Who or what is really in control? In today’s podcast I am joined by professor Fabio Vighi to discuss his theory that Big Money is actually the core driver. We delve into the economic side of the pandemic, touching on the danger of health passports, central bank digital currencies, and how capitalism could transform into a dystopian monetary slavery system. But even if his theories are correct, perhaps everything is paving the way towards a more beautiful economics where relationship is no longer mediated by money alone.  

AUBREY: Fabio, good to see you.

FABIO:  Good to see you, Aubrey.

AUBREY:  So we have a very interesting story to tell today. And until I encountered your work, I had, really, no idea about any aspect of this, this particular way in which we could see some of the different challenges that we're facing right now, as a culture, really no window into this until I started reading your work. And, of course, you're not the only one that had their eye on this for sure. But you just really write about it in a salient way. And the way I would like to start telling the story, is to start telling the story with a white paper that was issued by a gigantic mega financial corporation called BlackRock. So for those people who don't know, tell us what Blackrock is.

FABIO: BlackRock is the most powerful asset manager in the world today, together with Vanguard, and another one. But, basically Vanguard and BlackRock, you will find them as major shareholders of the wealthiest companies in the world. So they really do control trillions of dollars. They manage them, they move them, basically. They are extremely powerful politically because they've kind of infiltrated, if you allow me to use this term, Biden's administration. They also sit indirectly in the control room, as it were, in political terms. So, in many ways, they represent this notion of stakeholder capitalism, which is today's, let's say, more widely-known notion of contemporary capitalism. So it is difficult to distinguish between politics and economics, we got a system with revolving doors. We could say whereby the very powerful people in the financial system do manage to infiltrate politics directly. It's a very opaque area where it's difficult to distinguish who's really in control of things, but certainly they, Blackrock--

AUBREY: And this is also why, just to interrupt quickly, this is also why a lot of people have started calling them the fourth branch of government just because of the amount of power that they hold in the financial sector and how so many things revolve around money, all the lobbying, all of the campaign donations. Everything is really moved by an economic engine. Economics are really at the centre of so much of our culture. The way that people either consciously or subconsciously make their decisions, take their actions, and money is at the root of so many of the decisions that are being made. I think people have a pretty good understanding of that. All right, money is one of these forces, that if you actually go down into the centre, it's really at the centre of a lot of our lives, our own personal lives. Money actually mediates between relationships, between people, a lot of the relationships we have are mediated by money, except in the purest friendships and partnerships and forms of community but money is like a real mediating strong force. And, of course, it extends all the way through politics and policy.

FABIO:  Right, through our institutions. So we often think that power resides in our political institutions. We still have that sort of mind frame where we think that that's where power is. I think, as a matter of fact, today, power is above those institutions. Politicians are, in many ways, executing orders, to put it very bluntly, that they receive from these very powerful financial institutions themselves. Sometimes it's very difficult to say where the financial guy stops and where the politician begins. It's an opaque zone, where it's difficult to distinguish between the two, more-- 

AUBREY:  A lot of people try to reduce this to people, they say, "The elites," and these people, but it's almost like money has a consciousness, money itself has a consciousness. It's like an entity, and that entity itself, is potentially the most powerful entity that we have in our world, in many ways more powerful than God, in our culture, obviously.

FABIO:  Today, the economy is a sort of religion. It's a sort of religion that we all obey, in many ways without even realising that we do. So it's a kind of metaphysical entity. It's above us, it controls us deep down into our unconscious, it's the air we breathe. It moves everything around us. It's very difficult to think of a place, subjectivity, something that is not touched by that metaphysical entity. It's a kind of, what philosophers often called in the past, a real abstraction. It's abstract, it's, in a sense, a fiction, a narrative. But it's also totally real, because it runs our lives completely. You say that there's a consciousness there. I would say there's a kind of mechanism, that is a sort of automatic subject. It works in an automatic way. And it doesn't stop in front of anything, ultimately. It's a sort of mechanical dynamic, that has a mind of its own, almost. The thing is, we've internalised the categories, the values that, let's say, the universe of capital, as we call it, has brought about. And that's beyond politics, it's beyond religion, as we used to know it. It's something that is truly, I think, metaphysical in so far as it covers every aspect of our being. I could say ontological, in philosophical terms. It coincides with our being in the world. It's very difficult to escape it.

AUBREY:  Let's take this example and let's continue with this metaphor and think of money like, and we know it's not, I think you described it perfectly as this abstraction, a very real abstraction. But let's assume that it's like an entity, because we understand that from a biological perspective. An entity, when it's sick, it wants to heal itself, right? If an entity is sick, and the entity is dying, and the entity is stressed, it is going to do whatever it can to protect and heal itself. BlackRock as, let's call it the cerebral aspect of this entity to a certain degree, they identified in August, 2019, to get back to where we started, they were like, "Hey, the organism that we're the spokesperson for, or at least a spokesperson for, it's fucking sick. And we have a big problem." They write this whole white paper, and I've read the white paper, it's all online. We can put it in the show notes. They will write a white paper, August 2019 and they say, "Look, the situation, the economics, money itself, it's sick. And there's a serious problem here. And we need a radical, unique solution in order to solve this problem." Summarize a bit what this white paper really was saying and what it was pointing to, and then what the solution  was, and then we'll go back in time to how we got there. Let's start there at the paper.

FABIO:  Good. I think it's a really good starting point because that paper is what really opened my eyes in a sense. I read that paper and I thought, okay, that's why we have COVID today. So we will get to COVID eventually. But I think that paper was telling the Fed, because it was, I think, meant to be read by the Fed in the first place, but was practically a paper that was saying the economy is about to hit the buffers. The system is about to crash, basically. We've had 10 days of expansion, of monetary expansion. Sorry, 10 years. 10 years of monetary expansion, which means continuous QEs, continuous quantitative easing monetary policies. And quantitative easing means, effectively, the Federal Reserve, the American Central Bank, but also other central banks, injecting huge amounts of money into the financial sector in order to keep it afloat. And, of course, keeping the interest rate the cost of money near zero, nailed  to near zero, thereabouts-- 

AUBREY:  These are almost like blood transfusions. It's like an organism that was almost dying, and there was more blood transfusion, leaking blood everywhere, but it's like, "We got to stay alive. We got to stay huge and giant and full of steroids. And we even more fucking steroids, and we need more blood transfusions just to stay alive." That's quantitative easing.

FABIO: That's a really good metaphor. That's right, that's what it is. It started more or less after the 2008 crash in the US. It started a little later in Europe but more or less then. So 10 years, 10/11 years of blood transfusion nonstop, huge amounts of money is injected. It's about debt, ultimately. It's about creating money out of thin air, first of all, crucial, artificial money creation programmes, artificial money. This is not money that comes from the real economy. It's money that is created by a computer in the Fed's room. By adding a few zeros to a certain number, you create money. Most of it is electronic money. You throw it into the system and in exchange, you get junk securities, toxic assets, government bonds, whatever you want to buy from the financial sector. The point is that you inject trillions, you inject billions on a weekly basis into the system, to keep it afloat, to make sure that there's this money, enough money there, cheap money that people can borrow, that big investors can borrow and they can run the machine, the speculative machine,  they can create these bubbles. The economy has functions through this monetary doping, what I call monetary doping, you call it blood transfusion. It's the same idea. It kept itself afloat, basically, for 10/11 years until 2019 when things started going wrong again. These kinds of crises happen quite regularly. 2008, 2019, things suddenly were not working any longer simply because that sort of quantitative easing system had reached its internal limit. They drove the interest rates down to the point that they couldn't lower them any longer. They already reached zero--

AUBREY: What that does for people and why that's important when you lower interest rates down is it means that money can circulate really easily, seamlessly, quickly and so there's available access to money, velocity, borrowing. All of that happens really, really fast and easy. Even though it's not new money creation, it allows access to money in a way that allows money to be loaned and debt to be increased and all of these things happen as seamlessly as possible. As part of economic stimulus, whenever you wanted to stimulate the economy with more money circulating, the Fed always just lowers the rate.

