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

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Matt Dines returns to break down a week of escalating monetary chaos. Scott Bessent doubles the Treasury buyback limit to $4 billion, Stanley Druckenmiller fires a public warning shot in the Wall Street Journal, and the US-Canada trade relationship collapses into 50% tariffs. Matt maps the mechanics behind treasury auctions, yield curve defense, and the offshore dollar's unwind, then connects "Operation Economic Outcast" and Iran's oil smuggling scandal to a broader financial war. Plus tokenized securities, the stalled Clarity Act, the ARMA bill, and what Bitcoin's five-sigma candle actually signaled. Matt on X: https://x.com/LeveredUSTs Build: https://getbuilding.com/ Find the Home Mining Playbook here: https://www.tftc.io/home-mining-energy-playbook STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Block: Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Square: Visit http://square.com/go/tftc for up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/ Disclosure: Bitcoin services are provided by Block, Inc. Bitcoin services are not licensable activity in all U.S. states and territories, and not all services are available in all states. Bitkey is not available in New York. Block, Inc. operates in New York as Block of Delaware and is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Bitcoin is a non-deposit, non-bank product that is not FDIC insured and involves risk, including monetary loss. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures: https://help.cash.app/btcdisclosures Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/tftc! #squarepartner. Offer expires December 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST. Offer for $40 off the cost of one Square Stand, $75 off the cost of one Square Terminal, $100 off the cost of one Square Handheld, or $200 off the cost of one Square Register, excluding applicable taxes. Limited to one discount per product type per seller account. Each code is limited to one redemption per account holder. Valid for new Square customers located in the US only. Offer not valid with guest checkout. Square reserves the right to modify, revoke or cancel the offer at any time. Offer cannot be combined with any other coupon. Void where prohibited, not redeemable for cash, and non-transferable. #squarepartner #blockpartner

You've had a dynamic where money has 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 bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Matthew Dines.

it's a never-ending game, sir. Yeah, that's correct. There's always a tomorrow. There's always a tomorrow, but there's also a yesterday and last week, and it seems like over the last week, things have been heating up. I had to text you over the weekend and get you on because I need the Matt Dynes lens on what's happening right now. Well, that's good.

I try to put it all together in terms of not just Bitcoin, but the waters in which it swims. So that includes geopolitics, the dollar, treasuries, all of the above. So yeah, happy to be back. Well, mine print hash, you and Cameron have been doing an incredible job with that. I'm sure you've picked up on it, but John Arnold is your biggest fan. Thank you. John's awesome.

We have a little back thread chat going discussing these things. So, yeah, it's fun. But yeah, we're just trying to figure out the world as everybody else. have our framework, don't get too religious in terms of just base level, what would you call them? Like, hard beliefs, like be willing to update your priors as the facts come in. And, yeah, I think ultimately just try to, number one, understand the players involved, what are their incentives, all of that. But then don't get too wedded to your core convictions. And there's only really a couple of them in the Mindprint Hash framework. Number one, everybody

is chasing their own book of business, their profit incentives, all of that. Number two, we're moving towards like a monetary transition. So it might look a little bit on like, or different than what everybody expected in the 2010s or, you know, the 2021 peak QE printing cycle. The dominant narrative in the Bitcoin community was they're just going to print for, print forever. You know, 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 time to time. And so where do you think we should start?

I mean, obviously we're starting in-R-Raz media here because things are being developing. We've had multiple conversations describing the setup and the potential incentives behind the scene, 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. obviously the increase of the buyback limit from $2 trillion to $2 billion to $4 billion. We had dissent come out yesterday morning or rumors sources said that he's willing to save the bond market at all cost up to a trillion dollars in the TGA where the rumors is that he can plug into that. And then this morning, Wall Street Journal AI generated op-ed from Stanley Drucken Miller. Is that K-Fob, him calling out dissent with these moves?

What is happening right now? All right. So just understanding track record right in history here, Bessent and Stan Drucker Miller go way back, as does Kevin Warsh in this circle. So these are people who know each other. Very deeply, right? We'll just start with the Stan Drucken Miller, WSJ op-ed this morning.

It was actually yesterday as we're recording this. Maybe not the best place to start, but we'll just choose that as our beachhead. And that narrative of beachhead will bring it up later because I think we're going to touch on it, the Operation Economic Outcast. All right, but to start that, the, the WSJ article,

this is one of those things where when it enters the, like what used to be called fin twit i don't know what it is on x now fin x it doesn't sound as still fin to it still fin to it cool so when we see the the discussion of uh the drunken miller op ed it's it's immediately pushed into like uh what's the word like it's um it's uh like peris hilton type of journalism yeah yeah it's like this guy's attacking this guy it's real housewives of washington dc in New York. If you read what Sand Drucker Miller's op-ed, 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 like a long-term solution to the debt and fiscal problem, which in his assessment,

and I would actually agree with this, it's the entitlements problem. Like these, these public schemes are not economic as currently structured. Doesn't mean that with reform, they can't be extended in their longevity. But the way these systems work right now, that they are fundamentally unsustainable. And I think that's something as we go into every election cycle, no politician can win on that campaign. It's going to be something that's built up over time. And maybe I'll get into a little bit of that. I don't know if the TFTC audience cares about entitlement reform.

I do. deep ties. And I would push back. I would say Trump getting elected last year, like a lot of what he was running on was austerity, right? Oh, 100%, but it's different austerity. It's getting rid of fraud, waste, abuse. It's people, people love Social Security. Like, the other thing, too, when we talk about CPI, right, in Bitcoin, CPI is understated, where the rubber meets the road on CPI, like the biggest impact that actually has is in the, like, economically is the cost of living adjustment. So if you think about it, like it's your monthly paycheck that your grandparents get from the Social Security Administration or similar with, you know, Medicare costs, what they'll reimburse doctors for, et cetera. So that's really the rubber meets the road on the CPI. And what Stan Drucker Miller got at in his letter is, hey, you can't just rely on these gimmicks coming in with a liquidity support feature like buybacks. I'll get into the weeds on that in a second. But you're saying like you can't mask the symptoms of the disease. Like ultimately, like if you keep giving yourself painkillers to treat, let's say cancer or something, it's like the cancer is going to rear its head.

So what you're actually doing is you're masking the ability of society to get the signal it needs with higher interest rates to tell you something actually needs to be done here and address. Now I'll get on my soap box a little bit. And this may be correct or incorrect. But you see things like the labor force participation rate, like in decline, right? I think it's down to like 60 to 65 percent. That was the big kind of one of the big narrative takeaways from the latest jobs report. Uh, the decline in the labor force participation rate. Um, you've seen an exit of adult males from the workforce, all that stuff.

Um, part of what's going on in my opinion, the design of our, entitlements programs. I don't even know if that's a good word for it, just Social Security, Medicare, etc. Over the long run, like we're almost 100 years into the Social Security pension scheme, call it 50 years into Medicare, Medicaid, the LBJ programs. It's very generous, right? To vest your full benefits on Social Security or Medicare, you need 40 quarters or 10 years of payroll, contributions, right? And so you see like pretty much everybody can game their participation in the workforce for 40 quarters, right? You just stack those up. It's not that difficult to, you know, build up to that full benefit. And what you end up with over time is, you know, there's a lot of

the population who are just producers. They're going to work for a 45, 50 year career regardless, right? You know, like the dad in Zudlander, he's like, I'm going to die in the coal mines. Like, I don't care. Like, this is, this is me. I'm not going to short change it, but you're, or short change 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. Like some of it might be taking non-full-time work or just, you know, I'll take a laxcus job really with the intent just to accrue those quarters I need to get, you know, when I'm 65, a full, you know, monthly pension or, you know, you know, you know, a full ride on government subsidized health care. Over a hundred years, right?

The, the entropy coming through the design of the scheme just builds up. And that's what you get today where so much of that, you know, like long run non-economic, like design builds up into debt, right? And so what Stan Drucker Miller is actually getting to is like, no, no, no, no, no. But we need to get to the point where we can treat the disease. We're going to, like, if markets want to price the 30 year at five and a half or five, five and three quarters or six, it's just like, let it happen. Let, let the public see that signal because otherwise, you know, the, the voters are not going to acknowledge the, the crux of the problem. And what he was telling Scott Besant there in the public forum, this, he could just as easily pick up the phone and call him. Like they're 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've seen each other. Right. They're long term colleagues, probably friends as well. I don't think there's any animosity there. But what Stan Drucker Miller said publicly basically instead of privately is you told Scott Bessent, like if you keep, if you think you're going to support long term treasury yields. through this buyback mechanism or other, you know, short-term band-aids, you're just going to have to keep loading that, keep loading that. And eventually the market will, I may just override that defenses.

