TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #789: Stablecoins Are Replacing the Petrodollar with Michael Every

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Michael Every breaks down the reverse perestroika thesis reshaping macro and geopolitics in 2026. Marty and Michael cover the Iran war, Russia-Ukraine escalation risk, Venezuela and the Dunroe Doctrine, China's automation-driven job losses, structural inflation from the diesel and refined product shortage, the Fed's shift to short-end T-bill issuance, stablecoins replacing the petrodollar, economic statecraft, AGI implications, and why Europe has lost leverage with both the US and China. A must-listen for anyone tracking Bitcoin, monetary policy, and the shifting global order. Michael on X: https://x.com/TheMichaelEvery 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 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. Michael Everie, welcome to the show, sir.

Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, like I was saying, I'm very excited to have you on. I've been reading your research reports for years now. And I think the one that you sent in the beginning of the year about reverse perestroika, what's going on with Trump and his global economic geopolitical strategy in his second term really impacted how I viewed the world this year, particularly as things have been unfolding. But I think to take a step back, correct me if I'm wrong, but the tenor of that piece to me was that many people are stuck

in viewing the world through a lens that existed for 50 years leading up to maybe 2020. And we have tectonic shifts happening in the macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape that are going to force people whether like it or not to view the world through another lens, another way of saying things are not what they used to be only a few years ago. Is this a correct assumption of your perspective? Completely. Completely correct. I mean, I don't know exactly where you want to take this conversation. I'm happy to go wherever you would like. But literally in the background, just before starting to speak to you, I was just typing a little update of what I'm seeing here this morning. And on that basis,

and just plucking a couple of different stories, which all feed into the same thesis. So one, you've had the declaration from open AI, but they're ahead of Anthropic, and they now have a new AI, which is an AGI, so an artificial general intelligence, which is your sky net moment, if you want to believe the hype. Okay, now I'm not getting into the long grass on that, because I'm not a tech guy, but I'm fully cognizant of the fact that once you pass that particular threshold, if it's true, it's a Manhattan Project moment where we've got something artificial, that's smarter than we are that can teach itself.

So that's one to watch, because there's a lot of implications. a lot of different fronts. Elsewhere, we've got headlines that Putin said he might be interested in peace in Ukraine. Yeah, right. That's as everyone thinks the mobilization is more likely because it would be peace on his terms, apparently. Then we've got, you know, in the last 24 hours, Trump being reported that potentially he might want to say that the Iran war is over.

And again, I rolled my eyes saying, yeah, right. And immediately another report coming out backing what my view has been all along, which is that he will actually restart the war again after the midterm. So this is just a pause to refresh, if you will. And South Korea is now in the background saying they may send military forces to Hormuz. So all the pressure that he's been placing on them and saying, well, maybe I'm going to scale back support in Asia. Maybe, just maybe he's got his first actual ally to start sending forces to Hormor's

to help try and control it. So another huge breakthrough there. At the same time, and I'm going scattergun, but it all feeds them together, The Australian financial press, I think it was a day before yesterday, ran a op-ed. Now, op-eds can say a lot of the different things. The Wall Street Journal has loads of crazy op-eds all the time. But it's not so common in Australia. They ran an op-head arguing for negative immigration.

Not lower immigration, negative immigration. Now, I've never seen anything like that. That's an against a backdrop where you've got the Australian housing market really collapsing. And yet the RBA, their central bank, is probably going to have to hike anyway. just inconceivable for most Australians up until recently. And then in the Netherlands, you've had the Netherlands, I think it's a scientific research council for government policy. I may be mistranslating that title slightly, the WRR. They've put out a policy paper saying that Europe is really caught between a rock and a hard place between the US and China with their

neo-Mecanthalist trade policy, which is something I've been expounding on endlessly. and the Europe needs to really start making very, very hard choices. And the world that it understood is dead. They need to think outside the box. And they strongly imply that Europe should either push for a China Plaza accord to push the Remembe down to what on the back of an envelope would look like being around the four to the dollar level or the three to the dollar level versus where it is now, which is never going to happen.

Or they should mirror China one for one, which includes the ECB pushing the euro-lawful-law. So the ECV's role would be to try and weaken the euro versus the RIMIMB. Again, this is just mind-blowing stuff for people in markets. Or, lastly, they need to put in place tariffs and capital controls to make sure that, you know, they can just match what China is doing on that particular front. Now, I'm not saying any of those will happen, but you are seeing in just that two-minute little rant from me there the unraveling of just vast amounts of the ideology and intellectual superstructure

that we've built the last 45 years with, all coming tumbling down at once. I mean, I'll add to that. We have the Venezuela oil deal. We have Scott Besant getting as close to a druggie, whatever it takes moment last week. We had Druck and Miller come out with the AI written op-ed response to Secretary of Assence moves in the Treasury markets.

And it's very very, very discombobulating. Like where where do we find any stability in, in this environment? Should we even be looking for stability? Is this sort of like a Game of Thrones chaos as a ladder to climb opportunity that many people have to begin to view what's happening in that way? And that's one of the most discombobulating things is you have the macroeconomic, the geopolitical, and then the tech with the AI.

happening. And on this show, over the last year, I think the national security strategy document that the Trump administration sent out last November, if you read that, it looks like they were making moves to really go after that strategy, which is like, hey, we're going to pack things into the Western Hemisphere. We're not going to get in foreign wars. We're going to create allies in Latin America and really try to reindustrialize the U.S. Medoro picking him out of Venezuela, bring him to the U.S. It seemed like moving that direction. And then Iran pops up in February,

and it's a complete sort of reversion of what they said in the National Security Strategy document that really, I think, throw a wrench in what many people expected the plan to be. And is the Iran situation, like a situation that the Trump administration got themselves into and are trying to unravel as it goes on? Or is it something that the U.S. and Iran kind of like, did they like that the war is being extended because it gives them leverage in different points in the world from the U.S. perspective, particularly against China? So from my perspective, and that's all I can offer, Iran was always a target. I think ideally the US would have gone back after the midterms, so early 2027 and maybe even

a bit later than that and with a lot more munitions behind it and a lot more pre-planning. But you don't always get to pick and choose your moments. So Venezuela, it couldn't have been a more purpose. example of how economic and military state-craft can coincide. There's a lot of moral arguments and political arguments and practical stuff. I'm not getting into the long grass on that. I'm looking purely at the big picture of like a grand macro strategy, as I call it. That one was when we flagged.

