TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #555: How Trump Will Serve The CBDC Agenda with Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Marty sits down with Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin to discuss the nefarious plans of Trump's allies. 0:00 - Intro 2:15 - Trump savior narrative 11:31 - Unchained & Coinkite 13:24 - Trump coalition 22:30 - Epstein blackmail on both sides 32:04 - Zaprite & SOTE 33:06 - A new form of intelligence agency 51:49 - Stablecoin CBDCs 1:05:23 - Trump’s policy’s and cabinet appointments 1:14:44 - Politicians learning from bitcoin 1:20:13 - Big pharma and problems with deregulation 1:27:20 - Back to stablecoins 1:48:04 - Justifying crackdowns, Ross and Samurai 1:53:59 - Lightspark tease Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Coinkite https://coinkite.com/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

The next president, who we know now will be Trump, is going to face some sort of U.S. government debt crisis. When Trump was in office last time, BlackRock designed U.S. fiscal response to COVID that they began implementing before a pandemic was even declared, and it resulted in one of the biggest wealth transfers in American history and printed more money than at any other time in U.S. history. I've been really skeptical that that won't repeat itself. And so you're already seeing sort of signaling that someone like Mike Pompeo, been fielded for Secretary of Defense, or some figures that have neoconservative bents. I mean, they worked with Obama during 08.

They worked with Trump and they worked with Biden and would have worked with Kamala. Their track record is basically stealing wealth from the public. Why did we all forget this? Every four years, this is the most important election. We have to go vote. We all believe in elections again. I think that the Uniparty is going to do what it wants to do.

It's this Purple Party entity. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb and researcher Mark Goodwin just pulled back the curtain on America's fake democracy and how both Republicans and Democrats serve the same masters. Now they're about to reveal why stablecoins might be the biggest threat to Bitcoin. They are actively putting dollar instruments into the Bitcoin blockchain. They're creating all of these ways to create dollars on lightning. Stablecoins have the potential to be just as programmable and surveillable as a CBDC could be,

and the fed and the national security community meaning the cia among other agencies have been very open that that stable coins will ensure dollar hegemony from blackrock to bitcoin from elections to surveillance in the next 90 minutes webb and goodwin reveal the full story of what's coming and how you can stay prepared you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. 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.

I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Whitney and Mark, welcome back to the show. Hey, great to be here, Marty. Always a pleasure. Yeah, thanks a lot. We've got a lot to cover. What should we start with? Whatever you want. Let's talk about this week. It's timely.

The election just happened. People are very bullish in the Bitcoin world. Obviously, I follow you, too, on Twitter. You are signaling that people may be walking into the Viper's den. And let's just talk about it. What do you think the outcome of the election means for the future of America, particularly Bitcoin as a subsect of of potential policy under Trump administration? What are we walking into? Well, I just want to start off with saying that I definitely empathize with the view, just like I did in 2016 and other elections, you know, that the Trump ticket was the lesser of two evils. But I think after the first Trump term and the precedent set by campaign rhetoric versus policy action in that first term, you know, I've been really skeptical that that won't repeat itself.

Right. And so you're already seeing, you know, since Trump was elected, sort of these, you know, sort of signaling that, you know, Mike, someone like Mike Pompeo or some figures that have neoconservative bents, you know, like Marco Rubio is being considered for a cabinet position. Mike Pompeo has been fielded for secretary of defense. People that worked right under Pompeo or have been tapped to lead the transition team for the State Department, things of that nature. You know, this apparent signaling and claims from people like Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump transition team, that RFK isn't really going to have any role in any sort of HHS or HHS sub agency. you know, are these the beginning signs of backpedaling? It's, you know, I think it's fair to be skeptical and be vigilant. And, you know, particularly what I would warn against is the idea that now that the lesser of two evils has won, now is the time to sit back and just let things happen and not hold anyone's feet to the fire and not ensure accountability. Because I think that's, you know, a recipe for disaster, frankly, when people are complacent and too trust and

consistently politicians abuse that. And there's a very long, long track record of that happening in American politics with both parties, right? And so what I would, and what I've been saying a lot since the election is that complacency and the efforts to manufacture it are dangerous, I would say. And what I'm concerned about is that the people that were most against a lot of this, efforts to undermine our freedoms. A lot of them being on the right, for example, are people that were, you know, dissidents of the COVID era and COVID era policies, you know, and gun owners, for example, who obviously have a way to impact, you know, the fate of the country if things were ever to get really, you know, tyrannical. You know, if they're overly trusting of the federal

government, they're more likely to be, you know, complacent and sort of just sit back and not really do anything because they trust the person that is in power. And unfortunately, I think there's bipartisan agendas that even with like, you know, in 2016, Republicans also sweep the legislature. They took the executive branch, but it didn't result in the populist platform that was necessarily promised. So I think, you know, if people don't want to ensure that the country does go on a better track, there needs to be pushback and people need to not just sit back in their armchairs and trust the plan or what have you and need to really ensure that, like I've said for a long time, since I get accused of not offering any solutions, I've said for a really

long time and for many years on your show and other shows that I have long believed that change is going to come from the bottom up, not the top down, and that people need to really ensure and focus on their local communities, on local resilience, and on building out alternatives that can help us resist a lot of these technocratic, you know, agendas that seek to micromanage and control, you know, essentially every aspect of our lives. Yep. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, last time we were on here, we were like, oh, Trump's gonna win. Obviously, he's gonna fucking dominate it's gonna be a landslide we we were obviously correct and i mean i think it's it it's it's very helpful for i mean we all know it's a uni party like what are we why did we all forget

this every four years you know that seems to be this is the most important election this is we have to go vote it's like we all believe in elections again we all believe in and you know democratic uh you know process here in america after what we've you know kind of experienced basically our whole lives in this you know we're all kind of 9 11 kids and here we are kind of like trusting the government again i feel like there's a lot of people god damn it sorry about that are we back yeah it should be working you said trump's gonna win a landslide earlier yeah well yeah i mean i think i echo pretty much what when you just said last time we were on here it was like well trump's obviously gonna win that's obviously what happened um and i think

you know maybe a lot of the things that have happened you know the last few years have been kind of setting up for this, like, huge populist movement, you know, that was, again, curated by oligarchs, social network billionaires, all these people that kind of control these, these, like, DARPA cutouts and these projects and, you know, these social networks gearing up to be, you know, like in X's case, half the financial system, you know, whatever we have, we have all these guys working together, working on their podcast strategy that was talked about by Dana White during the acceptance speech. And it was a huge part of the of the election cycle.

And if you look at it, you know, I don't really believe in elections. I thought we kind of all agreed on that. I think that the Uniparty is going to do what it wants to do. It's this purple party entity, this idea that there's really this dueling faction between the two of them. I think that's just really, you know, it's like wrestling. I think it's really just this kind of like scripted thing that they give to the masses politics have become bread and circus. And now we all get geared up and they use it to divide

ourselves, you know, to divide the masses. And they, you know, I think, as Whitney said, very prudently, specifically kind of aiming this this cue Trump as a savior stuff at the dissonant armed group in America. You know, they've been able to sort of manufacture complacency and consent for what they're going to do now. And I think Trump has, you know, he has this huge mandate now. It's very obvious. Everyone feels it. He's, you know, swept, you know, all three important elements of of the American government system. And now we're going to see what what he's going to do. So it's not like the whole election cycle. I was going around being like, how dare you vote for Trump? But it's over. It's done. Here we are. If you believe in elections and you want

to vote, that's great. You like Trump. Fine. But the state hates you. They are murderers, terrorists. They throw good people in jail like the state put Ross in jail. Trump was president for four years, didn't free Ross. Let's get him out of here. Fuck. Yeah, that's a great win. But I really think the mindset should be let's hold these people as accountable as possible. Let's not, you know, I was going to say something gross there. Let's not, you know, dust them. You know, they're undercarriages. You know, let's let's hold them to the fire. That's what we need to do. And I think that there is such a an opportunity here when there is a populist uprising and a movement. Unfortunately, I feel like it was really captured into this

controlled pen, you know, back to the electoral system, back to the state, back to, you know, Poppy Warp Speed being our savior. And that's just, I think, kind of ridiculous, as Whitney said. It comes from us, from the people. So let's take this movement that there are a lot of truths in this movement that I think that I do agree with. There are elements of freedom and libertarianism and even anarchy tossed around in this MAGA soup. But ultimately, I think the mechanisms are not what I agree with. I don't want the state to have any more power. The only thing I agree that Eric Prince has ever said is,

let's keep the government as far away from Bitcoin as possible. I don't like the government moving into Bitcoin stuff. I don't want the government to have a Bitcoin stash. Like, fuck them. I want them to get smaller and get, you know, this is an opportunity to fuck the financial system up. I don't want them a part of it. Let's let them collapse it, like get smaller, forced to get smaller because they have to because they can't compete with the Bitcoin standard.

That's what we've been like arguing for so long. So long winded rant here, but it's a moment to push back. It's not a moment to celebrate a win that hasn't even happened yet in many ways. You know, these policies hasn't happened. We don't know the platform. We don't know who's in the cabinet yet. So let's be very, very, very, you know, smart and just push back when we have the opportunity to and not let the state just take over again. I kind of think it's that straightforward.

