TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #427: Killer Whale Liquidity Crisis with John Titus

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Marty sits down with John Titus to discuss the liquidity crisis caused by the Fed. John's Substack: https://bestevidence.substack.com/ Best Evidence on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BestEvidence 5:30 - Killer whales and banks lacking liquidity 16:13 - The Fed is at the center 21:01 - Coordinated consolidation effort 26:28- The strength of cash 33:57 - John’s origin story 39:09 - Fix the money, fix the world 42:20 - Dollar endgame 45:06 - John on Bitcoin 49:38 - The system is run by those who hate you 52:54 - Life expectancy decline 55:35 - Tyranny thrives in the fear of resistance 58:39 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

this report was brought to you by good friends at river i want to do mining talking about mining river makes it very easy to mine in a professional way you go to river.com slash tftc set up an account you go to river.com slash mining after that and you can pick an asic they have many asics for sale uh some are already plugged in with hosting contract so you can buy an ASIC and lock in a hosting contract immediately you purchase it you're already up and hashing and sat or streaming to your river account whether you're an individual or a larger institution that wants to mine a lot river is here to help you they have a white glove professional service it'll walk you through the process that'll get you set up if you don't want

them walk you through the process you can just go through the website through the app and do it without having to talk to anybody. Which I shouldn't say. I'm not certain. Maybe you do have to talk to somebody. But the point is, it's a great way to mine. You're doing it the right way.

So go check it out. Go to river.com slash tftc. Set up an account today. ASICs are cheap. Still cheap. Still in the bear market. It's a good time. About 11 months out from the halving.

Get all those sats with 6.25 block subsidy rewards. while you can river.com slash tftc this trip was also brought to you by good friends down the hall unchained they're here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model they're building a bitcoin financial institution the right way by leveraging bitcoin's native multi-sig properties their vault product is a two or three multi-sig wallet it allows you to hold two keys and unchained to hold one you eliminate single points of failure in this model since you hold two keys you control the bitcoin in the vault at any given point in time but if you're ever in a pinch. Unchained is there to be the second in the two or three. Multi-sig quorum. Beyond that,

they have their trading desk. If you want to buy Bitcoin and send it straight to your vault after you have it set up, Unchained is the best place to do it. You can do it all in one place. It's the best place to buy Bitcoin in bulk. You buy, it goes straight to cold storage. On top of that, they have their lending desk, their IRA, their inheritance protocol, again, all revolving around native multi-sig properties that Bitcoin has that reduces single points of failure. It is the future. Go to unchained.com. Tell them the TFTC sent you. Talk to their concierge team. They'll walk you through everything I just described. This rip is also brought to you by good friends at CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is here to help you bring sovereignty back to your health

care and how you pay for it. Incumbent health insurance is notoriously opaque, expensive, impersonal. CrowdHealth is the complete opposite. It's cheaper. It's transparent. And it's very personal. You get a personal health advocate. Once you get onboarded to CrowdHealth, CrowdHealth is not health insurance. It's crowdfunded healthcare. So the way it works is you become a member. And then when you have to go to the doctor, you let CrowdHealth know, Hey, I'm going to go to the doctor. They'll either help you find one or connect to your doctor that you're going to. Once you go to the doctor, you get the bill, you bring it back to CrowdHealth. They negotiate the bill lower with the doctor. And then you pay the first $500 of that bill and the rest gets

crowdfunded by the crowd health community. Me and my family are on this. We've used this. It works flawlessly. And again, it's cheaper because you have metrics that you have to meet to get into the crowd health community. It's a relatively healthier community of individuals. And so overall healthcare costs for the crowd health community are lower. So you're paying less than you would with insurance. So if you're on Cobra, any of that stuff, consider CrowdHealth. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC, sign up today. You can get a deal on your membership fees for the first six months. This report was also brought to you by our good friends at Bitcoin Talent Co. It's a recruiting firm built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. If you're a company in the space

looking to hire the best talent in the world, go get set up with Bitcoin Talent Co. They'll understand your needs uh what you are looking for what your company does against a recruiting firm by bitcoiners so they understand the difference between multi-sig mining lightning they actually understand bitcoin so you're not just spraying praying with a random recruiter to hope that they can actually understand what you need bitcoin talent co will understand already does understand likewise if you are talent stranded in big tech big banking big finance you're a bitcoiner looking to get into the space set up a profile on bit with bitcoin talent go go to bitcointalent.co to do all this tell them the tftc sent you and enjoy this rip

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be.

what is up freaks welcome back to tftc it's marty bent here sitting down with john titus from best evidence john welcome to the show thanks for having me marty first time here well very excited it came from a very strong recommendation which was whitney webb and i have caught some of your best evidence videos in the past but a couple weeks ago i went back and watched the last four. And I think the content you're putting out is very important, particularly now in the context of this banking crisis and the Fed's reaction to that and everything that's going on. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions, maybe not misconceptions, but maybe people are over-indexing on what you would define as the solvency problem that the

banks have and really disregarding the liquidity problem that the banks have. So I think to start off this conversation it's really diving to that concept of solvency versus liquidity and what people are missing yeah uh you want to talk about that yes please uh yeah it's so you could you could call it solvency versus liquidity to me that what people are overlooking is let's just start with you're ignoring a huge elephant in the room let's just call it a whale and the elephant that people are ignoring is during the Senate hearings on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, it comes out that that bank had 10 deposit accounts with $13 billion sitting in them that left the bank and essentially gutted the bank. Then another, you know, a total of $42 billion leaves in six

