[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “They're cracking down on cryptocurrency so that they can usher in Central Bank Digital Currency. So … what central bank digital currency really is, is it's digital money that’s programmable, that can be monitored by the government, and can be censored by the government.”
In this episode, I sit down with Aaron Day, a serial entrepreneur and author of “The Final Countdown: Crypto, Gold, Silver, and the People’s Last Stand Against Tyranny by Central Bank Digital Currencies.”
“I see Central Bank Digital Currency as the single biggest threat to human liberty,” says Mr. Day.
Aaron Day is a 2024 presidential candidate running on a platform of ending fiat currency, which he says is the only way to stop America from moving into a centralized, technocratic, one-world system.
“Between now and the next election, there’s going to be another 40 million surveillance cameras installed. Our pictures are taken 75 times a day. This is in the United States," says Mr. Day. "The China system—they have 626 million surveillance cameras. They'll track every aspect of your day. If you cheat in a video game, you'll get punished. If you don't visit your elderly parents enough, you'll get punished. They're tracking what you're putting in your shopping cart at the store—and not buying. Literally everything is tracked."
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/currency-of-control-how-cbdc-implementation-is-leading-to-global-tyranny-aaron-day-5505354
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Aaron Day, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Aaron Day: Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: You are one of the most knowledgeable people on CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]. It's a catchphrase, but many people are not really clear on what it is. It's not just another type of currency, that's for sure. Before we go there, I want to talk about your journey to becoming an expert on CBDC.
Mr. Day: I have been a serial entrepreneur since I dropped out of Duke University at age 19 and started my first company, an e-commerce company, right around the time Amazon was started. I recruited six of my former high school classmates to drop out with me, or it was more like I convinced their parents to allow it. I always had a passion for entrepreneurship. I sold that company and then got involved in investing. Then I started another company in 2004 in the healthcare sector focused on solving the number one health problem in America, which is obesity.
The interesting thing about this model is that it was a very simple business. We used financial incentives to reward employees for losing weight if they were overweight, or maintaining a healthy weight if they were at a healthy weight. We used team incentives as well, so you could have healthy weight and overweight employees working together.
The program was incredibly successful, and we had clients in 43 states. We were signing up Fortune 500 companies and they were seeing a real return in investment in terms of a reduction in healthcare costs and an increase in productivity. Our company was destroyed in three different ways by the federal government, and the first was by Obamacare. Obamacare came in and said, "You can't use health plan dollars to reward people for actual measured success."
They came in and said, "You can only offer participation trophies to people. You can only reward people for trying to lose weight, not for actually losing weight." In essence, that destroyed our business model, because the entire point of the business model was to improve health and reduce cost, and that obviously removed the entire incentive structure.
Mr. Jekielek: It was an incentive structure and you would reward success.
Mr. Day: Their progress was cumulative, and then we rewarded people. The issue with weight loss is that it's not about losing weight upfront, it's about losing weight and keeping it off. The more you would lose and the longer you would keep it off, over time, you would earn more rewards. This was more of a longer term program where people would be involved for 3, 4, or 5 years, because that's where you're going to see the health improvements and the healthcare savings.
As to the incentives themselves, we would reward people by using debit cards that could be reloaded every quarter, checks that would be mailed, or points that could be redeemed for merchandise. Because of the Dodd-Frank Act, the bank we were working with could no longer afford to be in the debit card business, and so they had to cancel us under emergency terms. Then we had tens of thousands of people across the country that had been engaged in the program for years that could no longer receive additional funding on debit cards.
We had a check vendor in Connecticut that had been in business for 30 working with thousands of clients. Attorney General Eric Holder came in and said, "We think one of the customers or a handful of the customers that used this check writing service was involved in offshore gaming," so they seized the funds of all of the customers. We were bouncing checks to nurses all over the country. We were presumed guilty because our check writing service vendor had allegedly been involved with providing check writing services for offshore gaming.
It was those three things; Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Act, and Attorney General Holder that destroyed my profitable business that was having an impact in the healthcare arena. That got me heavily involved in liberty activism and trying to understand why the government would do such a thing. Obviously, I was already a small government kind of person to begin with, because I had started a company at age 19.
I was influenced by Ayn Rand and libertarian philosophy early on. I got involved with a number of liberty organizations, and at one point I was the chair or CEO of five different organizations at the same time. I moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project, a group with a mission to get 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire and make the state a concentrated place for liberty.
