We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC192 - Silicon Valley Mafia Holding the Elite’s Bitcoin w/ Mark Goodwin (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

In this episode, Mark Goodwin, author of "The Chain of Custody: The Mafia Holding the Elite’s Bitcoin," explores the article's central themes, the concept of 'covert dollarization,' and Bitcoin's im...pact on venture capital and US intelligence. We also cover privacy and security concerns, and the future of Bitcoin in emerging markets. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 02:07 - The central message of "The Chain of Custody: The Mafia Holding the Elite’s Bitcoin." 02:49 - Insights from Mark Goodwin's book, "The Bitcoin Dollar." 05:25 - Explanation of Endeavor and its importance in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. 09:13 - The concept of 'covert dollarization' and its implications. 23:25 - How venture capital firms, influenced by US intelligence and organized crime, shape entrepreneurs and how Bitcoin fits into this dynamic. 31:28 - Predictions for the future of Bitcoin in Latin America over the next decade. 35:07 - Privacy and security concerns for individuals using Bitcoin in data-driven models by Big Tech companies. 49:03 - The potential for Bitcoin to empower or challenge entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging markets. 50:59 - The impact of the US intelligence community's relationship with Silicon Valley on Bitcoin's development and adoption. 53:14 - Addressing the connection between organized crime and the elite’s control over Bitcoin to ensure it remains a force for good. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Mark Goodman’s article: The Chain of Custody: The Mafia Holding the Elite's Bitcoin. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Check out our Bitcoin Fundamentals Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. Today I have Mark Goodwin, who's the author of the Bitcoin Dollar, and now the recently released article, The Chain of Custody, which is the subtitle, The Mafia Holding the Elite's Bitcoin. During the show, we discussed the central themes of his work, covert dollarization, the role of Bitcoin in disrupting or reinforcing the influence of venture capital, intelligence agencies and the tokenization of dollars all around the world with much, much more. With all of that said, let's go ahead and jump right into the interview with the insightful
Starting point is 00:00:36 and knowledgeable Mr. Mark Goodwin. Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Bitcoin Fundamentals. I am here with the one and only Mark Goodman, Bitcoin Magazine. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, Preston. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here again. So, dude, this article, good Lord, you and Whitney, Whitney Webb for those that might not know Whitney. You sent this out. I started reading through it. And I'm there like, I don't know, a half hour later.
Starting point is 00:01:28 I think this takes about an hour, maybe a little bit more to go through this entire article. And I'm just, anytime I read content from you or Whitney, I'm just left like, how in the world do they do this amount of research in a single lifetime? This is like a book. The amount of work and everything you guys put into this. This is wild. And I want to start off with this. The name of this article is the chain of custody, the mafia holding the elites Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:01:54 So, Zinger of a title. But let's start here. What were you guys trying to accomplish in a very simple? way. Describe it very simply for the audience. What were you guys trying to accomplish with this article? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think as always, you know, I've done editing for a long time now. I think the best work always comes from stuff that you're really like passionate about and interested in. And this work, this kind of research vein we've been on for the last like six months or something like that, we've probably putting out four or five articles has really been looking
Starting point is 00:02:24 at this. Where does intelligence and private capital, venture capital connect? And then where does this sort of new financial system, this kind of idea of the Bitcoin dollar, where do these groups come and meet in the middle? So obviously Whitney's quite literally written the book on the first part of that, the intelligence affiliated venture capital and the mob and intelligence sort of meeting with fintech and technology firms and the public sector. And then I've written obviously a bit about the Bitcoin dollar. I wrote a book called the Bitcoin Dollar for Bitcoin Magazine. And yeah, so we've just been sort of kind of picking away at this from two different angles. and this research vein has really met in the middle for better or for worse.
Starting point is 00:03:02 Good, good for content, but maybe the implications aren't so fantastic. But I would say in general, this is the first one we've ever done key takeaways at the beginning. I had a lot of people reach out about the last one, that from above this kind of piece about this satellite company, and saying that they had tried running it through a bunch of LLMs and trying to do machine-assisted missions. And it was actually rejecting it, saying that, you know, this is a pretty conspiratorial piece with a lot of,
Starting point is 00:03:28 accusations in it. So we're actually not going to grok it for you. So this one, we decided to do it for the people. So right at the beginning, there's these key takeaways. But I would say in general, it is sort of this looking at intelligence affiliated VC firms, how since kind of the late 90s, dot com boom, have really just dominated the tech industry in general and specifically the financial tech industry. And then looking at how these firms have gone from being a profit generating via kind of like consumer revenue coming in from customers and rather being about creating these free-to-use networks, generating hordes of data and then selling that data to data brokers, intelligence agencies, what have you, and basically using customer data as sort of like a new
Starting point is 00:04:11 commodity. So that's still going on, obviously. And the biggest people that are sort of the most known for this, maybe the most successful of this are the Facebook affiliated groups and then, of course, PayPal. the PayPal Mafia, sort of this infamous group of folks that, you know, Reid Hoff and went on. He's a big part of this piece to do LinkedIn. PayPal was then bought by Pierre Amityar's eBay.
Starting point is 00:04:34 eBay was kind of one of the first groups to really do this data broker, basically private intelligence group. So, yeah, looking at these intelligence-affiliated VC firms and how they are, you know, now really moving into the digital asset space, extremely so. And then also looking at these entrepreneurial social groups, I'll use the word control, but how do you sort of influence the people behind these groups, the CEOs, kind of right at incubation of these startups kicking off. And in the COVID era, we learned a lot about the World Economic Forum's young global leaders
Starting point is 00:05:04 and how they sort of, it was that great Klaus Schwab quote of like, we infiltrates the cabinets and how there was this sort of world lockstep kind of response to COVID. Well, you had a lot of these sort of social groups that was focused on the public sector, again, infiltrating the cabinets and being a lot of the world leaders are significantly influenced by these social groups. So now we're looking at these, not so much the public sector, but the private sector social groups. So this group in particular, that's a big part of the focus of this piece is endeavor, which is very similar to like a YGL, but really looking at the private sector emerging markets, entrepreneurs. And the reason why they do this is because they can mask this commonality
Starting point is 00:05:44 of funding coming from a small group of people in this sort of like, oh, this is so great. It's this wonderful free market blossoming of innovation in Argentina. But really, it's like a couple people like Pierre Amityar and Edgar Bronfen Jr., or Reid Hoffman, who are using their funding and their influence to basically invest and influence into these like now core infrastructure groups of the modern economy. So looking at this endeavor group and unfortunately seeing a lot of ties to like a Jeffrey Epstein, a nexium, these kind of more coercive influential groups, these maybe even blackmail rings, you could say. So looking at all that, seeing all this coming together.