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smaller government uh is what enticed me the most and so obviously we've talked at length about elon and many people surrounding trump uh in the lead up to this election and now that they're surrounding him uh in his current administration i think there's uh more reason than ever to be completely vigilant and make sure these people are being held accountable but that is what i'll be looking for is are they actually taking action to gut the administrative state that has quelled the ability for people to live free um and when it comes to bitcoin too like i would push back on i mean i don't want the government making rules about bitcoin obviously at the consensus level but when it comes like the united states government acquiring a strategic reserve this has always

been part of the game theory the bitcoin bitcoiners have talked about for 16 years maybe not the u.s government specifically but uh for 16 years now the the game theory has been it's going to start with individuals companies are going to adopt it pensions are going to adopt it and then ultimately governments are going to be forced to adopt the better money and i actually do think it is a means to manufacture a smaller government in the long term because the way the debt is set up uh it just has to grow it's a leviathan that is forced to grow and if you have no actionable way to actually reduce the debt the government's just going to be forced to issue more debt get bigger and well what if bitcoin is the way to do that i mean exactly kind of

straight up said that that's the point we pay the debt oh okay yeah exactly so like that maybe that is the roundabout way that you actually make government smaller in the long run as you find a solution to solve the debt problem and the leviathan just simply doesn't have the the means to or it's not that doesn't have the means to continue growing it's just the way it's set up now with the the federal debt it is forced to expand that reach and that misallocation of capital and that abuse of power i'm hopeful i'm white pilled right now because many have other things like uh i do think the populist movement is certainly there and i think what we saw in terms of the overwhelming message that was sent with this election again you mentioned taking the the

house the senate and the white house i think that that is a signal from the american people like we're fucking fed up of this unit party and the other high signal in my mind is the fact that this happened in spite or despite the overwhelming propaganda machine that got put in in the place of the mainstream corporate media over the last four years but particularly the last three months yeah but don't i mean i totally i think that this is a um you know we wrote about this like in january with token i think of kind of this idea of the the pivot has happened where now it's you know it's it's advantageous for that group that used to control the mainstream media um and the electoral process um you know now they're pivoting

to podcast strategies right boukele is tweeting out being like hey i talked to trump we talked about podcasts dana white's talking about like this that is the new media and i think that there is an opportunity there but also it's like let's not just bait and switch and replace it with these you know agents that are that that serve kind of similar powers you know you look at the weinstein brothers and people like that you know like you know their edge their edge group people they're uh you know they're teal capital managers um and here they are kind of they completely got coveted wrong at the beginning when it mattered now here they are you know acting like they got it right the first time and the joe rogans are the you know you're kind of seeing uh you know

You know, maybe these aren't, you know, that much better than the Don Lemons and Brian Seltzer's and CNN. You know, it's just a new apparatus. And so obviously there's been this big shift. We've seen it with Malay. You know, obviously we're seeing it with Trump again, round two. But this is now the more useful narrative is to push towards these, you know, this direction. Now that, you know, they basically did what they did with the COVID era policy, which was to, you know, in in in August and September of 2019, when the repo market explodes, Trump gets together with his money manager, Larry Fink, and they come up with a plan of basically how to get all this money to go right to Wall Street, not to Main Street. And then they crushed demand and locked down the country and push these, you know, deregulate these pharma products and push them out in this way.

That was they print more money than anyone has ever printed in the history of the United States or the world. You know, they crushed demand by locking us all in our houses. This was this was all scripted before the virus, you know, was dropping out. It was running rampant. What's that? What was it called? Event was the game, the war game they ran. All right.

Before COVID event 201. Yeah. But this specific plan with Fink was the going direct plan. And this was done, you know, this was, you know, a plan. This was absolutely, you know, they had to address this issue of the debt. How do you do it? Well, let's print all this money, lock down the economy so that we crush inflation as much as possible by crushing demand. And then we use these trillions of dollars that has no ability to go into checking accounts and into Main Street and use it to buy up all the assets in the world. We'll bring Bitcoin down to three thousand dollars at 20 X's in a year onshore all of this Bitcoin into the United States, move everything into a deflationary economic system now that we have it all. And then we start pushing a completely different economic and political system onto the people, you know, using these these new media formats. And now everyone thinks it's this, you know, huge, exciting win that, you know, the government is adopting these things. They want to cut all these people in the government and bring it down. It's like, well, of course they do.

Now they have everything. They have all the assets. They have all the technology. They have the drones to set up the border and to set up their citadels. They have, you know, enough Bitcoin to literally pay off the debt if they want to hyperinflate into the dollar into Bitcoin. And I think that's really what we kind of explored in this chain series was this idea of maybe this was all a huge plan. And maybe while, yes, there is, I think, a net good that comes from deflationary monetary system, I think ultimately that is a good thing. It's less important, you know, who is Satoshi and more important, who is Potoshi, who has all the Bitcoin, where is it?

And when you kind of explore and look at the people that were really there that built these things from a regulatory standpoint and a custody standpoint, these people are heavily connected to the intelligence state, Teal specifically, and a lot of these people that actually have a huge role in the Trump administration. And so I think it was very obvious in Telegraph, you know, specifically Trump, specifically stable coins. You know, I've been writing about this for three and a half years now that this is what's going to happen. Trump is going to pivot and go right towards Bitcoin. look at what he actually did um you know i don't think it's an accident that i was right about all those things it's they were that's what they were doing they were just saying something else so i've learned to not trust what they say and see what they do um and i think you know when you explore that um i think you can absolutely make a case which i have repeatedly um that there's actually

a lot to benefit the empire of the united states with a monetary expansion into bitcoin of course they can't dilute it they can't control it there's a lot of things they can't do that's great um but they can pay off the debt and continue us empire with stable coins and you know private issued tokens on public blockchains it's a boon for surveillance as a former cia director would say so i think there's a lot to sort of unpack about maybe we haven't won yet we're all going to be rich now it's awesome but maybe we haven't won yet and there's still a huge war to be fought And so I think that they are manufacturing that complacency, the same thing they did with Q going into the pandemic, you know, to just get us all to sit in our chairs and be like patriots are in control. They're arresting the pedos. Like, here we go. Did that really happen? Has that happened?

Some people on Twitter still think so. Yeah, but how do these people fight? They fight with lawfare. This champion of free markets, Peter Thiel, this libertarian god here who's really the guy kind of running a lot of these things, he took down Gawker using lawfare and suits after – the story is after they kind of released some personal stuff about his life and maybe his sexual orientation and some stuff. But really, it was because they published the Epstein list. Yeah, the year they went after him was the year that Gawker was the first publication to make public the Epstein black book. And at the time, Peter Thiel was meeting with Epstein pretty consistently between 2014 and 2015. So hard to know, really, what the reason was. But people were definitely not happy that that black book came out because the person who, you know, obtained it was actually Epstein's butler. And he was, you know, killed off in prison in 2015, the same year.

So kind of complicated stuff. And as far as Peter Thiel being a free market libertarian, he's pretty open. Well, he's on video and in writings has said that he doesn't like free market competition. It's actually for losers, he thinks, and that his definition of a capitalist is someone who accrues capital. So someone that believes in free market capitalism, but isn't a millionaire to Peter Thiel isn't really isn't really a capitalist very much like someone like Reid Hoffman. who backed Kamala heavily, for example, would be more of a capitalist

to Peter Thiel than someone like yourself, Marty. Yeah, it's been interesting. The Epstein-Diddy stuff leading up to it. You look at the Leviathan that backed Kamala specifically and Reid Hoffman on the list as well. It seems like anybody who was at Diddy parties are on the list. Well, I think there's also, you know, it's not it didn't just happen with Diddy. It also happened with Epstein. There's been a deliberate effort, in my opinion, to cultivate the perception that the only people that are sexually compromised or that are pedophiles in the United States are celebrities and Democrats only when it is. If you look at the evidence and I wrote a thousand page book that goes over the history of sexual blackmail operations, including those involving children, it's very clearly both parties and probably no government was more guilty of that than the Reagan Bush era with the Franklin scandal and a lot of the other things that were, you know, oversaw as part of that.

Or like Iran-Contra drug trafficking, helping facilitate BCCI, which the U.S. Senate report admits was also a sex trafficking minors to elites of the United Arab Emirates, including prepubescent children. Right. So this is something that has consistently been both parties. And, you know, the idea that it's only one partisan side, I think, is very complicated and ultimately not true and could potentially be used for troubling ends. And as far, you know, I have an article that I haven't finished yet because I've had a lot of other stuff going on about, you know, the overlaps between the Epstein and Diddy networks. And it's really not exclusively partisan. And there's a lot of very deliberate overlaps. The biggest one being, I guess, Ron Burkle, who owns the Kroger supermarkets between the two, who hasn't even been discussed at all, even though he was a big Clinton donor. Why does his name not get brought up?

But it's like, you know, a lot of focus on, you know, big name celebrities, perhaps, and, you know, Democrat candidates. But, you know, Ron Burkle was also all over the Epstein Clinton flights. Don't you think that people would want to call that out? It's kind of weird that his name's been left out of it. And there's other names as well that have been, you know, left out of it, too. You know, I would argue, unfortunately. But, you know, again, I think it's part of this effort to sort of sensationalize, you know, the very real scandals around Epstein and Diddy and, you know, scandals like that and try and sort of make it more of a spectacle and have people be like, oh, look at these evil, naughty celebrities and not really look at how our government has consistently enabled this type of behavior. Why is the FBI or the government only going after these people when they did, when most of their crimes were committed many, many years ago?

I mean, there's a lot of things I could, I guess, add to that. But essentially, you know, I don't really like that it's being treated as partisan when the historical record very clearly shows it's a bipartisan disease and that both parties have been very compromised by it for a long time, that it's essentially something that was done through this unholy alliance, if you will, between organized crime and intelligence agencies, which, as I know a lot in my book with a lot of facts to back it up. You can't really tell where organized crime and intelligence agencies end and begin. You know, they're, you know, for all intents and purposes, the same. And so and I think it's complicated, too, that you have people like this figure named Chuck Johnson, who's very close to Peter Thiel, actually had Peter Thiel become an FBI informant at his behest, you know, openly saying that Jeffrey Epstein was actually a patriot and Ghislaine Maxwell should be released from prison and things of that nature. Like, is there going to be a rebrand or something, you know, by media operatives that have ties to the state of Israel, for example, that Epstein was also tied to trying to rebrand their guy as someone that was just trying to keep the Dems from doing the wrong things or something like that? I don't know. But why is someone saying that? Um, you know, personally, I find that stuff kind of concerning and a lot of, you know,

uh, hints from people like Megyn Kelly that we'll be hearing from Epstein really soon. And there's going to be a big twist in, in the story. Um, you know, I just really don't trust the partisan, uh, bent of that personally. I think it's going to be, uh, misused and it doesn't fit with the facts, frankly. Um, is it true that there are very problematic people involved in these scandals that back Kamala? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Reid Hoffman obviously being the most obvious, but it's fair to say that Peter Thiel and also Elon Musk, you know, have their Epstein ties as well. It just hasn't been, I guess, of interest as much to people in certain media circles. But, you know, there's definitely facts pointing to that. A lot of them I've discussed in my book. Some came out after my book was published, when a lot of these discovery documents from the USVI case against J.P. Morgan, as it related to Epstein, were, you know, sort of released, at least aspects of them were, by the Wall Street Journal, which also illuminated the extent to which he met with Reid Hoffman. But, you know, that was the first time that it was officially confirmed that Peter Thiel met extensively with Epstein previously. It was, you know, I had to speculate about that for the purpose of my book because there were plenty of indicators suggesting that was the case. Now we know it's the case. And there's a lot that hasn't come out, you know, about Epstein. And there's still not a lot of interest in Epstein in particular on the financial crime angle of that, which I think is really significant. And, you know, the fact that they make it sort of the sensationalized salacious story that it's, you know, all about just these terrible sack sacks and stuff. It's a lot bigger story. And there's not a lot of interest in going after it, I think, because a lot of the people implicated are some of the biggest people in Silicon Valley.

