The Control Grid: How To Protect Your Money And Your Freedom With Catherine Austin Fitts

What happens when the financial system can control not just how we spend our money, but what we are allowed to buy? Catherine Austin Fitts, former Wall Street investment banker, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and publisher of The Solari Report, joins us to explain what she calls the emerging “control grid”—and why she believes it threatens food, health, and personal freedom.

Catherine breaks down the three pillars of the control grid: surveillance infrastructure, digital identity, and financial transaction control. She explains stablecoins, the movement of bank deposits and investment assets onto distributed ledgers, and how an “automatic third lock” could allow transactions to be restricted without human intervention. She also discusses the CLEAR Act and proposed protections for financial freedom.

The conversation explores Catherine’s views on the financial forces behind the COVID response, depopulation, and protecting our children. She shares her remarkable story of losing her wealth, enduring years of litigation, and rebuilding her life—and how it transformed her understanding of real wealth. Catherine explains why she believes we should finance the people and businesses we trust, support local farmers, and invest in the “people bank.” She closes with practical ways to begin “Coming Clean” and build a healthier, freer future.

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Kendall Nelson and the regular text is Catherine Austin Fitts.

Imagine walking into your favorite farm store to buy raw milk only to discover that your payment has been declined. Not because you lack the money, but because a digital system has decided that you’re not permitted to make that purchase. Imagine being unable to access your bank account, sell your investments, or support a business because your choices don’t comply with the set of rules you never agreed to. It may sound like science fiction, but our guest believes that technology being developed in our financial system could make this control possible.

How do we protect our freedom before this infrastructure is fully in place? This is episode 599, and our guest is Catherine Austin Fitts. Catherine is a former investment banker and assistant secretary of housing and urban development and the Founder and President of Solari, a company dedicated to helping people understand the financial system and build greater financial and personal freedom. Through the Solari Report, she has spent decades investigating the intersection of money, government, technology, and the forces shaping our economy.

She is also a longtime friend of the Weston A. Price Foundation and a passionate advocate for local food systems, independent businesses, and the power of communities to invest in their own future. In this episode, Catherine explains what she calls the control grid and the three pillars she believes are necessary to make it work, such as digital infrastructure, digital identity, and financial transactional control.

She introduces the concept of the automatic third lock. Explaining how programmable money could allow a third party to control transactions between two willing people. We discussed the movement of bank deposits, stocks, and bonds onto distributed ledgers and the difference between central digital bank currencies and stablecoins, and why Catherine believes these developments could have profound consequences for our food, health, and financial freedom.

This conversation is not only about the risks. Catherine shares the legislative guardrail she is working on to establish, including the clear act and explains why preservation in cash, barter, and other non-digital options matter. We also explore how to build a more resilient economy by supporting local farmers, entrepreneurs, and businesses we believe in. Catherine shares her own remarkable journey from Wall Street in Washington to a prolonged legal battle that transformed her understanding of wealth, trust, and what she calls the people’s bank.

Her message is ultimately one of possibility. We can choose where our money goes, whom we support, and what kind of world we want to build. Before we get into the conversation, are you looking for a conference that feeds more than just your mind? Join us October 16th through 18th in Washington, DC, for the 2026 Wise Traditions conference. The conference that nourishes you in every way. Spend three inspiring days with more than 40 speakers exploring nutrition, farming, health, food freedom, traditional cooking, and practical ways to live well.

Enjoy delicious nutrient-dense meals prepared with real traditional foods, browse an exhibit hall filled with like-minded vendors, and connect with people who share your passion for healthy living. Whether you’re a long-time advocate or just beginning your journey, you’ll leave with new knowledge, new friends, and renewed inspiration. Come hungry for wisdom, for community, and for real food. Visit the Weston A. Price Foundation website to register and learn more. We hope to see you in Washington, DC, October 16th through 18th. Now, let’s welcome Catherine Austin Fitts.

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Catherine, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be with you. I’m so glad to see you doing things for Wise Traditions. It’s great.

I’m so happy to have you here. It’s about time I got you on the show. Let’s start off simple. I want to ask you. You’ve warned a lot about the emergence of what you call the control grid. Can you give us a basic understanding of what it is and what the central threat is to our freedoms?

Escaping The Automatic Third Lock

I’m going to introduce a concept called the Automatic Third Lock. Let’s say you and I do a cash transaction. I want to buy something that you’re selling. I will give you cash. You accept it. You give me the product or service that we agree to. That’s a two-lock transaction. You have a lock and I have a lock. You can say no or yes. I can say no or yes. It only happens if we both say yes. What has been developed over many years in the banking system and the financial industry is what I would call a Manual Third Lock.

The government gives financial institutions a set of rules and says, “People can’t transact if they break these rules.” It’s sanctions. It’s, know your customer, money laundering rules, etc. If you look at what happened to the Canadian truckers when their transactions were turned off. They couldn’t use their bank accounts or their money was cut off. That’s a manual third lock because the government communicates with the financial institutions.