FABIO:  You need to lower the rates, so that money becomes more cheaper, easily available, and it sustains this debt-leveraged speculation. All these speculations are based on debt. So we get a hyper-indebted system. They need this constant flooding of money, of money printed out of thin air, cheap money to help them continue to expand, to inflate the bubbles that we find in the financial sector. As I said, that was going on for 10 years or so, so for a long time. It came to a point where it wasn't sustainable any longer. And that's what that paper, that you mentioned, the BlackRock paper referred to. The fact that that system wasn't sustainable any longer, there was going to be a recession, there was going to be what they call a downturn, a sudden downturn in the financial sector, with repercussions in the real economy, because it's all linked to this huge amount of value creation programmes in the financial sector. They said, "Look, we got to do something about this. We've got to make sure that the money that the Fed throws into the system goes directly to public and private spenders," and I'm quoting from that paper, more or less. They call that strategy "Going direct." It's a kind of QE on steroids. It's something that bypasses that debt creation system, and the money simply goes directly into the deposits. So they wanted to link the printer of the Federal Reserve directly to the deposits, to the accounts of the mega banks, the primary dealers. They got 24 primary dealers, investment banks, they're all investment banks, big banks, the mega banks, both in the US and internationally. Some of them like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas in Europe, Nomura Securities in Japan and so on, and so forth. So it's a global system. And they said, "Look, since this quantitative easing thing is not really working any longer, we lowered the rates to the point where…” We cannot make them negative, because otherwise, there's no point. So we need to get the money directly to these people who need them so desperately in order to continue to speculate and to inflate the bubbles that, in a sense, sustained the whole system. That's what they said to the Fed. The Bank for International Settlements in June of the same year, had already raised the alarm as it were, about the coming downturn, that this system was not working any longer. Then a month after the white paper from the Fed, you get exactly the sort of crisis that you needed to apply this sort of stimulus, a new form of stimulus, effectively.

AUBREY:  Just to talk about how unique this going-direct policy is, this is pretty radical. It's a pretty radical solution, because they're saying we need to deliver money directly, both to people, people themselves, and to banks. There's also a caveat. The problem is, if you do that, and why this is unprecedented, why doesn't the government just do this willy-nilly? First of all, you have to then justify it to the taxpayers, because ultimately, you have to say, "Oh, well, we're using this money for a good reason," so you can't have public outrage, like, "Hey, why are you just giving all of this money away? This is going to cause massive inflation. You can't do this. This is devaluing all of our money, and you're just giving all of this money away." It wouldn't make sense to people. They didn't have a real justification to do this but they needed it. They called it helicopter money, like there was a fire. They actually refer to it as that. There's a fire in the forest and you need to apply water, you just need to bring those helicopters full of water, douse the fire with water. But you need a justification for that. You need people to realize, oh, shit, there's a fire, we might burn down. So you need a justification for that. But also, at the same time, they're saying, well, fuck, this is also a challenge because if we do this, and we don't do it in exactly the right way, then we're going to create massive, massive hyperinflation and this is going to be uncontrollable. So there's a couple of conditions that they talk about of we need to go direct, give everybody money and also we need to make sure that that money doesn't actually circulate in a way that causes massive hyperinflation, which is another economic disaster for everybody.

FABIO:  I think, first of all, we need to say that, yes, the expansion, this massive monetary expansion in relation to previous QEs, had already started in September 2019. So that's when the repo market crashed and they needed to inject money in order to restore some kind of credibility and make sure that people would lend again, because there was a liquidity trap in the repo market. We'll talk about that a bit later. 

AUBREY: Just real quickly, what is the repo market?

FABIO:  Repo stands for repurchase agreement,  basically a contract where investment funds like BlackRock and big banks exchange money against collateral. So, for example, you're in desperate need of liquidity because you need to invest in the derivatives market or wherever you want to invest, you can get the liquidity in the repo market, in exchange of some security. Mostly, it's treasury, it's a government treasury. The idea is that you repay back that money with some interest within 24 hours. It's really immediate liquidity that you can get on the market, when you really need it quite desperately. But you have to pay back, normally, it's overnight, so it's within 24 hours, but it can also be extended, obviously. So there was a problem there because, all of a sudden, rates went up from 2% to 10%. All of a sudden, big banks stopped lending and, therefore, that could have had a massive contagion over all the other speculative markets, because if something breaks down there, then you have the infection, to use that metaphor, extending and spreading through all other markets.

AUBREY:  It's organ failure. If the blood can't flow, then organs start to fail. As the organs start to fail, the whole organism can start to collapse. So this repo, it allows blood to circulate, it's like the heart, it just keeps pumping blood that's in there.

FABIO:  It's massive. You're thinking about $1 trillion, $2 trillion exchanged on a daily basis. So it's a pretty huge market, it's part of the so called interbanking lending system, which is a kind of shadow banking system. But it does work at the heart of the financial industry as it were. So if something goes wrong there, it's a problem and it can happen very quickly. That provided the good reason for the Fed to begin this going-direct strategy. The exact figures are coming out now, two years later. The Fed has this agreement, where they don't make them public straightaway. You have to wait two years, more or less, to know exactly how much money and especially who this money went to, so who was the beneficiary of these massive going-direct types of lending, which the Fed is not supposed to do because it's not about that. They do it anyway, obviously, because they have to save the Titanic from sinking. That's what they did in 2019. What I'm going to say is that they expanded their own balance sheet of about 4.5 trillion within the last quarter of 2019. So if you look at the graph, it's more or less horizontal, and then it goes up like that the last quarter. So the balance sheet goes up hugely, which means that they've created all this money, and they've invested it. They've inserted it, they've pumped it into the financial sector, given it to the mega banks or the primary dealers in the attempt to salvage the market from implosion effectively. Of course, that went on and on and on in 2020 as well, under pandemic cover, as it were, under pandemic shield because then, that was justified.

AUBREY:  So this gets very interesting. And this is where, obviously, someone could say, "This is a crazy conspiracy theory!" And we'll talk about conspiracy theories, but ultimately, what ends up happening whether by serendipity or whether by unconscious behavior, capitalizing on some unique opportunity that they had, but basically this pandemic, for whatever reason, it happens. It starts hitting the world in January, February of 2020. People start becoming aware of COVID and then, all of a sudden, the lockdowns start to happen. The lockdown starts to happen, which then, at that point, all of the middle level of the economy, all of the businesses, everybody, all of that gets shut down. Simultaneously, right after that, stimulus money starts to fly. This is another very acute way that they were going direct. They were going direct by actually putting money in the pockets of everyday consumers. Stimulus money is just pouring into the economy. The other condition, which is we can't have this money circulating around to everybody and all of these small businesses. Inflation will just go crazy, but the economy was actually frozen. It was frozen by lockdown and a bunch of money was dropped in. That both prevented inflation and also allowed all of this additional stimulus to get into the economy. So it was this Cinderella magical way in which both of the conditions for the BlackRock Paper, two of the conditions, at least, were really met. One, there was a good excuse to deliver a bunch of money and also, there was a way to prevent that money from circulating in a way that would cause hyperinflation.

