Transcript: Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin Called the Synthetic CBDC in 2023

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Whitney Webb [5:40] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free, When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Mark Goodwin [5:59] 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 [6:09] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [6:12] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Whitney Webb [6:14] Probably should be.

Mark Goodwin [6:15] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [6:17] Mark, Whitney, it's great to have you.

Whitney Webb [6:19] Hey Marty, great to be here as always.

Marty Bent [6:23] We're in that—

Mark Goodwin [6:24] what's up Marty? What's up Whitney? Happy to be here.

Marty Bent [6:26] We're in that period between Christmas and New Year's where I'm terribly exhausted. You have 2 young kids around Christmas.

Whitney Webb [6:35] Me too, dude. It's all good. We'll be exhausted together talking about, uh, you know Banks up to no good, as they tend to be.

Marty Bent [6:46] I mean, that's a good jumping off point. You guys just wrote an incredible article expanding on something you discussed a year ago, Whitney, which was the Farmington, uh, FTX deal. Uh, what did they change the name to? Moon Bank or something like that?

Whitney Webb [7:02] Moonstone.

Marty Bent [7:03] Moonstone. Uh, you left the end of that piece in that conversation. Alluding to this weird company Fluent, and you and Mark just co-wrote a piece that really ties back Farmington and Moonstone and paints the picture of the technical architecture of what could eventually become the CBDCs. And it revolves around stablecoins, which, Mark, I know you've been on a pretty big vendetta on Twitter against stablecoins.

Mark Goodwin [7:33] Yeah, definitely. I mean, I just think that there's a huge push to sort of dollarize the world, right? I mean, that's what we've learned from the dollar system over all these years, especially post-gold standard window shutting. It's like, how do we increase the velocity of the dollar and increase the reach of it as much as possible? And now we have this tech that does that better than ever. And we're seeing, you know, we're about to see trillions of dollars go into the stablecoin, you know, ecosystem for sure. When you begin to kind of pick at it and look at the players, you know, you see spook banks like, like Farmington and Moonstone. And, you know, obviously a huge part of the FTX debacle was stablecoin related. So yeah, it gets very fun. There's a lot of fun things to talk about with stablecoins. For sure.

Marty Bent [8:29] Yeah, and I guess the start—I mean, I don't have the piece open right in front of me, but I think going back to Farmington Moonstone and how Fluence involved is probably a good jumping off point to basically connect the dots from the last time. Right.

Whitney Webb [8:47] Yeah. So, you know, Farmington came under the control of you know basically the Deltec crowd, like John Chalopin, who's chairman of chairman of Deltec. Deltec being a major bank for FTX and also Tether. Right. And so he, along with people like Noah Perlman, who I also wrote about recently, who's now the chief compliance officer at Binance and was previously COO of Gemini, was with him or is like on the board of the vehicle that was used to purchase and bring this tiny bank under control. So for people that like may not remember why it seemed sus that like this group wanted to take over this particular bank, they're like super small. It's like a broom closet. sized one branch bank in the middle of nowhere in like rural Washington State that like for like over 100 years had just been like this local bank for like local, local agriculture and like ranching and stuff and had like never really had any more than like $10 million in deposits. And then Shalopene takes it over and their deposits like within a year swell from like $10 million to like $84 million.

Mark Goodwin [9:56] Wow.

Whitney Webb [9:56] And I think roughly like $71 or $70— I think $71 million of that was just 4 accounts and $50 million was from one account directly related to Sam Bankman-Fried that was called FTX Digital Markets. And at the same time, they, they made this transition in the name, right, from Farmington to Moonstone and tried to make it like this big, you know, crypto-focused bank is when Alameda Research poured in like $11.5 million. So you have Deltec, Alameda, and SBF basically like putting the bulk of money and having the bulk of control over this really tiny bank that gets Fed approval or approval to be part of the Federal Reserve System when it like totally should not have. And the Fed still won't comment on the approval process, even though they issued an enforcement action to force Farmington after the FTX scandal to like shut down, saying they violated the terms about their like related to their approval, but won't explain what those terms was or like how they approved them or anything still. So basically the Fed, in my opinion, is like covering up why they approved them. And it's not just the Fed that's like abetting that cover-up. It's also like part of the Washington state government that's like involved with oversight of, you know, the finance— financial services industry in that state. And Moonstone, like around the same time they were, you know, becoming Moonstone, I guess, had also hired like one of the top guys for enforcement actions like in Washington State from the public sector side. So they were getting like very ready to be very active, I guess you could say. So obviously a lot of stuff going on there. And then FTX unravels and, and all of that. And a lot of scrutiny comes on this bank that it shouldn't have been approved. It had all these deposits and weird stuff was going on there, basically. So I guess that's a recap of what Farmington was. But right before, essentially, like I think a few weeks before the whole FTX thing fell apart, Farmington teamed up with Fluent Finance. And Fluent Finance is this company that is essentially based around this stablecoin and stablecoin protocol, US Plus. It's a dollar-pegged stablecoin. And up until this point, SBF, FTX, and Deltec— well, Deltec still is, you know, all involved with Tether. So why are they moving away from, you know, dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether to this other dollar-pegged stablecoin US Plus and getting involved with these guys? And I think You know, one major goal of this particular article was to answer that question. So I guess I'll pause there and see where you want to take the convo from here.

Marty Bent [12:46] I guess I'm wondering, like, what would have happened if FTX didn't fail? Like, would you have been able to write this article, do you think?

Whitney Webb [12:54] Yeah, probably, because Sam Bankman-Fried would have been like, yeah, FTX has a stablecoin and it's called US+.

Mark Goodwin [13:03] Yeah, and actually right before, like a couple days before the collapse, I think it was like the 27th of October, um, Sam did a, an interview where he talked about how, you know, they're working on a stablecoin and, you know, they're looking for the right partner to do it. And there's pretty much no reason for them not to.

Whitney Webb [13:20] And they're going to announce soon something about a partnership with a stablecoin issuer or something. And this is like a 3-day or like 4-day difference from when, uh, Farmington Moonstone, uh, announced their partnership with Yeah, I mean, stable—

Marty Bent [13:38] I mean, stablecoins generally, it's been fascinating. Obviously you have Tether, which is the monster in the room, and they've been around for quite some time. That's what I'm trying to figure out, like, because the CBDC narrative has been out there for years, stablecoins have been proliferating for years. And do you think this was always the intention, to backdoor into CBDCs via stablecoins, or do you think the government and these like fluent in R3, saw the success that Tether was happening and realized like, oh, this is the route we should go, just dollarize.

Mark Goodwin [14:10] I think always, I think always the, the, the way— I mean, you look at the way the, the government in general has kind of blurred the lines with the private and public sector, you know, uh, they reserve a lot more rights to restrict, you know, customer, you know, access, blacklist things, you know, if, if they kind of operate with a, with a private sector company. You know, I don't think the government actually wants to directly issue a CBDC. Um, there's a lot of, uh, you know, pain granular points that they have to deal with for doing that. They don't want to have retail accounts, you know, that they're directly responsible for. They want people to buy treasuries and keep this, you know, MIC Ponzi scheme, you know, going. Um, and so yeah, I think, I think that this was kind of always the plan. And I think now that we're starting to, you know, we're a little bit more zoomed out a year away from the FTX collapse, I think that, you know, you could kind of look at the FTX collapse as sort of the pillage before the foundation of the digital Federal Reserve. And now you're seeing Binance getting completely taken over by regulators. We have Tether onboarding the CIA and the FBI. They're blacklisting addresses at the behest of the American government. And they're like the biggest net buyers of treasuries of the US government. They're like top 20 country. I think they're like 19th if they were a country of owners of T-bills. I don't think any of that is an accident personally. I definitely think it's on purpose.

Marty Bent [15:42] It's funny with Tether particularly. I mean, Matt and I've been talking about this on Rabbit Hole Recap. For five years now, Tether Bitfinex has somewhat been characterized as pirates of the industry, like operating in this regulatory gray zone for many years, allowing people to evade the long arm of the U.S. government and send U.S. dollar stablecoins to each other without KYC AML. And now, particularly with the onboarding of the Secret Service, the FBI, CIA. and the massive blacklisting that they've done over the last few months, it's like, oh shit, was this just a massive honeypot that's been building for, for years? Like, do the Tether truthers actually have it all wrong?

Mark Goodwin [16:26] Like, I, I think the Tether, the Tether truther thing is like the greatest psyop ever because it really removes people. It's like the issue probably with Tether, which I think, you know, kind of is talked about in this article very much, is that Tether is like a narrow bank, you know. It's this kind of one-to-one. They hold the treasuries for all the dollars that they create, they actually hold 1-to-1. And the problem with that is you can't do fractional reserve banking in the Tether model. So we have to create, rather than just using T-bills that are held by Cantor Fitzgerald, this incredibly spooky— we can get into that later. They need to create this synthetic deposit security token that then they can rehypothecate and basically recreate this fractional reserve banking system that uh, you know, these, these folks have enjoyed for, you know, years and years and years.

Whitney Webb [17:22] You know, the reason Jamie Dimon was like with Elizabeth Warren was like, we should ban all crypto. If I was the government, I would do that. That's because the commercial banks like JP Morgan want to be the entities issuing the dollar peg stablecoins or the whatever stablecoins or deposit tokens. They want to take, you know, the Tether crowd and Paolo and all of those guys that they want to do it. They don't want these other companies to do it.

Marty Bent [17:47] Yeah. Which makes complete sense. I mean, yeah.

Whitney Webb [17:51] And these same, you know, a bank-issued stablecoin is still just as surveillable and programmable as like a hypothetical CBDC would be. But this 1-to-1 reserve thing is a big problem for them because the banks hold— I mean, they want to keep their casino going. They need fractional reserve stuff to follow their existing models, business model. They have no intention of changing that. And, you know, when you keep in mind too that like in the States, States specifically, the central bank is owned by the Wall Street banks. Like, they're going to direct obviously what the central bank policy will be with respect to digital dollars. Right. So, you know, there's a reason why I think the Fed has been so like unwilling to be like, yeah, we're going to do a CBDC. They've been very like, you know, we don't know, we're not looking at it, you know. And there's people that have taken that as a sign that like the Fed is fighting against CBDCs, right? But not so. Not so. It's just one that's issued by, you know, the people that we definitely know steal from. I mean, it's just a different group of thieves in charge of like programming and surveilling. But they, you know, are obviously going to collaborate with the same— with the government. It's going to be a public-private partnership, essentially. And I mean, FedNow, I mean, there might be an actual direct issue CBDC, but that'll probably be for like interbank settlement. Or something like that. It's not going to be what the public interacts with.

Mark Goodwin [19:18] Totally. And that's exactly what FedNow is. It's really just a securities clearing system. It allows them basically to set the rate of securitized overnight funding, the SOFR, and basically allows the Fed further ability to survey securities trading between Federal Reserve partner banks. It just gives them more control. But of course, it isn't an actual product. There's no token. There's no retail accounts. It's literally just like a communication system between banks. And yeah, and then we're seeing, of course, if you actually look at the pilot programs that the Fed has actually done with some of the regional Federal Reserve Banks, the 2 main ones that get referenced are Project Cedar and Project Hamilton. And Project Hamilton is the retail-facing, you know, how many transactions per second, kind of the throughput of what would be kind of the retail, um, you know, facing one. And that was through, um, the Boston Fed with MIT. And then there's, um, Cedar, which is actually like a securitized token deposit. And that's kind of the, the other side. And those are really the two sides of, you know, the dollar system, right? There's the securities and the T-bills behind it, and then there's the actual dollars created in your checking accounts that are done by the private sector. That's done private capital creators. That is increasingly moving towards the JP Morgans of the world and literally JP Morgan. So I think that whole system, this whole racket is exceptionally profitable for these people. And just because there's new tech coming out, they don't want to lose this racket. So How do we capture that within the system we already have? And the way that you do that is by creating synthetic deposit tokens.

Marty Bent [21:16] Well, that brings up a good segue because it seems like, because if we look at the monetary system right now, the financial system right now, one can make a strong argument that CBDCs are essentially already here. These entities have the ability to censor and deplatform, demonetize people at will, but it seems like they would be able to do it much more easily if they were to adopt new tech. And so I guess this is a good point to basically describe the— like you mentioned, Mark, they're paving the way for this new tech. They're getting SBF out of the way, getting CZ out of the way, probably trying to muscle out Yeah. Palo and Tether as well. And what is the technical architecture of the tokenized dollar system that they're building look like? And then, like you mentioned, the security system looks like they're also trying to replace the DTCC right now as well.

Mark Goodwin [22:13] Yeah. Or maybe not replace it and just transmute it into— I mean, literally, the DTCC working with R3, they settle the lion's share of of security settlement in the United States, which is obviously the lion's share of all security settlement in the world. And so, yeah, we're going to see some digital version of these T-bills that decrease the settlement failure rate, which obviously, it happens. There's a lot of settlement failure in the Treasury market. And it's really interesting when you go and look back at points in history where the major spikes of settlement failure rates in the United States, the main ones are, the most obvious ones are September 2001, which was 9/11. Interestingly, Cantor Fitzgerald, who owns the Tether T-bills, were in, you know, their office was in 9/11 and all of it was, you know, destroyed. And they passed some emergency measures that day to settle some treasuries that wouldn't have been settled. And you can get kind of into a rabbit hole there. And then of course, September 2019, there was the huge explosion in the repo market right before— what happened in 2020? I kind of— oh yeah, COVID, government lockdowns, and trillions and trillions of dollars of stimulus printing. Right. I don't think that's a coincidence personally.

Marty Bent [23:52] Neither do I. I fell down the Cantor Fitzgerald rabbit hole after their CEO was on CNBC talking about, um, Tether and crypto and Bitcoin. And there was a documentary about the families of the Cantor Fitzgerald employees that were lost on 9/11, and he was a complete scumbag in the aftermath.

Whitney Webb [24:13] Yeah, well, there was definitely a media effort to rehabilitate him after that. Uh, he was also Epstein's neighbor, fun fact.

Mark Goodwin [24:23] Really?

Whitney Webb [24:24] And, uh, yeah, and that house used to be owned by Epstein and Wexner and all of those guys.

Marty Bent [24:31] Oh, lovely.

Whitney Webb [24:32] Just, you know, what it's—

Marty Bent [24:35] I mean, Whitney, we've been doing this for years, making a cheery neighborhood.

Whitney Webb [24:39] Bill Cosby's there too, you know, just—

Marty Bent [24:41] We've been doing this for years, and every, every episode we record, I become more astonished at how small the circle is and how interconnected it is over decades.

Whitney Webb [24:49] Yeah, it's pretty small.

Marty Bent [24:51] And there's, I mean, more people you're mentioning— Perlman, others are involved in this stablecoin/CBDC evolution.

Mark Goodwin [25:01] Yeah, the Cantor stuff and the Tether stuff is really interesting too, where if you look at, you know, Max Keiser holds this patent for, uh, virtual security trading, right, that he filed, uh, in the late '90s. That was the backbone, the patent that they used for this Hollywood Stock Exchange. Which was a simulated digital securities trading platform that referenced in the initial patent, referenced the Cantor Fitzgerald patent from a few months before. A few years later, Cantor Fitzgerald buys out Kaiser from the board of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, takes all of that, throws it into the office, you know, a couple months before September 11th, And then, of course, it all blows up in the events of that day. And, of course, we see heavy involvement with Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald. And it's a very interesting— because now we're getting to this point where it's very clear that the next play is virtual security settlement and trading. And that, yes, the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, but really the reserve asset of the world is US Treasuries. And that's really the— for me, I wrote this book, The Bitcoin Dollar, that proposes, hey, let's not even really worry about the dollar right now. I don't even know if Bitcoin can replace the dollar, but what it can replace is the US Treasuries. It can replace Treasuries as a reserve asset for a new financial system if we do it right and if we do it well. But if we allow this dollarization and these stablecoin spooks to come in and encourage Bitcoiners to support companies, uh, that buy up Treasuries en masse. Um, you know, we're seeing Tether reintegrations and Strike. You know, we're seeing a lot of, uh, people that are very, uh, cozy to, to stablecoins and to Tether, and, and they're, you know, these huge net buyers of Treasuries when actually Bitcoin kind of is, you know, poised potentially to really disrupt this reserve asset system. I just think it's something Bitcoiners should be really aware of as we move forward and what kind of practices and systems and architecture that we promote.

