Transcript: Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on the Carbon Credit Coup

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Mark Goodwin [4:27] Okay.

Whitney Webb [4:35] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Mark Goodwin [4:47] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

Whitney Webb [4:57] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [5:00] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Whitney Webb [5:02] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [5:03] Probably should be. Ooh, Logan, that was a quick trigger. I didn't even get to finish my sentence. We jumped right into it. Whitney, Mark, welcome back to the show.

Whitney Webb [5:12] Hey, great to be here.

Mark Goodwin [5:14] Yeah, thanks, Marty. Great to be here.

Marty Bent [5:16] Well, thank you, Mark, for, for getting a proper mic for this. The audiophiles who listen to the show are going to be very happy.

Mark Goodwin [5:22] This is, uh, uh, I am a man of the people, and when the people, uh, yell and scream, I listen. And I respond and I throw money at the problem. And here we are, loud and clear, coming through.

Marty Bent [5:40] So, yeah, the audiophiles, they attack me. The YouTube comments, it's like, make sure your guest has— I'm like, I can't control the guest mic. And Freaks, if you're listening, it's not like I side channeled with Mark. He listened. I didn't even have to tell him.

Mark Goodwin [5:55] Right.

Marty Bent [5:55] He's got the mic. We're here to talk about something, Whitney, I think me and you started talking about this broader subject last year with Ian Davis with the Sustainable Development Goals series that you guys wrote and this attempt to monetize swaths of land, natural resources throughout the developed world.

Whitney Webb [6:17] Yeah.

Marty Bent [6:18] Mark and yourself wrote a piece, came out April 4th, so 12 days ago, Debt from Above, the Carbon Credit Coup. It seems like there is an initiative to push these efforts forward that involves a lot of things, particularly satellites and Bitcoin sidechains. So I think before we touch on the broader topic, maybe we can touch on that later. Let's talk about the specific piece that you two co-wrote. What is going on?

Whitney Webb [6:47] Right. So let's start off from like the broader part. So yeah, like I came on with Ian, I guess a year or two ago, and before that I came on with you to talk about Natural Asset Corporations, talking about this broader effort. One of the people leading this, of course, are people like Mark Carney, trying to recreate the global financial governance system, recreate the multilateral development bank system. And a big part of this is juicing up voluntary carbon markets and making them voluntary in name only and really making them involuntary carbon markets. And there's a lot of reasons why they want to do this. Specifically, it's a big shift towards, I guess, supercharging commodities and tokenizing them for this coming financial system.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And of course, carbon is one of the, you know, a big commodity that they want to, you know, introduce into that. And a big way they're doing that is through the financialization or securitizing of nature. And so there's a, you know, that's a big part of the Big part of the play here. So specifically this piece, this is a 2-part series. So the first part, the article that's out now is specifically about this thing called Green Plus. And green here is an acronym. I can't remember exactly what it is right now, but it's in the article. It's something like greenhouse gas reduction and emissions for net gain or something like that.

Whitney Webb ⋮ I don't know.

Mark Goodwin [8:14] It's Government Reduction of Emissions for Environmental Net Plus Gain.

Whitney Webb [8:19] I had like some of the words in there.

Marty Bent [8:21] Whatever.

Whitney Webb [8:22] Thanks, Mark.

Marty Bent [8:23] They're getting, they're getting, they're getting crazy with these acronyms. Nobody's going to remember that.

Whitney Webb [8:28] Yeah, totally. So anyway, there's like several founding members and this program has obviously had several iterations, but it's a, it's honestly a very secretive program. And the longer it's gone, the more time has gone on since it was first seemingly launched in 2022, the more, um, obfuscating they've become about the details. around it. And so the only program description that's really available of it anymore is on the, you know, of the nuts and bolts of what this program is supposed to be, is on the Wayback Machine, you know, the Internet Archive. But the program is still on, you know, and if you look at the website for the program now, it's just a countdown to Miami Climate Week, which is at the end of this month now, this April now, pretty much.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And it's a countdown to when they launch the rest of the satellites for this program. And so this has basically a carbon credit system enacted via contractual obligations that NGOs are sort of yoking the public sector to. It's a public-private partnership essentially, which is how they're pushing a lot of this SDG, Sustainable Development Goal stuff through in general. And so by doing it at the subnational level, they don't have to interact with the national level, no congressional approval, Senate approval. They're going straight to city halls essentially, and getting mayors and the heads of municipalities to sign on to this thing and basically give this program the rights to turn the protected areas.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And the goal is, of course, every municipality in Latin America, give them the right to turn those protected areas into natural equity Through the creation of carbon credits that are produced off of these protected areas with the supposed benefit for the public sector of getting money from the sale of these carbon credits in return. But there's, you know, as we discussed in the piece, there's a lot more going on there. And a lot of this is something that's been overlooked in the context of carbon markets. Is that there's a big surveillance component to it, surveilling where the carbon is sequestered that underpins the carbon credit.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Yes. And so a big part of this piece is about the satellite firm that was contracted to do this specifically, which is called Satellogic, very deeply enmeshed with US intelligence and US intelligence contractors like SpaceX and Palantir, which I've, you know, done a lot of work on Palantir over the years. And basically the ambition of Palantir is to be a relaunch of the Total Information Information Awareness Program that we've talked about on the show before, TIA, that was tried— they tried to launch after 9/11 and then was shut down because they said it would eliminate civilian privacy throughout the United States. And I mean, it has done that, but it's a private sector only thing.

Whitney Webb ⋮ You know, they took DARPA out of it by really in name only, to be quite honest. And so anyway, this particular satellite company, which has ties to DARPA and DHS and the NSA and what have you, you know, and has put Palantir in space basically, the company that's going to be surveilling all of these forests and really beyond that, the municipalities as well in Latin America, because one of the partners of this particular initiative called the Energy Coalition, the head of that in the press release announcing this and their team-up with the Satellogic satellite company said that the goal is to measure carbon emissions from space and make that part of this voluntary that's not really voluntary carbon market.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So, you know, you're emitting too much carbon, you're using a wood stove, uh, you have too much, you know, you have too much livestock, I don't know, or you're emitting too much heat for a reason X, Y, and Z in this urban area. We're going to surveil that from space and charge you accordingly, or you will have to purchase this many offsets or this many credits. You know, uh, it's part of this, you know, de-industrialization agenda, and only those that these guys like can industrialize and like use energy in those that they don't like or are doing things they don't like. You know, it's a way to, you know, force behavior by, you know, making energy money essentially, among other things, obviously.

Marty Bent [13:00] Yeah, a couple things here. Highly skeptical. I mean, I don't know, maybe the technology has advanced to a point where you can actually surveil carbon emissions from space, but it's like, how are they even calculating this? Like, how could you measure this from a satellite. Maybe I'm completely speaking out of my depth here and the technology does exist, but I find it, um, very hard to believe that you can accurately measure all these emissions from a satellite. And then 2, Whitney, it's not surveillance, it's observation. It's just Earth observation. They're just observing the Earth and issuing these credits. Okay, let's get the language right. It's not surveillance. We're just observing here.

Mark Goodwin [13:38] Observation is preservation. Okay, that is a phrase of Satellogic, this company. Yeah, it's simply observation. There's no surveillance here at all. Oh, to comment on the first part in regards to like the technology, yeah, I actually think the technology unfortunately is there, and it's there for, you know, this is obviously a private company, Satellogic. We can get into some of the background of it, but I mean, right there on the board, right, we have General Joseph Dunford, um, uh, you know, who's partnered with Steve Mnuchin and with Liberty Strategic Capital, which is one of the, the funders and founders of Satellogic. But there's a lot of government, uh, and intelligence ties, um, uh, and, and, uh, you know, American infrastructure ties with the Caterpillar Company, um, just like right here all on the board of Satellogic.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ Um, and, you know, basically they, they have, uh, the technology to be able to, uh, yeah, as you said, observe space to an incredibly accurate degree. I'm trying to see exactly what their, you know, what the lenses that they use are. I'm not exactly sure where we put it here, but I mean, these satellites drop, you know, they use Amazon Web Services, which is, you know, obviously a CIA contractor and, you know, has worked with the Pentagon, with their Space Development Agency, and they're beaming down 50 gigabytes of data per day. Wow. Which is obviously an insane amount of data. And so there's incredibly high-res imagery that's being taken by these very small satellites.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And this company is basically giving access to the world's data to private companies, to governments, and really any VC firm or local or national government that wants to partner with this company, they're able to get access basically to Earth observation data that normally is pretty much, you know, only for nation-state level intelligence agencies. So they've basically privatized, you know, the NSA and the CIA, which obviously, you know, we know about through, you know, In-Q-Tel. and through Palantir, which are essentially kind of these 2 arms of the public sector intelligence becoming private sector. And now it's getting to this place where places like Paraguay and some of these municipalities that are mentioned in our piece are now being able to access, for a fee, data from Earth.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ This is, of course, obviously done under the the means of providing a service and not just observing every square inch on Earth. And it's done under this way of, hey, you have an oil company and you need to watch all of these pipes. Great. You wanna do that with an airplane, it's gonna cost hundreds of dollars an hour. You wanna do this with a satellite or a group of satellites, a constellation service, that's gonna go down to below $100 an hour, $60 an hour.

Marty Bent [16:58] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [16:59] So it's kind of done under this economic scale and pitched as this, basically the market is asking for this. When in reality, you look at the people that are behind it and what are the means behind this expansion into space, as Whitney said, Palantir in space essentially. And I would say there's certainly much more nefarious intentions behind this group. And we can get a lot more into it for sure, but that's a little primer on Satillogic there. Yeah.

Marty Bent [17:33] After reading the piece and discussing the subject with you two in chat, it seems like this is the next— I mean, we talked about this with Ian and even before that, but it's like the next iteration of junk bonds, part 2. They're just going further. Yeah, as soon as one thing fails, they're on to the next thing, and this is the next thing. And there's a lot of people that have historically been involved with these synthetic markets that Wall Street spins up to, to get some yield out of the greater public, uh, and this is simply the next iteration to that with a sci-fi twist to it.

Whitney Webb [18:13] Yeah, I mean, literally the junk bond predators from the '80s are the people financing this. now and like involved in it. It's very crazy. And actually the person that created carbon trading essentially is this guy named Richard Sander, who is also credited with being the father of financial futures, credited with essentially creating the collateralized mortgage obligation. He was a senior vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s, made millions upon millions of dollars during the junk bond palooza over there that caused that bank to collapse. Then he was contracted basically by the Bush administration, Bush Senior, to develop an offset trading scheme for Bush Senior's EPA for sulfur dioxide emissions, I believe.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Then after that program, he was contacted by Maurice Strong, who's this UN guy, but very scandalous figure, very deeply tied to Rockefeller interests, for example, and just the worst of the worst oligarchs and figures in the predator class of note, I guess. Maurice Strong was a frontman for many of them at the UN. He's the guy that put on the Rio Summit that launched Agenda 21, now 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals. He had Richard Sander come and basically launch the whole idea of creating this private carbon market as a solution to the climate change situation. And a lot of these same figures in this particular UN Rockefeller nexus have been involved with things like trying to limit population and industrialization through groups like the Club of Rome, which is discussed in this piece because one of their descendants in terms of organizations is one of the governing members of this Green Plus carbon market program called the Global Footprint Network.

Mark Goodwin [20:17] The GFRN.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Yes. And these guys, the Club of Rome essentially grew out of these different organizations that were part of sort of the influence axis of influence of the Rockefeller network specifically in Latin America, which was involved in the installation of at least some of the US-backed and CIA-backed military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s. But one of these organizations was called ADELA, again, another acronym. And basically what this was, was where major multinational corporations and oligarchs of Europe and the United States essentially acted as kingmakers for who would become the corporate titans, or rather the oligarchs of Latin America. And this is something that they've done not just in Latin America.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They also did it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example. And all of these state-owned assets of Russia were privatized and put in the hands of these carefully selected oligarchs. And of course, the architect of that system in Russia, that's Larry Summers and Harvard doing all of that essentially under Clinton. Clinton. And so that same system has been done, I would argue, really throughout the world. And so this was done in Latin America through Adela, and Adela sort of spurred the creation of this Club of Rome organization, which goes very much together with this national security memorandum that was issued by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration that basically frames birth— high birth rates in Latin America and allowing them to industrialize to developed country levels as a threat to at US national security with the goal of having, you know, basically allowing these figures, you know, the desire to control, you know, how, you know, their population figures and how, you know, far along they industrialize and control of their resources.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And, you know, essentially this program, what we're talking about now is a modern iteration of all of that. And you have all of essentially the same players that have historically been doing this to Latin America specifically, but also beyond Latin America as well. doing this, you know, for the modern era, you know, attempting to put it all on blockchain, have it all be a surveillable, you know, digital enterprise, essentially. And I think it's quite sophisticated, honestly, the way that they're going to try and market this, because what they've been doing— and I think we talked about this last time as well— is that, you know, fundamentally what's running the world right now is a global public-private partnership.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And so what's been demonized, not necessarily wrongly, you know, within the independent media sphere post-COVID has been the public sector. And of course, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, all of those guys are not good at all. Right. But it's a public-private thing. And so there's been a lot of focus on how the public sector part of this is bad and corrupt. And the answer that we're being led to is, oh, well, let's just put it all in the hand of the private sector. But the World Economic Forum is the private sector, and they've created these public-private partnerships. Because it converts the nation-state into the enabling environment for all of these policies developed by unelected oligarchs who are stealing people's wealth through these insane wealth transfers and are the people that ultimately control the Federal Reserve, for example.