The financial institutions get the documents and make decisions, whatever. They then start interrupting transactions or de-banking people. Literally cutting them off from their bank account. That’s a manual third lock because it’s not happening automatically. An automatic third lock is the danger that we are facing. That’s a system where, in fact, the process is so automated with AI and software that it’s not your bank that’s reviewing our transactions and making a decision and stopping a transaction.

An automatic third lock cuts off your access without a human in the loop. Protect your sovereign wealth before options disappear.

It’s coming centrally through AI and software where I can literally apply, theoretically, the equivalent of an entire social credit system. Let’s go to the pandemic. If I want you to have a vaccine, if you don’t take your vaccine as required by my mandate, I can de-bank you or turn off your money or put a fine or extra tax into your account so I can intercede. With AI and data centers, I can collect so much surveillance data and apply rule sets that I don’t even have to watch you or be involved. It can all be automated.

That’s what I call an automated third lock. In 2025, we worked with states to pass legislation that would put up guardrails against an automatic third lock on stablecoins. We’re about to see a growth in the stablecoin market because of something called the Genius Act. The United States is getting ready sometime from November to early 2027 and pushing dramatic issuance of stablecoins, which are basically dollar currency on a distributed ledger. The interesting thing about stablecoins is it’s collateralized with the US Treasury. It’s a way of attracting individuals and small businesses and farms all around the world into financing the US Treasury market.

Institutions are pulling back, but now the goal is to bring in retail. We had designed model legislation to protect people from the controls that could come from stablecoins and a distributed ledger. That could put these kinds of rules that could enforce a pandemic lockdown or enforce a pandemic vaccine mandate. Subsequently, what has happened is the depository trust corporations, which manages the ownership and archive records for $114 trillion of stocks and bonds traded in the US market.

The Trillion-Dollar Asset Migration

It came out with their pilot to use digital tokens to transact stocks and bonds on a distributed ledger. The large banks and then a consortium of regional banks announced they’re going to put bank deposits on a distributed ledger. We go from a world where $4 trillion of potential issuance can be on an automatic third lock to $136 trillion, including our stocks, bonds, and our bank deposits. This is critical for people who understand the importance of food and health.

What we’re talking about is putting into effect controls on financial transactions that gives central authorities the ability to literally control all your food and health choices or cut off your money. I know you’ve seen it. We did this huge wrap-up. Elze van Hamelen wrote something called Pharma Food on lab-grown meat. I remember reading and thinking, “Why would anybody buy it?” I say, “Financial transaction control.” They’re going to say that’s the only meat you can buy. They’re going to be able to police it as you basically go through the grocery store.

That’s where this is going. Anybody who cares about food freedom, health freedom, and the education of your children because they can literally control where your children live and where your children go to school. All sorts of things related to your children. Imagine the Epstein class having control of your children through financial transaction control.

You’re talking about the third lock system being an automated system where there won’t be anybody for you to call and complain to. There won’t be any way for you to walk into your bank and say, “I have a problem.”

Your bank can’t help you. The issuer of, for example, stablecoins has a pipeline into treasury. They won’t control. It’s very interesting. We have a video short collection at Solari on financial transaction control. The first is the head of the Bank of International Settlements in 2020 saying on a panel, “We will be able to make the rules up of how you may use your money. We have the technology to enforce that centrally.”

That’s the only honest comment that ever came out of that but what he’s talking about is if we have programmable money, then we can control your actions in what you mentioned with the social credit score.

It’s not just your money. It’s your assets. We can control whether your stock or bonds can be traded or not, or whether you can sell them or you buy them. This means all your stocks and bonds, potentially all your bank deposits, all your currency, at least if it’s on a distributed ledger. This applies to essentially what some people call the crypto rails. Now, the reason we’ve been working so feverishly to put up these guardrails is we want to make sure people have non-programmable money options.

The Clear Act Legislative Defense

I want to make sure you can use cash. If you want to use barter, I want to make sure you can use barter. Any analog system. If you want to trade with gold and silver coins, I want you to be able to do that. The first and most important thing is we need options, but also programmable money should be subject to rules. We’re about to have a legislative briefing on September 10th. We have a new bill called the CLEAR Act, which is designed to put up guardrails on all. It’s $4 trillion of stablecoins, but $114 trillion of stocks and bonds and another $18 trillion of bank deposits. It’s $136 trillion of both money, currency, and assets.

Our goal is to make sure the state legislatures put up guardrails under consumer protection laws. Under the federal financial laws, the federal government, including in the Genius Act, respects the states’ rights to protect consumers. We’ve written a model legislation called the CLEAR Act. You can get it up on our website. We have a financial transaction freedom website with model legislation and legislative briefings. It’s a wealth of resources if you want to help do this.

