors are being awakened and warriors in the mythical sense. Not necessarily the ones with the bulletproof vests and the guns and the drones and all that. Yes, that's a factor. But what I'm talking about is the inner archetype of the warrior, those who are willing to speak the truth, to stand for something that's greater than themselves, what we look for in every heroic movie. Why we are inspired by Leonidas, because he stood with 300 men knowing he wasn't going to come back, knowing that he loved his wife and his child. But he did that for all of Greece, for the known Western world. And I'm sure the Persians have a different story about it. But regardless, the idea is that we stand for something. We're willing to stand for something greater and more beautiful. And, that's what's happening now.
PIPPA: Agreed. And so, can we make this new digital money and digital accounting system work in favor of bringing out the best in human beings? I think there are ways to do that. We could totally figure that out, especially as we're in this period of history where artificial intelligence is starting to be truly available. I mean, a lot of people have a super negative view on AI, but I see it massively empowering regular people, so that you now can create without needing to be a coder. And if you combine that with a money system that encourages or allows people to operate in this more entrepreneurial way, then we'll get a flowering of creativity out of that. One of the things I find and of course, most Europeans find just bizarre is, how is it the health insurance coverage in the United States is always tied to a corporate? Why can't you be in a small startup and have reasonable health coverage as well? So these are the sorts of things that I think need new thinking to catch up with the technology, as you say. The technology can do many, many things. It's our choice how to use it. We can use tech in positive constructive ways. We can use it in destructive ways, right? The car can kill you, the car can take you somewhere.
AUBREY: Which is about, again, consciousness and love, and how we connect to what we know is the good, true and beautiful in our own body, and how we express that. I think you're right. I think, in some cases, the technology can be shifted and biased in one direction, just by the nature of what it is. So, it's not always value neutral, but it can be value neutral, right? I think what Elon has done with Twitter, is to actually make Twitter once again, a value neutral social network. He's promised at least to expose all of the algorithms and to show people with transparency, exactly what they're getting into, rather than this kind of black box, we're going to secretly manipulate you and not tell you how we're going to manipulate you. And then, maybe leak a little information to people we want and then depress information for other people. But actually, transparency, honesty, and then trust. Lao Tzu said, trust them, and they become trustworthy. And that's, I think, this idea, yeah, government, trust us and we'll become trustworthy. Trust the world, and the world will become trustworthy. And it's just this attitude of trust.
PIPPA: It's Nietzsche's idea of you look into the abyss, and the abyss looks back at you. And so, what you bring to it is what's going to be reflected. Maybe the last thing I really want to say as an economist, as the big economic issue of our time, is also human capital, and what we see in other people. This idea that most people will be like, oh, well, they're not capable of being retrained for better jobs, whoever they are. And I'm like, you know what, we have no idea what humans are capable of. Most people don't even know what they themselves are capable of. Our most undervalued asset is actually humans. I love the story of Maya Angelou, who, of course, became one of the most famous poets. You look at her career. First of all, she didn't even have a career. It's so all over the map. You can't even call it a career. But at 16, she became the first female conductor of a San Francisco tramcar ever, and certainly the first black, the first African American. And, she's so sweet, when she was interviewed and asked, "Why did you go for that job?" She said, "I thought they had really nice uniforms." It's so cute. But she then left that, and had this amazing life where at one point, she's making West End musicals and winning awards. She ends up as a political editor of a major newspaper in Ghana and in Egypt. She ends up then as speechwriter to Malcolm X, and then to Martin Luther King. Along the way, at times, she was a prostitute. At one point, she ran a brothel. You look at this whole thing, and you're like, what are the qualifications for becoming one of the greatest poets of our time? Answer, trying a lot of different things.
AUBREY: Living life.
PIPPA: Living life. Having life experiences. Not to say that I'm condoning any of those specifics. I'm just saying, what are people capable of? We don't know until they find what's in their heart that they love, and pursue that. You hear these guys in financial markets, and banking, and even Silicon Valley, and they're like, "Don't do what you love. That's bad advice, because you won't get anywhere." And I'm like, guys, what are you talking about? If you love what you do, you will, by nature, be better at it than others.
AUBREY: I mean, I'm a living example of that. I studied philosophy and classical civilization, double major at University of Richmond.
PIPPA: Me too. Oh my God, I did the Peloponnesian Wars, military history. We have to talk more.
AUBREY: Right, philosophy and classics, and then a minor in Latin. Then did a lot of theater, and I just did everything I loved in college. And then ultimately, become an incredibly successful entrepreneur, and exited a nine-figure business. I'm like, what are you talking about, y'all? This is a new world. It's a new world that operates under new rules. And those old rules need to be updated and evolve, just like the old religions, all of the old beliefs.
PIPPA: Even your old phone needs a new operating system.
