TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: Druck and Disorderly

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

The Treasury declared economic D-Day on Iran the same week traffic through the Strait of Hormuz jumped 400% and Trump announced a deal for 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. None of that is a coincidence. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: What Operation Economic Outcast and secondary sanctions are actually targeting Why Bessent refused to rule out sanctioning Chinese banks Reports of a canal being dredged in Oman to route around Hormuz How the Venezuela deal more than doubles US access to proven reserves Why Druckenmiller's op ed makes an argument that missed its exit 20 years ago Trade unions turning into the loudest defenders of the AI build out TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Jackson Hole in the rearview and a dressed down August recap 00:00:37 - Treasury's economic D-Day and Operation Economic Outcast 00:02:20 - Secondary sanctions covering digital assets, gold and shipping 00:02:47 - Whether Chinese banks are above the reach of US sanctions 00:05:03 - Sanctions as a way to light up the map 00:05:58 - Hormuz traffic up 400% and a canal being dredged in Oman 00:09:52 - Gas prices and short memories heading into the midterms 00:12:35 - Why Hormuz is a better card to hold than to play 00:13:42 - Venezuela deal for 65 billion barrels of oil reserves 00:17:17 - Pushing China out of the Western Hemisphere 00:18:13 - Druckenmiller's op ed and the entitlements problem 00:20:12 - Yield management and the World War Two analogy 00:24:16 - Why entitlement reform is never going to happen 00:24:55 - Print the difference or redesign the game board 00:27:43 - Trade unions becoming the AI build out's best allies 00:31:29 - A quantum resistant Bitcoin transaction lands on mainnet SUBSCRIBE › Newsletter (free): https://tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ › YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TFTC?sub_confirmation=1 FOLLOW US › X: https://x.com/tftc21 › Nostr: https://primal.net/tftc FOLLOW MARTY › X: https://x.com/MartyBent › Timestamp: https://www.ten31timestamp.com/ › John Arnold: https://x.com/JohnArnoldTen31 › Ten31: https://ten31.xyz TFTC #MartyBent #Iran #Venezuela #Bitcoin

It's the last day of August. I don't think John and I took a vacation this summer. So we decided to dress down. It's a t-shirt, 1031 time stamp recap episode today. You know, when you do what we do, when your professional situation monitor, every day is a vacation, right? So I feel good.

I'm feeling arrested. I am too. I am too. I'm feeling about eight hours of sleep last night. Got the kids at the home base back from the shore. We're ready to dive in. A lot going on in the world. We mentioned last week that Jackson Hole,

would be happening between last week's episode and this week's episode happened over the weekend. We'll touch on that, but we're going to start where we always start, the straight-at-hermuse, Iran, Treasury, launching unprecedented campaign against Iranian regime on economic D-Day and also launching Operation Economic Outcast. We want to make clear here today that no one is above the reach of the U.S. sanctions. Besant said when asked whether the U.S. would sanction Chinese banks that do business with Iran. I don't think I mentioned it. I wanted to surprise John because I know of how big of a fan he is of Mindprint Hash. But I had a conversation with Matt Dynes early last week where we talked about

economic D-Day and what it means. But I want to hear your perspective, John. Yeah, I think, so I listened to, I haven't actually finished your conversation with him from last week. I did listen to the guys this past week. And this is now just a Mindprint Hash recap show for the record. But no, I mean, I think it brings up a whole thing. It brings up a lot of good points and a couple of things that I was going to flag here, too.