FABIO:  The problem would be if all that money turns into real demand for people to spend, because that real demand would cause inflation to surge very, very quickly. They wanted to avoid that and they also wanted to avoid raising rates, because that would have been the other problem. The moment you get inflation, you also immediately have the problem of trying to tackle inflation by hiking interest rates, which is exactly the problem we have today. What COVID allowed them to do was, first of all, I would say, ultimately, to kick the can down the road and to make sure that those problems, inflation with potential hyperinflation, and rate-hikes were postponed effectively. They didn't have to think about it then. They could just concentrate on replenishing the financial sector, making sure that everything was restored in the financial sector, while inflation and the rate hike issue were postponed, as I said. This freezing or the cooling down of the economy prevented it from overheating, and therefore, potentially creating huge inflation issues. Also it gave them time to do what they had to do, to print and print and print and throw all this money, like gallons of water, as you said, on a fire that is developing very quickly in the forest. That sort of allowed them, not so much to solve the problem, but effectively to postpone it, I would say, whilst avoiding the worst type of consequences, mostly hyperinflation, I think. But hyperinflation means devaluation of money fundamentally, fiat-currency devaluation. I think that's, more or less, what we are going to have to face now and in the future. There's no way that we are not going to face the issue of money devaluation. Our system is so dependent on these artificial money creation programmes, that the imbalance that they create in the system cannot be solved anymore. The system is not supposed to run on money created out of nowhere, out of thin air. The system is supposed to run on money that comes from investment in labor. That's how capitalism, as a social system, as a social bond, actually works. This is the kind of question that every child asks. I asked it to my father, I remember. If we need all this money, why can they print it and give it to us so we can spend it and there's no poverty and everybody's happy? You probably asked it yourself. I think every child asks that question. Why do we have to work to get money? Why doesn't the government just print money and give it to us? But, obviously, my father told me, "But that will cause inflation." And I thought what's inflation? I don't understand. It took me ages to understand what actually that meant. The idea being that the value of money in a capitalist system comes from a specific relationship between money itself and labor. Only by investing in labor to produce commodities that are then sold on the market and they realize profits, do you create wealth in a capitalist system. The moment you add or you create money from the outside, fictitious money, money created by a computer or by a printer, by a central bank printer, then you immediately create some kind of imbalance. You undermine, basically the foundations of a capitalist society. I think that's what we're doing--

AUBREY:  At the same time, what it does allow for, it allows for massive wealth-creation in the financial sector. So outside of what we could call, quote, the real economy; which is people working jobs, making products and making things, offering services, ways in which their efforts are then rewarded with money; instead of that, just typical process, there's this whole world, this whole gigantic world of the financial sector where people are getting extraordinarily wealthy by actually leveraging the creation of new money and the speculation of this money. And then we have this massive, massive sector of millionaires, billionaires, people and corporations that are actually benefiting greatly from this creation of money. It creates this massive financial window of opportunity for a whole new enterprise and a whole new type of capitalism to take hold, which is financial capitalism. These people then have all of this money and, of course, they do spend it, they buy homes, they buy things, they circulate some of the money as well. But all of this money is predicated on the creation of ever more greater amounts of money and ever greater amounts of speculation. That's why there ultimately becomes a bubble and when people talk about bubbles, all of this money that's all leveraged and indebted and all of this stuff in a bubble, that bubble can burst. And then all of that starts to collapse into the real economy again, of what is actually there? What do we actually have? What are we actually doing? Who's actually producing things?

FABIO: By now, the real economy is very much on the drip, almost, of the financial sector.It's very much on credit. It all depends on the banks lending money to businesses, so that they can invest it and make some sort of profit out of it, and create some sort of real wealth, but it depends on credit. The credit system, the financial system are growing disproportionately in relation to the real economy. We've got the growth of huge financial bubbles and the contraction of the real economy more and more. That's the disproportion I'm talking about. To me, this is not the result of some kind of criminal activity. It's not just some criminal gangs wanting to make more money. There's also that aspect, of course, because people will try to do that. But it's a systemic issue, as far as I'm concerned. The idea is that the only way in which capitalism can actually work today, more and more, is precisely through this process of financialization. We cannot rebalance it. We cannot go back to the post-war period where the real economy was flourishing, there was more distribution of wealth, things were functioning differently. Today, for this system to work, it needs to develop in this disproportionate way, where all this value is created in the financial sector and less in the real economy. So there's an internal dynamic that is pushing us to live in that way and pushing the system in that direction. I think that's what, to me, is really crucial, is the idea that the real economy is slowly contracting inevitably because capital invests less and less in labor, finds labor investment less and less profitable. Why? That's the big question for me. My answer to that is that automation, the process of technological automation, which has been exponential in recent years, with the third industrial revolution, microelectronics, digitalization and now we are going towards the fourth industrial revolution, of course, artificial intelligence. So that process of technological innovation has made more and more labor redundant, more and more labor superfluous in so far as it's not needed. Machines can do the job of productivity; they can produce much more than humans can. Therefore, capital that is always seeking to cut costs in order to remain competitive, individual capitals, end up shedding more labor, eliminating more labor than what they can reabsorb into the system. And that is what, ultimately, determines the contraction of the real economy and the compensatory mechanism whereby we need to inflate the financial sector more and more to retain, to create the sort of value that the system needs in order to reproduce itself, and the societies need in order to reproduce themselves. My issue is not just there's some bad people doing some very bad things in the financial sector. Yes, there are. The Fed and the Blackrock guy, they're all bad people in many ways. But the system is grinding to a halt by itself because it's increasingly unable to produce wealth through its original recipe, through its fundamental recipe, which is very simple, it's money that creates more money through labor, through the mediation of labor. Labour is the mediator for money to increase itself.

AUBREY: Also it allows the distribution of this wealth. When everything is automated, then you have a corporation, giant corporation, Google, Apple, Amazon, all of these things which do employ people, they obviously still do, but the delta, the difference between how much money is actually going out to the workers, versus how much money is being accumulated to the mega billionaires and the mega billionaire, trillionaire corporations that we have, there becomes an ever increasing gap where the super wealthy are getting super wealthier, but the people who are working are actually not getting that access to that money. So it's helpful for a very, very, very minute brush--

FABIO: Good point. Just an example, Apple has a market cap of $2.8 trillion, a huge market cap. So that's the value it has on the market. It employs 100,000 people. There's a huge disproportion between the labor involved in the production and the value of that company. There's a huge disproportion. That is not sustainable. Just look at that. It's not sustainable, because how is society supposed to reproduce itself if so few people are working, or are working in terms of producing value? And they're working, not as precarious workers, because precarious work doesn't produce much value for society. They need to be paid good wages, in order for that value to be created for society. But less and less of that happens. The labor commodity as it were is not as profitable as it used to be. The reason for that is because machines have been replacing labor more and more, and there's nothing we can do about it. There is really nothing we can do. I don't think there's nothing we can do about it because it's in the nature of our economic system to try and cut costs in order to be competitive. The best way they can do that today is by employing machines instead of humans to work, to produce. So the productivity potential is huge with technology, huge productivity potential but that also means that there's a lot of people who are out of the system or who don't really contribute to it and therefore, there's a problem of surplus, a surplus humanity that somewhat it's not really producing any longer, it's not receiving real wages, it's not really receiving the amount of money they need to reproduce themselves socially. Therefore, what to do with them? This is really the problem of the future for a capitalist society.

