[00:02:49] And then I’ve written obviously a bit about the Bitcoin dollar. I wrote a book called the Bitcoin dollar for Bitcoin magazine. And yeah, so we’ve just been sort of kind of picking away at this from two different angles. And this research vein is really met in the middle for better or for worse. Good, good for content, but you know, maybe the implications aren’t so fantastic, but I would say in general, this is the first one we’ve ever done.

[00:03:08] Key takeaways at the beginning, I had a lot of people reach out about the last one, debt from above this kind of piece about this satellite company. Okay. And saying that they had tried running it through a bunch of like LLMs and trying to do machine assisted missions. And it was actually rejecting it saying that, this is a pretty conspiratorial piece with a lot of accusations in it.

[00:03:28] So we’re actually not going to grok it for you. So this one, we decided to do it for the people. So, right at the beginning, there’s these key takeaways, but I would say in general, it is this looking at intelligence affiliated VC firms, how since kind of the late nineties dotcom boom, I’ve really just dominated the tech industry in general, and specifically the financial tech industry.

[00:03:48] And then looking at how these firms have gone from being a profit generating via kind of like consumer revenue coming in from customers and rather being about creating these free to use networks, generating hordes of data, and then selling that data to data brokers, intelligence agencies. What have you, and basically using customer data as like a new commodity.

[00:04:11] So that’s still going on, obviously. And the biggest people that are the most known for this, maybe the most successful of this are, the Facebook affiliated groups. And then of course, PayPal, the PayPal mafia, this like infamous group of folks that, read Hoffman went on.

[00:04:26] There’s a big part of this piece to do LinkedIn, PayPal was, was then bought by Pierre Midiar’s eBay. eBay was kind of one of the first groups to really do this data broker, basically private intelligence group. So yeah, looking at these intelligence affiliated VC firms and how they are, now really moving into the digital assets space, extremely so.

[00:04:45] And then also looking at these entrepreneurial social groups, I’ll use the word control, but how do you influence the people behind these groups, the CEOs kind of right at incubation. Of these startups kicking off. And when the COVID era, we learned a lot about the world economic forums, young global leaders, and how they it was that great Klaus Schwab quote of like, we infiltrate the cabinets and how there was this sort of world lockstep kind of response to COVID.

[00:05:09] Well, you had a lot of these sort of social groups that was focused on the public sector, again, infiltrating the cabinets and being a lot of the world leaders are significantly influenced by these social groups. So now we’re looking at these, not so much the public sector, but the private sector social groups.

[00:05:25] So this group in particular, that’s a big part of the focus of this piece is Endeavor, which is very similar to like a YGL, but really looking at the private sector, emerging markets, entrepreneurs. And the reason why they do this is because they can mask. This commonality of funding coming from a small group of people in this sort of like, Oh, this is so great.

[00:05:45] It’s this wonderful free market blossoming of innovation and in Argentina. But really it’s like a couple of people like a Pierre Amidiar and Edgar Bronfen Jr. Marie Hoffman, who are using their funding and their influence to basically invest and an influence into these like now core infrastructure groups of the modern economy.

[00:06:04] So looking at this endeavor group and unfortunately seeing a lot of ties to like a Jeffrey Epstein and NXIVM, these kinds of more coercive influential groups, these maybe even blackmail rings, you could say. So looking at all that, seeing all this coming together, and then the piece focuses a little bit on this one Bitcoin group, this company in particular, Zappo.

[00:06:24] Funded by this legendary Bitcoiner, Wences Casares, who’s considered the patient zero of Silicon Valley, Orange Pilled Teal and Hoffman and brought it to all of these, yeah, these stalwarts of kind of the American intelligence information broker entrepreneurs. Mostly coming out of California and looking at Zappo, really interestingly enough, they’re very Endeavor affiliated when says is coming out of Argentina, which is where Endeavor it’s focusing on emerging markets, Latin America specifically.

[00:06:53] And then you look at the first advisory board of Zappo and seeing D Hawk from visa, John Reed from city and Larry Summers from the treasury and from a bunch of other private and public sector kind of revolving door. When it’s convenient in the private sector, when it can be in the public. So there’s a lot to learn from these guys.

[00:07:10] Cause these guys are the proto architects of what we call the Bitcoin dollar system are all right there on the Zappo board. And then you look at what does Zappo do? It’s basically set the benchmark for custody, really like doing absurd things, putting keys in space, drilling vaults and Swiss bunkers and developing these pretty crazy biometric systems for like really strong key management.

[00:07:33] And And then, of course, at the same time, facilitating stable coin and U. S. dollar banking, connecting it very importantly to the Bitcoin system. So that’s the overview of the piece. Quite a bit of a rant there. No, there’s a lot here. Yeah. So that’s, that’s the brief overview. And of course, this is just part one.

[00:07:52] Yeah, I’ll stop there. But that’s more or less what we’ve been working on here.

[00:07:56] Preston Pysh: I just want to highlight, so people that listen to our show are familiar with a company called Zappos, the shoe company, this was the Tony Hsieh company, we are not talking about that Zappos, this one is spelled X A P O, it’s, now you might have to help me here, I saw Gibraltar and I saw headquartered in Switzerland, which one of those two is it?

[00:08:15] Is it out of Spain or Switzerland?

[00:08:17] Mark Goodwin: So they, they came out of Argentina. That was where he funded it. But yeah, they re registered in Gibraltar, for jurisdictional reasons. Yeah. And then the actual, that kind of infamous Zappo vaults are in Switzerland. In Switzerland. Okay. Thank you.

[00:08:30] Preston Pysh: Okay, where I want to jump to right out of the gate, so you talk about Bitcoin dollars.

[00:08:35] And I think for the audience, when they hear you say that they’re saying, what does he mean by a Bitcoin dollar? Explain this as simply as possible.

[00:08:44] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, totally. I think I’ve done this quite a bit now. I think the easiest way just to establish the analogy is Bitcoin dollar a la petrodollar. So it’s probably the easiest analog.

[00:08:56] And the idea is much like the petro dollar. Well, let’s explain the petro dollar, right? So Nixon shock, early seventies, the U S decides to cut from a gold back standard where you could actually take your reserve notes, go to a bank and get gold back legally, they had to do that. So you could argue, of course, right.