It was really obvious that would happen as part of the Dunrow Doctrine. Iran, I think ideally would have been later, but the dynamic there was that if you believe sources and people can quibble, whatever, that things were moving too fast. for them in that Israel was already likely to attack Iran anyway, which would have triggered the war that we currently have. Plus, you know, there's some sources say that Iran was much closer to a nuclear weapon than people would have wanted to believe. Now, again, that's a very controversial claim, right?

But if you put that on the table and you think you can't afford to take that risk, you can't just sit back and say, well, we'll happily build the Dunrow Doctrine and we'll lose them at least in the meantime. Because as we are seeing play out around us now, whether you're in AI or tech or whatever, oil and particularly diesel and refined product prices really still matter. They matter for everyone, everywhere, for everything. And they will continue to for the longest time to come. So that's where so much of that product still flows from,

either directly or in terms of the refined products. And what we currently see in the background, by the way, just as an adjunct for that, is the US probably is getting more oil out of onwards now and via different pipelines than many people suspect. It's not as ugly a picture as it looks just in terms of tank trackers, for example, you know, that's not showing with everything turned off at night, ship to ship, but it doesn't provide refined fuel.

Those refinaries are not getting products out yet, won't do for quite some time, years potentially, if this poor drags on. And in the interim, you have an enormous gap between the amount of crude sushing around the world, which is, you know, already itself not quite as much as people would like, and the refined product, which is in really short supply, and that's going to be a crunch everywhere. That's my answer in terms of where Iran fits in with this, because whoever ultimately ends up bossing this particular fight and bossing this region can turn around and say, as I, you know, linked to in that reverse perestroika piece, these are the hard commodities, which are still the essential facts of life that we effectively have underpinning our system. So if the U.S. loses all of them, sure, Donroe Doctrine with Venezuela, it's still a very nice cluster of countries and economies and natural resources, but it's nowhere near enough if you're throwing all the Middle East into the Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, access. It's not enough. That's why they're there. And I don't think you mentioned it, but Russia came out, what was it yesterday, the day before, saying that they were going to put their full support behind Iran?

Yes, no, absolutely. Apologies for not mentioning everything, but I just gave you 24 hours headlines or actually just five or six hours headlines rather than the entire week. Russia is openly saying they will back Iran. Now again, that's no surprise to those of us who followed these things in detail. Iran had given Russia the Shaheed drones, which are striking Kiev, and more help beside. And Russia had already helped Iran with some of the targeting of U.S. forces. in the region. It makes perfect sense for Russia to escalate via Iran to take the US focus away

from Ukraine, not that the US is focusing on Ukraine to a great extent compared to Europe, but it ties down what they see as the collective West, whether they are collective or not, is a different question. And from the Iranian perspective, again, you want to help the Russians. And both of them are being held by North Korea. And, you know, there are many fingers which point to at least dual use, if not more, held from China. China to both of them too. And China has, you know, very openly said they won't cooperate with Bess and this economic war operation, economic outcast against Iran. So I put out a theory paper like a what if. I do a lot of these back in 2018 talking about the rise and fall and

rise of the great powers and the great currencies. And I said, what happens if one day China starts to move to blockade Taiwan, which is, you know, something people talk about a lot in some circles. Russia moves on the on the Baltics. I didn't say Ukraine. I said the Baltics, which is, you know, by the way,

being mentioned again right now. Iran closes hormones. North Korea starts to move south, towards South Korea, and Turkey grabs a few Greek islands. All at the same time. So what happens in that environment? Well, the West, and this was in 2018,

I said, is in no position to fight on all those fronts. It's ridiculous. to assume we could do that. So you either step back or you fight bloodily and badly on many of them. Or you sit down at the table and say, what do you want the world to look like?

And you have a Tehran Yalta Potsdam moment where you start drawing lines on the map. So that's been an operating principle of mine since 2018. And it didn't work out quite that way because even within constellations of forces, for example, within the Iranian blog, when they attacked Israel in on 7th, October

2023, Hezbollah didn't fire at the same time as Hamas. That was the plan. Hezbollah was supposed to fire, you know, 50,000 rockets and sweep over the border down into the Galilee. And, you know, the picture would look very different today if that had happened, you know,

much to the detriment of Israel. But that didn't happen because they weren't coordinating properly. And you haven't seen the same full coordination across the spectrum from, you know, from this axis up until recently, and it's now emerging piece by piece, step by step. Ironically, just as the West is starting to cooperate less and less. But that is very much a viewpoint that one needs to have, or a lens, one needs to be able to put in and out of one's glasses to understand that this is not

individual countries, it is more and more block-based. And even within the West itself, much of the headlines, or most of the headlines that you're seeing where Trump is annoying Canada, Trump is annoying Mexico, you know, Trump is annoying country X in Latin America, Trump versus Europe, Trump versus the UK, Trump versus South Korea, yada, yada, yada, yada. This is about what will a Western bloc look like? It replaces the international system we have now, where it isn't a Western block. It's a political Western block where we all have powwows and inner parties together. And yet internationally, from an economic perspective, we're all integrated with everybody else. So it's like a polite,

vertical veneer on top of a structure which includes everyone. So the US is attempting to say, no, no, this is going to be a dinner party only for invited guests where we provide our own food. Hot luck, you know, but it's not going to be everyone coming in. And some people don't want to do that. and some people are jostling for position within that emerging framework. So those are two parallel lenses you have to wear it left eye and right eye. There's a perfect segue into, I think we've been focusing a lot of like the kinetic or chessboard moving with the wars going on. And obviously there's economic variables at play.