Marty Bent [27:23] Yeah, I completely agree. You have to imagine they're thinking of sly roundabout ways to undermine the end goal of Bitcoin, which is to replace that system.

Mark Goodwin [27:40] Yeah.

Marty Bent [27:40] Integrate at the hip together. And so I guess—

Whitney Webb [27:46] Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's naive to think that they wouldn't do that. I mean, if something— if you— if a tool is created to stick it right to commercial and central banks and like prevent malfeasance on their part, if they can co-opt it to become part of their system and part of their malfeasance and enable their malfeasance, they will definitely do that. It's not like they're going to be like, oh, well, you invented Bitcoin, you got us. That's not how these guys—

Marty Bent [28:18] All right, we give up. You guys won.

Mark Goodwin [28:20] Yeah. And arguably, and I think this is something I get into in the book as well, is I think the dollar system probably needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs the dollar system. The dollar system has now passed $33 trillion. We're at this runaway debt service where the amount of money the US owes just to pay its debt has now surpassed the GDP growth in a year. We're a zombie company. You would take us out back and Old Yeller us if we were a dog. It's like this— there's no way to fix this without massive, massive money printing and stimulus to service this debt. There's just no other way. We can't increase tax receipts. enough to service this debt. So what do you do? You print a bunch to pay for it. Well, now we have this demand-inelastic disinflationary supply cap system that can actually suck up all of this excess liquidity that comes from money printing. And then what do we see? Now that we're seeing ETFs start to go, we're starting to see Bitcoin start to increase again. And now we have the regulatory moat is finished being built. We're seeing Basel III requirements coming in that are forcing financial institutions to hold equal parts dollar to Bitcoin or dollar to gold. So, if we start to see these, in actuality, hyperinflationary events in the dollar system, we have no pun intended, tethered the dollar to Bitcoin price appreciation from a financial regulatory standpoint.

Marty Bent [30:00] Yeah. Now, when you— I keep saying yeah after everything I say. I got to stop that. The— Something I'm conscious of. But like the timing of all this, whether it's the over the last year, getting SBF out of the way, getting CZ out of the way, completely cucking Tether, and then in parallel you have the Treasury coming out writing that letter. Jamie Dimon, the rest of the executives on Capitol Hill, Elizabeth Warren dropping this bill. And then we have the ETF, which seems to be, uh, approaching imminent approval, maybe in the next couple weeks. It does seem very coordinated to me. And then I think there's also—

Whitney Webb [30:44] oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say, I think there's even more stuff to be cognizant of. Like, remember, the DOJ holds an insane amount of Bitcoin, and that's probably only going to increase. So like with Binance, a ton of DOJ people people have access not just to every, uh, transaction on that exchange from now going forward, but also everything in the past. What happens if they flag past transactions and retroactively start seizing wallets? Right. Um, they could do that. And, um, I think, uh, with a lot of this stuff that has— I've, you know, been warning about for a long time, but we've seen it escalate a lot since October 7th, this claim that Bitcoin specifically is being used to finance terrorism and you're having these, these pushes, you know, to regulate based on that, like under a national security justification. I think that's a recipe for like even more DOJ like seizures specifically of Bitcoin. And so, you know, why is the DOJ so interested in accumulating— or, you know, it's a major arm of the US government. So like the US government, we're broadly interested in accumulating so much Bitcoin and holding on to it. And also basically creating like national security justifications to literally take anyone's Bitcoin they could possibly want under a variety of like insanely vague metrics. Like, you know, like I've talked about before, the DOJ is part of this, this WEF organization that wants to label people who are accused of publishing misinformation online as cybercriminals and cyberterrorism who should have their domains and assets seized. Yeah, I know. I mean, obviously that's like everybody. anybody here. The DOJ could eventually, like, you know, it's a, it's a really broad net. But why are they setting that system up? You know what I mean? And I think it's important to keep in mind too that, you know, like Gary Gensler of the SEC has made it clear very consistently for a while now, uh, that Bitcoin is the only digital currency viewed from the SEC's perspective as a commodity. Everything else is a security to Gary Gensler. So they're going You know, that's a pretty unique status. They want to treat it as a commodity as they move everything into the digital currency space, and they have plans to do that and use it for their benefit. And to think they wouldn't do that is like, I I think personally really naive. I mean, of course they would.

Mark Goodwin [33:13] Get your back. The U.S. holds the lion's share for sure of Bitcoin from a retail standpoint and from yeah, as you said, a seizure standpoint. And I think again, you know, just an interesting way to get this. you know, you referenced Marty, the circle being so small. It's like Bitfinex, that huge hack, you know, years ago, has all that coin, you know. And the SEC has them by the balls because they did that Leo token to pay back everybody that got their Bitcoin hacked, which obviously was a security. Obviously.

Marty Bent [33:44] How much do they see? And if you go over like to the Bitfinex hackers, like the rapper couple, right, whatever, it's like, what? Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [33:52] Yep. She was actually a regular at my bar that I used to work at, a bar in, uh, in the Bay Area. And I like knew her as a, as a, as a regular. When the whole thing happened, I was like, this is the biggest fucking psyop I've ever seen. There's no way these people did this. There's no way they held it in a Google Drive account. There's no fucking way any of this is— anyway, it's all speculation.

Marty Bent [34:13] But how much did the DOJ get? The original hack was like 116,000 Bitcoin.

Mark Goodwin [34:19] I believe. I believe they got $96,000. Yeah, it was like $92,000. I think it was just below $100,000. Yeah, something like that. I could be wrong, but I think that's right.

Marty Bent [34:27] No, it hasn't worked because historically when they've seized the Silk Road coins and coins from other hacks or whatever, or illegal operations that they took down, they've auctioned them off. But they haven't done that with the Bitfinex coins, which they've been sitting on for, I think, over a year now. Um, yeah, and they haven't signaled that they're going to auction them yet. So you think they're going to—

Mark Goodwin [34:54] Talking about this circle again, it's like, well, who does that? Who, who do they sell them through? They sell them through Coinbase. Coinbase has gotten in trouble from the SEC for securities things, been asked to unlist stuff. They are also the custodians of the CashCreate spot ETF for BlackRock, for, you know, for everybody, right? So there's just this like mutually assured destruction. That meme of everybody in the church holding the guns against the— it's like, that is the situation we're in of the Bitcoin space right now. It's like, fall in line or we blow this whole thing up. It's very, very interesting.

Marty Bent [35:28] Yeah. So I said, yeah, goddamn it. As it pertains to this transition to the commercial bank-controlled stablecoin, quasi-CBDC, where are they in terms of their roadmap and how quickly do you think they can get to market with it?

Whitney Webb [35:49] That's a pretty good question. Well, I mean, so basically, I, you know, in this article it focuses on this particular network that Fluent Finance, which was partnered with, you know, this SBF Deltec thing, they're sort of in this network with like the XDC network and R3. Right. And R3 is developing CBDCs all over the world. But they also have like a more— like they're casting a wider net than just CBDCs. They have this thing called the Digital Currency Accelerator, and they're basically focusing on not just CBDCs, but, you know, deposit tokens and stablecoins. So like any entity, banks, central banks, whatever, can like sandbox and like test out their digital currency and, you know, ad programmability and all this stuff that, like, you know, people are concerned about when it comes to CBDCs as it relates to impacts on individual freedoms, specifically financial freedoms. Right. So they're like, they've created all these tools to, you know, make it happen really fast. The question is, I think at the end of the day, like trust and adoption. And so, you know, what I've sort of brought up on some recent interviews is, is this, you know, stuff I've been writing about since 2021, how the biggest banks in the world and the biggest central bank, some of the most important central banks in the world in this WEF partnership and the Carnegie Endowment, which at the time was run by the current CIA director, were basically gaming out financial cyber or cyberattacks on the financial system. And a lot of people don't know this, but the entire financial services industry in the US, so like all of the big banks have an ISAC. which is an information sharing and analysis center where their CISOs all get together like privately and like game out threats to the system and how to respond to them. So like all the Wall Street banks have had since 2021, like a unified plan about what they'll do if there's a big cyberattack on the banks. And so if you're like, you know, the biggest bank, these same banks that caused 2008, and you know that they're— another banking crisis and like economic calamity is inevitable, and you don't want to be blamed by people when they're angry about their money not really having value anymore, you know, how do you get around that? You know, I don't think they want a repeat of Occupy Wall Street. I think that's pretty clear, right? So how do you You know, get around that. Well, you're like, oh well, these faceless hackers took over the financial system and we have to relaunch it with these things because it's more secure. And you know, we'll know who everybody is. You know, because there's this parallel push to end online anonymity and financial privacy going on here, which is part of this whole like narrative too about like Bitcoin and you know financing terror transactions and stuff. Like it's all about like KYC and like linking your. Digital ID and government-issued ID to, you know, every transaction and having even the smallest transaction, $1, $0.50, you know, is surveillable by the banks and the government. Right. So people aren't just going to be like, yeah, let's do that system if they launch it without some sort of event that causes, you know, fear and panic. So I think it's likely it'll get rolled into some sort of like Cyber Patriot Act after some sort of mass cyber event that the banks have all gamed out. And the WEF, which runs this partnership the banks and all these intelligence agencies are a part of, say it is going to happen before January 2025. They said that. So—

Marty Bent [39:34] Whether you want to call it predictive programming or pacing and leading the public, I mean, you had Anthony Blinken leave on Capitol Hill saying— I think Lindsey Graham asked him, like, how big is the threat right now? Are you seeing blinking lights?

Whitney Webb [39:49] Yeah, blinking lights everywhere we turn. It was Christopher Wray, head of the FBI. Yeah, Lindsey Graham was like, so is there going to be another 9/11, Chris? Everywhere I turn, the answer is yeah. I mean, it's basically what that was. And I mean, they do this all the time. Like before January 6th, this top lady at DHS basically was like, we can see another 9/11 building and we can't stop it, and it's going to be Trump supporter insurrectionists. and all this stuff. And then, you know, immediately January 6th happens and all these like CIA, former CIA veterans that had just been elected to Congress, mostly on the Democrat ticket, uh, were all on like cable news being like, this is America's second 9/11, just like all on the same— immediately, dude.

Mark Goodwin [40:33] Yeah. Well, they have, they have kind of two like sort of modes of levers, right? They have this fear-based, which obviously they simulate fear and that's the whole 9/11 into Patriot Act and into all this stuff. And then they have the other side, which is this convenience thing that they build, which you look at what they've done in this private-public sector blur. Obviously, Whitney, you've written a lot about the DARPA Project LifeLog being Facebook. And then we look at what they did with fucking Venmo, and it's like they created this public social media network for paying each other and making— it's like, If I look at Venmo, I can see people that I was friends with in high school or whatever that are sending, paying their bills and stuff, and I can see how much they're paying. I mean, it's total madness. And they're doing it as this form of convenience. And you look at Venmo— Right, exactly. And you're looking at Venmo integrating— they're in part of the PayPal Mafia group, the suite of products. Now they're integrating. I did an interview with Walter Hester, the head of strategy at Paxos, asking him about the PayPal USD. And he very specifically said that, you know, I don't think the USDT and USDC model from a regulatory standpoint is going to last. But what I do see somehow also is trillions and trillions of dollars of stablecoins coming into the market. So he's, he's basically signaling that, you know, through this PayPal, Venmo, you know, convenience stick, you know, or the carrot, not the stick, uh, you know, they're, they're going to, you know, basically take over, uh, the stablecoin market from these other entities, um, and, and wrap it back into the, the PayPal, Stripe, Tealverse, um, you know, cabal, basically.

Marty Bent [42:30] Beware.

Whitney Webb [42:31] Just to elaborate on that really quick, so what, what Mark meant I guess, when he brought up like LifeLog and Facebook. So like LifeLog and these other programs, which also brought us Palantir, another Peter Thiel PayPal Mafia company.

Marty Bent [42:45] Right.

Whitney Webb [42:46] They tried to make this insane panopticon program after 9/11 called Total Information Awareness. Look up the logo. It's very illuminating. And basically the goal— they put like an Iran-Contra criminal in charge of it. who was obsessed with like mass surveillance for the purpose of pre-crime and arresting people for like potentially threatening the existing status quo of the government and like protesting war nonviolently and stuff, in charge of this DARPA public-private partnership called Total Information Awareness that was going to suck up everyone's data and predictably, you know, just enable a pre-crime type of surveillance dragnet. Very unconstitutional stuff. And I think the national security state realized then, because there was a huge uproar about it, that people were not willing to accept that if the government was overtly involved, but they would if it appeared at least as a purely private sector venture. Yeah. So the same, I think, is true for CBDCs. They've seen this pushback of people don't want CBDCs and no to central bank control. They don't want the government issuing the CBDC and the government programming and surveilling the money. So I think they're going to do what they did with Total Information Awareness. And use private entities like, you know, JPMorgan, the same banks that everyone, you know, most people use now and have them be the issuers of the de facto CBDC, or rather the synthetic CBDC is the term that gets thrown around some as well. And synthetic CBDCs, you know, as defined by the people that use that term, is something like a stablecoin with a twist, which means that the reserves are backed up by the Fed or backed up with the Fed.

Marty Bent [44:35] That's one thing people really need to begin to internalize is this whole demarcation between public and private is a complete mirage. The, yes, the, the private sector via lobbying dollars and control the Fed. The Fed, the money is the most important tool on the planet. The Fed is a private entity owned by the commercial banks. Yeah, essentially hold the economy, by extension the government, by the balls. There is no real demarcation, particularly at this point.

Whitney Webb [45:09] Yeah, and it's going to get even worse in terms of like the blending of these, of these groups, because, um, that same Carnegie Endowment thing that I mentioned with like all the big US, uh, US banks, the Fed, uh, the ECB, the Bank of England, and like tech companies companies and stuff, uh, their solution to cyberattack problems or a coming cyber pandemic was to basically merge banks, banking regulators, and intelligence agencies.

Marty Bent [45:39] And if you just look at the number of things that are happening in parallel, like we're hyper-focused on the financial system and the monetary system right now, and you mentioned the digital ID for sending and receiving transactions, it'll be tracked granularly. They're doing the same thing on social media and just pure information as well, where they're really trying to silo people into these censored platforms. They're trying to pass laws around hate speech, and what's happening in the UK and Ireland right now.

Whitney Webb [46:14] Yeah, and they're, they're pairing that with like gutting encryption too, specifically in the UK.

Marty Bent [46:19] Yep, and gutting open source software in the EU. Setting the stage to ban open source software because it's too dangerous.

Whitney Webb [46:29] Dangerous. Yeah. I mean, expect a lot of these terms to be thrown out. I mean, you know, if and when this big cyber attack that they're predictively programming happens, the enemy is going to be privacy. They're going to be like, we can't have privacy anymore. That's what they're going to say. I guarantee that because that's the only way they can, you know, basically force adoption of all this stuff they want to do, which is CBDC's digital ID, is they want everything you do online to be completely surveillable. And that includes financial transactions, like specifically financial transactions. And so people for a long time have rightly pointed out that digital IDs and CBDCs are like, you know, they go together, right? You get, you get both. It's not just like one or the other. Like it's a very like integrated thing. And, you know, this is all also tied up with this goal to have the driver's license for the internet that you have to have, you know, your digital digital ID or government-issued ID tied to everything you do online. Um, and whatever happens with this thing, they're going to blame whoever they want, really, because we know with like WikiLeaks Vault 7, right, the, the CIA through the Umbridge program can put like the fingerprints of literally any nation-state or person they want in any cyber attack and blame them.

Marty Bent [47:44] It was Russian bots.