Whitney Webb ⋮ The Federal Reserve is seen as, oh, the central bank, it's a state-connected entity. To an extent, I guess that's true, but people should know in the US that it's commercial banks like JP Morgan and Citigroup that really like own and run the Fed, you know, and people forget that. So if you're going to move from, you know, Jerome Powell to Jamie Dimon there, I don't really see there being any functional difference in what that means for the common person, you know what I mean? And so essentially what's going on here is that you're having a mix of, of both happening here. And, you know, if they're not going to succeed in selling programs through the public sector, they're going to go to the private and be like, let the free market decide.

Whitney Webb ⋮ But these are not market people. These are career financial criminals. These are like the Drexel Burnham Lambert goons and people like that engineering new ways to engage in blatantly illegal financial activity and fraud and steal. That's what a lot of these Wall Street giants have been doing for a long time with complete impunity. The idea that they should be given full free rein to do that just because public sector bad, I mean, that's not That's the trap I think they want us to fall into. And unfortunately, you know, these are the same guys that we know what they've done before and they're financing this stuff now.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So in addition to Richard Sander, you know, you have Michael Milken himself, a big junk bond guy. He's all in for the Sustainable Development Goals. The person that ran his crypto initiatives is now running Algorand, which is getting involved with this kind of stuff as well. with, uh, you know, stablecoins and efforts to implement CBDCs. Uh, they're partnered with some of the people we talk about in this piece, uh, Koi Bank specifically trying to get involved in El Salvador's, you know, digital money paradigm, among other things. Um, you know, that's, that's a bit unnerving. And then of course you have Craig Cogut, who was directly involved in the junk bond department of Drexel Burnham Lambert as well.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Uh, he directly finances several of the groups that helped create this Green Plus program and is also financially entangled with the head of Satellogic, the satellite company that's underpinning all of this. So these Drexel guys are here in full force. I would argue that, yes, the carbon credit, the voluntary carbon market is junk bonds on steroids, frankly, because it's being framed as a planetary imperative. We must participate or we will all die is essentially what they're arguing. Right. But it's participating in their grift. I mean, these carbon credits have time and time again been exposed, not just by people like that don't like, you know, the idea of climate change policy in general, traditionally on the right, but also like environmental groups on the left that are like, please govern me harder, Daddy, about climate change.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They're like, no, carbon markets are bad too, because these credits are meaningless, essentially.

Mark Goodwin [26:34] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [26:35] And it's creating a new market for all of this stuff that they can just like, you know, essentially looking for new ways to enable them to continue their extreme fiscal irresponsibility at both— in both the private sector and the public sector and allow them to steal everyone's money and wealth.

Mark Goodwin [26:50] Yeah, I think Craig— Craig Cogut and, and, uh, and, uh, Milken are— it's a really good example of this private-public partnership cabal thing because, you know, what was the thing, you know, everyone is cheering for Trump to, uh, you know, to pardon pardon Assange on his last days in office. And, and who does he decide to pardon? Michael fucking Milken, uh, who is an absolute— I think Whitney called him a literal ghoul, uh, on, on Twitter the other day, which is absolutely true. A total ghoul. And, and so Craig Kogut was, was like, I believe, the lawyer, um, for the, the junk bonds department basically, and, and for Milken kind of doing this, this huge, um, fraud.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And he, of course, you know, founded Pegasus Capital, Apollo Global Management. Pegasus Capital is one of the main funders of CC35. And before Pegasus Capital funded CC35, Emilio Kargaman, who's the founder of Sattellogic, they did a joint venture together under the Pegasus Capital name called Aconcagua Ventures. Aconagua Ventures, excuse me, which served as a member of the special projects group for the World Bank. And then of course creating Satellogic, which sort of spun out of this Core Securities Technology Group, which was co-founded by Kargaman and Riccardi, who's the CTO of Satellogic now, who listed, you know, having clients as like the NSA and NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ kind of in the late '90s. This group also, Core Security, was connected with the Endeavor Foundation, which comes up all across the board with connections to Reid Hoffman and a bunch of PayPal guys with Marcos Galperin of MercadoLibre, all of these groups. But Craig Kogut is hugely important in the junk bond scandal. It's like, not only is it the same mechanisms, just with a blockchain twist, but it's the same people. And it's the same people that are getting— basically using the government as this enabling environment, using the pardoning power of a banker president and a private sector ghoul like Trump who did so many things at the behest of private companies, whether it's Big Pharma, whether it's these banks printing trillions of dollars, locking down the country, pushing vaccines, and basically going in lockstep basically with the world empire in COVID policy.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And the last thing he does before he walks out the door is free this ghoul and Michael Milken. So you're really seeing this thing kind of this, you know, begin to take shape. And another, I think, essential thing in regards to the Trump cabinet and, and this whole play is stablecoins, right? And we talked about this a bunch last time, but, you know, specifically there was this letter sent from Kushner to Mnuchin referencing this blog post by Sam Altman about, you know, the creation of this USD coin. and using a dollar stablecoin and how this might be an important lever for our cabinet and for our government to sort of take advantage of to basically perpetuate the treasury market and US dollar-denominated liabilities across the world.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And so what did we actually see in regards to using the government as an enabling environment? We saw the officer of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is basically the, you know, the highest position in the government of, you know, financial litigation and law. You know, we saw a former VP of Coinbase and a former OneWest partner, Brian Brooks, come in and be— and sign legislation that basically said that all banks, private banks, could hold crypto assets and specifically could play with stablecoins and use stablecoins. And then, of course, on the board of SataLogic, the chairman of the board is our boy Steven Mnuchin, who, of course, was put in by Trump to run the Treasury, who printed, you know, trillions of dollars in connection with Jerome Powell and the Fed for COVID stimulus.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ But basically, they allowed this entire operation that we're now seeing, you know, through the private sector coalition that's basically, I wouldn't say is coming out of Argentina and out of South America, but it's certainly rooting very strongly there. And we're seeing so many people connected with this group that is essential infrastructure to the dollar stablecoin cabal, I guess. There's very few people more important to the digitization the digitalizing of the dollar. Then Steve Mnuchin, and then of course Howie Lutnick, who is also on the board of Satologic, whose company Cantor Fitzgerald took Satologic public. And he— his company Cantor Fitzgerald holds the majority of the US Treasury bills for Tether, which is of course the largest stablecoin provider in the world, at just, just under $110 billion market cap, is on the board of Satellogic, took the company public.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ I mean, is an essential part of Satellogic. So we have Steve Mnuchin, we have a former general, we have a guy essential to the Treasury Ponzi continuing and the digitalizing of the dollar via Tether, all connected to this one satellite company that is offering a service to be able to uphold what essentially breaks down to parametric insurance clauses and other data points that can be fed into a blockchain that can actually enable dollar-denominated liabilities to back real-world assets. So we're going to start to see kind of this very spooky coalition come to formation and begin to see really this play to dollarize really the natural world in this way that is backed by data from satellite companies that are run by historically ghoulish, uh, you know, private and public sector, um, uh, I hate to just keep saying ghouls, but I mean, just these, these worst of the worst people, um, that are upholding, you know, these, these very important positions, um, all across this entire, uh, CC35, Green Plus, and Satellogic, um, combination here of, of private sector businesses.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ You really see this conspiracy begin to take shape.

Marty Bent [34:15] Coincidentally enough, Steve Mnuchin and his private equity arm just took over New York Community Bancorp as well. So building on what Brian Brooks did and everything going on with Satalogic, that's a very timely and strategic acquisition. For Mnuchin specifically.

Whitney Webb [34:37] Well, those guys specifically, Steve Mnuchin and then Dunford came on to that firm. And it's also Trump's ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and some other people that were under Mnuchin at the Treasury Department that make up that Mnuchin-led VC firm that we're talking about here. Their first investment when they launched was in this company that I wrote about, I guess, 4 years ago now. Called Cyber Reason. And the reason I'd written about them is because they were gaming out the use of cyber attacks to— it was a foreign company, Israeli company gaming this out with the US DHS, the Secret Service, and other parts of US law enforcement, including local police departments.

Whitney Webb ⋮ I think the first one was actually with the Boston PD. Anyway, gaming out out the precise conditions that hacks would have to do in order to get the US presidential election canceled and martial law declared in the United States. And again, this is like a foreign intelligence company, Cyber Reason, and Mnuchin, that's the first investment they make as a VC firm. And at that same time, they were also trying to recruit to the VC firm Yossi Cohen, who was director of Mossad while Trump was in office. And instead of going to Mnuchin's firm, Yossi Cohen went to SoftBank, which is the main investor in Cyber Reason and now runs, like, I think, one of the main arms of SoftBank's, you know, that decides their investment portfolio and whatnot.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So a lot of weird stuff going there in the realm of, you know, is this a US or Israeli intelligence link with the, with the Mnuchin VC firm? It seems to be. Both, if you ask me, especially with someone like David Friedman there, who during his tenure as ambassador to Israel for the US was pretty open that he was very, very cozy with the Netanyahu side of things, which, I mean, the Trump administration in general was because Trump's biggest funder during his first campaign and first term was Sheldon Adelson, who of course is now deceased. But Sheldon Adelson is the reason Trump put in John Bolton.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And the reason he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, among many other things, and is also a big funder, was a big funder of Netanyahu as well. So a lot of cross-pollination there that's worth pointing out as far as Mnuchin goes. But Mnuchin is definitely a figure that people need to, I don't know, I guess remember about because now that it's like a presidential election and everyone's like, oh, which side are you on? Biden's terrible. And so if you're not with Trump, you're with Biden. You know, that whole mentality, um, is back. You know, people kind of forget that, you know, Steve Mnuchin was a guy that should have been prosecuted for what he did in the 2008 financial crisis, and he wasn't.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And then Trump puts him in charge of Treasury, uh, in a— and, you know, while head of Treasury, as Mark pointed out, engaged in, uh, very, very bad and fiscally irresponsible policies under COVID. And a lot of that, you know, those irresponsible policies, the effects of which which we're still feeling now and robbed Americans of a significant amount of their purchasing power. Essentially, that money that was printed was handed off to BlackRock, Larry Fink, to hand out to whoever he felt deserved it, whatever that means. And of course, before Trump was in office, his family's finances were managed by Larry Fink, and he appointed Larry Fink to his business council and definitely is a big fan of Larry So people need to keep this stuff in mind, uh, now that it's election season.

Mark Goodwin [38:12] And who was the DA in California that should have prosecuted Mnuchin but didn't? Kamala Harris, of course. Also, I just want to say SoftBank's SBLA Advisor Corps, uh, was the lead investor of the PIPE offering of $100 million for the Satellogic, um, SPAC with Cantor. And JP Morgan, of course, served as the exclusive financial advisor to Satellogic. So just to wrap up some of those names in there.

Marty Bent [38:39] Whitney, I think what you just said about Mnuchin's time as Treasury Secretary is very important because again, this whole concept of a public-private partnership and the facade, the mirage that there is actually anything separating the private and the public sector these days is very important for people to understand and really internalize. is that they've— they're the WEF, whoever it may be. They're trying to put us in this frame where it's like, hey, we have the private sector and the public sector and we need them to cooperate, when in reality they're more merged than ever before. You have these— they're the same doors. Yeah, they are the same exact thing. They're trying—

Whitney Webb [39:21] Different hands of the same person, and they're demonizing one hand to send people into the other hand. hand, and this is what they always do, and you have to realize that both hands are bad. Don't go in either hand.

Marty Bent [39:35] You have to reject their frame. Don't go in either hand. The frame is between the space between the hands, and they're just getting ping-ponged back and forth. And Mark, I won't speak for you, but I'll speak for myself. This is why I'm in Bitcoin, is because at the core of this public-private partnership is the ability to print money out of thin air and throw between the hands. And so whether it's the emergence of junk bonds, we mentioned Pegasus connection to Apollo. I mean, that was a big thing in September of 2019 when you had that overnight repo spasm.