Right. Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were all subpoenaed as part of that as part of that Epstein case. Tom Pritzker of the Pritzker family. And these are people that, you know, play both sides of the political divide also. But they all seem to have that, you know, behind them. And sometimes, you know, it may not be convenient. You know, you have Elon Musk going out saying like Reid Hoffman should be very afraid, you know, about the information about Epstein coming out. But, you know, as I said earlier and as I've said on other podcasts and as noted in my book, Elon Musk had business ties with Jeffrey Epstein and was subpoenaed as part of this, you know, banking probe into the financing or his connections to J.P. Morgan and other things, which is not just the sex trafficking thing. It's also connected with the financial crime aspect of it, because if you look into a lot of Epstein's financial stuff, you know, he was involved in essentially collapsing Bear Stearns, which was essentially executed intentionally as part of, you know, the 08 crisis. And then, you know, he switches banks to J.P. Morgan, and that's the bank that buys up Bear Stearns, all of their assets for pennies on the dollar.

And when Epstein popped one of Bear Stearns' most – one of their most overleveraged funds, which helped – which essentially created the conditions that led to Bear Stearns collapsing, people were like, well, he lost a lot of money. But as the Martins reported on Wall Street on Parade, he also got essentially a secret multimillion-dollar bailout from the Fed, so he didn't really lose any money. you know and you know you don't hear this stuff discussed about epstein you don't hear um mentions about diddy teaming up with the bromfman family or the lauder family he absolutely did and there are connections of that of course to the epstein scandal as is noted in my book but again it's a focus on sensationalism and trying to use it for partisan means and ultimately when we play those games everyone ends up losing because we're not getting to the truth of the matter and by not getting to the truth of the matter, we're unable to root out this evil from our society.

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sote.com that's drink sote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff well on this note anchoring back to accountability vigilance you mentioned megan kelly i saw kash patel i believe his name is i forget what show he was on he was saying they're gonna release the epstein and diddy files what But so in terms of accountability, how, in your mind, would an Epstein diddy list information be disclosed properly? How would you like to see, like what would make you sufficiently happy with like a disclosure of the Epstein diddy stuff? Well, I would like them to release all the files, and that includes on things that the government will never release information on, like Chinagate, for example, where Epstein, on behalf of the state of Israel, helped facilitate the transfer of sensitive military technology to China, you know, through, well, it was a very elaborate scheme. I've written about it in my book pretty extensively. It was really the Iran-Contra network sort of retooling themselves for the benefit of creating what Samuel Pissar, who's very close.

Well, Anthony Blinken's stepfather, for one thing, but he was also Robert Maxwell's confidant. He talked about to Congress about that the world was turning into what he called a trans ideological corporation where the corporate sector of the United States was merging with the state owned companies of the communist bloc. So China and Russia. And that's essentially what China Gate was furthering, because a key part of creating that of binding these state owned companies and the communist bloc and the private sector in the West was built around technology transfer, which is essentially what, you know, China Gate was about. And that even though conservatives remember are the only one only party, of course, that remembers China Gate, they remember it as a campaign finance scandal, not a military, you know, a military scandal fundamentally. Right. So there'd have to be a lot of things that come out. And again, I don't think they're interested and I don't think they will release information that relates to financial crimes or any of really of the intelligence activities of Epstein. And I don't know. I mean, we'll see what ends up getting released. But keep in mind, you know, when Trump campaigned in 2016, he campaigned in part, I mean, on many things, obviously.

But one of them was, you know, about sort of releasing, you know, JFK files, which was a campaign promise that was released this time. And when it came around to it in his first term, he declined to release a significant amount of documents. Some came out, but many notable ones that people had been waiting for were not released at the last minute. And I can't remember exactly what Trump said, but it was something to the effect of, if you had seen what I had seen, you wouldn't release them either or something like that. but then, you know, repeats the promise this cycle that he's going to, um, you know, put all these assassination files and all of these, uh, government secrets out there. Um, and yeah, unfortunately I'm a little bit skeptical of that, uh, just because that, uh, of the fact that some people close to, um, Trump or that have backed Trump, uh, figures from the Reagan Bush era,

for example, like Ed Meese, who was an advisor to Trump, uh, during his first term or someone like Oliver North, who, you know, was a key figure in Iran-Contra, and people forget that he, you know, created a domestic terror watch list, essentially, that included people on the left, on the right, that could be rounded up and essentially put into camps if the government ever declared a vague state of emergency. You know, this is not a freedom guy. You know, these people have, you know, been supportive and been influential on some of the policy decisions that were made last time.

And unfortunately, the Trump administration, just like all the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations, really every administration since the new century started have advanced the war on domestic terror, which is essentially, you know, in terms of software, it's run by Palantir, which has, you know, an outsized influence on the current, you know, Trump administration, as we discussed last time. And, you know, that's very complicated for because the war on domestic terrorism meant to be weaponized against dissidents on both sides of the political aisle, ultimately, at the end of the day. And so obviously the Democrats have their plans to weaponize it against certain demographics, but that doesn't mean Trump won't be doing it either because he's already essentially said that, you know, anti-Semitic speech is going to be challenged or what he deems anti-Semitic speech. But now that the definition of anti-Semitism has been expanded to criticisms of, you know, a foreign government, you know, not being allowed to criticize that foreign government, how far is that going to go? And what impacts is that going to have, for example, in discussing something like the Epstein case? And how would that impact, that type of viewpoint impact what types of Epstein files are released versus other ones, you know? I mean, I would, you know, anticipate just because of Trump's rather slavish deference to Israel that any sort of, you know, the connections that are clearly there between Epstein and the Israeli state, I do not really anticipate a lot coming out on that. You know, maybe some more information on the Epstein-Clinton relationship, which is absolutely terrible.

Epstein, of course, also had his own relationship to Trump that should honestly be more controversial than it probably is. While it's true they parted ways in the mid-2000s or so, which was mainly over a competition over a Palm Beach real estate property that neither of them ended up getting and was questionable in numerous ways. Yes, they did part ways, but that doesn't mean that they didn't do things of a questionable nature together before, that there weren't red flags about their relationship prior to that point in time. And, you know, obviously Trump has a very checkered past and a lot of his supporters, you know, forgive that and say it's a new, you know, that he's a new man and all of this stuff. And I don't really care what people believe, but that doesn't necessarily change, you know, what happened, what may have happened in the 1990s or the 1980s or, you know, things of that nature. I don't know. Sorry, I've been rambling for a while, but I would certainly like to see all of the documents come out. But the government has never done that. Will it be different this time? You know, given what happened with the JFK file release under Trump, again, I am skeptical.

I would very much like to be wrong. Any document that comes out, I'm sure will be helpful. But with, you know, people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and people, you know, like that relatively close to Trump, it's very unlikely that any documents implicating their connection with Epstein or that would shed light on that. You know, maybe they do a selective release. You know, I'm mad at Reid Hoffman. He backed Kamala, so we'll put out more on him. I don't know.

Again, it remains to be seen. But, you know, I certainly would like to see more transparency. But the way that FOIA requests are currently handled, you know, I'm not I'm not very hopeful. I mean, frankly, one of the key guys in the Clinton administration on Chinagate, Mark Middleton, who was killed off in the middle of the Epstein scandal sort of unfolding in 2019. He supposedly hung himself in an extension cord and shot himself in the chest with a shotgun. you know um gotta be really sure we've all done that it's easy yeah uh i i've had a full multiple foyer requests into the clinton presidential library they have folders on mark middleton crickets they don't want certain stuff to come out you know crickets like not even we can't give you this there's nothing they don't really have to you know i mean because

foy is like they're supposed to but like you have to go through all this lawfare to actually force them do obey the law a lot of the time yeah you know so i i think that you know this idea of we're going to get like a you know a good release of this stuff it's like you're looking at all the people that are around trump right now and how many have numerous connections as you just said obviously elon he's you know we just found out today he's on the call with trump talking with zielinski like he's very integrated into this group you know absolutely has connections with epstein teo absolutely has connections with epstein howard lutnick the canter fitzgerald one of 24 primary dealers for the Fed, the guy that custodies Tether's, you know, reserves.

He bought an estate previously owned by Epstein via this Guido Goldman Bronfman Comet Trust Group. For ten dollars. For ten dollars. It's a multimillion dollar estate, you know, in Manhattan. You know, and then, of course, you know, the guy that just got out of jail, you know, Steve Bannon, You know, he was working with Epstein. So he's like a Goldman intelligence guy. And he was working with Epstein on a documentary. I guess they filmed like 10 hours, 12 hours. I think it's believed to be between 18 and 20 hours, the amount of, you know, Epstein footage that Steve Bannon has and he has yet to release. And Bannon was pretty open that he sort of wanted to, that he thought Epstein was part of some, connected to some sort of intelligence service and that he wanted to sort of do that himself, essentially. Yeah.

So, you know, again, it's kind of complicated. It's a, again, it's a truly bipartisan scandal. So, you know, one particular party, if they think they can get an advantage by releasing stuff that implicates the other guys, but not themselves. Yeah, I think it's possible they will do that. But I don't think that necessarily serves the American public, because as I've strived to point out in my own work on the case, there's a very deliberate effort to weaponize the case and keep it solely focused on a very small range of what Epstein actually did during his relatively lengthy career that involved ties to organized crime and intelligence. There's been no interest in going after his most obvious benefactor, Leslie Wexner, despite the fact that Wexner, you know, was a never-Trumper in all of this stuff. You know, no interest in going after him at all or any of the people who arguably were the most involved. You know, no interest in getting the immunity removed for Epstein's secretaries like Leslie Groff or someone like Sarah Kellen. Again, I don't really,

I think the interest is, you know, weaponizing it potentially for partisan stuff or just not releasing anything at all. So I'll leave it there. Yeah, I think getting back maybe to some of the Bannon stuff, you know, we're looking at this, you know, blob, whatever mafia intelligence merger, which obviously, you know, Whitney literally wrote the book on. And, you know, we're sort of blurring the lines of like, what is intelligence? What is mafia? What even is governance? You know, how are these things all kind of meeting together? And I think looking at the Bannon story is specifically as it relates to digital currency is really interesting because I think it kind of nails all of this, you know, these axioms really well.