hours. And that's what killed that bank. And now there's sort of some revisionism going on to my mind where people are like well the bank was really dumb the officers are just really stupid they lent out a bunch of money at a low interest rate and now that interest rates are higher um those loans aren't worth as much and that's where it's like well that's no no no that's that's not the problem the problem is money leaving the bank all at once let's just get back to that that is a liquidity problem your liquid is being drained out of your body at a rate that your body can't sustain and the body dies so silicon valley bank is dead first republic signature bank all have massive liquidity problems with those massive deposits left the bank so all these people

trying to cast this as a as a solvency issue a solvency issue meaning your assets aren't worth as much as your liabilities but now that's that's that could be true for a long time i mean banks can exist in a state of insolvency for years, because that's really just a spreadsheet problem. And I talk about that in the video, the killer whales video, where you could have, you know, who cares if your spreadsheet is showing assets worth less than liabilities, as long as nobody really comes to the bank and says, Hey, I need my money out now. It's not a problem. But when they do, and people come into the bank and say, you know what, I've got, I've got a billion dollars on account uh with you and i want to i want to cash out or i want to transfer that money

now it's a liquidity problem and the liquidity problem is what killed these banks yeah solvency was a problem and in fact i did a video on it called why is the fed provoking a financial crisis in which i said there's a banking crisis going on right now and i said that that video came out february 15th that's three weeks and two days before silicon Valley Bank failed. I anticipated that crisis. I could see it coming a mile away. Not on the basis of a solvency problem, although I certainly identified that. To me, the tip-off was it's not just a solvency problem. It's a liquidity problem, too. And the tip-off for me was that the banks, as of February 15, 2023, were borrowing heavily and rapidly and suddenly from the Federal Home

loan board banks. They were panic borrowing, I call it. And that is always, if you look at graphs, historical graphs, you'll see that every time there's a banking crisis, there's always a spike in borrowing and panic borrowing from the federal home loan board banks. And that's what tipped me off. Even though I said, yeah, it is a solvency problem too, that's not really the defining feature of this crisis. And so that should answer your question about why it's a liquidity problem people wanting their money out not so much a solvency problem yeah and i think the most jarring stat that you pointed out in your killer whale video was the fact that pre-covid the average bank account by um the largest uh account holders at some of these banks was around 496 thousand

dollars and after all the money printing that went on post-covid had jumped up to to around five million dollars which is pretty pretty stunning yeah uh there's a lot of stats in there's a lot of stats in that video i mean my presentation style is i go into the details of stuff and i do present drawing details because i think they have a better tendency to get remembered but the stat that was the one you're talking about is the federal reserve in another another agency they track they track checkable deposits by household by a wealth band and if you look at the top wealth band the top one they track is the top 0.1 percent so the top one household in 1000 and what they what they showed there is and you see this in

the video the average household in the top 0.1 percent right in the fourth quarter of 2020 so right before COVID started, they had $565,000 of checkable deposits. And then in the first quarter of 2022, that amount had multiplied by eight and was up at $5 million per household sitting in checkable deposits. And I don't have to tell you that most of that money is uninsured. The FDIC insurance limit is $250,000. So sort of a backdrop question on the whole video is why are these accounts being maintained for years with it basically wholly at risk yeah what do you think was driving the growth in those accounts was it purely money printing was the people taking money off the table from stocks and rolling it back into cash

if they take money off okay so those are two different things and those those are good questions but if someone if someone sells let's say that someone's got a thousand shares of ibm stock and they sell it that that that doesn't change um the amount of money it'll change the amount of money in household accounts so that'll drive it up but it won't drive up the checkable deposits system-wide okay uh the really the what what drove up deposit system-wide was the federal reserve printed up four and a half trillion dollars of reserves and they bought assets okay they bought in which is what they did during the global financial crisis. The Fed did the same thing during the global financial crisis. But there's a very

big difference between the global financial crisis and the pandemic that you need to know about if you are going to understand why deposits went up during the pandemic, but not during the global financial crisis. The global financial crisis, when the Fed printed up, let's say it was a trillion and a half or $2 trillion of reserves. Fed bought assets with those reserves, but they bought them from banks. And when the Fed buys assets from banks, it's a two-party transaction because the banks have accounts at the Fed. So if, let's say, the Bank of America sells a $1 billion mortgage-backed security to the Fed, the way that works is the Fed prints up $1 trillion in reserves. It credits Bank of America's account at the Fed. So now

bank of america has an extra billion dollars on deposit at the fed and at the same time that mortgage-backed security now appears as an asset on the fed's balance sheet the liability is the bank of the new bank of america deposit for a billion dollars but that's a two-party transaction when by contrast and during the pandemic the fed takes that trillion dollars in reserves or billion dollars in reserves or whatever it is it buys an asset from a non-bank non-banks don't have accounts at the fed so it has to be a three-party transaction the third party being the non-banks bank which does have an account at the fed so the fed uses banks with accounts at the fed as intermediaries whenever it's buying assets from the non-banks