I mean, very heavy economic variables. And that's one thing I'm trying to discern is like how small is the head of the needle that the U.S. administration is trying to thread right now because you have multiple things on the kinetic geopolitical front with real politic, but then you have very severe economic rejiggering going on at the same time. And Scott Besant famously in July of 24 in the lead up to the election at the Manhattan Institute explicitly said, I believe there's a grand economic reordering going on and I want to be in the captain seat with the president. as he's going through that.

And so we're about two and a half years in to Trump's second administration with Scott Bassett at the head of the Treasury. And it seems like the moves that they've been making on the monetary side of things have been very deliberate, very relatively quick when you consider how slowly things typically move. But you get the Genius Act, obviously,

the Clarity Act is a big point of contention here in the U.S. And obviously, like I mentioned earlier, Scott Besant is really trying to protect the long end of the yield curve and really push people to the front end of it, how would you rate the U.S., particularly their handling of the economic side of things, the monetary side of things? Well, I try not to give ratings per se because that's kind of implicit in the underlying

projections that I make, whether one side or another emerges battered and bruised as the victor or not. I really do think it's in the balance in terms of how this works out. But in general, I'll say I think the US has got a two in three chance of managing to put it off and one and three chance of failing dramatically. And, you know, the outcomes there are so staggeringly different the spread that you have on any particular financial market asset cross that you're looking at or cross that you're looking at really bear considering, you know, this is not maybe there'll be one rate hike or two and you're therefore looking at a few basis points in the Fed Fund's futures. we're talking about entirely different futures.

The problem is that everything they're trying to do, as I've made abundantly clear, and again in that reverse perestroika piece, is every bit as challenging as what Gorbachev faced with the Soviet Union, and you have to do everything everywhere all at once. So you have to win kinetically. Because if you win kinetically, it encourages people to do what you want financially and economically.

Financial and economic power also helps you win kinetically. So it's a closed loop. Everything has to work everywhere at once. And you can make a couple of mistakes on one front, but only a few. And then you have to compensate somewhere else with something else. I would say that if we're moving towards this area in particular, let's just unpack it. In terms of the yield curve, clearly, you know, US yields continue to march higher. And as I was just writing in the background before, Dorothy to talk to you,

the world I think we're in now is this, that we have a structurally higher inflation world. for the moment because of this diesel and refined product shortage. That's not going to go away short of two things or three things. Number one, complete demand collapse. Okay, that's stackflationary. Someone somewhere is not going to get the vital stuff they need, which is only done by higher prices. So then you're talking about a collapsing growth somewhere

alongside those higher prices. That's really ugly. So stackflation is one outcome and that's zero sum, because the poorer people will be the ones who don't manage to consume anymore or eat, etc., etc., right? Or drive. If you're not going to go that route, you need to magically create refineries. So that's like a five, seven, ten-year project, depending on where you're building them, and the permits and the environmental protections, et cetera.

That's not happening at the moment. That's years away. If you're not going to do that, then it's a geopolitical binary. you are either going to declare peace on these two different waters, Russia, Ukraine and Iran, at which point is peace on the other side's terms. So you're going to give Ukraine to Putin, as if that could be done, right? Because, you know, they're a sovereign country. But effectively you say, right, there you go, yours.

And you give Iran the Middle East, which again can't be done because not all the Middle East will go with it. But you get my point. If you're not going to do that because you don't want to or you can't, you have to have more weapons than the other side to defeat them to get energy prices back down again. So you need to beat Russia and then good luck with that. Or you need to beat Iran, which I think can be done, but it's trickier. And that to me means you can't call this a cyclical inflation environment. It's a structure of inflation environment until you can geopolitically tell me we have refineries,

not for years, we have a decisive way to end both these wars, which are actually conflating into one and could even spread to other fronts. So how does the central bank act? What do you do on the financial front when actually you're recognising that just as was the case for the longest time in human history, to be a rates trader, you need to be an oil trader. You need to be looking at Brent or WTI to understand where the yields are going. How does the Fed even start to model that? You need to be looking at the geopolitics and how do you control energy? So the finance becomes linked in with the refineries, with the atoms, with the geopolitics. That's the first point.

But within just the finance itself, let's keep it siloed for the moment. Obviously, you can't have long yields exploding because you can't finance your debt. You can't afford to fund the Pentagon. You can't afford to do all the stakecraft you want to do. Ogo, you're going to move to the short end, which is what Yellen clearly what percent is going to do too. I mean, he's openly saying it, more and more T-bill insurance. So you do that, then, okay, effectively it's liquidity management at the short end of the

curve and the Fed is still there as the Fed, but people are looking at the short end, not the long-end, and they're looking at the Treasury. How many T-bills are coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? That's happening. Then, above and beyond that, you need to do two things in parallel. You need to be checking sure that the Fed helps get productive investment up rather than financial speculation.

So the way the Fed operates, instead of being all about markets, which is all it's about now, it needs to be about production. So you need Fed chairs and Fed governors who are literally in touch with the physical side of their economy rather than the market side and are doing everything they can through regulation to encourage people to lend productively. Okay, so that needs to be happening, like into factories. And in parallel to that, and these two are linked, you need to be getting people to buy more T bills to make sure that the, you know, the short end is well supported. And I think one potential bridge between the two, and it's not been tested, and it could go catastrophically wrong, or it could go amazingly right, but frankly, we're running out of alternatives if you're the US at this point, is to then look at stable coins. Because if you wish a dollar stable coins and they take off internationally,

and you ration the amount that you're backing by T-bills versus offshore demand, you can theoretically create a structure where you have a higher interest rate for US dollar products outside the US than in, which is great because you want low interest rates and you want other people to have a high dollar rate abroad to make them attractive. You can generate a couple of trillion dollars worth of investment every year. That funds the Pentagon. That funds a whole chunk of the budget. And within that, at the same time, externally, you can say to people,

we're going to start paying for US imports and stable coins, which is what I mentioned in the reverse perestroika piece, that you're basically taking the dollar and breaking it. But taking the Fed funds rate as a central interest rate for the world, and you're breaking it, and you're hypothesating it into different buckets which have different mechanisms because you can control them better. And at the same time, domestically, and here's the final piece,

and then I'll shut up, the Fed would be looking at banks and new startups or new financing mechanisms because, frankly, large US banks don't do lending to the real economy. It's not what they're there for. You know it, I know it. They know it.

