Transcript: Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on the Privatized Surveillance State

Whitney Webb [0:00] When you look at, you know, what it's building toward, and if we have that kind of system where, like, you know, peace through surveillance, mass surveillance, and like peace through a police state and all of that stuff, like, yeah, I mean, you, you can have an extremely authoritarian, totalitarian government impose order. But that's not really what most people think of when they see the flowery description that they give of SGG-16. But when you read what it's actually about, A very different picture emerges, and they can't do it without digital ID. They can't do it without implementing this whole surveillance panopticon, and they're relying hugely on private sector partners to build that.

Marty Bent [0:43] This Rip of TFTC was brought to you by River. It's the best place to buy Bitcoin. Go to river.com/tftc. and enjoy this episode.

Mark Goodwin [0:57] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

Whitney Webb [1:07] 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 [1:15] 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 [1:26] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [1:29] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. Woo doggy! What an interesting week, Whitney and Mark.

Whitney Webb [1:41] We yeah, to say the least.

Marty Bent [1:43] I think we scheduled this a couple of weeks ago, but considering everything that's happened over the last. 4 or 5 days, I think, uh, the conversation's gonna start in a different direction. So obviously we had the attempted assassination on Donald Trump over the weekend at a, at a, an event in Pennsylvania, uh, and since then a lot has happened. We've had the announcement of his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance out of Ohio. And we're a week away from the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, and there's a big lead-up. So there's a lot of intersecting themes here as we meet to talk about all this today. I think just starting with that, the assassination attempt and everything that's unfolded since then, what are your shoot-from-the-hip responses to what's been going on?

Whitney Webb [2:41] Well, you know, in my case, I didn't really look. Too much into the aftermath of the assassination. I know people have been— assassination attempt. I know people have been saying a lot of things. I think it's rather odd that— so there's very little known about the shooter. He basically exists in a 2022 BlackRock commercial and there's very little on him, no manifesto. I mean, if you think about some of the big name or the mass shooters or shootings that got big bigger attention in recent years, there's a lot more on them, either scrubbed from the internet or their social media posts or all sorts of things. Seems like this one's kind of a— I don't know, not a lot of info on him, which is kind of interesting. But, you know, again, a lot of people are more focused on that than perhaps his VP pick or any of the other things that he's come out and said since that. such as his willingness to consider putting Jamie Dimon in charge of the Treasury Department, you know, things like that. So, you know, I honestly don't know exactly what happened there. And I haven't, again, looked at it too closely. And I don't want to get in trouble by commenting on things that I haven't studied, you know. But generally, you know, when these things happen, regardless of whether it was organic or not, The responses, especially people's emotional responses, are always manipulated by the powers that be. And, you know, I think that's something people should perhaps keep in mind because, you know, the federal government, intelligence agencies, and also, you know, in the private sector, it's pretty well known that people tend to make decisions based on how they feel rather than, you know, what they're— rather than critical thought or rational thought. So, you know, when people are very emotional and very emotionally wound up, you know, they tend to try and move people more than perhaps they would otherwise. And I guess that's all I really have to say about it. I don't know if—

Mark Goodwin [4:49] Yeah, well, totally. Well, I think it's, you know, it's interesting. I think everything that you kind of just said is totally spot on. It's interesting that like the main guy that's kind of come out and been like false flag was like Reid Hoffman, who is like a huge part of this piece that we just, that we just dropped, honestly, huge part of it. But he's kind of a social network data baron, founded LinkedIn, but is super important in PayPal, and he's on the Microsoft board, and he's really heavily connected with Endeavor Group. But I think it's really interesting when you look at kind of what Whitney just said, like this idea that they're basically trying to manufacture consent and simulate reaction using social networks as sort of the main way that we intake information. And these social networks are all run by this kind of data broker social network cabal, basically this Facebook group that Whitney's written a lot about coming out of DARPA and kind of military origins of social networks. And They now have it. They have it so dialed in now that they can basically use these networks and use stimulus to very specifically direct it at certain bands of demographics. And they can basically kind of simulate and stimulate a reaction of very specific groups. They can look at far-right groups. They can look at people with interest in anti-government ideals. They can look at people that just totally line up to eat up the slop of the CNN narrative or whatever. And they can kind of exactly pick these people and feed them very specific data points using these network tools that are just really great for, yeah, taking data, scraping data, but also their data distribution networks as well. And so now we're seeing this just totally hyper-real, you know, they're going to do whatever they want to do. We're going to go wherever they want us to go anyway. A lot of this election stuff every 4 years, people just forget that they're pushing us wherever they want to go. And they use social networks and they use this sort of data distribution to manufacture consent for where it's going. And I think that's kind of just where we're at with this. I haven't really looked too much into it. I've been trying to stay off. So these social networks.

Whitney Webb [7:20] There's a lot of other work to be done in, you know, this line of work, I guess. You know, plenty of other people are covering, you know, the weekend's events. And to sort of piggyback on what Mark was saying, you know, one of the big efforts of the people sort of guiding AI policy in the United States, they've talked about how AI can— will be leading us into divergent realities based on what information is shown to people, what the algorithm's shown to people. And so, like, you know, if you look at the events over the weekend, a lot of people, like, on the left, right, were— it was being said more over there that this was like a staged thing, or also stuff like, you know, uh, very different data points. And then if you look at what was in the, in, you know, in more right-leaning circles on social media, like, a completely different narrative. And ultimately you have these people being like cognitively divided in a sense, like essentially living in separate realities. And because they just perceive these events so differently. Right. So anyway, something to keep in mind as we go forward, because I'm sure there's going to be a lot more crazy stuff happening during this election season going forward.

Marty Bent [8:36] Yeah. Somebody who's been very online over the last 5 days. It's— it is just And that's what I'm trying to figure out. Like, to me, at this point, based on what I've consumed from an information perspective, and I've seen what you described on both sides, um, the left saying it was staged by Trump, Trump saying it— or people— I don't think Trump said anything explicitly, but people on the right saying that it was, uh, an attempt at assassination in the lead-up so that the incumbents could keep power. But I also think there's like a possibility that the incumbent Republicans tried to do something, um, to keep their power. Because that's— I mean, the aftermath of all this, like, I think at this point I do believe somebody tried to kill him unsuccessfully. It's obvious to me that there was a lapse in security that is either negligent to the point of, uh, like just the worst incompetence that you could ever see, or it was intentional to um, create the next JFK event, if you will. But the aftermath is such that where it seems like the upcoming tech-forward conservative faction in this country is seeing it as a massive power grab. And obviously, I think J.D. Vance being inserted as the vice president is, is evidence to that, to sort of take over at least the Republican Party and put forward a new plan of where this country is going if Trump gets in. It's wild times. This episode was presented by River. River's The best, most secure place to buy Bitcoin in the United States. Go to river.com/tftc, set up an account today. You'll be able to DCA into Bitcoin without paying any fees. You'll be able to give people Bitcoin via River links. You'll be able to send and receive Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and you'll be able to set limit orders. If you want to buy Bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now, you can set orders to buy Bitcoin when it hits that price. Go to river.com/tftc. And set up your account today. This trip was also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is building a financial services platform for a Bitcoin standard. They have over 7,000 clients that are securing over 90,000 Bitcoin with 12,000 keys on their platform. Their platform leverages Bitcoin's native multisig properties. Their cornerstone product is their vault product, a 2-of-3 multisig vault, which allows you to hold 2 of 3 keys in a multisig quorum. That gives you full control over your Bitcoin. They also have an IRA product, a lending desk, and they're rolling out a bunch of other products including an inheritance protocol and sound advisory. So go to unchained.com, set up a call with their concierge onboarding team today, tell 'em that TFTC sent you and use the promo code TFTC at checkout. unchained.com.

Whitney Webb [11:25] Yeah, well on that note, I think it's interesting that in the past few days, you know, there's been reports of an alleged Iranian assassination plan targeting Trump. And then JD Vance rescues us from the— While his base is very— yeah, while his base is very wound up, right?

Mark Goodwin [11:43] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [11:44] Being like, it was the Iranians, you know? And then JD Vance is, uh, named, and then he goes, uh, just a few hours after, talks about, you know, the need to punch Iran hard and all this stuff. Um, interesting, um, when you consider that there's been a long-standing effort to sort of get us— get the United States embroiled in, in war with Iran. going on, you know, probably over 2 decades now. So, and obviously, you know, his base isn't really into the whole, you know, more wars thing. Not that really any Americans are at this point, except people that directly benefit from them. So I don't know. I think that's an interesting development. But as far as J.D. Vance is concerned, you know, he's an Ohio guy. He used to do— he's, you know, been involved in at least one fundraiser at Leslie Wexner's house, who again is the richest man in Ohio and a pretty important figure in the Epstein scandal. And I mean, that's the reality of people that come to power in Ohio, just like in Chicago. If you want to be crowned political royalty in Chicago, you have to make good with the Pritzkers and the Crowns and families like that. I mean, in the state of Ohio, it's kind of similar, if not with Wexner himself, with his kind of broader network. He's dominated politics in that state for a very, very long time. And but really the name that's most important as it relates to Vance is going to be Peter Thiel. As people have noted, Vance worked at Mithril Capital where he— Mithril, by the way, a big investor in the stablecoin issuer Paxos, which plays a pretty big role in the piece we'll be discussing later. And Mithril— from Mithril, he went on to be involved with some of these other VC funds, one tied to an AOL co-founder, one of them receiving a lot of money, this Rise of the Rest fund. It was heavily funded by people like Jeff Bezos and the Walton family from Walmart, who, if you're familiar with The Waltons, are very tied up historically with the Clintons, specifically Hillary. And then from there, he's involved— his political career, a lot of Thiel involvement. Once again, a lot of donations from from Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, like David Sacks and Elon Musk, of course, you know, being a big, you know, part of the fundraising apparatus, as are some other companies that Thiel helped create, like Palantir, which is now part of this super PAC with the Winklevoss twins and Elon Musk. And then you also have Joe Lonsdale, who's a Palantir co-founder with Peter Thiel, joining that. So why is this bad? I could probably go on a rant for a very long time about Peter Thiel, so I'm just going to try and condense it. I've been reporting on him and specifically on Palantir for a very long time. Uh, if I would encourage people to look at those reports because there is— it's, it's very clear that Palantir was expressly created by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to be the privatization of this program that was— they tried to launch after 9/11 at DARPA that was called Total Information Awareness. Pretty sure, Marty, we've discussed it. before. And Total Information Awareness was basically to create a giant data mining operation that would be combined with artificial intelligence for the purpose of basically creating a pre-crime society, not just predictive policing, but also predicting pandemics before they happen and bioterror attacks and terror attacks before they happen. And since then, it's been, you know, privatized as Palantir. Palantir's done all of those things. They, during COVID they were trying to predict COVID outbreaks before they happened by surveilling wastewater in conjunction with HHS. They've done predictive policing programs all throughout the United States. They're a contractor with pretty much every intelligence agency. Their only client until 2008 was the CIA. Palantir engineers in the early years of the company made over 200 visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Alex Karpis said on record the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir. And the TIA program, though it was housed at DARPA, was created in conjunction with the close involvement of the CIA, particularly the CIA's then Chief Information Officer, Alan Wade, who was also a business partner of Christine Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's sister, in a company called Kiliad that was very similar. The software program it produced was similar in many ways to Palantir as well. So, you know, Palantir, for all intents and purposes, is the panopticon software that TIA was meant to be. And it's important to keep in mind where TIA originally came from. The person that ran TIA was a man named John Poindexter, who was one of the— actually the top figure in the Reagan administration to be charged as part of the Iran-Contra scandal. And in direct relation with the Iran-Contra scandal, Poindexter and also Oliver North and other figures involved in Iran-Contra created a database using the PROMISE software, which again involved Robert Maxwell and Christine Maxwell specifically, and really the CIA and Israeli intelligence. And so the PROMISE software was basically a sort of a proto-Palantir, you could say, a way to sort of like data mine and, you know, generate intelligence from these, these masses of data. And Main Corps was basically described as a list of Americans that could be rounded up in a time— in a vaguely defined national crisis, which, you know, could be something like nonviolent protests against military— US military intervention abroad, right? So a big protest against an invasion of Iran or an invasion of Iraq or whatever could trigger it, something like that. And it was, you know, very vaguely defined once again.

Mark Goodwin [17:47] Right.

Whitney Webb [17:49] And it was active well past Iran-Contra. But actually, when it was like asked about during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearings were just like shut down. Oliver North like didn't answer the question. They just shut down the hearing for him so he didn't have to. And it was operating on 9/11. As the last time it was reported on by like a mainstream outlet, it was like 2008. And at that point, it was estimated to have 3 million Americans on it.

Mark Goodwin [18:15] Wow.

Whitney Webb [18:17] Palantir basically decides who's on that list today. They've been— they label people as subversives for the CIA, and they've been doing it for a very long time. And if you look at a lot of the other Thiel companies that have come up since he created Palantir, companies like Clearview AI, for example, and also Facebook, which wouldn't exist without Peter Thiel— he was his— he was the earliest outside investor in Peter Thiel— sorry, the earliest outside investor in Facebook. Facebook was also a resurrected DARPA program called LifeLog. Facebook was launched on the same day that DARPA had to shutter LifeLog. It was very related to Total Information Awareness. And at the same time that, you know, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp were expressly trying to privatize these DARPA programs, DARPA surveillance programs that were being shut down. And Clearview AI, for example, has boasted about going after Trump supporters on January 6th. being— they've developed this very advanced facial recognition software by taking photos off of Facebook, another Thiel-invested company. And they can claim to— they claim to be able to identify everyone in the world now, have been very involved with the Ukrainian military during the conflict there since 2022. But on January 6th, they were— they brag about having been used by law enforcement and then subsequently other law enforcement agencies after the actual day to identify people who were there, some of whom have gone to prison. So for people that want to, you know, claim this is a great victory, that, you know, a Peter Thiel protégé is a VP, and that Palantir Technologies itself is— and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, are donating so much money to Trump, you know, I would consider people to think about that, especially in the fact that Palantir CEO Alex Karp is very overt about saying that He thinks, you know, Christian nationalists or the far right in the United States is going to like murder him. It like keeps him up at night. He thinks they're going to push him out of a high-rise window and stuff and has like openly has expressed these like paranoid delusions of that kind of stuff. And that's what Palantir is focused on targeting. I mean, it just seems like a big honeypot at the end of the day for all these people that, you know, care about the Constitution and care about all these values that these guys certainly in my opinion, don't, because, I mean, they're CIA contractors at the end of the day, you know. And maybe Peter Thiel has framed himself as a libertarian, but would you— if you were a free market libertarian, would you create something like Palantir for the federal government? You know, it just seems kind of a hard sell if you ask me.