And we're going to have to come to an acknowledgement or, you know, some solution to this problem, you know, in the long term. So why not, you know, rip the band-aid off right now was kind of the Stan Druck and Miller approach. Now, then I have an approach what Scott Besson is actually doing with these buybacks we can get into that but uh we can just put a pen in that topic it does inject more real housewives of orange county you know meets washington dc and new york you know in this season by putting one more um you know voice of controversy or something like that around this this thing going on but uh yeah that's kind of how i how i viewed what uh drunken miller's uh op ed kind of was was getting at yeah i mean i mean

let's get to percent why why did you feel the need to increase the buybacks again two to four billion in nominal terms really not that much but i mean i think the market took it as a signal like okay here's the first domino to fall maybe we're going getting towards implicit it seems like many people took that as implicit yield curve control um at least the beginnings of it uh and then you quickly have the weekend happen yields revert back to where they were or close to where they were before Treasury Secretary dissent made the announcement of the increased buybacks

and then he came out with that message yesterday morning or the sources are saying I don't know if it's been confirmed whether or not he actually said this but whether or not he said it the market's taking it as if he said it and so put ourselves in Scott Besson's mind now why is he doing what he's doing

yeah so now you have to take Drucker Miller like yeah he's right put him on the shelf Now you get into the geopolitical swim lane and what's going on. This is where you bring in Canada, the episode last week, the developments, let's say on a deterioration front in the U.S.-Canada trade relationship, which is also de facto financial interconnection as well. But this is where you get into Bessent and what he's actually doing here with this buyback step-up.

The program has been running since 2024, right? It's two years old buying the off the run lower coupon, coupon treasury bonds, right? So 10, 20, 30 year would be the primary focus of, you know, what's going on front and center that Scott Besson's talking about raising from two bill to $4 billion. But the buyback program, it's every coupon bond for the off the run liquidity support. What does this mean? Just to start with the distribution pipelines for these treasury auctions, right?

You go through the primary dealers and then each one of those has a customer book of business where they take, you know, auction demand. Who's going to buy at this auction? And then every quarter, let's say for a treasury bond, like the 10 year, you'll you'll just hold the monthly auction and then you'll distribute it into those pipelines and find a balance sheet for the bonds, right? We'll get into the auction, the quarterly schedules. You do for a 10-year, you actually hold three separate auctions for one Q-SIP or one bond issuance. You do the initial auction, and then you do two reopenings where you just keep adding onto the existing debt. And then you start another one the next quarter. Reason concentrates capacity into like one treasury bond issue.

Okay. Yeah, you brought up this tweet. And what you end up getting is all of that debt packaged into one QSIP, and then all of that liquidity can take like the same fungible form. Right. So the buys and sales in the future are going to be tapping into a deeper pool than you would if you just had a new treasury issued every month. All right. So over time, you know, we're doing a new QSIP for the 10 year every quarter, right? over time, those old Q-Syps, they just become, it's like a, you know, a 2001, you know, Ford F-150, right? You got a new model every year. The old models, they trade on the secondary lots with Carvanna, CarMax, et cetera.

What this is saying, like, we've got all these old treasury bonds. It's like your secondary market is getting gummed up is technically what's happening. as we've moved from these old 2008 and on era of low coupon bonds, you know, when we were in a Bernanke, Yellen, Powell, chaired Fed version of policy, we've moved on to, we're out of the 2010s, right? And that's, that's pretty clear. But those old, you know, Ford F-150s that are now gumming up the lot, right? Customers have gone to their dealer and said, hey, I want to trade in my old F-150. Um, those are all sitting on the lots. So now the manufacturer, this would be like Ford, the equivalent here would be US Treasury. They say, we're going to come in and provide that liquidity support. We're not going to buy them off you, um, uh, you know, on a market price, but we'll be a back

bid. Um, when I say back bid, I mean, you set your yield at a level, um, that, that you want to defend. And it's, it's, it's on your, um, dealers. right same thing as a four dealer you got a primary dealer bank they say all right we're we want to dump we want to sell these bonds back to you treasury at this price so when we say there's going to be an increase from two bill the four bill think of that as um it's a back bid right and and scott besten is saying hey we're going to buy up to this much quantity uh if you need to sell the this old inventory

to make way for the new inventory um we'll we'll do that now Interestingly, the sign is the signal is in when this starts, right? So I talked about those auction reopenings. He specifically mentioned September 9th as the start date. What day is that? That's the next reopening auction for the US tenure. So what's going on here, we know there's going to be upward pressure on the long end of yield curves, right?

This has been kind of out there and publicly admitted by central banks, really starting with, 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 Eurodenominate is what their focus were. But they were talking about all, you know, G7 or, you know, the post-World War II coalition sovereign debt markets. They're telling you the writing's on the wall, like long-term yields up. Um, but what Scott Besson is saying is like, okay, well, now as we go into these monthly

re auctions, what, what he's announcing here with this two bill, the four bill upsize for the back bid is basically like a protective guardrail on the downside saying that, all right, as we try to do this rotation process, like the new bonds have to absorb capacity from balance sheets of both primary dealers, but also their investment funds and, and other clients, but it's mostly investment funds. So Treasury is saying, we'll be a liquidity backstop here. We'll set the floor as this kind of rotation, you know, model swap out from the, you know, 20 from the customers 2020 for at F150. That's, you know, let's just be out there, junkers. Not not literally Ford, but the 2020 30 year treasury bond issued at 1.25. Customers don't want that

thing. Right. So get me out of this. Get me in the new 2027 F150. That that's really what. but Bessent is operating here with this buyback program. Now all the discussion on X about this is overly focus is like, is this QE? Is this not QE? What I'm trying to understand and map to is like what's actually reality here? What's going on from a mechanical perspective and then why? And then you you bridge that into all the volatility we saw last week. Where does it take place?

It really hit in that intermediate window where the 47th administration, after kind of multiple rounds. This started on Liberation Day. Like if you go back, this administration has been running an offensive operation since April 2nd, right, with the tariff announcement in the Rose Garden. And we've just been building up steam from there is how I view it in my framework. But the Canada relationship, the USMCA, all of that, like, that's been touch and go and actually deteriorating, like deteriorating for this entire. entire like process and it's really escalated, it's, it's escalated in 2026. All right.

So you start with the tariffs like February, the week before Epic Fury commenced, the Supreme Court on February 20th issued that ruling six to three, that, that overruled the administration's constitutionality or ability to collect tariffs under the IEPA, right? which was like it was a much more, it was a much more of a straightforward tool within the administration's tariff policy toolkit on specific acts of Congress that have given them the constitutional like vested power to, uh, or what you call declare or and collect these tariffs. Um, Supreme court overruled on Feb 20. Hey, you can't do these. I, IEPA. I'm not going to stand. So we say, okay. All right. We do Epic Fury. All of that. you know, goes, goes on. In June, President Trump signaled that he wanted to strike a new trade deal or renegotiate terms with the USMCA, which, you know, implemented in the law in 2018 and the first Trump administration,

it had all these kind of scheduled checkpoints in the deal. And the way it worked right now, or the way it worked is we had a basically, an option, if you will, like in sports, if you follow this, you got player options on contracts or team options who can, you know, buy the players year, et cetera. Similar thing here, we had a window and it was in July where the U.S. would either need to announce an intent to abide by the existing agreement or withdrawal, which puts it, it makes it a year-to-year deal. So instead of being like a long-term deal, now we're saying with candidates like, well, we're going to go year. a year here. All right. And then you get in after that, 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 one of the handful of people who are involved in the negotiations like in the boardroom, reading that from the outside, if this administration is saying, all right, that deal we negotiated with you in 2018, we had the option to, to it's not eject from the deal, but like not. you know, re up for another, you know, long term, what it is 10 years. We want to go year to year renegotiate.

That to me reads as a signal where you like your bargaining position that you've moved into between 2018 and 2026, right? Or so a lot of facts on the ground have changed since 2018, right? But, you know, the, the, the signal we have or the information we're dealing with here, you see that the White House now opts to renegotiate tells me all else equally be like, all right, they feel something different about their poker hand. They like their positioning in this to ask for, ask for more out of the economic pie. All right.

So that opens up the process now where the administration starts to use another package of tools, right? standing acts of Congress that give it the legal power to apply tariffs on product imports into its country. And that's where you get into the Section 338, which I don't want to dive too deep on details here. But it's the power derives from the 1930s Tariff Act, which is a Hoover administration level tool, which is like that was the last whatever turning, right, where we're in. between World War I, World War II.

