Mark Goodwin | The Bitcoin-Dollar, The Stable Coin Conspiracy, & The Tokenized Takeover

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01:13 ♪ Without THC, no ♪ Cause we know they're lying to us. Just don't know to what degree where would be? Without THC, higher side chat show Greg Carlwood Always be closing higher side chatters doing the thing from the sunshine state I'm Greg Carlwood and even though the fake green paper chase and the corrupt economic structures were born into run our lives many of us know surprisingly little about how they actually work

01:52 By design, they don't make it easy and excessive complexity becomes their best defense against regular folks really grasping how it all works. Most of us just see a confusing matrix of booms and busts, bulls and bears default credit swaps quantitative easing commodities securities treasuries And the list goes on...and if our ignorance is this bad when it comes to the system we've had our whole lives what does that say about the new incoming digital overhaul that will dominate our future? Add in tokenized assets, blockchain ledgers, FedNow, central bank digital currency, strategic Bitcoin reserves and a slew of new concepts and we risk being swept even further out to sea. And dare I say? We miss what might be some of the best economic opportunities of our lifetime!

02:37 Well, today's guest Mark Goodwin has quickly become one of my favorite voices on these subjects because he sees both the opportunities for the individual as well as the coming storm of cashless technocratic programmable surveillance coins and has a much more nuanced and detailed forecast for this inevitable financial future than you're going to find most places. He's the former editor-in-chief of Bitcoin Magazine and the author of The Bitcoin Dollar, an economic monomyth. You can also find him contributing articles to Whitney Webb's Unlimited Hangout And it's a real treat to have him here, the laser eyed economic journalist technocrat critic and digital asset educator Mark my man How the hell are ya?

03:18 Wow, what an intro. Amazing! I don't need to say another word that you covered that pretty much sums it all up the opportunity the risk the confusion the hyper normalization here we are yeah super stoked to be here thank you so much for the great intro and having Of course, I try and thanks for doing it. You're going to be talking to a very skeptical audience today that usually even gives me a hard time when i say anything positive about crypto or bitcoin but as you write in your book This is the first time a new economic system is being formed where regular people at any point could get a seat at the table. When it comes to all of the previous systems, it's kind of a closed door thing and that makes a huge difference so there have been opportunities and there still are

04:07 And the reality is that whatever we think about it, it doesn't really change the onboarding of all this stuff. So it's probably best to just try to understand how the economic situation is changing because knowledge is power right? Amen a hundred percent I think that's such a good point this sort of equity fairness and this is a good place to start when talking about You know what the new economic system being built right is that in a tli an economic system cannot be fair in that the whole point of money. Is to express like a volatility between two bartering partners right like it's the whole point so when you're using money effectively,

04:50 You are literally acknowledging the imbalance that you have in your wealth or whether or not I have a good and you have money. We're acknowledging the difference, and then we're agreeing upon some trade based on that difference that we both find fair, and then there's a trade, and then there's an imbalance at the end of every buy-and-sell. That's just innately how financial system works. To say this idea of their ever being a totally equitable financial system It goes against the very definition of what an economic system is. It has to have these volatile imbalances, you cannot have just everybody has $100 it doesn't work. That just doesn't work and so what is a fair economic system? You allow everybody to have access to a stable monetary policy

05:44 So not one person can come in and have insider information, and insider leverage. And pull some lever and we print a ton of money, ton of dollars, and it creates this imbalance and creates inflation, and you debase your dollar rate like... You have to have unmitigated access to some sort of stability of your financial system to then be able to have fair trades and fair barters. So I think To understand Bitcoin is yes, there's a lot of issues with it and we'll get into all that today. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical and I am 100% like...I get the dismissal of it because of the fear right? Like I understand that where were going but at the same time you might miss out on a really big opportunity to actually ironically use this tool probably the state to opt-out what the state is planning to do next

06:38 Because it gives everybody that gets in at this time a little bit of access to that stable monetary policy, which is the first time in history that there isn't a monetary policy that's directly related to human action and political action. So we have an algorithmic protocol that tells us, hey this is the amount of Bitcoin that comes out every block. And it doesn't matter the politics, it doesn't matter the demand. Every 10 minutes a new block comes out this amount of Bitcoin comes out so we know the debasement plan and how things will occur in 140 years. We know how much Bitcoin will exist you cannot say that about any other monetary system including gold including oil stock

07:22 dollars, anything else. Bitcoin is really the only one that you can say with pretty extreme confidence mathematical confidence that there will not be a debasement in the system at the protocol level. So, that's a good place to start is just... That's what fairness in the financial system is. It's unmitigated access to stability and Bitcoin can bring that and it can bring a lot of bad stuff too as we'll get into all that but I think that's a great place to start so that opportunity really Even those the most afraid of this should really take a minute to think, to be like yes probably a whole bunch of technocracy bullshit is coming and the surveillance aspect of a digital ledger is scary. And I've been one of the more loudly vocal people about that in the space and out of this space

08:11 But also, I've been able to walk away from the state's statiness because I've had Bitcoin in my pocket and have been able to say I'm not going to get the Vax because you know I can drop out of. I went back to school. do this pharmaceutical product or whatever. And I was able to walk away, a lot of people didn't have that opportunity to walk away and say no because maybe they weren't in a financial position where they could just walk away from one semester left of a degree right? So i was able to use Bitcoin which is probably state created to tell the state fuck you! I'm not doing this thing you want me to do so there's so many levels

08:54 hypocrisy and irony in this unfolding thing, but I'm very thankful personally that I had that opportunity to say no. And so I urge people to at least inform themselves and I'll stop there so we can get into something. No, that is great! Congratulations on having that optionality. That articulates why you are kind of a perfect person for this audience because there is ignorance and anxiety about these changes. We see this big storm coming, this big digital change and we don't know a lot of the details and the only way we can help with that anxiety is by educating ourselves because we can't necessarily stop it so learn more about it so you aren't so stressed about it I suppose but

09:44 When it comes to your book, it clarified a lot of things for me. And let's start with some of the history here. So we know we had a gold standard until 1971 and then the money printers were truly unleashed to quote your book We can see how the violent monetary base expansion of the United States dollar could inflate away the purchasing power of an individual dollar, hurting savers and those with dollar-denominated positions. But why did this not hurt the United States' purchasing power on a net basis? Why didn't the massive inflation of dollars from well under $1 trillion in 1971 to $10 trillion in 2012 bring the economy to its knees and relinquish economic reserve hegemony to China or Japan

10:26 Japan, our biggest debtors. By the time millions of Americans found themselves without homes and the Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled out, the Federal Reserve was back to business as usual raising interest rates and resuming sales of bonds to foreign entities and eventually to itself How were we able to fight off the mechanics of an unhinged money supply decreasing its demand? The reality is that the United States never left an energy standard. We simply switched from a gold-backed dollar system, to an oil based dollar system." With the decree of 1971, the gold dollar was destroyed and in its place, the petrodollar was born. Really well said! Talk to us about this because it's important to understand before we get into the idea of a Bitcoin Dollar

11:10 Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. And I would say just like the good place to start where we just started was this idea of monetary what money is for it's a technology that allows you to basically scale barter beyond just trust have a really small group of people And so money allows you to take, you know, an economic system that's probably agriculture basis where a lot of this derived from. Take it from being like 7-12 person low people living in the literal area to actually being able to scale beyond you know to bigger tribes to groups of farms to regional governments to, no up to countries and then now obviously is it's digitized. You know that really global economy technology is the backbone of money money as a technology in

12:05 It's changed a lot and evolved the lot like technology in order to facilitate. You know more efficient settlement and better bonds of trust for barter so the reason why energy money has evolved out of this part or system is you know, you've heard that ism, you know money doesn't grow on trees And that's a good thing because if literally are greenbacks were green leaves it would be very easy to source you would just go out to your backyard and shake the oak trees a little bit and grab some leaves.

