Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on Stablecoins and Dollar Hegemony
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/tftc-whitney-webb-mark-goodwin-us-political-financial-systems
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/tftc-whitney-webb-mark-goodwin-us-political-financial-systems-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
========================================================================

[0:00] Whitney Webb: the next president, who we know now will be Trump, is going to face some sort of US government debt crisis. When Trump was in office last time, BlackRock designed US fiscal response to COVID that they began implementing before a pandemic was even declared, and it resulted in one of the biggest wealth transfers in American history and printed more money than at any other time in US history. I've been really skeptical that that won't repeat itself. And so you're already seeing sort of signaling that someone like Mike Pompeo, who's been fielded for Secretary of Defense, or some figures that have neoconservative bents, I mean, they were They worked with Obama during '08. They worked with Trump and they worked with Biden and would have worked with Kamala. Their track record is basically stealing wealth from the public.

[0:40] Mark Goodwin: Why did we all forget this? Every 4 years, this is the most important election. We have to go vote. We all believe in elections again. I think that the Uniparty is going to do what it wants to do. It's this purple party entity.

[0:51] Marty Bent: Investigative journalist Whitney Webb and researcher Mark Goodwin just pulled back the curtain on America's fake democracy and how both Republicans and Democrats serve the same masters. Now they're about to reveal why stablecoins might be the biggest threat to Bitcoin.

[1:06] Mark Goodwin: They are actively putting dollar instruments into the Bitcoin blockchain. They're creating all of these ways to create dollars on Lightning.

[1:14] Whitney Webb: Stablecoins have the potential to be just as programmable and surveillable as a CBDC could be. And the Fed and the national security community, meaning the CIA among other agencies, have been very open that, that stablecoins will ensure dollar hegemony.

[1:29] Marty Bent: Brock to Bitcoin, from elections to surveillance. In the next 90 minutes, Webb and Goodwin reveal the full story of what's coming and how you can stay prepared.

[1:38] Mark Goodwin: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

[1:48] Whitney Webb: If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts, So it's all acting like safe haven.

[1:57] Mark Goodwin: 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.

[2:07] Whitney Webb: I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

[2:10] Marty Bent: If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be.

[2:13] Whitney Webb: Probably should be.

[2:15] Marty Bent: Whitney and Mark, welcome back to the show.

[2:17] Whitney Webb: Hey, great to be here, Marty. Always a pleasure.

[2:19] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, thanks a lot.

[2:21] Marty Bent: We've got a lot to cover. What should we start with?

[2:23] Whitney Webb: Whatever you want.

[2:24] Marty Bent: Let's talk about this week. It's timely. The election just happened. People are very bullish in the Bitcoin world. Obviously, I follow you two on Twitter. You are signaling that people may be walking into the viper's den. And let's just talk about it. What do you think the outcome of the election means for the future of America, particularly Bitcoin as a subset of potential policy under a Trump administration? What are we walking into?

[3:00] Whitney Webb: Well, I just want to start off with saying that I definitely empathize with the view, just like I did in 2016 and other elections, that the Trump ticket was the lesser of two evils. But I think after the first Trump term and the precedent set by campaign rhetoric versus policy action in that first term, I've been really skeptical that that won't repeat itself, right? And so you're already seeing, since Trump was elected, sort of these signaling that someone like Mike Pompeo or some figures that have neoconservative bents, like Marco Rubio's being considered for a cabinet position. Mike Pompeo's been fielded for Secretary of Defense. People that worked right under Pompeo.

[6:37] Mark Goodwin: Yep. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, last time we were on here, we were like, oh, Trump's gonna win. Obviously he's gonna fucking dominate. It's gonna be a landslide. We were obviously correct. And I mean, I think it's, it's, it's very helpful for— I mean, we all know it's a uni-party. Like, what are we— why did we all forget this? Every 4 years, you know, that seems to be— this is the most important election. This is— we have to go vote. And it's like, we all believe in elections again. We all believe in, in, you know, democratic, you know, process here in America after what we've, you know, kind of experienced basically our whole lives in this. You know, we're all kind of 9/11 kids and here we are kind of like trusting the government again. I feel like there's a lot of people— God damn it.

[7:21] Whitney Webb: Sorry about that.

[7:23] Mark Goodwin: Are we back?

[7:23] Marty Bent: Yeah, it should be working. You said Trump's going to win in a landslide earlier.

[7:26] Mark Goodwin: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I think I echo pretty much what Whitney just said last time we were on here. It was like, well, Trump's obviously going to win. That's obviously what happened. Um, and I think, you know, maybe a lot of the things that have happened, you know, the last few years have been kind of setting up for this like huge populist movement. Um, you know, that was again curated by oligarchs, uh, social network billionaires, all these people that kind of control these, these like DARPA cutouts and these projects. And, um, you know, these social networks gearing up to be, you know, like in X's case, half the financial system, you know, whatever we have.

[9:47] Whitney Webb: Yeah.

[9:48] Mark Goodwin: I was going to say something gross there. Let's not, you know, dust them, you know, their undercarriages. You know, let's, let's hold them to the fire. Um, that's what we need to do. Um, and I think that there is such an opportunity here when there is a populist uprising and a movement. Unfortunately, I feel like it was really captured into this controlled pen, you know, back to the electoral system, back to the state, back to, you know, Poppy Warpspeed being our savior. And that's just, I think, kind of ridiculous, as Whitney said. It comes from us, from the people. So let's take this movement that there are a lot of truths in this movement that I think that I do agree with.

[11:31] Marty Bent: So, Freaks, this episode of TFTC is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Do you have an old IRA or 401 that isn't keeping up with Bitcoin? Rolled over into an Unchained Bitcoin IRA and take advantage of Bitcoin's long-term potential while enjoying tax-deferred growth. With Unchained, you hold real Bitcoin and keep control of your keys, reducing counterparty risk through their collaborative custody model while Unchained handles the tax forms. It's very important they handle the tax forms. Get started now with no setup fees and no account fee for the first year. Not only is this the only standard Bitcoin IRA where you can control keys unlike other Bitcoin IRAs, you can take distributions directly in Bitcoin avoiding exchange fees.

[13:24] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[13:25] Marty Bent: I think I completely agree with the idea that we shouldn't be complacent and we should be vigilant. We should be holding these people accountable. And to your point about Ross, I think that's the first thing that I'll be looking for day one. Does he get free? All right, there's some accountability. He's not getting free. And I mean, I voted for the first time ever in this election. I voted for Trump and this coalition because it does seem like— and maybe I'm becoming enthralled with the narrative and the posturing of this coalition— but I think the promise of making a smaller government is what enticed me the most.