Mark Goodwin [21:03] Yeah, and I think the celebration in general of Vance is sort of just kind of— is a general misunderstanding of how intelligence and venture capital has sort of merged. Uh, specifically looking at Palantir, I mean, it, it, correct me if I'm wrong, but it started at PayPal.

Whitney Webb [21:18] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [21:19] Spun out of PayPal.

Whitney Webb [21:20] It's technically a PayPal spinoff.

Mark Goodwin [21:21] Right. And, and, you know, who was funding Palantir at the very beginning? Again, Whitney mentioned, you know, its early contractors were all CIA, but also the CIA's venture capital firm itself, In-Q-Tel, was one of the main funders of Palantir. Um, and so, you know, there's been this kind of big push from public sector programs You could look at something like an Oracle that started as the Oracle project within the CIA. Larry Ellison was working on it in the CIA. And then, okay, well, actually, it's much better for us to contain all of this data and do all the things that we want to do being data brokers if we move into the private sector. We actually reserve a lot more rights to sell data, to do things with data if we're not stuck with all of the bureaucratic tape of being in the public sector. So let's go into the private sector. And it was an active thing kind of done with the formation of In-Q-Tech. And I'm sure Whitney can talk more about it. But basically they were like, if we want to compete with Silicon Valley, we have to kind of become Silicon Valley. And there was an infiltration in the late '90s into a lot of these information brokers and especially a lot of information banking. We see a lot of ties with like a Citigroup or something kind of having revolving door with the CIA and then something like a PayPal being funded that has all of these really heavy connections with Microsoft and and In-Q-Tel. And so now we're seeing Palantir, which is sort of just the modern version of it, uh, you know. And, and, and so why, you know, people will champion, hey, well, the free market's so great, uh, you know, this is, this is so badass, we have a VC VP, uh, well, well, no, this is crony capitalism again. And, and the reason why they're moving into the private sector is not because, uh, you know, uh, this is some champion of, of, you know, Austrian economics or some free market, uh, wonderfulness happening. It's because it gives them a lot more ability to play around with our data. Uh, having a private company in charge of the sensors on your cop cars and scanning your license plates and doing facial recognition software and the people feeding these LLMs and, and all these things, it being a private sector company is, is extremely beneficial for the data brokers, uh, that are incredibly intelligence-linked and they feed off government contracts but then allow Uh, you know, to, you know, to sell to private data, to sell your data to private companies. They can sell it to public companies as well, or rather to public governments. There's nothing that says a private company can't sell data to the government. They just can also sell it to advertisers and people that focus— again, that stuff I kind of talked about at the beginning, uh, you know, attacking certain bands of, of, uh, you know, demographics. Now they have all of this data that they can play with that's coming out of the private sector, and they can distribute it around and, and, you know, basically manipulate consent and manufacture consent, uh, using all of this private sector free market data.

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Whitney Webb [27:09] Well, if they're not happy about the economy, I'm sure they'll enjoy Jamie Dimon in charge of the Treasury.

Mark Goodwin [27:16] That's a good statement on the— I think you nailed it there on that, like, that image, right? I mean, there's such an iconic image already instantly of Trump bleeding with his hand up or whatever. And I think people forget, it's like, he's an actor. He's a reality TV star. This is kind of what Trump has been. He's a debt baron, of course, uh, casino guy, real estate mogul guy, heavily connected with the mega group and all this, yada yada. But I mean, he's really— he's, he's a, he's a media figure. And that's really what his forte is. And so he's built this persona as being this tech grandpa who gets his emails printed out to him. He doesn't own a computer. He wakes up every day and some assistant is reading Twitter to him or whatever, and he's not really touching these things. And he doesn't know what's going on. He's not this tech-forward guy, but he's completely surrounded by all of these tech ghouls. I mean, Thiel was a part of his transition team. And then a lot of this kind of rhetoric that Trump put out specifically about Bitcoin, I think, was very obvious at the time. A few of us called it out in real time that it was a total misdirection of rhetoric when you actually look at what his actions are. So he's out there tweeting about how Bitcoin is bad and it competes with the dollar and the only world reserve currency is the dollar. But meanwhile, he's appointing Brian Brooks, the OCC, that's like making banks be able to hold crypto. And now, I mean, literally, he's picking a VP that's investing in cryptocurrency and infrastructure providers while at Mithril Capital. And I think that a lot of people have been really fooled, I think, by what the persona that Trump is, especially in 2016. He was funny. It was funny to have a guy go out there and make fun of Clinton and do all this stuff and be very entertaining. But then again, what did he actually do? What actually happened? He pushed Operation Warp Speed, which is probably one of the biggest human rights violations of all time. He locked down the country. He printed trillions of dollars. This idea that he's this anti-establishment candidate when really he set the policy for the globe to use data brokers like Palantir to run a lot of the COVID response. And he really pushed—

Whitney Webb [29:29] The whole COVID response. Palantir was in charge of deciding who gets the vaccine first. They held all of COVID data, not just for the US but also the United Kingdom, um, and then started surveilling, like, you know, sewage systems throughout the United States, literally resurrecting an old, like, Total Information Awareness Program from 2003 called biosurveillance.

Mark Goodwin [29:51] Same thing.

Whitney Webb [29:52] Um, I mean, honestly, it's pretty insane when you consider how, uh, involved Palantir was, but it hasn't really gotten a lot of coverage. And I think also, yeah, like Mark said, uh, Trump has definitely gotten a pass about a lot of the Warp Speed stuff. And I know that a lot of people who like Trump trying to dismiss it as like, oh, he had bad people last time, or he listened to the wrong people. But I mean, I don't know if you can really have it both ways. I mean, it— what's going on right now sort of reminds me a lot of what happened with like lefties during the Obama era. Everyone's energized during the first campaign, hope and change, and then he's a complete disappointment when he's like actually in office. And then when it comes to the second campaign before the second term, you know, all these people on the left being like, oh, well, it was the Republicans, or he didn't have the right people, or these people weren't helping him. Meanwhile, we find out later that his entire cabinet from the off was chosen by Citigroup in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, right? Among all these other things that we know since then, right? So it's sort of like that same type of wishful thinking. You know, either, you know, Trump is the guy that's going to fight the deep state and win, or he's this guy that, like, you know, is beholden to the people he surrounds himself with and has no agency. It's kind of hard to argue both, in, in my opinion. And I mean, if you're talking about, you know, having all, you know, Peter— extreme Peter Thiel influence in the next Trump administration, and then, you know, people like Jamie Dimon are being floated, it's like, oh, he's going to surround himself with better people this time. They're also like floating Erik Prince as head of the Pentagon, the Blackwater founder. who's been going on this like PR tour all over the place trying to like frame himself as like something else, you know. Um, he's a CIA asset. It's a documented thing, guys. So yeah, I don't know. And he also was like super involved with the Chinese government through Frontier Services Group, Prince. So I don't know, how does that grok with the, the China bad stuff from the, you know, the Trump rhetoric? I, I don't know. You tell me.

Mark Goodwin [31:56] Yeah, the private sector coup is here, and I think we're agreeing to it passively through uh, unread user agreements on all of these data broker sites, uh, and also just passiveness to, you know, the ghouls that are getting let into the administration. I mean, I think there's just, you know, people are so focused on, on Trump and, you know, how his rhetoric and how he's so funny and he owns the, the libtards and all this stuff. But like, you know, he's surrounding himself with some of the worst people that are, that are quite literally part of the privatized CIA now kind of coming back And using the government to basically use regulation to kingmake and make a ton of money by allowing the services that they provide, the infrastructures that they provide, whether it's data, whether it's stablecoins, whether it's whatever, to be kingmade via regulation to basically, again, do the Thiel thing and find a market and dominate it and become a monopoly. I mean, literally, Thiel says this. I mean, he writes this in his book. Competition is bad for profits. Go find the thing that no one is dominating and dominate it and become a monopoly and then move on to the next one. Competition's bad. So that's not free market. That's not this badass Austrian economic whatever, hoo-ha-ra shit that they're selling us. It's not that. This is literally how do we build monopolies under the guise of the free market and then actually use the government to give us a bunch of contracts to feed on. uh, government contracts.

Whitney Webb [33:31] Yeah, and expand their power and keep them monopolies, right? Government-sanctioned monopolies, essentially. And I think it's useful to frame this sort of as the public-private partnership, which is, you know, directly related to what a lot of people have known about U.S. politics for a long time— the revolving door. Um, a lot of these people and interests are in public sector when convenient, then they move to the private sector when convenient. And I think, um, you know, what the setup here, um, is and what it has been, you know, we've been talking about it probably for most of this year, especially with like a lot of the Larry Fink stuff in Bitcoin that happened earlier this year, is the idea of sort of trying to move now that, you know, the public sector is unpopular, move it back to the private sector and frame, you know, that's— I'm sure a big reason why Erik Prince is, you know, being considered for the Pentagon because he's been on a during Trump's first administration was pushing to essentially privatize the entire national security state, both the intelligence and military communities. So is it, you know, better? Will all our problems go away if the official CIA is dissolved, but we have a private CIA led by former CIA assets like Erik Prince and stuff? You know, I don't necessarily think that's true. And is it really, you know, again, it's not free market private sector. The US has essentially been a crony capitalist economy for a very long time. And people have argued too that a lot of famous American capitalists have direct relationships with the Chinese government and rave about China. Everyone from the Rockefeller family to Larry Fink. And if you honestly look at how China has developed as an economy, it's focused on creating a— using government control to have a centralized control economy. And that's why you have people like Larry Fink saying, Markets love totalitarian governments because it like reduces risk for them, right? And makes it, makes it easier to trade when you know what's going to happen. And that's part of the utility of something like Palantir as well. That's supposed to predict everything before it happens. You know, there's, there's a lot of, you know, they view that as sort of like a market intelligence thing, I would assume anyway. So I think we're, you know, sort of being pushed in that, in that direction. I think Malay is part of it as well. And if you look at someone, some of the recent policies Milei has floated, it's things like, yeah, we're going to get rid of the education ministry, but we're going to put Facebook in charge of educating the youth. Facebook, the same company that has been hated by conservatives for censoring them and censoring speech. That's the one that, you know, that's the company you want to put in charge of like molding young minds. But I guess it makes sense if you look at it from like, you know, the Peter Thiel perspective and why he was interested in putting Facebook on the map and having it become, you know, what at least at one point was the dominant social network. It may not be in the US anymore, but it certainly is in Latin America, and I'm sure a lot of other places as well. So, you know, I would consider people to be kind of wary of what we're being sold. And I think also, you know, a lot of the arguments that have come around is like, oh, well, you know, the other choice is so bad. Yes, of course the Democrats are terrible. They're terrible on purpose. In my opinion, they've kept Biden there this whole time because he's completely unsellable. The only reason he would— like, a lot of Democrats even took him the first time is because he promised to be a one-term president. And obviously, you know, that hasn't happened. Disastrous debate performances and all of this, all these top Democrats saying he needs to go and he's insisting on staying in. I mean, I would argue it looks like they're trying to lose. And if you consider the funding sources of the Democrats and other things that I've, like, discussed in my book, Um, like, um, in terms of like these power networks of like intelligence and, uh, in banks and stuff that are behind, you know, pretty much our entire political system. It's a uniparty. Uh, the two-party system only exists really as a paradigm, uh, in, in, you know, as a divide and conquer strategy for the oligarchs of the United States. Um, so why would they, you know, if they want a particular person in power, I mean, it would make sense they do a controlled demolition of the other of the other side. And that's essentially, I think, what we're witnessing right now. And I think a lot of people, at least after COVID, sort of got the two-party paradigm stuff in some of this. But, you know, election fever can make people forget this stuff. It's very easy to get caught up in, you know, the emotions and, you know, the images and the speeches and the rallies. Right. But I, you know, I think, you know, again, campaigns are a sales pitch. I think people should focus more instead of on campaigns, on— especially considering that Trump's been in office before— on what he did last time he was in office. And in keeping with the whole discussion of pre-crime and Palantir, one of the things Trump did when he was in office is that he called on big tech to create software to surveil Americans to prevent mass shootings before they could happen. And then piggybacking off of that, his Attorney General William Barr legalized pre-crime in the United States while also attempting to eliminate encryption. And by that, I mean trying to guarantee backdoors for the federal government into consumer apps and devices that promise to— that market themselves as encrypted, you know, like WhatsApp, for example, among numerous others, I'm sure. So, and then he was also considering a program or the creation of this health-focused DARPA equivalent called HARPA, the first program of which was going to be called Safe Homes, which is an acronym for something I can't remember. But basically the idea of it was to data mine American social media posts and data from consumer devices like Fitbits and, you know, all these like the Alexa thing and all that stuff, the Google equivalent of it, like Apple TVs and stuff, to determine if Americans were showing early warning signs of neuropsychiatric violence and would become violent at some point and might commit mass shootings. and maybe mentally unwell in all of this stuff, using AI and, you know, and all of this stuff. And Trump was apparently sold on the program by his daughter Ivanka, who was the biggest lobbyist for it in the Trump administration. And actually, even though HARPA wasn't made under Trump, it was made under Biden. It's called ARPA-H. They just moved the H to the end, but it's the same people. So, you know, unfortunately, a lot of this that we've seen in terms of the construction of the surveillance state, I mean, if you look at it, it's a bipartisan agenda. And every president has advanced it. And if you look at some of the people backing Trump and some of the things he said, like the idea of the virtual border wall, which is being built by a company called Anduril, and Palmer Luckey is the person behind that who sold his VR company Oculus Rift to Facebook with Thiel's help. And his current outfit, Anduril, not only is backed by Thiel, but is a major contractor now to the US government, a relationship I believe started during the Trump administration. building the virtual border wall. And when Trump was in office the first time, he said, uh, he rejected what he'd campaigned on, the idea of a physical barrier on the US-Mexico border, and went full in on the— on this biometric, uh, virtual border wall, which is actually what the Democrats had been lobbying for. Um, and that was their answer to border security, you know, uh, in the post-9/11 era, was actually having this virtual border wall. So it's something that has bipartisan approval. And on recent campaign stops, Trump has been supporting the idea of uh, biometric entry-exit system on all U.S. borders and ports of entry. So, you know, that's like digital ID scanning your face in order to, you know, enter the U.S. and all of that, framing it as a way to, uh, you know, tackle immigration and all of this stuff. One of his campaign lawyers was suggesting the same system for voting— scan your face in order to be able to vote. Isn't it interesting that one of Peter Thiel's other protégés Besides J.D. Vance is Sam Altman, who's behind Worldcoin, which is, you know, the biometric face scanning gives you a unique digital ID. Hopefully, I don't know, we'll see the limits of Peter Thiel's influence on Trump's second term because obviously he's going to win. I don't think that's any question anymore, or if it really was a question if he was going to win or not. So yeah, I've been ranting for a while. So—