I like Matt's framing that the phrasing of this as economic D-Day is notable because, you know, D-Day is the landing point, not like the end of the end of the war, kind of breaching enemy territory, so to speak. And then, you know, moving forward and gaining ground from there if it works. So, but I think it's helpful framing to keep in mind that this is, you know, probably the, even in the administration's mind, kind of the beginning, not the end. You know, very notable, obviously, for a variety of reasons, kind of broad, broad sweep. sanctions, kind of wide birth of what's being affected here, number of entities, etc. Also, it's not on the screenshot here that we have in the video if you're watching, but secondary sanctions threatened for any institutions or countries that are, you know, deemed to be working with Iran along, along any of these axes that are cited here, which

interestingly, the first of which is digital assets. So digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping that in the administration's words, the Iranian regime uses to try to prop up its failing economy. So secondary sanctions are much broader than your kind of typical sanctions package and you kind of allow, give the Treasury and OFAC leeway to kind of reach into the pockets of actors that are potentially well beyond kind of the first order of, you know, who's kind of doing business, you know, with Iran, like immediately. And I think notable that in Besson's press conference to talk about this, you was specifically asked, you know, could China even be affected by by these sanctions, Chinese banks, and you pretty much deferred and said, you know,

no one is going to be above the reach. Now, you could argue that that's kind of a veiled threat and kind of, you know, some bluster. And I think that's certainly what, how the administration would like you to view it. He could also argue that he could have taken an even stronger stance and said, you know, we're definitely going after China. I don't know if that's strategically advantageous. And he kind of specifically even said, you know, we're going to try to let people, you know, do in his view, quote unquote, the right thing because there's no reason to, you know, blow up a bunch of trade relationships in the global economy if we don't have to, but, you know, watch out because we will.

So I think it's definitely an escalation. And I think that the China angle, as we always bring up on here, is one of the, one of the big ones. We probably, the really the driving force behind a lot of it, in addition to the ongoing controlled demolition potentially of the euro dollar market, which we can get into. But I do think it's, it's notable, right? It's not, I saw a lot of commentary over the past week saying, like, well, you know, sanctions never do anything and this is just a bluster from the administration because it's kind of scared to go on you know the offensive or get kinetic and it knows it can't win so it's kind of throwing this

package out there just to kind of as a token way to tuck its tail between its legs and kind of go home and I mean I think that's I think that's the wrong read I definitely think there have been sanctions on Iran before and prior administrations that have you know not really gone anywhere I think you can argue that those were maybe not as committed to targeting some of the key nodes that I think the administration is actually interested in going after, which are probably like well beyond Iran, which, you know, Matt's documented well. Tom Longo's documented well in the UK and in China and elsewhere. So, you know, remains to be seen. It's absolutely the case that sanctions generally don't have a great track record of kind of doing what you want them to do and really hitting the people that you want

them to hit. So I think we'll have to see if these are different. But I do think given how clearly this fits into all the other strategic kind of initiatives that are, you know, at play here, all the plates that are spinning. I think the wrong read is to say that, you know, this is kind of a nothing burger announcement that isn't going to matter in the long run. Yeah, I recall a conversation out with Tom Long ago last year describing sanctions is you got to look past the sort of first layer implications and they're a good way to basically light up the map of, I think the reaction to sanctions is what strategically people are looking at. at like okay you put sanctions on who do they fall back to like what routes should begin routing

through after that to highlight where their allies and potentially our adversaries are to really just like paint the map of who's working together behind the scenes yeah right like throwing up friction into kind of existing established channels and kind of like a smoke out campaign right to kind of see where where activity goes i think that's uh that's a decent read but again like all the you know aligns with everything that we've been talking about here and has some some interesting backdrop as well that you just scroll the next slide, I'll let you set it up. But we're in a, it's an interestingly timed announcement for sure. Yeah, timing announcements is important if you think you have leverage and a lot of the

conversation over the last six months, eight months has been around oil and gas markets and the traffic in the Strait of Hermuz will lead to deleterious effects in the supply chain and will not have knock on effects in terms of the price of fuels and inflation throughout the economy as fuel is the base layer of our economy and looks like they had some leverage because the the sea lanes and the strait are opening up and i mentioned this to john before we hit record he wasn't monitoring the situation too well on friday but there's also reports out there that the u.s department of war is dredging a canal on the omani side of the strait to create another pathway for oil tankers to get through um so it looks like traffic is skyrocketing

nearly 400% U.S. is returning staff to the Middle East. Goldman says, Hermuz, oil flows at two-thirds of pre-war levels. So it looks like the flow of oil is continuing. And if the reports out of the weekend are to be believed, it looks like the Department of War in the United States is creating optionality for themselves