AUBREY: Everything needs to be evolved to actually fit with the times. And so, it's just recognizing that evolution is a first principle of the universe. That all things evolved and our systems will evolve. And I believe they will. And it's just how much resistance we're going to have to the evolution, or, can we actually evolve alongside and evolve our consciousness and evolve our own values, so that we can live into this new world?
PIPPA: So, I think at the bottom of it all, as an economist, how do we enhance people's capacity to change? If we can do that, anything is possible.
AUBREY: Yeah. Amen. Amen. Pippa, this has been such a pleasure.
PIPPA: Amazing.
AUBREY: I'm so glad we got to make this happen.
PIPPA: Me too. Thank you so much.
AUBREY: Yeah, if people want to dive deeper on any of your stuff, or anything you're working on, where can they go? Where can they look out?
PIPPA: Yeah, so I'm writing an article, usually about once a week on Substack, where I try to get into all of these geopolitics, world economy, space sector, all these interesting things that are going on. I'm very active on Twitter. That's been my preferred platform. I'm on LinkedIn as well, so, thank you.
AUBREY: All right, beautiful. Beautiful. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We love you and we'll see you next week. All right, so we're back in the studio. Why? Because a few days ago, we did a podcast talking about one of the subjects being UFO, which is now UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena. And the disclosure that's kind of happening in a very interesting way, in between the time that we recorded, and while you're still here in Austin, there was a big congressional hearing. So, I called you up and I was like, "Hey, what happened?" And so, there's a big update that we want to share. So, let's get into it. What happened?
PIPPA: Well, it was huge. We had a subcommittee on Congress directly address three witnesses. One is a naval commander, very high ranking, Commander David Fravor. One is a former F-18, or, I think Hornet fighter pilot, who's also a Top Gun instructor, Ryan Graves. And one is the famous whistleblower David Grusch, who's worked for the most secret intelligence agencies, the geospatial agency, basically, he's ex Air Force. And interestingly, his counsel in the whistleblowing process is a former inspector general of the intelligence community. And he was accompanied by two others. They are in charge of ferreting out corruption, wrongdoing. So, to have three inspector general's sitting with the whistleblowing witness, kind of implies there's something quite serious happening here. And there's no question that these three men are 100% credible, and not making this up. So, the Congressman asked all kinds of questions, mainly to get things on the record. But they did get into some really tricky issues, including asking, are there retrieved craft? To which the answer, particularly from David Grusch, was, yes. And everything I said in the News Nation interview I did I stand by, and I can give you vastly more information immediately after this hearing. Locations, programs. And remember, Dave Grusch, because of his very senior role in the intelligence community, he had access to over 2,000, what they call SAPs, secret access programs. These are the most secret black budget programs that exist in the defense community. So. he says he's interviewed over 40 people inside those programs, and they have direct knowledge, direct contact, direct information. So, what he's doing is using the new congressional legal provisions to basically say, the bosses at the Pentagon would like to report to Congress, but they don't know. But the people who work for them do know, and I'm whistleblowing on them so they're compelled to tell the bosses so the bosses can tell Congress.
AUBREY: All right, because I didn't understand this exactly right. Because when you say Pentagon and you say Congress, there's not intuitively this kind of split. Pentagon is Congress, Congress is Pentagon, right? What do you mean? But there's clearly a difference. And this difference is being highlighted because it seems like the state that's on the surface, the overt state, is actually then pressing into what you would call the deep state or the covert state, some other layer that doesn't actually necessarily report to the overt state except through backchannels, and through special individuals. And this is a very interesting phenomenon that's happening that actually traces back, and we talked a bit about on the podcast, Robert F. Kennedy, but his uncle, John F. Kennedy, like a week before he got assassinated, was also making a similar move saying, "Hey, turn over all your information." There's a letter that's actually printed, that shows him making that request, like, let's turn over this information. I want to know what's going on. And then a week later, he dies.
PIPPA: So, what's I think really important here is you could take the whole UAP, are we alone, peace out of it, just remove all that for a minute, and think about this as Congress is saying to the Pentagon, we give you tax dollars, you are supposed to be accountable for what you do with that money. The law has been clear for the last five years that you should be audited every year. And they haven't been audited once in those five years. And even when I was in the White House--
AUBREY: And the Pentagon runs all of the alphabet agencies; CIA, FBI, NSA--
PIPPA: No, that's separate. The intelligence community has their own infrastructure. And by the way, they've just elevated the head of the CIA to the cabinet, in spite of the fact that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is above the CIA, is already in the cabinet. That's a separate thing is the intelligence community. What we're talking about is the defense community.
AUBREY: Okay, so we've got the intelligence community, we've got Congress, and then we've got the defense community, which is the deep military structure. So, the Pentagon is the deep military structure, is that fair to say?
PIPPA: Well, the Pentagon is the military.
AUBREY: Pentagon is the military. It's the military. So, it has an overt layer, the top layer, which is what the Pentagon is saying it's doing. Then it has the underneath structure, the deep structure.