Mark Goodwin [42:01] Well, I think so much of what you just said, I think, is a lot about, you know, kind of simulating these phase shift dialectics via controlled demolition of talking points going from public sector bad to private sector good. And looking at the surveillance state, I think that's very clear, everything you just said, that they're doing that. But also they've been doing that with monetary policy and private capital creation. And so we got guys up there like Malay running around saying afuera and printing money is bad and the central bank is bad. while he is opening the door for the people that really caused the global financial crisis, these huge banks that became too big to fail via their agents going into the public sector and deregulating the derivatives market, repealing Glass-Steagall and allowing these groups to— these banking groups to just become literally too big to fail, taking our retirement money, our mortgage money, and speculating with it, and then blowing up these huge bubbles and causing the government— via the public banks to have to print trillions of dollars worth of treasuries to then back this private capital creation speculation. And so we've kind of come to that point now where everyone is very upset at the Fed and they're upset at what public banks, central banks have done across the world in creating this hyperinflationary environment. But who controls But who controls the Fed? I mean, like, Jamie Dimon is not the answer. I mean, he is— you, you could, you could criticize him so much for the role of how the monetary stimulus happened.

Whitney Webb [43:41] Uh, you know, I mean, isn't it— wasn't JP Morgan like, aren't they the biggest like owner of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most influential bank in the Federal Reserve System, right?

Marty Bent [43:51] Well, yeah, um, I don't know if you saw my tweet a couple weeks ago, but Elizabeth Warren was kvetching on Twitter like Look, Jerome Powell had private meetings with Jamie Dimon this year. I'm like, yeah, like JP Morgan.

Whitney Webb [44:03] Didn't she like give Jamie Dimon a super softball interview recently? That one was like, well, Jamie, I fancy seeing you here. I forget what she was asking.

Mark Goodwin [44:12] It was about it was about Bitcoin and about cryptocurrency.

Whitney Webb [44:15] She was like, tell me now.

Mark Goodwin [44:16] I can't believe I'll ever side with with Jamie, but I guess if it's to take down Bitcoin and crypto, and it's like, well, Jamie Dimon is running like TCN with. with BlackRock. I mean, they're doing the JPM Coin, they're doing Onyx, they're doing this huge, you know, trillion-dollar volumes.

Whitney Webb [44:32] Yeah, he may not like Bitcoin, but he's all in on blockchain and all sorts of, you know, deposit tokenized deposits and surveillable programmable money. Yeah, ultimately, that's why people— right, right. But that's why people don't like CBDCs, right? It's programmable and surveillable and a threat to your freedom. But it doesn't have to be issued by the Fed to be programmable and surveillable. It can be issued by JPMorgan. It can be issued by Citigroup. It can be issued by whatever bank, Bank of America. And those banks have shown time and again that they're willing to cooperate with the federal government, even if it's unconstitutional. Just look at Bank of America giving banking records to the federal government for people that were in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6th, 2001.

Mark Goodwin [45:15] Totally.

Whitney Webb [45:15] Good example.

Mark Goodwin [45:16] And whenever there's any sort of dissonant movement happening, you know, the banks are the first people to get pressured by the public sector to shut it down. We look at the trucker movement in Canada. I mean, that whole thing happened because banking services, whether they were private, right? I mean, GoFundMe, the private banks, they were forced and coerced by the US government to shut down or the Canadian government to shut down and to stop servicing these people. And I think that's a really important part of the private bank digital currency angle here that I think we're attacking with stablecoins. Everyone's afraid of CBDCs. It's kind of a red herring. Private capital has always been in the hands of the private banks, private capital creation, and that's not going to change. They don't want to lose that racket. But there's innately a king-making axiom where stablecoin providers or these private banks that want to make digital dollars— the dollar's been digital for a long time, but they want to make digital dollars now using blockchain technology tokenized dollar instruments, they have to buy Treasuries. So they have to have some sort of regulatory connection, king-made connection with the powers that be that actually allow them to buy these Treasuries from the Treasury. So we're looking at who are the hungriest people now buying up US debt? It's stablecoin providers. They're like the biggest source of demand for the government to service their debt. I mean, it's just absurd what we're seeing. Tether specifically is like a 10th of the debt already that Japan and China hold each. And that's going to continue to grow. And we're going to see more people be kingmade in the stablecoin issuer consortium. And I think we're seeing someone like PayPal really stepping up and getting ready, especially with someone like JD Vance coming in, who literally the company that he worked at, his former firm that he was a principal at, was an investor in not only Palantir, but Paxos, which is the stablecoin issuer that used to do Binance's BUSD, but is now doing PYUSD, which is PayPal's stablecoin. PayPal, with a flip of a switch, can turn all of their Venmo, which has integrated PYUSD, all of their email, kind of eBay, the market that was created with PayPal via eBay, they can switch with a flip of a switch to being all on a ledger and being these tokenized debt instruments that are stablecoins. And they're going to come in with highly regulated trillions of dollars of stablecoins that are king-made by the regulatory arm of the government. But really, it's a private sector infrastructure company heavily invested in by PayPal, heavily connected with PayPal, with Paxos. And they get to basically be the private capital creators of the modern economy as things digitize. Um, and so like, you know, who's gonna buy the US debt? Who's ready? Who's primed to do that? It's these king-made groups. Now we have a VC VP who literally invested in this group specifically, very connected to PayPal. Here we are. I mean, I don't think this is this wonderful win for the free market. I think it's— we're being manipulated into saying central bank bad, but we're ignoring the fact that again, the private sector has more ability to restrict user access, to blacklist people, to seize funds, all the things that the private sector can do because they can restrict customers because they're a private business. A CBDC potentially wouldn't be able to do that. It would be a lot harder. They'd have constitutional issues to go up against, a lot more paperwork. A private company can seize your funds. We're seeing Tether already. They just recently hired a guy from Chainalysis, which is In-Q-Tel funded. They've integrated Chainalysis into their program. The FBI, the Secret Service, They have to play ball. Howie Lutnick and Cantor, they want to hold $100 billion of treasuries. They got to play ball with the public sector and do whatever the regulatory arm of the United States wants. But they are certainly a private sector company.

Marty Bent [49:19] Yeah. All this, I mean, even going back to the surveillance to predict mass shooters, facial recognition, all of that. When I hear stuff like that, particularly like mass shooters, it's like, all right, you're gonna just jump to surveilling everybody. Why don't we look into SSRIs and their effect on the psyche of people that are—

Whitney Webb [49:43] yeah, that are actually— Well, a lot of the stuff I mentioned in that regard happened after the El Paso Walmart shooting, which was a very questionable mass shooting. Yeah, just on its face.

Marty Bent [49:54] And that's the other thing, mass shootings, like, let's look at FBI entrapment. Uh, there's been plenty of cases where—

Mark Goodwin [50:01] Careful, Artic.

Marty Bent [50:01] The FBI is actually setting these people up to do these things. And then facial recognition at the border, it's like, I, I can't go to an airport anymore and not have that face scan in front of me, and I have to opt out. But just like looking at that, it's like, no, I think we should abolish the TSA and not have this, um, crazy surveillance society as I'm walking through.

Whitney Webb [50:21] Well, wasn't that the policy though of like libertarians before? It was like, let's dismantle all the stuff set up after 9/11 that's like harmful to our freedoms, like the TSA, or like, let's, you know, I mean, but instead we're getting like this privatized CIA-connected version through, you know, companies like Anduril or, you know, Clearview AI and all of this other stuff that's either tied to Peter Thiel or it's tied to some other Silicon Valley oligarch. And the idea that we need to like scan our face to be able to vote, like, why can't we just use driver's licenses or like other physical IDs? Why does it have to be all of a sudden this biometric crap that is not just being rolled in the US, rolled out in the US right now? They're rolling it out in the EU and the UK. It's in Chile. They're rolling it out everywhere, uh, globally. And it's— I mean, it's clearly a global agenda. It's the cornerstone of Agenda 2030, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, um, and a key part of the directly related to those global policing goals of Interpol, which is like almost every country in the world is a member of Interpol. So this is the way they're selling it to the American public as a solution for voter ID issues and for illegal immigration issues, which again, the illegal immigration situation was allowed to happen. It was clearly intentional. And considering that, like, this biometric stuff at the border and as far as digital ID is a bipartisan agenda, both parties work together to make the conditions for that to happen. One creates the problem and the other sweeps in with the solution.

Mark Goodwin [51:52] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [51:53] that everyone's clamoring for because the problem has been allowed to become so bad. And I think it's not just with biometric digital ID. You're going to see it with the programmable surveillable currency. You're going to see it with pretty much everything that's going to be pitched to you as a solution to all of these problems we have. But really, the solutions are going to just give us, you know, increased surveillance and march us closer to this techno tyranny that's being— that's been built by the national security state in close collaboration with the private sector and particularly Silicon Valley, even before 9/11 happened. But obviously after that, it got supercharged in very significant ways. And, you know, I think cheerleading this kind of stuff, I mean, people need to be a lot more vigilant because, I mean, they're just looking for ways to sell it to people and to manufacture consent for these systems ultimately. And if it's not working by doing it you know, if they can't appeal to one, you know, one set of talking points isn't working, they're going to switch to complete polar opposite talking points. But the solution's the same. Right. And, you know, again, this is the public-private partnership that we're dealing with, stakeholder capitalism and all of that. And actually, if you look at the war on domestic terror framework that was developed during the Biden administration, If you are a criticism of any form of capitalism, including stakeholder capitalism, you can be considered a domestic terrorist by the federal government now. So you don't like Larry Fink and Klaus Schwab's stakeholder capitalism? Uh-oh. And also anyone that doesn't like perceived government overreach? Uh-oh. That's not good. And what we've seen time and again—

Marty Bent [53:37] Is that guy molesting me?

Whitney Webb [53:40] Yeah. Yeah, but what we've seen time and again over the past like 20-plus years is that one administration puts stuff in and then the next administration of the opposing party uses that as building blocks. And we've gotten to this like extremely— the infrastructure for an extremely dystopian techno-tyranny is practically here. And I think, uh, what we're seeing is a major effort to manufacture consent so that a large segment of the population cheers it on. as the only possible solution. And this really concerns me when you consider that Peter Thiel is a major funding source for most of the biggest voices in alternative media.

Marty Bent [54:17] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [54:18] Not to mention the fact that he dominates, you know, the investments for Rumble, which is framed as the, you know, alternative to YouTube and stuff. And I mean, people should be really concerned about that, I think, considering the Palantir connection, all this data mining stuff, and the CEO of Palantir is like, I don't like Christian conservatives. And they've all sort of been herded onto Rumble. And so your Rumble account, the videos you watch, the videos you like, what you say in the comments, can we trust that it doesn't get sent off to Palantir considering the mutual Peter Thiel connection? I don't know. I would like someone to ask the Rumble people that question. But either way, you know, because of the extreme funding of alternative media by Thiel, very few people talk about him and very few people talk about Palantir. And it's been that way for several years. Hoping that will change. But the question is, like, you know, obviously the government the US has now is terrible. But I mean, people need to think seriously about what the stakes are and how many election cycles this country can go voting for the lesser of two evils.

Mark Goodwin [55:23] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [55:23] You know, because I mean, if you're going to get the same bipartisan surveillance police state agenda, regardless of who you vote for. I mean, is that really what we want to keep doing? Is that really how we fight and stop this?

Mark Goodwin [55:40] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [55:41] You know, I don't, I don't think so. But, you know, if I have any sort of reasonable criticism of this bipartisan blob that has been, you know, destroying our society and implementing all of these, like, Orwellian technologies and policies for decades, you know, people say I love Democrats and I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. No, I don't like any politician. I've never backed any of them. I don't know. I think they're all organized crime. I've been pretty explicit about that. But apparently it's— you're, you know, in some circles you can't have the opinion that both are bad anymore, you know.