So that kind of tells you where we are, that the executive is now using these tools that were last used and these type of areas. So July, I forget the exact date, but mid-July, the White House announces an intent to apply tariffs selectively on alcohol, dairy, and motor vehicles, imports from Canada. And that kicked off a 30-day kind of grace period

before those collections went into effect, which would have been 12.01 a.m. Wednesday, Eastern time last week, right? And so what happened, notice, Wednesday was the day where the Besant headline came out. Hey, we're going to come in with this back bid. We're going to, we're going to think about it as defenses, right? You're going to defend your yield curve from a sell-off from an attack going into the next Treasury auction. Wednesday was the day where Bessent goes out and says, hey, we're going to, we're going to add, you know, instead of two lines of defense on, you know, that front, we're going to put in four, right, as effectively how I'd view it. And the other thing there, too, the White House gave a three-day extension that would, that, that extended that process to 12.01 a.m., it was technically Saturday morning Eastern for a new, for like a, for like a, a, renegotiated deal to come through with Canada. That lapsed, right? And now we are where we are

with the U.S. Canada process. And it's, it's gotten to a very weird place, right? Which is, you know, but maybe we're Carney intended to take it all along. And we can get into that, that thread, pull that one apart. But that whole three-day window here, that's my point, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, where we saw all of that market action happen. Think about what was going on in the background. The big story was the U.S.-Canada trade relationship, but it's 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. We don't need to go deep into it here, like go listen in our other podcast conversations

where we've talked about that. But that whole process of the dollar moving from this offshore standard and center of gravity lives outside of the nation, this is part of that process of the gravity of the dollar and the marginal dollar in the system coming into New York and Washington, D.C. as the center of its universe. And this whole situation in Canada, it's it's just another chapter. It's another flavor of the story of that process taking out. And that's where in my opinion, you saw the market. panic, right? And the Bitcoin candle is where we get into that. Like I would, when I see that candle on the chart, like, yes, it's a break of the first wave we saw of, yeah, the bare trend. If you're

just looking at the technicals, you've got a very kind of well-defined downward channel there. That's just liquidity taking from Bitcoin, but also your treasury companies, all of that. And then you see the the jump out of that channel on uh wednesday and thursday aggressively like it's a what was it like a i think it was like a five signal move five six yeah uh but in terms of like percent move yeah it was like what 15 percent percent it was massive that's panic buying um so then you think about right where is that coming from um it it uh kind of the story we went with right on fin twit right was, oh, this is the QE, this is the money printing. Everybody's just, you know, we're gearing up for another cycle.

Yeah, I'd argue I'll go through the signpost. It looks like we're in, in terms of the global liquidity cycle, something similar to 2019, as we're working towards that, that, that bottoming event. So the initial reaction from a lot of the plebs, the retail accounts is like, yeah, smash by. But in my opinion, like the, the account, counts that actually matter in size, your large family offices, your kind of your, your big balance sheets that are tied to these geopolitical events and connected that I'm talking about, like,

like central banks, head funds, et cetera. The central banks aren't going to buy Bitcoin. 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, that first week of August, we saw, you know, you know, gold take off. And then Bitcoin followed in that window where the train came off the rails with the U.S. Canada relationship. The way I view that Bitcoin candle, yeah, to me, that reads like panic.

So freaks, this rip was brought to you by good friends at Square. Bitcoin a block is creating a whole ecosystem of companies cash app, BitKee, and Square to make Bitcoin everyday money. The way Square does that is by enabling eligible businesses to accept Bitcoin over lightning. This is a superior way. to do payments compared to incumbent payment processors. And if you're a square merchant that enables Bitcoin payments, if you're an eligible square merchant that does that, you're going to have 0% processing fees through 2026. Another benefit, there's no charge back. There's no chargebacks.

Think about what that means. The card networks have been skimming every local business for decades plus chargeback risk on top. Lightning settles in seconds. Final for free. This is a Bitcoiners asking merchants for a favor and saying, hey, Bitcoin is a superior payment rail. If you adopt it, I have Bitcoin. You accept it. I will pay. You will save on those fees. It's a beautiful thing on top of that. These merchants can take some of their Fiat revenue, convert it to Bitcoin automatically in the back end. Square is trying to make Bitcoin everyday money

for small, medium, and large-sized businesses. So visit square.com slash go-slash-TFC for up to $200 off eligible square hardware. Terms apply. This episode is sponsored by Bitcoin at Block. So freaks, this rip was brought to you by good friends at Square. Bitcoin a Block is creating a whole ecosystem of companies, cash app, BitKee, and Square to make Bitcoin everyday money.

The way Square does that is by enabling eligible businesses to accept Bitcoin over Lightning. This is a superior way to do payments compared to incumbent payment processors. And if you're a square merchant that enables Bitcoin payments, if you're an eligible square merchant that does that, you're going to have 0% processing fees through 2026. Another benefit, there's no chargeback. There's no chargebacks. Think about what that means. The card networks have been skimming every local business for decades plus chargeback risk on top. Lightning settles in seconds. Final for free. This is a Bitcoiners asking merchants for a favor and saying, hey, Bitcoin is a superior payment rail. If you adopt it, I have

Bitcoin, you accept it, I will pay, you will save on those fees. It's a beautiful thing on top of that. These merchants can take some of their fiat revenue, convert it to Bitcoin automatically in the back end. Square is trying to make Bitcoin everyday money for small, medium, and large-sized businesses. So visit square.com slash go slash TFTC for up to $200 off eligible square hardware. Terms apply. This episode is sponsored by Bitcoin app block.

And then you get into what's going on in this old dollar system and the is being made there. And that's where we get into what we found. what we saw yesterday at this best impressed with uh operation economic outcast right you know maybe there's someone in uh washington dc who's a big fan of uh was a big boy in and under 3 000 stanchonia bombs over bag that great like that's dating me to like 2000 era right um Chappelle show sketch uh the president of stanconia um but when i see that uh operation economic outcast and notice he used the term this is the economic D-Day. I think we overused that without thinking about what it was. D-Day was a beachhead invasion of, you know, Nazi Germany or the Third Reich,

you know, making the end roads into continental Europe. We take the beachhead, but it wasn't the end, right? The amount of time between D-Day and V-E-Day, right, when you, you know, you corner Hitler in the bunker and you get the, uh, the famous scene from, uh, what's the, the tweet meme, everybody down, the downfall movie saying that everybody memes over, um, which provides some, you know, Gallo's humor, uh, you know, from time. Yeah. Um, the, uh, so D-Day itself was that primary invasion, right, Eisenhower, all that you take, you take the beach head, but the key is it's a, it was a, a repreh, it was a, a represented a phase of World War II where we've moved beyond just doing, you know, hand-to-hand combat against, you know, on the defense perimeter. It represented really the first attempt on the European front of World War II of taking that beach ed, literally, at Normandy, and then working interior and disrupting the supply chains, the logistics, which the flip side of that, the flip side of that, the flip side of that, the

flip the flip side of trade and goods and services is your financial system, right? Because money is the other side of every transaction. You're disrupting the monetary flows. So and then ultimately, you know, patent, et cetera, grind down, you know, their opposition in Europe. There's a front there. There's an interesting thread there, Montgomery versus patent in Europe. And who could get to Berlin fastest save that one for another day. We don't have the time.

But think about that. When Besson says this is economic deed day, when I view that is what he's telling us is this is the, what this is the actual invasion of a beachhead. Iran is your Normandy here. And then from there, you're going up the interior. Now, what does that represent? Another headline we got Sunday night. We had a senior official in Pazashkian, the Iranian, I believe his title is, like, it's president is his actual office. It's, you know, whatever, president, prime minister.

We know their governance structure, right? The ultimate power and authority rolls up to this Ayatollah, right? This religious cleric. Pazeschian holds the presidential office. It's not like the U.S. constitutions, the executive, like vested power in the president, where, you know, this is an open argument, right? How much power actually accrues to the unitary executive, right? right, we're going to find out. These are open-ended questions.

And from time to time, you know, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, et cetera. It's like, well, it extends as far as it needs to, right, for the constitutional order to maintain itself. My point here, we get a senior administration official from the Iranian president openly admitting that there is a, I call it a criminal operation that may or may not be. Actually, yeah, I was trying to like make sure we're like being careful with our words here. But what the admission was was that there is a, call it a distribution ring that's absorbed politicians, right? They're beneficiaries of the scheme where Iranian like domestic oil that that is sold, that low subsidized prices for the Iranian people, businesses, etc. as beneficiaries, that oil was being exported into other countries, mainly China. And basically what you're doing here is you're taking that low subsidized price,

you know, ringleaders of this operation, which I think criminal would probably be an accurate term, but not proven out in there, you know, all the right courts of law. So alleged, let's just call it that. And basically trafficked into China, And what you're doing. So Iran's oil industry has been nationalized. I think it's the national Iranian oil company or something like that. It's, but they've nationalized producer, their producer, which is, you know, if you read the prize by Daniel Juergen, you'll get into this history.