[15:35] Mark Goodwin: Well, what if Bitcoin is the way to do that? I mean, Trump's kind of straight up said that.

[15:40] Marty Bent: That's the point I'm making.

[15:41] Mark Goodwin: Bitcoin is how we pay the debt. Oh, okay. Go ahead.

[15:42] Marty Bent: Sorry about that. Yeah, exactly. So maybe that is the roundabout way that you actually make government smaller in the long run, is you find a solution to solve the debt problem. And the Leviathan just simply doesn't have the means to— or it's not that it doesn't have the means to continue growing, it's just the way it's set up now with the federal debt, it is forced to expand that reach and that misallocation of capital and that abuse of power. I'm hopeful. I'm white-pilled right now because— And then you have other things like, uh, I do think the populist movement is certainly there, and I think what we saw in terms of the overwhelming message that was sent with this election— again, you mentioned taking the House, the Senate, and the White House— I think that that is a signal from the American people, like, we're fucking fed up of this uniparty.

[16:53] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, but don't— I mean, totally, I think that this is a— you know, we wrote about this like in January with Tokenizing of kind of this idea of the pivot has happened where now it's advantageous for that group that used to control the mainstream media and the electoral process. Um, you know, now they're pivoting to podcast strategies, right? Bukele is tweeting out being like, hey, I talked to Trump, we talked about podcasts. Dana White's talking about like this— that is the new media. And I think that there is an opportunity there. But also it's like, let's not just bait and switch and replace it with these, you know, agents that are— that, that serve kind of similar powers.

[18:59] Marty Bent: What was it called? Event, um, was the game The war game they ran.

[19:04] Whitney Webb: Oh, right, before COVID Event 201.

[19:07] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, but this specific plan with, with Fink was, was the going direct plan. And this was done, you know, this, this was, you know, a, a plan. This was absolutely, you know, this— they had to address this issue of, of the debt. How do you do it? Well, let's print all this money, lock down the economy so that we crush inflation as much as possible by crushing demand, and then we use these trillions of dollars that has no ability to go into checking accounts and into Main Street and use it to buy up all the assets in the world. We'll bring Bitcoin down to $3,000, it 20x's in a year, onshore all of this Bitcoin into the United States, move everything into a deflationary economic system now that we have it all.

[22:24] Whitney Webb: Some people on Twitter still think so.

[22:27] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, but like, how do these people fight? You know, they fight with lawfare. They, you know, this champion of free markets, Peter Thiel, this libertarian god here who's really the guy kind of running a lot of these things, you know, he took down Gawker using lawfare and suits after, you know, the story is after they kind of release some personal stuff about his life, um, and maybe his sexual orientation and some stuff. But really it was because they published the Epstein list.

[22:57] Whitney Webb: Yeah, uh, the, the year they went after him was the year that Gawker— it was the first publication to make public the Epstein Black Book. Um, and at the time, Peter Thiel was meeting with Epstein pretty consistently between 2014 and 2015. So hard to know, right, really what, what the reason was. But people were definitely not happy that that Black Book came out because the person who, uh, you know, obtained it was actually Epstein's butler, and he was, you know, killed off in prison in 2015, the same year. So, um, kind of complicated stuff. And as far as Peter Thiel being a free market libertarian, uh, he's pretty open— well, he's on video and in writings has said that he, uh, doesn't like free market competition.

[24:01] Marty Bent: Yeah. Yeah, it's been interesting. The Epstein, Diddy stuff leading up to it, and you look at the Leviathan that backed Kamala specifically and Reid Hoffman. On the list as well. Like, it seems like there was anybody who was at Diddy parties or—

[24:18] Whitney Webb: Yeah, well, I think there's also, um, you know, it's not— it didn't just happen with Diddy, it also happened with Epstein. There's been a deliberate effort, in my opinion, to cultivate the perception that the only, uh, people that are sexually compromised or that are, uh, pedophiles, um, in the United States are celebrities and Democrats only, when it is— if you look at the evidence, and I wrote a thousand page book that goes over the history of sexual blackmail operations, including those involving children, it's very clearly both parties. And probably no government was more guilty of that than the Reagan-Bush era with the Franklin scandal and a lot of the other things that were, you know, oversaw as part of that.

[30:58] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[30:59] Whitney Webb: crisis. And then, you know, he switches banks to JPMorgan, and that's the bank that buys up Bear Stearns, all of their assets for pennies on the dollar. And, you know, when Epstein popped one of Bear Stearns' most— one of their most overleveraged funds, you know, which helped— which essentially created the conditions that led to Bear Stearns collapsing, you know, people were like, well, he lost a lot of money. But as, as the Martins reported on Wall Street on Parade, He also got a, you know, essentially a secret, you know, multimillion-dollar bailout from the Fed. So he didn't really lose any money, you know.

[31:33] Mark Goodwin: Mm-hmm.

[31:33] Whitney Webb: And, you know, you don't hear this stuff discussed about Epstein. You don't hear mentions about Diddy teaming up with the Bronfman family or the Lauder family. He absolutely did. And there are connections of that, of course, to the Epstein scandal, as is noted in my book. But again, it's a focus on sensationalism. And trying to use it for partisan means. And ultimately, when we play those games, everyone ends up losing because we're not getting to the truth of the matter. And by not getting to the truth of the matter, we're unable to root out this evil from our society.

[32:03] Marty Bent: This rip was also brought to you by our good friends at Zaprite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using Zaprite and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business here at TFTC. We use Zaprite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment links, or connect e-commerce stores, connect your wallets or custodial accounts, and be set up in minutes.

[34:16] Whitney Webb: Well, I would like them to release all the files, and that includes on things that the government will never release information on, like Chinagate, for example, uh, where Epstein, uh, on behalf of the State of Israel, helped facilitate the transfer of sensitive military technology to China, um, you know, through, um, Well, it was a very elaborate scheme. I've written about it in my book pretty extensively. It was really the Iran-Contra network sort of retooling themselves for the benefit of creating what Samuel Pissar, who's very close— well, Anthony Blinken's stepfather, for one thing, but he was also Robert Maxwell's confidant. He talked about to Congress about that the world was turning into what he called a transideological corporation, where the corporate sector of the United States was merging with the state-owned companies of the Communist bloc, so China and Russia.