AUBREY:  So to summarize some of the things that we've been talking about: you mentioned that there're potentially bad actors in the system and the bad actors are actually manipulating these strings. However, for them, they probably don't think they're bad actors, because they're such a product of the machine itself and all they know is that it is the machine. All they know is the economic engine that they've created. When they look at what happens if they stop this economic engine, they look at it and they say, "It's a fucking disaster. So we just have to keep this going at all costs." They have all of the justification in order to do so. It's almost like a nuclear reactor. If they shut it down, then the nuclear reactor cores might overheat, and then all of a sudden, there's going to be all this spilling of radioactive energy. So they're keeping the toxic nuclear plant going, but they realise, fuck, if we stop, it's a disaster. So that's probably the justification that they have in their mind. But what they're missing is, it's really like a poverty of imagination. The poverty of imagination is, well, we've run this game for a long time. The game has worked. It's been the best economic system that we could create. We ran it for a long time. Technological advances, the way that the system works, it's just coming up against its logical ends and now we need to be creative and come up with another solution. In order for people to think about that, first of all, they have to have imagination. Second of all, they would have to trust people to be able to innovate, because the solution isn't something that could come top down. They would have to trust that innovation would emerge. We'll talk a little bit more about some ways in which we can imagine this other system that likely is inevitable to emerge anyways, and all of these transfusions, and all of these steroid shots that they're doing really won't ultimately work. It's pushing the ball down the line. So that's the position that they find themselves in. But let's go back real quick too. I want to summarize some of the things that you have written. We talked about how they needed to go direct. Blackrock needed to go direct, they needed to deliver money directly into the economy. Also they needed to prevent that from circulating through the real economy to prevent inflation. So you write, "With lockdowns, came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion, contagion of inflation. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture, through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy's engine being turned off. Had the enormous mass of liquidity pumped into the financial sector reached transactions on the ground, a monetary tsunami with catastrophic consequences would have been unleashed." So again, we get to this very unique situation, money needs to be pumped in and also certain aspects of the way that that money circulates need to be frozen. For whatever reason, COVID provided both of those criteria to be met. What ends up happening? What happens? You write this as well, "As anticipated, it has allowed the Fed to reorganize the financial sector by printing a continuous stream of billions of dollars out of thin air." Actually trillions, that's what happened. "It has accelerated the extinction of small and medium sized companies, allowing major groups to monopolize trade flows, it has further depressed labor wages and facilitated significant capital savings through smart working, which is particularly smart for those who have implemented it. It has enabled the growth of e-commerce, the explosion of big tech, and the proliferation of the pharma dollar, which also includes the much disparaged plastic industry now producing millions of new face masks and gloves every week, many of which end up in the oceans." And you say this as well, "To the delight of the Green New Dealers." "In 2020 alone, the wealth of the planet's 2,200 or so billionaires grew by 1.9 trillion, an increase without historical precedent, all of this thanks to a pathogen," that obviously, we know the story about what happened with COVID. So lots of conditions were met and then a lot of result happened from those conditions being met, which really meant that the uber wealthy absorbed so much more of the capital that actually went direct, all of this helicopter money was meant to go to the ground, it was meant to infiltrate in through the whole ecosystem, but it went just right back up to these massive storage tanks, the massive 2,200 storage tanks of money, that instead of actually putting out the fire, now we just have even larger storage tanks of money, which are these, 2,200 or so and more. It's not exactly that. It's just more wealth is accumulated into the super, super wealthy and less to the actual ground that needs the replenishment of the topsoil and micrological ecosystem. Everything that needs to actually happen, didn't really happen in a productive way. Now, just the uber wealthy got more uber wealthy. So let's say that those who were wealthy have the ability, through BlackRock and through other things, to manipulate the current system. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, they could be saying, "Look, we got to save the economy," and the unconscious desire for them to continue to accumulate wealth, which we all have, we all have an unconscious desire. However good we are, there's a part of us that wants to grow and become as big as we individually possibly can. It's the nature of our separate self, it's the nature of our ego that wants to become as powerful, wealthy, safe as possible. So unconsciously, this whole process happened. Another thing that you say beautifully, "If there is an unconscious, conspiracy and manipulation are inevitable." All that is required is that there's unconscious and subconscious desires by people who have great resources to create solutions that help them accumulate more resources. It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan by the elites.

FABIO:  I think we need to understand that the system, fundamentally, since it started a few hundred years ago, it started on a very specific premise, the premises money creates more money. This is the fundamental principle of our economic system and of our world, more generally, of our universe as we know it. It's based on a very simple idea: money that creates more money. And how does it do it? How did it come about? Thanks to people, free workers, so called free workers. The liberation of the slaves, of the serfs, suddenly they were free, but free to do what? Free to sell their labor power. That's the mediator that allows money to become more money in a capitalist system. So that's the drive. This is a desire, but also an unconscious drive that drives everything that we know. It creates all the categories that we know, all the values that we know. When you think of the good values of our society, democracy, when you think of even solidarity in a certain way, even other values, the market and so on, these are all values that have emerged in modernity from that moment on, when we went from a feudal society, to a capitalist society, when capitalist modernity was invented, and then it took time for it to become dominant, obviously. For a while there was an overlap of feudal system with capitalism with new modern capitalist system, especially through the industrial revolutions, first industrial revolution, in the beginning of the 19th century with the steam engine, second industrial revolution, particularly with the feudal system in beginning of the 20th century, then third industrial revolution. Those categories, which are capitalist categories, are more and more internalized and become more and more dominant. They become who we are fundamentally. This is something that we should never forget. It's not just bad guys versus good. In a sense, we're all driven by the same values. No matter how good we are, ultimately, there's that desire or drive that is linked, connected with the systemic drive. The systemic drive is not about the distribution of wealth, fundamentally, it's about the creation of more money through investment. You invest money in labor, originally, in order to create more money. Then there are some collateral events, and some of them are good, like the distribution, the trickling down of money, whatever, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. These are AP phenomena. They're not really what capitalism is about. Capitalism is a blind, anonymous drive, which has to do with the creation of money. That's it and then all the rest comes as a bonus, almost. Sometimes we get democratic organization, distribution, blah, blah, blah, we've had it, it failed, then we've had neoliberalism, now we're in a phase where the 0.01% owns everything, and the others are struggling. I'm simplifying a little, but this is disproportionate. But at the heart of it all, there is that fundamental recipe, that fundamental drive, which has to do with the multiplication of money, fundamentally. And that's why it works also, in the financial industry, because it's the same drive. It's only that originally it has to do with the mediation of labor. So it's money, labour, capital, whereas in the financial sector, labour doesn't need to exist. It's just money that creates money by itself. It's like the self creation of money, the speculative creation of money, without labor. And I think that's what we're having problems because we are eliminating the substance of capitalism itself. Labor is, like it or not, the substance of capitalist societies. If we take that away, then you really have a problem, you cannot have a capitalist society, sustained only by the financial system. It's impossible, and they know that. They know that very well that they cannot get rid completely of labor. They cannot. Otherwise, it's not capitalism any longer becomes some kind of tyranny, it becomes some sort of totalitarian system where very few people really are in charge of the monetary flow, and all the others are reduced to slaves again. So we go back to a new feudal world, right?

AUBREY: It's also similar to how the communist regimes of the past played out, where the state actually and state-appointed oligarchs in certain situations controlled all of the wealth, and then it was really a different form of feudalism where there was a lot of people working very hard, having very little and then state-controlled power, that tried to decide and make all of the decisions and figure everything out. And that failed, so then capitalism was like, "Alright, this is a much better solution." It does work, it works for creativity. It allows for infinite flexibility and also capitalizes on collective intelligence rather than centralized intelligence. It worked for a long time, and then all of a sudden, just because of natural forces, the forces of technology, that system no longer is serving. People in the financial sector, they're smart, and they're recognising that this game, they're not dumb, of all the insults, we can lob at them, it's not that they're dumb... That's not the case, you can say that about a lot of different areas, politics, you can be like, that's kind of dumb, but ultimately, ultimately, in the financial sector,  they're smart. So then you have people like Klaus and the World Economic Forum, they start putting out these very strange, very strange, cryptic ideas about the way the great reset, all the way things are going to go forward. You will own nothing and you will be happy. What the fuck are they even talking about? 

FABIO: That's wonderful.

AUBREY: How does that even make sense? In some ways, if you get into their mind, and you think, oh, shit, they know that the system cannot sustain itself any longer, so what is their solution? Well, all they know is control. All they know is control. That's all they know. They've controlled their companies, they've controlled their businesses, they have this inflated idea of their own mind and their own brain power and they think, you know what, if we actually controlled everything, and kept it away from the stupid people, then this mindset of like, we're the smart ones, we kept it away from the stupid people, then we could control everything completely. And if we can control everything completely, it would all work. Well, it doesn't fucking work that way, it can't work. You can get in the mindset of them thinking  what we need is more control. This becomes this slippery slope of justification towards a totalitarian dystopia. And that's something that, really, you write about, with great trepidation of where this could potentially lead with central bank digital currency. So take us down this trajectory of dystopia, that you're afraid that we may be navigating towards and then we'll talk about the ways to get off that bus to try to create a new system.