Starting point is 00:06:23 And then the piece sort of focuses a little bit on this one Bitcoin group, this company in particular, Zappo, sort of funded by this legendary bitcoiner, Wences Casares, who's considered the patient zero of Silicon Valley, orange pill teal and Hoffman and brought it to all of these, yeah, these stalwarts of kind of the American intelligence, information broker entrepreneurs, mostly coming out of California.
Starting point is 00:06:47 Yeah. When looking at Zappo, really interestingly enough, they're very Endeavor affiliated, Winces is coming out of Argentina, which is where Endeavor is focusing on emerging markets, Latin America specifically. And then you look at the first advisory board of Zappo and seeing D. Hawk from Visa, John Reed from City, and Larry Summers, sort of from the Treasury and from a bunch of other private and public sector kind of revolving door, when it's convenient in the private sector, when it convenient in the public. So there's a lot to learn from these guys, because these guys are sort of the proto-architects of what we call the Bitcoin dollar system are all right there on the Zappo board.
Starting point is 00:07:22 And then you look at what does Zappo do? It's basically set the benchmark for custody, really like doing absurd things, putting keys in space, drilling vaults and Swiss bunkers and developing these pretty crazy biometric systems for like really strong key management. And then, of course, at the same time facilitating stable coin and U.S. dollar banking, connecting it very importantly to the Bitcoin system. So that's the overview of the piece. Quite a bit of a rant there.
Starting point is 00:07:52 No, there's a lot here. Yeah, so that's the brief overview. And of course, this is just part one. Yeah, I'll stop there. But that's more or less what we've been working on here. I just want to highlight. So people that listen to our show are familiar with a company called Zappos, the shoe company.
Starting point is 00:08:07 This was the Tony Shea company. We are not talking about that Zappos. This one is spelled X-A-P-O. It's, now, you might have to help me here. I saw Gibraltar and I saw headquartered in Switzerland. Which one of those two is it? Is it out of Spain or Switzerland? So they came out of Argentina. That was where he funded it. But yeah, they re-registered in Gibraltar. In Gibraltar. You know, for jurisdictional reasons. Yeah. And then the actual, that kind of infamous Zappo Balls are in Switzerland. In Switzerland. Okay. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:08:36 Okay. Where I want to jump to right out of the gate, so you talk about Bitcoin dollars. And I think for the audience, when they hear you say that, they're saying, what does he mean by a Bitcoin dollar? Explain this as simply as possible. Yeah, totally. I think I've done this quite a bit now. I think the easiest way just to sort of establish the analogy is Bitcoin dollar a la Petro dollar. So it's probably the easiest analog. And the idea is much like the Petro Dollar. Well, let's explain the Petro Dollar, right? So Nixon Shock, early 70s, the U.S. to to cut from a gold-back standard where you could actually take your reserve notes, go to a bank, and get gold back. Legally, they had to do that. So you could argue, of course, right, the dollar was backed by gold. When exactly that mechanism sort of broke down from a market standpoint is up for debate.
Starting point is 00:09:26 But the actual Nixon shock happened in 71. And the U.S. officially removes itself from a gold standard. And it's a very interesting time. And everyone is sort of like, okay, well, here's the end of the dollar. There's going to be de-dollarization, all these things. And actually what happened was we saw military presence from the United States really significantly ramp up in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia. And we saw an establishment with the Saudi government of this petro dollar system in which for exchange for military defense, they would only allow the sale of petrol of oil to be denominated in dollars. So in effect, what that meant was the U.S. was able to offshore and shovel the should be inflationary effects of a DPEG dollar into the Middle East and said that anybody in Asia, anybody in Europe, really anywhere, anyone anywhere that needed oil that wanted to industrialize, they needed to buy dollars first.
Starting point is 00:10:25 So we created an artificial demand for dollars. I say we, like I had anything to do with it, but the U.S. created an artificial demand for dollars by establishing this. petro dollar system. And for 50 years or so, they were able to continue basically the U.S. treasury, if you will, but basically servicing U.S. debt by selling government debt and dollars to, yeah, anyone that wanted to industrialize, which frankly, anyone in the 70s, 80s, 90s, there was pretty much every country wanted to industrialize, and many of them were not oil independence. So establish the system. It's not a de facto monopoly, of course. There was settlement and other things, or rather it wasn't a literal monopoly, but it was a de facto
Starting point is 00:11:03 to a monopoly. So 95% plus of all global petro sales were denominated in dollars. So then we fast forward to 2020, right as the COVID lockdowns are starting and, you know, all of the big crash happens right in that like second week of March in 2020. And we see something that is totally absurd to me being, you know, kind of a 90s kid where all I've sort of known is the U.S. increasing presence in the Middle East, we see the oil futures go negative. So not quite literally, obviously it's a speculative thing, but basically they're paying people to take oil, which is just so completely absurd based on everything I've ever sort of grown up with. And then very shortly after the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan, right? But a very interesting thing
Starting point is 00:11:51 happening right about that same time, two months later in May is the Bitcoin halving, which for the first time brings relative issuance down below. below 2%, which is the target inflation rate of the US dollar, as well as gold coming out of the ground, right? Something in that 1.5%, something like that. So right before the Bitcoin relative issuance goes below the rate of the dollar in gold, we see this really funky thing happened in the oil markets. And that's when I would say was sort of the death of the petrol dollar and the creation of the Bitcoin dollar system is in that market mechanism. And so obviously Bitcoin crashed then as well, went down to like $3,300.