12:44 an apple on a bike, on whatever. You know you've just replenished by taking 30 seconds and walking outside and shaking your tree maybe raking it up maybe putting it in a bag but the pretty easy process to source more greenbacks right? Energy money is helpful because it makes the sourcing of more units of currency difficult which is good! You want the unit of currency to be rarer, to be scarcer and to be harder to debase You don't want it to have zero growth necessarily, because you want there to be able to be growth in the system. So you want some sort of capped mitigated inflation

13:25 But that one that doesn't run away and one that isn't really easy for a political governing body to say, you know here's the CARES Act and we're printing X trillion dollars or whatever. Right? That's bad! That's essentially going to... You know they went to the backyard on Capitol Hill And they all started shaking a bunch of trees and then there was a lot of greenbacks all of a sudden So energy money has taken a lot of forms. And the most popular form of energy money, ironically, a lot of people don't think of it as energy money but its the bimetal or gold standard by metal being gold and silver being some ratio between them 16 to 1 or what have you there's been many different ratios throughout history but then gold kind

14:15 maybe in some of the lifetimes of our listeners, they've actually lived under a gold standard if they're on the higher side of the age group. But it's an energy standard because it takes energy to take it out of the ground. Right? I mean, you can't just find gold willy nilly shaking trees. You've got to spend a lot of whether it's human capital literally the processing energy that it takes to extract gold out of a mine out of the ground bring it into something that's usable that's tradable

14:52 You know that it takes a lot of energy different types of energy to create more gold so when you have an energy based standard and link your value money. Do gold coming out of the ground you've now sort of capped the rate of growth in youth cap the rate of debasement that your dollars can have. If $1 is equal to X amount of gold, and I can only extract 3% to 4%, relative to the total supply of gold every year because it takes so much energy to pull out of the ground then you have kind of a nice like okay it's kind of hard to source this money and your savings aren't going to be debased immediately because it takes a year to pull out three

15:35 percent of the gold supply from the ground. It's not that there is not a ton of gold on earth, there are tons! There are a bajillion tons under the crust and it just takes a lot to get in out so the rate is capped and slow. So the Gold Standard worked pretty well. society scale and global trade to scale. And then of course, there was the paperification of gold which actually was another evolution of the technology of money which is where we have green dollars associated with a one-to-one ratio of a certain amount of gold in the bank which allowed it to scale even further because then instead

16:15 you know, have a truck and fill it with oil and drive a truck with hundreds of pounds of gold if I want to make this huge transaction. I can use credit and debit systems. And I can use physical bills and we can send pallets of cash overseas or what have you. You can actually scale gold using paper right? That was the idea Of course, there's a lot of trust involved in that. That they're not printing more paper and this and that so in 1971 officially the US Nixon comes out and says hey we're severing the gold window We're no longer accepting redemption of gold obviously a lot of things had happened before we got to that point It wasn't just this totally out-of-nowhere Everything's fine everyone thinks there's you know The dollar...the Goldback Dollar is you know This really strong

17:07 Hey you know there was a lot of cracks in the system. You know famously Charles de Gaulle sending about to the US to pull up all this gold and bring it back to France that was the London Gold Pool which is sort of the Europe exchange that tried to keep all of these foreign exchange currencies pegged to gold, that collapsed because there was a run of confidence. So we're seeing that kind of happen in the late 60s through through the very early 70s this lack of confidence in the US's ability to redeem the dollars for gold so foreign countries started pulling their gold out and redeeming dollars

17:51 So nixon was like well okay jigs up they caught us we're just gonna stop that whole thing and shut the window and we're just not gonna let anybody take their gold back. I'm amber just gonna stop redeeming it were just going to enter this you know this world of fiat currency where everything is just paid to one another through market forces, And there's no underlying energy commodity at all, right? There's no gold. There's nothing to stop the growth and the debasement of the dollar immediately upon doing that you know The US gets involved in the Middle East specifically Kissinger kind of going over to Saudi Arabia after the Yom Kippur War and

18:31 having this conversation and doing this handshake deal, that's very controversial historically of whether or not how real was it? Was it signed? Was it a handshake deal? Did this actually exist? There are a lot of arguments to be made. In my opinion as just a guy with an internet account I think it did happen. It seems pretty obvious that it happened and when you look at just the market structures and the way that things sort of went, I think it's pretty obvious that there was something that was keeping the US dollar—the net purchasing power of the US dollar sound during this super highly inflationary period. And what is that mechanism? And I would say it's the petrodollar as with a lot of other people

19:23 And so the petrodollar is just the next evolution of the energy money standard, which is rather than having it pegged directly to the rate of gold coming out of the ground. Which again in a good way limits growth but for a government that's trying to outgrow in this post-war environment that wants to grow their dominance over the world from an empirical standpoint they want to get away from any sort of limiting of growth So they move to this petrol standard and they say, hey Saudi Arabia you're the biggest supplier of oil in the world. We're going to give you military and political protection we're going to come in and protect your oil fields protect your trucks it's a crazy world out there were gonna set up shop over there very conveniently for us we are gonna protect all your oil and all we ask

20:15 Just very simple here. All we ask is that anytime anybody wants to buy any oil at all, you have them... they have to buy it with dollars." And Saudi Arabia said, yep sure easy done! They get tons of military equipment and they get big military presence. They grow out to be one of the largest I mean just one of the richest entities on the planet and they're just swarming in dollars, swarming in oil And it's a really simple mechanism but basically what we did was we offered political technological power military power.

20:51 to create a de facto monopoly on the sale of oil, which is something that everybody needs. You want to industrialize in the 70s which every country in Europe and Asia wanted to do you have to get Saudi oil basically not a lot of people have oil on the ground it's not a thing that every country has. You wanna get oil? You gotta buy dollars first and then the Saudis are getting tons of dollars in and then we say hey well than you take those dollars come spend with us buy our treasuries, buy US debt, buy US stocks. And they create this sort of mechanism called petrodollar recycling where they're getting dollars... The U.S is selling dollars to Eurasia. Eurasia is buying dollars to give to the Saudis to get oil and then the Saudis are taking those dollars and spending them back in the U.S. We create this sort of flywheel of demand artificial demand

21:44 For dollars that wouldn't be there in the first place. No one would be buying dollars in Eurasia If we didn't have this setup Where we said you need you want oil? You need dollars first so because of this agreement were able to find tons trillions of dollars of demand and or certainly hundreds of billions at the time, of demand over the next decades because of this petrodollar system. Yes and I just wanted to cut in here and say that You know, I don't want to get too fundamental but it really did kind of open my eyes to what the petro dollar was because you hear the term. But we were starting to print all this extra money it's supply and demand and we had to create a demand so that's how it was done that's the function of the petrol dollar. I guess I hadn't really connected the dots

22:38 as clearly as they're connected in your book. And then I just want to kind of fast forward through this because I want to make sure we have plenty of room for where we're going, which is you know where the anxieties are but these building blocks do help us get there but then you write By 1990, the U.S. dollar system had expanded to $3 trillion over the next 30 years the US had spread its power with maneuvers in Iraq Syria Lebanon Yemen Turkey Jordan Saudi Arabia and only now are we removing the last remaining military presence in Afghanistan by the fall of 2021 The US dollar system stood at $20 trillion. So why did we move our military presence out of the region then? Seems like an inappropriate lever to give up in a time when inflation has been acknowledged by retail and pandemic disrupted supply chains and labor forces around the globe, why would we want to jeopardize our world currency reserve status by removing our ability to prop

23:37 the dollar's demand as global interest rates sat at zero or even below. A Ponzi cannot simply be tapered and we continually find ourselves mere weeks away from smacking into our debt ceiling and risking default Yes, so we have this system that has gone through most of our lives with the petrodollar and then there seems to be a change. And it does seem a little counterintuitive talk to us about these decisions that were recently made and obviously the next evolution of creating artificial demand for the dollar Yeah, totally. So I think the important thing to sort of glean from the history of the US dollar system evolving technologically is that they will do anything it takes to perpetuate this system and kick the can down the road. And the way that they do that is finding clever ways to find more demand for dollars

24:32 And the way you create more demand for dollars is there's really like two ways. There's, uh, create more users, uh, right? Pretty simple if there's more people wanting dollars than new creator, more demand for dollar sure. And then there's obviously interest rate manipulation. So interest rates are the, um, sort of the cost of lending. So if you increase the interest rate and you raise the interest rate You're telling someone that's buying US debt. Maybe we have to rewind a little bit dollars are created in your bank account, they are created by usually by a private bank

25:10 And the private bank is buying treasuries, which are the reserve asset that's actually the asset printed by the treasury in the Federal Reserve System. They're not really printing dollars specifically. They're printing these T-bills, Treasuries. You know, T-bills are the short duration but long duration bonds whatever government debt That's what these bonds are. And so the Fed is setting the interest rate of the bonds, the treasury is printing the bonds and then a private bank buys them and puts the dollar bits basically now it's all digital in your bank account but they're backed by these reserve assets. So when you raise the interest rate, you're raising the coupon, the yield on the reserve asset on the bond