Like it starts with, you know, UK, Anglo Persian, developing their, their oil and energy production industry. U.K. Parliament even becomes a shareholder at some point. It goes to, like, it's a long history here. Like, speaking of the real housewives analogy, like, these people have been dating for a long time. There's a lot of baggage there. And it's not even, like, themselves. Like, their grandparents were dating.

They were often on. Like, there's, I don't know. There's just a lot of baggage and history behind this whole relationship. But anyway, you've got, you've got an un- unsanctioned, unlicensed or like selling of this low price subsidized oil. Let's say it's like a buck a gallon. They sell that into China at below market rates, right? What would it be?

I don't know. If WTI is 80, who knows, maybe they sell it for 50. But it's it's all, all of that profit is just captured by the scheme, which what you're actually stealing from is the national, nationalized, like the public oil company. Right. So that comes out Sunday night. That's huge in my read of the situation. And then you get an administration official.

Like, I hope this guy's security is top notch because there's going to be a lot of people who don't like him shedding light on the kind of internal. Not just Iranians. Yeah, exactly. Because, okay, this is where we get into Economic D-Day and the press conference yesterday or Operation Economic Outcast. Right. We'll see which term sticks here as, as, you know, the market bakes us in. The kind of the Easter egg in that press conference was Besson was quoted as saying there will be a major financial institution sanctioned. I think he said by the end of the week. So the shoe is going to drop here. 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. So, like, you got to read this from the outside and then the sources you do have to understand what's going on.

But starting from the fact that there is, like, an illegal sales operation, like, it's a, you call it a scandal, right? Of the subsidized Iranian oil meant for the domestic market, the next thing you would do with that is sanction the bank involved. And this is where you'll see on X, everybody's like, oh, it's going to be Canadian or, you know, something like that. It's like, your eye is like all over this hot button thing. It's like kids soccer, right? Like running to right where the soccer ball is. It's like, guys, you're missing the opposite wing.

It's wide open if we could just make the crossing pass. The banks who were facilitating those transactions are like in my mind. That's the most likely for these sanctions. That's where, all right, we don't need to go too deep into this, but you've got a bank called the Bank of Kulun, I believe it's called in China, operating in the Xinjiang province. 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? I know this is going to show up in the plot at some point later. Xinjiang is the region where the Uyghurs live.

If you think about China as, you know, we view them as a monolith, right, from like externally. But kind of like the U.S., we have different regions. They're culturally different, economically different, all of that. Xinjiang is like the interior portion of the modern Chinese states borders. And it what's up, I believe, it intersects with Iran. So it's just, it's cross-border oil trade. And so you're looking at this bank, this Bank of Kulun, it's an important bank to the people involved in this trade.

So if you know this operation or, you know, it's part of your book of business and you're making money off of this, you know, uh, oil scandal, right? You'll know that bank. Like it's important to you, but to us like, uh, you know, Western followers, you say, who is this? Uh, it's not even close to in your neck of the woods. Um, so that's what I'm watching for here, uh, as this Iran story.

plays out. And as time goes on, it's starting to more and more look to me. Like, um, so if you think about Iran moving towards, like we saw with Venezuela, like it's very clearly, like we're cutting, uh, relationships between, uh, supply and demand, uh, for, you know, commodities, but chief among them energy. Um, Venezuela, Iran and half one were like the key steps in that big picture plan. And when, and when, and when, When we hear other analysts, right, you hear them talk about, oh, the Iran thing, this administration just sought themselves in the foot. I think this goes way beyond the administration.

These are part of like the war gaming exercises, which have been in the works and, you know, gone through update cycles, war gameed out, you know, starting as soon as the books closed on World War II, like we're probably planning, what do we do as the, you know, once we get back, go from peacetime to wartime again. So my point is all of this stuff has been, you know, war-gamed out kind of extensively. You don't know like all the different branches and the kind of the lattice tree, your own decision tree, what you can influence there. We're in chaos mode right, right now.

Like it's definitely wartime. The signal on that is when we change the name on the front of the building from the Department of Defense to Department of War. But yeah, if you think about what's the next phase now, it's like, all right, first step, We changed, we reconfigured all the Western Hemisphere relationship, relationships with oil production, primarily in Venezuela. We've gotten on good terms with Argentina. There's massive kind of movements in elections in South America as far as which kind of end of the economic spectrum that they're tilted, that they want to tilt to. And then which sphere of influence, they'll, they'll lean into.

to for probably the rest of the 21st century. But then now when you start to hear economic D-Day, you're like, oh, now this is the the beachhead operation. It doesn't mean we're going to send, you know, how many soldiers were on D-Day, 10,000, like a lot, right? Doesn't mean we're going to send the, the ducks, all of those, you know, amphibious vehicles to land troops. It's like, no, this is going to be financial.

This is going to come through the financial channels. And so you're going after, yeah, the enemy's logistics. economy, but ultimately, what's actually being absorbed here is like financial sphere, is how I would describe what's happening. So then now we get back into the treasury auctions, right? The thing with Canada, right, that a trade deal that fell apart, now we're tariffing each other, view that in light of the same way that you saw a panic, like there's a rush to gold when Putin finally invades Ukraine, like we shot up at 2000. It failed that test back in

2022, retraced a little bit and then had to make its run at 2000. Once it broke through, it just ran, right? 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. The timing goes a little bit differently, right? Because Gold is kind of the chosen blessed collateral in the existing central bank architecture. Bitcoin is for the upstart, the new internet, what you call it, decentralized account, whatever you want to call it. Like it's the new thing where the public sector, or sorry, the private sector, households, businesses are the primary leads of adoption.

But that sign we just saw, you could say really it's been all of August, but in that heated event last week between the US and Canada, um, was a strong signal there. Now, is this the end of the bear market? I don't know. Well, we'll have to wait and see. From my point of view, like in the big picture, the underlying situation, right? This open heart surgery that's being conducted on the entire global economy, the financial system, the trade routes, those relationships that have really locked in and been established starting with World War II, So that process is not yet finished. Like I said, that 11 months between D-Day and V-E-Day, there's probably a lot of time left in

between. So we're just going to have to wait and see the way I view it is like we're kind of in that that brackish water territory between freshwater and salt water. You're like, what are you here? It's like, I don't know. It's its own special thing. But that's where we find ourselves right now. So yeah, everything's been interesting.

You said like this is like my Super Bowl right at the beginning. It's like it's just really, you know, week 100 of infinite game season is kind of how I describe it. Freaks look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an Angels halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of.

I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a crowd health member. My family and I have been crowd health members for five years now, literally this month. Five years ago we joined crowd health. We've had two babies. We've had multiple health events and we're never going back to health insurance. Crowd Health is crowdfunded health care. So you sign up for crowd health.

You pay a monthly fee. You help out with other people's bills. And it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA. It's a family of three when I left my last job before I went full time to TFTC. Went on the crowd health. Now as a family of five, we pay, I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper.

They're going to negotiate prices lower for you. They've consistently negotiated health care prices as much as 50, 60, 80% in many cases. They help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and the crowd covers the rest. If you have a regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays the rest. Go to join crowdhealth.com. Sign up today. Use the code TFTC.

Opt out of health insurance. I'm on insured baby, and I love it. Use the code TFTC at join crowdhealth.com. You'll get $99 a month for the first three months that you're on in crowd health. platform in the community. Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign health care. So freaks, when you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader

in collaborative multi-sig custody in Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about one out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an Unchained Vault. Their model is simple. You hold two keys, they hold one key. It always takes two keys to move Bitcoin, meaning their single key can't access your Bitcoin on its own. Just resilient, shared custody that gives you institutional grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault. Access Bitcoin back commercial loans, open to Bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys and set up personal, business, trust, or retirement vaults. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long-term hodlers. Or offer the highest-level private

client service with Unchained signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features and much, much more. If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up control, go to Unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multi-sig vault. That's TFTC10 at Unchained.com. Two questions related to everything you just said or two parts of what you just said. Canada. And we're in your mind, where do you think the administration is trying to repressure them to get to

what position, what concessions they want to make. And then second, this Iranian official ringing the alarm bell on Sunday, is that like a black swan that really fucks things up for China and others that are on the other side of the U.S. trying to negotiate and rejigger things on the back end. Yeah. So the Canada question, Canada itself is an interesting union. Like, it's different.

