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April 25, 2025 - The David Knight Show
50:09
Unveiling the Collapse: Chris Menedis Exposes Why the World’s Gone Mad
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Hey there!
My name's Chris Manitas, and I wrote a book called Why the World Doesn't Make Sense, Reclaiming the Liberty You Didn't Know You Lost.
For those of you who don't know me, I help folks at all stages of life learn to think more deeply, challenge the status quo, and find financial and personal freedom, independence, and sovereignty.
A word that's not often fully understood.
We're living in a time where it feels like the rules keep changing, where nothing in our secular society, politics, culture, the economy, adds up the way it should.
Because we don't understand some pretty fundamental truths and have allowed words and their meanings to be inverted and used against us, we've sacrificed our inalienable rights.
We've allowed our own government to be manipulated and turned against us, allowed the weapon of money to be used against us, allowed a bureaucratic state to develop and control us.
We've been distracted from confronting the truths that matter most and have failed to have the words to stand up as truth and first principles thinking were banished from our schools and universities.
I could go on and on.
The good news is that while we've allowed this to happen, we hold the power to change it.
The reality is we should never have to depend upon another person for our own success, for our own happiness.
Elections are great, but if we really want to be free...
If we really want it to last, it starts with us.
The individual.
Another concept.
It's high time we understand.
I believe it's time for an era of civic renewal to propel us into the next great age of enlightenment.
Something special is starting to bubble under the surface.
Humanity is about to enter its next era.
And we're the generation that gets to decide what that is.
To bring it into reality.
To make the next great leaps and advances.
Not just in the sciences, but in thought.
Darkness, centralization, control, those will always be there in our fallen world.
But what can exist in parallel and perhaps in our next era dominate and far outshine them are truth, decentralization, and liberty.
Instead of asking questions that wise men answered thousands of years ago, we can choose to stand on the wisdom of the ages and from those heights look out to see and to build what's next.
What I don't believe in are how-to guides or telling you what to think.
Instead, I teach you how to think and arm you with knowledge and tools.
I empower you as a free and sovereign individual so that you can decide what's right for you, your family, and your community.
So, if you've ever wanted to better understand the major threads underlying our world, money, civics and politics, bureaucratic machine and censorship, words and their emergence, war, globalism, join me.
Grab a copy of Why the World Doesn't Make Sense and start today.
Wherever you are in life, whatever you have or don't have, you can do this.
We can do this.
We can do this.
All right, and joining us now is Chris Manitas, and I think I mispronounced her name.
I hope I got it right this time.
And we wanted to talk to her about her book, Why the World Doesn't Make Sense.
I've got some ideas about that, but I'd like to hear what she has to say about it.
Thank you for joining us, Chris.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
This is a new book that you read, and you've written several different books, and you've got a YouTube channel.
You've got some very interesting thoughts on the YouTube channel as well.
But tell us a little bit about that.
Tell us a little bit about the book.
Why the world doesn't make sense?
Why do you think it's crazy?
Well, I have a feeling you're going to agree with me on this one.
I think it's because it's no longer built on truth.
We have replaced natural law with legal fictions.
Virtue with identity, reason with control.
And we've stopped acknowledging that liberty comes from personal sovereignty and that it has to be about more than just rights.
And this basic premise that if we don't want the government to step in, then we the people have to step up.
And we have to remember that freedom often is the freedom to do what we should.
And I think it's also really critical that we recall that We should never ascribe more to government than it requires.
It's not meant to be a recipe for our lives.
It's merely our secular governance.
And when this basic civic knowledge fades, we don't just get bad policy, but we can lose the ability to even talk about these foundational truths without triggering panic or polarization.
The book is ultimately about pulling back the curtain, if you will, and showing not just how we got here, but why.
Why would we as a free people allow this to happen in the world?
As we sit on the precipice right now, I think you would probably agree of this collapsing post-World War II global order.
How can we reclaim liberty by returning once again to truth and to moral order?
I think it's really important because truth ultimately brings us to a fuller understanding of the individual.
That's true.
Yeah, you know, I've said in the past, when I was growing up, we'd say, well, don't make a federal case out of it.
Now we want to make a federal case out of everything.
Everything needs to be solved by government.
Every problem needs to be solved by government and needs to be solved in Washington.
And that's now true of conservatives as it has been true of liberals for quite some time.
Everybody's looking for a savior in Washington, aren't they?
If you notice in society, we even pose the question the wrong way.
Oftentimes, the first thing people say is, well, what should the government do?
And the answer is almost always, nothing.
Get the heck out of the way.
And I think we really need to start once again asking ourselves, what should we do?