[37:56] Mark Goodwin: Right.

[37:58] Whitney Webb: ultimately at the end of the day. And so obviously the Democrats have their plans to weaponize it against certain demographics, but that doesn't mean Trump won't be doing it either, because he's already essentially said that antisemitic speech is going to be challenged, or what he deems antisemitic speech. But now that the definition of antisemitism has been expanded to criticisms of a foreign government, not being allowed to criticize that foreign government, how far is that going to go and what impacts is that going to have? For example, in discussing something like the Epstein case, and how would that impact, that type of viewpoint impact what types of Epstein files are released versus other ones?

[41:04] Mark Goodwin: We've all done that.

[41:05] Whitney Webb: It's easy. Yeah. I've had multiple FOIA requests into the Clinton Presidential Library. They have folders on Mark Middleton. Crickets. They don't want certain stuff to come out.

[41:18] Marty Bent: Crickets? Like, not even, we can't give you this?

[41:21] Mark Goodwin: Just nothing.

[41:23] Whitney Webb: They don't really have to, you know, I mean, because FOIA is like, they're supposed to, but like, you have to go through all this lawfare to actually force them to obey the law. A lot of the time.

[41:31] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, you know, so I, I think that, you know, this idea of we're gonna get like a, you know, a good release of this stuff, it's like you're looking at all the people that are around Trump right now and how many numerous connections. And as you just said, obviously Elon, he's, you know, we just found out today he's on the call with Trump talking with Zelensky. Like, he's very integrated into this group, you know, absolutely has connections with Epstein. Thiel absolutely has connections with Epstein. Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald, one of 24 primary dealers for the Fed. the guy that custodies Tether's, you know, reserves. He bought an estate previously owned by Epstein via this Guido Goldman Bronfman Comet Trust Group.

[42:12] Whitney Webb: For $10.

[42:14] Mark Goodwin: For $10. It's a multimillion-dollar estate, you know, in Manhattan. You know, and then, of course, you know, the guy that just got out of jail, you know, Steve Bannon, you know, he was working with Epstein So he's like a Goldman intelligence guy, uh, and he was working with Epstein on a documentary. I guess they filmed like 10 hours, 12 hours.

[42:38] Whitney Webb: I think it's believed to be between 18 and 20 hours, the amount of, uh, you know, Epstein footage that Steve Bannon has and he has yet to release. Um, and Bannon was pretty open that he sort of wanted to, uh, that he thought Epstein was part of some— connected to some some sort of intelligence service and that he wanted to sort of do that himself, essentially.

[42:58] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[42:59] Whitney Webb: So, you know, again, it's kind of complicated. It's a— again, it's a truly bipartisan scandal. So, you know, one particular party, if they think they can get an advantage by releasing stuff that implicates the other guys but not themselves, yeah, I think it's possible they will do that. But I don't think that necessarily serves the American public, because as I've strived to point out in my own work on the case, there's a very deliberate effort to weaponize the case and keep it solely focused on a very small range of what Epstein actually did during his relatively lengthy career that involved ties to organized crime and intelligence.

[44:11] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I think getting back maybe just to some of the Bannon stuff, you know, we're looking at this blob, whatever mafia intelligence merger, which obviously Whitney literally wrote the book on. And we're sort of blurring the lines of like, what is intelligence? What is mafia? What even is governance? How are these things all kind of meeting together? And I think looking at the Bannon story specifically as it relates to digital currency is really interesting because I think it kind of nails all of these axioms really well. Bannon was Brock Pierce's right-hand man. They were working on digitizing commodities and creating digital economies in the early 2000s, working in the video game world.

[47:00] Marty Bent: Mm-hmm.

[47:01] Mark Goodwin: I'm sorry if I'm wrong, but the husband who was a representative there who was involved later had to come out and be like, oh, I'm bi, and hey, You know, it's fine. But there were absolutely inappropriate things going on there, just in the same way that these Diddy parties, you know, that everyone's very excited about, it's kind of the same play. Have these compromising things happen in an area that's their area where they can film everything, and then they can hold all these people accountable. Brock Pierce was a part of that, very much so.

[47:27] Whitney Webb: Disney.

[47:28] Mark Goodwin: The Digital Entertainment Network also has all of these connections to Disney, to Microsoft, to Enron. There's a lot of spooky things there. Brock Pierce, ends up working with Clearstone out of the Idealabs Group. Idealabs is the first investor, institutional investor in PayPal, and they're heavily connected to Near, which is one of the largest human traffic of movement brokers in the world.

[47:56] Whitney Webb: Geolocation.

[47:57] Mark Goodwin: Geolocational brokers in the world. But then you see, well, what does Brock do? He's one of the first Bitcoin evangelists. He creates Tether with Craig Sellars, who I generally like. I think Craig's cool, even though I obviously am very skeptical of Tether, but he's kind of the tech guy. one, and Bloomer described Pierce as being this orchestrator. So he's working with Bannon, Bannon his right-hand man, and he's this orchestrator who can create 3 or 4 businesses that really operate as one business. That was sort of the quote that he said. So we're seeing like, you know, that there is absolutely what you would consider modern intelligence, this apparatus that, you know, intelligence in the '40s and '50s, '60s, and maybe '70s, you know, was really academic-based.

[49:38] Whitney Webb: Mm-hmm.

[49:39] Mark Goodwin: And that's, that's, that's really what happened here. And so you're looking at the early PayPal group and you have someone like Olevchin. I mean, he literally applied for the NSA and they told him no. And just so you know, You're never going to make any money if you come work for the NSA. If you have a really good idea, you'll never make money here. You won't be able to publish anything that you make here. You know, you're beholden to the government by being an official member of the NSA. Why don't you go drive out to California and go find Peter Thiel? And then, you know, you build all the crypto for PayPal and kind of start this digit— you know, they were really kind of the first group to digitize money.

[54:07] Whitney Webb: Well, one thing I want to bring up about, you know, people like Gillibrand and Lummis is that they frame a lot— and especially Lummis, you know, frames a lot of her crypto advocacy as necessary to ensure dollar hegemony. Right. And so, as you know, as I understand it, and a lot of rhetoric I've heard in the Bitcoin space for years is that fiat is terrible, it's broken money. We need to move on from fiat. And so hearing things like that from Lummis, hearing Trump at the Bitcoin conference say, actually, the Bitcoin and the dollar are not competing, Bitcoin is going to strengthen the dollar and all of this stuff, you know, I think it does— is a harbinger, should be a harbinger for concern for people that don't want a debt-based monetary future.