Mr. Jekielek: Like Galt's Gulch?
Mr. Day: It's like Galt's Gulch in a way, but it's not like we're taking over the state. The state motto is already, “Live free or die.” We're just kind of an insurance policy bringing people in to buffer against the people moving up from Massachusetts into New Hampshire. I got involved in a number of political organizations like the Republican Liberty Caucus. I started a super PAC [political action committee] called Stark 360. I was running a nonprofit called the Atlas Society, focusing on limiting government and promoting libertarian philosophy, all while trying to understand Obamacare. We ended up trying to stop Obamacare and Medicaid expansion in New Hampshire, and we could talk a full hour on that. I won't go into that, but that led me into running for United States Senate as an independent. During this process of being involved with the Free State Project, I was introduced to cryptocurrency in 2012.
I got my first Bitcoin in 2012. In fact, New Hampshire has been on the cutting edge of cryptocurrency adoption for a long time. There are restaurants and shops in New Hampshire that have directly accepted Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for over a decade. This is something that's just part of this liberty movement.
I decided to get out of politics in 2018 after beating my head up against the wall. The fundamental issue is there's a belief even at the state level that you can do things from the bottom up at a grassroots level, but it turns out everything is top down. Even at the state level there's a huge influence from the federal government and beyond. I exited politics and went 100 percent into crypto. I basically moved everything into crypto, gold and silver, but predominantly crypto, seeing crypto as the opportunity to separate money from the state.
There are other things that you can do with crypto. It’s the underlying technology to improve capital markets and supply chains. My focus was on how you could apply this new technology. I was out of politics and out of activism. Then Covid hit in 2020, and we saw the complete erosion of individual rights.
I remember going to my daughter's ballet in February in New Hampshire, and they had to have the ballet outside. All of the dancers had to wear masks. All of the parents had to bring their own lawn chairs and socially distance. I wanted to understand what was causing this? What was motivating this?
I also started to see a huge crackdown on cryptocurrency in a way that directly impacted me, having been involved in this Free State Project for such a long time. In fact, the person who introduced me to cryptocurrency is a guy named Ian Freeman. Tomorrow, I'm going to a hearing for his sentencing.
He is facing up to 70 years in prison for selling Bitcoin. In essence, that is all he did. He sold Bitcoin either through ATMs or person to person exchanges, and he's looking at 70 years in prison. We're going to his sentencing hearing tomorrow.
Another Free Stater who was into blockchain technology early on, Jeremy Kaufman, started a company called Library. Library is a decentralized, censorship-resistant version of YouTube. He was targeted by the SEC [U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission], and for five years they went after his business. They basically won their case against him, pushed him out of business, and drained all of his funds in the process. I'm out of politics, because I know politics doesn't work. I'm in crypto, and I'm seeing there's a complete top-down crackdown on crypto.
I started asking, “Why are they cracking down on crypto? In these examples that I have given, these are people that are promoting liberty. These are people that are promoting voluntary trade. These are people that are promoting sharing information in a way that is censorship-resistant. These aren't the bad guys.
It turns out they're cracking down on cryptocurrency so that they can usher in central bank digital currency. My process of living with crypto led me to research what's going on with central bank digital currency, and that's how I got into this topic.
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain what central bank digital currency is.
Mr. Day: Sure. The propaganda version is that it's a form of digital money that you can use that is not cash and it's really convenient, cheap, and easy. It's digital money that's programmable, that can be monitored by the government, and that can be censored by the government. In other words, imagine a society where you no longer have cash, and literally every financial exchange you have is monitored by the government.
If you've ever had a health savings account, they are usually debit cards that you can only use to buy certain healthcare-related items already on a list. Imagine if all of the money worked like this—the government even decides what you can buy. You can only use your programmable money to buy things the government decides they want you to buy.
Mr. Jekielek: There is a system now being used by millions of people that works in exactly this way, the WeChat digital yuan in China. It's a CBDC that is currently functioning, and it works just like that. People can't buy a train ticket if they don't have a green light on their vaccine passport, which is all integrated. IThere are multiple instances of this, and the whole system is structured like that.
Mr. Day: I'm focused on CBDC as somebody that's a proponent of liberty and has moved to New Hampshire because of my libertarian values. I see central bank digital currency as the single biggest threat to human liberty. It is the gateway to everything that you just described. Once your money can be monitored, controlled, and censored by the government, that ties into social credit systems, vaccine passports, and digital IDs. That is the plan. This is something that's actually been worked on. We are 50 years into a plan to push for a one world, global, technocratic form of government with this level of top-down control.