Our goal with the CLEAR Act is to make sure you can take a piece of model legislation and then adapt it to your state, state laws and get this passed so that you have guardrails where you live. We also have model legislation to protect cash and also a state constitutional amendment on the right to a non-digital life. We want governments to protect a citizen’s right to live without digital technology if they so choose.

Catherine, let me ask you. Is all programmable money bad? Is some of it good and we just need these guardrails?

Wise Traditions - Kendall Nelson | Catherine Austin Fitts | Control — Control: When transactions move to centralized digital rails, basic choices like buying local food can vanish instantly.

I can put smart contracts on programmable money, which could be unbelievably useful. There are thousands of things you can do. I can come up with many cases where they’re all perfectly wonderful. They’re designed to implement transactions where the two parties have conditions and have negotiated things and are not being coerced in any way, and are not being subject to compromise of their fundamental rights.

What we’re talking about is the application of programmable money and the use of distributed ledger in a way that compromises people’s real fundamental constitutional rights, or boxes and squeezes them. What we’re looking for is programmable money, which makes you more efficient and freer, and not can be used centrally to coerce. We’re worried about central coercion. Part of the reason we’re worried about it is because the central bankers have said this is what they want to do.

Tell me exactly what their goal is. Why do they want to control us so badly? What’s in it for them?

I have to go into conjecture. Let me first tell you, we did a scenario plan. We have it all up on our website. I’m a great believer that when the future is uncertain, you do scenarios and then you figure out how to adapt in whatever scenario comes true. The question was, what is the intention of the people running the system? Is their goal to centralize and kill financial transaction freedom, or they just want to automate, and they’re open to decentralization and free?

We had four different scenarios, from decentralized and free was fine to total central control. In the audience, in the briefing we did this, 68% said the goal was total control, but 32% said they would never be that horrible or evil and do that. What was interesting is almost everyone agreed we need guardrails. Whether that’s their intention or not, we need to make sure the guardrails are there so that if somebody should come along that has a different intent, they can’t do it.

It’s very important to understand you don’t have to accept the premise that the goal is total centralization, to embrace the desire to have guardrails so that can’t come true. If you listen to what they’ve said, we have the Bank of International Settlements, who for many years has been running a system to prototype programmable money around the world in different partnerships and efforts. We’ve seen, for example, at the G20 meeting in 2024 in India, essentially everybody embraced this vision of digital IDs and central bank digital currencies.

If you do it publicly at central bank digital currencies, if you do it privately at stablecoins or other crypto, on a distributed ledger. There are many different ways of doing it. They all embrace programmable money and digital IDs that would give total central control and allow social credit systems. If you look at the money that they’re pouring in to build the hardware, software, and digital ID systems to do this, we’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. We’re talking about one of the greatest allocations, I would say, misallocations of capital in the history of the Western world. This is important. You need to understand when the WEF says it’s 2030 and you have no assets. This is how they accomplish that.

Catherine, I know that there are three real parts to the control grid, and we’re touching on them but can we be clear about what those three parts are?

There are three baskets of actions. The first is the hardware and the software. If you’re going to have financial transaction control, you need enormous hardware and software to do surveillance, collect the data, analyze the data, and send the inputs out that says, “Kendall’s been bad. Cut off her groceries.” If you look at the data infrastructure, hardware and software. You’re talking about the data centers, the cloud, and all the servers, the underground cables, satellites in the sky, and the telecommunications infrastructure.

We remember during the pandemic, they dramatically accelerated the implementation of all sorts of telecommunications, hardware, and infrastructure going into communities, going into schools, etc. That’s the hardware and software. What’s interesting is there are two key components to this infrastructure. One is the data for spatial control. That’s our movements, where we go, and what we do. That’s very intense.

It’s one of the reasons we have so many data centers with so much capacity. It’s all that spatial control. Spatial control has bothered people because we’re talking about the Axon and Flock cameras and other drones with an eye from the sky, anyway. That’s the hardware and software. That’s the digital infrastructure. As the hardware rolls out, it gets more intense, more people are beginning to realize, “I’m under 24/7 surveillance.” That’s number one.

Number two, the whole thing depends on a very high-quality interoperable digital ID system. If you’re going to do millions of financial transactions at unbelievably high speed, you need precision. I need to know about Kendall’s Kendall and Catherine’s Catherine. I need to be very sure of that. Digital ID is also enveloped with biometric surveillance, which you could argue is part of the telecommunications hardware, but its biometrics is very involved in identification. Identifying that you are you. That’s the second leg of the stool.

The third is financial transaction control. The ability to put on a third lock and make the manual third lock automatic. That’s where the real power comes in because suddenly, if you look at all the great legislation that we have worked to get passed in health and food since 2016 with financial transaction control, you negate all of it.