and when that happens let's say the fed printed up a trillion dollars of reserves and bought assets when it buys from non-banks yeah there's a new trillion dollars of reserves but there's also and necessarily and inherently a new one trillion dollars of bank deposits and that's the difference with the pandemic and that's why those checkable deposit graphs look like they do they all look the same they all look like this they're kind of jumping wrong and then the pandemic hits and the thing the graphs basically go vertical and people's accounts get multiplied by anywhere from 2.56 times. If you're in the lower 50 percentile of households and checkable deposits, their accounts got multiplied by 2.56 before and after the pandemic, up to

the top 0.1%, and their accounts got multiplied by 7.77. And each stratus up, the multiplier was higher. There was no, it was completely sequential. And that was really sort of the telltale sign that something that the hugest accounts the hugest household deposit accounts of the fed are really massive really massive now and that's what came out during that testimony of silicon valley bank it's like you have come again you have 10 depositors with 13 billion dollars who keeps that much money in their bank account and why would you do i i could see maybe doing that for a day you know maybe a week at the outside this is going on for three years and that's what that video really gets into is this is what is going on here and the thing is

nobody's talking about this well i am but nobody else is not that i know of yeah everybody seems to be focused on the solvency side the the duration mismatch and uh the selling off of those assets and the falling. That's a patsy. That's as big of a patsy as, oh, well, what caused the crisis? Well, people have apps and they're transferring billions of dollars out of their account on apps. That's a patsy too. They're not addressing the elephant in the room is that why do people have billion dollar accounts? Why are they being yanked all at once? And where did those accounts come from? And the answer every single time you start asking questions about where things came from why things happen it's the fed if you ask why do people pull the money out the answer

is well their interest rates are higher now who raised the interest rates the fed who created the billion dollar accounts to begin with the fed you know the all all signs point to the fed in this crisis and no one's talking about that during the testimony even you see these bank officers get up there and the question the line of questioning is largely well aren't you a dumb dumb mr president you had a duration mismatch and yada yada yada and the bank presidents are just sitting there like oh well yes i guess i am and not one of them said hey you know when you bought a billion dollars of assets from one of my customers you didn't ask me about it you simply use my bank as an instrumentality of your own policy so you know you've got a big hand in this and not one fed

not one bank president not one bank executive pointed to the fed said well that's the problem that gets into the question why is that are they simply ignorant that the fed has created this problem and usually when people do that is they they've made an agreement they've agreed to not throw their boss under the bus i mean let's be honest those guys get let's let's just be let's get right down to brass tacks the bank the banks that failed okay silicon valley bank silicon valley bank signature bank and first republic bank those are the richest banks in the country If you look at the percentage of depositors, the percentage of depositors at those banks that is north of $250,000, those banks rank one, two, and three among banks with $100 billion of assets. One, two, and three.

They are the richest banks in the country. Their executives are paid richly. And to get paid, I'm sorry, in this crony economy, to get paid the kind of money you're getting paid, when you see people dragging down $10, $20, $30, $40 million, they've agreed to do bad things. And one of the things I'm sure that the bank presidents agree to do was keep their mouth shut about what went on with those asset purchases, because not one of them mentioned, oh, by the way, the billion dollars that flew out of my bank, that was created by a Fed asset purchase from one customer. Nobody ever said that.

And yet we know that's what happened. The Fed wrote a paper. I've been writing, I've been making videos for years saying when the Fed buys assets from non-banks, the Fed is creating bank deposits, okay, period, full stop. Anybody who doesn't agree with that simply does not know what they're talking about. And the Fed finally, after three or four videos, they came out and wrote a paper saying, yeah, when we buy assets from non-banks, which like we did during the pandemic, deposits get created. We are creating deposits.

Fed asset purchases from non-banks create deposits. And nobody's mentioned that. And it's like, well, the deposit base during the pandemic went in the U.S. went from 13 and a half trillion to about 18 trillion dollars in the space of a very short amount of time and it's just like trending along linearly and then boom it goes to 18 trillion that's all from the federal reserve and no one mentions it it's just ridiculous and now we have a crisis on their hands and people are blaming this nonsense like apps and liquidity mismatches yeah those things are contributing factors but you're missing the fact you're missing the 357

magnum to the head of the banks that went off and the smoke is coming out of the bank's head you're ignoring that and you're concentrating on well what kind of suit was the guy wearing you know what what street was he on when he got shot in the head it's like well does anybody want to talk about the bullet in the head of the banks that seems like a logical place to start but no yeah they try to keep it all esoteric and mysterious it's ridiculous well it is very confusing and they successfully got everybody talking about duration mismatches and the ability to incite bank runs in the age of social media and mobile apps they're trying to regional bank crisis like this is going on in mayberry north carolina oh yeah the bank that

went down it says that's where andy and opie back sheriff andy banks there and a bank went down it just failed it's like no no these are these are some of the biggest banks in the country and they're being their depositors are being hoovered up by institutions like jp morgan chase you know it's not it's not hard to connect the dots when you sit down and you look at the data instead of relying on yarns like liquidity mismatches and apps yeah well that gets to the media the question what is the intent is it simply incompetence or is there a assert an asserted effort to consolidate all these banks up into the jp morgans of the world i i think it's i think it's i think it's a concerted effort i don't think it's accidental

law i mean the the fact that the three banks had the highest concentration of wealthy depositors is no accident. The fact that the three banks that failed, there are 4,700 banks in the U.S. The three that failed are in the top 32. The odds of three random banks being in the top 47, okay, not the top 32, but in the top 47 are one in a hundred times, one in a hundred times, one in a hundred. It's less than one in a million. All right. That's not a random event. This is a deliberate event. It's like a game of Pac-Man. And the next rung down, the too big to fail banks aren't the ones that are failing because they're protected you know by the prince of darkness on high it's the it's the layer below i mean seriously they've been protected for

