← TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:07]
Marty Bent
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
- [00:11]
Mark Moss
If you talk about a fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
Whitney Webb
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- [00:29]
Mark Moss
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco.
- [00:32]
Marty Bent
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. Guys, it's been ten and a half months since we, since we last caught up.
- [00:40]
Mark Moss
That's a long time.
- [00:42]
Marty Bent
A lot of time was we recorded, I believe November 10, 2025, which is two days after the election. We talked about paler mafia coming in. And when I was thinking about how to start this conversation, I'm sure you guys saw it, but Alex Carpenter at the all in summit, very confidently letting the people of the United States know that Palantir is not spying on individual Americans. At first I was like, oh man, maybe I've really misunderstood Palantir. And then I was like, wait a second, like, how is that possible?
- [01:14]
Mark Moss
Yeah, do you remember when like James Clapper lied about how they were spying on Americans under oath and didn't get in trouble for it? Yeah, I think when people like that say they're not spying on Americans, it's kind of hard to trust them given a lot of the precedence, you know?
- [01:34]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [01:34]
Marty Bent
You know, James Clapper, nsa. The NSA is not going to work with Palantir though. They can't get the contracts. They don't spy enough. That's what was told.
- [01:43]
Mark Moss
Well, I'm pretty sure the contract for all 18 u. S. Intelligence agencies.
- [01:48]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well, I guess a year into the Trump admin, the last episode we did was like what to expect the next four years. And I think the crux of that conversation revolved around sort of financial stablecoin implementation. I think it's pretty clear that that was a very strong priority. This administration, they passed the genius act rather quickly. Obviously we're Talking about the PayPal palantir mafia getting more ingrained in the surveillance state here. That seems to be happening. And I think one thing we highlighted was with the immigration policy, watch out for the border. Digital IDs are probably the borders where they're gonna basically trojan horse digital IDs in.
- [02:36]
Mark Moss
And so, yeah, I mean that's still possible. I think that's definitely what's happening in the UK though. So Keir Starmer is pushing through digital ID to stop illegal immigration, which, you know, previously the Labor Party in the UK was pushing it. You know, this is, we're going to stop hate speech and stop online bullying. But it seems like in the US they're actually, instead of sneaking it through border stuff and on, on those same, you know, justifications that the UK government is using, it looks like it's going to slide in with the Genius act, considering what they've, some of the stuff they've put out asking for comment on after its passage, sort of framing Digital ID is an essential pillar to the implementation of, of the Genius Act.
- [03:20]
Marty Bent
So, so somebody, somebody who prides himself on being on the cutting edge of all this. I was unaware that digital ID was tied into this, I assume some KYC AML stuff, but didn't realize.
- [03:31]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, it's not, it's not directly like there's nothing in the Genius act specifically talking about digital id. There's obviously a lot about know your customer and bank secrecy act stuff and, and what have you. But I think the, the bigger, well, so as it relates to the Genius act specifically, the treasury did open up, you know, asking for comments and within that, you know, proposition asking for, for public comment, they did bring up digital id. And you know, I think people like Lola Leeds at the Rage has been covering a lot of the, the Genius act implications for like, you know, basically using articles of the Patriot act to push towards a lot of this stuff, which is obviously not good. But I think what's actually kind of interesting is not so much about the US yet, although I think that's, it's pretty inevitable that that will come at some point. But we're actually seeing the downstream effects of the stablecoin legislation passing in the U.S. other places in the world now, like in the U.K. they're limiting how many dollar stable coins or attempting to limit how many dollar stable coins a U.K. citizen can hold. And then we're seeing mass debanking in Vietnam. I think it was something like 70 something million bank accounts were closed, basically saying we'll rebank you if you agree to this biometric stuff and basically implement a digital id. And I think the reason for that is when there's a proliferation of US dollar stablecoins across the world and you know, now there's even avenues for yield to be given to those stable coins which we're going to see right at some point. You know, why would any foreign national hold anything other than, you know, dollars? Hopefully, you know, Bitcoin, if, if, if you're into that but why would you hold a local currency when you can hold dollars, get yield from it? And all you need to do to get to it is have, you know, a smartphone. So I think countries around the world, the euro, you know, the ECB is now putting out comments being like, we're screwed if we let the dollar stablecoins take over because why would you want to stay in the euro when you can get dollars with yield? So we're going to actually see, I think the rest of the world first implement a lot of restrictions on people via digital ID and you know, choking these on ramps to stablecoins because people are going to massively, you know, flight, you know, just incredible capital flight from their local currencies, you know, and they want to keep that money in their country, otherwise, you know, they're fucked. They don't want you putting their, their money in US debt or, you know, in tethers, you know, they want to keep you in your local currency. So we're already starting to see the downstream effects internationally from the genius act as it relates to like, let's prevent capital flight because of all the money leaves the country. You know, we're kind of screwed. So it remains to be seen how they'll do it in the US what carrot they'll dangle, whether it's some UBI or some, you know, yield thing or something that gets American citizens to comply with this stuff. But we're already starting to see it as like a defensive maneuver from, from foreign nations to like prevent capital flight via stable coins. Just kind of crazy.
- [06:52]
Marty Bent
Yeah, the Vietnam story, I wrote about it last week, it's pretty astonishing. I believe it was like 84 million bank accounts were closed. And it's typical government and maybe it makes sense to a certain extent, but I think it's certainly an overreach. They were like, hey, there's a bunch of people spinning up drop shipping businesses here and they're sort of laundering money from other countries in Southeast Asia and fraudulently spinning up these bank accounts. And I think the population of Vietnam is less than 100 billion. So obviously there's multiple bank accounts. But something that we've been talking about for quite some time is this push towards biometric verification. And that was sort of what they trojan horsed in. It's like, hey, we need to stop this fraud, we need to stop this money laundering. So we need a face scan or a fingerprint if you want to have an account.
- [07:39]
Whitney Webb
Yep.
- [07:41]
Mark Moss
Yeah, well, I think you're, I mean the, the pace of that globally pushing that through globally is really picked up. Especially you know, the EU announced last year that they were going to have this year basically be where they roll it all through for foreign travelers coming into the the eu. I think the State Department just issued something being like, Americans prepare to scan your face when you go to Europe. So you know, they pretty much done that. But this was an agreed upon thing with Interpol that to move that way and the US was like agreed to do that. So it just is a matter of time really until they implement it. Unless, you know, there's some directive from the administration distancing themselves from that, that Interpol policy. But I haven't seen anything that at this point, so. And already, I mean, I haven't traveled to the US since 2023. But I mean, even then it was kind of, you know, face scanny and they wanted you to, you know, do an even more like intense biometric thing if you wanted to skip the line with that private company.
- [08:43]
Marty Bent
Clear.
- [08:44]
Mark Moss
Yeah, yeah, those guys. And then there's the, the TSA itself has sort of like that, that fast, fast lane they offer if you like pre check and apparently they're going to put the deeper scan in with pre check at some point.
- [08:57]
Whitney Webb
And you know, one of the last times I was flying, I was like, you know, I had like an hour and I don't like to get to airports early, you know, because fuck that. And I had like an hour to get to my flight. It was international flight. And you know, this lady ran up and was like, you're going to miss your flight. You're going to miss it. The security line is too long. Come with me and I'll sign you up for the clear thing and we'll do the thing and you'll make your flight like you can't miss your flight, you know. And I was like, I'd rather miss my flight than go do that shit. And then I made it with like 45 minutes. Like it wasn't even close. But like, you know that trying to sigh out. Yeah, that like immediate, like you're gonna, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss like a big thing.
- [09:36]
Mark Moss
You're doomed. Scan your face.
- [09:37]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [09:38]
Mark Moss
And you won't be doomed.
- [09:39]
Whitney Webb
No, I'll take the doom. It's fine. I'll catch a later flight.
- [09:42]
Marty Bent
It is funny watching how easily conditioned people are. Because even still in the United States, I fly quite frequently within the States and I don't have pre check. People think I'm crazy for that. I'm like, I just don't have it and you go through the regular line and they have the face scanners pretty much nowadays at every sort of TSA checkpoint for regular, for regular boarding lines. And most people don't read the sign right before it that says you can opt out of this. And I, I can say with confidence, in the last 20 times I've flown over the last two years, I'm the only one that I've observed that is saying, I'm gonna opt out of this to scan your face. And even if it doesn't matter, there's cameras all throughout the airport and they're definitely scanning your face.
- [10:28]
Whitney Webb
Sure.
- [10:29]
Marty Bent
No matter what it's like I want to send the message like, I do not like this at all. I'm going to consciously opt out of it.
- [10:36]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, you, you can't comply to this stuff. Like I, I, I, I like totally. And I say this, you know, people always on me talking on stable coins and it's like, like I empathize and, and sympathize with people that want to use them. I totally get it and I understand that. But I think like, you know, we have such few, you know, lines in the sand to draw anymore and it's like we need to not comply as much as possible. That, not in a way that, you know, I'm not suggesting anybody really fudge their lives up or their kids lives or whatever. Obviously it's, it's, it's a personal decision. But like, yeah, I think if we normalize pushing back these things because it becomes super normalized that we get our whole body scanned and it's just like, we really shouldn't have to do that. And digital ID really won't work unless everybody complies. And you know, unfortunately they're going to try to figure out some way to manufacture consent for the compliance, you know, and they're damn good at that. Unfortunately.
- [11:33]
Marty Bent
That's just what I was going to get to like. We are in an environment where it seems like manufactured consent is being drummed up with speech laws not only in the UK but the coming here in the United States. The newsletter I wrote last night, I'm not sure if you've seen. I believe it's SB 277 out of California that just passed the Senate. They're basically going to bring hate speech laws and they're focusing on the social media platforms with more than $100 million in gross revenue annually first. But it's basically the state of California saying if, if you say something that we deem is hate speech, we will Find the social media platforms. And that's just a sort of light nudging towards forcing the social media platforms to curb speech. So we're seeing that, obviously, with the aftermath of Charlie Kirk, things are very divisive right now. The right is certainly ginned up. The left is ginned up as well. And I made a conscious effort two weeks out. The first few days, I definitely was reacting to it, a little emotional. But now after some conversations with people and looking at how the story has sort of developed since then with the narrative that the government's putting out there, what's happening, and like there's something here, it seems like there's some attempt to divide and conquer here. So I'm trying to step back from the culture wars and just focus on bitcoin and privacy right now.