What can we be doing?
Because ultimately, it starts with us.
And I think a society that understands that and lives that truth...
Of taking responsibility and understanding that our being as individuals really transcends our rights and our obligations and even opportunities has to reach a state of communion and voluntary self-sacrifice.
And I think it's key not just to fulfillment of who we are as people but it's key to making the whole system work.
So you can't have liberty without virtue.
And so I think this kind of timeless call to fix ourselves and our own hearts first is actually at the heart of really helping to fix our society to move forward as well.
And that's really what the founders were talking about when they mentioned happiness, isn't it?
You know, it wasn't hedonism necessarily.
It was the freedom to pursue virtue, wasn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
It was integrity and there is a property element in there, I think, in pursuit of happiness since the initial wording was property.
But a lot of it is integrity.
It's this understanding of virtue and that happiness is not this ability to always do whatever we want.
In fact, that's the exact opposite, right?
I think that's actually slavery, not freedom, when you're a slave to your passions.
And so I think really kind of understanding these timeless truths that have been around forever that society seems to have forgotten.
We've become deeply uncomfortable talking about the entire concept of virtue somehow.
It's almost as if we can sense how far we've drifted.
And so we're afraid to have the discussion.
It's only allowed to virtue signal on social media.
We can't be didactic about the virtue.
Of course, the inversion is always okay.
That's right.
So when you talk about this, What does it look like at a local level or a personal level when we look at this and we try to move society back in a direction that is more focused on the individual,
more focused on virtue, and not so much a centralized solution?
What does that look like on an individual basis?
I think it starts with a couple of things.
I think, obviously, it starts with us and it starts with our families.
What is our connection to our Creator?
What is our connection to our family?
And then building up from there into our local communities.
And I think a huge part of it for folks is education.
I think not being afraid to go and connect with the entire Western canon, you know, to travel as, you know, it's often called that dusty path between Athens and Jerusalem and know from once you came and be able to connect with the long arc of history.
I think is incredibly important to people.
So I think reading certainly helps.
I think being afraid or not being afraid to question.
Somehow even our scientific method has gone away and it's become whatever is settled science or condoned by whoever's paying for the study.
And our greatest discoveries in the world have always come from questioning.
And so I think it's this idea that Within ourselves, challenging ourselves and within our families and our small, you know, local communities, how can we once again instill this basic idea of first principles thinking?
And really being able to drill every issue down and build up from there.
And it gets you to an interesting place because instead of falling politically into line with a lot of these ideologues or what the party's doing...
You know, I caught the end of your last segment before joining.
And what I heard was this idea that once you have a principle, that principle is a principle.
And you don't get to be, you know, I'm going to apply it over here, but not really on Tuesdays and not to that group because it's not politically convenient.
And I think we've lost that idea as a society.
And we all have to decide.
You know, what are our principles and where are they grounding us?
So perhaps, you know, for me in my personal life, that principle would be my faith.
In my secular life, that principle is liberty.
And I think what happens is a lot of us have chosen economic gains or dominance or, as I like to call it, empire as that principle.
And so you tend to manipulate everything else around it.
In that secular sense around liberty is the underlying guiding principle that I am going to put everything within the context of, self-sovereignty.
All of a sudden you look at the world in a very different way.
You understand everything differently from whether it's money to globalism to geopolitics to domestic politics, words and how they're used against us, you know, war.
And so I think it's really important that people challenge themselves and figure out...
What are these principles and what are the lenses that you're going to do this?
And do you have this ability to reason and break things down and then build up again from there?
And it gives you the strength then to be able to approach any worldview issue, any global issue that you come across with a foundation.
And obviously then having a willingness to listen to other ideas because we don't know everything.
But now we have a grounding to filter those ideas.
So we can properly say, Which ones we want to allow to strengthen our resolve?
Which ones can maybe broaden our understanding or add a little bit of depth or nuance?
And, you know, I like to always say that we get a lot of that from reading, but the truth is we can get a lot of it from anywhere in society if we have the tools to be able to do it.
I agree.
Yeah, I remember Rod Dreher's book, Live Not by Lies, which is based on Solzhenitsyn's—he took the title from Solzhenitsyn's essay.
But he was talking in it, he said that he had— I had a lot of friends who had family that had lived under totalitarian governments, whether it was in Russia or Germany or whatever.
And they were very concerned because, and they started talking to their children, who were his age, and said, you know, I'm starting to see the same thing starting to happen here.
And he said then he started seeing it himself.
You know, people who would be talking in a cafeteria or something at a university, they would start to guard their speech and kind of sideways glance to see, is anybody listening to me?