Mark Goodwin [56:17] And speaking of manufacturing consent via this, you know, simulated contrarian narrative, who took Rumble public? Who did their SPAC? It was Cantor Fitzgerald, who holds all of the T-bills For Tether. But I think this idea of, yeah, this manufacturing consent via this false dichotomy is literally— I mean, it's Hegelian dialectics. And we're seeing one group will come in and create a situation, will simulate and stimulate a situation and propose a solution, get everyone rallied up about that solution. And then it actually ushers us into an unknown but desired by the simulators outcome. And that's sort of, you know, the, the general axiom of how Hegelian dialectics works. And now it's like people are so unaware of how they're being played that the dissident right is cheering on biometric voting and, and border walls.

Whitney Webb [57:10] Digital ID.

Mark Goodwin [57:11] It's just crazy.

Whitney Webb [57:13] I mean, these were the people that were like the most against it.

Mark Goodwin [57:15] Yeah, right, right. And I watch, you know, as someone who, you know, like I was in the Bay Area during COVID I was an anti-vaccine, anti-mandate dissonant, and people were calling me a Trumper, which didn't make any sense because he was the guy that pushed the vaccine in the first place, gave Fauci an award, did all this, this Operation Warp Speed stuff. And now I've really not changed my position at all. And now I'm saying, why would you ever vote for Trump? He was the Operation Warp Speed guy and all this stuff. And now I'm being called a libtard and I'm a Biden voter and I love the left and I'm a social commie. And it's like, no, no, no, I don't want Any of this stuff. He was wrong then and he's wrong now. I haven't changed, but the simulated, uh, perception of my opinion has now pivoted because they've again used their social networks that they create in this data distribution, content distribution. They've created X, Truth, Rumble, all of these things. They have these— they have us exactly where we want, and they keep us on the reservation, on the farm, on this in this thought room by being able to control exactly what it is that we see algorithmically. And it's extremely dangerous that people don't really— aren't aware of this. And we just eat up this controlled narrative. And I think so much of the alternative media now, people just have replaced CNN and The Daily Show with Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool and Rumble. And I'm not saying there isn't good content on Rumble. I'm sure that there is. But all the stuff that's promoted really heavily, it's like, you know, you can start to see these common agendas, these common themes, like something like Trump was, you know, saved by God via his assassination attempt or whatever. You know, you can see these talking heads that are incentivized to algo post. They're now making money on X as a content creator. They only get money based on how much interaction they have. They're being directly incentivized by the, the algo and by the money being paid out to content creators to post in a certain way. Those things get signal boosted. We have someone like a Jack Dorsey at the HRF coming out and saying free speech is a distraction. We should be really talking about having more algorithms and not open box, open source algorithms, but just more choice. It's really about free will. And so they're again pushing us into this false, you know, this, this, this simulated outcome, this, this simulated thesis to say, no, we don't need to know what these algorithms are. They don't need to be open source. Free speech is a distraction. It's about choice of algorithm, which is absolutely horseshit when they control all the algorithms. They control Truth, X, Rumble, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, all the things that you are participating in, in, in taking in content from, Instagram, all these networks are held by very, very similar people that are all in connection with each other. And then especially when you look at the VC stuff behind it, I mean, there's an insane amount of connections between all these people and all of these networks, not to mention the internet service providers. And you start to see that there is, you know, there's really honestly, seriously a conspiracy against our perception via the content algorithms that are manipulated and controlled by these data barons. And here we are. And again, it's just— I've seen the phase shift happen in real time. I've seen the people coming out cheering about Milei as he dollarizes the country and sells out the minerals to Israel and brings in JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and all these people to help his cabinet and dissolves the right to print money. Why shouldn't he be able to print money? That you're actually taking away a tool from the people to be able to do something with. Yes, it's been manipulated by private sector goblins that have jumped into the public sector. when it's convenient for them. But, but these are tools that citizens should have. If we're free market capitalists, you should be able to make money. You should be able to create money. But we've been so controlled and our reactions so, so simulated via stimulus that I think we really have no idea what we're just kind of passively letting happen. So—

Whitney Webb [1:01:25] In the case of Milei, though, I just want to say that the play there, it seems to be if you look at influential people in the Argentinian fintech space, And also this broader network that Mark and I have now a couple articles writing about. The plan there is to use— is to develop stablecoins backed by commodities, specifically in the case of Argentina, grain exports. So in that case, you know, maybe he might get rid of the central bank even or something like that at some point. But instead, you're going to have these stablecoins tied to commodities and whoever owns those commodities, which in Argentina, I can, I can tell you they are all oligarchs, a very small connect— just like in every other Latin American country, it's a small group of oligarchs that have been in charge of those respective countries for a very long time. You know, they own the commodities and they're going to be basically your central bank replacement. Is that necessarily a better system? I mean, some people might argue that it is, but I think we should also, you know, look critically at this stuff. And as far as what Mark said on On the case of media goes, you know, as far as subbing out alternative media for mainstream media, I think the most problematic aspect of that is that people didn't change their relationship with media when they made that switch from mainstream media to alternative media. What do I mean by that? Whatever the talking head that you're watching says, you just believe them and don't think critically, and you just, you know, take what they say and believe it. because this person that you trust said it. Right. And that's what got us in a lot of trouble as a country with mainstream media. And now we've gone— a lot of these people have gone to alternative media or people that are seemingly independent and are, you know, but they're same relate— that same relationship with media continues. You know, there hasn't been— maybe there's been a revolution in viewership from mainstream to alternative, but there has not been a revolution in You know, just believing whatever people say and critical thought and doing your own research, following up, checking their sources. And I think that really needs to happen as well, which is why, you know, in my articles and in Mark too, you know, we put hyperlinks everywhere so you can see the sources we had and, you know, what we used. You can look at the, you know, at the sources for yourself and draw your own conclusions. And I think that is, you know, people need to be responsible media consumers and that shift hasn't Unfortunately hasn't happened, and I think it really needs to.

Mark Goodwin [1:03:51] Yeah, and you see it so much, especially— and that's why I'm so thankful, Marty, for a show like TFTC to have us on— is that, you know, you see so many people that are sponsored, uh, or that have opportunity for brand deals, you know, prevent certain type of content coming out that maybe is negative against certain companies or certain infrastructure. And you see so many talking heads in the Bitcoin space. And I don't really like to air dirty laundry, and I don't really like to attack people personally. Like, when I wrote The Bitcoin Dollar, it's specifically about the mechanisms, and it has almost no names in the book at all. Uh, there's very few people that we're— I'm actually calling out specifically for building this. It's— I think it was a lot more important to, uh, you know, understand how the mechanism works rather than like, hey, this guy works for this company, he's a prick. I'm not necessarily saying that. Now we're kind of starting to name some names because we have to, because it's— everything's just accelerating. But I think it's really important to know that a lot of the talking heads in this space are sponsored and their consent is purchased and they're manufacturing consent for other people. This whole idea of banking the unbanked and all this stuff is Bitcoin and crypto being this innately empowering technology for the underprivileged. Well, no, actually, Bitcoin is so powerful and so crazy with what it is. It is what it is that it empowers Microsoft, Citi, PayPal, Facebook executives as much as it does the unbanked guy in the global south. And I think that mechanism and that understanding is just completely not talked about by design, because you see a lot of these podcasts and a lot of these people are afraid to have kind of counter narrative to the pro stablecoin sort of concept, which you know really what stablecoins are are tokenized U.S. debt. And if we're supposed to end fiat and Bitcoin has this opportunity to replace settlement networks and replace the Treasury market as a reserve asset, you know you can argue if it can replace the dollar as a currency, but it certainly can replace Treasuries as as a as a reserve asset. But we have basically every single paid talking head in Bitcoin coming out and saying you know oh I'm really impressed by stablecoin issuers, uh, you know, passion for banking the unbanked. And it's just like, well, no, what they're really doing is buying up the, the biggest terrorist organization in the world's debt, uh, and they're perpetuating dollarization, which the US Treasury market has been used as a financial tool to inflict financial terrorism on the Global South. And now you're claiming that, oh, actually now we have this private sector company coming in that now has access to all the data, all of your purchasing data, You know, you're down in South America. Everybody loves Tether. They love it. They love it so much. And I empathize and sympathize. But what are we really pushing them towards? We're pushing them towards intelligence-linked private sector companies that can blacklist and sell your financial data, you know, at a whim. Not even do they have to sell your financial data. It's just available on the blockchain. And if they have any sort of nation-state capability of data harvesting, They can sweep the blockchain and basically triangulate any purchasing identity using Chainalysis tools, which, again, literally, Chainalysis, the company, is an In-Q-Tel-sponsored company. It's a CIA-sponsored company. So here we are, the Bitcoin space, the consent has really been purchased to this financial freedom element. Well, it's financial freedom for everybody, including the CIA. And that doesn't mean that I think we should throw away Bitcoin or throw away the ability to have trustless, unstoppable, no trusted third-party settlement. That's obviously a state change of money, not to mention the monetary policy. There is so much that I still love about Bitcoin and think is a state change for humanity. But what we do next is extremely important, and you can't know what to do next if you don't understand the scope. of what's going on here. And when you look at some of the work that Whitney's done and you look at this group, this cabal of organized crime that has infiltrated the public sector and has infiltrated private banking, and you see what they've done with backdoors and the way that they've built out this panopticon from a hardware and a software standpoint, that has extreme implications on how a Bitcoin system could work and the freedom that actually could come from it. From the ISP level, from the fiber optic cables in the ocean, from the satellite data distribution constellations. There's so much to be said about how a Bitcoin system actually works. And there's a lot of orange washing, frankly, which is sort of a term of like, well, hey, Bitcoin's a freedom tool, so everything associated with Bitcoin must be freedom. And that's just absolutely not true. You can build a whole bunch of things on Bitcoin that are very bad. And I think we're starting to see the Finks of the world understand that Bitcoin as a ledger can be used to put a bunch of data on there that's unfuckable and immutable. And that's very powerful for people like that to create identity systems, to, you know, use it as an asset storage technology for their tokenized debt. And I think we're gonna see that really go off very extremely here in the next few years. And it's gonna happen via the enabling of regulatory kingmaking from the public sector before they really kind of dissolve, you know, really the, the, the advantages of being in the public sector before we really just disintegrate into the private sector. And the private sector has really couped, you know, the government basically in every way, unfortunately. And once they take private capital creation just strictly from a technology standpoint, information is now money. Information is now a commodity, literally. with Bitcoin, bits and bytes. Uh, you know, there's, uh, there's just a lot to be said there. That's all. I'll leave it at that.

Marty Bent [1:09:57] No, I completely agree. I think— I mean, obviously I think about this a lot. I'm immersed in the Bitcoin space. Uh, full disclosure for anybody listening, I'm a venture capitalist myself in the Bitcoin space, and I do talk to a lot of the people across the industry and even those working on stablecoins. And that's what I'm trying to discern just personally, like, is The stablecoin thing, like going back to like the Global South and utility that it provides individuals there. Like, I think, I do think there is a case to be made that a lot of these stablecoin issuers were looking to fill demand that was there, which are people like, I can't stomach the price volatility of Bitcoin, so I need something stable. And they're like, all right, here's a stablecoin. And then what I imagine happened is like the people involved with treasury markets and all these banks looked at that and they saw that as an inroad. Um, then moving forward, I completely agree, we have to be conscious of this expanding and the regulatory moats being erected because it could really hinder Bitcoin adoption if we're not vigilant enough. And that's why, um, I'm sure you've seen— I'm trying to be white-pilled, I don't want to, I don't want to doom too much. And so like things like, I'm not sure if you've been following, I know we talked about it last time, which saw me in MINTS and Nostr a little bit. But I think what's beginning to bubble up over there gives me a lot of hope that we can avoid the co-option of the industry, if you will. I'm not sure if you've seen, Kali is integrating Nostr and EMINTS into HTTPS, which would give you inherent privacy. Your IP would not be exposed since Nostr is end-to-end encrypted. Like, you'd be able to interact in the web browser using Nostr with a way higher degree of privacy. And then on top of that, if you're using eCash as your currency there, you get privacy transactionally. And then on top of that, from stablecoins competitor standpoint, I'm not sure if you've been following the development of these stable channels. that you can create in these stability pools you can create within these mints, but you can essentially create a stablecoin-like experience that is fully backed by Bitcoin and way more private.

Mark Goodwin [1:12:24] And so I think it's— So on both of those points, Marty, from the get-go, from the incubation of both of those projects, Calais is the man. I think he's great, incredibly smart person. building really important tools. E-cash has some limitations, but I think it also can do a bunch of things extremely well. I wrote a piece called Ideal Banking a couple of years ago now, I believe, and it became a chapter in my book as well, that basically offers this same path forward, saying, hey, maybe Bitcoin can't compete with the dollar as a currency, but it certainly can as an asset. And so we can use Chia and EMINs like a Cashew or a Fetty, and create really nice privacy within the mint. Amenity sets are sort of beyond the mint as well, but within the mint and using Lightning is basically the settlement network between these mints. And we can create a really cool financial system. That's really what we should be doing is creating an alternative financial system that doesn't perpetuate Treasuries. And that's the issue with these Tether and USDC and PYUSD is that they're backed with Treasuries and they're buying government debt. And that's the problem. The problem isn't the dollar. The problem isn't someone in Argentina wanting to avoid inflation via the peso and have a stable purchasing unit. That's not the problem. Again, I totally sympathize with that. But how do we create those instruments, the idea of a dollar, without perpetuating the biggest terrorist organization in the world? And we can use technology to do it, and we can make Bitcoin-backed things. And then again, specifically with stable channels, I was in Bitcoin Azores, And the creator of stable channels came up to me and said, hey, you're Mark Goodwin. I read your book. I think you've been writing some interesting stuff. I used to work and do a lot of stuff with banks that perpetuated the tokenization of treasuries, and I don't want to do that anymore. And I came up with this really clever idea of basically creating the idea of a dollar by having one person on the side of the Lightning channel being long the dollar and one person being short. It's all Bitcoin, and you have some oracle feeding it, and it's a price feed. And it just sends Bitcoin back and forth to offset what the price of the dollar is or what the price of Bitcoin is in dollar terms. Incredibly genius. Doesn't touch a treasury at all. E-Cash, Cashew, Fetty doesn't touch treasuries at all, but it still creates dollar-esque instruments, which are, again, that's a financial tool. Great. So those are awesome. But then you look at, okay, well, the stablecoin bill written by Lummis and Gillibrand. This is a little bit of alpha that's going to be in part 2, but fuck it, we'll do it live. You look at, okay, Terra Luna was sort of the most famous algorithmic stablecoin where they were trying to create a US dollar instrument backed by Bitcoin infamously exploded and led to huge issues in the Bitcoin space, potentially leading to the FTX implosion and a bunch of other things. Well, what actually happened there? Why did Terra Luna blow up? Why is Gillibrand and Lummis in their stablecoin bill literally saying we can't have algorithmic alternatives to stablecoins because of look what happened at Terra Luna? Again, this manufacturing this Hegelian dialectic of, hey, let's ban algorithmic-backed stablecoins.