PIPPA: Let's back away a little bit from the word deep, because it is so loaded and think about it a different way. What you have for decades inside our military establishment are lots of secret programs, because we didn't want the Chinese and the Russians and any of our adversaries to know what we were doing or what we had. So within the Air Force, within the Navy, within the Army, within the Marines, there are all these secret programs. I think what's happened is over the years, so much money went into them and then there wasn't any accountability, what are you doing in those programs? And some of them, not all of them, but some of them had to do with this UAP issue. So as Congress says, show me the money, what have you been doing with it? They're getting a blank response. And when I was in the White House, when Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense, he publicly said, I got a trillion dollars missing over here that I can't account for, and I'm the Secretary of Defense. I cannot tell you what the heck is going on. So today, it's a much bigger number. And so, this is what Congress is saying is--
AUBREY: A trillion. Just to fathom that. A trillion dollars. So, if you're spending a trillion dollars, you're doing some wild shit.
PIPPA: Yes.
AUBREY: Because if you're spending a trillion dollars in a way that nobody sees what you're doing, that's actually impressive.
PIPPA: It's impressive.
AUBREY: It's impressive to spend that much money and not have anything that anybody can see.
PIPPA: Well, so, fast forward. We've had record level defense spending for maybe the last decade. And again, no transparency on, not where all of its going. But a big chunk of it can't really be accounted for. So I think one of the reasons the Pentagon is pushing back is because even though there's whistleblower protection on the UAP issue, if you come forward, you're effectively admitting that you've been taking money from Congress and spending it away that was not in keeping with how it was allocated.
AUBREY: And you have to presume that somebody who was giving them that money was saying, look, we're going to give you this money, we'll take care of you. But if you get caught, you're on your own. Similar like Mission Impossible type of movie situation. Like, "Listen, if you get caught, this never happened. We never gave you support. We're not going to come save you."
PIPPA: You're on the right track. I'd go further and say all of these people have been under nondisclosure agreements. And if they in any way broke them, they would immediately be thrown into a military tribunal and into prison. So, the problem now is how do they come forward and say, actually, money got diverted to these programs, because now you're admitting to Congress that you misappropriated or misallocated funds, and that could put you in jail. So, my personal view, and this is just a personal view, is the only way to square this circle, is Congress is going to ultimately have to give amnesty to everybody, right? Because if we want to get at the truth, which is what the heck is going on with all this money, we cannot be taking the people who are in these programs and putting them all in jail at the same time. Because after all, who have we got in them? They're going to be the top most brilliant scientists, the most trusted officials in our establishment. Now, have some of them been up to things they shouldn't have been up to? Maybe--
AUBREY: But probably under promises and under guises that they were doing the thing that they needed to for the good of all. Probably, most likely. I think I understand your reason for pushing back against the word deep because it's so involved in this kind of conspiracy nest of the deep state. But when I say deep, I'm not referring to that type of Qanon deep state. I'm just saying like, that thing, which is not visible to the light that's underneath, that's underneath NDAs. It's beneath the visible layer of, if you're thinking about the ocean, like there's a visible layer of the ocean where you can see the fucking fish. And then there's the submarine layer where you got to go way down in there, you got to break through all of these different, redacted and secret programs and ways that money's moving. So there's an underneath deep structure. But I think it's important to actually say, we're not trying to make a big claim here about some organization or some malevolent force. And we also can't exclude that that's a possibility. However, what we're saying is, there's just something that's going on with that structure that has not been overt, that has not been able to have transparency, for whatever reason. And now there's tension between those people where hey, we're in the light, we have to show what our money is being spent on. You guys can't show it. There's this phenomenon going on. And you're not telling us what's up. And they're pressing and asking them, and now they have people saying, we'll tell you, but we want to tell you, we'll tell you a little bit here, and then we'll tell you everything if you give us a secret room and you were telling me about that secret room.
PIPPA: Exactly. There's something called a SCIF. I've been in SCIFs. SCIFs are literally a small room, which is basically a Faraday cage. So, it protects anything you say inside it from being picked up by listening devices outside. So, whenever you're talking about anything that is truly classified, you physically enter a SCIF to have that conversation. I can't remember exactly. I think it's a secret compartmentalized information facility. I'll probably get corrected on that online. But anyway, it's something--
AUBREY: We get the idea, basically.
PIPPA: So interestingly, a couple of the congressmen, particularly Congressman Tim Burchett, Congressman Luna, and Congressman Gaetz, last week all asked to interview or converse with David Grusch inside a SCIF prior to the hearings. Because Grusch can tell them everything inside the SCIF. But under the rules, he cannot tell them classified information outside the SCIF. And you can only tell people who are classified themselves.
AUBREY: But the Congressman had the classification that would allow him to speak to them?