by dredging a canal in Oman right now. Yeah. The male impulse to go dredge a canal to rat around a town. attacks in a contested waterway. Yeah, look, I, you know, I only saw the tweet right before this recording. So obviously, I'm really failing in my situation monitoring. We'll see if that gets more confirmation in airplay. Wouldn't be surprised in any way if that's happening. And we did know that, you know, the kind of the midnight runs that were happening along the, the Omanecoast

line were helping get a lot more well out of, out of the straight. But I think, yeah, all of these headlines hit last week. And I think, you know, you can argue over numbers. You can argue over whether there's kind of Western bias to any of them. And it's probably the case to some degree. But I do think, kind of whether there's smoke, there's fire. And this is the chess board seems to be kind of moving in a certain direction here. You know, if it's one headline like this every now and then, that's, you know, that's one thing. But I think we've gotten a steadier and steadier drip of these for different sources over the last few weeks.

And I think that's, you know, important to kind of keep an eye on. And I think generally like it's, this is not, you know, a rah-rah US podcast. This is not saying like that's, you know, the basically, you know, we're up 40-0 in the fourth quarter and the games also is already basically one. Not really the point at all. But I think it's important to just kind of level set relative to, you know, the context of the overall drift of the story over the past year or the past six months. just like full stop, if you were saying that the oil market's going to implode, the U.S. is going to be totally, you know, strategically wiped out and have no leverage and it's all going to be, it's all going to be kaput by, you know, if this isn't resolved by like April

or May or whatever, like you were just wrong. Like full stop, like that was not correct. And there were all of these things, you know, happening in the background, which we, you know, we don't have any particular insight into a lot of it. Obviously, we have no security clearance. But like if you're kind of paying attention, then it's, it seemed like it was all about like, how do you extend and pretend? How do you, you know, open up a little more, a little more leakage here, a little more leakage there? How do you backfill lost volumes and kind of all these different ways? And it's kind of, you know, the opposite of death by a thousand cuts, right? It's like, you know, survival by a thousand little maneuvers. TBD,

if it will continue. But like, this is kind of what we were, you know, signaling early in the spring. It's like it looks like this isn't necessarily like nuclear yet. Let's see how it plays out. And thus far, I think the things that we've been seeing over the last couple weeks continue to point meaningfully in that direction. And I think probably, you know, to your point, set up, the Treasury set up the administration to feel like it had, you know, the hand to really, you know, push. And maybe those two things in conjunction will make the sanctions more, you know, meaningful this time around than they had been previously. Yeah. And the timing is very positive for the domestic side of things, too. If you're able to signal like, hey, straight's open, not even signal, just verify that that traffic's up.

You're dredging an alternative pathway in case things do. Hit the fan. Oil prices coming down leading in the midterms. Like that's what you want to see because we have very short-term memories here in the United States. So if gas prices are coming down as we're everybody's heading to the polls to vote on midterms, that's like a positive indicator in their mind as they're headed. like, okay, gas prices are back down.

Maybe they're not doing such a bad job. Maybe we will vote red this time. So I think there's definitely some non-coincidental timing of these moves leading up to midterms as well. And we'll get into it in a bit too, but it's got to keep oil in the back of your mind and energy in general as a key input. Obviously into everything in the economy and the inflation picture and what that does, then, you know, that is then an input into where rates want to go, right? So we'll get into that more, but I think it's critical to continue focusing on a path of oil energy prices as like an input into that downstream question of, you know, can the U.S. manage? It's Achilles heel of its massive debt burden that we've talked about. So just kind of put a pen in that and keep it in mind. Yeah. And speaking of putting a pin on Murom conversation and John's point of victory by a thousand little maneuvers. I think you were alluding to this in your previous comments. But.

It seems like if everything is as presented in the headlines and the stories and what we're covering while we're monitoring the situation, it looks like we did successfully push the people of Iran to a limit where they're demanding the war to end. And there are real consequences that are basically leading people to a point of exasperation. Or it's like, okay, let's move on. Yeah. Like it maybe, maybe that's the case. Maybe it's not. Maybe these headlines are, you know, overly biased and overly tilted toward kind of a Western U.S. perspective. Always got to keep that in mind, fog of war and everything.