- [12:59]
Mark Moss
Yeah, definitely. Good for you. Well, you know, a lot of these, you know, big events and a lot of times they capitalize on real tragedies, but the national security state takes advantage of these types of things pretty consistently, consistently to put for greater control. Right. And so, you know, you brought up hate speech laws in California, presumably coming from the left. There's been a lot of questionable rhetoric from the right after the Kirk assassination, talking about hate speech as well. And so ultimately, you know, where does that take us? To a place where there's a lot more censorship than people would want. You know, censorship was a big political issue last election cycle, you know, really big for certain, you know, demographics. And so to have sort of the idea that hate speech is going to be potentially embraced by, by both sides, I definitely don't see that as, as a good thing. And also, you know, some of the stuff that has come out in the, in the aftermath of this assassination has been this, what I would call a renewed push to upstart the war on domestic terror, which people have to keep in mind. You know, there's a long history to that. And so a lot of times when people get really emotionally sucked in to things, they kind of are focusing very much on like the present and the recent. Whereas, you know, the domestic terror infrastructure is something that's been steadily developed by every administration ever since 9 11. Because remember, in the post 911 environment, that's how we got the Department of Homeland Security. And right before 9 11, they introduced legislation to basically make DHA, DHS, but under a different name. And there wasn't a lot of support for it until conveniently after 911 when a lot of legislation that was liberty curbing was pushed through. You know, the Patriot act being the most well known, but also the creation of DHS and numerous other laws and ultimately a lot of the war on terror infrastructure was always meant to be used domestically at some point, which is why you have a lot of those same things launching, you know, at the same time in the early 2000s. And so, you know, every administration since then, from Bush to Obama and then Trump the first time around and Biden, they have all expanded the domestic terror infrastructure and apparatus. And if you actually look at the definition of how the government defines domestic terrorism, which is actually put out by the Biden administration, but it's been supported. I haven't seen them change, to the best of my knowledge, the definition since Trump came in. But it includes people really on both sides of the divide. People that are against perceived government overreach, for example, can be defined as domestic terrorists. And then people who are against all forms of capitalism, for example. And that was Biden that put that out. But that could include potentially you're against stakeholder capitalism of the World Economic Forum, for example, and some of the. And it's a pretty wide, wide reaching thing unfortunately. And you know, governments tend to use kind of these vague definitions and use them to their advantage whenever they want. Right. So they're kind of, they give themselves a lot of wiggle room so they can label whoever they want a domestic terrorist. And so, you know, Antifa has now been labeled a domestic terror organization. And I would look at them as something, you know, sort of like probably most likely very Fed infiltrated in the same way that like Patriot Front and like even the proud boys had Feds or like informants like at the very top of the, of the structure and things like that. You know, they tend to, this is how the national security state operates when it wants to justify bigger budgets, more control and a removal of our liberties. And this has been going on since the 1980s with Operation Gladio when they developed the strategy of tension. They were, the CIA and intelligence agencies basically were funding terrorism against civilians in Europe. And then they were blamed on, on left leaning groups and they specifically were going after civilians. And it was a CIA plan really to prevent regimes that they deemed as aligned with Soviets potentially, but not even actually just like left wing parties. They wanted to push Europe politically in a particular direction or towards particular candidates. They, you know, were financing terrorism and they were doing that with like the mob in the Vatican. I mean it was a very. But I mean it's a documented thing. So you know, call me a conspiracy person all you want. Which of course people like to do. But, I mean, it's something that, you know, intelligence agencies have been doing. And so that, you know, if they want to institute draconian control measures, digital control measures over the United States or Western society or global society at large, they're probably, you know, they tend to go fall back on these same patterns and tactics that they've used time and again, decade over decade. And so what I worry about is a push for that happening again. Now that. But, I mean, flipping sides, right? So you could argue that Biden tried to do it to an extent, but I think really, it's whatever party's in power, they push for continued expansion of this apparatus and they, they use it. They, they use whichever group is convenient to pander to their base to justify us giving up liberty for perceived security. Right. Which is also part of the Operation Gladio strategy of tension. I mean, that's exactly what the goal of it was, was to get people to give up their liberties to feel safer from these terror acts that, you know, that were being financed by intelligence in the mob.
- [18:39]
Marty Bent
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- [21:06]
Mark Moss
Yeah, yeah, there's already a massage CIA. I would argue it's a front. It's a company called Gabriel that sells like preventative tech to schools and churches to prevent shootings before they happen. If you're interested in reading about them, you can search for Gabriel and unlimited Hangout. But there's been efforts to sort of build up position particular companies for this what I would call pre crime infrastructure. And they in 2019 specifically they really started selling themselves as preventing mass shootings before they happen. One of these companies was Carbine911, now known as Carbine, which people may remember was financed heavily by Jeffrey Epstein and Leslie Wexner and Ehud Barak used to be the chairman and a lot of you know, Israeli intelligence people, including like the Commander of Unit 8200 were on the board. An Epstein associate named Nicole Yunkerman was on the board. And then they kind of the Epstein association came out and they tried to distance themselves, yada yada Yada. But they were selling themselves to take over nine one one call systems throughout the US and set and basically sold themselves in 2019 that we can stop mass shootings before they happen or respond, increase response time and all of these things. And now they've slowly taken over the 911 call systems of a litany of counties across the United States. But after the Epstein stuff came out, they tried to rebrand as more American. So they only left one, you know, ex Israeli intelligence guy that co founded it, you know, there and they put like Michael Chertoff on the board of advisors who was former dhs and they put one of Trump's previous heads of dhs, Chris Christian Nielsen I think her name was, and then an ex FBI guy or something to try and I guess make it look more American. But it's, it's really the same, the same type of program. And also Peter Thiel was a big investor in that. And now recently published emails from Epstein World that have come out in the first half of this year's show Ehud, Barack and Epstein talking about meeting with Peter Thiel specifically about, about carbine. And you know, that's relevant because of, you know, Teal and Palantir, Palantir being specifically pre crime focused. And what's important too is, you know, back at the end of 2019 when all this was going on, Trump was still was in office the first time and all of these, you know, mass shootings were happening and there was an outcry about it, like the El Paso Walmart shooting for example, and a few other things that took place in a relatively short period of time. And what's interesting about that is before those shootings happened, not long before, William Barr, who was Attorney General gave this speech where he basically was like, we need to remove encryption. We have to have a federal back door into everything encrypted, all encrypted software. And we'll eventually get that because what he called a galvanizing event would soon happen that would help reduce Americans resistance to that policy. Right. And then all of these shootings happen and, and then in that same. And, and then not long after that, William Barr makes pre crime of an official policy of the Department of Justice. So he set up the infrastructure to legalize pre crime at that time in October 2019. And so it's been being built on ever since. But they haven't really necessarily made it, deployed it massively. Right. But they've set up the legal infrastructure to legalize it and they created a program under which the doj has made a few arrests. That's called deep. It's an acronym. I forget exactly what it stands for. But they've made a few arrests where they've arrested people preemptively for social media posts. And then in that same period of time also Trump came out as in his touted response to these mass shootings was to have social media sites deploy some sort of software program that would detect shooters before they can act. Right. So continuing to build on this pre crime thing and at the time he was being pitched, and the biggest lobbyists in the administration for it was Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Trump, to create this new agency, a Health DARPA or a HARPA they called it. And the first program of it that, the pilot program of it was called Safe Homes, which is again another very long acronym for something that I don't remember, sorry. But basically the idea of it was to have AI scour American social media posts in mass and then use an algorithm to determine which posts show users exhibiting early neuropsych psychiatric warning signs. And that if they were, you know, flags, they could be triaged to a variety of, of solutions like court ordered physicians or psychiatrists. Right. Or like potentially house arrest just for having social media posts that the AI has determined is bad. Um, it's, it's very messed up. So you know, ultimately they didn't make Harpa, but Biden made Harpa. It's called ARPA H. And the same architects of the HARPA that was being pitched under Trump ended up being the same architects of Biden's ARPA H. But ARPA H was sold as a cancer moonshot. We're going to cure cancer with ARPA H. But I mean ARPA H is absolutely still around and still has these kinds of, of this kind of focus in addition to its health focus. Right. So unfortunately, you know, the Trump administration, or at least Trump as a president, has that precedent from his previous administration of responding to concerns about guns by being like, we should apply pre crime to American social media posts and determine who might be a bad actor before they commit any crime. And from the civil liberty perspective, this is terrible. And an even greater warning sign is the increasing involvement, which you brought up earlier, Marty, of Palantir in this administration because Palantir is, was specifically really created to be a pre crime entity. It is a successor to this post 911 program that was housed in DARPA called Total Information Awareness. And it's, it's, you know, been a Palantir since then, has been piloting predictive policing, you know, throughout the country. I think they first started doing that in the 2014, 2015, 15 window. And, you know, they, they, because of their connections with all of, you know, pretty much every US Intelligence agency and how much data they hover up and hold on every American having Palantir, you know, be involved in, in the government so extensively and also now in, like, your taxes, like their recent partnership with, like, the IRS and, you know, with mortgages and like, increasingly getting involved with finances and also, you know, running a lot of major Wall street banks. You know, it could potentially get very, very complicated. And so we're sort of at this stage where a lot of this infrastructure is starting to come together. And in order to get people to relinquish civil liberties enough to have this kind of predictive policing infrastructure be the norm, something really big has to happen. People have to get really angry, and more importantly, people have to get really insecure and fearful. Right. And so, you know, I worry that this is sort of a, you know, an important moment, an inflection point where they're going to try and start pushing us in that direction.
- [28:58]
Whitney Webb
A turning point.
- [28:59]
Mark Moss
I was going to say that, but I didn't want to. But, I mean, well, you know, I mean, you know, Trump and Elon Musk and some of these other people explicitly made that, you know, saying, signaling in their statements around the Charlie Kirk Memorial, for example, that this is a turning point and all of that. But we don't want it to be a turning point where it leads us to a dark end point. Right.
- [29:23]
Whitney Webb
Well, it's interesting, right? One of the first reactions to the, you know, the brutal assassination was, you know, the putting pressure on Discord, on Steam, on Signal, on Signal, on. I think even Twitter. I think a bunch of the CEOs for these companies are going to be called to sort of testify about what they can do to sort of prevent things like this. And a lot of the, you know, public discourse about the shooting has been about, you know, the grooming that takes place on platforms like Discord. And, and, you know, how can the Feds come in and clean it up with predictive policing, with AI algorithms, with some sort of AI moderation, as if Feds have never groomed a mass shooter before or anything like that. But what's that get you demonetized? But, but the, but it's. Whenever I, you know, obviously it's a difficult thing to talk about because it's, we're so close to it. No one really has any idea what's going on we're all being fed information from sources we generally don't trust anyway. So I don't necessarily trust the FBI right now not to get put on the list. But, you know, I don't know. I have no idea what happened. It's. It's fucked up. It's sad. But the reaction is something I can absolutely, in the discourse is absolutely something I can comment on. And immediately it went to, you know, these apps, these communication platforms, which are very important for us to be able to organize under, you know, and it's, it's dangerous. I think it's very scary to me that, you know, the, you know, a few of the platforms left where people can kind of have a. Somewhat of a public square. You know, they're actually a centralized choke point, just like that California bill you brought up. It's like they're not attacking the people writing the stuff on the, on, on Twitter or YouTube. You know, they're attacking the centralized platformers and they can put pressure on them. I'm going to fine you $100 million. If someone says, you know, something, something, something, they're not going to let that happen because it will hurt their bottom line. And so the incentive is very easy to push on these private companies, again, they're private companies, you know, they're not necessarily constitutionally protected. And so I think, unfortunately, the reaction that we're going to see from a lot of this, and I've already started to see it, is, you know, a further, you know, erosion of the little public square we have left, which is, which is not a lot. And you mentioned it earlier, you know, like, the left is ginned up, the right is ginned up, and like, they fucking should be. Everybody should be ginned up right now. But unfortunately, it seems like we're ginned up at each other and.
- [31:59]
Mark Moss
Well, that's the goal, right?
- [32:00]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [32:01]
Mark Moss
You know, I would argue who are some domestic terrorists that should be gone after? I don't know, what about Dick Cheney? What about Leslie Wexner, who funded Jeffrey? Why can't we investigate them with all of the resources of, of DHS and, you know, the Palantir and the, the NSA and whatever. Like, why can't we go after people like, people like that, you know, but instead it's going to be pointed at regular people. And what I am concerned about too specifically with like, the antifa branding is that they'll try and conflate anyone who criticizes fascism in general as being somehow affiliated with antifa. And like, there was a zero hedge story that I Read talking about the, the antifa labeling that basically was conflating like people who are anti fascist but not necessarily associated with the group antifa as being part of it. And that's complicated because maybe you're someone like me and you don't like fascism or communism.