And I don't spend my time. I'm not from inside the Canadian system, so I don't have like the level 100 out of 100 type of expertise on their own structure. But it's not the same as the U.S. where the states come together. They form the federal union, power derives from the states, all of that. You know, what I do know and what I have kind of studied about Canada, this modern country of Canada derives from, I think it's actually an act of UK parliament. It's the British North America Act. And it's like right after the American Civil War. But it is a different beast.

Let's just say that from a governance structure. It's not as cohesively and like compactly held together as the kind of the US constitutional structure. And you know, if you want to spend a deeper podcast on it, bring in other people, Matt Eric or someone like that who get into the weeds. But my point here, you see like what is. What is Trump's point of view? Where is he pressuring them? There is definitely some cultural pushback between the,

not just between the French elements, right? Montreal, Quebec, all of that and the kind of the French culture. Because you got to remember, these are formed out of the colonies, right? The North American colonies, same way that in the U.S., there's a distinct French culture in Louisiana, right? Same thing at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, Montreal, all of that. Quebec has that element. So they're patching on a legacy kind of French cultural colony with the leftovers of the American

Revolution who wanted to stay loyal to the British. They packed those things together, merge them and one collective whole. It's just been a back and forth process for 150 years since. But then on top of that, you've got a cultural. really distinct identity in the interior provinces like Calgary, Alberta, right? They've got their own, I mean, it's kind of a independence movement there. It's real. They're, you know, on the ground.

They're strong. They're trying to push for their own kind of economic sovereignty. And then you've got British Columbia in Vancouver, which are pseudo-aligned. They're 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, I call it like British cultural antecedents and then on the west coast as well. Very similar to the New York, D.C. plus San Francisco type of combination in the U.S. But politically, I think you see Trump or the White House, the administration, they're pushing in on those

existing kind of, we call them fissures in the Canadian hole, right? Pressing on the Alberta movement when it becomes, and when there's an opening there, but also this week with the Quebec situation, France, et cetera. There was stuff in the kind of the response to how things shook out the boilerplate language and the agreement that was stated, I think, by the Canadian side to be the hang up and why they didn't get a deal done. There were things in there about French language. So you see the White House, like, tapping in to those existing, what you call them,

like fissures, fractions, whatever, at their own Thanksgiving dinner table. You know, Canadians have their own Thanksgiving, too, right? So, yeah, that's how I would view how the administration is playing this for now. And then you're going to have to let your economies and your financial systems kind of sort out now that, now that these tariffs have gone into effect, like 50% on U.S. imports of Canadian alcohol, dairy, motor vehicles, we're just going to have to see supply chains are going to have to reconfigure, realign, et cetera. And then Canada's been slapping their own 50% tariffs on the U.S. for its exports.

But there's a total difference in relationships, right? Like U.S. is 12 times the size and the trade relationship. between US and Canada is much more significant to like Canada's side of the table versus what it represents the US side. It's going to hurt both. But right now we're in that marking to market phase. And this is where like, so when Besant saw that this was going to happen, right? The response was like, oh, we're going to increase our back bid size on the treasury auctions as this process works through the sovereign debt markets. So that's how I would characterize that story. Now, the second one was question on was it China? Yeah, the Iranian official Black Swan that's completely messing

things up for people on the other side of the US throughout all these. So when we use the term Black Swan, I think Teleb, you know, he defines it as things that people viewed as improbable or things that would like never occur prior to them happening. And then after they happen, everybody is like, yeah, this is, that was inevitable the whole time, that type of thing, right? But then they're big. They're shock disruptors to, uh, to a system. Was Iran the Black Swan? I guess, yeah, you would arguably say like, this was the thing that was sitting there all

along. Like it was your, it was your, your, your, like, wedge issue, your plot device for 20, 30 years, right? As, you know, it was in the original Bush, the second axis of evil. We're talking about, what was the name, Mahmood of Minidjad on, you know, the South Park movie and all of that. Well, I'm not talking about like just Iran War generally. I'm talking about this official coming out and blowing the... Oh, is that the black swan?

Blowing the lid on the oil, the oil trades with likely China. Because there was another, because there was a headline to our true social post that Trump sent out. That was basically like, oh, yeah, we're just... we're 10 million barrels a day are going to the straight. We're just sending the ships at night. There was that intermixed in the headlines of the last week as well. So the oil or the energy exports through the Persian Gulf, they're consent, like majority consumed by Southeast Asia.

Right. So I think like if you're making this story and the bigger thing is about the interaction between the U.S. and its economic order or like coalition, it's building out. I call that one Paxilica's, I think the best encompassing term, all the supply chains that go into the, yeah, the kind of economic block that the U.S. is framing for its vision of the 21st century buildout, the, you know, AI development, all of that. Think about the Persian Gulf and the actual tankers not making it out of the straight. of Hormuz, those were mostly going to the Southeast Asian markets. We've already seen in the Q2 data. This was an analysis Al-Hajee 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, everybody, like those economies, they're like, down. The as kind of TFTC audience will know, energy is your base level input for pretty much all economic activity, right? So that's your that's your base layer collateral in the system as if you pull the energy out or you shrink consumption by let's say 10%. Number one, you could have in China's case build up of strategic reserves, which you rely on for exactly this case. But still, that's, you know, that's finite, right? What you're doing is you're pulling economic growth and,

you know, activity trade away from that regional. sphere, which translates into the financial system, right? Because that's the counterpart of every transaction that doesn't take place. That's missing credit expansion in the financial system. And then you think about how are credit-based financial systems, purely Fiat credit-based financial systems, kind of structure it as their Achilles heel. It's like when you pull away growth, that's when your Jenga tower starts to wobble.

And so you start to see other headlines. I'll just go through key events that I'm watching that didn't get much coverage. Two weeks ago, the PBOC did its first mid-month liquidity injection into its repo markets domestically. That's a sign of that growth, that growth that's been removed from the system or the headwind, if you will, kind of materializing in the money market. And so the central bank, PBOC, has to come in and do a liquidity injection, similar to where the U.S. was, or New York-based repo markets were in September, October of 2019. Now, they haven't reached that scale, right?

But you're seeing like PBOC has had these standing liquidity operations. I think they announced they started spending them up in June. But if you think about like zooming out big picture where we are in this process, everybody's waiting for the big print. Right. These central banks, which no longer kind of agree to each other, the old offshore dollar system that kind of connected them all together. And we were just going to keep creating more and more dollar debt until until the system couldn't bear anymore. We're past that point now. So now you're seeing these other other players kind of make do with reality. Right. So you're seeing that repo market support from the BBOC. You saw another headline in June where banks ago. Mexico Central Bank spun up their own repo market, you know, emergency liquidity facility. It hasn't been used yet. But as these kind of this broad operation that you would say is, you know, at the end of the day, it's been war-gamed out several times.

And your decision-treeing, you know, red team, blue teaming, all of this and identifying, you know, what you're going to press on or how you would react given an enemy's response. I'd say that's kind of what we're what we're looking at here. So when you're watching for it. Yeah, the repo markets too. Like, you're seeing reserves. Like there's a need here too for the U.S. with the treasury curve. Like we're waiting on Scott Besant to start terming out debt, like to add on or upsize the longer term.

Coupon bond, you know, auction sizes to take pressure off of the front end of the yield curve. And right now we're in. This is that brackish state. It's like, yeah, we're eventually going to need to shift. shift out and increase long-term treasures supply, hence the upward pressure on interest rates across all, you know, Western government sovereign yield curves that we've seen since really Epic Fury began. Like this has been a year of yields rising across most of the, uh, across most of the world, right? Everybody except for China and then maybe Switzerland is still trying to maintain like a ZERP type of,

uh, uh, strategy. But, um, I would say, yeah, if there's a black swan, it's like, well, the thing with there all along, like our intelligence analysts, both military intelligence as well as you would say the more profiteering-based intelligence arms like, I don't know, CIA, MI6, Mossad, those, they were always aware. They had to have the understanding on the ground that there was this oil running scheme going on between Iran and Xinjiang, hence 10 years of the buildup on this week. Weager issue, right?

And so, yeah, I was there all along, but now it's now that we're in D-Day, we're going to press on that. And then if D-Day is successful, what it means is you're integrating. You're like burrowing in. You've got your beachhead. You've set up your defenses so they can't, you know, run you back into the sea. And you're going to then push into the supply chains, trade, all of that. and then ultimately into the financial system as well. So it's integration.

And then that just shows the big picture going on here is 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 get there, right? Up until 2022, it was the dominant kind of narrative of how this plays out is old system will collapse and we're going to have a crypto anarchist. whatever scheme. I don't know that that's going to play out that way as kind of the dominant voices in the space were kind of telling us how they saw this playing out. Nor do I know that that's the ideal way, the optimal way, because if we just keep pushing on this existing system and let that all of that massive amount of dollar that,

you know, most of it offshore collapse upon itself, we lose the constant. constitutional order in the United States. And this vision of your own self-sovereignty sounds good in theory, but there's no social patchwork or cohesion around you. So it's a world of violence. You don't have a constitutional order. I don't think it looks as bright of a future for your children as, uh, as we might naively, uh, suggests.