Bannon was Brock Pierce's right hand man. They were working on digitizing commodities and creating digital economies in the early 2000s, working in the video game world. Goldman understood, you know, World of Warcraft gold was was a digital commodity, you know, before anyone else did. And, you know, Goldman comes in and puts a ton of money into Brock Pierce's company. And, you know, he's like a kid basically puts all this money into Brock Pierce's company. Bannon ends up replacing him as the CEO of the company. And they're working on – literally it's stated, Pierce says this, that they were working with economists to basically simulate and stimulate things in a digital world to try things in an economy that they wouldn't be able to do in the real world with much lesser consequences. So we have literally Goldman, Epstein connected, you know, people, intelligence connected people working with this guy, Brock Pierce, to create a digital economy and try these these new economic policies and new things in video games.

And they were incredibly successful at it and they made they made a ton of money. And, you know, Brock, I think, is is a very interesting case of, you know, maybe how modern intelligence, you know, would work. they find a very compromised person. He was a part of the Digital Entertainment Network with Mark Collins Rector, who is a known pedophile who, you know, recruited Chad Shackley, his business partner, who, you know, Brock was kind of the third person when he was a minor. And Mark was certainly not a minor at the time. And they created the Digital Entertainment Network and And they had this Chad Shackley, Mark Collins rector, you know, palace sort of estate in in Southern California. And they were running basically, you could argue, you know, a blackmail ring that that was, you know, based on, you know, having young boys and meeting them directly with people that were in venture capital and people that were in politics.

like the the husband of Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post I think it's Arianna sorry if I'm wrong but the husband who was a representative there who was you know involved later had to kind of come out and be like oh I'm bi and hey you know it's fine but there were absolutely inappropriate things going on there just in the same way that these ditty parties you know that everyone's very excited about it's kind of the same play have these compromising things happen in an area that's their area where they can film everything and then they can hold all these, these people accountable. Brock Pierce was a part of that. Um, very much so. Um, the digital entertainment network also has all of these connections to Disney, to Microsoft, um,

to Enron. Um, there's a lot of spooky things there. Brock Pierce, um, you know, ends up working with Clearstone out of the Idea Labs group. Idea Labs is the first investor and, uh, institutional investor in PayPal. Um, and they're heavily connected to, um, Near, uh, which is one of the largest human traffic of movement brokers in the world. Geolocation. Geolocational brokers in the world. But then you see what does Brock do? He's one of the first Bitcoin evangelists. He creates Tether with Craig Sellers, who I generally like. I think Craig's cool, even though, you know, I obviously I'm very skeptical of Tether, but he's kind of the tech guy. I think the way that, you know, it's described as Brandon Bloomer from Block.One, which was obviously, you know,

heavily backed by lewis bacon who also was a huge investor in idea labs and and paypal and kind of the soros acolyte um and peter teal obviously in block one and bloomer you know described pierce as being this orchestrator um so he's working with bannon bannon his right hand man and he's this orchestrator who can create three or four businesses that really operate as one business um that was sort of the quote that he said so we're seeing like you know that there is It's absolutely what you would consider modern intelligence, this apparatus that, you know, intelligence in the 40s and 50s, 60s and maybe 70s, you know, was really academic based. You know, there was a little bit more office stuff, a little bit more what we think of when we think of, you know, what what intelligence is, you know, pencil pushers and kind of nerds and offices and academia. And they were really these breeding grounds for intelligence.

they figured out, you know, into the 80s that, you know, where we needed to go was the private sector. That's where we if we want to compete with the technologists, if we're going to kind of unleash the semiconductor and the Internet on the world, we need to compete with them, you know, directly. We can't really be doing that with all this government red tape. You know, a huge part of all these operations is money management. It's laundering. It's moving things around so they can finance black operations. And that's really what happened here. And so you're looking at the early PayPal group and you have someone like Olevchin. I mean, he literally applied for the NSA and they told him, no. And just so you know, you're never going to make any

money if you come work for the NSA. If you have a really good idea, you'll never make money here. You won't be able to publish anything that you make here. You know, you're beholden to the government by being an official member of the NSA. Why don't you go drive out to California and go find Peter Thiel? And then, you know, you build all the crypto for PayPal and kind of start this digit, you know, they were really kind of the first group to digitize money in their, you know, their big blowout. They did this thing called beaming at bucks where they did the first ever transfer between infrared ports of a Palm Pilot of millions of dollars. They were kind of the first people to do it. And he created all this anti-fraud stuff, all these things as he was

building it. You know, he says in this 2013 interview with Charlie Rose that the relationships he built with the three and four letter agencies while building PayPal were the most productive ones that he ever had in his whole career. Obviously, Palantir comes out of PayPal. It's the anti-fraud algorithm known as IGOR. It comes out of the PayPal movement. And you're seeing all of these you know you have to look at the you know we call it the chain but you look at all these people that were there at the beginning uh of this movement um and unfortunately it just stinks of intelligence now you could argue which i think is a definitely a prudent argument well of course they're going to try to come in and co-opt this shit of course um that's what they

do that's what the government does that they're going to come in if there is this beautiful movement they're going to come in and and try to co-opt it and that's absolutely possible it's also absolutely possible that this came out of intelligence and kind of this new splintering group of, you know, In-Q-Tel kind of starting in the 90s and going direct, the CIA going directly into venture capital. You know, it's kind of hard to tell where the lines are, where they aren't. And again, as I'm sure you would argue, it doesn't fucking matter who made Bitcoin. It literally doesn't. It's the protocol is the protocol and the math is the math. But where it's going and what it can enable and empower is extremely important. And when you see these people

that are very obviously have the markings of intelligence agents, you know, being all over the primordial goop of the digital revolution, obviously, we knew the digital money was coming in some form. It was inevitable. I don't think we thought it would be like Bitcoin, but like here we are. You have to sort of zoom out and look at all these things and look at this whole group. That's we did this investigation um you know i pretty much researched myself out of a job uh what was supposed to start as just a simple tether uh let's look into tether turned into you know an 80 000 word uh investigation of like the early bitcoin space and now the stablecoin issuers and the regulators and where we're going and there's so much disgusting stuff all over this i mean the the

the the gillenbrand connections with nexium you know both of her parents being involved in a Bronfman led sex cult, extremely disturbing. And now she's writing the legislator, the legislation, excuse me, that regulates stable coins. It's heavily uses the Terra Luna FTX implosion, which you could argue. And I do that these were controlled demolitions done to simulate a dialectic. Basically, if we need to ban algorithmic stable coins, they all say that everywhere. David Marcus, Thiel, the reserve guys, the legislators, you know, like Gillenbrand and Lummis, they specifically say we need to preserve the dual banking system. We can't have Bitcoin backed money. We need to do treasuries. They're really building this this, you know, you look at

this whole machine and they're building this, you know, consent towards us all being super stoked about, you know, this private stable coins and Bitcoin being held by the U.S. government. You know, this is sort of where we are. And so if you look at it as sort of an intelligence play, you know, these are currency speculators. That's what Epstein was. That's what Thiel was. What would they do? How would they fix our debt and move into this new system? They would probably do exactly what they did. And one thing I want to bring up about, you know, people like Gillibrand in Lummis is that they frame a lot, and especially Lummis, you know, frames a lot of her crypto advocacy as necessary to ensure dollar hegemony, right? And so, as you know, as I

understand it, and a lot of, you know, rhetoric I've heard in the Bitcoin space for years is that fiat is terrible, it's broken money, we need to move on from fiat. And so hearing things like that from Lummis, hearing Trump at the Bitcoin conference say, actually, the Bitcoin and the dollar not competing. Bitcoin is going to strengthen the dollar and all of this stuff. You know, I think it does is a harbinger, should be a harbinger for concern for people that don't want a debt based monetary future. And unfortunately, you know, I mean, it's essentially been admitted that, you know, the next president who we know now will be Trump is going to face some sort of U.S. government debt crisis. And of course, that debt crisis is the consequent of

wildly irresponsible fiscal policy. Right. And so what's what I am concerned about is that there will be no accountability for that. There is a plan to use things that were meant or at least pitched as destroying fiat and the debt based monetary system will be used instead to usher in a newer version of it that, as Mark pointed out earlier, it will likely be deflationary, but only because they've stolen all of the assets and really most things of value. So at that point, they do want a deflationary system because they have hoarded all of the wealth and they don't want their wealth to inflate away now that they hold almost all of the cards. Right. And so, you know, what concerns me there then is like, you know, the stable coin play,

you know, as we said for a long time, stable coins have the potential to be just as programmable and surveillable as a CBDC could be. And the Fed and the national security community, meaning, you know, the CIA, among other agencies, have been very open that stablecoins will ensure dollar hegemony. And you have, you know, stablecoins like Tether, for example, saying that we're a partner of U.S. dollar hegemony. And, you know, Trump with the, you know, his family's, you know, stablecoin project having recently come out.

it's about um having globalizing i don't think that's gonna get much adoption uh well no maybe not that necessarily but it shows that the intent is to globalize the dollar and essentially use dollar stable coins not that aren't necessarily directly issued by the u.s government but will be regulated by it uh to become you know essentially a de facto world currency you know that's essentially the push and uh you know it's essentially been happening relatively quietly for some time in economies that are dramatically unstable and have been made unstable by entities like the IMF, for example, which, you know, the U.S. military refers to the IMF as a financial weapon of military power of the United States government. Right. And so, you know, and then

Argentina, of course, a lot of people are using Tether because their local currency is no good And that's happening in other places around the world that have also been subjected, you know, to essentially financial warfare by the same predatory, you know, again, debt slavery model based institutions. And so will this actually improve the situation? Will it prevent future irresponsible fiscal policy if this is what ultimately ends up happening? Um, it, it, it's, it's, uh, it will come down to people resisting that and saying, no, that's not okay. Um, if really it is true that people in the Bitcoin space are opposed to debt slavery and debt-based monetary, um, a debt-based monetary paradigm, which is what I have heard for a long time. And I absolutely agree with that. And I am also concerned about the introduction now of climate finance as a way to use carbon market schemes or other forms of carbon pricing or some of these efforts to securitize the natural world. like one that we recently wrote about, about the Amazon rainforest, for example, being securitized by the guy that invented ETFs and used to be, you know, head of BlackRock's global investments or something like that. You know, that these are going to be used as different places to shovel

debt because if you have a huge debt crisis, you're looking for things to, you know, shovel the debt into to make your debt problem go away. And so, you know, as we've talked about, you know, I think starting, you know, maybe three years ago, Marty, you know, on your show, you know, I've been on talking about this effort a while, right? At least five. Yeah, an effort to securitize, you know, the natural world and create this new asset class, you know, that these groups that back this call nature's economy. because they can, you know, essentially quadruple or quintuple the amount of assets in the current economy and basically keep the existing casino model that Wall Street and these criminal banks have, you know, go on forever. They need that new asset class to keep their models going, you know, that generate them a lot of money.

