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#786: The Offshore Dollar Is Being Dismantled with Matt Dines · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
0:10
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
0:16
So it's all acting like safe haven.
0:18
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
0:23
currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
0:28
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
0:31
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
0:36
Matthew Dines, it's a never ending game, sir.
0:41
Yeah, that's correct.
0:43
There's always a tomorrow.
0:46
There's always a tomorrow, but there's also a yesterday and last week.
0:48
And it seems like over the last week, things have been heating up.
0:51
I had to text you over the weekend and get you on because I need the Matt Dines lens on what's happening right now.
1:02
Well, that's good.
1:03
I try to put it all together in terms of not just Bitcoin, but the waters in which it swims.
1:09
So that includes geopolitics, the dollar, treasuries, all of the above.
1:13
So, yeah, happy to be back.
1:15
Well, Mindprint Hash, you and Cameron have been doing an incredible job with that.
1:18
I'm sure you've picked up on it, but John Arnold is your biggest fan.
1:23
Thank you.
1:24
John's awesome.
1:25
We have a little back thread chat going discussing these things.
1:31
So, yeah, it's fun.
1:32
But, yeah, we're just trying to figure out the world as everybody else.
1:35
We have our framework.
1:37
Don't get too religious in terms of just base level.
1:44
What would you call them?
1:45
Like hard beliefs.
1:46
Like be willing to update your priors as, as the facts come in.
1:49
And yeah, I think ultimately just, just try to number one, understand the players involved,
1:55
what are their incentives, all of that, but then don't get too wedded to your, to your
2:00
core convictions.
2:01
And there's only really a couple of them in the mind print hash framework.
2:04
Number one, everybody's chasing their own book of business, their profit incentives,
2:08
all of that.
2:09
Number two, we're, we're moving towards like a monetary transition.
2:14
So it might look a little bit unlike or different than what everybody expected in the 2010s or the 2021 PQE printing cycle.
2:26
The dominant narrative in the Bitcoin community was they're just going to print forever.
2:33
We just try to read the facts, understand what's going on and update and don't get too religious and be willing to kill your heroes from time to time.
2:42
And so where do you think we should start?
2:44
I mean, obviously we're starting in res media here because things have been developing.
2:48
We've had multiple conversations describing the setup and the potential incentives behind the scene.
2:54
But obviously in the last week we've had, I would say, at least three things on the Treasury front that are drawing people's attention.
3:04
Obviously the increase of the buyback limit from $2 billion to $4 billion.
3:12
we had Bissent come out yesterday morning
3:16
or rumors, sources said that he's willing to
3:22
save the bond market at all costs
3:26
up to a trillion dollars in the TGA
3:27
where the rumors is that he can plug into that.
3:30
And then this morning,
3:31
Wall Street Journal AI generated op-ed
3:35
from Stanley Druckenmiller.
3:38
Is that K-Fob him calling out?
3:41
uh, ascent with, with these moves, what, what is happening right now?
3:46
All right. So just understanding track record, right. And in history here,
3:50
Bessent and, uh, Stan Druckenmiller go way back as does Kevin Warsh in this circle. So these are
3:56
people who, who know each other, um, very deeply, right. And we'll just start with the Stan Druckenmiller,
4:04
uh, WSJ, WSJ op-ed this morning, uh, or it was actually yesterday, um, as we're recording,
4:11
this. Maybe not the best place to start, but we'll just choose that as our beachhead. And
4:16
that narrative of beachhead, we'll bring it up later because I think we're going to touch on it,
4:20
the Operation Economic Outcast. All right. But to start that, the WSJ article, this is one of
4:27
those things where when it enters the, like what used to be called FinTwit, I don't know what it
4:32
is on X now, FinX. It doesn't sound as- It's still FinTwit. Still FinTwit. All right, cool.
4:37
So when we see the discussion of the Druckenmiller op-ed, it's immediately pushed into like, what's the word?
4:46
Like it's like Perez Hilton type of journalism.
4:51
Yeah, it's like this guy's attacking this guy.
4:53
It's Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. and New York.
4:56
If you read what Stan Druckenmiller op whether it was AI generated or not or assisted what stuck out to me was several times and this is where the lead was buried he is calling for a long solution to the debt and fiscal problem which in his assessment and I would actually agree with this
5:20
it's the entitlements problem. These public schemes are not economic as currently structured.
5:27
It doesn't mean that with reform, they can't be extended in their longevity, but the way these
5:34
systems work right now that that they are fundamentally unsustainable. And I think that's
5:40
something as we go into every election cycle, no politician can win on that campaign. It's going to
5:46
be something that's built up over time. And, you know, maybe I'll get into a little bit of that.
5:50
I don't know if the TFTC audience cares about entitlement reform. I do. And I would push back.
5:56
I would say Trump getting elected last year, like a lot of what he was running on was austerity,
6:00
right oh 100 but it's different austerity it's getting rid of fraud waste abuse it's people
6:06
people love social security like um the other thing too when we talk about um
6:12
cpi right in bitcoin cpi is understated where the rubber meets the road on cpi like the biggest
6:19
impact it actually has is in the like economically is the cost of living adjustments so if you think
6:25
about it. Like it's your monthly paycheck that your grandparents get from the social security
6:31
administration or similar with, you know, Medicare costs, what they'll reimburse doctors for,
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et cetera. Uh, so that's, that's really the rubber meets the road on the CPI. And, and, um,
6:41
what Stan Druckenmiller got at in his letter is, Hey, you can't just rely on these gimmicks coming
6:46
in with a liquidity support feature, like buybacks. I'll get into the weeds on that in a second.
6:51
by saying like you can't mask the symptoms of the disease.
6:56
Like ultimately, like if you keep giving yourself painkillers to treat, let's say cancer or
7:01
something, it's like the cancer is going to rear its head.
7:04
So what you're actually doing is you're masking the ability of society to get the signal it
7:10
needs with higher interest rates to tell you something actually needs to be done here and
7:16
addressed.
7:16
Now, now I'll get on my soapbox a little bit and this may be correct or incorrect, but you see things like the labor force participation rate, like in decline.
7:26
Right. I think it's down to like 60 to 65 percent.
7:30
That was the big one of the big narrative takeaways from the latest jobs report, the decline in the labor force participation rate.
7:40
You've seen an exit of adult males from the workforce, all that stuff.
7:43
part of what's going on, in my opinion, the design of our entitlements programs,
7:50
I don't even know if that's a good word for it, just social security, Medicare, et cetera.
7:56
Over the long run, like we're almost a hundred years into the social security
8:00
pension scheme, call it 50 years into Medicare, Medicaid, the LBJ programs.
8:06
it's very generous, right? To, to, to vest your full benefits on social security or Medicare,
8:15
you need 40 quarters or 10 years of payroll contributions. Right. And so you see like
8:23
pretty much everybody can game their participation in the workforce for 40 quarters, right? You just
8:30
stack those up. It's not that difficult to, you know, build up to that full benefit.
8:35
And what you end up with over time is, you know, there's a lot of the population who are just producers.
8:41
They're going to work for a 45, 50 year career regardless. Right.
8:45
You know, like the dad in Zoolander, he's like, I'm going to die in the coal mines.
8:48
Like, I don't care. Like, this is this is me. I'm not going to shortchange it.
8:52
But you're or shortchange the rest of society. But the incentive of the system is like, hey, I'm going to put in, you know, get my 40 quarters.
9:01
Like some of it might be taking non full time work or just, you know, I'll take a lax job really with the intent just to accrue those quarter those quarters I need to get, you know, when I'm 65, a full, you know, monthly pension or, you know, a full ride on government subsidized health care over 100 years.
9:24
right? The, the entropy coming through the design of the scheme just builds up. And that's what you
9:31
get today where so much of that, you know, like long run, non-economic like design builds up into,
9:41
into debt. Right. And so what Stan Druckenmiller is actually getting to is like, no, no, no, no,
9:47
we need to get to the point where we can treat the disease. We're going to like, if markets want
9:52
to price the third year at five and a half or five, five and three quarters or six. It's just like,
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let it happen. Let, let the public see that signal because otherwise, you know, the, the,
10:04
the voters are not going to acknowledge the, the crux of the problem. And what he was telling Scott
10:11
Besant there in the public forum, this, he could just see just as easily pick up the phone and call
10:16
him Like they like they probably had dinner at least like a few times in the last year would be my guess Or you know who knows They seen each other right They long colleagues probably friends as well I don think there any animosity there But what Stan Drucker said publicly basically instead of privately
10:38
is he told Scott Bessent, like, if you keep, if you think you're going to
10:42
support long-term treasury yields through this buyback mechanism or other, you know,
10:48
short-term band-aids, you're just going to have to keep loading that, keep loading that. And
10:53
eventually the market will, I may just override that defenses and we're going to have to come to
10:59
an acknowledgement or, you know, some solution to this problem, you know, in the longterm. So why not,
11:06
you know, rip the band-aid off right now was kind of the Stan Druckenmiller approach. Now,
11:12
then I have an approach what Scott Besson is actually doing with these buybacks. We can get
11:16
into that, but we can just put a pin in that topic. It does inject more Real Housewives of
11:23
Orange County meets Washington, D.C. and New York in this season by putting one more
11:30
voice of controversy or something like that around this thing going on. But yeah, that's
11:38
kind of how I viewed what Drunken Miller's op-ed kind of was getting at.
11:44
Yeah, I mean, let's get to percent. Why did he feel the need to increase the buybacks again?
11:49
Two to four billion in nominal terms, really not that much.
11:53
But I mean, I think the market took it as a signal like, OK, here's the first domino to fall.
11:58
Maybe we're getting towards implicit.
12:01
It seems like many people took that as implicit yield curve control, at least the beginnings of it.
12:06
And then you quickly have the weekend happen.