Starting point is 00:12:29 But it basically 20x within the next year, within the next 12 months. Pretty absurd for a commodity. So there's a lot of parallels to oil and to Bitcoin, sort of this like energy commodity. Obviously, a lot of things different. It's a lot easier to move Bitcoin around than it is to move millions of barrels of oil. But it is really an energy commodity. And we've created essentially the same de facto monopoly of the ins and outs of the Bitcoin system being 95% plus denominated in dollar pairs, whether they're stable coins or just
Starting point is 00:13:03 USD, but mostly stable coins. And so we've in effect created another demand for U.S. dollars within this inflation into an energy commodity, into the pricing of a deep-pegged energy commodity. So it used to be oil and now it's Bitcoin. And we're seeing a new demand for U.S. treasuries in the stable coin system, which is innately linked to Bitcoin's price appreciation. So that's kind of a quickie of the Bitcoin dollar system. But in effect, it's how do we create artificial demand for dollars as dollars get more and more printed and the individual purchasing power inflates away. We retain the net purchasing power,
Starting point is 00:13:43 much like we did in the petrol dollar system by creating artificial demand for U.S. Treasuries. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo. at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have
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Starting point is 00:17:51 That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. And the wild thing, I think that might be lost on folks, they hear about all of these things and they're saying, well, who in the world would keep buying on it? And they just don't have a deep appreciation for how much dollar-denominated debt there is around the world to the tune of trillions. and where they're going to have to go next because of impairment in fixed income markets
Starting point is 00:18:16 is going to be even crazier. Totally. Do you buy into this idea that pretty much the only buyer, kind of in the coming decade, starts to become the stable coin companies? Or who's going to buy this? I think it is the stable coin companies for sure. I think there is sort of a movement, at least socially, of kind of this de-dollarization with bricks currencies and there's a lot of talk of this here and there.
Starting point is 00:18:41 But we're not really seeing that in terms of actual, you know, the buyers. We're seeing huge amounts of demand for U.S. treasuries in these stable coin providers. I think in the article we say, and again, I think it changes every day because people sell, people buy. But, you know, the stable coin issuers are like the 18th largest holder of U.S. debt in the world, which is just insane. And growing at a rapid pace. Just growing like that.
Starting point is 00:19:04 And unbelievable pace. I mean, I think a billion dollars of tether was just minted today. And again, sometimes it's redemption. who knows, 250 million of USDC was issued today. And what that means is there has to be some sort of underlying asset to sort of offset these liabilities, these tokenized liabilities. And so they have to buy debt to basically create more dollars, which is exactly the same mechanism done in the private sector capital creation of the
Starting point is 00:19:29 banks that sort of hover around the Federal Reserve, right? I mean, the Fed doesn't print dollars. It prints treasuries with the Treasury. That sets the rate of yield of these treasuries that the Treasury makes. And yeah, so we're seeing 180 billion-ish or so, give or take, 20 billion of demand being bought by these stable coin providers. And you look at our biggest debtors, our biggest creditors rather, in like Japan and China, and it's just a little over a trillion, right? So already these stable coin providers, like tether specifically is like a tenth of the debt held by our longest debt partners in China and in Japan. And this is so new.
Starting point is 00:20:08 this is such a new currency or rather a new economy and it's just going to get crazier. It's just going to build even more and more and more. And I argue actually that the regulatory regime of the United States, of course, is they're the kingmakers. They're the ones that sort of set the policy that sort of dictates what kind of happens in the rest of the world. Obviously, it's a little Western-centric, but it's true, especially for the economy. I think that's true. And so we're seeing right now in adoption or at least an interest in adopting, you know, new capital requirements, for the United States system, like a Basel 3, that would actually have a significant influence in this sort of this axiom, specifically of Bitcoin appreciating and needing dollars on the books.
Starting point is 00:20:51 So if Bitcoin is determined as a liability and not really an asset in terms of balance on your balance sheet, then you need to offset Bitcoin appreciating with dollars as this capital requirement axiom, basically to appease, hey, there's a lot of risk in having Bitcoin. So if you want to play with Bitcoin, you want to have it on your books, well, you better hold a lot of dollars too. And so it creates this artificial demand and it creates this, you know, Bitcoin is this really special thing, right? Because it's demand inelastic. So no matter how much demand is there for Bitcoin, there's a set amount of Bitcoin issued every 10 minutes. It doesn't matter how many people want it.
Starting point is 00:21:28 So it's the first commodity ever to really establish that, whereas oil or gold or silver, these previous sort of energy standards, if there's a huge demand, spike for gold. Gold, 4x is in price. You can send three more people down the mine. Go get a bunch more gold. There's a lot more supply that hits the market and then demand goes down. Bitcoin doesn't care. It's completely demand agnostic. And so the supply
Starting point is 00:21:51 doesn't change. So you create the system where you actually have, you know, we've created this huge debt bubble of dollars, dollar denominated debt. And now we have basically this vacuum of Bitcoin that can suck all of this debt, this huge bubble. And right into this demand inelastic
Starting point is 00:22:07 asset. And if we create a regulatory environment that requires companies that hold in the United States, a lot of Bitcoin to hold dollars, now we've created this mechanism for Bitcoin to appreciate substantially and require trillions of dollars to be held by these institutions that hold Bitcoin. And so that's part of this Bitcoin dollar play that I think is really important with a Zappo. And that's why we were looking at this piece. I really wrote the Bitcoin dollar as sort of just a mechanism, was sort of a look at, okay, well, this is a complicated thing. A lot of people don't necessarily know how interest rates work or the treasury system works.
Starting point is 00:22:43 And I didn't really know until I was researching the book and getting into it. This knowledge is sort of obfuscated for a reason so that we don't know how it works. That's for sure. Yeah. Totally. And so you look at a Zappel and they built the two things that you really need to create this Bitcoin dollar system. One being obviously extreme security. You know, you want to hold these keys.
Starting point is 00:23:04 You want to inflate bits and bytes to be. worth trillions and trillions of dollars, which is where we think this is going as Bitcoiners, well, you damn well better be sure that you can secure those keys really well. And Zappo really built that. They did really absurd things. As I mentioned, putting stuff in space, digging it into the ground. They even did stuff where they created these pulse, like fingerprint scanners that have a pulse reader on them so that you can't just cut off someone's hand and put it on the thing to get someone's keys. It can tell if the hand's been cut off, right? Like all of these just super, to build a system that holds trillions of dollars, you need to have this highly
Starting point is 00:23:39 secure level of key management. And Zappo built that. And it came out of, it wasn't really what they were trying to do. It's sort of, it came out of just, I sold Bitcoin as this great thing to guys like Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. And then they wanted to buy millions of dollars of it. And then it grows thousands of percent. Now it's worth billions. And it came out of this just necessity of his friends saying, hey, keep these things safe for me. So you have to have that super high security. And then also you need to have, again, this right. regulatory environment, this capital requirement, and the Bitcoins be within the United States. That's obviously an essential part of this regulation play. And of course, Zappos sold its custody
Starting point is 00:24:14 service to Coinbase in 2019, including Grayscale, including just an absurd amount of Bitcoin. I think something like 514,000 Bitcoin, I think, were transferred to the United States from Gibraltar back into the regulatory regime of the United States via the sale. Grayscale specifically did like 225,000 Bitcoin, it was like $2.7 billion at the time. It was the largest cryptocurrency transaction at the time, all bringing it back to the United States from being held out of the regulatory regime of the U.S. So Zappa really has created the Bitcoin dollar system. Obviously, they don't affect regulations specifically. But then you go and you look at some of the biggest lobbyers in the country. And this is what kind of part two is going to be about.