That type of thing.
There's a fear there.
There's a fear there that you're going to stick out, you know, and you're going to be hammered down.
The old saying, the nail that sticks up is going to get hammered down.
And so everybody is afraid of that, and they're ashamed of their convictions.
And part of it, I think, as you're pointing out, they don't really have firm convictions.
They haven't really thought about the meaning of life and where they stand on this stuff and why they stand on something.
And so if you don't have firm convictions, I mean, you're just going to be pushed around with everything.
And I think that's really where we are for most people.
And I think that is a big part of why we have the kind of influence in these institutions, these public schools.
I think that's been a big part of what they were trying to achieve, the fact that everybody just doesn't have any foundation, and they're afraid of the peer pressure, and they're afraid of the pressure from above, aren't they?
They're very afraid of it.
And I think you're right.
it's because they haven't been taught how to think and so what happens is instead we've trained entire generations on what to think and it's an incredibly dangerous thing because it's not always the easiest skill to relearn later in life to go back
and actually have the strength of character to be able to break things down because you realize that you end up questioning yourself a lot
It's something even that happened to me in the writing of the book.
Really discovering when you're willing to look at facts, honestly, throughout history, what things are and how they might change your mind and really see what's happening across the board.
So I think, to me, this is actually the broader discussion that we should really be having about education.
We're kind of trapped, I think, in this parallel discussion right now in the country about who should get into higher education universities and then what we should be doing when they're there.
And I think that's kind of missing the entire point.
We're missing an entire underpinning of civics, of natural law, of understanding who we are as a people.
And really starting with that foundation of first principles and not just understanding American first principles from a civics perspective, but first principles thinking on a broader basis across the board.
And so I think we're seeing that right now.
It's permeating our sciences.
We're less productive.
With the number of PhDs, I think it's dropped down to less than 1% in terms of productivity, even though the number of PhDs has gone through the roof.
We're seeing it certainly in our thought and inquiry, in our social sciences.
So it's across the board a problem that, to me, this is the discussion that we should be having.
And it's not something that government can fix.
It's only something that we can fix ourselves by having the strength of character and the willingness to take it on voluntarily.
Yes, I agree.
I agree.
And, you know, I should have started with your credentials at the beginning because you have been able to build You're an entrepreneur who has built a $200 million plus real estate portfolio by applying sound money principles.
So you have successfully been able to put these principles into play.
And you've also gotten involved as an early Bitcoiner and other things like that.
But you've taken personal sovereignty over your own life.
And I think that's one of the key things that is there.
And you've been very successful at that.
And that's one of the reasons why you're writing books.
And why you have your YouTube channel and other things.
Oh, by the way, I didn't mention, what is the YouTube channel where people can find you?
It's Christine Manitas YT.
Okay, YT.
Okay.
And your website is?
My website is ChristineManitas.com.
Good, good.
Okay, I wanted to get that out.
And then from there, you can link out to all the social in YouTube.
Okay, and she spells her last name M-E-N-E-D-I-S.
That's Manitis, and that is the way you spell it.
So that's excellent.
Yeah, and so, you know, you're...
You have a lot to say about financial things because, again, that is a key thing.
If we're going to have liberty and if we're going to have independence, we need to be able to take care of ourselves.
And you have done that and have been very, very successful at that as well.
On your website, on your channel, and I guess it's also in this recent book, Why the World Doesn't Make Sense.
And that is S-E-N-S-E.
It's not C-E-N-T-S.
We're not going to have sense anymore.
We just got rid of the penny.
Trump did that for us.
So we're not going to have any more sense as well.
The federal government is not going to make any sense.
But it never did to me.
But when you talk about that, talk a little bit about the financial aspect of it.
About how we make sense of this world.
Absolutely.
Well, money is a weapon.
And I think it needs to be understood that way because, in fact, it's probably the principal weapon throughout history that's been used to create poverty and dependency rather than eradicate them.
So, without an adequate understanding of financial principles, you can't really have sovereignty.
And a lot of societal evils...
Are allowed to continue to occur because a lot of naive people fail to grasp this role of money as a weapon.
And it's worth saying that as with any weapon, I always point out, you can be on either side of it.
It can be defensive or it can be used to defend.
It can be offensive or defensive.
And so I think it's really important.
These things are tools at the end of the day.
I've never been someone who is a maxi with any particular point of view.
To me, these things are tools and you have to understand them and bring them back to what are your principles that you want to use these tools in service of.
But on a bigger basis, if you don't really understand how money works, then you can't understand the broader world around you.
And it may sound kind of dramatic, but currency, payment systems.
All of this is the hidden engine behind everything, right?