It’s so scary. At the heart of this is the programmable money. Can you give some practical examples so that we could understand? How is this going to affect me personally? I know you’ve been touching on it, but here I am going about my daily life. Now, I have a digital ID and I’ve got all this hardware that’s surveilling me. I’ve got the programmable money. What is it that I should be most worried about? Is it food? Is it healthy? What’s my number one concern with this type of control?

Real financial freedom requires protecting analog systems, cash, and decentralized local barter networks right now.

Your number one concern should be the safety of your children. The safety, well-being, and education of your children. Basically, what you’re talking about is giving these tools to the Epstein class. As we know, they have not yet been held accountable for their last foray. Remember, these are people who can create money out of thin air. They don’t care about money. They do care about control and ownership of assets. Your land, your water, your minerals are very important. The asset they value the most is access to your kids and control of your kids. That is what I would be most concerned about.

You’ve mentioned Epstein a couple of times. I was surprised when I was doing some research that you’ve called Epstein the father of programmable money. Tell me more.

To a certain extent, the sex stuff is a distraction from what he was up to. There’s a wonderful Substack that I recommend to everybody who’s interested in this. First, I recommend the books of Whitney Webb has tied Epstein into a portion of what I would describe as the National Crime Syndicate and the evolution of all sorts of what I would call the financial coup. She has described Epstein’s role as part of engineering a financial coup in America.

Part of this was helping to develop the crypto prototypes you needed to figure out how to do programmable money. There’s a wonderful Substack called @EscapeKey that describes Epstein’s role in helping to build the prototyping in Bitcoin and other kinds of crypto to get the whole programmable money thing figured out. He was deeply involved. I see Epstein as being a major player in what I call the financial coup. The sex issues were going on, but it was part of building control files to help execute the financial coup. The goal was a financial coup.

That makes sense. We’re talking a lot about programmable money. Can you help me understand the difference between a central bank digital currency and programmable money because that might be important?

Central bank digital currency is issued by the central bank. The interesting thing about that is that a central bank has legal obligations to the citizenry and to the government. In the United States, the central bank is a creature of the Congress. It has disclosure obligations both to the Congress and has broad public policy obligations. Now, remember the Twitter censorship where the government was telling Twitter what to do, but Twitter was saying, “We’re a private company. We don’t have to follow the FOIA laws. We don’t have to obey anything?”

Think of stablecoins as the financial equivalent of Twitter censorship. Where, in fact, you have an issuer that’s private, but under the Genius Act, they are required by law, or presumably under the Clarity Act, when and if that passes. They have a pipeline to the Treasury, and they have to implement whatever the Treasury’s rules are in terms of knowing your customer, money laundering sanctions. They have to be set up digitally to apply that automatic third lock.

In fact, we’ve responded to Treasury rulemaking saying it shouldn’t be automatic. A human has to make the decision. It looks to me like they’re planning on an automatic third lock. That means the rule system is not coming through the central bank. It’s coming through the Treasury. Since our Treasury is 100% financially dependent on the central bank, it’s 6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other. The central bank and the treasury are like two sides of the same coin but here’s the thing.

Since the issuers are private, they don’t have disclosure obligations. They don’t have public policy obligations. If you make the mistake of clicking their 250-page terms and conditions without realizing the powers it gives them. You’ve just given away the store, and you essentially may have no legal recourse or rights. It’s funny. I had a friend who wanted to start a crypto firm a couple years ago, and he got the terms and conditions from the banking infrastructure we’d need to work with.

He realized, “I have to implement whatever rules they make up or tell me now or in the future. It’s not my company they control.” He canceled his plans and didn’t do it. Anyway, stablecoins is like an infinitely more dangerous version of CBDCs because they have no obligation. Ultimately, if the Fed did the CBDCs wrong, Congress could pull the rug out from under them. It’s one of the reasons they haven’t gone forward with CBDCs because they know they need congressional authority. They need new legislation from Congress. They don’t want to dare go through that process and answer the questions.

Once they get the system on stablecoins, stocks, bonds, and bank deposits, if they put in that automatic third lock and start controlling then they can move to CBDC if they want. Make no mistake about it. You have all these people running around and saying, “We’re okay now because we’re going to do stablecoins.” It’s much worse

That’s what I wanted to get to, and something like the central bank digital currencies reminds me of what you’re talking about with Epstein and his sexual scandals. It’s a distraction, as they issue in the stablecoins or the more programmable money. Is that correct?

Remember, on the stablecoins, you’ve got a whole bunch of private guys who can make a fortune in grift and get away with murder. That would be much harder to do in a central bank digital currency. I reject both. It’s like saying, which do you prefer, Volkswagen or BMW? I reject both. What a great financial system offers is freedom. It offers options. If I want to barter, I can barter. If I want to start a community currency, I can start a community currency. If I want to use fiat currency, I can use fiat currency.