Starting point is 00:25:00 And Wincest is the head of Coin Center. He's the chair of Coin Center, which is the biggest lobby in the U.S. And Paxos, which is affiliated with them and with PayPal as well. Charles was one of the founding members of Coin Center as well. So you start to see kind of this system being built. And yeah, here we are with basically a million Bitcoin have come back to the United States just specifically via through this company selling back to Coinbase. So that's where we're at.
Starting point is 00:25:27 And I think in the private markets. When you say that, you're saying, Privately through the ETFs that are held people have paper receipts for these Bitcoin. Okay. Right. Exactly. So it's like, okay, when the Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January, I think it was January 11th, there were 11 that were approved, Black Rock's Ibit, their I shares, ETF offering, which
Starting point is 00:25:47 is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs. I think they hold almost 400,000 Bitcoin now. They're custody with Coinbase, gray scale is with Coinbase. Arc 21 shares is with Coinbase. Bitwise is with Coinbase. So something like 800,000 Bitcoin, just with the ETFs are held by Coinbase custody, which of course is using the infrastructure set up by Zappo. So when BlackRock rang the bell for NASDAQ on January 11th, they invited WinCest to
Starting point is 00:26:15 ring in the bell with them, which I thought was interesting. You would, you know, there's really no direct affiliation between BlackRock's iBit and Zappo, except if you look at, oh, well, in 2019, actually they sold this whole service to Coinbase. interesting. So yeah, Zappar really has built the Bitcoin dollar. They were the first regulated bank to integrate USDT in 2023. They integrated USDC and 2022. And I think stable coins being this huge demand for U.S. Treasuries and this custody, this just unbelievable extreme security measures being built up by Zappel, here we are. So this Bitcoin dollar system that kind of became as sort of this idea that I had in 2021, the first time I wrote about it, now we've seen,
Starting point is 00:26:58 this basically appreciate into something that holds 5% of all liquid Bitcoin is like within this Bitcoin dollar system very directly. So yeah, it's very interesting the way that this is developed. I think the ETFs are a huge game changer for Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm sure when you've talked about it quite a bit here on the show, but this is a real game changer and the people that built the infrastructure are right here with Zappo. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.
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Starting point is 00:30:49 And you had mentioned the Weft's Young Global Leader Program, the YGL. For people that aren't familiar with this, like Justin Trudeau, there's a lot of other, like, very famous, maybe you can name more, but there's some very famous world leaders today that came out of this Wefts program. You're using this almost as an example of these social groups that entrepreneurial social groups that have been stood up to reinforce and seed and kind of percolate out these bigger agendas that they're trying to do. And instead of the Weft's Young Global Leader Program, you talk about this one that's called Endeavor. So explain how this works with respect to intelligence affiliated venture capital firms dominating this financial
Starting point is 00:31:37 technology industry. And like how much of an impact has Endeavor really had, I guess if you were going to put some magnitude on it, like how much is this specific organization had in your humble opinion? I know that's a very qualitative question. No, no, for sure. Well, I think I think the best way to answer it is through the way that they explained it themselves, which I think is in many ways. It's kind of disturbing a little bit. It depends on how you look at free markets. But basically, Bronfman in the 2009 Endeavour Gala, Bronfman came in a little bit later after the founding, I believe it was founded in 98. Bromfman came in, I think about a decade later. But Bronfman came in and he does this talk at the 2009 gala and he talks about how he was discussing with the Chilean
Starting point is 00:32:21 endeavor entrepreneur and was saying that the top three leading candidates in Chile at the time for the presidency all had used entrepreneurship as a like a pillar of their platform. All three of the basically the choices that the Chilean public had to be president were all pushing entrepreneurship. And when Endeavor was founded in 98, there was no word in the Spanish language for entrepreneur. And so he does this as and he says very specifically, this is all thanks to Endeavor. Basically, they've focused on emerging markets and specifically Latin America. And they came in and they established this private sector, this blossoming of private sector activity, entrepreneurial activity.
Starting point is 00:33:03 And specifically, I think Argentina is a huge one, Brazil. But yeah, like literally, this word didn't exist in Spanish and now everyone's pushing it. And you can see that the effect that this has on the language of the people, as well as obviously the public sector, right? I mean, these are three people running for president that are all pushing for. free markets and entrepreneurship. And I think a lot of people obviously will say, well, hey, isn't that good? Isn't this a success over? Let's look at something like what's happening in Argentina now with Malay. He's really pushing the free market. Isn't this great? Well, I think I am
Starting point is 00:33:34 a free market capitalist. I'm not saying that we should regulate away anyone's ability to participate in the market or not be able to run for president because they made money once. Like, I'm certainly not saying that. But when you look at that these are people that are all funded by a very small group of people that have connections. significant connections, not just weak connections, but significant connections to organize crime and intelligence-backed venture capital. You start to see that, well, maybe this isn't really the free market. Maybe this is crony capitalism. And it's having an effect on the language of the people, right? So I think an interesting thing to looking at with Endeavor. So, yeah, the YGL is basically this
Starting point is 00:34:10 public sector, infiltration of cabinets. And Endeavor is really going for private sector. And so I think it's important to look at the history of Endeavor. So Peter Kellner and Linda Rottenberg, funded and founded Endeavor, rather, having worked for this group, Ashoka, which was funded by Bill Drayton. And Bill Drayton is, he was a pretty big guy in the Harvard Business School. He started this thing, you know, these Ashoka roundtables where, you know, entrepreneurs and people would come together and they'd start sharing ideas. And this kind of, that was sort of the first real birthplace of this sort of like multiplier effect, as Endeavor calls it. But things like the PayPal mafia where it's like, well, how did these guys become multi-tile?