25:57 That's backing your dollar. And when you have a really high interest rate, you're paying more people to store their value in dollars. So you're creating artificial demand by saying I'm going to raise the interest rate to 5%. So if you give me $100, I'll give you a hundred and five dollars back after the duration of the bond. If it's a 30 day bond, if it's a 90 day or three year, whatever it is at the end of that bond, you'll get that percentage and obviously the longer the duration theoretically, the higher the yield

26:35 But the interest rate sets, you know the interest. You could think of it the higher the interest rate to higher the interest in being In the system because you're getting paid more so when the US raises the interest rates all of these foreign Entities or or or you know domestic entities are saying oh I can get a risk-free 5% by just storing all my money in U.S government debt okay cool great why would i do anything else if i have a billion dollars all go through here and get. No free three millions like for sure no problem so at the highest level which is where we're at now we scaled up to the point with dollar system demand is in the billions you know getting to the trillions

27:18 It's really these risk-free rates, these interest rates are what's driving demand towards the dollar less so than retail or trying to get more users by dollarizing the world. So the US basically finds itself now removing its foot off the gas pedal of keeping up the petrodollar system You know, by this military force at this kind of really weird time as I expressed in that quote. And it's like why would the U S do this when it seems like they would need to do this more than ever? The you know, that brings us to sort of the pandemic era of looking at the lockdowns and the monetary system. There are a few important things to look at just as we paint the parallels here is we look at the 08-07-09, the great financial crisis crash

28:15 And I think the really important things to note about the 08 crash. is that it happened in between two administrations. Bush is leaving, Obama's coming in and also very interestingly Bitcoin has launched January 2009 anonymously by this anonymous figure online really as the US dollar system is beginning its first really big foray into quantitative easing into buying its own debt And basically bailing out the world economy that was highly leveraged using these, how do you create more demand? You create more dollars by creating these highly leveraged

29:02 house of cards that are debt leveraged on top of debt. And they built these things called collateralized, the debt obligation CDOs blah, blah, blah. They're trading all of our mortgages around packaging them and then the whole thing blows up very interestingly perhaps a controlled demolition. The Lehman Brothers Epstein stuff is very interesting. That's a whole other pod but regardless we have a big explosion that is coming from US dollar interests As the two presidents, you know the two terms that to parties are switching.

29:43 On the right, blames Obama and Citibank and his bankers. And they print a whole bunch of money billions at the time which was a ton of money bail out all the banks not the lenders or rather than not the mortgage holders. The show kind of goes on for some reason there's kinds seems to be sort of no Pied Piper moment But Bitcoin is launched like at the froth of all of this, Bitcoin comes out. Then in fall of 2019 you know six months before we hear really any whisper of a pandemic of a serious pandemic things were sort of strolling out in December and January that there were things going on overseas but in August and September of 2019 we saw a failure in the banking system in the reverse repo system which

30:32 Basically, if a bank has a bunch of these T-bills, these reserve assets but doesn't have enough cash and depositors are trying to take cash out they'll do a repurchase agreement with another bank. And they'll say okay we have all these treasuries but not enough cash so we're going to lend you treasuries and you're going to give us cash. We're gonna make our depositor whole And then the next day when we reset everything, we agreed to repurchase those treasuries right back. It's called a re-purchase or repo agreement and so we saw huge failure in this system months before the pandemic and the Fed had to step in and put...and instead of the banks lending to each other all of a sudden the hot potato of this fractional reserve banking system that was playing with all these things everybody got scared and they stopped throwing their potato

31:23 And no one would lend overnight. And so the banking system was going to collapse because the banks wouldn't lend, the cash needed in short term to cover their depositors that wanted cash because every bank is insolvent on a fractional reserve right? So this Fed had to step in and bail out the whole banking system again months before the pandemic happened very interestingly. This all kind of happened in the shadows And Trump literally, with his money manager, his former money manager Larry Fink of BlackRock. They created this plan called the Going Direct Plan which they wrote in fall 2019 which was basically a bailout for Wall Street on how we're going to get trillions of dollars from the Fed and the Treasury via these backstopping mechanisms to save the banking industry and how are you going

32:15 these trillions of dollars right to Wall Street, right to the banks and skip Main Street entirely to sort of fix this issue that they're having in the banking system. So months before COVID happens They write this plan to give trillions of dollars from the Fed and the Treasury to BlackRock, basically. To buy its own ETFs and its own mechanisms. And that's literally what they did very conveniently. What do you do when you want to print a ton of money? What happens when you print trillions and trillions of dollars? There is a highly inflationary moment

32:52 And what's bad about that is that if there's a lot of velocity and the money is moving around a lot, you start to notice the debasement a lot quicker. Because if you print trillions of dollars and just give everybody $1 million in the US Then all of a sudden, everybody has $1 million. So why would you sell your gallon of gas? Your apple? Your bicycle at the same price if every single person in your neighborhood has $1 million? You're going to raise your prices. As demand increases, prices go up as velocity increases, prices go up so they have to find a way to crush demand as they put in trillions of dollars into the dollar system very conveniently

33:37 All of a sudden, the virus comes out and they have to shut down the entire world economy. No one is allowed to go outside. No one is allowed to work. They shut down everything, this supply chain, everything. They shut it all down in March 2020 officially and they begin to print trillions and trillions of dollars and they give it to BlackRock and the likes. And yes we got you know $1500 You know severance check or whatever for them printing all this money some money went out to people depending on where you were what state and what have you.

34:15 But they crushed global demand. Overnight, a virus is the perfect cover for if there's an issue in the plumbing of the financial system and you need to print trillions of dollars and you need to crush demand which we saw happen in August 2019 by March 2020, the world goes to sleep takes little nap, the economy takes a nap. And what did we see in March 2020? What did we see in that era that's parallel to the 09 crisis? Well, we saw the Trump administration on its way out and the Biden administration on its way in. We saw the bailout sort of mostly in the Trump administration but you know, we saw them as sort of blame kind of the COVID lockdowns of the printing of inflation some people say Biden inflation some people blamed Trump but there is a whole mess of who actually to blame here because

35:09 you know, the split of the election season occurring during an economic crisis. So we see the same kind of parallels of the 08 crisis, that split where no one takes responsibility but this time we're seeing trillions of dollars printed rather than billions hundreds of billions and of course in March 2020 to just push further this petrodollar dead here's-the new system You know that week where everything shut down and you know Trump came out and closed the country down two weeks to stop the spread this drop the spread of what apparently dollars? Um, you know two weeks to stop to stop the spread We see gold have one of its biggest losses in a week ever. We see oil as

35:59 Literally at one point, you know it was a futures contract which is not exactly You know There's some nuances here But we saw oil literally go negative right in this futures contract where there was it was negative $30 a barrel We're basically they were saying will pay you to take this oil away from us because there's no demand because no one's going anywhere Right when have we ever? You know our entire lives It's someone finds oil and we send an f-16 there and bomb the shit out of them And that's our oil right that's like u.s diplomacy All of a sudden, there's like someone giving away futures contract again but giving away oil and no one wants it. That's a state change. Then we saw Bitcoin go from being around $6000 to going to about three and then we saw the money printing start. By the end of the calendar year of 2021 basically within 18 months of that March low

36:57 Bitcoin is 20x and bitcoin hits this all time high of basically hitting $70,000 a bitcoin just under 69 420 I think literally was the top which is just another one of these it's all it's all me But we see we see Bitcoin have this unbelievable run at sort of the onset of you know This crushing demand because of virus. And so You could begin to sort of put together Okay, we're running that we're taking away. You know Biden comes in and we pull out of Afghanistan We're taking away military pressure from the Middle East oil at one point a few months ago was literally trading negative

37:37 And now this new fangled thing that came out of nowhere on the internet, which we all know was a DARPA project to begin with. Not that necessarily means everything on the internet is a DARPA project because obviously we are on the internet right now and I'm pretty damn sure neither of us work for DARPA but you know we're seeing this sort of change if we're looking at the charts were seeing a really big change A very important thing about Bitcoin that is really misunderstood is there's this halvening cycle.