You just buy a cabin in the woods. You just buy a cabin in the woods and you, you bunker out and wait like 30 years. You raise your kids. and then so Ted Kaczynski has entered the chat. I don't think that guy had the answers. Yeah, that's it. I mean, if you if you want to retreat to the woods, and there was part of that, right? As Rome was collapsing, right?

And you know, the hundred AD that's like it got sacked, right? And what you saw like that means like you go ahead. Yeah, the Benedict, yeah, like the Benedict monks go out and they create their own villages and these parallel societies. The cities collapse. People, people just retreat to the mountains. You don't have, there's, you can't economically integrate. Like, it's not a great world for building a business or conducting trade. Like, uh, it really is a downgrade and kind of your standard of living. And, uh, I mean, this is true. Like through trade, you, we all accomplish more, right? If we can cooperate,

figure out a way to economically, uh, cooperate with each other on a money, uh, that, that is a a level playing field and you can defend and the monetary structure allows you to maintain the political order. That's that's the strategy. I think that is that is the winner and where we leave it better than our than we found it. So like I don't try to be a fanboy or like we're, you know, you know, Scott Besson's my hero, whatever. I just try to look at these things, see what's going on, what they mean, how they develop. There's very clearly, um, What would you call it? Just a renegotiation of all these large global businesses that, the two, two largest

businesses in the world. It's not Nvidia. It's not, you know, who have been at Microsoft or Apple. Like two largest businesses in the world are the global monetary franchise or, you know, now they're just regional monetary franchises are starting to be. And then the global trade franchise or regional trade franchises. So that's who I try to watch, understand. And then, yeah, you see those trends playing on top of that, the build out of AI, all that,

the technologists becoming more and more important, getting their seat at the table as the old kind of economic monopolies start to, start to fray. But yeah, that's how I see it. So was the oil scheme in Iran a black swan? Like, we knew it was there all along. And once we, once we, you know, conducted all the steps in the order of operations, that the war plans kind of teased out as, hey, this is the way to actually accomplish our objectives here. You knock out the defenses, IRGC capabilities, oil middlemen in Iraq who are same way exporting gray market, black market, Iranian oil, sanction the Iranian banks and crypto exchanges and then the external banks, financial institutions.

institutions, crypto exchanges who are business, like, like, what you call it? I want to say businessing, but just serving those client relationships and doing business with those internal Iran factions. Like you knock out all of those. And then, and then, you know, as, as kind of those steps are checked off the project list, I think now you go for your D day is kind of what it looks like is in the card. So yeah, one way or the other, one way or the other, this will be interesting. and the rest of Q3, Q4, as it always is.

But that's, yeah, where I see this. And then Bitcoin is, I'd say we're in that middle ground. We're in the brackish waters. Is the bear market over? Are we into the bull market, TBD? The way I view this, so start with the landmark legislation that would get the US government, like our existing constitutional order. How do we maintain that and then port that on to our monetary structure?

We start with these things like, well, number one, get rid of Biden. Vote that, vote that power faction out of office because they, their plan was to go with the CBDC route. So we've ejected those people from the, from, you know, control of the system. I mean, at this point, like with the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, right, I think is their acronym. It looks like they're starting to take control of the, the Democrat party, the DNCE, the establishment, your Chuck Schumer's, you're Elizabeth Warren's. I mean, you could almost place Elizabeth Warren in the DSA almost. But it looks like those people are being moved.

Like they're being transitioned out. Yeah. And so I'm sorry to tell you those voters, but I don't think they're going to give you the Bitcoin standard or the porting of the American constitutional structure, the experiment of people being the, government at the end of the day. We have a, you know, a unique thing on our hands, a very prized and valuable thing, in my opinion. It's been tampered with for 250 years, but I still think that that thing itself is worth preserving and should be. But my point here is I don't think Hunter Biden is actually going to be your steward of Bitcoin and said thing. So my point here, When you're looking at these actions in New York and D.C.

And which way is the United States leaning? Is it integrating Bitcoin into its monetary kind of base layer? You look at the playbook. Just Biden, that whole camp, you know, the path to the CBDC, which we were on under that administration. We put in the new administration in January 2025. First order is just revoked stop work. on examining the legal roadmap and steps to get the U.S. onto a CBDC.

You see the order of operations here. You get Genius Act to figure out how do we integrate the stable coin dollar, how do we regulate it so that we can transition this offshore dollar to the stable coin dollar system? Where we're kind of stuck at right now, I mean, you could say clarity, but that's pseudo relevant. That's where I want to bring up because everything we discussed earlier, what's happening in parallel to the CFTC, the SEC, the OCC, and the executive, or I mean, they sit under the executive, but Trump is well coming out saying, we're not waiting for clarity

act. Yeah, we'll start issuing these charters. We're going to. That was also Wednesday last week, right, regulation crypto assets. Yeah. In that three-day window. Okay, go ahead. No, it just seems clear to me that, like, they have this plan.

And they're like, we're not waiting for clarity. We're just going to start writing rules. And so I think clarity is one of those where we had to call an audible because it looks to me, so we got genius done June 2025, along with one big beautiful bill. Those are the two meaningful pieces of legislation to come out of this Congress. From what it sounds to me or seems to me. So clarity past the House is my understanding. It is hung up in the Senate.

It does not have the votes to get whatever. to make it to the executive's desk from this Congress, right? So when you see that special meeting on Wednesday, what I would view that as is that's your audible. And you say, all right, guys, we didn't, for whatever reason, we couldn't get the 50 votes plus J.D. Vance's tiebreaker to get clarity signed into law with this Congress. You know, there's people rotating off. You know, Mitch McConnell will be, you know, exit stage left here at some point.

rest in peace he's probably dead i dude i don't know but that that video yeah i'm just sitting on the senate for nine hours that's insane yeah i don't think um i have one kid when we go on road trips uh who just like we 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 every time i was like you need to go like just go to the breast trip just just empty like he's just got the whale bladder is what we call him but anyway yeah nine hours for for a uh how old is Mitch McConnell, 85? Like, he's up there. He's dead.

I think he's dead. Yeah. I mean, yeah, he could be sitting in a pair of depends for nine hours, but there's no way you can sit that long without needing a restroom break, food, water. That's insane. That's elder abuse is what it comes down to. 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 pictures we saw of Diane Feinstein rolled out onto

the Senate floor when this was like a few years ago, right? And she like late stage dementia of it was like it was like you look at how she looked. And it's like this is a person who should be like, you know, with her family, you know, going out, you know, the right way. And they do like the way they treat people. It's just insane like to to put them through. And granted, Diane Feinstein. It's part of the water that they sign me. Exactly.

So it's part of her deal. So you can't feel too guilty about it. But it's just insane all the way around. Then you juxtapose that with COVID era. Like you couldn't go in and see grandma if she's going to die in the hospital. So she has to die alone. It's like, what are we doing, guys? All right.

Get off the soapbox there. But yeah, so to get on the acts of Congress, yeah, clarity looks to me like it's stalled out. It's going to be tough. There's going to have to be some horse trading negotiations if it is going to, if Thune is going to put it up for vote on September 15th, I think as he promised or allegedly kind of, I don't know if he promised. He made the statement like, oh, we'll put it in, put it out in September. If they don't get it now, it's like, yeah, we got the election. It's going to have to come to a new Congress to get that one through. What clarity really gives us, in my opinion, so all right, this tokenization of securities,

kind of the back-end settlement, the DTC, National Security's Clearing Corporation, all the back-end infrastructure for settlement, they all know that they're going to have to shrink the settlement time for trade. It's like the liquidity is going to move towards whatever venues can offer that real-time settlement. We know the closest thing you can get to final real-time settlement, right? It's Bitcoin. You know, we'll cut to the chase here. That's where this all leads, in my opinion, if you just map out the big picture.

But you look at the tokenized securities. Like there's already all this stuff trading. A lot of it is like tokenized stretch and all these, you know, wild, you know, hairbrained. leverage schemes, junior stretch, 10x, you know, whatever, like senior. It's like, all right, guys, come on. But no, there's also tokenized equity shares, like Micron. I was like, like there's, there's massive trading. And then if you look at the charts of market cap of the tokenized securities, like it's,

you know, you're a VC, right? Like it looks like, oh, this is a durable and strong trends. So there's a thing. So the market cap and the liquidity is going to port onto this new structure, right? We say tokenized securities, but at the end of the day, it's just going to be securities. They're just going to take a new form. Instead of, you know, in that 100 years ago, your share certificate in Disney or whatever would be the physical certificate that they sent you and grandpa or great grandpa would put in his safe.