FABIO: I think that's the trajectory. That's the inevitable trajectory, if we follow the capitalist line, the capitalist drive, in the current situation, where more and more labor becomes redundant and there's no need for mass labor any longer, we end up with a lot of the population being superfluous. And they need some somehow to be controlled and given some kind of reason to exist, unless they get rid of us. There's other solutions we don't want to even think about, eugenics and so on. I think the WTF advert is a wonderful one, really. And it's unfortunate for them that they put it out. They got rid of it straight away, almost, after people started talking about it. But you will own nothing, and you'll be happy, it's a wonderful one, because it really tells us what the reset is about, the reset they're trying to implement. They know very well the workers will be poorer and poorer. So the only way in which they will be able to continue to exist is by borrowing more and more and becoming enslaved to a monetary system controlled from above fundamentally. I think that's why they are so excited about the central bank digital currencies, because that's one way in which they could really control the monetary flow and control whatever money one has in one's bank account. They can actually give the money to the people who are now out of work. Think about all these UBIs, programmes for people who are unemployed, et cetera. I think those will be the first ones on the receiving end of this kind of monetary slavery programme that is in the making, in a way right. And CBDCs are the perfect tool to implement it, because we had central bank digital currencies, they say that. They say we have the technology to implement this, and to control people, to control what people spend, and the amount of money that they have in the bank account. We are giving them the money and, therefore, we have the right to control everything they do. In a post-work society, in a post-labor society this, for them, seems to be the natural solution. People will rent, will not own anything, they might be able to rent, if they behave, if they do the things that we tell them to do, if they don't consume in a certain way, if you pay the taxes in a certain way. So everything will be about controlling people and I think it will also be about some kind of humanitarian justification for that. They can't just impose it by brute force. They'll have to find some sort of humanitarian justification, whether it's climate change or something else, or some kind of emergency. That's why I call it emergency capitalism, because it's all based on that justification. They need to justify why we can't spend, why we need to stay at home, why we can go to work, why we have to consume in a certain way. To me, that's the direction, it's very clear to me that that's the way we're going. We are exiting the work society of the past. We are entering another type of capitalism, which is very dark, very, very dark. It's prone to implosions. Maybe even a market crash could be the beginning for this new type of monetary slavery that, in a sense, it's in the making, based on mass unemployment or mass underemployment, of course. This is what we have to deal with here, ultimately, with CBDCs as well. They are the solution for them to this, inevitable I think, drive towards a post-work capitalist society, where--

AUBREY: So in this paradigm, just so people are clear, there's a central bank digital currency, which is not too dissimilar from the currency that we currently have. But it's the central bank just absolutely having full autonomy over the entire money supply. Where it gets really nefarious is we've already seen the creation of vaccine passports, which a lot of people talk about, is the entryway, the door that's opening towards a digital ID. And this is something that's already occurring in China with social credit scores, and the ability for every single person to have a digital identification. Based upon their actions, whether the government likes the actions or doesn't like the actions, they can control the population. So the control that already exists in another part of the world, that formula, could actually start to creep in to the west. It could creep into the west through vaccine passports, then becoming digital IDs, and then extending beyond vaccination into other policies, like what food you eat, how much you drive, what decisions you make, also, in a dystopian world, also what comments you make, what things you say on social media--

FABIO: Access to the internet.

AUBREY: What protests you. And of course, they link it to the phone, then you would know, and you had to leave it on, and they would know where you were, whether you were participating in something. You get this potentiality of absolute control and this total dystopia? It becomes very Orwellian at this point. Now, there were a lot of people who were saying, "Vaccine passports. It's all a fucking conspiracy theory, it's never going to..." Well, it's already started to happen, it's already starting to happen. So these next steps can happen. It's not that they can't happen. We don't know if they will, who knows. That way in which it could happen is fucking terrifying, because that is this dystopia of total control where nobody actually has any leverage anymore. We don't actually have our own economic wealth and power. It's all controlled and mediated by a single, authoritarian, totalitarian source.

FABIO: Especially with vaccine passports, people don't realize the potential they have. It's the first step, potentially. It's the first step towards this kind of digitalization of life, that will become more and more a way of controlling us. It's not necessarily the end in itself, it's only the beginning of the installation of this digital infrastructure, which will be more and more linked to our identities and therefore will be able to control us more and more completely. So it's only opening the door to this new world that awaits us out there, the vaccine passports. It's a huge step to convince people that they need it. It's a huge victory for them already. Regardless of whether they will continue or not this year or they will be dismissed and whatever, they're already there. They've already broken that taboo as it were. They will easily continue, they can force us to use them again, another pandemic or another emergency. Here we are. We are already done in the past, we can do it again. That allows them to gain ground on what they want to do.

AUBREY: Yeah, once they have access to this technology, the fear is if you have access to more control, the natural inclination, when you're in the myth of control, is that if you have access to control, you're going to use it. And every time that the government has been granted access, or any large body, really, has been granted access to power and control, we've typically seen them utilize and wield this power and control, which is also why all of the founding documents of our nation and so many of the great thinkers have warned against the natural inclination of tyranny, to go to ever greater levels of control. We're not saying that that's, for sure, what's happening or that's the only way but becomes a possibility, and with the possibility there comes it real.

FABIO: It becomes a very real possibility, they will encounter huge problems. It's not an easy one. The infrastructure is huge in itself. They have to wait for the right moment to implement it because people at some point will realize that it's not necessary, that you don't have to do that. They need the right emergency, the right crisis, maybe a huge market crash, much worse than 2008, reducing people to poverty, and therefore forcing people to accept these conditions, crap in that way. But there has to be the right timing. They have to have the right moment, they have to do it at the right moment when the infrastructure is ready. It's a huge infrastructure, it's not easy for central banks to control everybody's bank account, even in technological terms. It's not that easy. So it's something in the making, but we have to be aware that that's the trajectory. That's where we're going at least. 

AUBREY: If they had artificial intelligence that was controlled, then all of a sudden, it gets way easier. It's way easier to make these controls, they pipe in the directives into an artificial intelligence machine and then all of a sudden, it's actually very precise, exactly how they're able to control and how they're able to maneuver the infrastructure. So that's another potential danger.

FABIO: It's so important to keep some kind of critical awareness, to be aware of these things, and to reject certain forms of blackmail even, moral blackmail, emotional blackmail. We shouldn't give into this. We should keep some kind of autonomy, critical autonomy, somehow. And we should form some sort of resistance to this. It's quite simple. Without some sort of disruption or resistance to this, there's no emancipation for us. We're going to follow in line  more and more to what we're told to do. That's what's really been frustrating for me over the last two years, I have to say, the ease with which they've done what they wanted to do, and people have just followed. And I know you've talked about this before, with Professor Desmet-- 

AUBREY: Mattias Desmet.

FABIO: So I don't want to go back there.

AUBREY: The way that you talk about this though, is powerful, because you're talking about how, as soon as you start asking these questions, you're labeled as a conspiracy theorist. And then as soon as you're labeled as a conspiracy theorist, then all of a sudden, all of the questions that you're asking can be discarded. 

FABIO: Exactly.

AUBREY: You say, "The epistemology of conspiracy theory drives much of today's propaganda as a rhetoric of exclusion. The a priori rejection of paranoid thinking leaves the official narrative as the sole bearer of truth, irrespective of empirical verification. This is  coming across in so many different ways, whether you're talking about it from a medical perspective, what is the virtue of vaccination versus non-vaccination? What's the virtue of mask versus non-mask? There's this idea that you either follow science and the truth, or you're a conspiracy theorist. And if you're a conspiracy theorist, you're also some right-wing fascist, blah, blah, blah. They put all of these other things to actually dehumanize and desensitize people to actually critical thinking, which is essential, essential. For science itself, it is essential. 

FABIO: That's the blackmail I was referring to. I'm not going to give in to that blackmail. I don't care if they call me a conspiracy theorist. I want to keep open the possibility of doubts and critique without being labeled a conspiracy theorist, without being excluded from public debate.

AUBREY: Too late. Too late. 

FABIO: I know it's too late, but at least we're here talking about it. So there's still some space and we need to make the most of it. But yeah, the label will be there. It's an easy game for them. It's a way of generalizing. Especially, it's a way of making sure that there are no disagreements with regard to the official line. Everybody should follow the official line. Everybody else who has doubts, who wants to express doubts is immediately disqualified by being called a conspiracy theorist, and all the list of adjectives and attributions that go along with it that you've mentioned. All of a sudden, you become a right-wing extremist, all of a sudden you become a racist, all of a sudden you become a sexist, there's so many of them, crazier and crazier. And just because you've raised your hand and said, "Look, wait a second. Let's talk about it again. I have some doubts. Tell me about this..." You cannot even have doubts any longer. That's the big problem today for critical thinking.