38:13 within the algorithm. So we talked about the issuance of new units of currency being bad for the net purchasing power or the individual purchasing power of the currency, because if you have more currency then there's less supply and then less demand innately. So Bitcoin has this clever thing where every certain amount of blocks which ends up being about four years, there is a step function halving of the relative issuance of the supply of Bitcoin. So when Bitcoin first started right after the Obama Bush 08 implosion, Bitcoin comes out in the beginning of 2009, the second week of 2009 every 10 minutes 50 bitcoin is being printed that's $5 million today back then it was literally worthless

39:03 Every 10 minutes, $5 million. That would debase the currency pretty quickly right? It's a highly inflationary currency so 50% Of all Bitcoin ever issued were issued in that first epoch at the very beginning where no one fucking knew what this thing was and No one gave a shit about it 50% of the supply. Where did all that Bitcoin go? I don't know Yeah, but hey someone's got it right fifty percent of it And then four years later in 2012 it cuts cuts to down in half so its 25 Bitcoin a block So twenty five percent of all the Bitcoin ever supplied ever was between 2012 and 2016. Then it goes down to 12 and a half, right as we're about to hit May 2020, so two months before March 2020 or rather two months after the shutdown of the world economy in March 2020. Two months later is the scheduling of the next halving of Bitcoin

40:04 Which is a very important mathematical happening in that it's the first time the relative issuance of Bitcoin goes below the rate of the dollar inflating 2% and the rate of gold coming out of the ground. So before, it was over 4%. Relative issuance, so it was actually inflating faster than gold coming out of the ground and faster than the supposed targeted inflation rate of the dollar. So mathematically it made more sense to keep your money in these other currencies or other stores of value because Bitcoin was actually inflating faster then the dollar system and then gold

40:40 May 2020, that's no longer true. When that step function hits it's now going below the relative issuance of gold and of the dollar so That's an important you know metric for okay well this whole thing as we're talking about is about You know scarcity of the unit of account And We're seeing this really important moment where its actually now mathematically issuing Uh, at a lower rate than any other currency and any other unit of value in the world. And in that time period we see it go up 20 X and we see this huge embracing of Bitcoin on the global stage. Right? I have in my notes not to cut you off, but it went from 3200 to nearly 65,000. And so, you know, you're explaining this catalyst and of course

41:36 hindsight's 2020 would have been nice to know a lot of this stuff. So we could benefit from it and a lot of people feel like the opportunities are gone, I do want to get into that or they really gone but because a lot of people only hear the first hour here, I wanna fast forward to what we think is coming because yeah point where I think you really nail it so of course Anyone who knows Bitcoin 101 knows 21 million coins. There's not gonna be any more fine But stable coins now are different and they just passed the genius act so it seems like about two or okay, or about two and Yes is just where I think you're really nailing it So just like we saw with the early internet where the government hid behind these private front companies Facebook Google

42:25 PayPal, you know all these companies are positioned as private but they're all propped up by military intelligence. It seems like we have all this concern about a central bank digital currency and then this bill is in the pipeline and Trump says there'll be no central bank digital currency okay fine yeah well you say that's a red herring because again what we're going to see is functionally the same thing it's gonna appear private But it is backed up in the same way. In fact, the quote from the book is we spent so much time looking for CBDC's that we missed the private entity stable coin monster right? In front of our eyes this is what I want to make sure first hour people get because it is

43:12 how they're gonna move to a new system and it's not quite as clear as oil or gold, which we have a better concept of than we have a concept of stable coins. But in a way I feel like this lessens the anxiety a little bit because people are talking about total system collapse where we're going to be guarding our Can goods with shotguns on the front porch. And it's nice to know, even if there's a lot of problems with it that there is some kind of plan perhaps and maybe even opportunities to know about the future of this plan rather than just the past of it talked us about some of this stuff. Yeah, totally. I mean great segue. Yes. Shout out the first hour people second hour people are going to have some fun too for sure but I do think it is really how

43:59 You know, right. I think we kind of explained the gold dollar or the petrodollar and we have described the Bitcoin part but we haven't really said the Bitcoin dollar part which was a phrase that I coined in 2021 as I was sort of watching this play out and you know what? Let's go back to March 2020 The stablecoin industry which is now Bessant and Lutnick And you know the guys running commerce The guys running the treasury David Sachs, who's the former McKinsey analyst who really took PayPal from being a bunch of nerds with their Palm pilots to like no we're going to scale this to dollarize the internet. Everyone always focuses on the mafia and they completely forget that PayPal dollarized the fucking internet but anyways our boy David Sachs that was his thing so he came in and kind of took Teal

44:52 his currency speculation and Max Levchin, the cryptography. And went from it being this pet project of Palm Pilots to being an internet money. He's now the crypto AI czar All of them are saying, without fail that the way the US dollar is going to keep its hegemonic status, its reserve currency status through stable coins. And once this regulation passes trillions of dollars of demand will be unlocked for these reserve assets these treasuries that the Fed and the Treasury print to back dollars

45:35 Everybody's talking about it. No one can stop talking about it, literally in the EO that Trump signed and like the first few days of coming into office he banned CVDCs like two paragraphs later He's like we're gonna use stable coins to dollarize the world you know? It's like in your face. It's so obvious this dialectic of, you know, CBDC bad bad bad. And it is bad I'm not sometimes people like to say, oh man he's like shilling for CBDC because we think stable coins suck It's like no i think they should all burn in a fire but they created this Hegelian dialectic basically creating this problem of like we're digitizing money and the government is super there's controlled demolition basically that's occurring right now of trust and government

46:22 Why would we let the government control our money? So there's this problem and then basically the solution or the reaction to the problem is fuck government money, fuck CBDCs. And then the proposed solution, the herding into which is really the crux of the dialectic is well, then we'll just let private banks do it. Bad central banks, private banks are cool. And so we'll take the money power away from the government and give it to, you know these FinTech ghouls that have basically taken over the government with the Trump administration. But regardless this dialectic has really been smashed over our heads I mean literally Trump will do a speech and he'll say The government shouldn't have this power and then 10 minutes later He's talking about how sweet stable coins are So this dialectic has been smashed over our heads

47:13 And we spent all of this time in the last few years in the COVID era, you know talking about how bad CBDCs will be. And then a lot of people saw this EO and they were like, oh man what a win Trump is one of us he's banning CBDCs This is so good But really, he set this up in his first term that the ability for banks to hold crypto and very specifically for banks to hold stable coins. So he put in this former Goldman guy who was a Brian Brooks who had worked with Steve Mnuchin at One West Bank which was a bank that profited immensely in the 08 crisis then DA at the time Kamala Harris was what I had on her desk the ability to prosecute Mnuchin

47:53 And Brian Brooks and these people that worked under him, and she obviously threw the case out just to show you that the union party will fuck you no matter what. And Brian Brooks comes in he was a big early Coinbase guy which is the biggest exchange in America crypto exchange who holds the US government's Bitcoin that they've seized holds BlackRock's Bitcoin pretty big deal. He was one of the early like legal partners there, he got put in as the OCC, the comptroller or the currency which is basically the head legal regulator in the banking industry and on his last I think he had three days left of his term, he puts out this bulletin

48:37 that says that banks can hold stable coins and play with, you know, with digital assets. And then he gives a bank charter to this heavily associated PayPal crypto bank they have the first charter ever Anchorage Digital advised by Max Levchin but regardless Trump 1.0 set up the whole system for stable coins to really proliferate domiciled in in the US But we didn't really see that yet. So in 2020, there was like $10 billion of stable coins. It wasn't really a big market yet so there wasn't really a ton of demand now we're hitting this over 200 billion. We're seeing an immense increase in dollar demand

49:23 stable coins as Bitcoin is appreciating immensely. Bitcoin is now over $100,000 a coin and we're seeing huge amounts of dollar demand occurring via these private issued stable coins at the same time so this brings up this crux of okay well we're leaving Afghanistan bitcoins pumping to the moon how does the US system wrangle It's fingers around this beast that theoretically is defanging the Federal Reserve System, right? So what does the US do? The US embraces stablecoins. And they say that hey if we look at this you know when people talk about Bitcoin they refer to the price I mean i've already done it three or four times today it's always in dollars I say bitcoin hits a hundred thousand dollars The price of bitcoin isn't dollars its like a dollar proxy In a lot of ways