Mr. Jekielek: That is a big statement, and please explain why you think that. But first, going back to CBDC for a second, would you actually call that a currency? Because when I think of a currency, I think of a dollar. I can give it to you, and you know that I gave it to you. I tend to use cash myself whenever I can, because I don't want to be tracked, which is already the case with credit cards, correct?
Mr. Day: Yes. I would say it's more of a control system than a currency. In no sense is it actually a currency based on any traditional understanding of what a currency is. If they want to stimulate the economy, then they'll tell you, “If you don't spend the CBDC that you have in your wallet, we will just simply take it away.” You have no ownership or no actual custody of this so-called currency. This is just ones and zeros on a ledger somewhere that you have no control over one way or the other.
Mr. Jekielek: Ultimately, the government will be able to decide whether you have it or not, and without recourse. Is that what you are suggesting?
Mr. Day: Yes. They already have this idea put into EU legislation regarding digital currency. Several years back, Cyprus actually did a bail-in. Their financial system wasn't working well, so they just took a percentage of all of their customers' deposits and said, "You're helping us with a bail-in.” They weren't really given an option. That has worked its way into legislation and into the framework of how CBDC actually works. But it's the ideology that pushes this. The question you might ask is, “Why are they doing this? Why are they implementing the CBDC?”
It is because their view is that we should be living in a technocracy, a form of government where elites pick scientists and engineers to make the best decisions for everybody, from the top down. It's not a system that values individual rights or property rights.
It's a system that says, “We're going to have the smartest people telling you how to live your life, what foods you can buy, how you should spend your money, and when you should spend your money.” It's done under the guise of perfecting humanity by applying technology and using the best minds that we can come up with.
Mr. Jekielek: To sell this CBDC, people will say, “Look at how much fraud there is, and look how much control we'll have over that. We'll be able to prevent fraud. This is a very powerful and attractive tool." My question is would that be beneficial? Is there some sort of cost-benefit analysis to be done around CBDC, or is your position it's all cost?
Mr. Day: It's all cost because you can see that it's all part of a control system. You understand that at the highest level this is the reason they're actually doing this. It is part of the rollout of a technocratic system where they will track everything. This is what's motivating it, regardless of what they say when selling CBDC to the individual. All the way back to 2000, they have been putting in tracking systems through the Patriot Act. Every day in America, there are a hundred thousand surveillance cameras installed.
Between now and the next election, there are going to be another 40 million surveillance cameras installed. Our pictures are taken 75 times a day, and this is in the United States. The China system has 626 million surveillance cameras and they track every aspect of your day. If you cheat in a video game, you'll get punished. If you don't visit your elderly parents enough, you'll get punished. They're tracking what you're putting in your shopping cart at the store. Literally everything is tracked.
Mr. Jekielek: They're also using your manner of walking to track you. The cameras can identify who you are based on the way you move. It's all individualized. This is a highly personalized surveillance system, even if your face is covered.
Mr. Day: This has been the intent going all the way back to 1974; being able to track, monitor and surveil your every personal detail.
Mr. Jekielek: What was the moment when you realized there was a serious push towards global government? This isn't something that most people today can accept.
Mr. Day: Most people don't accept this, and a lot of this is new to me. I track down and figure out what has happened, and I just keep on asking questions. That's what I have always done. Why did they implement Obamacare and how did that all work? Even that led up to this current situation, and I just keep asking questions.
Part of this is from having been in cryptocurrency and knowing what an innovation that is. To be clear, most of the cryptocurrency projects are actually scams. There are only a half a dozen projects out of 20,000 that are suitable replacements for money. I lived that for 10 years and then basically saw that CBDCs were the antithesis of that.
A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is decentralized, and it actually allows for the separation of money and state. CBDCs are the exact opposite of that. It's a centralized currency with complete control and complete programmability. I just started asking, “Who are the people that are behind this? Who is pushing CBDC?”
To start, I didn't necessarily think that this was a one world, global conspiracy. In 2020, there were only 20 countries globally that were even exploring this. At that point, just three years ago, nobody was implementing a CBDC. They were just saying, “Maybe this is something we should look into.”
Mr. Jekielek: Aside from communist China, because it was proceeding very much according to their plan.