12:10
yields revert back to where they were or close to where they were
12:14
before Treasury Secretary Bessent made the
12:18
announcement of the increased buybacks. And then he came out with that message yesterday morning
12:22
where the sources are saying, I don't know if it's been confirmed whether or not he
12:26
actually said this, but whether or not he said it, the market's taking it as
12:30
if he said it. So put ourselves in
12:34
Scott Besson's mind now. Why is he doing what he's doing? Yeah, so now you have to
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But take Drucker Miller.
12:40
He's right.
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Put him on the shelf.
12:43
Now you get into the geopolitical swim lane and what's going on.
12:47
This is where you bring in Canada.
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The episode last week, the developments, let's say, on a deterioration front in the U.S.-Canada
12:58
trade relationship, which is also a de facto financial interconnection as well.
13:06
But this is where you get into Besson and what he's actually doing here with this buyback step up.
13:12
So the program has been running since 2024, right?
13:16
It's two years old, buying the off-the-run, lower-coupon, coupon treasury bonds, right?
13:25
So a 10, 20, 30-year would be the primary focus of what's going on front and center that Scott Besson's talking about,
13:32
raising from two bill to four billion.
13:34
uh but the buyback program it's it's every coupon bond for the off the run liquidity support
13:40
what does this mean um just to start with the distribution pipelines for these treasury auctions
13:47
right you go through the primary dealers and then each one of those has a customer book of business
13:51
where they take you know auction demand who's going to buy at this auction and then every
13:56
quarter let's say for for a treasury bond like the 10-year you'll you'll just hold the monthly
14:03
auction and then you'll distribute it into those pipelines and find a balance sheet for the bonds.
14:10
We'll get into the quarterly schedules. You do for a 10-year, you actually hold three separate
14:15
auctions for one QCIP or one bond issuance. You do the initial auction and then you do two
14:22
reopenings where you just keep adding on to the existing debt and then you start another one the
14:28
next quarter. Reason concentrates capacity into like one treasury bond issue. Okay. Yeah. You
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brought up this tweet. And, and, and what you end up getting is all of that debt packaged into one
14:47
QSIP. And then all of that liquidity can take like the same fungible form, right? So the buys
14:53
and sales in the future are going to be tapping into a deeper pool than you would if you just had
14:58
a new treasury issued every month. All right. So over time, you know, we're doing a new Q-SIP
15:06
for the 10-year every quarter, right? Over time, those old Q-SIPs, they just become, it's like a,
15:13
you know, a 2001, you know, Ford F-150, right? You got a new model every year.
15:20
The old models, they trade on the secondary lots with Carvana, CarMax, et cetera.
15:27
What this is saying, like we've got all these old treasury bonds.
15:31
It like your secondary market is getting gummed up is technically what happening as we moved from these old 2008 and on era of low coupon bonds
15:43
You know, when we were in a Bernanke, Yellen, Powell, chaired Fed version of policy, we've moved on to we're out of of the 2010s.
15:54
Right. And that's that's pretty clear. But those old, you know, Ford F-150s that are now gumming up the lot.
16:01
right customers have gone to their dealer and said hey i want to trade in my old f-150
16:09
those are all sitting on the lots because so now the manufacturer this would be like ford
16:12
the equivalent here would be us treasury they say we're going to come in and provide that liquidity
16:17
support we're not going to buy them off you um uh you know on a market price but we'll be a backbid
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um when i say backbid i mean you set your yield at a level um that that you want to defend
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and it's it's it's on your um dealers right same thing as a four dealer you got a primary dealer
16:41
bank they say all right we're we want to dump we want to sell these bonds back to you treasury
16:46
at this price so when we say there's going to be an increase from two bill to four bill
16:51
think of that as it's a backbid, right? And Scott Besson is saying, hey, we're going to buy up to
16:59
this much quantity. If you need to sell this old inventory to make way for the new inventory,
17:06
we'll do that. Now, interestingly, the signal is in when this starts, right? So I talked about
17:12
those auction reopenings. He specifically mentioned September 9th as the start date.
17:21
What day is that? That's the next reopening auction for the U.S. 10-year. So what's going
17:27
on here, we know there's going to be upward pressure on the long end of yield curves, right?
17:32
This has been kind of out there and publicly admitted by central banks, really starting with,
17:39
For me, the first signal was in the ECB's Financial Stability Review document published in May 2025, where they acknowledged there's going to be a sharp and abrupt repricing in euro denominators, what their focus were.
17:57
But they were talking about all, you know, G7 or, you know, the post-World War II coalition sovereign debt markets.
18:04
They're telling you the writing's on the wall, like long-term yields up.
18:09
Um, uh, but what Scott Besson is saying is like, okay, well now as we go into these monthly
18:14
re-auctions, what, what he's announcing here with this two bill, the four bill upsides for the back
18:20
bid is basically like a protective guardrail on the downside saying that, all right, as we try to
18:27
do this rotation process, like the new bonds have to absorb capacity from balance sheets of
18:33
both primary dealers, but also their investment funds and other clients, but it's mostly investment
18:38
funds. So Treasury is saying we'll be a liquidity backstop here. We'll set the floor as this kind of
18:43
rotation, you know, model swap out from the, you know, 20 from the customers 2020 Ford F-150.
18:51
That's, you know, let's just be out there junkers, not not literally Ford, but the 2020
18:55
30 year treasury bond issued at 1.25. Customers don't want that thing. Right. So get me out of
19:01
this, get me in the new 2027 F-150. That's really what Bessent is operating here with this buyback
19:09
program. Now, all the discussion on X about this is overly focused. It's like, is this QE? Is this
19:14
not QE? What I'm trying to understand and map to is like, what's actually reality here? What's going
19:19
on from a mechanical perspective and then why? And then you bridge that into all the volatility
19:26
we saw last week, where does it take place? It really hit in that intermediate window where
19:33
the 47th administration, after kind of multiple rounds, this started on Liberation Day. Like,
19:41
if you go back, this administration has been running an offensive operation since April 2nd,
19:48
right, with the tariff announcement in the Rose Garden. And we've just been building up steam from
19:52
there is how I view it and, and my framework, but, uh, the, the Canada relationship, the, the USMCA,
19:59
all of that, like that's been touch and go and actually, uh, deteriorating, like deteriorating
20:06
for this entire like, uh, process. And it's really escalate. It's, it's escalated, uh, in 2026.
20:14
All right. So you start with the tariffs, like February, the week before, uh, Epic Fury commenced,
20:21
the Supreme Court on February 20th issued that ruling six to three
20:26
that overruled the administration's
20:30
constitutionality or ability to collect tariffs under the IEPA.
20:34
Right.
20:34
Which was like it was a much more it was a much more of a straightforward
20:39
tool within the administration's tariff policy toolkit on specific
20:44
acts of Congress that have given them the constitutional
20:47
like vested power to
20:50
or what do you call it, declare and collect these tariffs.
20:56
Supreme Court overruled on Feb 20.
20:58
Hey, you can't do these.
20:59
I, I, EPA, not going to stand.
21:01
So we say, okay, all right, we do Epic Fury.
21:04
All of that, you know, goes, goes on.
21:06
In June, President Trump signaled that he wanted to strike a new trade deal
21:13
or renegotiate terms with the USMCA, which, you know, implemented in the law in 2018 and the first
21:22
Trump administration, it had all these kind of scheduled checkpoints in the deal. And the way
21:29
it worked right now, or the way it worked is we had a basically an option, if you will, like in
21:37
sports, if you follow this, you got player options on contracts or team options who can, you know,
21:42
buy the players year etc similar thing here we had a window and it was in july where the u.s would
21:48
either need to announce an intent to abide by the existing agreement or um withdraw which puts it it
21:57
makes it a um a year-to-year deal so instead of being like a long-term deal now we're saying with
22:03
candidates like well we're going to go year to year here all right and then you get in after that
22:08
um well also on that on that arm if i'm trying to read this poker table and i don't you know i'm not
22:14
one of the handful of of people who are involved in the negotiations like in the boardroom reading
22:21
that from the outside if this administration is saying all right that deal we negotiated with you
22:26
in 2018 we had the option uh to to it's not eject from the deal but like not you know re-up for
22:36
another you know long term when it is 10 years we want to go year to year renegotiate
22:41
that to me reads as a signal where you like your marketing position that you've moved into between
22:48
2018 and 2026 right or so a lot of facts on the ground have changed since 2018 right uh but you
22:55
know the the the the signal we have or the information we're dealing with here uh you see
23:02
that uh the white house now now uh ops to renegotiate tells me all else equally be like
23:10
all right they feel something different about their poker hand they like their their positioning
23:14
uh in this to ask for ask for more uh out of the economic pie all right so that opens up the process
23:23
now where the administration starts to use another package of tools, standing acts of
23:34
Congress that give it the legal power to apply tariffs on product imports into its country.
23:43
And that's where you get into the Section 338, which I don't want to dive too deep on
23:47
details here, but it's, it's the power derives from the 1930s, uh, tariff act, which is a Hoover
23:55
administration level tool, which is like, that was the last, whatever turning, right. Where we're in
24:00
between world war one, world war two. So that kind of tells you where we are, that the executive is
24:05
now using, uh, these tools that were last used and, uh, these types of errors. So July, I forget
24:12
the exact date, but mid-July, the White House announces an intent to apply tariffs selectively
24:20
on alcohol, dairy, and motor vehicles imports from Canada. And that kicked off a 30-day
24:27
kind of grace period before those collections went into effect, which would have been 12.01
24:34
a.m. Wednesday Eastern time last week, right? And so what happened, notice Wednesday was the day
24:41
where the Besant headline came out.
24:46
Hey, we're going to come in with this back bid.
24:48
We're going to think about it as defenses, right?
24:51
You're going to defend your yield curve from a sell-off,
24:53
from an attack going into the next treasury auction.