50:14 And actually what happens is when you, again we talked about we need to create demand for dollars and there's how do you do that? Well one of the ways you do it is you created an asset. that is a neutral reserve energy asset, say gold, say oil. And you pump the price of it in dollars and then you create more demand for dollars because this thing, this proxy that people need is now more expensive so you need to get more dollars to be able to buy it." Well, that sort of happens in the Bitcoin system as well So imagine you spent $100 on Bitcoin a decade ago and now it's worth $100,000. Well you've created $99,900 worth of dollar demand

51:02 Even though you only spent in a hundred and you just waited. And now if you want to cash out and go buy a house or do something, you cash out the dollars. You've created basically $100,000 of dollar demand by holding this neutral reserve asset and then cashing out into dollars so that government sort of I think either A, created this neutral reserve asset via their fintech ghouls. Via PayPal, via these people that were really all there at the very beginning or they just noticed hey these anonymous cypherpunk guy this mythical creature put out this really interesting instrument that we can use to generate trillions of dollars of dollar demand either way obviously I have some thoughts but either way

51:51 You know, the government saw an opportunity to latch on to that demand. And literally the item that they formed is called Tether. I mean it's quite literally tethering the dollar system to this neutral reserve asset to Bitcoin and we saw Tether go from yeah as i said under 10 billion dollars in 2020 to now at about 160 billion. The extended stablecoin space is about 200 billion and Besant is saying when When the Genius Act passes, we will see up to $3.7 trillion of demand being created by these stablecoin providers because they have to buy treasuries as said in the Genius Act you want a player in the regulatory regime of the US You want a bank partner in the U.S., you want access to U.S customers

52:40 You need to have a one-to-one backing of all of your stable coins with us government debt. Interesting? Yes, yes there it is. So just to cut in again that's where I was a little unclear because with the petro dollar it's very obvious that the bottleneck The lynchpin is Saudi Arabia as you said or just we could say the Middle East in general sure but then in this scenario It's a little harder to see the bottleneck or linchpin because it seems like anyone in the world can on and off ramp to crypto in their native currency. So, it really wasn't exactly clear to me how this was a dollar play because of that ability. Like there's no gatekeeper, like Saudi Arabia would be the gatekeeper says we'll give go get dollars first and then we'll give you the oil

53:28 But anybody can use PancakeSwap or Uniswap or any, whatever. I imagine outside of the US they're swapping to their native currencies the same way so it didn't seem like there was a proper gatekeeper in place but i guess its the stable coin companies and the private banks And so what? So that gatekeeping element right because Petrodollar was never de facto or was never a literal monopoly Right just heavily suggested Right, like there were settlements in other currencies. There were settlements in euros eventually when the euro came out and whatever they were just a very small amount of the volume of the global petrol trade and that's exactly the same thing that we're seeing in the global crypto trade is the vast majority of the pair to Bitcoin or to Ethereum or whatever the coin is it's US dollar pairs and usually it's through these proxies these dollars stablecoin proxies

54:22 And that brings up also an issue about Bitcoin itself, is that it doesn't really scale very efficiently as a medium of exchange for billions of people because of the technical limitations of you know, a distributed block ledger. They want to basically keep it so Anybody can run a node, anybody can audit the chain. That makes the chain data size have to be really small so that you can send it over cell phone, there's these one megabyte blocks Whereas if you wanted to scale the whole financial system on a blockchain, you could have gigabyte blocks where you have everybody's financial transactions in it. But then the only people that could meaningfully run a node that verifies the chain is someone that could download a gigabyte every 10 minutes which closes the decentralization circle to like ten data centers in the world which is sort of not the point of having this thing that anybody can audit

55:25 That's the dialectic, that what they say. But the issue is then that you create a need for more trusted systems to come in to be able to scale Bitcoin just like we saw with paperback gold dollar instruments that allow you to scale gold, we now have that with Bitcoin and stablecoins. So you create all this dollar demand, you create $100,000 from buying a hundred dollars of bitcoin 10 years ago, now you're sitting on 100 grand and you want to spend that on something or do something meaningful in the day-to-day, you need to go into basically a dollar proxy because it's too expensive for everybody in the world to just use bitcoin on the base layer

56:10 It's way too expensive so it forces people and incentivizes people to find cheaper fees using these dollar stable coins. So the incentive is really how you dictate, really behavior in general economic incentives is really how you dictate you know, so much of human behavior. That's why I really focus on money because it's like well if we don't have a good grasp on what's happening in the evolution of the financial system, we can think we're as prepared as we are and we can walk right into an incentive trap. And so stablecoins are the incentive trap where they where they can draw people in with yield, they can give you interest rates. We can have yield bearing stable coins." Why would I keep my money in a bank if PayPal USD is going to give me 3% on my money and I'm going to store $100,000 in that and I get 3% in a year? That's amazing! And then you go outside the US dollar system and why would someone keep their money in the peso

57:10 The one if they can get 3% on US dollars You know, just by keeping their money in this stable coin. And so the stable coin creates this incentive to all you need is internet access to basically have access to the dollar and I don't even know if he needed that anymore because I don't know if you saw this. I saw today preparing but Jack Dorsey just created and launched a messaging app that only uses Bluetooth and people have already been sending crypto over it. So if you're in an area with no wifi Or signal, I guess. And you're just in proximity to someone within the Bluetooth range. You can send messages and funds without internet apparently it's so new. I don't even really know but apparently it just uses Bluetooth. So just another interesting side note to this whole new future a hundred percent yeah I mean the internet access is its mesh nets can kind of replace some of these things there are bartering methods because basically we've turned

58:14 the economy into a data economy. We're just simply sending like really large prime numbers back and forth, that's really what a Bitcoin transaction is and so you can do that over any communication protocol which is actually kind of an interesting... I think that creates a really interesting segue with this idea that communication protocols now can exchange money Because that sort of pushes us to where we're going, where stablecoin issuers are going to spring up basically. Because what the Genius Act really does is it allows anybody to become a private bank or they become a money creator. We've entered this moment of private currency creation is back baby and you can argue some of that is good and you could also argue that some of that is very bad

59:00 And so we're going to see this incentive push via these yield bearing stable coins, be via this dollar access from just a smartphone. You know the irony was Bitcoiners were always saying we're gonna end the Fed and central banking And in reality, the Bitcoin dollar system does. But not the Federal Reserve and every other central bank in the world 180 or so of them because if a central bank in the world can't stop capital flight, if they can't stop the citizens of Argentina from going into dollars, if they can't stop the global south in general Africa, Eurasia wherever

59:45 Getting dollar access because all they need is an internet account or a guess you know maybe even they don't just smart phone there lose the ability for it for capital control so they dont have the ability to keep them money in their economic system when they print money, where citizens can take the money and just go right into the dollar system writing to bitcoin write into stable coins. Because they're gonna be incentivized to do that because they get a yield or because they get a better store of value in an effective has. You know this what was supposed to be this great decentralizing force as actually probably arguably defined and neutered,

1:00:24 180 central banks around the world and has made the Central Bank in the United States, the most powerful as it is already. But even more so a more centralizing force because everyone has access to dollars now via stable coins. Everyone can get access to debt. The US government debt like the tokenization of it is what stable coins are and so the whole world is now incentivized to go to these stable coins And we're going to see large network effects pop up. The Genius Act allows stablecoin issuers to be anything they can be, you know what Elon Musk is trying to do with X it's half AI company half a... You know he wants it to be the half of the financial system that something he literally said

1:01:13 How do you do that? Well, you create a stable coin XUSDX or whatever. And you create stable coin rails via that are native to X because all you need to do to transfer the value in these things is it's the same technology as a DM. It's just it's just a handshake of numbers and letters. It's just a handshake of bits And so you can make any data protocol an economic protocol and then you put huge, huge, huge just power into the social networks, which we all know were created by DARPA basically to create consent for digital IDs whether it's Facebook or you know to feed giant amounts of data into AIs. Whatever I think correct conspiracy you want to lean into these giant data networks these social networks there is a reason why they came out of DARPA because they serve

1:02:18 the entities that be very, very well by incentivizing certain behaviors of humans. So we've gone through the Bitcoin dollar have gone through like so many of these dialectics energy money boom, boom, really where we're about to go and it's going to happen in the next week or so we're gonna see that genius act is most likely will be in this session see it signed by Trump into law And when we see that, we will see if Besant and Sachs and Lutnick and these guys were telling the truth when they say we're going to see demand unlock overnight. Every single fintech social network, every single bank in America really anybody that wants to be as Trump and his family have demonstrated creating their own coins literally on the eve of the inauguration you know anybody can become a money creator