a long time right i mean bank of america jp mortgage a city open wells fargo those are the four big commercial banks going into the global financial crisis and then along come uh goldman sachs and morgan stanley they get their commercial banking licenses overnight overnight from the fed And it's like, well, if you paid back TARP and you pay back your bailout, how come JPMorgan, I mean, I'm sorry, how come Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs still have their commercial banking licenses? If the bailouts are over, give your licenses back and just go back to becoming an investment bank. So now you've got six too-big-to-fail banks institutionally recognized as too-big-to-fail, and they're swooping in, they're absorbing the failures from this next rung down. And is this asserted effort, the Fed trying to put the genie back in the bottle and have somewhat of a soft landing via consolidation, or do you think it's just go for total control? I think those are two different things.

I think you could, in other words, let me put it in a sense. I think it's possible to achieve total control with a soft landing. You do it slowly. What you can't have, okay, so you've got 34 banks in the U.S. with $100 billion of assets and more. Six of them we already know about, I've already talked about. So that leaves roughly 28. A few of those are foreign, HSBC, UBS, and the like. You can throw those out, too, because they're too big to fail, too, even though their numbers within the U.S. jurisdiction don't put them in the biggest of the big.

But they're above the law. They're not going to be touched. So they're safe, too. So I think that what you do and what we're seeing is as you move to a CBDC, to me, it looks like that next layer of banks is being sort of rolled up into the too big to fails, which are getting bigger. And that's why you're seeing this false pitch of this crisis is a regional banking crisis. I mean, Silicon Valley Bank, in terms of assets, it had north of $200 billion in assets. The bank was bigger on a GDP basis than Greece. These are huge banks.

It's not a regional bank, okay? This is a whale bank. It's a massive, powerful bank with a lot of money in it. I mean, do you think your corner bank has 10 depositors who have $13 billion between them in their accounts? No, it doesn't. And these are big, powerful banks. And they're the ones I think that are getting absorbed

as the Fed wants to move to central bank digital currency. and it realizes it's got this it's got it we we live in a two-tier system our monetary system where you have the fed as a top issuer it technically it's three tiers but practically it's two tiers at the top you have the fed issuing money and then the next year down is the commercial banks issuing credit issuing deposits they create those out of thin air the third tiers, the treasury issuing coins, but that's de minimis. But those are the two tiers. And what the Fed has to do to get to CBDC is it's got to radically change that middle tier of commercial banks, that second tier down. And one way to do that is just to consolidate

the banking industry into four or six or whatever it is, big players, and then iron something out there. But right now with 4,700 banks on their roster, it's unmanageable. That doesn't give them the control that they want. Well, that's been the big knock on CBDCs or the idea that they will become a thing. The biggest pushback is that the commercial banks will never let it happen because they get cut out of the equation. If you can just go directly from a Fed account to individual consumers the jp morgan's boas wealth fargo's of the world won't accept that and won't allow that because they get cut out and they're not able to make their fees but i think there's another theory that winnie and i have actually talked about is just you just consolidate up to

the big four and they act as a ui and they're able to say it's not technically a cbdc when you make a deal with the guys like jamie diamond yeah and it's so how do we protect against this or i mean this is a bitcoin podcast that's why i focus on bitcoin and like to talk with individuals like yourselves because number one i think this information needs to get out there number two we need to talk about solutions you should get on the get on the phone your representatives you got to call your representatives number one number two stick with your local bank you know just through through thick and thin because those banks are actually the healthiest If you look at the numbers, it's really the best banks are the ones that are smaller, so long as they're well-run.

You can find some dogs among small banks, too. Don't get me wrong, but the best-run banks tend to be medium and small-sized banks. Stick with your local bank. The third thing to do, I'd recommend, is just transact in cash. Don't let them take cash away. Once you go all electronic, you've got a problem on your hands. Do you remember there was a speech, it was actually a symposium in October of 2020, where Jerome Powell was there, the chair of the Fed, and Augustin Carson, who's the GM of the Bank for International Settlements, was there. And Carson gets this insane look in his eye and says, well, the problem with a $100 bill and the problem with a thousand peso note is we don't know who has that money and we don't know what they're spending it on.

And then he launches into why CBDC is great. And he's like, well, CBDC is great because we have total control over how people spend that money, which tells you right there that they don't have control. And they don't. And he says flat out, we don't know who has the cash and we don't know what they're spending it on. And that ought to be a huge green flag for what you ought to be transacting in. And that's that's just at a minimum to do those things. yeah now the cbdc world is untenable if you want to live in a world with freedom and liberty and they seem dead set like they're it's weird it feels like they're slow rolling the cbdc to the one day they'll be like oh he's a really good idea and the next they'll be like oh maybe

we can't do it but yeah the pitch the pitches on cbdc let me talk about two different things about cbdc i noticed one is that the story the storylines they come out with like the reason they need cbdcs are just ludicrous, okay? One of their pitches is, well, we want to help the unbanked. So what do you mean? It's like, well, people, you know, they don't have bank accounts.

It's like, really? You're worried about people who don't have enough money, they're living under bridges, they're living in a forest, they don't have an account, and that's really your concern? It's the unbanked?