[00:09:13] The dollar was backed by gold. When exactly that mechanism broke down from a market standpoint as up for debate, but the actual Nixon shock happened in 71. And the U. S. officially removes itself from the gold standard, and it’s a very interesting time, and everyone is sort of like, okay, well, here’s the end of the dollar, there’s going to be de dollarization, all these things.

[00:09:35] And actually, what happened was, we saw military presence from the United States really significantly ramp up in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia. And we saw an establishment with the Saudi government of this petrodollar system in which for exchange for military defense, they would only allow the sale of petrol of oil to be denominated in dollars.

[00:09:57] So in effect, what that meant was the U. S. was able to offshore and shovel the should be inflationary effects of a deep peg dollar into the Middle East. And said that anybody in Asia, anybody in Europe, really anywhere, any, anyone, anywhere that needed oil that wanted to industrialize, they needed to buy dollars first.

[00:10:19] So we created an artificial demand for dollars. I say, we, like I had anything to do with it, but you know, the U S created an artificial demand for dollars by establishing this petrodollar system. And for 50 years or so, they were able to continue basically the U S treasury, if you will, but basically servicing us debt by selling government debt and dollars to anyone that wanted to industrialize, which frankly, anyone in the seventies, eighties, nineties, There was pretty much every country wanted to industrialize and many of them were not oil independent.

[00:10:48] So establish the system. It’s not a de facto monopoly. Of course, there was settlement and other things, or rather it wasn’t a literal monopoly, but it was a de facto monopoly. So 95 percent plus of all global petro sales were denominated in dollars. So then we fast forward to 2020, right? As the COVID lockdowns are starting and all of the, the big crash happens right in that like second week of March, mid 2020.

[00:11:14] And we see something that is totally absurd to me being, kind of a 90s kid, where all I’ve known is the US increasing presence in the Middle East. We see the oil futures go negative. So not quite literally, obviously, it’s a speculative thing. But, basically, they’re paying people to take oil, which is just so completely absurd based on everything I’ve ever grown up with.

[00:11:38] And then very shortly after the U. S. pulls out of Afghanistan, right? But, and a very interesting thing happening at right about that same time, two months later, in May, is the Bitcoin halvening, which for the first time brings relative issuance down below 2%. Which is the target inflation rate of the U. S.

[00:11:55] dollar as well as gold coming out of the ground, right? Something in the one and a half percent, something like that. So, right before the Bitcoin relative issuance goes below the rate of the dollar and gold, we see this really funky thing happen in the oil markets. And that’s when I would say was the death of the petrodollar and the creation of the Bitcoin dollar system was in that market mechanism.

[00:12:17] And so obviously Bitcoin crashed then as well, went down to like 3, 300 bucks. But it basically 20x within the next year, within the next 12 months. Pretty absurd for a commodity. So there’s a lot of parallels to oil and to Bitcoin. This like energy commodity. Obviously, a lot of things different.

[00:12:34] It’s a lot easier to move Bitcoin around than it is to move millions of barrels of oil, but it is really an energy commodity. And we’ve created essentially the same de facto monopoly of the ins and outs of the Bitcoin system being 95 percent plus denominated in dollar pairs, whether they’re stable coins or just USD, but mostly stable coins.

[00:12:57] And so we’ve in effect created another demand for us dollars. Within this inflation into an energy commodity, into the pricing of a deep peg energy commodity. So it used to be oil and now it’s Bitcoin. And we’re seeing a new demand for us treasuries in the stable coin system, which is innately linked to Bitcoin’s price appreciation.

[00:13:18] So that’s kind of a quickie of the the Bitcoin dollar system. But, but in effect, it’s how do we create artificial demand for dollars as dollars get more and more printed and the individual purchasing power inflates away, we retain the net purchasing power much like we did in the petrol dollar system by creating artificial demand for US treasuries.

[00:13:40] Preston Pysh: And the wild thing, I think that might be lost on folks, they hear about all of these things and they’re saying, well, who in the world would keep buying on it? And they just don’t have a deep appreciation for how much dollar denominated debt there is around the world to the tune of trillions and where they’re going to have to go next because of impairment in fixed income markets is going to be even crazier.

[00:13:59] Do you buy into this idea that pretty much the only buyer kind of in the coming decade starts to become the stable coin companies or who’s going to buy? Yeah. Who’s going to buy this?

[00:14:10] Mark Goodwin: I think it is the stable coin companies for sure. I think there is a movement, at least socially, of kind of this de dollarization with BRICS currencies.

[00:14:19] And there’s a lot of talk of this here and there, but we’re not really seeing that in terms of actual, the buyers we’re seeing huge amounts of demand for us treasuries in these stable coin providers. I think in the article we say, and again, I think it changes every day because people sell, people buy, but.

[00:14:34] The stable coin issuers are like the 18th largest holder of US debt in the world, which is just insane. I mean, growing at a rapid pace, just growing at an unbelievable pace. I mean, I think, I think a billion dollars were of tether was just minted today. And again, sometimes it’s redemptions. Who knows?

[00:14:51] 250 million of USDC was issued today. And what that means is there has to be some sort of underlying asset to offset these liabilities, these tokenized liabilities. And so they have to buy debt to basically create more dollars, which is exactly the same mechanism done in the private sector capital creation of the banks that sort of hover around the Federal Reserve, right?

[00:15:12] I mean, the Fed doesn’t print dollars, it prints treasuries with the, with the treasury that sets the rate of yield of these treasuries that the treasury makes. And yeah, so we’re seeing 180 billion ish or so, give or take 20 billion of demand being bought by these stablecoin providers. And you look at our biggest debtors, our biggest creditors rather in like Japan and China, and it’s just a little over a trillion, right?

[00:15:35] So already, these stablecoin providers like Tether specifically is like a tenth of the debt held by our longest debt partners in China and in Japan. And this is so new. This is such a new currency, or rather a new economy, and it’s just going to get crazier. It’s just going to build even more and more and more.

[00:15:54] And I argue, actually, that the regulatory regime of the United States, of course, is they’re the kingmakers. They’re the ones that sort of set the policy that sort of dictates what kind of happens in the rest of the world. Obviously, it’s a little Western centric, but it’s true, especially for the economy.