Mr. Day: That's true. China actually started exploring this in 2014.
Mr. Jekielek: But free countries weren't thinking about this.
Mr. Day: No, free countries weren't thinking about this. About 20 countries were looking at exploring this in 2020. It's now 2023 and 130 countries are exploring CBDC, and 20 countries will have implemented a CBDC by the end of this year. Over a billion people on this planet will be using a CBDC by the end of this year. What's more alarming is that the United States has actually conducted three pilots.
The official view that you will hear from the chairman of the Federal Reserve is, “We don't know if we will be looking at this. We don’t know if we're going to be seriously pursuing this.” The reality is they have conducted three successful pilots and they already have the technology needed to roll out a CBDC in the United States. That's the discrepancy that we have.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me more about that.
Mr. Day: There are three pilots. The first one is a pilot called Project Hamilton. The MIT multimedia lab was involved in all three of these pilots. Interestingly, the guy that was the chair when these things were started had visited Epstein's Island twice.
You can't make this stuff up. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there it is. This MIT group has been involved in each of these projects. Project Hamilton is a retail central bank digital currency. That simply means this would be the replacement for what we consumers use on a day-to-day basis as cash.
They did a pilot from 2020 to 2022, and this pilot was able to handle 1.7 million transactions per second. I'll tell you why that's important. If you look at Visa, MasterCard, and now this FedNow thing, which I could talk about separately, the current, traditional financial system can do between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions per second.
This Hamilton Project pilot can do an order of magnitude more than the traditional financial system, and that technology is sitting on the shelf. In the conclusion they said, “While we have the technical details worked out, there's still a few things we might want to tweak. The real next step is figuring out the legality of how to roll this out, and the marketing of how to get people to accept this.”
People can be complacent and say, “This will never happen in America. They don't have the technology yet.” No, it's literally on the shelf. Project Cedar was a wholesale CBDC pilot. This is basically a CBDC that's used for banks to communicate with one another for larger transaction volumes and to do transactions across the border. That pilot was concluded.
There is another one that's even more dystopian, which was why they gave it a bland name. It's called the Regulated Liability Network. The idea behind that one is to create one ledger that tracks all CBDC transactions. It's basically a way of consolidating and managing all transactions and all digital assets, whether they are CBDC or non-CBDC.
It has taken me a while to summarize all this. I'll give you an example of what it means and why it's important. Imagine a future where there is no more cash, and the only thing that you can use to make purchases is CBDC. For instance, you go to the Apple Store and use your CBDC to buy a computer, and now your computer is given a digital token.
That digital token is tracked on a ledger along with your CBDC purchase of that computer. If the government decides they don't like something that you've said online, or if you have a social credit score like they have in China where you have dipped below a certain level, they can not only shut off access to your money, they can shut off access to your computer, because your assets are actually assigned digital IDs. That is what is being contemplated with the Regulated Liability Network.
Mr. Jekielek: That is astounding, but that is not existing technology. That's something that's in development as a pilot.
Mr. Day: That is in development as a pilot. The Bank for International Settlements is developing a competing uber-architecture to basically track and control. We talked before about what could be bad about a CBDC vs. what could be good in terms of convenience. With this Regulated Liability Network, you could have multiple governments or third parties monitoring and tracking your behavior. It's not even just one government, you might have multiple third parties doing this.
Mr. Jekielek: We hear a lot about smart appliances, and in fact, many of us have them. You can talk to them and turn on your AC if you're not at home. Your smart appliances are seamlessly plugged into the CBDC.
Mr. Day: Literally every asset can be digitized, tracked, and put into the system.
Mr. Jekielek: They are all attached to the network because you have to be able to turn them on or off. There would be a record of your every purchase that lasts forever. You would have an ever increasing ledger of everything you have ever purchased with your CBDC. Then an AI would be scrutinizing all this to understand you better.
Mr. Day: The whole point of the technocracy movement was to move from a price-based system to an energy-based system. This actually started in 1931, if you can imagine that. The whole concept of controlling energy and controlling all of the information about energy was actually developed in the early 1930s.
When you look at ESG, it is just a way of saying, “We're going to be able to track everything that you can do. We can track your energy expenditure. We can track everything that's connected to a smart grid. Then we can use that as kind of the focal point for monitoring and controlling.