If I’m stupid enough to use a debt-based fiat currency, I can do that. We have many options, and people exercising whatever their preferred options are, is what creates the financial liquidity that does make things pretty wonderful. We’re so angry with the financial system at this point that we forget the blessings of financial liquidity.

Financial liquidity has done remarkable things throughout the world, and I would hate to lose it. Unfortunately, what we’re talking about here with programmable anything, whether it’s money or assets, is the end of currency. It’s a technocratic rule system, top-down, and it’s an end of currency and the end of financial liquidity of any kind.

What does that mean for our health and food freedom?

What it means is that entrepreneurs, ranchers, and farmers will only be able to get capital if they kiss the ring. What food people eat will be determined by mandated rules as opposed to what they can choose in the marketplace. You can make rules that say, “This is the end of representative government,” because what you’re talking about now, the central bankers control monetary policy. With this financial transaction control and spatial control related to financial transaction control, the central bankers can control fiscal policy.

It’s the end of representative government because you don’t need an executive branch or you need a minor one. You don’t need a Congress. People don’t need a representative. You can just tax people’s bank accounts. The bankers can just take the money out of your account. They control. It’s very interesting. If you go to our video transaction short videos, one of my favorite videos is the President of the Minneapolis Fed in 2023 speaking at Columbia saying, “I can understand why China would want to do this, but why would we want to do this? This is the end of freedom.”

Earlier, you mentioned our greatest wealth or our greatest concern should be with our families and our children. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s happened culturally and how maybe we can have a reset and come to a place where we have faith that our children are going to be living in a safe, free world.

Building Decentralized Alternative Networks

We just started a class at Solari called the Solari Builders. It’s ten online courses and two events. It’s for young people 18 to 35 who don’t want to go work for the big corporations or governments. They want to be entrepreneurs who build a wonderful world in what I call the pro-decentralization team. It’s been a remarkable experience for us because the talent that’s come forth, these are immensely talented young people. They do not want to go work for the centralization team.

They get it. They’re like, “I want to be free. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want an independent income. I do not want to be a wage slave at doing horrible things with any of these people and pretending reality is different than it is.” They’re very intelligent and very talented. What is happening is something new and it’s got me very enthusiastic. Let me step back and just create context. If you look at the economy, one of the little secrets is that tyranny is so destructive.

Central control is so destructive to wealth creation that if in some way we could suddenly say, “We’re going to try and create as much wealth as possible and not spend all this money on control, but just try and grow a healthy economy.” The wealth potential with new technology is unbelievable. It’s just explosive. There is no reason for poverty. A lot of the economy is spent on control or stopping people from exercising their imagination and their inspiration.

With it, comes an enormous amount of corruption, grift and nepotism, and all the bad things we all know about. If enough people can say, “I’m pulling out of the pro-centralization team and I’m going to go build something.” There are so many of us and so few of the oligarchs that that’s where the opportunity lies, and that’s where the future for young people lies. That’s where civilization lies. The reality is, if you and I are going to have good food and good health, we need people who are going to grow the food, have ranches, process the food, have good restaurants, on and on.

There’s a whole economy that has to be built of healthy people. I’ll give you an example, and you know more about this than I do. We had a series of interviews on homeopathy. We did homeopathy, then we had one on sound healing. If you listen to all these interviews together, what you realize is healthcare. If we used economic healthcare, we could all be healthy. Especially if we didn’t poison our food, our air and our pharmaceuticals. There are solutions and there are ways of building forward, but we can’t. We can’t get there unless we walk through the doorway full of grief of facing the reality of how bad things are.

We have a group of people governing this planet and the United States of America. They’re psychopaths. They’re evil. They’re committed to depopulation. If you look at the reasons why they want to have control, I don’t think they want to bring out a lot of the new technology until they have that complete control. The other thing is, they literally will tell you they plan to live forever or to 145. They’re planning on living to 145 or forever, and they don’t want us doing the same. When we figure out that’s what they’re doing, they want to make sure they’ve got complete control.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the depopulation and maybe even talk a little bit about COVID and how they used that in order to start implementing some of this control.

I started to look at what was happening with what I call the financial coup, trillions of dollars going missing from the US government. As of 2015, it was $21 trillion that had gone missing. I always tell the story of sitting in Bolivar, Tennessee. I was running errands talking to Dr. Mark Skidmore, who’s a professor who had helped me with the survey. He had done the survey of the $21 trillion missing. He said, “Nobody cares about the missing money. Why don’t you give up?” I said, “I can’t give up. Don’t you understand the only way they can balance the books is to lower life expectancy? That’s what they’ve been doing.”

It hit the lower-income groups. I said, “They’re going to have to move up. It’s going to be your family, and my family.” He was like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “It’s a formula. If you don’t have the money to meet the contingent liabilities, then you have to lower life expectancy, and then you can meet the contingent liability. It’s math. It’s just pure algebra.” He couldn’t envision it. When COVID hit, I knew exactly what it was. Day one, I had thought it would happen after the election. I was thinking it would hit later, but the central bankers voted.