PIPPA: I can't confirm that. But they could have supplied members of Congress or their staff that would have been fully able to receive the information. So, that wasn't the issue. The issue is the Pentagon and whoever's responsible for clearing access to the SCIF refused to give permission. And so, they refused to allow Congress to interview this person. Then these same Congressman went out to Eglin Air Force Base where--
AUBREY: Where's Eglin Air Force base?
PIPPA: Actually, I don't know off the top of my head. Where is Eglin? So, they went out there because apparently there's something there.
AUBREY: And this something, the word biologics was used.
PIPPA: Yes, it came up.
AUBREY: Biologics came up in this hearing. That's wetware. That's bodies, that's bodies, or drones, bodies, android bodies, but whatever it is, it's wetware.
PIPPA: Yeah. That's right.
AUBREY: Fundamentally, that's what we're talking, when we're talking about biologics.
PIPPA: And the congressmen pressed on this and asked, "Were there pilots? Were there bodies?" And the witness, Dave Grusch said, "Yes." He just said yes. So again, this elevates this whole thing into such a weird space. But here's the key. So they went out to Eglin. And basically demand access to the base, and they were denied access to the base. And then the congressman, I think it was Tim Burchett. He put it so elegantly, he said, we had a conversation with them about how power flows under the Constitution of the United States, i.e. you in the military report to us in the Congress. So, you can't deny us access to your facilities. But they did. So they didn't get in there and they didn't get into the SCIF. And this has created a further sense of what the heck are you guys hiding?
AUBREY: And so, there's this tension that's developed where Congress is saying, “look, this is our facility. We paid for it. Let me in”. And they're like, “hmm, no”. This is a kind of standoff. We're in a standoff position right now.
PIPPA: And it's a bureaucratic standoff, just to be clear. Because my goodness, we're in such a moment in history where we're still pursuing, where we were in a physical standoff over Capitol Hill not very long ago, right? On January 6. So, I want to be clear, this is not that kind of a standoff. But it is, nonetheless, an argument about who has the right to know. And does Congress have the right to demand the information on a subject that is of such historic importance, not just to Americans, but to all humanity?
AUBREY: Does Congress have the right?
PIPPA: It does.
AUBREY: Okay. So this is where it gets tricky. And again, we do not want any situation that has any... We want this to be resolved in the most beautiful way. And I think before we finish discussing this, we're going to talk about the story of the most beautiful way that this can all unfold. And so, that's where we're headed. But I think it's also important to illuminate that there's tension, conflict tension right now, where there's a request that's being denied. And then what happens when a request is made, and the request is denied? I mean, you get the idea of if the police really want to get in your home, and they go, "Can we enter your home?" And you go, "No." And they go, "Okay, I'm going to go get a warrant from the judge." And they're going to say, we're going to be able to get in your home. Then they come with a warrant, and then they come in and they have force and they go in. Well, that's one model. But then, the place that they're going is the force. What force are they going to bring to the force itself? It's a very confusing and fucking strange situation. And obviously, we don't want to enter that dystopic reality, but this is also just, this is what's happening. And that's why I'm calling it a standoff because it's like, what do we do now?
PIPPA: Yeah, so Senator Schumer has written legislation and amendments to the National Defense Appropriation Act for this year. And he refers to non-human intelligence 22 times in one piece of legislation. So again, when people say, do you really think this is real? You're like, well, Congress does. Because here we have the speaker in the house writing this. So in dealing with a non-human intelligence, another piece of this puzzle is how do you get the right questions on the table? What is this phenomena that we're talking about? And right now, the focus is all on, are there physical things? Are there biologics? Are there programs? Are there facilities?
AUBREY: Well, there's something they're spending a trillion dollars on.
PIPPA: Well, I'm not saying all of it went to that, but yeah.
AUBREY: Yes, rough something. Some part of that trillion dollars, presumably.
PIPPA: And remember too, a lot of it seems to have landed up outside of the Pentagon, outside of the Department of Defense in private contractors' hands. This is where it gets really tricky. Because if it's with private defense companies, then they're not subject to any of this. They're like, hey, I'm running my company. It's like if somebody came to your door here and said, you have something we want. You'd be like, I'm not in the government. I'm not subject to any of this legislation. So, another layer of this is how do you get into those defense companies where maybe a lot of this stuff is being held, conducted?