- [33:01]
Whitney Webb
Right.
- [33:02]
Mark Moss
You know, fancy. And do we, you know, if there's an issue where it becomes very apparent or a policy is being put forth that would very much, I don't know, bring to fruition the Mussolini style of fascism, court of corporatism, you know, a fusion of corporate corp, you know, of corporation and state. And you want to criticize that, will you get labeled as anti fat, you know, as part of this, these organizations. And people might think that's kind of far off. But I mean, think about how the original war of domestic war of terror went right, where regular people in the US that happened to be Muslim were targeted and even though they had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Right. Well, and now you have the former head of Al Qaeda being given a diplomatic welcome in New York. Like, you know, well, that's. I want David Petraeus is like, how you holding up? Yeah, former head of Al Qaeda.
- [33:57]
Marty Bent
This is insane to me. I had this teed up to share because I think it highlights one thing.
- [34:02]
Mark Moss
Like the 911 was an inside job. Most definitely.
- [34:06]
Whitney Webb
Whoa.
- [34:07]
Marty Bent
Whoa.
- [34:07]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [34:08]
Mark Moss
So sorry, Marty.
- [34:09]
Marty Bent
You know how I think. Yeah. I mean, I think the 911 narrative that we've been fed is completely wrong. What happened to Building 7? Nobody wants to talk about building.
- [34:16]
Mark Moss
Well, I mean, Americans were told we have to give up all of our freedoms because we have to destroy the people who did this. This is one of the guys that.
- [34:27]
Marty Bent
Yeah, and that's, that's the point. That's why is like their, their narrative when it's convenient to push through the Patriot act and all these civil liberties infringing directives from the government, they'll. They'll run with the narrative. But here we are, 24 years later, nobody really cares about Al Qaeda anymore.
- [34:46]
Mark Moss
It's like, hey, yeah, well that guy Al Jaloni or Al Jilani, who's in charge of Syria now, the US helped put him there. It was Obama and Hillary in the Obama administration. It's been aided by every administration since then until Assad was overthrown. And they're literal terrorists. And here, here we are now he's in a suit, so it's fine. And now he's shaking hands with another terrorist named General David Petraeus that used to be head of the CIA speech. I Better be careful.
- [35:19]
Marty Bent
It's almost so far in your face too. And like, building on. It's almost like, all right, command and control. We had the Al Qaeda war against terrorism narrative for 20 years. Forever War that sort of pittered out. And it's like, okay, now we're going to pivot to this domestic terrorism framing to try and divide people and bringing even more surveillance technology to the country. And oh, by the way, as soon as we start doing that, we're going to basically tie a knot in the Al Qaeda thing. We're friends now.
- [35:47]
Whitney Webb
And it's, yeah.
- [35:48]
Marty Bent
Completely weird.
- [35:49]
Mark Moss
And can you imagine having lost a family member in 911 or having cancer because you were a first responder to.
- [35:55]
Whitney Webb
911 and watching this happen in New York too. Like, it. Right, it was at the un, Right.
- [36:01]
Mark Moss
Yeah. And like, they want to let anyone from, From Palestine come represent Palestine and. No, not Hamas like the pa, you know, or like someone, Any. Any Palestinian diplomat, including the ones that have no affiliation with Hamas at all. They were all blocked from coming to represent Palestine. But yeah, let's let the Al Qaeda guy come in. That's. That's fine.
- [36:23]
Marty Bent
It's very weird. It's very weird. And that's what I think.
- [36:27]
Mark Moss
Well, I mean, it just means they're full of.
- [36:30]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well, and that's what I wanted to bring up. I mean, obviously, years ago, we're talking about Agenda 2030 as put forth by the World Economic Forum. But if you. And I think there's a lot of people that are under the impression, like, okay, we avoided that. We're not. Yeah, the great reset. But I think it's just.
- [36:45]
Mark Moss
Oh, really?
- [36:46]
Marty Bent
Branded.
- [36:46]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, we said that when we came.
- [36:50]
Mark Moss
On, I don't know, 2020, 23 or I guess early 2024 maybe. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:55]
Whitney Webb
We wrote this piece called Tokenized Inc. And we kind of phrased it as like, we called it phase shift dialectics. And it's like all of a sudden, you know, malaise at, at Davos and like, everybody's cheering.
- [37:07]
Mark Moss
Yeah. They were like Malay obliterated Davos. And the Davos elites they were interviewed were like, we loved it. He's spank us harder, daddy Malay. You know, I mean, that doesn't make any sense if that. Okay, right. It doesn't happen that quickly. The switch.
- [37:20]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [37:20]
Mark Moss
Doesn't go like that. Also, by the way, he did not get rid of the central bank and now we're going to bail them out.
- [37:25]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of issues there, but yeah, I mean, like, think, you know, he's like Mr. ESG basically. And then he pivots, becomes a bitcoin maxi and you know, starts leaning into a lot of this, you know, kind of like freedom rhetoric or whatever. Now he's running the west, now he's running the weft stuff. And I was thinking we, we watched this really interesting Corbett report documentary about BlackRock and talking about Aladdin, which was, you know, the, this, this computer system built, you know, by an Israeli with, with the blackrock guys that basically is like the risk management tool system for like the whole financial system. It's pretty incredible. It's brought up in Adam Curtis's hypernormalization. Aladdin is a very interesting, you know, data farm and I believe in Seattle in the Washington area. And, you know, it's really interesting. I connected a dot for me that I had never really connected before about how, you know, why are they pushing these ESG things? And the way that I kind of understood it in the context of this was, you know, because Aladdin is actually this financial instrument that, that helps put, you know, does risk analysis for all of these big index funds and all these big traders and VC firms that are, you know, sloshing around, you know, the biggest, most liquid market in the world in the US Dollar, like derivatives and futures and funds, indexes. And you know, ESG is actually really this way. If they create an ESG score, this like, social credit system and they say, you know, you know, if you're using too much of your own power or, you know, you, you have these, this infrastructure that is really bad for the environment, but you're actually like an independent, you know, company that can kind of survive on its own because you have the infrastructure you need to survive. You're not dependent on, you know, maybe less, you know, resilient, you know, green energy or whatever. You know, they can actually literally pick and choose which companies survive via this, you know, algorithmic financial market. And they can say if you don't have a high enough ESG score, then we're not going to put you in these indexes, we're not going to tell people to buy your funds and you get a low score in Aladdin, which runs fucking everything. And so in reality, they're actually picking and choosing companies that have a less chance of being independent and pushing back from, you know, whatever sort of totalitarianism market, you know, wef agenda structure stuff that we're starting to see be implemented under a right rhetoric. So these companies that are actually able to get through have a high enough ESG score play By Daddy Fink's rules, they're actually going to be a lot less independent. So they are able to financialize companies that don't have as much independence and therefore can't really push back against the state, which has, you know, kind of gone into these, you know, private wells everywhere. And Aladdin is just like this humongous thing that no one ever talks about and it has such huge effects for like how they're going to implement this stuff. And I think it's really not that surprising unfortunately that, you know, Fink is now, you know, co chair of the forum and he's also the guy who has more control over anybody else via his firm and via this analytics, you know, empire to pick and choose winners of the future economy. So it's like they're using the guise of, of, you know, free market, you know, libertarianism to actually enact and actualize all of the ESG shit. All the WEF stuff, all the. That is really scary that we, we end up having these sort of companies that are reliant on, you know, state power companies and state data centers and all this stuff and they really don't have any ability to push back. Then those companies are the ones that get choke pointed by free speech. They're the ones that are running YouTube, Facebook, you know, all these companies that choose to, they want to be winners so they, they play ball and now they have no grounds to stand. You know, when, when things get crunched down and we're seeing that now the, the crunch is really happening from the state and there's a slow erosion of civil liberties via financial incentives. And you know, yeah, that's something that, you know, bitcoiners and, and freedom based people have talked about for so long. This erosion of constitutional rights will be done through financial incentives. Well, how do they actually do it now? They have all these mechanisms to really pick and choose and make sure only companies that have no chance of pushing back are the ones that get, you know, all the, all the money and the ones that get all the, the resources from a financialization standpoint. And nowadays it's all about financialization. I mean there's really like companies nowadays, it doesn't, doesn't even matter how much money you make. It's, it's, it's like what your stock price is and you know, if you're included in the s and P500 or not, if you're in such and such index fund or not, if the traders like you, if there's a meme, if someone, some influencer is shilling your stock. I mean it's, we've gone into such this, we financialized finance in such a ludicrous way that now it's really all algorithmic driven. And who controls the algorithms? There's not that many people. It's a really small group of people. It's the finks, it's the carps, it's the teals, and now they're all sitting on top of the biggest think tanks and basically in the White House. So, you know, now we're, we're kind of going to see the fruits of that, of that work and hopefully we don't. I think I started this rant talking about left and right being jimmied up against each other and not against the guys shaking the jar. And it's like we know, we know what they're gonna do, we know what they've built. We, they've told us their policies that they want to implement. You know, it was just Klaus Schwab and his robe and he told us what he wanted to do and we just sort of forgot because we just assumed he's gone now. But it's like, no, they're going to implement all these things. It's going to be digital id, it's going to be carbon credit scores, it's going to be erosion of free speech. And now they can actually do it. They are doing it and they're going to keep using legitimate crisis or manufactured ones to keep slowly eroding the shore.
- [43:44]
Mark Moss
And it's also a big part of the web's push right was the fourth Industrial Revolution, which is this push into transhumanism. And the so called libertarian elites behind people like J.D. vance and that have been really involved with the Trump administration this cycle are very overtly transhumanist and think that the only way forward is to basically merge with machines which you know, in practice is not really that different. And you know, I really wish that more people that actually cared about liberty and civil liberties and freedom and individual sovereignty would actually pay attention to the political philosophies of people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. Nick Land, who was a, you know, one of the main influences on Marc Andreessen's techno optimist manifesto because they're not libertarian. I mean it's bonkers to me that people, I mean, I guess they self define as that, but I think it's in the same, I mean it's a wolf in sheep's clothing for them to self define like that. And I think people haven't really looked at, Looked very closely at what these people want. Because, you know, in the case of someone like, like Yarvin, who's very close with Peter Thiel and has influenced tremendously his political philosophy, I mean, basically, you know, and this is kind of common with how a lot of the stuff we've been talking about recently works. You know, they'll accurately talk about how the system sucks. And people are like, yeah, the system does suck, you know, but then they get around to their solutions. And then, you know, when people, like, agree with your diagnosis of the problem, they'll be like, more inclined to get on board with your solutions. So, you know, with, with Curtis Yarvin, it's basically about creating, turning the US Into a corporate monopoly. So it's about deconstructing the existing state and the cathedral and all of that. And then once sufficiently deconstructed, you know, sufficiently, basically completely privatize the state. But in doing so, you're not going to limit or eliminate the authoritarian powers of the state. You will keep them. And then you'll basically have a CEO of that SOV Corp, sovereign corporation or whatever, a gov corp, a government corporation, run everything as a dictator. Yeah, I don't think that sounds very liberty maximizing to me. And there's a quote from Yarvin that is very. I mean, honestly, it's something Klaus Schwab could have said. I'll read it to you, Marty, because I wanted to make sure that I had it verbatim right. So no one can be like, he never said that. No, he absolutely did. This is his opinion on what should be done with undesirable elements of society or adults who are not productive members of society. He said, quote, our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is, the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder, the removal of undesirable elements from society, in parentheses, but without any of the moral stigma. The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards, meaning people, either metaphorically or literally, but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell, which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual reality interface that allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world. Live in the pod. Live in the multiverse.