Centralized resets siphon capital from small producers to enrich corporate monopolies. Support local producers instead.

The Mechanics Of Capital Re-Engineering

First of all, they agreed to a policy called FASAB-56 in October 2018, which gave them complete control to do whatever they wanted with the federal credit. I would point out that, suddenly, there was $500 million available for Moderna like the next day, which I doubt was a coincidence. Anyway, but then in August 2019, they reviewed a plan called the Going Direct Reset at Jackson Hole, all the G7 central bankers.

We’re off to the races with actions in the marketplace in September, but then COVID hit and that gave them the ability to inject $5 trillion to $6 trillion directly into the economy and then shut down all the small guys. Which creates offsetting deflation so you don’t get too much inflation too fast from the injection, which normally you would. That means all these guys are shut down and the big guys can steal their market share and buy their assets cheap.

It was clearly a re-engineering. If you go back through the history of resets, to the extent we have information about them. Asserting control of labor, asserting control of capital so it can be sucked up centrally is exactly what happens, then they make a variety of moves. This time, the move is to essentially end currency. Usually, it’s to shift the reserve currency, but this time, it’s to go to the digital control grid. I knew exactly what was happening.

It was funny because you can know exactly what’s happening, but that doesn’t mean any of the people who love food and health can understand a word you’re saying. I was like, “This is obvious. They have to lower life expectancy. It’s working.” If you look at the numbers, it worked. It was very successful. Now, we’re in COVID 2.0, and instead of using health, they’re using energy but it’s the same game. Slaughter the little guys and move their market share into the big guys.

That’s why the offsetting opportunity for the rest of us to say, “We’re going to buy our food and health and other stuff from the little guys. We’re going to finance the little guys because we want to eat. We want to be healthy. We need to create. We exit the system and start building forward on our own.” You see it happening and it can happen, but we have to be clear on the opportunity. You can’t just sit in the traditional system and work harder.

That’s not going to work. You have to, I call it, jump the curve, see where the opportunity is, and organize with people who also see the opportunity. The world is full of wealthy people who need food and need health. They’re not going to be able to get it in the traditional systems. They might as well finance it, because that’s the only way they’re going to get it.

We can help finance with cash. You’re so good about talking about financing our friends and the companies that we believe in and keeping the money within our communities and all of that stuff. I had to laugh when you said that the energy crisis, because like you, when COVID first started, the first thing I said was, “If this doesn’t work, they’ll just say there’s an energy crisis and they have to be locked down and stay in our homes.” Catherine, I’m just curious. How are you? Are you worried for your own safety? You’re so outspoken about this stuff.

I’m not worried for my own safety, and I’ll tell you why. It’s impossible that I’m alive. It’s absolutely impossible, if you look at my experience so far. One of the things I’ve learned, you can worry about the risks and try and protect yourself against the risks. If you look at what’s going on in the world, there’s not enough money and power in the world to protect you from all the risks. That’s number one. What you need to do is you need to do everything you can to get into alignment with the good guys.

That’s the only way I can describe it. Don’t worry about the bad guys. Worry about getting in alignment with the good guys. If you are in alignment with the good guys, they will protect you until the moment you’re supposed to leave, and then you’ll leave. I’ve had so many unbelievable experiences in that way. What I try and focus on is, what is it I’m supposed to be doing, how do I do a better job of doing that and not worry?

Now, I try to be careful about risks because I’m running two companies and I want to meet the payroll. I don’t want to disappear and not be there to meet the payroll. I try and be prudent. The reality is, do everything in your power to attract the divine protection that is available to you. Everybody can do this, and it works. That’s all I can say. Get into alignment with your divine purpose and attract that protection. Miracles happen.

I know you’ve been protected. I believe that you will continue to be protected. One of the things that you talk about is the fact that we’re bankrupting Americans in order to poison them. What do you mean by that?

We’re just about to publish a big piece on student loans by a wonderful student loan activist. It’s a perfect example. You get these young people in huge amounts of debt, then you give them an education, which is not an education that will lead them to generate an income that can pay the debt. You poison them with the food and the pharmaceuticals. You’ve destroyed them. You’ve put them in a box and they can’t get out. It’s amazing that the amount of student loans that are not being serviced or paid, and a majority of it is people over 50.

You put these people in a debt trap for their whole life, it’s horrible. It’s one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. I used to be on the board of Sallie Mae and I wrote an article called William M. Diefenderfer: The Financial Hit Man of Student Loans. I talk about what I saw when I was on the board of Sallie Mae. This student loan piece we’re going to publish will bring you up to date on what’s happened.