Whitney Webb [40:12] Totally.

Marty Bent [40:13] Many people don't know this, but the Fed created new facilities that allowed hedge funds to get access to the Fed window. And then with Mnuchin's very irresponsible fiscal policy and the expansion of the debt since 2020, the Fed and the Treasury have been put in a position where they essentially are merged at this point. There really is no difference between the two. They have accounts with each other and they're sort of just sloshing funds between each other. They are essentially merged. And so there is no private-public separation. So this idea of a private-public partnership all bullshit. It's all the same thing.

Mark Goodwin [40:51] Especially after the dissolving of certain legislation that prevented banks becoming investment firms and these really big interstate entities. I mean, in '33 under FDR, we had Glass-Steagall be put in, which basically prevented banks from certain types of investments.

Marty Bent [41:20] Commingling commercial deposits with insurance products, particularly.

Mark Goodwin [41:25] Totally. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then, of course, what did we see? We saw in the mid-'90s, we saw Greenspan, who later went on to run the Fed, we saw him put out a pamphlet while at JP Morgan that was Rethinking Glass-Steagall. We saw Larry Summers help help dissolve this, who kind of very infamously kind of jumped back and forth between some of these private and public things, as well as universities with Harvard as well. And so we saw kind of this push of back and forth, this ping-ponging of when there was an advantage to be within the public sector, these people are in the public sector.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ When there is an advantage to be in the private sector, these people are in the private sector. You look at someone like a Mnuchin, You know, ping-ponging back and forth from OneWest when, hey, we can take advantage of— now that Glass-Steagall is dissolved, you know, we can take advantage and basically use taxpayer money to back, you know, this ridiculous, you know, CDO, CMO gambling with, you know, retirement funds and people's money that should be, you know, much safer. We can go gamble and have a bunch of fun when this all blows up. Taxpayers are on the hook, and you know there's too big to fail.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ You know, with with the basically the creation of of Citicorp and and and and Chase and and all of these groups kind of coming together to become too big to fail right at the same time as as these regulatory you know you know basically methods that would have prevented these things from happening are being dissolved by goons put into. put into power to dissolve these laws. Now they're back in the private sector, they make a bunch of money off of it, and then they come back into the public sector right before COVID And Brian Brooks and Mnuchin kind of set up what they need, you know, using government as this enabling environment to set up the blockchain carbon credit system.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And then as soon as they're done and the Trump presidency is over and they've done what they need to do, they leave and they go back to the private sector and they set up these systems to take advantage of basically private capital creation. Stablecoins, I think, are very misunderstood because it's not like they're really this novel technology. I mean, dollar creation has pretty much always been a private sector gambit. It's just now it's on a blockchain and it's digitized. But a group like Cantor holding $80 billion plus or whatever percentage of the Tether bonds are holding, that was always something that was done by private sector banks.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And now we're just seeing it done with a much smaller— instead of having all of the energy and manpower and office buildings and real estate needed to run a huge international operation from a banking standpoint, Now you can basically run Tether with 50 employees or whatever and be a $110 billion private capital creation entity. So blockchain basically just allows them to perpetuate the dollar, perpetuate the treasury system, and then do it in a much more efficient way without requiring all of this overhead. So I think these systems were very deliberately put in place by these ping-ponging private-public sector ghouls to make them a ton of money.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ There's a reason why Howie Lutnick has come out and said that he loves Bitcoin and he loves Tether and he loves Circle. And they're making a bunch of money for him within a high interest rate environment. 5% in a year. That's a huge amount of money when it's billions of dollars for basically nothing. And they get to use, you know, those funds to buy Bitcoin and make a bunch of money and appreciate the appreciation of Bitcoin that we've seen this year as it just gets more and more scarce. So yeah, I think this idea of this private-public, you know, barrier, it's just completely dissolved. And we're really at a point, I think, just in general where we've really hit this world empire context.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And I think a lot of people, as it comes down to election season, as we start to see again conflicts in Russia, Ukraine, or in Gaza, it's like people just immediately fall back into these two-party systems and this private-public system. And I think most of these are generally just distractions to keep us to pick a side and be against the other side rather than really be against the hidden hand that is really controlling both sides of these dynamics. It's so easy to fall into, and they're getting so clever with it. We're seeing this huge explosion of interest in Austrian economics, this huge explosion of sentiment of libertarianism through a Milei.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And what is Milei actually doing? He's selling all the lithium to Israel. He's dollarizing the country. He's putting out a red carpet for Musk and for Larry Fink to just come in and privatize the country and dollarize the country even more than it already is. And I think that there's a lot of— a lot to be learned by the basically the Hegelian dialectics that are being employed on us to be distracted from, you know, these mechanisms that are really being put in place And when you see something as dire and as extreme as intelligence-linked satellite companies creating a metric and a mechanism to dollarize the forest and real-world assets and create commodity-backed stablecoins to completely take out the power from the state and give it to private companies, this isn't necessarily the win that we all think it is as kind of liberty-minded people.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ I don't want Steve Mnuchin running my money, whether or not he's running SataLogic or he's in the Treasury. He's not to be trusted. And so, I think we're falling for this dialectic and this false choice quite extremely, in my opinion.

Marty Bent [48:06] Quick break here, freaks. This rip is brought to you by Gradually, Then Suddenly: A Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the foreword to the book. I'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero-to-one primer if you're looking for a logical explanation of why Bitcoin obsoletes all other money. Buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends. com/gradually. com/gradually. Use the promo code TFTC for $5 off at checkout. Buy it now, freaks. The price of Bitcoin is going up. up. You need to understand it. This is the best zero-to-one primer. Back to the show. Do you really think people are falling for it?

Marty Bent ⋮ I think luckily you two wrote this piece to get in front of what's happening next week in Miami. But I do think I see it just from the conversations I have at 1031 talking to institutional investors, and they're all caught hook, line, and sinker on the tokenization of assets meme. They think that is the future. That is what they're investing behind, throwing a lot of dollars at. But like I said in our chat, I do think there is a chance that this all implodes in on itself, particularly because it's such a complicated system. Mm-hmm. You're combining satellites with these physical natural assets on the planet, and then you're throwing a blockchain in the mix, not only a blockchain, a sidechain and then on top of that tokens.

Marty Bent ⋮ And there's a lot of problems that can arrive or arise from that. But before we get into that, I think maybe this is a good point to let the audience understand how the blockchain aspect fits into this. What are the mechanisms that are being used to tokenize these carbon credits, these assets to create these stablecoins? And so you guys highlighted in the piece, a pivotal part of technology in this whole mix is a Bitcoin sidechain, merge mine sidechain. Rootstock, RSK, is more popularly known on Twitter specifically. It's been around for a while. I've been joking like they've been looking for product market fit for the better part of a decade now.

Marty Bent ⋮ It seems like they finally found it. So Mark or Whitney, if either one of you two want to explain what Rootstock is, how it works, then we can get into the nitty-gritty details of the financialization of these assets via Rootstock.

Mark Goodwin [50:37] Yeah, totally. I think before getting into the, maybe the blockchain aspect of it, I think just zooming out one more layer just to like green bonds, and we're starting to see these kind of like cleverly authored green bonds that aren't using blockchains yet, But essentially, you know, what a bond is, is, you know, you're buying up debt and you're getting a yield, you know, through this maturity over time, right? So, you know, say you buy a 10-year bond, you know, in the 8th year, you know, you're getting a 1% coupon, you're getting 1% on your clause. You could write this bond that says in year 8, 9, and 10, if you haven't reduced your greenhouse gas CO2 emissions, by 50% compared to where you were 8 years ago, instead of paying out 1%, it pays out 0%.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ So you can basically write these huge bonds that are being done everywhere. We're seeing them issued by Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo. These huge firms are doing these green bonds. They're not necessarily incredibly new, but they're, they're very popular now. Some huge companies like Verizon has done, you know, huge, huge, huge companies. So basically what you need to actually enable a bond kind of authored in this way is you need some kind of broker and some kind of insurance company and some kind of data that is accredited that can be fed into some arbiter that can actually determine at year 8 if this company has met the requirements to get that 1% coupon, right?

Mark Goodwin ⋮ So you can think of it without a blockchain and just, okay, you need basically some company that can be accredited, that can measure the greenhouse gas emissions and be able to, you know, agreed upon when the bond is authored that in year 8, we are going to provide you with a number. And if that number is below, you know, X percent, then you don't get 1% of a billion dollars that year. Say it's a billion-dollar bond. You know, that's a significant, you know, market. That's a significantly expensive thing to basically have, you know, a brokerage firm, some, you know, paying the lawyers to litigate this, having the data provided.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ there's a lot of points of, of, you know, granular points to actually uphold green finance. And so a firm like, or rather a sidechain like RSK, what it can do is it can actually basically act as all of those things, as the litigator, as the broker, and as the settler, as the place that the actual assets are settled. By using, you know, assets that are put onto a blockchain. The only thing that it can't really do is basically be the oracle to feed data. You know, blockchains are kind of clunky and stupid in a lot of ways, and it's hard to, you know, put in real-world data into a blockchain.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ It's not necessarily that easy to agree upon it. So you have to have a company like Asadalogic basically be the accredited satellite that measures these emissions and then find a way to be the oracle to feed that data into this cleverly authored smart contract bond. So rather than relying on JP Morgan and Lockton Insurance and some other accredited carbon company, you can reduce your costs significantly by using a sidechain like RSK. RSK, basically what it is, is it's just a way to do Ethereum on Bitcoin. So basically, it has a clone of the Ethereum virtual machine that allows you to take any contract written in Solidity, which is the programming language of Ethereum, and actualize it on Bitcoin using this merged mining peg.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ So RSK has all of these things. It has identity systems already built in. It has the ability to create carbon credits. We've seen groups use Ethereum already to create carbon credits already that are just financial instruments that are tokenized, where they can basically tokenize you know, tons of carbon emissions, uh, you know, and trade it on Ethereum. Well, now RSK allows you to do that exact same thing, um, but just put it on Bitcoin. Um, and of course, RSK and Rootstock, you know, it's, it's a federated sidechain, um, but it was created by people, uh, generally in Argentina that have all of these connections, um, to a lot of the people involved In this group, I believe that there is a bunch of connections.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ I believe they share a board member, Joey Garcia, with Wences Casares Zappo, which was you know I think he's kind of a name that a lot of modern Bitcoiners sort of forget. But you know a really important guy, kind of considered the the patient zero for Silicon Valley that basically introduced. Bitcoin to Peter Thiel, to Reid Hoffman, to the PayPal Mafia. And he was very connected with PayPal and Facebook. He helped— he worked on the Diem project that failed. But yeah, RSK shares a lot of, a lot of people, you know, with this Zappo group, with this Endeavor group. And RSK, yeah, basically allows stablecoins, identity systems, carbon credits, any of these cleverly authored smart contracts to exist on Bitcoin itself.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And so Bitcoin, rather than being just this kind of settlement network for Satoshis, can now actually uphold stablecoins, carbon credits, other assets, and can have these cleverly authored bonds that get fed data from, say, a company like Satologic, and be able to uphold a carbon market, real-world asset, commodity-backed stablecoin. There's now possible to be upheld on Bitcoin, which is again, that's kind of what we talked about last time with this Fink universal ledger. He called Bitcoin a technology for data storage, for asset storage, and RSK basically is kind of an enabling environment for this, you know, as well as doing a lot of other things.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ But I think that's kind of the role that it plays in this system.

Marty Bent [57:34] Yeah. To semantics here, RSK is merge-mined with Bitcoin, just so audience who's coming to this and may not be fully immersed in Bitcoin like we are, Mark.

Mark Goodwin [57:48] Yeah, sure.

Marty Bent [57:49] It is not technically at the protocol level. So this merge-mine sidechain, this peg sidechain, federated peg, essentially anchors into the Bitcoin protocol and then has this EVM that operates separate to the Bitcoin protocol, but it does anchor in to get the benefits of Bitcoin's finality, settlement, robustness, resiliency, yada, yada, yada. So there is like a degree of separation from Bitcoin, the core protocol, but it's anchoring into that. And that's my biggest curiosity And again, I told you guys this in chat, but I'm really interested to see if they can successfully do this because when it comes to the smart contracts, the virtual machine, I mean, historically Solidity has been a very unstable and insecure scripting language.

Marty Bent ⋮ I don't know. I haven't been following RSK as closely in recent years, so I don't know if they've made advancements at the, the scripting language level that make it more secure. I'd be highly skeptical of that. Then you have this oracle problem. Satalogic is the oracle here feeding the data that releases funds one way or another within the smart contract. And then just so that whole process there, all it's going to take is one like, uh, mismeasurement of data being fed to a smart contract and money being sent the wrong way for somebody to to hold their hands up and be like, this is complete bullshit.