[00:16:09] I think that’s true. And so we’re seeing right now an adoption or at least an interest in adopting, new capital requirements for the United States system, like a Basel III that would actually have a significant influence in this sort of this axiom, specifically a Bitcoin appreciating and needing dollars on the books.

[00:16:30] So if Bitcoin is determined as a liability and not really an asset in terms of balance on your balance sheet, then you need to offset Bitcoin appreciating With dollars as this capital requirement axiom, basically to appease, Hey, there’s a lot of risk in having Bitcoin. So if you want to play with Bitcoin, you want to have it on your books.

[00:16:50] Well, you better hold a lot of dollars too. And so it creates this artificial demand and it creates this, Bitcoin is this really special thing, right? Because it’s demand inelastic. So no matter how much demand is there for Bitcoin, there’s a set amount of Bitcoin issued every 10 minutes, but it doesn’t matter how many people want it.

[00:17:06] So it’s the first commodity ever to really establish that. Whereas oil or gold or silver, these previous sort of energy standards. If there’s a huge demand spike for gold, gold 4x is in price. You can send three more people down the mine, go get a bunch more gold. There’s a lot more supply that hits the market, and then demand goes down.

[00:17:26] Bitcoin doesn’t care. It’s completely demand agnostic. And so the supply doesn’t change. So you create the system where you actually have You know, we’ve created this huge debt bubble of dollars, dollar denominated debt. And now we have basically this vacuum of Bitcoin that can suck all of this debt, this huge bubble and right into this demand inelastic asset.

[00:17:47] And if we create a regulatory environment that requires companies that hold in the United States, a lot of Bitcoin to hold dollars that now we’ve created this mechanism for Bitcoin to appreciate. Substantially and require trillions of dollars to be held by these institutions that hold Bitcoin. And so that’s part of this Bitcoin dollar play that I think is really important with a Zappo.

[00:18:10] And that’s why we were looking at this piece. I really wrote the Bitcoin dollar as just a mechanism, but a look at, okay, well, this is a complicated thing. A lot of people don’t necessarily know how interest rates work or the treasury system works. And I didn’t really know. Until I was researching the book and getting into it, the knowledge is obfuscated for a reason so that we don’t know how it works.

[00:18:29] Preston Pysh: That’s for sure.

[00:18:30] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, totally. And, and so you look at a Zappel and they built the two things that you really need to create this Bitcoin dollar system. One being obviously extreme security. No, you want to hold these keys. You want to inflate bits and bytes to be worth trillions and trillions of dollars, which is where we think this is going as Bitcoiners.

[00:18:50] Well, you damn well better be sure that you can secure those keys really well. And Zappo really built that. They did really absurd things, as I mentioned, putting stuff in space, digging it into the ground. They even did stuff where they created these pulse, like fingerprint scanners that have a pulse reader on them so that you can’t just cut off someone’s hand and put it on the thing to get someone’s keys.

[00:19:10] It can tell if the hand’s been cut off, right? Like all of these just super, to build a system that holds trillions of dollars, you need to have This highly secure level of key management and Zappo built that. And it came out of, it wasn’t really what they were trying to do. It it came out of just, I sold Bitcoin as this great thing to guys like Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman.

[00:19:27] And then they wanted to buy millions of dollars of it. And then it grows thousands of percent. Now it’s worth billions. And it came out of this just necessity of his friends saying, Hey, keep these things safe for me. So you have to have that super high security. And then also you need to have, again, this regulatory environment, this capital requirement And the bitcoins be within the United States.

[00:19:46] That’s obviously an essential part of this regulation play. And of course, Apple sold its custody service to coin base in 2019, including gray scale, including just an absurd amount of Bitcoin. I think something like. 514, 000 Bitcoin, I think were transferred to the United States from Gibraltar back into the regulatory regime of the United States via the sale.

[00:20:10] Grayscale specifically did like 225, 000 Bitcoin. It was like 2. 7 billion at the time. It was the largest cryptocurrency transaction at the time. all bringing it back to the United States from being held out of the regulatory regime of the U. S. So Zappa really has created the Bitcoin dollar system.

[00:20:27] Obviously they don’t affect regulations specifically, but then you go and you look at some of the biggest lobbyists in the country and this is what kind of part two is going to be about and Wincest is the head of Coin Center. He’s the chair of Coin Center, which is the biggest lobby in the U. S. And, Paxos, which is affiliated with them and with PayPal as well.

[00:20:48] Charles was one of the founding members of Coin Center as well. So you start to see kind of this system being built. And yeah, here we are with basically a million Bitcoin have come back to the United States, just specifically via through this company selling back to Coinbase. So that’s where we’re at. And I think in the private markets, the ETFs,

[00:21:06] Preston Pysh: When you say that you’re saying privately through the ETFs that are held, people have paper receipts for these people. Okay.

[00:21:12] Mark Goodwin: Right. Exactly. So it’s like, okay. When the Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January, I think it was January 11th, there were 11 that were approved.

[00:21:21] BlackRock’s Ibit, their iShares ETF offering, which is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs. I think they hold almost 400, 000 Bitcoin now. They’re custodying with Coinbase. Grayscale is with Coinbase. ARK21 shares is with Coinbase. Bitwise is with Coinbase. So something like 800, 000 Bitcoin, just with the ETFs, are held by Coinbase custody, which of course is using the infrastructure set up by Zappo.

[00:21:46] So when BlackRock rang the bell for Nasdaq on the 11th, on January 11th, they invited Wincess to ring in the bell with them, which I thought was interesting. There’s really no direct affiliation between BlackRocks, iBit, and Zappo, except if you look at, oh, well, in 2019, actually, they sold this whole service to Coinbase.

[00:22:05] Interesting. So, yeah, that’s Zappo really has built the Bitcoin dollar. They were the first regulated bank to integrate USDT in 2023. They integrated USDC in 2022. And I think stablecoins being this huge demand for U. S. treasuries. And this custody, this just unbelievable extreme security measures being built up by Zappo.