You know, that's just nonsense. The other thing out there is that they're talking about, and pretty open about it, is there's a lot of articles and speeches and symposia, you could see where these so-called legal scholars and legal experts get up and monetary experts.

And they say, you know, the great thing about CBDC is if the Fed prints too much money, we can rein inflation in simply by debiting people's accounts at the Fed. Isn't that great? And that was one of the Biden's, Biden nominated a professor of law from Cornell, Sala Omarova, to be head of the Office of the Comptroller

the currency and she had written this whole this whole law review article talk about you know cbdc and how great it was and one of the things she says in the article is yeah you could debit get too much inflation don't worry about it just take money out of people's accounts there's another guy um it was at a symposium in imf he's a big imf guy i think he might be a gm or a deputy gm he's He's up there in the third or even second tier of the IMF. His name is Bo Lee. Bo, just B-O-L-I, Lee. And this is a Harvard-educated attorney who says, yeah, well, the CBDC,

you know, we can control people's food with CBDC. And now we control what you eat. He's all excited about it. It's like these people are psychopaths. And they're open about it. They're open about it. They're quite, they're forthright and freely discuss their plans for just controlling everybody else. And they're happy about it.

It's unbelievable what goes on in broad daylight. No, it's pretty disgusting. And in the one video that you mentioned, Bo Lee, you mentioned that he had legal tender, the definition of legal tender. You try to say CBDCs will be acceptable because they will technically be legal tender. And you had a very good retort to that. That's actually not true. and no well he doesn't know number one because there is no cbdc legislation in the u.s yet but what he said was that it all in all countries money issued by the central bank is legal tender

um and electronic money issued by the bank is legal tender it's like no money you know in the u.s the only legal tender is cash and coins and the federal reserve did issue the federal reserve issues cash but it's certainly it's printed by the treasury the federal reserve doesn't issue coins at all coins are legal tender too they're issued and printed minted by the treasury so he's just way off on that but what he's what he's getting at though and what gets me is if they're going to make cbdc legal tender let me back up what is legal tender legal tender legal tender is money, okay? All legal tender is money, but not all money is legal tender, okay? Legal tender is money that if you offer it to someone in payment of a debt you owe to that someone, that debt is

discharged regardless of the fact of whether that someone accepts the money. So let's say you owe somebody $1,000 and the debt is documented. You owe the, whatever it is, you owe the electricity, the electric company, $1,000, and you offer to pay that company $1,000 in cash, and they turn you down, and then they come after you for payment, your defense in that lawsuit is that debt is discharged, and that power company is going to lose that lawsuit, because you tendered legal tender, and they turned it down. That's the power of legal tender. So in other words, when you're creditor, if someone's offered you legal tender, you'd better accept it, or you'd run the risk of not collecting at all. And that's where I think Bo Lee and the gang at the IMF have fantasies of

taking CBDC is, if we make it legal tender, then we can crush out small and medium businesses by having a bunch of customers go in, offering them CBDC, having them turn it down, and then having whatever assets on their books you know where they've credited they've got it on their books as an asset that joe charlie and sam owe 300 between them and they the joe charlie sam offers cbdc and the business refuses that business is going to be out 300 bucks you know i'm a cynical guy and i'm looking at how the i am these people are up to no good okay i know the aroma of them well um these psychopaths who are running things and i think that you can just whatever the worst fantasy you can imagine about what they're going to do you're probably pretty close to the

truth and i think that's where they are going to carry legal tender they're going to they're going to weaponize it um as a concept what sent you down this path originally to do all this deep research and service this information that many aren't seeing the bailouts of 2008 2009 when i realized that the rule of law in the country was out the window and i realized that most lawyers that you know i'm a practicing attorney you know i talked to them about it they didn't really care you know they didn't really think about that stuff and i'm like well you know this doesn't you don't understand i mean if the rule of law is gone meaning you don't you no longer have Let me back up on the rule of law. The best formulation of the rule of law was probably by John Adams in the Massachusetts Constitution, where he says, we want to be a nation of laws, not of men.

And what he means by that, he's expressly referring or implicitly referring to King George III and said, you know, we've had enough of this nonsense where one person decides the outcome of our lives. what we want is a system that's stable and predictable we want a system where the law is a supreme ruler not some criminal like king george iii and that's what he says our ideal is we want to be a nation of laws not of men now flash forward to the bailouts of 2008 and say well you know their bailouts because everybody knew the rules in advance right and you get an outcome that the powers that be don't like so what do they do they just ignore the rules and bail their buddies out that's a system where the rules get bent and they're getting they're getting bent by the people who benefit from the rule chains and they're getting bent by the people

who lost under that system the big banks are the ones that got that made the bad bets they got lost and they were getting bailed out and that's really what sent me down this path as far as doing the research and stuff i had always you know i cut my teeth uh litigating patents at a boutique law firm that was really successful. It was successful by pursuing the method that I try to pursue on my channel, which is you just follow the details, stay true to the information, stay accurate, use documents, use admissions, use video of the person you're going after against them and prove your case through documents and through admissions and through video that's how that's how you prove up your case and you prove it block by block so i'm just

taking old methods that i picked up um through patent litigation in my particular firm a boutique firm which of course got absorbed into a global firm and i basically left that firm um after the bailouts to do my own thing but i did that that's a method i picked up and i'm just amusing in my channel um as i talk about things like the rule of law and um and what's going on in the monetary system because it's really it's really in the monetary system where you find the root of the of the violation of the rule of law you have to be like when i got it when i first got into this for the first few years i was like well why aren't the banks being prosecuted and there was a there was a documentary done by pbs frontline called the untouchables