Mr. Jekielek: A number of people have pointed out a quasi-religious ideology that says energy use is bad. The climate movement and the different green movements say, “We just need to reduce energy use, period.” They would create a command and control system that would allow the people that took control to essentially implement their agenda, whether you wanted to or not.
Mr. Day: Yes. That's what they intend to do. Again, let's look at their charitable explanation for why they are doing things. Their view is they're helping humanity because they believe we have scarcity. Their entire model is actually built on scarcity and fear. They believe that because of this scarcity, the only way that humans can move forward is by managing that scarcity. The only way you can do that is from the top down through the application of technology.
I disagree with scarcity as a concept. If you have that as a belief system, then you are only going to find solutions that feed into your paranoia about scarcity. Whereas, on the other hand, what we don't know is much more vast than what we do know. But they're trying to enforce their ideology and their limited perception of the world on everyone else from the top down.
Mr. Jekielek: Why do you believe there is a push for one world government? In your mind, what evidence is there for that?
Mr. Day: I started looking at some of these CBDC pilots. For instance, I talked to some people in the crypto community in Nigeria where a CBDC was being implemented, maybe last year. They said, “We’re in Nigeria. Nobody in Nigeria was asking for a CBDC. Nobody voted for this.”
In fact, Nigeria didn’t have the technical infrastructure to implement a CBDC, and the rollout actually hasn't been that successful. He asked me, “Where did this come from?” Then I looked up where it came from. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank were responsible for promoting, designing and pushing a CBDC in Nigeria. This has been the case for a lot of the countries that are piloting this.
Then you might ask, “Okay, who are these organizations? What is the IMF all about? What is the World Bank all about?” These are two organizations that were formed after World War II as part of the reconstruction effort. You also have the UN, which is also a big focal point for a lot of this. The UN Agenda 2030 has 17 sustainable development goals.
These 17 sustainable development goals cover pretty much every aspect of human behavior; where you will live, what your job will be, how you deal with equality, and even how you deal with things like diversity and inclusion. All those are UN sustainable development goals. The regulation of the land, the air and the sea are all part of this.
How will they implement those 17 sustainable development goals? They ask, “If we were going to implement a social credit system, what would we track? What would we monitor based on those goals? What types of behavior would we reward or punish based on those goals?”
When you go through that intellectual exercise, what comes out the other end is something that looks a lot like what China has already built. This is the evolution of my research on that. The liberty community will say, “But they're incompetent and they will fail. We've seen people at the UN. They're not going to be able to implement this.”
But are they the ones driving the strategy? They are not the ones driving the strategy. It turns out the elites behind the scenes are using the UN, the WEF [World Economic Forum], the World Bank, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], and the Bank for International Settlements to implement their agenda. They're essentially pushing their technocratic agenda and getting us to pay for it through these international organizations that are funded with taxpayer dollars.
Specifically, what I found was that this technocracy movement really took off in 1973, a pivotal year. The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski literally wrote a book about technocracy and was the intellectual force of the day for promoting globalism and technocracy. The Trilateral Commission literally drafted what is called the New International Economic Order, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1974.
Again, the UN wasn't sitting around a table and saying, “We came up with this New International Economic Order.” The Trilateral Commission is a group of elites, roughly 300 to 350 people. It wasn't that big at the time, but driven by Brzezinski and others they developed a platform called the New International Economic Order. It was adopted by the UN, and it promoted globalism.
It promoted the idea of international corporations and banks and the erosion of sovereignty over time through trade deals. That new international economic order is the basis for the UN Agenda 2030 and the 17 sustainable development goals. This is a direct path and there are a few groups behind the scenes. There is the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Club of Rome, which is a huge group that promotes this scarcity concept regarding environmentalism.
Then there's the Bilderberg group. While they don't publish their full lists, you can start to research and collect some of the overlap. There are people like Kissinger and Rockefeller who have been associated with and on the boards of all four of these organizations over time. Members of the Trilateral commission include the the CEO of BlackRock, Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and the former chair of BAE systems.
These are the people that are developing the strategy and pushing it through these global organizations for implementation. For 50 years, it's always been an explicit push towards one global government, and an explicit push for tracking and recording information about people. This is baked into it.
I don't have the quotes, but they themselves all say this is what's driving it. In the end, multinational, corporate elites are driving all of our decisions and how our lives function from the top down through the application of technology.
Mr. Jekielek: After what we saw over the last three-and-a-half years, it's a lot less difficult for some people to accept what you're saying. We did see unprecedented coordination around really bad policy around the world. It was bizarre to see and to try to comprehend what was actually happening.