AUBREY: So we're talking about a potential, again, in the dystopic view, like what was it? Cyberdyne that was in The Terminator series. It was like a Cyberdyne and Cyberdyne has the Terminator tech in there. But obviously we're not talking about terminators, but I'm just saying, it's interesting how art imitates life in a certain way. We have an intuition based on I think our connection to the field, and the muse of James Cameron and these people who come up with these ideas. You just have a feel for what might be actually real. And that's why art imitates life in such a way is because we are connected to a universal field of spirit, and there's information that's actually shared. And now, we're in a time where truth wants to emerge on all levels and all layers. And this is one of the deep secret protected truths that's being held. So if we imagine, alright, so we're in this scenario. There's a deep secret truth that's being held by a small group. We don't know who that small group is, but it's somewhere involving into the subsurface layers of the Pentagon and private contractors. They've been working on stuff for a while. I mean, is it hypothetically possible that we've been able to reverse engineer these craft, fly these craft, that some of the phenomenon that we're seeing are actually us doing it? I mean, there's so many different things that open up. Then on top of that, there's also the question of, well, we're aware that our government is willing to do massive psyops to actually shift public perception. Like Operation Northwoods is a classic example of that, where they were going to create some kind of Cuban terrorism that would incite us to go to war and take over Cuba. And, JFK was like, get the fuck out of here. I'm walking out, and I'm going to dismantle you piece by piece, because he was like, "This is insane." So it's not that, we have to be aware that the government does run psyops. And this could be manipulated into some kind of psyop if it was taken down the wrong type of way of disclosure. And then there's the beautiful way of disclosure, which is just truth, and just sharing what's there. And, transparency and being honest. So, there's just kind of two ways. There's the psyop way that would be used to control and manipulate through fear. And then there's, alright, here's the honest truth. And here's what we don't know, here's what we do know, here's where we're scared, here's where we're not scared. And, really kind of open up this whole conversation.
PIPPA: So, to answer this, we have to ask the question, why now? So, I'll give you my own theories on why is this happening now. Why it didn't happen 20 years ago? And part of it is, we now have such sophisticated sensors and cameras that we didn't have before. And we have computational power on a scale, which we've talked about in the podcast, on a scale that we've not had before. So, our capacity to observe and collect data has gone through the roof. And so, things that used to be written off as somebody's imagination, it's not. Because you got triangulated data from multiple sensors, all saying there's something there.
AUBREY: Yeah, Jimmy in the swamp seeing something weird now has an iPhone 11. At least. He might even have a 14. And he's capturing shit in 4K. This is a different time.
PIPPA: It is. Plus, by the way, we have a ton of private cameras and sensors in space, which we never had before. All these shoebox-sized satellites that are under private control. So, I think part of it is that, government used to have a monopoly on all the data. And now it's been broken by private ownership of sensor and camera mechanisms. So, you couldn't hide lots of stuff. That's part of it. I think, part of it as well is, the transparency of the internet. And so all these, again, black budget, not accounted for programs that could be hidden in a world that didn't have the internet and didn't have iPhones. But you can't in a world where everything is being subjected to radical transparency. So, there are real reasons why now. But I go further and say that I just don't think this can be a psyop because after all, Congress has had five years of private hearings on the subject. Now, no one noticed when they were occurring, because none of that's reported. But you're not going to hold five years of private hearings if this is just a total ruse on a lark. Then they held public hearings, and then they held this as a public hearing. I personally would go a little further and say as well, it just strikes me, I'm super interested in what we're doing in space and the expansion into the space economy. We're going back to the moon for the first time in 50 years.
AUBREY: We might be mining comets, what is it Comet Phoebe?
PIPPA: Asteroids. Psyche. The asteroid Psyche. Phoebe is another one maybe. But yeah, just massive value, a game changer for the world economy, an ability to protect Earth from having to rip it up anymore. But why? Because as we are going into space, suddenly, we have an explosion of disclosure. Are they totally coincidental? And having said that, I'm not at all convinced that the phenomena is exclusively space-based either. But I'm just saying, I think that might be part of what's driving this as well. What I find impossible is that all of these incredibly well-credentialed, super senior, high classification level people are all either crazy, or making this all up. This does not make sense.
AUBREY: I think we're just beyond that. One of the things that we were talking about is that disclosure may not come in this big public moment. Well, it may come. RFK, knowing him as the man that I do, and I talk to him, text him every week, and, I know that man. If he finds it, and he finds out some truth, he's the type of guy that's going to want to share it unless it's going to... I mean, I imagine that he could not share something that was going to destroy a bunch of, obviously, he has the sensibility. It's not like truth is the only thing he cares about and he'll say it even if the world burns. No, but fundamentally, we're entering also a period where we have a president who would want to tell the truth, just like his uncle wanted to tell the truth, and would have probably led down this road. And so, it's interesting that there's also that same continuity of a Kennedy about to come into office.
PIPPA: Yeah, it's fascinating.
AUBREY: It's fascinating how this is just all coinciding.
PIPPA: It's just totally, totally fascinating. I think also, there's one more piece of this puzzle, which is also, how interesting that our entire legal and justice system rests on the testimony of witnesses. But on this subject, anyone who says that they've witnessed something has been completely cast aside as a nutcase.
AUBREY: Just gaslit, yeah.