24:58
Wednesday was the day where Besant goes out and says,
25:00
hey, we're going to add, you know,
25:03
instead of two lines of defense on, you know, that front,
25:08
we're going to put in four, right?
25:09
As effectively how I'd view it.
25:10
And the other thing there, too, the White House gave a three-day extension that extended that process to 12.01 a.m.
25:24
It was technically Saturday morning Eastern for a renegotiated deal to come through with Canada.
25:31
That lapsed, right?
25:33
And now we are where we are with the U.S.-Canada process.
25:36
And it's gotten to a very weird place, right?
25:40
Which is, you know, maybe where Carney intended to take it all along. And we can get into that
25:46
thread, pull that one apart. But that whole three-day window here, that's my point. Wednesday,
25:51
Thursday, Friday, where we saw all of that market action happen. Think about what was going on in
25:56
the background The big story was the US trade relationship but it also a financial story as well So you think about this system this transition in the dollar away from the offshore dollar towards the next thing
26:10
We don't need to go deep into it here. Go listen in our other podcast conversations where we've
26:15
talked about that. But that whole process of the dollar moving from this offshore standard and
26:22
center of gravity lives outside of the nation. This is part of that process of the gravity of
26:30
the dollar and the marginal dollar in the system coming into New York and Washington, D.C. as the
26:37
center of its universe. And this whole situation in Canada, it's just another chapter. It's another
26:47
flavor of the story of that process taking out. And that's where, in my opinion, you saw the market
26:53
panic, right? And the Bitcoin candle is where we get into that. Like I would, when I see that candle
26:59
on the chart, like, yes, it's a break of the first wave we saw of, yeah, the bear trend.
27:07
If you're just looking at the technicals, you've got a very kind of well-defined downward channel
27:14
there that's just liquidity taking from uh bitcoin but also your treasury companies all of that
27:20
uh and then you see the the the jump out of that uh channel on uh wednesday and thursday
27:27
aggressively like it's a what was it like a i think it was like a five signal move
27:32
five six yeah uh but in terms of like percent move yeah it was like what 15 percent yes it was
27:39
massive that's panic buying um so then you think about all right where is that coming from
27:43
Um, it, it, uh, kind of the story we went with right on fin twit, right.
27:52
Was, oh, this is, this is the QE.
27:55
This is the money printing.
27:56
Everybody's just, you know, we're, we're gearing up for another cycle.
27:59
Yeah.
28:00
I'd argue I'll go through the sign, the signpost.
28:02
It looks like we're in, in terms of the global liquidity cycle, something similar to 2019
28:07
as we're working towards that, that, that bottoming event.
28:12
So the initial reaction from a lot of the plebs, the retail accounts is like, yeah, smash buy.
28:19
But in my opinion, like the accounts that actually matter in size, your large family
28:24
offices, your kind of your big balance sheets that are tied to these geopolitical events
28:31
and connected that I'm talking about, like central banks, head funds, et cetera.
28:36
The central banks aren't going to buy Bitcoin.
28:38
They they their liquidity kind of panic would show up and say a bid for gold, which we saw starting in early August after the intervention.
28:49
That first week of August, we saw gold take off and then Bitcoin followed in that window where the train came off the rails with the U.S.-Canada relationship.
29:00
The way I view that Bitcoin candle, yeah, to me, that reads like a panic.
29:05
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slash go slash TFTC for up to off eligible Square hardware Terms apply This episode is sponsored by Bitcoin at Block And then you get into what going on in this old dollar system and uh the moves being made there and that where we get into what we found
31:21
uh what we saw yesterday at this best in press conference with uh operation economic outcast
31:26
right you know maybe there's someone in uh washington dc who's a big fan of uh there's a big
31:33
boy in under 3000 stankonia bombs over bagdad great like that's dating me to like 2000 era
31:38
right? Chappelle show sketch, the president of Stankonia. But when I see that Operation Economic
31:50
Outcast and notice he used the term, this is the economic D-Day. I think we overused that without
31:58
thinking about what it was. D-Day was a beachhead invasion of Nazi Germany or the Third Reich,
32:06
Like, you know, making the inroads into continental Europe, we take the beachhead.
32:11
But it wasn't the end, right?
32:13
The amount of time between D-Day and V-E Day, right?
32:17
When you, you know, you corner Hitler in the bunker and you get the famous scene from the tweet meme, the downfall movie scene that everybody memes over, which provides some, you know, gallows humor.
32:35
you know, from something. Yeah. So D-Day itself was that primary invasion, right? Eisenhower,
32:44
all that. You take the beachhead, but the key is it represented a phase of World War II where
32:52
we've moved beyond just doing, you know, hand-to-hand combat against, you know, on the
32:58
defense perimeter. It represented really the first attempt on the European front of World War II
33:07
of taking that beachhead literally at Normandy and then working interior and disrupting the supply
33:15
chains, the logistics, which the flip side of that, the flip side of trade and goods and services
33:22
is your financial system, right? Because money is the other side of every transaction. You're
33:27
disrupting the monetary flows. So, and then ultimately, you know, Patton, et cetera, grind
33:34
down, you know, their opposition in Europe. There's a front there. There's an interesting
33:39
thread there, Montgomery versus Patton in Europe and who could get to Berlin fastest,
33:44
save that one for another day. We don't have the time. But think about that. When Besant says this
33:51
is economic D-Day, what I view that as what he's telling us is this is the, what this is,
33:56
is the actual invasion of a beachhead. Iran is your Normandy here. And then from there, you're
34:02
going up the interior. Now, what does that represent? Another headline we got Sunday night.
34:08
We had a senior official in Pazeshkian, the Iranian, I believe his title is, like,
34:13
it's president is his actual office. It's, you know, whatever, president, prime minister. We know
34:17
their governance structure, right? The ultimate power and authority rolls up to this Ayatollah,
34:24
right? This religious cleric. Pazewski holds the presidential office. It's not like the
34:31
US Constitution's executive, like vested power in the president where this is an open argument,
34:40
right? How much power actually accrues to the unitary executive? We're going to find out.
34:49
These are open-ended questions. And from time to time, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
34:54
FDR, et cetera. It's like, well, we, it, it extends as far as it needs to, right. For the
35:00
constitutional order to maintain itself. I, my point here, we get a senior administration official
35:06
from the Iranian president openly admitting that there is a, I call it a criminal operation,
35:14
uh, that, that may or may not be, uh, actually. Yeah. I mean, I was trying to like, make sure
35:21
we're like being careful with our words here but what the um admission was was that there's a
35:30
call it a distribution ring that's absorbed politicians right they're they're beneficiaries
35:35
of the scheme where irani like domestic oil that that is sold at low subsidized prices for the
35:43
Iranian people, businesses, et cetera, as beneficiaries, that oil was being exported
35:52
into other countries, mainly China. And basically what you're doing here is you're taking that low
36:00
subsidized price, you know, ringleaders of this operation, which I think criminal would probably
36:06
be an accurate term, but not proven out in there, you know, all the right courts of law,
36:11
alleged, let's just call it that, and basically trafficked into China and what you're doing.
36:18
So Iran oil industry has been nationalized I think it the National Iranian Oil Company or something like that But they nationalized their producer which is if you read The Prize by Daniel Yergin you get into this history It starts with
36:35
UK, Anglo-Persian developing their oil and energy production industry. UK Parliament even becomes a
36:48
shareholder at some point. It goes to like, it's a long history here. Like speaking of the real
36:53
housewives analogy, like these people have been dating for a long time. There's a lot of baggage
36:59
there. And it's not even like themselves, like their grandparents were dating. They were off and
37:04
on like, there's, I don't know, there's just a lot of baggage and history behind this whole
37:10
relationship. But anyway, you've got, you've got an unsanctioned, unlicensed, like
37:18
selling of this low price subsidized oil, let's say it's like a buck a gallon.
37:23
They sell that into China at below market rates, right? What would it be? I don't know.
37:28
If WTI is 80, who knows, maybe they sell it for 50. But it's all of that profit is just captured
37:36
by the scheme, which what you're actually stealing from is the nationalized, like the public oil
37:42
company. Right. So that comes out Sunday night. That's huge. Uh, in, in my read of the situation,
37:48
and then you get an administration official, like, I hope this guy's security is top notch,
37:54
uh, because, uh, there's going to be a lot of people, uh, who, who don't like him shedding
38:01
light on, uh, the, the kind of internal, uh, which is Iranians. Yeah, exactly. Cause okay.
38:08
This is where we get into Economic D-Day and the press conference yesterday or Operation Economic Outcast.
38:15
Right. We'll see which term sticks here as, you know, the market bakes us in.
38:22
The kind of the Easter egg in that press conference was Bessent was quoted as saying there will be a major financial institution sanctioned.
38:32
I think he said by the end of the week. So the shoe is going to drop here.
38:35
And if you're just trying to put the puzzle pieces together, because like I said before, like I don't have a contact like in the small room where these negotiations take place.
38:45
So like you got to read this from the outside and then the sources you do have to understand what's going on.
38:50
But starting from the fact that there is like an illegal sales operation, like it's you call it a scandal, right?
38:59
of the subsidized Iranian oil meant for the domestic market,
39:07
the next thing you would do with that is sanction the bank involved.
39:12
And this is where you'll see on X, everybody's like,
39:14
oh, it's going to be Canadian or something like that.
39:18
Your eye is all over this hot button thing.
39:21
It's like kids' soccer, running to right where the soccer ball is.
39:26
It's like, guys, you're missing the opposite wing.
39:28
It's wide open if we could just make the crossing pass.
39:32
The banks who are facilitating those transactions are like, in my mind, that's the most likely for these sanctions.
39:39
That's where we don't need to go too deep into this.
39:42
But you've got a bank called the Bank of Kuhn Lun, I believe it's called in China, operating in the Xinjiang province.
39:48
And this is where if you start to look back on the last 10 years and these little threads that have been opened up in the media, like, where is this one going?