Marty Bent ⋮ How do we know this data? That's where you really get down to it. And this is where the ruse is, is because I find it hard to believe that you'll ever be able to have verifiability of the data actually being pure and accurate.

Whitney Webb [59:35] Yeah. So there's this whole thing going on in carbon markets right now because everyone involved has been outed for being— well, Well, not everyone involved, but basically the whole market up until now has basically been outed as being very like grift-prone, you know, lots of fraud, lots of negligence, etc., etc. So the way they've been planning to get around this, and this is reflected in the Green Plus program, is through parametric insurance, like insuring carbon credits so that if the fraud and negligence continues to occur, which it will, it's now insured. And now the insurance market has a new market.

Mark Goodwin [1:00:11] Right.

Whitney Webb [1:00:12] for products.

Marty Bent [1:00:12] Holy shit.

Whitney Webb [1:00:13] Right. So there's no need to correct or to end the rampant fraud in carbon credits. They're just going to add like a new layer of insurance products now. Yeah. And there's like all the big insurance companies are getting in on this. And then there's new companies that are coming out of nowhere that are specifically specializing in carbon credit insurance. And then there's the other thing too, that you have some of these entities involved basically looking to urge the planet, like the Global Footprint Network through the Club of Rome stuff. You know, there's very prominent Club of Rome figures that for a long time have talked about, uh, if we can't depopulate peacefully, we will need to implement a benevolent smart dictatorship.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Okay, if you've ever seen the movie Brazil that came out in the 1980s, this is all basically about this like like, you know, bureaucratic monstrosity dictatorship government, and they make a mistake, and all these people suffer all these unfortunate happenings that end in death and torture and things like that, uh, because they're trying to rectify the mistake that the state made, right? So when you have a totalitarian system and they make a mistake, they don't own up to the mistake, you know what I Like, good luck trying to go through the bureaucracy that they create as part of their benevolent smart dictatorship to try and be like, um, yeah, so I didn't get my, like, credit carbon credit allowance or whatever, or like, you guys messed up my climate wallet, can you fix it please?

Whitney Webb ⋮ Um, I mean, honestly, they don't really need it to work the right way. And I think, you know, that's been my criticism of stuff about the AI industry too, that they've been overselling it for a really long time and trying to be like, we should put AI in charge of all these things, even though a lot of the algorithms in terms of their accuracy aren't independently audited. And sometimes they can be as low based on the company's own metrics of like 70%, probably a lot lower than that, probably no better than a coin toss, things like that. I mean, they don't care. It's all really, I think, about the illusion of those systems being in place and this whole idea, sort of like the physical underpinnings of the panopticon in general, the idea that being under constant observation will make you behave even if they don't do anything because you know they're watching you and they could do something.

Whitney Webb ⋮ There's a lot more to this than— I mean, I guess that's kind of dark in a way to point out.

Marty Bent [1:02:55] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:02:55] Sorry, but it's true because these people are incompetent at times and they're trying to launch stuff, I think, before they really have these systems ready to go in the way they want them to be.

Mark Goodwin [1:03:08] Yeah.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And so the idea is we have to not interact with these systems at all. The way out of these kind of things is to not comply because so much of this, what, you know, Green Plus, I would say, is the start of getting this really out there and like at scale, you know, with people not really paying attention to it and framing it as part of the climate crisis response. But this whole play of digital ID, digital wallet, surveillable programmable money has advanced a lot. And it's not just CBDCs. The CBDC discussion is about keeping attention on a very narrow band of what they're doing, but it's much broader than that.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So what we really need to do to defeat things like this is to not engage and become part of that system because we risk entering into this Brazil-style type dictatorship that's incompetent, but also like very totalitarian and authoritarian and violent. And you don't want to brush up against that because it's not like they'll correct their incompetence when they get caught. I mean, look at how the system is now.

Mark Goodwin [1:04:19] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:04:20] I mean, it's basically like digitizing that system, developing it at scale. And it's a way for, you know, the crony capitalists, these oligarchs. I mean, there's so many different ways to talk about them. But, you know, essentially they're the people at the top of the 1% that engage in blatant financial criminal activities to steal from people beneath them. Right. And so they want to create— deepen the divide between the haves and the have-nots. And they want to basically make like digital barriers to maintain that. And AI is part of that. And, you know, these systems, this whole idea of like carbon offsets and the carbon market in general, you know, most people aren't going to be able to afford all the offsets that the elite are going to be able to afford.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Right. I mean, it's a way— this is all part of the system. And that's leading us to neo-feudalism, as I've called it before. And so essentially, you know, we really can't get out of this if we— unless we choose not to interact with the system and create something either parallel or just find some way to live your life without having to really interact with the, you know, the digital ID and the digital wallet at all. And there's a lot of different ways it seems like it's coming together. You know, the World Bank is working with Google and a lot of these other entities, including the ones in this article about Green Plus that are direct partners of Green Plus to create the climate wallet that's tied up with the whole idea of doing CBDCs and all of that.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Right. And things related to that. The private sector equivalent. They call it the climate wallet. Yeah, because it's all tied up with carbon emissions and there's this, you know, the carbon taxes and all of that. And this is why, you know, I would to point out, we mentioned it a little bit earlier, but bring it up again, the whole idea of SpaceX being involved in launching these Green+ satellites. Elon Musk is a big proponent of carbon taxes and has been for a very long time.

Marty Bent [1:06:18] Well, he benefits massively from it.

Whitney Webb [1:06:19] And of course he's— well, sure. And he's— but he's framed himself as being sort of this like libertarian free speech hero after, you know, his acquisition of X, which, you know, again, he's been been fairly open about his goal is to turn X into WeChat USA and make it half of the financial system, I guess, to start. But beyond that, you know, the idea is to also have, you know, carbon emissions, carbon taxes, you know, intimately inter— interfaced with this coming digital ID, digital wallet paradigm. And there's a lot of different efforts to create those systems. But it's not just going to be one system.

Whitney Webb ⋮ It's going to be a mosaic of interoperable systems. ID2020, for example, a big force behind the vaccine passport push during COVID for example. That's the Rockefellers and Gates and all of that. It's not about making one global digital ID. And unfortunately, a lot of people in independent media, when there was a lot of reporting on this during COVID missed the boat on this one. It's not about one global digital ID system. It's about several digital ID systems that are all interoperable. And to have them all interlaced with each other so you can export the data to one global central database. And it's the same for, you know, CBDCs and the stablecoins and all of that.

Marty Bent [1:07:47] Yeah.

Whitney Webb ⋮ The goal is to have it all be interoperable and all the wallets. And the same is true also for the carbon carbon market. And all of these are meant to go together. The pillars of the, of the new financial system, this new financial governance system involves all of these things. And so, you know, we, you know, a lot of times the carbon market gets ignored. A lot of times the private sector CBDC equivalents get ignored. But we need to look at this stuff holistically because there's a lot of other stuff going on here. And, you know, we are ignoring the carbon aspect of this. to our peril, because this is, again, as we said, or as we discussed earlier, a new reiteration of the junk bond villains, as it were.

Whitney Webb ⋮ But now they're not just trying to take bad debt and they're using the natural world to fuel their debt schemes, basically. And there's also this effort that's been posited by Larry Fink and Mark Carney and people like them to reimagine the World Bank and the entire multilateral development system, which for its entire existence has been about debt enslavement, mainly of the Global South. And so those same people say one of the key ways of financing Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, is debt. So we have to saddle these countries in debt, and we have to, because of this idea that if we don't do this, the planet will explode.

Whitney Webb ⋮ We have to get people to develop these smart grids and all these different new technologies that we say we— they need and implement these carbon markets and these surveillance paradigms all under the guise of combating climate change. You know, that's not what Satalogic is there for. You know, if you're really about combating climate change, you don't set up a system like Green Plus where at best 40% of the proceeds from the carbon credits go to decarbonizing initiatives that aren't actually about decarbonizing. It's going to a crony company. That's one of the guys involved in creating Green Plus. It's his company, and it's about building smart grids and smart cities from the microgrid utility level up.

Whitney Webb ⋮ I mean, that's not anything that has nothing to do with saving the planet. That's about creating a slavery system and a control system so that the debt lords can suck us dry forever. With technology, you know, and that's essentially what's happening here, and it's very bad. And I would really like people to start to wake up about this, but unfortunately a lot of the discourse has been very narrow, and it's getting narrower because we are in an election year. So if you bring up the fact that both Democrats and Republicans are on board with this kind of crap, people will be like, oh, but no, my guy is so much better, and that guy's so bad.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And, oh, you know, I mean, this binary thinking crap with presidential elections has to stop. Um, the CIA has meddled in elections all over the world and overthrown governments all over the world, and our elections have always pretty much been fake since they've been around, you know. So like, this election is no different. I know that people like the whole idea of we need the political savior to come save us, let's get the right guy in the White House. What a mess. Our whole country is. We need to get the right guy in the White House. The guy in the White House is always a front for the bankers, and it's pretty much always been that way.

Whitney Webb ⋮ The CIA itself—it's the bankers. If you look at the early CIA, it was all bankers. It was Wall Street lawyers out of Sullivan and Cromwell. You know, that's who's been doing this the whole time, and now they're enslaving the planet with spy satellites, and they're the spies. You know, so like. I don't know, I just get so tired of the election rhetoric sometimes. People just really need to understand that this is the bankers. They run the public sector, they run the private sector. This is a financial slavery system. It's the slavery system they've been using for decades, but on steroids. And in Latin America, their big focus is to integrate Argentina and Brazil.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They want to do the same thing to South America. that they did to Europe to create the European Union, which is start with a free trade agreement for all of Europe. That's how the EU started. It evolves into this bureaucratic totalitarian behemoth, and it's yoked to the US through the eurodollar. They're doing the same thing in Latin America. There's all these different iterations of it, right-leaning and left-leaning, which are basically all globalist governance attempts to integrate South America at the regional level. There's PROSUR, there's MERCOSUR, there's UNASUR, there's ALADI, there's all these different acronyms. There's the Organization of American States. The goal of all of these, one way or another, is to regionally integrate, whether it's under right-leaning dialectics or left-leaning dialectics.

Whitney Webb ⋮ That's what they want. And they want a Free Trade of the Americas. So not just NAFTA, that was the North American one, right? They want one for all of the Americas. They want to regionally integrate all of the Americas at the economic level, lead it down this path towards bureaucratic regional governance to be part of this global governance patchwork thing, which has been, you know, the push for arguably a very, very, very, very long time. And they want to do it with spy satellites and all this other stuff going on. But the idea is to do that same model used in the EU, but they want to yoke it with dollar stablecoins, not, you know, not the eurodollar necessarily.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And so the Argentina, you know, Brazil and Argentina are the ones they need to have most under their thumb because they're the biggest countries in size of South America. You get Brazil and Argentina, you basically get the whole continent. So my concern is you're going to have them try and do it the right-leaning way through people like Javier Milei. And if they get him back in power of Bolsonaro and frame them as, oh, they're defeating the baddies, but really they're just the other hand like we discussed earlier. And what's interesting too is a lot of this group that's discussed in the Green Plus piece, RSK, the satellite firm, and some of the connective tissue between them that includes Zappa, Wences Casares, and these figures are essentially like the Argentinian branch of the PayPal Mafia.

Whitney Webb ⋮ , who, if you've read my book, you'll know a lot about the Bronfmans and organized crime and political power there. For example, the family that essentially bankrolled Justin Trudeau in Canada, among other figures. And they're very powerful. Reid Hoffman of the PayPal Mafia and LinkedIn and whatnot, also a very close Epstein pal, is also very intimately tied up with Endeavor. And the companies that Endeavor helped create are some of the biggest companies in Latin America now. Many of them are based in Argentina. The biggest one, of course, is based in Argentina, the first Endeavor success story, which would be Mercado Libre. which is Marcos Galperín, who, as Marc mentioned earlier, he's on the board of Satellogic, involved with a lot of these other companies.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Mercado Libre itself is very much interfaced with Paxos, PayPal, and groups like that. It's sort of like what happened earlier, what I mentioned earlier about those figures sort of kingmaking the corporate titans of Latin America. This is like a modern iteration of that with the same players. They're funding these startups and ensuring which companies get big and if they succeed. But Endeavor's not an Argentinian entity. It's an entity run by people like Edgar Bronfman and Reid Hoffman. And so there's an Endeavor Argentina branch, and pretty much all of these companies that we discuss in the piece that are based in Argentina are part of this Endeavor Argentina network.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And Argentina is where they, I would argue, are going to test out a of these efforts, most likely under Milei, because he's very amenable to these kinds of policies. And so one of these figures that comes up a lot in the piece, this Diego Gutiérrez, he's one of the co-founders of RSK, of Rootstock. He gave this very revealing interview about a year ago, and he was talking about several things that I think are important to bring up in the context of this interview. One of them is that as Bitcoin becomes integrated into Wall Street, Bitcoin has to shed its ethos, as he called it.