PIPPA: And one of the provisions Congress has put in place is that the intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense have to hand over the information on who have you destroyed because they said it was true. And you had a policy and a program for undermining their career and their integrity, because they suggested that this was so. That's going to be fascinating all by itself. But it's almost like a different version of the Me Too and the Weinstein movement. If you think about it, all those people who said something happened to me, and here's my story. And for decades, everybody just dismissed it. The witnesses, not sound. And then finally, everybody went, oh, actually, something is systematically wrong here. And so, we've done it on a number of issues. We've done it on the Me Too movement, we've done it on the issues related to the Catholic Church, and pedophilia. It's not the first time that we've taken a whole subject--
AUBREY: And there may be more work to do on all of those issues still remaining. But nonetheless, yes, the pattern is established.
PIPPA: So, what's the pattern about, is my question. Societally, why do we keep dismissing the victims of these things? Why do we dismiss the people who've experienced something and say, we don't want to hear your story, and we don't believe you before you even tell us. It's interesting.
AUBREY: Yeah, while those movements that you mentioned have patterns, there's the individual details of all of these things. And then there's also the ways in which then, when those movements came, then those movements were also weaponized against people that wanted to get taken down. I just read a column from Douglas Murray about Kevin Spacey has been actually cleared of all charges in court that were leveled against him, but, nonetheless his reputation is completely destroyed even though twice now, all allegations have been actually, he's been cleared of all allegations. And I think we saw that in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard. There's situations in which things can go too far, and that angle can be weaponized. But that's a whole other bracket that I think is, but what you said is true, that there's a pattern of finding the underlying, where are there things that are not being handled in the right way, how do we bring those to the surface? And how do we deal with those? And how do we integrate those as a society, and find the right, first of all accountability for your actions if you've taken those actions, And also, forgiveness, when there is forgiveness. And also exoneration for those people who we actually now show to be not acting out of alignment.
PIPPA: Yeah, and I think this is the key thing, and why I think amnesty is something to consider. Because we can throw all our energy into the past, and the blame game, and the not forgiving. Or we can say, okay, a lot of stuff happened, that wasn't cool. But let's go forward and throw her energy into what does this mean for the future of humanity? Now, I think some of the people who are trying to break open the subject, particularly from the defense community, they want to do it because they genuinely believe that there are technologies that would allow us to have serious advantages over our peers.
AUBREY: True.
PIPPA: And we are in a very tricky moment in geopolitics, as we've talked about in the podcast amongst the superpowers, there's no question about it, right? The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Federation of Atomic Scientists, they keep saying we're closer to midnight than we have been on the atomic clock since the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, given that pressure and that threat, you can understand why a lot of people might be like, if we have reengineered technology, let's get it so that we can vanquish our opponents. So that's one driver. But another driver is, if we're really dealing with a nonhuman intelligence, and if it is really so much more advanced than we are, then we could treat this as a moment where we're able to ascend into a higher form of conversation. And again, I know I said this on the podcast, but just to bring the point home, when we had the Chinese balloon fly over the United States, then there were three other unidentified objects after the balloon. And what did we do with all of them? We shot them down. And I'm like, okay, if this is really a nonhuman intelligence, and a higher intelligence, is the way we want to open the conversation here with shooting at it? Is this how humanity wants to--
AUBREY: Right, we don't want to project our level of bellicose consciousness on these likely advanced civilizations who quite possibly have advanced in their own level of consciousness as well as they've advanced in their own level of technology. I mean, we are far less brutal and inhumane now than we ever were. I mean, if you can look back, go back you find lobotomies and slavery and shock therapy and all kinds of, like the ways that we treated women and the ways that we treated, we're far more humane, and general. And yes, there's still problems. And yes, it's not perfect. And yes, we have more to go, for sure. But we're evolving in our consciousness and morality, largely in the macro. And there's spurts in which we're not, and I understand. But we're evolving in consciousness. And it would make sense, it's always made sense to me that those advanced civilizations would have also evolved both technology and consciousness, or they would have just destroyed each other if they didn't, like we are. Potentially if we go down the dark, dystopian path, we'll just fucking destroy each other. If we don't evolve our consciousness, we'll kill each other. And then we'll never get to the high level technology that these other civilizations have done. So, it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that there's benevolent intelligence, and maybe there's different types of intelligence, and maybe there's a confederation that has different agendas. I know there's good forces and dark forces in the psychonautic cosmos that I'm involved in. The dark forces are real, the good forces are real. It would make sense that potentially advanced civilization could have conflict between the dark forces and the good forces. My friend, Matias de Stefano does allude to such things from his own channels and memories of these stories being told. So we're entering a complex galactic federation type of moment, how are we going to show up to this? What have we done so far? And then how do we move forward? And really, again, this comes to the people really, not being easily dissuaded, not being, I think of a movie like Independence Day, and all of these movies that have prepared us for the aliens are coming, and they're going to try and kill us and we better kill them back. Signs from M. Night Shyamalan and all of these other movies. It's always hostile, because that's what we know. That's what we do. We're the hostile ones, but we're projecting that on them. That may not be what they're up to, at all.