Whitney Webb [47:45] Yeah, or they can, you know, like they've been doing recently, not actually have any evidence but then get a mainstream media That says Iran hacked this, China hacked this. I mean, it doesn't really matter. Like it's all just fake, you know. And a lot of those companies attributing blame, like Recorded Future, for example, has a recent one that's been surfacing. They were created by the CIA and QTEL, you know. So like you really want to trust these guys saying like we were attacked by this nation? Trust like the intelligence front company that wants to push all of this through because the CIA director was in charge of this. Like like, whole thing that mapped out how to, like, bring down the banks and launch all of this shit. I mean, it's just— it's mental.

Marty Bent [48:29] It seems—

Whitney Webb [48:29] I don't know what else to say about it.

Marty Bent [48:30] It seems like they're setting up Iran to be the scapegoat here with what's going on.

Whitney Webb [48:34] Well, sure. Uh, I mean, you know, there's, there's a big Israel component here. So, like, that WEF Partnership Against Cybercrime I mentioned is led by a career Israeli, uh, intelligence guy named Tal Goldstein. And then you have this stuff that I've reported on recently— well, a couple of years ago, but it's become recently relevant, like the CTI League, which has a big relationship with, like, you know, a key part of the US's DHS as it relates to critical infrastructure and, like, cyberattacks and stuff. And the guy that created CTI League, Ohad Zadenberg, has been his whole career blaming Iran for stuff with little to no evidence. for cyberattacks and is still pretty much an active Israeli intelligence asset. And Israeli intelligence for the past like 20 years has had like a documented, admitted policy of trying to get the US to use as many resources as possible to further regime change in Iran, including the US striking Iran first so Israel doesn't have to. And you even have former Mossad directors like Meir Dagan Literally saying that and also saying that Mossad has like unlimited funds and powers to make that happen and have a 5-front strategy for regime change in Iran that includes like goading the US into striking Iran first. And when you factor in stuff like Israel and the USS Liberty, where Israel tried to get us involved in one of their regional wars by blowing up a US ship and killing, you know, US, you know, naval personnel. and then blaming it on Egypt to try— false flagged us hard to try and get us involved in their war. And now they're about to have a regional war again. Yeah, I mean, they're about— I mean, they've openly said like in the past couple of days it's gonna go beyond Gaza and they're gonna declare war on Hezbollah now, which is Lebanon.

Marty Bent [50:30] Did you see— right, did you see— so 2 things happened this week. Iran and Iraq I think engaged in a deal to explore oil reserves together and like in a joint venture produce revenue for their countries. And then this week Biden announced tactical, uh, hits on strategic areas in Iraq, um, just somewhat out of nowhere.

Whitney Webb [50:57] It's going to escalate. I mean, it's obviously was, I, in my opinion, just like planned from the off. escalate to a regional war because every effort to de-escalate has intentionally been scuttled by the US and Israel. Right. Not unlike what happened in Ukraine and like how Boris Johnson, when he was in charge of the UK, scuttled— like they could— that war could have ended like very early on and he scuttled it on purpose. You know, there's like an intentionality here to keep this going and to expand it. And people need to keep in mind, too, that Iran is now part of BRICS. And that includes like not, you know, in to an extent some form of like military alliance, you know. So there's a potential to like bring in China and Russia to all of this. And you have all this stuff going on in the Pacific theater as well. I mean, I don't want to get too like into geopolitics right now because I also haven't been following it like super closely. It's the holidays and that stuff like develops really, you know, rapidly. Right. But there's definitely it's going to go regional and Israel will not want to be fighting that alone. And so to get the US to specifically the US public to consent, at least a significant faction of the US public to consent, that people in the US need to feel like they're under attack also. And there's been this like framing too of like, oh, the border is so porous and the US-Mexico border and Netanyahu saying like, you know, Hamas sleeper cells could come to the US and all the shit, you know. Well, that's pretty wild. And then they, and then the IDF put out this, or maybe an Israeli embassy put out like this video of Hamas like blowing up a Christmas parade in South Korea and like all this stuff.

Marty Bent [52:45] Yeah, the story of the Mexican border patrol.

Whitney Webb [52:47] What's going on, guys?

Marty Bent [52:48] Finding IEDs at the border. And which, that's like, that's where it's like so blatant in your face. It's like they're letting, yeah, tens of thousands of people come in a day now. And then they're also like, there could be sleeper cells. It's like, why don't you just close the border? Are you trying to—

Whitney Webb [53:03] But they're, they're, it's an intentional thing that, you know, this is something that, that really gets me sometimes is because like people look at stuff like the border policy right now and they're like, oh, it's just incompetence because look, we have the senile guy who's president. Well, yes. But no one, you know, who actually is serious thinks Biden makes any decisions. He's just a figurehead, arguably, like U.S. presidents have been for decades.

Mark Goodwin [53:27] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [53:27] So like, there's people that want— I mean, he doesn't run DHS. There's like non-senile people in charge of DHS, for example, right? I mean, it's not all like, oh, senile Biden, he's senile, thus all U.S. policy decisions or lack thereof are because of, you know, him being senile. That's just— that's not how it works. It's like a very deliberate thing. And a lot of times things that are deliberate are written off as like incompetence or stupidity. And, um, I don't think that's the case here.

Mark Goodwin [53:58] No, I think I can tie some of this regional stuff kind of back to the, you know, this sort of dollar, Bitcoin, oil stuff, right? Where like, if you look at— if you look at March 2020, when we had that big COVID implosion of stock market, gold, oil futures went negative. That was a few weeks before the halvening, which was a very important halvening where issuance, relative issuance actually went to 6.25 Bitcoin a block, which relative to the total supply was the first time Bitcoin issuance was below 2%. which is the target inflation rate of the US dollar, the target, or the rate of gold coming out of the ground is around 2%, and oil as well. So we saw the petrodollar system essentially go tits up that day. And now we're seeing it being replaced by— it's the exact same mechanism of an energy commodity that through a monopoly of the exchange of the in and out of the energy commodity being in dollars, which is what we're seeing with Bitcoin, that's how they upheld the petrodollar system, was this monopoly on, hey, you want to industrialize, you want to modernize your country, you want to buy oil, you got to buy dollars first. We can shovel all of these inflationary effects into Europe and into Asia and have all these people buying T-bills and buying cash to buy oil. Now we're seeing the exact same thing set up with Bitcoin, and now we're seeing a whole bunch of our regional policy has really changed considerably. I mean, we're all relatively the same age, right? And our entire life has been about being in the Middle East and mucking around in the oil fields, right? And then all of a sudden, we're out of Afghanistan. We pull out and leave a whole bunch of shit there. It becomes no longer economically viable to continue this money laundering oil scheme. And then they go on and obviously do what they were doing in Ukraine, which has a huge component of money laundering via crypto, which is very interesting. But we've established basically the Bitcoin dollar in lieu of the petrodollar system. And if the world wants access to this energy commodity, they need to buy dollars first. And I think we're seeing that sort of play out and in an extreme way, right as we're getting ready for another halving where this, where this issuance gets cut in half again. And we're going to see that even be more extreme. And now we're setting up with regulatory action, ETFs, like everything that has happened the last 4 years between this halving and this next halving are, uh, entirely by design, you could argue. And I think to the point of the digital ID stuff, to the point, like, you know, the regulatory moat is built, but maybe we don't know all the components yet. But when they monetize Bitcoin to the rate at which they wanted to, and it really does get extremely high in US dollar value, there's going to be so many more requirements in the US for citizens to be able to use it. Exchanges are going to get more and more and more KYC. There's going to be hey, take a selfie and scan your face to be able to, you know, sell on Coinbase or whatever. You know, we're kind of moving towards that, that world. And I think, you know, we obviously have to just be exceptionally careful. You know, Bitcoin has really entered the macro world in a very extreme way. And it's right before I think we kick off an election cycle, right before we kick off probably a debt jubilee of sorts. If there is another cyberattack or another lockdown or any of these things that we all basically are just waiting for to happen again, You know, there's going to be massive stimulus, and the next stimulus is not going to be $5 trillion, $6 trillion. It's going to be $40 trillion, $50 trillion. You know, we're going to see really extreme stuff.

Whitney Webb [58:06] If I can add something on the border really quick. So the whole mess on the border too, in terms of its intentionality— so it's not just happening in the US, it's, it's happening similar in similar ways in a lot of other countries. In my opinion, this is one of the main ways they're going to shoehorn in Digital ID. We have to know who everyone is because there's too many migrants, and we have to know who has what rights and who can do what. And so we all need digital ID for everybody. That's biometric and all of this stuff. And I'm sure they'll invent something like, oh, there's fraud, there's fake IDs. We have to have secure interoperable IDs, just like designed by ID 2020 and then SDG 16 and whatever. Yeah, so that's definitely going to be part of it. And then you have this whole added thing of like. something crazy is obviously going to happen with the economy next year, whether it's provoked by a cyberattack or whatever. The way the UN, UNICEF, World Food Program has set up all of their stuff for humanitarian aid is the Worldcoin model, which is scan your eyeball and we give you a digital ID, and that tells us whether or not you eat or not. You know, if you want to get your rations, you have to go to the wherever the rations are and have your eyeball scanned. And if there's a mistake in the system and it decides you're not you, no food for you. And this has happened in India's digital ID system, Aadhaar, to like a significant degree. And they haven't fixed it and they don't do anything about it. And they justified it by saying that like people's data will be safer and more secure. It's the most easily hackable thing in the world. There was like a big, big time like Indian CEO guy that was like, I'm publicly going to like put up my Aadhaar ID number and like Look how safe it is. And it was like hacked in like 10 minutes and people like trolled the crud out of him. You know, I mean, it's a joke, but they need to manufacture consent for all of this stuff. And the way they're going to do that is fear and panic. There's obviously going to be some sort of national security crisis they have to create to bring in that fear and panic, but they're creating the base issues on purpose. I mean, it's an intentional decision to have the border in that state. And it's not just happening in the US. It's like a broader thing, just like digital ID is like a global thing. And, you know, talking about the geopolitical stuff, you know, the divide here of, you know, BRICS versus the West, specifically like US, UK, Israel, Europe, the EU, they all agree on digital ID. So like, yeah, there's this geopolitical tension stuff at one level, but go another level up, they all agree about some sort of surveillable, programmable money. Maybe in the US it's synthetic DBDs, CBDCs. In China and the BRICS countries, it's direct issue CBDC. They all agree about digital IDs that are biometric. They all agree on Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. Yeah. And what's interesting about that, well, to take it back to the article in Fluent Finance, the United Arab Emirates, what are they setting up financially? What is Fluent Finance after Farmington gets shut down specifically doing in the United Arab Emirates? They're the connective tissue between the CBDCs, direct issue CBDCs of BRICS land and the synthetic CBDCs of the West and the deposit tokens. That's what they're setting up. That's what Fluent Finance is doing in the UAE right now with R3. That's partnered with the DTCC for the securities stuff that Mark was talking about earlier and doing the central bank digital currency for the UAE and a host of other countries that are interoperable with a lot of other ones, specifically being overseen by the BIS. These MCBDC projects for like multi-CBDC projects about interoperability. The goal is to have, you know, Corda, the R3 DLT, right, have that as much run on that as possible. But what doesn't run on that will be interoperable with that. So interoperability is like a key thing to watch out for. And a lot of these companies like Fluent Finance, for example, are developing this stuff and like no one has noticed, which I think is kind of interesting. Like a lot of people that are so focused on CBDCs and they're a threat to human freedom and all of this are just pointing the finger at like BRICS and not paying attention to any of these other countries, really. They're just like, BIS bad. But like, yeah, you know, Wall Street has plans for this too. And like, they're not good either. Like Jamie Dimon and Jerome Powell are not coming to the rescue, guys. They're creating the same system under a different name.

Marty Bent [1:02:39] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:02:40] Well, it's funny to mention because Jamie Dimon programming my dollars to expire and tying it to my carbon credits or whatever is not any better than Jerome Powell or, I don't know, Janet Yellen doing it. I mean, it's all the same garbage.

Mark Goodwin [1:02:57] It's a red herring, really. It's like we're going to get this false victory of like, oh man, you know, DeSantis signed a bill that says, you know, no CBD issuance in Florida. Like, fuck yeah. But it's like, but now we got Bradley Allgood coming in. Well, that's— I mean, exactly.

Marty Bent [1:03:16] It's when you sent me the piece to read over before you guys publish it, I remember messaging you, Whitney. I was like, I thought R3 had been shoveled into the dustbin of irrelevance. And I think many Bitcoiners believe that because around 2015, 2016, when I was in New York, they had like a big presence. They had a big social media presence. They were publicly speaking on CNBC, if I recall correctly, and really making this push for distributed ledger technology for corporations. And I thought they just petered out and never found product-market fit and faded away. But as your article proves, they've been very successful in creating these partnerships via their Corda platform, which I thought was defunct.

Whitney Webb [1:03:58] Oh, definitely, definitely. Yeah. Without a doubt. And, you know, what I think is interesting, too, to take this back to FTX, too, you know, in light of their team-up with Fluent Finance and what Fluent Finance has gone on to do, I really am curious and I don't really know if there's any way to know now. But, you know, all those donations and cozying up to like, you know, Elizabeth Warren and all these other like lawmakers by FTX executives or Ryan Salame cozying up with the Republicans and stuff. Like, was this to have them favor the stablecoin FTX was going to team up with? Which seems to have been Fluent Finance's US Plus, like to favor them as like, you know, the stablecoin issuer of choice for the synthetic CBDC. Pretty interesting possibility there because a lot of it thought it was just like, oh, crypto regulation to favor you know, FTX and SBF and stuff. But I think there's a lot of bigger plays that have been going on here for some time. And I think people ignoring these kind of actors, we're doing ourselves a disservice. If you look at the people who created Fluent Finance, the main guy, Bradley Algood, used to work for like NATO and like military intelligence stuff. And then immediately starts making special economic zones out of a building on this Indian reservation in South Carolina. to like replace Delaware as a place where like companies register to like get tax advantages and stuff. And that— I mean, and then goes on to team up with this guy, Oliver Gale, who is a failed reggae artist who claims to be the inventor of CBDCs. And the other guy was with him in that first CBDC project in Barbados. So the inventors of CBDC team up with like NATO spook guy, uh, to create the SBF stablecoin. That's what was going on before FTX, uh, collapsed. And so yeah, maybe SBF is like out of the picture and whatever, but this isn't going away. Like Fluent Finance, okay, yeah, we can't do the thing with Moonstone and with Chalopin and Deltec and FTX, but we can do it with R3.

Mark Goodwin [1:06:12] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:06:12] which was partnered with, you know, Fluent Finance, like, pretty much from the very beginning, because R3 started off as a consortium of, like, some of the biggest banks in the world, and their backers are still the biggest banks in the world. And there's a lot of overlap between how Fluent Finance started and those same banks that back R3, specifically Citibank, uh, HSBC, and Barclays, which, uh, if you know the history of any of those banks— Big time. Not good. And then you have Bradley Allgood, the fluent finance guy, like publishing op-eds and Cointelegraph and stuff being like, CBDCs would be great if they put Wall Street in charge. And all the money— what it says, I mean, it's just they're telling you, but no one's paying attention because they're like, oh, well, look, these Fed chairs are saying we're not going to do a digital dollar and that means freedom wins in the good old USA. No, what happens in the USA is that Wall Street steals from everyone and funnels the money to the oligarch class and leaves everyone dirt poor. That's what they're going to do. It's not good. Please don't trust them. You know, like, I just don't know what to say to people who are like, Jamie Dimon's on our side anymore. Like, and Jerome Powell. Like, they're not.

Marty Bent [1:07:28] He's a red-blooded—

Whitney Webb [1:07:30] I promise you they're not.

Marty Bent [1:07:32] He's got your best interests at heart, but I mean, trust the plan. Yeah, the many things to say here. Number one, Whitney, thinking back to when Michael Krieger and I were on your podcast, like, this is why I'm extremely happy that you guys wrote this piece, particularly hiding, uh, highlighting Fluent and US Plus, because I think whether it's Tether or more specifically USDC, if you recall the conversation that you, Michael, and I had last year, I was pretty convinced that like USDC was going to be like the private-public partnership company of choice.