From the price of eggs to the rise and fall of empires.
And historically, as I'm sure your audience is well aware, we've managed this in many different ways.
And over time, we've moved from commodity money into fiat or government money and all of its issues.
And I realize your audience is probably very well versed on this, so I won't get into that.
But what I think is interesting is that As we start to now layer in, and I talk a lot about this in the book, modern payment systems, digital banking, credit cards, digital currencies, CBDCs, suddenly it's not just about what money is,
but how it moves, who gets to transact, what can be tracked, frozen, taxed, is it private, is it programmable?
And very quickly you realize we're not talking about money anymore, we're talking about freedom.
Yeah.
And so all of this I think matters right now with an extreme urgency and it's one of the reasons that I really wanted to arm people with this information is because the time to understand it is now.
I can tell you for a fact having seen it that The system is built.
We just haven't turned the key yet to turn on a lot of this.
And so one day very soon, everyone's going to wake up and whatever is in their bank account is going to have converted.
And at that point, it's too late.
We don't get to opt into systems after they're built.
So I think there's good, there's bad, but we really, I think knowledge of that is probably one of the most important things that we can help our fellow citizens with right now.
I agree.
And, you know, they don't want us to own anything.
They want to have universal basic income.
We've had Democrats and Republicans have all talked about this in one form or the other.
You know, we're not going to have jobs.
I mean, we just had talked about it yesterday briefly.
Some guy with an artificial intelligence company says, I'm going to replace all jobs everywhere, you know, everything.
And it's going to be great, you know.
Nobody will have a job but him, I guess.
And I don't know who's going to buy his products.
He'll be happy.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know who's going to buy what he makes.
But it's crazy.
They don't think about that.
And yet, at the same time, you know, when Bloomberg was running, he was talking about how, well, you know, we had the farmers and they're stupid and we had the people working in the factories and they're stupid and the smart ones of us, like me, we just have to figure out how we're going to control these people so they don't try to kill us.
And it's going to be universal basic income.
And we saw Musk was heavily into that as well.
How do we defend ourselves against this system that you point out is already built and they just got to flip the switch to put this thing out there?
What is it that people need to do in order to protect themselves against this system?
I think number one is awareness to understand how it works and the implications of the various aspects of the system.
So that would be an understanding of...
Digital money, which a lot of people I've found tend to just shy away from because they say, I don't like it, I don't want it.
And it says, well, that's great, but it's here, so let's understand it.
So I think an understanding of what digital money is.
And I think understanding things, you know, timeless commodity money is really key.
So gold, Bitcoin.
To me, they both serve their purpose.
I'm a huge fan of both, have been a big believer in both for a long time.
My dad was an old gold guy, so I'm well-versed in all that growing up.
And obviously having its moment now as the world is going crazy.
And I think understanding Bitcoin to me as a digital aspect of that.
And so if you think about, you know...
Gold and all of its properties in terms of privacy, but also as a bearer asset.
I think bearer assets are incredibly important for people to understand, where you don't need that trusted third party to transact through them.
And so to me, Bitcoin's acting as a bearer asset within the digital realm in the age of digital money is incredibly important for people to understand and to be able to take advantage of that.
You know, God forbid you ever needed to move or to travel, it's a lot easier to travel with.
Something like Bitcoin.
It's just words in your head.
So you can cross borders.
And so to me, that's one of the most powerful aspects of understanding these things.
So again, they're tools.
So you have to look at your life and understand what is it that you're trying to do.
Are you trying to grow wealth?
Are you trying to preserve wealth?
Are you trying to just have a little bit to opt out of the system?
Or, you know, this is obviously in parallel with a lot of other non-financial aspects of your life as you're planning.
And then I think also an understanding of what's happening in the world bigger picture is really important as people look at their finances.
Because I think a lot of people, especially on the right, looked at what President Trump was doing going in with tariffs and said, Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
that the primary source of income and instead you get a lot of republicans today who are saying well no we're going to keep spending these spending bills are absolutely insane going through congress and so when you look at this and you understand that america's broke
we're facing a
This whole thing about taking the markets down a notch really only has to do with one thing.
It has to do with the 10-year because we can't afford to finance our debt and we can't afford to refinance all the debt that the Biden administration there put in short-term treasuries.
That's also going to come due at the same time as we need to put out roughly another $3 trillion.
And so we have no idea where this is going to come from.
And if the 10-year creeps north of 5.5%, we hit a debt spiral.
We're done.
It's over.
So if you hold gold, great.
It's going to go through the roof with your Bitcoin.
But if you're, you know, God forbid, in fiat or needing to just buy food and do things for your family, these are very serious issues.