1:03:10 And so we're going to see a new contest, a new war. A stable coin war basically between the banks that have had a monopoly on private capital creation they were the only ones that get access to the Fed and to the treasury to buy these T-bills now we're gonna see X and Facebook and Uber and Walmart and all of these people have all literally said that they are exploring this idea competing with JP Morgan in Bank of America Wow And we're going to see sort of is the network effect of a social network enough, um, to overtake the banking cartel? Are they all fronts for banking cartels to begin with. Um, and in sort of what effects does this have on control and on surveillance? And I do want to breathe cause I know you got stuff to say, and I know I've been ranting a bunch but the blockchain aspect of this all

1:04:04 Has a lot of rightful, I think to toss a coin to the dissenters of the cryptocurrency movement. They get a lot of things right and when you make money digital and create this ledger that all transactions are settled on You know, I give Greg three Bitcoin or whatever. If I send that to you, you're welcome it will be published in the ledger on in the blockchain. That's how a blockchain is. It's just a ledger that's chopped up into segments with a hash that makes it so that you can't change any of the blocks before it. So all the transactions are etched into cryptographic impunity but its public

1:04:54 So every transaction is carved and inscribed into this public thing that anybody in the world can download and look at. So whereas our old financial system had a ton of issues with it, at least it was mostly within a closed box. If I'm using cash, it's pretty much impossible to track the transactions if I'm using debit cards and credit cards surely the debit card of the bank, you know, the seller or merchant gets access to that information but it is still pretty closed. You know, there are groups of people who can see it, there is legislation and You know certain constitutional protections within the speech of settlement you know maybe thirty to forty people or whatever can take a look at your wire transfer in the whole world when you start settling. All this on public blockchains,

1:05:41 It literally creates an environment of unprecedented warrantless surveillance where anyone can download the blockchain and look at the transactions themselves. And it creates a really scary world, where yes CBDCs are terrible in giving your government Access to all of your transactions is really bad, but the dialectic response to that is let private banks do it so they can still seize and program and do all the bad things we don't like that CBDC's can do to your money. But then anybody with internet access can download and look at all your transactions." It creates kind of a really scary world in a new financial system. Right?

1:06:25 Anyone can do the banking part, but the banks, the companies that are backed by the government have an unfair advantage. Just like anyone can make a website, but the websites that are backed by the CIA and intelligence in DARPA run our lives Facebook, you know, Amazon all the, all the big companies Google. So you could say that there's a real parallel there like now Anyone can do it, but the people who are going to win are the ones who are backed by the government. So there's just really this wrapper on a CBDC that is just looks like private company. It's like you could call Google the CIA or DARPA, but they liked to put this little fun little wrapper on it so that people don't look deeper

1:07:16 I'm going to wrap a couple of questions into one, but I want you to kind of Nostradamus this for the next five years for us or so. You even mentioned that the AI cryptos are... Couple there and i've heard people talking about this big investment in nuclear being there because you have to power the ai, i believe there's even a line in your book someone are somewhat close to saying that like inanimate objects could basically carry out digital transactions in the future. And I don't know about a real use case for that. I don't know what that looks like in our lives, like we have this idea of a smart fridge telling us when we're out of milk does the smart fridge just pull from our wallet and get the milk sent to the house now without us really even facilitating a transaction? Help us understand the roadmap for the next five or so years because the uncertainty creates the anxiety and if we can at least have some foreknowledge of what might be coming it might be helpful to people

1:08:22 Uh, connect AI and inanimate objects in our lives. And the smart technology with the financial piece and how you just see it rolling out in the average person's middle-class life? We're going to see an extreme expansion of like technologies that seem like kind of magic. You know, we are going to see the Jetsons sort of style shit happen here with drones and artificial intelligence. It's gonna be a little bit of a culture shock I think everything is always overhyped until it's right you know so it's like a and all the stuff has been overhyped until what's not in now we're starting to see it i'm starting to see my peers completely lose their ability to write articles because they using AI for adjusting and that should be.

1:09:04 is just to jump in really quickly. There was that study that just came out the first early study on people's brains who outsource everything to chat GTP it's wrecking your brain, stop doing it just the same way as you can't remember a phone number because you put them all and your phone has mom dad wife You know, I remember phone numbers from when I was in grade school. Get kid down the street for six four six two seven four you know? I don't need to call Kevin Jones anymore but i could so it's the same principle But we are losing our ability to communicate, do anything. So stop using it this way. Sorry to interrupt I just asked you a question and interrupted you but yes go ahead. No it's all good. I totally agree. Once again kind of like stable coins is that I empathize with the convenience of it but what are the second order effects?

1:10:02 like brain loss function. Like, no I don't think it's worth it. I get why people think it is but I think over time it's not and I'm already seeing it. It's changing the way people are consuming content anyway that's a different rant but everything's over hyped until its not and then its here and I think thats going to be the case you know over the next five years I think a lot of these things that have been overhyped are actually going to start meaningfully being in our lives And so a good example of like the autonomous inanimate object becoming animate, I guess is like a self-driving car. Like an Uber, Tesla Uber right? Tesla taxi or whatever they're called it can show up and pick you up at your house without

1:10:48 a human driving it and send you to your workplace or whatever, and do that whole bunch of times. Then it's like I'm running out of battery power, I need to go charge. It can take the digital currency that you gave it for your ride that's probably native to the app. Let's say Uber makes their own stable coin and then an Uber picks you up and just takes it out of your Uber wallet, your Uber coin Then it goes to a power station and it pays for itself to be charged completely automated using the Uber currency that they've created, that you paid it. And then it goes and picks up the next person or say if a tire gets popped or whatever, it needs maintenance. It can literally pay for the maintenance out of the wallet that it holds the keys for. So things like that will start to happen and it will be kind of weird.

1:11:43 I was living in the Bay for a long time and in San Francisco, and I saw a lot of those things start to happen. I also saw a lot of them get kicked to the side like Google Glass and stuff like people were writing them for two seconds and then someone got into fight at it dive bar and they got all banned from all the bars and whenever because you know you couldn't tell if they were recording or not. And this social fought fight was lost in Google Glass basically got shelved I think we're going to not see the shelving here. I think we're going to see drones and autonomous things in the AI-ification of so much, of education, our content it's gonna really explode and with that I think we will see people becoming way more comfortable with wearables

1:12:33 Not even just the screen in their hands, but screens closer to their eyes. And you know they're just that blend of... They're gonna start kind of gearing us up for brain chips and robo arms and stuff like that. It sounds crazy! But that is where we're going i think that it's pretty likely and there's probably some good use cases somewhere in their right for certain people very specific situations. For the most part they can push it as this uber convenience everything's gonna be about convenience you save this amount of cost this, ultimately were gonna see our autonomy will away the last choices

1:13:15 And you know will just basically more or less get to the point where. The economy is completely imploded because all jobs have been replaced with automation not all but a lot in our lifetime will see like fifty percent of the jobs nowadays. Will be completely destroyed by the deflationary effects of technology we don't need as many other jobs as we have so what will they replace it with the beast and weird like you know your ear in the metaverse and your watching an ad then you make enough money and then they eat deliver you love, a burger and you eat that, it's going to become a very strange economy.