And the fact that, you know, there's all these efforts from people like Lummis and Gillibrand and others that want to support the dual banking system that rewards irresponsible government fiscal policy and criminal acts of the private banks. You know, I'm concerned about that. And the fact that, you know, in Trump's administration in particular, you have someone like Howard Lutnick closely tied to Tether, but also very connected to ESG, the Sustainable Development Goals. Cantor Fitzgerald has an entire fund dedicated to implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Right. Which includes, by the way, digital ID is part of that and programmable, surveillable money linking a digital ID to some sort of CBDC or UBI biometric wallet and all of this stuff.

This is in the SDGs. And he's, you know, on the board of this company that we've talked about most of this year, actually called a SataLogic that is involved in all several efforts to securitize nature and turn basically things like the Amazon rainforest into, you know, tradable financial products that don't actually conserve anything but are framed as that. And then, you know, this effort to basically install a predatory global carbon market over Latin America that at the same time it ends local and national sovereignty or would de facto end it and lead toward a more regional government and regional government block and try and build out like a smart power grid and 5G stuff throughout the continent under the guise of conserving it and

ending climate change. You know, ultimately, you know, as I've argued in that, and Mark and I have argued in some of our other pieces, the goal is really just to use that stuff to shovel debt someplace. And even, you know, RFK Jr.'s former VP pick, Nicole Shanahan, you know, she's led projects, research projects about how to shovel, how to facilitate quantitative easing by quantitatively easing into, you know, carbon sequestration projects and tokenized carbon credits and carbon coins and all of this stuff. So this is something that is definitely being talked about by figures that are around the current administration. And if there is a debt crisis, uh, even though, you know, Trump, uh, pulled people out of the Paris, uh, accords and

all of that stuff. Um, you know, uh, I mean, Elon Musk, uh, quit all the advisory panels here in council councils. He was on in the first Trump administration because Trump, uh, ended the U S is, um, commitment to the Paris agreements. Right. Uh, but this time he's obviously come back in a big way. And as recently as February was pushing for carbon taxes and some other form of carbon pricing and has been a big advocate for that for really several years. And he's really not the only one. There's a lot of Republicans actually that were pushing for carbon taxes when Trump was in office last time. He didn't listen to them. But if it's considered or framed as necessary because of a debt crisis or something like that, you know, the tune may change. And,

you know, with someone like Lutnick, who's so I mean, he's not Larry Fink, but I mean, he's certainly not like an anti-ESG guy and not an anti-climate finance guy. And I mean, if you look into carbon markets or any of this other stuff, I mean, the reason they've been failing is because they're exposed time and time again as scams. So now the new thing is to frame them as high integrity carbon markets. We need high integrity carbon markets. But you're never going to get a freaking high integrity carbon market when it's criminal bankers making them up. Because criminal bankers do one thing and that's steal you know and so i mean that's what the carbon market they will make will do it's essentially inevitable um what was the what was what fink saying uh he

was like i'm sick of everyone talking about how this is the most important election you know we work with both parties like who gives a shit you know i mean he didn't say he gives a shit but well that is unfortunate you have kamala's economic team and biden's economic team essentially being run by BlackRock executives. And then, you know, when Trump was in office last time, Larry Fink had basically, you know, BlackRock designed U.S. fiscal, the U.S. fiscal response to COVID that they began implementing before a pandemic was even declared. And it resulted in one of the biggest, you know, transfers, wealth transfers in American history and printed more money than at any other time in U.S. history. And, you know, that was BlackRock. And they're

not going away. And the fact that Fink is is like we work with both administrations. I mean, they worked with Obama during 08. They worked with Trump and they worked with Biden and would have worked with Kamala. Yeah, he's not he's not he's retired the term ESG and uses things like sustainable investing and climate finance and other terms now. But he openly says that it was never about conservation or saving the planet. It's about profits. And if you look at Larry Fink's track record, like what I just mentioned with COVID fiscal policy, you know, their track record is basically stealing wealth from the public and then using control they take over corporations or pension funds or, you know, other things like that to try and force behavioral changes among

corporations and the American public. And what sort of behavioral changes does Larry Fink want? I think we all know by now. Well, also, all you have to do is look at is look at the lockdown I mean, and look at how Going Direct was written before there was a talk of a virus. And you have to look at the lockdowns as it was fiscal policy to crush demand, to be able to print a bunch of money, give it to Wall Street and let them buy everything up. If you actually think about the implications of that, think about the implications of that. They committed the greatest violation of human civil liberties, maybe arguably in human history, or certainly modern era, right? They locked everybody in their homes, completely murdered the middle class, printed more money than anything. And after they had spent all of this time building out the euro dollar market, dollarizing the entire world, and then they inflated it, you know, away and it's going to continue to inflate away.

And we're not we're going to see the effects of this, you know, for our entire lives. But this was a plan. This was done. And I know that's controversial and maybe get you demonetized. I'm sorry, Marty, but I think it really was. If you look at the you look at the the the plans, I mean, they they planned this before the virus happened and then they locked everybody down. And what else happened? You know, it's very obvious to look at 9-11 and see, oh, wow, there was this huge expansion of the intelligence state because of regulation that happened from this event. The intelligence state expanded in a very disturbing way, extremely so under Trump and during the lockdowns and who was able to kind of run in this crisis, you know, run fiscal policy, who was able to run the data for these for these the implementation of Operation Warp Speed, the deregulation of pharmaceutical products, you know, who made billions and billions of dollars and who got crushed and who got, you know, in some cases, literally killed. It's an absolute travesty. And this was done for money. And it was done, I would say, arguably, as sort of a controlled demolition to force us all into the

new financial system. I know that's controversial. And it's a it's a kind of a step to make to be like, wow, this was this really all a plan. And I think I think it was, when you look at the treasury market. You look at the repo market. I mean, this is a decades long, you know, expansion of the monetary debt system. Let's dollarize everything. You know, in the early 80s, we were the largest creditor in the world. And by 87, we were the largest debtor. You know, where did all that money go? A lot of it went to Latin America, this whole Latin America debt crisis. There was the savings and loan scandal that was heavily connected to the CIA and the Bush family and James Baker. They were even some connections to some Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiaries in there.

We see this huge expansion of debt. We see the Plaza Accord, which was sort of coordinated central banking. We saw coordinated central banking again in 2020. You know, Mnuchin was the one that recommended Powell and they all came in there and they worked with central banks around the world and they all came together to say, let's all go to zero interest rates. You know, we have to fight pandemic. And then what happened? The U.S. raised rates faster than ever in history and completely broke the bond market. And the dollar is stronger than ever, even though it's inflating like crazy. And we printed, you know, how many trillions of dollars and basically handed it to BlackRock. These people are financial manipulators. They are currency speculators.

They understand this stuff better than anyone. They know how to launder profits. They know how to manufacture consent from the people. They started building out social networks. They started building out blockchains, you know, issuing private bank digital currencies. They basically set everything up in this incredibly perfect way. And here we are with this huge populist movement running in. Trump has more of a mandate than ever. And he really was an essential part of allowing this coup and this robbery to happen.

unfortunately um and the people around him are still a lot of those same people uh and here they are um and if you really look at what the implications of what we should have learned from covert era for some reason um we're forgiving everybody that we just handed the keys to the castle to uh for the role that they in the expansion of the monetary supply and the expansion of the security state um and here we are uh it's time to hold people accountable i don't know why Trump gave Fauci a medal. I don't know why he gave him any power at all. I don't know why they deregulated pharmaceutical, you know, red tape to speed things along. I don't know why they let Palantir run all the data for this distribution. But now we're here. We have to learn from the

immediate history. And we can't get sidetracked by these quick social media pivots and this this feeling that we've won, uh, when actually we were just robbed our, our entire like generational wealth was, you know, maybe not us cause we hold some Bitcoin, right. But anybody that didn't hold Bitcoin before then, and has been holding dollars, I mean, they, they really were robbed. Our parents were robbed, our grandparents, our uncles or whatever. Um, it's, it's, it's an incredibly nasty thing that happened. Uh, and it wasn't an accident, uh, in, in any way, shape or form. Well, it was a wealth transfer that went beyond the wealth transfer. That was the 2008 economic crisis um and you know what concerns me is that one of the top people uh being floated for a

treasury secretary position under the new trump administration is this uh james paulson guy uh who was one of the most successful 2008 criminals and made more money than anyone else but really should have been prosecuted for the way he did that because the bank he worked with goldman sacks actually ended up sort of getting prosecuted for it no one was really prosecuted in 08 but there were civil cases, very few. And this, what was the, it was like called Abacus. And there was another one that Paulson and Goldman Sachs worked on together. And that was one of the few that was so egregious. It actually resulted in a civil lawsuit, even though yes, no bankers went to jail, no banks were really punished. There were some fines handed out, but there was really no

accountability. And when you have that scale of wealth transfer and theft happen with no accountability, you can be sure that the same people responsible for that were like, we can continue to fleece the public and steal more if we do it the right way, you know. And so the fact that, you know, he's even he's being considered, you know, for that position, I find very concerning. And as I understand it, the other pick is Scott Bessant, who is a former money manager for George Soros, which, you know, doesn't necessarily appeal to me either, or at least doesn't suggest that it will be fundamentally, you know, different than maybe preceding Treasury Secretary policy at the end of the day. But again, we will see. Hopefully it will be someone

not that terrible. And there are some people in his camp that are big, sound money people and backing the dollar with something of substance. Maybe something will come of that. But what has been most telegraphed is generally been this this Bitcoin dollar stable coin play that we discussed earlier. But given that those people are in the Trump camp, if people want to see something different, they should push to have those people elevated over people like Paulson, who, you know, used credit default swap fuckery to make up a zillion dollars at the expense of lots of other people um yeah specifically it was what it was state pension plans basically he worked with goldman and created these vehicles um that had all of these junk just total junk mortgages and

a bunch of bullshit in them and he took a negative a short position on them and then he had goldman sell them to like arizona state pensions and as a good investment as a good investment going to fail and they shielded as this good thing meanwhile he has this huge short position on it and uh he's It's considered one of the greatest trades ever because he made billions of dollars in a day when it went under. But it's robbery. That is robbery 100 percent. He stole from regular lower and middle class Americans to make the greatest trade ever. And I don't necessarily see that as appealing when you have over arguably definitely before the year 2000 but since then so many orchestrated wealth transfers and robbery of people's wealth time and again and no accountability.