39:59
I know this is going to show up in the plot at some point later.
40:02
Xinjiang is the region where the Uyghurs live.
40:06
If you think about China as, you know, we view them as a monolith, right, from like externally.
40:12
But kind of like the U.S., we have different regions.
40:15
They're culturally different, economically different.
40:18
all of that Xinjiang is like the interior portion of the modern you know Chinese states borders
40:27
um and it butts up I believe it intersects with Iran so it's just it's cross-border uh oil trade
40:36
and so you're looking at this bank this bank of Kulun it's an it's an important bank to the people
40:42
involved in this trade so if you know this operation or you know it's part of your book
40:47
of business and you're making money off of this, you know, oil scandal, right? You'll know that
40:57
bank, like it's important to you, but to us, like, you know, Western followers, you're like,
41:01
who is this? It's not even close to in your neck of the woods. So that's what I'm watching for here
41:07
as this Iran story plays out. And as time goes on, it's starting to more and more look to me like,
41:16
So if you think about Iran moving towards, like we saw with Venezuela, it's very clearly
41:23
like we're cutting relationships between supply and demand for commodities, but chief among
41:32
them energy.
41:33
Venezuela, Iran, and half one were like the key steps in that big picture plan.
41:39
plan. And when, and when we hear other analysts, right, you hear them talk about, oh, the Iran
41:44
thing, this administration just shot themselves in the foot. I think this goes way beyond the
41:49
administration. These are part of like the war gaming exercises, which have been in the works
41:54
and, you know, gone through update cycles, war gamed out, you know, starting as soon as the books
42:01
closed on World War II, like we're probably planning. What do we do as the, you know, once
42:07
we get back, go from peacetime to wartime again. So my point is all of this stuff has been, you
42:13
know, war gamed out kind of extensively. You don't know like all the different branches in the kind
42:20
of the lattice tree, your own decision tree, what you can influence there. We're in chaos mode right
42:26
right now. Like it's definitely wartime. The signal on that is when we change the name on the front
42:31
of the building from the Department of Defense to Department of War. But yeah, if you think about
42:37
what's the next phase now? It's like, all right, first step, we changed, we reconfigured all the
42:42
Western hemisphere relationship, relationships with oil production, primarily in Venezuela.
42:49
We've gotten on good terms with Argentina. There's massive kind of movements and elections
42:57
in South America, as far as which kind of end of the economic spectrum that they're tilted,
43:04
that they want to tilt to, and then which sphere of influence they'll lean into for probably the
43:10
rest of the 21st century. But then now when you start to hear economic D-Day, you're like, oh,
43:16
now this is the beachhead operation. It doesn't mean we're going to send,
43:20
you know, how many soldiers were on D-Day? 10,000, like a lot, right? Doesn't mean we're
43:24
going to send the ducks, all of those, you know, amphibious vehicles to land troops. It's like,
43:30
no, this is going to be financial. This is going to come through the financial channels.
43:33
Um, and, and so you're, you're going after, yeah, the enemy's logistics economy, but ultimately
43:41
what's actually being absorbed here is, uh, like financial sphere is, is how I would, uh,
43:47
describe what's happening.
43:48
So then now we get back into the treasury auctions, right?
43:52
This is the thing with Canada, right?
43:54
That, that, um, a trade deal that fell apart.
43:58
Now we're tariffing each other.
44:01
View that in light of the same way that you saw a panic, like there's a rush into gold when Putin finally invades Ukraine.
44:11
Like we shot up at 2000.
44:13
It failed that test back in 2022, retraced a little bit and then had to make its run at 2000.
44:20
Once it broke through, it just ran.
44:22
I view this as it's that same phenomenon where there's a panic into those collateral assets like gold, Bitcoin, similar to what we saw in 2022.
44:35
The timing goes a little bit differently because gold is kind of the chosen blessed collateral in the existing central bank architecture.
44:44
Bitcoin is for the upstart, the new internet, what do you call it?
44:48
Decentralized economy, whatever you want to call it.
44:50
Like it's the new thing where the public sector or sorry, the private sector, households, businesses are the primary leads of adoption.
44:58
But that sign we just saw. You could say, really, it's been all of August.
45:02
But but in that heated event last week between the U.S. and Canada, that was a strong signal there.
45:08
Now, is this the end of the bear market? I don't know.
45:11
Well, we'll have to wait and see it from from my point of view, like in the big picture, the the underlying situation.
45:20
right? This open heart surgery that's, that's being conducted on the, the entire global economy,
45:27
the financial system, the, the trade routes, those, those relationships that have really locked in and
45:33
been established starting with world war II. That process is not yet finished. Like I said, that,
45:39
that 11 months between D day and VE day, there's probably a lot of time left in between.
45:47
So we're just going to have to wait and see.
45:49
The way I view it is like we're kind of in that that brackish water territory between fresh water and salt water.
45:55
You're like, what are you here?
45:56
It's like, I don't know.
45:57
It's its own special thing.
45:58
But that's that's where we find ourselves right now.
46:01
So, yeah, everything's been interesting.
46:02
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46:07
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46:15
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48:46
Two questions related to everything you just said, or two parts of what you just said.
48:52
Canada, where, in your mind, where do you think the administration is trying to pressure them to get to?
49:00
what position, what concessions they want to make. And then second, this Iranian official
49:07
ringing the alarm bell on Sunday, is that like a black swan that really fucks things up for
49:12
China and others that are on the other side of the US trying to negotiate and rejigger things
49:19
on the back end? Yeah. So the Canada question, Canada itself is an interesting union. Like it's,
49:27
it's different and I don't spend my time, like I'm not from inside the Canadian system, so I don't
49:33
have like the level 100 out of 100 type of expertise on their own structure.
49:40
But it's not the same as the US where the states come together,
49:44
they form the Federal Union, power derives from the states, all of that.
49:51
You know, what I do know and what I have kind of studied about Canada,
49:54
This modern country of Canada derives from I think it's actually an act of UK Parliament.
50:00
It's the British North America Act.
50:02
And it's like right after the American Civil War.
50:06
But it is a different beast.
50:10
Let's just say that from a governance structure.
50:11
It's it's not as cohesively and like compactly held together as the kind of the U.S.
50:19
constitutional structure.
50:19
And, you know, if you want to spend a deeper podcast on it, bring in other people.
50:24
Matt Arad or someone like that who get into the weeds. But my point here, you see, like, what is
50:30
what is Trump's point of view? Where is he pressuring them? There is definitely some cultural
50:35
pushback between the not just between the French elements, right? Montreal, Quebec, all of that,
50:43
and the kind of the French culture, because you got to remember, these are these are formed out of
50:49
the colonies, right? The North American colonies, the same way that in the U S there's a,
50:54
there's a distinct French culture in Louisiana, right? Um, same thing at the mouth of the, uh,
51:00
St. Lawrence river, Montreal, all of that. Quebec has that element. So they're patching on
51:05
a legacy kind of French cultural colony with the leftovers of the American revolution who wanted to
51:14
stay loyal to the British. They pack those things together, merge them in one collective whole.
51:21
It's just been a back and forth process for 150 years since. But then on top of that,
51:26
you've got a culturally distinct identity in the interior provinces like Calgary, Alberta, right?
51:34
They've got their own, I mean, it's kind of a independence movement there. It's real. They're
51:43
They're, you know, on the ground, they're strong.
51:45
They're trying to push for their own kind of economic sovereignty.
51:50
And then you've got British Columbia and Vancouver, which are pseudo aligned.
51:56
They they a lot more like the if you think about the traditional U S East coast West coast split the connection between Toronto right is like your center of call it like British cultural antecedents And then on the West Coast as well very similar to
52:14
the New York, D.C. plus San Francisco type of combination in the U.S. But politically, I think
52:21
you see Trump or the White House, the administration, they're pushing in on those existing
52:26
kind of, we call them fissures, in the Canadian hole, right?
52:33
Pressing on the Alberta movement when it becomes, when there's an opening there, but also this
52:39
week with the Quebec situation, France, et cetera.
52:43
There was stuff in the, kind of the response to how things shook out, the boilerplate language
52:49
in the agreement that was stated, I think, by the Canadian side to be the hang up and
52:55
why they didn't get a deal done. There were things in there about French language. So you see the
52:59
White House like tapping in to those existing, what do you call them, like fissures, fractions,
53:05
whatever, at their own Thanksgiving dinner table. Canadians have their own Thanksgiving too,
53:12
right? So yeah, that's how I would view how the administration is playing this for now.
53:18
And then you're going to have to let your economies and your financial systems kind of
53:23
sort out now that now that these tariffs have gone into into effect like 50 on uh uh u.s imports of
53:32
canadian uh alcohol dairy motor vehicles uh we're just gonna have to see you know supply chains are
53:39
gonna have to reconfigure realign etc and then canada's been you know slapping their own 50
53:44
tariffs on on the us uh for its exports but there's a total difference in relationships right
53:49
Right. Like like U.S. is 12 times the size and the the trade relationship between U.S. and Canada is much more significant to like Canada's side of the table versus what it represents.
54:02
The U.S. side, it's going to hurt both. But right now we're in that marketing to market phase.
54:08
And this is where like so when Besant saw that this was going to happen.