AUBREY: And just to be fair, on the other side, one of the interesting things is that everybody who tends to be more liberal or let's say supports vaccination, you can have your own beliefs about vaccination, all of a sudden, they're being labeled and they're being slumped into a category, "These are communists that are shills for China," or something like that or they're sheep or they're this other category. We're creating this system in which nobody is really talking to each other. Everybody is just trying to ad hominem attack the individual rather than take the dialogue itself, this Hegelian dialectic. this Socratic review of what is actually happening, let's all just talk about this, let's see, what might we have, let's look at all the facts. Let's look at the timelines. Let's see everything that's going on. And let's talk about it and let's see if maybe we need to speak as a voice of the people and as a voice collectively to say, "No, I don't think we want to go this way. I think we need to go this way." That's how a democracy itself is supposed to be, it’s like the people speak.

FABIO: But they don't want that. They want to polarize. They want people to fight people because they want a polarized situation because that's the best way for them to rule, divide et impera, divide and rule. They've created very well with the no-vax, the anti-vaxx and the pro-vaxx. They've created two categories, they're fighting each other and allowing them to continue with whatever they're doing. They created a perfect scapegoat, in the anti-vax. They label everybody as an anti-vax who has doubts and even great scientists, and Nobel Prize winners, even them are labeled as anti-vax. They polarize public opinion, they prevent debate from taking place. We've seen that in mainstream media, the way they've operated. So it's very hard not to think that there's some kind of planning behind this. Without wanting to be a conspiracy theorist, but a degree of planning is necessary or maybe serendipity, as you said. It becomes more and more difficult to believe it, because they've created a situation that suits them perfectly. They can blame the anti-vax even if 70% of the population is now vaccinated. In many countries, they still keep on blaming those who haven't taken the vaccine for the infections and everything.

AUBREY: I think you said it really well. You said this is the first time in history that the failure of a treatment is blamed on the people who don't take the treatment. The treatment was promised to end the pandemic and to prevent people from getting COVID. But instead of going like, "Oh, well, I guess that didn't really happen," especially with Omicron and some of these others. Well, shit, that didn't actually work. But instead of it saying, "Well, shit, the vaccines didn't work as promised." They're switching it and saying, "The problem is the people who didn't take the treatment. That's why the treatment is not working." 

FABIO: That's absolutely crazy. 

AUBREY: It's this wild manipulation of logic. What? How does that make sense?

FABIO: And yet most people fall for it. They want to be on the right side of history, I think. They just fall for it out of conformity. They want to conform, they want to be on the right side of power. Some of them are naive, I guess. Some of them are opportunistic. I've also questioned myself, why do people go along with all this when it's so blatantly obvious that there are so many contradictions in the official line? We should, at least, doubt them? But people just go along. Most people, at least, just go along. Then it, obviously, becomes a question of human nature, I guess. I've struggled over the last two years. I've lost friends over this. I guess most of us have. But, at least, I've made new friends as well, which is important that I've been able to express myself.

AUBREY: So if we look forward to some more optimist ideas of where this could actually go and what could actually transpire, I think all pressure creates adaptation. Of course, we wouldn't have changed anything if everything was working. We're not going to change anything. In 2015, when things are still working as far as everybody can feel, well, shit! Or even 2004, 1995, or all of these different points were like, "Yeah, it's fucking still working. We know we're piling on debt but, nonetheless, the debt doesn't seem to bother us. Everything's working." Now we have pressure and more pressure could be coming. And the prayer is obviously for a smooth transition as possible. But it seems like the system itself is not going to be able to sustain itself in the way that we know it. So a new system needs to emerge. We started talking about this, about an alternate parallel structure that potentially is already in its infancy of forming, potentially could involve cryptocurrency, as one way, which is, by its very nature, at least, we believe it is, decentralized. It's decentralized so it's not subject to the same kind of Fed manipulation. There's a fixed amount of Bitcoin, for example. If people move into an alternate structure of using that as a currency, it's not going to solve everything. We're not saying crypto is the solution for everything but it's an interesting facet of what's, at the same time as all of this other stuff, it's also developing in parallel. It's almost like the solution, in its infancy, potentially is developing at the same time by grace. A potential kernel of a solution is appearing at the same time that the pressure is being applied to the structure as it stands. It's interesting that those two things have coincided and really speaks to, potentially, even the intelligence of the universe, in a way, it's like alright, this thing needs to change, a lot of pressure on this side of the game and a lot of things that, if you look carefully, you can see through, and then some potential opportunity on the other side. 

FABIO: I think the contradiction, basically, cannot be hidden any longer. There's negativity in the system that is emerging. It's creating a lot of suffering for a lot of people. And people, despite the emergency tactic, despite the emergency strategies, the fact that there's been a pandemic, et cetera, people are realizing that the system is breaking at the seams. Something is not functioning any longer, the contradiction is you cannot contain it anymore. I think we're coming slowly to the end of this form of life, that was capitalist modernity. I think we're coming to the end of it. It's dying out by itself, not because of external forces, but it's reaching the internal limit of its expansion. You can think of expansion in terms of imperialism. Where else can we go? We've already conquered the whole world, in the sense that we've commodified the whole world. There's nowhere else to go unless we go on Mars or something, to another planet, try to do something else but we've reached the limit.

AUBREY: And a lot of other strategies that we've used, including the military industrial complex, war itself. War is a very powerful economic engine, where you're creating things with the real economy, creating bullets and bombs and guns and mobilizing troops and traveling this way and that way and consuming fuel and doing all of these different things, moving troops this way, building airplanes, all of this stuff, and then those airplanes explode, and the bombs explode, and these things explode, that wealth evaporates, and then you create more and then people are being employed. It's as toxic a structure--

FABIO: Today, especially, with the kind of weapons that we have, will be totally self-destructive.

AUBREY: It's all death. It's all death. The way that that has supported the economy, that can’t be sustainable either.

FABIO: No longer viable, no longer viable. There's the external limit, of course, of the planet as well, the real issue of climate emergency, which is the external limit, but to me, the most interesting one is the internal limit, the wealth creation. It's reached the internal limit, and we don't know how to do with it anymore. We don't have a plan. We don't have a policy to deal with that. We try with the Keynesian policy of state spending. That didn't work. It worked up until the mid-70s, and then it turned into stagflation, a stagnant economy with inflation. Then we went into the neoliberal route, with the potentiation of the financial sector, but that, today, is clearly imploding too. We don't really have an alternative to that so we need to think of a completely different set of values, a completely different system. We need to think of a systemic change, really. That's the only way that can save, and I think will save us, eventually. Because as you said, things move, before we even realize, things change, even inside us, in our desires, in the way we think, and we hope et cetera, before we become consciously aware of it. I think that's the great  resilience of humanity, that it can change, it can turn the contradiction, which will never be fully eliminated because we are contradictory. Human beings are contradictory by definition. But when a contradiction becomes so destructive like it is today, it needs to be employed or redefined within a different system of values, where it's less destructive, where it's more sustainable. I think that is the next step that will need to take place at some point where we live our lives differently and we subject the categories of our current way of living to some kind of radical criticism. We think, okay, we cannot live with them any longer and we reject them and we embrace new categories, new values, a new language even, a new way of interacting with each other, a new way of understanding the social bond, the social link, a new way of understanding community, a new way of understanding money, perhaps, or whatever we have instead. You mentioned cryptocurrencies. Maybe they could be adapted to a different kind of socialization. At the moment, they don't seem to. And to me, at least, they seem to have problems that are related to the capitalist system. They're not really related to value production. They're more on the circulation level. But nevertheless, it's an opening, it's a way of thinking about, for example, taking into consideration the fact that fiat currencies are dying, slowly but surely, they're devaluing themselves. We need to think of a different way of organizing life, a different social system, a different form of alienation as well. Alienation is not just a bad word. In so far as we're human, we are somewhat alienated, but we need to make that sustainable, and we need to sustain it in terms of common living, of communities, et cetera. I'm sure that that will take place, because the only other outcome is destruction, slavery, it's mass slavery, it's the totalization of slavery, it's the totalization of a tyrannical system. I don't think that we will allow that to take place. I don't think humans will allow that to take place.