Marty Bent [1:16:47] Cool.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Essentially, it has to stop being a tool of dissent, a threat to both commercial and central banks, and essentially become their tool. That's what he says. So for Bitcoin to succeed, in his eyes, that has to happen. So that's very telling. And then he also says that there's going to be a concerted push to move away from money printed by the state, meaning central banks, and instead move to commodity-backed stablecoins where the people that own the commodities will have all the power. I think that's very interesting because obviously Milei, in his case, came to power framing himself as very libertarian, but his policies thus far have shown him to be very crony capitalist, in my opinion.

Whitney Webb ⋮ We've talked about this before, and Mark brought up some stuff to that point. But keep in mind too that a lot of the people in his government are from JP Morgan, for example, or the Argentinian branch of major Wall Street banks. He's been very cozy with people like Fink and Musk, as discussed, among others. very friendly with Zelensky and the Ukraine stuff. I mean, this is not a very libertarian guy under other metrics. And there's been a lot of antagonism with him and Argentina's central bank, which of course is responsible for a lot of bad stuff that has happened in Argentina. But people also need to remember the history of how Argentina got here, which has a lot of this fiscal trouble for Argentina began when it was run by a US and CIA-backed military coup, then under Carlos Menem, Menem, who was the great— I say this great not in the actually like, oh, that was great sense, like big, I guess, the big neoliberal in Argentina recent political history, who was basically just like a goon for US foreign interests really to gobble up Argentinian resources.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Milei is a big fan of Menem and some of the people that are in his government started their political careers under Menem, like Patricia Bullrich, the interior minister, for example. So you could really frame Milei as a continuation of that stuff because Mauricio Macri, a lot of people in Milei's government are from the Macri government, especially his economics team. There's a direct line to all of that. And so I am very concerned that that would be celebrated as a big Yes, we've you know he's gonna you know the central bank's not gonna print the peso anymore. It's over, and he's saved Argentina. Well, is it really saving Argentina if he's you know going to make you know they're gonna use dollar peg stablecoins?

Whitney Webb ⋮ They're regulating the credit of Bitcoin right now. They're gonna move to this whole model of commodity-backed stablecoins, which is already actually happening in Argentina. A company backed by VC. said, that's based in Argentina, is tokenizing basically all of the country's grain deposits to use that as currency. So whoever owns all of the grains and the biggest landowner is a big former backer of Mauricio Macri, part of Endeavor Argentina. His name is Eduardo Elstein. He owns all of the commodities. He's also a big shareholder of some of Israel's biggest companies. He's going to be the guy that basically controls the money then. Right? At least with the grain-backed stablecoins.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So if you have all these oligarchs in charge of different industries, which is essentially what Argentina has been becoming and has been happening really everywhere around the world, who's going to be in charge of the money? Is that really better than the central bank having it? Because remember, the central bank's run by the commercial banks. So you're just getting, I mean, the same shit under a different, you know, name, basically. I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of different stuff going on here, and it's going to be interesting to see how it develops. But, you know, sorry, I'll let someone else talk. I've been rambling a while.

Mark Goodwin [1:20:41] No, it's amazing. I think the way you talk about just sort of this establishment of, you know, commodity-backed stablecoins and money, it gets back to this idea of kind of what Marty was saying earlier. Well, there's still the oracle problem. There's still all these issues of making a federated sidechain work. Well, then you look at, well, where did the money go? You know, a lot of this research came from looking at VCs and looking at where the money came that funded and founded these companies. And you look at, you talked about X, a lot of people forget Elon was heavily involved in PayPal, and X was initially an idea that came out of the PayPal primordial goop.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And we look at this PayPal Mafia and how it spread everywhere. And the first idea of Bitcoin sidechains was introduced in the sidechains paper in October 2014 by all of these Blockstream employees led by Adam Back. The next month, weeks later, the seed round for Blockstream is led by Reid Hoffman. And what the sidechain concept did basically was allow Bitcoin to uphold other ledger assets and give the ability to transfer these assets between multiple blockchains and give new functions to assets that they already own. Um, and, you know, you look at, okay, well then who, you know, who was the, the money behind PayPal? And you, you look into it and you see who, well, who is the seed founder of PayPal?

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And you get this guy Bill Elkis. Uh, Bill Elkis, um, was a former trustee of the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation. Uh, and in 1997 He co-founded Clearstone Venture Partners with this guy William Quigley, who later went on to co-found Tether. Uh, William Quigley also, uh, you know, co-founded Sunlot Holdings with Brock Pierce, uh, when Mt. Gox went under to try to buy up, uh, the assets of Mt. Gox in bankruptcy. And they were advised by Louis Freeh, who is a former FBI director. Um, but you're, you know—

Marty Bent [1:22:49] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:22:51] Yeah, exactly. And so you're, you're seeing, you know, okay, PayPal is all over this thing. Bill Elkes connected directly with Epstein. Uh, you know, Howie Lutnick, the guy that holds all the treasuries for Tether, uh, purchased, uh, an estate, um, you know, from Comet Trust connected to Guido Goldman, um, connected directly, uh, you know, a neighboring estate to Epstein's house. I believe he bought 11 71st Street, East 71st Street, and Epstein was 9 East 71st Street. And then you look into PayPal and you see, okay, well, who's kind of doing the digital infrastructure for the blockchain of, you know, entity basically of PayPal? Who's allowing all these things to happen?

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And it's this company Paxos. S. senator from New Jersey, as well as this guy Jim Mansey, who's you know former he you know ended up being at IBM. He founded a company that got purchased by IBM, but a chairman of this Lotus company. Both of those guys, Bill Bradley and Jim Mansey, were on the board of directors for this East Coast company Cargo Metrics. run by this gentleman, Scott Borgertsen, who was believed to be husband of Ghislaine Maxwell. And basically, CargoMetrics was kind of like the first Satellogic in that it was this ocean observation company that was providing all of this data and collecting all of this data on shipping lanes.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And basically looking at how, again, in this world empire context, looking at all of the transportation of commodities, of people, of whatever it is, but anything traveling on ships across the oceans, this company was basically collecting all of these data. CargoMetrics is literally the name of the company. Both of these guys are on the board of this company, and now they're both on the board of Paxos here. 10 years later. And CargoMetrics ended up becoming this data company, and then it turned into this quant financial trading desk. Because what actually happens when you have all of this surveillance data, you have an extreme heads up, and leg up rather, on other people trying to trade in these global forex markets.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ We knew Epstein was a really big forex trader. There was actually a letter from Lynn Forrester—

Marty Bent [1:25:36] To Rothschild.

Mark Goodwin [1:25:39] Correct me, Whitney.

Marty Bent [1:25:40] Yes.

Mark Goodwin [1:25:41] Exactly. Yes, to Bill Clinton in the White House about how they discussed currency stabilization and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was heavily considered to be really into forex trading. And that was kind of his passion in a lot of ways. And how do you get a leg up on all of these things is you get extensive amounts of data and then you create infrastructures that allow you to do trades and move large amounts of liquidity and settle large amounts of liquidity within the realm that you acquire all this data for. So you're beginning to see these are the same people that were heavily connected not just to intelligence, but basically the mafia that controls intelligence.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And they are heavily connected already to, again, Paxos runs the PayPal stablecoin. I had a conversation with the head of strategy there, Walter Hesert. And again, I'm not accusing him specifically of anything or anyone specifically of anything, But, you know, he spoke of, you know, the stablecoin, you know, market and basically said that, you know, there's an opportunity here for regulation to come in from the public sector and basically kingmake, you know, the stablecoin remaining in the private sector, but, you know, kingmaking who gets to basically create the dollar-denominated liabilities for this, you know, future economic system. And Paxos is really set up via PayPal to be an essential infrastructure provider for the modern economy.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And they're seed-founded by Bill Elkes, directly connected with Epstein, has direct connections to Tether, to former FBI directors, to Brock Pierce. And here they are connected to CargoMetrics, this other Ghislaine Maxwell-connected Surveillance company turned, you know, quant trading desk. You know, and we've seen this time and time again with the Maxwell sisters, with their, you know, early adventures in, you know, basically in data harvesting and data collecting through the early internet, through Magellan, you know, one of the first internet search engines, which I believe was Christine Maxwell. Maxwell, and then later I think Whitney could probably talk more to this. S. intelligence, you know kind of came out of the same mafia-massad.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ Sort of entity that, you know, we all look at, you know, kind of the Epstein group as kind of this human trafficking, you know, cabal, which is, you know, obviously true to some degree. But there's, there's an incredible amount of data and, you know, foreign exchange and currency financial hitman, basically. Everybody kind of generally forgets, you know, how much of how he was tied into a lot of 2008 and a lot of these firms that blew up. And so, you know, you really zoom out on a lot of these things and zoom in on specific people, and it's the same people, it's the same mechanisms, they're just being modernized.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And this PayPal Mafia is just everywhere, all over the whole this whole this whole whole blockchain and Bitcoin world. And I think it's really interesting that Blockstream themselves, generally regarded incredibly highly in the Bitcoin space, have such huge connections with Reid Hoffman, and then of course with Bitfinex and Tether. And there's a huge push within the Blockstream, you know, with their Liquid Foundation, basically their own federated sidechain, you know, to incorporate Tether into the Bitcoin ecosystem. You're seeing companies really, and spokesmen and discourse really pushing towards this, you know, this digital dollar system as, you know, something that will basically enable number go up for Bitcoin.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ But I think there's a lot of caveats to that. And I think we have to really take a step back and not just let number go up induce this amnesia over the Bitcoin community that there's a lot of, I'll call it orange washing. A lot of these sidechains are not a net good for people. They are able to create digital ID systems, perpetuate the treasury system at really, really high velocity. But they make Bitcoin go up, so we cheer them on. And I think when you look at some of the people that are really behind these mechanisms, who funded these mechanisms, why these mechanisms were created in the first place, and you begin to see this darker picture, yeah, it's very concerning in my opinion.

Marty Bent [1:31:11] It is. But I would push back and say, I don't think these sidechains have gotten anywhere near the degree of adoption that the likes of Blockstream or RSK for that matter would like. Blockstream's been pushing Liquid for 6 years now, and you can look at the block explorer. They have 1 transaction per block, and it's the Coinbase transaction. I think it's good to see that there's— I don't know if it's a natural aversion or just nobody's picking up what they're putting down, In terms of the Bitcoiners that I know and the companies that we invest in, none of them are incorporating Liquid or any of these sidechains, because it's like, yeah, that's boring. It's not really enabling the sovereign future that we're going after here. But I mean, it certainly is the case.

Mark Goodwin [1:31:59] Totally agree. Sorry. I totally agree, because right now we're seeing all of these ID systems and dollar stablecoins be on like Ethereum or Solana, right? Or whatever these bullshit sidechains, or not sidechains, but like altchains. But what happens when the public-private gang teams up and they go, hey, Ethereum is a security, Solana is a security, you need to use Bitcoin because it's the only digital asset that's not a security. And then all of that movement gets pushed onto Bitcoin and then all of a sudden Liquid is an an integral pillar of basically these systems, because they no longer can be upheld on Ethereum or on these other things.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ So there is actually this potential for basically setting up kind of the vacuum for when they pop the bubbles of these sidechains, where do they flow to? Do they flow to Taproot assets on Lightning Labs? Do they flow to Liquid? You know, do they flow to RSK? I think we're going to see some sort of regulation. The Fed, the Congress, you know, they're very much so looking at stablecoins because they understand, you know, how important they are. And, you know, there's a Howie Lutnick, you know, our boy all over this piece, was speaking at the Chainalysis conference last week. And he said that, you know, the stablecoins are essential for US dollar homogeneity.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ We need it to perpetuate the treasury system. If the government knows that, the government realizes that, and they want to create an enabling environment for the perpetuation of it, they probably don't want to let validators on some of these sidechains make a ton of money. They want to push it really just to the holders of these treasuries, and let's reduce the costs as much as possible at the granular points otherwise, and really just push all the profits, you know, into who holds these treasuries. And in which case, we could see an explosion of volume on these sidechains. I definitely agree with you, it hasn't happened yet, but, you know, who knows where we're going.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ You know, we could see PayPal's stablecoin be issued on one of these things, and, you know, they integrate it with Venmo, they integrate it with PayPal, and all of a sudden you have 100 million users across the world or more That's all it takes. And I think that's why there's an important part of this system being set up is the Mercado Libre play, which we haven't really talked about too much. You need a market. One of the big reasons why PayPal was able to take hold was because of eBay. eBay didn't really make a lot of sense when you had to have these long settlement times.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ It didn't really work for this type of online auction house. So they had to— they really used PayPal And it took huge market hold because of this huge market that was native to the internet. MercadoLibre is basically the Amazon and eBay of South America, of Latin America. All they have to do is integrate one of these things and we'll see 100 million plus people, more, way more than that, billion, have access to whatever infrastructure provider that they choose. And we've seen them already have some sort of connections with Tether, with Circle, and with Zappo, who has connections with both, who, you know, expressly, expressly admit that their goal is to connect to the US dollar, Bitcoin, and stablecoins and be the banking service for all of these things.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ Zappo has also partnered with Satologic to put Bitcoin keys in space. I mean, we're seeing a lot of, you know, all they have to do is flip a switch basically at the this point, and they can onboard, you know, billions of people if they have a need to go on to use these systems, as long as the cost is low enough. So we could see, we could see that happen at any point. I think adoption of these sidechains is really dependent on the market first, and MercadoLibre could be that market for, for, you know, 30+ countries, right?