1:13:57 Everyone is already kind of a gig economy person that's going to accelerate and then to the point they're basically literally paying us To stay at home and watch TV as we like idiocracy move into just like in total insanity in the political spectrum so Technology is gonna play a huge role The incentive structure of how you dictate human behavior to wither people away to the point where Where that is a reality it's gonna be through like conveniences just the slow erosion of conveniences. Freed from the mental anguish of making choices. Yeah, well that's so there is this crazy Kissinger Eric Schmidt book they literally wrote a book together about AI that Whitney Webb reviewed for the Solari report for Catherine Osen-Fitz's publication and they talk about how they want people to use AI too offshore their cognitive ability until they no longer need it and then they're dependent

1:14:58 And once they can create a class of humans that are dependent on information source and thinking source analysis of the information that it provides, i can basically get you to believe or think anything. We're already seeing that today right now with the Epstein stuff like people literally coming out now being like there was never evidence for epstein it was totally this crazy Uh, phantom fabulous just story. And it's so crazy you ever believe what were those binders? Well you guys told me yeah exactly. You guys told me there were like hundreds of hours of uh, of you know CP and Bondi said it was on her desk. What was on your desk Pam So now we're just in this total post-truth hyper normalization of it

1:15:46 and everyone is just at rock is this true we've. It's it's gross and we have just offshored in we will continue to whittle away in the solution of convenience will, will take over and we keep eating the carrot and then its gonna be a big old stick and we're gonna be in this technocratic 1984 kind of shit where there's going to be a separate class of people in stable coins and in these closed internet pens Who really have no ability to move up in class? because technologically they're basically stuck down there and then you're gonna have the Yeah, the new elites. Basically that people that have somewhat of a control and somewhat of assets that they held During this, you know crazy pivot

1:16:34 in time. I think the reason why we're moving to a deflationary standard, a Bitcoin standard is because they've pillaged everything there's nothing really left to pillage so now they want money to appreciate over time rather than depreciate over time because they're not buying up land from us or buying up assets, they have it all You know, what more assets does BlackRock and Co. need? They really don't... I mean some rare earth minerals for their batteries and you know those things will play out but very very little so they want a deflationary money and then when they get the deflationary money And then when they've taken their technocratic throne and

1:17:38 It's dark but I think that's the path they want us to go. So how do we not do that? Well obviously maybe acknowledge that the tsunami is probably coming, a lot of money is going to be printed and when that happens People lose homes, people lose agency. People lose jobs so be prepared for that Hold assets that you think will appreciate with the tsunami of dollars and then build an exit and build I mean build your own communities find people that you trust in your area that grow eggs And have chickens and have meat you know, figure out self-defense and figure out how to print things and figure out...

1:18:22 You know people that you can trust build your family and teach them that, you know. Hey things could get kind of weird here so let's be prepared and lets not go crazy lets no do the picture you painted at the beginning protecting our goods with shotgun shells on the front porch every car that drives by its like no there still good people are good they want us to be divided they want us to think you know, everything is not real. And it's you know we're in this crazy whirlpool of fakeness It's like no there's plenty of truth out there There's plenty of beauty humans are awesome make crazy art go walk in the woods throw your fucking apple wash In the lake and and disconnect every once in a while if not forever um and I have to just speak personally

1:19:14 Because I got into Bitcoin, I've been able to do that. And I've been able to say fuck you to the COVID inoculation. I've been able to say bye when I had some editorial disagreements with my former work. I'm able to basically write at my own pace and not really have any worries. I'm not ballin', ballin or anything but I'm like secure And that was because of this technology that I also think has an opportunity to enslave the world. So there's opportunity in danger and just like remember to have fun, remember humans are like way more important than machines and we're really powerful beings and we can do a lot of fun shit if we get our heads together and build then we can use these tools

1:20:00 you know they invert goodness that i don't think the powers that be a really good creators are really good and we can invert this shit right back at them, you know if they wanna use the block chain to enslave everybody we can use it as alleged to write a whole bunch of crazy shit and we can publish. All this information on the Bitcoin blockchain, we can expose so much stuff using the technology to publish. It's immutable. You know there is... We can use the technology of the internet which is a DARPA project to enslave to use it to connect and share information like this So there is so much that we can do to invert and play their games And then when we don't want to play and we can fucking walk away you're not going fight the technocracy with blue check tweeting fucking 35 times day

1:20:43 Go the fuck outside, eat an apple get a bruise have kids meet your neighbors What else can we do? That's what humans are supposed to do. We're supposed to create don't let AI make songs, don't let them make paintings and pick up a paintbrush get a guitar you know like take the power back from the machines like you're not useless here at all powerful being go have fun. Yeah hey cheers to that although I do use AI to make songs but thats because i never learned guitar well Mark, I am glad we could do this and present this material to the audience. I hope that it made things more clear and thus there's a little less anxiety although we kind of ended on a very anxious picture of the future but either way you know let people know what you're working on next where to follow you where to get the book all that good stuff

1:21:38 Yeah, sure. Well I hope we ended ended on a positive air but you I agree that the five to 10 year picture is pretty dark. It turned out of this kid right there at the end. Yeah yeah exactly well yeah you can ironically follow me on Twitter at Mark Good W underscore i n which is I share, I've kind of published only. I tried to publish only on there. I've been writing for Unlimited Hangout now for a little bit. Whitney and I have been working on this chain series thechain.wiki so there's an internet version of it. It's five articles but we're turning it into a book that should be out hopefully by the end of the year going to be starting...I haven't announced any of this yet but going to be starting a physical magazine

1:22:28 In a publishing house with my old friend I used to print the physical magazine that at Bitcoin Magazine with my friend Baza. She's an amazing designer and printer, so we're starting a physical magazine that's going to be in the UH family because we think that the content platform hopping sort of where modern media is now is just not going to work if the internet does what we think it might do. We are not paranoid people but we are just prepared people. So I'm gonna be doing Should be very fun, I'm very excited for that. It's in my heart and it's what I want to do and we just need it. And yeah, I'll be writing at UH for the foreseeable future... Yeah! That's about it. Love it! Obviously you're busy and this was a lot of fun hopefully you'll come back every so often and set me straight? Any friend of Zorak's is a friend of mine, ya know that?! But thank you and take care! Cheers

1:23:34 And that's the way the cookie crumbles or the country. I'm not really sure, but I definitely liked this interview. I'd be happy to talk to Mark every so often so that we get updates on this part of the world because we don't have a great stable of financial guests. I do think that's a weak point in my overall bench strength. Sure, we know about the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking but that is the old world and when it comes to the details of the new economic reality and the economic health of the country and the financial games going on geopolitically and all that I would like to find the guy for those kind of updates and maybe it is Mark

1:24:20 But the problem is generally that it's hard to find the right person with a high degree of conventional financial literacy, but also the conspiratorial mindset. There is this libertarian gold bug archetype that we have in this subculture. But even among those guys I just find a lot of them circling around the same ideas and shilling their financial products a little aggressively I listened to a couple of those interviews and there's not even much analysis going on. So, I am open to suggestions though let me know! And yes i'm standing for this one...I think this is a better setup. I don't really like my printer showing in these videos that's odd. I do think I tried to make my office nice but it's hard to compete with what I see going on out there some really nice setups but anyway

1:25:14 Mark really knows where the ball is going as well as where it's been. So maybe that is all we need I certainly like the level-headed approach to Bitcoin and crypto its use cases are as wide as the internet itself I'm totally fine saying it was an intelligence project gone live so were eight of the top ten Internet companies It hasn't stopped many people from using them, It is what it is. The algorithm and the wallet, and the anonymous creator that's three sketchy elements Three strikes in your out right? Plus it all got started in the dark web drug trade Is that some magical place free from intelligence access and influence I doubt it I think about doing more with the dark web too from time to time And then I talk myself out of it

1:26:09 I would like a dark web guy actually. Let's put that on the list too when the news cycle headlines say, oh x y or z has been released on the dark web i need a guy to verify that for us and relay the message without actually getting ourselves that close to the material but we do want to know if those claims are real because they constantly come up and no one's really verifying so Either way, getting off track here. But I thought this was a great interview. I think we maybe went a little too deep on the history of the dollar and we could have fast forwarded further up the current timeline. I don't really mind too much cause it's all good context and I just find him easy to listen to but I'm watching the clock as always. I saw us get into that 40 minute Mark and I could tell we weren't going to get to where I hoped we would get to before the free plus split

1:27:06 But I can only do so much. That's why you should just be a plus member anyway, right? In the second hour we did get deeper into the details of the new pivot and what it means The intersection of AI and finance in some ways We might see it rolled out in the near future some Opportunities and risks in cryptocurrency? Not to say if you can't beat them, join them. But don't you wish you invested in the early Internet? We gotta eat too so... The machine is gonna do what it does cuz that's the game always but we could use some of the knowledge we've cultivated to create a little wealth and opportunity for ourselves maybe I Don't think anyone says well thank God I didn't invest in the early internet because there's just a DARPA project

1:27:54 No. So this is how the situation is, all the tools are bloody as I've heard Gordon say before and you're going to participate one way or another, might as well use insights to be forward thinking so we got into some of that and also a couple strategies for individuals trying to navigate and prepare for the big societal upheaval And i should also say we recorded this like 10 days ago and bitcoin rallied right after hitting new highs today it's all about xrp in aetherium even mention that the show that these are the five currencies that are gonna be in the reserve. So think about that when the president who is pretty damn corrupt has a side business investing heavily in crypto and buys like,