AUBREY: What's also coinciding is a revolution of consciousness. It's the evolution of consciousness mediated, in some cases, through the psychedelic renaissance and this revolution of ways that people can access higher states of consciousness, greater levels of interconnectivity, of recognising that you are not so different from that tree, not so different from that person, and not separate from the entire collective. These different ways of thinking about the world are coming online at the same time that the economic system that's built on an older consciousness and older ideas, and then reaching its logical conclusion, it's all happening together. What you could imagine is a world in which instead of money mediating relationships, communities start to actually work to support each other, maybe on a small scale first, but instead of your neighbor just blocked off by the walls, and in all the meditations of everything else, you start to actually form real communities and more of a gift economy where you're actually exchanging and using a decentralized currency to actually so one person doesn't have to bring over steaks and the other person doesn't have to bring over milk. That's all very difficult to do. You can still use currency, but just changing the attitudes around it. And then as labor dries up, as labor dries up, because automation is taking care of things, then reimagining the contribution of art. And again, I think Burning Man is a great example of this because in Burning Man, it's just a microcosm, there is no currency that's available and people just give each other things. It works out. The Playa provides. And then the contribution often is art. It's art installations, small amounts of art, your costume is art, it's kindness, all of these ways in which you support somebody else, then becomes built into the monetary system of exchange. Actually, there's a structure that's being built on cryptocurrency platforms called Zion, in which actual comments in the ways that people put out ideas are then rewarded with sats, with small amounts of Bitcoin, and then there's an exchange of currency, which is actually carrying the information. So it's censorship resistant, but also rewarding, just simple interactions. You could potentially make a living, just supporting people who are struggling on this platform, or contributing art and you post your art or you post a podcast, you post some ideas, a video, an article, and all of a sudden, people say I really liked that, that was great. That added value to the commons, it added value to the commons and because it added value to the commons and value to me, let me support you in this way, and mediating it in just a whole different psychology of how we interact with each other and support each other. And naturally, of course, those people with those things that are dragging society down, putting out negative information or spreading hate, all of this, they obviously wouldn't be benefiting the commons, and so they wouldn't be rewarded and supported. It seems like this economic revolution and the consciousness revolution, must inherently work hand in hand to create this whole new economic system.

FABIO: What you said earlier about the necessity of us experiencing this negative trajectory that we're experiencing, it's absolutely fundamental. Because if we didn't, we wouldn't even think about changing it. We need the shock, the trauma, if you like even, we can talk even about the trauma, the trauma of a system that is imploding, a form of life that is not working any longer. Only if we see that, can we change our consciousness, as you said, and create a different system. Here, of course, the point to be made is that there's always a little bit of a disparity between the theory and the practice. The theory can never fully work in terms of delineating the practical aspects, because it doesn't work like that. But you need a bit of theory, in order to support some practical solutions, maybe social movements, some kind of social movements that go in a different direction that then will form themselves through their own experiences, in terms of creating a different system. So the theory is, for me, fundamentally a critical theory of what's going on at the moment, and the categories of the present, that opens up the space for different practices that need to be tried, need to be tested. They need to work by creating a new set of values, fundamentally. I think the important thing is that it doesn't become the self-management of poverty. That is certainly not what we want. We don't want the self-management of poverty, like people living in some kind of poverty situation outside the big system. I think there needs to be some sort of appropriation of resources. There needs to be a way of making time for different activities that are not related anymore to work, because work will be taken over by machines more and more. So we have this great opportunity to make more of our lives,  not subjecting our lives to the routine of alienating bullshit jobs, because the majority of the jobs we have are bullshit jobs, people today anyway. They don't want to do them. They have to do them because they have to pay the bills, et cetera, but they hate them. So machines are going to take over in that respect. There needs to be some kind of socialization of production in that respect but also the freeing of time, the freeing of space to do other things, art, play, leisure. There's many things that we can do with that time that we couldn't do before in a work society. The work society is driven by work, and by profit-making and by all those categories that we discussed. Now, all of a sudden, there will be something else. And that is quite shocking and quite new and quite traumatic, I guess, for populations who are used to living... Again, those conditions, the conditions we're still familiar with are dying by themselves. So we'll have to, by necessity almost, come up with a different plan, a plan B. The problem with those who are driving our economy today is that they can't even think of a plan B. They don't even want to think of a plan B. They think the plan B is not even possible. It's out of the question. So they continue with the same routine, with the same logic that is driving us down, that is driving us to collapse. And I think that's what actually happened, to most civilizations. When they were in crisis, they continued with the very logic that brought--

AUBREY: They just double down, double down, double down.

FABIO: They couldn't think of, okay, we need to pull the brakes here. The gravy train has no gravy left for us anymore. We need to pull the brakes and get off.

AUBREY: We can't conquer any more Germanic people, we can't conquer any more goals, we've stretched our empire as far as it will go. It will no longer reach and there's corruption on the inside. Ultimately, instead of saying, look, we got to change everything, pull the borders in, let the people rule themselves outside here, tend our own garden, weed our own garden, take care of all of these things, and then create a new system--

FABIO: Create a new system, a new social bond and redefine, completely, radically, the concepts, the categories that we have today, including the state. Because the state is not what we think it is, most of the time, it's not at all. It's becoming an oppressive category in the hands of the BlackRock that we discussed before, of the big power. So things need to change.

AUBREY: All things including democracy, including economics, including consciousness, including what we value as valuable. I think that that idea that play is inherently valuable, so some way in which play in a productive way is rewarded, I think of like rec leagues and basketball leagues and ways in which people are playing and all of a sudden, there's energy of actually "Oh, this is your contribution, you're showing up to this pickup basketball game, so that nine other people at the same time can play basketball, and experience something that's meaningful," that has inherent value. That has value to the people playing. It has value to those who get out that energy, and then come back to their families. There's value there but we're not actually thinking of that. Even though that's just basketball, there's some value there. And there's some value in all of these different other fields that need to come into our consciousness and then somehow be woven into our economics, and then also the sovereignty of the individual being rewarded, and encouraged, and nourished so that we can actually make policy decisions about who our leaders are, and have emergent leaders that actually represent this new consciousness.

FABIO: That doesn't mean that work will be completely eliminated. Of course, we will have to work one or another, but less, much, much less than we've been working so far. We can therefore devote our lives to other activities. This is the only way out, reinventing the system quite radically, I think. That's the only way. The system cannot be mended anymore. That fundamental point cannot be adjusted. The reformist approach is now exhausted itself.  There's no way of reforming the system any longer. It will come to a point where we will realize that there's nothing else we can do apart from reconfiguring it quite radically. Starting from each and every category, each and every value that today thinks it's almost natural but it's not.

AUBREY: So what do you think people can do? If people are looking at this, and they're saying, "Oh, shit, the old system is not working." And what do we do besides just spreading ideas and spreading consciousness and spreading awareness and loving people through this process? Is there anything that you can see that people can do with their own assets, with their own mind? I think it's very easy to slip into more solipsism, "Let me get my own bunker set up and let me point guns at anybody who wants to come into my bunker," but fundamentally, no one wants to shoot anybody that's hungry. What world is that? Someone's hungry and you're like, "You can't come in or like please, just give me some of your beef jerky,  I'm going to die." What is the idea, that you're just going to leave them out there and watch them on your fucking webcam, watch them die slowly? No, you're going to give them water and give them food because we love each other fundamentally. So that strategy is not going to really work either.