Small banks do, local banks do. But you'll be looking at them and new mechanisms, new digital mechanisms, to use stable coin-backed lending into incentivized areas of the economy, which are related to the military-industrial complex. Like, we need to get more movement of critical minerals. We need to get more movement on drone tech, et cetera, et cetera. What financing mechanism could we use? Right, stablecoin back, there we go, smart contracts, etc. If that works, we've just rewired everything all at once and financial mechanism is more stable, the hard power, at least short term, medium term, nothing works in the long term.

The physical power is, the hard power is there to impose itself more on the world. And in a smaller territory, because it's not a global system anymore, the US has to contract from a global role to a largest dog in the pack role, you have like a new model. So freaks, this rip was brought to you by our good friends, the Bitcoin team at Block, Bitcoin at Block. Bitcoin was originally introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. We all know that. The idea wasn't just a buy and hold is to use Bitcoin in many different facets.

Holding is one facet, spending, receiving is another facet. I've been working towards this for 17 years and Block has put together a whole ecosystem of companies is to really bring about the reality of Bitcoin is everyday money. So with Cash App, you can buy, spend, send, receive, earn, get paid in Bitcoin. When you're trading over $2,000, you're not going to pay any fees on that. So then they're Square, which is helping bring Bitcoin into real world commerce. Eligible businesses can accept Bitcoin payments over Lightning with settlement in seconds and 0% processing fees. Customers can pay with Bitcoin or even dollars over Lightning through Cash App and help local

businesses keep more of every sale. It's making Bitcoin payments feel as easy as tapping a card. And when we're ready to hold Bitcoin, there's Bitcoin. It's a Bitcoin wallet built for real life. No seed phrases to two or three multi-sig. So no single points of failure. It has recovery and inheritance processes and capabilities built in. And the new big key device includes a screen.

So you can verify important actions directly on the device before approving them. So you know exactly what you're authorizing. So together, Cash App Square and Big Key are helping make Bitcoin easier to earn, save, spend, and secure. It's a simple idea. Bitcoin works when people can actually use it in the way that they want. That's Bitcoin app block. Breaks look at me. I'm glowing.

I've got like an Angels halo going around me. You know why that is. is 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, 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 percent 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 joincrowdhealth.com. You'll get $99 a month for the first three months

that you're on the crowd health platform in the community. Bitcoins. You found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. So many follow-ups there. I mean, started with stable coins. I'll just do rapid fire three off the top of that. Stable coins.

It's funny because. I remember when Tether launched, when BitFinex launched Tether 10 years ago at this point. And I've been following the development. This is a Bitcoin podcast. I've been in Bitcoin for 13 years. And I've been following what Pallow and Giancarlo and everybody at Bitfinex has been doing. And it's funny, like, Tether started out as this pet project where they didn't even think it was going to have a $100 million market cap. And now it's become this geopolitically important asset, not only,

tether, but now you have Circle and other stable coins. And obviously, the Genius Act is enabling as many people who can abide by the rules to spin up their own stable coins. And it's crazy to me how integral stable coins become in this geopolitical chess match that's playing out. The question I have, though, is can they get to the critical market cap quickly enough to basically have enough liquidity to manage all these things they're trying to do? on a large geopolitical international scale.

The second point I wanted to bring up was in relation to the need for commercial banks to invest in critical parts of the economy. It seems like the executive is leading with investments in Dell critical mineral companies. You have the executive in the U.S. acting like wartime footing in World War II. where they're quasi, they're not, obviously they're not nationalizing, but they are putting, they're buying equity stakes and companies that they deem to be critical to the reindustrialization and basically sending a signal, I think, to commercial banks, like, we're going to back these companies. You should too. So we'll just start with those two. Like stable coins, how big

does the market have to get in what period of time for this potential path to be successful? And then is the executive, do you think sending an explicit signal to the commercial banking system, we're going to buy stakes in these companies? This is where you should be investing to. Okay, so let's break them down. On the first one, nothing succeeds like success. So it needs to create a sound momentum quickly and it needs to get big quickly. If this is purely a market mechanism, purely markets, I don't think it works. But if the US uses its state power in various different mechanisms and state craft to do what I just alluded to, for example, saying we want to pay for imports with them, great.

Everyone who exports to the US is neither in or out. It's a gun on the table moment in the same way that this economic outcast is versus Iran. Your with us are against us. Very high risk. very high reward. If you can flip the Middle East, and so, for example, Saudi, Qatar, which is more questionable,

but that would be a good run to flip on the gas front, you get them to say, hey, we want to be paid in stable coins. That's the quick pro quo for us, for example, nuclear power from the US. Then you suddenly have a global nexus of countries who have to start getting stable coins to pay for oil.

Effectively, it's the petrol stablecoin, rather than the former petro-dollar which is not really the thing people think it is. It's the Eurodollar now, which is much broader. So you can put policy-related frameworks in place, which would accentuate that and accelerate it. And I can tell you, you know, having lived in nine different countries and emerging markets, there's going to be a chunky appetite

for people to hold what is a dollar equivalent if the taxman locally can't see it. and if you get paid what will not be a yield, but an incentive, which is what they're going to have to call it under the Clarity Act, I believe, which is not very clear, but that's the, I guess, the deliberate pun in it, right? So if you're getting paid to have that and you can keep it on an app on your phone that no one else can see via a VPN, well, then every country is going to have to close down their VPN access and internet access, et cetera, et cetera.