Whitney Webb [1:15:34] Well, why?

Mark Goodwin [1:15:35] We should be able to do that. There's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't. Why not? Who blew up Terra Luna? Again, who's to say exactly? But over 70% of all value in the Terra network was in this thing called the Anchor Protocol at the time of popping that was offering almost 20%+ yields. So all of this movement was going into the Anchor Protocol on Terra. Well, who made Anchor? This guy, Ryan Park, out of Korea, who was literally paid by Peter Thiel as a Thiel Fellow to build Anchor. And then they pop Terra Luna, which is this infamous dollar-backed algorithmic— or sorry, Bitcoin-backed dollar algo stablecoin that's now being used by politicians to say, this is an example why we can't do this and this is bad. And you can directly connect the reason why it popped to the yield of a chain, or rather a protocol within the system built by a Thiel fellow. Very interesting that. And again, I think that these things aren't really accidents when you see that, hey, he wants to make PYUSD. I talked to Walter Hester, the head of strategy at Paxos. He says PayPal is uniquely set up to sort of dominate the highly regulated stablecoin market, even more so than USDC and USDT. And why is that? Well, because they have inroads in the public sector. They have people advising senators to write specifically, hey, Terra Luna bad. We need highly regulated Treasury-backed stablecoins because we can't trust those darn Bitcoiners to code. Well, you could very much so argue that that consent was manufactured by the Anchor Protocol and by the Thiel Fellowship specifically to create an enabling environment for trillions of dollars of highly regulated stablecoins issued by Paxos. The head of Paxos, Charles, was one of the founding members of Coin Center, and the chair of Coin Center currently is Wences Casares, heavily connected with PayPal and is the founder of Zappo, which is the first bank to integrate— first fully licensed bank to integrate Tether. They integrated USDC. They built the custody 4 that they eventually sold to Coinbase, which houses all of the Bitcoin, or 8 of 11 of the spot Bitcoin ETFs, including BlackRock's, like 400,000 Bitcoin. So you begin to look at, well, the lobby of the public sector is also dominated by these same players. And you're looking at, well, hey, maybe a lot of these things weren't done um, these weren't accidents and maybe that these were simulated controlled demolitions to lead us into the exact, uh, pen, uh, that they want us in.

Marty Bent [1:18:26] Yeah, for what it's worth, I've met Charles from Paxos multiple times. I personally like him, think he's an interesting dude, and from what I can tell, like, really gets Bitcoin. And that's what I wonder with all the stablecoin stuff specifically, like, is Is it a lot of these people just trying to push things forward? And that's what stablecoins have been marketed as for many years, is this transitionary tool that we're going to use until we get to a Bitcoin standard. And that's just the question I have. When we question the intent of these people, is it nefarious from the beginning? I'm not sure. Or are they simply trying to solve a market problem that outsiders are recognizing that they're trying to do this and see that they may be able to co-opt it? But point being said, I don't think we need these stablecoins. And going back to the stablecoin bill, when it comes to these stable channels, I think they would actually be immune from that because you really don't have a— it's all Bitcoin at the end of the day. You don't have a token that you're creating like TerraUSD or something like that. It's literally Right.

Mark Goodwin [1:19:38] That's why I think those alternatives are so important and should be championed and not the US Treasury perpetuate. But I would say quickly, and I know Whitney's chomping at the bit to get in here, but I think this idea of is this a mistake or is this not? It's not a mistake. I don't think so. I think that this new system, this new financial system was created very specifically to use Bitcoin as this underlying energy commodity. exactly like petrol was used when we went off the gold standard, which is also an energy commodity. Bimetal standards are energy commodities. It takes energy to take stuff out of the ground. The Bitcoin dollar system absolutely started in 2020. Oil went negative 1 month before, or 2 months before the May 2020 halving, where Bitcoin's relative issuance goes below 2%, below the target inflation rate of the dollar, below the gold coming out of the ground. And so we've basically created this analog to the petrol system where there's this de facto, not literal, but de facto monopoly of pricing the underlying energy commodity that everyone wants that's highly demanded in dollars. And you create artificial demand. You have to buy dollars first to buy Bitcoin, which is something that the Bitcoin system is absolutely encouraging now. And then you look at, well, what incoming capital requirements are going to be with the Basel 3 regulation that the US is looking to adopt, Bitcoin is considered a liability. You're going to have to have all of these dollar instruments to offset the price appreciation of Bitcoin. So they basically created this wonderful area. You can look at Bitcoin as a vacuum for the debt bubble that is the fiat monetary system, the debt monetary system. And Bitcoin is ready as a demand-inelastic energy commodity to suck up the hyperinflation of the dollar. What does trillions of dollars of highly regulated stablecoins mean? It means trillions of dollars of Treasuries made, which means a lot of monetary printing. So I think this idea that maybe it's just this transitionary tool, I would say that's not true. I'd say it's much more likely that it was literally created by design, much like exactly the way they created the petrodollar system. This time they don't need military force. This time it's just economic incentives. But this idea that sort of it's this net good as we transition to a Bitcoin standard, it's like, well, we don't need to do any of this at all. We don't need to yoke Bitcoin to the dollar, tether Bitcoin to the dollar for any reason at all whatsoever. There's other alternatives, as we've just mentioned, that we can do. So I would say that this, I think, was designed, frankly.

Marty Bent [1:22:11] And Whitney, before you jump in, another alternative instead of Instead of needing dollars to get Bitcoin, just work for Bitcoin. Go set up a Zapprite account and—

Mark Goodwin [1:22:20] Pure barter.

Marty Bent [1:22:21] Plug in your self-custody wallets and receive Bitcoin for your goods and services. That's a good way to do it.

Mark Goodwin [1:22:27] Exactly.

Marty Bent [1:22:27] We do it here at TFTC. Sorry, Whitney.

Whitney Webb [1:22:29] No, no worries. All I was going to say was just comment on what you brought up about like intent, right? So when talking about expressly, you know, PayPal-backed entities, since Mark spent a lot of time talking about PYUSD specifically, I think a really good example in terms of looking at intent is something like Kiva, which is sort of this microfinance platform that framed itself as direct peer-to-peer lending or microlending. And it turned out it wasn't actually directly peer-to-peer a few years after it launched. But the main people behind that are people like Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder, who obviously has a lot of direct ties to PayPal since he has owned it since 2002. And then you had people like Reid Hoffman from the so-called PayPal Mafia. On the board, you also had Wences Casares on the board for some time. I don't believe he's there anymore, but Reed Hoffman still is, and a lot of the other people, including the people that created Kiva, hail from PayPal or they hail from eBay or the Omidyar Network, or you know. But essentially, we're in the eBay PayPal family here when we're talking about Kiva, and Kiva framed itself for a long time when it first launched as banking the unbanked or banking the unbankable, which is similar to the. The talking points that have been used with stablecoins. Right. So as time has gone on, what happened is that, yeah, people in these areas that were being banked by Kiva or receiving these loans through Kiva over time became more dependent on that service. And they also, I guess, gained trust among this particular base. And then Kiva launched something called the Kiva Protocol. And then teamed up with the UN to go in these countries where they had become a major part of the economy for these so-called unbankable. And they have now imposed a digital ID on these countries in places like, I believe, Sierra Leone as an example. But they're doing it across the board in direct coordination with the UN. Of course, part of the whole digital ID agenda backed by the UN-sponsored public-private partnership ID2020, brought to you by Bill Gates and the Rockefellers and all of these guys, right? So, and, you know, the framing of it is, oh, it's not just going to be, you know, your government ID, it's going to be your key to banking and it's going to have your credit history and it's also going to have all your health data and all of this stuff. I mean, basically an exact replica of, you know, what the World Economic Forum and UN plans for digital ID are.

Marty Bent [1:25:04] Right.

Whitney Webb [1:25:05] on these people. And, you know, on, you know, the so-called unbanked or the unbankable are often, you know, voiceless people, vulnerable people, and people that don't really know that these particular agendas are, you know, rolling out on the global level. So, you know, and I think also when you look at sort of this particular network as it relates to PayPal, which we do in our most recent piece, you know, Chain of Custody, looking at how they frame either their philanthropy or their sponsorship of entrepreneurs in places like Latin America and Africa. It's framed under altruistic terms, but when you actually look at what these people's motives are for doing it, something else definitely emerges. And I think that's particularly true if you look at someone either like Pierre Omidyar or someone like Reid Hoffman, who spent a lot of his— in Hoffman's case, a lot of his quote-unquote philanthropy has been, you know, for fighting like shadow wars and political campaigns and like creating, you know, false flags that didn't happen and all of this weird stuff that he funded through like these shadow groups called Acronym and all of this stuff, you know, and a lot of it, just as we discuss in the article, turns out to be like influence peddling for this particular group. That isn't to say that every stablecoin that says banking the unbanked is just like these guys. Sure. But this particular network that we're talking about here, whether like eBay, PayPal, you know, that particular crowd and obviously the same crowd that's behind PYUSD, you know, this is the kind of stuff they've done before when they've used a lot of these same talking points, I guess. And considering that you have people like Wences Casares involved who, you know, also is— or at least he was involved and then went on to Zappo and all of that. And this idea that Zappo was going to be the bridge between stablecoins, uh, the dollar and Bitcoin, and bring it all together. And his past ties to PayPal and also to like Facebook's Diem project, you know, their attempt at a stablecoin, I guess, you know. I mean, uh, you know, I, I find that, uh, a little bit concerning.

Mark Goodwin [1:27:08] Definitely.

Marty Bent [1:27:10] I do as well. And the— and that's another thing, I think we talked about this last time you guys were on too, like narrative crafting and manufactured consent. And that's one thing I've been trying to, again, similar to what I did with ESG 5 years ago, it's happening this cycle now. Bitcoin doesn't compete with the dollar. It's not money, it's a commodity. It's real estate, property, whatever you want to call it. It's like, no, Bitcoin is money. It is competing with the dollar and every other currency for that matter, whether they be fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. And we need to own that. that and get ahead of that? Because that's from a framing perspective within the Bitcoin industry. I think that is something that could really trip us up in the future if we go along with Bitcoin's just property, it's this commodity, it doesn't compete with the dollar. And then lo and behold, Bitcoin price goes up, it becomes easier to spend it, more people want to receive it. It is obviously competing with the dollar as a monetary asset. The government's like, well, you guys told us it wasn't competing with the dollar, so we have to come in and down with the hammer. We should own it from the beginning, be like, no, this is competing with the dollar. We don't like the dollar system. We think it's inherently corrupt. And this monetary system is much more open, transparent, and morally aligned with the future that people want to see.

Mark Goodwin [1:28:30] But Michael Saylor says that we shouldn't fight the dollar and we should— no, but yeah, no, 100%. I think you are seeing narrative carving or whatever the phrase was that you used that was better than the word I just said. But you are seeing it in the Bitcoin space, and you're seeing huge people come in like a Larry Fink pushing Bitcoin as digital gold or in this way that's not really this peer-to-peer currency. And I'm not trying to go total Roger Ver hijacking Bitcoin thing or Bcash. I think Bcash is a bad idea because of the centralizing effects of big blocks. But this idea that, you know, hey, well, our bags are going to go up, so we should just sit back and be passive because we're rich now is super fucking lame. That's not why we're here. I think we are here to have a state change of money and take the power back from the debt pardoning levers of the state via the central bank and via this Ponzi scheme that is the Treasury market. We're here to defang that. Because it's an extremely powerful political tool that they use to wage war on the world with the Treasury market. So let's not let Bitcoin become a ledger where we store dollars and store Treasuries and tokenize debt, because that's what they want to do. And they're not just going to tokenize debt or dollars. They're going to tokenize pretty much everything. They're going to tokenize the Earth. They're going to tokenize carbon. They're going to push all that ESG shit. Fink didn't just stop being an ESG guy because it's politically convenient. He's been building these structures with hugely important groups, World Bank, UN. Whitney's written a ton about sort of the green finance system, and these guys haven't just forgot about that. It's just convenient for them right now to push Bitcoin as digital gold, price out a bunch of people from— we might even already kind of be there. America is probably the highest purchasing economy in the world, the best positioned. Most people in the United States can't afford a whole Bitcoin, and that's just going to continue to get worse and worse as Bitcoin does inevitably, I would say, cross 6 figures and maybe even 7 figures here in the incoming decade. As that happens, more and more people will be priced out. It will be harder and harder to transact on the base layer and to actually have the power that we enjoy as early adopters or early-ish adopters. And I think the only responsibility Bitcoiners have is to leave Bitcoin as permissionless and as accessible as it was when we got there. And that changes a lot economically and programmably as more and more people use it and as Bitcoin gets more and more expensive. What Bitcoin actually does is it purchases ledger space. That's really all that it can purchase. It's the bits in the ledger to basically— describe your spending conditions. And as more and more people get on the Bitcoin network, and as Bitcoin gets more and more expensive, it actually becomes harder to have permissionless settlement for the users of Bitcoin. And that pool of people being able to access permissionless settlement is going to get smaller and smaller, which seems backwards. Early adopters get richer, less and less people are actually able to use Bitcoin, and then they're forced to use these treasury-perpetuating tokenized debt systems like stablecoins in lieu of actually being able to access Bitcoin and hold their keys. So I think this is a really important time, not to get too soapboxy, but it's just so important as consent is being manufactured and we're being fattened up. I mean, quite literally, we're pigs feeding on Larry Fink's inflationary effects of Bitcoin price. And now a lot of people, I think, are just losing the ethos completely of what made Bitcoin special and what made Bitcoin interesting. And we just really got to get back to what we're here for. I don't think we should trust a Trump. I don't think we should trust the state moving into Bitcoin like the way that they are. We should understand and have learned by now there's ulterior motives for the adoption of Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [1:32:50] No, I completely agree, but I think all this was inevitable, like people getting priced out, particularly at transactions at the protocol level, just like the nature of scarce block space and increased adoption. But then going back, like, that's why I'm so bullish on Chaumian mints. Yes, they may be more centralized than peer-to-peer transactions at the protocol level, but they are permissionless in the sense that anybody can spin up a mint. It's open source code. that anybody can go implement and try to provide a service to a market and allow people to accumulate eCash tokens commensurate with Bitcoin over time, cheaply, privately. And so that's where I think when it comes to this particular discussion about scaling Bitcoin in a permissionless fashion to as many people as possible, I think It is abundantly clear that's never going to happen at the protocol level. And so what can we do to ensure that we build these layers above Bitcoin that are tightly aligned with the permissionless nature of the protocol level? And that's why I'm infinitely bullish on these mints. And I do think, I think we may have mentioned this before, but if not, bears repeating, which is like this, Hal Finney identified this in December of 2010, where it's like, not everybody's going to be able to transact on the protocol level. We're going to need to build these Bitcoin banks. And this was before the reemergence of Chaumian mints on top of Bitcoin. But I think what he described in that bitcointalk.org post is coming to fruition via these mints. And it's really imperative that— I agree with you that we—