- [47:26]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [47:27]
Mark Moss
Who decides if you're undesirable? The corporate monarch, on top of the day.
- [47:32]
Marty Bent
I've met Curtis in person. I actually went to two Two of the four part lecture series of Peter Thiel's Antichrist you did in Austin. Yeah.
- [47:41]
Whitney Webb
Oh shit. What was it like?
- [47:44]
Marty Bent
Yeah, by a friend they did at UATX and it was actually interesting and I think the, I think people like the way he thinks the Antichrist is going to be some like 33 year old and something we should look out for and the way he framed it.
- [48:00]
Mark Moss
33 year old, interesting.
- [48:02]
Marty Bent
The Antichrist has to be around the same age of Jesus as his is his thesis. And it was very interesting. I met Curtis in person too and I think he's got a very hoppy in view you describe as like a corporate monopoly dictatorship. He would describe as like we need to get back to monarchy. Which I don't think I agree with. I think we need more. I think we need.
- [48:22]
Mark Moss
I mean that's not libertarian. You see what I'm saying? Like a monarchy isn't libertarian. It isn't liberty maximizing it does not reduce or remove the authority authoritarian power of the state. There would still be under a monarchy there's still like tariffs and regulations and all of these things that libertarians don't like. I don't see how it's libertarian.
- [48:45]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, I mean the, I think the argument. I'm not going to speak for him but I think the gist of what I understand not saying I completely agree with like I don't think it's pragmatic in the sense that it could actually be implemented but I think his view would be is that monarchs, if they're actually doing their job right and they're incentivized to do their job right. Because the people will kill them if they don't. And so they're like I'm just giving the sort of neo reactionist monarch.
- [49:10]
Mark Moss
Yeah. But at the same time if you do that in today's world, you know, and someone like Peter Thiel has Palantir around, no one gets to kill the monarch when he does a bad job.
- [49:22]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, I, I completely agree. It's not pragmatic for today's day and age. Like I think we to get back to like Holy Roman Empire. You think that levels of distribution like if you go back to the Holy Roman Empire and you have like very, very small city states.
- [49:38]
Mark Moss
I think that is what wasn't it still kind of feudalist though?
- [49:43]
Marty Bent
It was, it was. I'm talking about from like a state structure wise like I'm talking get more distributed, more decentralized like here in the.
- [49:49]
Mark Moss
United States, but without the feudalism. Right.
- [49:52]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Yeah.
- [49:52]
Mark Moss
Okay.
- [49:53]
Whitney Webb
Well, to me, it's interesting the way that technology plays a role in the, like, decentralization and then recentralization, and then, like, the state is always kind of fluctuating like that. And, like, I mean, it's an analogy that's been made a bunch of times, but, like, the idea of, like, the gunpowder revolution being a decentralizing thing at first, you know, because it's like, you want to go kill the monarch. Well, now I got a musket, and I can go in there and shoot you or whatever. And it, like, decentralized the monopoly on violence. But then they got really good at making gunpowder and, you know, F16s and whatever and, you know, drones and surveillance technology and all these things. And then that, like, monopoly was reinstated by the furthering of that technology. So while it was something that initially decentralized power and did lead to, like, uprisings of, you know, you know, people in the feudal system being able to, you know, get out of it because they could go, blam, blam. Good luck. Reloading your musket fast enough, you know, as one monarch to kill 50 peasants or whatever. Like, good luck. But then as the technology grew on, it became recentralizing, and I think we're seeing that with communication tech tech, and we're seeing that with, you know, financial tech, because initially all these things did distribute power. Like, the Internet in the 90s was awesome. The Internet in the early 2000s was amazing. It was cool. There was tons of crazy happening. It was really creative. There was, like, you know, I was, like, a big gamer in that time and, like, playing Counter Strike and user map settings and mods and Starcraft and, you know, downloading ROMs and things. Yeah, exactly. Like, there was. There was. There was vernacular being made. There was connections being made. There was a really cool thing. And I think I said this actually on the show before, but it's like, we built the Internet. It was the people. It was very. Yes, it was a DARPA project. But then it spread out and it, you know, all the. The communication early on in the Internet, the cool content was, like, made by us. It was made by, like, cool people online. And that was very cool. And now we're seeing it, like, recentralized, and now it's like the Internet to, like, 6 billion people in the world, like, is Facebook, and, like, that's not the Internet. Like, that sucks.
- [52:12]
Marty Bent
Going back to aol.
- [52:13]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, exactly. Like, we've gone back to the AOL homepage, but without the, like, disturbing chat rooms and interesting going on. You know, now it's just like the most like sanitized, you know, corpo approved content. And now we're seeing, yeah, communication tech has kind of recentralized and I think kind of unfortunately, like I don't know how it's all going to play out but I think we're kind of seeing that with financial tech too where like a lot of the stuff that was going on at the beginning of the sort of digital financial revolution like was pretty revolutionary. And like it was amazing that you could generate coins meaningfully with like a CPU and be able to you know, transact, you know, with like, like very little bandwidth, very little storage space and very little processing power and being able to have like a Swiss bank on your, you know, Dell or whatever. Now it's like kind of recentralizing and a lot of the peer to peer stuff that was, you know, so cool about the promise of the early revolution is like everyone's just going to trusted custodians. Like I'm not saying everybody, I'm not saying I'm not, I'm not a doomer about it. I think there are people doing cool stuff. But my fear is that we've seen a cycle of technology dissolving power and then recentralizing it to an even smaller, you know, the US Empire is the biggest monopoly of violence in the world. Yes, the gunpowder revolution decentralized power from feudal lords to the peasants. But now it's recentralized to you know, F16, B52s, B2s, whatever. You know, no one's fucking with that. Now we have drone tech and all the stuff that's going to just even further centralize where good luck, you know, when we have AI drones going around taking out, you know, people before they do something bad because they've, they've profiled them successfully, like good luck fighting back against that power. We've seen this time and time again this, you know, devolving decentralization, recentralization. And I think we're seeing it with communication tech. I think we're already kind of there. The Internet is way less free than it used to be. And I'm fearful of that happening with financial tech because I think the way you dictate human behavior is with financial incentives. Like that's how you do it. And so if they want to really dictate human behavior, they've got the content stuff kind of down. They're doing pretty good with that. But now you affect monetization, you affect their bank accounts, you affect income streams, you inflate the out of the dollar, which is obviously happening and about to happen. You get everybody on the globe onboarded onto the dollar with stablecoins, then you inflate the fuck out of the dollar. And then it's like, okay, well you have your wallet and we'll send you 2,000 bucks a month if you, if you conform and do all these things. And they can really centralize monetary policy. Like, it's ironic. Like, the end result of cryptocurrency might literally be the U.S. treasury runs the entire financial system.
- [55:14]
Mark Moss
Yeah, well, that's how you get your new world currency.
- [55:17]
Marty Bent
We're not going to let it happen. We're not going to let it happen.
- [55:19]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, yeah. I mean we can't. I mean we can't because there's no coming back from it.
- [55:24]
Marty Bent
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- [58:53]
Mark Moss
Yeah, see, I mean this is why it's important with the talking about the war on domestic terror, war of terror stuff, because a lot of this is justified of we. A lot of the stuff that's been rhetoric that's been used to justify targeting, you know, improved privacy on transactions has been, oh, it could be used to finance terrorism or it could be money Laundering. But you know, who's the biggest financer of terrorism and the biggest money launderer in the world? Well, it's probably, it's probably, you know, the U.S. government and its allied governments in their national security states that have documented, I mean, there's so much evidence of them doing that for a very, very long time through a variety of banks. And you know, in the digital era, they're probably using entities like that for those same purposes as well. I would be shocked if they were not. And this is about censoring or preventing regular people from having privacy, just like how I said earlier, Bill Barr being like, we want access to everyone's encrypted stuff. We don't want encryption to really exist, at least as it relates to the federal government. You know, maybe there's encryption between, you know, me and Mark and me and you, Marty. Right, but like the government would have a back door into whatever it wants and that's what they want for financial transactions too. And also, you know, you have to keep in mind, you know, data is the new oil. They want to harvest as much data from us as possible. If, you know, financial transactions are walled off and they can't take that data, they don't like that. And it's an important part of them being able to profile you. I mean, a lot of the stuff that's in your NSA file or whatever and what they've sucked up through all the warrantless spying for decades now, you know, a lot of it is financial transactional stuff and I don't think they have any interest in having that change. But now as we see this, you know, apparent effort to sort of regen up war on domestic terror rhetoric. We need this to stop antifa and the dark money going into these radical left organizations, this and that, that, I mean, be careful there because they may be pushing for the same stuff and say it's to stop all these groups, you know, but ultimately it is less financial freedom for everyone.
- [61:11]
Whitney Webb
Right? And even if you do subscribe to the two party system, like in earnest, it's like, let's not set precedent to go after leftist groups really hard. And then, you know, it's Gavin Newsom running this and he comes in and starts going after all, all these right groups like, like even if you do subscribe to that, it's a very dangerous because I mean they'll, they'll change perception and pivot whenever it's, it's convenient for them and they'll use it to enact really disgusting dangerous, you know, even acts of war. Like, let's, like, what are they doing in Venezuela right now? It's like they're like, oh my God, all the drugs are pouring in from Venezuela. Let's go bomb these people. It's like as if the US Government hasn't been bringing in drugs and trafficking drugs in the United States and financing their, like, black book operations. Like, oh, now we got to go blow up a fishing boat in Venezuela and start like an act of war and have like, it's, it's just absurd. I guess maybe they figured out another way to finance black book operations using cryptocurrency, but maybe they don't need the.
- [62:12]
Mark Moss
Well, they're keeping the Ukraine war going, so that's.
- [62:14]
Whitney Webb
Right, right, sure. But it's like they'll, they will take something that they'll entrench and they'll use to, you know, to, to make a law or, or to do a thing, you know, a decade ago, and then in the future they'll use the exact opposite of that thing to enforce, you know, whatever the hell they want. So it's like, we have enough evidence now of this ping pong back and forth. These ping pongs used to be generational where we would see, you know, you know, parties literally just switch entirely. You know, the Dems and the Republicans basically switched, you know, in the, in the Kennedy era. Like, you know, and before, you know, what side they were really on in terms of kind of traditional left. Right. That switch that used to be a generational thing. You wouldn't see that in your lifetime. Our generation is getting onslaughted with just back and forth. We're in this, you know, like we, we kind of said, you know, last time we were on, we're like, we're entering this, you know, a cyclone and the hyper normalization of everything is going to be super destabilizing and discombobulating on purpose. And they're going to use it to push a whole bunch of. And it's going to be really crazy. It's been even crazier than I possibly thought it could be with, with like how fast things are going back and forth and moving and just like, I.
- [63:35]
Mark Moss
Mean, just this administration alone, I mean, does it feel like it's been nine months? I mean, I feel like it's been like two years.