in which Lanny Brewer, the deputy attorney general at the time, admitted that the banks weren't, they weren't even investigated. It wasn't that they weren't prosecuted, which everybody knew. The Justice Department was not even investigating these banks. And to me, that was like, well, if you're not investigating the banks, that means you're above the law. But once I, and that's a bad thing, don't get me wrong. But that's, ultimately, I kind of came out to thinking,

that's really more an effect of an effect than a cause when i went in i was thinking that's the cause of the problem and i was like nah not really they didn't get that power overnight they didn't get the power of being immune from criminal prosecution overnight they acquired it somehow they had some pre-existing power that i need to discover like what what is the magic fairy dust they have what's the source of it and ultimately i came and found out well it's the power to create money out of thin air. So if you really look at it, society, in American society,

really throughout the West, it divides into two classes of people. One tiny little class of people is the people who are allowed to create money out of thin air and lend it out to everybody else. And then the second class is everybody else. And that to me is the central affront

to the rule of law because you have in advance, you've tilted the playing field, you've skewed the playing field in favor of the people who are allowed to create money out of thin air and lend it out to everybody else in interest that's our monetary system and that's kind of where i am now but that took a while to evolve to that um and you can sort of trace it through my videos pretty i haven't i just don't do that many videos i think i've done a total of 34 in nine years so i'm at a more casual production pace than most most video channels but that's

that's basically the evolution of my channel and of my own thinking on monetary policy and monetary um reality and the rule of law yeah i mean i completely agree with you that's what we have outside the studio here is fix the money fix the world we think the core of all the issues today whether it be the monetary issues social and health care stuff it all leaks into everything that has completely corrupted our society and as you mentioned in a lot of your videos you bring up the real aoc there were people who could see this this rot begin before the federal reserve even existed once you understand yes how the mechanics of the system work it's pretty obvious that the rules aren't tilted it's really disheartening uh disencouraging i don't know how to put it but like

today's day and world people just simply don't know how the federal reserve works most people thinks it's a federal agency. They still think the dollar's backed by gold. Um, and that's, that's the massive problem. How do you get people to realize like, uh, all the problems that you're seeing throughout society, they stem because we've, we fucked up the money. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a, it's a big problem. And there's a lot of like sub problems. I know a lot of people who they kind of know something's wrong with the federal reserve. They sort of sense that something is fundamentally off with having the fed, but they benefit from the system. So as long as they themselves are benefiting, and as long as they themselves remain in the top 1% or the top 0.1%,

they're like, well, everything's hunky-dory. And some of them are even like, how dare you criticize the Fed? Warren Buffett says the Fed is great. Who are you to say otherwise? And say, well, if you read monetary history, you understand that it's not great. It's fundamentally, it's a problem because when you create money, they're not even really creating money.

They're creating credit out of thin air. which they lend out in interest. And the problem with that is that interest payment, it goes back into the class of people that's creating the money. It goes into, let's just call it, some people call it the rentier class. I just call it the parasite class. You're hoovering off, you're skimming off the top of the money supply, interest payments that are getting fed back into the parasites.

And they're coming out of the pockets of the people who produce and who create and who are original thinkers and everything else. And you're feeding the class of people who are just like, you know what, I just want to kick back and go get a check out of a mailbox that's your interest payment. And that can go on for a while, but eventually that system is going to implode on itself. That's really where our system is now. China and Russia have the same. They also have a debt-based monetary system over there, but they're early on. They're early on in the product curve.

We're up here on the top of the S. They're down here at the bottom of the S. So their problems are way down the road, but they're ultimately going to have the same problem too. But we're in an advanced state of decay right now. And what you're seeing now, a lot of the tumult you're seeing is people trying to come to grips with the fact that now we're going to have trouble making the interest payment on our debt. It's gotten so big because we just hoovered off too much interest over the years, really over the centuries. It's gotten to that. yeah so you would agree we're probably in the end game of the dollar reserve system the fiat system

we've erected over here it's tricky it's it's it's not it's tricky and the reason it's tricky is that the people you know what a poison pill is it's kind of like a point yeah you can't you do something where if if your opponent it strikes you back they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna go down with you you know it's sort of like the scorpion and the frog um and the poison pill is 60 of the global monetary system 60 of what we call money in the world is denominated in u.s dollars and all those dollars are created as debt so yeah the dollar's in trouble but there's a lot of dollars out there and a lot of people have a lot of those dollars now i think what you're what you're seeing so

they're not going to shoot themselves in the head and flush the dollar down the toilet right they're just not going to do that but what you're seeing i think worldwide is a you're seeing a lot of resources remember the dollar once you go off the gold standard in 1971 you know what do you do well we went to the petrodollar you required the petrol the oil producers to transact in U.S. dollars. And they agreed to that. So it was a way to sort of maintain control and maintain the dominance of the dollar through resources. And you're sort of seeing among the BRICS right now the same kind of jockeying of like, well, we're going to trade resources in our own currency. I think it's just a matter of time before they try to parlay their own

new dominance with resources into a monetary dominance but it's not i don't i don't see it being i don't see the dollar house of cards it's not going to end up like a game in jenga i think a lot of people are waiting for that that jenga peg or whatever to come out and the whole structure to fall down i don't i don't i don't see that happening um i i see it's a much more it's a slower process it's got to be because there's so much so much money in the world that's in it's in it's expressed itself electronically and it can vanish just as quickly as it was created which is instantaneously yeah part of me upset it is a slow burn um just for the the sake of the world not getting into a state of chaos mad max scenario

So what are your thoughts on Bitcoin? Again, we've both, I think, come to the conclusion that money is the core. I, as an individual, have decided I think Bitcoin can sort of get us back to a sane world when you mentioned John Adams. I don't understand it. I mean, I understand the impulse for it. I understand wanting to get away from the system where certain chosen few get to mint the money or create the credit out of thin air and lend it to the rest of us at interest. I get that.