Mr. Day: It's easier for people to accept, but it has still been written off as just greed or a few bad apples. People need to understand this is a deliberate, coordinated, sustained strategy that has been rolled out for the last 50 years. Regarding the magnitude of this, those five organizations I talked about employ 65,000 people and have an annual budget of $35 billion. The top 10 WEF partner companies have a combined market cap of $8.8 trillion. They employ 6 million people and they have $1.5 trillion worth of cash on hand.
In some cases, these global groups are funded by our own tax dollars, and this is something that we need to start taking seriously. I am sounding alarm bells because in 1974 Brzezinski was talking about how we need to have records on everybody, but we didn't have the technology for that back then. We now have the technology to do that. The gateway to this digital tyranny is central bank digital currency, because it will be hard for us to protest, and it will be hard for us to resist if they can shut off access to our money.
Mr. Jekielek: You're expecting this is going to be pushed hard in the not too distant future.
Mr. Day: When I started writing my book, I didn't have the person who introduced me to Bitcoin being convicted and looking at 70 years in prison. My other friend who started the Library platform, his company hadn't been shut down by the SEC. What has happened in just the few short months since I've written the book is breathtaking. I originally thought we had one to three years, but there's a high probability CBDC will be rolled out in the United States before the next presidential election. I say that because the technology exists, as I've just described.
Biden has issued executive order 14067, authorizing the government to explore CBDC and authorizing the government to explore the regulation of digital assets, which is why we are getting this complete and total crackdown. The intent has been expressed in the technologies that are here. Based on what we saw with Covid, we're one emergency away from this being rolled out.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's assume that your premise is correct. What can everyday people do in this situation?
Mr. Day: This is controversial, but what I propose is that people actually exit the dollar. This is going to take a little bit of explanation, but exchange your dollars for either self custody crypto, gold or silver. I don't want to make this just about crypto. Have an alternative form of currency in your own possession that you can use to engage in voluntary trade with other people, so that you don't get stuck in a position where your only choice is this censorable, programmable form of money. Now, you might find yourself in a situation where the next time they try to push a vaccine mandate, you have no choice.
Mr. Jekielek: But what about cash?
Mr. Day: Cash doesn't work because they will ban cash. They will just come in and outright ban cash. Now, there might be a market for people to continue to use these paper notes, but frankly, there's counterfeit ability and there are some issues with fiat currency. This is the hardest part of this for me to explain.
In fact, I actually believe if only three percent of people exchange their fiat dollars for these alternatives, that would actually grind the existing system to a halt. That sounds ridiculous. You're probably saying, “What? Three percent?” But every fiat currency in human history has failed. It has a zero percent success rate.
This guy wrote a book called Dollar Days where he analyzed 750 fiat currencies. The average government backed currency only lasts 27 years and it has a zero percent success rate. Then people will say, “Yes, but this is different, this is the dollar. We're the greatest country in the world and we're the largest economy.”
Then I have to walk them through this process and say, “Yes, we have been the global reserve currency for 103 years.” For the audience that is watching now, the dollar has been the global reserve currency for their entire lives. But if you go back and look at the five previous global reserve currencies, the average global reserve currency only lasts 94 years. Before the dollar we had the British pound, the Dutch currency, and the French currency. Let's look at the dollar itself. The dollar used to be backed by gold. Nixon got us off the gold standard 52 years ago, and we've seen inflation and a whole variety of things since then, but it gets worse. In 1992, banks were required to hold 10 percent of customer reserves in order to be able to meet withdrawal requests. Because of Covid, there are no longer any reserve requirements for banks. Just think about that for a second.
In fact, this is actually true, and I have experienced this watching people on social media. Depending upon your bank, If you want to take out $10,000 to $15,000 in cash, you may need to schedule an appointment three days in advance, because they actually don't have the physical cash. On top of that, they don't have a lot of reserves. It's not backed by gold. We have no requirements for reserves. How are banks able to satisfy requests if people come in to take money out?
They're counting on their customers making their interest payments and principal payments on the loans that they've made. What are their loans? They are for commercial real estate, which is in a state of free fall. Residential real estate is in a state of free fall. Starting in October, student debt will have to be repaid again.
Everything that the bank is counting on for money coming in to satisfy customer withdrawals is in a state of free fall. Right now, 61 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and that's before the $1.75 trillion owed in student loans starts coming due again.