54:12
right the response was like oh we're going to increase our back bid size on the treasury auctions
54:17
as this process works through the sovereign debt markets so that's how i would i would characterize
54:23
that story now the second one was a question on was it china yeah the iranian official black swan
54:29
that's completely messing things up for people on the other side of the u.s throughout all these
54:36
so when we use the term black swan i think taleb you know he defines it as uh things that people
54:44
viewed as improbable or things that would like never occur um prior to them happening and then
54:51
after they happen everybody is like yeah this is that was inevitable the whole time that type of
54:56
thing right but then they're big they're shock disruptors to uh to a system was iran the black
55:02
swan i guess yeah you would arguably say like this was the thing that was sitting there all along
55:08
like it was your it was your your like wedge issue your plot device for 20 30 years right as
55:15
you know what it was in the original bush the second axis of evil we're talking about um
55:22
was the name uh mahmoud aminijad on you know the south park movie and all of that well i'm not
55:28
talking about like just the wrong war generally i'm talking about this official coming out and
55:31
blowing the oh is that the black swan blowing the lid on the the oil the oil trades with uh likely
55:39
china because there was another because there was a headline to our true social post that trump sent
55:45
out that was basically like oh yeah we're just uh we're just we're 10 10 million barrels a day
55:52
are going to the straight we're just sending the ships at night there was that intermixed in the
55:57
headlines of the last week as well. So the oil or the energy exports through the Persian Gulf,
56:03
they're consent, like majority consumed by Southeast Asia. Right. So I think like if you're
56:10
making this story and the bigger thing is about the interaction between the U S and its economic
56:17
order or like coalition, it's building out. I call that one pack silica is I think the best
56:22
encompassing term, all the supply chains that go into the, yeah, the kind of economic block that the
56:29
U.S. is framing for its vision of the 21st century build out, the AI development, all of that.
56:38
Think about the Persian Gulf and the actual tankers not making it out of the Strait of Hormuz.
56:46
Those were mostly going to the Southeast Asian markets. We've already seen in the Q2 data,
56:51
This was in Anas al-Hajji post like three or four weeks ago at this point, as we got the second quarter energy consumption data, like you see it hitting China, it's Japan, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, everybody like those economies.
57:04
They're like down the kind of TFTC audience will know.
57:10
Energy is your base level input for pretty much all economic activity Right So that your base layer collateral in the system If you pull the energy out or you shrink consumption by let say 10
57:27
number one, you could have, in China's case, buildup of strategic reserves, which you rely
57:32
on for exactly this case. But still, that's finite, right? What you're doing is you're pulling
57:39
economic growth and activity trade away from that regional sphere, which translates into the
57:49
financial system, right? Because that's the counterpart of every transaction that doesn't
57:53
take place. That's missing credit expansion in the financial system. And then you think about
58:00
how are credit-based financial systems, purely fiat credit-based financial systems,
58:05
kind of structured as their Achilles heel. It's like when you pull away growth,
58:11
that's when your Jenga tower starts to wobble. And so you start to see other headlines. I'll
58:18
just go through key events that I'm watching that didn't get much coverage. Two weeks ago,
58:23
the PBOC did its first mid-month liquidity injection into its repo markets domestically.
58:30
that's a sign of that growth, that growth that's been removed from the system or the headwind,
58:39
if you will, kind of materializing in the money market. And so the central bank, PBOC,
58:47
has to come in and do a liquidity injection similar to where the US was or New York-based
58:52
repo markets were in September, October of 2019. Now, they haven't reached that scale,
58:58
right but you're seeing um like pboc has had these standing liquidity operations i think they
59:04
they announced they started spinning them up in june but if you think about like zooming out big
59:08
picture where we are in this process um everybody's waiting for the big print right these central
59:16
banks which no longer kind of agree to each other the old offshore dollar system that kind of
59:21
connected them all together and we were just going to keep creating more and more dollar debt
59:25
until the system couldn't bear anymore.
59:28
We're past that point now.
59:30
So now you're seeing these other players
59:33
kind of make do with reality, right?
59:38
So you're seeing that repo market support from the PBOC.
59:41
You saw another headline in June where Mexico,
59:44
Mexico Central Bank spun up their own repo market,
59:48
you know, emergency liquidity facility.
59:50
It hasn't been used yet.
59:51
But as these kind of, this broad operation,
59:55
that you would say is, at the end of the day,
59:57
it's been war gamed out several times
59:58
and your decision treeing, red team, blue teaming,
1:00:01
all of this and identifying what you're gonna press on
1:00:07
or how you would react given an enemy's response.
1:00:14
I'd say that's kind of what we're looking at here.
1:00:17
So when you're watching for, yeah,
1:00:20
the repo markets too, like you're seeing reserves,
1:00:23
Like there's a need here, too, for the U.S. with the Treasury curve.
1:00:27
Like we're waiting on Scott Bessent to start terming out debt, like to add on or upsize the longer term coupon bond auction sizes to take pressure off of the front end of the yield curve.
1:00:40
And right now we're in this is that brackish state.
1:00:42
It's like, yeah, we're eventually going to need to shift out and increase long term Treasurer's supply.
1:00:46
Hence the upward pressure on interest rates across all Western government sovereign yield curves that we've seen since really epic fury began.
1:00:55
Like this has been a year of yields rising across most of the across most of the world.
1:01:02
Right. Everybody except for China. And then maybe Switzerland is still trying to maintain like a ZERP type of strategy.
1:01:10
But I would say, yeah, if there's a black swan, it's like, well, the thing was there all along.
1:01:15
Like our intelligence analysts, both military intelligence, as well as you would say, the
1:01:21
let's say the more profiteering based intelligence arms like, I don't know, CIA, MI6, Mossad,
1:01:28
those, they were always aware, like they had to have the understanding on the ground that
1:01:34
there was this oil running scheme going on between Iran and Xinjiang.
1:01:40
hence 10 years of the buildup on this uh weaker issue right um and so yeah it was there all along
1:01:49
but now we're it's now that we're in d-day we're going to press on that and then if d-day is
1:01:55
successful what it means is uh you're integrating you're like burrowing in you've got your beachhead
1:02:01
you've set up your defenses so they can't you know run you back into the sea um and you're gonna then
1:02:07
push into the supply chains, trade, all of that, and then ultimately into the financial system as well.
1:02:14
So it's integration. And then that just shows the big picture going on here.
1:02:19
Bitcoiners are well aware of this at this point. I think what we didn't have is kind of a good roadmap of how we actually
1:02:29
get there, right? Up until 2022, it was the dominant kind of narrative of how this plays out
1:02:36
is old system will collapse and we're going to have a crypto anarchist, whatever scheme.
1:02:43
I don't know that that's going to play out that way as kind of the dominant voices in
1:02:48
the space were kind of telling us is how they saw this playing out. Nor do I know that that's
1:02:54
the ideal way, the optimal way, because if we just keep pushing on this existing system and let that
1:03:02
all of that massive amount of dollar debt, most of it offshore, collapse upon itself,
1:03:08
we lose the constitutional order in the United States. And this vision of your own self-sovereignty
1:03:15
sounds good in theory, but there's no social patchwork or cohesion around you. So it's a world
1:03:21
of violence, you don't have a constitutional order. I don't think it looks as bright of a future for
1:03:28
your children as, uh, as we might naively, uh, suggest. You just buy a cabin in the woods. You
1:03:34
just buy a cabin in the woods and you, you bunker out and wait like 30 years, you raise your kids
1:03:39
and then. Ted Kaczynski has entered the chat. I don't think, uh, that guy had the answers. Um,
1:03:46
I, I, yeah, that's it. I mean, if you, if you want to retreat to the woods and there was part of that,
1:03:54
right. As Rome was collapsing. Right. And you know, the hundred AD that's like, it got sacked.
1:04:01
Right. And what you saw, like, that means like you go ahead. Yeah. The Benedict, yeah. Like
1:04:05
the Benedict monks that go out and they create their own villages and societies. Yeah. The
1:04:09
cities collapse. People, people just retreat to the mountains. You don't have, there's,
1:04:14
you can't economically integrate. Like it's, it's not a great world for building a business
1:04:20
or conducting trade. Like, uh, it really is a downgrade and, and kind of your standard of living.
1:04:26
And, uh, I mean, this is true. Like through trade, you, we all accomplish more, right? If
1:04:32
we can cooperate, figure out a way to economically, uh, cooperate with each other on a money,
1:04:37
uh, that, that is a level playing field and you can defend, uh, and the monetary structure
1:04:43
allows you to maintain the political order. That's, that's the strategy. I think that is,
1:04:49
that is the winner and where we leave it better than our, than we found it. So like, I don't try
1:04:55
to be a fan boy or like, you know, you know, Scott Besson's my hero, whatever. I just try to
1:05:01
look at these things, see what's going on, what they mean, how they develop. There's very clearly,
1:05:07
what would you call it? Just a renegotiation of all these large global businesses,
1:05:15
the two largest businesses in the world. It's not NVIDIA. It's not Microsoft or Apple.
1:05:24
Like two largest businesses in the world are the global monetary franchise, or now they're just
1:05:31
regional monetary franchises are starting to be, and then the global trade franchise or regional
1:05:37
trade franchises. So that's who I try to watch, understand. And then, yeah, you see those trends
1:05:42
playing on top of that, the build out of AI, all of that, the technology is becoming more and more
1:05:47
important, getting their seat at the table as the old kind of economic monopolies start to fray.
1:05:55
but yeah that's how I say so was the the oil scheme in Iran a black swan I don't like we knew
1:06:01
it was there all along and once we once we you know conducted all the steps in the order of
1:06:07
operations at the war plans kind of teased out as hey this is the way to actually accomplish our
1:06:12
objectives here you knock out the defenses IRGC capabilities oil middlemen in Iraq who are
1:06:23
same way exporting gray market black market uh iranian oil um sanction the the bank the iranian
1:06:31
banks and uh crypto exchanges and then the the external banks financial institutions crypto
1:06:39
exchanges who are business like like uh what do you call it i want to say businessing but
1:06:46
um just serving those client relationships and doing business with uh those internal iran factions
1:06:52
like you knock out all of those and then and then you know as as uh kind of those steps are checked
1:06:59
off the project list uh i think now you go for your d-day is kind of what uh it looks like is
1:07:05
in the card so yeah one way or the another one way or the other this will be interesting and
1:07:09
the rest of q3 q4 as it always is but uh that's yeah where i see this and then bitcoin uh is
1:07:16
i'd say we're in that middle ground we're in the brackish waters is the bear market over
1:07:20
are we into the bull market tbd the way i view this so start with the the landmark legislation
1:07:29
that would get the u.s government like our existing constitutional order how do we maintain that and
1:07:35
then port that onto our monetary structure we start with these things like well number one get rid of vote that vote that power faction out of office because they their plan was to go with the CBDC route So we ejected those people from the from you know control of the system
1:07:50
I mean, at this point, like with the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, right,
1:07:57
I think is their acronym.