Mark Goodwin [1:34:33] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:34:34] begin to highlight these technologies in this particular way to leverage Bitcoin as opposed to centralized stablecoins or any other centralized technology that the Borg wants to build on top of Bitcoin and try to funnel people into.

Mark Goodwin [1:34:51] Yeah, financial services are necessary for scaling an economic system. Trust is okay. Trust can't be replaced by ones and zeros. There's a lot of things that can't be done But I think this perversion of Bitcoin's blockchain to become storage of dollars when we have PayPal, we have Venmo, we have all of these centralized trusted programs, and now we're just building it again and pretending it's trustless. I think it's kind of sad in general that the space has been so co-opted by these groups when it's like, oh, cool, we digitize the dollar again, we tokenize debt again. this is some big innovation. I think it's pretty lame. Bitcoin is really complicated and stupid, and blockchains are really clunky and dumb and slow. And to build up all this thing and have this 10,000 iterations of the blockchain scattered across the world, and then just to reduce that back down to trusted dollar instruments, I think is obviously dumb. So yeah, I think we're on the same page, but there's a lot of people in this space that want to turn Bitcoin into a place to just stash dollars and debt. And carbon credits and all of these things.

Whitney Webb [1:36:06] So yeah, it's worth saying that one of the pioneers of trading electronic US government debt, and that's intimately involved with Tedder Cantor Fitzgerald, were also the pioneers of electronic carbon credit trading, like in the late '90s, early 2000s. They've always been into that. A lot of these guys have, if you look at it. So yeah, but like Like whether—

Marty Bent [1:36:29] I mean, I don't think Larry Fink has changed his mind about ESG. I think he's taking a step back and trying to reorient and think about the next iteration.

Whitney Webb [1:36:37] Well, he's trying to rebrand.

Marty Bent [1:36:38] Yeah, exactly. And but like, it's ESG. I mean, carbon credits fall under the bucket of ESG. I think these dooms— these things are just doomed for failure, um, in the, the lust for power and the attempt to funnel people into these products, um, with the with the intent that it will allow them to control more things. It's very hubristic in the sense that it ignores economic reality, which is these things fundamentally don't make sense.

Mark Goodwin [1:37:06] Yeah, but that's what the public sector does. Regulation ignores economic reality all the time. They force us to buy carbon credits.

Whitney Webb [1:37:11] Well, you know, I think too, like, if, if we allow ourselves to be onboarded to these digital ID systems and this, you know, these financial surveillance systems, these programmable surveillable currencies that they've been developing, then it's going to be much easier for them once everyone's dependent on those new systems to force things like carbon credits on people. And I think that's part of the plan because the same people that are the architects of the digital ID stuff at the UN, people like Mark Carney and Mike Bloomberg, I mean, they're all in for this carbon credit stuff. They're arguably architects of that entire system and the whole stakeholder capitalist model and ESG stuff. They love all that that stuff. And I don't think they have any intention of abandoning that market just because people don't like it. I think they're waiting for the right time that once they have people onboarded to these systems enough and there's this insane surveillance state in place where like, you know, your face is your ID and all of this stuff, and they can just track everything you do and everywhere you go and whatever, and smartphones become more invasive. And we're at, you know, this, this point too where like in the next couple of years, all the brain-machine interfaces are to roll out like Neuralink and whatever for commercial use, at least allegedly. I mean, you know, it gets kind of crazy then. And I think at that point it will be much easier for them to impose this kind of stuff that in the current environment would be a hard sell. It becomes a much easier sell once you have those kind of systems in place. And I think that's why, you know, like in UN documentation about the SDGs, without digital ID, so many of them just don't work, right? And, you know, the digital ID stuff in the SDGs is built within SDG 16, which is intimately tied up. I mean, Interpol is the implementing partner for SDG 16. It's about building strong institutions and like ensuring peace. But if you look at the nuts and bolts of it, as Ian Davis and I have done in our work on the SDGs, specifically SDG 16, it's about—

Marty Bent [1:39:18] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:39:19] completely controlling speech online, uh, since, you know, complete blanket censorship of, of dissent is a key part of manufacturing peace here. Uh, no one's disagreeing online anymore, so I guess we've solved the hate speech problem. Oh no, well, you just like censored the crud out of like people talking. Um, you know, that's not exactly the same. Or giving like Interpol all this power to basically become a de facto like global police organization, which is what it's been angling to be for a very long time, quite frankly. Um, but you have like, you know, people like, um, you know, like I mentioned earlier, the idea of this biometric entry-exit thing, you know, that's the SDGs and that's Interpol. It's tied up with the digital ID stuff, uh, and the financial inclusion agenda of the UN. Uh, but, you know, it— all of this stuff is, is, is very bad, uh, when you look at, you know, what it's building toward. And if we have that kind of system where like, you know, peace through surveillance, mass surveillance, and like peace through a police state and all of that stuff. Like, yeah, I mean, you, you can have an extremely authoritarian totalitarian government impose order on a society or whole nations or the world, uh, and you can say that's peace, um, but that's not really what most people think of when they see the flowery descriptions that they give of SGG 16. But when you read what it's actually about, you know, a very different picture emerges. And they can't do it without digital ID. They can't do it without implementing this whole, you know, surveillance panopticon. And they're relying hugely on the private sector partners to build that. Right. But again, as we've discussed before and as is noted a lot in this piece, you know, that panopticon has been a public-private partnership. It's been these private companies, the same network of Silicon Valley oligarchs oligarchs who oddly enough all have some sort of Jeffrey Epstein connection. That's how close-knit they all are. Um, have, you know, I have done it with like, you know, In-Q-Tel funding or some sort of, you know, federal backing, um, of some variety. And almost all of them, I'm pretty sure all of them actually, of the biggest tech companies are government contractors either for the military or intelligence or other parts of the government. So, you know, I don't really think it's It's fair to talk about some of these VC firms as just venture capitalists and they're free market capitalists and American success story stuff. I mean, they're there because a particular network selected them and ensured their success. And there's a lot of incubators for those type of networks around. The one we focus on in the piece we've sort of been mentioning on and off today is called Endeavor. It's backed by the Bronfman family, which comes up up a lot in my books as it relates to the Epstein scandal. And also Pierre Omidyar of eBay and has a lot of ties to the PayPal network because Reid Hoffman is one of their main dudes. And they've developed a lot of these entrepreneurs in the Global South that are now dominating fintech in places like Argentina and beyond and have all these ties with— if you look at some of these Endeavor companies like Satellogic that we've talked about before, you have the involvement of people like Steve Mnuchin. And Cantor Fitzgerald and like a lot of these debt barons in the— in these intelligence-linked satellite companies and stuff. I mean, there's a lot of very disturbing plays going on right now, and I think it's really not getting enough scrutiny. And oddly enough, you know, we're kind of in this situation where if you're, you know, on Twitter a lot, for example, you're being told that, you know, some of these billionaires are the only thing that stands between us and total tyranny. To paraphrase a recent tweet from Michael Shellenberger.

Mark Goodwin [1:43:10] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [1:43:10] Right? And so this idea that these billionaires are the answer to all of our problems, I mean, Trump's a billionaire too, right? I mean, it's just kind of crazy that people have been led to believe that the only thing we can do as a country and as a society is place our entire future in the hands of a very small network of billionaires.

Mark Goodwin [1:43:35] The answer to all of our problems is always surveillance. That's, that's the idea. Democracy, uh, we need, we need surveillance and ID. Uh, the oceans, uh, we need to, uh, to, to surveil them. Pandemics, surveillance, surveil the animals. Yeah, the border, the border issues, uh, we need to surveil more. Um, and then you see, I mean, yeah, like you mentioned Satellogic, Tether gave them $30 million, you know, in April. Why is, why is Tether investing in BlackRock Neurotech? Why are they investing in all this AI stuff? Why are they investing in satellite observation companies?

Whitney Webb [1:44:14] Yeah, someone needs to explain to me why banking the unbanked Tether is, is, is investing so heavily in brain-machine interfaces.

Mark Goodwin [1:44:21] You know, and satellites.

Marty Bent [1:44:23] Like, what? Why?

Mark Goodwin [1:44:24] For what? For what reason? Aren't they, aren't they in empowering the Global South? Why do they need to look at them with satellites? I don't—

Whitney Webb [1:44:30] Yeah. Run by— chaired the board, chaired by Steve Mnuchin, the former Treasury Secretary.

Mark Goodwin [1:44:36] And Howie Lotnick of Cantor.

Whitney Webb [1:44:39] The former head of the US military basically is on the board too. Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:44:43] Dunford. Marcos Galperín, who's Endeavor's first success story, who is the head of Mercado Libre, which is basically the Amazon, eBay of Argentina, of Latin America really in general. You have the head of Caterpillar on there, which, again, if you want to sort of look at, you know, maybe we're moving towards commodity-backed stablecoins, well, then that puts all of this power into the oligarchs. Not only the oligarchs that own all of the fields and all of the wheat, but also the manufacturers of the machines that can, you know, farm at a scale big enough to have agriculture commodity-backed stablecoins. You got them on there.

Whitney Webb [1:45:19] And SatoLogic is like surveilling the grain stuff.

Mark Goodwin [1:45:23] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:45:24] Already with the plan to, you know, do that. And they already have a company in Argentina called Agro Tokens backed by Visa and all of that that's trying to advance that play as it relates to Argentina's agricultural sector. But the last time we talked about Cytologic, Marty, it was because they were trying to impose this carbon market with this network of companies. Right. So again, you know, these are efforts where I think what we're going to see from this particular network is unprecedented efforts to create new markets where markets have not existed before. So a lot of this is being done through the real-world asset tokenization frenzy and the push to, you know, move into natural capital, which I know we've talked about for actually a couple of years now. And the idea of like securitizing natural resources or the global commons, the world's oceans, oceans, rivers, lakes, streams, and all of that. The guy that invented carbon markets, really, Richard Sander, who's like an ex-Drexel Burnham Lambert guy and created— helped create derivatives and stuff, he wants to create a private market sort of like the carbon market, but for clean air and water. So get ready for your de facto air tax. guys. Um, I mean, this is— but I mean, these are people making money and they want to make markets. And the way these— this crowd, uh, makes markets— I mean, I always go back to this Larry Fink quote where he says markets like totalitarian governments. Totalitarian governments can impose markets no one wants on the population. Like, I mean, this is what hap— this is the China model, you know? This is why people like Larry Fink, like, love it over there.

Mark Goodwin [1:47:09] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [1:47:09] The federal government comes in to help out the markets. It's like centralized control for the purpose of creating controlled markets. And if this was a free market play, uh, people would be like, no, I don't want to— why do we need this stuff? Like, there's no need for it. And they can try and manufacture consent through the need, through climate change, uh, you know, fear-mongering and whatever, but at the end of the day, it hasn't worked. So how do they get it? Well, they have to have governments impose it on people.

Marty Bent [1:47:36] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [1:47:37] Um, and when you have a complete surveillance panopticon, it's much easier to impose that on people. than it otherwise would be. And they have all these markets lined up to impose on us. A lot of it involves, you know, the complete destruction of the natural world, really. And, you know, just complete financial madness.

Mark Goodwin [1:47:58] And what are— and what are all these assets denominated in? Dollars. They're dollar-denominated assets. And so that it allows another place for the US government to shovel highly inflationary effects from, from printing a lot of money, which we know they have to do to be able to service the now $34 trillion of debt. The debt service is now outpacing the growth of our GDP. It's outpacing our military budget. So they need to find places to create artificial demand for dollars. And they do that by putting a price tag on the trees in your backyard and the methane coming out of your ass. And they do that and they dollar denominate it. And now we're perpetuating the US Treasury Ponzi market because you ate some pinto beans.

Whitney Webb [1:48:40] You know, well, I mean, that, that was the Satellogic play, like talking about measuring carbon emissions from space. I mean, they want to try and surveil this stuff from space so they can charge you for it. This is a market, right? But it's a market no one wants, and it's crony capitalism to the core.