And this is the person that you'd like to put in charge of the Treasury, and that's been the most floated. The only name that Trump said on the campaign trail as a possible Treasury secretary was the Paulson guy, and he's still at the top of the list. If you look at Polymarket today, it looks like Besant is leading with 55 percent probability. Well, better than Paulson, but we'll see. The Polymarket play is so interesting. I think the third candidate on there is Jay Clayton, right, the former CFTC, SEC guy. He's also an advisor to Fireblocks, which is, you know, at one point was going to do the stablecoin issuance for Facebook's Libra. They're heavily connected to the IDF and Israeli intelligence.

And Israeli intelligence veterans made the company. And they use MPC, which is insecure compared to multisig. That's a whole other technical rabbit hole we could fall down. Rob Hamilton is fuming right now. um the uh i mean a couple things i mean going back to like cynthia lummis and gilderbrand i don't know gilderbrand well i do know cynthia um and her team very well and even though she may publicly posture like bitcoin's uh strengthening the dollar and all that i think it is important to the consideration just like the the rhetoric around bitcoin being adopted as a reserve asset

and thinking of like the debt situation the government does have a needle to thread if they are going to allow bitcoin to proliferate facilitate growth within the united states of individual bitcoiners bitcoin businesses because if they send the signal to the market like oh we're dumping the dollar we're going all in on bitcoin like they have this massive 36 trillion dollar debt problem that is systemically important to a somewhat stable financial system globally and so i think they have to be very strategic about how they position so i wouldn't be surprised if the um the head nod to the dollar is going to be around for a while is simply just a a late hedge against potentially rugging the treasury markets like in a moment's notice

um and then yeah drunken miller's shorting the bond market there's there's i think i saw you talking about that yeah drunken miller short uh paul tudor jones is recommending that people don't own bonds and so the government is in this federal government's in this position where it's like we have this 36 trillion dollar gorilla in the room and we need to figure out how to safely um walk it into its cage well i'm sure howard lutnick is trying to figure out how to do that since he's one of the biggest traders of u.s government debt yeah yeah at one point you know like 70 of all u.s treasuries were like settled through cantor and cantor subsidiaries which is which is totally insane yeah and like going back to like the the co-option of bitcoin that's i mean that's another

part of the game theory has been talked about for a while it's uh and something i've been saying written about it said uh you don't change bitcoin bitcoin changes you and that's the optimist eternal optimist maybe some will say it is naivety um or gullibleness but it i do would not be surprised if people within the government have seen bitcoin for what it is and are like oh shit this is the thing we need to basically act to make sure that we are well positioned to not get left behind um and are trying to figure out a way to basically i mean using jerome powell's words jenny elms words create a soft landing transition um in which bitcoin is allowed to flourish with that being said like yeah jill de bram particularly i don't like her position on privacy kyc aml

well she's hillary clinton's successor in new york she was picked by clinton and she considers hillary her mentor yeah all you really need to know so that's like i think again going back to anchoring to accountability um and vigilance that's i'm cautiously optimistic like that's the other thing like going back to trump's first term in 2016 like i'm sure you guys have heard like um the narrative that he was completely handcuffed he got into office and didn't know how to operate within the bureaucracy of the federal government and sort of had the the uniparty blob forced on him and i will say this time around does seem like he's learning the lesson like he the msnbc i don't know if you guys are watching at the night of the election i clicked

for a little bit i don't think i've ever watched msnbc i clicked over for the first time in a year i just i heard it here marty loves msnbc i just wanted to see what these people were saying and one of the things that was actually signaled to me i picked up on was that trump's campaign has not been communicating with the white house transition team which is you're supposed to do for months leading up to the election to ensure that there's a a um a sort of a efficient uh exchange of power yeah when uh when when the new administration comes in and then you see i mean the few appointments that we have seen um wiles yesterday being chief of staff i looked tear up her background she seems pretty pretty confident she's the daughter of pat summerall

an american i know i think that's so funny well sure but she helped elect uh rick scott uh to be governor of florida uh who uh was previously a pharmaceutical executive that committed fraud um and in florida i believe his nickname uh is skeletor uh he's now a senator um and uh she was also a big time big pharma lobbyist including for uh her uh firm uh represents gabi the vaccine alliance well that's what makes all this thing this coalition interesting because you do have this sort of uh embedded gridlock between the people some of the people behind trump like it seems like like i'm sure you saw the big pharma execs are all on a conference call preparing for the incoming administration yeah but at the same time marty it's like going back on going on tesla

is going back to vigilance and accountability again yeah not saying things 100 100 100 like these are the things i'm looking at like for sure there is you know i think you're the man it's just i think elon i mean he was building uh mrna tech technology for the curevac in tesla factories he's saying the science is an equivocal uh you know huge proponent for vaccines and coveted insanity at the very beginning obviously then he pivoted as all these people did when it it was no when it was like no longer politically dangerous and it no longer really mattered uh they all pivoted um vivek uh you know also heavily involved in mrna stuff um uh you know this this there's so much pharmaceutical money and lobby in that in that little avengers group of people that

that that people are so fucking stoked about um i know you want to say something on that right well Well, I have a lot to say about pharma in general. So really, since before COVID-19, Big Pharma had a major issue with what are known as patent cliffs. And patent cliffs are basically where drugs that they had exclusivity on go generic and they can't make as much money off of them anymore. And there's also a problem. That problem is combining with an R&D problem for traditional pharmaceuticals, where drugs that can be marketed under that exclusivity model just aren't really, don't really, they can't really find anything new that's profitable and works and can pass existing regulations to make it to market, right? So what most big pharma companies have done, and it really grew substantially during the COVID era, was that they teamed up with technology firms or smaller biotech firms. So out of that, for example, you saw GlaxoSmithKline team up with Google and made Galvani Bioelectronics.

On the board was Monsef Salawi, who was later put in charge of Operation Warp Speed, for example. And there's a lot of these team ops where really you sort of have tech merging with pharma to usher in sort of this new era of what are being referred to as precision medicines and various things like that. That was allegedly the motive for the Biden administration to create the health DARPA, which they called ARPA-H. It was considered under Trump as well, but under the name HARPA. But nevertheless, it exists. And what concerns me about that is, OK, so in Trump's first term, he deregulated biotech extensively, mainly in terms of GMO crops, to the point that anti-GMO organizations and small farmers sued the Trump administration over the proliferation of GMO crops as a consequence of that policy. So there is a precedent for him sort of unchaining GMO development. And it's very possible that could happen in terms of medicine since Operation Warp Speed arguably was that. Elon Musk, as Mark mentioned, invested in mRNA technology, but so is J.D. Vance, so is Vivek, and so are a lot of other people that extensively backed Trump. For example, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, his VC from 8BC, is involved with this company called Resilience that has a lot of ties to the CIA, including the head of In-Q-Tel on its board. And they started producing all of the mRNA for the COVID shot, or at least Moderna's COVID shot at some point and are, you know, have built up this huge enterprise with the goal of creating a lot of biotech medicines and all of that. And it's very likely because this is a huge thing that it's not just Vance and these guys, the big Silicon Valley guys, the biggest ones are all hugely invested in biotech.

It doesn't matter if they backed Kamala or they backed Trump. It's essentially across the board. And there's a huge push for this. um and it's tied up too with you know a lot of push from silicon valley and their products itself for like health wearables or wearables that can be applied to health care which have troubling surveillance capabilities you know you had like you've all you've all know a harari during covid say once they get it in your body they can read your brain and you'll be sent to the gulag for not clapping for the leader and whatever you know please please clap yeah yeah

The early signal, like Joel Salatin being brought into the USDA. I think that is very positive. It's like, why do we get away from GMO? Well, let's hope so. But again, remember, Trump's first term, and generally Republicans in general, tend to say we're going to get rid of the red tape for innovation in the industry. But the problem with GMO crops, for example, is that they're a threat to health. They're an environmental threat and they threaten small farmers that don't want to produce GMO crops because they can cross pollinate and contaminate. And GMO crops have been used time and again to force farmers into debt slavery where they were introduced in places in the global south like India led to a rash of suicides of Indian farmers who were.

No, it's definitely a thing because they were trapped in these debt slavery cycles with Monsanto having to buy seeds because they can't say you can't save GMO seeds. Right. And then having to buy the chemicals to grow them and all of this stuff. And it's very problematic. So, you know, it can be problematic in that sense when you deregulate something that threatens people's health around you. And I think that's arguable, too, with some of these under tested and very controversial biotech, you know, injections, for example, as we saw with mRNA, you know, concerns about shedding, for example, concerns like that. Is it OK to deregulate those things? Not that I'm saying that regulation is always the answer. Absolutely not. But, you know, I think it could be complicated to do those things. Well, deregulation is a misnomer. It's a red herring. I mean, the idea of what of what deregulation is, is it's re-regulation. And really the way that it works in practice and as we've seen historically is it's kingmaking. They use deregulation with very specific clauses and grandfather, you know, expiry terms. And so and so we look at, you know, well, how did what happened with Glass-Steagall?

Again, something Trump campaigned on, you know, bringing back and then deregulated the banking industry even more in 2018 and up the limits from the too big to fail banks from 50 billion to 250, which had honestly pretty big implications on the regional banking crisis. It's not that, you know, you'll read that in the Teal-funded Pirate Wires, but, you know, the way that Glass-Steagall worked, it was deregulation. It was. Citibank put $100 million into, you know, lobbying people like, you know, the head of the Senate Banking Committee at the time, Alphonse D'Amato, who was heavily connected to Gillenbrand. And what Glass-Steagall actually did was it king made city and travelers, you know, which became Citigroup to become, you know, this just unbelievable, you know, blob entity. And, you know, we saw people jumping in and out of the public sector and private sector moving in. But but really, it was guised as getting rid of red tape and blah, blah, blah. And it's going to be so good, this big boom. But really, it just consolidated and centralized. And I think we're going to see that, you know, again, when we're looking, you know, again, to bring it back to stable coins, because that's all I know what to talk about.