PIPPA: Well, this is one of the things that comes up in this conversation about what the heck is the phenomena. And the line from the philosopher Nietzsche really captures it, which is you look into the abyss, and the abyss looks back at you. So, what you bring to this will be reflected to you. So, people who come from the intelligence and military establishment, they're trained to look for threats, they're trained to assume that everything is going to hurt you. They speak in terms of, and you'll hear it in the congressional testimony, they talk about, there's something in our airspace. Not being in that world, I'm kind of like, maybe we're in their airspace. And maybe this approach that everything's a hostile opponent, the things you do see, they look like a hostile opponent. But people who don't bring that mentality see something very different. And one of the things that makes this whole thing so complicated is, it does seem that some people, you can have several people, and some will report they've seen something and the others will be like, what? So it's not so easy for science yet to get a grip on what are we dealing with--
AUBREY: Which is why anomalous phenomena make more sense than flying objects, because flying object is locating it in Newtonian physics, where what we're saying is this may be also available only to people who have the ability to perceive in extra dimensional capacities, in four-dimensional. So there's lots of complicated issues with this. But I think your point, to just double-click on your point is that, we've always been operating from a military and safety standpoint, that if anybody could absolutely wipe us out, we need to make sure that we neutralize that threat. So, that was always what the atomic arms race was all about, was first strike. Is there a position where all of the missiles could come wipe out our country completely and we would not be able to respond? If so, we assume that somebody would do it. And so, that's the assumption. That's the overarching meta assumption of the military industrial complex is, if they can, they will, and we have to prepare ourselves for the likelihood that they will. But it seems in this case, like they can, and they haven't.
PIPPA: They can and they haven't. Well, we don't know if they can, but they haven't. So, we know that.
AUBREY: But it seems like if they have far more advanced tech than we have, you have to imagine that if they can do the things that they've done, what the pilots are reporting, the movements that they've made, the way that they're able to operate, how the fuck are we going to fight them? And do you think that they wouldn't have nuclear tech? Of course they would. Do you think they couldn't just get in there and destroy us if they wanted to? I mean, it seems obvious that they could, but they haven't.
PIPPA: This is what Ryan Graves said in his testimony as well. And one piece of the testimony I found particularly intriguing was when David Grusch, in the past testimony, in the interviews, I think he's done with, Oh, darn, the wonderful reporter Ross Coulthart. This is jetlag. So, Ross Coulthart done this long form interview with him on News Nation. And he talked about how the phenomena is co-located with us. And everybody kind of freaked out, like what the heck does co-located mean? But he was implying that when you ask the question, how could this thing come from light years away? The nearest planet is so far, how could it get here? And he was implying that's not what's happening.
AUBREY: It's quantum.

PIPPA: That it's quantum. And again, the Nobel Prize was awarded for quantum physics last year. And when you go back and reread the original quantum physicist, David Bohm, he talks about the implicate and the explicate order. He implies that there's an implicit order to things that manifest into reality. And this idea, got him literally run out of town, in fact, run out of the country at the time, because it was a challenge to the Einstein standard model of physics. And there are quite a few people in the realm of physics who would say that, for many decades, few people have been brave enough to challenge that model of physics. But now because we have new sensors, new expanded computational power, we're discovering things that tell us that our knowledge of physics may not be as strong as we thought it was. So, I thought it was fascinating when Grusch said, maybe a good place to start is holographic theory. I was like, oh, boy, okay, everybody's going to go down a rabbit hole on this one. What the heck does he mean by this? Already, I saw Eric Weinstein was out on Twitter saying, as a physicist, this doesn't make sense. There's going to be a big argument. But what's important is the known boundaries of physics are now having holes punched in them. And that, for me, as an economist, a person in the markets, I'm like, we're going to get new discoveries, we're going to get new definitions of what's possible. And that is very exciting. And I still see, we are expanding the realm of possibility so quickly. I mean, I have a very abundant view of the future, a very abundant view.

AUBREY: Yeah, me too. And I think it's an abundant view of the evolution of consciousness too. I think the picture that we've been fed about what humanity is, and who humanity is, is actually not accurate. It's been manipulated, and we've been pitted against each other. You take two dogs, and you starve them. You poke them with sticks, and you get them. That's how you get a dog fight to happen. But those dogs, if you let them out in the wild, maybe every once in a while they'd fight but for the most part, they'd probably get along. Same with the roosters. You can create a situation where people are at each other's throats. But that doesn't mean that that's their natural state. And I think we've been actually prodded into a position where we're in this antagonistic relationship with each other, but it's not our natural state. It's not who we really are. And that's why I have this optimistic vision of the future is because I don't think this is our nature. I think we do have a higher nature. I believe that God lives within us, as us, and through us. And that's why I'm optimistic.