Starting point is 00:34:51 time billion dollar founders, like who strikes lightning, who strikes gold twice, right? Never mind three times, four times. And it happens because they're able to use their influence to corner markets and dominate them and basically look for opportunities for monopolies and dominate them. And this is not just me speculating that that's what Peter Thiel says. I mean, he goes up there and talks and says, go find a thing that someone is doing poorly. Don't look for competition. Competition's not good. Find a thing you can dominate and dominate. His book, Zero to One talks about like the desire to become a monopoly, like literally right in the book. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. He says competition is bad for profits. I mean, that's something that it's said. And this guy is this, you know, consider this libertarian champion of the free market. And he's literally saying competition is bad for profits. So I think that's an important framework for this a little bit, right? And again, I just want to be very clear, just so I don't lose my libertarian credibility here. I'm not saying the answer is regulation. I'm saying the answer is let's call the.
Starting point is 00:35:51 these people out and let's call a spade a spade, right? So Bill Drayton, this guy who funded Ashoka, he was the guy that invented the term social entrepreneur in like the 70s in 1972. So right about the time the petro dollar is being established and the Nixon shock happens. So he's coming out of Harvard and is bringing up this whole new idea of the citizen sector. So you have the private sector, the public sector, and then you have this middle ground, this nonprofit sector. And there wasn't really a thing going on there in the early 70s. It wasn't really a big thing. So he comes out of Harvard and establishes this group, Ashoka, and probably the most important thing
Starting point is 00:36:27 that came out of this group was this idea of like microfinance and microloans, which is obviously kind of the predominant way that people think about financially affecting emerging markets nowadays is through like micro loans. You know, on the face of it, it sounds like, oh, that sounds like a great idea. Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. But then you actually look at, well, hey, what are these guys really trying to build?
Starting point is 00:36:49 they understand that, hey, in the world of free money, freely printed money, fiat money, it's not really necessarily about the profits anymore. Maybe there's these other things that are worth more than revenue coming in than kind of these proto information brokers. You're looking at microfinance as a way to sort of grab a whole bunch of information about individuals, right? Because it's instead of these kind of neighborhood banks getting funding and being distributed out, it's like you're going directly to the individual. So you're getting a lot of information about them. Plus, also their higher yield, and they give these banks a lot of opportunity to make money off of the fees that happen from these micro loans. And you look at a lot of these
Starting point is 00:37:29 onto these sort of philanthropic ventures or even, you know, like COVID response, Bank of America made billions of dollars off of giving out money from the government just in processing fees. Maybe not the best example for microfinance, but it is because those were fees made directly depositing money, I get money from the government, I deposit directly into your account, which is very similar to what these microloans are doing, and then I take 5% each time. It kind of centralizes power in a very specific way and gives a lot of information to these like information brokers that are playing as the banks or the fintech people in this case. So now we're seeing basically this new kind of concept of philanthropy being this microfinance
Starting point is 00:38:09 and this microloan space. And Drayden actually has a quote where he says, within five years, years of being an Ashoka fellow, 50% of them change national policy in their respective countries. So even though it's, again, it's looking at the third sector, the citizen sector, this nonprofit sector, they're saying that within five years, half of the people are changing policy in their country. So you're seeing that directly come out of a Harvard, this really important kind of American institution, is coming out here, starting this thing totally guised under philanthropic means and intense, and within five years, 50% of them are changing the country. You look at Endeavor, they're creating new words in languages and changing policy and changing focus of what the
Starting point is 00:38:55 public sector looks at, even though they're not focusing on the public sector publicly. So the Endeavor really came out of this, the Schoqa model, this microfinance model, and this citizen sector model, and is totally having huge effects on the public sector and the people of emerging markets, and again, specifically Latin America. So Endeavors is a very fascinating kind of case study and you start to look at, well, who are sort of the Endeavor success stories? Obviously, Wincescasaurus is a huge one. He started Patagon. He started the first ISP in Argentina, which obviously has huge, that's exceptionally important in emerging markets is who runs the internet service providers, especially as all these FinTech things pop off. And then the first success story, the first
Starting point is 00:39:38 endeavor group company to go public was Mercado Libre, which is sort of the considered like the Amazon eBay of Latin America run by this guy, Marcos Galprin, who's the richest man in Argentina. And you're starting to see, especially when you pair that with Winces Casares, Zappo, which is heavily pay, has huge PayPal ties, former PayPal member, board member. And you start to see basically a reestablishing of what made PayPal PayPal, PayPal. It was that they, that they, They had a market with it when it first really took off, which was eBay and eBay eventually bought PayPal. But PayPal never would have worked without eBay.
Starting point is 00:40:17 There would have been no need to have settlement via email, basically. Settlement that also has fraud protection. That was really the big state change. It was instant settlement and fraud protection. Which led into Pete Palantir spinoff after dealing with all of the security side of PayPal, if I remember, right? Totally. I mean, Pallentier, yeah, basically building the private sector security state.
Starting point is 00:40:41 Yeah. And actually, very interestingly, Pallanteer technically started at PayPal. Yeah. And spun off, which is disturbing, frankly, basically this idea, again, that free markets are so great and everything's so great. Well, I don't know. I'm not necessarily cheering on Pallantier being, you know, it's a government contractor. They're getting all these huge government contracts. They live off government contracts.
Starting point is 00:41:01 But they actually retain more because of their private sector, they can do more things that a public sector. company wouldn't be able to do. Yeah. And this plays really importantly, again, not to just jump all over here, but massively. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Totally. A public sector, a government sector company has a lot of things that they can't do because
Starting point is 00:41:19 their government sponsored literally were formed in the government. So there's a lot of customer right restrictions and a lot of things that they sort of have to give everybody access to. Maybe there were some things about if you're a felon or whatnot or whatever. But for the most part, if you're a government, you're a public sector company, you have to be extremely inclusive. and your ability to just sort of restrict speech or restrict access at a whim or even sell, let's say sell data at a whim, it's much harder to do. So these companies, they live off of government contracts, but they're private sector. And that's exactly what Palantir is. It's essentially a privatized CIA. That is a huge data broker. Just to give people a little bit of background on like Palantir, like, we're saying these things, but we're not giving you any examples of like what they do. So like police cars, like a police. force could hire Palantir. They put these video cameras on the back of all their cop cars.