I think these are at least highlighting that, you know, as we've talked about on the show before, like there's the civilian component of the government and the IRGC, which is much more kind of hardline and maybe more plugged into kind of some of the Eurodollar and dark money networks that are really driving this whole thing. But it certainly looks like, again, you're getting a drip of headlines from the more, you know, civilian moderate side of the aisle pointing to a desire to, you know, wrap this thing up sooner than later and realizing that there are limits to the leverage points that, you know, Iran does have. And I think everything we just talked about with Stratio-Farmuz is certainly related to that. It's also tough because it's like that that's a card that it's almost a better card to just

have in your back pocket and be threatening to play than one that you actually play. Because like when you play it, you know, all of your neighboring countries, right, are just never going to allowed this to happen again. It's going to take a few years to dredge up, you know, new canals and open up new pipeline capacity that we've talked about with East-West Pipeline, Saudi Arabia, etc. It's going to take, you know, more several years to maybe we'll get into this in a minute, but find alternative sources of oil to make hormones itself less meaningful. But like as soon as you play this card, like you better hope that you win with it, right? Because you do it once and like everyone else is immediately going to decide we will never ever allow this to happen again.

will find any way to avoid this even if it takes a few years. So I think the the shot clock on the relevance of Hormuz as a leverage point, you know, just is running down, you know, rapidly every day. And I think that's something that, you know, maybe the more kind of moderate elements of the government are, you know, carefully considering. Yeah. And speaking of finding alternative sources of oil, big headline towards the end of last week, big deal in Venezuela. Trump says the U.S. has entered a deal of Venezuela to take control of 65 billion barrels of oil reserves. So it was a little under a year ago where, or excuse me, at the beginning of the year, where at the end of last year, where we went in and took Maduro out and people have been

wondering what's going to happen with Venezuela, particularly as it pertains to the U.S.'s relations with Venezuela and their oil. And I think many people were expecting there would be some sort of deal. I don't know if everybody was thinking it was going to be the whole shebang, but it looks like we're getting the whole shabang here. I mean, it's a lot, right? It's the headline number is more than doubles U.S.'s current access to proven reserves. And that's obviously meaningful. I think, you know, to be to be clear, like this is a Trump-sized deal, which means like every, basically every detail still needs to be worked out or at least announced.

We don't really know a lot about this. We don't know what capital commitments are, who pays for what, what the timeline is. you know, it's not like this tomorrow we wake up and there are 65 billion additional barrels of oil that the U.S. can just kind of access free and clear. This will take likely years to kind materialize in terms of actual flows into the oil market. And so all those caveats are relevant. And certainly like there's a chance it falls through. Like who knows what's actually been signed firmly committed. But again, like I think all those caveats aside, like if you were if you were coming into the year, you know, Jan 1 before Maduro was taken out.

you were told only, you know, the, everything that had gone on in Iran and you were looking at kind of the US strategic position and thinking about energy impacts. I think, you know, if I then also told you that this deal was going to happen, you would say, okay, like, I can at least squint and see, like, what they're trying to do here. And I think anyone who looks at, you know, this headline and says, oh, well, that's a nothing burger. Again, you know, similar to the Treasury thing we talked about earlier in the episode, if you look at this and say, it's irrelevant, that's Trump bluster.

That doesn't matter. I think that's just like straight up the wrong read. I think you're being very intellectually dishonest if you think that a deal like this, as novel as it is, in terms especially as it relates to the U.S., actually going and taking a stake in, I think it's a JV, the company that's going to be responsible for and have the benefit from these barrels of oil, you know, the structure of it to basically take out a leader of a sovereign nation, again, right or wrong, and then spin up a new corporate entity that the government controls to go take a massive amount of the interest in oil fields. of a nation that has the most proven reserves in the world.