Marty Bent [1:36:06] Yeah. I wish them luck. Actually, I don't wish them luck, but—

Mark Goodwin [1:36:12] Yeah.

Marty Bent ⋮ I think, Whitney, getting back to what you said earlier, I think that's the big question in my mind right now, because we've talked about this throughout the years on the show. What can we do to protect ourselves against this? Individuals, become as sovereign as possible. De-Google yourself. Grow your own food. Use Bitcoin the right way. But do you think there needs to push back against this? Because because they literally have satellites surveilling. The panopticon is gone from the Pennsylvania State Penitentiary in Philadelphia where it's a physical place where there's something in the middle that can surveil humans in a physical space within a 100-yard radius to literally satellites spanning the whole globe and surveilling us from space.

Marty Bent ⋮ Do you think there is going to be a necessary pushback? from private sector actors that don't want to be beholden to carbon credit markets to stand up publicly and say, no, I'm not participating in this. I'm not buying carbon credits. I'm not incorporating it into my business, or is this more of a social movement where we need individuals like the two of you to write pieces to get in front of this and educate people? Yeah. and literally prod and poke the facade to highlight the hypocrisy and the giant scam that all this is.

Whitney Webb [1:37:35] Yeah. I mean, I think the cornerstone of the response really does need to be self-reliance because if you're hoping on people in the private sector solving this problem for you because they don't like ESG, I don't think that's enough at all. And talking about this public-private play, it's important to keep in mind that what happens— I mean, just look at this, the Treasury Secretary office alone. So like in Clinton, it was Robert Rubin, Goldman Sachs. He helps repeal Glass-Steagall. And then when that whole bubble pops in 2008, Goldman Sachs' Henry Paulson is set Treasury Secretary. Then it's Tim Geithner, who worked under Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, is Treasury Secretary under Obama.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And then it's Steve Mnuchin, who was involved in the 2008 financial crisis and whose dad was one of the top guys at Goldman Sachs, and he was also Goldman Sachs. So what they do when they're in power is that they create policies that help benefit them. You know, they came from Goldman Sachs with intentions to implement policies that benefit Goldman Sachs. Right. And so generally what happens is that when the private sector wants something or they want— they've created a big market for something, they've invested lots of money in creating something like the carbon market, and no one's using the carbon market.

Mark Goodwin [1:38:49] Right.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They are going to then use the public sector to force people to use the carbon market. And so they're trying to do that through the, through the guise of climate emergency. Right. And that's not working. So if that's not working, how will they go about and how will they do it? Well, like we've— Mark and I have discussed before, they're trying to go about it the private sector route. Oh, okay. You guys aren't interested in programmable, surveillable money if it's emitted by the central bank. So if it's emitted by a private bank, maybe you will. Right. And but the other side of this is what's happening in places like Argentina right now, where people have lost so much of their purchasing power.

Whitney Webb ⋮ So like before Milei came to power, I think the poverty rate was just— I mean, it was insanely high. I think it was something like 60%. And then Milei came into power and devalued the currency by 50%, which led to a massive loss in purchasing power for Argentinians on top of that. P. Morgan guy that they're doing Worldcoin. They're scanning their eyes in the Sam Altman orb for shitcoins and a cattle tag, a digital ID. S. USDC, whatever, supported by Mercado Libre's giant entity Mercado Pago, which is also integrated with Brazil's biggest crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin. And then there's Ripio in the mix, which is partnered with all of these guys too.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They're going to control all the rails that stuff runs on. And that's where people are running because their money has been so devalued and they have no alternative. And I think that's ultimately the goal. Is to get people on programmable, surveillable money by any means necessary. So if you won't do it because you're like, oh yeah, this is a way I'm going to use JP Morgan coin and beat the Fed CBDC, you know, if that if you're not going to get suckered into that, then you know it's it seems like they'll use destabilization and desperation as a way to get people to onboard into the systems that they're creating.

Whitney Webb ⋮ They're not just going to spend billions of dollars. Creating these systems and have no one use them. They're going to try and use either desperation created by public sector policies or by private sector policies and then have— sort of like 2008. Oh, look, the private banks have destroyed the economy. Now we need the public sector to come in and rein them in, even though Obama's cabinet that was supposed to be doing that was literally chosen by Citigroup. group, right? They're the ones that are going to come in and they're going to rein these in, and these are the policies and changes that need to be made.

Whitney Webb ⋮ But actually, it's the bankers that wrote the changes that need to be made, right? So we're likely going to get set up for something like that where they're going to try and make like existing money worthless. And if you want your money to be worth anything and maintain any sort of semblance of purchasing power, you have to use, uh, financial products X, Y, and And they're all going to be programmable and surveillable, if not by the private sector, by the public sector. And they're all going to be interoperable. They're going to be all these different wallets and digital ID systems that look like they're different companies, but they're all the same, essentially, in terms that they can export all their data to the same central global database.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And that's essentially the goal here. So how do we fight against that? against that, don't use the database, don't use the digital wallet, don't use the digital ID, don't interact with the system. And I think also, you know, I think Bitcoin is, is obviously very key to their plans, but they need Bitcoin to stay, as Larry Fink said, a technology for asset storage. They refuse to have it be a currency. And actually, Jeffrey Epstein gave an interview about Bitcoin that I didn't know about until maybe like a couple months ago when we started researching this.

Marty Bent [1:42:46] Oh, really?

Whitney Webb [1:42:46] Oh, yes. And he says the exact same thing Larry Fink says. It's yeah, it's not a currency. It's you know a technology for asset storage. There's there's another very prominent Bitcoiner that likes to run with that line.

Marty Bent [1:43:01] So yeah, so Michael Saylor is basically it's property. It's not it's not currency.

Whitney Webb [1:43:08] Yeah, yeah, funny that didn't the chief of staff of In-Q-Tel come from Microsoft?

Mark Goodwin [1:43:13] That's interesting. Anyway, um, sure did.

Whitney Webb [1:43:17] Yep. So, um, anyway, basically, if Bitcoin is kept in that box that people like Larry Fink and Jeffrey Epstein and people like them— Larry Summers, presumably, who was on the Zappos advisory board— um, you know, these guys want Bitcoin to be a specific thing because they can use it. And there's people in the space like this RSK guy saying Bitcoin needs to lose its revolutionary ethos. It's got to drop that and become a tool for Wall Street. I think it's pretty obvious what needs to be done to scuttle those plans, which would be ensure the opposite.

Marty Bent [1:43:57] Yes.

Whitney Webb [1:43:58] Yes.

Marty Bent [1:43:59] Yes. Use open source software.

Whitney Webb [1:44:01] Yes. So people need to be putting resources into making that Try my best here, Whitney.

Marty Bent [1:44:07] I'm trying my best.

Whitney Webb [1:44:08] Well, sure. But basically, to recap on that, if they need the Bitcoin blockchain for asset storage, and presumably if we're right about what's going on in this article, which we seem to be, carbon markets, they need that blockchain. How do we make— invert their plans and use the Bitcoin blockchain so that it's the tool of financial freedom it was heralded to be because they can't get rid of it without scuttling their own plans.

Marty Bent [1:44:39] No.

Whitney Webb [1:44:40] Right? So how do we—

Marty Bent [1:44:42] Bitcoin is money. It's not digital property.

Whitney Webb [1:44:45] Use it.

Marty Bent [1:44:45] It is digital property, but it is money. And it's hard within Bitcoin. There's a lot of hero worship these days. A lot of people get a lot of pushback for pushing back against the heroes.

Whitney Webb [1:44:56] Yes. Well, it's not just Bitcoin. I mean, it's everywhere. Yeah. And pretty much most of the heroes are bitches for bankers, whether it's in Bitcoin or in politics. I'm sorry, but it's—

Marty Bent [1:45:08] No, Mark, but I'm sure you've observed this.

Mark Goodwin [1:45:11] Trump is not here to save you. QAnon, while a very fun time, we all had a great time looking at it. It was an Operation Trust. It was, hey, our guy's in there. Don't worry about it. We got it. And now here we are, and they locked down the country, they printed trillions of dollars, uh, they pushed Big Pharma products. I mean, uh, you know, none of these people are, are going to jail. Like, uh, no. So, um, I think we— I think Whitney really nailed it, uh, with this inversion thing. And I know it's very controversial within Bitcoin itself, but I think if we kind of use Bitcoin, uh, as a mechanism, uh, to store things as well, Again, it is a database.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ We need to enable Bitcoin as currency as much as possible. Stablecoins are not a scaling option for Bitcoin. It's fucking embarrassing that we're there, that that's our best scaling option. I think that's a terrible way, especially when it's treasury-based. We can do some fun things with DLCs. We can do some fun things with eCash. We can do fun things with Lightning-backed eCash where we can create— or Lightning channels even that basically um, you know, create, uh, you know, a, a stable dollar purchasing, um, you know, ability without actually touching treasuries at all. Um, these are the kind of things we need to play with. I understand and I empathize with people that are looking for dollar instruments, um, in certain economic environments and political environments, but ultimately, if Bitcoin just becomes, okay, 10,000 people got really rich and now it's a data storage blockchain for dollar assets because of Lightning Labs Taproot assets or whatever it is that comes up next, I think we've really failed at the promise that Bitcoin could be.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And so I think there's a lot of ways we can fight back. And obviously, we need to do things like this, get like-minded people together and talk very earnestly about this stuff, people that don't have financial incentives I think that's a huge problem in the Bitcoin space, specifically with stablecoins, is that so many people in the space are paid for by Tether. And I'm sure a lot of them are well-meaning, but they're not going to talk crap about the perpetuation of the treasury system by a private company that has onboarded the FBI and the Secret Service to their company to allow US intelligence and US law enforcement to blacklist addresses.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ That's not banking the Global South. That's not banking the unbanked. That's just perpetuating perpetuating this dollar-denominated debt model over the world, which I think is obviously not something that we want to see. Bitcoin can do so much more. So how can we use Bitcoin cleverly? If they want to use it to store dollar assets in the witness Merkle, we can use it to store data cables. We can use it to store articles like this. You can publish with markdown files to Bitcoin. There's a lot of things that we can do Bitcoin is not going away because it's too important as an enabling environment for a lot of these things.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ I think this idea that, you know, I saw even Edward Snowden tweet out, you know, Gary Gensler had tears in his eyes as he approved the BlackRock ETF. And it's just like, give me a break, dude. Like, no, the state absolutely wanted Bitcoin to have an ETF. They hold more Bitcoin than anyone. The US DOJ, and private companies within the United States hold more Bitcoin than anyone else, significant portion of the supply. This idea that this is this complete counterrevolution to US dollar interest, I think, is a little bit misguided and naive at this point. Now, we have to really make sure that we don't allow it to be co-opted by dollarizers.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ We don't allow Bitcoin to be dollarized. And instead, we push back and we say, hey, I have an ability to send you, Marty, money without any fucking spook getting in the fucking way at all. And that's fucking important, and that's magical, and that's something that, you know, we need to make sure stays possible. That, you know, we own UTXOs, we own the ability to do that. We'll be able to transact, you know, on Bitcoin to each other for, you know, the next— for the rest of our lives. How can we get a billion people there? How can we get more people to have that same permissionless access to Bitcoin that we have because we were quote-unquote early adopters, right?

Mark Goodwin ⋮ There were much earlier adopters than us that have a lot more Bitcoin than us. Who are they? Why is Dee Hock? Why is John Reed? Why is Larry Summers on the advisory board to Zappos in 2013, 2014? These huge titans of Citibank, of Visa, You know, why is Epstein talking about Bitcoin back then? You know what? There's a lot of people that have a lot more Bitcoin than us, right? Another important thing. Yeah, go for it. I'm sorry for no, you're good.