- [63:43]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. And it's like I wrote a newsletter like the week after Charlie Kirk, like, don't focus on the negative, focus on the good coming out of that. And I think when it comes to all this discussion, like, particularly the war on domestic terror. Like, the signal to me that we're going in the right direction is when you're actually attacking the core of the problem, which I think is people are doped up on SSRIs that are driving them crazy. The food's bad, your health's bad and you're not actually. We're not actually getting to the other core of the problem, the predominant core of the problem, which is the economic situation. Like, people are all pissed off because they can't sustain a quality of life that, that their parents and grandparents were able to. And that's going to drive people to the streets and they're gonna have sort of.
- [64:31]
Mark Moss
Yeah, but they don't wanna, they don't want another like Occupy Wall street thing when people realize that they're still getting, you know.
- [64:38]
Marty Bent
Exactly.
- [64:38]
Mark Moss
Screwed by bankers. Right.
- [64:40]
Marty Bent
That's what like we need to ask people to focus on the core problems. Like it's.
- [64:44]
Whitney Webb
Right.
- [64:44]
Marty Bent
It's economic, quality of life, wealth gap.
- [64:48]
Whitney Webb
Totally.
- [64:48]
Mark Moss
Yeah. And I would add that our government is run by organized crime who were also the bankers basically. And they don't want freedom for the plebs.
- [65:03]
Whitney Webb
Yeah. It's like, let's hyper focus on like.
- [65:06]
Mark Moss
How do we get the plebs to give their freedoms away to us? And we'll tell them that they're getting all of these things, things, you know, better security, no crime.
- [65:15]
Whitney Webb
And also like, etc, who like people have really bad quality of life for all the reasons why you just said. I would say I agree. You know, it's a bit of a cop out sometimes, but I kind of think it's true. It's like, well, the, the dollar has just inflated so much. No one can save any money. Wages suck, everything's more expensive. Everyone is like, it's just the pot is boiling. And really instead of blaming the people that caused the situation in the first place. Right. Like, this was an issue I had had, you know, I hate both parties, but this was an issue I had with some of the people that were giving a free pass to Trump for 2.0. It's like he printed a ton of money and locked everybody down. But like he was a big part of the bailouts the first time around. The going direct plan, which you could argue maybe was even the point of the pandemic was to print a ton of money when the repo market fails in fall 2019 and then shut everything down so there's no demand. And we would print trillions of dollars and hand it to BlackRock, basically. But like we're all focusing on. On not the issues A, and not the cause of the issues B, and then C, we're focusing on, like, oh, it's like armed mentally ill transsexuals that are the. That's why my life sucks. You know, it's like, no, it's not. There's like, barely any of them in the world at all. Like, I, I, like, we're all being really like, you know, because our content feeds are so curated, they can. Again, I talked about this last time. They know what demographic we are. They can feed us exactly what it is that we need to see to push us a little bit in that direction. And we misplaced the blame. Yeah, they get us so angry at the total wrong things. Like, again, I think TDS Trump Derangement Syndrome was like, the greatest psyop, maybe next to Q, like, ever. Because the left is so deranged as to how they talk about Trump that you can't even take them seriously. And they don't talk like, it's like, okay, well, your criticisms of Trump are ridiculous, but there's a lot of things to criticize Trump about out. But you can't, because then you're a libtard. And it's like, well, no, I, I don't have anything against the. I'm not. I don't blame the liberals for, for anything that happened. Like, they were socially engineered to do absolutely insane and believe crazy because their quality of life sucked. And I don't blame the right either, because they were socially engineered just on a different social media platform or with a different algorithm. And I don't blame them. It's not their fault. It's not the left or the right's fault. It's the, the people at the top that are giving us all this shit to make us mad at each other. And we need to come together and not go kill each other in the streets and go point at the people that are causing this. And as the discourse falls apart, as our public squares fall apart and we're forced more and more onto centralized platforms and centralized financial instruments, we, like, lose the ability to come together and fight the real issue that we need to fight. And even just saying that, right, Like, I'm probably now on some Palantir database because I'm. We should, you know, they don't surveil us as. You're fine, good.
- [68:16]
Mark Moss
Perfect. Perfect.
- [68:18]
Whitney Webb
But, like, yeah, we should tar and feather the people running the government on both sides that did this to us. I don't want to hurt my brother in the street. You know, it's like they're my classmates, you know, like they're not. I don't care if they believe crazy things. I think both people on both sides believe crazy things. I probably believe crazy things, but I'm not that. They're not my enemy, you know, they're my brother. So why are we shooting each other?
- [68:38]
Mark Moss
Well, I brought up, I brought up walkie by Wall street earlier and I think that that was really disturbing to them because that was like, this is a majority of people. Yes. And it's against the oligarchy, right, the 1% oligarchy. And honestly, you know, a lot of my work points to this being a bipartisan thing pushing us towards this techno feudalism, like a neo feudalism stuff with transhumanism in it where they use transhumanism and, and AI to basically stratify the 99 from the 1% by technological and genetic engineering means, basically. And they're very open about that. And one of the guys I brought up earlier who was an inspiration for Marc Andreessen's techno optimist stuff, one of the neo reactionary guys, the dark enlightenment guy, his name's Nick Land, he basically says, he calls the elite the self filtering or. What is it? I wrote it down, sorry, genetically self filtering elite and says that they're superior and that they'll continue to be superior because, you know, once the singularity is here, you know, we'll be, the elites will be able to dominate genetic engineering and will engineer themselves into something completely superior to everyone else. And then basically the rest of us will be trash, you know. And this is also in, you know, I mean, a lot of the same rhetoric in like Marc Andreessen World and Nick Land World is really similar to the rhetoric he get from the globalists like Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger in their books about it and how basically we need to become, forget what they called it, something like techno optimists or something that like we need to become. We need to merge with machines. It's the only way. And you hear this from Elon too. And you know, it's. I, it makes sense when you look at how people like Eric Schmidt are also on the steering committee of Bilderberg with Peter Thiel and Alex Karl Carp. And we're told these are elites on different sides. Like you had people in last election like Pete Canones being like, these are our elites, they're on our side. And Bari Bari Weiss being like, yeah, they're the counter elites. No they're not.
- [70:52]
Whitney Webb
Dave Smith calling them the cool billionaires.
- [70:57]
Mark Moss
I don't think there's anything cool about this. Sorry. Taking us to this end point of transhumanism. I mean, it basically creates a massive up us versus them thing. And you know, the way Kissinger and Schmidt put it, they're like, eventually people won't even be able to cognitively comprehend what's being done to them and how they're being engineered by AI and by this other class of people that program and maintains the AI and decides what it does to people. And ultimately a lot of the rhetoric here about, you know, like Nick Land's hyper racism, it's completely indistinguishable from the eugenics of like the Rockefeller crowd and the global government crowd, which obviously Kissinger and Co. Or are parts of or even some of these old time Fabian socialist guys like H.G. wells. The idea of like, you know, the, the lower classes will become a different species from the upper class. I mean, these people were the, the, you really genesis, you know, back in the early 20th century and 19th century were openly saying this and you know, they were behind the League of Nations. A lot of them were intimately involved in the creation of the, of the UN and it's. This is not good. It's something. It's the elites on both sides and this idea that there's these two types of, you know, two classes of elites that are fundamentally different. Now at the end of the day, they are playing us against ourselves. And some of them play the role of we're elites on this side and we're elites on the other side to help engineer the divide and conquer necessary to hurt us into this cattle pen that is digital. And eventually, if we allow ourselves to go in there, they have made it very explicit that the, the not chosen ones basically will be engineered to be inferior genetically. And also with the use of technology like brain chips and all of this transhumanist and oh my God, dude, it's insane. It's just completely bonkers. And it's not conspiracy anymore. They're very open about it on both sides. But the thing is, people don't read what these people write. They don't read their books. They look at sound bites of them on Joe Rogan's podcast where they're basically like, hey, I'm a normal guy like you. You know, I mean, Peter Thiel went and did that. And you know, Mark Andreessen went and did that. Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, fellow kids. It's me, Marky. I didn't mean to censor you.
- [73:21]
Whitney Webb
I wanted the look at my chain.
- [73:25]
Marty Bent
Had YouTube come out yesterday. Google admit. Yeah, I'm not demonetized anymore, so I don't think we have to worry. I think we have at least two weeks where we don't have to worry.
- [73:33]
Whitney Webb
Hell yeah.
- [73:34]
Marty Bent
This is frustrating because I got demonetized for talking about climate change and Covid vaccines and Yeah, I mean, I got.
- [73:42]
Mark Moss
Demonetized for the COVID vaccine also on Patreon.
- [73:46]
Whitney Webb
And that's, that's. Yeah, it, it sucks so hard because it's like this is where again, where like, even when you push back on this stuff, like, you need to have a lot of empathy and sympathy for people that, that are good, hard working people who are stuck using platforms that they don't control that their livelihood is connected to, where they're like, like they have to play the algo games, they have to do the mouth open thumbnails, they have to do these things. And Richard Greaser told me to mention that to you, by the way.
- [74:12]
Marty Bent
Yeah, we're gonna make, we're gonna make the best thumbnail for this episode.
- [74:16]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, but it's, but it's like they have to play those games and it's like, like, I think your show is like wonderful. It's, it's one of the few shows in the space that I like actually regularly check out and, and because you have open discourse really all across the board, people that you don't necessarily agree with, sometimes you have, you know, and, but you're still at the whim of like, if you want to talk about COVID vaccines, they can fucking pull your money, you know, your livelihood. And you know, I obviously, you know, a lot of us in the bitcoin space have some bit more of fuck you status where we can be like, okay, well, I can deal with not having it for a week or whatever, but some people can, you know, and I had that privilege during COVID where like, I was a semester away from finishing a degree in electrical engineering when Covet happened and they were like, you got to get a thingy. And I was like, I'm not, I'm not doing that. And I was able to just walk away because I had some, some money squirreled away in this, in this weird protocol thing and I was able to just say no. But like, a lot of people have a family and they worked really hard to do that and they wouldn't be able to say no. And that's now happening with like, content creation and, and the livelihood of people online and it's just like, it's it's, it's sad and it's scary.
- [75:26]
Mark Moss
Well, it's, it's, it's ultimately going to go back to that, that same coercive mechanism that Mark was just describing. It may not be Covid next time, it might be something else, but this is how it's going to operate. And eventually it'll be like, if you don't want to comply with digital id, then you can't be banked, period. Or it could be, you know, infinite number of, of things, you can't travel, et cetera, if you don't play ball. And you know, it was the vaccine passport crash gap during COVID but that's really just a road map for where all of this is going. And I think there was a lot of awareness of that a couple years ago and it seemingly evaporated, which is unfortunate because if you're aware of where they're trying to take us, you can plan things to not have to comply. So like, so for example, if you're like one of those people Mark mentioned where like you had, you felt like you had to get the COVID vaccine because you have a family support and you can't, you didn't, you couldn't lose your job, do you want to be in that same situation situation again like five to six to ten years later, or would you want to structure your life so that you don't have to be that dependent on the whims of a government or another, you know, authoritarian entity that's, you know, forcing you to make choices you don't want to make and wrecking your individual sovereignty because of whatever reason. You know, ideally we should all have been spending this time being like they're gonna do this crap again and how, here's how I'm gonna set up my life to be independent so that I don't have to go through this stuff or, or, you know, these lessons I learned about how this tactic affected my life and how I'm gonna be free from it next time. I mean, that's really what we should have been doing. But there's been constant distractions, you know, and the more people are sucked in, I guess, to social media and the online world in this, it's not even a 24 hour newsletter cycle, it's like a two hour news. I mean, it's just crazy, you know, the less you are doing probably I would assume, you know, and so it's really important for people to, I think, remember that and look at how can I structure my life and my family's life to help us be independent and safe from what's coming. Because what happens when, like I mentioned earlier, like a lot of these elites, you know, they have these transhumanist fantasies, not just for them where they're going to live together, but for the underclass. And what happens when it's like, well, you know, if you want to work and have a job and not just have UBI whatever. Well, you need a brain chip.