1:07:59
It looks like they're starting to take control of the, the Democrat party, the DNCE, the
1:08:05
establishment, your Chuck Schumer's, your Elizabeth Warren's. I mean, you could almost
1:08:10
place Elizabeth Warren in the DSA almost, but it looks like those people are being moved.
1:08:18
Like they're being transitioned out. Yeah. And so I'm sorry to tell you this voters, but they're
1:08:25
like, I don't think they're going to give you the Bitcoin standard or the porting of the American
1:08:32
constitutional structure, the experiment of people being the government at the end of the day.
1:08:39
We have a unique thing on our hands, a very prized and valuable thing, in my opinion.
1:08:44
It's been tampered with for 250 years, but I still think that that thing itself is
1:08:51
worth preserving and should be. But my point here is I don't think Hunter Biden is actually going to
1:09:00
be your steward of Bitcoin and said thing. So my point here, when you're looking at these
1:09:08
actions in New York and DC, and which way is the United States leaning? Is it integrating Bitcoin
1:09:16
into its monetary kind of base layer? You look at the playbook, just Biden, that whole camp,
1:09:23
you know, the, the path to the CBDC, which we were on under that administration.
1:09:31
We put in the new administration in January, 2025. First order is just revoke, stop work
1:09:37
on examining the legal roadmap and steps to get the U.S. onto a CBDC. Like you see the, the,
1:09:46
the order of operations here, you get genius act to figure out how do we integrate like the
1:09:51
stablecoin dollar how do we regulate it so that we can transition this offshore dollar to the
1:09:55
stablecoin dollar system where we're kind of stuck at right now i mean you could say clarity but
1:10:00
that's pseudo relevant that's where i want to bring up because like everything we discussed
1:10:05
earlier what's happening in parallel to you know the cftc the sec the occ and the executive or i
1:10:13
mean they sit under the executive but uh trump as well coming out saying we're not waiting for
1:10:17
clarity act yeah let's start issuing these charters we're gonna that was also wednesday
1:10:22
last week right regulation crypto assets yeah in that three-day window okay go ahead no it just
1:10:28
seems clear to me that like they have this plan and like they're like we're not waiting for clarity
1:10:33
we're just gonna start writing rules and so i think clarity is one of those where we had to
1:10:37
call an audible because it looks to me so we got genius done june 2025 along with one big beautiful
1:10:45
bill. That's, those are the two meaningful pieces of legislation to come out of this Congress.
1:10:51
It, from what it sounds to me or seems to me. So clarity past the house is my understanding.
1:10:58
It is hung up in the Senate. It does not have the votes to get whatever, like to make it to
1:11:05
the executive's desk from this con Congress. Right. So when you see that special meeting on
1:11:12
Wednesday, what I would view that as is that's your audible. And you say, all right, guys,
1:11:17
we didn't, for whatever reason, we couldn't get the 50 votes plus JD Vance's tiebreaker
1:11:22
to get clarity signed into law with this Congress. There's people rotating off. Mitch McConnell will
1:11:30
be exit stage left here at some point. Rest in peace. He's probably dead.
1:11:35
Dude, I don't know. But that video of him just sitting on the Senate for nine hours,
1:11:41
that's insane yeah i don't think um i have one kid when we go on road trips uh who just like we
1:11:47
can go on a five-hour drive or like hey who needs to stop here and one of them is like don't need to
1:11:53
every time i was like you need to go like just go to the breaststroke just just empty like he's just
1:11:57
got the whale bladder is what we call him but anyway yeah nine hours for for a uh how old is
1:12:03
mish mcconnell 85 like he's he didn't move there he's dead i think he's dead yeah i mean yeah he
1:12:07
could be sitting in a pair of depends uh for nine hours but there's no way you can sit that long
1:12:13
without needing a restroom break food water that's insane that's elder abuse is what it comes down to
1:12:19
if he was alive like that's just i don't know it's just insane it's kind of like that video or the
1:12:23
pictures we saw of uh diane feinstein rolled out onto the uh the senate floor when um this was like
1:12:31
a few years ago, right?
1:12:33
Yeah.
1:12:33
Like late stage dementia.
1:12:35
It was like, it was like, you look at how she looked and it's like, this is a person
1:12:40
who should be like, you know, with her family, you know, going out, you know, the right way.
1:12:45
And they do like the way they treat people.
1:12:48
It's just insane.
1:12:49
Like to to put them through that And and granted Diane Diane Feinstein what else that they signed me Exactly So it part of her deal So you can feel too guilty about it but it just insane all the way around Uh then you juxtapose that with a COVID era Like you couldn go in and see grandma
1:13:05
if she's going to die in the hospital. So she has to die alone. It's like, what are we doing guys?
1:13:09
All right. Get off the soapbox there. But, uh, yeah. So to get on the acts of Congress,
1:13:14
yeah. Clarity looks to me like it's stalled out. It's going to be tough. There's going to have to
1:13:18
be some horse trading negotiations if it is gonna if thune is gonna put it up for vote on uh september
1:13:24
15th i think as as he promised or allegedly kind of i don't know if he promised he made the statement
1:13:30
like oh we'll put it in put it out in september oh and if they don't get it now it's like yeah we
1:13:34
got the election it's gonna have to come to a new congress to to get that one through what what
1:13:39
clarity really gives us in my opinion so all right this tokenization of securities um kind of the
1:13:46
back-end settlement, the DTC, National Securities Clearing Corporation, all the back-end infrastructure
1:13:54
for settlement, they all know that they're going to have to shrink the settlement time
1:14:02
for trades. The liquidity is going to move towards whatever venues can offer that real-time
1:14:09
settlement. We know the closest thing you can get to final real-time settlement, right? It's Bitcoin.
1:14:14
And, you know, we'll cut to the chase here.
1:14:17
That's where this all leads, in my opinion, if you just map out the big picture.
1:14:22
But you look at the tokenized securities, like there's already all this stuff trading.
1:14:26
A lot of it is like tokenized stretch and all these, you know, wild, you know, harebrained leverage schemes.
1:14:34
Junior stretch 10x, you know, whatever, like senior.
1:14:37
It's like, all right, guys, come on.
1:14:39
But no, there's also tokenized equity shares like Micron.
1:14:42
i want to like like there's there's massive trading and then if you look at the charts of
1:14:47
market cap of of the tokenized securities like it's you know you're a vc right like it looks like
1:14:53
oh this is a durable and strong trend so this is a thing so the market cap and the liquidity is
1:14:58
going to port onto this new structure right we say tokenized securities but at the end of the day it's
1:15:04
just going to be securities they're just going to take a new form instead of you know in the 100
1:15:09
years ago, your share certificate in Disney or whatever would be the physical certificate that
1:15:16
they sent you and grandpa or great grandpa would put in his safe. And then to trade it, he might,
1:15:22
you know, Oh, I'm going to sell with my broker. Um, you know, whatever in St. Louis call the phone.
1:15:26
It's like, all right, we'll do the share. All right. Now we've got to bring in your
1:15:29
certificate, all of this. You saw this with paper bonds as well. And like, as of a few years ago,
1:15:33
you could still get paper bonds trading. And so we went over from like the real physical thing,
1:15:41
like the bearer instruments to a credit based settlement of a thing where you got the DTC
1:15:49
as the master ledger, the exchanges sit on top of that, the brokers sit on top of that as like
1:15:54
an inner layer. And then your record of Disney stock ownership now is an IOU with your broker
1:16:00
dealer and then the real iou is pointing to the uh to like the dtc layer so you got this middleman
1:16:07
this whole thing of tokenization now we're we're getting rid of that uh uh like we're like instead
1:16:14
of the digital representation of the thing being these credit-based liability uh kind of relationships
1:16:20
we've got away now satoshi showed us oh now we can make it back to the real thing
1:16:25
in the in the digital realm i was actually just looking at roche this week um just pack
1:16:30
silica important companies. Roche, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, probably
1:16:38
well-run, one of the best in class of that sector, right? And we're on a Bitcoin podcast,
1:16:44
best in class in the pharma industry is still probably a four-letter household name. But anyway,
1:16:49
I looked at their share ledger and it was something like a meaningful number of their
1:16:54
shares are still in the form of these vault instruments, like the paper certificates,
1:17:00
right?
1:17:00
It's like, oh, that's interesting little nugget there.
1:17:04
But yeah, so where this is moving, all of your security settlement, they're moving towards
1:17:11
this 24-7 liquid rails.
1:17:13
And Wall Street knows this, right?
1:17:17
Like April or May, you're seeing headlines, hey, we need to be ready for T plus zero settlement
1:17:23
by whatever X years.
1:17:25
And like, we've got these pilot projects
1:17:27
that are coming out as we move towards that milestone.
1:17:30
And like, this is going like fast.
1:17:34
In 2022, I want to say it was,
1:17:37
it's like just yesterday,
1:17:39
you know, in my lived experience, essentially,
1:17:42
corporate bonds still traded T plus two.
1:17:45
So if I traded whatever an Apple bond today,
1:17:48
we wouldn't settle with it.
1:17:50
It's Tuesday, August 25th.
1:17:51
We wouldn't settle our transaction until Thursday, August 27th.
1:17:58
That shrunk down to T plus one.
1:18:00
So you got a 50 reduction but now you going to look to move like treasury market is still T plus one Corporate bonds T plus one Equities I want to say final settlement T plus one We going to shrink that again
1:18:14
So this is where you get into Clarity Act.