And so we have, I think, an opportunity right now that we have to be very realistic about this and understand that the problem may be at a point where, like so many other things, the government can't fix it anymore.
And so it may be that point where I think...
A lot of people need to start to say, how can I take a little bit every month and start to protect myself?
Get off zero in some of these ways of getting out of the government system.
And not everybody can do everything, but everybody can get off zero.
And you can start to do something, and you can create a community and be aware.
Because what we're seeing happen in the world is extreme chaos is being created because instead of using tariffs to go down a path towards where the country started, And to put us back forward to path of non-extractive income tax, they've been weaponized.
And so what's happening?
The world is reacting to this because instead of tearing down the post-World War II global order and then instead restoring a republic, we seem to be wanting to rebuild it now with all the old Lego pieces.
And it's not only confusing as hell to watch.
But it's terrifying if you're in the markets.
And I can tell you the markets, you add this in now with algorithmic bot trading.
And it's a wild time in the markets right now.
Oh yeah, nobody knows what's going to happen.
Your stops better be tight.
You have no idea what's coming.
Oh yeah, everybody is frozen.
They don't know what's going to happen.
And it's that uncertainty that is so fatal with it.
And regardless of what's happening, regardless of, we can all talk about tariffs or income taxes or whatever, however we raise taxes, but you need to have that stability so that people can make plans.
Nobody can make plans.
Nobody knows what's going on with it.
And we're sitting here.
As you're pointing out, we've got this exploding debt.
We've got what's looking like now stagflation.
Now that's pouring gasoline on the fire of the stagflation with this uncertainty and everything.
And I'm old enough to remember when...
had all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put it back together again they didn't know how to do any of that right and so they all wanted to pretend that they knew exactly what to do and nobody could stop it you know it wasn't we could get the whip inflation now buttons and none of that worked you
know and we couldn't just say no to inflation and and of course the congress and the federal government can't say no to spending or to creating money and so we've got this this um
This economic tidal wave that is kind of looming over everybody's head.
And as you point out, you've got to do something.
Jack Lawson, who does Civil Defense Manual, he says, just start by getting some canned food and start to put it under your bed so that you've got something that you're starting to just start small.
You don't have to do it all at once.
You just start a little bit at a time.
And I think that's what you're saying as well about the financial stuff.
I think that's it.
I think so many people feel like, It's too much, and I can't do it.
But you don't realize you can start small, and that small compounds.
And honestly, the way these assets are moving, as the currency continues to be debased more and more, that little bit can actually be a lot.
And I think it's a principle in general in life.
Just start.
Do something.
Make a decision.
Start.
You feel better moving forward, and you're productive, and it's also along the way, because you're starting, now you're in that world.
Now you're getting educated.
Now you're paying attention to these things.
Because we could very well be entering a time of continued chaos.
There's no guarantees that any of this is going to get turned around.
I think there is a guarantee that they're going to completely change the financial system.
I mean, they've even said it as much.
You know, I mean, we had Besant say that, yeah, we're talking to the stakeholders, to the World Economic Forum, not the World, the World Bank and the International Monetary Forum.
And so it's like, oh, great, we're going to do another Bretton Woods, he says.
And so it's like, okay, so it's going to be the same but different.
The Mar-a-Lago Doctrine.
Yeah, there you go.
That's right.
So, you know, when you look at this, And part of it, I've talked to people in the past about the hijacking of Bitcoin, because Bitcoin was really, Roger Ver, that's his book, said it was really set up as a transactional medium, and now it's become this big store of value.
And I've also talked to Aaron Day, who is very much trying to...
You know, have gold, silver, as well as some kind of a digital currency, but he's concerned about privacy issues and things like that.
And he's, you know, he's focusing on it, and it's really changing very, very rapidly.
It's hard to keep up with it.
And so it's like a full-time job for him.
So I have him on from time to time to talk about that.
But, you know, that's the other issue about it.
I guess that's one of the things that concerns me about Bitcoin, even though it is now there and the institutions are accepting it.
So privacy, and that's one of the things that Aaron Day is looking at.
How do I get digital currency that is also going to be private?
So I'm sure, as he tells you when he comes on, one of the key things about Bitcoin, because I agree that it has been hijacked, and it is supposed to be both.
It's not supposed to be one or the other.
That's just human beings having the absurd fights that we like to as different groups want to take control.
But it's supposed to ideally be both because these are different aspects of what money is.
Money is not just a unit of account.
It's a store of value and a method of transacting, and it has to be both.
I think you're right to be concerned with it, especially...