And you've already seen reports from even like major European banks. I don't mean commercial banks. I mean national central banks saying that, yeah, we can imagine there could be capital flight on the back of this. And in Europe, it will be limited to a degree because the euro works digitally so well within Europe. But in emerging markets, in other economies, in emerging markets, you could certainly see a lot of money heading in that direction if the US is seen as winning. If the US is seen as losing, and I don't want to get Trumpian, but yeah, you need

to be winning bigly, that builds momentum, which of course builds momentum. So it either goes very, very well or it goes very badly. Now, in terms of the second part of your question, it was so blindingly obvious to me when Trump was re-elected the day he won that we would go the route that we have. I published a paper on it, basically saying, welcome to the world of economic state craft, which is not a new concept. I kind of have that label tagged on me all the time. It's hundreds, if not thousands of year old concept. I was just merely banging the drum saying, guess what? Everyone will be using these two words going forward. And everyone is. They don't fully understand it, but they're all using it. And the obvious part is big corporations

have to do what's good for their national interest. I mean, there's nothing new with that, except for big corporations who have forgotten all about it because they've got very rich in the past 45 years, not doing it. And I believe that there will be more and more phone calls, more and more golden shares, more and more and more deliberate stakes, more and more stakes similar to the ones we've already seen where the government doesn't put any money down, but you just get 10% share. And it's not that they, I mean, they want to monetize that on the way up. Don't get me wrong. This is America.

Everyone wants to make a buck. It's more that they want to seat at the table when they're listening to the strategic decisions. Like, should we shut down all of our plants in, you know, in the middle of America and send them to China or not? You want a guy at the table saying, I'm voting not rather than it happening and you're finding out about it when it's already happened, which is how we've done everything for 45 years. Well, I think that's a big question, is that 45-year period, maybe we don't call complacency, but that lull in viewing the world through the lens that you have to view it through now,

how far as that set? Like, how quickly do you think the American economy, particularly around this idea of re-industrialization, can reorient itself? Do you think it's possible? Look, it's possible, but all the radical mechanisms and more that I've just already described to you, in which I fleshed out in that paper you referred to. We can put a link to it at the bottom or something. All that and more need to be done.

And I think at minimum it's a 10-year project. This is never a second-term Trump project. This is just the first foundations he's digging here. Then you have to go up. It's probably another two terms after that. I think you can start to achieve something real within that, which would be altogether, you know, if you include the first Trump term,

which was kind of hot and cold, it would be 16 years on and off, or which maybe if you take away all the COVID distractions and everything, maybe a good 12 years of it, you know, was focused on that to try and reverse 40, 45. I do think it can work, but it's by no means a gimmie. And at every single step of the way, there will be vested interests who have made a fortune from the past system or who are ideologically still wedded to how things were done,

which I fully understand. If you've grown up in a system when you press the red button, you know, you get a free meal. You're going to want to keep pressing that red button getting your free meal. You don't want to have to go and cook your own lunch, right? Or pay for your own lunch. And we're going to fight it every step of the way. But I do believe that on balance, even though it's on a razor's edge at the moment, that the momentum is with the US and that we are more likely to fall off on what for the Trump agenda would be the right side of it,

than the wrong side of it. But things can change. You have to monitor so many things all the time to keep an eye on it. And for example, that AGI news today, today in my time as I'm speaking, I don't know if that's hype. It's quite likely to be hype, right?

But I'm not making any kind of equity call. But just imagine for a moment it's true. Just imagine the US has managed to generate AGI years ahead of everybody else. Who else is even close to that? China claims to be, I don't know if they really are or not, Europe's nowhere, no one else is anywhere. What would AGI look like? Really? What would AGI look like in 12 months if it really is AGI and can now improve itself at an expenditure rate?

What are the implications of that? Now, they're mind-blowing. But of course, you still have the physical limits that you actually physically have to be able to have the atoms to do stuff. You still need the diesel, you still need the metals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But who's to say AGI can't find new production systems, that it can't find new processes to accelerate a lot of these, you know, frankly 19th and 20th century mechanisms that we use to do certain things using chemicals? I don't know. Nobody knows. But we could find out.

So it could be transformative or it could be hype just to try and, you know, get ahead, one firm, get ahead of the other in it for an equity bump. I'm looking for a $2 trillion IPO here. Exactly. Exactly. All right, freaks. You know, I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Avan Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal.

You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single SAT. No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws. And your Bitcoin is custody by Bitco, one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. Aven never lends it out. There's no rehypification. You stay in control. You can lock in a fixed rate for up to. to 10 years, 10 years, that's 10 times longer than most lenders out there, where go interest only

for up to five years. Rates started 8.99% APR for a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity, it's hard to beat. On top of this, that's what, you also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card. Spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin, that's the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and you need liquidity without triggering a taxable event, this is worth a serious look. Go to Aven.com slash Bitcoin. That's Avae. VEN.com slash Bitcoin. Check it out. So, freaks. This rip was brought to you by our good friends at salt of the earth.

It's so delicious. This is my pink lemonade electrolyte mix. It's pink Himalayan salt. There's no sugar. It's way better than LMNT liquid IV. I went through a big electrolyte kick, testing them all out. And I landed on this, settled on this, been drinking it pretty consistently every day for two years now.

It is my favorite. This is the pink lemonade. They have orange here. As you can see, this one's ripped. I had this on the train ride back from New York last night. I'm always stocked up with these things. They also have creatine packets. Very convenient, particularly if you're traveling,

and you like to work out. You like get the brain juices flowing. They have these creatine packets as well. They're about to launch a bunch more flavors, lemon lime, watermelon, and a few others as well. So go check it out. Go to drink sote, D-R-I-N-K-S-O-T-E.com. Use the code T-F-T-C for 15% off.