1:28:44 couple million dollars in the theorem and then it goes from 2600 to 3600 that shouldn't surprise anyone but did anyone use the knowledge they had now hindsight 2020 with this kind of stuff so I don't really mean to blame anybody but Yeah it's crypto week apparently news is moving fast but i do hope you feel a little more comfortable understanding the game behind the game now in the realm of digital finance and this big transition and maybe now you can read between the lines of some of the headlines and propaganda

1:29:20 A bit easier than before. I still think back to the last time we talked to Gordon and i've still got that ringing in my ears about World War 3 throughout 2026 and 27, and a US civil war that breaks up the 50 states permanently And so there is that, but also maybe we feel a tad bit better about total freefall collapse. At least there seems to be some kind of plan for the debt issue and it may be a long shot but it might keep the hot potato in the air a little bit longer and I guess that is what it is If they're winning the game of Monopoly, right? They have as much incentive as anyone to extend the game. When the game ends and everyone gives up like your advantage goes away too so that's just kind of my mindset like I try to have one foot in one foot out i've always kind of said that I want everything to be better but when people actively root for total collapse I don't think they have really thought that through

1:30:23 i'd like a rebalancing and the silver lining to me is that. The corruption and theft and embezzlement is so bad, that if we just got rid of maybe half of it and then reduced military spending forty percent for just like five years. We actually could write the ship I mean who am I to say but I do get that impression you know that the corruption is so bad they're just Even just stopping the skim for a little while would be enough. But either way, this is also a stretch I know and as much as I love the field, I'm not exactly synchronistically inclined but we recorded this the week that Superman came out okay? And Bitcoin hit 112 right then The new all-time high on Wednesday the day after that Now it's up to 120 so 112 seems low

1:31:20 But this is obviously the biggest run up it's ever had. And so I just thought it was interesting that Superman is out, Superman reviews start coming out and what's the big gimmicky play in the new Superman movie? What what is the very first thing we saw in the very first announcement trailer for Superman his dog Crypto specifically crypto saving Superman symbolically crypto saving America because we all know Superman thought of as the embodiment of America. So I think that's kind of interesting, I guess i gotta talk to Alex Fulton about how interesting it might actually be but you know whatever...I hear the movie is fine not great not that bad but I'm interested to see it just because I like to see a bright color palette again everything has been so dark and gritty for so long Superman looks kinda fresh

1:35:12 And I just want to make sure people get enough time to engage with it during the trial period. Some people, again might only want to find a few quick things and it's easier to do right now you got about 10 more days I guess but all right the next big thing on the list is to talk about the last episode this is the one with Richard Dolan and A little low. It clocked in at a 4.1 and this really surprises me! He is the gold standard when you use the term UFO historian, and I thought people would love hearing him get outside of the ET hypothesis box a little bit and talk more about the esoteric angles but...I guess not so much? I think people find him a bit too trusting of insiders he obviously voiced his frustration with those who are overly skeptical

1:36:05 And I didn't expect the listeners to dock him as many points, almost half a star from where I thought it would be. But...I kinda get it! Yeah, I see ya. But he says that Dolan said something like, would you automatically question your friends if they told you about something strange? Well no Richard I wouldn't because they're my friends not some government suss lord who until yesterday was receiving a paycheck from the Pentagon for lying to people. If Dolan is really that naive i am seriously tempted to email him claiming that i'm a Nigerian prince So yeah I kind of understand that sentiment

1:36:51 I mean, i do agree that if you're going to be making an argument about what you consider to be excessive skepticism equating One's friends to career counterintelligence operatives is not really even close to the same thing. Sometimes your credibility is just suspect and that's fine, you can still do a lot of work as a counter intelligence expert. You don't get to pivot to a new field where honesty transparency and trust are really the only currency sorry sometimes we do things in life that disqualify us from participating in something else

1:37:30 I don't want to use a highly charged off the radar example, but what comes to mind is the trans athlete thing. If there's a trans athlete league sure but there's not enough to really have that league it's hard enough to have women's leagues and a lot of this stuff But if you feel like you're in the wrong body and you want to transition, you can. That's fine but then you don't get to play sports with the women. You just don't get too same as if you were born 5-2. You probably don't get to play basketball so I want everyone to do what they wanna do but yeah there are some disqualifying aspects of a life and so I think that when it comes to the ufology thing

1:38:15 You don't get to be counterintelligence for three, four decades and then jump into ufology because we've just seen this game before. So that is not how disclosure's going to work for me and I don't consider being overly skeptical of specifically counterintelligence people to be too broad to be a problem cause that's what the suggestion was is that these people are broadly too skeptical I see the other argument too. You want insiders to speak out, but if you don't trust any insider who might have the knowledge then you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot it's a catch 22

1:38:53 But I think when it comes to insiders speaking out on ufology, I'm more inclined to believe a Navy ship captain who saw something out there in the middle of the ocean. Or I might believe some military pilots who saw something flying around in the sky that's fine. That is still far different from someone whose counterintelligence right? So that's, I guess how I feel about that. I agree, but we've had a lot of guests recently who are really good at what they do, but have used some outside examples and maybe don't really work for us and those ratings haven't been quite as low so 4.1 to me strikes strikes me is odd little low, but I guess it might've had more to do with that sort of stuff if I had to guess because otherwise I think he's great

1:39:45 Disappointing because I consider Richard Dolan to be one of those guests that every so often, I can rely on to boost the excitement around the general lineup. He's one of the best at UFO history and the names and dates and figures in this space as far as I'm concerned even if he is still primarily ETH it's fine. So a little disappointing there but i guess the next thing we do is take a look at the meetup calendar! We got some events on deck here they are Alright on deck Sunday this Sunday the 20th of July we got to Centralia Washington at Bub's Pub Sports Bar and Grill and also July 20th. Colorado Springs at the Crooked Q there are pool tables, dartboards pinball seems like a good time

1:40:39 And then the next day on a Monday, we got Eden Terrence Auckland New Zealand Gale breaths ale house moving on to July 28th Brooklyn New York at the cafe ornithology. So cool and then the next on deck is Bentonville Arkansas on August 1st they're definitely putting themselves out there sponsored by former THC guest Marduk The Sun God Wow i remember that show that is a ten year old episode they had a egalitarian community kind of a permaculture setup, i remember that i wish i could remember off the top of my head the name. Of that but look just search mark up the sun god and it'll come out

1:41:25 And then we also have Astoria, Oregon at the Astoria Brewing Company on August 8th. And then August 9th Raleigh North Carolina, the Raleigh Brewing Company now that I'm on this coast, I want to get up to the Carolinas kids are a little young for that big of a commitment in the car but the Carolina seemed nice as does Tennessee and Appalachia. I'm ready to get out there Nathan Isaac where are you? Get at me show me around Wainwright, Alberta Canada August 16th Wallace Park. I like it and then the last one here on the list is Black Rock City Nevada on August 27 so there it is lots of things happening. I think more and more of our guests are making comments about the importance of having real world meetups and you want to have good people in your network that are

1:42:21 Not needing to be updated when shit really goes south. So I would advise people if you live in any of those areas, hop on the calendar higher side meetups dot com get more details and show up there's really no risk at all and it's totally free and if you didn't hear about an event near you go ahead make one Okay. Well, again, I thank Mark for taking the time to be here and to you for listening. I hope we all learned a little something sign up for plus if you want more of this episode where it got really deep and more of every episode, of course. And maybe you just want to give me an attaboy for being one of the few podcasts that truly rejects the sponsorship model and stays fully independent.

1:43:02 Meet me on the plus side. All right, I'm out of here! I've done my part Your move stablecoin con men digital grid designers and technocratic tyrants your fucking move Dark comes in hope burns out Empire tightens up its grip There's no more oil gas or industry Just a cracking off the whip They nurtured our dependence when they pulled the rug Hard to imagine climbing out from the awful hole we We can resist if we know the secrets A holistic, symbiotic way not far off in the distance Melt down the coins you might find some strange effects Hidden energy is harder to enforce When they still lock the castle doors There's a better world

1:44:12 them with the gifts nature provides we'll learn to work with energy beyond the system's lies so we can resist if we know the secrets a holistic symbiotic way not far off in the distance meltdown makes more real ones you might find some strange effects the higher part can often be a paradise if you can change your mind enemy is in control but fears the march of time

1:45:05 is a thought away, flip the mental switch those who hold the truth are the only true bitch no denies it makes more sense if you even have real ones you might find some strange effects it makes moos if you eat real ones you might find some strange effect you might find some strange effects