Starting point is 00:42:10 The cops then drive around. All of that information, video content, depending on what sensors they're even using on it, I'm just assuming it's video, but there might be other things like LIDAR or whatever. They're collecting all of that data, all of that information, and then they're running basically pattern analysis. So let's say they drove past the bar and the video collected a license plate XYZ that was at the bar. It is pinning that, geolocating that, license plate. And let's say that license plate's there every day at three o'clock when that car car drives past the bar, they now know that so-and-so who's tied to that license plate drinks, and then they run AI and all this other stuff on all this information and data and they have
Starting point is 00:42:50 a whole construct of like what's happening in that town. And I think that people, your comment that this is in the private sector, some people might look at that and say, well, that's better than the government having it. But I think what's lost on people is the government can just then ping Palantir and say, hey, can you tell us this? And they're like, yeah, sure, we're a private company. We can tell you whatever you want, right? Like, it's the, the privacy has been totally what they do. Yes, that's exactly what they do. Exactly. I mean, you could look at Peter Thiel as the guy who has established the company that sells your data to the government. Yeah. You could really look at that. And I think that the contracts sort of speak for themselves that, yes, this is Incutel, right,
Starting point is 00:43:30 which we haven't even talked about yet. Incutel was essentially, it was the CIA basically saying, hey, the dot-com boom is happening. The 90s are happening. And we need to compete with Silicon Valley. And the way that we compete with it is by becoming it, right? And the way that we do that is by VC firms. And a lot of them are shadow VC firms. But Inc.
Starting point is 00:43:52 U-Tel is actually directly the CIA-affiliated venture capital firm. And Incutel specifically helped create Palantir. And Palantir's first contractors to CIA, and they fed off the CIA for, an extremely long time. But yes, they are quite literally, it's hard to say if it started in the public sector and moved into the private sector or was a private sector from the beginning, but funded by public, it's all kind of wishy-washy and nebulous by design. Again, I would say by design. And I think this mechanism of private and public is very interesting. When you understand that,
Starting point is 00:44:26 okay, the CIA has created a venture capital firm. It's investing in companies like Palantir, like chain analysis. And then also as we're coming to the digitalization of money. So there's a lot of talk about how bad CBDCs are, which of course they are. They're not great. We don't want the government to have all this information. We don't want the government to be able to blacklist or do a lot of these things with the user's money. It's a very obvious, easy thing to see as being like an overreach of power. But people don't apply that same skepticism to private bank digital currency, which is what a lot of these sort of stable coin issuers are. You know, you look at a tether. And again, I understand a lot of people have a lot of
Starting point is 00:45:08 sympathy for stable coins in the emerging markets. Hey, it's better than inflating peso. But you look at they've integrated the FBI, the Secret Service. They've integrated Incutel-funded chain analysis into their platform. They're buying up U.S. debt as much as anybody. And because their private sector, they actually, again, retain a lot of this blacklisting ability, this restriction, this ability to seize funds to restrict your spending, a lot of things that maybe a government issued currency couldn't do. They wouldn't maybe be able to restrict customer access, right? My issue with bashing the stable coin issuers and all of it is just when I look at where we're at with the legacy system and transmuting all of that over to this Bitcoin system, which actually
Starting point is 00:45:56 has a peg and all the things we talk about every show and that you talk about at Bitcoin magazine, I just don't know how you port that legacy system from where it was to where we need to go. I would much rather have some type of private CBDCs in the form of 100 of them or 10 of them or whatever than one U.S. government entity that's then managing a CBDC. And I don't think, and Mark, I don't think we can get from there to where we're going without this happening or this being here. So then the question becomes,
Starting point is 00:46:29 so what's a better solution than this? I don't know. I can't answer that. Yeah, it is interesting. And again, I do have a lot of sympathy for it. And again, anyone that says they know what the answer is,
Starting point is 00:46:38 is a liar because no one knows. We're learning this in real time. Markets are 24-7. We're all learning here. But I would push back a little bit on this idea that I think there's innately a king-making element to the treasury market, right? I mean, the U.S.
Starting point is 00:46:53 government is essentially saying, Yes, we approve tether because we're selling it boatloads of U.S. Treasuries and not seizing the treasuries and saying, okay, well, we'll sell you another $50 billion of treasuries if you integrate chain analysis. You integrate the Secret Service. You integrate the FBI. Again, it's sort of a pun. There is a tether to the U.S. government and the U.S. Ponzi by creating a mechanism where they sort of have to play ball with what the U.S. government wants, what the public sector wants. And I would again say that, yes, this idea that there should be a lot of them is better than the idea that there should be one, which I definitely agree with. But how can we create dollar instruments and do have this
Starting point is 00:47:37 transitional period into a Bitcoin system? Is there a way to do it that doesn't perpetuate the U.S. Treasury market? And I think that there are. I think there are ways to build what is in effect a dollar instrument that doesn't perpetuate government debt and doesn't allow via delcies and lightning is that where you're going with it sure or e-cash or whatever it is i think there are really clever mechanisms that we can build and so i think it's important to clarify and this is why i appreciate the pushback and it's a great question is like well i'm not like i don't think the dollar as a mechanism or as an idea is a bad thing I think it's a role in the way that the treasury market perpetuates the military industrial complex, the way that the U.S. government has used the U.S. dollar system via the treasury market,
Starting point is 00:48:28 via the debt market, to basically enact financial terrorism on the global south through like debt weaponization. Yes. Let's defang that. We have Bitcoin. Bitcoin maybe can't necessarily work as a currency for 8 billion people for every single purchase that they need to make in a day. There are some limitations to how many transactions you can fit into a block, even with Covenants, even with Layer 2 solutions. There are some limitations. I'm not like naive to that. I think we can do a lot better. I think we can onboard billions of people to Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:49:03 I haven't given up on that idea. But how do we create Bitcoin to be basically a reserve asset? That's really what it is. I mean, I think it works really well as a reserve asset. It maybe can't compete with the dollar, but it certainly can compete with treasuries. as the settlement network that other currencies are built on top of. So why can't we have U.S. dollar instruments that are backed by Bitcoin and be successful that doesn't perpetuate the treasury market? So a lot of the things that people say about tether and about this and that USDC and there's such this huge dollar demand and we can't go overnight, sure, but that doesn't mean we need to perpetuate the treasury market. So I'm very sympathetic to this idea that people need dollars or want
Starting point is 00:49:43 dollars and that Bitcoin is not ready to monetize as a currency yet. I'm totally sympathetic to that. But let's build the system that doesn't kick the can down the road for the U.S. government one more time. Let's not recreate the petro dollar system. Let's be clever. Let's write code. Let's be cypherpunks. Let's do some clever things here to basically use Bitcoin as a reserve asset for a dollar-esque instrument that doesn't touch treasury. And I think that's totally possible, whether you use, yeah, DLCs, as you said, there's some really interesting things going on with like stable channels, basically using like a lightning channel where one side is long the dollar,
Starting point is 00:50:20 one side is short, things like that, e-cash that create basically this idea of the dollar without perpetuating the debt Ponzi. So let's do that. Let's be clever. Unfortunately, and I'll give you a little alpha here, this is something that working on for the next piece here is obviously the biggest example of the algorithmic stable coin is Terra Lune. of course.