Mark Goodwin [1:48:59] Yeah, and Thiel's telling you, find a market that no one else is doing because competition means price war, which means bad for revenue. Find a market that no one else is doing. No one else can possibly do this. No one else can build, uh, observation as preservation carbon credit blockchain market that's backed by US dollar instruments, that's tokenized debt, that's upheld by a surveillance network of satellites, that's upheld by oligarchs that own the grains in Argentina. No one, no one can establish that market other than an extremely specific group of people. And guess what? They're all on the board of Satellogic. And guess what? They're all connected to Endeavor. They're all connected to a lot of this PayPal Mafia, this group that Whitney has really done the work of really mapping out, this mob-connected, intelligence-connected banker, data broker, debt baron cabal, frankly.

Marty Bent [1:49:58] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:49:59] Uh, you know, that is, that has really just kind of taken over the private and the public sector. Um, one nation under blackmail is now one world under blackmail, and they're shoving this, this, this debt, which is so useful to them, onto the natural world and, and, and, and buying up all of our data with it. It's, it's, uh, incredibly disturbing, frankly.

Marty Bent [1:50:17] No, it really is. And going back to just repeating what I said earlier, like, the, like, from a first principles perspective, all this is built on bullshit. I mean, you mentioned it, Whitney, like the climate hysteria that's out there. Like, well, we need to put these carbon markets and put the satellites up there to track all this because we have existential climate change. Which I plan on having some scientists who recently released a peer-reviewed paper that claims— and they would like to say proves— it's absolute bullshit because they're manipulating the data, um, over time. And they use fear. That's like whether it's the carbon markets or the surveillance and the digital IDs. It's all either wrapped in some cataclysmic event due to climate change or terrorist, uh, again, going back to like TSA. Like, we should—

Mark Goodwin [1:51:07] What, what did 9/11— what did 9/11 create? It created this state that we're talking about, this panopticon of, of, of the security state that was the private sector. 9/11 created all of that. There would be no consent for any of this stuff stuff, uh, if it wasn't for 9/11, uh, and then you go and look at the official story of 9/11 and, and everything that was going on there. And I don't want to get you that demonetized. I think we've already done enough here, uh, to, to attack your channel. But, uh, you know, but no, for sure. Well, I— well, frankly, you know, I don't necessarily feel super comfortable going all in on, on here anyway. But just, you know, that— why do we have Larry Ellison coming out and doing a huge op-ed at the New York Times immediately after 9/11 being like, we a central depository for everyone's data, and we could have prevented 9/11. You know, a literal CIA front, uh, coming out, you know, demanding a central repository for, uh, for all of, all of our citizens.

Whitney Webb [1:52:02] Yeah, well, that was also the main argument from the intelligence community about their failure to predict 9/11, was that, oh, like, all the data between intelligence agencies is siloed, so we need to combine it all into one thing. And the people that made that argument, like the CIA CIA's chief information officer, Alan Wade, again tied up with the Maxwell family through Kiliad. He's one of the guys that helped create Total Information Awareness as the answer to that. And now it's Palantir, right? So even if we, like we were talking about earlier, we get this shift where they dismantle these public agencies in name only, they've been moving to the private sector for a long time. I mean, you could argue that's what In-Q-Tel is all about and why all the big tech firms that are dominating our lives right now all have like significant intelligence connections. Um, you know, the CIA has always really been a private thing, uh, in some capacity when you consider that all of the earliest members and directors were directly from Wall Street. They were either Wall Street lawyers or Wall Street bankers. A lot of the CIA's earliest coups were done expressly to benefit U.S. national multinational corporations, not necessarily U.S. national security, arguably the opposite on many occasions. And it's all been about protecting markets. And this includes the drug market, which organized crime has long dominated. And then, as I noted in my books pretty extensively, organized crime merged with intelligence in the '40s, even before the CIA existed. And their big markets were drugs and sex traffic, human trafficking and all of that. And then the intelligence agencies got in those businesses. are protecting those rackets. Why was the CIA the first boots on the ground during the Afghanistan invasion, which was arguably about the banning of opioid cultivation and oil pipelines and all of that stuff? It's about protecting markets almost all the time. And that's why recently I've sort of been trying to frame the CIA as Wall Street secret police. That's essentially what happens. And it's the oligarchs, the moneyed people in the United States that really, you know, that's who the CIA has been answering to for a long time. And these are the guys that are now backing, like, you know, the Silicon Valley titans and all of that. I mean, it's, you know, maybe they're going to change the facade the system wears, but, you know, it's going to be the same ultimately at the end of the day. And that's why, you know, I'm so critical of what, you know, appears to be shaping up here, because I think it's just another effort to hoodwink us and saddle us with something that they It's just as Orwellian and terrible as what the CIA was trying to do decades ago. I mean, the agenda has marched forward, and if it's coming from the private sector or the public sector, who cares? It's terrible for human freedom on all counts, right? So anyway, I guess getting— I don't know, how long ago did I freeze?

Marty Bent [1:55:01] It's like 10 seconds ago. 30 seconds ago. 30 seconds. Well, time flies.

Mark Goodwin [1:55:05] Hmm.

Whitney Webb [1:55:09] Do you need me to like wrap that up again? I forgot what I was kind of saying.

Marty Bent [1:55:12] You were, you were like in the process of wrapping it up. You're worried about the narratives because I wanted to interject. It's interesting because it's so multifaceted and it's so discombobulating, right? Because you have the cultural war stuff going on too. And that's one thing No, that I'll just admit, like, to me, I am optimistic about, uh, like, again, going back to lesser of two evils. Maybe not from like the economic or surveillance thing, just like culturally. I think we've gotten so divided here in the United States, and I do think things have gone to insane, uh, insane extents and like particularly like with the state interjecting between the family, the parents and the children. Um, just crazy lawlessness in terms of, uh, attorney generals and district attorneys not actually, um, abiding by laws, decimating the police force and letting people go rob and steal things. So for me as an individual looking at the choices, and particularly in the context of the cultural war, it's like Like the message that the, what seems to be incoming administration is putting out there in terms of like, we're going to bring back justice and we're actually going to abide by the laws. Things like Chevron deference that the Supreme Court just overturned, like that's a really good signal to me. And like, these are things that I would like to see happen. But then as you guys bring up, it's always important to be aware of these other things that could really hinder financial and just, um, just freedom generally if we get thrown into this financialized panopticon.

Whitney Webb [1:56:56] Yeah, well, the problem here is that, you know, especially considering the big Silicon Valley backing of whichever party wins in November, um, there's been a huge Silicon Valley, uh, push by these same players we're talking about that are tied to intelligence and advancing the surveillance state into basically dominating law enforcement And this idea of replacing, you know, oh, there's less police officers, so let's replace them with AI. Let's put facial recognition everywhere and identify people that we say are suspects. I mean, they've been doing that in places like the UK and then have found out that their facial recognition, you know, algorithms are like extremely inaccurate, but they don't change anything anyway, which is if you look at some of the the, um, you know, inspirations, uh, of Palantir specifically, you know, it's about— goes back to this philosophical— the philosophical development of the panopticon, that people obey when they just know they're being watched. Uh, no one actually has to be watching. Just knowing that you are being watched, uh, induces subservient, submissive, obedient behavior. And, um, you know, and in addition to that, I mean, the idea that like a lot of, a lot of law enforcement and also emergency services, 911 call centers are all being moved to a lot of intelligence-linked platforms. So in the case of law enforcement, a lot of them are being onboarded to the software program produced by this company called Mark 43. David Petraeus is like one of their backers, the former CIA director, along— I think Jeff Bezos is one too. And a lot of other intelligence-linked figures are on that list specifically. And then Carbine 911, has basically made a move to dominate the next generation 911 call system because there's a push to move away from sort of the decentralized emergency call model that the US has had for a long time where it's county specific, move it to a whole nationwide system. And Carbine is set to have that. They were backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund very heavily and have Founders Fund people on the board. And they also have currently DHS people, uh, like Trump— one of Trump's DHS heads and one of, uh, the Bush-era DHS heads, um, on the board as well. And they were backed really heavily by Jeffrey Epstein, originally launched out of people who came from Israel's Unit 8200. It used to be essentially led by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, had heads of, uh, former commanders of Israeli intelligence agencies on the board of directors. No longer, but it was that way at the beginning. And basically, when you call 911 with your smartphone into a system that runs CARBY 911, you agree to basically allow them to pull all of this data off of your phone, essentially data mine everything on your smartphone device for the purpose of helping locate you and also determining through another component of their system where past crimes have occurred and where crimes are likely to occur in the future, i.e., pre-crime.

Marty Bent [2:00:03] Right.

Whitney Webb [2:00:04] Which is something that really all of this has been building to for some time. So, you know, unfortunately, a lot of what the sales pitches are— again, I go back to this whole, you know, idea of problem, reaction, solution, that you have one party create the problem and the other party come in and offer the solution. You know, Democrats have dismantled a lot of the law enforcement stuff, and that's resulted in a lot of increased feelings of insecurity and actual insecurity depending where you live in the United States.

Mark Goodwin [2:00:29] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:00:29] States, and arguably what's going to happen now, and what's sort of being set up, is that the solution is like no, we need to use technology to get because it's more efficient and because there's less people and yada yada yada, and we need to you know onboard law enforcement onto all of these different platforms and software that are either tied with AI or run on AI and biometrics. metrics and all of that.

Mark Goodwin [2:00:58] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:00:59] So I don't, you know, I think there's a lot of setups here for this particular system that they've wanted to have in place. If you look at the history of it for many decades and that it's essentially been building up here, but they need people's consent to do it, right? Because if everyone is in an uproar about it, they don't do it. And, you know, unfortunately, I, you know, I don't know how how many people I can necessarily convince about this stuff, but I'm going to keep trying to do my best about it, I guess. But I think a lot of people are being had right now. And I think if you look at the funders of all of this, it's quite clear the type of world that they've been trying to build. I mean, in the case of Biden, the person that's been his tech czar has been former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt, who's on the steering committee of the globalist closed-door conference known as Bilderberg with Peter Thiel. They're actually— Newsweek named Thiel and Schmidt the most influential members at Bilderberg on the steering committee and basically, you know, argued in a 2019 article that Bilderberg factions were divided along, you know, along their 2 lines. They agree on a lot more than they don't agree, and they agree on a lot of the stuff discussed at Bilderberg, which ultimately advances this whole, like, global tyranny agenda that a lot of people got wise to during COVID and have seemingly forgotten again. But they back both parties. It's a uniparty. And I think enough people have learned that at one point or another and learned that— hopefully we'll learn, if not this election cycle, I don't know when— that continually voting for the lesser of two evils is just— you're still voting for evil, right? Is this really the best we can do? And people say it's the only choice we have. I mean, it's not, uh, you can take personal responsibility, build solutions, and also not comply. I mean, if we have enough people not comply with the digital ID stuff and the biometric stuff, um, it won't work. And that's what a lot of people said during the vax passport stuff during COVID is like, don't comply with the vaccine passport, you know. Uh, this is a trial for something they want to roll out that's going to be much worse than just vaccines, but could be tied to that too, potentially in the future. You know, you don't take a particular vaccine, you can— your freedom of movement can be restricted again, or you say the wrong thing online, your freedom of movement can be restricted. This world is being built and it's being built by both parties. And I think some people just don't really want to face that reality and find it doom and gloom and super blackpilling when I talk about this. But it actually should be super whitepilling that, like, it's very easy to not comply. Well, maybe not necessarily easy, but we're all capable of not complying. And the more people that don't comply, the better chance of success we have. have. Um, and so I don't know, I guess I'll get off my soapbox there.

Mark Goodwin [2:03:48] No, no, stay on there. But, but I think, I think you're totally right about the— that it should be white pilling in the sense of, you know, this isn't my quote, but, you know, if the situation was hopeless, the propaganda would be unnecessary. And if they didn't need to, you know, manufacture consent for us to comply, if they didn't actually need that, they wouldn't spend all the money and all the time and the man-hours to create these like fake counter-narratives and these, these false messiahs and these people that we look up to. They, they would just, they would just make it happen. They wouldn't try to manufacture our consent. So there's so much power that we have as individuals and as collectives to push back by not complying. And if this was useless and hopeless, it was over, they wouldn't go through all of this work. So I think that this net is about to be cast. This panopticon is about to be soldered in. The satellites are about to be unstoppably launched in space. The blockchains are about to be built. The infrastructure providers are about to be captured. We have an extremely important opportunity here to push back and to not comply, even if they're going to give us UBI and stablecoin-backed payments for the rights to the carbon in our backyard. Whatever the bullshit that they're going to try to incentivize us to do, we cannot comply. We can push back. And there's a reason why they're doing it, and it's because they need our consent, they need our compliance, uh, and, and let's not fucking give it to them.

Marty Bent [2:05:19] Yeah, completely agree. And going back to problem-reaction-solution framing, the Hegelian dialectic, it— and like, particularly as it pertains to like, we've had crime waves and open borders and like, all right, now we got to replace it with, uh, AI surveillance and pre-crime. It's like Again, that's another instance where you point out, you're like, actually, you're not solving the core of this problem. Number one, we have proven throughout time that we have been able to enforce laws and properly put people in jail for murdering and robbing people. We've been able to do that before. We don't need to replace it with pre-crime. We just need to go back to that. And then even a layer below that, what are the conditions that are leading people to a life of crime, which is a bad economy and I would argue a bad economy, bad family lives, bad food that make them hyperactive. And the a lot of people in a state of despair where they don't think they have the ability to pull themselves up from their bootstraps and climb the social ladder, or even if they don't want to climb the social ladder, just remain where they are. And so they're forced into a life of crime. And so by like saying like no, we just need pre-crime and all this AI, it's like well, you're actually still not. up solving the, the core of the problem, which is more psychological, social, and economic, where we need good money. We need people to have the ability to save money and live a comfortable life so that they're not incentivized to go create crimes. Then on top of that, let's fix the food so people aren't eating like shit, which fucks up their brains, makes them think in a hyperactive fashion. Like, none of those conversations happening out in the mainstream or even in a lot of independent media.