[00:22:25] Here we are. So this Bitcoin dollar system that kind of became as this idea that I had in 2021, the first time I wrote about it. Now we’ve seen this basically appreciate into Something that holds 5 percent of all liquid Bitcoin is like within this Bitcoin dollar system very directly. So, yeah, it’s very interesting the way that this is developed.

[00:22:46] I think the ETFs are a huge game changer for Bitcoin. I’ve obviously, I’m sure when you’ve talked about it quite a bit here on the show, but this is a real game changer. And the people that built the infrastructure are right here.

[00:22:57] Preston Pysh: Endeavor was a huge piece of the article, and you had mentioned the WEF’s Young Global Leader Program, the YGL.

[00:23:05] For people that aren’t familiar with this, like Justin Trudeau, there’s a lot of other like very famous, maybe you can name more, but there’s some very famous world leaders today that came out of this WEF’s program. You’re using this almost as an example of these social groups that, entrepreneurial social groups that have been stood up to.

[00:23:25] Reinforce and seed and kind of percolate out these bigger agendas that they’re trying to do. And instead of the WEF’s Young Global Leader Program, you talk about this one that’s called Endeavor. So explain how this works with respect to intelligence affiliated venture capital firms dominating this financial technology industry.

[00:23:51] And like how much of an impact has Endeavor really had? I guess if you were going to put some magnitude on it, like how much is this specific organization had in your humble pain? I know that’s a very qualitative question.

[00:24:01] Mark Goodwin: No, for sure. Well, I think, I think the best way to answer it is through The way that they explained it themselves, which I think is in many ways, it’s kind of disturbing a little bit.

[00:24:12] It depends on how you look at free markets, but basically Bronfman in the 2009 Endeavor Gala Bronfman came in a little bit later after the founding, I believe it was founded in 98 Bronfman came in, I think, about a decade later. But Bronfman came in and he does this talk at the 2009 gala, and he talks about how he was discussing with the Chilean Endeavor entrepreneur and was saying that the top three leading candidates in Chile at the time for the presidency all had used entrepreneurial ship as a like a pillar of their platform, all three of the basically the choices that the Chilean public had to be president.

[00:24:48] We’re all pushing entrepreneurial ship. And when Endeavor was founded in 98, there was no word in the Spanish language for entrepreneur. And so he does this as, and he says very specifically, this is all thanks to Endeavor that basically they’ve focused on emerging markets and specifically Latin America.

[00:25:07] And they came in and they established this private sector, this blossoming of private sector activity, entrepreneurial activity in specifically, I think Argentina is a huge one Brazil, but yeah, like literally this word didn’t exist in Spanish. And now everyone’s pushing it. And you can see that the effect that this has on the language of the people.

[00:25:26] As well as obviously the public sector, right? I mean, these are three people running for president that are all pushing free markets and entrepreneurship. And I think a lot of people obviously will say, well, hey, isn’t that good? Isn’t this a success over let’s look at something like what’s happening in Argentina now with Malay.

[00:25:41] He’s really pushing the free market. Isn’t this great? Well, I think I am a free market capitalist. I’m not saying that we should regulate away anyone’s ability to participate in the market or not be able to run for president because they made money once. Like I’m certainly not saying that, but when you look at that, these are people that are all funded by a very small group of people that have connections, significant connections, not just weak connections, but significant connections to organize crime and intelligence backed.

[00:26:08] Venture capital, you start to see that. Well, maybe this isn’t really the free market. Maybe this is crony capitalism and it’s having an effect on the language of the people, right? So I think an interesting thing to looking at with Endeavor. So, so yeah, the YGL is basically this public sector infiltration of cabinets and Endeavor is really going for private sector.

[00:26:27] And so I think it’s important to look at the history of Endeavor. So Peter Kellner and Linda Rottenberg funded and founded Endeavor, rather having worked for this group Ashoka, which was funded by Bill Drayton. And Bill Drayton is, he was a pretty big guy in the Harvard business school. He started this thing, these Ashoka round tables where, entrepreneurs and people would come together and they’d start sharing ideas.

[00:26:49] And this kind of, that was the first real birthplace of the sort of like multiplier effect as Endeavor calls it. But things like the PayPal mafia, where it’s like, well, how did these guys become multi time billion dollar founders? Like who strikes lightning, who strikes gold twice, right? Nevermind three times, four times.

[00:27:07] And it happens because they’re able to use their influence to corner markets and dominate them and basically look for opportunities for monopolies and dominate them. And this is not just me speculating that that’s what Peter Thiel says. I mean, he goes up there and talks and says, go find a thing that someone is doing poorly.

[00:27:25] Don’t look for competition. Competition is not good. Find a thing you can dominate and dominate.

[00:27:30] Preston Pysh: His book zero to one talks about like the desire to become a monopoly, like literally right in the totally. Yeah.

[00:27:36] Mark Goodwin: Yeah. He says competition is bad for profits. I mean, that’s something that it said. And this guy is this, consider this libertarian champion.

[00:27:44] Of the free market. And he’s literally saying competition is bad for profits. So I think that’s an important framework for this a little bit. Right. And again, I just want to be very clear, just so I don’t lose my libertarian credibility here. I’m not saying the answer is regulation. I’m saying the answer is let’s call these people out and let’s call a spade a spade.

[00:28:02] Right. So bill Drayton, this guy who funded Ashoka. He was the guy that invented the term social entrepreneur in like the 70s in 1972. So right about the time the petrodollar is being established and the Nixon shock happens. So he’s coming out of Harvard and is bringing up this whole new idea of the citizen sector.

[00:28:20] So you have the private sector, the public sector, and then you have this middle ground, this non profit sector. And there wasn’t really a thing going on there in the early 70s. It wasn’t really a big thing. So he comes out of Harvard and establishes this group, Ashoka, and probably the most important thing that came out of this group was this idea of like microfinance and microloans.

[00:28:41] Which is obviously kind of the predominant way that people think about financially affecting emerging markets nowadays is through like micro loans.

[00:28:50] Preston Pysh: Yeah. On the face of it, it sounds like, Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Totally. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:28:55] Mark Goodwin: But then you actually look at, well, Hey, what are these guys really trying to build?