Marty Bent [1:50:11] Zappo acquired by Coinbase holds all the ETF Bitcoin.

Mark Goodwin [1:50:16] Yeah, the custody. Yes, exactly. That the custody solution that Zappo, you know, yeah, they were. I think they literally. literally marketed themselves as the Fort Knox of Bitcoin, I think, which is kind of an interesting analogy to choose. Yes. And the Titanic of ships. What actually happened at Fort Knox here?

Marty Bent [1:50:39] White pill. White pill. Don't want to be too optimistic, and we should certainly be aware and fighting against all this stuff. But I am incredibly encouraged by all the innovation that's happening, particularly with Chaumian mints, whether that's on the Cashew protocol or the Fedimint protocol. It is obviously— it does come with some custody trade-offs, but I think the privacy benefits and the fact that you can build these modular DLC stability pools within Chaumian eCash systems that give you the same functionality of the centrally controlled stablecoins. Yeah. coins is very promising. I mean, we're doing everything we can at 1031 to back the companies pushing the industry in this particular direction.

Marty Bent ⋮ Oh yeah, you are. Totally. We've got the Feddy team here, the Mutiny team here, working hard to do this. And I think it's a combination of things that are going to lead to this success. The backing of these projects, number one. Then two, what you guys are doing, educating the market and really instilling confidence in people to push back against this because, um, it is a bit daunting. It is a bit ominous. It is a David versus Goliath-like fight where people have been psyoped into believing they have no agency and therefore no ability to push back against this. But it's here. The tools are being built.

Marty Bent ⋮ You just have to be aware of them, support them, adopt them, um, and then at the same time, uh, as Whitney likes to say, like, stab a needle in the eye of everybody trying to push us towards the digital panopticon.

Whitney Webb [1:52:12] Yeah, well, I think it's important to say too that I think, um, there's a lot of people in the Bitcoin media space that will never talk about this or what you just mentioned. And I think a lot of that is because a lot of money and effort has been put into specifically homogenizing, uh, media discourse in the Bitcoin space because they want them They want Bitcoiners as much as possible to be compliant while Larry Fink and his ilk do what they want with Bitcoin and make it what they want it to be so that people are content with number go up and sort of the Saylor-esque talking points that have gotten a lot of, you know, a lot of people have heard those versus what you just mentioned from examples.

Whitney Webb ⋮ You know, there needs to be a cultural shift in Bitcoin in the opposite direction of what this Diego guy from Rootstock said, where he's like we need to drop the whole you know stop fiscal irresponsibility of the banks and central banks and you know be a challenge and threat to their power. We have to drop that if we want to get rich. I mean, that's the mentality there, and I feel like the sale. mentality really isn't that different from that. We have to push people in the other direction, because if we go in the direction they're pushing those, you know, people to go in, you know, people that want to drop the ethos or whatever and make Bitcoin just a tool for Wall Street, um, I mean, no.

Whitney Webb ⋮ If we let that happen, very bad things happen. And there has to be a fight. And there's a specific effort that's been launched against people that hold Bitcoin to try and get them to be compliant in that sense. And, you know, and, but, and that's through, you know, controlling the discourse in the media space. There needs to be a desire among Bitcoiners to return to the original ethos, uh, not the opposite. There needs to be a fight for that. People need to care about that again.

Marty Bent [1:54:11] Imagine the glory.

Mark Goodwin [1:54:12] Compliance is not defiance, I think, as the Bitcoin Bugle Boys Like say compliance. They say compliance is defiance, which obviously is making fun of this stuff. And I totally agree, Whitney. And you know, I think it was very said very clearly in the sailor keynote from Pack Bitcoin 2022. Literally, as you know, FTX was collapsing around us. You know, literally, you know, our phones are blowing up. All this crazy shit's happening November 2022. Sailors on stage saying, "Don't be a martyr." Don't fight the system. Uh, stablecoins on Lightning is a $10 trillion industry. Um, you know, let's, let's go, let's bring it on. You know, we're all gonna get rich. Um, don't be a martyr.

Whitney Webb [1:54:55] Bend over for Larry.

Mark Goodwin [1:54:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bite the pillow. Uh, they're going in raw. I don't want this to be like calling for people to, to go, to go be a martyr. Like, I'm not saying go set yourself on fire in front of, you know, the BlackRock headquarters. That's— I'm not— that's not helpful either. It's not productive at all. Um, plus the emissions, the carbon emissions from burning yourself, I think, you know, uh, it's very bad. I wouldn't— I would hate to see—

Marty Bent [1:55:26] you're gonna get it. You're gonna get an estate tax ding on top.

Whitney Webb [1:55:29] Yeah, your family will be taxed for that. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:55:34] And imagine the glory.

Marty Bent [1:55:35] I owe Satellodges Yeah, imagine the glory. I think we can—

Mark Goodwin [1:55:41] But there has to be things we have to do.

Marty Bent [1:55:42] Yes, but then the, the path that we're describing here is a harder path to take. It's gonna take longer, it's gonna take a lot more effort, it's gonna take a lot more education and new learnings from individuals to actually interact with this compared to an ETF where you don't interact with TD Ameritrade or whoever, and you just click a button, and that's your interaction with Bitcoin. That's not the future we want. We want to actually interact with the protocol and the layers built on top of it, and actually hold and use Bitcoin correctly. And I want to paint the picture of a glorious victory where we successfully do that. And if we can build out the tools and make Bitcoin as useful and provide the market with fundamental utility that gives people agency over their money, Bitcoin will number will go up naturally from that, that path as well. It's just going to be longer and harder, but I promise you—

Whitney Webb [1:56:39] Yeah, but it doesn't involve everyone's financial enslavement, and it doesn't enable the fiscal irresponsibility of the commercial and central banks to you to, to dump all the irresponsible, like, debt generated by their money printing into, like, Bitcoin and be like, oh, problem solved, keep printing Forever. I mean, that's basically what they want to do. It's insane. It is. And there's people that are like, "That's fine because now I have money." And it's like, yeah. So you remember why you got into this? And like, you know, I don't know. Yeah. It's just let's go back.

Mark Goodwin [1:57:12] Yeah. People get on us. You know, I'm I'm still new at you know some of this stuff, and you know I still read comments and whatever, and and I see people say stuff you know where they're like, well, you don't. offer any solutions. You're just blackpilled. You're like doom shilling. And it's like, I'm actually like a really upbeat, optimistic guy. Like, I think we're gonna win. I think we have a lot of work ahead of us and we have an incredibly ghoulish apparatus that we need to fight. Um, but I really, you know, I'm a monomyth guy. I believe in the, you know, our history is fake and, uh, but the stories are real.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And in the stories, the good comes together in the end. And, uh, you know, they, uh, they defeat the dragon or whatever, right? And, and I think that's what we have to do here. And I'm really thankful for shows, um, you know, like TFTC and, uh, you know, certain platforms where we actually can talk about this stuff still. You know, there's like a couple of them, um, and, you know, getting us like-minded people together just to be able to talk freely about this stuff is, is so important. Um, you know, this is, you know, uh, this is, this is fiery stuff, I think, with this piece and And particularly with kind of this conspiracy of what they're trying to do.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ But it hasn't happened yet. None of this stuff has really been enacted yet. It's all about to be enacted. And there's a bunch of stuff that we can still do and push back. And as much as Bitcoin is an empowerment tool for a lot of these evil people, it also can be an empowerment tool for revolutionary action. So maybe they made a mistake if they tried to co-opt Bitcoin and they let a bunch of us get funding. Maybe they made a mistake by letting your fund be able to fund Mutiny and Fedi, by letting us get some capital and deploy it efficiently. We actually have an ability here.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ What happens— I think this is one of the most important years for Bitcoin ever. I think it's one of the most important moments ever for humanity, you know, because this revolution is happening regardless. This digitalization, you know, this panopticon is gonna be built, and, you know, we have to kind of make technological strides and pushbacks now. And there are so many ways we can do it, but ultimately, you know, it's really about, you know, the revolution is an internal thing. It's a singular thing, and, you know, we just have to live better lives, and we have to to, you know, give the lives to our kids that, you know, that they deserve and show them the world that they deserve.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And we can win on so many different levels. Um, you know, the human spirit is, is a beautiful, wonderful thing, and it can't be captured by a blockchain, uh, you know, run by, uh, some federated key signers somewhere. You know, there's, there's so many things that just can't be bogged down by a blockchain. Um, so, you know, we gotta really just, you know, buckle down figure out, you know, who our enemies are. And a lot of them are, are, uh, you know, in sheep's clothing. And, and we, we roll down the, the red carpet for them at all these events as they're literally manufacturing consent for censorship, for dollarization, uh, and the enslavement of the Global South via dollars.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ Um, and we need to push back on these things, not be afraid to talk about them, because discourse is the first thing that they capture. It's also the first ground that we can win with Truth resonates like crazy. There's a reason why I jokingly refer to Whitney as like the ghost in the machine where she gets crazy numbers on all these things. But it's like, you know, she's pushing back on their very tools. Like, that's what's so funny about, you know, you know, we're enslaved by the algorithms, right? But also we can fight back using those same algorithms that, you know, are trying to enslave us.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ We can push back with good content because it does resonate. So it's really important that we do this stuff, and yeah, I'm just thankful to be here. Yeah, and there's so much left to do, but this is where it starts really is discourse.

Marty Bent [2:01:02] Well, discourse, and I'm very happy you said the R word because that's talk about language control. That's one word revolution that some Bitcoiners like don't say it, don't say it. Like we don't want the state to think that we're pushing up against them. It's like no, we need a revolution. Look around you. Look at what's going on. Look at this carbon credit program. They're literally. We're going to be sending satellites in the sky to send data to smart contracts that dictate whether or not you can spend money at the grocery store next month. It is time for a revolution. The revolution does not need to be bloody, I don't think. Like you just said, Mark, I think we have the ability to leverage the same tools that they do in a different way to have a successful revolution against this impending fucking hellscape that they're trying to push on us. And you can't be afraid of that word. I can't be scared. Go ahead, Whitney.

Whitney Webb [2:01:50] I just want to chime in really quick. So part of what we're talking about here, part of the way to defeat this apparatus that Mark— as Mark referred to it, so much of what they do, including their media ops in efforts to control discourse, but also just getting people to onboard to stuff when they otherwise wouldn't, it all runs on fear, right? And all the stuff that happened during COVID people fell in line because of fear. It's all fear-based, pretty much everything they do. A great way to not fall into that is not be afraid of these people, no matter what psyop they throw at you.

Whitney Webb ⋮ And I think this year, election year, not just in the US but in much of the world, uh, yeah, unprecedented fear-based psyops are going to be coming one after the other until they get enough people to comply and acquiesce. And the way to, uh, you know, get around that is to not fall into it. You know, it's the trap, and a lot of it is the media discourse. And I think, you know, the more controlled online discourse becomes, the greater the effort will be to use it to get people to be very afraid of what's happening.

Mark Goodwin [2:02:59] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:03:00] And if you unplug a little bit and spend more time in, like, the actual world, you are much less likely to feel that way. And I think that's why during COVID they wanted so much of our discourse to be be online. And then they took even greater control of the online discourse. And we know now, under the guise of election censorship, they're going to clamp down even more on online discourse and lead it in very particular directions. They want Americans in particular to be at each other's throats, you know, textbook divide and conquer. Among other things though, I mean, they have this whole war on domestic terror apparatus, all this stuff about civil war and we need this and that.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Regular Americans are generally on the same side. And they want to divide everyone, and it's all through fear. And they've been doing this psyop after psyop after psyop, whether it's 9/11, COVID, you name it. I mean, it's all fear-based and wants to alienate you from your local community. Like, again, it's about self-reliance at the local level. You know, that's a big part of the response, but it's also, you know, getting people, not just you yourself, though obviously that's where you start, But making sure that the fear doesn't anchor in to you know where you are based. I think that's a big part of it. Just that's all I wanted to say.

Whitney Webb ⋮ Thanks. Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:04:18] Well, in in terms of like this, like in two points, what you said earlier, election year, fear-based divide and conquer is being employed. If you're not for Biden, you should be for Trump. If you're not for Trump, you should be for Biden.

Whitney Webb [2:04:34] Bullshit. They do this every 4 years. How have people not figured it out?

Marty Bent [2:04:37] And we have— we have an example this week. Nothing matters because the FISA reauthorization and the expansion of FISA this week— you have a Republican-controlled House, you have a Democrat president, and they're both like, yeah, we're gonna surveil you more.

Whitney Webb [2:04:57] Same shit, different rhetoric. Only difference, I mean, It's a rhetorical difference that's ultimately meaningless.