FABIO: There needs to be new forms of solidarity, including mutual aid, relating to food, relating to money, whatever we have, there has to be new forms of solidarity that kickstart,  that trigger the new system, which which will be as complex as the previous one and will be based on some categories that we have to internalize in our unconscious and think of as natural. They need to be built into us, into humans because that's how societies work. It's never fully transparent. There's always a degree of opacity in the social link that we can't really understand but it works. It takes, it takes a while, it will take a while but I think people need to keep an open mind to others, precisely in this sense of I can see social movements growing in that respect. First, maybe nationally, first, locally and then internationally, and then everywhere. But they will need to network in the name of new forms of solidarity, based on different categories from the ones we have now. I think it will inevitably happen. I'm quite optimistic in that respect. So there's a sense of pessimism in relation to this system, this system is not going to be mended, but there's optimism insofar as I think humans will always come up with some creative solution that will drive the way they live together. Individualism is not the solution, you cannot live on your own. You're a social animal, by definition, you need others. Others are what make you who you are. This is the fundamental, discursive law about any social bond. You become yourself because you inherit stuff from others, whether from your culture or from the others around you, your parents in the first place, but also your peers, your family. You are what they are, in a sense. And then you create yourself out of that influence. You gotta start from there, to realize that's the only starting point.

AUBREY: It's happening in interesting ways. It's just happening through a system that's flawed. I mean, the Black Lives Matter revolution that happened in 2020 as well, massive outpouring of support. And, of course, there's challenges to how that organization utilized the resources and there's some issues with how it all played out but the impetus is beautiful, people caring, people really caring and wanting to support something that mattered to them, cared for a disenfranchised part of the population, and systemic injustice, people really caring. So that is a noble, beautiful thing but it still didn't quite hit the ground in the way... And it was still navigated and manipulated in ways. It wasn't a perfect execution but the idea was beautiful. Same with the trucker convoys. A bunch of money poured in to support the truckers for standing up against these kinds of tyrannical mandates, that they said, "No, you can't impose this." And then people donated a bunch of money, but of course, that system was flawed, because that money got frozen, and prevented from actually reaching. So then new systems emerge, like okay, you donate this way, we promise it's going to get to the truckers. A new system emerges as the old system tries to choke up and--

FABIO: And even more than that, because the old system tries to manipulate populations to do certain things but precisely from that manipulation, something good can come, insofar as those people, once they're together, they can realize that they can go against the very people who manipulated them into believing the same thing. Things can happen and things can be uncontrollable. I don't believe that those who are in power today, those we could regard as the puppeteers of the show, that they can ever establish a form of totality of control over people. Things will go wrong, by definition, for those who are in power too. They cannot control absolutely everything. Very often, what they think they are controlling will revolt against them. This is bound to happen, because the contradiction operates precisely in that way too. That's how it is useful to have a contradiction, because it means that you cannot totalize a field, you cannot totalize a field completely. There's always something that escapes your attempt at totalization. To me, I'm very interested in psychoanalysis, for example, I believe that there is an unconscious and I think the unconscious is the contradiction that prevents things from working. Your consciousness is precisely what makes you say something that you don't want to say. But then all of a sudden, what you said has more meaning than what you thought you were going to have in... I think it's a fundamental issue that we need to keep in mind that that shouldn't drive us down, shouldn't be made to make us too negative and too pessimistic. In that very attempt at totalizing, there's the solution, that something will go wrong and will create the possibility and another set of conditions outside that attempt of totalization.

AUBREY: It's also very good for individual psychology because we could freeze in our own absolute fear. It's all ruining the world, it's coming down. The sky is falling and then all of a sudden, we get locked in our own fear--

FABIO: Fear is the worst thing. Absolutely.

AUBREY: And fear, being constrictive agent, it's going to limit our creativity, limit our ability to actually make decisions that make sense. Everybody knows you make horrible decisions when you're afraid. Instead thinking, alright, there's a lot of pressure, and there's going to be a lot of challenges that come, but I believe in people, I believe in myself, I believe in my ability to help navigate and steward this new consciousness that's emerging, these new systems that are emerging, just have a little trust in humanity. We've gone through all kinds of crazy shit, volcanic eruptions and floods and ice ages and we didn't even have technology and tools. We just put on as much fur as we could, and walked, hopefully, towards some places that was a little bit fucking warmer, because our toes were freezing off, and we figured it out! One way or another, human beings were tough and were resilient, and were strong and when pressed down to the last bit, there's something that emerges, there's something that emerges from us. That's the beautiful part about us is that there's something strong and heroic and beautiful, I really believe, at the core of all humans.

FABIO: That you cannot control. That cannot be controlled from above. That's what pissed me off the most about the use of fear in all this. They really have instilled fear into large parts of the population. That's terrible, that's the worst bit of it. I think we should be optimistic, maybe precisely because things are going belly up, we should be optimistic that something new can come, a new discourse, a new set of values can emerge from this.

AUBREY: Again, just to reiterate my final message, think of all the times, anybody listening, think of all the times that you've had a challenge that you couldn't figure out, you just couldn't figure out how you're going to deal with this, maybe you lost your job, or maybe things didn't work out. I've had countless examples of these moments where I felt like I have no idea what I'm going to do. There's no way out of this thing. And then the pressure stays, and then you get creative and you get innovative, and then you get inspired, and then you move forward in spite of the difficulty. And then all of a sudden, the solution, which wasn't available to you now, was available, you're just sticking to the path and sticking it out and holding faith and then all of a sudden, this new branch of possibility opens up, and then you move your energy to that. I think it's as much about just trusting each other and trusting ourselves in this time and being curious, what's going to happen, we don't know what's going to happen. These are some dangers, let's be mindful of the dangers. Let's try to steer this entire ship, which we're all a part of. We all have an oar on the collective boat of humanity, and we all have the opportunity to steer it. But if we're steering against each other, the boat's going to sink. We gotta continue to move in a positive way.

FABIO: You said it. There's not much more that I can add. I think we've said it all. I appreciate the opportunity you've given me to talk about this, I really do.

AUBREY: Of course, of course. I appreciate all the work that you've put out. So many of your articles, which are brilliantly written, are on Philosophical Salon. I'll offer those notes, and I'll give the exact links in the show notes. I encourage people to take a look and read timelines of how all of the financial pieces have worked all the way from the beginning, the challenges that you've talked about, through these different industrial revolutions, through all of the ways that it's played out in the last three years. There's a lot of really potent information there, ideas that extend. You're a philosopher, by nature, so it extends even beyond economics, but into psychology and into so many different areas that we've touched on a little bit. It was just a real pleasure to read your work and be aware of some of the things that I was personally just blind to. You can get very myopic in what you look at. And I think what you've done is just said, "No, let's continue to look deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, all the way back to that source, the source point, which is the entity of money itself," Let's look all the way back into the inner core of the system, and then try to make sense of everything from the--

FABIO: It's a rabbit hole and you have to go down and down. You're driven by your curiosity, and sometimes it's painful and frustrating, but it's worth doing it. The deep dive you take, I think, is very rewarding in the end, even if it's painful sometimes. But still, it's something that you do because you do it, because you cannot not do it in a sense. Once you kind of get hooked into that sort of thing, it becomes a kind of addiction. I didn't know much either but COVID made me so curious about all this, I just couldn't explain it in another way. I saw it from the beginning. I couldn't believe what they were doing. The disproportion was huge, all these measures that were never implemented before. And I'm asking myself, why are they doing it? And you've got to look into the root cause of our own existence today to understand what is actually going on.

AUBREY: Yeah, indeed.

FABIO: Thank you.

AUBREY: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, my friend. Absolutely. And we'll put out all the links so people can read more from you and all that. I look forward to continuing the discussion and dialogue as more things unfold, and look forward to reading your next articles whenever they come out and get a chance to see through your eyes and your perspective, the things that people like me, that don't know as much about macroeconomics, we had a little call before this just so I can get a little grasp on some of these economic concepts because it's a little high level but you did a great job explaining it. And hopefully, we did so again today on this podcast, at least a sufficient job. Once again, thank you and we'll be in touch.

FABIO: Thank you, Aubrey. Definitely, thank you so much.