Like if you're going to tell me that that's somehow not relevant, I mean, I just don't really think you're being very serious. So, but it all, like we've been saying, not to do the pepicellia mean, but it all ties together, right? It's all these plates have been kept spinning at once. And this is, you know, very, very clear how this is meaningful to, you know, kind of the rest of the dynamics that we've talked about. And correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't include the Guyana oil assets.

I think that is right, but I would have to go back and look and either way, I bring it up because I don't think it does. And you have to imagine that Guyana would be more willing to work with the U.S. government compared to the Maduro regime. Yes. So the point being is that there's potentially even more reserves that we can tap into if we come correct to Guyana and say, hey, let's help you monetize these assets. Yeah. I think that's, you know, reasonable and certainly like the last year has shown you, like, something like that is definitely not beyond the pale or outside the Overton window anymore. And I think the point that I highlighted here on the video, on the slide, is just notable, too,

as it relates to how you think about all these discussions, like the interests that in a lot of these oil fields that the U.S. is taking over, you know, were controlled by a former Venezuelan insiders and the Maduro government who are being indicted, kind of, you know, extracted and thrown out. but more interestingly, by China, right? So this is like maybe the purest expression that we've seen so far, even more so probably than Maduro being taken out of, you know, the, I kind of hate the name, it's very stupid, but the Don Roe doctrine, right, the idea of, you know, the U.S. really reasserting dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

Again, whether that's right or wrong, there are a lot of like considerations to think about there, but I think just on a calling balls and strikes basis, like, it's extremely notable to go in and essentially kick out a proxy government of, your main geopolitical rival and, you know, kind of take the spoils for yourself. Yeah. Big moves. The night after recorded, I believe, Stan Drucken Miller took to the Wall Street Journal to write an opinion piece. Many people took it as chastising. Well, he didn't write it either. AI wrote it and he admitted that. But many, many people from the, I read it and then from the hip reaction was, oh my gosh, he's completely dismantling his protege and Scott Besson

here. But if you read through the tea leaves, what he was really calling out was. the entitlements side of the fiscal book here in the United States and how unsustainable it is. And I really like the title of this week's timestamp truck and disorderly. This isn't just an op-ed. It's a think piece, to quote Claude. But, you know, I'm glad you like the title. I have to cop to that was a Claude suggestion. So soon, we're not quite there where Claude can, you know, write it entirely for me.

I have to give it props. I have to give Dario props for creating a machine that can make a great newsletter puns like that. It was very very beneficial to me. But I think there, I mean, there's a lot to take away here. And I put this kind of toward the end because I think it all ties back to everything that we discussed in the prior slides in ways that may not be totally obvious. But I want to maybe like, I'll say a couple of things and then kick it to you. But like the I've seen a lot of kind of things. 4D chess type analysis about how, like, this is actually, you know, Druck and Besson probably have dinner every week. And so this is just some sort of like, there's, there's all this like game theory around like what he was actually doing with the op-ed and was he actually providing air cover kind of to your point for Besson to do what he needs to do. And, you know, I think that's all interesting and potentially correct. I kind of just want to address some of it from the perspective of like the pulling back from like the 4D chess, just like how would the, how does the modal like Wall Street Journal Reader look at this. And I think there are two big pieces that I

that are worth digging into. And I, the, an asterisk before I say any of this is that this is, this is, this is, this is the last face you see before your portfolio gets utterly decimated by a legend. So I think, uh, important to say that drunk is definitively several orders of magnitude smarter than either of us. So no one should take this as, as me, uh, critiquing him too, harshly, but I think on the left side of the, of the slide, there's basically a quote, which I won't read all of, but he's basically comparing, you know, yield management, like what he thinks the Treasury's doing, which we talked about last week with the buybacks that Besson has embarked on or doubled the size of. And he's indicated that, or at least sources have indicated that Besson will use

the TGA if he needs to fund those, trillion dollar TGA, you know, to kind of scare markets into where they need to be with long, long end yields. And, you know, Dr. Miller sees this at, as kind of yield management that looks like akin to the Treasury Fed operations to the cap yields during World War II to get that finance. And then he kind of moves on. But I think it's notable because like, again, my guess is that he probably realizes a lot of this. I'm not going to be telling him anything new, but to a reader of his op-ed, like, it might, the

