Tucker Carlson discusses global financial control systems with Catherine Austin Fitts.
Summary
Tucker Carlson speaks with financial analyst Catherine Austin Fitts about the hidden infrastructure of global financial control. Fitts argues that recent Middle Eastern conflicts and pressure on Iran are fundamentally about consolidating central banking control rather than nuclear proliferation, and explains how programmable digital currency, digital IDs, and surveillance hardware form the pillars of an emerging control grid that would allow unprecedented monitoring and restriction of individual financial and physical movement.
Key Takeaways
• Iran represents "leakage" in the global financial control system because its independent central bank and oil exports to China enable economic activity outside Western banking control, which Fitts suggests is the real motivation behind geopolitical tensions rather than nuclear concerns.
• The "control grid" consists of three interconnected pillars: programmable money that can enforce rules on transactions, digital IDs that enable tracking across jurisdictions, and local surveillance infrastructure including cameras, cell towers, and satellites integrated with artificial intelligence.
• Programmable money would allow central bankers to replace legislatures by embedding and enforcing rules directly through currency, enabling scenarios like preventing purchases outside designated areas or shutting off funds remotely based on behaviour.
• The assassination of 11 Iranian officials during the June 2025 conflict demonstrated how surveillance technology can track and target individuals, relying primarily on digital systems rather than traditional human intelligence.
• Massive data centres being built ostensibly for AI have a primary purpose of managing the enormous data requirements for applying individualised social credit systems to financial transactions and spatial movement control.
Full Transcript
Tucker Carlson: If you go back to 9/11 and when Wesley Clark said we're going to invade seven countries in five years, what you were talking about were the countries where those central banks were not on board to do programmable money and their governance structures were not on board with what I, because of Epstein, I'll call it the Rockefeller Rothschild model. There was an effort to say we're going to basically assert control of the central banks in those countries. That's my interpretation. And I think one of the reasons we're seeing so much tension around Iran is because Iran right now is the big leakage in the system.
Catherine Austin Fitts: How?
Tucker Carlson: It's not about their nukes?
Catherine Austin Fitts: No. Iran's central bank counts. One of the reasons it counts is because their oil and energy is very important, including for China. That's very important in the BRICS system. What the BRICS system is trying to do is to create independent payment systems. But if you're going to come out with programmable money with digital IDs that are interoperable globally and programmable money that controls in each jurisdiction centrally, you can't afford leakage. And so you've got way too much leakage in the system to proceed with what they're trying to do. Iran and the BRICS nations are a sticking point. And certainly Iran's oil feeding China gives China greater independence.
Tucker Carlson: So you think that one of the motives behind toppling all these governments was the creation of the control grid we're talking about now?
Catherine Austin Fitts: Right. So if you go back, you had the wonderful Richard Werner on your show and Richard has a book called The Princes of the Yen, which is about the effort to take over the Japanese central bank. And I think what you're looking at, I think part of the state of play with both Russia and Iran is how are you going to make sure that those central banks are entirely in the system?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, that was an amazing interview. And he told the story about writing this book on the Japanese central bank. I can't imagine a more obscure topic from my non-economically minded standpoint. It would be like writing a book on postcards from the Falkland Islands. Okay, a book on the Japanese central bank. And he said, "Well, actually, they suppressed it. I couldn't get it published in the United States, and you can't get a copy." And that's checkable. So I checked it. You can't get a copy of that book. It's really hard.
Catherine Austin Fitts: I think you can order from his publisher right now.
Tucker Carlson: Right, but why would someone try to suppress it?
Catherine Austin Fitts: Because it shows you the true secret governance system and it shows you the primary mechanism by which they implement policy.
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's always the things you're not allowed to say that are probably the important things, right? Whenever they penalise you for having a thought, you're probably on the right track.
The Third Rail of Control
Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, it's one of the critical train tracks of control. It's what I call the third rail. I used to finance transit systems and train systems. A lot of these systems have two tracks that the wheels go on and then they have a third rail that the power line runs on and you get a thing that flips over and sucks the energy from the third rail. So a lot of the things that really operate the third rail are very invisible. For example in central banking, to listen to talk about tier one and tier two and tier three capital at the BIS and the banks, there's nothing more boring. It's designed to absolutely—
Tucker Carlson: I just fell asleep in the middle of that sentence.
Catherine Austin Fitts: Exactly, right.
Tucker Carlson: Is it boring by design?