[56:30] Marty Bent: I don't think that's going to get much adoption.

[56:31] Whitney Webb: Well, maybe not that necessarily, but it shows that the intent is to globalize the dollar and essentially use dollar stablecoins, not that aren't necessarily directly issued by the US government, but will be regulated by it to become essentially a de facto world currency. That's essentially the push. And it's essentially been happening relatively quietly for some time in economies that are dramatically unstable and have been made unstable by entities like the IMF, for example, which, you know, the US military refers to the IMF as a financial weapon of military power of the United States government.

[57:14] Mark Goodwin: Mm-hmm.

[59:01] Marty Bent: A while ago.

[59:01] Whitney Webb: A while, right?

[59:02] Mark Goodwin: At least 5.

[59:03] Whitney Webb: Yeah, an effort to securitize the natural world and create this new asset class that these groups that back this call nature's economy. because they can essentially quadruple or quintuple the amount of assets in the current economy and basically keep the existing casino model that Wall Street and these criminal banks have go on forever. They need that new asset class to keep their models going that generate them a lot of money. And the fact that there's all these efforts from people like Lummis and Gillibrand and others that want to support the dual banking system that rewards irresponsible government fiscal policy and criminal acts of the private banks. You know, I'm concerned about that. And the fact that, you know, in Trump's administration in particular, you have someone like Howard Lutnick closely tied to Tether, but also very connected to ESG, the Sustainable Development Goals. Cantor Fitzgerald has an entire fund dedicated to implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

[1:00:10] Marty Bent: Right.

[1:00:11] Whitney Webb: Which includes, by the way, digital ID is part of that and programmable surveillable money linking a digital ID to some sort of CBDC or UBI biometric wallet and all of this stuff. This is in the SDGs. And he's, you know, on the board of this company that we've talked about most of this year, actually called SataLogic, that is involved in all of several efforts to securitize nature and turn basically things like the Amazon rainforest into tradable financial products that don't actually conserve anything but are framed as that. And then this effort to basically install a predatory global carbon market over Latin America that at the same time it ends local and national sovereignty or would de facto end it and lead toward toward a more regional government and regional government bloc and try and build out like a smart power grid and 5G stuff throughout the continent under the guise of conserving it and ending climate change.

[1:03:25] Mark Goodwin: What was what Fink saying? He was like, I'm sick of everyone talking about how this is the most important election. We work with both parties. Who gives a shit? I mean, he didn't say gives a shit, but—

[1:03:38] Whitney Webb: Well, that is unfortunate. You have Kamala's economic team and Biden's economic team essentially being run by BlackRock executives. And then, you know, when Trump was in office last time, Larry Fink had basically, you know, BlackRock designed US fiscal— the US fiscal response to COVID that they began implementing before a pandemic was even declared. And it resulted in one of the biggest, you know, transfers, wealth transfers in American history and printed more money than at any other time in US history. And, you know, that was BlackRock and they're not going away. And the fact that Fink is, is like, we work with both administrations. I mean, they worked with Obama during '08, they worked with Trump and they worked with Biden and would have worked with Kamala.

[1:05:03] Mark Goodwin: Well, also, all you have to do is look at, is look at the, the lockdowns. I mean, and, and look at how Going Direct was written before there was a talk of a virus. Um, and you have to look at the lockdowns as it was fiscal policy to crush demand, to be able to print a bunch of money, give it to Wall Street, and let them buy everything up. If you actually think about the implications of that, think about the implications of that. They committed the greatest violation of human civil liberties, uh, probably maybe arguably in, in, in human history that, that we are certainly modern era, right?

[1:10:30] Whitney Webb: Well, it was a wealth transfer that went beyond the wealth transfer that was the 2008 economic crisis. And, you know, what concerns me is that one of the top people being floated for a Treasury Secretary position under the new Trump administration is this James Paulson guy, who was one of the most successful 2008 criminals and made more money than anyone else, but really should have been prosecuted for the way he did that, because the bank he worked with, Goldman Sachs, actually ended up sort of getting prosecuted for it. No one was really prosecuted in '08. But there were civil cases, very few. And this, what was the— it was called Abacus.

[1:11:52] Mark Goodwin: Hmm.

[1:11:53] Whitney Webb: you know, doesn't necessarily appeal to me either, or at least doesn't suggest that it will be fundamentally, you know, different than maybe preceding Treasury Secretary policy at the end of the day. But again, we will see. Hopefully it will be someone not that terrible. And there are some people in his camp that are big sound money people and backing the dollar with something of substance. Maybe something will come of that. But what has been most telegraphed is, has generally been this, this Bitcoin dollar stablecoin play that we discussed earlier. But given that those people are in the Trump camp, if people want to see something different, they should push to have those people elevated over people like Paulson, who, you know, used credit default swap fuckery to make a bazillion dollars at the expense of lots of other people.

[1:12:49] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, specifically it was what? It was state pension plans. Basically, he worked with Goldman and created these vehicles that had all of these junk, just total junk mortgages and a bunch of bullshit in them. And he took a negative short position on them, and then he had Goldman sell them to like Arizona state pensions.

[1:13:08] Whitney Webb: And that's a good investment.

[1:13:10] Mark Goodwin: As a good investment.

[1:13:11] Whitney Webb: It's going to fail.

[1:13:11] Mark Goodwin: And they shilled it as this good thing. Meanwhile, he has this huge short position on it, and he's considered— it's considered one of the greatest trades ever because he made billions of dollars in a day when it went under. But it's robbery. That is robbery.

[1:13:26] Whitney Webb: He stole from regular lower and middle class Americans to make the greatest trade ever.

[1:13:32] Mark Goodwin: Right.

[1:13:32] Whitney Webb: And I don't necessarily see that as appealing when you have over, you know, arguably, definitely before the year 2000, but since then, so many orchestrated wealth transfers and robbery of people's wealth time and again and no accountability. And this is the person that you'd like to put in charge of the Treasury? And that's been the most floated. The only name that Trump said on the campaign trail as a possible Treasury Secretary was the Paulson guy, and he's still at the top of the list.

[1:13:58] Marty Bent: If you look at Polymarket today, it looks like Bassett is leading with 55% probability.

[1:14:04] Whitney Webb: Well, better than Paulson, but we'll see.