But I'm fundamentally a suspicious person. I smelled a rat. Let me put it this way. I didn't really wake up to what was going on in the world until 2008 with the bailouts. And then I was like, whoa. I mean, I started to wake up and see what was going on. But I was, let's just say, I was pretty well dead asleep in front of the TV up until 2007, 2008, okay? And yet, even then, I remember in 2005 or so, whenever Facebook became the rage, I smelled a rat a mile away.

I'm like, something's off here. And I just, I never signed up for Facebook. And it's the same thing, anytime something new comes along and Bitcoin falls in that category, i was like something's something's off with that like the white paper written by satoshi nakamoto like who is that guy what's his first name what's his real name where does he live where did that guy go to college where does that where does that dude buy his groceries i don't know he's a fictitious character that makes i'm suspicious guy so i'm you know i've held off on i've never owned i don't want to say i've never owned a a um a cryptocurrency a digital kind of currency

because I do have a little bit of Monero that I got from someone in a wallet that is physical, I think. I think I have to put it in a USB port on my computer, but I don't do that because I'm suspicious. So I'm a Luddite. I've just avoided all this stuff. It's like, well, what's wrong with cash? What the hell?

Why don't we go back to that? So the short answer on Bitcoin is I don't know. Yeah. Fair. fair breakdown of why you're a bit suspicious I mean Satoshi the argument for him being

pseudo anonymous is that he understood the gravity of what he was unleashing to the world and did not want to be identifiable have the feds take him down number one and number two just so there was no leader there was no King George that could be identified and looked to for answers

so there could be no King George in the Bitcoin sort of project, the open source coding project. And then when you mentioned John Adams, I want a nation of rules, not rulers. I think that's really what Bitcoin embodies at its heart, but I'm not here to hard sell you. Yeah, yeah.

I understand the ledger system. I mean, that I get, that it's a transparent system and there's rules and no one's got control over it. I kind of get the impulse for it. um but the satoshi to me is a red flag the anonymity of him is a red flag i don't care whether it comes with the story or not the story is as red as the as the initial flag was to me but that's just one person's opinion yeah i mean if there's a lot of people i know made a lot of money on it you know i know a guy got in you know but under a buck so he's he's a happy guy

yeah you know i'm happy he's good that's a completely fair assessment um i'm not uh personally obviously as you can tell got a whole podcast here about bitcoin haven't been turned off by the pseudo anonymous nature of satoshi but yeah i think that's i think that's why i'm drawn to it too because i think i do view the banking financial political crisis because it's multifaceted it stems from the money but that's created a political and cultural crisis to me it's like the only tangible actionable thing to to work against that other than calling your representative or going to your local bank but i really don't have much faith in the incumbent political or banking apparatuses yeah and that that's a that's a big problem too as is you know

at the federal level i say in that video in the fed killer whale video that congress is 100.0 percent corrupt i don't think there's a there's a straight member in there anymore um and which is the that's that's bad news because the constitutional you know monetary authority that comes it's in the it's in the constitution it's an article one power to coin money and regulate the value of thereof it's in article one congress so that you know you know money in the us it's a creature of law it's in your foundational document there's no getting around that unless you want to jettison the constitution and that to me you know i don't want to do that you know i got a lot of respect for the people who wrote it i got a lot more respect from them

than i do you know people today by and large so i that i think to me that's a radical notion but i understand the impulse of what do you do and i've said this for a while um what do you do in your system like ours is that there's some people can make can commit crimes with total impunity meaning the too big to fail banks can i lay that out i've made that case again and again and again and ultimately it comes down to your problem once you reach that stage of you've got a system that's where people are above the law it's like well you no longer have you no longer have a constitution you no longer have a republic you no longer have the rule of law because if someone can declare themselves above the law and they are above the law that that's that that does

fundamental violence to the notion of any kind of legal authority of any kind of constitutional governance and what it means ultimately is to correct that your only remedy is a revolution because otherwise anything short of a revolution means in essence what you're trying what you're proposing is that the criminals who took over the system now take a vote and decide whether or not they get to stay in power yeah how do you think that's going to shake out they're not going to take that vote it's ridiculous to think that if you just vote harder you can make the changes you know right so i understand you know bitcoin to me is that that's the first it's a stab in the right direction because it's like well you you do need a revolution of some kind i just have my

let me put it this way if someone could write a paragraph or a paper explaining why bitcoin is the revolution that i'm looking for i'm all eyes i'm all ears but i've never seen it i've never seen anybody make out that case hmm have people been hard selling you for years on it or no no people just like oh well you know you just don't understand bitcoin i was like yeah i don't you know sell me on it in a paragraph you know on why i i bite into that is is the way out of the mess we're in but you got to understand the mess we're in we're in a serious mess we're in a bad we're in a bad way we're our system is run by criminals you get that run by criminals they'll kill you yeah and they're lying and that's the other thing they're very good at