Whitney Webb [1:08:05] But they said that, right? Like, who was it? It was like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase was like, USDC is going to be the de facto CBDC of the US.

Mark Goodwin [1:08:14] Exactly. Yep.

Whitney Webb [1:08:16] Oh, right.

Marty Bent [1:08:17] It seems like whether it's R3, Fluent, the combination of the two just working behind the scenes. Like, again, I thought R3 was done. Like, I thought they just completely missed their product market fit and were defunct. And that's leading me to believe that like the Tethers and USDCs of the world, which get all the, the tick—

Whitney Webb [1:08:35] R3 this year won CBDC Partner of the Year from the Central Banking Magazine. Like, they're all over the place. They're building this stuff and no one is paying attention to them at all. And they're the big banks of the world. So, you know, people being like, oh, this is all central banks and all Augustine Carsons. Well, like, obviously they're involved. evolve to a huge degree. But don't think Wall Street's out there like just gonna let the BIS take away their like fractional reserve crack from them. That's, it's not how this works, you know.

Marty Bent [1:09:08] Yeah, but everything's based on framing, right? And that's why, again, I'm extremely happy you guys wrote this piece because I think over the last few years particularly, like the mainstream media and people covering stablecoins and CBDCs have really tried to fit the frame around USDC and Tether. No, I don't think most people are aware of US Plus, Fluent, or the fact that R3 was not defunct until a couple of weeks ago.

Whitney Webb [1:09:34] Right. Well, you know, I think Tether's recent overtures— oh, sorry. I think Tether's recent overtures to, like, you know, onboarding the Secret Service and the FBI and all of this stuff, freezing all of these wallets on behalf of the US government, this is them trying to curry favors so they don't get totally nuked by regulations and they can be like a de facto synthetic CBDC. And I'm sure USDC is looking to do the same, you know, and that's why I mentioned earlier, like, what were these SBF political donations potentially really about? To be like, who, you know, the people that develop the regulations and enforce them are going to be the kingmakers of like which stablecoins are the de facto CBDC or CBDCs. Right? And you know, I think that's something to to look for here. I mean, which one is it going to be? I mean, like like Mark brought up in talking to the the Paxos guy, saying like he didn't think like Tether and USDC was going to make it past regulation. Like obviously, in my opinion, that's what SBF and Chalopin thought because you know FTX Deltec very tied up with Tether. for a very long time, like very connected. So why are they moving from one dollar-pegged stablecoin to another? Well, the big difference between Tether and US Plus is that US Plus like overemphasizes regulation and CBDC compatibility and trust and reserves and all of this stuff. It's a trusted Tether. It's a trustworthy Tether, right?

Marty Bent [1:11:07] Mm-hmm.

Whitney Webb [1:11:08] I mean, I wouldn't really say it's actually trustworthy because it's working with the same shady people, right? So I mean, but they want that public perception to be there. And obviously I think the gambit was to sell that to regulators and be like, look, this Citigroup-backed US Plus stablecoin and whatever is compliant and compatible with CBDCs. It can be used for trade, cross-border finance all over the world. And look, R3 in the UAE, and they're going to be the bridge between BRICS and the Western countries and all this stuff. I mean, I'm sure those conversations have been had behind closed doors, you know. And then one thing I think we didn't mention really quick on why it's going to— the digital dollar is going to be this and not like a direct issue CBDC. Like if the Fed was going to do a direct issue CBDC, they're really behind. Like, that would take them multiple years to roll out, and they need this stuff a lot sooner. Yeah. So as, uh, CIA spooks, literal CIA veterans focused on this kind of stuff, have said in publication and from think tanks like CSIS, is like, we have to use the digital dollars that are already here. We can't make a CBDC.

Marty Bent [1:12:25] And what does that mean? It means like they're close to structural insolvency and systemic collapse.

Whitney Webb [1:12:31] Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Marty Bent [1:12:34] That because that's what worries me because we could talk about we're talking about like fear and false flags in the future, and I maybe I'm in a bubble and have some confirmation bias, but it does seem like the marginal return on utility of these fear tactics tactics has diminished. Like people are calling bullshit. Sure. Inflation with inflation rates. Pissed. Uh, the border situation, people are like, what the hell is going on here? You have the mayor of New York being like, we gotta stop this. He never thought—

Whitney Webb [1:13:06] Yeah, totally. Well, 2024 is gonna be chaotic, and they've designed it to be chaotic, I think. But I think in that chaos, though, they're very likely to lose control, and I think they know it too. Like, once they inject, whether intentionally or not, instability into all these systems, their hold on things becomes a lot Uh, less strong than it arguably is now. Because for one thing, when things get really unstable, you're disrupting a lot of the convenience comfort factor that keeps people from like paying attention or doing anything about how things are.

Marty Bent [1:13:40] Well, that's what worries me, is the return on marginal utility of these fear tactics is falling. Like, they're gonna have to create something so goddamn scary.

Whitney Webb [1:13:48] Why do you think there's this UFO shit that they keep like resurrecting and like like all these like crazy things that like happen simultaneously. They're gonna throw them all at us and see which one sticks. And their problem is like, what happens if none of them stick? Which is what I hope for. That's, um, but I think people are like psyoped out, dude. And also you have all this stuff with like ChatGPT and deepfakes. Like no one knows what's real online anymore either. And like everything is just really fake.

Mark Goodwin [1:14:17] Yeah. But that's why I think you also see this big push of, uh, you know, the other side of the stablecoin spook, uh, angle, which is like banking the unbanked in this altruistic, uh, you know, like Human Rights Foundation sort of angle that's like, oh, look at how good Tether is. It's, you know, it's being used and, and people love it and, and all this stuff. And it's, uh, you know, FBI loves it too. Exactly. And you look at the people that are sort of, you know, the other side, right? There's the fear angle, and then there's the like, hey, let's kind of trick people into building these infrastructures and rooting for them. And you look at that, you know, there's almost no better examples of the public-private sector spook, you know, smashing than like Jack Dorsey with the spy shop that he ran at Twitter for, you know, a decade and his integration with with intelligence censoring stories. And then, of course, Peter Thiel with Palantir and Founders, his big fund. And both of them are 2 of the biggest supporters of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark's outfit, which is literally building a protocol to add Tether and stablecoins onto Bitcoin directly. And you have people like Saylor coming out and manufacturing consent for this thing. doing this, you know, keynote at Pack Bitcoin being like, don't be a martyr, don't fight the system, stablecoins on Lightning are gonna bring, you know, $10 trillion to Bitcoin and it's all gonna pump our bags. And it's just like, guys, like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, what? No, let's keep that shit way off of Bitcoin. Why would we ever do that? And, you know, you're seeing that opposite push of the— there's the fear push, which I totally agree, I'm horrified, Marty, of what's gonna come next, because I agree that the diminishing returns of the simulated fear— it's like the next thing is— I mean, 9/11 was insane, COVID was fucking insane. What the fuck is next? Like, I don't even want to think about it. But then we have the other side of the, you know, again, the convenience, the carrot versus rather than the stick. And, you know, we have these people manufacturing consent for let's dollarize Bitcoin literally. I mean, I think that's Lightning Labs Labs is like Taro asset, like, like line is let's Bitcoinize the dollar. And it's like, no, you're dollarizing Bitcoin. Like, I know what you're doing.

Marty Bent [1:16:39] A couple things here, freaks, if you're listening. Don't get the carrot because you get the carrot at the end of the stick, you start eating it, and then you get beat with the stick. It's not worth it. Uh, it's not worth it. And then 2, with Taro and like, uh, stablecoins and Lightning, I think Matt Odell does a great job of like, I think from a technical architecture, it's doomed from the start because you're trying to totally create convenience parity with the Tethers and USDCs of the world on top of this interoperable distributed protocol. You're just never going to be able to get the same UX or liquidity profile that you could with Tether just holding treasuries in a bank and issuing stablecoins and centrally issuing them. So I think that's playing into our favor. And then, Mark, I completely agree with you. Like, I don't think we need to dollarize Bitcoin at all. Like, I'm a true believer, like, we should hyper-Bitcoinize as quickly as possible. Dollar is literally in the early stages of hyperinflation. Like, I think it's a complete waste of time to try to dollarize.

Mark Goodwin [1:17:39] And ironically, Tether, you know, it was, it was created by Craig Sellars and, you know, this Brock Pierce, this like Island Boy group, whatever. Craig is cool, but, you know, not, not really a big fan of a lot of these folks. And, you know, it was, it was an OmniCoin master coin thing. You know, it was on Bitcoin, you know, originally at the get-go. And then, you know, obviously there was, there was huge inefficiencies with that, so they moved on to, you know, Joe Lubin's Ethereum, basically. Which the, you know, Howie Lutnick said in that when he was talking about how much he loves Tether, he's like, you know, hey, if we want to, if we want them to freeze something on Tether, you know, we call Tether and they freeze it. If you want someone to freeze something on Ethereum, you call Joe Lubin. I mean, he literally said that.

Whitney Webb [1:18:21] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:18:21] It's fucking hilarious. And then he obviously said with Bitcoin you can't do that, right? So there is this like state change. But yeah, Tether was, you know, a big part, you know, it was on Bitcoin at the beginning. And now we're, you know, kind of they're posturing it as this reinvention of this, this new thing that it's like, well, no, we did that 10 years ago or, you know, 9 years ago or whatever.

Marty Bent [1:18:38] Yeah, it all stinks.

Mark Goodwin [1:18:41] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:18:43] I really, I really hope people are like psyoped out and like are mentally strong enough to—

Whitney Webb [1:18:48] I mean, aren't people burned out of this stuff? I mean, I know I am. I am. I mean, I write about it, so that's probably a factor, but honestly, it's just so insane.

Marty Bent [1:19:00] Yeah. Yeah. If you look at it too, like they're, they're sloppy, they're lazy. Like, like Joe Biden's our fucking president, dude. Can't even fucking— and it's becoming glaring.

Whitney Webb [1:19:09] But I think, I think that's on purpose though. Like I said earlier, so like everything they're doing, they can write off as incompetence because the person who's the figurehead of the country is clearly incompetent, but like a lot of the stuff they're doing is not. It's deliberate and intentional.

Mark Goodwin [1:19:24] Totally.

Marty Bent [1:19:25] You know, well, that's where I think, I think with Joe Biden particularly, like they played too big of a hand where it's like, you guys really put this asshole in front of us and you're gonna expect us to believe that he's—

Whitney Webb [1:19:37] Well, they didn't have anyone else.

Marty Bent [1:19:39] I don't think anybody thinks he's competent.

Whitney Webb [1:19:40] Because he was— well, yeah. I mean, I think it was kind of like someone they had to put in just because of how the, the DNC primary was playing out. You know, he like won what, like South Carolina? And they were like, all right, we're running with Joe, you know? And that was that.

Mark Goodwin [1:19:56] Yeah, yeah, yep. And the Trump stuff, I mean, you know, like, yeah, 2016 was fun. Like, I get it, you know, that like there were some great memes.

Whitney Webb [1:20:06] It was fun that he made fun of Marco Rubio. and Jeb Bush on live TV. It was very cathartic.

Mark Goodwin [1:20:11] Yes. She's ugly, Ted. That's hilarious. He was hilarious. Very, very funny. He locked the country down, printed trillions of dollars. He was a huge proponent of Operation Warp Speed. I mean, this idea of him draining the swamp is so ridiculous. And obviously, I think the plan, it seems like, is to sort of have him come back, right? And sort of be this kind of false, like, hey, we, you know, we took the country back. And it's like, but it's the same fucking swampy—

Whitney Webb [1:20:41] Yeah, people. Exactly. Well, I think they need to do that because Trump's base has the guns, right? And so how do you disarm the people with the guns without coming and taking them? You make them think that they won, and then they're complacent. And that's what I think they want to do.

Marty Bent [1:20:59] And that's— I don't have an answer to this, but I'm wholly convinced that there is no political solution to these problems. You're not going to vote your way out of this. You're not going to— no, no. So, Whitney, I know we've talked a lot throughout the years about like, what can you do? Uh, make yourself individually robust, sovereign. Sure. Know your neighbors. But I just think there's also like a social narrative aspect to this that we really need to get out there. It's like, these politicians are not going to save you. Like, we need to fix this problem. That's why—

Whitney Webb [1:21:30] They're not. And if you keep trusting the politicians and trusting the system to fix itself, you're going to end up on your couch with like an Oculus Rift Facebook VR thing or Apple thing on your head, clunking around in the metaverse, like trying to earn like, you know, cryptocurrency for like your body heat, like that Microsoft patent and shit, like running on a tread— treadmill like a literal hamster when you're like not on the sofa. Is that what humans are supposed to do? Is that what humanity is? No, it's not. What humans are supposed to do is like go out and build and create stuff. That's literally what humans are here to do. And so what humans should be doing is building alternative stuff to the model that they have, which is become like a human vegetable trapped in the metaverse or whatever.

Mark Goodwin [1:22:26] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:22:27] You know, um, let's go out and build stuff in the real world and like get local and make like real things. And we don't have to like say no to all the technology. We just have to divest from these crazy people that run the technology right now that they have us dependent on and just make alternatives to those that we can use, you know. And there's people that can do all that stuff. There's people that are doing that stuff. But people have to start being active. And this whole thing of like, well, I'm just gonna sit here and live my life as I've been living it up to this point and not change anything, and I'm just gonna, you know, go out in November and vote for one of these 2 guys— that, I mean, no, you're gonna end up in the pod. Sorry, dude.

Mark Goodwin [1:23:13] And how embarrassing on this trope, like, how embarrassing has the Malay stuff been where it's like, oh yeah, this like ancap libertarian guy who ran for president. And it's like, and he wants to dollarize the country, bringing in outside financiers to dollarize the country.

Whitney Webb [1:23:31] From New York. So Wall Street.

Mark Goodwin [1:23:33] Yeah. He's got ex-Goldman Sachs Caputo as his fucking head of the central bank picked guy. His VP literally was trained by the, you know, took courses, you know, with the CIA in DC. I mean, it's just, it's like embarrassing. But he says parasito, he has a chainsaw, he makes fun of blue-haired libtards. It's like he does— it's the same Trump play, the Bolsonaro play, the same thing where it's like he does the lexicon of the things that we want to hear.

Whitney Webb [1:24:04] They ridicule the ruling class and the establishment and they ridicule people that, like, you know, a large segment of the public does not like or is tired of. And then they gain trust and support. And then when they're in office, it's the same people that they put into power. So Javier Milei was railing against the establishment of Argentina. But right, so the outgoing president is Fernandez with, with Cristina Kirchner as his VP. So the Kirchners were there.

Mark Goodwin [1:24:35] Right.

Whitney Webb [1:24:35] But right before them was Mauricio Macri, who was a disaster for Argentina, also a center-right guy. And Milei, his economy minister, the head of his central bank, and other people in his government are all from Macri's government. They're not from outside the political establishment. They are the Argentinian political establishment. And there are people from mainly JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank running his fiscal policies and all of this stuff. And those same people have the same designs that the IMF had for Argentina, which is to sell Argentina's state assets to foreign companies, specifically in New York, which is exactly where Milei went first to seek out financing for dollarization. So basically Milei has done what the IMF was hoping to do to Argentina faster, or at least that's how it's shaping up. And he, you know, his first thing too was to devalue the peso by like, what, like 50%, like by like half, right?

Mark Goodwin [1:25:30] 52%.