Mr. Jekielek: You just stated three things, commercial and residential real estate in free fall, and the student loan question. Commercial real estate is definitely underpriced compared to before, and that's a big deal. Is residential housing really in free fall? What about the student debt? Please tell me more.
Mr. Day: Residential real estate is definitely moving into that direction again. If 61 percent of people are living paycheck to paycheck, you will see that impact on residential mortgages as well. That has already started to pick up in certain regions.
With the student loan situation, I saw a statistic that 45 percent of people believe they're going to default on student loans immediately, once they become due again, because they're already living paycheck to paycheck. They've had this pause and now all of a sudden they have this increased financial liability.
Mr. Jekielek: You're expecting there's going to be a financial crisis, and then you're suggesting that people make it worse?
Mr. Day: I'm suggesting that there is a financial crisis right now, but this isn't a utopian solution. I'm not actually suggesting that if you do this it will be great. To point this out, I've been solely living off of crypto since 2019, and by the way, it's not easy. It is incredibly inconvenient to do this. I'm doing this because I believe everything that I'm saying to you today, and everything that I wrote about in my book.
Mr. Jekielek: You're living it.
Mr. Day: I'm living it, but it's not convenient. By the way, if people do this, it's not going to make your life any better. You are not all of a sudden going to make all kinds of money and have things turn out great. What we're fighting against here is complete global tyranny.
Mr. Jekielek: You're suggesting that the collapse of the system is deliberate and this will be the solution that you have to accept if you want to keep living.
Mr. Day: Yes. Once you study the technocracy movement and what they're trying to do, it’s about elites making decisions from the top down and large multinational corporations doing this. What are we seeing with the bank failures that went on earlier this year? We're seeing the consolidation of bank deposits into companies like JP Morgan Chase, and the largest banks, which are likely the owners of the Federal Reserve. Coincidentally, they also happen to be WEF partner companies and people that are associated with and on the board of the Trilateral Commission.
Mr. Jekielek: What about our elected officials? What do you want from them?
Mr. Day: I've been a political activist for a long time. In fact, my stepmother was the co-chair of the RNC and was the ambassador to Costa Rica under Trump. I have watched politics for 30 years at all levels, and I've participated in running PACs, recruiting candidates, and being a candidate. The simplest thing that I could say is voting doesn’t work. Boycotts work. We are at a point right now where I don't care what a politician says, because they have no ability to actually execute on what they are saying.
Let's go back to everything from read my lips, to there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to you can keep your doctor with Obamacare, to we're going to drain the swamp to make America great, to we're going to build back better. None of it has come to fruition. In part it's because we have reached this point where even if you get elected, you're going to have a uniparty in Congress, and you're going to have a deep state that is permanent that you can't navigate around. We have politicized courts.
All of this is in a context of $33 trillion worth of debt and $160 trillion of unfunded liabilities with World War III breaking out on two fronts. What could somebody do if they got elected? They're not likely to have a mandate knowing that two years later there will be midterms and they're going to be neutered. I'm running for president to bring awareness to this issue. I haven't had issues getting coverage for political activism in the past.
I've actually been running since February, and no one wants to touch this concept. I've been promoting this idea of exiting fiat. I have this thing called the Bank Run Manifesto on Twitter, which has 1.25 million views now and grew organically. No one wants to cover and discuss this because it goes right to the heart of what the actual issue is.
Mr. Jekielek: You described a situation where you believe there's not a lot of options, but it's a bit different for me. I believe we have to do everything we can using the existing structures. But there's a kind of inherent nihilism when you are participating in pulling the bottom out of a system that's obviously in big trouble, which everyone agrees on.
Mr. Day: It's hard, and this is coming from the guy who ran these political organizations. I had people living in my house. I bought a digital printing press. I believed what you're saying right now for 15 years. I got involved with the Tea Party in 2008.
I have lived this and pushed this strategy and seen that strategy. I have seen this through my stepmother for 30 years and then directly experienced it myself for 15 years. I've exhausted that and seen about as much as I can. Most people are not aware of how this all works.
Let me explain. I will tell you who's going to win the next election and then I'll explain why, and we'll see if this turns out to be correct. The Democrat is going to win regardless of who is running. There's also this statement that says, “You can indict a ham sandwich.” The Democrats can elect a ham sandwich.