Seriously, game-changer in our house. My wife drinks it. I drink it. Or boys drink it. Stay hydrated. It's a beautiful thing. Well, that, and it's very clear to me. So I've been in Bitcoin mining for 10 years.

And in the industry, in the Bitcoin mining industry, eight years ago, when when Bitcoin mining became somewhat prominent in the, you know, US and it's become very prominent. I think still to this day, 30% of Bitcoin network hash rate is in the United States. But as we were building out the infrastructure, the bring that hash rate to the United States became abundantly clear rather quickly. The grid system outside of ERCOT in Texas, which is a relatively free market, is a bit brittle and has been desperately, or has been critically underinvested in for 50 years. And I think that, I would say, I would not be shocked of AGI is here.

If Astro 6's benchmark scores are what they're advertised to be, like we are close to AGI. Seoul 5.6, but it's at 7.8% AGI. They're marketing Astro 6 at 98%. So that is an incredible jump. And if it is here, then we can utilize that tool to our advantage. It will be massive. The question is, will we have the power to electrify?

the compute to actually effectuate the solutions that this AGI may be able to provide. I still think that's an open question. I do think American ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit has been reinvigorated in a way that makes me incredibly optimistic. I'm sure you've seen it with a Colossus 1, Colossus 2, this whole concept of bring your own generation that's spin up a bunch of natural gas turbines, turbines not connected to the grid, and just run these data centers without even working. about having the interconnect. So I think there's a view to do that. There's a way to do that there,

and I am a bit optimistic towards that. But to your point, it is very high stakes. It's like a, if you shoot for it, you got to hit it because if you miss, uh, the other side of that miss is is pretty pretty bad. And bringing this back to jumping around here, but I, I want to touch on it too, because we mentioned the long end of the yield curve. And I think it plays into this because we're about the financing of this infrastructure build out, everybody's focused on the long end of the yield curve. One thing that I've been following as the 10-year and 30-year have been drifting up is the move index, the volatility index. And I'm interested to get your perspective on that. Like, do you think that's what dissent is actually looking at? He knows that yields have to drift

higher just because of the state of the fiscal situation in the United States and the national debt. And he just needs to manage that drift upwards by managing the volatility on my way up? I'm not sure about that because the obstacles really, as you just mentioned, are physical. I'm not an MMT advocate. I'm a post-Kinzean, and that I've always argued that MMT as it's sold does make sense if you've got empty factories and unemployed people sitting around, you know, plotting revolution. Yeah, in that environment, of course, print money and get everyone employed, start making stuff, right? But when you're importing from everybody else, no one else can do it without the currency going down the drain, and the US could do it for as long as it was hegemon,

but could only do it for so long before everyone else started to challenge that hegemony, which is where we are now. So therefore, effectively, it's a zero-sum game. You can only do that. If you run a trade surplus like China behind a firewall, then you can do MMT, which is effectively what they're doing into the physical economy, right? And the US needs to replicate that. What I'm saying is effectively, it's a physical challenge to try and get this stuff done, I don't necessarily see that it's capital constraint in that we still are in, like it or not, a fiat system. We can still. And for example, you're talking about like a $2 trillion valuation, right, for stock X. I'm not, stock Y, Z, right? And not giving any kind of

recommendation. We have funny money figures flying around, right? And that two can become three, can become four. In what way are we capital limited? We're not. We're not. We're We're not capital limited. Now, you can say, okay, yeah, anything's unlimited depending on the price. And certainly, in terms of the rate, people are prepared to lend to the government, US government and what other governments are, that is moving higher. But I reflect back, that's not moving higher because people are necessarily worried about the term premium, which I don't think is that different in the US from anywhere else yet.

In fact, from Fed data, it's better than in Germany and Japan, the long-end term premium. And even break-even inflation rates, yep, they're not particularly good, but they're not shocking either, right? Now, that says something about how we measure inflation as well. And I think there are a big question marks over, you know, inflation and how much it really is hurting people. I'm a big believer that inflation is higher than people think because, you know, you say a flat-screen TV is getting cheaper in real terms. Yeah, I buy one every five years. You know, I eat three times a day, right? So the periodicity of what you're looking at matters more for your conception and your purchasing power of inflation.

rather than something much lumpier. I don't know the way we do the indices. Sidebar. The real problem is physicality. So that is where I think we have to be looking at, you know, what is the yield? What is the inflation? Like if you don't have enough copper or nickel or yadda yada yada to do it, or as Elon Musk was saying recently, you know, the big blades for these gas turbines, right?

If you don't have any of these things, that's your problem. And to say that that is important, it's an understatement, to say that this is different from how we've had 45 years of thinking, even with the greatest respect, what you were just alluding to about managing volatility on the financial market front, market-shmarkets. I mean, they are important. Don't get me wrong. It's stuff that matters. So you can control the volatility of anything that you want. You can control, you know, bond yields with yield. of control. Then, of course, the currency can go through the floor, et cetera, et cetera. Any of these can be moved at another financial market variable cost, but it doesn't produce stuff. So I already mentioned that if you want inflation to come down, make peace with Russia and Iran on their terms and lose global power, then you get cheaper oil, or arm up and make sure that you can defeat them or do a deal with them on your terms, at which point oil comes down again. And then bond yields

come down and then volatility comes down. But that's just one crude, rude, rude metric, right? There are many, many other geopolitical supply chains and product markets that need to be looked at in their totality. And I think that's what Besson is looking at. I certainly hope that's what he's looking at. Everything else I think is just damage control, you know, to try and make sure that the consumer isn't too shocked during this particular process.

Well, the former scenario that you laid out, with Iran and Russia, particularly, that would align with a national security strategy that was laid out. Depending on who you ask in America, some people are like, just get us out, pack it in. Let's focus on the U.S. and our hemisphere. I'm not going to say whether or not that's popular opinion or not, but I know for sure that there's definitely a number of Americans. you're like, I'd be fine with that. Whether or not they understand the geopolitical knock-on ramifications of that is another thing. But yeah. And outside, well, outside of that, again, the other big piece of the puzzle is China.