Mark Goodwin [2:07:06] In the same way that, you know, we're such perceptive creatures, you know, we, you know, we are what we eat, we are what we consume. And if we're on these platforms where we're being fed very specific things that are targeted specifically to our demographic, you know, they're able to simulate literal brainwaves and behavior and thus action. And thus they can simulate and stimulate compliance, uh, uh, you know, in, in any demographic that they want, you know, very specifically. So I think it's probably a good time, you know, we were talking about this earlier, like, you know, it's election season, maybe sign off, maybe, maybe, maybe take a break, you know, maybe go to publish only.

Whitney Webb [2:07:46] Yeah, if you don't want your brain to be fried and you want to feel like more sane than you do now, probably best to like minimize.

Mark Goodwin [2:07:53] Yeah. Assange was released—

Whitney Webb [2:07:54] Social media.

Mark Goodwin [2:07:54] Like how many weeks ago? Trump was attempted assassinated a couple days ago. The VP— I mean, it's just we haven't even discussed so many things that should be huge global news, you know, barely get any, get any play anymore. Uh, you know, everything is so hyper-normalized and moving so fast. And if we understand, you know, who are these data barons, uh, you know, they're, they're the new debt barons, uh, and they control this infrastructure. They control what consuming, which affects how we think and what our reality is. We need to make sure we're really careful about what we ingest in every way.

Marty Bent [2:08:29] Yeah, that's very important. I've been very online the last 5 days, which, and I can feel it myself. Like, that's why I'm happy I talked to you guys today. And I've been having conversations off of Twitter with people. And yeah, it's very, it's very discombobulating. It's funny, Whitney, because we've talked probably 2 or 3 times over the last 12 months, and I think every time we've talked, it's like, election season's gonna get crazy.

Mark Goodwin [2:08:58] Like, you're gonna be—

Marty Bent [2:08:59] you're gonna be—

Whitney Webb [2:09:00] Yeah, it's gonna get crazier than it's been this past week, I'm sure. Yeah, like, this is just like the pre-RNC nomination warm-up, you know? Just wait till the Democrats are like a total intentional, in my opinion, clusterfuck, uh, and it's just gonna be like, can you believe that this is happening. I mean, I don't know. I think that's just going to be so ridiculous as we get closer to it. And I think they just want people like outraged and angry and like very emotional, because when people are like very triggered and very emotional, they're not critical thinkers. Um, and, uh, you know, pretty much ever since COVID the agenda of, you know, the World Economic Forum and all the elites has been to rebuild trust, uh, the trust they lost during COVID and all of that. And so by having all of these like emotional triggers And, you know, one after another after another. I mean, a lot of it seems like it's trying to cultivate, you know, a certain segment of the population, like make them trust or, you know, practically in some cases, maybe even beyond trust into like borderline worship. Some of these figures that have been held up to us as, you know, the solution to all of our problems. And, you know, no, no one person is going to get into the White House and solve smaller problems, even if he's great and not a lesser of two evils candidate, you know. Um, and I think again that Americans need to return to like the core values of the country, like individual responsibility and resilience, and like take responsibility for building alternatives to this stuff. You don't want to comply with digital ID and programmable surveillable money? Make new systems. Make new alternative financial systems, alternative, uh, any system. But I think financial is definitely an important start because, you know, a lot this ultimately leads to people being like financially deplatformed or like completely cut out of, out of the economy, right? Um, but there's a lot people need to be doing in terms of solutions. And the more we're distracted by like the political circus in the United States, um, you know, the less time people are spending building and also letting people in the public know about solutions. Because as we get closer to November, the, the censorship situation on platforms, um, is going to just get crazier than it even was last time or any of the previous elections. It's going to be harder to get information out. Uh, so either alternatives for communication or information distribution or, or finances, whatever, a lot of that has to be thought about and like at least start to be developed like now would be good.

Marty Bent [2:11:28] That's why I was holding my thumb up, because I think the combination of Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, eCash is what people should be focusing on.

Whitney Webb [2:11:38] Or just solutions, building something, you know. Um, and a lot of it has not been that. A lot of it— I mean, it's almost like, it seems like sometimes there was an effort to convince some Bitcoiners, almost like a version of QAnon, trust the plan. Like, let's just sit back and do nothing, and then we're just gonna win. Because Bitcoin's the best. And then you have— I mean, I don't know. I think that complacency is not good. People should be building. Developers should be developing, right? And this idea that like we just sit back and do nothing and everything's going to be like fine and dandy while like all these crazy agendas and policies are being rolled out. You know, I don't think that's good to have, whether it's for Bitcoin or really anywhere else, you know.

Marty Bent [2:12:31] No, I know, I completely agree. No, I don't think— and I, I'm a big proponent of we're going to win, and I've written articles about this, and I want to make it clear it's not like a—

Whitney Webb [2:12:41] Sure, we agree.

Marty Bent [2:12:42] Statement of complacency. It's like you have to believe that you can win so that you can totally win. And so it's like trying to instill confidence. But white pill here is like, I have an upfront and close view to all this due to what we do at 1031, and it is happening. People are building And it is accelerating, particularly on Nostr and E-Cash. Things are really accelerating at a pace that I would not have expected only a year ago or at the beginning of this year even. So that gives me a lot of hope. And then another thing I wanted to add, sort of unrelated to that, but going back to the emotional manipulation, that's why I think I've been very online for the last 5 days and trying to figure out because If it was truly— and I, I, I like— I think I do believe that it was a failed assassination attempt. And so like, if we're running with the assumption that that's exactly what it was, which I tend to believe it was, is like they tried to manipulate our emotions that way and it failed. And so that's been like the perplexing thing for me over the last 5 days is like, ah, fuck, like what? Like they missed. And now what does that mean? Is it like Going back to the divine intervention, was it some sort of divine intervention that sort of set a path that the incumbent power structure, whether it was the Democrats or Republicans, that have set something off? Or maybe it was truly a lone wolf guy and pure incompetence by the social— or excuse me, um, uh, what's it called— the Secret Service. Um, that's what, like, for me personally, just taking a step back, be like, oh, did they try to manipulate us one way? It didn't work. And what's the ramifications of that? Just thinking.

Mark Goodwin [2:14:23] Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to know what is the manipulation, what is the narrative, what is the miss, what is— what is— yeah, exactly. It's about the discord, uh, and sort of the breaking of, uh, you know, keeping us really highly emotional, high, easily triggered creatures that become addicted to consuming more content on the service because we're trying to dig to you know, the truth. You know, we're searching for meaning on Twitter, on Reddit, on 4chan, whatever it is. I mean, they're controlled boxes and we're searching for meaning on there. And they hide a lot of truth in these shit narratives. You know, there's a lot about QAnon I'm sure that's very true and is, you know, why people are emotionally manipulated by it, you know, because there's elements of truth to it. There's elements of truth to all of these counter-narratives. There's elements of truth to mainstream narratives, but they coat it in a way with shit that, you know, that push you towards these boxes, these pens that they want you in. So I would say that, you know, they want you thinking, was this a miss? Was this not a miss? Let's go look at ballistic stuff. Let's go look at triangulations of points. You know, they want you thinking about that and consuming it on their platform because it makes you a highly emotional and easily controllable person. And obviously, Marty, I think you're, you're one of the best for sure. And I'm not, I'm not, it's not criticizing you specifically because I'm just not. Um, but I mean, it's like, I see this happen with people that, you know, I see it happen with myself. Like, I should know better.

Marty Bent [2:15:59] That's why I'm trying to put it out there because I'm just like, I'm just reflecting on how I've been affected over the last 5 days and trying to lay it out there.

Mark Goodwin [2:16:06] Yeah, totally. And I think we just in general, you know, there's, there's a lot of understanding and moments of clarity, but we really just have to like kind of practice what we preach and, and do it every day and every moment of every day. You know, 'cause that's how we win. Again, it's an internal thing. You know, we break away from these silos and these, these, these data feeds, this, this slop, you know, disconnect from it and, and get back to reality. Go touch grass, you know, go build barter systems, go grow things, you know, yada yada, all the typical white pills that we talk about at the end of every episode. But but it's true, you know, go do those things and, and disconnect because they, they want your attention. Your attention and your perception is the only commodity. Your time is the only commodity.

Whitney Webb [2:16:51] And, and the more distracted we are also, the less focused we are on building solutions. I mean, honestly, during COVID um, and, and even slightly after, you know, uh, we had enough information to know what the agenda was, you know, and what they were trying to push, this like global biosecurity surveillance And how they were going to do it— digital ID, programmable, surveillable money. Like, we have known about this stuff from a long time, and we've been, you know, told that, you know, for example, we were held up people like Ron DeSantis. He's against CBDCs and against all of this tyranny and stuff, but he like has pushed through Florida's digital ID arguably faster along than most other states.

Mark Goodwin [2:17:33] Um, pushed it 8 years.

Whitney Webb [2:17:35] Built by like a World Economic Forum strategic partner, uh, from France, Thales. I don't think that's how you say it, but that's how it's spelled. And like, I don't know. I mean, these guys are politicians. They're beholden to their donors. They have been. I mean, that's just how it works, right? And so we need to look at the money behind our politicians and see what that money wants and is trying to drive the country toward. And if you look at both parties, it's essentially the same.

Marty Bent [2:18:02] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:18:04] So, you know, however much, you know, we want to get in the weeds of like, oh, current events And like Trump said this, Biden said this, yada yada yada going on. You know, we're, you know, distracted on this and not focused on the bigger picture of like what both of these parties are trying to develop, you know, and impose on the country. And we need to be developing solutions. And if we're distracted by all this other stuff going on, you know, we're less focused on that. And I think that's part of the goal. And I think also part of like this economy that they want to build. that involves later on stuff like the metaverse and all of that. You know, it's, you know, us little plebs are going to get rewarded with like shit tokens for like what we read and like the stuff we consume and stuff that distracts us all day. You know, we're sort of being trained for that, you know, and it's, it started and there's people that are like all in for that in some cases, you know, but I, you know, I'm certainly not. And I think people need to be kind of aware of all this.

Marty Bent [2:19:06] With that in mind, if you're still here listening 2.5 hours in, which I'm sure you are because people listen, most people listen to every minute of episodes that we record, particularly with you two, Bitcoiners, be aware of what they're trying to do with the CFTC and get every company that handles spot Bitcoin basically put under the CFTC, which is unprecedented. CFTC, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, only regulates derivatives and futures contracts right now, and they're pushing to get it so they can regulate spot Bitcoin. And again, this is, I think, I believe, a fault of the narrative that Bitcoin's a commodity, it's not money. And the CFTC is taking that like, oh well, if it's a commodity, we'll regulate everything. And so that's something to be aware of in the midst of this chaos leading up to election is pay attention to if and when they try to present a bill in Congress that would give the CFTC domain over anybody that handles spot Bitcoin, because that would not be good for the industry at all.

Whitney Webb [2:20:10] Um, yeah, I think you're in Bitcoin and beyond just gonna keep seeing these kind of power grabs sneak out here and there.

Marty Bent [2:20:20] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:20:20] And again, the importance of vigilance and trying to avoid some of these distractions. But as these algorithms become increasingly manipulated, it's going to be harder to use them to find useful information. You know, I think after the assassination attempt, what a lot of people do after those kind of big events is they go on social media and try and find out what the heck is going on or what the heck happened, right? But if they control these platforms more and more and more and manipulate what people see more and more and more, you're going to find less truth on it. And, you know, all of these platforms, including Twitter, X, whatever, are all part of, you know, these efforts to censor as we get closer to the election to protect democracy or whatever, just like last time. I mean, it's just— but it's going to be worse, guarantee it, this time than last time. And I think people should be really vigilant about that and maybe find other ways to get their news. You can develop your own news feed on RSS. mass, you know, and take out the social media middleman entirely and not have to worry about the algorithm bumping out something that you actually would need to see, or it, you know, actually important news that's relevant to like your interests and what you care about.

Mark Goodwin [2:21:25] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [2:21:26] You know, um, and I think the more people that do that, the better off we'll be, um, because the ways Silicon Valley and this intelligence Silicon Valley-like cabal have so much power is because our world has become so dependent on all of their Mm-hmm.

Mark Goodwin [2:21:38] And content creators, please stop making content that's just algo slop and just make content that you wanna make and that you believe in. And don't change your headlines and don't change your thumbnails and don't play all the games because then you become incentivized to just become algo slaves and you just end up creating the same content that you started out being a content creator.

Marty Bent [2:22:04] Mm-hmm.

Mark Goodwin [2:22:05] To circumnavigate and to create truth. So you have a lot of responsibility. And Marty, I think you do a great job. And I think more people out there should be really aware of, you know, of course there are some games that need to be played to get viewers, but never let that affect the actual core of the content because this is such an important time and we need truth tellers. You can't be afraid to talk the truth. Don't let financial interests change your content. Don't let them censor you. Don't self-censor. You know, we need brave people right now. We need truth. Don't make it about you. Make it about the content. And we just need that so desperately right now, especially the Bitcoin space. It's such an important space and it's so co-opted right now. So I'll leave it on that. But Marty, thanks so much for having us, man. This has been a blast.

Marty Bent [2:22:53] It's always a pleasure and I'm going take what we talked about to heart. My youngest is about to wake up for a nap, and I'm gonna unplug and go to the beach for a few hours with my family.

Whitney Webb [2:23:03] Yeah, sounds like a plan.

Marty Bent [2:23:05] All right, you guys crushing it. Thank you for coming on, and we'll do it again at some point, I'm sure, in the next few months.

Whitney Webb [2:23:13] Absolutely.

Marty Bent [2:23:14] All right, peace and love, freaks.