You know, the fucking bill here. These are the same people. And what is this regulation actually going to do? There's clauses in there that literally say, well, if you're already above 10 billion and you're here and, you know, they already have these clauses that, you know, will be good for USDC, like Lummis said. Yeah, she pretty much said that, didn't she? That as it's written, it favors circle over tether. So, I mean, that's an example of how these bills king make. Not that Tether, we don't obviously have a pretty negative view of Tether, but USDC really isn't much better, and there couldn't be deeper, more deeply tied to BlackRock, among other unsavory entities. Right. And then the other big part of this thing is that, you know, in this regulatory expression is the idea that anybody using dollar denominations are now under the purview of the regulatory arm of the United States.

And that could get really weird, really interesting, like really quickly. Right. Because why are all these groups like Lightning Labs, like LightSpark, which have multiple connections to PayPal, Libra, when and visited with Lightning Labs, when they were working on Libra, David Marcus then goes and leaves and does LightSpark. They are actively putting dollar instruments into the Bitcoin blockchain. That is what they're trying to do. They're creating all of these ways to create dollars on Lightning. And literally, yes, like Taproot Assets is in the blockchain specifically. It's misnomer to say it's on Lightning. They're transacted on Lightning, but there are dollar instruments now on all of your nodes. What does that mean then?

Does that mean now everybody using Bitcoin somehow is under the regulatory arm of the United States because there's dollar instruments on there? There's a lot of complicated things that can happen from the way that this is – that the Bitcoin space is moving. And like Saylor, this fucking spook who has Mayo Shattuck on the board of fucking Alarm.com, the guy, the insider trader of 9-11, who – it's disgusting what he did. It's disturbing. He's on the board of Michael Saylor's company. Anyway, Michael Saylor, total spook, he's coming in and saying, you know, hey, don't fight the system. Don't be a martyr. Let's bring dollars onto Bitcoin and it will be a multi-trillion dollar industry and the Bitcoin will get stronger.

And, you know, again, he was kind of the first guy to come out and really start this. Hey, maybe Bitcoin isn't really against the dollar. Maybe they're working together. And, you know, there's so many people now that are rising up into this space. They've really manufactured consent for bringing dollars on Bitcoin. It doesn't make any sense. It's incredibly dangerous. It's very stupid. Scaling is not going to be done through dollar denominated tokens. It's stupid. There are other ways to do this. We can create dollar like instruments that don't touch treasuries that wouldn't be under the purview of this this Gillenbrand Lemus law, like, you know, kind of like some of the things you guys have been involved with with Fedde or with Fedde. You know, there's there's some things here that can be done. I'm not sure that e-cash is 100 percent the answer in any way, shape or form.

I think we need to scale Bitcoin, figure out how to get it to scale. Keep locks small. We are not closet B cashers, but fucking figure it out. What covenant solution are we going to do? How are we going to get it so billions of people can hold UTXOs? I don't want everybody using fucking AquaWallet. I don't want them using Tether. I don't give a fuck about that.

I don't want them using Liquid. I'm sure there are amazing people working on all those products, but I don't think that the mechanism is where we want to go. I don't want to scale through dollars. I want to scale through Bitcoin. I want to scale through sats, and I think we should be pushing towards that. Yeah, I hung out with Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs for a few hours yesterday. He's great. He's super nice.

no and i think i mean that's what i worry about like the like i hope like to people working at these companies but like tether lightning labs on lightning via tappered assets i think is a genuine attempt to meet market demand recognizing that people simply aren't transacting with bitcoin they're particularly in the emerging world uh they're using stable coins because they don't want to stomach the price volatility of bitcoin and that product is an attempt to meet the demand of the market and i it doesn't scare me as much as it um scares you because i think bitcoin ultimately wins and it goes back to the problem of the debt um which like bitcoin is a superior monetary instrument in every regard it's just going to take time for people to realize that

And I mean, we can go the dollar milkshake theory seems to be playing out. And that's totally, of course, I don't think it's a consequence of nefarious intention. It's just pure monetary economics and competition. I think it's absolutely from. I mean, the U.S. dollar system wants to spread as far as it can because it needs people to use their instruments. It needs it needs velocity. You know, there's a reason why the U.S. again went in the 80s from being the largest creditor in the world to the largest debtor. That was on purpose.

they let the euro dollar market build on purpose they created instruments to build these things they created mechanisms to spread the dollar faster you look at you know there's some there's some pretty crazy i agree with i agree with that i think the dollar like the the the market dynamics i'm describing are consequence of this attempt to push the dollar on everybody yeah and i i say this a lot like i really empathize with people you know i've been spending time in in south america while working on some of this stuff and you you talk to people and they're like oh yeah tether's amazing it's great uh you know we love it that that's true i mean i'm not like denying that that's true but like how much of that is because a lot of bitcoin scaling opportunities were neutered uh you know

how much of that is be that's that's a quick like i would push back i think bitcoin has scaled tremendously like it is scaling perfectly if you look at the amount of value settled on an ongoing basis it's continually going up tens of trillions of dollars at this point and again i think it's like uh using bitcoin as a transactional currency with stable value like people just haven't recognized it as that yet and so they're using stable coins like i don't think it's i i truly believe that stable coins are an attempt to meet market demand of people who don't want to stomach volatility i don't like it i don't think people should do it but i think recognizing the reality of the situation is that there is this demand for the ability to send dollars over these networks

relatively cheaply very quickly outside um relatively outside of this regulatory gray area at least for the time being up to this point um and i don't worry about like stablecoins get to a trillion dollar market themselves i don't think it really would prevent bitcoin's ultimate success well what i'm worried about with stablecoins might be a little different than maybe what you or mark or some other people worried about for example in the case of tether um they're openly willing to seize um people's wallets at the behest of ofac or the Treasury Department if they're put on the U.S. government naughty list. I find that very problematic that if someone, for example, in Argentina or another country is holding tether

and the U.S. government decides, I don't know, let's pretend they have a government they don't like. They do right now. Right. But it's someone else. And then they're like, oh, we're going to sanction whoever, you know, they can take someone's dollar denominated, you know, stable coins or whatever, and just seize them without any sort of accountability. And then that way, you know, for as I mentioned earlier, about how the US military views the IMF as a tool of financial power, they view sanctions that way, too. And if Tether and presumably other stable coin issuers, but specifically with this effort to regulate all dollar stable coins, have them all be regulated by the US government, there is the potential for the US government to very much

abuse that and also use it as a tool for wanton financial surveillance in the same way that you have people like Augustine Carson's at the BIS saying we want to have complete visibility into every, you know, cent essentially that people spend and it will, and now we have the technology to enforce that. We want total control. Stable coins can lead us to that paradigm. And at the same time, I would argue that one of the most damaging things that has happened in the past several hundred years is the debt-based monetary paradigm. Debt crises have been manufactured by criminals time and again to steal people's wealth all over the world, leading to great suffering for people really everywhere in ways that, I mean, I think people forget that, I mean,

And pretty much in the case of Latin America, pretty much as soon as Latin American countries became independent, they began to be attacked by banks and started having their first debt crises, again, manufactured, most of them by the Bank of England or by British banks or the City of London. But that has continued for decades and decades. The cycle repeats, and it's happened everywhere. And now, you know, since the Bretton Woods system in post-World War II, you've had the You've had the World Bank and these entities, you know, using debt slavery essentially to, you know, force countries to do things they otherwise wouldn't do, erode sovereignty and, you know, steal from people and abuse entire populations.

that paradigm should not continue in my opinion and by allowing it to continue and by trying to like yoke bitcoin for example to that paradigm i think um really would be a loss of an opportunity to use bitcoin to neuter what is uh one of the greatest enablers of financial criminality of for centuries. And I think it's going to be difficult to truly liberate people from the criminal system that runs our government and most of our world, frankly, if we continue to allow that debt-based paradigm to continue and have a particular government that, I mean, I've noted in my book, for example, has been controlled by criminal elements for a very long time. And maybe people think the criminal elements will be less now, but we can't quite be sure, can we?

Do we really want one government to have so much power over people's money, including in countries that are not the United States? I completely agree. And that's, I mean, it's, I mean, we've, Matt and I on Rabbit Hole Recap for the last six years have been warning, like, people, again, it's like recognizing that there is this use case that's being filled by these stable coins. but we've been warning for six years like these are centrally controlled and get rubbed yeah at any moment and that's like i don't think bitcoin ever gets yoked to the stable where there's definitely some interplay between the two but i don't think the stable coin markets have any control over bitcoin the protocol specifically they definitely don't absolutely not i wasn't saying that no no i'm not saying that you are but i'm saying like right there's people need to get

rugged people are going to get rugged yeah the ofac list number is going to go up people are going to be like all right but but bitcoiners might get rugged when if the the price of bitcoin gets so high and which is you know a good thing generally but these people that hold small amounts and in shittily consolidated utxos and they can't spend them uh or it's so prohibitively expensive and so how can they get them out they can use you know key swaps atomic swaps with you know groups where they they move into dollars and other instruments perhaps it forces people if bitcoin you know kind of doesn't necessarily figure out maybe a shared utxo model or you know lightning is really cool for interoperable uh settlement between like institutions but it's not really

that great um you know for individuals for daily payments and stuff so like where does that wealth go where where does it you know what what are you forced to use and if we leave bitcoin sort of where it is um with its sort of uh you know perhaps inability to service uh you know the majority of the world they're going to have to use dollar instruments um because that's the only other thing that we've built out that has a network that's ready uh to be able to scale to that level so i think that we probably will see uh you know dollar instruments take more of a share out of bitcoin unfortunately in terms of transactional peer-to-peer volume that was kind kind of the point here. I don't I think Bitcoin is awesome. I'm less interested in it if it's

just a reserve asset and less so a peer to peer currency. I don't think that stable coins stop Bitcoin from being able to be transacted. Obviously not. But price dynamics might be able to limit that. There's an amazing book that came out. There was a paperback edition in 2008 called Who Controls the Internet by Goldsmith and Wu. It came out on Oxford Press and talks about in the updated version about how the internet movement it was this like liberation movement right and in the 90s it just focused on all you know john perry barlow and all of these sort of declarations of being like the internet will dissolve the nation state and they'll have no ability to control it uh it's gonna be so based and awesome and it's just totally great

and let's go and then they spent the next decade the 2000s like begging regulators and governments to like uphold free speech and and markets and it became like actually no the government or the the internet doesn't dissolve borders like that. It really doesn't. And the way that, you know, countries and sovereign nations are able to sort of, you know, fight and restrict data coming in and out of the country. Of course, there's technology like the China, you know, firewall or whatever, but there's, but it's actually lawfare and it's financial sanctions. And so like Yahoo wants to, you know, host Nazi memorabilia on an auction site. This is a real story that happened in the late 90s. And France has a law that says, you know, you can't

sell Nazi memorabilia. You would think, oh, well, hey, you know, Yahoo is a U.S. company who cares. You know, they can just say, fuck you. But they can't because they have, you know, financial, you know, instruments that exist in France that can get pressure put on them. And then they ended up actually pivoting away and not listing these things even in the U.S. markets. So the Internet And technology, even though it's this hyperconnective tissue, it doesn't just like dissolve the nation state immediately. And you look at some of the issues. Again, I really recommend people check out this book. It talks a lot about, you know, the U.S. control over the Internet and the ICANN system, which was sort of done.