Whitney Webb [1:25:31] So that immediately, immediately just like worsens the economic situation for everyday Argentinians, you know, in terms of their purchasing power. It gets like cut in half like that. I mean, I get the whole thing about like the debt and all of that, But I don't like— Argentina has a lot of issues. Yeah, but in terms of— and I've explained this on some past podcasts before, but if you look at why Argentina has those problems and how they developed and like why the central bank started printing all that money and like why their economy collapsed in 2001, the guy that basically engineered that economic collapse was put in charge of the economy again when the economy collapsed. And he had like a quasi-dollarization plan that Milei's dollarization plan is based on. And And this other guy, Domingo Cavallo is his name, endorsed Milei and his dollarization plan. It's like the same crowd. And Milei looks different. I mean, it's not that different than Trump, right? Who in the early '90s was bailed out by Rothschild Inc. and then puts Wilbur Ross in charge of the Department of Commerce, the Rothschild banker that bailed him out as like a big thank you. And then like, doesn't really— I mean, if you think about like Trump's policies and stuff, like when he was president, like a lot of people have forgotten, like what he actually did. Sort of like Mark brought up, like, you know, Operation Warp Speed and the lockdowns and all of this stuff, right? Uh, but he also had— you know, people like to say that Trump is like anti-war and like anti-interventionist, but, uh, his national security advisor was John Bolton, guys. Trump did that. Uh, who do you think we'll have this time? You know, um, it's, it's problematic. And so like the idea that like we're just going to, you know, trust the plan and that these guys are going to help us. When Trump was in for 4 years, did he drain the swamp? No. Um, he enabled the swamp. He'll do that again. And I think a lot of this stuff, this, you know, martyrdom of Trump in terms of like, oh, they're going to take him off the ballot in these states, I think that's, uh, I think that's a psyop personally.

Marty Bent [1:27:35] Totally.

Whitney Webb [1:27:35] I think they want Trump in because remember, they wanted Trump to be the nominee back in 2016. That was a deliberate policy that came out because of what WikiLeaks. Like, we know that they, like, wanted Trump to be the Republican nominee, and the Democrats worked to make that happen.

Mark Goodwin [1:27:50] Yeah, in the— within the Podesta leaks, which I highly recommend— everyone always talks about how great Assange is and WikiLeaks is, but no one ever actually reads the fucking shit. Go through the Podesta leaks. It's fucking horrendously scary, but talk a lot about— yeah, there were Clinton staffer emails where they literally are like, we want Trump. Yeah, you're exactly right. It's It's, it's no accident at all.

Whitney Webb [1:28:10] Why would anybody do that?

Mark Goodwin [1:28:11] Right. And you look at the, you know, there's this, you know, the, the Soviet intelligence, you know, play called Operation Trust that they ran, which is basically exactly the same playbook that they're running now with Trump. If you include, you know, it's— I think it's pretty safe to say at this point, like, the Q trope is, is an intelligence operation, pretty much. I think that's relatively safe to say. This trust the plan, there's this guy who's gonna take care of everything, this fucking false savior. your guy who's gonna blah blah blah and, and don't do anything about it. Don't, don't go after these bad people. We got the guy. He's in there. Just sit back, drink your Double Gulp, watch your Netflix. It's gonna be fine. And now here we are.

Whitney Webb [1:28:55] Right. Yeah. I mean, stop believing that.

Marty Bent [1:29:00] Was QAnon just a big psyop to get everybody away from Pizzagate because of the Podesta emails?

Mark Goodwin [1:29:05] 100%. 1,000%. I was there when it all happened. That was, I mean, I mean, I've talked with Whitney about this before. Like, that was the thing that really broke my brain, was like going through the Podesta leaks in, yeah, like 2016, 2015, I think end of 2015 into 2016. And like, just, I knew something was just so wrong. Like, you just— my intuition, right, was just something is disgusting here. And then I saw it be, you know, I saw 4chan be basically bombarded and it turned into this. I even think Pizzagate trope, a lot of that stuff was a distraction away from the actual things that were in the Podesta emails and a lot of this stuff. And then by the time Q came out, it was just a total, you know, trust sessions, blah, blah, you know, it became this, you know, people are analyzing clock things. And, you know, it was just, it became such a goose chase of a rabbit hole. Yeah, take it away.

Whitney Webb [1:29:59] Sorry, the model for QAnon was created a few years earlier by Cass Sunstein, who an advisor to the Obama White House. He's married to Samantha Powers, who's currently head of USAID, which is pretty much known these days to be like a CIA front. Yeah. Uh, and he's also like a top guy at the World Health Organization now and has been since COVID He's all about getting people to like alter their behaviors. And he wrote this paper about how to disarm, um, conspiracy movements from within. And instead of getting them to—

Mark Goodwin [1:30:29] Right.

Whitney Webb [1:30:30] distrust the government to trust the government. Literally what QAnon did. And he wrote the roadmap for it before. And to think that one would have been followed, um, I, you know, I think it's important. But also like the Podesta leak stuff, you know, I think also aspects of Pizzagate, there were people that were like put in there to like ridicule the whole idea that like there would be this type of like sexual behavior specifically, um, from our political elites. And of course, this is a couple years before the Epstein scandal breaks, for example.

Mark Goodwin [1:30:58] Right.

Whitney Webb [1:30:59] And from that we have, you know, uh, among many other things, what these emails between people like Jess Staley and Epstein being like, what Disney princess do you want next? And all of this stuff, right? And like, there's stuff like that in the Podesta emails. Like, we can't talk about that apparently, but they want to like ridiculize it, uh, sort of like what happened with, uh, the COVID vaccines. People who were critical of like, why is the military in charge of this Why is it being rushed? Why is it being forced on people? And then people being like, it's going to turn you into a 5G antenna. It's 99% graphene oxide based on a study that didn't actually conclude that.

Marty Bent [1:31:36] Look, this magnet's next to my arm now. It's like, what? You fell for it.

Whitney Webb [1:31:40] Yeah. But I mean, they do this kind of stuff all the time and it's to try and get reasonable people from looking into stuff and just to do what the term conspiracy theorist as a pejorative was designed to do. Which is to get the, the whole laughter response when you criticize the government and say it's up to no good. Um, and honestly, there has to be a change in tactic from those of us who want to reach people, uh, with this stuff, because I think too many people, even in alternative media, are willing to like buy into stuff when it comes out and gets viral without looking into it, and then they propagate it. Like, people have to do a lot more, I think. You did do Due diligence and realize that like this is an info war. I mean, Hillary Clinton said that years ago, and she's like, "We're losing the info war," and all of this stuff. Like they were then for sure, and they obviously invest a ton of money in not doing that. Do you know how many bots the U.S. government, and specifically just like the military alone, has to like shape narratives online on social media? And think about how ChatGPT has just like boosted that kind of. stuff. The whole plan is to not have anyone know what's real or fake anymore. And AI is, I mean, is being used for that. It's like overtly admitted to in this book that Henry Kissinger and the, and the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote together. It's explicitly about that. And then having us be so dependent on AI technology, specifically generative AI, that we become cognitively diminished and we can't even write anymore. We can't communicate without AI, and then we can't perceive reality what's real or not without AI telling us. And that's this whole gambit here with like censorship, um, going on right now that we're, you know, AI is going to be in charge not just of saying, deciding what content you can see, but it's also going to be producing the bulk of the content. Humans won't be anymore. And that's already happening, guys. Um, so the best way to deal with that is to spend a lot more time in the real world talking to real people because like what you see on Twitter and all of this stuff is like insane. It's going to be more insane than it is now. Right now it's more insane than it's ever been before, and that's only going to continue escalating because it's just gonna— it's gonna be nuts, you know? Yeah. And we have to focus on building other things, not focusing on all these distractions and psyops that are constantly going to be online. And, you know, another aspect of this, like, remember in 2016 when, like, Hillary Clinton— that they were all saying it was like 99% chance she was going to win based off of literal fake polling. They just like made it up to try and demoralize Trump voters and not have them go vote. That same tactic they do to people all the time. To make us think that like we're alone and we're isolated and no one else sees this stuff to demoralize us. And Facebook specifically experimented with trying to manipulate news feeds to make people feel that way. It's like a matter of record, as it was like 10 years ago. They still do that stuff all the time. Totally. So like, if you're, if you're not looking at social media as like a war zone, you need to. Otherwise, you are very susceptible to all of this stuff.

Mark Goodwin [1:34:56] And then you have, I mean, you know, Peter Thiel being a huge part of that Trump Facebook manipulation, of course. Totally. And And then, you know, you have, you know, this Twitter Files transition team, basically.

Whitney Webb [1:35:10] Exactly.

Mark Goodwin [1:35:11] And then to have him, you know, with his Rumble stuff, you know, buying out, you know, the, you know, the Glenn Greenwalds. And then you have Elon, you know, buying out Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and the whole Twitter File limited hangout bullshit that was, you know, hey, where are the files? Like, release these things. Why didn't We have a new system for doing this. It's you drop the files publicly, you don't get 8 Google searches with Elon Musk over your shoulder, you know, going through the files and only able to write about that. So you have these incredibly popular limited hangouts so that people that do, you know, don't trust the modern narrative go towards these, you know, lightning rods. They're forced down into these very controlled operations that are literally funded by, you know, Pierre and Peter Thiel and these guys. And so you— the counter-narrative is exactly— it's funny how PayPal keeps coming up, it's so interesting. And you— the controlled narrative is— or the counter-narrative rather— is just as controlled as the mainstream narrative. And indie media is just as controlled sold as mainstream media. It's just as clickbaity. It's just as fake and dumb as mainstream media. And we're in this place now where it's like, there's like 4 people that I like trust that I think do good news coverage. And I'm talking to like 2 of them. You know what I mean? It's like, it's pretty miserable out there. And I think people have to just be like way more aware of, of just how kind of insane the, the control of the narrative really is.

Whitney Webb [1:36:57] It's, it's— critical thinking needs to make a comeback big time.

Mark Goodwin [1:37:01] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:37:02] And that's why the Podesta emails, like, anchoring back to that Pizzagate, I anchored to 2 things. The Podesta emails, like, what the fuck is a pizza-related handkerchief? What is walnut sauce? Never heard of those. Yeah. Instagram page when it first dropped. Like, I went to it, took screenshots. Like, that shit was real. It was very creepy. Totally. And it's the controlled narrative side of things, because as we've talked for most of this discussion, like, with Bitcoin, like, there's this controlled narrative coming to Bitcoin. I'm very happy, number one, you guys wrote this piece, and number two, Mark, you said some things that you did earlier, like, as Bitcoiners, and I do Truly view Bitcoin as the most potent tool we have to get away from this. Control the money, you can control the world. If we can take their control of money out of their hands by making Bitcoin succeed, we actually have a chance of getting away from this dystopian hellscape. But they're infiltrating, and that's what I worry about moving forward is like, all right, how do you preserve the properties of Bitcoin that make it worth actually using without it getting co-opted before that.

Mark Goodwin [1:38:16] Totally. I mean, that's the thing that's so crazy. There's this whole narrative of it empowers the unbanked and all this stuff. Well, it's like, well, it empowers the DOJ holding 200,000 Bitcoin just as much as it empowers the guys selling pupusas on Bitcoin Beach, right? It's like, but times 200,000, right? So there's like a lot of power and responsibility, I think, as voices within this system that I think people have. We just, you know, I've kind of made it my mission of 2024 to just like, like scorched earth. It's like, I don't care about being kind of nice to these people anymore. It's like, I see what they're doing. I see them infiltrate the conferences and the spaces, the way that they write, the things that they push, the things that they manufacture consent for, the things that they, you know, apologize for. And I think stablecoins is the easy one to really look at because it's just like, this is the dollar system. This is the military-industrial complex. This is the DOJ. This is the CIA. This is the FBI. This is the US fucking government. Like, what are we doing? Why are we letting these people into our stable, you know, no pun intended. Why are we letting these wolves in? Um, you know, and, and there's so many ways that Bitcoin can monetize and succeed and actually make life way worse for the majority of humans on Earth. I think, you know, we'll probably, you know, be fine to some degree because we know how to consolidate UTXOs and coin control, and, and, you know, we self-custody, and, you know, we've been in it for years, so we're like set up. But, you know, there's not that many Bitcoiners, um, really. And if things monetize insanely here because of ETFs, because the regulatory moat's finished, all this stuff, it's like, okay, well, the DOJ makes billions and trillions, if tens of trillions of dollars, and like the 4 of the 4 people in the Bitcoin space that get it make, you know, a couple million, but that million is worth $100,000 in today's dollars because everything's blown out anyway. And it's like, is the world really an much better of a place if 8 billion people can't afford base layer transactions. So there's a lot of things that can go wrong in the monetization of Bitcoin if not done right with really good education and really thoughtful, articulate— the next steps, the next year, the next 2 years are just so important for Bitcoin. And I think we need to understand the stakes but not be demoralized and know that it is still an open protocol. It is still a system. We can build whatever the fuck we want on it. You know, we can build, you know, torrent seeding incentive structures, eCash structures, Lightning fun stuff, right?

Marty Bent [1:41:08] Well, I'm happy you said eCash because I think like stability pools and Chaumian mints is— could be a stablecoin killer.

Mark Goodwin [1:41:16] 100%, I agree. Or you could build a stablecoin using eCash or using Lightning channels, stable channels that don't touch treasuries at all. And you have— you know, we don't need the dollar system to exist, but we can have the idea of a stable unit of account. That's great. Let's do that. That sounds awesome. We can build that. People have already built it, actually. It's pretty incredible. We don't need to buy treasuries. We don't need to continue on. You know, frankly, the US government's the biggest terrorist organization in the world. I mean, they just are. So why are we saying that we're banking the unbanked and serving the global south by perpetuating the biggest terrorist organization in the world.

Marty Bent [1:41:52] No, it really is. It was poetic too when Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon were powwowing on Capitol Hill talking about how crypto is used for terrorism. Powwowing. 3 months after he paid a $75 million settlement fine with the Virgin Islands for the Epstein stuff. And you mentioned Les Daly, who was the man behind, uh, Jamie Dimon as well.

Mark Goodwin [1:42:13] Yep. JP Morgan was caught with like ridiculous amount of cocaine on a boat that they ran. I mean, it's like they were trafficking on a container.

Whitney Webb [1:42:23] Yeah, it was. Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [1:42:25] Yeah. Like, give me a fucking break here. This ethical bullshit. We know the majority of financial crime is done with the dollar. It's not even close. Bitcoin is used by stupid criminals.

Whitney Webb [1:42:35] Sorry. Well, to take this back to the whole thing of like Jamie Dimon programming your money and like not Jerome Powell. Okay. Remember how Jamie Dimon a few months ago was like, well, we should just seize people's people's private property for, you know, climate change policy. Remember that? Like, private property doesn't exist to Jamie Dimon. If his friends at Goldman Sachs, who basically designed all this, like, crap that the UN is backing and green finance and blue finance for Mother Earth and whatever, you know, uh, if those projects decide that they want your property, uh, I guess they'll just turn off your money. or whatever and take it. I mean, do you really want to give these guys total control? No, I don't. But they have big plans. I mean, remember, Marty, I came on, I guess, probably a couple of years ago now, and we talked about natural asset corporations, how they're trying to securitize the entire natural world, and now they're going to tokenize those securities. And whoa, it's going to be wild. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:43:40] It's, uh—

Whitney Webb [1:43:40] SDGs is going to pump like the most insane, like, Wall Street casino the world has ever seen. No one talks about that stuff either. It just drives me crazy. Uh, but again, BRICS countries, Western countries, all on board for Agenda 2030. The people in charge of climate finance for the UN, Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire. And Mark Carney. I think your viewers know enough about Mark Carney to know why that's insane. And to think that Mark Carney and Jamie Dimon and Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates and all of these guys just care so much about the planet and not about robbing you of all of your wealth, which is what they've spent their entire careers doing. I just— come on, guys. We have this. We have to, like, watch what people do and, like judge them by their actions and like not when they say stuff like whether it's cloaked in humanitarian gooblygook or it's Trump being like making fun of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush and it's very cathartic. Yes. But like, look at what the guy does too when he is in power. Go, you'll do the same thing again. You know, I think, totally.

Marty Bent [1:44:50] I think we've shilled this on one of our episodes in the past, but I'll never pass on shilling this. Go to the Best Evidence YouTube channel and look up all the Plenary's men. John Titus did a dissect of the HSBC— yeah, the Mexican drug cartel, um, money laundering event with HSBC. Mark Carney's involvement in that is astonishing.