power and relevance of that analog might be lost on people. Like I think that's exactly what, agree or disagree, I think that's what Besson thinks he's living through right now. I think that's, you know, we can debate worse. We haven't even talked about Jackson Hole, which we don't have time for, because I think a lot of this stuff is actually more relevant. But, but, but Hegsafe, Besson, Bridge Colby, Trump, to the extent that he, you know, actually thinks about this stuff and to any meaningful degree, like, I think that they

believe that they are living through something like a transition like World War II, right? Economic D-Day. I mean, never being very expensive. Yeah, exactly. Economic D-Day, globally, economic reordering. Like, so I think that doesn't necessarily mean that, again, any of this is like, like right or wrong, but I think it's important to remember a lot of the, I've said on the show before, but like correlations kind of go to one in the institutions, the institutions that hold the levers

of power. They all kind of start moving in lockstep when it's a question of like sovereignty and hegemony or when they perceive it to be that. And so I think like you should expect to see things like this, right? Like get used to it. Like the analog to World War II and saying, well, that was like, you know, the implicit idea there is we're not living through anything like we're, we're not living through anything like World War II. So that's, you know, it would be crazy to do some sort of extreme like yield management. And I don't necessarily know if it's going to look exactly like it did back then. But I think like that's, that's the wrong view to take. Like the, these guys like it or not, I think, believe that they are living through a time as pivotal as pivotal and transformative as that.

So they're going to act like it, right? The other quick thing I'll say is on the right side of the slide. There's another quote here where to your point, it's kind of the punch that he's landing in the op-ed. is that, well, what we should really do is return buybacks their state of purpose, move on from that, and basically do the responsible thing, turn out the debt, honestly. If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear market, that isn't a crisis, it's an invoice, thank you, Claude, then do the only thing that, you know, durably lowers long-term yields, address the primary deficit, reform entitlements, all these different ways, means testing, et cetera.

And I look at this and I'm like, again, he may have a totally different view in mind and, you know, what he privately thinks. but just from like the surface level of what's being said, it's like, well, yeah, like, no kidding, but like you missed that exit 20 years ago, right? Like, y'all could have listened to Ron Paul in like 1995, but no one wanted to. And like the argument that he was always making that, you know, your MES Institute guys were always making is like there is an event horizon at which you will no longer have the opportunity to just go do fiscal rectitude and, you know, go be responsible.

And I think Drach and Miller's op had even kind of recognized. earlier earlier on that like you know there are all these structural constraints to actually getting any of this through and it's like you know if you if you really like are honest about that and take it to its limit it's like this is literally never going to happen okay with like with with with that's a GP where it always where it already is deficits where they already are and you know the the dynamics behind this yeah the dynamics behind mass democracy right I mean look look around you like the the capital of finance in the world is run by a communist like do you not see where we are like we're not doing entitlement reform, okay? It's not going to happen. And like all,

meanwhile, like the vast majority of campaign finance comes from, you know, from who? From boomers who are like the main beneficiaries of all this stuff, right? They're just not going to vote this away. I don't really think you're going to vote your way out of this problem. And like, it's not just a question of like get Congress to act responsibly. Like that's done, man. That's done. So then the question is like, what do you do to deal with that? Well, you can like print the difference, which is what I think a lot of us have assumed, you know, would ultimately have to happen. And certainly it might. It still might.