1:18:16
As we know that process is going to happen, if New York wants to maintain itself as the
1:18:22
largest and most liquid capital market in the world, we've got to get something like,
1:18:27
well there has to be a piece of legislation for who is going to regulate it but also then which
1:18:34
which parties are going to capture the the share of that economic pie and that's where you get into
1:18:40
clarity where the hang-up actually is in my opinion is who you know which firms which businesses which
1:18:47
power factions are going to get what share of of said pie so that's clarity that's hung up
1:18:53
The thing that we actually, as Bitcoiners, should have our eyes on is the ARMA, the American Reserve Monetization Act.
1:19:04
Because if you want to get a Treasury who is leaning into Bitcoin as a reserve asset, which if you look at Scott Besson, you can see the indications that this is where he wants to move it, as well as statements from Trump.
1:19:18
Like, you know, there's a laundry list now of breadcrumb saying this is where they want to go.
1:19:23
We have to get kind of the legal authority from Congress to do so.
1:19:30
And this is where, all right, the ARMA was introduced, I want to say May or June.
1:19:36
It had something like 18 co-sponsors.
1:19:39
So there's a meaningful contingent who wants this.
1:19:42
But it doesn't have the 215 votes right now to get that into law.
1:19:48
So if you want to take this whole process, we talked about it like the elephant in the room, which ultimately amounts to integrating Bitcoin into the new US dollar framework.
1:20:01
We've got work to do this November, I guess is the short way to put it.
1:20:06
But I think, yeah, that piece of legislation, the mechanics, all of that, there's only so much you can do without an act of Congress to lock in and write that authority into stone.
1:20:16
Other than that, this play that was made on Wednesday with regulation crypto assets, remember at the beginning of this administration, staff letter, was it 321?
1:20:29
I forget the numbers, but essentially it was the treatment of digital assets held in custody by a US regulated financial institution.
1:20:40
They had to hold a massive amount of capital for, you know, say your bank wanted to custody Bitcoin for you, similar to the way Unchained did, right?
1:20:48
They would have had to hold a massive amount of-
1:20:51
An equal amount of dollars or treasury.
1:20:53
Which was insane.
1:20:54
Yeah.
1:20:54
I mean, it had a risk rating of like 1,000% or something that would just, it was actually prohibitive.
1:20:59
It was a blocker to the U.S. financial industry from moving in and building business on, you could say the crypto rails, but this is a Bitcoin podcast.
1:21:10
We know that's all bullshit, right?
1:21:11
It's Bitcoin is the prize.
1:21:14
So that was set up as a roadblock to prevent the U.S. financial institution from taking or the U.S. financial industry from taking market share and this global competition.
1:21:25
Right.
1:21:25
It's the hill to take.
1:21:26
but the same way. I think it was staff accounting bulletin one, two, one 23 or something like that.
1:21:33
And it was one 23. No, it was 21 and 22. So they rescinded 21 and created 22. Okay. Yeah. So it
1:21:43
would have been three 21. I want to say, okay. Either way, show notes. We'll, we'll clean that
1:21:47
up. I think if you've been following this story for five years, right, you'll, you'll know what
1:21:52
I'm talking about. I just forget the numeral identifier on that one part, the senior moment,
1:21:59
right? I just turned 40, so getting up there. But my point here is with regulation crypto assets,
1:22:07
that is not law of the land, right? It's accounting procedure. As soon as if we had a
1:22:14
replacement to another executive who was not friendly to said policies, they can just rescind
1:22:21
those with the stroke of a pen. And all of that goes away. So yeah, there's a lot of work to be
1:22:27
done. Nothing is certain here, right? And that's where I said we're in that brackish water in
1:22:36
between the fresh water and salt water. A lot of outcomes are going to hinge on what happens
1:22:43
between today and let's say the next six to 12 months. Other point here, we kind of know in the
1:22:51
Easter eggs that Scott Besson has buried, right?
1:22:53
1 million Bitcoin has been the target goal that's been always thrown out as the
1:22:59
the objective or
1:23:02
the US Treasury acquiring for its Bitcoin supply.
1:23:08
I don't see a world where it wants to bid those
1:23:11
and they up like an upward market where price is getting away from it.
1:23:16
So we'll see.
1:23:16
I mean, is it going to acquire those?
1:23:18
I mean, right now it sits on what?
1:23:19
100,000, 200,000 coins, something like that ballpark.
1:23:24
I don't like it.
1:23:26
It probably doesn't work for the treasury to get to a million coins and
1:23:30
acquire, you know,
1:23:31
Bitcoin in size and a bull market where price is running away from it.
1:23:35
So we'll just have to wait and see.
1:23:38
Yeah.
1:23:38
Kind of what I'm saying.
1:23:40
Yeah.
1:23:40
It's sab 121 and sab 122.
1:23:42
Just to clarify that.
1:23:44
Awesome.
1:23:44
I knew it went, it was like a 121,
1:23:48
but then I thought it was in order 321.
1:23:51
But yeah, good.
1:23:52
Thanks for pulling that.
1:23:54
And I mean, the other thing I brought up the tweet earlier,
1:23:57
but I'm not going to bring it up.
1:23:58
So just read it.
1:23:58
The U.S. is mining banks at the fastest pace in 20 years
1:24:02
and crypto is leading it.
1:24:03
EOCC approved 22 bank charters in Trump's first 19 months,
1:24:07
more than the previous five years combined.
1:24:09
All right.
1:24:11
That's an interesting development as well.
1:24:12
Yeah, we didn't get into this,
1:24:14
but think about what we're seeing with the sports ownership.
1:24:17
you know at this point it's like a targeted operation there was an ian fleming quote it's
1:24:21
like once his happenstance twice is uh is is a coincidence 49ers yeah we'll get into that in a
1:24:29
second twice as coincidence three times that's in an enemy action right so first we see um i want to
1:24:37
say the first one it was either mark walter or the ishbia family with the phoenix sons
1:24:42
Mark Walter, everybody knows this one's getting all the coverage, right? Guggenheim,
1:24:47
the insurance companies, we're just going to see where that one connects. Below the surface,
1:24:52
I don't think we have the full kind of public market disclosures of like, hey,
1:24:58
where was that capital coming from? Is it cross-border? What's going on here? We're going
1:25:02
to find out. The Ishbia family and United Wholesale Mortgage, that one's interesting,
1:25:07
You had the earnings call for Q2 back in, I want to say, late July, early August.
1:25:14
Yeah, he basically margin loaned his stock, and the stock's down 80%.
1:25:19
Well, on the earnings call, it was down like 50% on the day.
1:25:22
They had to announce, hey, we're discontinuing the dividend.
1:25:27
We needed liquidity injection from our partners at Oaktree, which is 100% owned by Brookfield,
1:25:34
which is, if you think about it, it's kind of the Canadian power factions, kind of national champion of private capital markets.
1:25:44
Right. It'd be like Blackstone, Apollo, like kind of the U.S. behemoths in the space.
1:25:50
What United Wholesale Mortgage was, this is interesting.
1:25:52
They they they held the leading market share of the U.S. wholesale mortgage industry.
1:26:00
and uh the way they did it was like aggressive pricing right so if you think about it like
1:26:09
what's been revealed after the fact so this oak tree right comes in for the
1:26:14
i don't know if emergency is an accurate word for it but it was like
1:26:19
very much so needed financing right i just want to make sure i'm being careful with words they
1:26:24
come in in q2 with i think the total kind of package was uh for liquidity injection was one
1:26:29
and a half billion into this entity, which it's not making economic sense at this, at this,
1:26:37
you know, kind of point in time, we're in a different world than, than the ZERP QE era,
1:26:42
where, uh, cost of funding is, is, is cheap. Right. Um, but, uh, you get the bailout rescue,
1:26:51
like the majority of the package. I want to say like the, uh, Ishbia family put in 150 mil
1:26:56
And then everything and then that's that that's subordinate to all of the capital, that oak tree, which is 100 percent wholly owned subsidiary of Brookfield.
1:27:10
They're injecting liquidity into this thing to keep it up and running.
1:27:14
But you think about that, the.
1:27:17
The the one thing all of these stories have in common, right, well, number one, they're sports franchises like trophy assets,
1:27:23
but there's a tax benefit to those things for, you know, once you accrue, you know, a significant
1:27:31
amount of wealth and say Steve Ballmer is one of these owners who has followed on this trend,
1:27:36
also heavily tied, if you've made a large nest day or nut from this offshore dollar scheme,
1:27:44
and then you need to minimize your tax bill these trophy sports franchises actually have a very favorable treatment right You can depreciate them like you can depreciate the person the acquisition cost over let say 15 or 20 years even though
1:27:59
they're long-lived assets like it doesn't make any sense they're saying oh we got player contracts or
1:28:03
our stadiums and you know you depreciate those and that gives you a tax shield uh you know to
1:28:10
to lower or, you know, deduct your, uh, your positive earnings on. And then when you go to,
1:28:17
um, bequeath it to your heirs after your, after you pass away and it goes through the trust
1:28:22
process, all of that, um, your children get a step up in basis. So it's really a, uh, besides
1:28:29
like the posh lifestyle and, you know, front page and, um, what's the Paris Hilton kind of journalism,
1:28:37
that outlet, whatever magazine people, like all that bull crap. Like it gets access to that,
1:28:44
that type of, uh, um, exposure wealth seeking and luxury lifestyle exposure, all that, all that crap,
1:28:51
um, to tax asset. Right. And so what, what, if you look at these ownership groups, like the
1:28:57
things they have in common, Mark Walter, um, you know, at the helm of Guggenheim partners, which is,
1:29:04
It's an asset manager, but it's connected in with, you know, insurance companies.
1:29:10
And that's actually the wedge here.