Whitney Webb [1:45:20] Um, he doesn't care about the planet, guys. I mean, honestly, green finance is the biggest grift in the world. It's like, because they literally are going to use and sell off the entire natural world for the grift. I mean, what is he doing? It's environmentalism.

Marty Bent [1:45:38] He was the finance minister of the UK. He did something in Canada.

Whitney Webb [1:45:42] Head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada. So 2 central banks. What? Financial Stability Board, top guy at Goldman Sachs. friend of the environment, you know.

Mark Goodwin [1:45:54] I mean, it's such a running trope. I mean, you saw it with, with Ghislaine Maxwell's like Terramar Project and the Citizens of the Sea, and it's, it's digital identity and citizenship and faux protection of the environment as a way to basically like traffic launder, uh, and, and make tons of money for, you know, I mean, it's, it's, uh, it's a disgusting racket.

Whitney Webb [1:46:18] Well, speaking of, I mean, what we have right now is them literally tokenizing all their existing rackets to move it into this new, like, Fourth Industrial Revolution paradigm. That's literally what is happening across the board, and people just, like, don't recognize it, and they're cloaking it in all this stuff, like, specifically with, like, SDGs and Agenda 2030. It's like, this will make a better world, and then you actually, like, look at it, and it's like, this is insane. Why are all bankers in charge of this, you know? Like, I mean, it's just not—

Marty Bent [1:46:49] You want the smartest people doing this.

Whitney Webb [1:46:51] Smartest people.

Mark Goodwin [1:46:53] Um, if they're rich, they're smart.

Marty Bent [1:46:55] So it is—

Whitney Webb [1:46:57] Oh man, I hate it so much. But I mean, you go back into like the UN, like the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, like at the end of the '90s was like, yeah, so you know how we used to be at least viewed as like a— the public public sector, you know, all the public sectors of the world all coming together to like democratically vote on stuff. Well, now we've basically been taken over by corporations and now the business of the businesses of the world is our business. You know, I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he said. You know, I like to think it's—

Marty Bent [1:47:30] I mean, the UN's not your friend, guys.

Whitney Webb [1:47:33] No. Um, it's the There's so much I could say. Anyway, I could literally go on for hours and be like, here's an example of why you should never trust the bankers. And still there's going to be that handful of people with the hashtag Jerome Powell is my pal and Jamie Dimon is my knight in shining armor. And I don't— I sometimes you just can't reach people, dude, you know.

Mark Goodwin [1:47:59] Cue QAnon, you know.

Whitney Webb [1:48:02] Okay, that was pretty good.

Marty Bent [1:48:04] That's what I really do think. I do think the, uh, I think the inflationary pressure that people are feeling in their everyday lives right now is like a catalyst that is going to push people towards our side. Well, that's what I said earlier.

Whitney Webb [1:48:20] If you— they're— they, in order to create this space where they want to like push people into this new system, there's going to be chaos and there's going to be instability. And so the comfort and convenience that keeps people asleep will be disrupted. What people do in that point in time is the most critical about this whole thing, about how it plays out. Seriously, like, that is the most important window. And again, that is why it's so important to be local, because, okay, there's a big cyberattack on the financial system, the internet goes down for a couple of days, what are people going to do? They're going to go out in the street and look for answers, figure out what's going on. This is why it's important to know what's going on and couple that with having, you know, connections in your local community so you can direct people about what needs to be done and what's happening at that point in time. It's like very important.

Marty Bent [1:49:09] Yeah. And prep them for when the internet gets turned back on. Don't believe anything these people are telling you.

Whitney Webb [1:49:14] Well, also the internet, when it turns back on, isn't going to be like the internet now at all. They're going to put AI in charge of like literally all content. Your ID is going to be tied to not just everything you post online, but everything you read and consume, every site you visit. And they plan to pass all of that through AI to determine if you're a threat to the system or not. This is all like predictive policing. All of this stuff is built into this system. Specifically in the US, the Biden administration already has the policy framework developed. They've had it since, I mean, they first came into power in 2021.

Mark Goodwin [1:49:48] It's funny, it's been there for 2 years, the PRISM and the muscular programs that, you know, were kind of, you know, exposed in the Snowden and Vault 7 and, you know, a lot of the WikiLeaks. You know, we know directly that the US government has access to, you know, the profiles of whoever they want on Yahoo, on Google, you know, on Facebook, on these huge, you know, private-public sector blurriness. And then as well, I think specifically the interesting thing about the muscular program is that that not only do they, with PRISM, they can just ask basically without a subpoena, without a warrant, they can ask for information on user accounts. But with Musketeer, they were actually directly attaching themselves to the fiber optic lines of Yahoo servers, and they were taking people's information directly. Even though they had access where they could file paperwork and get anything they wanted directly from Yahoo, the US government was like, the NSA and CIA were like, hey, let's do this project where actually we can just pull it directly from the fiber cables, and then there's less of a paper trail. So, you know, you start to look at, you know, who's actually controlling the infrastructure of the internet, and you're seeing a massive explosion of submarine optic cables that are owned by these, these companies. You know, Google owns or partially owns 8.5% of all submarine fiber optic lines in the entire world. Facebook just did one where they went all the way around Africa. Amazon is right behind Google. They have like just under, I think it's like 90,000 kilometers of cable cables. Microsoft has a ton. And then, of course, you know, then there's the Starlink play, and Elon is a total, you know, DARPA boy as well, um, subsidized by the government in so many ways. And, you know, the infrastructure of the modern internet is, is on a physical level very co-opted. And as soon as they want to basically flip that switch, they will.

Marty Bent [1:51:42] Lovely.

Whitney Webb [1:51:45] And you're not gonna be able to do this. Eric Schmidt, right, who basically runs, like, AI national security policy for US too, and is like funding all this science and technology policy stuff. Basically, key officials in that at the Biden administration are being paid— their salaries are being paid by Eric Schmidt. It's like super illegal. And Politico reported on it and like nothing was done. They were like, well, I see you found out. And that is that. That guy has an insane amount of power. He was just on a podcast talking about what needs to be done about misinformation. And he was saying Uh, yeah, uh, we need to, uh, get everyone's ID tied to social media, and then when people post misinformation, report them to law enforcement.

Marty Bent [1:52:29] Oh, lovely.

Whitney Webb [1:52:30] Remember how that guy posted stuff about how he hated Joe Biden, uh, and how Joe Biden shouldn't come in his neighborhood and all this stuff, uh, on Facebook, and then the FBI shot him in front of his house and he was like an old disabled guy?

Marty Bent [1:52:42] Yeah, the fat— yeah, fat old guy.

Whitney Webb [1:52:45] Eric Schmidt's idea is a very bad idea. It's a very bad idea. Eric Schmidt is also a dangerous fascist who controls a large amount of U.S. government policy right now and how the government and the intelligence agencies and the military plan to use AI.

Mark Goodwin [1:53:02] Yeah, and meanwhile, Larry Page has been missing for like 6 months and no one knows where he is because the USBI is, uh, hiding from the subpoenas in the Epstein case. And all these guys own islands. Richard Branson with the sex cult on his Necker Island, where I believe Sergey Brin was married and he was the best man. Larry Page has an island. I mean, all these guys, there's this huge island boy consortium of Google, stablecoins, and developers.

Whitney Webb [1:53:32] And they love to bank with Jamie Dimon, it turns out.

Mark Goodwin [1:53:36] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:53:38] Yikes.

Mark Goodwin [1:53:39] That's interesting.

Marty Bent [1:53:41] Do we need another Occupy Wall Street? I know you mentioned it and you said they don't.

Whitney Webb [1:53:44] Like, yeah, dude, but it's— I mean, they don't want that. They don't want that. And so what has to be done is people have to divest from Silicon Valley and Wall Street as much as possible, um, because basically what I call the blob that basically runs the US, it's the national security state, it's Silicon Valley, and it's Wall Street. Street. Okay. It's harder to divest from the US government if you're living in the US than it is to divest from big tech and Wall Street. You can take your money out of JPMorgan and Wells Fargo and Citi, and you can stop using Google products, Microsoft products. You can not use OpenAI maybe, which is basically Microsoft and all of this other stuff because they plan to do a lot of bad stuff with your data. Yeah. Like a lot of very bad things. Here's an example that's very blackpilling. Sorry, everybody. Okay, so what's going on right now in Israel, right? The IDF uses an AI algorithm called that they literally call the Gospel, and they said the IDF officials have said that before the Gospel, they identified. 15, 20 targets to assassinate in Gaza a day. Now that they use the gospel, the AI algorithm identifies hundreds. Right. And what are the metrics for identifying who gets to live and who dies? Well, they won't tell anybody, but a lot of the people that have been killed have been women and children. Was it because they liked a post that Hamas made on a social media network? Was it because their cousin is in Hamas? Hamas? Was it because they went to a person's house who a person, a relative of Hamas lives there? I mean, it's very broad, isn't it? No one really knows. So it's very likely that because of the surveillance dragnet that Israeli cybersecurity companies test out first in Palestine and then export around the world, because that cybersecurity segment of Israel's economy is like a major part of their GDP.

Marty Bent [1:55:53] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:55:53] And they test it out there, right? So Palestinians are some of the most surveilled, data-harvested people on the planet. That data is being fed into the gospel.

Mark Goodwin [1:56:02] Except on October 7th. Except on October 7th. It was down that day. We're not sure what happened.

Whitney Webb [1:56:09] Yeah, just like NORAD on 9/11 and all this stuff.

Mark Goodwin [1:56:11] Exactly.

Whitney Webb [1:56:13] I mean, it's so interesting. Um, yeah, and then they called it their 9/11. Um, you know, very Very interesting. But anyway, this data that's been harvested on Palestinians is now being used to decide which of them are blown up or not.

Mark Goodwin [1:56:28] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [1:56:31] What happens when we get to that point? Do you know who runs the AI weapons stuff in the US that's also being tested? Not just— I mean, Israel has their own, but the US has it too. It's being tested in Ukraine to decide who lives and dies. It's Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, who created Oculus. Which was sold to Facebook because of Peter Thiel, um, and all of this stuff. It's the same crowd. Peter Thiel runs Palantir, that you harvest your data for intelligence agencies. Every intelligence agency in the US uses it, and it profiles people, and they can label you as subversive. And Palantir is the outgrowth of Total Information Awareness that I mentioned earlier. Palantir was literally created to replace that. They did it on purpose.

Marty Bent [1:57:12] Palmer Luckey's company, Anduril, too.

Whitney Webb [1:57:16] Is insane. It's involved with the border stuff too. Well, they have this huge surveillance autonomous dragnet on the border, Anduril set up. It's obviously not stopping people from coming in. Is it to stop people from coming out? Maybe.

Mark Goodwin [1:57:31] But I, I just finished writing— it works both ways. I just finished writing a piece about, uh, the, the basically the peer-to-peer revolution, uh, in the late '90s with Napster with Natulla, with eDonkey 2000, which was Jed McCaleb, the Mt. Gox, Ripple, Stellar guy. And you look at— actually, there was a huge amount of involvement of intelligence agencies in the founding of Napster, of BitTorrent. And you see that the ISP usage, the percentage goes from being like well under, you know, 10% of, you know, the internet usage being peer-to-peer networks to being over 60% by the time BitTorrent had really done its thing. And you cannot really have a surveillance state without being able basically to obfuscate data sending, packet sending from your devices to these centralized servers where they're doing this work. So you actually even look at the— basically, you know, Napster was arguably a psyop to get us all to connect our computers and make the internet be this huge network of peer-to-peer stuff with huge amounts of data packet sending to set us up right before 9/11, right before the Patriot Act, right before, you know, all the things that were then later exposed basically in Vault 7. And you can kind of see this trend of, you know, I mean, it's literally Peter Thiel and then these same people that were infiltrating, you know, the peer-to-peer networks that basically allowed for the of the data surveillance market that we now have.

Whitney Webb [1:59:03] Yeah, it's very— on that note, the big trend with data after 9/11, like intelligence agencies, you know, the narrative, right, was like failure of imagination and intelligence failure about why 9/11 happened. Right. And so the solution that the intelligence agencies had ready-made to this excuse was that all the data of the national security community data needs to be warehoused in one central spot and shared.

Mark Goodwin [1:59:33] Yeah. So you had shared with me the letter from Larry Page who wrote a New York Times op-ed like 2 months after 9/11.

Whitney Webb [1:59:41] No, Larry Ellison.

Mark Goodwin [1:59:42] Sorry, Larry Ellison of Oracle, which was a CIA project as well. Project Oracle. Yeah. And he had come out and been like, you know, the way to avoid 9/11 next time is to— yeah, exactly what you just said. Sorry, just wanted to—

Whitney Webb [1:59:56] They want everyone's data. I mean, data has been a huge part of this play for a really long time, and now we're giving away more of our data than ever and more intimate parts of our data. And now they have tools that use that data that can do awful things if we let them. And it doesn't mean we have to live without AI or any of this stuff. Like, if you want to use it, okay, but we have to divest from big tech AI because they are trying to use AI to turn us into a like, giant underclass of subhumans who— I mean, this Kissinger-Schmidt book is so crazy, and I encourage everyone to read it because they literally lay out that it's going to create neo-feudalism. They don't use that term, but basically they say there will be 2 classes of people. There will be the people that program and maintain and set the objective functions of AI, and then there will be the people that AI acts upon who lose the ability to understand what AI is doing to them. Yeah, that's neo-feudalism, but like, for obviously it's big tech and everyone else is essentially what that is. And the people who set the objective function, I'm sure, will be like existing oligarchs and existing power elites. Yeah, once that system's in place, you're not gonna break and get into the, the top tier. Like, that's over, you know. And you'll— the whole what they talk about is you'll be cognitively diminished AI will act on you, will manipulate you in ways you don't understand, and you won't be able to tell what's real and what's not. And that AI, uh, well, first of all, AI hallucinates. Like, that's the term. It, like, will produce output that isn't even real and doesn't exist. And they argue in this book that AI will push us into this era of unseen realities and that only AI can see, and we should trust that those are real because AI is super smart. Yeah. And so they— I mean, this is like Matrix-level shit to an insane degree. It really truly is.

Marty Bent [2:02:01] I had a good conversation with Alex Fetsky last month, and like the whole narrative around AI right now, particularly why they're trying to create these regulatory moats, is this concept of AGI, artificial general intelligence. It's— yeah, it's a complete red herring to just funnel people into these closed-source AI systems where you can control the propaganda. A bit of a white pill here. It's good to see. Yeah, totally open source.

Mark Goodwin [2:02:27] It is a bit of a white pill. Yeah, there is this—

Marty Bent [2:02:30] Here's the white pill: open-source AI models are reaching parity with OpenAIs and, uh, Midjourneys of the world, which is good.

Whitney Webb [2:02:38] Yeah, I mean, if you are against the Worldcoin model and you're using OpenAI and pumping Altman's bags and making him more powerful. Like, please stop, dude.

Marty Bent [2:02:49] I will. I've been experimenting with it just to like see how it works. But yeah, that's what our strategy in 2024. We're transitioning all to open source models.

Whitney Webb [2:02:59] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason they've been so successful. It's because they've made us so dependent on specifically big tech tech. And it's very hard to drop that like that. Especially when you have like businesses to consider that are like so entrenched with that a lot of the time. But if you are a company that wants to stand for freedom and specifically financial freedom, you must move away. You must have a plan to move away because I mean what's happening? I mean take Microsoft as an example, which basically is OpenAI at this point. They've basically said, okay, you have a Windows system. Your data on there is tied to your Microsoft account. If you lose access to your Microsoft account or we block you from your Microsoft account, you lose all of your data on your own computer. And at the same time, you have no right to say no to them uploading all of the data, all of your data on your computer to feed their AI, which presumably will include OpenAI. So your data is not even your data anymore with Microsoft.

Mark Goodwin [2:04:03] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:04:03] Why are you using Microsoft products?

Marty Bent [2:04:05] effects.