[1:14:06] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, the Poly marketplace is so interesting. I think the 3rd candidate on there is Jay Clayton, right? The former CFTC guy. He's also an advisor to Fireblocks, which is, you know, at one point was going to do the stablecoin issuance for Facebook's Libra. They're heavily connected to the IDF and Israeli intelligence.

[1:14:27] Whitney Webb: Israeli intelligence veterans made the company.

[1:14:29] Marty Bent: Yeah. And they use MPC, which is insecure compared to multisig. But that's a whole nother technical rabbit hole we could fall down.

[1:14:38] Mark Goodwin: Rob Hamilton is fuming right now.

[1:14:40] Marty Bent: I mean, a couple of things here. I mean, going back to Cynthia Lummis and Gilderbrand, I don't know Gilderbrand well. I do know Cynthia and her team very well. And even though she may publicly posture like Bitcoin's strengthening the dollar and all that. I think it is important to take into consideration, just like the rhetoric around Bitcoin being adopted as a reserve asset and thinking of the debt situation, the government does have a needle to thread if they are going to allow Bitcoin to proliferate, facilitate growth within the United States of individual Bitcoiners, Bitcoin businesses, because if they send an the signal to the market like, oh, we're dumping the dollar.

[1:15:52] Whitney Webb: A signal.

[1:15:54] Marty Bent: a late hedge against potentially rugging the treasury markets like in a moment's notice. Um, and then yeah, go back to Druckenmiller shorting the bond market.

[1:16:04] Mark Goodwin: There's, there's a— I think I saw you talking about that.

[1:16:06] Marty Bent: Yeah, Druckenmiller short. Uh, Paul Tudor Jones is recommending that people don't own bonds. And so the government is in this— federal government's in this position where it's like we have this $36 trillion gorilla in the room and we need to figure out how to safely, um, walk it into its cage.

[1:16:23] Whitney Webb: Well, I'm sure Howard Lutnick is trying to figure out how to do that since he's one of the biggest traders of US government debt.

[1:16:29] Marty Bent: Yeah, yeah.

[1:16:31] Mark Goodwin: At one point, you know, like 70% of all US Treasuries were like settled through Cantor and Cantor subsidiaries, which is, which is totally insane.

[1:16:39] Marty Bent: Yeah. And like going back to like the, the co-option of Bitcoin, that's what I mean, that's another part of the game theory that's been talked about for a while. It's, uh, and something I've been saying, written about, it's that you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. And that's the optimist, the eternal optimist. Maybe some will say it is naivety or gullibility, but I would not be surprised if people within the government have seen Bitcoin for what it is and are like, oh shit, this is the thing. We need to basically act to make sure that we are well positioned to not get left behind and are trying to figure out a way to basically, I mean, using Jerome Powell's words, Janet Yellen's words, create a soft landing transition in which Bitcoin is allowed to flourish. With that being said, yeah, Jill DeBrand particularly, I don't like her position on privacy, KYC/AML.

[1:17:39] Whitney Webb: Well, she's Hillary Clinton's successor in New York. She was picked by Clinton and she considers Hillary her mentor. Yeah, all you really need to know.

[1:17:48] Marty Bent: And so that's like, I think again going back to anchoring to accountability, um, and vigilance, that's— I'm cautiously optimistic. Like, that's the other thing, going back to Trump's first term in 2016, like, I'm sure you guys have heard like, um, the narrative that he was completely handcuffed. He got into office and Didn't know how to operate within the bureaucracy of the federal government and sort of had the the uniparty blob forced on him. And I will say this time around does seem like he's learning the lesson. Like he the MSNBC. I don't know if you guys were watching it the night of the election. I clicked for a little bit.

[1:18:25] Whitney Webb: I don't think I've ever watched MSNBC.

[1:18:27] Marty Bent: I clicked over for the first time in years.

[1:18:29] Mark Goodwin: I just I heard it here. Marty loves MSNBC.

[1:18:32] Marty Bent: I just wanted to see what these people were saying, and one of the things. It was actually a signal to me I picked up on was that Trump's campaign has not been communicating with the White House transition team, which you're supposed to do for months leading up to the election to ensure that there's an efficient exchange of power when the new administration comes in. Change. Yeah. You see, I mean, the few appointments that we have seen, Wiles yesterday being Chief of Staff. I looked her up, her background. She seems pretty competent. She's the daughter of Pat Summerall, an American hero.

[1:19:13] Whitney Webb: I know.

[1:19:14] Mark Goodwin: I think that's so funny.

[1:19:15] Marty Bent: I love that.

[1:19:15] Whitney Webb: Well, sure, but she helped elect Rick Scott to be governor of Florida, who was previously a pharmaceutical executive that committed fraud. And in Florida, Florida. I believe his nickname is Skeletor. He's now a senator. And she was also a big-time Big Pharma lobbyist, including for her firm represents Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

[1:19:39] Marty Bent: Well, that's what makes all this thing, this coalition interesting, because you do have this sort of embedded gridlock between the people, some of the people behind Trump. Like, it seems like, like, I'm sure you saw The big pharma execs are all on a conference call preparing for the incoming administration.

[1:19:57] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, but at the same time, Marty, it's like going back on—

[1:20:01] Marty Bent: going back to vigilance and accountability again. Yeah, not saying things 100% as we are, 100%. Like, these are the things I'm looking at. Like, for sure, there is—

[1:20:12] Mark Goodwin: you know, I think you're the man. It's just, I think Elon— I mean, he was building, uh, mRNA tech technology for the CureVac in Tesla factories. He's saying the science is unequivocal, uh, you know, huge proponent for vaccines and COVID insanity at the very beginning. Obviously then he pivoted, as all these people did when it was no— when it was like no longer politically dangerous and it no longer really mattered, uh, they all pivoted. Um, Vivek, uh, you know, also heavily involved in mRNA stuff, um, uh, you know, this this— there's so much pharmaceutical money and lobby in that, in that little Avengers group of people that, that, that people are so fucking stoked about. Um, I know you want to say something on that, right?

[1:20:56] Whitney Webb: Well, I have a lot to say about, about pharma in general. So really, since before COVID-19, uh, Big Pharma had a major issue with what are known as patent cliffs. And patent cliffs are basically where drugs that they had exclusivity on go generic and they can't make as much money off of them anymore. And there's also a problem. That problem is combining with an R&D problem for traditional pharmaceuticals, where drugs that can be marketed under that exclusivity model just aren't really— don't really— they can't really find anything new that's profitable and works and can pass existing regulations to make it to market. Right. So what most big pharma companies have done, and it really grew substantially during the COVID era, was that they teamed up with technology firms or smaller biotech firms. So out of that, for example, you saw GlaxoSmithKline team up with Google and made Galvani Bioelectronics. On the board was Moncef Slaoui, who was later put in charge of Operation Warp Speed, for example.