Starting point is 00:50:40 Yeah. And I don't want to get too much into it. But the main reason you could argue that the Terra Luna protocol imploded was these super high unsustainable yields that were being perpetuated by the system. And the highest yield in the system where over 72% of all of Terra's wealth was stuck in at the time of popping was in this thing called the anchor protocol. And the anchor protocol was designed by this guy, I believe his name is Ryan Park out of Korea, and he was given a teal fellowship to build anchor and basically create this. No one knows
Starting point is 00:51:16 it. It's not a well-known thing. And so you look at, well, okay, how come every single regulation, every single stable coin bill, like the Gillen brand Lummus bill, you're looking at this, how come they always talk about how algorithmic stable coins are bad? Why is that? Why did we manufacture this consent to basically say that? No, no, no, no, no. Bitcoin can't be used to create dollar instrument We can't do that. You could very much so make that claim that this was manufactured consent for treasury-backed stable coins. No doubt.
Starting point is 00:51:49 In lieu of algorithmic stable coins. No doubt. And now we're seeing PayPal is partnered with Paxos and is doing P-Y-U-S-D. And I actually talked with Walter Hesert, who's the head of strategy at Taxos, and he said PayPal was incredibly well positioned to capitalize on the incoming boom of trillions of dollars. of highly regulated stable coins in an environment where USDC and USDT probably won't survive. Now, again, he's pushing his bags, right? I mean, he's obviously very connected with Paxos, who's to say what crystal ball he has for
Starting point is 00:52:22 where regulation is going, but he's basically coming out and saying a couple important things. And the main one being trillions of dollars of highly regulated stable coins means what? Well, it means trillions of dollars of treasuries that are being bought by stable coin providers. By a winner that's been selected. By a winner that's already been pre-selected, yeah. And when I look at Tether, like so much of it's Euro dollars that they're basically, you know, sucking out of the market. I want to explain to the listener real fast, and if I get any of this wrong,
Starting point is 00:52:52 please correct me, Mark. But when you say a lightning channel dollar stable coin, imagine Mark and I basically opening a channel together. Let's say that we open a 10,000 sat channel with each other. and we also construct a discrete log contract, basically a smart contract that follows the price of the dollar. And every 10 minutes or every hour or whatever we define inside of that discrete log contract, it updates with the amount of SATs that then need the flow to mark or back to me based
Starting point is 00:53:26 on who's taking the long dollar side and who's taking the long Bitcoin side. And if you get enough people to open these channels with each other, your risk is very very, very different than Terra Luna as far as a synthetic stable coin, which was almost like a consolidated debt obligation, like the 2008, like where you're chunking all this stuff in there and you got yield and everything. There's no yield associated with this. This is just a constant. Now, you need a good reference spot price for it to, because this is effectively a derivative
Starting point is 00:53:56 in this channel, a derivative of the dollar. And if you do this at scale, these microchannel dollar stable coins, you get in a weird world where it's all Bitcoin, but it's moving and representing dollars without having to buy treasuries or any of that stuff. And this is, in my humble opinion, really fascinating stuff. And I think that in the coming the five to 10 years, especially when you get into developing nation states that probably aren't using, don't need really large channel capacity, but need some type of hedge in dollar terms for whatever debts they've got, I think this one gets really fascinating, really fast. I'm curious if you have any other comments on that, Mark.
Starting point is 00:54:36 Yeah, 100%. I had a really interesting conversation at Bitcoin Azores last year with this gentleman, Tony, who developed this idea of stable channels. And he actually came up to me and he was like, hey, I read your book. And I've actually done a lot of work in, not to docs or anything, but in kind of tokenized treasury systems and worked with some of these banks. Then he was like, I don't want to perpetuate this stuff. I don't like this stuff. I don't want to be the guy building these things for these banks. So I'm going to go work on a lightning-based system that, yeah, exactly, as you said, it's all Bitcoin. It's very, very cool. It doesn't touch dollars at all, but it gives what is essentially like the idea of a dollar mechanism to one side, to whoever's long,
Starting point is 00:55:18 the dollar on their side of the channel. And yeah, as you said, lightning, you can pass back and forth, you can update it as much as you want. You could update it every 30 seconds. You could update using your Oracle basically update it every 10 minutes, whatever you want. Obviously, there is some trust involved as always there is in some HTLC's in Lightning. But you can always leave. You can always close the channel. You can always take your money whenever you want. You can't get rugged.