1:29:13
The federal investigators are coming in and examining, hey, this looks like a related party loan, which you can technically do, but only to a certain degree.
1:29:24
And those transactions are going to be much more heavily scrutinized.
1:29:27
That's what's coming in.
1:29:28
You know, the federal regulators to bust that up.
1:29:31
But then the same thing with the Ishbia family.
1:29:33
They're tied in with mortgages. And then the DeBartolo family, they made their money
1:29:37
in kind of real estate development. They merged with the Simon Property Group in, I want to say,
1:29:43
1996. And they do a lot of business. Like Brookfield is a huge operator of shopping malls
1:29:48
or commercial real estate in the United States. When a tenant, there is a track record for
1:29:55
the firm that, you know, or the kind of the Simon Property Group that is also a mall operator.
1:30:02
when the shared tenant base, right?
1:30:05
Like Express or, you know, shopping mall kind of tenants, right?
1:30:09
That below.
1:30:11
Yeah.
1:30:11
Over the hot topic.
1:30:14
Oh, God.
1:30:15
What's that Lexner company?
1:30:18
Victoria's Secret.
1:30:19
There you go.
1:30:21
Interesting, right?
1:30:23
I don't want to sound too much like Winnie Webb here,
1:30:26
but, you know, at some degree, you know,
1:30:27
you see the connections and it's like, okay.
1:30:29
but they're like when whenever these tenants that are you know occupying their properties as we've
1:30:37
seen this trend like all right amazon's going to kill shopping malls like okay yeah we know
1:30:41
when they need to come in and do emergency rescue financing first let's say an express or bonobos or
1:30:48
something like that like they partner with each other on these bailouts so there's business
1:30:53
relationships let's just say that there's there's a public record of transactions and financing
1:30:58
similar to what we just saw with the United Wholesale Mortgage, ultimately connected up to
1:31:03
Brookfield, who was the chairman of Brookfield before he kind of was promoted. Or I don't know
1:31:09
if it's a lateral hire to the prime minister of Canada and some interesting circumstances, right?
1:31:15
It's Mark Carney, right? Former Bank of England governor, former Bank of Canada governor. So
1:31:19
I don't know if you just zoom out, it's like, all right, that's the actual important thing going on.
1:31:24
You know, as I look at it, it's like, oh, there's a there's a prize at the middle of the table in the boardroom that these power factions and capital factions are fighting over.
1:31:36
Like one of those prizes, because it's it's all trade trade franchises and financial franchises.
1:31:42
But the specific trade franchise and financial franchise between the U.S. and Canada, that's one of the, you know, infinite topics of discussion up for renegotiation.
1:31:52
negotiation. And so you're starting to see this all play out. So the sports franchise is all of
1:31:57
these headlines. I mean, it's just interesting when Jed York shows up on the front page of the paper
1:32:02
for, you know, what took place in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. You're like, interesting. All right.
1:32:10
But yeah, I don't know. That's how I see it. As always, like, yeah, follow the core trend,
1:32:16
like over the long term, right?
1:32:18
You see this transition away from the offshore dollar That value is you know leaving the offshore dollar system we are trying to run the indiana jones kind of bait and switch to move the dollar off
1:32:34
of this old thing that we we're the ones uh executing the uh the teardown the dismantling
1:32:41
right it starts with sulfur and it works forwards from there so it's like when i say we new york and
1:32:44
and DC are running the, like they're controlling the action here to try to port it in with the
1:32:52
stable coin dollar. And in the meantime, like these power factions are just duking it out with
1:32:57
each other for who's going to get the bigger share of pie in this new world. And I guess from your
1:33:03
standpoint, as a, as a pleb, your job is to not get shaken out, stay on top of your skis.
1:33:09
don't get run over when uh things like cold card or bip 110 happens but then also on the other side
1:33:16
of that um don't like like keep your center of gravity on top of your footing when this green
1:33:26
candle shows up and uh like you don't want to be on the wrong side of uh uh like like like your
1:33:33
balance right off balance if if and when the next move is is just more volatility because i know the
1:33:39
way i see it yeah you like that big green candle like it's a great run um but you also just stay
1:33:46
humble stacks hats i guess to put the uh put the famous matt odell saying out there yeah
1:33:52
it's so wild i did not connect the sports franchise shenanigans with all this but it
1:33:58
makes total sense when you see three of them it's it's like what's going on here for mark walter
1:34:04
specifically i mean the one insurer that was like a related party i own the rights to the
1:34:08
la dodgers tv um contract and it's like what yeah like are they holding that as like a long duration
1:34:16
asset i haven't dove in that's where nick nemeth would probably be your better like okay he goes
1:34:22
into the exact um assets on the relationships i'm i don't invest in those bonds so i'm not focusing
1:34:29
my time uh analyzing so back in the 2010s you had things like the uh the root sports deal or like
1:34:36
all the TV rights for the regional MLB franchises, you know, packaged up and, you know, they were in
1:34:43
a high yield bond offering. I stayed away from that one. And they, you've seen those default
1:34:50
or go into distress. So you've got underlying secular problems, but yeah, I didn't go into the
1:34:56
deep interconnections between Dodgers tickets, LLC and all of that. But those were marked as
1:35:03
unrelated party transactions. And what we're seeing is the regulatory scrutiny going in there
1:35:13
and I guess cleaning house. And the way I view that is you're forcing these key nodes in the
1:35:23
system. And Mark Walter is not a senior node. He's not a Mark Carney node. He's an important
1:35:27
note however but when i see the uh the transaction who did he sell to joshua kushner bob eiger it's
1:35:33
like okay well that tells me someone maybe someone crossed the line on from one side of the negotiation
1:35:39
table to the other right yeah it happened so quick and it's like oh josh kushner exactly exactly
1:35:46
also like heavily involved in the uh the financing of um the ai build now like if you go to business
1:35:54
schools right now like in you know mba programs where do they want to land for a vc deal it's
1:36:00
like everybody's like thrive i want to go to thrive capital it's like yeah the the uh the hottest job
1:36:06
placement uh for for that field but anyway my point there is like all right you're trying to
1:36:10
trying to analyze individual q-sips from day to day that's what i do but uh like just to under
1:36:16
understand the big picture backdrop setting understand the long-term trend right so don't
1:36:21
buy the uh the root sports or the diamond sports offering and you know 2015 it's like yeah that
1:36:26
one's not gonna get you there uh those bonds aren't gonna make it to maturity you know stuff
1:36:31
like that so yeah everything i've described in the last hour and a half it's just kind of
1:36:36
my latest update on um kind of the big picture understand the uh the the conditions of the
1:36:42
heist high seas that you're trying to trying to navigate so i don't know any any last thoughts or
1:36:48
follow-up questions.
1:36:49
No, I want to give you your time back.
1:36:52
I guess the last thought based off what you said again D the heads being set There a new time between D and BE Day Could last
1:37:04
a couple years. Could happen quickly. Who knows? But I think
1:37:08
what you're alluding to is Bitcoin is, as all
1:37:12
this is going on, it's probably going to still
1:37:16
be relatively under the radar. Yes, the price may go up, but when it comes to
1:37:20
like full-on integration that might be further down the road, closer to BE day than D day.
1:37:26
Yeah. Well, I think we need the legislative framework to get there, to get us to the promised
1:37:30
land, which could take, I mean, if we're lucky, we make forward progress this midterm election,
1:37:36
we get a more favorable Congress, then we could see something like the ARMA passed into law.
1:37:43
If Congress is not there, then we got to wait till 2028. And that becomes an opportunity where
1:37:50
it's not just Congress that's up for election. It's the executive. So we could take a significant
1:37:56
step back. I know as much as everybody kind of rightfully wants to criticize this administration,
1:38:02
right, for a handful of things. And like number one among them would probably be communication.
1:38:09
Number two might be the apparent look of self-dealing or profiting off of these big
1:38:16
picture developments. But there is a scenario, like there is a path between in 2026 and 2028,
1:38:26
where the Bitcoin progress or integration onto the US constitutional order gives back some forward
1:38:36
progress. And right now, I don't know who to tell you to go vote for or anything like that. I would
1:38:41
just say as you're voting for a congressperson, hey, it'd be great to call the candidates,
1:38:45
listen to their campaign teams, get them on the record. Do you support something like the ARMA or
1:38:56
Bitcoin integration into the US treasury, all of that, that would be forward progress. But yeah,
1:39:02
I don't know who to tell you to, this side or this side. There's no hero here is what I'm saying.
1:39:07
I can eventually, if Scott Bessent does the wrong thing or something like that, it's like, yeah,
1:39:14
I have no qualms whatsoever killing my heroes if I need to.
1:39:18
But I just will say this.
1:39:19
I don't think Hunter Biden, you're saying this,
1:39:23
like there is very clearly a campaign on Twitter to positively-
1:39:27
Shame all the podcasters letting him do this rehabilitation tour.
1:39:31
Absolutely.
1:39:33
But yeah, I don't think Hunter Biden is your answer, fellow Bitcoiners.
1:39:38
I'll just say that.
1:39:39
Neither is Gavin Newsom.
1:39:41
Neither is Gavin Newsom.
1:39:42
I would double stamp that.
1:39:44
as well. All right. All right. That's good for now. This is good for now. We'll keep,
1:39:51
I'll keep annoying you as, as things progress and we get into week two, 110, week 120, week 200,
1:39:58
and this ongoing forever game. All right. Fascinating. Definitely is. Yeah, this is,
1:40:04
it's definitely a more complex picture than we all thought in 2020 and 2021. But the, but the,
1:40:11
cool thing is Bitcoin matters here. And that's very clear. It's not front and center yet,
1:40:17
but I think as we continue to take positive momentum, that'll become abundantly clear.
1:40:24
Yeah. Cool. Beware, freaks. Beware. Peace and love.
1:40:28
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1:41:18
And until next time.
1:41:20
Okay.