[1:21:55] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:21:56] Whitney Webb: And there's a lot of these team-ups where really you sort of have tech merging with pharma to usher in sort of this new era of what are being referred to as precision medicines and various things like that. That was allegedly the motive for the Biden administration to create the Health DARPA, which they called ARPA-H. It was considered under Trump as well, but under the name HARPA. But nevertheless, it exists. And what concerns me about that is, okay, so in Trump's first term, he deregulated biotech extensively, mainly in terms of GMO crops, to the point that— Hmm. Anti-GMO organizations and small farmers sued the Trump administration over the proliferation of GMO crops as a consequence of, of that policy.

[1:23:43] Marty Bent: Right.

[1:23:44] Whitney Webb: It's essentially across the board. And there's a huge push for this. And it's tied up too with, you know, a lot of push from Silicon Valley and their products itself for like health wearables or wearables that can be applied to healthcare, which have troubling surveillance capabilities. You know, you had like Yuval Noah Harari during COVID say, once they get it in your body, they can read your brain and you'll be sent to the Gulag for not clapping for the leader and whatever, you know.

[1:24:12] Mark Goodwin: Please clap.

[1:24:13] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:24:14] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[1:24:14] Marty Bent: Well, that's why I get like—

[1:24:16] Mark Goodwin: Oh, sorry.

[1:24:17] Marty Bent: The early signal, like Joel Salatin being like brought into—

[1:24:20] Whitney Webb: I think that is very positive.

[1:24:22] Marty Bent: It's like, and, and maybe get away from GMO.

[1:24:26] Whitney Webb: Well, let's hope so. But again, remember, Trump's first term, and generally Republicans in general, tend to say we're going to get rid of the red tape for innovation in the industry. But the problem with GMO crops, for example, is that they're a threat to health, they're an environmental threat, and they threaten small farmers that don't want to produce GMO crops because they can cross-pollinate and contaminate. And GMO crops have been used time and again to force farmers into debt slavery, where they were introduced in places in the Global South like India, led to a rash of suicides of Indian farmers who were— is this—

[1:25:00] Mark Goodwin: That's not true.

[1:25:00] Whitney Webb: No, it's definitely a thing because they were trapped in these debt slavery cycles with Monsanto having to buy seeds because they can't save— you can't save GMO seeds.

[1:25:08] Marty Bent: seeds, right?

[1:25:08] Mark Goodwin: Mm-hmm.

[1:25:09] Whitney Webb: And then having to buy the chemicals to grow them and all of this stuff. And it's very problematic. So, you know, it can be problematic in that sense when you deregulate something that threatens people's health around you. And I think that's arguable too with some of these undertested and very controversial biotech, you know, injections, for example, as we saw with mRNA, you know, concerns about shedding, for example, concerns like that. Is it okay to deregulate those things. Not that I'm saying that regulation is always the answer, absolutely not. But I think it could be complicated to do those things.

[1:25:45] Mark Goodwin: Well, deregulation is a misnomer. It's a red herring. I mean, the idea of what deregulation is, is it's reregulation. And really the way that it works in practice, and as we've seen historically, is it's kingmaking. They use deregulation with very specific clauses and grandfather expiry terms.

[1:26:07] Marty Bent: Setbacks.

[1:26:08] Mark Goodwin: Exactly. And so we look at, well, what happened with Glass-Steagall? Again, something Trump campaigned on bringing back and then deregulated the banking industry even more in 2018 and upped the limits from the too-big-to-fail banks from $50 billion to $250 billion, which had honestly pretty big implications on the regional banking crisis. Not that you'll read that. the Thiel-funded Pirate Wires. But the way that Glass-Steagall worked, it was deregulation. It was. Citibank put $100 million into lobbying people like the head of the Senate Banking Committee at the time, Alphonse D'Amato, who was heavily connected to Gillibrand. And what Glass-Steagall actually did was it king-made Citi and Travelers, which became Citigroup, to become this just unbelievable— You know, blob entity.

[1:27:40] Whitney Webb: Yeah, she pretty much said that, didn't she? That as it's written, it favors Circle over Tether. So, I mean, that's an example of how these bills kingmake. Not that Tether— we don't obviously have a pretty negative view of Tether, but USDC really isn't much better, and they couldn't be deeper, tight, deep, more deeply tied to BlackRock, among other unsavory entities.

[1:28:00] Marty Bent: Right.

[1:28:01] Mark Goodwin: But and then, and then the other big part of this thing is that, you know, the, the in this regulatory expression is the idea that anybody using dollar denominations are now under the purview of the regulatory arm of the United States. And that could get really weird, really interesting, like really quickly. Right. Because why are all these groups like Lightning Labs, like LightSpark, which have multiple connections to PayPal— Libra went and visited with Lightning Labs when they were working on Libra. David Marcus then goes and leaves and does LightSpark. They are actively putting dollar instruments into the Bitcoin blockchain. That is what they're trying to do.

[1:30:59] Marty Bent: Yeah. I hung out with Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs for a few hours yesterday.

[1:31:03] Mark Goodwin: Great guy. He's great.

[1:31:05] Marty Bent: He's super nice. That's what I worry about. I hope the people working at these companies— Tether, Lightning Labs on Lightning via Taproot assets, I think is a genuine attempt to meet market demand, recognizing that people simply aren't transacting with Bitcoin. Particularly in the emerging world, they're using stablecoins because they don't want to stomach the price volatility of Bitcoin. And that product is an attempt to meet the demand of the market. And I— it doesn't scare me as much as it, um, scares you because I, I think Bitcoin ultimately wins. And it goes back to the problem of the debt, um, which like Bitcoin is a superior monetary instrument in every regard. It's just going to take time for people to realize that. And I mean, we can go— the dollar milkshake theory seems to be playing out, and that's— I don't think— of course, I don't think it's a consequence of nefarious intentions, just pure monetary economics and competition.