As the analytics on chain get better and better across the board, and it is certainly something where gold is naturally superior.
But we do have the Lightning Network, and the entire point of the Lightning Network, other than the faster, cheaper transactions, is privacy.
And so only your initial and your closing transactions are ever recorded on chain.
So the thousands that you have in between...
So you're talking about the on-ramps and the off-ramps, let's say, you know, getting into that system and getting out of it.
Exactly.
Or when you open and close the portal on the Lightning Network to move from the Bitcoin onto the Layer 2. Now, to be fair, it is very much still what I would call a DIY system.
So if you treat Lightning like a bank and you go and you use, you know, One of these guys who've set up the wallet system for you and now you're just back in Rustland and you're custodying with somebody else and you've lost the entire purpose of the Lightning Network.
But if you do actually take advantage of what Lightning naturally can offer, the payments are happening off-chain in private channels and they're bouncing through several channels, in fact, who are not aware.
Of where that's coming from.
And so I think lightning is really the answer.
And so one of my strong hopes is that as this continues down this path of digital money, that we get a lot more of the incredible talent that right now has been drawn into the crypto space because of...
You know, the promise and the returns and the power that they actually find their way back over to the freedom space and put their minds to work on the Lightning Network, because I think that does have the opportunity for privacy within the digital age.
Well, that's interesting.
Talk to us a little bit about stablecoin, because this is something that's being pushed a lot.
Of course, that's where Howard Lutnick, I can't remember.
Anyway, that's where he's coming from, kind of that world.
And, you know, as he's been focusing on treasury bonds, you know, part of the pushback, When Trump did the big tariffs, people, different countries started pushing back and saying, well, we're not going to buy the bonds anymore.
And so this would be some place where they could offload the bonds.
And I kind of look at that and think, are they going to use a state?
You think they're setting this up to use a stablecoin as kind of the place where they can stuff their bonds if they can't get other countries to buy these bonds?
And is that something that they're going to try to replace the dollar with as some kind of a stablecoin?
What do you think?
Yeah, so a stablecoin is, just to kind of step back and define it, right?
It's any type of digital currency that's backed by a reserve asset.
And that can be treasuries, it can be physical cash, it can be gold, it can be Bitcoin, it can be anything.
But some type of a reserve asset there.
And hopefully, we're talking about not algorithmic, which are backed by math, but the traditional kind that governments are accepting.
Hopefully the peg remains.
But that's the idea, is that it's one-to-one.
It's not going to fluctuate because it is backed.
Now, Lutnick, as you mentioned, is very tied with Cantor Fitzgerald to Tether.
They were their auditor for many years, and now they're actually partnering together to pull something, run very much of a micro-strategy-like play with Tether's balance sheet.
And stablecoins, this is really how they were sold to the federal government, That they are the biggest opportunity in a world where less and less people want our dollar.
Stablecoins not only expand dollar dominance, they allow people in Argentina, Hong Kong, India, anywhere in the world to access the US banking system with a smartphone and escape their own currencies, which currently are far worse off than ours are.
So they can get around the politicians of the central banks in those countries that don't want to deal with it.
Correct.
They can trade on their phones without the daily spikes in inflation that make it so difficult to plan out your life for basics like food and shelter and things of that nature that are recurring costs that you have.
And so not only do stables help to expand dollar dominance because around the world there's a huge market for them for that reason.
But it's also the case that as governments have wanted to legitimize these stablecoin companies, they're all turning to US Treasuries.
So Tether is one of the largest holders.
Tether is one of the major stablecoins, one of the largest holders of US Treasuries in the world.
And the idea is that this could be, to your point, an increasing...
So, as other countries, especially Asian countries, are beginning to dump our bonds openly, then we need something to replace this with.
So, the idea is that it can flow into stablecoins.
Now, stablecoins, it should be pointed out, are private.
So, there is no...
It's private in the sense that it's centralized.
Whoever issues the stablecoin, they can flow through whatever policy they want.
They can turn your right to transact on and off.
Now, to date, it's never been done.
But that capability is there.
And this is what I think it's important for people to understand.
Now, I personally believe that we're actually going to get a stablecoin as a CBDC.
And I think that's coming very soon in America.
That's what I was curious about, because I've been saying that as well.
It checks all these boxes.
It helps them with the dollar.
Yeah, and it helps them with the dollar, helps them with the bond, and it has all the functions of being able to control whether you have access to it or not, and shut that down that they had with CBDC.
So they can tell the public, we're not going to get a CBDC.
We're not going to get one.
Yeah, that's right.
We won't call it that.
And then what happens is they also preserve the two-tier banking system, so banks are happy, because otherwise...