Mark Goodwin [2:04:05] And that's where I think the removal of, you know, it really, the onus is on us to, you know, stop feeding these things. There was a, you know, a 2006 paper by Assange called Conspiracy as Governance that kind of is basically the white paper for WikiLeaks. And he talks about the need for us as citizens to increase the cost of the conspiracy against us. And I think in regards to AI, AI, you know, the way that we do that is we stop feeding them the data that they need to, you know, if we feed them bullshit data, it gives them more shit to process, more things to parse. The thing that AI really does for them in the panopticon that we're in is it helps them parse through all of the survey data really, really quickly. So if we are really like careful with what data that we feed them, you know, AI is a great tool for them. them for decreasing the cost of their conspiracy of general surveillance. They don't need to hire 1,000 people to parse through all of our chats. They can just have one thing search for, oh shit, these guys said Hamas sleeper cells, boom. And then they, now they're looking at all their things, they flag them. So it's really important for us to not expose our data by using and agreeing to these user agreements where we let, like what Whitney just said, Using Microsoft products means all of your data on your Microsoft product is theirs, and that feeds their AI. Without that data, this AI is completely useless. So we need to increase the cost of the conspiracy against us very carefully. And that's really how we do it, is limiting our exposure to their systems. And then, hey, maybe if we want to set up a bunch of APIs that feed a bunch of bullshit of data into Sam Altman's thing, sure, let's go do that. But that's not something that everybody can do. That's not a practical thing for my parents or a day-to-day user of the internet. But understanding that data is the most liquid commodity in the world, and there's huge speculative markets for data. There's huge data brokers that sell billions of people's data for pennies on the dollar to these companies There's so much stuff in data brokers, it gets so crazy. And I think AI and data and surveillance have a huge sort of— they're odd bedfellows. And we have to just be really careful about what we feed into it and what we let out incidentally. Because again, convenience is the easiest way to leak all of this stuff. You use Facebook. I mean, that's what Facebook really was. It was like, how do we get everybody to tag their faces? places, tag where they are, say what they're doing. I don't know. I think it's exceptionally important for us to understand that our data is feeding these products and make it worse for everyone else. It is sort of a team sport, much like privacy on Bitcoin, right? It's like if you do good privacy tactics, it makes everyone's privacy better. better. It's kind of the same thing with how we deal with AI and these learning language models and these data harvesting techniques. It's like the better we are, the harder it is for everyone else to triangulate, because that's how data markets really work. It's triangulation.

Marty Bent [2:07:30] Yeah, the, um, I'm very bullish on the open source models that really get away, especially when you add like the Lightning Network paywalls, because that's a big problem for people. That's what OpenAI does very easily. It's like you pay a monthly fee, you get access, you just do this thing. Whereas if you were to set up an open source model, you'd have to run it, you have to get a cloud server or whatever, a cloud GPU, host it, and then use it, host it locally to some extent. But where the Lightning Network comes in, makes it very easy for people to do all that hosting. You just pay a Lightning Network paywall. You don't have your identity attached to that at all. And again, they're reaching parity with the ChatGPTs of the world, which is good.

Mark Goodwin [2:08:18] Absolutely.

Whitney Webb [2:08:20] Well, I mean, the most important thing here is divest from big tech, specifically like the big 4, the ones that are contractors with the national security state and have essentially fused with the national security state. So like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, like all the big ones, Facebook, like all the big ones that are like obvious, have like obvious documentable intelligence connections from their beginnings to now, you know, like those are the ones to avoid that we should not, definitely not be using. And I think also something that needs to happen is that like supporting that kind of stuff and saying like, oh, we shouldn't divest, like don't be a martyr and don't fight the system, whether it's like for Bitcoin or like big tech or whatever. Like, that needs to become culturally unpopular for people who actually care about, like, individual freedom and protecting it, you know?

Mark Goodwin [2:09:12] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:09:12] Like, that stuff should be called out for what it is, whether the, the people saying it, like, know it or not. Then give them the opportunity to be educated about it, you know? But if, you know, there's a lot of infiltration going on right now to get people to acquiesce to this kind of stuff or saying it's inevitable or saying it will be good for you or you little guy will become part of the privileged class. Yeah, you know, that's all fake and that's not what's gonna happen. It's just to get you to be complacent and not to do anything about what they're doing.

Marty Bent [2:09:46] Yeah. And so if you're looking for like an OpenAI ChatGPT alternative, a Bitcoiner actually just released a company called unleashed.chat. That uses specifically open source models so that you can avoid ChatGPT. That's the thing. Like, I think these guys are going to lose because the open source models are beginning to outpace them in terms of quality.

Whitney Webb [2:10:10] I definitely hope they lose. But the other thing here that's also highlighted in this Kissinger-Schmidt book is like, if people become dependent on AI, it doesn't really matter if it's open source or not, people then become what they talk about in their book, cognitively diminished. The whole idea, it doesn't even, I mean, it existed before AI. If you don't use it, you lose it. Like any type of skill, right? So like most of us, right, were, I don't know, in college 10 years ago. Like, do you remember everything you took then? Specifically the stuff you haven't used since? Like, probably not. Like, that is a real thing that happens with the human brain. You know what I mean?

Mark Goodwin [2:10:47] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:10:48] So like, if you become You know, if you use ChatGPT for a few things and like certain cases, okay. But like if you're using it for everything to the point where like you don't, you've gone a year without actually writing your own article and you're like a journalist or something and you're using ChatGPT to generate it all for you, you're gonna go to try and write without GPT and you're gonna find it really hard. Like that's what Kissinger and Schmidt are talking about and that's what they want to happen. And, and, and not just in the case of ChatGPT in terms of like the algorithms like dictating your preferences, right? Things like that, you know, or, or dictating like where you go and what you do, like the suggestion stuff, like by algorithms and all of that. Like you won't even be able to make basic decisions based on your own preferences anymore. Like that's what they're talking about. So like all this stuff with AI is a slippery slope. Obviously open source is better than big tech. But people also have to, like, engage with this technology responsibility— responsibly, because these guys are very aware, and we should be aware too, that it can have very negative impacts on human cognition. And we need our critical thinking skills to get through this and to build alternatives. So let's keep them, please. You know, and I think it's very obvious. But not that nice. You know, I think it's very obvious this has already happened.

Mark Goodwin [2:12:12] I mean, just looking at what's happened in the last 6 months of consuming content, I mean, it's— yeah, this— there's a homogeneous blob of clickbait bullshit that's just clearly been made by AI. It's on every media platform everywhere. I mean, you just see it, uh, and it's horrible. And, you know, I think there's an opportunity for people to look for real content, look for people that are actually writing stuff. Doesn't necessarily have to be long form or the stuff you do, Whitney, or whatever, but there's a serious need and there's a huge vacuum because there's a big love affair going on right now with predictive generated content. And I think it's very obvious as a consumer of content that it's really messed up the market for journalism and for content. It's just become this—

Whitney Webb [2:13:05] It's a huge problem, honestly, in independent media because AI has already like caused a lot of damage for independent media even before ChatGPT was here. Because people that like grew a platform and then instead of becoming motivated about like getting the truth out or like spreading the word about a particular issue, they become like a slave to the metrics, to the click count, to the view count. and all of that stuff and playing the algorithms and SEO and stuff to get to the top. And so what happens then is everyone's trying to do the same content, not the same content necessarily, but trying to play the algorithm's game and placate the algorithm to get to the top. And so a lot of that creates a lot of like, you know, a homogenizing effect among a lot of independent media. And in terms of like titling and like clickbait and all of that stuff, like if it wasn't for the algorithm and all of that, that would not have happened, you know what I mean? And I think that's kind of harmed journalism, uh, to be quite honest. Um, but yeah, well, I'd be very interested about SEO, but I know other people can't do that.

Marty Bent [2:14:11] Well, I'd be very interested because we've— I mean, I've been using this stuff in an attempt to— in a very particular way.

Whitney Webb [2:14:20] It's okay. A lot of, a lot of people do, you know. If you're trying to like run a news website and you're one person and you want to put out Like I don't know five or six stories a day. Like I get it, you know what I mean? But like there's you know situations where it's just people being like this is so convenient I'm gonna use it. What I'm talking about is like I'm not saying like don't engage with it at all. I'm saying like use it responsibly and be aware it can have this impact on you. This if you don't use it you lose it stuff. You don't want to lose it because they want you to lose it because then you're easy to control because you like lose. your cognitive faculties. And that's what they're trying to herd people towards.

Mark Goodwin [2:14:59] Yeah. Like at Bitcoin Magazine, we write in the print mag like AI-free because we don't use any AI at all. That's like a choice that we made deliberately. But on .com, we use AI to generate images for certain things that we don't have images for. But we don't— we're not like writing stuff, you know. It's like there's— there are lines that I understand that, you know, for a media company, that when people make those choices, I totally understand. But I also— there's a reason why the print mag doesn't touch any of that stuff and proudly demonstrates it, puts it as a thing on there that says we don't do this, because it's part of what actually sets us apart. And, uh, you know, hopefully it will give us some lasting power, right?

Marty Bent [2:15:38] Yeah. And I've been— so the way I've been experimenting with it for like the last 3 or 4 weeks is I agree with everything you just said, like if you don't use it, you lose it, and the hallucinations. But I found a tool that really— so like what I'm trying to do is curate like content that I think is good that people should like get access to. And it's usually audio and video content and those content producers don't write articles about it. And so what I do is I take their YouTube video or their podcast, then I put it through a transcription service, and then I point right now ChatGPT, but I've recognized I've honed in on an open source AI that I'm going to use to do this going forward is you point ChatGPT at it and you say, all right, write here, give it a prompt, like write me a summary of this transcription of this audio file in the form of an article. And it doesn't hallucinate, like you can only write about that specific transcription. So we'll run this episode through it and it will only be able to give us information about what was said in that transcription.

Mark Goodwin [2:16:40] Right.

Marty Bent [2:16:43] attribute the original content creator, put a link to the original content, and then the article's written by staff. So it's somewhat obvious that it's not like a human writing it.

Mark Goodwin [2:16:52] Right.

Marty Bent [2:16:53] And try to make it like this is AI content, but it's all in an effort to curate what I deem to be high signal content and then help those original content creators like get attribution, like sort of weaponizing the SEO game, giving them backlinks so their stuff begins to bubble up and all that. And it's, uh, no, it's weird because it is, it's new. We've been experimenting with it. I think it's a value add, but I can see, like, I haven't written in 3 weeks because I've been trying to get the process down for this. I'm going to start writing every day again, but it's like, uh, it's like, how do you fight back in this world? To try to get the good content out.

Whitney Webb [2:17:34] Well, I mean, the thing is, you know, everyone— I'm like a voluntary, like into voluntarianism, you know, like just like I don't want to tell anyone what to do, you know, but people should think about this stuff and be very aware of the risks and make informed decisions. And I think prioritize keeping their critical thinking ability, you know.

Mark Goodwin [2:17:55] Yes.

Whitney Webb [2:17:56] So like definitely don't threaten that, you know. And do as much as you can to divest from big tech. I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to tell you what to do, Marty. If you think it's useful and a value add, very cool, you know, but people need to be aware of the risks. So a lot of stuff like when I focus on AI specifically, stuff like where hallucination, AI hallucinations come into play. I mean, they're trying to put AI in charge of like major decisions, not just like who lives and who dies, but stuff like facial recognition. And like in the UK, they're there was like sort of a mini scandal because like the Met Police were using like these live facial recognition algorithms and they were like super inaccurate and like flagging people to like pull out of crowds and stuff. But it was like insanely inaccurate. And also there's been a long problem recognized for a long time that a lot of these AI facial recognition algorithms like used by law enforcement are super like racially biased, for example. Right? Among other issues. And they, like, in the UK, like, just didn't want to change it. They're like, yeah, we know it's inaccurate. So what? I mean, what is that really about then? Well, I forget his first name, but there's this famous, like, philosopher Foucault who, you know, wrote about, like, you know, control and the panopticon and all of this stuff. He's like a big inspiration for the Palantir guys. Like, when the New York Times had this big spread about Palantir, they, like, posed under Foucault.

Marty Bent [2:19:23] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:19:23] Cult's Portrait and stuff. The idea of like his panopticon is like, you know, just the, the feeling that you're being watched by the state will make you behave. You know, it's not about like the AI being accurate necessarily. It's about like everyone knowing they're being watched and they could be plucked out of that crowd at a moment's notice and to get in line. You know, that's the kind of stuff they're trying to create. So like In my opinion, that AI cannot be fed and cannot be supported, and it's the big tech companies making that AI starve them of your data or feed them garbage data if you have the capability to do that. You know, like those should be opposed 100%. You know, and the problem is here with like OpenAI. You know, that's Microsoft. Microsoft is so in bed with all of this stuff, dude. I mean, come on. It's Bill Gates's company. It was super compromised by Epstein in the '90s. No one wants to talk about that. That's why they lie and say that Bill Gates and Epstein didn't meet until 2011 when he was no longer like running stuff at Microsoft, even though there's news articles in mainstream media saying in 2001 that Epstein made a bunch of his money in the '90s from Bill Gates. Oh, but they didn't meet until 10 years later. It makes no sense, right? So like they're covering for Microsoft. has been so compromised and tied up with intelligence for years and years and years. Not good for anybody. And they're basically, uh, trying to get their new election software, ElectionGuard, installed all over the U.S. They're responsible for NewsGuard, part of this crazy censorship industrial complex that's just totally insane, and all this other stuff. Um, like, they're a lot more than just a big tech company. They're involved in a lot of very bad things, and they're a dominant Market player. I mean, Windows is used by like not everyone, but like a dominant amount of the world, right? I mean, same with Google. But we have to break into that. I mean, we have to make the choice to not support that. Like even if you're just the one person or you feel like you're one person doing that, like it's it's an important decision to make, and hopefully other people will make that decision. But like I don't know. I look at sort of like a car. angle. Like, I don't want to feed that. I know it's bad, and if I continue to feed it just because of convenience, like, that's not going to be good for me long term. I mean, that's how I feel about it personally. I mean, obviously people may not look at it that same way. Yeah, but again, I mean, those same people that end up relying on this stuff and big tech stuff— big tech products are being designed to herd you into this world as outlined by Kissinger and Schmidt.

Marty Bent [2:21:59] Yeah, so I completely—

Whitney Webb [2:22:02] Stop using it, you know. Um, and they're putting the stuff in charge of, you know, who goes to prison, who stays free, who lives and who dies, uh, who gets visited by the, you know, vaccine people and who doesn't. I mean, whatever. I mean, it, it's, it's all there. Like, the biosecurity agenda is still definitely like a thing going on, even if it's like kind of on the back burner now. I mean, there's all this crazy stuff happening. And they need AI for all of it, just in terms of like scalability. You know, they want to put like an insane amount of people under their thumb and they're a small group of people like we've talked about and they're losing, they're hemorrhaging trust and have been for years.

Marty Bent [2:22:43] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:22:44] So they need it. How people need to really think about how to fight against this and understand what the risks are. And it starts off with individual and personal responsibility and And it starts off with building alternatives and being local and unplugging occasionally and doing real stuff.

Marty Bent [2:23:03] Completely agree.

Mark Goodwin [2:23:05] And totally on that note, I have to run to the restroom so badly. I'm so sorry. I gotta run. I'll be right back.

Marty Bent [2:23:11] All right. No, and that's the, this whole OpenAI thing. I've been using it for like 3 weeks and I'm just like, all right, can I do like a minimal viable product? Does this work? And it does seem to work. But I've again identified, and I've said this publicly too, that's our goal in 2024 is to go completely open source, do it in a very narrow fashion, trying to highlight other people's content that is signal to get it to people.

Whitney Webb [2:23:37] Um, well, like, you know, I used to work for like a news company that used Google Docs but then complained about Google censoring them. And it's like, why are you still using Google Docs? Well, because Google Business Suite is convenient. We've been using it for it's great. Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't know. I mean, there's alternative to Google Docs. There's like CryptPad and like other things like that out there that like value privacy and aren't like training their generative AIs off of like studying how you write in Google Docs. Yeah. You know? So like people need to make this decision because if you're feeding AI, it's going to be weaponized against you. They're already weaponizing it against you. Do you want it to know exactly everything like about you and how you think and how you write and like all of this stuff? I think that's a very bad idea.