[00:28:58] They understand that, Hey, in the world of free money. Freely printed money, fiat money. It’s not really necessarily about the profits anymore. Maybe there’s these other things that are worth more than revenue coming in. Then kind of these proto information brokers, you’re looking at microfinance as a way to grab a whole bunch of information about individuals, right?

[00:29:18] Cause it’s, instead of these kinds of neighborhood banks getting funding and being able to distribute it out, it’s like you’re going directly to the individual. So you’re getting a lot of information about them. Plus also their higher yield and they give these banks a lot of opportunity to make money off of the fees that happen from these microloans.

[00:29:37] And you look at a lot of these onto these sort of philanthropic ventures or even, like COVID response, Bank of America made billions of dollars off of giving out money from the government just in processing fees. Maybe not the best example for microfinance, but it is because those were fees made directly depositing money.

[00:29:54] I get money from the government. I deposit directly into your account, which is very similar to what these microloans are doing. And then I take 5 percent each time. It kind of centralizes power in a very specific way and gives a lot of information to these like information brokers that are playing as the banks or the FinTech people in this case.

[00:30:12] So now we’re seeing basically this new kind of concept of philanthropy being this microfinance in this microloan space. And Drayton actually has a quote where he says, within five years of being an Ashoka fellow, 50 percent of them changed national policy in their respective countries. So even though it’s, again, it’s looking at the third sector, the citizen sector, this nonprofit sector, they’re saying that within five years, half of the people are changing policy in their country.

[00:30:41] So you’re seeing that directly come out of a Harvard, this really important kind of American institution is coming out here, starting this thing totally guys under philanthropic means and intense. And within five years, 50 percent of them are changing the country. You look at Endeavor, they’re creating new words in languages and changing policy and changing focus of what the public sector looks at, even though they’re not focusing on the public sector publicly.

[00:31:07] So, Endeavor really came out of this Ashoka model, this microfinance model, and this citizen sector model, and is totally having huge effects on the public sector and the people of emerging markets, and again, specifically Latin America. So, Endeavor is a very fascinating kind of case study, and you start to look at, well, who are the Endeavor success stories?

[00:31:28] Obviously Wenceslas Casares is a huge one. He started Patagon. He started the first ISP in Argentina, which obviously has huge, that’s exceptionally important in emerging markets is, is who runs the internet service providers, especially as all these FinTech things pop off. And then the first success story, the first Endeavor group company to go public was Mercado Libre, which is the, Considered like the Amazon eBay of Latin America run by this guy, Marcos Galperin, who’s the richest man in Argentina.

[00:31:58] And you’re starting to see, especially when you pair that with when Cesaris is Zappo, which is heavily paid as huge PayPal ties, former PayPal member, a board member, and you start to see basically a reestablishing of what made. PayPal, PayPal, it was that they had a market with it when it first really took off, which was eBay and eBay eventually bought PayPal, but PayPal never would have worked without eBay.

[00:32:25] There would have been no need to have settlement via email, basically a settlement that also has fraud protection. That was really the big state change. It was instant settlement. And fraud protection.

[00:32:35] Preston Pysh: Which led into Pete Palantir spin off after dealing with all of the security side of PayPal, if I remember right.

[00:32:44] Mark Goodwin: Totally. I mean, Palantir, yeah, basically building the private sector security state. Yeah. And actually, very interestingly, Palantir technically started at PayPal. Yeah. And spun off, which is disturbing, frankly, basically this idea again, that free markets are so great and everything’s so great. Well, I don’t know.

[00:33:01] I’m not necessarily cheering on Palantir being, it’s a government contractor. They’re getting all these huge government contracts. They live off government contracts, but they actually retain more because they’re private sector. They can do more things that a public sector company wouldn’t be able to do.

[00:33:16] And this plays really importantly again, not to jump all over here, but massively, absolutely. Yeah, totally. A public sector, a government sector company has a lot of things that they can’t do because their government sponsored literally were formed in the government. So there’s a lot of customer, right?

[00:33:31] Restrictions and a lot of things that they have to give everybody access to. Yeah. Maybe there were some things about if you’re a felon or whatnot or whatever, but for the most part, if you’re a government or you’re a public sector company, you have to be extremely inclusive and your ability to just restrict speech or restrict access at a whim, or even sell, let’s say sell data at a whim.

[00:33:51] It’s much harder to do. So these companies, they live off of government contracts, but their private sector. And that’s exactly what Palantir is. It’s essentially a privatized CIA, a huge data broker.

[00:34:02] Preston Pysh: Just to give people a little bit of a background on like Palantir, like we’re saying these things, but we’re not giving you any examples of like what they do.

[00:34:10] So like police cars, like a police force could hire Palantir. They put these video cameras on the back of all their cop cars. The cops then drive around all of that information, video content, depending on what sensors they’re even using on it. I’m just assuming it’s video, but there might be other things like LIDAR or whatever, they’re collecting all of that data, all of that information, and then they’re running basically pattern analysis.

[00:34:32] So let’s say they drove past the bar and the video collected a license plate X, Y, Z that was at the bar. It is pinning that geolocating that license plate and let’s say that license plates there every day at three o’clock when that cop car drives past the bar, they now know that so and so who’s tied to that license plate drinks and then they run AI and all this other stuff on all this information and data and they have a whole construct of like what’s happening in that town and I think that people Your comment that this is in the private sector, some people might look at that and say, well, that’s better than the government having it.

[00:35:07] But I think what’s lost on people is the government can just then ping Palantir and say, Hey, can you tell us this? And they’re like, yeah, sure. We’re a private company. We can tell you whatever you want. Right? Like it’s, The absolutely privacy is what they do.

[00:35:21] Mark Goodwin: Yes, that’s exactly what they do is exactly. I mean, you could look at Peter Thiel is the guy who has established the company that sells your data to the government.

[00:35:30] Yeah, you could really look at that. And I think that the contracts speak for themselves that yes, this is In Q Tel, right, which we haven’t even talked about yet. In Q Tel was essentially it was the CIA basically saying, hey, the dotcom boom is happening. The 90s are happening. And we need to compete with Silicon Valley.

[00:35:48] And the way that we compete with it is by becoming it right. And the way that we do that is by VC firms. And a lot of them are shadow VC firms, but In Q Tel is actually directly the CIA affiliated venture capital firm. And In Q Tel specifically helps create Palantir. And Palantir’s first contract was the CIA and they fed off the CIA for an extremely long time.