What's the role of banks in this world?
And so now the banks are happy.
They get their CBDC that they can work with the central bank.
Our central bank is happy.
They have one to transact with other central banks who are all moving to CBDCs.
And we're just told we have these wonderful things called stablecoins and you should all have them.
Yeah, I agree.
That's what I wanted to know, if you saw it that way as well, because you're much more well-versed in this than I am, and that is really where I see this all happening.
You're spot on.
It's trying to get into something that is outside of their system as much as we can and to, you know, even if it's just baby steps, take the baby steps and start to do some preparation to get outside of that system.
And so, you know, you would suggest that people start accumulating small amounts of gold and silver and, of course, you would do Bitcoin as well.
Anything else that people can do to start to prepare and take baby steps?
I think it goes down to...
Education.
That's the number one thing I would say that people can do to prepare.
And I think a lot of times it gets overlooked because it's not tangible, right?
I didn't buy it.
I can't see it in the cupboard.
But I think oftentimes it's the number one thing you can do to arm yourself for the future is to understand what's happening and to have the tools.
It's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book.
And also so that you can think through, you can process, you have...
This skill that we talked about earlier of first principles thinking, well, now let me apply it to money.
Let me understand what's the government doing and why and what's the likely response going to be so that I can position myself and protect myself.
And maybe it means how much do I keep in my bank account?
And maybe it means starting to do something else on the side or look at how I'm teaching my kids about what they might want to do in the future as they look to education and their future earnings within the context of a broader, ever-changing global
economy. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Yeah, I guess, you know, that's the concern when we look at the debt.
And we look at, you know, as everything is slowing down, there's also the issue that this is having on the supply chains.
And I understand the goals.
I had a guy on a couple of days ago, we were talking about rare earth minerals, and he's got an American company that's trying to do that.
But as he's pointing out, we're like five years away from being able to do anything of this.
So what happens in the meantime, right?
What happens when, as part of this economic war, trade war, whatever, the Chinese cut off these We've got to learn how to do it.
We've got to set up the factories.
We've got to start the mining and all the rest of the stuff.
And that takes a long time to do it.
And you can go down with that with everything.
Everything we have created.
Over many decades, we have created a distributed supply chain that is global in nature, and everything is interwoven, and you can't decouple that instantly without just ripping everything apart.
And I guess that's everybody's concern.
Is everything going to be ripped apart?
How do you see this playing out?
Not well.
Yeah.
Nobody knows, of course.
Nobody knows even in the Trump administration.
They don't know what he's going to do the next day in terms of the numbers and stuff.
To your point, it is interconnected at this point.
We have built an interconnected world.
And there's going to be pain no matter what happens.
It's a matter of who feels the pain and why and what's on the other side.
collapse that I believe we're living through of the post-World War II global order.
This has been coming for a while.
Those on both the left and the right
have been well aware that we've kind of reached the end we've played the game out as long as we could play it and i believe that those on uh the side of globalism were kind of hoping that it would kind of imperceptibly collapse into everything that
they had waiting for it all of the institutions and the mechanisms and the ngos and the trade agreements and
trump stepped in and kind of
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
If we were tearing this down and he came out and said, let me have an honest conversation with you, America.
We've got a $36 trillion debt in rising.
We've got a deficit of over $2 trillion a year.
This is approximately 7% of our GDP.
We've got unfunded liabilities of over $73 trillion.
Heck, we're paying over a trillion just in interest on our debt.
It's not sustainable.
We're going to fix the system and it's going to hurt.
But here's what I'm doing and here's why and stick with me.
He doesn't want to do that.
He wants to win.
Yeah.
And so the problem is you're hurting a lot of innocent people along the way who are trapped in this system.
And what makes it really painful not just to live through but to watch is that I don't think there's freedom and liberty on the other side of it.
No.
So it's just going to be trade deals and actions that because Congress isn't stepping in can all be undone via the next guy in office.
And it's an incredibly dangerous way to run the government.
And so you're disrupting the only functioning global order that we have in terms of stability from an economic perspective.
But you're not actually running.
I think the sad and scary part, if we're being really honest about it, is that a lot of people who most need those short-term wins are the people who would have otherwise opted for liberty and freedom.
But we've put them in such a terrible position that they're like, just give me anything, man.
Just help.
Let me know that it's going to get better.
And they're so desperate for that message and because they're not grounded in an inner strength, we end up with this movement of populism, which is a symptom, not a cure.
And liberty can only come from sovereignty, from us.
I agree.
I think all of this plays through into the economy.
And so what I see ahead, honestly, is a lot of chaos.