- [77:54]
Marty Bent
It's demolition man, you know.
- [77:57]
Mark Moss
Yeah, but I mean, I mean, maybe it sounds weird, but it really shouldn't at this point. Or maybe it's like you have to, you know, we'll inject this into you next time if you want to keep your job. It could be anything. I mean, I don't know.
- [78:08]
Whitney Webb
I have this issue when talking about, with like independent media people that have, you know, a lot of reservations about like bitcoin and digital finance in general because they just sort of throw garlic and holy water and kind of do the, you know, they're like, this is a Trojan horse for CBDC or whatever, total control and, and maybe they read some of our work or, or looked at the stablecoin mornings or whatever and we're like, oh my God, this is it. And maybe didn't really grok the nuance of the situation. And it's like, like actually like, yes, there might be a divided class entirely that comes downstream of the bitcoin monetization and the dollar play underneath it with stable coins. That's very actually likely and is where I'm personally expecting things to go. That's why I want it to go as slow as possible. I want as many people to get on board it as possible, to have it safely off boarded on exchanges as possible and all these things that we talk about. But it's like I can still say bad things could happen from a hyper bitcoinization world. The faster it happens, it. We won't really save that many people if, if the way that it happens now. How many people can really hold their own coins? Yada, yada, yada. But they see these warnings and then they take it and they're like, bitcoin's terrible. Anybody that says anything about bitcoin is a fed, scammer, pusher, guy, blah, blah, blah. They're a spoon. It's like, like, no, I'm telling you that you need to learn about this so that maybe you don't become in that lower class because that's probably where this is going to go. Now there could be good things that come from removing the monopolization of, of monetary growth, like to this deflationary system that no one can change monetary policy of that could be an extremely good thing also. There could be like, okay, 100,000 people have access to that meaningfully and 7.9 billion people don't and that, and that's bad. But they just, they take all of the, you know, good work and research and things about like, hey, maybe some of the people behind these things aren't so good and look at where this could go. And then they write off the whole thing and it's like, no, I won't. I don't want you to be a slave. I don't want you to be an underclass because you didn't research this technology. And maybe it does go to zero, I don't know. But there's a good chance that it won't and it's a good chance the state's going to use it to debt pardon. And in which case you probably want to grab some. You know, it's the same thing. Why the precious metals people have been talking about this for years and they were directionally correct. But I think technology wise they were probably wrong. Although we will see. Obviously gold is on a hell of a run, but I think when that stops and I think things will pivot back into to Bitcoin and maybe some crypto too. But you know, why would you ignore this trend? It's like saying let's not buy gold before Bretton Woods. It's like because they're going to create a new world order with gold. Why the wouldn't you want to hold gold in your house if they're going to do that? Not participating in the building of the new world order by owning Bitcoin, even if they use Bitcoin and stablecoins to create and you're not, it's not the same as buying a stock like a Palantir stock where you're like financing the company by buying their equity. It's like it's a commodity, it's an asset. It's not the same thing. And like there's a lot of reasons to be apprehensive about a hyper bitcoinized world. I think that there are, there are also a lot of reasons to be excited about it. But the nuance there is like lost on a lot of people. And I just like, I hate that. Otherwise well intentioned smart people can't like see that, you know, hey, maybe this will be bad for a lot of people but like I want to protect my family. And I want to, I want to be set up so that I don't get put in that lower class. Why wouldn't you consider that? Why wouldn't you squirrel away $500 or $1,000 if you can in a, in a hyper inflating, you know, dollar world anyway? It's like, like you should really look into it and educate to make the decision for yourself because I don't want you to be in the Yarvin honey bee pod virtualized world thing. I don't want anybody to be that. I wanna, I wanna go throw a ball with you outside in the field. I don't want you stuck in the metaverse, you know, so like consider ways to make sure you don't get stuck on the metaverse. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what I'm saying, but I hope that makes sense.
- [82:29]
Marty Bent
I have a couple thoughts here. Number one, like I'm highly skeptical that like AGI ASI is as close as these people are making.
- [82:37]
Whitney Webb
I agree with that.
- [82:38]
Mark Moss
But they're gonna sell it as that. I mean they already tried that ex Google guy that was like it's sentient. Here it is. And people are like oh, it's happening. And then he, and then it was like, oh yeah, doctored the transcript. It didn't really happen. I mean they can do that whenever they want want. And here's the thing too, is that like in that Kissinger, one of the Kissinger Schmidt books about AI, they're like either the, at the, the development of the AI industry leads to one of two outcomes. Either it creates a new world religion or you know, the underclass revolts against the elites and overthrows them. What, which outcome do you think Kissinger and, and Schmidt want?
- [83:16]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well out of that I was gonna say it's gonna stop. Blasphemous.
- [83:21]
Mark Moss
They, they want AI pretend Jesus source.
- [83:24]
Marty Bent
Models to an extent. Like obviously they have their own system prompts but I think that's our, our best way to fight back against like the open AIs metas of the world and xai, if you don't, if you don't think they're going to bring us down a good direction. I can see what Tony and Mark said at Maple. AI have been able to build like using actual end to end encryption to make sure that your conversations with the large language models are private and the data stays on the secure encl. Like that gives me a lot of hope. And if you are paying attention to like the cutting edge models, these open source models are really Catching up. And so it's just making people aware that they exist in the first place and pushing them to leverage them.
- [84:07]
Mark Moss
Well, even with that, the only thing I would add is that I think it's important for people to not become dependent on any sort of AI algorithm because there's the whole. I mean, I've talked about this for years. If you don't use it, you lose it kind of thing. If we become dependent on AI, AI for a variety of tasks, one day you wake up and you can't do that task without the AI anymore and you like need to have it obviously better to be. I mean obviously in the case of like open AI and those companies, it's a subscription model. So you lose the ability to do that task. You are stuck paying them. Right. Infinitely to be able to do the thing that you need to do. Right. But in, in general, just like at a cognitive level, I feel like, you know, the, the people of the world are really under like a multi pronged attack and a lot of it is a psychological war and like a cognitive war. And so it's really important for people to like still be able to use their brain for things that are important. And a big part of that is, you know, being able to discern for yourself critical thinking and analysis. You know, I think a lot of things, of course, that aren't really taught in US schools or really schools anywhere. Right, right. But I mean, they're essential and the more we outsource our thinking to AI, you know, it's problematic and also, you know, just sort of not preparing yourself to look at the ex Twitter's, you know, for you algorithm and having all this stuff pushed at you, you know, and absorbing it all without having any sort of discernment about why that may be. You know, I think people need to kind of consider that they're going into a literal, you know, battlefield every time they're getting on these platforms. And to not be so easily. Well, sure, but it's not so not to be so easily influenced by things.
- [85:53]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [85:54]
Mark Moss
And to look at a variety of sources and try and discern things from yourself and try to avoid all the, the rage bait, you know, and the stuff to get us really like emotionally upset and angry. Because I've said this before on your show, Marty, you know, the more upset and agitated and emotional people become, the last. The less rationally they think. Right. And the more impulsively they do things or say things. Right.
- [86:20]
Whitney Webb
And I think it's specifically.
- [86:22]
Mark Moss
That's how they want us though, all the Time.
- [86:24]
Whitney Webb
And also how they want us again, I think, as it relates to talking about Schmidt and Google and AI and how they meet. You know, you were telling me the other day about the, the, the, like, you know, Google. Schmidt has said Google is a failure in the sense that every time you ask a question and search for something, it should give you one answer, just one answer. Like the perfect search engine, you get exactly what you're looking for. This whole, you know, 10 pages of going through trying to find something and all these links, like, that's a failure in the sense that if they were doing their job perfectly, you would ask a question and get the perfect answer.
- [87:03]
Mark Moss
The right answer.
- [87:04]
Whitney Webb
The right answer. Right, yeah. And who determines what's the right answer? Well, it's, it's Google's AI. It's, it's, it's the algorithm.
- [87:12]
Mark Moss
Well, that's the goal of AI ticking research for Schmidt and presumably for a lot of these guys.
- [87:17]
Whitney Webb
Right. I mean, Google's easily the most important one. It kind of doesn't really matter.
- [87:21]
Mark Moss
So now a lot of these search engines, you know, they'll preface with the AI answer and the results of results will follow, but their goal is to not have the results follow. Right, right. It's just to have that answer there. And I mean, a lot of people are treating AI like it's authoritative, like, grok, is this real? You know, but AI hallucinates and doesn't actually think, you know, it's trained on patterns of data, and so it returns.
- [87:47]
Marty Bent
You know, it's a probabilistic outcome, not a deterministic.
- [87:49]
Whitney Webb
Is like the, and, and ultimately, you know, it's the man behind the curtain. You know, even if they are feeding it off of, you know, sound data cache and, you know, it's, it's a fine algorithm. Once they establish the dominance of single input, single output, and everybody is getting their information from these things, they can swap it out. They can come in and, and be like, oh, well, now we control the present and we control the past and we control the future, and we control the, the answers you get for your. We become the front page of the Internet. We become your only interaction with the Internet. We become your friend, we become your lover. We become whatever the AI is becoming with people. And, and you don't actually know who is controlling these algorithms, what the algorithms are, how they change, what changes them, what they're feeding off of. And like, it's just, it's almost an impossible thing to nail down to know exactly what it is that you're interacting with that, that won't be changed. And your habits, your patterns are being built. You are learning. You are actually the learning model, the large language model that is being conditioned by using these things. And then you just become conditioned to go towards that for everything that you ever need. And that is scary. I think in general, and I think.
- [89:16]
Mark Moss
Especially with kids being like, yeah, having kids use it.
- [89:20]
Marty Bent
I can hear Matt Odell screaming in my ear right now. And I have to bring up. But this is like why something like NOSTR exists, right? Because you sign a piece of data, an event, with a private key that is associated with you at a particular point in time and you basically have that. It's not on a blockchain, but you can prove cryptographically like this happened at this point in time. Similarly with what the Simple Proof team is doing by anchoring sort of of digital record data into the bitcoin blockchain, into transactions, and basically proving this record existed at this point in time.
- [89:53]
Whitney Webb
I mean, to your point, Open Time.
- [89:54]
Marty Bent
Stamp is like, what do they call it? The. The dead Internet theory where you don't know, oh, we are there, brother has ever existed.
- [90:02]
Mark Moss
It's freaking insane. Like, I have AI impersonator channels that get like hundreds of thousands of views per video. They make like, AI versions of me that don't even even look like me, dude, it's terrifying. Or they like Photoshop like a hand that's like way bigger than my hand, like in front of my face.
- [90:19]
Whitney Webb
They're coming like, what? Black rock you. They're on the moon. That's going to happen.
- [90:23]
Marty Bent
Well, this is the.
- [90:24]
Mark Moss
Yeah. And eventually how am I going to prove that? It's like, not.