[00:36:11] But yes, they are quite literally, it’s hard to say if it started in the public sector and moved into the private sector or was a private sector from the beginning but funded by public, it’s all kind of wishy washy and nebulous by design. Again, I would say, by design. And I think this mechanism of private and public is very interesting.

[00:36:30] When you understand that, okay, the CIA has created a venture capital firm. It’s investing in companies like Palantir, like chain analysis. And then also as we’re coming to the digitalization of money. So there’s a lot of talk about how bad CVDCs are, which of course they are. They’re not great. We don’t want the government to have all this information.

[00:36:49] We don’t want the government to be able to blacklist or. Do a lot of these things with the user’s money. It’s a very obvious, easy thing to see as being like an overreach of power. But people don’t apply that same skepticism to private bank digital currency, which is what a lot of these sort of stable coin issuers are.

[00:37:10] You look at a tether and again, I understand a lot of people have a lot of sympathy for stable coins in the emerging markets say it’s better than inflating peso, but you look at they’ve integrated. The FBI, the Secret Service, they’ve integrated In Q Tel funded chain analysis into their platform.

[00:37:27] They’re buying up U. S. debt as much as anybody, and because they’re private sector, they actually, again, retain a lot of this blacklisting ability, this restriction, this ability to seize funds, to restrict your spending, a lot of things that maybe a government issued currency couldn’t do. They wouldn’t maybe be able to restrict customer access, right?

[00:37:46] Preston Pysh: My issue with bashing the stable coin issuers and all of it is just when I look at where we’re at with the legacy system and transmuting all of that over to this Bitcoin system, which actually has a peg and all the things we talk about every show and that you talk about a Bitcoin magazine. I just don’t know how you port that legacy system from where it was to where we need to go.

[00:38:13] I would much rather have some type of private CBDCs in the form of a hundred of them or ten of them or whatever than one U. S. government entity that’s then managing a CBDC. And I don’t think, Mark, I don’t think we can get from there to where we’re going without this happening or this being here. So then the question becomes, so what’s a better solution than this?

[00:38:36] I don’t know. I can’t answer that.

[00:38:37] Mark Goodwin: Yeah. It is interesting. And again, I do have a lot of sympathy for it. And again, anyone that says they know what the answer is, is a liar because no one knows this. We’re learning this in real time. Markets are 24 seven. We’re all learning here. But I would push back a little bit on this idea that I think there’s innately a king making element to the treasury market, right?

[00:38:57] I mean, the U. S. government is essentially saying, yes, we approve tether because we’re selling it boatloads of U. S. treasuries and not seizing the treasuries and saying, OK, well, we’ll sell you another 50 billion dollars of treasuries if you integrate chain analysis. You integrate the Secret Service, you integrate the FBI.

[00:39:18] Again, it’s a pun. There is a tether to the U. S. government and the U. S. Ponzi by creating a mechanism where they have to play ball with what the U. S. government wants, what the public sector wants. And I would again say that, yes, this idea that there should be a lot of them. Is better than the idea that there should be one, which I definitely agree with, but how can we create dollar instruments and do you have this transitional period into a Bitcoin system?

[00:39:45] Is there a way to do it that doesn’t perpetuate the U S treasury market? And I think that there are, I think there are ways to build what is an effect, a dollar instrument that doesn’t perpetuate government debt and doesn’t, and doesn’t allow via…

[00:39:59] Preston Pysh: dLCs and lightning is, is that where you’re going with it?

[00:40:03] Mark Goodwin: Sure. Or e cash or whatever it is. I think there are really clever mechanisms that we can build. And so I think it’s important to clarify. And I, this is why I appreciate the pushback. And it’s a great question is like, well, I’m not like, I don’t think the dollar as a mechanism or as an idea is a bad thing.

[00:40:22] I think it’s a role in the way that the treasury market perpetuates the military industrial complex, the way that the U S government has used the U S dollar system via the treasury market via the debt market. To basically enact financial terrorism on the global South through like debt weaponization.

[00:40:40] Let’s defang that we have Bitcoin. Bitcoin maybe can’t necessarily work as a currency for 8 billion people for every single purchase that they need to make in a day. There are some limitations to how many transactions you can fit into a block, even with covenants, even with layer two solutions. There are some limitations.

[00:41:01] I’m not like naive to that. I think we can do a lot better. I think we can onboard billions of people to Bitcoin. I haven’t given up on that idea, but how do we create Bitcoin to be basically a reserve asset? That’s really what it is. I mean, I think it works. Really well as a reserve asset. It maybe can’t compete with the dollar, but it certainly can, can compete with treasuries as this settlement network that other currencies are built on top of.

[00:41:25] So why can’t we have US dollar instruments that use, that are backed by Bitcoin and be successful that doesn’t perpetuate the treasury market. So a lot of the things that people say about Tether and about this and that USDC and that there’s such this huge dollar demand and we can’t go overnight. Sure, but that doesn’t mean we need to perpetuate the treasury market.

[00:41:43] So I’m very sympathetic to this idea that people need dollars or want dollars and that Bitcoin is not ready to monetize as a currency yet. I’m totally sympathetic to that. But let’s build a system that, doesn’t kick the can down the road for the U. S. government one more time. Let’s not recreate the petrodollar system.

[00:42:00] Let’s be clever. Let’s write code. Let’s be cypherpunks. Let’s do some clever things here to basically use Bitcoin as a reserve asset for a dollar esque instrument that doesn’t touch Treasury. So, and I think that’s totally possible, whether you use Yeah, DLC is, as you said, there’s some really interesting things going on with like stable channels, basically using like a lightning channel where one side is long, the dollar one side is short, things like that, e cash that create basically this idea of the dollar without perpetuating the debt Ponzi.

[00:42:30] So let’s do that. Let’s be clever. Unfortunately, and I’ll give you a little alpha here. This is something that working on for the next piece here is obviously the biggest example of the algorithmic stable coin. Is Terra Luna, of course. Yeah. And I don’t want to get too much into it, but the main reason you could argue that the Terra Luna protocol imploded was these super high unsustainable yields that were being perpetuated by the system and the highest yield in the system where it were over 72 percent of all of Terra’s wealth was stuck in at the time of popping was in this thing called the anchor protocol.