Starting point is 00:55:44 You can't give the money to the other player unless it's not in any way that isn't an agreed upon at the time of the writing of the contract. Someone can't just run away with your money, which is not true of something like a Terraluna, obviously. So yeah, I think it's very, very fascinating. I think lightning is going to be a really interesting settlement layer. for a lot of these things. And I've written about this in regards to e-cash, which is a custodial mint that gives you pretty good privacy within the mint. And you can create things that
Starting point is 00:56:12 decently private payments that then you can settle out with lightning. Then there's some trust involved. But it's pretty good depending on, you know, this idea that everything is going to be built without trust, I think is a little bit nutty. On the dollar side. Yeah, on the dollar side. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But you know, if you want to send a Bitcoin transaction and you don't want to have any trust at all. You don't need to. Just settle something on the Bitcoin layer. Totally fine. Amen. Or use Lightning and do it that you're entering an agreement with someone else to do have a shared channel. Obviously, there's limitations of what they can take from you, but as long as you can settle and close the channel, it's pretty trustless, right? E-cash, not quite so. The Mint has the ability to
Starting point is 00:56:52 rug you or debase you, depending on how long you have exposure to the Mint. But if you have very minimal exposure to the Mint, you can do some pretty interesting things. So I think we're going to see Lightning evolve and be really interesting and connect a lot of these systems. But yeah, if you want to trust the system, that's what Bitcoin's for. I mean, that's why it's a state change. It's this unbelievable, this tool that really empowers people to have, yeah, trustless settlement without a trusted third party. I think the thing that people miss about this, though, of course, is that this also empowers the baddies or the U.S. government or the private sector ghouls that have run crony capitalism for the last 50 years plus or whatever, right? So I think that this idea that
Starting point is 00:57:31 that Bitcoin just eliminates corruption is just ridiculous. Of course not. There can be corruption in a Bitcoin system. What there can't be is monetary debasement. They can't just continually debase our funds now that we have a place that we can hold our money in that can't be inflated away. Bitcoin is a disinflationary system. Eventually will be deflationary. And that's a state change of money. And so that's phenomenal. But it goes both ways, right? It's like, I'm in this funny place right now with Bitcoin where It is everything I always thought it could be, which is fascinating. Seeing this play out, now it's the biggest talk of the election cycle. You're seeing this thing that was a twinkle of an idea in 2021,
Starting point is 00:58:13 is now the Bitcoin dollar system is really here. It's the presidents are talking about it. We're fully in. We're not turning back. But it empowers the ghouls of the financial system as much as it empowers the unbanked in the global self. So I think we just need to be wary of that and aware of it, really more so than wary of it. And so the systems that we build, are we really building sustainable systems that empower people, or are we building systems that perpetuate the U.S. Treasury system? And Bitcoin can really, it can defang the treasury system. So let's let it do that. And let's learn and see what mechanisms are being built and who's really the money behind these mechanisms. And that's really the purpose of this piece, I guess, if we could kind of sum it up, is that, wow, there's incutel money. There is CIA directors on the board of Greylock partners.
Starting point is 00:59:00 who are seed funders of a lot of these companies. They're connected, highly connected with Endeavor Catalyst, which is the venture firm of Endeavor, that's heavily connected with the Zappo. Then you're beginning to see sort of intelligence crony capital linked players building the Bitcoin dollar system. And so how do we not support these groups and, again, build, write code, and educate people that we really have an opportunity here to make a difference as we move into the Bitcoin era because I think it's undoubtedly we are in a new financial system for sure. I mean,
Starting point is 00:59:35 Larry Fink is out there shilling our bags, right? I mean, we got the biggest money manager in the world shilling our bags. Why? And how can we not just get rich and, you know, forget about the ethos of why we're here, which is, you know, I'm not here to get rich. It's a cool side effect, but I'm here to be free. I saw what happened. I was 18 when 2008 happened. I was a little too young to really participate in it, but like I remember Occupy and and walking the streets of Occupy. And then it got very co-opted and kind of this ethical movement sort of deteriorated. And we're kind of backing this again in the crony capitalists are sort of running amok doing their thing again.
Starting point is 01:00:12 I don't trust a lot of these players. I don't trust a Larry Fink. I've seen what he's done buying up a lot of these places and buying up infrastructure and commodities across the global South. And I just have a lot of trust issues, rightfully so, I would say. So I hope Bitcoiners don't lose that. That's not to say we can't celebrate. Okay, let's have a little cheers. The presidents are talking about our bags. That's fun. Let's remember why we're here and how we can build systems that actually truly give us an alternative.
Starting point is 01:00:38 That's what I'm here for. Well, I love it. And I think at the end of the day, the proof of work of what you're saying and preaching right there is in the articles and the thought pieces that you are clearly working very hard to produce and putting out there. And at the end of the day, it's all about education. It's all about shining a flashlight and all these dark corners to help people decide for themselves whether they agree with your article or not agree with your article. All the information is there. All the resources are there for them to spot check and go find out whether they believe it or they think it's spun a certain way or whatever. And that's what I love about your work and Whitney's work. And I can't thank you enough,
Starting point is 01:01:17 Mark, for coming on. The name of this article for people, The Chain of Custody, the Mafia holding the elites Bitcoin. We'll have a link to this in the show notes. We'll have a link to Mark and Whitney's Twitter, anything else that you want to highlight or point the listener to, Mark? I think you really just nail that right there at the end is, you know, don't trust me. And not that I don't try so hard to be a trusted voice, but it's not like, I don't want you to just offshore your trust in me. I'm just a guy with an internet access. Same with Whitney. Same with yourself. We're just desperately looking for meaning, for truth, for whatever. And don't trust my spin. Don't trust my thesis or my idea. Look at the links.
Starting point is 01:01:55 Look at the source material. There's obviously been a lot of trust lost in media, which I think is rightfully so. But let's not just then just place that in new voices and new talking heads, because I think that that is a huge part of where we're going next is, okay, well, mainstream media is dead. Alternative media is here. But a lot of these alternative media guys and gals aren't necessarily to be trusted either. And I think develop trust with people that you care about that you like. You watch shows that I'm on or Whitney or read our stuff. and you develop relationships with pundits.
Starting point is 01:02:27 But really make sure you're trusting the source material. There's a reason why basically every sentence in this thing has a link because there's so much source material that needs to be poured over. And there's a lot of stuff that I miss too. And there's a lot of stuff I'm going to continue to miss. There's also a lot of stuff I purposely don't put in, not because I'm trying to avoid conflict against my thesis, but stuff that is just maybe not super relevant.
Starting point is 01:02:50 There's a couple things in here that just aren't necessarily that relevant, but are interesting. Go jump off this work, go find other things in here, find your own research veins, find cool things, share them. Because I think we really have to decentralize truth finding. And we shouldn't just re-onsure it to trusted figures that then can be manipulated or incentivized to work against us. So yeah, trust me as far as you can throw me, which probably isn't super far. Look in the work itself. I love the writing.
Starting point is 01:03:17 That's what I'm here for. I love the interviews too. Love catching up with friends. It's great. But really take a look at the work, take a look at the links, and make your own work. conclusions and find your own research veins and then share them back with me. So, but yeah, Preston, man, absolute pleasure. Really appreciate it. As I was saying, when we talk kind of coordinating this, I think you were one of the few people that really at the beginning were, I think,
Starting point is 01:03:36 being very intellectually honest about stable coins and treasury demand. And you were very early on to this. So I was excited to come on and talk. And yeah, appreciate the love man. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much, Mark. Such a pleasure having you. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals. on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network.
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