Why? Because voting all comes down to getting out the vote. In 2008, the Democrats built a system based on technology for targeting voters and getting people to the polling places, and it was vastly superior to anything that the Republicans had.
Trump was an outlier in 2016 because he had his own brand and his own following, and that was enough to overcome the difference between the get out the vote structure between the two parties. But with that not being in the race, it now doesn't matter who the candidate is. This probably does sound nihilistic, but again, please find the flaw in what I'm saying.
Two thirds of Americans can't identify the three branches of government. Only 20 percent of eighth graders are proficient in civics, and 13 percent in U.S. history, but their vote counts as much as yours or mine. In fact, on voting day, the majority of people who vote are low or no-information voters.
You'll have a situation through targeting where the Dems will literally go to a nursing home with a flyer that says, “Unless you vote for ham sandwich, you're going to get kicked out of this nursing home and you're going to starve on the street.” Then they say, “By the way, here's a van, let's go to the polling place.” This is how the mechanics of this work on the ground for get out the vote.
When you're in a system where you have this level of lack of civic engagement and civic knowledge, then what can we possibly expect the outcome to be? I don't think I'm pessimistic at all. I believe in free will, and I believe in love over fear. I believe in abundance over scarcity, and I believe that this is something that is possible.
We don't need a turnaround specialist. We actually need an entrepreneurial mindset. We need America 2.0 from first principles. We need to be talking about how to understand what has happened. I love America, and I love its revolutionary period. I love the founding of America, but we have failed. At some point, we're going to have to admit we screwed this up.
You need to know that for 50 years there has been this insidious movement that has been infiltrating not just the United States government, but also other governments. The Trilateral Commission essentially recruited Carter to be president. Every single member of Carter's cabinet was a Trilateral Commission member except for one. The Trilateral Commission has infiltrated both political parties, the presidential cabinet, and the highest level of government in the United States. They've done it that way in Europe and Asia as well.
We have had this infection from within, but we are at that point right now where voting is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are at that point where it needs to be about radical non-compliance and civil disobedience. In the end, we can get to a place where we can have free will, love, abundance, and decentralization, but it's not going to be through voting.
Mr. Jekielek: Something you said really resonated with me, which was America 2.0 from first principles. That's something I hope that a lot of people could get behind. A final thought as we finish up?
Mr. Day: America is not going to remain the way that it is right now. The default situation is that we move into global tyranny in this one world form of government based on fear, centralization and complete authoritarian control. The basis for that is central bank digital currency. Once central bank digital currency is implemented, then the social credit system and vaccine passports will limit our ability to even protest or change America.
Mr. Jekielek: You're talking about a complete erosion of the First Amendment all the way down the line, correct?
Mr. Day: Hasn't that already happened? In 2020 I put out a series of videos in March at the very beginning of the pandemic. The whole purpose of the videos was to show people the decentralized technologies they could use instead of Facebook and Twitter. I did one on how you can use Signal, and how you can use something called Twitch instead of Twitter.
In March of 2020, I saw that they were not going to let us talk to our own friends and our own families about what was coming with the pandemic, which I didn't understand at all. I had Facebook pages that had a combined 100,000 subscribers. They limited my speech to 40 viewers per video. They cut that off at the very beginning. Do we even have free speech? Do we really think we have free speech now, when you start looking at what technocracy is all about? In the end, this movement is about giving more power to multinational corporations.
I can tell you personally from my own experience that Twitter is shadow banning people. Do they have algorithms that determine what content goes viral and what doesn't on all of the social media platforms? The power isn't even necessarily with the government. The power is already with the multinational corporations.
With these different AI systems like OpenAI, or Anthropic has something called Claude, whoever is controlling the mechanism that filters responses, that is a complete restriction of free speech right now. It doesn't require any government. They've designed whatever their own viewpoint is, and they've already put that filter on what information you can get out of these systems.
It's frightening. In the videos that I did in 2020, I actually talked about why we need decentralized alternatives. In the early days of Facebook, 40 percent of your followers would see a post. Now it's down to one percent of your followers. You can't even communicate with your own friends on your own social network.
With Twitter, even if somebody turns on all their notifications, they're still not getting all of your stuff. They have already restricted our ability to speak with and communicate on a reliable basis with our own personal social networks.
Mr. Jekielek: I agree with you, and a push to decentralization makes a lot of sense. Perhaps this is where we should leave off. Aaron Day, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show .
Mr. Day: Thank you for having me.
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