And then to trade it, he might, you know, oh, I'm going to sell with my broker, you know, whatever in St. Louis, call the phone. It's like, all right, we'll do the share. All right. Now we've got to bring in your certificate, all of this. You saw this with paper. bonds as well. And like as of a few years ago, you could still get paper bonds trading. And so we went over from like the real physical thing, like the bearer instruments, to a credit based settlement of a thing where you got the DTC as the master ledger, the exchanges sit on top of that. The brokers sit on top of that as like an inner layer. And then your record of Disney stock ownership now is an IOU with your broker dealer. And then the real IOU is pointing to the, to like the DTC layer.

So you got this middleman. This whole thing of tokenization now we're, we're getting rid of that. Like we're like instead of the digital representation of the thing being these credit-based liability kind of relationships, we've got away now. Satoshi showed us, oh, now we can make it back to the real thing in the digital realm. I was actually just looking at Roche this week, just pack silica important. companies, Roche, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, probably well run, one of the best in class of that sector, right? And we're on a Bitcoin podcast, best in class in the pharma industry is still probably a four-letter household name. But anyway, I looked at their share ledger and it was something like a meaningful number of their shares are still in the form of these vault instrument, like the paper certificates, right?

is like, oh, that's interesting little, little nugget there. But yeah, so where this is moving, all of your security settlement, like, they're moving towards this, like, 24-7 liquid rails. And, like, Wall Street knows this, right? Like, April or May, you're seeing headlines, hey, we need to be ready for T-plus-0 settlement by whatever X years. And, like, we've got these pilot projects that are coming out as we move towards that milestone. And like this is going like fast. In 2022, I want to say it was, it's like just yesterday, you know, in my lived experience essentially. Corporate bonds still traded T plus two.

So if I traded whatever, an Apple bond today, we wouldn't settle with it. It's Tuesday, August 25th. We wouldn't settle our transaction until Thursday, August 27th. That shrunk down to T plus one. So you got a 50% reduction. But now you're going to, you're 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're going to shrink that again.

So this is where you get into clarity act. As we know that process is going to happen, if New York wants to maintain itself as the, you know, the largest and most liquid capital market in the world, we've got to get something like, well, there. There has to be a piece of legislation for who is going to regulate it, but also then which parties are going to capture the share of that economic pie. And that's where you get into clarity, where the hang up actually is, in my opinion, is who, you know, which firms, which businesses, which power factions are going to get what share of said pie. So that's clarity that's hung up.

The thing that we actually, as Bitcoiners, should have our eyes on is the ARMM. the American Reserve Monetization Act. Because if you want to get a Treasury who is leaning into Bitcoin as a reserve access, 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, like, you know, there's a laundry list now of breadcrumb saying this is where they want to go. We have to get kind of the legal authority from Congress to do so, And this is where, all right, the ARMA was introduced, I want to say May or June.

It had something like 18 co-sponsors. So there's a meaningful contingent who wants this. But it doesn't have the 215 votes right now to get that into law. 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 U.S. dollar framework. we've got work to do this November, I guess is the short way to put it. 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.

Other than that, this play we made, or that was made on Wednesday with regulation crypto assets. Remember at the beginning of this administration, staff letter, was it, 321? I forget the numbers, but essentially it was the treatment of digital assets held in custody by a U.S. regulated financial institution. They had to hold a massive amount of capital for, you know, say your bank wanted a custody Bitcoin for you, similar to way unchanged it, right? They had to hold, they would have had to hold a massive amount of-an-of-dollar- Which was insane. Yeah, I mean, it had a risk rating of like 1,000 percent or something that would just, it was actually prohibitive. 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.

We know that's all bullshit, right? It's Bitcoin is the prize. 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, right? It's the hill to take. But the same way, I think it was. staff staff accounting bulletin one two one 23 or something like that it was a no it was 21 and 22 so they rescinded 21 and created 22 okay yeah so it would have been 321 i want to say okay either way

show notes we'll we'll clean that up ever i think if you've been following this story for five years right you'll you'll know what i'm talking about i just forget the the the numeral identifier on that one part the senior moment right um I just turned 40, so getting up there. But my point here is with regulation crypto assets, that is not law of the land, right? It's just it's accounting procedure. It's book a business as soon as if we had a replacement to another executive who was not friendly to said policies, they can just rescind those with a stroke of a pen. And all of that goes away.

So yeah, there's there's a lot of work to be done. nothing is certain here, right? And that's where I said, we're in that, that brackish water in between the fresh water and salt water. It's going to, a lot of outcomes are going to hinge on what happens between, you know, today and let's say the next six to 12 months. Other point here, we kind of know in the Easter eggs that Scott Besson is buried, right? One million Bitcoin has been the, you know, target goal that's been always thrown out as the, um, the objective. for the U.S. Treasury acquiring for its Bitcoin supply, I don't see a world where it wants to bid those in a upward market

where price is getting away from it. So we'll see. I mean, is it going to acquire those? I mean, right now it sits on what, 100,000, 200,000 coins, something like that ballpark. I don't, like, it probably doesn't work for the Treasury to get to a million coins and acquire, you know, Bitcoin and size in a bull market where price is running away from it. So I get, we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the reason. It's SAB 121 and SAB 122. Just to clarify that. All right. Awesome.

I knew it went. It was like a 121, but then I thought it was in order 321. But yeah, good. Thanks for pulling that. And I mean, the other thing I brought up to tweet earlier, but I'm not going to bring it up. I'm not going to bring it up. I'm just read it the U.S. is mining bank.

are the fastest pace in 20 years and crypto is leading it. The OCC approved 22 bank charters and Trump's first 19 months, more than the previous five years combined. All right. That's an interesting development of as well. Yeah, we didn't get into this, but think about what we're seeing with the sports ownership, you know, at this point, it's like a targeted operation. There was an Ian Fleming quote.

It's like once this happenstance, twice is a coincidence. Are you talking about the 49ers? Yeah, yeah. We'll get into that in a second. twice as coincidence, three times that's in an enemy action, right? So first we see, I want to say the first one, it was either Mark Walter or the Ishbia family with the Phoenix Suns. Mark Walter, everybody knows this one's getting all the coverage, like Guggenheim, the insurance

companies, like we're just going to see where that one connects. Like below the surface, I don't think we have the full kind of public market disclosures of like, hey, where was that capital coming from? Is it cross border? Like, what's going on here? We're going to find out. The Isbia family and United Wholesale Mortgage, that one's interesting, right? You had the earnings call for Q2 back in, I want to say, late July, early August.

Yeah, he basically margin loaned his stock and the stock's down 80%. Well, on the earnings call, it was down like 50% on the day. They had to announce, hey, we're discontinuing the dividend. We needed liquidity injection from our partners at Oak Tree, which is 100% owned by Brookfield, which is, if you think about it, it's kind of the Canadian power factions, kind of national champion of private capital markets, right? It'd be like Blackstone, Apollo, like kind of the U.S. behemus in the space. What United Wholesale mortgage was, this is interesting.

They held the leading market share of the U.S. wholesale mortgage industry. And the way they did it was like aggressive pricing. So if you think about it, like what's been revealed after the fact. So this oak tree, right, comes in for the, I don't know if emergency is an accurate word for it, but it was like very much so needed financing. I just want to make sure I'm being careful with words. They come in in Q2 with, I think the total kind of package was, for liquidity injection, was one and a half billion into this entity, which it's not making economic sense at this,

at this, you know, kind of point in time. We're in a different world than the ZERP QE era where cost of funding is, is cheap, right? But you get the bailout rescue, like the majority of the package. I want to say like the, uh, HBIA family put in 150 mil and then everything. And then that's for that, that's, uh,

subordinate to all of the capital, that oak tree, which is a hundred percent, you know, wholly owned subsidiary of, uh, Brookfield. They're injecting liquidity into this thing to keep it up and running.

Um, but you think about that, the, the, the, the one thing all of these stories have in common, right? Well,

number one, their sports franchises like trophy, assets, but there's a tax benefit to those things for, you know, once you accrue, you know, a significant amount of wealth and say Steve Ballmer is one of these owners who has followed on this trend. Also heavily tied, if you've made a large nestay or nut from this offshore dollar scheme, 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 acquisition cost over, let's say, 15 or 20 years, even though they're long-lived assets. Like, it doesn't make any sense. They're saying, oh, we got player contracts or stadiums and, you know, you depreciate those. And that gives you a tax shield, you know, to lower or, you know, deduct your, your positive earnings on. And then when you go to bequeath it to your heirs after you pass away and it goes through the trust process, all of that, your children get a step up and basis. So it's really a, besides like the posh lifestyle and, you know, front page and what's the Paris Hilton kind of journalism, that outlet? Whatever. People magazine.