Or you can embark on an aggressive campaign of, you know, reshoring and kind of decoupling where you, you know, get a bunch of vassal states on your side and basically kind of make them eat the difference in different ways and do economic partnerships with them. You run the GDP hot as much as you can, you know, you try to dismantle all systems like the euro dollar, which, you know, drain economic mass and economic energy out of the U.S. and more fully bring, you know, the dollar system under the control of the Treasury, perhaps in the form of, you know, spendable T-bills, which is effectively what, you know, stable coins, I think will ultimately be all these different things. Maybe the stuff will work, maybe it won't. But like, those are kind of your options, right? You radically redesign the game board in some way, or you print the difference. And I don't

think they're at the point where they have accepted, you know, that they might have to print the difference eventually. So if you weren't going to do that, like the only other thing that you can do is kind of exactly what they're doing. So, and by the way, to get back to the point of this op-ed, that includes buybacks. That includes things like managing every little, you know, all thousand little things on the margin to kind of keep the game going so that you can, so you can just get to the other side of this trade without getting shaken out of it. So I think like all this is to say rant over, but basically like the op-ed strikes me as written from the perspective of an extremely, extremely, conventional boomer who is processing things from the perspective of 1995, basically.

I don't actually think that's what Drucken Miller is. I think, again, like orders of magnitude smarter than either of us. So I probably think, to your point, there is a lot of game theory going on here. But for the, again, like the modal reader of this who's looking at it and saying like, yeah, great idea. That's what we should do. It's like, in reality, that's not going to happen. So like, just be honest with, you know, with yourself about where things are sitting and then

kind of evaluate, you know, policies accordingly from that. Well, the fact that, I mean, the fact that this was written with AI, it's like, was the Wall Street Journal some outside force putting pressure on the Wall Street Journal and drug? Like, hey, we need you to come up with something quick as like just to set the scene or set a scene between you and Scott Passent or put another perspective on this. Like that just the fact that this happened and the fact that he came out a minute, like, yeah, I read it with AI. What, like, do you think he approached Wall Street Journal? I have some thoughts. Like, Claude and I have been going back and forth. Was he approached and asked to allow them to put his name on this, which I think the latter may be the case.

Yeah, KFabe, basically, right? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely possible. Yeah. Moving on, bringing back to AI, which is another core theme at the center of all this economic reordering that you have another Wall Street Journal article, I believe, or is this the Times? Yeah, as much year.

Yeah. We'll talk about blue collar. jobs are the next, the new flashpoint for data center fight. So trade unions are threatening to withhold support for politicians joining the building backlash. And so I think if you're talking about hurdles or speed bumps in the road for reshoring and basically facilitating the large buildout of the AI data centers in the United States, it's becoming clear that the blue collar work and anti-data center propaganda is material. It's real and something that needs to be figured out. Yeah, I think this is relevant to all of it because, you know, as we talk about every

week, like, this is the key driver right now of any kind of reshoring push that you want to do, you know, it doesn't really work without, you know, a massive ongoing Cappex campaign for data centers and everything related to AI. So I think it's relevant to that degree. But I think it's, it's notable to me that if you look, if you look through this article, there are various different instances of unions and union leaders and trade groups, basically saying, you know, you know, we're not going to donate to anyone. We're not going to support anyone. We're not going to knock doors,

knock on doors for anyone who is opposed to the AI buildup. So you're basically in a situation where, as we all thought, you know, a couple of years ago, the greatest allies of Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman would be trade unions. It's a pretty funny new set of bedfellows that we've created here. But I think it's notable that I recommend people go read this article. We don't have time to get into all of it right now. But this really cuts against and is like a, I think, consensus narrative violation for a lot of what the mainstream readers of the journal or New York Times or whatever might be thinking about kind of the data center build out. Gavin Baker had a great post over the weekend on kind of basically just dismantling point by point, all of the myths surrounding data centers.

I think there's a lot that you can say if you are opposed to data centers or if you're uncomfortable with AI. I think those are all like there are reasonable points to make there. But basically, you know, the water impact, the environmental impact, the impact on jobs, whatever, at least on the blue collar side are all like very, very overplayed or very misunderstood. Now, you could also say, like, Gavin is mainly, potentially like the most AI levered investor in the entire world. So, like, what a shocker that he likes data centers. But I think it's a good moment to just revisit from first principles, like everything going on here. And I think it's very notable as you as you go into midterms, as you think about the realignment of different. interest groups to see kind of your typical like yellow dog Democrat type voters in you know labor unions who are