I see it for a time where we may get a period of short-term wins as trade deals are negotiated.
But ultimately, I think we're going to see a lot of pain.
And I think it's really going to come down to two things for me.
One is, how does China respond to this?
They are in a world of pain internally themselves.
But then we're also looking at stats like their imports to the U.S. are estimated to go down by as much as 77%.
And just this morning they came out and said, we're not in trade talks.
That's going to have a huge impact on all of us and trade flows around the world.
And the second is, we still have not settled this war between Russia and Ukraine.
Or really Russia and us, if we're being honest about it.
That inability to do so, I think, is filtering through to a lot of his actions and policies because he hasn't been able to clear the board and reset.
So we still have dollars going there.
We still have attention going there.
We still have loyalties going there.
And because of that, we can't cleanly negotiate even with Europe.
And so I think those are the two big issues that I'm watching that I really want to see how this plays out that I think can have a huge impact on whether or not we're able to get a short-term reprieve.
But long-term, I'm afraid we're creating chaos.
Like I said before, we've spent decades intertwining these things.
I mean, just look at Trump's USMCA, right?
We wanted to distribute automobile manufacturing between the three countries.
Now, all of a sudden, we want to stop it, you know?
And so everybody had that set up.
And we as individuals are intertwined in this system, right?
And we can't help being intertwined in it.
And so I guess the real concern is that rather than gradually starting to build something else, whatever Whatever we're talking about is just this abrupt...
It's the uncertainty, but also the rapidity of which things can change in a massive way that is going to be so destructive, not just for global economies and everything, for each and every one of us, the way we're all tied into this system.
And that's why it is so imperative for us to get some handle on what we're about, what we believe, what our principles are, and to start making some preparations on the outside as much as we can.
We're tied into the system.
We can't escape the system.
But we can start to try to make some preparations on the outside and just hope that it doesn't come so quickly that it overwhelms us, I guess.
I think you're exactly right.
And we are tied up in this.
Every single person, look, this is the only system that any of us have ever actually lived in.
So we may talk about and continue to be the remnant of society that pushes for freedom.
And helps to keep things from going over the edge.
But the reality is we've all lived within a system of control our entire lives.
It has rules.
It has referees.
It's a game that's being played financially.
And so what happens?
You build your life within it.
You build your company within it.
You decide how to send your kids to school and what they should do within it.
And all of it is being blown up right now.
And so it's incredibly important that People do make preparations, that people do understand.
And I think, first and foremost, to your point, that we know who we are as a people, that we return to these underlying truths.
Because at the end of the day, not only is it the only thing that can actually bring us back together as a society, but if we don't have that going through potentially whatever is coming in the world...
We don't have anything to build what's on the other side and to have a say in building what's on the other side.
And as I think we all know very well in history, if you don't have an idea of what you want that you can vocalize and that you can explain to others and help to build a consensus around, somebody else is going to do it for you and that's what the world's going to look like.
That's a great way to put it, yeah.
Yeah, I know, you know, what my foundation is, and I know as much as I identify with America, I identify with Christ and his kingdom, and so that's really where my foundation is.
And if we have that foundation, you know, we understand that we're just passing through this world.
It's a temporary situation.
And we understand that God is ultimately in control.
We do what we can.
And there are things that we have been given and responsibilities and abilities that we have been given.
And we do what we can with that to try to persuade people in the world.
But, you know, that's really where our rock is.
And that's really where our foundation is.
And if we don't have that, we've actually lost a lot more.
I know that you agree with that as well.
Again, tell the website, let's see, Christine Menidis, and it's M-E-N-E-D-I-S.
And you have a YouTube channel.
You have a website.
The World, Why the World Doesn't Make Sense is the book, and people can find that, I guess, on Amazon, or they can also get it at your site, right?
like that.
They can get it.
Yeah, there's links from my site to Amazon.
It's available anywhere books are sold.
So whoever you want to support locally.
But yeah, it is on Amazon, of course.
Why the world doesn't make sense.
And give us your website again.
Is that Christine Medidas?
ChristineMonetis.com.
Good.
And the last name again is spelled M-E-N-E-D-I-S.
It's really been a pleasure talking to you.
And it's time for us to be deliberate and to be serious and understand and to take evaluation as we're getting into this massive generational change that we've got here.
About every four generations we get this great fourth turning, and we happen to be living in very interesting times, I think, that are coming up.
They're getting very interesting very rapidly, I think.
The old Chinese curse.
May you live in interesting times.
That's right.
And we're going to see some other Chinese curses coming our way, I think.
They've already started.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right.
All right.
The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidKnightShow.com.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for sharing.
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