And basically piggybacking on what you just said, how much leverage is China have right now in this whole situation in this whole scenario, considering they have all the stuff. They build out their energy for sure. I look at the chart of energy generation growth in China. in awe and as an American jealous that they've done this. But obviously they have a demographic problem, and it's a bit opaque from a westerner looking into what's going on in China. A lot of people in our neck of the woods don't really have an understanding of how China operates.

It's positioned as this communist country. But if you've ever worked with Chinese people, there's some of the most capitalistic people you've ever met in your life. And I think that's the big unknown. for many people are just watching mainstream media in the US is what is actually happening in China and how much leverage do they have? Huge leverage, obviously. They're an incredibly important economy and they're massively more important in all the areas

that America needs to be focusing on, which is the physical. Because in the financial, America is the giant. But this is no longer about finance. As I said, you need that finance power. Don't get me wrong. I don't dismiss finance. I work in finance, right? You need it, but you need it.

to do something useful. So the fact that you can have a company coming to market and saying, we're worth $2 trillion, maybe $3, maybe $4, and people from all around the world will be giving you their money. That shows you the finance isn't important as a conduit, but it has to be into something that generates power based on the physical. That's what I'm saying. So China understands the physical part, better than anybody.

They have a whole stack of problems that aren't reported. For example, now the clarity of their data is not that good. The opacity is rising all the time. And what you can see from some reports is that even the Wall Street Journal, so the Washington Post was reporting on this yesterday, that there's more and more automation of this incredibly productive system that they have, upstream to downstream coming through, which is even starting to see job layoffs in China.

Now, they have huge demographic problems. I mean, staggering to the point that if you ask me whose population will be larger in the year 2100, I would argue the US. That's baked into the cake already, particularly if immigration were to pick up again, even moderately. And if demographics, fertility were to pick up, which at the moment it isn't, but it could do, then yeah, the US will have a larger population than China in a year 2100, which people can't get their head around, but it's already happening so much.

But within their current labour force, like, say, 750 million people, the Washington Post is reporting that around 30,000, 350 million are going to be gig workers, you know, doing side jobs within the next year or two because they're just being laid off from their factory jobs because everything's now being automated. Now, ironically, when you throw the word communist about, that's exactly what Karl Marx was arguing was that would end up basically undermining capitalism because effectively there's no one to buy the products.

So, you know, you fire all the workers in the factory to make it more efficiently, but you don't pay them anything. And as a result, they can't afford to buy your product. Now, that was debunked by economists, you know, 100 years ago, at least, pointing out that it's very easy if you just share the productivity games. So either people who are left in the factory, you pay them really well. And then they can afford to spend a lot and that money flows down and employs other people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So a distribution or a global flow, the circulation of capital and commodities, as Marx revert to it, doesn't work in the current system. That's one of the reasons why things are breaking down. So China is flooding the world. world with stuff with this incredible energy complex, this incredible manufacturing complex, but they can't absorb it domestically because people haven't got the money. And internationally, everyone is turning around and saying, well, we don't want the stuff anymore because it means we're going to follow you down that path. We will all be basically doing three or four part-time

jobs without any industry as these automated factories make everything and all the return flows to China, except China actually loses money on most of what they're making. One third of Chinese companies now lose money doing it. It's effectively been propped. It's effectively been propped. up by subsidies that the fiscal situation in China is far worse than the US, far worse. They're just behind a firewall and you can't see it. So again, I'm throwing in a lot of information. The point is China is streets ahead of the US where it needs to be in some areas, but the overall package has got massive Achilles heels that aren't seen. But the US can't use what it would think would be a strength like the financial muscle against China because it's built a system where it's ring fenced.

And we even saw that with Iran where the US thought they could show, look, We control hormones. You're not going to get any oil from them the same way that you didn't get any oil from Venezuela. And China turned around and basically showed the world, hey, first of all, we can cut our oil usage by like 6 million barrels a day, which is just unprecedented. We're that electrified now. We don't need it. Like, wow. And secondly, we've probably got a year's worth of reserves.

So if you want to try that geopolitical squeeze on us, we won't sell you X, Y, or Z for a year. See how you get on. So it's a standoff. And both sides have huge strengths and huge weaknesses. And the U.S. needs to take more pages out of the Chinese book. And I don't think China is going to take many out of the U.S. That's so fascinating. So how do you think the rest of the year looks sick?

Because as you're saying that, the interesting thing of, one of the interesting variables of the U.S. is these election cycles. And we're heading into midterms here in the next couple of months. and they typically throw a wrench and trying to make these geopolitical maneuvers because you're worried about the elections for the reps and the senators and governors. And so we have this toss-up

of who's going to win the House and the Senate and who's actually going to win the House and is the Trump administration going to be able to use Congress to push through their agenda? And does that slow down their ability to make the moves they need to move, they need to make at this particular point in time with everything going on around the world,

which you described for the first 50 minutes of this conversation. So what should we be looking for throughout the rest of the year in terms of the strategic moves that need to be made in the position that the Trump administration is in their ability to make those moves considering midterms? Sure. I'll try and be more concise. So we have the physical, which we've discussed, we have the geopolitical. And on that particular front, the risk is that, as I said, after the midterms,

which I'll come back to, or move on to in a second, after the midterms, I think the greatest likelihood, my base case is that the US escalates versus Iran again. Because, you know, the economic war is working. It is to a degree. But you need to give it a push. And Iran, of course, is more likely to try and escalate in turn if the economic war is biting. it can start firing missiles at desalination plants or oil fields in the region at which point the US is going to get dragged in again.