[1:32:11] Mark Goodwin: I think it's absolutely from— yeah, I mean, the US dollar system wants to spread as far as it can because it needs people to use their instruments. It needs volat— it needs velocity. Uh, you know, there's a reason why the US again went in the '80s from being the largest creditor in the world to the largest debtor. That was on purpose. They let the Euro-dollar market build on purpose. They created instruments to build these things. They created mechanisms to spread the dollar faster. You look at— there's some pretty crazy—

[1:32:39] Marty Bent: I agree with that. I think the market dynamics I'm describing are a consequence of this attempt to push the dollar on everybody.

[1:32:51] Whitney Webb: Yeah.

[1:32:51] Mark Goodwin: And I say this a lot, like, I really empathize with people. You know, I've been spending time in South America while working on some of this stuff. And you talk to people and they're like, oh yeah, Tether's amazing. It's great. You know, we love it. That's true. I mean, I'm not like denying that that's true, but like, how much of that is because a lot of Bitcoin scaling opportunities were neutered? You know, how much of that is—

[1:33:14] Marty Bent: That's the question. Like, I would push back. I think Bitcoin has scaled tremendously. It is scaling perfectly. If you look at the amount of value settled on an ongoing basis, it's continually going up, tens of trillions of dollars at this point. And again, I think it's like using Bitcoin as a transactional currency with stable value. People just haven't recognized it as that yet. And so they're using stablecoins. I truly believe that stablecoins are an attempt to meet market demand of people who don't want to stomach volatility. I don't like it. I don't think people should do it, but I think recognizing the reality of the situation is that there is this demand for the ability to send dollars over these networks relatively cheaply, very quickly, relatively outside of this regulatory gray area, at least for the time being up to this point. And I don't worry about it. Stablecoins could get to a trillion-dollar market themselves. I don't think it really would prevent Bitcoin's ultimate success.

[1:34:27] Whitney Webb: Well, what I'm worried about with stablecoins might be a little different than maybe what you or Mark or some other people are worried about. For example, in the case of Tether, they're openly willing to seize people's wallets at the behest of OFAC or the Treasury Department if they're put on the US government naughty list. I find that very problematic that if someone, for example, in Argentina or another country is holding Tether and the US government decides, I don't know, let's pretend they have a government they don't like. They do right now. Right. But it's someone else. And then they're like, oh, we're going to sanction whoever, you know, they can take someone's dollar-denominated, you know, stablecoins or whatever and just seize them without any sort of accountability.

[1:37:37] Mark Goodwin: 100%.

[1:37:37] Whitney Webb: And I think it's going to be difficult to truly liberate people from the criminal system that runs our government and, you know, most of our world, frankly, if we continue to allow that debt-based paradigm to continue and have a particular government that— I mean, I've noted in my book, for example, has been controlled by criminal elements for a very long time. And maybe people think the criminal elements will be less now, but we can't quite be sure, can we? Do we really want one government to have so much power over people's money, including in countries that are not the United States.

[1:38:17] Marty Bent: I completely agree. And that's— I mean, it's— I mean, we've— Matt and I on Rabbit Hole Recap for the last 6 years have been warning, like, people— again, it's like recognizing that there is this use case that's being filled by these stablecoins, but we've been warning for 6 years, like, these are centrally controlled and get rugged.

[1:38:33] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[1:38:34] Marty Bent: At any moment. And that's like— I don't think Bitcoin ever gets yoked to stablecoins. There's definitely some interplay between the two, but I don't think the stablecoin markets have any control over Bitcoin, the protocol specifically.

[1:38:49] Mark Goodwin: They definitely don't. Absolutely not.

[1:38:52] Whitney Webb: I wasn't saying that.

[1:38:52] Marty Bent: No, no, I'm not saying that you are, but I'm saying like, right, there's— people need to get rugged. People are going to get rugged. Yeah, the OFAC list number is going to go up. People are going to be like, all right.

[1:39:01] Mark Goodwin: But Bitcoiners might get rugged when— if the price of Bitcoin gets so high, and which is a good thing generally, but these people that hold small amounts in shittily consolidated UTXOs, and they can't spend them, or it's so prohibitively expensive. And so, how can they get them out? They can use key swaps, atomic swaps with groups where they move into dollars and other instruments perhaps. It forces people, if Bitcoin doesn't necessarily figure out maybe a shared UTXO model, or Lightning is really cool for interoperable settlement between institutions, but it's not really that great for individuals for daily payments and stuff. So, where does that wealth go?

[1:45:43] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:45:44] Whitney Webb: No.

[1:45:44] Marty Bent: And I think shout out to everybody working on eCash. Shout out to everybody working on Lightning, Nostr, And that's what I think. I think we got to stay vigilant, keep everybody accountable. I think Bitcoin is scaling given what it has at its fingertips right now. People are obviously focused on covenants. It's great to see ARK launch. I did the test run of Seconds ARK implementation. That seemed very promising.

[1:46:13] Mark Goodwin: Cool.

[1:46:14] Marty Bent: Somebody just came out with the 160-bit Apparently, maybe the collision, uh, the covenants without a soft fork. And so that's what, like, we're discovering how Bitcoin works as time goes on too. And I don't know, again, maybe I'm an eternal optimist, gullible, naive.

[1:46:31] Mark Goodwin: But so am I. I don't, I don't, I don't think— I think optimism is great and we need optimism, otherwise we wouldn't be doing any of this.

[1:46:37] Marty Bent: But we also have to— no, no, that's why I love you two. It's because, like, you also have to be aware of how you can be attacked and have the adversary mindset.

[1:46:44] Whitney Webb: Yeah, we get accused a lot of being doom pillars and offering no solutions and all of that. But really, I mean, you know, I feel like at least in my case, and I believe in Mark's as well, but I don't want to speak for him. You know, my views have been consistent ever since I started going on Bitcoin podcasts about, you know, fuck Wall Street and fuck the state. And I just haven't really changed that. But maybe some people have, you know, different opinions now that there's been about face from Wall Street and also the government as it relates to Bitcoin. And I think there is a reason that prominent stablecoins like Tether have tried to cultivate ties and a favorable perception among Bitcoiners. And I would really hope that people would not be fooled by that and would remember, for example, the outsized role of Tether in FTX.

[1:47:37] Mark Goodwin: For example.

[1:47:39] Whitney Webb: which seems to have been rather drastically memory-holed, or the fact that they've openly partnered with the FBI, which, you know, runs war on domestic terror stuff and does all sorts— is essentially a cover-up agency for the mob, basically, as opposed to actually being a meaningful law enforcement agency and creates their own terror plots that they then foil so they can justify larger budgets.