Marty Bent [2:24:25] Yeah, no, I completely agree. That's why I don't feed it any of that stuff. I'm just like, all right.

Whitney Webb [2:24:30] Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:24:30] Yeah. Um, nah, it's fascinating because it is weird. We're at this inflection point where things are changing so fast, like on the financial side, on the tech side.

Whitney Webb [2:24:42] Yeah. I think it's going to keep accelerating too. I mean, especially when things get really crazy. I mean, The internet may go off, and I mean, as soon as they're like, "Oh, you need a digital ID to get online," like I'm not going to be online anymore. Like I'm not doing that. Like this is the time for people to like decide what their red lines are, and like how they're going to set up things and set up their lives to avoid having to renege on those red lines. Yeah. You know, like I am never going to do digital ID. I'm never going to do CBDC or synthetic. synthetic CBDC or any of this shit that we've been talking about, I'm not gonna do it, right? So how do I set up my life so I don't have to engage with those systems when they're launched and made like involuntary, you know? I mean, that's just— this is the time to think about all that stuff.

Marty Bent [2:25:29] This is why I think we need like another Occupy Wall Street. I mean, I think Occupy Wall Street was completely cucked and missed the point, but like something like that where people hit the streets and for like—

Whitney Webb [2:25:38] Well, I think they want people to hit the streets. I think it's all about building stuff. They hate that. They want you to use their tools. They don't want you to make your own. We have to make our own, you know. And it's not just like tools, like tech tools. It's like just building community, building or building a homestead, or like just building anything. They want you on your butt glued to a screen, uh, and doing nothing. Trust the plan, whatever. And, and using all these technologies that are super convenient and being fed to us all the time instead of going out and doing what humans do, which is to create and build. And if we stop creating and building, same deal, you use it, you lose it. People— humanity will lose the ability to even remember how to create and build, you know? I mean, imagine like kids born like 30 years from now if these guys win, and they're just going to be like bombarded with like some like TikTok shit from the time they're like born on. Their brain isn't going to know how to create anything. They're just going to be used to being bombarded constantly by like all this generated content. Like, they're not going to be like humans are now. They're not going to know how to build and create anything. This is like an existential thing. Like, what are humans? What are humans and what do they— what is humanity? I mean, they're trying to answer those questions for us and lead us to an answer that is not what humans are. Humans are creative beings and we build things, you know, and they've hijacked our society and are trying to build their thing to control everyone.

Marty Bent [2:27:09] Yeah.

Whitney Webb [2:27:10] And we have— if we don't want to live in that system, we have to build something else. And they want to create it so that only this upper privileged class, very small class, will be capable of building, and everyone else will lose that ability and will be a giant underclass that they can do whatever they want to. That's not how this is supposed to be. Yeah. And so we have to not give away those abilities to these guys. We have to do stuff. It's really that simple. And you know, I know people get like blackpilled by this stuff all the time, but like building stuff is fun. Creating stuff is fun. You know, I mean, it's very— the way you get blackpilled about this stuff is by doing exactly what they want to do, want you to do, which is get depressed and get demoralized and stay on your screen and sit on your ass all day and be miserable. And that's them winning. That's them winning.

Mark Goodwin [2:28:07] And I would say it's not just building stuff, it's building sustainable stuff, which I know is a naughty word and it's been totally co-opted by, you know, terrible people. But it's, it's, it's building sustainable architecture with incentive structures that feed it, right? It's not just about, uh, creating, you know, little separate walled gardens that once the people that created it lose interest or pass on or whatever, it falls apart. It's like you need to create alternative communities and structures that have built-in game theoretical incentive structures that will perpetuate it long past, you know, the creators being around. You know, I mean, that's what Bitcoin is, right? It's an incentive structure above anything else that, you know, you could argue triggers some of this altruistic stuff to work for the benefit of the network, but really it's a selfish incentive structure that allows you to buy back your time and be able to feed into it. And I think we need to kind of learn to build architecture that increase the cost of the conspiracy against the human race by these people, and then also creates like a sustainable alternative architecture that promotes creativity and promotes having fun building stuff and all these things. It's not just about going out and building. It's like, well, how do we build stuff that's going to last, that can survive the internet going down, that can survive the coming onslaught of psyops that are here?

Whitney Webb [2:29:43] Yeah. And it's not like even everyone has to get out and make all the things. I mean, some people have to. I mean, it's not like we have to convince everyone on the planet to stand against them with us. it doesn't take everybody. It just takes enough, you know.

Marty Bent [2:30:00] And that's why it's like a very small minority of people to really affect this type of change.

Mark Goodwin [2:30:05] So it's big changes always comes downstream from a small majority— a small minority of people. I mean, it's always that. This is the Pareto effect, basically, is the, you know, the 20% affecting the 80%. Uh, it's always a small group of people. And you see, you know, you know, Like, again, not to mention Assange again, but it's like you get one person that kind of stood up and built a sort of system, and now you have all these, you know, acolytes that are everywhere around the world that see what he did and now can build alternative architecture that can maybe build WikiLeaks better than what WikiLeaks was and can actually sustain the seeding of these things and keep these things going. And by standing up once, you know, you create hopefully 5 people that see you stand up, and then that that sort of trickles away because people can really tell. There's a bank run on trust, you know, and people can really see when things are really fake. And when things are true, it resonates like crazy. You know, I think that's why you guys get like such good numbers and stuff of the work that you guys do because it's like actually real in a world of fucking shit, right? So more of that, more of that encouragement from via doing, uh, not just talking about it, but the actual actions, right? We need to really like internalize and externalize all the stuff that we talk about and, and actually put it in. You know, the revolution is a very inward, small, local thing. It's not this huge massive thing. It's— yes, we can use the internet to teach people the skills, but it's like, learn to 3D print, learn to hold Bitcoin, learn to grow food, Learn to do all this stuff, and then go do it and fuck off and throw your phones in the river and like stop feeding all this shit, right? It's like the revolution happens when that happens. Right now, it's important that we teach and that those skills and those that tech is disseminated.

Whitney Webb [2:31:57] But once it's disseminated, use the existing internet to learn that stuff while it's still here, right? You know, because it won't that kind of info and knowledge they will take off when they. bring it back. It's not going to have the same content it has now when it comes back. I guarantee it.

Marty Bent [2:32:11] No. Yeah, we need an offline library of apps.

Whitney Webb [2:32:16] Start storing stuff offline on hard drives that you will want, or skills you want to learn, ebooks about it, video rips about it, whatever. Start storing that stuff. You know, it won't be there.

Marty Bent [2:32:30] The Cubans exist and they've been running these like USB packet, uh, data packets for a while.

Whitney Webb [2:32:36] They're like in Peru too. Yeah. And like all over. They're pretty like ingenious. Like, I don't know. I mean, I know like the Global South, like a lot of these banking the unbanked guys, like have a— I think have a very like negative view about like people in the Global South. But as someone who like lives in the Global South, people are like very resourceful and creative here and like do a lot of stuff with very little compared to the US and have a lot of skills that people in the US have lost. In terms of like, you, if you don't use it, you lose it kind of stuff. Like, I mean, if you think about like in the US, like, okay, so my great-grandma knew how to knit, but I had to learn how to knit from YouTube. My grandma and mom never learned. My grandma worked and didn't cook and made like TV dinners. My mom did the same. I had to learn how to cook myself. Like where I live in you know, in Chile, like, people have a lot of skills that people in the US have kind of— it's just been generationally, like, phased out because people, like, just don't know how to produce their own stuff anymore or, like, stuff they need anymore.

Mark Goodwin [2:33:47] I've lived in California for, like, 12 years, and it's like these people don't fucking know how to do anything. It's like, absolutely. They go from middle school to high school to college to Google campus and they walk in packs of 30 people. They all have their backpacks on. They get every meal cooked for them. They deliver their— everything that they buy is delivered. They get their laundry done by somebody. I mean, it's like— I mean, I worked in service for this whole time and I served all these people and it's like the things that I would go see, I would watch Tinder dates happen and see people meet each other and talk talking about, you know, and it's just, I just saw like creatures of the algorithm and complete loss of all of these skills that Whitney's talking about, just like everywhere, you know, and I know it's fun to shit on California. It's so easy, but it's like, it really is like, it's, it's scary. The, the atrophy.

Marty Bent [2:34:45] That really is.

Whitney Webb [2:34:46] So fight against the atrophy and fight against the apathy. 100%. That needs to happen. On that note, I probably have to go. Do some kid stuff here in a second. Um, but I got like 5, 5 minutes if you wanna sort of like wrap it up, if that's cool. Or at least I can pop out.

Marty Bent [2:35:08] I mean, we've been on for 2 and a half hours.

Whitney Webb [2:35:10] Yeah, I think it's been great though. Covered a load of stuff. Very cool.

Marty Bent [2:35:16] It's been awesome. And before we wrap up, I'm gonna give a shout out to the War Mode guys, guys, uh, Billy and Spade run the War Mode podcast for letting me use their studio in Philly for the holidays. Really good podcast, you go check it out. Whitney, I think, uh, it'd be— they'd be good, uh, good show to go on as well. I think they're—

Whitney Webb [2:35:38] All right, right on.

Mark Goodwin [2:35:39] Yeah, that would be fucking hilarious. I would love that. I'd watch that.

Marty Bent [2:35:44] I didn't know you're a War Mode, um, fan.

Mark Goodwin [2:35:48] But it's, uh, yeah, I mean, I'm a huge comedy fan, uh, and, uh, yeah, I think I saw them. They were on an early MSSP like a really long time ago, um, and, uh, yeah, just catch them on that. They're pretty funny.

Marty Bent [2:36:03] Yeah.

Mark Goodwin [2:36:04] I grew up in New England. I know a lot of Philly people. Um, I used to play a lot of shows. I was in a band and used to play a lot in like New York and Philly and Western Mass and all that. So I have a pretty big Philly crew, so I know some of them guys.

Marty Bent [2:36:17] Hell yeah. Philly's, uh, Philly's all right. Uh, where I was born and raised. But, uh, yeah, we covered a lot. Uh, stablecoins are gonna be CBDCs. Don't use the stablecoins. Protect Bitcoin because it's, uh, they're trying to co-opt it right now.

Whitney Webb [2:36:39] It's under co-opt attack. Definitely, the co-op attack is here.

Marty Bent [2:36:47] Don't let the sailors of the world be like, "Just let it happen. Don't fight back. Don't be a martyr." That's the thing. That's like a bent again, like bad framing. It's like the framing isn't like you go along with it or you're a martyr. There's like a whole another third option. You win. You gotta have that winner's mentality. We're gonna win. It's not cocky. It's not a cocky assertion. To win, you have to believe that you can win. It's a confidence builder. We can do this.

Whitney Webb [2:37:14] No, but we will win because literally these people are insane. They're insane. And they're like actually idiots. The problem is like everyone else is like too distracted and too complacent and letting this cognitive diminishment thing take place and letting it happen to them. If there is a change there, it's like they have major problems. They have major problems. I mean, think of the psyops they have to throw at us now. I mean, did you see that thing with like a couple months ago, like the whole alien thing? And they have like these like stone things in Mexican Congress being— I mean, that literally looked like E.T. from the movie and like all the stuff. And like, it was like papier-mâché. I mean, like, stop, dude. I mean, these are the people that are taking over everything and we're letting them do it. It just doesn't make it— no. And then like the guy that invented CBDCs is like a failed reggae artist, uh, like, and co-founds Fluent Finance. Make it stop. Make it stop.

Marty Bent [2:38:19] They're sending their best and their best are, are not that good.

Whitney Webb [2:38:22] They're not.

Marty Bent [2:38:23] Have you seen Tucker going on the podcast circuit? He's like, I've got the alien information. I don't even think they're aliens. I think they're like demonic beings. So he's like being very vague about it, like they've been with us forever, the Vatican knows, the government knows.

Whitney Webb [2:38:34] Oh my God, no. I have, I have not, uh, followed Tucker, whose father was in charge of U.S. propaganda operations and who went to visit Nicaragua during Iran-Contra for Contra propaganda operations. And, uh, you know, has had a very interesting career trajectory. I'll just leave it at that. Um, be very careful about—

Mark Goodwin [2:38:55] because if you Peter Thiel's Rumble, right? He just joined Thiel's Rumble. No.

Whitney Webb [2:39:02] Well, yeah, a lot of people are at Rumble. Um, it's true. But again, you know, I think there is a big effort to co-opt, just like, you know, co-opting Bitcoin, big effort to co-opt alternative media. Um, and a big part of that is people offering money to people on alternative media. And the Peter Thiel circuit, Thielverse, definitely does that. And they do it to a significant degree and they publicly posture as being libertarian. Peter Thiel goes to Bitcoin conferences and calls himself a Bitcoin maximalist. And then later he goes on stage with the then CIA director and says it's a financial weapon from China to destroy the US dollar and US military power.

Mark Goodwin [2:39:47] Okay.

Marty Bent [2:39:48] That was within like a 3-month span.

Whitney Webb [2:39:50] It was very rapid. Yes. So, um, again, uh, don't just buy what these people say, watch what they do. Peter Thiel, if he's a libertarian, literally gave the worst part of the state the most powerful tool to eliminate individual freedom ever in Palantir. What kind of libertarian does that?

Mark Goodwin [2:40:12] Yeah, but he sold it. For dollars. So he's just a capitalist dude, you know?

Whitney Webb [2:40:19] All right, that empowers the state along the way, right? Libertarian.

Marty Bent [2:40:25] Now he's funding their drones. Is Andrew—

Mark Goodwin [2:40:30] yeah.

Marty Bent [2:40:30] All right, I know we all gotta go. Mark, Whitney, number one, thank you for coming on. Thank you for writing the piece. If you guys haven't read it, we'll link to it in the show notes. Go read it, the plan to roll out the stablecoins and the CBDC, who's involved.

Whitney Webb [2:40:45] Yeah, if you want to know how the CBDC is going to be in the US, this is the piece to read for sure. Hopefully more people will build off of this because there's a lot happening in this deposit token stablecoin space, uh, and it needs more coverage and more light shown on it, uh, because as things stand now, there's going to be this, uh, dumb thing basically like this false victory sigh Of oh yeah, no CBDC for the U.S. We believe in financial freedom. All is well here. But the same programmability, surveillability will be in the synthetic CBDC. It's not a real victory. So people need to be aware of what they actually plan to do. You know, and it's very clear. They've made it very clear. Just no one's paying attention. So I would really encourage other content creators watching to start looking at this very seriously. start talking about it a lot more, because thinking that it's just the BIS is, is very mistaken. It's not just the BIS, and the US has very different plans.

Mark Goodwin [2:41:45] Totally. And if you want a nice little summation to catch you up, I wrote a book called The Bitcoin Dollar. Came out of Bitcoin Magazine last year, uh, or rather this year, I guess. It's not 2024 yet. And, uh, it's a nice little summation of the history of interest rates, dollar system, treasuries, how they work and how they are trying to dollarize Bitcoin. So, you know, it's kind of a broad stroke look at the mechanisms, whereas of course, you know, this piece, uh, with Whitney is much more like the specifics of like, hey, this guy, this person, this reggae artist, this spook, whatever. Um, so, uh, yeah, check out the Bitcoin Dollar if you want a little speed run, uh, on, on how this is happening as well.

Marty Bent [2:42:28] Yeah, we're gonna win. Instill that confidence in yourself. Even if you're not a content creator, speak out against this. If you are a content creator, you should definitely speak out against this. Like, this is an existential threat to the future of freedom for all of humanity that it's probably gonna play out over the rest of this decade. So the time is nigh. It is time to get on this shit.

Whitney Webb [2:42:55] Time to think about this stuff and start Doing stuff about it.

Marty Bent [2:42:59] Yeah. All right, we'll end it there. Peace and love, freaks.