massively benefiting right now from all the skilled trades demand resulting from the data center build out to kind of see them aligning more and more with you know a ticket that looks more and more red is I think extremely noteworthy going into November and beyond I mean the Republicans have become the party of the working class it's very obvious and I mean we we read the the piece I forget what was the data center review or something like that that the CTO of Giga wrote a piece in I mean in that piece he highlighted that there's a extreme shortage of electricians for this buildout and so you have to the union's got to be licking their lips right now like hey we're going to be able to grow grow our force we're going to be an appealing sort of sector of the economy to to to join in the next decade and it makes a lot of sense yeah it means the first time like 40 years that manufacturing has had like real secular tailwinds in the U.S. like if It's been multiple generations since you've seen anything like that.

So don't underrate the AI push and the run a hot push on that, on that vector either. Yeah. And as always, we will end on Bitcoin. And this week, it has the topic that we're going to cover has to do with quantum, quantum computing, quantum resistance. More specifically, a couple of pretty big developments. If you are worried about the quantum scare, I'm still a bit skeptical that it is imminent or at all possible. But don't short human ingenuity, especially with these AI. iTools let's not say that there there won't be a breakthrough in quantum computing and if there is

bitcoin needs to be prepared particularly its signature scheme and there are two big developments last week the first was starkware research demonstrate that quantum resistant bitcoin transaction transactions are possible so they have an actual main net transaction that was qr bt compliant so they they were able to successfully get a transaction that is quantum that was made with a signature scheme that is quantum consistent included in a block the way in which they did this. It was a non-standard transactions within consensus rules, but not not a standard transaction. So they created this transaction and then you slip stream, which is an out of band sort of

transaction facilitator that marathon runs, marathon mind a block with this transaction in it. Basically what QRBT does, I believe to get the signature, you do some GPU compute on the side to create the signature. and then you can broadcast a transaction after you do some GPU work. So it's a bit clunky and adds another variable to Bitcoin transactions. But it successfully did it. If you want a quantum resistant Bitcoin signature, the team at Starkware proved, you can do that on Mainnet last week.

And then the team at Blockstream Research, Jonas Nick and McKell, two to many others. They've been working on a BIP, Shrinks, which is a new signature scheme that is, Quantum resistant. I had Jonas, Nick and Mikhail Kudanov on TFTC last December talking about this at the very beginnings after they came out with the research paper. It looks like they've made a lot of progress. And so if you're worried about quantum, the Bitcoin developer research landscape is making progress on that front. Yeah. I think it's just like, you know, we do every week. But they're always over the last, you know, if you want to call it the bear market, maybe that's ending, whatever. But the, as we've gone through bad or sideways price. Just like every single week, there are very notable headlines under the hood, whether it's on the technology side or the kind of financial infrastructure side for Bitcoin. So as you're seeing more and more, what I think we would all argue are secular tailends and meaningful generational shifts in the way that the financial system works globally, the way the dollar system works. You're also seeing at the same time Bitcoin continue to execute against a lot of key priorities. I think it's fair to, like you said, put an asterisk on, you know, is quantum imminent or is it, you know,

potentially ever going to exist in a cryptographically relevant way. We'll see. But I do think these are certainly worth keeping an eye on. There's a lot of a lot of work going on behind the scenes by some real gigabrains to kind of advance the state of the art here. And encouraging to see it continue. Yeah. I'll just end it with particularly when it comes to what Jonas and McHale and others working all with BIP shrinks. I really like how Jonas and McHale framed it on TFTC last year where it's like, hey,

eventually ECDSA is going to be broken. Like we should not rely on one signature scheme. We need to bring more signature schemes to market, regardless of quantum comes. We have been researching that. This has been well known in the Bitcoin developer space for a while. Progress is being made best of both worlds as we get a new signature scheme. We think about it. We do a lot of research.

We work on it for many years and then say, okay, we think we have a signature scheme that we're comfortable with, begin implementing it. And it just so happens to also be quantum resistant. That's the best of both worlds. Work methodically. Do the work, do the research, do the review. And it's happening. Totally.

We'll be back next week. See you guys.