Marty Bent [2:05:03] And on the line of pushing all the discourse digital, what they just expanded FISA to be able to do is going to be able to give the government the ability to granularly target people that are exhibiting speech that they don't like. They just got the ability to literally tell coffee shops, you need to give us all your Wi-Fi traffic data so that we can surveil everybody. FISA, which was originally supposed to be targeted towards foreigners.

Whitney Webb [2:05:29] Terrorists.

Marty Bent [2:05:31] Yeah, terrorists. Now it's really—

Whitney Webb [2:05:33] Yeah, well—

Marty Bent [2:05:34] The government just told your coffee shop they had to give the government your email address.

Whitney Webb [2:05:37] What Palantir originally was— so Palantir was originally Total Information Awareness, and then they tried to rename it Terrorist Information Awareness, but Total Information Awareness is what they always wanted, and that's surveilling everyone. For everything. And it's surveilling people at the biological level, like the to-stop-pandemics-before-they-start narrative. That was part of it. It was also about financial surveillance. It was surveilling what you buy at the grocery store. That is literally what they are doing again. But it's a mix of public entities and private entities that are all in these— involved in these opaque partnerships. So it's not one clear clearly defined program at DARPA like it was originally supposed to be.

Whitney Webb ⋮ But the goal is to completely erode privacy, to completely surveil everything and prevent X before it happens. X being literally anything they don't want to happen or say they don't want to happen. So prevent crime before it happens. Pre-crime. William Barr, Attorney General under Trump, legalized pre-crime in the United States. It will come. They've set it up, you know, and they want it all to run on your data. They want to prevent, you know, they'll say it's for terrorist attacks, it's for pandemics, it's for crisis X, Y, and Z, it's for climate calamity. You know, we have to prevent it before it happens. It's all algorithmic based, but it's all— they can only manufacture consent for that if there's a climate of fear.

Marty Bent [2:07:00] Yeah. Period.

Mark Goodwin [2:07:03] And what's that Trevor Moore, that Trevor Moore tweet where he's like, hey, what if, you know, all these spooks discovered, you know, through the MKUltra program that you can control, uh, humans through fear-based tactics. And now they simulate, uh, you know, events, uh, in the public to instill fear, to like control the masses, you know, hahaha. And then, you know, of course he died, you know, a month later or whatever. But I think that idea of, uh, you know, fear-based control, it's something that we've seen. Um, you know, there's this great Baudrillard book, um, Simacron and Simulation, that, you know, talks about this idea of, you know, if you are a person in a bodega and someone comes in to rob the place and you— this fear is instilled in you because someone comes in with a gun and holds it up at the person and goes to rob the register and you're fearful for your life.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And then as soon as it's over, they turn and they go, hey, just kidding. I'm actually an actor and he's an actor and this is a fake gun. gun, it doesn't matter. The, the fear and the emotional, uh, you know, output that you had because of this, this simulated input, it doesn't matter that it's fake. You still have that same emotional response and you still react in the way as if it was real. Um, you know, they've realized this, that this is such an incredible tactic to control people at an individual level. This very clearly works at, uh, you know, at a, at a mass And now we're seeing you know fear-based tactics everywhere.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ I mean COVID made us fearful of each other. The climate you know game game game here makes us fearful of you know it makes humans basically exactly it makes us fearful of the earth and also the the thing that causes the weather to to go bad is human action. It makes the enemy of the world humans are like themselves. And this is something explicitly stated by like the Club of Rome, you know, ghouls that, you know, are behind a lot of these things. You know, they've really turned humans into being fearful of each other, divided. If there's a subject they don't want people to talk about, they create, you know, through Operation Mockingbird and other tactics, they create manufactured discourse about manufactured events to shepherd people into this fear.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ fake/false dichotomy. And now we're stuck in these 2 choices that were both fake to begin with, that were simulated through fake events. And it's really wild when you see, okay, hey, YouTube is bad because Google's bad. We all know that, right? So let's all go to Rumble. Well, hey, Cantor Fitzgerald took Rumble public, right? It's the same people that are—

Whitney Webb [2:09:48] Peter Thiel funds it.

Mark Goodwin [2:09:49] Peter Thiel funds it from Palantir. It's the same people that were fearful. What are we afraid of Google? Oh, because they have all our data and they run everything and, and, you know, they're not so great. Well, Palantir is better. Cantor Fitzgerald is better. Why is Peter Thiel better than Susan, you know, YouTube? Why is that any better? You know, it's, it's this total false dichotomy, and we fall hook, line, and sinker for it because we have these Pied Pipers that are literally paid paid, uh, you know, to lead us there. Um, you can see that on X so, so like obviously with, you know, the people paid by, by Elon to, to post on there. You know, this idea that X is the public square is just so ridiculous. You know, now they're gonna start charging for posts.

Marty Bent [2:10:35] The amount of murder videos I've been fed and like fights at schools that I've been fed. And another thing, it's getting so egregious, like around the totality solar eclipse, like the amount of content that was just being flooded with, oh my gosh, the world's going to end after this, there's going to be earthquakes, like they're going to cyberattack. Like, it's—

Whitney Webb [2:10:52] They want people scared as fuck all the time. That's what they're doing. Yep, yep.

Marty Bent [2:10:57] And I, I almost fell for it over the weekend with the Iran bombing Israel. I was like, oh shit, World War III. Then I took a couple minutes, I was at a baseball game with my boys and my wife, and I was like, you know what, this is definitely something being manipulated here. All wars are banker wars, and both sides are being played in this.

Mark Goodwin [2:11:17] Iran totally wasn't couped by the CIA. You know, it's totally not a world empire. You know, all of these conflicts are real. Russia and Ukraine didn't have the exact same COVID policies. You know, it's just lunacy that we understand so much about what's happening, You know, zoomed out. And then when we get locked into these little, you know, I'm on Team A, I'm on Team B, it's like, well, fuck that guy. You know, he's wearing the wrong color on his shirt. Uh, you know, I'm a Red Sox fan, he's a Yankees fan, like, fuck that guy. It's like, no, we're all being controlled. Uh, you know, let's, let's, let's get together here. Even sometimes I think with, you know, some of the dissonance that I think was, was ultimately generally correct.

Marty Bent [2:12:02] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [2:12:03] Like with COVID um, you know, obviously it was, it was a pretty wild time, um, to be looking around looking for any signal anywhere. Um, but, you know, so much of COVID dissonance was, you know, absurd things about vaccines and all this stuff. And I'm not, I'm no vaccine fan. I wouldn't do it. I'm not vaccinated. But, you know, a lot of the discourse was very controlled and very insane. And it's graphene and nanotechnology.

Marty Bent [2:12:26] Like, all you don't have a 5G antenna in you? Good job.

Mark Goodwin [2:12:28] No, not yet. Not yet. Not yet. But, and I don't know ultimately, right? Like, I'm not sure. I'm just a guy with internet access for the moment. But, you know, so much of the discourse was controlled so quickly to divide each other and to distract from— no one talks about the lockdowns. No one talks about, you know, printing trillions of dollars. Like, it's, it's all about the vaccines and are you on this side or this side, and it became this politicized thing.

Marty Bent [2:12:54] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [2:12:55] That was literally inverted in front of our eyes, where Kamala is saying, I'm not taking the vaccine because it's Trump's vaccine, to 6 months later, you know, I'm getting yelled at and being called a Trumper because I'm not vaccinated. And it's like, well, what the fuck? He's the vaccine guy. Like, what? Like, did no one just see this phase shift happen in real life? Am I going crazy? Like, what happened?

Marty Bent [2:13:15] Excuse me, you're not a Trumper. You're a murdering Trumper. Okay, you're murdering your grandmother.

Mark Goodwin [2:13:21] Exactly. And it's just, it's, it's, it's so wild. And, and, and I think even some of the smart people really fell for it. I mean, and it's really tough to stay up on psyops. I mean, it's very hard. But I think in general, when there's something that is trying to divide people to a dichotomy, the dichotomy is wrong. Like, like, the world is not black and white. It's very gray. And so whenever there's very clear black and white you know, tropes. That's a very, very big trope of some of these, you know, groups that control us, is false dichotomies of black and white. And just whenever you see that, you know, you should raise a little flag and be wary of that, in my opinion.

Marty Bent [2:14:00] Agreed. Be aware, freaks. Be aware. Be the patriot you want to see in control. Don't depend on Q, okay? This has been great. 2 hours. Do you have anything we should leave the freaks with, Whitney? Any final thoughts?

Whitney Webb [2:14:19] Yeah, don't let them— I don't know. I mean, there's so much stuff to say. I feel like I've already said it. Just, I guess, repeating, don't fall into the fear-based psyops. It's just maybe we should get offline a little bit more, everybody. And also, Please do not let Bitcoin become Larry Fink's little bitch. I mean, that's just embarrassing. Yeah. Please don't do it.

Mark Goodwin [2:14:46] That's my second wrap up.

Marty Bent [2:14:50] Plant a garden. Never go up amnesia is a good good phrase I'm gonna take from this one because it is hard. Take it, baby. Sitting there, your old Bitcoin numbers going up. You're like, oh shit! This this feels good. You have to fight that urge. It's a.

Whitney Webb [2:15:03] Well, they want to try and buy people out and be like, oh, you wanted to be a revolutionary, did you? Well, here's, you know, 6 figures.

Mark Goodwin [2:15:11] Yeah. How about a second saltwater pool? How about a hot tub, Mark? You know, it's like, how about you peel off a little Satoshi and get yourself something nice? You know, it's like, no, I don't give a fuck about that actually. Like, I'm, I got into this stuff, you know, totally not because I, I was never a thing about getting rich. And, you know, I want to use, you know, whatever funds I've been lucky to get to, you know, to do— to establish sustainable, which I know is a dirty word these days, but to just to create sustainable architecture that, you know, can really push back on these things.

Mark Goodwin ⋮ And, you know, I think we all have a duty, I think, of Bitcoiners to keep Bitcoin permissionless, keep the spirit alive of the Mershas and the Amir Takis and and the Martis and, and, uh, you know, and, and push and push that shit forward, um, you know, and, uh, and keep Bitcoin, keep Bitcoin freaky, um, and, you know, yeah, don't, don't let BlackRock, uh, dollarize Bitcoin, please. That's, that's my final word.

Marty Bent [2:16:13] Well, I know for certain I can give you 2, um, this is what I'm looking for. It's not closure. You can, uh, you can understand well that there's at least 4 or 5 teams working to build products that push us in the right direction here, right in Bitcoin Commons here in Austin. Educate yourself, freaks. Don't be afraid to speak up. That's been one of my goals, initiatives, I guess you can say, over the last 6 to 9 months particularly, is I repeat it. I'm sorry if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my God, Marty, I can't believe you're saying it again, but it cannot be understated.

Marty Bent ⋮ educated, you need the confidence to speak up against this. There are very prominent figures in the space who we've discussed throughout this 2-hour conversation that want to push you a certain way. Yes, they may say a lot of right things, but you have to listen for the dog whistles trying to push you in a certain direction subconsciously. And don't be afraid to speak out. Say, no, Bitcoin is money. I do want to use it to transact. I do think I think the US dollar reserve system is inherently evil, and I do want to replace it with Bitcoin. I want to use Bitcoin as my money.

Marty Bent ⋮ I want to use it in a self-sovereign fashion, in a peer-to-peer fashion. And that's not bad to say. It's not bad to vocalize those thoughts, especially— there may be very rich people, there may be very prominent people, there may be people who are very articulate, certainly more articulate than me, that that put a good smile on, they jack people up, they help number go up. But in the long run, the timeline of Bitcoin's success being an asset that's Larry Fink's little pet rock that he integrates into the financial system is not the future, not the timeline that I want to live on. So have the confidence to speak up.

Whitney Webb [2:18:10] Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:18:13] Whitney Mark.

Whitney Webb [2:18:13] Well said. I thought that was very articulate, Marty.

Marty Bent [2:18:16] I'm not known for— I can't pronounce words. Clip it, clip it, clip it. When can we expect part 2 to drop?

Mark Goodwin [2:18:25] Oh, well, am I pushing timelines on you guys?

Marty Bent [2:18:30] A month. Okay.

Mark Goodwin [2:18:32] Yeah, uh, halving is a little crazy over here in Bitcoin Magazine world. But yeah, I'm hoping to get some good headway in it in the next week or two. Yeah, I'd say sometime in May.

Marty Bent [2:18:46] All right, so we'll congregate again at some point in May to follow up.

Whitney Webb [2:18:51] Sounds good.

Marty Bent [2:18:52] I think not repetition, but to keep getting this message out there is important.

Whitney Webb [2:18:58] Agreed. Well, thanks a lot, Marty.

Marty Bent [2:19:02] Thank you, guys.

Mark Goodwin [2:19:03] Yeah, thanks for having us.

Marty Bent [2:19:04] Peace and love. D'key!