This was the fraudulent inducement of several generations, intentionally to destroy them. It’s funny. If you look at the student loan part, it’s bad enough because it is fraudulent inducement. The banks knew and the government knew that these kids wouldn’t be able to pay it back. They knew. They loaded on all sorts of games and fees and dirty tricks and the servicing. It’s unbelievable. When you look at that and integrate what they’ve done to the food and pharmaceuticals, you realize, “You can’t pay back your student loans if you’re struggling with poisoning, if you’re toxic and you can’t work.”

I litigated with the Department of Justice for eleven years. I was poisoned eight times. I know all about trying to meet the rent when you’re poisoned. It’s hard. You have to look at those things on an integrated basis because it’s the same children and the same families that are struggling with the debt as they are struggling with the poisoning. The biggest problem with the poisoning is you think you’re sick. You don’t realize you’re poisoned. You keep going back into the health system to get help. Instead of helping you, instead of saying, “You need to detox.” They give you more poison to take, so it gets worse.

They bankrupt you in the process because it’s so expensive. One of the best things that ever happened to me was when I got thrown out of the establishment. I couldn’t go to the doctors. I couldn’t go to the hospital. I had to take care of myself and it forced me to completely wean myself from my mounds of doctors and healthcare insurance and all that whole infrastructure. I had to just go it alone. By breaking away, also all sorts of people who have old-timey knowledge and underground networks embraced me and taught me. Suddenly I realized, “If I have Wim Hof, homeopathy and sound healing. I don’t need all this stuff.” It’s much cheaper because they bankrupt you.

Catherine, as we begin to wrap up, I want you to tell us the story about where you were financially when you were working, and then how they came after you and you lost your money, then how you got your money back. That’s a nice positive story to end on, and it’s just a great way to look at things.

I was an investment banker on Wall Street. I loved investment banking. It’s my gift. The great tragedy of my life is I had to stop doing it because it’s what I’m good at, then I decided I would go to Washington. My goal in Wall Street was to see how the money worked. Finally, I realized, “It’s all being engineered from Washington. I have to go learn the Central Bank of the Treasury,” so I went to Washington. I learned a lot, but I had to leave the administration because they kept ordering me to break the law, and I wouldn’t so I had to leave.

I discovered the internet, so I started a company, and everybody said my idea was crazy but I started it. The company was wildly successful, then they came after me, the Department of Justice. It’s a shaggy dog story. It’s all on the internet. You can read all about it. I spent eleven years and 36,000 hours and $6 million working for free. Can you imagine? I got poisoned. It was a whole shaggy dog story but I will say this. I learned a lot about the economy. More importantly, I learned a lot about who’s real, what’s real, and who can you count on. What I realized was, “I was very wealthy and successful and had a great reputation but they could take it away from me like that.”

I was like, “This is not real.” It was a very spiritual walk. It taught me a lot about spiritual warfare and what your values are. You have to come down. You go through a process where you’re put through various stress. Ultimately, you have to choose which is more important to me, my love of God or my money, or my love of God or my freedom, or my love of God or my life. You go through all these value choices, and when you get down to the bone, you understand who you are and what you care about.

It was a very cleansing process, is what I would say but then what happened was I finished. By an amazing set of miracles, we won most of the litigation. I got a settlement. They owed my company a lot of money, and I got the money but I was convinced they would come at me with my taxes. I ended up gifting and bonusing a lot of the money out to the people who helped me. One of the things I learned during the litigation is the people you can count on are the people you’ve been there for.

Investing In The People Bank

I had loaned or given $250,000 to family and friends before it started. The reason my family wouldn’t drop me is because I had financed them, and I’ve always been there for them. I had a wonderful uncle who was wealthy and said, “She’s always stood by us, so I’m not going to drop her.” He stood, and the rest of the family stood behind him. I never got completely isolated or dropped. That’s when I said, “I had $250,000 in the people bank, and that’s why I made it.”

When the money came in on the settlement, my CPA said they had pulled dirty tricks on my 401, so I busted it, paid $225,000 in fees and taxes just to get the money. My CPA said, “Let’s fund up the 401(k) again.” I said, “I’m never going into business with the government ever again. I’m going to take that $500,000. I’m going to bonus it out on the people’s bank because that’s the only bank I trust.” It taught me a whole other way of thinking about investment and your business.

Integrated living equity with financial equity is the way I describe it. We have a lot of information at the Solari Report about it. The funny thing about the situation was, all my life I’d said the two things I would never do was media and investment advisory. Those are the only two things people would pay me to do. Now, I have an investment screen company and the Solari Report but it all came from people asking questions. To stay alive, literally, I did these radio shows.

People would ask me questions and those questions grew into the two businesses I have, the Solari Report and Solari Investment Screens. We’re still just answering questions. It was a journey to find real solutions. Where are the real solutions? The heartbreak of my life is I spend so much time watching the American people spend enormous amounts of time and money on dead ends. There are real solutions, but first you’ve got to give up on the dead ends. I’m not saying don’t vote, but I’m saying the Uniparty is not going to get us out of this.