- [90:28]
Marty Bent
You need to sign with a private key. You need to start using. Yeah, sure, down there. I know you're. I know. But like, I, I think, thinking optimistically, how do we get out of this? And that's why whenever we talk, talk, I'm extremely optimistic because I'm following like the front edge of what's happening on Bitcoin. And now Nostr and Nostr specifically, if you look at some of the clients being built on top of it, it's reaching parity with X Twitch substack. And like, we're getting to the point where you can have a similar experience on NOSTR that you're having on the sort of walled garden platform Internet with the major social media platforms, that. That is extremely encouraging. The fact that Bitcoin's intertwined with that so you can produce content, prove it was you have it distributed on this Distributed protocol that nobody can control and then you can monetize it directly via Bitcoin. More people need to be aware of this. They need to be focused on it. And going back to the whole divide, conquer Hegelian dialectic. Again, I got riled up immediately after the Charlie Kirk thing, but we can week, almost two weeks since it's like very obvious that they're trying to gin up this division. It's like don't focus on that, focus on the solutions like Bitcoin, Nostr, open source AI and educating people about this.
- [91:46]
Whitney Webb
And this is the perfect segue into what we're working on right now, which we haven't even really talked about anywhere yet. So we can funly plug it now.
- [91:57]
Mark Moss
Yeah. But we're hoping to be on the, I guess the front edge of the, of independent media by going back into physical media a little bit, which is pretty uncommon in the independent media space. Because what better way to know that it's really us, not a slop.
- [92:15]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [92:15]
Mark Moss
Than literally hold it in. Hold it in your hand. So we're making a magazine.
- [92:23]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, we're starting a magazine and a publishing house house with our good friend Basa, who I worked with on the print magazine at Bitcoin magazine. And we got a couple books in the canon.
- [92:37]
Mark Moss
Yeah. The first magazine that we're gonna be having is called the Technocratic Dark State. It's by Ian Davis, who of course, you know, Marty, he's the man. And a lot of the stuff that I brought up today, you know, I learned from him about, you know, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Lamb, you know, and a lot of that philosophy, it's in that book. It's almost done reading it so far. Incredible. As is the case with Ian's work, pretty much across the board, it's top notch.
- [93:06]
Whitney Webb
So. Yeah.
- [93:07]
Mark Moss
Yeah.
- [93:08]
Marty Bent
What is the magazine going to be called?
- [93:10]
Whitney Webb
Well, you know, of course anything could happen, but we are going to be calling it Paper Cut Publishing House and the magazine will be called the Paper Cut.
- [93:19]
Marty Bent
Nice. Love that.
- [93:21]
Whitney Webb
So slow content for fast times. We're trying. We were like, we literally like got cameras or like, let's do a video show. Let's go do what everyone is doing. And then we like kind of thought about it for a minute and we were like, no one else does long form stuff. Maybe we should just do long form stuff.
- [93:41]
Mark Moss
Like I feel like the only people that really do regular like long form journals. I mean, obviously our output is slower, but it's like, it's very rare almost. People, people do like short Punchy things, trying to be as timely as possible. What is everyone talking about? I'm going to talk about that. Well, it's okay because it needs to happen.
- [93:57]
Whitney Webb
We need it. We need people like you. We need the rage. Like we need it. Like it's important too.
- [94:02]
Mark Moss
But we were, you know, that's not what unlimited hangout is. And so did we really want to change and do what everyone else is doing or is. Is an entity like that needed? So yeah, we're gonna do some old school stuff. I mean maybe next year we'll do a video show like everyone else. I don't know.
- [94:17]
Marty Bent
But it'd be well received if he did.
- [94:20]
Whitney Webb
It's not a knock on video shows at all because it's like video is extremely important. It's how most people take in information. I just watched this amazing documentary by Elephant Graveyard about the Austin comedy scene. I don't know. Did you see that? You should check it out.
- [94:35]
Mark Moss
It's really good.
- [94:36]
Whitney Webb
Unbelievable. And I like a lot of those people. Like. And I think the Austin comedy scene is very interesting. But it's so good. Highly recommend checking that out.
- [94:44]
Marty Bent
Talk about the hierarchy. Everybody. Everybody.
- [94:47]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, basically like the samakura being created by like the kill Tony sphere in the Joe Rogan sphere and then him in the tech bro sphere and how they have basically co opted comedy to defang one of the only meaningful ways to cut through kind of like state propaganda by like normalizing the tech bros. And I, it. I don't want to ruin it, but it's incredibly good. That guy is, is a genius. It was incredibly funny and really well made. Made. Adam Curtis.
- [95:16]
Marty Bent
What?
- [95:16]
Whitney Webb
You know, there's people that make amazing long form and not really good shows like video. Video content is important, but not video people. Yeah, I'm balding. I got like skin stuff like I don't. You don't want me. I gotta. I got a face for radio. More so a face for books. You know, I gotta. I got a, A body for long form journalism. So I should lean into that. That and do that and obviously like, you know, Whitney's the. The best of the best in that and I'm just happy to be here. But the. I, I think it's going to be really good and, and it will just be a nice like companion to everything that's going on online. Like we need, we need that too and we also need this stuff but I don't think anyone's really doing that.
- [96:00]
Mark Moss
What I mentioned earlier too, you know, there's this effort to use social media And AI to try and dumb us down. So an important way to hedge against that is how to I keep myself from being dumbed down. So I think it's important for people to read. Even if you don't want to read our books or our magazine, reading physical stuff is good for you. There are literally studies that say this is good. So I mean, you should, you know, really consider that. And you know, if it, if it's a mental war, it's a cognitive or at least part of the battle is cognitive and mental, you know, how do you build yourself up to fight in that war, you know.
- [96:35]
Whitney Webb
Yeah. And obviously we were just extremely lucky to be friends with, with Basa, who, you know, is just, you know, she did the COVID for my book. She's just did all the amazing physical print magazines for Bitcoin magazine for, for a few years now. And I just say she's a bonafide genius and really likes doing physical media, knows how to use printers and do the pantones, you know, has the perfect skill set and is such a savage and a genius. And it's just, it was, it just made a lot of sense, you know, it's like, I don't think, think maybe we would be thinking that if we didn't have someone on our side that could kick so much ass at it and be able to do it, bring her skill set. That's like a lost art, quite literally, you know, and it's so, it's a perfect, you know, companionship there. So obviously just hats off to her. I want to make sure she gets, she gets due. But we haven't done anything yet that much so. No hats off yet. But you know, it's coming and we're excited to really talk about it here. Here for all first more or less, so.
- [97:34]
Marty Bent
Well, I can't wait to subscribe, I'll say that.
- [97:37]
Mark Moss
Thanks, Marnie.
- [97:38]
Marty Bent
I've been trying to read now I've noticed this as well, getting dumbed down by the algo, trying to read more long form. So I've been reading more books. I got the Daylight computer trying to read books on that. Nice on Kindle. And yeah, it is.
- [97:53]
Mark Moss
I mean, I mean it's really important, you know, we have people that are like, well yeah, I see that you wrote this piece, but can you like reduce it to one sentence please?
- [98:02]
Whitney Webb
When. When video pod about it.
- [98:04]
Mark Moss
Or they'll be like, grok, make me a summary of this article so I don't have to read it. And it's like, well, I mean that's what they want you to do.
- [98:11]
Whitney Webb
Yeah. And sometimes they won't even. They'll be like, this is too conspiratorial to break down. It's like, why? Why?
- [98:18]
Mark Moss
But you know, it's like eventually, okay, what if the AI run by these big tech companies that the owners have a lot of overlap with the national security state, for example, people, and are arguably fused with them? So what happens? Okay, maybe it's giving you accurate summaries now, but then you get dependent on asking it for everything. And then what happens when they. They could easily flip a switch and then it's just whatever they want you to believe. And would, you know the difference after that point? Yeah, yeah.
- [98:45]
Marty Bent
Well, on that, I mean, it would be remiss of me, too. Before we wrap up here, it's like, just talk about the whole Epstein stuff. We've been covering it for five years.
- [98:53]
Mark Moss
Oh, man.
- [98:53]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it's like it's getting swept under the rug bug.
- [98:56]
Mark Moss
Yeah, now it is. Yeah. No, I mean, now it's very inconvenient. It was very convenient on the campaign trail, wasn't it?
- [99:02]
Marty Bent
What was it? And then they had binders.
- [99:04]
Whitney Webb
They were shown what was in the binders.
- [99:08]
Mark Moss
It was documents that had already basically come out and had already been publicly available. But it created. They tried to create the impression that it was new and. But I mean, they bungled that hard and all the 180s.
- [99:19]
Marty Bent
Very crazy question, are they worried, like, to your point, about Occupy Wall Street? That really scared them. When it comes to the Epstein files and now with the COVID vaccine particularly, I think there was a lot of momentum, positive momentum towards getting accountability or holding the people who thrust that vaccine on the populace accountable. And who knows, maybe there still will be accountability in regards to COVID vaccine. But obviously the Charlie Kirk thing happened a couple days after the MAHA hearings where all this stuff was being brought up. And the study by Kevin McKernan and Jessica Rose that proved that there's SV40 and DNA fragments and the Pfizer vaccine specifically got basically presented as evidence to Capitol Hill. And then, boom, Charlie Kirk happens and it all goes away. Like, I feel like Epstein also, the.
- [100:08]
Mark Moss
Epstein list got wrapped up in that go away thing after the Kirk assassination too. Even though one of the things that. That he was pushing for, for also was a release of the documents. Right. So, yeah, but I don't know. I mean, now a lot of people in the administration are being like, the last thing Charlie Kirk told me that he wanted me to do is send the National Guard to Chicago and the Last thing he told me before he died was dismantle the radical left, even though I thought his whole thing was to debate and beat the radical left through debate and discourse. So I think people, again, like we brought up earlier, just kind of taking advantage of the situation and a lot of things are being swept under the rug, unfortunately. And yeah, I mean, ultimately what they don't want is us to go back to us versus the oligarchy and working together and it's all about division. And the more that they can drive that home, they will. And I feel like, you know, as the, the base and the public start to sort of do that coming together, they're, they're throwing some event at us that fragments us back into polarization. So think the Kirk assassination is just going to be, you know, a one and done thing in the sense that I think, you know, there could be some other event to bring back that strategy of tension, esque feeling so that they can either sweep things under the rug that are inconvenient, like the Epstein case, you know, because, I mean, I don't know, it's just so crazy that there was all this momentum for that and now it's like, well, it's a Democrat hoax. Marty. I didn't know if he. You knew that it was.
- [101:48]
Marty Bent
It's all very odd.
- [101:51]
Whitney Webb
It's all a distraction from what we really should be doing, which is falling in love and, and having, and getting pregnant and eating as much Tylenol as possible while you're pregnant and creating a whole generation of artists to.
- [102:08]
Mark Moss
That are really good at Magic the Gathering.
- [102:11]
Whitney Webb
Exactly. And push back against this Panopticon regime. Because what else can we do other than that?
- [102:18]
Marty Bent
I mean, that was like, to your point earlier about people on the extreme left and extreme right being driven to look like crazy people. I was like, there's plenty of crazy.
- [102:26]
Mark Moss
People on both sides. Right.
- [102:29]
Marty Bent
Women just chugging Tylenol.
- [102:30]
Mark Moss
But the social media algorithm makes you think you're like, literally surrounded by those people in your own house.
- [102:35]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [102:36]
Mark Moss
You know, no. And if you go out and meet regular people, you'll find you have a lot more in common with them than the pregnant women on TikTok. Chuck chugging bottles of Tylenol.
- [102:46]
Whitney Webb
Totally.
- [102:47]
Mark Moss
Yeah. You know, or, you know, the other side of the spectrum, you know, the people that after the Kirk assassination were like, Trump, now is the time to seize power and dismantle democracy. You must do it right now.