[1:48:04] Marty Bent: Did you see the one from this week?

[1:48:07] Whitney Webb: Oh, the, the, the natural guy? Yes. Oh, huh? No, I didn't.

[1:48:11] Marty Bent: Oh, Monday, right before the election, they're like, oh, we caught a domestic white supremacist terrorist who's gonna bomb the, uh, the grid system.

[1:48:18] Mark Goodwin: His name, Joe Rogers.

[1:48:20] Marty Bent: Luckily, he was co-conspiring with 5 FBI agents. It's like, what the fuck is going on?

[1:48:24] Mark Goodwin: Oh no.

[1:48:25] Whitney Webb: Well, they, they do that to justify, you know, expanding their budget and expanding their powers.

[1:48:30] Mark Goodwin: Look, you need us.

[1:48:31] Whitney Webb: We stopped terrorism, except we, like, told him to do it and we gave him the gun and we gave him the bomb and we told him it was a good idea and we were his only friends. We weren't really his friends. We were feds. I mean, it happened. So many examples of that. So, yeah, Tether thought it was cool to team up with them and the Secret Service. And the Secret Service is part of the World Economic Forum PAC that's trying to end online anonymity and online privacy. So So that's fun, right? And, you know, again, I think, you know, this, this effort to sort of use stablecoins to manage US government debt, the problem I have— and I under— I can sympathize a little bit with the idea we don't want the dollar collapse because that causes economic instability. I mean, yes, that's obvious. But the problem is when you reward criminal activity from the private banks and the central bank.

[1:49:24] Marty Bent: Mm-hmm.

[1:49:25] Whitney Webb: that has been going on, well, really the Fed's entire history and really arguably for the private banks as well, they will continue that criminality. And if we allow them to do that, they will do it in the next iteration of whatever monetary paradigm they're poised to introduce with all digital currencies and things of that nature. And I don't think that the bankers deserve our trust.

[1:49:51] Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

[1:49:51] Whitney Webb: They rob us and they've never been held accountable. They've never given the money back and they keep screwing us and finding new ways to convince us to trust them. And I think it's bad. I think debt slavery is terrible and should never, ever be used again. People should do their best to do everything they can to really root it out because debt slavery is slavery at the end of the day. There's been a global effort to herd us into a slavery system. So let's not give it to them, please. Yeah.

[1:50:24] Mark Goodwin: You know, and we're criminals now. They just haven't written the laws like that. Like, we've just seen that. I mean, as much as we want to fucking talk about how badass Bitcoin is and all this stuff, it's like, you know, there's nothing that Ross did necessarily that was illegal. Maybe some things, but, but, but, but for the most part, those legislations and those laws came out like kind of through discovery in this weird way of, oh, actually, no, that is illegal. Actually, it is illegal for the Tornado Cash people to do what they did. Actually, it is illegal for the samurai guys with— but to exchange prime numbers? To write code that lets you exchange prime numbers with yourself? I mean, the samurai one is really insane. I think there are some things you could argue with the Ross stuff, maybe that was true. Obviously, I think he's a hero and fuck the state, obviously.

[1:51:10] Marty Bent: For example?

[1:51:10] Mark Goodwin: But I think the samurai thing is really interesting. It's like, in the Tornado Cash. Like, they wrote those laws, uh, it wasn't illegal what they were doing when they did it, uh, and it's certainly not illegal just because you write a speech, you know, you write code and then someone uses that code to do something bad with it. It's not illegal to make a gun and then someone uses that gun and shoots someone, uh, obviously that's bad. Um, did we disconnect there or are we still here?

[1:51:32] Marty Bent: We're still here.

[1:51:33] Mark Goodwin: No? Oh, great, sorry. Obviously it's, you know, it's not illegal to make a gun and then have someone take that gun and do something illegal with it. The, the maker of the gun isn't responsible. Somehow, that's not the case with digital asset mixing. And I think that without privacy, I think a lot of this anti-state stuff goes away, unfortunately. We need privacy. We need to figure that out. And they're going to just move the laws to arrest the good people that are working on these projects. And as they begin to— again, what I really think is happening with the stablecoin play is extending the regulatory reach of the US government by saying anyone that touches a dollar is under our jurisdiction.

[1:52:48] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:52:49] Mark Goodwin: And this is something that needs to be defended, you know, from the amendment level. And that can't be applied to people outside of the United States. It is ridiculous that Roger Ver was arrested.

[1:52:58] Marty Bent: Let's give— let's give props where props are due to some people on Wall Street. particularly Ross Stevens at NYDIG, who really stuck his neck out there and wrote a white paper about why Bitcoin is speech. It should be labeled as such.

[1:53:12] Mark Goodwin: And it's funny, and he quoted all the inscription shit, uh, that, uh, you know, apparently it's like CCP or whatever. Um, I've just heard some absolutely ridiculous comments on some of the Ordinals stuff, and I don't give a shit about Ordinals, but I like the inscription stuff, and, and I think that it is speech. And if, if maybe Bitcoin is going to be used to empower the state. Well, hey, maybe we can invert some of that stuff and we can publish ridiculous things on it and make some cool things happen with people like us that have Bitcoin that can use it in a dissonant way.

[1:53:43] Marty Bent: And I think that's the big question. The big hope is that, is Wall Street going to use their will to bend Bitcoin or is Bitcoin going to use its will to bend Wall Street to act in a more free, freedom-oriented fashion. I have to get on a call. We need to do another episode soon because in your latest piece you mentioned LightSpark's UMA, which I think is actually a big problem that needs to be highlighted and talked about and avoided.

[1:54:10] Mark Goodwin: I agree. Thank you, Marty. And, uh, see, man, you are the man. I agree. We'll do a whole rip on that shit.

[1:54:16] Marty Bent: We need to catch up on that. I've got to hop on this call. Thank you guys for doing what you're doing. Let's do it again real soon because I do want to jump into that topic specifically because I think that's something that people should be aware of.

[1:54:27] Whitney Webb: Yeah, sounds great.

[1:54:28] Marty Bent: Thank you.

[1:54:29] Mark Goodwin: Make America great again, baby.

[1:54:31] Marty Bent: Make America healthy again. Joel Salatin. I'm gonna say Joel Salatin. I saw that, I was like, maybe, maybe we're gonna get something here.

[1:54:38] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, let's do it, baby.

[1:54:39] Marty Bent: Peace and love, freaks.