There are real solutions if you will shift your money from financing the bad guys to financing the good guys. Our third quarter wrap-up is going to be in data centers, and we have a great article on how to make sure your 401(k) and IRA is not financing the data centers you say you don’t want. If you look at most people in America, they’re financing everything they say they don’t want. If we finance what we don’t want, that’s what we’re going to get. We’re going to get what we don’t want.

These are all important points. Catherine, my final question to you is, if the reader could do just one thing to improve their health. What would you say for them to do?

Purging Toxic Influences With Coming Clean

I would go to Solari and download our PDF, Coming Clean. Coming Clean is a system. It’s like a buffet and you should. Everybody’s different. You should do it in whatever sequencer you want, but you should do it in a way that helps you that gives you energy. It’s how to get the evil out of your head, out of your mind, out of your home, and out of your family. It’s like a detox. If we are dealing with evil powers, how do we detox those evil powers out of our life where it’s draining us? Everybody’s different so I want you to drain, I call it the tapeworm. It’s like a tapeworm.

I want you to detox the tapeworm in the way that gives you the most energy the fastest. Again, everybody’s different but if you read the Coming Clean, I’m sure you’ll see lots of ideas. It links you to lots of resources. One of the things we always tell people wherever you are, go find the Weston Price group because the foodies are the people who know, and they know where the good food is. They know a lot. Go find the foodies.

Stop financing the exact corporations that make you sick and dependent. Take your sovereign energy back today.

If there’s no Solari Circle, go find Weston Price or both. Oftentimes, you’ll see tremendous overlay between our two groups. Go download Coming Clean and read it, but with a mindset of saying, “What can I do this week if I can turn off the TV for two hours or something? What can I do that’s going to give me the most energy by getting that tapeworm out of my life?”

I want to let the readers know that you just talked about Solari and Weston Price merging together. You’re going to be speaking at our conference. They can come October 16th through 18th to the Wise Traditions Conference in DC. Meet you in person, and hear so much more from you.

I will tell you this. At Solari, every year we say, “What are we going to do this year besides go to the Weston Price Conference?” The Weston Price Conference is the most wonderful conference because you will see all these people you know or you will meet amazing people. There is the alignment of knowledge and interest. If you go through the vendor fair, it can take you like a whole day because there’s so many people you want to talk to. It’s so amazing what people are doing.

I have to tell you. There’s so many of us from Solari, and our allies who are going to be at Weston Price. Even if it’s in DC. I don’t race to go to DC, but it’s a central transportation hub. There’ll be a whole bunch of people from the Solari team, and we’re going to have a Solari meet-and-greet right beforehand that Thursday night. We’re going to have dinner. If you’re free, you must come. I’ll send you more information about it. I have to just give a plug. This is a fabulous conference, and you don’t want to miss it.

I can’t wait to see you there and give you a hug. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate you and your expertise. You’re just such a wealth of knowledge. Thank you, Catherine.

Let’s be free.

Cheers to that.

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Our guest was Catherine Austin Fitts. To learn more about her work, visit Solari.com, where you’ll find the Solari Report, her research and educational resources and information about the financial transaction freedom initiatives we discussed. You can also find her Coming Clean guide which offers practical ideas for reducing dependence on systems that may be draining your energy and resources. Our conversation explored the relationship between financial freedom and the choices we make about our food, health, and families.

Catherine explained what she calls the control grid, the potential risks of programmable money in digital assets and why she believes it is essential to establish safeguards before new financial technologies become more deeply embedded in our daily lives. We also discuss the importance of preserving cash and other non-digital options supporting local farmers, and independent businesses and making conscious decisions about where we invest our money.

I especially appreciated Catherine’s personal story of rebuilding her life after years of legal and financial challenges. Her experience led her to a different understanding of wealth. One rooted not only in financial assets, but in relationships, trust, and the people who stand beside us when we need them the most. She calls it the people bank and it’s a powerful reminder that the communities we build and support may be among our greatest assets.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this episode is that we have more power than we realize to shape the world we want to live in. Every time we choose to support a local farmer, invest in a business we believe in, preserve our financial options or strengthen our relationships, we are helping build a more resilient and independent future.

As Catherine reminds us, real solutions begin when we stop financing what we don’t want and start supporting what we do. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d be grateful if you take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you tune in. Your feedback helps others discover the show and become part of this growing community. Thank you for spending this time with us. Be well, be nourished and be free.

About Catherine Austin Fitts

Catherine Austin Fitts served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration, and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc. Catherine has designed and closed over $25 billion of transactions and investments to-date and has led portfolio and investment strategy for $300 billion of financial assets and liabilities.

Catherine graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the Wharton School (MBA), and studied Mandarin Chinese at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She blogs for the Solari Report at solari.com.