- [102:58]
Whitney Webb
Thanks, Sam Hyde. Well, those people aren't even real. Like, that isn't necessarily their opinions either. It's like they're also like influencers that are playing to the algos.
- [103:06]
Mark Moss
No, but so are the pregnant people.
- [103:08]
Whitney Webb
Of course. I mean, that's what I mean. On, on.
- [103:11]
Mark Moss
It's an emotional reaction. I'm going to push against this because I'm angry and pissed off, but I don't really know why. And so I'm just gonna be a.
- [103:17]
Whitney Webb
Reactionary and if I go publish something and then I'll get some likes and I'll feel better or this or maybe monetize it or. I mean it's. And then you see people doing that, then you're influenced by people doing that. It's like the whole like people like Photoshop like, you know, Paris Hilton era, like body dysmorphia or whatever where it's like they're like already unbelievably thin and then Photoshopping them to be even that. And then people are seeing that and being influenced by that and then they're living like that. And it creates this like down. It's turtles all the way down of just like manufactured like insanity, you know. And that's not reality, it's hyper reality. And that is what we're like getting fed. We're not getting fed reality, we're getting fed hyper reality.
- [104:01]
Mark Moss
To bring up the Kissinger Schmidt thing one one last time. Kissinger, who's like one of the most evil globalist Turkish herds to like probably ever exist, was like the revolutionary. Well, one of them, you know, there's a whole gaggle of them. But he basically was like, yeah, AI is the revolutionary potential of AI is in its use as a tool of perception and how it can like alter the perception of the masses at scale. And you know, if you are able to alter a lot of people's perceptions about a particular event, you can change that event. Right? So you can also change how people behave. I mean that's the. It's the easiest way to influence human behavior too. So it's not MK Ultra mind control necessarily, but it's a way of getting p of controlling people and controlling human behavior.
- [104:53]
Marty Bent
Not that we're trying to control human behavior, but we've been using video generation to tell stories that have never been told before.
- [105:00]
Whitney Webb
And you've been doing very well with them. I mean that.
- [105:02]
Marty Bent
That's again silver lining mining. Like you can use these tools to combat this stuff too. Like.
- [105:08]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, yeah.
- [105:09]
Mark Moss
But at the same time, like I said earlier, you have to mentally prepare your prepare yourself not just to use them, but consume them. And so, you know, people need to be just able to distinguish between, you know, you just have to. I mean, it's important to use all the tools at our. Right. But it's important to be able to use all the tools at our disposal to fight this war. But we also don't want to fall victim to the stuff that they're trying to us to entrap us in.
- [105:34]
Whitney Webb
Right, either.
- [105:35]
Mark Moss
So it's a fine line to walk, but you have to be mentally prepared about it.
- [105:38]
Whitney Webb
It's like being like, I have a. I'm a blue check, you know, Shadow Matt, you know, blue check on Twitter, fighting the globalists, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like tweeting 55 times a day online, 247 live streaming on spaces. It's like, you're exact. You're the globalist wet dream, bro. Like, what do you. I don't mean you. I mean, just like, you know, someone doing that, it's like, well, like, yes, there is something. There is ground to be gained by being in the. You know, like when Noster was kind of first kicking off and, you know, I am on there, but not with my real name. But I remember kind of being like, but X is still. Or Twitter is still the battleground, and that's kind of where the discourse is still happening.
- [106:19]
Mark Moss
And I think that's starting now.
- [106:20]
Whitney Webb
I think it's like. It's just. We are sort of unfortunately in the dead Internet. I mean, it's just bots. It's terrible discourse. You're getting fed crap. I never see my friends. Friends anymore.
- [106:30]
Mark Moss
It's an AI to look for it. AI is overtly taking over the algorithm in like a month's time or something. It's gonna get weird.
- [106:38]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [106:38]
Mark Moss
They're gonna be like, look at our anime waifu chat bot. That's Grok.
- [106:43]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, That I like. I do like those.
- [106:46]
Mark Moss
It's like.
- [106:48]
Marty Bent
It's like Elon's like, go up, go. You need. We need to have more kids. And it's like, here's this anime that's gonna suck you into the metaverse. It's a. Yeah, yeah.
- [106:57]
Mark Moss
But at the other side of his mouth, Elon's like, the population is declining, you know, and then he's like, here, have the. Have the sex chat bots so you don't reproduce. Yeah.
- [107:09]
Marty Bent
Who is doing. Who do you guys look to right now? It's building out there projects that are being worked on outside of Bitcoin. Noster, Anything we discussed. Anything we haven't discussed that you like, you think we should be paying attention to.
- [107:24]
Whitney Webb
Well, our publishing companies.
- [107:28]
Mark Moss
So unfortunately, I'll let, I guess maybe mark the stuff. I don't. But you know, basically, I mean, all I really know is like at a personal level, you know, my house is now off grid 100%. Very cool. Because where I live, the power companies are up to no good. They are screwing people just like raising rates 300% with like no justification. People are really freaked out about how they're going to pay their power bills. And I think that's something that's happening in the US too. I think it's just gonna, you know, probably be happening at a global scale and it's important to be as independent as you can off of, off of the system. So, you know, I know other people here that have done that and are doing that. I know people that are, you know, expatting to Chile, where I live, trying to develop an affordable homestead because you can get clean water and a nice sized property for pretty cheap down here, here, and trying to build a better life for, you know, them and their family and build community down here. There's Chileans doing that. There's Chileans and expats doing that together, you know, so I only really know about that on a personal level and I know obviously of people in the, in the States that are also trying to do those things up there. But obviously, you know, it can take a lot more capital to do it up in the US just because of property prices and things like that and how different it is. But ultimately, you know, I think those are the things that, that anything that contributes to people being more resilient at the family level and then in the neighborhood level. You know, I've always said for a long time we have to focus as locally as, as we can to prepare ourselves for what they're going to try and thrust upon us to hurt us into these digital corrals. So how to not be, I mean, we should be focusing as much as possible on how to not be hurt us basically. And that necessitates networks of local resilience. Right. So, you know, that's basically, you know, what I've been trying to focus on and restarting my garden and all of that kind of stuff. So. But obviously, you know, that's me focusing on the local, trying to, you know, practice what I preach. But I'm, I'm sure there's, you know, a lot of other good stuff going on that I'm just not super plugged into because I'm trying to be less plugged in, I guess in General. Because I also have, you know, three tiny people to take care of and focus a lot of my time on them too instead of the, you know, everything.
- [110:02]
Whitney Webb
Everything else. Yeah.
- [110:05]
Marty Bent
I was telling you before we hit record, I moved back home to be closer to family. Three little people to take care of as well. And it's been extremely rewarding. And to your point about online is not the real world like you can, can. I moved back to the Philadelphia area where I was born and raised and famously in the United States, the one of the shitlib capitals of the country.
- [110:23]
Whitney Webb
But, but, but also, but also, I.
- [110:27]
Marty Bent
Don'T know, family agrees with my political views. Some people have been psyoped by things that have happened. But I, I've found that not only my family, but in the neighborhood people in the area, if you have a conversation and you don't get too aggressive, they're, they're typically open to, to dialogue.
- [110:44]
Whitney Webb
Dialogue 100. I grew up in New England, which obviously, you know, you know, Philly and New England have their, have their history but, but Northeast. Like yeah, there's shitlib stuff or whatever, but I don't know, it's a different kind of shitlib. Like the California shitlib is a little more up than the, the Northeast shitlib. And I can say from having lived in both places and like, but I think to your point, hey, you know, leaning into family is the way to go. But yeah, like go meet your neighbor. Go talk to your neighbor. I mean that's, that's like you're gonna find, find you have so much more in common with them. Like discourse is not what we see on, on DARPA social networks that are fed by DARPA algorithms that, you know, like, that's not really discourse. It's simulated discourse. It's hyper reality. Like the touch grass meme is a little overdone. But like, go knock on doors. Go, go meet your neighbors. Like, I don't know, they may be crazy, they may be awesome. They may be crazy awesome, they may be all the things and, and, and that's just like it's, it's trite. It sounds stupid. It sounds so like cliche. But like those are the people that are going to be around you and near you when if goes down and you need to build relationships with them. Like the whole idea of decentralizing and all this we talk about like what if you need a, a, a, a, a cup of sugar? You know, like, you go to your, your neighbor, you know, we need to be able to bring back bars and all these things that doesn't. That doesn't happen from being on Instagram. You know, it happens from going and meeting the people in your. At your farmer's market or this or whatever and all the things, getting yourself ready to take care of your neighbors if something gets fucked up. Have chickens, have a garden, have a well, have solar, whatever it is so that you can help your neighbors when. When shit goes down. But you have to meet them and know them and be prepared yourself for any of that to happen.
- [112:32]
Mark Moss
Because, like, the COVID era was all about getting us locked in our homes and like not talking to other people. And, and now they want us to just talk to AI about everything and have conversations with AI and not with real people. So be able to, like Mark said, building real connections is super important and what they don't want you to do.
- [112:50]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [112:51]
Whitney Webb
And get into group chats, not posting on the timeline. Go, go get discourse going and brewing with the boys and the gals and, and, and that's, that's to me what the social media stuff is from, from like, I've met so many important people in my life just because of Twitter. Like, I'm not going to say that, like, I got my job because of Twitter. A lot of these things. I found my community during COVID because of it and a lot of other way more important things. But there's also all the things that we've said in this last two hours or whatever is also all true. So, you know, nurture the relationships you can from these things, but don't get caught up in them. Don't let them use you. Use them. And I think the best way to do that is like, understand it's about connecting with the people. People. Go see them, go meet them, go, go talk with them on another platform. Go figure out other ways so that if your, you know, group chat gets blown up, you can still talk to them on another thing or whatever and forge real relationships that aren't reliant on centralized algorithms and centralized platforms. And so you can have resilient relationships at the local and international level.
- [113:52]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And the last thing I'll say, because I forgot to mention earlier, go watch hypernormalization. Like this whole Al Qaeda guy thing, it's like the reverse Gaddafi storyline in hyper.
- [114:03]
Mark Moss
Totally. Totally. But like I said earlier, they repeat the same tactics and crap all the time.
- [114:09]
Whitney Webb
Yeah.
- [114:09]
Mark Moss
So the more you learn about how they've done this in the past, the more you'll be able to recognize how they're doing the same crap now. Like they're not creative yeah.
- [114:17]
Marty Bent
Focus on the Gaddafi storyline and hypernormalization. Then compare it to the Al Qaeda guy that's going on right now. It's like, very, very similar.
- [114:23]
Mark Moss
Yeah, it's. It's bonkers, but it's very disturbing. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, I probably have to go pick up one of my tiny people from school here in a little bit, but it's been great catching up, Marty. Hopefully we won't have to wait ten and a half months to do it again.
- [114:42]
Marty Bent
Well, I will. I will wait patiently if it does. Good luck to the both of you with paper cut.
- [114:49]
Mark Moss
Thanks, Marty.
- [114:50]
Whitney Webb
Yeah, thanks, brother.
- [114:51]
Marty Bent
And we'll. We'll do it again.
- [114:52]
Whitney Webb
Absolutely.
- [114:53]
Marty Bent
All right.
- [114:54]
Mark Moss
Sounds good.
- [114:54]
Whitney Webb
Cheers, everybody. Thanks for having us.
- [114:57]
Marty Bent
Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes along with way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that. $5 a month get you every episode a day early, ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time, time.