You know, we apparently kind of gave up, you know, sort of root access to ICANN, you know, under Obama in 2016. We kind of really didn't. It's kind of a little bit loosey goosey. And the U.S. actually has still a huge amount of control over the Internet. We've seen people get their websites ripped out of DNS for things like Gab. Right. You know, we've seen that happen. The idea that Bitcoin, just because it can't be diluted or seized, which I agree with mathematically, doesn't mean that the instruments that propagate things can't be restricted. Doesn't mean that the privacy elements are even going to be possible with Bitcoin.

And in fact, you know, pretty much nothing you do on the Internet is private at all. It's incredibly hard to find any sort of privacy on the Internet. That's not going away anytime soon. So I think when you see like intelligence agencies and law enforcement, you know, being onboarded onto, you know, these blockchains and of these private issuers, that's not going to stop happening. These bills, these regulations, as the U.S. moves towards digital currency, it's only going to get worse. And we have to kind of like really take a step back and be like, how actually ready are we for this war that's going to happen? Because we're sovereign individuals. It's cool. We actually probably will make it like us because we have a good amount of Bitcoin. We have a capability to spend no matter where the market goes.

The mempool, you know, we'll be OK, but a lot of the world probably won't. And so, like, how do we do we want to just get rich and just kind of fuck off and disappear? maybe sometimes yeah um but that's not really what i got into bitcoin for and that's not what i want to fight for so in the same way i think that we have to be very uh you know not rest on our laurels the the fight is not over decentralization doesn't mean unstoppable and there's no other uh you know granular points like it is decentralized control but where does it push control to to isps to energy markets to chip manufacturers like there are centralization forces within the distribution of Bitcoin. You know, and I think Whitney had an amazing tweet

a few months ago that everybody fucking lost their fucking shit over. That was like, hey, this sucks. I don't want this to happen to Bitcoin. And I think it was actually demonstrated an incredible understanding of Bitcoin that it does go to these granular points. And we just need to fucking like, what do we want here? Do we want to just get rich? Let the U.S. government get rich. Let Michael Saylor become a pharaoh and Larry Fink build a giant pyramid somewhere and, you know, embalm his corpse and Peter Thiel lives to be 10,000 years old because he's like drinking blood or whatever. Like, do we want that? Like, I don't give a shit about any of those things. I think they're all financial criminals. I would rather someone that isn't

born yet be able to in 150 years be able to spend a UTXO. That's not just because their grandfather held Bitcoin. Right. I want that to be able to happen. And I think Roger Ver was wrong in a lot of ways, obviously, technology-wise and scaling-wise. But I think that there is a truth to let's make this a peer-to-peer thing. How do we enable that? And I know there's a lot of smart people doing it, but I don't think the answer is stablecoins. I don't think the answer is stablecoins either.

Because I think it's a centralization force. Yeah, no, and I think shout-out to everybody working on eCash. Shout-out to everybody working on Lightning, Noster. And so I think we've got to stay vigilant, keep everybody accountable i think bitcoin is scaling given the giving what it has at its fingertips right now people are obviously focused on covenants it's great to see arc launch i did the uh the test run of seconds arc implementation that seemed very promising somebody just came out with 160 bit uh it's apparently maybe the collision uh the collision covenants without

without a soft fork and so that's what like we're discovering how bitcoin works as time goes on too and i don't know again maybe i'm eternal optimist gullible naive but so am i i don't i don't i don't think i think optimism is great and we need optimism otherwise we wouldn't be doing any of this but we also have to no no that's why i love you too it's because like you also have to be aware of how you can be attacked and have the adversary yeah we get accused a lot uh of being doom pillars uh and offering no solutions and all of that but really i mean um you know i feel like at least in my case and i i believe in marx as well but i don't want to speak for him you know my views have been consistent ever since i started going on bitcoin podcasts about um you

know fuck wall street and fuck the state and i just haven't really uh changed that but maybe some people have you know different opinions now that there's been an about face from wall street and also the government as it relates to Bitcoin. And I think there is a reason that prominent stable coins like Tether have tried to cultivate ties and a favorable perception among Bitcoiners. And I would really hope that people would not be fooled by that and would remember, for example, the outsized role of Tether in FTX, for example, which seems to have been rather drastically memory-hold

Or the fact that they've openly partnered with the FBI, which, you know, runs war on domestic terror stuff and does all sort is essentially a cover up agency for the mob, basically, as opposed to actually being a meaningful law enforcement agency and creates their own terror plots that they then foil so they can justify larger bullets, budgets. Did you see the one from this week? Oh, the national guy? Yes. Oh, no, I didn't. Oh, Monday, right before the election. They're like, oh, we caught a domestic white supremacist terrorist who's going to bomb the grid system. His name, Joe Rogers.

Luckily, he was co-conspiring with five FBI agents. It's like, what the fuck is going on? Oh, no. Well, they do that to justify, you know, expanding their budget and expanding their powers. Look, you need us. We stopped terrorism, except we, like, told them to do it. And we gave them the gun. And we gave them the bomb.

And we told them it was a good idea. And we were his only friends. We weren't really his friends. We were feds. I mean, so many examples of that. So, yeah, Tether thought it was cool to team up with them and the Secret Service. And the Secret Service is part of the World Economic Forum PAC that's trying to end online anonymity and online privacy. So that's fun. Right.

And, you know, again, I think, you know, this this effort to sort of use stable coins to manage U.S. government debt. But the problem I have, and I can sympathize a little bit with the idea we don't want the dollar collapse because that causes economic instability. I mean, yes, that's obvious. But the problem is when you reward criminal activity from the private banks and the central bank that has been going on, well, really the Fed's entire history and really arguably for the private banks as well, they will continue that criminality. And if we allow them to do that, they will do it in the next iteration of whatever monetary paradigm they're poised to introduce with all digital, you know, currencies and things of that nature. And I don't think that the bankers deserve our trust. Yeah, they rob us and they've never been held accountable. They've never given the money back and they keep screwing us and finding new ways to convince us to trust them.

um and um i i think it's bad i think debt slavery is terrible um and should never ever be used again people should do their best to do everything they can uh to really root it out because debt slavery is slavery at the end of the day and there's been a global effort to herd us into a slavery system so uh let's not give it to them please yeah you know and we we're we're criminals now they just haven't written the laws like like we've just seen that i mean as much as we want to fucking talk about how badass bitcoin is and all this stuff it's like that you know there's nothing that ross did necessarily that was illegal maybe some things but but but but for the most part those legislations and those laws came out like kind of through discovery in this weird way of

oh actually no that is illegal actually it is illegal for the tornado cash people to do what they did actually it is illegal for the samurai guys with but to exchange prime numbers to to a write code that lets you exchange prime numbers with yourself i mean the samurai one is really insane i think there are some things you could argue with the raw stuff maybe that that was true obviously i think he's a hero and and and fuck the state obviously but i think the samurai thing is really interesting it's like in the tornado cash like they wrote those laws uh it wasn't illegal what they were doing when they did it uh and it's certainly not illegal just because you write a speech you know you write code and then someone uses that code to do something bad with it it's

not illegal to make a gun and then someone uses that gun and shoot someone uh obviously that's bad um did we disconnect there are we are we still here we're still here no oh great sorry obviously it's you know it's not illegal to make a gun and then have someone take that gun and do something illegal with it the the maker of the gun isn't responsible somehow that's not the case with digital asset mixing um and i think that that's you know without privacy you know i think a lot of this um you know anti-state stuff you know kind of goes away unfortunately we need privacy We need to figure that out. And they're going to just move the laws to arrest, you know, the good people that are working on these on these projects. And as they sort of begin to, you know, again, what I really think is what is happening with the stable coin play is extending the regulatory reach of the U.S.

government by saying anyone that touches a dollar is under our jurisdiction while they just spent the last 30 years spreading the dollar all across the world. um it's it's the the globe is dollarized um and so now they have jurisdictional um you know rights over everybody and they can you know make up the rules and say well hey if you did this without kyc or whatnot now you're a criminal um i think it's it's a scary precedent to drop down into um and so i think as much as we need to you know press to get our heroes out that that did get arrested we also need to sort of like establish that this is speech yeah um and this is something that needs to be defended you know from the amendment level um and that can't be applied to people outside of the united states it's it is ridiculous that roger bear was arrested let's give

uh let's give props where props are due to some people on wall street particularly ross stevens and i dig who really stuck his neck out there and wrote a white paper about why bitcoin is speech that should be labeled as such and it's funny and he quoted all the inscription uh that uh you know apparently it's like ccp or whatever um i've just heard some absolutely ridiculous comments on some of the ordinal stuff and i don't give a about ordinals but i like the inscription stuff and and i think that it is speech and if if maybe bitcoin is going to be used uh in uh to empower the state well hey maybe we can invert some of that stuff and we can publish ridiculous things on it and and and make some cool things happen um with people like us that have bitcoin

that can kind of use it in a in a in a dissonant way and i think that's the big question the big hope is that uh is wall street gun to use their will to bend bitcoin or is bitcoin going to use its will to bend wall street to act in a more uh free freedom oriented fashion i have to get on a call we need to do another episode soon because in your latest piece you mentioned light sparks uma which i think is actually a big problem needs to be highlighted and talked about and avoided uh i agree and uh man you are the man i agree we'll do a whole rip on that we need to catch up on that i've got to hop on this call thank you guys for doing what you're doing um let's do it again real soon because i do want to jump into that topic specifically because i think that's

something that people should be aware of yeah thank you make america great again baby make america healthy again joel salatin i'm gonna say joel salatin i saw that was like maybe maybe we're gonna get something here yeah let's do it baby peace and love freaks