gaslighting and propaganda and they'll put out all this economic data and jobs numbers and cpi to make it look like things aren't as bad as they really are but if you know the actual inflation rate and the one chart that jarred me last week i tweeted this out was uh the expected the life expectancy in the u.s it's collapsing right now it's dropped from like 76 to 73 and a half or other nations whoa whoa whoa i didn't really i knew it was going down i didn't realize it was that big yeah it was pretty big and that that's yeah with the fentanyl crisis that's that's we're in the late stages you know once your monetary system goes yeah to me that's that's what's going on and they've got to cope with that because what's what's killing the financial system what's killing

the monetary system is healthcare. You can't have, I used to have a boss, I worked at a pizza place about eight years. The guy who owned it was, it was like, he's a Greek guy told, he's spoken like fables. But he would say, you can't have, you can't have a million elk living in a field. It's like, that's the US. We've got a million, we've got, you know, too many old people drawing too much money for the health system. You can't, that's just not going to last that long. And, And, you know, unfortunately, what I see coming is not, you know, they've got to bring that down. The powers that be are going to do whatever they can to maintain control over this U.S. debt-based monetary system. They're going to do whatever they can to maintain that control.

And if that means you've got to off a bunch of old people, sick old people, then, yeah, they'll do it. No doubt about that in my mind. I'm under no illusion whatsoever about that. so to hear that the life expectancy in the u.s is collapsing not surprising at all to me i mean the amount is surprising simply because i three year decline that's a that's a massive drop in basically a short amount of time and it means there's a lot of dead people that i just didn't know about that's the surprising part yeah that's a lot of dead bodies man it's like it's actually i was off by about a year it's like 79 to 76 uh is the drop 70 79.1 to 76.1

i'm going off a a rough chart with no hard data i'll show you it's right here yeah that's that's a lot that's a that's a big drop man 79 to 73 years yeah over what period of time is that drop that's from like 2020 to today or 2019 to today oh that is that is bad news bears i'm gonna have to check that out that's that's that's breathtaking yeah um how do you stay optimistic in times like this can you stay optimistic are you an eternal pessimist um you know you gotta you gotta win the spiritual war um and you gotta you you can't give in to fear you know uh tom pain said you know the only way that tyranny remains affected the strength and power of tyranny is it lies solely in the fear of resistance and that's that's a very powerful statement

you can't be afraid you gotta swing yeah you gotta go down you gotta watch you gotta you gotta adopt the mindset of i'd rather i'd rather go down swinging and die that way than die on my knees not going out that way agreed and that's uh i've actually read about a thomas pain quote uh in my newsletter a few weeks ago essentially like uh let the hard times come in my time not my children's time it is yep yeah that's what i think we just gotta rip the band-aid off and take it right now you guys yeah it's like the cypress hill song i remember the rap the hip-hop group from the early 90s you know i i ain't going out like that nah yeah nah i'm not going out like that i'll i'll i'll take one for the team i'll go down swinging but i'm not going down to my knees no

yeah for my children's sake they will not i'd like to leave them a better world um so that's why i mean at the end of the day you maintain a good attitude by saying you know what it's like the movie friday night lights you know where the coach billy bob thornton says you know you you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror and look yourself in the eye of the mirror and say there's not a single solitary thing i could have done to make the different outcome and then once you do that your clarity of mind you'll get is amazing because everything else becomes secondary you don't have to worry about it you know just worry just worry about yourself and about what you can do and don't don't worry about the whole wide world yeah yeah actionable steps you can take

take control of your money make sure your family's fed you got water all that stuff essentials that too you know not true you know people like people always like they ask you where do i put my money where i have money and i say man you need to you should be worried about your access to your money what happens if the power goes out where are you going to get your money do you know the answer to that and most people frankly don't you know just worry about that stuff and stop worrying about oh my god what's going to happen in 20 years the fear game is something that the media and even a lot of big all media specializes in is selling fear porn they're really good at it and it's debilitating it'll freeze you like a deer in the headlights

and that's not where you want to be you want to have a clear mind agreed agreed and luckily we have people like you putting out incredible content to help draw the picture and give people some clarity in this world particularly with the banking stuff so um i appreciate your time today and all the work that you're doing hopefully this is the first of many this was a it's a great back and forth yeah yeah i enjoyed it um thanks for having me on it's great to read you know it's always nice to be able to reach an audience that i don't really reach that much i've only done one uh prior interview with with any anything crypto related that was a guy named a youtube channel named darren moore jr anyway he's a good guy yeah haven't met darren yet but also very knowledgeable

guy too like you yeah i bet there will be um i bet there will be a bunch of bitcoiners trying to send you paragraphs that explain bitcoin and why it's a revolution i'd look forward to that that'd be great you know my email address by the way if you just go to my youtube channel whatever i'll just tell you what it is it's titus t-i-t-u-s best evidence at gmail.com that's the email address of channel so if you've got if you've got the paragraph that can tell me on bitcoin send it i'd love to see it well you've got your homework assignment freaks let's get on it john thank you again really appreciate your time thanks a lot for having me hopefully i'll see you again all right keep crushing peace and love freaks