Catherine Austin Fitts: The way you're taught to talk about it is boring by design. But it's like the mechanisms of the legal system. If you look at the mechanisms of civil procedure or criminal procedure, it can get very boring unless you understand the application, and that can make it very interesting. But the capital regulatory system, most people don't understand it, and it can get very very boring.
Tucker Carlson: Can you just for people who haven't seen your previous talk explain what the control grid is, what it looks like and what it means?
Understanding the Control Grid
Catherine Austin Fitts: The control grid is a process or an infrastructure that allows digital technology to be used to assert phenomenal surveillance and control of people. And at the very heart of it is what I call programmable money. It's money that is no longer just a currency. It's money that comes with a set of rules that can be surveilled and enforced. So imagine back in the pandemic if your money, if I said you've got to lock down and your money won't work if you leave your house, you can't buy petrol in your car because your money is programmed with AI and software to enforce a whole set of centralised rules. Programmable money allows the bankers who've been running monetary policy to now control fiscal policy and essentially replace legislatures and executive branch by making and enforcing the rules through the money.
Now that requires a large infrastructure of surveillance. So you need digital IDs and then you need the hardware locally and globally to do the surveillance and implementation. For example, if you look at the local hardware, now people are seeing it snap into place. I don't know if you know of Flock cameras, but there are many communities across the United States that are entering into contracts paid by the taxpayers to put up cameras all around their neighbourhood that track licence plates and keep that data and share it with a variety of people.
Or you have the FCC trying to overrule local controls on cell towers so they can literally put cell towers every 400 to 700 feet so that they can have the kind of invasive surveillance you need. Or you have satellites now that can literally beam in Wi-Fi so that whether you have Wi-Fi in your home or not they can start to track you. All those systems put you in what I call the panopticon.
We saw in the Middle East with the first war with Iran, we saw 11 leaders out of 12 top leaders in science and government assassinated because they're literally tracking everyone and they can identify them and track them and then you have invisible weaponry that can then take them out or can identify missile strikes.
Tucker Carlson: May I ask you about the 12-day war against Iran in June of 2025? We were led to believe just as newspaper readers or news consumers that those 11 Iranian officials were targeted with human intelligence, that Israel had spies inside of Iran. But you're saying that was done digitally?
Catherine Austin Fitts: That's probably true because you always want to get human confirmation of what the systems are telling you. It's always better if you have both. But we are now moving into building out the kind of surveillance systems that can literally track, identify and integrate with not only our existing weaponry but ultimately autonomous weaponry.
The Three Pillars
Let me step back. You've got three parts to the control grid. One is the local hardware and infrastructure and that includes the data centres.
Tucker Carlson: I thought those were for AI.
Catherine Austin Fitts: They are, because if you look at what it takes to apply the equivalent of a social credit system to people's money, the social credit system I apply to you is different than the one I apply to me. And if you look at the data I need to track you and test whether or not you're following the rules I've given you and enforce those rules, it's an explosive amount of data, particularly because you're looking not just at financial control, but spatial control. So what is AI good at, Tucker?
Tucker Carlson: Spatial control, movement control.
Catherine Austin Fitts: Yeah. Turn off the car. Congressman Massie is trying to kill the kill switch in your car. That's because spatial control means I can turn off your car or I can set it so your money won't work more than a mile from your home or a 15-minute city. So you literally aren't allowed to leave your 15-minute city and your transportation and your money won't work outside of that area.
Let me step back. What is AI good at? AI is very good at tracking things that can be expressed mathematically and financial transactions and spatial movement can be expressed mathematically. And so what the AI centres are for primarily is to build that digital control grid and to manage that data. Now it can be used for many other purposes too. It's not just going to be used for control. But to me that's the primary purpose. If you look at the cameras, if you look at the cell towers, if you look at the satellites and then the AI, the data centres, those are all component pieces of the local hardware.
There are three pillars that I track. One is the programmable money and that's what we at Solari are trying to stop. The second is the digital ID because you need digital ID systems that are interoperable globally. And then the local hardware. Those are the three pillars. What's interesting is there's phenomenal development of all three.
We have a commentary at Solari where we track, it's called the Fast Approaching Digital Control Grid, and every week we update all the things that are being done to build those three pillars and have them integrate with each other. Ever since the inauguration it's been moving very very quickly. Now it's both sides of the uniparty. They come at it in different ways and they do different things. But ultimately what this is doing is setting the world up so that the central bankers, whether they do it with a central bank digital currency or private stablecoins and asset tokens, can control your financial transactions literally in real time with the equivalent of a social credit system.