PIPPA: Look, on this whole UAP anomalous phenomena issue, as I said to you before, I was never in this issue, I was never following this. It came as a total surprise to me, like three years ago that people I knew from my government days started to approach me going, you gotta watch this thing. Congress is doing something really radical here. So I started paying attention and realized, oh, my gosh, something major is going on. But I was approaching it from a policy and a leadership angle, because this is a massive leadership issue for this country, for sure. Because we've had so many leadership failures, and for the public to kind of come to terms with being lied to on such a profound subject, potentially challenges our sense of trust, to say the least. So, how it's handled is really important for the stability of the future. And that's kind of how I came to it. But now that I'm in it, and I've had the privileged position of meeting some of the witnesses and being around some of the congressional staff that are involved in this, I'm like, this is an incredible moment in history. And my question is, where is our sense of curiosity? Why are people so quick to shut this down and say, this is ridiculous, this is not real, this is not worth reporting. Where is their fundamental sense of curiosity? Our willingness to say, maybe I didn't know everything.
AUBREY: That's essential to have that open ended question. And science really needs to remember that as well. Science is the science of asking questions, and continuing to ask questions, and continuing to test your former hypotheses, knowing that your hypothesis is the best thing that you have going at a certain time. And there may be another alternate hypothesis that advances, potentially includes and transcends, or actually shifts the fundamental structure of what we once believed. And this is just the way it's always been, and this is the way it's going to be. Also, I think they're underestimating the public's ability to, if someone comes up and says, hey, we kept this shit secret, because it was scared us and we didn't know what it would do to, we didn't know how this would be handled. We didn't understand it ourselves. We didn't feel like we could share this with everybody. It's okay for a truth to have a temple, and to be held within certain bounds until you understand it. I think the public would understand that, But now we're getting to a point where it's alright, time's running out. And I think for a lot of different reasons, lots of things are converging, where there's going to be a big moment in time. I just feel the quickening, this quickening of lots of things coming together. And I for one can say I would never choose to be in a different time, in a different place than right now. It's the most exciting time to be alive.
PIPPA: Totally, totally. And the other day on the podcast, I kind of mangled the quote from Richard Feynman, but it captures so beautifully the right way to think about it, which is, I would rather have questions that can't be answered, than answers that can't be questioned. And this is where we are. It's super exciting. And I actually think there are a lot of scientists who will bring to bear all their rigor and all their discipline, and do exactly what Senator Gillibrand has asked for, which is to bring science to this, so that we can get a grip on it. And, just to remind everybody too, the other formidable reason why this was all kept secret for so long, was also because we were in an era of mutual assured destruction. We were in a period of history where Washington DC was literally ground zero, the target for a full nuclear hit. And so we didn't want the Russians or the Chinese to know that this existed, or that maybe there were some circumstances in which our weapons didn't work.
AUBREY: You could hypothesize a reality in which if the Russians believed that we were very close to being able to blink all of their ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles out of existence, all of the missiles from everything, because we had high level, extra-terrestrial or extra dimensional tech, then at that point, they would freak the fuck out and make an immediate first strike. Because they would believe that if we had that technology, we would do the same to them. So I think there's, it's a complex field. And I think what you were saying about amnesty, like alright, everybody deescalate, calm down. Let's just assess what's really going on, and then hopefully come to a greater spirit of collaboration, and also not allow this to be a manipulation by those forces that want total control, total surveillance, one world government, where there's a clear hierarchy of these people on top who hold all the secrets, tell all the lies. That's not the world we want. We want a different type of global cooperation, the celebration of diversity within a single unified community called Earth, Gaia, Sophia. And fuck yeah, let's go.
PIPPA: Let's go.
AUBREY: Let's go. Pippa, thank you so much. I think we'll check in with you and keep abreast of this. I haven't spoken to anybody who has such a rigorous and beautiful mind that's been tracking this in such a way. So just, once again, thanks for coming back on and filling us in on the latest of the latest. And yeah, so we'll just keep in touch and if new developments come out, we'll find a way, digitally or in person, maybe we'll lure you to move to Austin so we can have a regular, "This is our weekly disclosure report with Pippa and Aubrey."
PIPPA: Well, listen, I'm so grateful. Having these long form podcast formats is such a privilege to be able to go into detail, and take a breath while explaining something so mind blowing and so heavy. For many years, did mainstream media and I know what it is to be compressed into three minutes. And it's impossible to convey anything about the subjects that I'm into, geopolitics, world economy, technological innovation, and now this subject which is new for me. It requires this kind of peaceful, generous allocation of time and I'm grateful for that.
AUBREY: Nuance, humility, and just this kind of, that's absolutely the approach. Well, thank you so much, so much love. And thanks, everybody for tuning into this bonus add-on, bolt-on part of this podcast. So thanks, everybody. We love you. We'll see you next week.