So expect escalation there. The word on the street is that even by the end of this month, potentially Russia could escalate against Ukraine. And again, this is just speculation, but you see people talking about not just massive missile attacks on Ukraine to deliberately try and break them over winter, which is really going to hurt their economy and their population. but to do grey-zoner tanks on Europe, to maybe even transgress and do something against NATO, like the Baltics, just to see if NATO is prepared to say we're going to fight.

Questionable whether they actually would, that's the whole point. Or even talk of a nuclear weapon, a tactical nuclear weapon, just to say, hey, guys, we have these. You know, we'll let one off against a, in a field over there in Ukraine, just to show you that we've got them, because that's how serious this is. I don't think China wants Russia to do that, but you can't rule anything how. not if Russia keeps getting its oil refinery smashed the way the Ukraine is doing at the moment. So that's geopolitically. And of course, the two would happen together.

If Iran escalates, Russia will at the same time and vice versa, because you want to have that mess on two different fronts. And then the real tail risk is only those two who escalate. There are other players who could escalate. So it could be a really, really noisy end of year into the Christmas period, potentially. Rumors of a Putin-Trump-she meeting November 19th, APEC. If that's true, you know, really, really interesting what does or doesn't emerge from that. Politically, no one knows what the midterms will look like. All I would say is this.

We have had headline after headline fest for years saying it's going to go one way or the other, and they're often wrong. And I did see a poll yesterday for whatever it's worth. For the first time, I think the generic Republicans in the House, the likely voters were actually plus one. versus Democrats. And we remember we're looking at a series of local races, not national. And while Trump himself, I believe, is unpopular, looking at the aggregate polling, that doesn't mean that the alternative agenda is popular. So it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the Republicans

retain both the Senate and the House, not to me anyway. But equally, you know, the mainstream view that they lose both cannot be entirely ruled out. Either way, I can guarantee you two things. we see escalation from Trump because he will just rely on executive orders more and more, which is already having to do. Congress is doing very, very little. So just executive orders for next two years or 18 months, whatever. No, two, sorry, two years. And at the same time, within the democratic camp, you will have a continual move to the left. Because you've already seen this week, I believe AOC was rejected by the DSA as a prospective candidate, the president, in 2028 because she's not radical enough.

So once a revolution starts moving, it eats its own young, and it will continue moving leftwards in the same way that politics in many other countries is moving more and more to the right. The centre will not hold in that particular environment. I didn't ever think it could because it doesn't produce policies that produce centrists. It produces policies that produce people on the far left and the far right, given enough time. And that's exactly what we see coming now. So I see instability politically, whatever happens.

I see instability geopolitically with a narrow chance of some great deal being done, but I don't think that's very realistic. And so markets are going to have to adjust to that because it implies more problems in energy markets and energy prices being, you know, uncomfortably high, particularly for diesel, etc., going forward. And everyone else will then have to try and find whatever coping mechanism they have got. And the US has got a much bigger bag of tricks than most in that respect. I want to end it on Europe. What is going to happen with Europe? We can tie this in to everything. Obviously you just mentioned dark horse, Russia, Baltics,

gray zone area in Europe. On the financial side, Van der Leyen coming out. And again, they've been beating the strum for years, but again, explicitly saying there's X trillions of dollars or euros and savings accounts throughout Europe.

We need to tap into those to reinvest in the European economy. You have Canada. going to a European Parliament event. You have Mark Carney going over there. Obviously, we have the US Canada TIF going on right now. When we talked about the relative structural weaknesses that exists in the US because of the last 50 years of underinvestment in critical infrastructure, it seems like Europe may be in an even worse spot and less coordinated in solving their problems.

Is that how you see it? Yeah. Europe's in a very, very, very, tricky spot. And as I alluded to at the beginning, more and more, you know, conservative with a small C, centrist organizations and think tanks and politicians are coming out and saying the same thing. This is bad and getting worse. And we really need to shake the box. It remains to be seen how the box will be shaken by whom and how many pieces, you know, realign within that box were that to happen. Because Europe, if Europe could manage that

to, you know, get out of its mess with off-sides and working groups and acronyms and grand speeches, it would already be the world hegemon. But, you know, it's very, very hard to get one country to change. It's incredibly hard to get 27 countries to change when, you know, one of them can veto just about anything. So it remains to be seen. But I do think the pressure is building there for sure. A key thing to watch, by the way, is in October. So next month, Europe is supposed to tell China, okay, either you have changed your trade policy towards us because Europe's trade deficit with China is exploding.

It's far bigger than America's now, which is completely bloody obvious that would happen because they refused to tariff anything or anything much. Either you change or we're going to start a trade war with you. So watch that one. If Europe actually starts a trade war with China, if it does, then that snowball is going to turn into an avalanche because it will have to do so much more on the back of that.

And if it doesn't, even when it's got an enormous and exponentially increasing trade deficit with China, then I'm not sure what it can do. Yeah. I feel like they don't have a lot of leverage when it comes to trying to get into a trade war with China. Well, Europe doesn't have a great deal to leverage with China. It doesn't have a great deal to leverage in America. It doesn't have a great deal of leverage with anyone because it didn't build up an economy or political economy that created leverage.

It was built for an idealist, neoliberal, pacifist world that doesn't have exist. So, you know, that means it has to change. And it accepts that. The question is how it does it and when. Yeah. Maybe you shouldn't decommission all those nuclear and coal power plants. Well, I'm not giving policy advice. I'm just analyzing, but clearly it's asking lots of questions. Anyway, I hope that's covered everything you wanted to do today. And we didn't even mention Bitcoin. I apologize, but maybe next time. But there's so much to talk about, so much to cover. And as I said, They're all integrated if you choose to try and see the bigger picture. I understand many people don't because it's exhausting, you know, brain busting,

etc. But I do genuinely think I'm not mad that there is a threat to all this. There is a pattern there. And, you know, please let's continue the conversation. We'd love to, Michael. Thank you for your time. This was an absolute pleasure for me. Me too.

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

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