[00:43:08] And the anchor protocol was designed by this guy. I believe his name is Ryan Park out of Korea. And he was given a teal fellowship to build anchor and basically create this. No one knows it. It’s not a well known thing. And so you look at, well, okay, how come every single regulation, every single stable coin bill, like the Gillen brand, Bill, you’re looking at this.

[00:43:32] How come they always talk about how algorithmic stable coins are bad? Why is that? Why did we manufacture this consent to basically say that? No, no, no, no. Bitcoin can’t be used to create dollar instruments. We can’t do that. You could very much so make that claim. That this was manufactured consent for treasury backed stable coins.

[00:43:53] No doubt. In lieu of algorithmic stable coins. No doubt. And now we’re seeing PayPal is partnered with Paxos and is doing P Y U S D. When I actually talked with Walter Hesert, who’s the head of strategy at Paxos, And he said PayPal is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on the incoming boom of trillions of dollars of highly regulated stable coins in an environment where USDC and USDT probably won’t survive.

[00:44:19] Now again, he’s pushing his bags, right? I mean, he’s obviously very connected with Paxos, who’s to say what crystal ball he has for where regulation is going, but he’s basically coming out and saying a couple important things. Thanks. And the main one being trillions of dollars of highly regulated stable coins means what?

[00:44:36] Well, it means trillions of dollars of treasuries that are being bought by stablecoin providers. By a winner that’s been selected. We’re talking money printing.

[00:44:44] Preston Pysh: By a winner that’s already been preselected. Yeah. Well, and when I look at Tether, like so much of it’s euro dollars that they’re basically, sucking out of the market.

[00:44:52] I want to explain to the listener real fast, and if I get any of this wrong, please correct me, Mark, but when you say a lightning channel, a dollar stable coin, imagine Mark and I basically opening a channel together, let’s say that we open a 10, 000 sat channel with each other, and we also construct a discrete log contract, basically a smart contract, That that follows the price of the dollar and every 10 minutes or every hour or whatever we define inside of that discrete log contract, it updates with the amount of sats that then need the flow to mark or back to me based on who’s taking the long dollar side and who’s taking the long Bitcoin side.

[00:45:34] And if you get enough people to open these channels with each other, your risk is very, very different than Terra Luna as far as a synthetic stable coin, which was almost like a consolidated debt obligation, like the 2008, like where you’re chunking all this stuff in there and you got yield and everything.

[00:45:52] There’s no yield associated with this. This is just a constant. Now you need a good reference spot price for it too, because this is effectively a derivative in this channel, a derivative of the dollar. And if you do this at scale, these micro channel dollar stable coins, you get in a weird world where it’s all Bitcoin, but it’s moving and representing dollars without having to buy treasuries or any of that stuff.

[00:46:18] And this is, in my humble opinion, a Really fascinating stuff. And I think that in the coming, the five to 10 years, especially when you get into developing nation states that probably aren’t using, don’t need really large channel capacity, but need some type of hedge in dollar terms for whatever debts they’ve got.

[00:46:35] I think this one gets really fascinating, really fast. I’m curious if you have any other comments on that, Mark.

[00:46:40] Mark Goodwin: Yeah, 100%. I had a really interesting conversation at Bitcoin Azores last year with this gentleman, Tony, who developed this idea of stable channels. And he actually came up to me and he was like, Hey, I read your book.

[00:46:53] And I’ve actually done a lot of work in, not to docs or anything, but in kind of tokenized treasury systems and worked with some of these banks. And he was like, I don’t want to perpetuate this stuff. I don’t like this stuff. I don’t want to be the guy building these things for these banks. So I’m going to go work on a lightning based system that yeah, as exactly as you said, it’s all Bitcoin.

[00:47:13] It’s very, very cool. It doesn’t touch dollars at all, but it gives what is essentially like the idea of a dollar. Mechanism to one side to whoever’s long the dollar on their side of the channel. And yeah, as you said, lightning, you can pass back and forth. You can update it as much as you want. You could update it every 30 seconds.

[00:47:30] You could update using your Oracle, basically update it every 10 minutes, whatever you want. Obviously there is some trust involved, as there, as always there is in some, in HTLCs in Lightning, but you can always leave, you can always close the channel, you can always take your money whenever you want, you can’t get rugged, you can’t give the money to the other player unless it’s not, in any way that isn’t agreed upon at the time of the writing of the contract.

[00:47:55] Someone can’t just run away with your money, which is not true of something like a Terraluna, obviously. So yeah, I think it’s very, very fascinating. I think lightning is going to be a really interesting settlement layer for a lot of these things. And I’ve written about this in regards to e cash, which is a custodial mint that gives you pretty good privacy within the mint.

[00:48:14] And you can create things that decently private payments that then you can settle out with lightning, then there’s some trust involved, but it’s pretty good depending on, this idea that everything is going to be built without trust, I think is a little bit nutty on the dollar side, minimize the on the dollar.

[00:48:30] Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you know, if you want to send a Bitcoin transaction and you don’t want to have any trust at all, you don’t need to just settle something on the Bitcoin layer. Totally fine. Or use lightning and do it that, you’re entering an agreement with someone else to do have a shared channel.

[00:48:45] Obviously there’s limitations of what they can take from you, but as long as you can settle and close the channel, it’s pretty trustless, right? E cash, not quite. So the mint has the ability to rug you or debase you depending on how long you have exposure to the mint. But if you have very minimal exposure to the mint, you can do some pretty interesting things.

[00:49:03] So I think we’re going to see lightning evolve and be really interesting and connect a lot of these systems. But yeah, if you want to trust the system, that’s what Bitcoin’s for. I mean, that’s why it’s a state change. It’s this unbelievable, this tool that really empowers people to have, yeah, trustless settlement without a trusted third party.

[00:49:19] I think the thing that people miss about this though, of course, is that this also empowers The baddies or the US government or the private sector ghouls that have run crony capitalism for the last 50 years plus or whatever, right? So, I think that this idea that Bitcoin just eliminates corruption is just ridiculous.