People like all that bull crap. Like it gets access to that that type of exposure wealth seeking and luxury lifestyle, exposure, all that all that crap. It's a tax asset, right? And so what if you look at these ownership groups, like the things they have in common, Mark Walter, you know, at the helm of Guggenheim Partners, which is an asset manager, but it's connected in with, you know, insurance companies. And that's actually the wedge here.

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 and those transactions are going to be much more heavily scrutinized. That's what's coming in, you know, the federal regulators to, you know, bust that up. But then the same thing with the Isbia family. They're tied in with mortgages. And then the DeBardo family, they made their money in kind of real estate development. They merged with the Simon Property Group in, I want to say, 1996.

And they do a lot of business. Like Brookfield is a huge operator of shopping malls or commercial real estate in the United States. When a tenant, there is a track record for the firm that, you know, or the kind of the Simon property group that is also a mall operator. When they shared tenant base, right, like Express or, you know, shopping mall kind of tenants, right that uh below yeah over the hot top oh uh god what's that lex lexner company i have victoria secret there you go um interesting right um i don't want to sound too much like witty web here but you know at some degree you know you see the connections it's like okay but they like whenever these tenants that are

you know occupying their properties as we've seen this trend like all right am Amazon's going to kill shopping malls. Like, okay, yeah, we know. When they need to come in and do emergency rescue financing first, let's say, an express or Bonnebos or something like that, like they partner with each other on these bailouts. So there's business relationships. Let's just say that. There's a public record of transactions and financing, similar to what we just saw with

the United Wholesale Mortgage, ultimately connected up to Brookfield, who was the chairman of Brookfield before he kind of was promoted. or I don't know if it's a lateral hire to the prime minister of Canada and some interesting circumstances, right? It's, you know, Mark Carney, right? Former Bank of England governor, former Bank of Canada governor. So I don't know. If you just zoom out, it's like, all right, that's the actual important thing going on, you know, as I look at it. It's like, oh, there's a prize at the middle of the table in the boardroom that these power factions and capital factions are fighting over.

like one of those prizes, because it's all trade, trade franchises and financial franchises, but the specific trade franchise and financial franchise between the U.S. and Canada, that's one of the infinite topics of discussion up for renegotiation. And so you're starting to see this all play out. So the sports franchises, all of these headlines. I mean, it's just interesting when Jed York shows up on the front page of the paper for, you know, what took place in the middle of nowhere Ohio. You're like, interesting. All right.

But yeah, I don't know. That's how I see it. As always, like, yeah, follow the core trend. Like, over the long term, right? 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 of this old thing that we,

And we're the ones executing the tear down, the dismantling, right? It starts with sulfur and it works forwards from there. So it's like when I say we, New York and D.C. are running the, like, they're controlling the action here. Try to port it in with the stable coin dollar. And in the meantime, like these power factions are just duking it out with each other for who's going to get the bigger share of pie in this new world. And I guess from your standpoint, as a, as a pleb, your job. is to not get shaken out, stay on top of your skis. Don't get run over when things like cold card or BIP 110 happens.

But then also on the other side of that, don't like keep your center of gravity on top of your footing when this green candle shows up. And like you don't want to be on the wrong side of like your balance, right, off balance. if and when the next move is just more volatility because the way I see it yeah you like that big green candle like it's a great run um but you also just stay humble stack stats I guess to put the what the famous Matt O'Dell saying out there yeah it's so what I did not connect the sports franchise shenanigans with all this but it makes total sense when you see three of them it's it's like what's going on here for Mark walters specifically I mean the one insurer that was like a related party like own the rights to the lea dodgers tv um contract

and it's a what yeah like they holding that as like a long duration asset i haven't dove it that's where nick nemath would probably be your better like okay he goes into the exact um assets on the relationships i'm i don't invest in those bonds so i'm not focusing my time uh analyzing so back in the 2010s you had things like the uh the root sports deal or like all the TV rights for the regional MLB franchises, you know, packaged up and, you know, they were in a high-yield bond offering. I stayed away from that one. And you've seen those default or go into distress.

So you've got underlying secular problems. But yeah, I didn't go into the deep interconnections between Dodgers tickets LLC and all of that. But those were marked as unrelated. you know, party transactions and what we're seeing is, you know, the regulatory scrutiny going in there. And I guess, cleaning house. And what the way I view that is you're forcing these key nodes in the system. And Mark Walter is not a senior note. He's not a Mark Carney note. He's an important note, however. But when I see the transaction, who did he sell to, Joshua Kushner, Bob Eiger, it's like, okay, well, that's tells me someone maybe someone crossed the line on from one side of the negotiation table to the other

right yeah it happened so quick and it's like oh josh kushner owns exactly exactly also like heavily involved in the uh the financing of um the i build now like if you go to business schools right now like in you know MBA programs where do they want to land for a VC deal it's like everybody's like thrive i want to drive capital it's like yeah the the uh the the uh the hottest job placement for that field. But anyway, my point there is like, all right, you're trying to try to analyze individual cues from day to day. That's what I do.

But like just to under understand the big picture backdrop setting, understand the long term trend, right? So don't buy the root sports or the diamond sports offering in, you know, 2015. It's like, yeah, that one's not going to get you there. Those bonds aren't going to make it to maturity, you know, stuff like that. So yeah, everything I've described in the last hour and half. It's just kind of my latest update on kind of the big picture, understand the, uh, the, the conditions of the high, high seas that you're trying to, trying to navigate. So I don't

know. Any, any, any last thoughts or follow up questions? Uh, no, I want to give you your time back. I guess the last thought based, based off what you said, again, for D day has the beach heads being set. There's any time between D day and B.E. Day, um, could last a couple of years. could happen quickly, who knows. But I think what you're alluding to is like Bitcoin is like as all this is going on, it's probably going to still be relatively under the radar. Yes, the price maybe go up. But when it comes to like full on integration, that may be further down the road closer

to VE Day than D-Day. Yeah. Well, I think we need the legislative framework to get there to get us to the promised land, which could take, I mean, if we're lucky, we make forward progress. this midterm election, we get a more favorable Congress, then we could see something like the ARMA passed into law. If Congress is not there, then we got to wait until 2028. And that becomes an opportunity where it's not just Congress, that's up for election, it's the executive. So we could take a significant step back.

I know as much as everybody kind of rightfully wants to criticize this administration, right, for a handful of things. And like number one among them would probably be communication. Number two might be the apparent look of self-dealing or profiting off of these big picture developments. But there is a scenario, like there is a path between and in 2026 and 28 where the Bitcoin progress or integration onto the U.S. constitutional order gives back. some forward progress. And right now, I don't, you know, I don't know who to tell you to go vote for or anything like that. I would just say as you're voting for a congressperson, hey, it'd be great to call the candidates,

listen to their campaign teams, get them on the record. Are you, are you, are, do you support something like the ARMA or, um, Bitcoin integration into the US treasury, all of, all of that, that, that would be forward progress. But yeah, I don't know who to tell, tell you to this side or this side. I don't know. There's no hero here is what I'm saying. I can eventually, you know, if Scott Besson does the wrong thing or something like that, it's like, yeah, I have, I have, I have no qualms whatsoever killing my heroes if I need to. But I just will say this.

I don't think, I don't think Hunter Biden. You're saying this like there is very clearly a campaign on Twitter like to, to. Shame all the podcasters letting him do this rehabilitation tour. Absolutely. But yeah, I don't think Hunter Biden is your, is your, is your. answer fellow bitcoiner. I'll just, I'll just say that. Neither is Gavin Newsom. Neither is Gavin Newsom. I would, I would double stamp that as well.

All right. All right. That's good for now. This is good for now. Well, we'll keep, I'll keep annoying you as, as things progress. And we get into week 210, week 120, week 200 and this ongoing forever game. All right. Fascinating. Definitely is. Yeah, this is. It's definitely a more complex picture than we all thought in 2020 and 2021. But the cool thing is Bitcoin matters here. And that's, that's, that's, that's very clear. It's not front and center yet. But I think as, you know, we continue to take positive momentum, um, that'll become abundantly clear. Yeah. Cool. Beware freaks.

Beware. Peace of love. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, So please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and add free,

make sure you download the Fountain Podcasting app and go to Fountain.fm to find that $5 a month. month, get you every episode at day early, ad-free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing to a fountain as well. Thank you for your time. And until next time, okay.