[00:49:37] Of course not. There can be corruption in a Bitcoin system. What there can’t be is monetary debasement. They can’t just continually debase our funds. Now that we have a place that we can hold our money in that can’t be inflated away. Bitcoin is a disinflationary system. Eventually it will be deflationary and that’s a state change of money.

[00:49:58] And so that’s phenomenal. So, but it goes both ways, right? It’s like, I’m in this funny place right now with Bitcoin, where it is everything. I, I always thought it could be, which is fascinating. Seeing this play out. Now, what’s the biggest talk of the election cycle? You’re seeing this thing that wasn’t a twinkle of an idea in 2021 is now the Bitcoin dollar system is really here.

[00:50:18] It’s the presidents are talking about it. We’re fully in, we’re not turning back, but it empowers the ghouls of the financial system as much as it empowers the unbanked in the global South. So I think we just need to be wary of that and aware of it really more so than wary of it. And so the systems that we build, are we really building sustainable systems that empower people?

[00:50:38] Or are we building systems that perpetuate the U S treasury system? And Bitcoin can really, it can defang the treasury system. So let’s let it do that and let’s learn and see what mechanisms are being built and who’s really the money behind these mechanisms. And that’s really the purpose of this piece, I guess, if we could kind of sum it up is that wow, there’s In Q Tel money.

[00:50:59] There is CIA directors on the board of Greylock Partners who are seed funders of a lot of these companies. They’re connected, highly connected with Endeavor Catalyst, which is the venture firm of Endeavor that’s heavily connected with the Zappo. Then you’re beginning to see sort of intelligence crony capital linked players.

[00:51:18] Building the Bitcoin dollar system. And so how do we not support these groups and again, build, write code and educate people that we really have an opportunity here to make a difference as we move into the Bitcoin era, because I think it’s undoubtedly we are in. A new financial system for sure. I mean, Larry Fink is out there shilling our bags, right?

[00:51:40] I mean, we’ve got the biggest money manager in the world shilling our bags. Why? And how can we not just get rich and, forget about the ethos of why we’re here, which is, I’m not here to get rich. It’s a cool side effect, but I’m here to be free. I saw what happened. I was 18 when 2008 happened.

[00:51:57] I was a little too young to really participate in it, but like, I remember Occupy and, and walking the streets of Occupy, and then it got very co opted and kind of this ethical movement deteriorated, and we’re kind of backing this again, and the crony capitalists are running amok doing their thing again.

[00:52:14] I don’t trust a lot of these players. I don’t trust Larry Fink. I’ve seen what he’s done buying up a lot of these places and buying up infrastructure and commodities. Across the global south. And I just have a lot of trust issues, rightfully so, I would say. So I hope Bitcoiners don’t lose that. That’s not to say we can’t celebrate.

[00:52:30] Hey, okay, let’s have a little cheers. The presidents are talking about our bags. That’s fun. Let’s remember why we’re here and how we can build systems that actually truly give us an alternative. That’s what I’m here for.

[00:52:41] Preston Pysh: Well, I love it. And I think at the end of the day, the proof of work of what you’re saying and preaching right there is in the articles and the thought pieces that you are clearly working very hard to produce and putting out there.

[00:52:54] And at the end of the day, it’s all about education. It’s all about shining a flashlight and all these dark corners to help people decide for themselves whether they agree with your article or not agree with your article. All the information is there. All the resources are there for them to spot check and go find out whether they believe it or they think it’s, spun a certain way or whatever, right?

[00:53:14] And that’s what I love about your work and Whitney’s work. And I can’t thank you enough, Mark, for coming on the name of this article for people, the chain of custody. The mafia holding the elites Bitcoin. We’ll have a link to this in the show notes. We’ll have a link to Mark and Whitney’s Twitter.

[00:53:29] Anything else that you want to highlight or point the listener to, Mark?

[00:53:33] Mark Goodwin: I think you really just, you just nailed it right there at the end is, don’t trust me. And not that I don’t try so hard to be a trusted voice, but it’s not. I don’t want you to just offshore your trust in me, I’m just a guy with an internet access.

[00:53:45] Same with Whitney, same with yourself. We’re just desperately looking for meaning, for truth, for whatever. And don’t trust my spin, and don’t trust my thesis or my idea. Look at the links, look at the source material. There’s obviously been a lot of trust lost in media, which I think is rightfully so. But let’s not just then just place that in new voices and new talking heads, because I think that that is a huge part of where we’re going next is okay.

[00:54:10] Well, mainstream media is dead. Alternative media is here, but a lot of these alternative media guys and gals aren’t necessarily to be trusted either. And I think develop trust with people that you care about, that you like you watch. Shows that I’m on or Whitney or read our stuff and you develop relationships with pundits But really make sure you’re trusting the source material There’s a reason why basically every sentence in this thing has a link because there’s so much Source material that needs to be poured over and there’s a lot of stuff that I miss too And there’s a lot of stuff i’m gonna continue to miss There’s also a lot of stuff.

[00:54:42] I purposely don’t put in not because i’m trying to avoid Conflict against my thesis, but stuff that is just maybe not super relevant. There’s a couple things in here that just aren’t necessarily that relevant, but are interesting. Go jump off this work, go find other things in here, find your own research veins, find cool things, share them.

[00:55:01] Because I think we really have to decentralize truth finding and we shouldn’t just re ensure it to trusted figures that then can be manipulated or incentivized. To work against us. So yeah, trust me as far as you can throw me, which probably isn’t super far. Look in the work itself. I love the writing.

[00:55:18] That’s what I’m here for. I love the interviews to love catching up with friends. It’s great, but really take a look at the work, take a look at the links and make your own conclusions and find your own research veins and then share them back with me. So. But yeah, Preston, man, absolute pleasure. Really appreciate it.

[00:55:31] As I was saying, when we talk kind of coordinating this, I think you were one of the few people that really at the beginning were, I think being very intellectually honest about stable coins and treasury demand, and you were very early on to this. So I was excited to come on and talk and yeah, appreciate the love, man.

[00:55:45] Thanks so much for having me.

[00:55:46] Preston Pysh: Thank you so much, Mark. Such a pleasure having you.

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